RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I worry that over the course of several administrations but certainly this administration, the stiff arm that is being given to the media, that has been given to the public has become excessive. In this administration there were more than 550,000 times that the administration has claimed some sort of exemption and not let that information out,” he said at a National Journal event focused on Chaffetz’s chairmanship.

“In fact, less than 30 percent of the time that somebody submits a FOIA request do they actually get information back, a full and complete accounting of what they asked for, less than 30 percent. That’s just not who were are as a people.”

Chaffetz said the U.S. differs from every other country in the world by being open and transparent.

History is not static and it does not progress linearly. There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5th-century Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now. Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry.

That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression — especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas.

Whenever Islamists lose elections, it is to be celebrated. In that spirit, we should celebrate Turkey’s national election, in which (as Jim, John, Jay, and Pat note) the AKP — the “Justice and Development Party” run by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — lost the parliamentary grip it has held since 2002. However, this is at most a necessary first step in what would have to be a long campaign if Turkey is to beat back the Islamist ascendancy that has gutted its democracy.

Erdoğan’s Turkey was my “Exhibit A” in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (2012). The former prime minister, now Turkey’s president, is a sharia supremacist in the mold of the Muslim Brotherhood with which he makes common cause. Erdoğan’s paeans to “democracy” made Western government officials swoon — particularly in the Bush administration, and even more so in Obama’s. But Erdoğan has never been an adherent of real democracy, as in a culture of governance that promotes liberty and minority rights.

In the question-and-answer segment of a press conference on Monday following the G7 Summit in Germany, President Obama admitted that the United States doesn’t have “a complete strategy” to combat the growing threat posed by Islamic State fighters in Iraq.

While Obama kept jobs and economic growth at the forefront of his speech, reporters quickly changed the subject once the president opened the floor for questions, pressing him on the fight against ISIS.

Bloomberg Business White House reporter Justin Sink asked the president, “You said yesterday ahead of your meeting with Prime Minister Cameron that you assessed what was working and what wasn’t. So I’m wondering, bluntly, what is not working in the fight against the Islamic state?”

In his response, Obama talked at length about the need to step up the training of Iraqi security forces, before admitting that America lacked a “complete strategy” for defeating ISIS, which he blamed partly on the Iraqi government.

Every time Hillary Clinton makes a left-wing policy pronouncement, it is, in effect, another eulogy marking the death of the coalition and style of politics that twice made her husband president.

Bill Clinton got elected by peeling off working-class whites and suburbanites from the Republican party, while holding traditional Democratic voters. He made significant geographic inroads, winning a handful of southern states both in 1992 and in his 1996 reelection, when he narrowly won the popular vote in the region as a whole.

This is all very interesting, but we might as well be talking about Grover Cleveland’s path to the presidency in 1884. The Clinton coalition is rusty and up on blocks in some overgrown backyard like the El Camino pickup he once boasted about. And Hillary knows it.

It’s been a tough couple weeks for the Corrections Officers’ Benevolent Association, New York City’s jail-guards’ union. Already under the scrutiny of the U.S. attorney in Manhattan since last August over alleged prisoner abuse at New York’s Riker’s Island jail, now the New York Times reports the union itself and its powerful president, Norman Seabrook, are under investigation. And this week, The New Yorker reported that Kalief Browder, the Bronx resident sent to Riker’s as a teenager whose allegations of abuse at the hands of Riker’s guards and inmates had drawn national attention to problems there, has committed suicide.

The union’s misconduct, according to the Times, is rampant. Among other issues, a subpoena served on the union by the U.S. attorney reportedly questions whether labor leaders pilfered union funds — ultimately, taxpayer money — making cash deposits in their personal bank accounts, funding trips, and making “personal purchases” with union money.

The public has come to know three Obamas. But which, if any, of these portraits is real, and which are fantasies?

Aside from those who automatically support Obama because he is a redistributionist Democrat, and those who automatically oppose him because he is an unapologetic Great Society liberal, there are currently three general takes on Obama.

