RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/334219

Winter is “fast approaching” in the Arab world, Ruthie Blum warns.

One U.S. president “enabled the rise of and spread of a pernicious form of radicalism that threatens the globe to this day.” That president was Jimmy Carter, who “opened the door to this radicalism in Iran three decades ago.” But it is our current president, she contends, whose “policies are laying out the welcome mat for it to flourish in the rest of the Middle East today.” Blum talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about her new book — To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the “Arab Spring” — and about the Mideast’s past, present, and future.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Was the presidential election in the United States a disappointment for Israel?

RUTHIE BLUM: It was certainly a disappointment for all those in Israel — including, no doubt, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who understand how bad President Barack Obama has been for the West as a whole. Since Israel is on the front lines of the global war against the West, all Jews and Israelis should have been disappointed by the results of the American election. But this is not the case. In fact, most American Jews supported Obama, as did the Israeli Left. Nor is “disappointment” the issue here. I am convinced that the U.S. presidential-election results are bad for Israel and for America.

LOPEZ: We do seem to be standing by Israel for the moment?

BLUM: It is true that the Obama administration did not throw Israel under the proverbial bus during the recent Gaza operation. It was, indeed, a pleasant surprise. Less surprising is its having elevated Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi to ill-deserved international respectability. Even worse, by brokering a cease-fire between Israel and a terrorist organization, the United States placed the two sides of the imbalanced conflict on a par. So I don’t really see America as standing by Israel at the moment any more than I see it standing by itself.

LOPEZ: What was the recent flare-up in Gaza about? Will the cease-fire hold?

BLUM: The flare-up was the result of Israel’s finally having had enough of the Iran-backed missile fire from Gaza, and Israel’s targeted assassination of one key terror master. It is highly unlikely that the cease-fire will hold, since Hamas has no compunction about making deals and breaking them. Furthermore, Hamas’s aims are neither local nor based on territorial issues with Israel. No temporary truce for media or State Department consumption will put a dent in the terrorists’ ultimate goal of global jihad.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/334222/misremembrance-things-past-charles-c-w-cooke Smarter conservatives winced when Francis Fukuyama made his declaration that the closing decade of the 20th century marked the “end of History.” But their disquiet was nothing compared with the sheer wretchedness of those who had spent the prior decades hoping history would progress ever leftwards. When Fukuyama pronounced the endpoint of History, classical […]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/11/27/the-next-mitt-romney/print The Next Mitt Romney???? Jeb was neutral. Say again, neutral. As Ronald Reagan might say, there he went again. What was Jeb Bush neutral about? The choice between liberal Charlie Crist and conservative Marco Rubio for the Republican nomination for United States Senator from Florida. Oh, he finally came around. After then-Governor Crist endorsed […]

PULEEZ! JUST SAY NO!….I LOATHE POLITICAL DYNASTIES…NO MORE CLINTONS, NO MORE BUSHES, NO MORE KENNEDYS, …..RSK

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/look_out_here_comes_jeb_bush_for_president.html

“Bush III?” Haven’t we had enough with Bush I and II? Not if those very same establishment Republicans who gave us Mitt “Flat Tire” Romney have their ways.

The Drudge Report headlines it today as “Bush III.” As in Jeb Bush, former Florida governor and son and brother to George I and George II, respectively. Drudge’s headline links to a short entry at National Review’s “The Corner.”

That would be quite a Trifecta, wouldn’t it? Jeb Bush picking up where his pa and bro left off?

George H.W. Bush won the White House in 1988 on the wave created by President Reagan. With the help of the late Lee Atwater, Bush ran an aggressive campaign against the hapless Michael Dukakis. Winning handily, in forty-eight short months, the elder Bush triumphed in a quick war in Iraq, soared in popularity, and then managed to renege on his “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge at time when the economy was wobbly, no less.

The elder Bush went down to an ignominious defeat in 1992, garnering only 37% of the popular vote and opening up the White House to everyone’s favorite scoundrel, Bill Clinton (only the second president in U.S. history to be impeached).

