RUTHFULLY YOURS

For most of the modern era, the Republican party has been identified with a strong national defense. Through most of the Cold War, the GOP dominated the Democrats in polling on which of the two was to be trusted more on matters of the country’s security. And while Republicans’ reputation on defense suffered significantly in the 2000s, the party is recapturing much of its credibility on these issues with a public worried not only by the immediate threats of ISIS and Ebola but also by the palpable sense that the world is becoming a more unstable and dangerous place. With their message of the need for a potent military and the importance of a clear-eyed and resolute approach to threats, the new Republican majority in the Senate and the expanded majority in the House are well positioned to regain the national-security leadership mantle.

But this favorable political trend should not be taken as a reason for just doing more of the same. For while the Republicans are usually considered the more hawkish party, the deeper reason for their long-term ascendancy on defense issues is that voters have seen them as more serious in dealing with defense. Republicans have been most successful, in other words, when they have earned the reputation for being the more responsible party on defense — the sober experts on the matter — and not simply for always preferring the more hawkish course. Of course, being the more serious party has often meant being tougher on security issues than the Democrats. But the most successful Republican presidents have prevailed over their opponents — the Adlai Stevensons, George McGoverns, Walter Mondales, Michael Dukakises — by being seen as more trustworthy with the nation’s security rather than simply being bellicose. Republicans have been at their best when they have been seen as smart hawks rather than just reflexive ones.

Voters on Election Day chose Tim Scott as South Carolina’s U.S. senator. They also sent Utah’s Mia Love and Texas’s Will Hurd to the U.S. House of Representatives. Thus, the 114th Congress will include three black Republicans. This is a new high-water mark for black Americans.

Too bad the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People couldn’t care less. (America’s oldest civil-rights organization still plasters that retrograde expression all over its logo and website.)

NAACP has yet to congratulate, acknowledge, or even attack Scott, Love, and Hurd — now America’s three most powerful elected black Republicans. What you hear is the silence of the Colored People. Despite ten separate requests for comment on this “advancement of colored people,” I could not squeeze a consonant out of NAACP’s Baltimore headquarters, its Washington, D.C., office, or even its Hollywood bureau.

NAACP president Cornell William Brooks did say on November 5, “This election was not about who won but rather the citizens who lost the right to participate.” Despite complaints about malfunctioning polling machines and voters blocked for lack of photo ID, one wonders where NAACP is hiding these disenfranchised citizens. Why have we heard as much about them since November 5 as NAACP has said about Scott, Love, and Hurd?

NAACP did issue a November 14 press release expressing its “strong support of the new Qualified Residential Mortgage rule” under the behemoth Dodd-Frank financial-services law. The group praised the rejection of new down-payment rules for home loans. Who needs strong credit standards? What could go wrong?

NAACP has offered communiqués praising Obama’s new draconian carbon dioxide regulations and even applauding La June Montgomery Tabron for becoming president of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. As for three black Republicans getting elected to Congress? Crickets.

What a disgrace.

Jonathan Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses is thematic of the last six years.

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud.

Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them.

Gruber apparently thinks such deception is okay because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage.

Unfortunately, Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses — he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees — is thematic of the last six years.

Another master-of-the-universe drafter of Obamacare was Ezekiel Emanuel. He scoffed on national television that the number of people covered by Obamacare at that point was “irrelevant.”

Emanuel also drew attention for his recent adolescent rant in a men’s magazine about the desirability of everyone dying at 75 to save society the expense of maintaining what he sees as the unproductive elderly.

Former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lectured of Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” The same elitist message reverberates: that government and academic elites are smarter than average Americans, and so need not explain what they are doing.

This is a pattern of Obama administration ruling elites who express disdain or lack of concern about the people they are supposed to serve. Former energy secretary Steven Chu made a series of astounding statements about energy use, the most inane being that America would be better off if gas costs soared to Europe’s sky-high prices.