I. Self-Portrait
Obama’s own judgment on his tenure is now all too clear: He saved us from another Great Depression, and he has made the United States more secure and more popular in the eyes of the world than we have been at any time in our recent history. Obama “ended two wars” (in the sense of pulling troops out of Iraq and steadily bringing them back from Afghanistan). According to Obama, America has never been more liked abroad, largely because his lead-from-behind policies have ended the image of the U.S. as bully. He hunted down and “got” Osama bin Laden. At last, an American president has crafted a comprehensive plan to navigate Iran away from nuclear-weapons acquisition. The Middle East is no longer defined as an obstreperous Israel and triangulating Gulf monarchies dominating American policy — on the basis of a “special relationship” in the former case, and the American need for oil in the latter. Europe has been weaned off dependence on the United States and, in tough-love fashion, is emerging from its past infantilization. Obama has isolated Putin and warned the Chinese about their rough elbows that cause tensions to flare. Obama ended the controversial “war on terror,” and, as a result of his inspired outreach to the Muslim community, there has been no repeat of 9/11.

“You want me to spell it out? I am afraid of Muslims,” stated Swedish-Jewish writer and political adviser Annika Hernroth-Rothstein on May 27 before a room-filling audience of about 40 at Washington, DC’s The Israel Project (TIP). Her presentation “The Future of Jews in Europe: How Both Covert and Violent Anti-Semitism is Making Jewish Life Unbearable” highlighted how Islamic immigration has given new virulence to European anti-Semitism.

Hernroth-Rothstein’s discussion of Sweden’s 15,000 Jews exemplified the introductory comment of David Hazony, TIP’s Tower Magazine (TM), that anti-Semitism is a “morphing, changing force in our world.” Anti-Semitism “started when Jews arrived” in the late 1700s in Sweden, she stated, where Protestant reformer Martin Luther, “not a big fan of the Jews,” helped shape a theological “old school anti-Semitism” in Swedish Lutheranism. World War II was later a “very difficult time to be a Jew” in a “neutral” Sweden that actually collaborated with Nazi Germany. That Swedes in 2009 actually believed a Swedish journalist’s blood libel of Israeli soldiers harvesting Palestinian body parts “tells you the kind of mindset that there is.”

Hernroth-Rothstein noted how neo-Nazism personally haunted her in a small town Swedish high school, as detailed in her TM article. Six fellow students somehow acquired accurate recreations of Third Reich Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend) uniforms and intimidatingly wore them before her, a known Jew, at school. Such hatred during and after World War II convinced her mother that “it was a nuisance to be Jewish” and led her to raise a “totally assimilated family.”

The truism expressed by Arthur Laffer’s “curve” a little more than forty years ago is as relevant today as it was then. It is obvious that tax rates of zero and 100% yield zero. The “curve” was an attempt to find the optimum rate. Economics are elemental to politics. In general, the Left wants government to assume a bigger role, which requires higher taxes. The Right argues for more limited government and, therefore, less need for revenues. That is the essence behind all political debates and partisan bickering that we see in Washington and State Capitals. Logic tells us there are certain societal functions that can only be handled by government. Common sense tells us that the more government takes, the less there is for consumers and businesses to spend and invest. That, in turn, leads to less economic growth – fewer jobs and lower standards of living. It is a self-perpetuating cycle. The role of Governor or President is to find common ground.

“There’s no Saudi-Israeli alliance or friendship today, nor will there be one tomorrow. But a wise American policy would seek quietly to explore and to expand these first seedlings of contact. I doubt that the Obama administration can do that, because its failings are in no small part what brings Israelis and Arab states to talk in the first place. Our next president, however, should make it a priority to see if the ice can be cracked a bit more.”

Two new developments may suggest an opening in relations between Israel and the Gulf states.

The first is a new survey of public opinion in Saudi Arabia, conducted by telephone–from Israel, by students at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Result:

The poll found that 53 percent of Saudis named Iran as their main adversary, while 22 percent said it is the Islamic State group and only 18 percent said Israel….A whopping 85 percent also support the Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative, which calls for peace with Israel in return for a full Israeli withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders.