RUTHFULLY YOURS

We’ve heard a great deal lately about the “wrong side of history.” It is one of the president’s favorite ways to describe whatever side he isn’t on, and it’s been a phrase on the lips of progressives for quite a while. Among the myriad problems with the notion of a “wrong side of history,” as many critics (including me) have long argued, is that in the domestic sphere it is a call for one’s opponents to surrender to the inevitability of defeat, and in the international sphere it is deployed rhetorically to avoid deploying anything real.

So, for example, on the home front, liberals insist that opponents of same-sex marriage should give up now because they are sure to lose eventually. And on the international stage, when Barack Obama castigates Vladimir Putin for being on the wrong side of history, what he’s really saying is, “Don’t worry, we don’t need to do anything, History and her long moral arc will do the heavy lifting for us.” No wonder the British historian Robert Conquest complained that the phrase has a “Marxist twang.”

One irony is that although a slogan that glorifies history, it is a statement about the future, not the past. That’s because history is full of episodes that would, with a moment’s retrospection, illuminate the vacuity of the phrase. No one on the Trail of Tears took much comfort in the idea that the white man was on the wrong side of history.

Still, there’s an implicit assumption that things have been going in the right direction for a very long time and that there’s no reason to believe they will have a serious course correction in the future. It’s always comforting to believe that the unfolding evolution of the universe is your co-pilot. Unfortunately, not only was Yogi Berra right when he said that predictions are hard, “especially about the future”; it turns out that predictions about the past are hard, too. For any prediction of how the future will unfold is really an implied statement about how you think the past will — and should — be understood. All arguments about politics, in the grandest sense of the word, are arguments about what constitutes a “usable past,” in Van Wyck Brooks’s famous phrase.

We are all familiar with the idea that what we do today has consequences tomorrow. There is no shortage of high-school-yearbook-ready quotations on this subject. But the present can change the past as much as it changes the future. And while I don’t quite mean this in a literal way, I don’t mean it entirely figuratively either.

The Obama administration is desperate for an agreement with Iran, but Congress must say no.
With the Iran nuclear talks now in their endgame and the prospect of a very different political environment in Washington next year if Republicans capture the Senate, Obama officials are in overdrive to achieve their dream of a legacy agreement with Tehran so that President Obama can claim he halted the threat from the Iranian nuclear program. Their goal is to get a final agreement before the nuclear talks are scheduled to end November 24.

While the Obama administration has long been desperate to get such an agreement, two recent ill-advised American concessions and a string of misleading statements and proposals demonstrate how far the White House is willing to go and why it is vital that Congress denounce on a bipartisan basis the nuclear talks and a possible final agreement .

Two weeks ago, the United States floated a proposal to let Iran keep all of its 19,000 centrifuge machines, which Tehran is using to enrich uranium to reactor grade as long as all but 1,500 are “disconnected” and cease enriching uranium. This proposal alarmed many experts because Iran could quickly begin enriching uranium to weapons grade by reconnecting all of its centrifuges.

As generous as this offer was, it apparently did not go far enough for Tehran. The Associated Press reported on September 25 that U.S. diplomats have proposed letting Iran operate up to 4,500 centrifuges if its stockpile of enriched uranium gas is converted to uranium “powder.” This proposal rests on the assumption that such an arrangement would give the international community plenty of time to react to an Iranian “dash” toward constructing a nuclear weapon because it would take over a year for Iran to re-convert low-enriched powder into uranium gas for further enrichment to weapons-grade uranium.

The assumption behind this proposal is false. Both Amos Yadlin, former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, and Mark Hibbs, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment and nuclear proliferation expert, agree that it would take Iran only about two weeks.

A final agreement also appears unlikely to do anything to reduce the nuclear-proliferation threat posed by Iran’s large stockpile of low-enriched uranium. I noted in NRO last November how a 2013 American Enterprise Institute study found that Iran has produced enough reactor-grade uranium since 2009 “to fuel a small arsenal of nuclear weapons after conversion to weapons grade.” The Langley Intelligence Group Network agreed with this assessment and estimated that, from its 20 percent-enriched-uranium stockpile, Iran could make enough nuclear fuel for one bomb and could make another seven from its reactor-grade uranium if further enriched to weapons grade.

