RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rep. Gabbard is impressive on foreign policy but voted against the Keystone Pipeline without limiting amendments and supports Obamacare…..rsk
Meet the Beautiful, Tough Young Democrat Who’s Turning Heads by Challenging Obama’s Foreign Policy
Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard is pushing back on White House weakness She’s young, she’s hip, and she’s beautiful. She’s also a combat veteran and a Democrat who has made headlines for slamming the Obama administration’s rudderless foreign policy. Tulsi Gabbard may be a Democrat, but the 33-year-old congresswoman from Hawaii has endeared herself to right-wing hawks by showing a willingness to buck the president, and her party, on foreign affairs. “I like her thinking a lot,” American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks tells National Review in an e-mail. Brooks describes Gabbard as “smart and reasonable,” as well as “pragmatically strong on defense.” “She could be a very powerful new voice on the D side,” he says. It’s not often, especially in the Age of Obama, that you hear prominent Republicans lavish praise on up-and-coming Democrats

But Gabbard’s public condemnation of the president’s national-security strategy is turning heads and winning her rave reviews from across the aisle. With the U.S. on the precipice of a deal with Iran, Gabbard’s embrace of American exceptionalism, combined with her exotic background — she was born in American Samoa, and she is Hindu — seems to offer the Democratic party a different way forward. It harkens back to the Truman era, and it’s attractive to many Republicans, particularly those who care about foreign affairs and are seeking to renew a bipartisan consensus on national security. “I think she’s a responsible American congresswoman who served in the military and looks at the situation as she sees it,” says Danielle Pletka, AEI’s vice president for foreign policy and defense. “She doesn’t see everything through a political prism and is thoughtful and serious,” Pletka says. “I admire her.”

In looking for liberal turncoats, Patriotic Betrayal ignores George Kennan and Cold War realism. The cover of Karen M. Paget’s Patriotic Betrayal consists entirely of an extraordinary advertorial instructing readers how they should think about the book’s revelations. The text declares that in February 1967, “CIA director Richard Helms had, as he would later recall, ‘one of my darkest days,’ when President Lyndon Johnson told him that the muckraking magazine Ramparts was about to expose one of the Agency’s best-kept secrets: a covert project to enroll American students in the crusade against communism.”

Asserting that the Ramparts article revealed only “a small part of the story of the CIA’s two-decades-long effort to ensnare the National Student Association,” the cover then boasts that Paget “tells the rest of the tale, which reads like a John le Carré novel, filled with self-serving rationalizations, layers of duplicity, and bureaucratic double talk.” It also claims that Paget “throws a sharp light on the persistent argument, heard even today, about whether America’s national-security interests can be secured by skullduggery and deception.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I winced when I read those words. That’s because I was one of the editors of Ramparts and the principal author of the article exposing the CIA’s covert funding of the NSA, only one part of an elaborate web of anti-Communist citizen groups supported by the spy agency during the first decades of the Cold War.

Once again our leaders are needlessly appeasing a hostile state that shows them nothing but contempt. The Western capitulation to Adolf Hitler in the 1938 Munich Agreement is cited as classic appeasement that destroyed Czechoslovakia, backfired on France and Britain, and led to World War II. All of that is true.

But there was much more that caused the Munich debacle than simple Western naiveté. The full tragedy of that ill-fated agreement should warn us on the eve of the Obama’s administration’s gullible agreement with Iran on nuclear proliferation. Fable one is the idea that most people saw right through the Munich folly. True, Europeans knew that Hitler had never once told the truth and was already murdering German citizens who were Jews, Communists, or homosexuals. But Europeans did not care all that much. Instead, the Western world was ecstatic over the agreement. After the carnage of World War I, Europeans would do anything to avoid even a small confrontation — even if such appeasement all but ensured a far greater bloodbath than the one that began in 1914.

The new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam focuses on oppression, group identity and Reagan the warmonger.

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

—President Ronald Reagan, speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1987

President Reagan’s challenge to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev remains one of the most dramatic calls for freedom in our time. Thus I was heartened to find a passage from Reagan’s speech on the sample of the new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam that students will take for the first time in May. It seemed for a moment that students would be encouraged to learn about positive aspects of our past rather than be directed to focus on the negative, as happens all too often.

Presenting himself as Tobi the German, the author hears praise of Nazis in the West Bank and talk of Jews’ ‘racist’ DNA in Tel Aviv.

