RUTHFULLY YOURS

Where previous presidents fostered American strength, Obama revels in weakness.

Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, set during the Depression, was a divine counterfactual thought experiment designed to remind a suicidal George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) that his hometown, Bedford Falls, would have turned out to be a pretty miserable place called Pottersville without his seemingly ordinary presence.

Consider the Obama administration’s first six years as a prolonged counterfactual take on what the world might have been like for the last 70 years without a traditionally engaged American president dedicating our country to preserving the postwar Western-inspired global order.

The what-if dream seems to be working to show the vast alterations in a world that Westerners once took for granted. France, a perennial critic of America, is suddenly an unlikely international activist. For seven decades, the French harped about American hyperpuissance – on the implied assurance that such triangulating would be ignored by an easily caricatured, aw-shucks American George Bailey trying his best to keep things in the global community from falling apart.

The peacemakers, as has so often been the case, have made war of every imaginable kind more likely — and that includes military intervention in Iran. If Obama dreams of a legacy, a war his policy of appeasement promoted may well be it
Back in December 2014, former US secretaries of state Henry Kissinger (who served from 1973 to 1977) and George Shultz (1982 to 1989) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “What a Final Iran Deal Must Do”. This missive appeared a week after President Obama signed the 2013 interim nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran, one that purported to temporarily freeze Tehran’s decade-long advance towards military nuclear capability. Kissinger and Shultz warned that the Islamic Republic’s quest for the nuclear bomb would be enhanced by the 2013 interim agreement. On April 12, 2015, a week after Obama celebrated his latest “breakthrough” with the Mullahs of Iran, the so-called framework for a preliminary nuclear agreement, Kissinger and Shultz published a sequel in the Wall Street Journal, this time titled “The Iran Deal and Its Consequences”. The worst fears of the former secretaries of state appeared to be confirmed by the latest turn of events:

A strong West, united behind Washington, might have responded to Russian adventurism in Ukraine by supplying materiel, intelligence and public support. With Obama in the White House and US influence in retreat, that is one possibility Moscow need not worry about
On one level, the news, reported in The Australian on May 29, 2015, that Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had signed a decree making military losses in “special operations” during peacetime a state secret is one more marker in Russia’s reversion to its Soviet totalitarian past. On another level, Putin is seeking to sustain an utterly implausible deniability. Yet the cat is well and truly out of the bag, as the old saying goes.

On May 14, President Obama said that the two-state solution is “vital” for peace between Israel and its Arab population. Furthermore, in a Huffington Post interview dated March 21, the President reiterated his belief that, “A two-state solution is the only way for the long-term security of Israel, if it wants to stay both a Jewish state and democratic.”

The question is why anyone is still talking about a two-state solution? After all, no one person or body has succeeded in imposing or implementing this “solution” to the satisfaction of all parties, even going back as far as the 1937 Peel Commission, when it was first suggested that the Mandate for Palestine could be divided into two states for two peoples. And if we can all agree that the two-state solution hasn’t worked, one might reasonably ask whether the two-state solution is really the “only” solution available toward the resolution of what Ruth Wisse calls “the Arab war against Israel and the Jews.”

Supporters of Obamatrade won in the Senate by selling the idea that Fast Tracking would strengthen American power. They cited a letter signed by several former defense secretaries which claimed:

There would be harmful strategic consequences if we fail to secure these agreements. In both Asia-Pacific and Atlantic, our allies and partners would question our commitments, doubt our resolve and inevitably look to other partners.

Unfortunately, these defense secretaries did not understand the economics of trade deficits. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the first deal that Obama is negotiating, would actually accelerate the destruction of U.S. power by growing our massive trade deficits.

Trade Deficits and Power

It is clear at this point that TPP would increase U.S. trade deficits. Amendments to combat mercantilist currency manipulation were narrowly rejected in the Senate because TPP backers argued that U.S. insistence on ending currency manipulation would lead others (e.g. Japan) to scuttle the deal. Instead, TPP will enable currency manipulation, the chief technique used by mercantilist countries to expand their trade surpluses and our trade deficits.

The basic contention of mercantilism (the strategy of running intentional trade surpluses) is that maintaining a favorable balance of trade leads to an increase in national power. Hence, running a trade surplus is a means to the end of increasing national power and wealth, while running a trade deficit undermines these. There is nothing new in this contention. It is expressed in the Bible in Deuteronomy (15:6):

Thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many nations but they shall not rule over thee.

Mercantilist governments buy foreign currency (as part of their currency manipulations) and then they lend that currency to foreign nations. In this way they gain trade surpluses and power. We analyzed the economic reasons why trade deficits undermine national power in our recently published book Balanced Trade.

The Only Way Hillary’s Democratic Competition Can Defeat Her Which Democrat presidential candidate has the guts to call Queen Hillary a liar?

You’ve probably noticed a few intrepid souls have stuck their toes in the Democratic Party 2016 presidential race to contest the coronation of Queen Hillary. So far they’re not doing too well. According to the Real Clear Politics averages, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is running at 8.8% and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley at a stupendous 0.8%. (Two-thirds of them must have been at his announcement in Baltimore last week.) O’Malley’s even 1 percent behind Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chaffee, who hasn’t announced yet. He’s supposed to take the plunge on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Queen rules at 63.6%. The one who’s doing the best against her at 12.5% is that house -flipping squaw Elizabeth Warren, who claims not to be running and is a full 51.1% behind anyway.

So things look pretty bad for Sanders, O’Malley and, potentially, Chafee, and, oh yes, again potentially, Jim Webb, all of whom seem to be prepared to engage in a tedious bidding war for who has the most extreme progressive policies. That will get them virtually nowhere — and if by some chance some idea catches fire, Hillary can co-opt it in ten minutes. She may lose a few points here and there (she’s even losing them now) but she’ll end up cruising to the nomination anyway.

The indictment of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert provides a good opportunity to weigh in on a subject that is especially apt for a blog called “Ordered Liberty”: over-criminalization. It is one that has gotten a good deal of attention on the right and the left — even bringing Rand Paul and Al Sharpton together, notwithstanding their disagreements on most everything else.

The ever-more sweeping regulation of human activity and concomitant diminution of liberty are elements of the “democratic despotism” problem foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville, as Roger Kimball eloquently observes (see, e.g., here).

Students of the criminal law learn early on the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum — i.e., conduct that is wrong in and of itself (e.g., murder, theft) versus conduct that is considered wrong only because we have chosen to legislate against it. The structuring of cash transactions is an excellent example of the latter.

“Black Lives Matter.” At first blush, it seems difficult to imagine anyone taking issue with the obvious, self-evident truth articulated by those three simple words. But when we peel away the veneer of deception, we find that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is in fact one of the most destructive, hateful, racist movements in living memory. Founded by a core group of revolutionaries who detest the United States and revere the nation’s most devoted radical enemies, BLM is, at its essence, an ideological reincarnation of the Black Panther [2] movement that flourished in the Sixties.

Black Lives Matter was established [3] two years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the “white Hispanic [4]” who was tried for murder and manslaughter vis-à-vis the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. According to BLM, Zimmerman’s act was but a microcosm of the “virulent [5] anti-Black racism” that “permeates our society” and continues to exacerbate [6] “the deep psychological wounds of slavery, racism and structural oppression.”

The president’s dangerous release of almost 100,000 criminal illegal aliens.

For patriots knowledgeable of the Immigration & Nationality Act, such as immigration judges, ICE attorneys, and litigators who fight for greater immigration enforcement like myself, the day President Obama told the American public he would “re-prioritize” the statute’s mandatory removal provisions was one of astonished disbelief that still endures.

Nowhere in the Act did Congress give the President the authority to “re-prioritize” illegal alien and criminal alien-removals. The INA is a deterring statute and it’s been continuously amended to better deter illegal immigration since it was originally enacted in 1952.

As the results of the 2012 and 2014 “executive actions” show, re-entries and recidivism among convicted criminal aliens (legal and illegal aliens convicted of crimes) has spiked and, as a result, we’re pushing deeper and deeper into immigration anarchy. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s lawlessness is leading to ever greater lawlessness.

While Americans yawned through another weekend, watching television or playing catch with their kids, the greatest human rights violation in our nation’s troubled history took place in the sky above Chicago.

Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim chaplain at Northwestern University who has participated in MSA and ISNA events, and gotten her photo taken with Obama, was denied an unopened Diet Coke.

“Muslim Chaplain Tahera Ahmad Denied Diet Coke,” NBC News blared. “I Can’t Help But Cry,” the CNN headline declaims. “’No Diet Coke for you’: Islamophobia at 30000 feet,” bleated The Guardian.

“Outrage after United Airlines refuses Muslim woman Diet Coke,” the Mirror chimed in.

The Diet Coke crisis was upon us. Islamists called for a boycott of United Airlines and #unitedfortahera became a trending hashtag as random idiots denounced racism and commiserated with the horror of being denied a Diet Coke and pledged not to fly United until they actually need to use their airline miles.