RUTHFULLY YOURS

Why a lot of progressive received wisdom was exploded in Thursday’s GOP battle.

Last week’s Republican primary debates have quickly become a cultural and political phenomenon. Even progressive pundits have been forced to acknowledge the high quality of the Fox News moderators, the toughness of their questions, and the sheer entertaining excitement of the shows. Contrary to the usual soporific political debates, with robotic recitations of prefabricated talking points, this one had fireworks and substance. Let’s hope this new paradigm for presidential debates carries through all the way to next year’s presidential debates.

But there’s another value to the debates. A lot of progressive received wisdom was exploded last Thursday night. First is the notion that Democrats are smarter and better informed than Republicans, who are typically dismissed as badly educated, anti-science, stuck in the racist and sexist past, and tools of capitalist hegemons. The great variety of candidates, the intelligence of their answers (with, in my view, the exception of Donald Trump), the freshness of their ideas, and the range of personal experience and achievements, exploded that cliché, and all contrasted starkly with the other side’s anointed candidate.

Hillary Clinton, an old pol well beyond her sell-by date, cannot stand comparison to the fresh, young best of the Republican field. She is the quintessential Washington insider and operative, without a fraction of the achievements of Carly Fiorina or Dr. Ben Carson or any of the governors on the stage, or a particle of the charisma of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. She is a grotesquely hypocritical class warrior, a denizen of the 1%, as shrewd a financial manipulator and piratical capitalist as the Wall Street fatcats she routinely demonizes––and who contribute to her campaign. She talks only in vague ignorant bumper-sticker slogans like “income inequality” and “war on women.”

Amid the Trump psychodramas, the public has forgotten not just Hillary Clinton’s latest contortions over her emails, but Mrs. Clinton herself. Hillary has assumed the position of a tired vice president in waiting, without any of the perks that might accrue from a lame-duck president to his dutiful VP.

Ostensibly Clinton’s candidacy is to be a continuation of her boss’s eight years. The problem, however, is that for all Obama’s iconic status, the president polls well below 50% in approval ratings. He lost both the House and Senate, and the majority of state governorships and legislatures are now Republican, if not solidly conservative.

His signature legacies — Obamacare, the Iran nuke deal, open borders, and massive deficits — poll poorly. Is borrowing another $8 trillion Clinton’s agenda? Cutting another 25% from defense? No one believes that Obama’s liberal boilerplate — more government regulation, zero interest rates, higher taxes, bigger deficits, smaller defense, more illegal aliens, greater racial hyphenation — is working.

BCC (Before political correctness)….we used to use words like “he-man” “macho” and “cojones” or “balls”…..Them days are gone forever as gender is being “erased” in the academies…..rsk

As if Women’s studies weren’t frivolous enough, SUNY Stony Brook is now offering degrees in “Men’s studies” as well. I thought all I needed was a full-length mirror, but evidently there is more to learn.

Michael Kimmel stood in front of a classroom in bluejeans and a blazer with a pen to a whiteboard. “What does it mean,” the 64-year-old sociology professor asked the group, most of them undergraduates, “to be a good man?”

The students looked puzzled.

Me too!

Dr. Kimmel is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system, which will soon start the first master’s degree program in “masculinities studies.”

In an effort to intimidate some of the Jewish senators and congressmen thinking of voting against Obama’s Iran deal, there are murmurs from Team Obama about “dual loyalty” and not caving into “Jewish donors.” These are old anti-Semitic canards. Some have called those planning to vote against the deal “traitors.”

Truth is, voting for a moral cause on behalf of one’s people has never been considered an act of dual loyalty, as evidenced, for example, when the entire Congressional Black Caucus voted to place sanctions on South Africa during its apartheid years. This was rightly considered the moral thing to do and brought with it many votes from non-black congressmen. Surely Mr. Obama, who found such acts of conscience admirable, should not now reverse himself when it comes to a Jewish act of conscience. If the living conditions and equality needs of blacks in South Africa were worthy causes, then certainly the actual saving of Jewish lives from a nuclear inferno constitutes a moral act.

It was November 2012, in the dead of winter, when the ghoul of a lie came back to haunt Israel. The specter, a paper tiger with young biting teeth, appeared in the assembly hall of the United Nations where diplomats are perpetually at daggers drawn. The ghoul was called ‘Observer with non-member status.’ This made it not quite real but not imaginary either, hence young teeth indicative of the latent threat it posed. But just for now Israel had to contend with a quasi-state called ‘Palestine.’

“A victory for the values of truth,” exclaimed Sudan’s diplomat after UN members voted to give Palestine that halfling status. In General Assembly ‘speak’, what he meant was a defeat for truth and a victory for a lie of long standing. For Israel it meant a threat, of historic proportions. For international law it meant relegation to a fun league. For the ruling clique that wanted the UN to create a new state it meant second prize. For nine-tenths of member countries it meant one step closer to rescinding the right of Israel to exist. For America and Europe it meant a new arm-twisting lever to get Israel to do their bidding. For all players it meant a whole new ballgame.

Now you see it now you don’t, OPT is a trick of smoke and mirrors, the stuff of mumbo jumbo.

