RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution — perhaps the most important historical event of the 20th century — five British writers were on the scene and sucked into the violence. Closely watched by the secret police, who did not respect judicial niceties once a suspect was arrested, these significant eye-witnesses were exposed to danger and risked their lives. They wrote about their exciting experiences in letters, diaries, dispatches, articles, memoirs and novels. Somerset Maugham was in his forties; Arthur Ransome, Hugh Walpole and Robert Bruce Lockhart were in their thirties; William Gerhardie was in his twenties. Gerhardie went to Russia as a soldier, Ransome as a foreign correspondent, Walpole as a Red Cross volunteer, Lockhart as a diplomat, Maugham as a spy.

In the hermetic foreign community of Russia the five writers knew each other and had various degrees of experience and expertise. Gerhardie was a native speaker of Russian; Lockhart spoke it fluently, with an excellent accent, and was sometimes mistaken for a Russian; Ransome, Walpole and Maugham learned to read and speak the language. In their different ways, they were supposed to carry out the official policy of the British government: support the moderate socialist regime of Alexander Kerensky and keep Russia in the war against Germany; oppose Lenin and the Bolsheviks and prevent them making a separate peace that would free massive numbers of German troops to fight against Britain and France on the Western front. Ransome and Lockhart eventually contravened British policy by supporting the Bolsheviks and opposing British military intervention in the civil war that followed the Revolution.

The Institute of Supply Management issued a study warning that American manufacturing growth had come to a standstill in September, and the Labor Department’s latest employment figures, the worst jobs report of the year, tell the same story from another perspective: unemployment rate stagnant, wages stagnant, hours worked down, number of new jobs far below forecast, previous reports revised downward, labor-participation rate at 38-year low, with nearly 95 million eligible American workers sidelined.

That the Obama administration is foundering from an economic-policy point of view is not news. Barack Obama & Co. represent the very freshest and most imaginative thinking of the 1930s — stimulus, public works, monkeying with the minimum wage, political favoritism for union constituencies, the ancient superstition that simply putting money in somebody’s pocket makes the nation richer through the miraculous power of the economic multiplier, etc.

“Get ready for the new normal,” writes Scott Sumner. “3.0 percent NGDP growth — it’s coming soon.”

Fifty years ago Saturday, Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law. Though it has been modified since then, the bill — known as the Hart-Celler Act after its sponsors — established the paradigm for today’s immigration system.

All the supporters’ confident claims about the bill’s impact were proven incorrect, some within just a few years. President Johnson said, “This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy wrote that, “It would increase the amount of authorized immigration by only a fraction.” Senator Claiborne Pell said, “Contrary to the opinions of some of the misinformed, this legislation does not open the floodgates.”

Senator Ted Kennedy’s assurances are so absurdly off-base that they should be carved into the marble of the U.S. Capitol as a caution to anyone making claims about the future effects of grand legislation on any subject:

The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

Buffoonery is clownishness. The word comes from buffare, Italian for puffing out one’s cheeks, as comics have done since antiquity. Political buffoonery involves gross rhetoric and slapstick histrionics. Up until now, the American body politic has had reasonably effective antibodies to resist the swaggering demagoguery of political buffoons.

Other nations have been less fortunate. Plutarch describes the 5th-century b.c. Athenian politician Cleon as a buffoon who yelled, slapped his thigh, and pranced about while speaking. Plutarch disapproved. Cleon encouraged contempt for serious public discourse, the historian noted, and that harmed the state.

Mussolini’s strutting, chest-jutting, and self-identification with predatory-animal symbols of the Roman Empire — eagle, lion, and wolf — earned him special infamy as a fascist buffoon. His over-inflated pride led to Italy’s grim fall.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949, has 28 members devoted to the idea of collective security. Prediction: By the time President Obama leaves office in 2017, the NATO pledge of mutual defense in response to aggression will have been exposed as worthless. Objectively the alliance will have ceased to exist. The culprits? Vladimir Putin — and Barack Obama.

Right now the world is focused on the Middle East: Russian jets and bombers, operating from an expanding air base in Syria, strike opponents of dictator and war criminal Bashar al-Assad. The Russians say they are going after Islamic State — but there’s no evidence they are doing so. Nor do they have reason to, considering the aim of Putin’s war is to preserve Assad’s rule and to expand, for the first time in decades, Russia’s sphere of influence into the Middle East.

Key to Putin’s strategy, write analysts Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan, is the doctrine of “reflexive control”: establishing facts on the ground “in such a way that the enemy chooses Russia’s preferred course of action voluntarily, because it is easiest and all the others appear much more difficult and risky, if not impossible.”

Doesn’t have to be this way. Moscow’s propaganda notwithstanding, Russia is a weak state with a deteriorating military capability, whose claim to great power status is based on its nuclear arsenal. But, by acting decisively and provocatively, Putin has found the means by which to reassert Russian sovereignty and preeminence and ward off challenges to his authoritarian regime.

It’s ba-aack.

