RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the 21st century, doctrinaire liberalism is synonymous with hypocrisy.

Or maybe it is better seen as career insurance, providing exemption from all the many paradoxes of a leftist worldview.

The rich supporter of affirmative action still uses, without apology, the old-boy network to pull privileged strings to get his own son admitted to the proper college. Al Gore flies on a carbon-spewing private jet, saving the planet by getting to conferences more quickly and enjoyably. High-tax proponent John Kerry docks his yacht where he can avoid taxes; how else to ensure downtime for furthering social justice?

A spread-the-wealth Obama, who warns others about making too much money and profiting at all the wrong times, nonetheless chooses the tony haunts of the moneyed and privileged — the Hawaiian resort coast, Martha’s Vineyard, Rancho Mirage — in preference to the old Chicago hood or even Camp David.

It is hard to be a progressive in a sea of capitalist lucre, or an idealist when careerism pays so much better, or personally frugal when personal excess is contextualized and made guilt-free by an abstract selfless agenda.

So how does one balance the conflicting elements of the progressive worldview?

How can one sort out the policies of a radical environmentalist who wants to send life-giving California water out to sea — thereby hurting impoverished immigrant farm workers from Latin America?

ISIS is a threat, but the Muslim Brotherhood is an even greater threat, moving among us and transforming America bit-by-bit, cut-by-cut.

The threat of Islamic terror is constant. Violence may erupt anywhere. Unexpectedly. That’s the nature of terror. And it’s happening more and more, with less and less time between events. Most recently, as AT readers know, a Philadelphia police officer was shot by a Muslim barbarian who pledged his allegiance to ISIS. And now it appears he may be linked to a terror cell. Reuters reports:

Philadelphia police said on Sunday they were seriously pursuing a tip that the man suspected of shooting and wounding a police officer had ties to a group with “radical beliefs.” (snip)

The Philadelphia Inquirer and television station NBC10 in Philadelphia quoted police sources on Sunday as saying that according to the tip-off Archer was associated with three other men and was not the most extreme of the group. The sources said police were warned the threat to them was not over, the two media outlets said. (snip)

People who knew the gunman told Reuters he was a devout, quiet Muslim who became more “combative” after trips to Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

As Barack Obama puts the finishing touches on his final State of the Union address, a White House teaser reveals one of his planned props for the evening: “We leave one seat empty in the First Lady’s State of the Union Guest Box for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.”

Blame Woodrow Wilson.

Until Wilson, presidents stretching back to Jefferson had been content to fulfill their constitutional requirement to inform Congress about the state of the union in writing. In 1913, alas, Wilson elected to deliver his assessment in person. Speechwriters of both parties (I served my time in the George W. Bush years) have been embellishing ever since.

The spectacle is made for President Obama. After all, this is the man who strode out on a stage of foam Greek columns when he accepted his party’s nomination for the presidency. How appropriate that in his last State of the Union he now opts for the empty chair routine used to such derision by Clint Eastwood at the last Republican National Convention.

Then again, for Mr. Obama the maneuver has always been the message. From his 2008 campaign appearance before the Berlin Wall (where he declared himself “a fellow citizen of the world”) to his decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize before he had in fact done anything, the stage has always upstaged the substance. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s penchant for the beau geste carries a high price for Americans, not to mention other, less fortunate citizens of the world.

Start with foreign policy. Though Candidate Obama inveighed mightily against the U.S. intervention in Iraq, he also campaigned on the idea that Iraq had distracted us from winning “the necessary war” in Afghanistan. When he announced to the American people his own surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, the cadets at West Point were drafted to serve as the dramatic backdrop.

It required only half a minute for the mayor of Philadelphia, Democrat Jim Kenney, to achieve national fame. On Friday, an already sensation-crowded day, it fell to the mayor to take part in the official pronouncements on the attempted murder of city police officer Jesse Hartnett, shot and severely wounded as he sat in his patrol car when a would-be assassin emptied his gun at him—13 shots in all.

Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr., appointed just three days earlier, delivered the details with noteworthy eloquence: The wounded officer, bleeding heavily from three wounds, one arm useless, had gotten himself out of the car, chased the attacker and shot him.

The drama of this recital needed no amplification, but there it was anyway: Clear security video images showed the assailant in his flowing white dishdasha—a robe favored by Muslim men—running toward the patrol car, shooting, sticking his hand in the window, and racing speedily away. Pictures too of the police officer lurching out of the car to give chase.

President Obama’s showmanship is reaching new highs. He even shed tears to promote his gun-control agenda last week. Tomorrow, during his widely televised State of the Union Address, he will be calling attention – emotionally, no doubt – to an empty seat next to Michelle Obama, “for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.”

Obama falsely claims more people die in the U.S from gun violence than from car accidents and illicit drugs. But statistics published last November by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) tell a different story; In 2013 (the last available numbers) the growing drug epidemic killed more than 46,000 people in the U.S. Car accidents caused 35,369 deaths and Firearms 33,636. Since then, as the nationwide heroin addiction increased, so did the number of people dying from an overdose. Don’t they deserve the president’s tears? An empty seat in the First Lady’s guest box?

The Obama administration’s 2010 National Drug Control Strategy predicted that by 2015, drug related deaths would decline by 15 percent. Instead, it has risen by 30 percent. As this abysmal result has been heavily criticized, the administration claimed it had no way to predict the surge in heroin use, which led to 440 percent rise in overdose deaths. However, they did little, if anything, to stop the surge of purer, cheaper heroin on America’s streets.

