RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Veterans Affairs–​scandal headlines speak for themselves. The Daily Beast: “Veteran Burned Himself Alive outside VA Clinic”; azfamily.com: “Dead veterans canceling their own appointments?”; New York Times: “Report Finds Sharp Increase in Veterans Denied V.A. Benefits,” “More than 125,000 U.S. veterans are being denied crucial mental health services,” and “Rubio, Miller ask committee to back VA accountability bills.”

Are these headlines from 2014, when the VA scandal broke? The sad answer is no. All these headlines — and so many more — are from the past ten days, a fact that also speaks for itself.

Two years ago this week — thanks to courageous whistleblowers in Phoenix and a fed-up House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman — the world was finally exposed to rampant VA dysfunction and corruption. Dozens of veterans had died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA — which was, unfortunately, just the tip of the iceberg. Across the country, VA officials had manipulated lists to hide real health-care wait times. In total, thousands — and possibly far more — met the same fate: waiting, and dying, at the hands of a calcified and soulless bureaucracy. Investigations were launched, and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki eventually resigned.

Even the reflexively defensive Obama administration confirmed the obvious in a June 2014 report, admitting that “a corrosive [VA] culture has led to personnel problems across the Department that are seriously impacting morale and by extension, the timeliness of health care,” with “problems . . . exacerbated by poor management and communication structures, distrust between some VA employees and management, a history of retaliation toward employees raising issues, and a lack of accountability across all grade levels.” The report flatly states that the VA must be “restructured and reformed.”

Yet, two years after the VA scandal broke, no such restructuring or reform has occurred. Instead, almost nothing has changed at the failing Department of Veterans Affairs. VA officials have kept their jobs, and veterans continue to be treated like second-class citizens inside their own system. But after two years of committee hearings, two years of investigations, and two years of funding increases for the VA, how bad could it really still be? Judge for yourself.

Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation’s landlords.

Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration’s novel interpretation of housing law.

“The fact that you were arrested shouldn’t keep you from getting a job and it shouldn’t keep you from renting a home,” Obama’s far-left Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Julian Castro, told the annual meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition this week.

This is part of the campaign by the most radical left-wing president in American history to de-stigmatize criminality itself. The Left views criminals — especially minorities — as victims of society, oppressed for mere nonconformism. Lawbreakers, they believe, should be treated the same as law-abiding citizens.

Obama’s policies strike at the very heart of the criminal law system. Removing the stigma of a criminal record undermines the system and respect for the law and attacks the underpinnings of civilization itself.

Of course, a criminal record carries with it a degree of social stigma, as it should. Removing or watering down that socially beneficial stigma reduces disincentives to commit crimes and hinders the marginalization of the antisocial. Without stigma and social ostracism, society would eventually collapse.

But this administration treats criminals as a protected class. It wants felons’ voting rights restored. It supports legislation “banning the box,” that is, banning employment applications that ask if the applicant has a criminal record. It wants to empty the prisons and afford illegal aliens special protection by frustrating law enforcement in so-called sanctuary cities.

Refusing a prospective tenant is now fraught with danger in the Obama era. Since minorities are over-represented in America’s criminal cohort, landlords are automatically deemed racist if they balk at housing criminals.

President Obama’s regulators aren’t slowing down, alas. And on Wednesday they unveiled another part of their plan to push Americans out of private investment accounts and into government-run plans.

The Department of Labor says its so-called fiduciary rule will make financial advisers act in the best interests of clients. What Labor doesn’t say is that the rule carries such enormous potential legal liability and demands such a high standard of care that many advisers will shun non-affluent accounts. Middle-income investors may be forced to look elsewhere for financial advice even as Team Obama is enabling a raft of new government-run competitors for retirement savings. This is no coincidence.

Labor’s new rule will start biting in January as the President is leaving office. Under the rule, financial firms advising workers moving money out of company 401(k) plans into Individual Retirement Accounts will have to follow the new higher standards. But Labor has already proposed waivers from the federal Erisa law so new state-run retirement plans don’t have the same regulatory burden as private employers do.

This competitive advantage could be significant. Last month the board of California’s new “Secure Choice” retirement plan wrote to state legislators about their “exciting win” in Washington. They reported that employers enrolling workers in the new government-run plan “would have no liability or fiduciary duty for the plan.” Score! The California bureaucrats added that “we have been given the green light to auto-enroll workers into an Individual Retirement Account (IRA).”

Meanwhile, there are only losses for private competitors. The final rule Labor Secretary Tom Perez unveiled Wednesday is being marketed as less onerous than an earlier draft. Thus much of the financial industry is going to take a few weeks to decide on its response. But the main question is exactly how many billions of dollars in costs and lost opportunities will be visited upon investors. And how big the incentive will be to seek government options.