The Vacuum, that is. That’s the Beltway fairy tale about how Syria was teeming with secular-democratic Muslim moderates ready and willing not only to topple the barbarous Bashar al-Assad regime but simultaneously to rout al-Qaeda. They were not able to pull off these feats, we’re told, without the massive help that President Obama refused to give them. This default, combined with Obama’s unconscionable retreat from neighboring Iraq while jihadists were on the rise, created a leadership void — the Vacuum — into which the Islamic State (formerly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) poured in . . . or spontaneously generated . . . or . . . something.

It is a myth, but a useful one for people who do not know what to do, or know what to do but fear explaining it because they know there is no political appetite for it.

The Syrian mess has gotten messier because Vladimir Putin, with all the unpredictability of the morning sun, has invaded Syria on behalf of Assad and Putin’s more important ally Iran — Assad’s longtime string-puller. The Russian strongman’s claimed purpose is to fight the Islamic State — a pretext no more real than was the supposed need to protect indigenous Russian populations that Putin cited in invading Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine.

Putin, with China’s indulgence, is obviously attempting to fortify a sphere of anti-American influence across the Middle East. Anti-Americanism in this Islamic-supremacist region long predates Putin, of course. What has changed is that the United States is governed by a man of the hard Left — a president who is sympathetic to the Islamist narrative about American imperialism, ambivalent at best about American power, and determined to diminish America’s regional commitments, and thus American influence.

Dear Reader (including Kevin McCarthy, who may be too busy putting a cast on his Boehner, having stepped on it so badly),

I feel like Donald Trump when asked to list all the reasons why he’s terrific; I have no idea where to begin.

Lots of stuff has happened since my last “news”letter. Rather than approach this blank page with the sort of planning and care that you’ve come to expect from this well-crafted digital epistle, I’m going to throw care to the wind and, like Bill Clinton at a Saudi harem, I’m going to just jump right into it.

Don’t Move On

Speaking of Bill Clinton, by the end of his presidency, whenever critics said anything critical of him, the almost instantaneous response from his praetorians was to say (1) the critics were “obsessed” or “haters” and (2) that it was time to “move on.” People forget that MoveOn.org began as a kind of non-partisan, No Labels-y, bit of marketing claptrap designed to make the Lewinsky scandal seem like old news. It was a mass-marketing version of the liberal habit of saying “the time for debate is over” — something liberals never say when the debate is politically helpful to them.

Of course, once the country did in fact move on, MoveOn revealed what was always obvious to all of us “obsessed” “haters”: It was an entirely partisan, left-wing operation from soup to nuts.

When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Thursday to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, America’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, was not there. Neither was Secretary of State John Kerry. Though both Kerry and Power were in New York.

Representation of the U.S. was left to a lineup of lesser State Department eminences.

This petty behavior could only have come with the blessing and at the orders of America’s top boss, and it was a gross insult, from the president of the United States to the nation of Israel. That does not represent the broad view of the American public, nor does it represent the support for Israel in Congress — where Netanyahu’s speech earlier this year warning about the Iran nuclear deal was received by the majority of lawmakers as the important and dire warning it was, but dismissed by Obama as “nothing new.” It suggests what Elliot Abrams neatly sums up in an article on this latest destructive U.S. snub of a vital ally: “The Obama Vendetta Against Netanyahu. [1]”

Rep. Issa is right but he should first check out Open the Books, http://www.openthebooks.com/, where every dime these government agencies spend on gratuitous “benefits” is documented. rsk

“Every day countless individuals, companies, news organizations and law firms try to receive information under FOIA. The first thing that happens is it goes to a human being who begins a search process, who then begins looking through the data in order to redact information that’s not going to be given – literally a human nightmare to try to do,” he said at an event held by the Transparency Data Coalition.

“Under the DATA Act, we envision that metadata will be so easily searched, that when you are looking for it, you won’t even have to ask for a FOIA because the vast majority of information that today is being asked for in FOIA will already be available online with appropriate personally identifiable information. FOIA will be limited to, ‘I looked at the data, the data indicates something more, and I believe I have a right to some portion of what is redacted,’” he said.

President Obama signed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 last May.

Recently, I was surprised to come across a chapter titled “My Dinner with David”— the David in question being me, and the dinner is one that continues to produce indigestion for the diner — in a just released book called “Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent [1].” In this self-published account, Ottawa author Fred Litwin sets out to tell the story of how he became a moderate gay conservative, a voice of reason and sanity in the heated rhetoric of gay liberation and anti-jihad activism. The chapter in which he distinguishes his own apparently sensible views on Islam from the apparently toxic views of various anti-jihadists uses me and some of my close friends as hateful foils to his enlightened position.

The book received several glowing endorsements from such heavy-hitters as Daniel Pipes, who praises its handling of the ongoing dispute between what Pipes calls “anti-Islamist sophisticates” and “anti-Islamic simpletons.” (More on this later.) Litwin’s mischaracterizations and temper tantrums, applauded by Pipes and several biggish names who give the book their imprimatur, got me thinking once again about the much-belabored subject of the hypothetical difference between Islam and Islamism.