RUTHFULLY YOURS

His pitch is that he can reform Washington as he did Florida.

Jeb Bush formally launched his presidential campaign on Monday, and no candidate needed it more. The former Florida Governor’s non-campaign so far has been curiously defensive, but now he has a new opening to make the case for why he can beat Hillary Clinton and be a worthy President.

Mr. Bush’s drawn-out pre-campaign allowed him to help his Super PAC raise money, and fundraising has been his biggest success to date. Money is an important measure of support, especially in a GOP field that is larger and more formidable than any in memory. Mr. Bush’s cash hoard will give him staying power to make it to the Florida primary or the later regional contests in an extended race.

But Mr. Bush’s long launch fuse has also made his candidacy seem more hesitant than dynamic, more biographical than about leading a larger cause. He has spent more time answering questions about his family name, and his brother’s foreign policy, than he has laying out his own campaign principles.

The focus on biography is especially harmful because many Republicans are instinctively averse to nominating the third Bush in 30 years. This does not mean Jeb should take the media bait of trying to explain how he is different than either his brother or his father. It does require offering a vision and agenda that are bold enough to set the terms of the debate, and then show that he can sell them.

Jeb Bush (with or without last name) made a fine debut speech at Miami Dade College Monday, right up there with Marco Rubio’s several weeks ago. Must be something in the Florida water. (Manatees?) They were both far better than the stultified, rigid Hillary, who can’t even quote The Beatles without sounding like a schoolmarm teaching Wordsworth to third graders. (Talk about “Yesterday”!)

Problem is, as I wrote in late May, I still wish Jeb wasn’t running. I had reasons then and they haven’t gone away — and this is with no offense to the former governor who, for all I know, could be the best potential president currently running from either party.

The overwhelming issues for me are democracy itself and defeating Hillary Clinton. Enough already with royal families. Are we Argentina? This is the USA (still… maybe…). Sure politics can be a family business like anything else, but there are limits. And the presidency is one of them, indeed the most important of them.

Twenty miles west of London, in Surrey, lies a quiet meadow along the Thames River. It is a centuries-old place deep in the heart and soul of England, though no formal memorial to it was placed there until the middle of the last century by (ironically) the American Bar Association. Almost a century ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem [1] about it:

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers.
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter signed at Runnymede.

That charter, the so-called “Great Charter” (or Magna Carta in the Latin used by the Norman rulers of the time), signed under duress by the tyrant King Jacques (we now call him “John”), reined in the power of his capricious reign, 800 years ago today. The event will be commemorated this evening [2] at the site (morning in the U.S.) by Daniel Hannan, southeast England’s representative to the European Parliament, and fierce critic of the EU and defender of the principles of the Anglosphere.

Appeasement defined the global conflicts of the 20th century. Time after time, America and other forces for freedom and democracy withheld their power in efforts to appease the most evil regimes in recent history. Over and over again, the policy of appeasement has ended in disaster. Now, conservative giant Victor Davis Hanson asks: why is appeasement so seductive and where will it take us in the 21st century?

In this collection of Hanson’s best columns from the last four years on the policy of appeasement today and in history, the path becomes clear. If America continues down the road of appeasement with radical Islamic groups and aggressive regimes in Russia and North Korea, the world will see a conflagration rivalling World War II.

A copy of the book can be purchased here.

‘Nobody has a monopoly on making mistakes.” When I was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to the end of 2013, that was my standard response to reporters asking who bore the greatest responsibility—President Barack Obama or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—for the crisis in U.S.-Israel relations.

I never felt like I was lying when I said it. But, in truth, while neither leader monopolized mistakes, only one leader made them deliberately.

Israel blundered in how it announced the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods and communities in Jerusalem over the border lines that existed before the Six Day War in 1967. On two occasions, the news came out during Mr. Netanyahu’s meetings with Vice President Joe Biden. A solid friend of Israel, Mr. Biden understandably took offense. Even when the White House stood by Israel, blocking hostile resolutions in the United Nations, settlement expansion often continued.

The text of Magna Carta of 1215 bears many traces of haste, and is the product of much bargaining,” the British Library website surprisingly states to individuals examining this iconic document for the first time. Yet Magna Carta, which turns 800 today, richly deserves being called, in the words of British Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan, the “most important bargain in the history of the human race.”

Driven to rebellion by abuses of royal taxation power, nobles imposed the Magna Carta (“Great Charter” in Latin) upon England’s King John at Runnymede on the Thames on June 15, 1215. The name merely reflects the document’s length, not any contemporary understanding that Magna Carta would become the “greatest constitutional document of all time,” as described by Britain’s most renowned jurist, Lord Denning. “Most of its clauses deal with specific, and often long-standing, grievances rather than with general principles of law,” the British Library notes. “Some of the grievances are clear; others can be understood only in the context of the feudal society in which they arose. The precise meaning of a few clauses is still uncertain.” Certain Magna Carta articles, for example, regulate borrowing from Jews, reflecting the money-lending role this people played in a medieval society that forbade Christians from earning interest.

On trade, terrorism and nuclear proliferation, Democrats would rather not know.

Because a wing of the Republican Party is hostile to immigrants, it’s tempting to see the GOP as a descendant of the mid-19th-century Know Nothing Party, infamous for its antipathy to Irish-Catholic newcomers—the Mexicans of their day. But if the Know Nothings have a 21st-century heir, it is Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party.

So much was made clear last week, when House Democrats did their best to torpedo the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. So opposed is Mrs. Pelosi’s party to free trade—that is, so beholden are Democrats to organized labor—that the party was prepared to defy President Obama and vote against a $450 million retraining scheme to scuttle TPP.

ROME—Pope Francis calls global warming a major threat to life on the planet, says it is due mainly to human activity, and describes the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels as an urgent matter, in a published draft of a much-awaited upcoming letter on the environment.

The draft copy of “Laudato Si’ ” (“Be praised”), his encyclical on the environment, has been eagerly awaited by business, policy makers and environmental groups. It was published online on Monday by the Italian magazine L’Espresso, three days ahead of its scheduled publication date.

The Vatican said the posted text wasn’t the final document, which would remain under embargo until Thursday, but it didn’t say whether there were material differences between the draft and the final document.

Left to themselves, certain of Israel’s potentially nuclear adversaries could bring the Jewish state into eternal darkness, into fire, into ice. It is essential, therefore, that the country’s leadership take appropriate steps to ensure that any failure of national deterrence would never spark a regional nuclear war. In this connection, it is especially important that the IDF continue to plan conceptually around a distinctly fundamental understanding: Nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence are not separate or discrete security postures. Always, these core protective strategies are more or less critically interrelated.

It is time to call things by their correct name. A nuclear war in the Middle East is no longer inconceivable. This is the case, moreover, even if Israel were somehow to remain the only nuclear weapons state in the chaotic region.

Thursday marks the 200th anniversary of the British and Prussian victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, a battle that changed Europe temporarily and France, perhaps, forever.

We all know the jokes: “Why do the French plant trees on the banks of the Seine? So the Germans can march in the shade.” “Used French army rifles: only dropped once.”

Since World War Two, there has been a sneering arrogance that characterizes our French ally, an arrogance unjustified by past achievement in peace and war. Their foreign minister at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion was Dominique de Villepin. When asked who he hoped would win in Iraq, he refused to answer. But, as I said on Chris Matthews’ program “Hardball” at the time — before he went nuts – going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion: you just leave a lot of noisy, useless baggage behind.

It wasn’t always this way. Hundreds of years ago they weren’t “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” It’s taken centuries for the French to become what they are today.
To understand why France is what it is, you have to study both its national psychology and its history.