RUTHFULLY YOURS

As MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber squirmed through a session with the House Oversight Committee, we are provided perfect example of an all too common practice: the “ends justify the means” political tactic foisted upon our political system by the Alinskyites of the American Progressive Movement. And while Mr. Gruber is today’s poster-boy for a bloated faction of disingenuous politicians, only a fool would believe that this concerted disingenuousness is exclusive to just one side of the aisle.

In a Washington Post piece titled, The Gruberization of the Democratic Party (the correct designation is Democrat, not Democratic, but that’s another matter of disingenuousness entirely), Ed Rogers writes:

“It’s too bad the Gruber videos weren’t revealed before the 2014 elections, because they perfectly crystallize the entire Democratic 2014 campaign. That is, don’t admit what you really believe or what you will really do in government. Say things that purposely deceive or at least misdirect the voters from your true intentions. Anyway, Gruber isn’t just a bad episode. He is a living example of what the Democratic Party has become.”

While I concur with Mr. Rogers’ analysis, he stops short in focusing solely on the Democrat Party. But for a very few in elected office – very few indeed, the practice of not being “straight” with the American Electorate is epidemic among political class. The very existence of the job descriptor “spin doctor” proves this point beyond doubt, to wit, if a politician was being honest with his constituency, why would he or she need to “spin” anything? To “spin” is to deceive or manipulate the truth; to provide “nuance” to the “narrative.” To deny it would require a willing suspension of one’s common sense; an all too rampant malady in the United States in and of itself.

Political disingenuousness is present in almost every issue and on both sides of the aisle. Inside the beltway Democrats and Republicans have abdicated serving the public, instead existing pre-occupied with the acquisition and retention of power and station. To make my point, here are three issues that both sides of the aisle routinely sacrifice at the altar of political opportunism:

A knife is not a conversation and riots do not make for better relations between the races.

Is this the conversation we’re having? The mudslingers keep telling us “we need to have a conversation” about race relations.

Okay, go ahead. Let’s talk.

But a conversation means both sides get a chance.

Last night, at Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn, a male described by authorities as African-American, Calvin Peters, stabbed an Israeli student, Levi Rosenblat.

The New York Daily News reports that Peters kept yelling, “I want to kill a Jew.”

Is this a conversation? Is this what they mean?

Rosenblat never had a chance against a weapon.

A knife is not a conversation and riots do not make for better relations between the races.

Yet the flamethrowers, beginning at the top with Obama, keep telling us that we need to talk. We need to discuss.

I doubt there was ever a time in America, pre-Revolution and since, that race was not an issue. It was for the framers of the Constitution who, in order to get the southern colonies to accept it, included in Article Two that, for the purpose of taxation, slaves were to be identified as only “three-fifths” of being a person. In Section 9, it was agreed that the issue of slavery was not to be addressed until 1808, but “a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.”

Protesting something, anything, is as American as the flag. After fighting a Revolution for six years to rid themselves of a British monarch and his control of the colonies, Americans embraced the right to protest as part of their definition of liberty and freedom. By 1861 the protests against slavery had so divided the nation a Civil War had to be fought. In 1870, the 15th Amendment enfranchised former slaves with the right to vote, but Congress would wait until 1920 to extend the same right to women!

Having lived through the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert who was the Attorney General, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I concluded that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had “solved” the issues that had afflicted blacks in America. I was wrong.

The protests that occurred in the wake of grand jury decisions not to indict a police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or another group of police officers whose arrest of Eric Garner led to his death in Staten Island, New York are different only because they swiftly went from local to national. The initial Ferguson protests immediately descended into looting and arson. The Garner protests attracted large crowds that disrupted traffic and interfered with consumers in some shopping outlets. It seems to have gone unnoticed that large numbers of those in the latter protests were white.

The protests were magnified by the involvement of the President and the Attorney General who, while urging that violence be avoided, told the protesters to “stay the course.” Had either Michael Brown or Eric Garner obeyed the law, they would be alive. Brown had committed a robbery just prior to his attack on Officer Darren Wilson and Garner had a long history of arrests and was engaged in a minor offense of selling cigarettes.

With the exception of those who joined the protests, white America is deeply at odds with black America. There are serious differences that include issues involving crime rates, school dropout rates, numbers of illegitimate or aborted children, single parent families, and other comparable social differences between the two racial groups.

A MUST READ BIOGRAPHY OF MARIA MONTESSORI WAS WRITTEN BY RITA KRAMER: Maria Montessori: A Biography (Radcliffe Biography Series)Jan 22, 1988

Some book debuts are memorable and marvelous to behold, and this is one of them. I almost feel privileged to review Charlotte Cushman’s Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child’s Success and Happiness, recently published by The Paper Tiger.