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/11/27/european-disintegration-animal-prostitution/?print=1

If you ever wondered what lies at the bottom of the slippery slope, go to Germany. There, you will find Europe’s modern moral and cultural bankruptcy on open display. There, you can visit one of many “erotic zoos” and partake in sex with animals for a price.

In a German “erotic zoo,” customers pay to have sex with farm animals. A barnyard pimp collects money from the customers. These businesses are proliferating throughout Germany and Denmark, and are completely legal.

The Telegraph gives us some background to the law’s “enlightened” legalization of bestiality:

Bestiality was legalised in Germany in 1969, the same year that gay sex was also removed from the criminal code. After that, sex with animals was only punishable if the animal was severely injured.

The current proposal would outlaw animal prostitution by banning the pimps at the erotic zoo. That’s right, pimps. The gatekeepers, literally, would be criminalized. If you collect cash from freaks looking for a lamb, it would be a crime for the first time since 1969.

Has Europe really fallen so far so fast?

Apart from Muslim communities across most of western Europe, birthrates have crashed. Mohammed is the most popular boy’s name in England. European law is in full retreat. In the Netherlands, you can order a mobile euthanasia van to your house like we order a pizza. In England, the Royal College of Obstetricians support infant euthanasia, a.k.a., murder. The glorious cathedrals of the west are empty on Sundays, except in still-devoutly Catholic countries like Poland and Ireland.

Might the rise of secular, hip Europe have any relation to the rise of erotic zoos?

The spectacle of German heavy-petting zoos has some lessons for us here in the United States. PJ Media’s Zombie routinely covers the California version of the moral collapse found in the German sheep and bull bordellos. These beastly bordellos pose a vexing question for libertarians here.

Customers at the German erotic zoos consider this a simple lifestyle choice. Alas, the 1969 repeal of German laws got the government out of the bedroom, or, perhaps more appropriately, out of the barnyard. And under a libertarian model, cows and pigs are properly consider chattel, mere property like a chair or tractor. If one wants to do things to a chair or tractor they own, then they certainly aren’t hurting anyone else.

The central tenet of libertarianism is freedom of action as long as you don’t hurt another human. Pigs don’t count.

Live and let live. Heck, who’s to say the sow would object, if she could speak?

When you are done laughing, realize that an effort was made in Congress to amend the uniform code of military justice to legalize bestiality.

And thus we peer down from the top of the slippery slope. This is not to say that libertarianism is a bad thing. Having those strong tendencies myself, I recognize individual liberty is the law’s greatest force for good. That gave birth to this great nation and still sustains it.

The German law puts the government back in the barnyard, or in the bedroom, if you can stand the smell in the house.

To some, moral codes build and preserve civilizations. To others, moral codes impair civilization. This is the fundamental fault line of modern politics. Regular church attendees skew conservative. Secularists skew left.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/11/27/rice-bombs-in-meeting-with-senators/?print=1

As PJM’s Bridget Johnson reports, President Obama’s dice-rolling attempt to clear the path for Susan Rice to succeed Hillary Clinton appears to have bombed. Ms. Rice, the president’s ambassador to the UN, called for a meeting with three of her most vocal Republican critics — Senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH). The senators obliged her this morning and, evidently, came away from the meeting more troubled than ever.

The problem ought to be obvious: Rice cannot possibly have a good explanation for the preposterous story she was dispatched by the president to tell the country on the Sunday shows after the Benghazi atrocity in which Islamist terrorists killed four Americans.

The administration’s problem is reminiscent of the shoddy defense lawyer who is so taken in by his own spin that he can’t understand why others see right through it — a problem that the president’s adoring media exacerbates by not challenging him. We have our disagreements here at Ordered Liberty with Senators McCain and Graham, but neither they nor Sen. Ayotte are babes in the Washington woods, particularly on matters of national security and intelligence. Unless they were just dying to be won over by Ms. Rice (thankfully, they were not), they knew exactly what questions to ask — questions for which there are no good answers.

