RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/427993/print

It is the worst of times. It is the worst of times.

While America certainly suffered light years more during the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Jim Crow era, that hardly comforts a nation in which nothing seems to go right, on a planet where everything seems to go wrong.

Wednesday offered fresh grimness. Newlyweds Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, left their six-month-old daughter with her grandmother. They then went to Farook’s workplace in San Bernardino, Calif., and stormed into a Christmas luncheon. The young couple looked at the very same people who recently threw them a baby shower. And then they opened fire, murdering 14 of them, and wounding 21 others.

After some of the 300 intrepid police officers who responded to this emergency cornered and liquidated these killers, they discovered that they had converted their home into a pipe-bomb factory. Further investigation may prove that these two crusaded against poor working conditions. However, Farook’s devout Muslim faith and the couple’s recent sojourn in Saudi Arabia suggest that this may be a blood-soaked example of militant-Islamic terrorism on American soil.

San Bernardino exploded six days after Robert Dear’s one-man atrocity in Colorado Springs. He allegedly burst into a Planned Parenthood clinic, pulled his rifle’s trigger, and continued until three people were dead and nine wounded.

While Dear reportedly muttered to police, “No more baby parts,” his motive remains unclear. Beyond eccentric, he inhabited an isolated trailer unencumbered by electricity or plumbing. Regardless, the Left soon launched yet another corrosive attack on the Right. Citing, at best, scant evidence, they blamed pro-lifers for these homicides.

Also, America’s universities, once Earth’s leaders in scholarship and innovation, have devolved into giant playpens full of overgrown, screaming brats. Rather than rattles, they shake placards. While many of their parents marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War (major issues, whatever one’s views), these babies literally collapse on the floor over “microaggressions.”

Freedom Riders died to stop lynching and secure voting rights for oppressed blacks. Yet these huge infants have brought Yale to its knees because someone thought it racist to wear wide-brimmed sombreros on Halloween. Rather than resist the silly demands of these jumped-up juvenile delinquents, university administrators fold like paper napkins and obey their new, pimply masters.

This on-campus acrimony pales beside the racial tension sweeping the nation. Jim Crow has rotted for a half century. A black man occupies the Oval Office. America has had two back-to-back black attorneys general and, under G. W. Bush, two consecutive black secretaries of state. Black celebrities are beloved: Their songs, sneakers, and movie tickets sell like mad. And Lester Holt chronicles this age every weekday evening on NBC Nightly News.

None of this fazes screechy demonstrators. “Legalize Blackness,” one of their picket signs lately demanded.

Ethnic strife has boiled up from the Black Lives Matter movement. Its relentless War on Cops has led many police officers to hide in their patrol cars and retreat into their precinct houses. The bad guys notice. Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald calls this “the Ferguson effect.”

The result? Compared with November 2014, homicides are up 8.3 percent in New York, 19.2 percent in Chicago, 51.5 percent in St. Louis, and 52.5 percent in Baltimore. And these cadavers are disproportionately black.

Meanwhile, thanks to 15 years of democratic socialism under both Obama and G. W. Bush, America’s economy stagnates at about 2 percent growth and a 62.4 percent labor-force-participation rate (the worst since October 1977). Among the culprits: an OECD-leading 35 percent corporate tax, Obamacare, Washington’s relentless regulatory onslaught, and an $18.8 trillion national debt — equal to 103 percent of GDP.

Things are even darker overseas. The words Paris, Beirut, Sinai, Syria, and Crimea echo the rise of ISIS, Putin, Khamenei, and other blithe spirits. As the world burns, a frightfully delusional or willfully destructive Obama declares “climate change” Earth’s gravest challenge.

No, Virginia, there is no good news anymore. If that’s what you seek, go play with a dog.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.