RUTHFULLY YOURS

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won’t be uncorking the champagne when Secretary of State John Kerry officially opens an American embassy in Cuba today for the first time in 54 years.

Instead, the Republican White House hopeful marked the historic occasion by delivering a stinging rebuke of President Barack Obama’s two signature diplomatic breakthroughs this year, vowing to reimpose economic sanctions on Iran and threatening to sever diplomatic ties with the Castro regime in Cuba.

Mr. Rubio outlined those positions in a Friday speech in New York hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative, further casting himself as the candidate most eager to reignite tensions with two longtime adversaries.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton has decided to give up her Senate seat to become secretary of state in the Obama administration, making her the public face to the world for the man who dashed her own hopes for the presidency,” the New York Times reported on Nov. 22, 2008.

Well, that was a mistake.

Maybe even the mistake of a lifetime. You’ve probably heard that Mrs. Clinton is seeking the presidency again. As in 2008, she is the inevitable Democratic nominee but her prospects are looking shaky. This time virtually all of her problems, except those having to do with her character and political talent (or lack thereof), can be traced to her decision to leave the Senate and join the Obama administration.

Start with the one that is most obvious, and most severe: the metastasizing scandal over her improper use of a private email server. As the Associated Press reported in March, when the scandal first became public:

Members of Congress who are demanding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails are largely exempt from such scrutiny themselves.

Congress makes its own rules, and has never subjected itself to open records laws that force agencies such as the State Department to maintain records and turn them over to the public when asked.

There’s also no requirement for members of Congress to use official email accounts, or to retain, archive or store their emails, while in office or after. That’s in contrast to the White House and the rest of the executive branch.

The AP piece suggests that makes hypocrites of the Republicans who currently hold majorities in Congress, but then goes on to note that “open government advocates are largely unconcerned. They agree it makes sense for Congress to be treated differently from the executive branch.”

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign “is taking on the stale air of the bunker,” writes Peggy Noonan. “When you mention to Democrats that Nixon never burned the tapes but Hillary surely burned that server, they nod, smile or half-wince. No one grows defensive for her. It does not seem possible that more candidates, big ones, won’t get in.”

A Journal editorial today adds that the “admission that her aides were also using her server demolishes Mrs. Clinton’s previous claim that she used this server for personal ‘convenience.’ She was really running a parallel mini-State email operation.”

And our columnist Kimberley Strassel notes that this week Mrs. Clinton’s “use of private emails while serving as secretary of state turned from a political problem into a potentially legal problem.”
It’s not the only problem. “Democrats also see new weakness in their favorite themes. Here is Mrs. Clinton trying out an inequality argument, as she builds up her personal bank account. Here she is floating the ‘war on women’ theme, as her foundation takes donations from countries that whip rape victims. Here she calls for lower college costs while charging these institutions $250,000 for a speech. Here is a candidate who was in the past for Keystone, and for trade, and for more intervention overseas. And who maybe now is not. Though they don’t really know.

A cheer and a half for the Obama Administration for finally recognizing something the U.S. government has been denying since the 1970s: that the market for oil is global.

The acknowledgment takes the form of a Commerce Department decision disclosed Friday to let U.S. companies export domestically produced crude oil to Mexico. Technically it’s a swap, meaning that we give Mexicans crude oil in the grade they need in exchange for Mexican oil that fits our needs. The swap will help to ease a refining mismatch on the Gulf Coast that has caused America’s light crude to pile up in storage areas that are almost full because they have no place to go.

While this is a good step, it leaves the real problem untouched: the ban itself. The ban dates to the 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which Congress passed in response to that era’s oil crisis. The idea was that if we could keep oil produced within our borders for the domestic market, it would insulate Americans from price spikes.

‘Cuba’s future is for Cubans to shape,” declared Secretary of State John Kerry in Havana on Friday as he reopened the U.S. Embassy after 54 years. If only this were true. The reality is that Cuba’s future is still reserved for the Castro brothers and their political comrades to shape, and that hasn’t changed a whit since President Obama decided to recognize the Cuban regime in December.

“Having normal relations makes it easier for us to talk—and talk can deepen understanding even when we know full well that we will not always see eye-to-eye on everything,” Mr. Kerry said. This sums up the Obama vision of foreign policy, in which talk typically turns out to be its own reward.

Certainly there isn’t much to show so far for the U.S. outreach to Cuba. The U.S. has supplied the government run by Fidel and Raúl Castro and the military with much-wanted new global legitimacy. The U.S. has also eased travel restrictions to the island, and American business interests and the Obama Administration are lobbying Congress to end the U.S. trade embargo.

Edward Said leaves us with the impression that all prejudice is only on the part of the West.

To the traditionally minded, news of such things as man-made laws based on objective evidence, free speech, equal justice under law, democracy, elections, freedom for women, freedom of religion and respect for the “other,” and so on, may have come as a sort of horror. Despots recoiled from the very thought of democracy. Religious leaders fumed at secular education, the freedom to question and say what one liked, even about religion.

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” — Hasan al-Banna’, Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, 1928.

The vast amount of what is called “Islamophobia,” however, is not that at all. Fair criticism is not phobic, responses to Islamic terrorism are reasonable reactions to violence.

Based on news reports of Muslims murdering other Muslims and killing Christians, there is, ironically, probably more Islamophobia among Muslims for each other than there is from Westerners toward Muslims. There is also probably more “Infidelophobia” by Muslims toward non-Muslims than by non-Muslims toward Muslims.

The position of US voters on the nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs – and therefore the position of Senators and House Representatives – is shaped by their worldview, in general, and US homeland and national security considerations, in particular.

According to RealClearPolitics’ most recent polls, a major wedge has evolved between the US constituent, on the one hand, and US policy-makers, on the other hand, when it comes to foreign policy and national security: a mere 38.5% approval rating of President Obama’s foreign policy. For instance, a CNN poll documented a majority disapproval of Obama’s handling of Islamic terrorism, and a majority backing the use of military force against ISIS.

The chasm between most constituents and the White House is highlighted by the congressional debate on the nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs.

Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York (1988-2006).

The question of whether Hillary Clinton’s emails were marked top secret isn’t legally relevant. Any cabinet member should know that.

Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct public business while serving as secretary of state, followed by the deletion of information on that server and the transfer to her lawyer of a thumb drive containing heretofore unexplored data, engages several issues of criminal law—but the overriding issue is one of plain common sense.

Let’s consider the potentially applicable criminal laws in order of severity.

It is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than a year to keep “documents or materials containing classified information . . . at an unauthorized location.” Note that it is the information that is protected; the issue doesn’t turn on whether the document or materials bear a classified marking. This is the statute under which David Petraeus—former Army general and Central Intelligence Agency director—was prosecuted for keeping classified information at home. Mrs. Clinton’s holding of classified information on a personal server was a violation of that law. So is transferring that information on a thumb drive to David Kendall, her lawyer.