The most famous of the classic blunders is “Never get involved in a land war in Asia”? I don’t think so. I’d go with Never get involved in a blame war with the CIA. And that goes especially for lame duck presidents saddled with plummeting approval ratings as they head into the last two years of their terms.

Fox News reports:

The top U.S. intelligence official, in a memo to staff obtained by Fox News, praised his analysts for their work bringing attention to the Islamic State’s gains over the past two years — as Republican lawmakers likewise jumped to their defense after President Obama claimed they “underestimated” the threat.

The president’s comments to “60 Minutes” over the weekend have prompted a vigorous round of finger-pointing. The White House has eased off, saying the president did not intend to blame the intelligence community — but also is disputing accusations from GOP lawmakers and intelligence officials that Obama simply ignored their ISIS warnings for months.

“It wasn’t for lack of information, we all knew about it for years,” Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., told Fox News on Wednesday. She claimed lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee, on which she sits, “gave it to the administration and said, ‘wake up, there’s something very serious happening.’”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has been left in a difficult position, with Obama pointing at him in his “60 Minutes” interview. In the interview, Obama said Clapper “has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

But in the memo to staff sent Tuesday, Clapper made clear his officers have been on the case for a while.

“I’m proud of the [intelligence community’s] efforts over the past two years to monitor, assess and call attention to the expansion of ISIL, and I know the president has found that work to be critical to developing his strategy,” Clapper wrote.

The Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator and ranking member, Saeb Erekat, is once again stirring controversy and fabricating history. Taking cue from his boss, Mahmoud Abbas, who just days prior accused Israel of committing “genocide, “ Erekat absurdly charged Israel with killing 12,000 Gazans during Operation Defensive Edge and, just as ludicrous, alleged that 96% of all casualties sustained were civilians. Where he derives his facts he does not say, but who really cares about facts when Israel is the target of the invective? Just days later, Erekat compounded the vitriolic slander by comparing Prime Minister Netanyahu to ISIS and then went on to charge the Jewish State with burning mosques and churches. Of course, Erekat offers not a scintilla of evidence to back the spurious charge, but no matter: His professed Palestinian pedigree (he’s actually from Jordan by way of Arabia) gives him a free pass to fabricate.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Erekat engaged in mendacious historical revisionism. In April 2002 Israeli forces embarked upon a counter-insurgency campaign in the city of Jenin – dubbed the suicide capital of the West Bank – to rout terror nests that had taken root there and, in an effort to minimize civilian casualties, utilized less lethal methods, incurring greater casualties as a result. When the battle was over, some 52 Palestinians were killed, the vast majority of them PLO and Hamas combatants. That did not stop the deceitful Erekat from claiming that a “massacre” had taken place in which upwards of 500 people – all civilians of course – were killed. Even after a UN commission of inquiry determined that there was in fact no massacre, Erekat refused to issue a retraction, stubbornly clinging to his defamatory fiction.

Not to be outdone, Erekat’s PLO colleague and terrorist apologist Hanan Ashrawi accused Prime Minister Netanyahu of invoking slander, hate language and obfuscation in his recent address in the UN General Assembly. Really, Hanan? Do you want to go down that road? In July, when confronted with pointed questions by a CNN reporter concerning Hamas’s use of UN schools to store rockets, a stumped Ashrawi laughed awkwardly and then deflected, whitewashing blatant Hamas violations of the laws of war.

In March 2013, Ashrawi’s Western funded NGO published a text, in Arabic of course, that repeated the medieval anti-Semitic blood libel that Jews use the blood of Christian children to bake Passover matzah. When challenged, Ashrawi initially attacked the blogger who exposed the canard. She eventually issued an apology for the piece but only after being confronted with the possible loss of Western funding. In other words, her actions were dictated by pecuniary considerations rather than genuine remorse for propagating the most ancient of blood libels.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/mark-tapson-on-fighting-the-culture-war-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Mark Tapson, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter who focuses on the politics of popular culture.

Mark came on the show to discuss “Fighting the Culture War,” emphasizing why Conservatives need more filmmakers, songwriters and novelists instead of political lecturers.

Don’t miss it:

The quintessential question of Watergate was “what did the President know and when did he know it?” Obamagate, the vast scandal that encompasses an entire presidency, offers a preemptive answer.