The administration’s line, parroted by everyone from Obama on down, is that Rice’s abysmal performance on the Sunday show came about because she, automaton-like, merely relayed what the intelligence community told her. This has always been absurd on its face and is especially unbecoming for an official who is asking to be promoted to even greater responsibilities.

The intelligence community, particularly the CIA, knew that the Benghazi operation was a terrorist attack while it was happening. The White House, including the president, no doubt, was also aware of the fact that a terrorist attack was underway. The State Department, of which Rice is a high ranking official, is not an outlier — it is actually part of the intelligence community, with a division called the “Bureau of Intelligence and Research” that is an intelligence agency and has access to all intel relevant to U.S. foreign policy. The players here were not in the dark, and if they had been they had the means to be brought up to speed quickly.

There is no sugar-coating this: the administration lied to to country about what happened. The massacre was a foreseeable result of Obama’s policy of empowering Islamists. Moreover, the massacre cut against the Obama campaign narrative that killing bin Laden had effectively destroyed al-Qaeda. The Mohammed movie was blamed in order to divert attention from those facts as the administration played out the clock until election day. Rice, an ambitious Obama loyalist, was sent out to convey the misleading version of events and dutifully complied.

Straightforward.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-politicians-war-on-science/?print=1 As Paula Bolyard noted [1] the other day, the “gotcha” game by the Democratic operatives with bylines to poison Republican candidates’ chances started early, with a loaded question to Marco Rubio: To read some of the reactions to Senator Marco Rubio’s comments on the age of the earth, you’d think that he’d proposed rounding […]

‘The Killing Has to Stop’ A Visit to the Home of Former Hostage Gilad Shalit By Dieter Bednarz

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/former-hostage-gilad-shalit-and-his-father-on-israel-conflict-with-gaza-a-869381-druck.html

PURE EVIDENCE HERE OF HOW A HOSTAGE AND HIS FAMILY THEN IDENTIFY WITH THE GOALS OF THE TERRORIST CAPTORS….AND TO HINK HOW MANY TERRORISTS WERE SET FREE IN ORDER TO GAIN THE RELEASE FO GILAD SHALIT…..RSK

Gilad Shalit, who spent more than five years in the hands of Hamas kidnappers, harbors no thoughts of revenge toward the Islamist group. And his father, who is beginning a political career, says that Israel needs to negotiate.

The hero of Gaza, as they called him, must be a late sleeper. The sun has already been shining for hours over the Mediterranean, shimmering in the distance, but still there is no movement on the second floor of the house in Galilee, where the shutters haven’t been opened yet. “Gilad, we have company,” Noam Shalit, 57, calls up to the second floor.

Smiling shyly, his son walks down a short flight of stairs into the kitchen, wearing a blue sweatshirt, jeans and sandals. Gilad Shalit, 26, a lanky young man with a soft handshake, is the most famous victim of Hamas since the radical Islamist group began fighting Israel, which it calls the “Zionist entity.” In June 2006, Hamas fighters attacked his army post, which was guarding the border to the Gaza Strip at the time, and kidnapped Shalit. On Oct. 18 of last year, after spending five years as a hostage, Shalit was released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fatal-flaws-in-the-reliance-upon-international-guarantees?f=puball When an earlier Secretary of State before Hillary Clinton, namely Condoleezza Rice, arrived several times in Jerusalem she pressured the then weak and embattled Israeli government of Ehud Olmert into continuing the dreary and one sided exercise of concessions to the Palestinian Arabs. The futile peace process, which has now existed through successive US […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/war-peace-and-wishful-thinking In one Seinfeld episode, Elaine Benes, the irrepressibly liberal camp follower, promiscuous skank, and social climber – and small screen progenitor of Sandra Fluke – remarks with reckless abandon and shameless gaucheness to a Leo Tolstoy scholar: “Although one wonders if War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it was, had […]