RUTHFULLY YOURS

But three quarters of a million soldiers lost their lives, and the nation nearly extinguished itself.

The shooting will have been over for a century and a half this spring, but the casualties keep mounting. As recently as a decade ago the best estimates of the soldiers killed in the Civil War put the number at 600,000; today’s scholarship has increased the toll to three quarters of a million. That was 2.4% of the American population when the war began. As James M. McPherson observes in his brisk and engrossing book, “The War That Forged a Nation,” if the same percentage of Americans were killed in a war today, “the number of war dead would be almost 7.5 million.”

But the appalling mortality rate is hardly the only reason the war lives on in our culture. Mr. McPherson sees the war as lying at the heart—and the midpoint—of the American past, a terrible clarification of the ideals on which the country had been established in 1776. “Founded on a charter that had declared all men created equal with an equal title to liberty,” the author writes, America had by the 1850s “become the largest slaveholding country in the world,” an irony that vexes us even today, so long after Appomattox.

The partisan default in cases of alleged political corruption is for everyone of the opposite party or philosophy to pile on. So it speaks volumes about the lost credibility of President Obama ’s Justice Department that last week’s leaks to the media that federal charges are being prepared against Democratic Senator Robert Menendez has produced skepticism across the ideological divide.

It’s impossible to judge the charges without a formal indictment, and Mr. Menendez is from New Jersey, which rivals Chicago as a laugh line about political corruption. The stories say Mr. Menendez will be charged with using his office to aid a friend and donor, Florida eye-doctor Salomon Melgen, with federal business. Mr. Menendez responded by saying, “I have always conducted myself appropriately and in accordance with the law.”

The skepticism results from the politicized nature of Eric Holder ’s Justice Department as well as previous abuses in its Public Integrity Section. Recall the indictment of the late Senator Ted Stevens in the middle of his re-election campaign in 2008. His conviction was set aside after a judge found the prosecution had withheld “significant” exculpatory evidence.

After the earthquake in 2010, the Clintons’ outsize influence in the small nation increased.

The Clinton Foundation lists the Brazilian construction firm OAS and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) as donors that have given it between $1 million and $5 million. Those relationships are worth learning more about.

OAS has been in the news because it is caught up in a corruption scandal centered on Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras. In November Brazilian police arrested three top OAS executives for their alleged roles in a bribery scheme involving inflated contracts and kickbacks. OAS denies the allegations. Closer to home the 2013 OAS donation to the Clinton Foundation deserves attention because of the power that Bill Clinton has in Haiti, where OAS has been awarded IDB contracts.

President Obama has again extended a jaw-dropped reaction to news of yet another scandal in what has become a parade of scandals scaring his administration. This time the President is trying to convince the American public that he learned of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account during her time as Secretary of State through…wait for it…the news media. It’s curious how every time someone in his administration fails at spinning his or her way out of a career-ending scandal he just happens to find out about it through the news media, as if he were as innocuous as the average American citizen.

When asked by CBS News’ Bill Plante about when he learned about the unethical – and most likely illegal – use of a private email account, complete with home-based servers, for official government correspondence, Mr. Obama replied, “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” He continued, “the policy of my administration is to encourage transparency…and that’s why my emails, the BlackBerry that I carry around, all those records are available and archived.”

What is it that compels the hundreds of millions of Muslims who slavishly accept Koranic injunctions to so eagerly be willing to destroy and desecrate all ancient and priceless artifacts of non-Muslims.

We hear during every ghastly atrocity committed by Muslims the Islamic war cry – Allahu Akbar – which doesn’t mean “God is Great” as most folks think it does.

No, it is the Muslim triumphalist cry that, “Allah is Greater.” This is the Islamo-Nazis, “Allah uber alles” supremacist pronouncement to the world just as it was the German Nazis, “Deutschland uber alles.”

Happening now throughout those parts of the Middle East under ISIS occupation or influence, Muslim hordes in Syria are destroying archaeological treasures, including Byzantine mosaics and Greek and Roman statues. In Iraq, ISIS has destroyed several Jewish Biblical tombs such as those of Ezra and Jonah.

