Is 2015 Worth Remembering

How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it?

It is always hard to know when a turning point has been reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point, it may well have marked a turn in a downward spiral for America and he West.

This was the year when we essentially let the world know that we were giving up any effort to try to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb and gave them lots of money. Surely it does not take much imagination to foresee what rests at the end of this tunnel. Does it really matter if we have more nuclear bombs than they have, if they are willing to die and we are not? That my friend may determine who capitulates. And ISIS and other terrorists have given us grisly exhibitions of what capitulation would mean to non-Muslims.

Putting aside, for the moment, the fateful question whether 2015 is a turning point, what do we see when we look back instead of looking forward? What portrays the year that is now ending? More than anything else, 2015 has been the year of the big fib. There have been lies in other years, and some of them big, but even so 2015 has set new highs (or is it new lows).

This is the year when we learned, from Hillary Clinton's personal e-mails, after three years of prevaricating, skirting the truth and circumvention, that Secretary of State Clinton lied, as did President Barack Obama and others under him, when they all told America in 2012 that the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three other Americans was not a terrorist attack, but a protest demonstration that got out of hand. Then again, “What difference does it make?” Lying, by itself, is obviously not new. What is new is the growing acceptance of lying as "no big deal" by self-righteous sophisticate literati types, so long as these are lies that advance their political and philosophic causes. Many in the media greeted the exposure of Hillary Clinton's lies by admiring how well she handled herself. Does the media not realize that lies are a wall between us and reality -- and being walled off from reality is the biggest deal of all? Reality does not disappear because we don't see it. It just hits us like a roadside IED blast when we least expect it.

Does anyone truly expect that misrepresentations or falsehoods will simply vanish from political articulacy? If you took all the lies out of politics, how much would be left? If there is anything that is bipartisan in Washington, it is deceit. The most recent budget deal showed that Congressional Republicans lied in a big way.

Then there is "Hands up, don't shoot" and its counterpart, "Black Lives Matter." Both had repercussions in 2015, with the open promotion of the killing of police officers, in marches across large metropolitan areas around the country. But the bushwhack assassinations of Law Enforcement Officers that followed aroused no such outrage in the media as any police use of force against thugs. Nor has there been the same outrage as the murder rate shot up when the police backed off, as they have in the past, in the wake of being condemned by politicians and the media. Most of the people murdered have been black. But apparently these particular black lives don't matter much to activists and much of the media alike. No surprise there.