RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: Below is the third article in the Frontpage series, “Obama’s Betrayals.” Click the following to read Part I and Part II.

President Barack Obama is guilty of multiple counts of illegality and malfeasance in office. He has both willfully abused his executive powers and willfully neglected to perform his executive duties under the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

More than any president in the history of the United States, Obama’s motive for his shredding of the Constitution is the pursuit of absolute power for the purpose of, in his words, “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Richard Nixon is often mentioned when one talks about abuse of presidential power. From his enemies list to Watergate and its cover-up, Nixon set the bar in his time for illegality and malfeasance in office. But he was an amateur compared to Obama, who has taken illegality and malfeasance in office to a whole new level.

Nixon, for example, tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies, but did not have enough loyalists in the IRS to do his full bidding. Obama created a climate that encouraged IRS targeting of nonprofit tea party organizations. The purpose was to keep them from raising enough tax-deductible funds to play any significant role in connection with issues relevant to the 2012 presidential election. When the IRS scandal first broke, Obama feigned surprise and dismay. But after months of stonewalling by members of his administration of congressional investigations, Obama said during a 2014 interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption.”

ByAndrew R. Finlayson

“This is a gem of a book by one of the truly distinguished “Old Asian Hands” in the fields of journalism and scholarship. What is so appealing in this book and what sets it apart from so many other memoirs is the delightful prose style employed by Mr. Sanders and the wide range of very interesting people he has known during his long life. As someone who has spent a great deal of his adult life studying China and the other nations in Asia, I found his personal insights into the personalities that contributed to 20th Century Asia, both well known and unknown, absolutely fascinating. As a young China scholar, I often relied on the very accurate intelligence gained by a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest named Father Ladany. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Father Ladany produced what I consider to be the most accurate information on events then transpiring inside the People’s Republic of China. Sol Sanders was a personal friend of Father Ladany his book is full of little vignettes about him that I had never heard before. His short, highly entertaining chapters, each devoted to one or two of the very interesting people he was know, are a pleasure to read and provide tidbits of information about these individuals you will not find anywhere else. I recommend this book highly.”

If you had thought that the only qualification needed is to excel at your chosen art form and then see if you can gather audiences, you were wrong. That is not enough anymore — certainly not if you are Jewish.

The treatment of the reggae star Matisyahu is something new. For Matisyahu is not an Israeli — he is an American. For a while, only Israeli Jews were made pariahs among the nations because of an unresolved border dispute involving their country. Now it is Jews born anywhere else in the world who can be targeted in the same way. They are singling out Jews — Jews and only Jews.

Habima performers were insulted and vilified while on stage at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, trying to perform “The Merchant of Venice.” None of the protesters seemed to see the irony of vilifying Jews on stage during that of all plays.

Spain has its own border issues. Perhaps Spanish performers should henceforth be quizzed about their political attitudes before they are allowed to perform abroad? Maybe the rest of the world should demand that all artists from Spain sign a statement or make a video supporting Catalan independence if they are to be allowed to perform in public?

The U.S. has provided approximately $5 billion to the Palestinians in bilateral aid since the mid-1990s and about $540 million this year. The EU added more than €500 million ($558 million), making it the largest single-year donor. Why should Palestinian Authority (PA) not have to pay the bill for its own savage behavior? And why is the U.S. so determined to protect it?

According to the deputy head of UNRWA, the organization needs $101 million in order to open schools on time. Why does the Hamas government not pay for its own children to go to school? And why does the Hamas government not pay for the repair of its own people’s houses? UNRWA and the U.S. government seem to believe that the PA and Hamas cannot be expected to spend their own funds — or donated funds — on the needs of their own people. Hamas can therefore use all its funds to make war.

As long as Hamas and the PA are permitted both to spend sponsors’ money on terrorism and warfare while escaping responsibility for the needs of their people, and as long as Iran is a key donor — with all the temptations, means and opportunity to “wipe Israel,” as it repeatedly threatens to do — the idea of a U.S.-led “peace process” is fantasy.

The world is poorer for his passing, but his searing and accurate appraisals of Soviet evil will stand as enduring indictments of those calculating apologists and useful idiots who persist, even now, in making their excuses for Stalin and his murderous tyranny.
How important are obituaries? And do they serve any significant purposes other than informing us that someone important has died and comforting the bereaved that the worth of his life has been widely recognized? I’ve had cause to ponder that in the days since my friend Robert Conquest died and obituaries, tributes, and reflections on his work and life have flooded the internet. Among these are the obituary on Quadrant Online to which John Whitworth contributed here and an earlier piece by John on Conquest’s poetry and literary criticism. And there are more to come. Quadrant on paper will be publishing assessments by Clive James and Peter Coleman in our next issue.

From the most detached viewpoint this attention is richly deserved. Conquest was the single most important historian of the Soviet Union and its crimes while also being eminent in other fields, notably literature and criticism, and not least an influential advisor to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at a key turning-point in the Cold War. One can hardly sum up such a life in a single article, especially when the task has to be completed by journalism’s arbitrary deadlines. No single obituarist can mention everything. So one or two achievements may fail to be mentioned anywhere. I may be mistaken but I don’t believe that any obituary has yet mentioned Bob’s highly readable but also profound 1980 book, We and They, which examines the differences between civic and despotic cultures and the importance of which, alas, did not vanish with the end of the Cold War.