Who can forget the Obama acceptance speech in 2008 on a football field in Denver, the nominee standing amid Greek columns and scrolling through a long list of goals to 84,000 Democrats? That was the high. Six years later, the Democrats get the hangover. On Thursday, Mr. Obama will announce his presidency’s only declaration of war—against the Republicans. After describing how he will redesign the U.S. immigration system on his own authority, he’ll fly Friday to Las Vegas.

The remaining two years will be irregular warfare, with Mr. Obama deploying his weapon of choice, the executive order. This essentially turns the presidency into a cruise missile: The president tells the country what to do, and the country does it.

Before the U.S. political system goes to the mattresses, I’d like to spend a moment discussing Jonathan Gruber, ObamaCare and the American people.

Jon Gruber is the now-famous ObamaCare designer and explainer-for-hire who said the Affordable Care Act became law because the American people were too stupid to understand what was in it.

Within days, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi were throwing Jon Gruber down the memory hole. You bet they were. The Gruber incident poses a direct threat to the Democratic Party.

Jon Gruber’s remarks matter not for what they say about the Democratic Party’s modus operandi but because of the truths he revealed about the Democratic Party’s reason for being. The Gruber threat to the Democrats isn’t reputational; it’s existential.

The Democrats have believed for decades that if they build it—a health-care entitlement or any other federal bestowment—the voters will come. That political model is cracking.

Villagers from the Cévennes cooperated to save thousands of innocents wanted by the Nazis and their French collaborators.

In 1934, when André Trocmé took up his new post as the Protestant pastor of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, an isolated, wind-swept village in the highlands of the Haute-Loire in the French Cévennes, he and his family could have been forgiven for ruing their luck. Enclosed by mountains and prey to heavy snows during the long winters, the village could be cut off from the outside world for weeks at a time. Trocmé’s new parishioners seemed to him “as grey as their granite farmhouses,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “They talked incessantly about death.” Not the most engaging qualities on the surface, but as the charismatic pastor eventually discovered, it would take a special kind of bullheadedness to defy the Nazis and their French collaborators in 1940-44.

The inhabitants of Le Chambon and its surrounding parishes in the non-Occupied Zone of south-central France would save thousands of lives during World War II: Communists, resisters, Freemasons and a large number of Jews, including hundreds of orphaned children and babies whose parents had been deported to the death camps, were all given vital refuge from the Gestapo and French Milice, the paramilitary force created in 1943 by the Vichy regime to combat the Resistance. Nearly everyone in the town cooperated to save these innocent strangers, Trocmé among them.

After the war, about 40 people from Le Chambon, including Trocmé and his wife, Magda, were awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Center for Holocaust Research. A best-selling book, “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed” (1979) by Philip Hallie, and an award-winning documentary film by Pierre Sauvage, “Weapons of the Spirit” (1987), were made about the extraordinary efforts of the people of Le Chambon. Now, in “Village of Secrets,” Caroline Moorehead delivers the definitive account of how and why they did what they did.

Jordan is a moderate Muslim country.

But it’s not exactly surprising. This would be the Jordanian parliament which fought any effort to criminalize honor killings and which called for the release of a Jordanian soldier who murdered seven Israeli teenage girls. With good reason. Jordan was the original “Palestine”.

After the brutal murder of four Rabbis, this story via Elder of Ziyon comes as no surprise at all.

On Wednesday, Jordan’s parliament offered a prayer in honor of the spirit of Ghassan Abu Jamal and Uday Abu Jamal – the terrorists who slaughtered five people.

The prayer was held as the House of representatives session opened.

MP Khalil Attieh requested his fellow representatives to recite the Fatiha for the “spirit of the heroes.”

The Fatiha is the first chapter of the Koran, recited on important occasions.

Attieh further declared that the murders were a “natural reaction to the occupation crimes against the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Palestinians.”

In addition, MP Mohammed Al-Qatathh of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the assembly condemning the “Zionist attack on Jerusalem and its people” in the wake of “the heroic operation” on the synagogue in Har Nof.

Obama’s excuse for his illegal amnesty will be that the immigration system is “broken” forcing him to act. But when Obama says that the system is broken, he means that some parts of it still work and so he intends to break immigration all the way through to benefit his own corrupt political allies.

