RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, confirmation hearings were conducted for Loretta Lynch, the person who would replace the current Attorney General, Eric Holder. When asked about her views concerning the Obama administration’s policies on immigration, her responses where apparently contradictory.

Before we go further, it is of the utmost importance to understand that with all of the pressing issues that our government needs to address, immigration, unlike most other issues, is not a single issue, but a singular issue because immigration impacts virtually every other challenge and threat America and Americans face in this particularly dangerous and difficult era.

Here is how a Yahoo/AP news report, “Attorney General nominee defends Obama immigration changes,” covered the exchanges Lynch engaged in to discuss the administration’s immigration’s policies:

Lynch said she had no involvement in drafting the measures but called them “a reasonable way to marshal limited resources to deal with the problem” of illegal immigration. She said the Homeland Security Department was focusing on removals of “the most dangerous of the undocumented immigrants among us.”

Pressed by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a leading immigration hard-liner, she said citizenship was not a right for people in the country illegally but rather a privilege that must be earned. However, when Sessions asked whether individuals in the country legally or those who are here unlawfully have more of a right to a job, Lynch replied, “The right and the obligation to work is one that’s shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here.”

Sessions quickly issued a news release to highlight that response. Under later questioning by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, Lynch clarified it, stating there is no right to work for an immigrant who has no lawful status.

It is disconcerting to consider that what was being discussed was not a matter of opinion or politics but of law.

Ask the White House and it’ll tell you that Al Qaeda is on the run. But it conveniently neglects specifying which direction it’s running in.

While Obama and his small army of spokesmen mumble something about degrading and destroying ISIS, his policies pad out the ranks of Al Qaeda and ISIS with experienced recruits released from Gitmo.

It’s still unclear whether there is any Gitmo terrorist that Obama will not free.

Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said that the White House pressured him to free more Gitmo terrorists faster. White House reports suggested that Obama fired Hagel because he had been moving too slowly on freeing terrorists, making him guilty of thwarting Obama’s plot to close Gitmo.

That would make Hagel the first Secretary of Defense to be fired for failing to undermine national security.

But considering the rate at which terrorists are being released, the only way to empty Jihad Alcatraz any faster would be by moving the whole base to Pakistan overnight.

Obama already freed key Al Qaeda figures, including members of precursor ISIS groups. He freed Abdul Bin Mohammed Abis Ourgy, a bombmaker whom authorities suspected may have known about 9/11. He freed Mohammed Zahir, the Secretary General of the Taliban’s Intelligence Directorate, who was caught with nuclear materials to be used to build a bomb. He was also involved in smuggling drugs to the US.

It’s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a case of arrested historical development. The whole argument is a tissue of logical fallacies and historical ignorance.

The author, a professor of history at Harvard, starts by explaining that Christianity was once violent and intolerant, but changed over time, and thus can provide an example for “modernizing Islam.” But most of his catalogue of Christian violence and persecution is little more than the tu quoque fallacy. It ignores the fact that Christian violence was typical of the whole pre-modern world, a sad banality of human existence like plagues, war, torture, and famine. The comparison of premodern Christian violence to today’s Islamic terror is as irrelevant as rationalizing modern torture and executions, like the mutilation and beheading regularly practiced in Saudi Arabia, by bringing up the hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and quartering the English used to punish traitors in the 14th century.

The moral panic over U.S. undergraduate life features increasingly illiberal demands to restrict open debate, due process and voluntary association—and the first impulse of most college administrators is to capitulate. So raise a toast to Dartmouth College President Phil Hanlon for responding with pragmatism instead of politics.

For several years the New Hampshire school has been conscripted into the national debate about sex assault, binge drinking, hazing and various forms of “privilege.” Protestors claiming to be oppressed by their Ivy League education occupied Mr. Hanlon’s office for two days last year, while Rolling Stone magazine attempted to smear the college as it did the University of Virginia.

Mr. Hanlon answered this week with a student-life reform plan, and the media seem most impressed with his ban on hard liquor on Dartmouth property. They’ve forgotten the lesson of the 21st Amendment, which is that prohibition rarely succeeds. Students who obey the rules will somehow make do with beer or wine, though perhaps a young entrepreneur is being handed the opportunity to become the Jay Gatsby of Hanover.

It is an indisputable fact that carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing about 90% less temperature rise than expected.

Facts like this are important because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound policies. Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the models expected. But models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease, yet it is increasing. Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating—if anything, two recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in the January 2014 issue of Global and Planetary Change, and the other by U.S. scientists published in the May 2013 issue of Coastal Engineering, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea-level increase.

Message N°1

When you witness an event like this, an expression of collective opinion and determination on a scale never seen in the nation’s history, you can’t simply dismiss it. Of course you can, you are free to dismiss it. But I don’t. And that’s based on what I saw and heard.

Message N°2

What explains the mobilization of 3.7 million people in France?

Media discourse has changed, government discourse has changed, measures are being taken. Why? In response to the will of the people. The Hollande government did not create this collective movement, it is trying to keep pace with it.

How many hundreds of thousands had never made the connection between jihadis who attack Jews and those who ram shoppers at a Christmas market, attack the London tube, or plot to blow up la Tour Eiffel? The Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly made the connection for them.

Message N°3

I am still wondering how you can scoff at the millions of French people who stood up to be counted that day (the latest estimate is a total of 4.5 million), and look on Marine Le Pen with such benevolent respect.

We know what the perversions of antiracism have wrought. Is anti-jihad going to play the same tricks?