RUTHFULLY YOURS

I keep thinking we’re done with George Pataki — but like an order of bad clams, he keeps coming back up on me.

The three-term Republican governor of a famously blue state seems like a serious 2016 presidential contender on paper — until you read the fine print.

Pataki had a promising start. He beat Democratic icon Mario Cuomo in 1994. He cut income taxes 25 percent and trimmed other taxes as well. In his first two years in office, spending went down 2.5 percent.

If you had stopped the Pataki show there, he’d be the next Reagan. Similarly, if Napoleon had quit before invading Russia, he’d be remembered very differently, too.

It’s a journalistic cliché to say that when a Republican lurches left he’s “growing in office.” Woodrow Wilson once said that every politician either grows or swells when he enters office. Pataki did both and for so long, conservatives felt he should have come with a Viagra-like warning label: If this apostasy lasts for more than one campaign, consult a physician.

President Barack Obama is less than stalwart in the fight against ISIS and doesn’t seem overly concerned about Vladimir Putin’s predation in Ukraine or China’s aggression in the South China Sea. It is the fight against climate change, an allegedly dire threat to the nation’s security, that brings out his inner Churchill.

In remarks at the Coast Guard Academy commencement, Obama pledged his undying hostility to climate change and his determination to fight it on the beaches and in the fields. He called it “one of the most severe threats” we face and “an immediate risk to our national security.” President Obama is to climate change what Cato the Elder was to Carthage.

Defenders of the College Board’s controversial new AP U.S. History (APUSH) framework like to paint their opponents as ignorant chauvinists who want to censor the bad bits out of American history. That’s going to be awfully hard to do now that 55 distinguished historians, Americanists, and education specialists have issued a powerful condemnation of the College Board’s revisionist history.

The statement’s signatories make it clear that they favor a “warts and all” account of American history that nonetheless emphasizes the ways in which “we remain one nation with common ideals and a shared story.” I cannot improve upon this statement, which will almost certainly stand as a landmark in our public debates about what sort of country we are and want to be. I recommend that you read it forthwith, along with the excellent commentary on it by Peter Berkowitz. (Note that the bottom of the statement contains instructions for those with professional competence in the study or teaching of American history who wish to add their names to the list of signatories.)

The New York Times reported in an article today that a new IAEA report indicates that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium has increased by about 20 percent since the nuclear talks began in early 2014, “partially undercutting the Obama administration’s contention that the Iranian program had been ‘frozen’ during that period.”

The article says Western officials and experts can’t figure out why this is but cited two possibilities: Iran has run into technical problems that have kept it from converting some of its enriched uranium into uranium powder, or it is increasing its stockpile to give it an edge if the negotiations fail.

When he lamented the crimes of socialism in arms, George Orwell received the usual rejoinder, that one has to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Orwell, who was unique among the literary men of his generation, had the insight to ask the necessary question: “Where’s the omelet?”

We might ask the same thing regarding the Transportation Security Administration.

The TSA, and the inconvenience, financial losses, and personal degradation associated with TSA procedures, is necessary to keep us safe, or so we are told, e.g., “Heightened TSA Security Is Necessary to Keep Us Safe” is a headline in a U.S. News and World Report over a column written by a former TSA official, Jeff Sural, who wrote:

Regardless of recent, widely publicized attacks and thwarted plots, some Americans continue to question TSA security initiatives. Our narcissistic obsession with someone viewing or getting too close to our “junk” and anecdotes of pat-downs gone bad have diverted our attention from the seriousness of this reality.

Israel will be briefly jolted back into last summer’s ordeal with rockets, sirens and army maneuvers beginning Sunday, as the military’s Home Front Command holds a yearly emergency drill simulating three enemies attacking the country at once.

Turning Point 15 will test the preparedness of the country to deal with a massive coordinated rocket attack on population centers across Israel, including damage to essential infrastructure, as well as a cyber attack that brings down the electrical and telephone grids.

It is expected to last five days.

On Tuesday, two rocket sirens will ring out in cities across the country — at 11:05 a.m. and 7:05 p.m. — and people will be asked to rush to bomb shelters in a test of their ability to seek cover in case of rocket attack.

Sirens, however, will not sound near the Gaza Strip after residents, scarred by last summer’s war, asked to be excluded.

In recent weeks, the Muslim Brotherhood has stepped up their terrorist activity and made unmistakable calls for more violence in Egypt, effectively dropping the “moderate” mask that gave cover to Western analysts and government officials going back to the Bush administration.

This policy has nonetheless stayed intact — the Obama administration continues to meet with and be advised by Brotherhood officials.

—————————–

A March 2007 Foreign Affairs article, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” provided talking points to the D.C. foreign policy “smart set” advising a continuance of this charade. At the time, I was one of the few analysts publicly challenging claims of the Brotherhood’s “moderation,” and I documented elsewhere the foreign policy disaster wrought by embracing the Muslim Brotherhood and other so-called “moderate” Islamists.

Just days before my arrival in Cairo last year, two Muslim Brotherhood members were killed in a shootout with Egyptian security forces as they attacked a police checkpoint in the Nile Delta. At the same time, the ISIS-linked Sinai terrorist group that has been waging a terror campaign there released a suicide bomber video showing one individual who was know to have been involved in the Muslim Brotherhood protests that were broken up by Egyptian authorities in August 2013.

As I traveled into Upper Egypt I saw churches and ancient monasteries that had been burned down by Muslim Brotherhood mobs, complete with graffiti identifying those terrorist acts with the group. I interviewed Coptic church officials who gave testimony to the direct role of Muslim Brotherhood officials in those attacks, which were responsible for the destruction of more than 70 churches and 1000+ Christian homes in the space of just a few days:

But when the United Arab Emirates gave terrorist designations to two U.S. Muslim Brotherhood groups in its efforts to stamp them out last November, the State Department weighed in on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Legacy” or something.

The Obama administration is set to announce that it will require new rules to cut emissions from airplanes, expanding a quest to tackle climate change that has included a string of significant regulations on cars, trucks and power plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to report as early as Friday its conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes endanger human health because they significantly contribute to global warming, although people familiar with the agency’s plans said the announcement could slip into next week.

Once upon a time, Dan Rather — the fallen CBS celebrity anchorman from the evening news and at 60 Minutes – was the master of “gotcha” journalism. Rather would play up his populist credentials, do ambush interviews with supposedly self-important grandees, and then pull out an unknown memo, an embarrassing quote from one’s past, or some sort of previously unexamined hypocrisy. And, presto, down went the high and mighty, as Rather grinned that he had taken down another enemy of his middle-class viewers without power and influence.

Rather became a multimillionaire celebrity himself, and forgot the very rules of ethical journalism that he so often preached to his victims. Nemesis finally — she is often a slowcoach goddess — caught up with him at 73, in the heat of the 2004 campaign and furor at the Texan-twanged, evangelical, Iraq War promoter George W. Bush. Rather’s producers got hold of faked memos purportedly proving that the commander-in-chief had once gone AWOL while serving as a twenty-something pilot with the Texas National Guard.

There is an insidious meme afoot that in the Obama era Democrats have been heroically restraining themselves by clinging to moderate policies while ideologically extreme Republicans have gone hog-wild in the pursuit of conservative purity.

Today’s Democratic Party makes common cause with the criminals who burn down poor people’s neighborhoods in American cities. And yet the Right is somehow alleged to be more susceptible to “extremism.”

Sharpening her class-warfare guillotine, Hillary Clinton calls for the “toppling” of the one percent. She copycats her potential rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), claiming that “the deck is stacked” in favor of the wealthy and powerful.

“My job is to reshuffle the cards,” Clinton says.