That will hurt his own voters the most, but the Democratic Party has a notoriously masochistic relationship with its voting base. It beats them up and then it gaslights them by hugging them and telling them that it was really the mean Republicans who punched them in the face.

When African-American unemployment rates rise, the workers who can’t find jobs because of all the brand new DREAMERs won’t blame the White House, they’ll blame the evil Republicans for income inequality, assuming Sharpton manages to read the term correctly from his MSNBC teleprompter.

According to Obama our immigration system is broken because it doesn’t allow illegal aliens who illegally crossed the border to take American jobs. That’s not a broken system, that’s what the system is supposed to do.

When illegal aliens aren’t allowed to legally take American jobs, that’s how you know the immigration system is working.

In the language of progressivism, helping means ruining and fixing means breaking. A system that fulfills any useful purpose must be reformed out of all usefulness. If the tattered shreds of the immigration system still keep a single Democratic voter from legally cashing a welfare check and casting a vote, then immigration must be reformed and helped and fixed until it is completely destroyed.

The immigration system is broken because it was reformed so many times that it makes as much sense as an outhouse on a space shuttle. Its main function now is to bring millions of people without jobs to a country where millions are out of work. Obama wants to fix that by adding millions more people.

Below are the video and transcript to Geert Wilders’ speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

“It is always a pleasure to be in the United States. And it is an honor to be at Restoration Weekend again. Especially at this moment when a new Congress and a new majority in the Senate are preparing to lead this great country and change it for the better.

I am a politician from Europe. I am a member of the House of Representatives in the Netherlands and the leader of the Party for Freedom, the leading party in the Dutch opinion polls today.

Before I continue, let me tell you something about my life as a European politician.

I am not a President, nor a Governor, nor even a member of Cabinet, just a member of Congress. For over ten years now, I have been living under 24/7 police protection. I lived with my wife in army barracks, prison cells and safe houses until this very day, just to be safe.

Wherever I go, armed policemen accompany me to protect me against Islamic jihadis. Al Qaida, the Taliban, ISIS and many others threatened to kill me because I tell the truth about Islam and speak out against the Islamization of our free Western societies.

In Europe we have made a terrible mistake. During the past decades, our politicians foolishly allowed millions of Islamic immigrants to settle within our borders. Everywhere the Islamic culture was welcomed as an enrichment. Nowhere was the demand made that the immigrants assimilate.

Not a single European leader had the guts to state the obvious and tell the truth: Our Western culture based on Christianity, Judaism and Humanism, is far superior to the Islamic culture and immigrants have to adopt our values.

Jerusalem Synagogue Massacre: Enough Status Quo, Maybe?

Four rabbis at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue were murdered – hacked to death — by a pair of terrorist Arabs, and this we all know. We have since learned, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that the homes of these terrorists will be destroyed, and this is too is not big news. (A Druze-Israeli policeman to the rescue has become the fifth fatality.)

Nothing, in fact, is really news. Another day, another massacre. Despite the shock, the grieving and the rage, Israelis have learned to take it in stride.

We also learn that Har Nof, the same place where all that happened only hours ago, is “back to normal.” Those words from an Israeli spokesman.

Yes, the doors of the shul are open again, the blood wiped clean of Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Aryeh Kupinsky, Kalman Ze’ev Levine and Avraham Shmuel Goldberg.

Among Israelis, getting back to normal is a matter of pride. “We won’t live in fear. We won’t be intimidated.” That is the message.

For Obama’s citing Palestinian suffering in the same breath as this atrocity, no words at this moment except one – disgraceful.
Admirable, I suppose.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/392982/rescission-course-andrew-c-mccarthy Unlike my friend Quin, I am not the slightest bit surprised that the GOP may use the Theater of Rescission to playact “opposition” to Obama’s executive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. As Quin and Eliana report, that gambit has been floated by Representative Hal Rogers of Kentucky, the Republican establishment factotum who chairs […]