The White House claims it is solving a $17 billion problem for consumers who suffer from “conflicted advice,” but the investment advisory industry is already among the most regulated. The $17 billion figure was assembled from a variety of data sets, many of which weren’t measuring the alleged problem that Team Obama says it can solve, and some of which were generated by people who don’t endorse the White House analysis. In any case government-run plans will have their own conflicts of interest—politicians want the money—and will be expensive. CONTINUE AT SITE

George Orwell’s political novel “1984” painted a disturbing but all too prophetic image of how a totalitarian government would come to rule its citizens with an iron fist. Language — that is to say, the deceptive use of language — was a critical element of the government and the dystopia it created that Orwell described.

In Orwell’s thriller, electronic surveillance conducted by the omnipresent “Big Brother” was a major factor, as was the development and implementation of a language, Newspeak, that was devised to control thought over time by eliminating words from the vernacular. When words were eliminated, thoughts and concepts those words represented would be eliminated.

Furthermore, terms to describe government agencies were often the opposite of what their respective missions were. The editing process of published material, especially by rewriting history books and employing propaganda, was the domain of the Ministry of Truth. The omnipresent Party understood that “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

The contradictorily named, “Ministry of Love” tortured citizens to coerce their unflagging and uncompromising compliance with the dictates of the government.

The world in which the residents of 1984 resided was a world of deception and lies where “up” was “down” and “right” was “wrong.” In the words of the official slogan of the Ministry of Truth:

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”

In 1984 the use of conflicting terms were designed to be disorienting and intimidating to better gain total control over the masses.

Let’s contrast the machinations of the government in 1984 with the precepts of the Founding Fathers of our nation.

The Founding Fathers understood that democracy could only exist when citizens were granted a series of freedoms — including the freedom to express their thoughts and concerns with virtual impunity and to meet with others to hold discussions about grievances about their government. Journalists and their mission to report on the facts was sacrosanct to the Founding Fathers. As evidenced by the fact that journalists are members of the only profession that is specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers understood that the citizens of this nation must have unfettered access to the truth.

Consider the First Amendment of the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Now let’s consider how far we have fallen in just a few short years.

Islamic terrorism threatens our lives in ways both visual and dramatic. Primordial screams, the stench of death, and blood-streaked streets where bodies so mutilated they are virtually unrecognizable capture our senses of hearing and sight. It is horrific, real and frightening. It is meant to scare. It does.

The danger from political correctness is different, but no less treacherous. It arrives like the morning fog that, as Carl Sandberg wrote, “comes on little cat feet.” It settles imperceptibly and enshrouds us. Political correctness makes one feel noble and caring, because it is said to be inclusive and sensitive to the feelings of others, especially those who are racially and culturally different. But it is exclusive; it impugns those whose thinking is at odds with convention. It is based on “group think.” It is dependent on minds closed to ideas outside what is deemed correct. It was the basis of fascism and underlies communism. Its consequence can be deadly to those who value freedom and democracy.

We see it on college campuses when students and faculty prevent conservatives from speaking, and in the willingness of administrations to provide “safe places” for those who feel threatened by opinions and expressions that do not match what they have been taught to believe. Political correctness ill prepares students for a world that does not march to a single drummer and puts them at a disadvantage when they enter the workforce where diversity of ideas is as commonplace as cultural diversity. Diversity is a powerful force for good, but only when it extends beyond genetic traits and delves into the realm of ideas. Its adherents claim idealism, but that is not true, as it denigrates those who think differently. It is, in fact, anti-intellectual and anti-liberal. It suffocates curiosity, accountability and individualism, characteristics critical to a liberal education and necessary for life after college.

Tariq Ramadan was barred from the US under Bush, but Obama threw open the doors for him. Ramadan was billed as a moderate reformer. And here is the “moderate reformer” on the Brussels attacks. After the formality of condemning the attacks, mumbling that terrorism is wrong, Ramadan pivots to the same old song and dance.

We cannot, today, afford to disconnect these events with the violence, terror and death that have long been commonplace in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and in Africa and Asia more widely. European and American foreign policy does not happen in a vacuum, as those who target us have repeated in countless videos: You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.

Now the “war and death” that ISIS terrorists are talking about is the US and the rest of NATO pushing back against its genocide of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities. Or to put it another way, American intervention against Islamic terror doesn’t happen in a vacuum either. “You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.”

But what is Tariq Ramadan really suggesting? That bombing ISIS is wrong?