The well-publicised “secret meeting” recently held in Jordan between Israel’s newest negotiations Minister Silvan Shalom and perennial PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat is but the latest in a 20 years old meaningless talkfest that has seen little tangible signs of ending the 100 years old Jewish-Arab conflict – despite two offers made by Israel in 2000/2001 and 2008 and rejected by the Palestinian Authority.
Talks have been conducted on Israel’s side within a framework comprising the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2003 Bush Roadmap (with 14 documented Israeli reservations.)

Mahmoud Abbas’s approach to those Israeli reservations should have sounded alarm bells from the start:

“They don’t interest me …

We do not accept each side picking and choosing only those specific elements that are convenient for them in the road map.

Here is an assessment that mirrors my own preferences….rsk

After the Republican convention in 2012, one commenter at Instapundit wrote: Romney was not my first, second, or third choice, but I will crawl over ground glass to vote for him.

That has stayed with me ever since; it rang true for me as well [1]. With the field for the 2016 Republican nomination as crowded as it is, the exercise of ranking and re-ranking the candidates is surely one that many interested voters (and pundits) will be conducting on a frequent basis. After the first debates, now is the perfect time to start. This is where my personal-preference ranking of the GOP candidates stands, along with notes about why I have placed them in that particular spot.

1. Marco Rubio: I am firmly in his camp and a donor to his campaign. As a Floridian I’ve been following his career for several years, and I think he is one only three actual contenders for the nomination. I know the commenters are going to beat him up (and me as well) because of his dalliance with the “Gang of 8” on immigration reform. Well, what can I say: I agree with Senator Rubio and disagree with the peanut gallery. Marco’s actual overall record is as conservative as anyone in the field. What makes Marco so attractive as a candidate is that he brings conservatism together with an optimistic outlook and rhetorical skills.

The general election is going to boil down to convincing about 5-6% of the electorate (that won’t be paying attention until about two weeks out). I believe Rubio has the right stuff to make that convincing closing argument.

2. Scott Walker: He is also one of whom I consider to be the three actual contenders. There’s a lot of talk on social media of a Walker/Rubio ticket; one can see why that’s so attractive. Both are from purple states that are needed to win in 2016. Walker is a strong candidate with executive experience who took on the trade unions and the Democrats and won. If you’re looking for “a fighter,” nobody has proven more tangibly that he can fight the American left and come out victorious than Walker.

3. Rick Perry: I think he’s a much better candidate than what he showed in 2012 (because of his back surgery, etc.). He’s a former governor with a strong fiscal record and jobs record in a big and important state. Texas has stood defiant against all the hope-and-change rhetoric and ensuing malaise that much of the country has endured. I also like the way he’s taken took on Trump and his crass remarks.

Why do polls show that racial relations have gotten much worse under Barack Obama, who won the White House with over 95% of the black — and 45% of the white — vote?

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll [1] just revealed that about 60% of Americans feel race relations are not good. Some 40% think that they will become even worse. Yet when Obama was elected, 66% of those polled felt race relations were generally OK. All racial groups, according to recent polling, believe that Obama’s handling of racial relations has made things worse since 2009. Another recent Pew poll confirms these tensions, and suggests whites are now about as pessimistic as blacks.

What has happened to racial relations?

Crime. A small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty — no more than 3-4% of the general population — is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed. Blacks are 5-8 times more likely to commit rather suffer an interracial crime, which makes up less than 10% of most violent crime. Both the analysis and solution have become taboo subjects. Writing the above is a near thought crime.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.

For Donald Trump, the Iranian nuclear deal is like a business contract, like one would negotiate with a realtor on Central Park West.

The Iran nuclear deal will lead to a nuclear holocaust, Donald Trump warned Sunday. Still, if he’s elected president, the GOP front-runner won’t “rip up” the deal as some of his Republican primary opponents have said they would. Speaking in a prerecorded interview Sunday morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said he’d “police” the deal to mitigate its impact.

Trump questioned claims that the deal could simply be cancelled once it has gone into effect. “It’s very hard to say, ‘We’re ripping it up,” he argued

This is where Trump is wrong. As an Executive Agreement, it is not binding on the next president like a treaty.

“Iran is going to be unbelievably rich and unbelievably powerful and Israel is in real trouble,” Trump warned. “[Iran is] going to have nuclear weapons. They are going to take over parts of the world that you wouldn’t believe. And I think it’s going to lead to a nuclear holocaust.”

Iran gets money that should be used to pay its terror victims.

The giveaways in President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal keep piling up. By handing $100 billion or more in frozen funds to Tehran, the deal would not only fill the coffers of Iranian terror proxies. It would also abandon American victims of terrorism waiting to collect tens of billions of dollars in compensation owed to them by Iran.

Over two decades U.S. federal courts have found the Iranian government liable for orchestrating or supporting the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers U.S. Air Force facility in Saudi Arabia, and multiple shootings and suicide bombings in Israel, among other attacks. Judges have awarded some $45 billion in damages to hundreds of plaintiffs such as Embassy bombing survivor Anne Dammarell and the widow and orphaned children of Hamas bombing victim Ira Weinstein.