We’re told there were no winners or losers from Thursday’s main stage debate. We’re told the Fox talking heads asked the tough questions that need to be asked to vet the candidates. We’re told to ignore what was in front of our eyes: the Fox media elite carrying water for the Republican establishment and their own political predilections. Fox had their own agenda, and it has nothing to do with Republican voters’ concerns or what our candidates have to offer America.

There were winners and losers. The winner was the media conglomerate that owns Fox News and Megyn Kelly’s career. Fox is taking credit for breaking all records in number of viewers, as if it were Fox’s accomplishment. Nonsense. Twenty-four million viewers tuned in to hear Trump take on the establishment.

The viewers wanted to hear Trump push for the end to illegal immigration. American citizens have been clamoring to end illegal immigration for decades. We have been lied to and ignored by what Ted Cruz dubs the Washington cartel. Immigration, legal and illegal, is now at a crisis point. Viewers wanted to see how the other candidates would handle Trump’s challenge to the establishment and his brazen personality, and how they would measure up on this issue.

We are well past the point where we can ever believe Obama the man because, as those prescient about Obama’s background instinctively understood, whatever was taught Obama the child is what is now being reflected in his dangerous anti-American actions.

Thus, the 17th-century Jesuit-inspired quotation of “give me the child, and I will mold the man” remains true.

This is why the idea that one can trust the Iranians is not only naive, but extraordinarily dangerous, given the education of their children. In the May 2015 Special Interim Report entitled “Imperial Dreams: The Paradox of Iranian Education” by Eldad J. Pardo, the incessant propagandizing and intimidation of Iranian students is proof positive that they are being primed to attack those whom their leaders deem the enemy. The first page of the report shows the map of a “New Dreams of World Power” with Iran at the center. Underneath this map is a picture of “Iranian children preparing for martyrdom.”

It was my great misfortune to be marooned in the vest-pocket nation before chronic electrical-supply problems were fixed. Now that an abundance of electricity has brought even indoor skiing to the sweltering kingdom, I look back on an experience that only a carbon-phobic Greens voter might envy
This short memoir is about the reality of life without electricity, that dream of the Dark Greens, which I lived in Dubai during the power outage of June 2005. The reports that followed made light of the reality as just a minor inconvenience. That is not what I experienced.

By 2005 Dubai had undergone a decade-long building frenzy and such an expansion of the population that they had outstripped the infrastructure’s electricity-generating capacity—but nobody stopped the developers.

I had been in Dubai for ten days and was due to fly out on a 2 a.m. flight for London. As I had a lazy day to kill, I woke at about 9 a.m. I had woken up, not because it was time to get up but because my hotel room was uncomfortably hot. My sweat was soaking the bed sheets. (I usually sleep with the air-conditioning set to “Igloo”—13°C—as I find that snuggling under a doona in the cold air leads to a better and deeper sleep, but that’s just me.) Clearly we had a problem, so I called reception and was told that the air-conditioner was off due to an electrical fault, but it should be OK in an hour or so.

“It’s the fashion in these circles to celebrate Mr. Trump’s rise in the polls as if rage and insult will defeat Hillary Clinton and implement conservative reforms”

The conservative blogger Erick Erickson caused a media stir this weekend by withdrawing an invitation to Donald Trump to address his RedState gathering. This comes as a revelation because Mr. Erickson is among the media conservatives who have trumpeted the businessman as a political tonic.
Mr. Erickson says he was offended by Mr. Trump’s crude comments about Fox News presidential debate moderator Megyn Kelly. The casino magnate has been insulting Ms. Kelly since she asked him about his history of demeaning the looks of certain women. The candidate really got going Friday on CNN and said Ms. Kelly was spewing blood “wherever.”

This was finally too much for Mr. Erickson, though it’s fair to ask what took him so long. This is what Donald Trump does. As recently as July 24, Mr. Erickson wrote approvingly that, “The number one thing you hear when you ask any Republican about Donald Trump is this—he fights.” On July 22 he wrote that while he wouldn’t vote for him unless Mr. Trump became the GOP nominee, “Donald Trump is a non-traditional candidate who is running a non-traditional campaign and kicking the asses of traditional campaign consultants.”

The idea that a collective memory of the Holocaust renders Jewish judgment defective is somehow acceptable these days.

Ah, Israel/Palestine, where thinking Westerners go to play! How many people with an advanced degree in the humanities can resist fiddling with competing national narratives of victimhood? The stakes—peace, no less—give the whole thing a frisson of importance lacking in so many other parts of intellectual life. How fortunate the world is to have the Holy Land, without which everyone might have to grapple with the baffling nature of the entire planet or the dreary failures of their own societies.

In “The Two-State Delusion,” Padraig O’Malley has given us an account of his own time in this familiar landscape. As the title suggests, the author believes the idea of two states is not realistic. He’s right, and in reaching this sad conclusion he joins most of us locals, Israelis and Palestinians alike. Since the collapse of peace talks 15 years ago and the violence of the Second Intifada, the idea of a two-state solution has existed mainly thanks to the Oz-like pyrotechnics of Western diplomats and journalists, aided by Israeli and Palestinian politicians trying to keep the foreigners happy and their money flowing. What little hope remained a few years ago has now been quashed by the Middle Eastern nightmare—carnage in Syria, chaos in Iraq, ISIS in Sinai—unfolding a short drive from our homes.