Hillary Clinton’s trouble with her email account is only a symptom of what ails the lady. Like Bubba, she suffers from terminal arrogance.

Hillary and Bubba — or should that be Bubba and Hillary? — think rules don’t apply to them. When he gets caught in a jam, which is often, he winks, smiles, crooks his crooked pointing finger, and asks one and all: “Whatcha gonna do with a good ol’ boy like me?”

That always worked. Hillary knows better than to try that anywhere but at home. When the heat is turned up under her, as when the telephone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning with news of catastrophe at Benghazi, she disappears.

There is land of wonder where magic princes and princesses rescue humble folk from the malignant spells of wicked sorcerers. Call it the Kaganate of Nuland: I refer of course to Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland and her spouse Robert Kagan, respectively the source of the silliest statement on record about US foreign policy (“F— the Europeans”) and the worst book on foreign policy in a generally dismal decade.

I reviewed Kagan’s awful tome when it appeared three years ago, with its fairy-tale thesis about the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy. “It is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history,” Kagan wrote. Nuland got her 15 minutes of fame when someone, presumably Russian intelligence, leaked her expletive-adorned 2013 conversation with America’s ambassador Ukraine to YouTube.

The American Jewish community, united to Israelis by bonds of the heart, has, through this tie, been facing terrorist onslaughts for years. Israel suffered the per capita equivalent of 250,000 Americans dead and wounded during the “peace process” when arch-terrorist Yassir Arafat was installed in power. Yet the rise of Palestinian and Arab-style Nazism has been ignored and tolerated by the majority of Jews, who at times appear deficient in basic human capacities for self-defense and reality testing. I will propose the thesis that American Jews display the faulty reactions typical of trauma victims.

American Jews do not see themselves as victims, but as winners, and they are right. Most victimized groups are dysfunctional. Societies who have suffered two thousand years of oppression and assault could be expected to disintegrate into social pathology — murder, violence, alcoholism, family breakdown, neglect and abuse of their children — but the Jewish community, in every country, is to the contrary marked by the lowest levels in all these social symptoms.

Republican candidates were invited to speak at the Agriculture Summit in Iowa, sponsored by Bruce Rastetter. Rastetter is the Darth Sidious of ethanol, who wants all the candidates to kiss his ring and promise to keep subsidizing ethanol, also called the “Renewable Fuels Standard.” For the most part, the candidates complied.

Here now are my ratings of the candidates who came to Iowa.

Jeb Bush: F

“At some point, we’ll see a reduction of the (federal Renewable Fuels Standard) need because ethanol will be such a valuable (product) for our country,” Bush said. Why do I feel that “some point” will be in his son’s George P’s third term?But Jeb Bush primarily came to Iowa to talk about an act of love:

“Imigrants [sic] that are here need to have a path to legalized status,” Bush said at the Iowa Agriculture Summit. “What we need to do is make sure people pay fines,” Bush said. “That they learn English. That they work. That they don’t receive government assistance.

You know, like the current “immigrants” who learn English, and work, and don’t go on welfare.

That they earn legalized status over the long haul. That they come out from of the shadows[.]

Is there any way we can get Bush to go back into the Shadows?

Jewish time is not measured in years. It is measured in space; the transitions from one age to another continually merge with each other. Rabbi Hanina ben Teradyon casting a merciful last rite on his Roman executioner who chose to die with his victim juxtaposed against teacher Janusz Korczak who went with his orphan charges to the extermination camp. All escaped the misery of this world. Is it Jewish fate to leave the world rather than to live in it? How many times does the energy of Satan need to be destroyed? Is this the unrelenting rhythm of Jewish life? Yet there is “Next Year in Jerusalem” under the safety of the Iron Dome!

Fire, the source of life, is fire, the beacon of death, for nameless children whose only crime is that their parents wish to believe in an ineffable unseen force. The pagans worship images as if from a void but cannot accept the essence of a spiritual sustenance of a different order — a force of thirteen attributes.