Obama didn’t know anything and he never knew it. At least not until, like smuggling weapons to druglords, bugging journalists, IRSing his political enemies and killing vets, his right hand found out about what his left hand was doing from the morning paper.

After skipping 58% of his daily intelligence briefings in Term 1 and 59% of them in Term 2, he went on 60 Minutes and blamed intelligence agencies for being caught by surprise by ISIS. The intelligence had been there all along, but Obama wasn’t just missing his 3 AM phone calls — he was also skipping the 3 PM phone calls while golfing with the CEO of Comcast, friendly hedge fund managers and assorted lobbyists.

When the media, in the person of loyalist New Yorker editor David Remnick, tried to do its newfound duty by briefing him on the ISIS takeover of an Iraqi city, Obama snarked back by calling ISIS a jayvee team. Snark had proven to be an effective national security strategy for him before when he won a presidential debate by dismissing Mitt Romney’s concerns about national security with lines like, “The 80s called, they want their foreign policy back” and “We also have fewer horses and bayonets.”

The media cheered the spectacle of a real life version of a Saturday Night Live or a Daily Show skit while licking its lips at the thought of a President Stewart or Colbert ruling through pre-scripted quips. And the problem was solved until ISIS took over much of Iraq. The ISIS version of a snappy comeback was to call Obama “a White House slave” and a “mule” which sounds really racist and doesn’t translate well.

What the ISIS standup act lacked in comic timing, it made up for by besieging Baghdad, bringing back slavery and taking selfies with severed heads. Between his golf games and vacations, Obama finally penciled in a war, declaring, “The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.”

And it only took him 6 years to figure that out. Talk about an intelligence failure.

Obama botched his own disastrous ObamaCare program turning it into an even more expensive mess than it already was. Once again he claimed that he only found out about the problem from the media. Just like he found out that his VA turnaround was killing more vets than Al Qaeda was from that same media.

The phrase, “change the laws on my own,” is not in the U.S. Constitution.

History will ill-serve Eric Holder if it does no more than echo the view common in the wake of his resignation that his tenure as Attorney General was “controversial.” Mr. Holder’s more than five years as the nation’s chief legal officer were consequential.

In tandem with Barack Obama ‘s White House, Mr. Holder pushed the authority of the federal government and its administrative agencies beyond the edge of the Constitution and law. They did so not in one or several controversial instances, as with past presidencies, but repeatedly and across the breadth of the federal government.

Universities, public schools, fire and police departments, the financial industry, utilities, state legislatures, orders of nuns, black parents, small-business owners, the electrons inside the Internet, random sections of the U.S. Constitution—all have learned that what they took to be the clear meaning of existing law was wrong.

Messrs. Obama and Holder have attempted to make federal legal authority limitless. The Obama-Holder theory of law—that the needs of justice, as they define it, supersede the law’s boundaries—deserves to be repudiated. It has no precedent outside progressive law journals or various periods in South American history.

Mr. Obama made his intentions clear. In July 2011, the president said in public he’d like to “bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.” The phrase, “change the laws on his own,” is not in the U.S. Constitution. The next year, Mr. Obama made his now-famous and unconstitutional recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The recess appointments were the tip of the iceberg.

For the firm of Obama & Holder, shocking the conscience of sitting federal judges with legal overstepping is just another day in court. The Obama lawyers’ legal justification for their actions has often been, in effect, what difference does it make? That isn’t a legal argument. Yet.

Socked by new taxes, U.S. health-care technology companies are moving R&D centers and jobs overseas.

Of the many unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the least noticed is its threat to innovation. Although most discussions center on the law’s more immediate effects on hiring, insurance rates and access to doctors and care, attention should also be paid to its impact on U.S. research and development and health-care technology.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s health-care innovation occurs in the U.S. This includes ground-breaking drug treatments, surgical procedures, medical devices, patents, diagnostics and much more. Most of the funding for that innovation—about 71% of U.S. R&D investment—comes from private industry. A recent R&D Magazine survey of industry leaders in 63 countries ranked the U.S. No. 1 in the world for health-care innovation.

But that environment is changing. According to R&D Magazine and the research firm Battelle, growth of R&D spending in the U.S. from 2012 to 2014 averaged just 2.1%, down from an average of 6% over the previous 15 years. In that same 15-year period, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, India and the European Union saw faster R&D spending growth than the U.S. China’s grew on average 22% per year.

