RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration maintains that its principal strategic response to the conflict in Syria is humanitarian, not military, and focused on human rights. In Syria as well as Iraq, the consequences of this policy have been shockingly deficient. The West is only now beginning to wake up to its catastrophic results, as Europe struggles with a mass migration of a magnitude the continent has not experienced since the 1940s.

In April, Assad began intensifying the barrel bombing of Aleppo and Damascus’s Sunni neighborhoods while streamlining the passport process. In June, the U.N. was forced, unconscionably, to slash Syrian refugee food rations for lack of funding. Whether it was then, or when human traffickers began operating rickety craft from the port of Izmir, Turkey — leading to some 3,000 drownings — at every juncture, the administration failed to lead a serious effort to mitigate the suffering. This explosion has been building for years. The administration slumbered instead of coordinating an effective allied effort to head off a dangerous and chaotic westward surge of hundreds of thousands, potentially tens of millions, of oppressed and poor migrants, with some terrorists among them.

And that’s not the half of it. In Syria and Iraq, there continues to develop a horrific human-rights crisis that evokes the darkest episodes of World War II. ISIS and other Islamist extremists are waging genocide, the most egregious of all human-rights atrocities, against Christians, Yazidis, Mandaeans, and other defenseless religious minorities, whom the administration, apart from last year’s airstrikes to help the Yazidis, has failed.

For nearly 40 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But “in the end,” what have they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists — in other words, their “empire of dirt”?

Hillary Clinton just released a brief video about the need for women to stand up to their sexual assaulters while demanding relief from society’s unwarranted doubts about their allegations: “It’s not enough to condemn campus sexual assault. We need to end campus sexual assault!” Who would not agree with that assertion?

Not long ago, she went after hedge-fund operators and the Wall Street insiders who connive, avoid taxes, and profit inordinately: “You see the top 25 hedge-fund managers making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined. And, often, paying a lower tax rate!” The liberal PolitiFact rated Ms. Clinton’s assertion as true.

Ms. Clinton, during this campaign season, has also sermonized on student loans and the crushing burden universities are putting on American youth, to the tune of $1 trillion in collective debt: “We need to make a quality education affordable and available to everyone willing to work for it without saddling them with decades of debt!” “Decades of debt” is no exaggeration.

How Trump should have responded to the town hall questioner who claimed Obama is a Muslim.

Everybody has pounced on Donald Trump for not confronting a questioner at a town hall meeting who said President Obama is a Muslim and “not even an American.” Trump ignored the statements and responded to the questioner’s concern about terrorist training camps with a vapid “We’re going to be looking at that.” But the critics have a point, though not the one they think. Trump should have made the question an opportunity to direct our attention to where it belongs––not on Obama’s biography, but on his actions and the need for Republicans to put more energy into the fight against them.

Missing that point, Republicans who already dislike Trump were quick to condemn him. Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News that Trump should have “immediately sort of undermined and denied the premise” of the question, a sentiment shared by NRO’s Charles C.W. Cooke. Long-shot presidential candidate Lindsey Graham said Trump missed a chance to put the man “in his place.” Many pundits held up as a model John McCain, who while campaigning in 2008 corrected a woman who said Obama is an Arab. They seem to forget that despite McCain’s high-minded praise of Obama, he still lost.

What China’s beleaguered president could learn from his visit to the U.S.

Dear President Xi,

Welcome back! The last time you were stateside—at the Sunnylands estate in California a couple of years ago—you seemed to be at the top of your game. China’s GDP was about to overtake America’s. You were cracking down on corruption, liberalizing markets, setting the pace for what you called “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Upper East Siders competed to place their toddlers in Mandarin immersion programs. Newspaper columnists fantasized about the U.S. becoming “China for one day.”

Now your stock market has fizzled, your economy is sinking under the weight of unsustainable debts and zombie companies, your neighbors despise you, and every affluent Chinese is getting a second passport and snapping up a foreign home. Even in Beijing, word is out that behind that enigmatic smile you’re a man overmatched by your job. And out of your depth.

Maybe you’re even thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice to be America for one day?

Yes, America, perhaps the only country on earth that can be serially led by second- or third-rate presidents—and somehow always manage to come up trumps (so to speak). America, where half of college-age Americans can’t find New York state on a map—even as those same young Americans lead the world in innovation. America, where Cornel West is celebrated as an intellectual, Miley Cyrus as an artist, Jonathan Franzen as a novelist and Kim Kardashian as a beauty—and yet remains the cultural dynamo of the world.

“Catholics understand that while the pope speaks for God on matters of faith and morals, his infallibility does not extend to his economics or environmentalism. We hope he enjoys his visit to the land of the free, and that the education goes both ways.”

Pope Francis arrives Tuesday on his first visit to the United States, and the welcome event illustrates his unique and paradoxical appeal. The Argentine pope is being celebrated more for his embrace of progressive economics than for the Catholic Church’s moral teachings.

Millions of American Catholics will of course welcome the pope as a spiritual messenger and the head of a religion of some 1.2 billion world-wide. As a pastoral shepherd he has set a Christian example that Americans of all faiths might emulate with his modest life-style and manifest concern for the poor and least powerful. His public American itinerary—to a Harlem school, a Philadelphia prison—reflects this pastoral mission. He is a man of God who avoids the ostentatious trappings of man.

Yet the pope will also visit the White House and speak to Congress, and this is where his tour takes on an extra-religious resonance. Pope Francis has overtly embraced the contemporary progressive political agenda of income redistribution and government economic control to reduce climate change.

Why is it only the Jewish state, and not Iraq or Syria, that is pressured to split into parts?

