RUTHFULLY YOURS

The late real estate magnate Leona Helmsley sealed her reputation as the “queen of mean” when she told a housekeeper, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

Hillary Clinton is under new scrutiny after the revelation that some of the e-mails on her now-infamous private server included information then classified as “top secret.” Her flat denial in March that classified information ever passed through the server was laughable at the time, and it’s been proven false now. But no one expects the Obama administration to punish Hillary the way it has so many “little people” who have mishandled classified data in the course of their government service.

Take former State Department analyst Stephen Kim. He’s now serving a 13-month sentence in a federal prison for leaking classified data on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen, who in turn had his e-mail records searched by the Obama Justice Department without his knowledge. Journalist Peter Maass has made a compelling case that the North Korean material wasn’t sensitive: “According to court documents, one State Department official described the intelligence assessment as ‘a nothing burger,’ while another official said Rosen’s story had disclosed ‘nothing extraordinary.’” But Kim sits in prison nonetheless, a victim of the Obama Administration’s crackdown on the abuse of classified material.

Republican leaders on a summer tour of the Holy Land met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week and the Iran deal was front and center in the talks, but according to The New York Times, Netanyahu did not try to push Republicans on which way to vote:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not directly advise visiting Republican members of Congress how to vote on the Iran nuclear deal, the leader of the delegation told reporters on Thursday. The head of a Democratic Congressional group that visited Israel last week had said the same thing to journalists.

“He doesn’t tell us how to vote but he lays out concerns for the future about what the world could look like,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader who is spending the week in Israel along with 35 mostly new members.

McCarthy says he doesn’t know of any Republicans that are voting for the deal with Iran and at least some Democrats, though it isn’t know how many, are expected to break ranks. If enough members of Congress vote against the deal it could over ride the veto President Obama has promised to use.

The leftist cancer on our society — funded by our own tax dollars.

George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” If one wants to discover the truth of Orwell’s statement, he need only step upon most college campuses.

Faculty leaders of the University of California consider certain statements racism and feel they should not be used in class. They call it micro-aggression. To them, micro-aggressive racist statements are: “America is the land of opportunity.” That is seen as perpetuating the myth of meritocracy. “There is only one race, the human race.” Such a statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That’s “racist” because it gives the impression that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.”

How the “progressive” Gestapo rules the American campus.Recently, the University of New Hampshire’s “Bias-Free Language Guide” (BFLG) was revealed to the public. There was a backlash and the President of UNH flew into damage-control mode.

Soon thereafter, administrators decided to pull the guide from its website.

While writing about the BFLG, I assured those readers who may not be in the know that UNH is all too typical of academia today. About as outrageous as the BFLG was President Mark W. Huddleston’s assertion that speech “is free and unfettered” on UNH’s campus.

The contemporary campus is many things, but a bastion of free and unfettered speech is not one of them.

Take the University of California’s program on “Diversity and Faculty development.” The program identifies a host of “micro-aggressions.” The latter are “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”

The source of the nation’s heroin epidemic.

In the “Wild West” America’s pioneers who were heading west would employ a simple but effective strategy when they came under attack. They circled their wagons to form what was hopefully an impenetrable perimeter.

Further back in history, castles were protected by high walls and often moats were created to offer a buffer beyond the walls, requiring draw bridges to enable those who wanted to traverse the moat to either enter or leave the castle compound.

It is more than ironic, as we about to see, that Obama himself drew that very same analogy about border security concerning a moat. For good measure, he even threw in alligators to fill that moat.

Of course he used that language derisively to insult and ridicule anyone who dared suggest our borders are not secure, but that those borders must be made secure.

Editor’s note: The following is the first article in the FrontPage series “Obama’s Betrayals,” which will explore the president’s record of perfidy, malfeasance and crimes against the American people. As the Obama presidency enters its final stages, examples of this treachery are only becoming more numerous and brazen. “Obama’s Betrayals” will shine the spotlight on these attacks on the American polity, the incredible damage they are inflicting on the nation, and the dangerous agenda the president intends to complete before leaving office.

