RUTHFULLY YOURS

Charlie Brown: I guess I don’t really know what Christmas is about. Isn’t there anyone who understands what Christmas is all about?
Linus: Sure, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.
— “A Charlie Brown Christmas”

In the Peanuts Christmas (not “holiday”) classic, a morose Charlie Brown struggles to come to grips with “the true meaning of Christmas.” Recall that Lucy, dispensing psychiatric advice as a cure for Charlie Brown’s melancholy, therapeutically tasks him with directing their school’s Christmas play. “You need involvement,” she tells him. “You need to get involved in some real Christmas project.” When the advice fails to pay off, Linus takes to the school auditorium’s stage and having transformed his blanket into a shepherd’s costume recites Luke 2:8-14. “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown,” Linus concludes.

At least one court disagrees. In a ruling issued last week in the case of Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Concord Community Schools, a federal judge ordered an Indiana high school to cancel a live Nativity musical number enjoyed since 1970 as a regular part of its annual “Christmas Spectacular” shows. Over drifting choruses of Christmas carols and surrounding a hay-lined crèche, costumed student performers played the parts of Mary, Joseph, the Three Wise Men, shepherds and angels. In light of last week’s ruling, Linus’ homily no longer represents a message of hope for all mankind. Rather, it is an unconstitutional example of religious indoctrination imposing its cruelty on children vulnerable to religious conversion at the twinkle of a light and the tranquil strains of Silent Night.

Last week, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the latest round of the Fisher vs. University of Texas case over whether race can be used as a criterion in college admissions policies. The defenders of affirmative-action admissions policies have generally been unwilling to discuss the impact these policies have on black students. Indeed, when Justice Antonin Scalia raised the possibility in oral arguments that these policies actually harm black students by placing many of them at schools that are too demanding, he was immediately vilified.

“Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at ‘Slower’ Colleges,” ran a typical headline at Mother Jones. Senate minority leader Harry Reid called Scalia’s line of questioning “racist,” and Georgia Democratic congressman John Lewis said Scalia’s “evident bias was very troubling,” leading him to question Scalia’s “ability to make impartial judgments.”

Here is what Scalia actually said:

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.

The brief in question was submitted by UCLA law professor Richard Sanders. A one-time proponent of affirmative action, Sanders changed his position when he studied its effects on black students at American law schools. Sanders found that, because of these schools’ commitment to increasing diversity, the median black student accepted by them placed in the lowest decile of white students admitted — and this translated into low class rankings and low rates of passing the bar exam for these black students. Sanders presented evidence that if black students who had attended a top-tier law school had instead attended a lower-tier school, they would have been more likely to pass the bar exam.

A Department of Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary had no answers for Congress last week when questioned about the U.S. visa waiver program, leaving Republicans worried that “DHS seems clueless about what is going on with potential threats to our security.”

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing last Thursday to address the vulnerabilities of the U.S. visa waiver program, and assess what the U.S. government has done to prevent terrorists from abusing the VWP.

Established in 1986, the VWP allows nationals of certain countries to enter the U.S. as temporary visitors (nonimmigrants) for up to 90 days without having to obtain a visa or undergo an in-person interview at a U.S. consulate. Currently, nationals of 38 countries can enter the U.S. without first obtaining a visa under the VWP.

Attention has been directed toward the VWP of late because of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. At least five of the attackers were French nationals and one was a Belgian national. Nationals of both France and Belgium are able to enter the U.S. under the VWP.

Thousands of Westerners have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria or Iraq to fight with extremist groups. Individuals from VWP program countries who return could then enter the U.S. by taking advantage of the VWP.

President Obama talks a lot about the scientific method. On climate change, he has often invoked the idea of a great divide between those on the progressive left, such as himself, who believe in “settled science” and thus a looming man-caused climatological disaster, and those, presumably on the Neanderthal Right, who are slaves to superstition, ideology, prejudice, and self-interest—and thus deny that the planet is rapidly warming due to inordinate human-induced releases of excessive carbon.