The “21st century approach to drug policy,” as advocated in Obama’s 2010 National Drug Control Strategy, had miserably failed to stop both heroin and cocaine production, importation to and distribution on the streets of cities and rural areas in America.

Those who have been marveling at Donald Trump’s political showmanship were given a reminder of who is the top showman of them all, when President Barack Obama went on television to make a pitch for his unilateral actions to restrict gun sales and make a more general case for tighter gun control laws.

It was beautifully choreographed, like a great ballet, and performed with consummate skill and understated eloquence. First of all, the scene was set with a room full of people who had lost loved ones to gun violence. A father whose son had been gunned down made a long introduction before the president showed up, walked down the aisle and up on to the stage to growing applause.

As political theater, it put Donald Trump’s rantings in the shade.

As for the substance of what Obama said, there was very little substance, and much of it false, but one of the signs of great artistry was that the presentation overshadowed the substance.

None of the things proposed by the president is likely to reduce gun violence. Like other restrictions on people’s ability to defend themselves, or to deter attacks by showing that they are armed, these new restrictions can cost more lives on net balance. The most we can hope for is that the effects of the new Obama-created rules will be nil, rather than harmful.

Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special Operations School.
Thursday’s announcement that the New York Police Department (NYPD) will settle a lawsuit filed by Muslim activist groups is unsettling and confounding. With Islamic terrorist acts on the rise globally and the FBI stating that it has as many as 900 open cases on individuals suspected of being ISIS operatives, it is beyond reason that NYPD would cave to the demands by a select group to impede investigations in potential terrorist cases.

The department was accused of singling out the Muslim community for surveillance and undercover operations in a post 9/11 world, as if that was some sort of abnormal behavior by law enforcement. The original suit, brought by several Islamist activist organizations, included the Muslim Students Association and the Muslim Foundation, accused the NYPD of violating their civil rights through a program which including surveillance and intelligence gathering of the Muslim community in New Jersey.

It was tossed by U.S. District Judge William J. Martini in February 2014. Then, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit last October.

Philadelphia comedian Jim Kenney has a flair for absurdist humor, and his talents were on abundant display Thursday, when a local jihadi, a convert to Islam named Edward Archer, shot and seriously wounded police officer Jesse Hartnett, and then explained: “I follow Allah. I pledge my allegiance to the Islamic state. That is why I did what I did.” Kenney’s response was as dazzling a sendup of the willful ignorance of today’s public officials as you’ll ever see.

Pretending to be the Mayor of Philadelphia, Kenney, one of the most daring and imaginative comedians on the scene today, said this after showing a surveillance video of Archer garbed in Islamic dress and shooting at Hartnett: “In no way shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what you’ve seen on the screen….It is abhorrent. It is terrible and it does not represent the religion or any of its teachings. This is a criminal with a stolen gun who tried to kill one of our officers. It has nothing to do with being a Muslim or following the Islamic faith.”

Brilliant! Kenney had the audience laughing, clapping and howling for more with his poker-faced impersonation of an intentionally clueless contemporary public official. His performance recalled some of the career highlights of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and their British colleague in comedy, David Cameron, such as Obama’s classifying the Fort Hood jihad massacre as “workplace violence” and Kerry’s suggesting that all jihadis needed to discard their romantic dreams of being a modern-day warrior for Allah would be a chance to say “Would you like fries with that?”

Michigan Democrats have a second issue for which they hope to roast Gov. Rick Snyder (R) over a fire of public outrage. The first was, and still is, Michigan’s terrible, pothole-filled roads. That is bad. But the new issue could be even more emotional: the poisoning of children.

Gov. Snyder, who was mentioned briefly as a GOP presidential primary candidate because of his perceived ability to just get things done without worrying about politics, had to apologize Dec. 29 for his administration’s inability to keep lead out of the drinking water of Flint, Mich.

A week later, Snyder declared a state of emergency for Flint and Genesee County, which means state officials decided local resources would not be enough to clean the water and keep it pure.

Snyder also forced the former head of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, Dan Wyant, out of office that day, as the Republican admitted it was because the DEQ botched the testing of Flint’s water that the children of Flint have been poisoned by lead in the water.

Two Veterans Affairs managers from the Phoenix VA facility who faked wait lists for treatment that led to the deaths of dozens of veterans are going back to work after being suspended — with pay — for nearly two years.

Agency investigations into their wrongdoing proved to be “inconclusive,” says the VA.

Washington Free Beacon:

Two top administrators at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs health system in Phoenix, Arizona, who were suspended following revelations of fake waitlists and delayed patient care will return to agency jobs Monday.

The Arizona Republic reported:

Lance Robinson, associate director of the Phoenix VA Health Care System, will be assigned as a planner at the VA’s southwest regional office in Gilbert, known as VISN 18, according to spokeswoman Jean Schaefer. Brad Curry, the system’s chief of Health Administration Services, will serve as a data analyst. The two men have been focal points in a controversy over the VA’s perceived failure to hold leaders accountable for mismanagement and misconduct that caused a breakdown in care for veterans in Arizona and nationwide.

Robinson and Curry were placed on paid leave and given termination notices in May 2014. During their suspensions, they have been given hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay and benefits.