RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama has built a legacy, all right: appeasement, staggering debt, racial animosity . . .
President Obama last week spiked the ball on the Supreme Court’s decisions to legalize gay marriage and to ratify the Affordable Care Act.

Yet it is difficult to see quite how Obama had much to do with these decisions — or, to the degree he did, that they are earth-shattering. He twice ran for president expressing opposition to gay marriage while emphasizing the religious element of holy matrimony, which, he argued, precluded same-sex marriages. Is he delighted that the Court ignored his prior views?

On the Obamacare front, all the Supreme Court did was to clean up the Affordable Care Act, in a postmodern ruling that the administration’s poorly worded law actually meant something other than what the text as written actually said. The Court’s intervention was an act of partisan salvation, not disinterested legal reasoning.

Obama’s trade pact passed only with Republican votes. Apparently free-traders in Congress wanted the deal more than they worried about the president’s taking credit for their eleventh-hour rescue of what otherwise would have been a strong rebuke from his own party.

One of the assurances made by Team Clinton at the start of her latest presidential run was that her campaign would have a different look and feel than her failed attempt in 2008.

Hillary Clinton would be more accessible, her staff “footprint” would be smaller, relations with the press corps would be less chilly.

That promise is proving tough to keep.Over the weekend, Mrs. Clinton turned up for a Fourth of July parade with an entourage that deployed ropes to corral the reporters covering her march through the streets of Gorham, N.H.
Clinton aides said the maneuver was needed so that real voters got a chance to see the candidate. It also minimized any unscripted brushes Mrs. Clinton would have with the press.

A presidential campaign is a messy thing. People shout questions. Hecklers appear out of nowhere. It’s unavoidable. And, in some ways, testing candidates in a variety of unpredictable situations is valuable.

Where is the GOP candidate who will actually call for cutting the job destroying, anti free enterprise EPA down to size? rsk

The Supreme Court scolded the Environmental Protection Agency last week for bombing Dresden, albeit long after the bombs fell. In 2011, the year the EPA proposed the anticarbon mercury rule that the Court has now ruled illegal, some 1,500 fossil-fuel-fired electric units were in operation. Only about 100 have not already closed or complied at a cost of billions of dollars.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is hoping to prevent a replay on the EPA’s new Clean Power Plan, which will demand another 30% carbon reduction, on average, from the states. The rule was proposed by the EPA in June 2014 and is expected to be final by the end of this summer. The challenge Mr. Pruitt filed last week is a test of whether the snail’s pace of the judicial process in response to new rules lends de facto immunity to whatever the EPA wants to do, even if the conclusion is another legal defeat that arrives too late to make a practical difference.

On Sunday, Greece became only the second country in history—Argentina was the first—to make the transition from membership in the developed world to membership in the developing one. Now the question is: Who’s next?

The question is worth asking since so many very serious people— Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz among them—think Greeks did the right thing by voting down their creditors’ demands that they attempt to live within their means as a condition of further largess. Mr. Stiglitz, who doubles as a cheerleader for Argentina’s Kirchner government, says a “no” vote gives Greece the chance to “grasp its destiny in its own hands” even if it means a future “not as prosperous as the past.”

Destiny can seem so romantic—particularly to intellectuals wealthy enough to disparage the value of other people’s economic aspirations.

Destiny also has its uses for politically ambitious ideologues throughout Europe determined not to let the Greek crisis go to waste. France’s far-right National Front, Spain’s far-left Podemos Party, and Italy’s far-out Five-Star Movement all cheered Greece’s “no,” and they will emerge politically stronger should Athens now succeed in extorting better terms from its creditors. If nobody has the will to enforce the rules, nobody will have the desire to follow them.

Turkey boldly challenged its Western allies to join them in a fight against terror. But the target was not al-Qaeda or ISIS. Instead, Turkey wanted the West to fight the “terrorist state, Israel.”

One of Erdogan’s favorite statements is his famous line, “There is no Islamic terror.”

Why are these terrorists terrorizing? What is the ideology they are fighting for? Are they fighting to impose onto others by force the laws stipulated in Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Shintoist holy books? If their acts of terror are not related to Islam, what are they related to?