Here is the classic recipe for writing about Israelis and Palestinians: start by mentioning the “cycle of violence” and the distrust it has bred between two peoples in a contested holy land. Next speak of the sane moderates on both sides who are willing to compromise and believe in what “everyone” knows to be the reasonable way forward, a two-state solution. Bemoan how “extremists” on the side you dislike are sabotaging prospects for peace. Repeat until the U.S. president calls for a new peace conference, then insist it represents a last chance.

In “Catch the Jew!,” Tuvia Tenenbom eschews this crusty framework. Crisscrossing Israel and the Palestinian Territories over seven months in 2013-14, Mr. Tenenbom meets with high-ranking politicians, celebrated writers, religious leaders, “human rights” professionals, left-wing political activists and West Bank settlers, cajoling Jews and Arabs to speak for themselves. Mr. Tenenbom’s conversations range from the sacred to the profane, from high-level politics to ribald discussions of the dating rituals of various religious groups and ethnicities. “Catch the Jew!” is an illuminating—and alarming—account of a part of the promised land that few foreigners see.

Nuclear talks with North Korea prove Iran’s program will go forward—deal or no deal.

By the nuclear compliance standards of Barack Obama and John Kerry, North Korea was a model state—in 1992. In 1985, North Korea joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In 1992 it and South Korea jointly declared the “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. North Korea next signed a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Within months, the IAEA reported “inconsistencies” in North Korea’s nuclear program.

Three years ago, film-goers were treated to “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” which critic Kenneth Turan called a “pleasant fantasy” about the Middle East. Today, of course, Yemen is the hub of a bloody conflict, one which President Obama persists in viewing with equal unreality.

Most obviously: Yemen is not, as the administration has touted, a “success” brought about by its “smart diplomacy.” Most importantly: Iran has a plan. Yemen is a vital component.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees that. So does Saudi King Salman (and no, I will not dwell on the pun). His foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, last week called Iran “an aggressive state that is intervening and operating forces in the Arab world.” Iran’s nuclear weapons program, he added, represents “a threat to the Gulf and the entire world.”

A quick tour of the neighborhood: Much of Syria is already an Iranian satrapy. Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist foreign legion, is the most powerful force in Lebanon. Iranian military advisers and Iranian-backed Shia militias increasingly call the shots in Iraq. And now Iran is aggressively supporting the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

It’s okay to insult Jews, but watch out when it comes to blacks or Muslims.
Don Imus, the famous radio/TV talk show host, was caught making a joke insensitive to Blacks and it nearly finished him off. He was taken off the air, spent years being rehabilitated, and now he’s back, but careful – very careful. Zero tolerance!

Schooled by people like Al Sharpton, Imus learned the limits to humor – and so did every other comedian. Don’t go there is the message.

But for Jews, the jokes keep on coming…tasteless, offensive, hurtful, harmful, doesn’t matter. Fair game to be Jewish and we’re into a trend.

So now it’s Trevor Noah and who is this, you ask? I asked the same question and the answer is that if you thought Jon Stewart was obnoxious when it came to Israel, wait till you meet this creep. Trevor (no Noah this guy) is a 31-year-old South African who is slated to take Stewart’s place on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

The long road from marching side by side at Selma to today, when the White House is openly clashing with Israel.

President Obama is trying the patience of Jewish Democrats in Congress, a dozen of whom took Deputy National Security AdviserBen Rhodes to the woodshed last week over the president’s continued criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to Politico, the lawmakers complained to Mr. Rhodes that Mr. Obama is behaving as though the Israeli prime minister’s recent comment dismissing the chances for Palestinian statehood is all that is blocking the peace process, when the talks have been moribund for a year. The Democratic congressmen also noted that the president had refrained from criticizing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and had even hinted that he might back United Nations recognition of Palestine.

If the steady, but manageable flow of ignorant commentary on Israel of late has turned into a flood, it’s because of a particular tactic of the left employed in abundance since the Israeli elections. A surefire way to misunderstand Israeli politics is to view it through the stable lens of America’s two-party system. And one meme that has gained traction on the left during Benjamin Netanyahu’s premiership is the lazy, obtuse narrative that he acts as some sort of representative of the Republican Party rather than his own party and country. Such self-refuting nonsense doesn’t generally need to be dignified with attention. But the latest version represents a despicable smear that demands a response.