Obama’s view of science is reductionist. It relies on count-em-up numbers: if more university professors (not known to be an especially independent or courageous cohort) believe in dangerous man-caused climate change than doubt it or its seriousness, and if climate change fits a larger progressive agenda, then it becomes factual.

Would we assume thereby that Newton, Galileo, and Darwin were all exemplars of groupthink, and worked through consensus and collegiality, especially with the support of status-quo institutions and universities, in advancing majority-held theories?

When Obama signed legislation in his first weeks in office enabling human stem cell research, he pontificated that his act was about ensuring “that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Aside from the fact that there were and are methodologies of harvesting stem cells without resort to embryonic protocols, the president’s entire approach to science, data, and the inductive method is to privilege ideology and subordinate facts.

On a New Yorker panel nearly a dozen years ago, in the wake of the publication of his novel Snow, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk set forth an emphatic credo. “Our moral duty,” he said, “is to pay attention to the humanity of everybody.” And since the subject of the panel was “Literature and Politics,” this comment was altogether in keeping with Pamuk’s remarks elsewhere, on the responsibility of the novelist: “I strongly feel that the art of the novel is based on the human capacity, though it is a limited capacity, to be able to identify with the ‘other.’ .  .  . It requires imagination, a sort of morality, a self-imposed goal of understanding this person who is different from us.”

But in 2004, this anodyne and conventional literary conviction, addressed to the New Yorker’s loyal audience, rang out with an unexpectedly unsettling force. The motivations and influences and inmost desires and doubts and dreams and fevered schemes of invented characters in a novel, however pleasing or villainous, make up the very essence of what we derive from storytelling. We want to understand Isabel Archer and Mr. Kurtz (who are so different from us), we want to know them to the deeps of their marrow. The glory of literary modernism especially— the revelatory dazzle of Joyce and Proust and Woolf — turns precisely on this psychological probing into hidden consciousness. It was a shock, then, to learn that Pamuk’s “everybody,” his requirement of imagination, his “goal of understanding this person who is different from us,” his vaunted “humanity” — all this was meant to reach well beyond his primary literary argument. It was meant to include terrorists. Are not terrorists a portion of humanity? A challenge came from a fellow panelist: What about suicide bombers, are they to be similarly understood by the humanely embracing imagination? Pamuk’s response was quick and sharp and dismissive: “We have to base our judgment on moral essential things rather than on what we see on TV the other night.”

We have recently started a not for profit resource site http://militarybases.co that displays all the U.S. military bases on an interactive map.

Militarybases.co is a novel resource for interactive maps that display military bases operated by the U.S. either locally or abroad conveniently along with data points such as: historical info, base facilities, housing, weather, driving instructions and pictures of the bases involved.

Militarybases.co cover different army branches such as air force, navy, marine, coast guard and regular army installations. We aim to be a resource for elementary, secondary and college students who want to learn and absorb information regarding our countries military infrastructure and for families of service men and woman as well as those on active duty to get more information on their next deployment location.

The site is useful in many ways as it can be used for research for geopolitical issues in terms of arms deployment of the US forces accross the globe, it can also be used by families of service men and woman to find their way around the bases where their loved ones serve to protect our country. It can also be used as classroom material for elementary, secondary or even college eductation.

The site is a resource for data points on housing, weather, driving directions, base facilities and even historical information of ALL U.S. military bases either on our soil or abroad. We currently have over 500+ bases listed and expanding day by day.

‘We see growing efforts by terrorists to poison the minds of people like the Boston Marathon bombers and the San Bernardino killers,” President Obama said while addressing the nation in the wake of the latest homegrown massacre at the hands of Muslims.

But is that really what’s poisoning their minds?