The Assads in Syria and the Sunni-Muslim Saddam Hussein (now deceased) are examples of minorities ruling over majority populations not of their own ethnic or religious branch. The fall of Saddam’s Iraq was like Humpty Dumpty: once broken, it cannot be put together again. In the Syrian civil-war, the Sunni-Muslim majority is determined to end the Assad dictatorial rule through unprecedented violence and mayhem. Atrocities are perpetrated by both the Assad regime and the Islamic State. It has resulted in fracturing Syria. Millions of Iraqis and Syrians are now displaced, streaming toward European shores. It is fair to ask why the U.S. and the West in general are not openly supporting the new realities in the Levant.

The George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama administrations have displayed double standards toward Israel with respect to the “two-state solution.” One can legitimately ask why not apply the three-state solution to Iraq and the five-state solution to Syria? Why is it that, according to Obama, the Jewish state can be split into parts (two states), while the artificial colonial creations of Iraq and Syria must remain unitary states? In the case of Israel, the territory it occupies from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean was recognized by the League of Nations as the historical homeland of the Jews.

The pontiff’s visit gave the Castros what they wanted.

In 1960, Cuban bishops declared that “Catholicism and Communism respond to two totally different concepts of man and the world which it will never be possible to conciliate.” Pope Francis however contends that Communism is really Christianity. “The Communists have stolen our flag,” he said.

The Cuban bishops condemned Communism as “a system which brutally denies the most fundamental rights of the human being.” Pope Francis’ criticisms of the Castro regime were limited to oblique references, a plea for religious freedom for Catholics and general criticisms that could apply to Cuba or any one of a number of other places. He failed to even reiterate his old criticisms of the regime.

Cuban dissidents were kept from meeting Pope Francis and even the “passing greeting” that had been planned was shut down when the Communist authorities detained political dissidents. When the protesters risked their freedom to get near him, they were arrested without receiving any acknowledgement from the pope. The Castros got their meetings and their publicity.

The oppressed, whom Pope Francis claimed to speak for during his visit and during his international travels, were left out in the cold. They were treated to another oblique reference, as Pope Francis expressed his desire to “embrace especially all those who for various reasons I will not be able to meet.”

The wave of anti-Christian attacks will allegedly include Pakistan’s Christian churches, schools, and hospitals.

Few Pakistanis will shed a tear for people who do not, in their eyes, represent Pakistan’s Islamic values.

The Pakistani government and military have warned the nation’s tiny Christian minority that Islamic terrorist groups plan to target Christian religious institutions in the near future. The wave of anti-Christian attacks will allegedly include Pakistan’s Christian churches, schools, and hospitals.

The warning issued by Pakistan’s leading generals represents an extraordinary, positive development in the military’s relationship with minorities in general and with Christians in particular. Their warming relationship appears to be a calculated political move to complement the military leadership’s ongoing offensive against the terrorist havens in the northwestern corner of the country.

Some high-profile commentators think they smell a Marxist clothed in white papal robes, who dreams of redistributing the world’s wealth. Pope Francis insists that he has little interest in Marxism and that his political advocacy against materialism, capitalism, greed and idolatry are largely religious in nature. However, the flavor of some of his statements might suggest otherwise.

The Pope also knows that the UN is poised to strong-arm member nations to sign on to an impossible globalist agenda that will require a total shift of the world’s wealth, and a restructuring of international politics and economics with a one-world government and a universal religion at the steering wheel.

Even to the Pope’s admirers, that sounds a less like peace and love and more like a utopian totalitarian nightmare.

The world press is in high gear for Pope Francis’s visit to Cuba and the United States this week. Recently, the Pope has stirred up a stew mixing world poverty, the evils of capitalism and global warming into an elaborate narrative that is likely to keep journalists awake for weeks to come.

Our modern age, the one Malcolm Turnbull finds such an enticing topic for self-promoting homilies, is actually one of desperate mediocrity, cynicism, opportunism, and alienation in which all credible leadership is lacking. No wonder he finds it so very exciting
Malcolm Turnbull’s pretentious vacuity is nowhere better illustrated than in the rhetoric surrounding the cabinet he has installed to lead his new progressivist junta. This, he insists is required to form “a government for the 21st century” to ensure that “Australia seizes the opportunities of these, the most exciting times in human history.”

Is he serious, are these really the most exciting times in human history? By what measure can such a claim be made — apart from the fact that this era has been blessed with the advent of Malcolm Turnbull? In fact, by any objective historical criteria, the present period is one of decadence and decline, perhaps exemplified above all by Turnbull’s own ascendency.

In terms of politics the present era is not one of excitement. Instead it is characterised by desperate mediocrity, cynicism, opportunism, and alienation in which all credible leadership is lacking. In which countries of the world can be found politicians who could be ranked with the even the second-string figures of the past, much less the great leaders whose exploits have inspired their people and shifted history onto a different path? Turnbull? Merkel? Cameron? Obama?! Are these third-raters and frauds the agents of excitement that Malcolm is getting worked up about? Or perhaps he only sees the world through the cynical prism of Game of Thrones, or House of Cards, which has itself drawn the connection between its fantasy world and Malcolm’s.

In terms of economics the period is also hardly exciting. The USA, China, Europe and Australia are struggling while the world staggers along under a $200 trillion burden of debt. This is a crippling encumbrance that has increased by $57 trillion since the GFC in 2007, when governments and consumers were meant to have learnt their lesson about unsustainable borrowing. Is this mortgaging of the future a source of excitement for Malcolm? Perhaps it might be for an extremely wealthy merchant banker able to leverage profit even in a time of financial crisis. But for the rest of us? Is excitement the right word, or are “desperation” and “dread” better descriptions?