The recent slowdown in R&D spending in the U.S. is in part caused by weak economic growth since the 2008 financial crisis. But the economy’s weakness itself has been exacerbated by the negative impact of new taxes and regulations under ObamaCare. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the new health-care law will levy more than $500 billion in new taxes over its first 10 years to help pay for insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion. These new taxes include significant levies on key health-care industries, such as manufacturers of medical devices and drugs, and their investors.

Originally, I thought that President Obama’s refusal to invite Prime Minister Netanyahu to a White House dinner was merely because of our president’s animus toward Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular. It turns out, however, that Obama was saving dinner delicacies for a gala meal to honor Prime Minister Modi of India. At the White House dinner, P.M. Modi only had warm water. As a religious Hindu, he was observing Navrati, a Hindu festival, and was fasting.

The White House had been informed that Modi was fasting, but they assumed that meant that he was eating fast food dishes. I’m guessing that Modi’s uneaten food will be saved for Netanyahu, whom the White House will invite for a barbecue on Yom Kippur.

President Obama might not have known about Navrati. But perhaps he considered Modi to not be a real Hindu. Our President has proven to be somewhat of an expert on theology. At the UN, he explained that ISIS was not truly Muslim and he reiterated his assertion that no religion tolerates the killing of innocents. I’m guessing that part of our President’s expertise must have come from attending twenty years of sermons by the Reverend Wright who perhaps had suggested that the Crusades and Inquisition were part of a Jewish conspiracy.

On the other hand, perhaps it is not really a matter of theology. After all, the State Department has adopted the new dictum that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and even flies like a duck, then it is probably a kangaroo. They are constantly providing us with new names for Al Quaida terrorists . In part this is in order to disguise the fact that the requiem for Al Quaida pronounced by President Obama was a bit premature.

Also this is because our administration is so enamored with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, that it would much prefer that the perpetrators of these atrocities turned out to be 7th Day Adventists.

“We awoke one morning in September and the world lurched on its axis.”Jeb Bush

The world may not have “lurched on its axis” this month, but President Obama did. This was the man who scored a Nobel Peace Prize, not for what he had done, but for what it was hoped he would do. He said he would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unilaterally, he pulled all troops from Iraq two years ago, leaving a vacuum rapidly filled by al Qaeda and its affiliates. He plans to do the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2016. This month he added airstrikes against ISIS in Syria to those he began flying in Iraq last month. The “Peace” President has gone to war.

Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry gathered an impressive list of Arab allies – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain – to aid in the destruction of ISIS through air strikes. Additionally, the plan is to arm about 5,000 Syrian insurgents who are fighting Bashar al-Assad to take up arms against more than 30,000 ISIS troops in Syria. And, Mr. Obama did this without having crossed any red lines. In contradiction to previous promises, in August he did put a few thousand “boots on the ground” in Iraq (military advisors, as President Kennedy quaintly called them, when he sent 400 of them to Vietnam in May 1961). Whether he does the same in Syria is yet to be known, but it is likely that some special forces are already there.

However, keeping true to form, when asked last Sunday by Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes” if he had been surprised by the rapid rise of ISIS, he said he was, but deflected the blame. Mr. Obama said “they underestimated them,” naming James Clapper and the intelligence community. He did not say “we;” he said “they.” However, three weeks after Fallujah fell to ISIS early last January it was Mr. Obama who referred to ISIS as the jayvee, not Mr. Clapper. The most salient characteristic of Mr. Obama: never take blame!

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Sir Walter Scott’s lines apply to the Middle East. Mr. Obama has quoted the proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”, or maybe the first enemy is still my enemy? Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with allies you have, not the ones you wish for.” Maybe, but are they real allies? Any deal we make with Arab allies risks being Faustian. It was the lesson learned by Jabez Stone in Stephen Vincent Benét’s novel, The Devil and Daniel Webster. Our most visible Islamic terrorist enemies are Sunni, but so are the Saudis, an ally. The greatest longer term threat we face is a nuclear Iran who are Shias. Iran’s centrifuges continue to spin. The Country is also Syria’s patron. In attacking ISIS in Syria, we are doing Bashar al-Assad’s work, but Assad has now killed an estimated 190,000 of his own people. What sort of deal will we strike with Iran?