Maria Montessori was born on August 31, 1870, in the provincial town of Chiaravalle, Italy, to middle-class, well-educated parents. At the time that Montessori was growing up, Italy held conservative values about women’s roles. From a young age, she consistently broke out of those proscribed gender limitations. After the family moved to Rome, when she was 14, Montessori attended classes at a boys’ technical institute, where she further developed her aptitude for math and her interest in the sciences-particularly biology.

Facing her father’s resistance but armed with her mother’s support, Montessori went on to graduate with high honors from the medical school of the University of Rome in 1896. In so doing, Montessori became the first female doctor in Italy.

Montesorri displayed the same insatiable appetite for knowledge that she has encouraged her teachers to imbue in their pre-school and kindergarten students. Her premise was that “class” and a child’s external environment did not necessarily determine the contents and actions of his mind, unless he has a passive, as opposed to an active, ambitious, eager mind. (Passivity is also an action of volition, or of choice, but a negative one.) The mentally healthy mind possesses the human attribute of volition, and can develop a willingness and ability to think. This, Cushman, emphasizes, is a natural desire in children. Bright, independent, confident children could hale from any strata of society. Social status is irrelevant.

As a doctor, Montessori chose pediatrics and psychiatry as her specialties. While teaching at her medical-school alma mater, Montessori treated many poor and working-class children who attended the free clinics there. During that time, she observed that intrinsic intelligence was present in children of all socio-economic backgrounds.

Montessori became the director of the Orthophrenic School for developmentally disabled children in 1900. There she began to extensively research early childhood development and education….

This is the third church in Muslim-majority East Jerusalem to be forced shut in recent years.

“You think all men are equal… Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become victims of the enemy you have welcomed into our home.” — Archbishop Amel Shimoun, Exiled Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, Iraq.

As usual, after filing a complaint about a gang rape with the local police, her family received threats of more violence. “In Pakistan, rape is used as an instrument of arbitrary power over Christian girls… It is a form of violence that wants to reiterate the submission to Muslims. The rest of society is not outraged because the victims mostly belong to religious minorities. Rarely rapists are punished.” — Sardar Mushtaq Gill, lawyer, Pakistan.

American Pastor Saeed Abedini’s young children have submitted a video to President Barack Obama pleading with him to being their father safely home from Iranian prison. “Now we understand that ISIS members in the prison have said that he is their number one target.”

Around 45 churches in Mosul… were destroyed and converted into mosques.

Muslims beheading Christians was a visibly growing spectacle throughout the month of August. Islamic State [IS] militants cut off a Christian man’s head—after compelling him to say the shehada, the Islamic profession of faith, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” When the shehada is spoken before Muslim witnesses, the speaker becomes Muslim and thus, in theory, safeguards his life and possessions from the jihad. Not so for this hapless man, who, after renouncing his Christian faith for Islam, was still slaughtered on camera (graphic video can be viewed here).

UAE: Attacks on Americans by Woman in Niqab a ‘Personal Terrorist Act’ By Bridget Johnson

Two Americans have come under attack in the usually-safe United Arab Emirates, though officials there claim the woman in the niqab suspected in both crimes is not linked to any terror organizations.

Whereas the phrase “lone wolf attack” is popular with U.S. authorities, the UAE is calling the recent crimes in their country “a personal terrorist act.”

Kindergarten teacher Ibolya Ryan, 47, was stabbed to death by a veiled woman in the bathroom of a posh mall in Abu Dhabi last week. She leaves behind three kids.

The same woman is accused of planting a nail bomb outside a 55-year-old Egyptian-American doctor’s home, according to The National. Abu Dhabi officials defused the bomb and sent the man and his family to a hotel under guard.

The bomb was located by his 13-year-old son, who luckily didn’t touch it and notified his dad.

The suspect in custody, caught through the use of surveillance video despite her attempts to cloak her identity, is an Emirati national in her 30s, reportedly of Yemeni descent.

The Zionistfrei Movement In Britain, France, Spain and beyond, a drive to ban products from the Jewish state is picking up speed.

In Nazi Germany, it was all the rage to make one’s town Judenfrei. Now a new fashion is sweeping Europe: to make one’s town or city what we might call “Zionistfrei”—free of the products and culture of the Jewish state. Across the Continent, cities and towns are declaring themselves “Israel-free zones,” insulating their citizens from Israeli produce and culture. It has ugly echoes of what happened 70 years ago.

Leicester City Council in England last month voted to boycott goods made in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. All services run by the council will be free of any product or technology made in any of the settlements. The motion “condemns the Government of Israel for its continuing illegal occupation of Palestine’s East Jerusalem and the West Bank” and resolves “to boycott any produce originating from illegal Israeli settlements.”