Turkey’s Islamist government, now squeezed in a political drama in which it lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002, has in many recent years boldly challenged its Western allies by calling them to join an allied fight against terror. But the target was not al-Qaeda, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or one of the dozens of different Islamist groups designated by the civilized world as terrorist.

Polls show most Americans understand the farcical P5 + 1 Iranian nuclear negotiations are on a disaster course. Nonetheless, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have announced a one week extension to their prior June 30 deadline. Quite favorably, Mr. Obama made clear during a press conference that he will “walk away from the negotiations if in fact it’s a bad deal.” While such declaration reeks of being just another Obama “red line” delivered as political wordsmithing with no intention of ever being followed, it does indicate the clear choice he now has to make: whether to be President Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik or British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich. Walk away or appease and submit. Dignity or disgrace.

After 50 years, later this month an American flag will again fly over the old U.S. Embassy in Havana and the Cubans will open their diplomatic representation in Washington.
Pres. Obama has justified the move because it was time to change a policy that has not worked. That, not to put a fine point on it, is not true. Over five decades Washington was able – sometimes with direct intervention as with the Contras in Nicaragua – to prevent the spread of the Castros’ Communism in Latin America. And it wasn’t for lack of trying by Fidel Castro with Soviet inspiration and help. The list of by Cuban Communist attempts to subvert other governments in the Hemisphere, sometimes with actual military infiltration, is too long to list here.
That, of course, poses the next question coming up quickly.

There is universal agreement that China is increasingly the U.S.’ No. 1 policy concern.
But perhaps never in the history of modern Sinology has there been such difference of opinion about what is happening in China and what – if anything – the U.S. should and could do about it.
One reason is some Old China Hands have changed sides rather abruptly, no longer convinced that there is “a peaceful rising China” — which incidentally is a slogan Beijing itself has dropped.
True, there have been times when there was enormous difference among China scholars, not least during World War II and immediately afterward when in 1949 the Communists took over. There were a lot of “they ain’t Stalinists, just agrarian radicals” around; some with very long greybeards still in business not having yet offered a mea culpa.

The good news is that there wasn’t a nuclear weapons deal with Iran by the June 30 “deadline.” The bad news is that there will probably be one this week, and it’s going to be a very bad one.

The world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism – as even Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has to admit Iran is – is as recalcitrant as the “P5+1” group, led by Vichy John Kerry, is eager to make a deal. The more the Iranians demand, the more the West caves in.

As we go to press, an agreement has already been reached allowing Iran to get its multi-billion dollar signing bonus in the form of relief of the international economic sanctions that forced them to the bargaining table. One of the disagreements – as of Sunday – was on the risible “snap-back” mechanism to reimpose the sanctions if (that should be “when,” not “if,” but suspension of disbelief is a principle tenet of Western diplomacy) Iran violates the agreement. It’s risible because there will be no reimposition of the sanctions. The French, for example, are lining up for oil contracts with Iran. None of the Europeans will allow sanctions to be reimposed, nor will Obama.

More East Jerusalem Palestinians are taking Israeli citizenship, learning Hebrew, and living in Jewish neighborhoods. But does that affect their identity?

Jerusalem — Suha, a young Palestinian lawyer, grew up in East Jerusalem and got her degree in the West Bank, then took a crash course in Hebrew to pass the Israeli bar.

Now she is planning to take a step that was once considered taboo among Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the passionately contested holy city: take an oath of loyalty to Israel in order to become a citizen.

“A lot of people are applying for it. Even people you would never expect: like sheikhs with beards. The lawyers that I work with all have it,” says Suha, who declined to give her full name so as not to risk rejection by Israeli authorities. “I don’t see the occupation going anywhere,” she says. “Eventually I’m going to do it.”

Ever since Israel conquered and immediately annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, the city’s hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents have lived in limbo. Even as their blue residency cards afforded them Israeli social benefits and freedom of movement, they remained loyal to their countrymen in the West Bank and Gaza and resisted the Israeli system.