We must hear those who criticize the incoherence of our allegiances and our support of dictatorships.

What dictatorships? Obama threw them overboard. And the Islamist alternative is itself a dictatorship. That’s what ISIS is.

Does the condemnable violence of their reaction mean we can ignore their arguments?

Any fair reading of State Department and general federal government laws regarding the use of classified information by federal employees makes it is clear that Hillary Clinton violated the law—both by improperly setting up her own private server, and then by sending information through it that was classified. And it is evident that Clinton went to such extraordinary lengths in order to mask her communications and shield them from the sort of Freedom of Information Act suits that now are plaguing her—and that she arbitrarily decided which of her private server emails were public and which private, and then simply destroyed thousands of them without audit.

If she is not indicted by the Obama administration for violations of federal laws or conspiracy to obstruct justice, in the future it will be almost impossible to prosecute successfully any federal employee for violating government protocols about the handling of classified information. If Clinton avoids indictment, it will make a mockery of the Obama Justice Department that sought to prosecute Gen. David Petraeus for showing his personal journals, which contained classified information, to his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. The government leveraged Petraeus on the basis that he knew his notebooks contained classified information though they were not formally identified as such; Hillary Clinton knew the same about her own communications, but unlike Petraeus was sneaky enough not to admit to that fact on tape or to associates.

In 2007, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted and then won a conviction against Scooter Libby, in an investigation that ostensibly began over accusations that Libby had leaked the “covert” status of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the spouse of flamboyant loudmouth Joseph Wilson, who was making wild (and later to be proven unfounded) charges against the Bush administration. Yet in a bout of prosecutorial (and politicized) overreach, Fitzgerald had known all along—but kept quiet—about Secretary of State Colin Powell’s aide Richard Armitage being the self-admitted leaker of information concerning Plame’s employment with the CIA. And Fitzgerald also either knew or should have known that Plame was not really a covert operative but instead was widely recognized to have worked at the CIA. Given such precedents, how can the Obama administration possibly determine the degree of wrongdoing of its own former secretary of State and the likely Democratic presidential nominee? The answer is that this is now a country, after all, that jails a video-maker on a trumped-up probation charge to cover up false talking points about a supposed riot of aggrieved Muslims who ad hoc showed up to kill four Americans. And it jailed Dinesh D’Souza, another video-maker, on a rather minor campaign money-raising infraction.

The response of “non-violent” Islamists to counter-extremism programs displays a master class in deception. The greatest mistake made by the Obama administration is to treat groups such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) as genuine representatives of the Muslim community.

Very few American Muslims believe that CAIR is a legitimate voice of American Islam. A 2011 Gallup poll revealed that around 88% of American Muslims said CAIR does not represent them.

It is little wonder that groups such as CAIR disparage genuine moderates. They perceive moderates as a threat to their self-styled reputations as representatives of American Islam. Many in them have learned to speak the language of liberalism and democracy in their pursuit of an ultimately illiberal and anti-democratic ideal.

Counter-extremism work is best achieved by marginalizing such groups — by freeing American Muslims from their self-appointed Islamist spokesmen, and by working instead with the genuine moderates.

A number of Massachusetts Muslim groups, led by Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, are currently spearheading a campaign against the Obama administration’s program, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), which has designated Boston as one of its pilot cities.

From the government’s perspective, Boston was an obvious choice. The city has a long, unfortunate history of producing internationally-recognized terrorists, including the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston marathon; Aafia Siddiqui, whom FBI Director Robert S. Mueller describes as “an al-Qaeda operative and facilitator;” Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the founder of the Islamic Society of Boston, and named by the federal government as an Al Qaeda fundraiser, and Ahmad Abousamra, a key official within Islamic State, whose father is vice-president of the Muslim American Society’s Boston branch.

During the past decade, in fact, twelve congregants, supporters, officials and donors of the Islamic Society of Boston alone have been imprisoned, deported, killed or are on the run in connection with terrorism offenses.

Despite these alumnae, a number of extremist Islamic organizations, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have claimed that the government’s attempt to combat radicalization “targets American Muslims” and “undermines our national ideals.”

Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, who is also a director of CAIR’s Massachusetts branch, has spoken at a number of anti-CVE rallies, condemning the government’s approach as “authoritarian” because it included “violent practices like surveillance and racial profiling.”

In response, Robert Trestan, the Massachusetts director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), points out that the CVE program “is relatively new in this country. It’s not fair to judge it yet and be overly critical.” He added: “Nothing I’ve seen or participated in has gone anywhere near proposing or suggesting anything close to surveillance, crossing the line of people’s civil rights or profiling.”

What, then, is the basis for this opposition?