Leicester Mayor Peter Soulsby insists that there’s nothing anti-Semitic about this erection of an Israel-deflecting force field around the city, telling the local Leicester Mercury newspaper that it’s simply about expressing dismay with “the behavior of the Israeli state.”

But Jeffrey Kaufman, former president of Leicester’s Progressive Jewish Congregation, isn’t convinced. He wants to know why, “of all the horrible things going on in the world,” the council singled out Israel for punitive treatment. “It’s blatant anti-Semitism,” he said.

Maybe it’s easier to get tenure at MIT than we thought. At least that’s our reaction to the Forrest Gump routine put on Tuesday before Congress by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who sounded for all the world as if he knew nothing more about politics and health care than the lovable bumpkin who always showed up when history was being made.

That wasn’t the way Mr. Gruber sounded in his now famous videos—including in a University of Pennsylvania appearance last year—when he credited the enactment of ObamaCare to a “lack of transparency,” the gaming of Congressional rules intended to measure the law’s fiscal impact, the “stupidity of the American voter,” and a lack of Democratic candor about the redistribution of wealth embedded in the new insurance scheme.
Opinion Journal Video

Political Diary Editor Jason Riley on the MIT economist’s Congressional testimony about his remarks about ObamaCare and the intelligence of the American public. Photo credit: Associated Press.

But on Tuesday before the House Oversight Committee, Mr. Gruber distanced himself from his remarks while refusing to say if they were true. He apologized for the tone, arrogance, glibness and the inappropriate nature of his remarks. But his response to substantive questions suggested that he is mainly sorry for getting caught on tape.

He even insisted on Tuesday that ObamaCare had been debated and passed in a transparent manner. But this position is 180 degrees from the one he expressed on tape. So he simply dismissed his taped remarks as “conjectures” about a political process he now claims not to understand.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has released its majority report on Central Intelligence Agency detention and interrogation in the wake of 9/11. The following response is from former CIA Directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden (a retired Air Force general), and former CIA Deputy Directors John E. McLaughlin, Albert M. Calland (a retired Navy vice admiral) and Stephen R. Kappes :

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Central Intelligence Agency detention and interrogation of terrorists, prepared only by the Democratic majority staff, is a missed opportunity to deliver a serious and balanced study of an important public policy question. The committee has given us instead a one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation—essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks.

Examining how the CIA handled these matters is an important subject of continuing relevance to a nation still at war. In no way would we claim that we did everything perfectly, especially in the emergency and often-chaotic circumstances we confronted in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. As in all wars, there were undoubtedly things in our program that should not have happened. When we learned of them, we reported such instances to the CIA inspector general or the Justice Department and sought to take corrective action.

The country and the CIA would have benefited from a more balanced study of these programs and a corresponding set of recommendations. The committee’s report is not that study. It offers not a single recommendation.

Our view on this is shared by the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority, both of which are releasing rebuttals to the majority’s report. Both critiques are clear-eyed, fact-based assessments that challenge the majority’s contentions in a nonpartisan way.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogations is a moment for reflection, but not for the reasons you’re hearing. The outrage at this or that ugly detail is politically convenient. The report is more important for illustrating how fickle Americans are about their security, and so unfair to those who provide it.

After the trauma of 9/11 and amid the anthrax letters in 2001, Americans wanted protection from another terror attack. The political class fired up a commission to examine what went wrong so it “would never happen again.” So the CIA, blamed for not stopping 9/11, tried to oblige. It captured the plotters, detained and interrogated them—sometimes harshly. There hasn’t been another successful al Qaeda plot on the homeland.

But political memories are short. As the Iraq war became unpopular, the anti-antiterror left fought back. Democrats who sensed a political opening began to fault the details of how the CIA and Bush Administration had protected the country—on surveillance, detention and interrogation. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, the lead Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, unleashed their staff to second-guess the CIA.
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That’s the context in which to understand the Senate report, which reads like a prosecutor’s brief. It devotes 6,000 pages to marshalling evidence to indict the CIA program, and nothing was going to interfere with its appointed verdict.

Not former CIA directors, who weren’t even interviewed (see the op-ed nearby). Not the virtues of bipartisanship, as the GOP minority staff were reduced to bystanders (see the minority report). And not the requirements of future security, which have been sacrificed to the immediate need to embarrass the agency to prove that Democrats were right.

The worst CIA failing in the report is poor management and a lack of adequate oversight. Junior officials were put in charge of detainees when wiser hands were needed, and in one case a detainee died from hypothermia. This may have resulted from the rapid CIA recruitment after 9/11, but it is a major failing, especially given the political backlash that CIA leaders knew was inevitable.

The report also uncovers rough methods that are now barred, though how shocking those are may depend on how you view the terrorist threat. The executive summary scores the CIA for using “in many cases the most aggressive techniques” immediately, in combination and nonstop.