FBI investigators are now operating on the belief that San Bernardino terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were individually “radicalized,” and for “quite some time,” possibly starting as early as 2013 — before the rise of ISIS and its Internet propaganda machine. So it wasn’t ISIS poisoning their minds, as the president suggests.

So what was it? The feds are still scratching their heads, willfully blind to the obvious religious factor.

Who are today’s racists?

A “March for Dignity” recently assembled outraged “anti-racists,” who shouted insults in the name of universal love.

It was in the name of anti-racism that the progressives chanted “death to Jews” at the UN’s Durban conference against racism in 2001.

Every week, the Place de la République has seen the roaring processions of the Sheikh Yassin Collective, inciting the hatred of Jews. Did anyone even care?

These “progressives” were strangely silent while a quarter of a million people were killed in Syria, while Yazidi women were sold into slavery, or when a new Caliph ordered the massacre of thousands in the name of Allah, or the mutilation and murder of Christians who refused to convert. Is that kind of behavior nothing more than bad taste?

AndrewCMcCarthy.com
ANDY’S NOTE: As most readers know, the columnist usually does not write the headlines on the column. That is the case this weekend. Contrary to what the headline on my column says, my proposal is that our immigration laws should screen out ALL Islamists, not “radical” Islamists. I do not use the term “ radical Islamists” because it is redundant — and, indeed, I have written several columns grousing about Washington’s infatuation with “moderate Islamists” because the term is self-contradictory. As the column contends (and as I have contended elsewhere many times), and Islamist is a Muslim who desires to impose sharia’s law, system of governance, and societal framework. That, in and of itself, is radical enough for me.

I appreciate being held in “(otherwise) . . . considerable esteem” by Charles Krauthammer. Not only is the feeling mutual; from my end, I would even omit the “otherwise.” That said, I am dismayed by his specious response to my legal analysis of Donald Trump’s proposed moratorium on Muslim immigration to the United States. I am personally disappointed that Charles has distorted my position, portraying me as a Trump apologist. But that is almost beside the point. His rebuke is counterproductive to the defense of our national security — about which Krauthammer and I both care deeply — because it makes solving a vexing problem that much more difficult.

Dr. Krauthammer fails to address the substantive legal points I made. Instead, I get the back of his hand for explaining that I focused mainly on the “final form” of Trump’s moratorium proposal — the retreat to a temporary ban on foreign Muslims, after Trump initially suggested such a ban on all Muslims. Charles finds this “hilarious” because, he concludes, I am taking Trump’s policymaking process seriously – “as if Trump’s barstool eruptions are painstakingly vetted, and as if anything Trump says about anything is ever final.”

Sigh.

As Dr. K must know (since it is quite apparent from the post he attacks), I am not a Trump supporter, much less a Trump apologist. I confess to not being Trump-obsessed: I just don’t think he is going to be the nominee and life is too short to get that whipped up about him. As I’ve pointed out, I don’t believe even the Republicans are daft enough to nominate a man who has donated more money to Hillary Clinton and the racketeering enterprise also known the Clinton Foundation than most Democrats have combined.

There’s a demagogue loose in the land. He uses immigration and the war on terror to drive a wedge into the American populace. He traffics in absurd conspiracy theories about foreign influence, he mocks his political opponents, and he inspires friends and allies to lash out, lawlessly, against them. He compares patriotic Americans to jihadists, and he endangers our national security with his reckless rhetoric.

I’m speaking, of course, about the President of the United States. It’s been amusing to watch the media hyperventilate over Donald Trump’s comments when it has largely cheered or ignored our own president’s rhetoric — rhetoric that’s inspired serial violations of First Amendment freedoms, and been used as justification for executive overreach and deadly mistakes at home and abroad.

We knew of Barack Obama’s contempt for his political opponents in 2008, when he famously mocked Hillary Clinton’s blue-collar supporters, calling them “bitter” and saying they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” But this was small potatoes compared to the rhetoric he’d employ once he was elected.