It doesn’t get any more explosive than this: a high-ranking former Obama administration official charging that the administration made a conscious decision to support al-Qaeda – so where is the mainstream media?

Brad Hoff reported in Foreign Policy Journal last Friday that “in Al Jazeera’s latest Head to Head episode, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn confirms to Mehdi Hasan that not only had he studied the DIA memo predicting the West’s backing of an Islamic State in Syria when it came across his desk in 2012, but even asserts that the White House’s sponsoring of radical jihadists (that would emerge as ISIL and Nusra) against the Syrian regime was ‘a willful decision.’”

When Hasan asked Flynn if “the administration turned a blind eye” to analyses explaining how the Syrian “rebels” against the Assad regime were actually Islamic jihadists who wanted to establish a hardline Sharia state in Syria, Flynn responded: “I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.”

“A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?,” asked Hasan.

The White House conceded everything years before talks.

Anyone wishing to assess the true intentions of those pulling the strings in the Islamic Republic of Iran needs to understand first and foremost that there are no moderates in the Iranian echelons of power, only extremists. To assume otherwise is both naïve and dangerous. Some of the more polished regime elements may express themselves in a more moderate fashion when addressing Western audiences, but readily ratchet up the anti-Western rhetoric when behind closed doors.

In 2013, Hassan Rouhani was, for lack of a better word, “elected” president of Iran replacing the noxious Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rouhani, a grandfatherly-like figure with an affable smile, appeared to be, at least outwardly, more moderate than his predecessor, but in reality expressed the same rancid, xenophobic views. He was quoted as saying that “the beautiful cry of ‘Death to America’ unites our nation,” and referred to Israel as a “wound,” “a festering tumor” and the “great Zionist Satan,” among numerous other reprehensible pejoratives.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an address to the United Nations, dryly noted that while Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing, Rouhani was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but both were wolves nonetheless. What’s more, real power in Iran vests not with the nation’s president, but with its Supreme Leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, a pernicious man who seems incapable of addressing crowds without inserting at least one “death to America” reference somewhere in the speech. Indeed, just four days after signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) he addressed a large crowd and repeated the tired banalities of “death to America” and “death to Israel.” Khamenei is also solely responsible for vetting and approving presidential candidates which means that he found Rouhani to be an acceptable contender and that speaks volumes about what kind of character Rouhani is.

Just when you think the Islamic State can’t do anything that would outrage civilized humanity any more than we already are, along comes this story in the New York Times that goes into excruciating detail about how rape is being used to recruit ISIS members and the twisted justification for it that ISIS says comes directly from the Koran.

The report also details how the sex-slave market works — its bureaucracy, its logistics, and its organization.

The article starts with a horrific description of an ISIS fighter raping a 12-year-old girl:

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

They say it’s not the crime, but the coverup. But sometimes it’s the crime and the coverup. Hillary Clinton’s metastasizing email scandal is beginning to look more and more like a case of both.

Back in the seventies, Charles Colson of Watergate fame boasted he would “walk over my own grandmother” to assure the election of Richard Nixon. Hillary Clinton — who cut her teeth on the very Watergate investigation before she was “let go” by the House Judiciary Committee under disputed circumstances — now may have to demand the same kind of loyalty from longtime “girl Friday” Huma Abedin. From Politico:

Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s most trusted confidante, is increasingly becoming a central figure in the email scandal that’s haunting her boss on the campaign trail, as Republicans and federal judges seek information about Clinton’s communications while she was running the State Department.

Secretary Kerry is going to Havana this week. The island’s chief dissidents will be kept away from the celebration at the new U.S. embassy.

President Obama made his Cuba announcement in mid-December. U.S.-Cuba talks are down to this: Fidel Castro is now asking for money on his birthday:

“Castro wrote: “Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages, which total many millions of dollars, as our country has stated with irrefutable arguments and data in all of its speeches at the United Nations.”

He did not go into detail on precisely how much money he reckons Washington owes Havana.

The Americans are also claiming compensation for US-owned property, such as real estate, that was confiscated when Castro took power.”