RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Reader (if there are any of you left),

Well, if this is the conservative movement now, I guess you’re going to have to count me out.

No, I’m not making some mad dash to the center. No, I’m not hoping to be the first alternate to Steve Schmidt on Morning Joe, nor am I vying to become my generation’s Kevin Phillips. I will never be a HillaryCon. And I have no plan to earn “strange new respect” from the Georgetown cocktail-party set I’m always hearing about but never meeting. But even if I have no desire to “grow” in my beliefs, I have no intention to shrink, either.

The late Bill Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review, often counseled young writers to remember, “Politicians will always disappoint you.” As I’ve often said around here, this isn’t because politicians are evil. It’s because politicians are politicians. Their interests too often lie in votes, not in principles. That’s why the conservative movement has always recognized that victory lies not simply in electing conservative politicians, but in shaping a conservative electorate that lines up the incentives so that politicians define their self-interest in a conservative way.

But if it’s true that politicians can disappoint, I think one has to say that the people can, too.

And when I say “the people” I don’t mean “those people.” I mean my people. I mean many of you, Dear Readers. Normally, when conservatives talk about how the public can be wrong, we mean that public. You know the one. The “low-information voters” Rush Limbaugh is always talking about. The folks we laughed at when Jay Leno interviewed them on the street. But we don’t just mean the unwashed and the ill-informed. We sometimes mean Jews, blacks, college kids, Lena Dunham fans, and countless other partisan slices of the electorate who reflexively vote on strict party lines for emotional or irrational reasons. We laugh at liberals who let know-nothing celebrities do their thinking for them.

Well, many of the same people we laughed at are now laughing at us because we are going ga-ga over our own celebrity.

Behold the Trumpen Proletariat

To undermine President Obama’s atrocious Iran deal despite the Republican-controlled Congress’s irresponsible Corker legislation, it will be necessary to follow, of all things, the Corker legislation.

On Wednesday, Barbara Mikulski became the 34th Senate Democrat to announce support for the deal, which lends aid and comfort to a regime that continues to call for “Death to America.” Under the Corker Roadmap to Catastrophe, Mikulski’s assent ostensibly puts President Obama over the top. After all, the legislation sponsored by Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker (R., Ky.) and other Beltway GOP leaders reverses the Constitution’s presumptions against international agreements that harm national security. In essence, Corker requires dissenters from the Iran pact to round up a two-thirds supermajority opposition in both congressional chambers (67 senators and 290 House members). If the Constitution were followed, the burden would be on the president to convince either 67 senators to support a treaty, or majorities of both chambers to make the pact legally binding through ordinary legislation.

Mikulski’s announcement meant that dissenters would now be able to muster no more than 66 Senate votes against the deal. In fact, they won’t get that many. Additional Democrats, such as Cory Booker (N.J.) and Mark Warner (Va.), have dutifully trudged into Obama’s camp.

See the movie “Gifted Hands- The Ben Carson Story”- the remarkable biography of a remarkable and decent man……rsk

Republican voters have been expressing in every way they can that they’re fed up with Washington and the political class. But as angry as they are about the Obama era of governance, that doesn’t mean they’ll want an angry presidential nominee—or accept brashness as a substitute for conservative reform. Witness the rise of Ben Carson.

While the media have been recording every utterance from Donald Trump, the soft-spoken Mr. Carson has been surging in Iowa and across the country. A recent Monmouth poll in Iowa has him in a dead heat with Mr. Trump atop the Republican field and he’s only five points back in a Des Moines Register poll.

The website FiveThirtyEight uses data from Google and finds that over a recent three-week period Mr. Trump received 60 times more media coverage than Mr. Carson. Yet voters have still moved toward the retired pediatric neurosurgeon.

In this Masterpiece Mystery! drama, Arthur Conan Doyle tries to clear the name of a man convicted of brutal crimes in the English Midlands.

This three-part drama about Arthur Conan Doyle’s dedicated battle to undo a gross legal injustice begins inauspiciously, with a strangely flat and wandering first episode, then goes on to become a work of stirring suspensefulness and passion that is sustained to the end. It’s a transformation that owes much to the powers of the well-documented story of George Edalji (Arsher Ali), a young Anglo-Indian solicitor living in the English Midlands, accused of heinous acts of cruelty against farm animals. Their horrifically mutilated bodies led to the case known forever after as the Great Wyrley Outrages.

A former Army Ranger And a Marine veteran join Kurdish fighters against Islamic State in Syria

Bruce Windorski could hear Islamic State fighters taunting him as he peered down the moonlit Syrian village street early this year. Their voices were getting louder, and their aim seemed to be getting better.

The 40-year-old former Army Ranger from Wisconsin reached into his bag of semi-reliable grenades, chose one, pulled the pin and tossed it over the wall. There was a blast, he says, and the jeers came to an abrupt halt. “It was definitely a satisfying event.”

But the battle continued for days. As militants closed in one night, Jamie Lane, a Marine combat veteran who had traveled from California to fight, wondered if they would make it out alive. “We’re holding our ground,” he says quietly in a video he took in the pitch dark as gunfire crackles. “I imagine it will go until dawn.”

The men are part of an unusual fringe of American veterans joining the war against Islamic State. They go, even as their president and Pentagon leaders strive to keep U.S. forces out of the ground war.

Sometimes you have to fight battles you cannot win because fighting – regardless of the outcome – advances a larger cause. Israel’s fight against the nuclear deal the major powers, led by US President Barack Obama concluded with Iran was such a battle. The battle’s futility became clear on July 20, just six days after it was concluded in Vienna. On July 20, the US administration anchored the deal – which paves the way for Iran to become a nuclear power and enriches the terrorism-sponsoring ayatollahs to the tune of $150 billion – in a binding UN Security Council resolution. Once the resolution passed, the deal became unstoppable. Most of the frozen funds that comprise the $150b. would have been released regardless of congressional action. And the nonproliferation regime the US developed over the past 70 years was upended the moment the deal was concluded in Vienna. The fight in Congress itself probably couldn’t have succeeded even if the administration hadn’t made an end run around the lawmakers at the Security Council.

These threats hardly align with the EU’s stated ambition of “ever-closer union” between member states. They are a gun to the head of EU integration.

The question of “what to do” remains politically toxic for any mainstream Western European politician. During the summer, British Prime Minister David Cameron passingly referred to the “swarm” of migrants at Calais. His political opponents immediately jumped on this and denounced his “offensive” language. What chance is there, however, of proposing the kind of bold thinking we will need to consider in Europe if we keep reducing our response to this crisis to a language game?

Professor Paul Collier recently suggested setting up EU-sponsored work-havens in Jordan to ensure Syrian refugees (who comprise 40% of recent EU arrivals) have an incentive to stay in the region.

It would make far more sense for EU countries to keep migrants out of Europe while sorting out who they are (most arrivals come without papers) and then assessing the legitimacy of their claim. The EU might consider paying North African countries to provide such holding centres. Tunisia is an obvious possibility, as is Morocco.

emigration, which is eroding the current 66% Jewish majority.

The growing, youthful Jewish emigration from Jerusalem is driven by the scarcity of jobs as well as costly and limited housing. It was triggered – beginning in the 1990s – by Israeli Prime Ministers, who have relegated Jerusalem to a lower national priority, in sharp contrast to preceding Prime Ministers.

Simultaneously with a litany of “O Jerusalem” boasting statements, they have demonstrated “Oy Jerusalem” feeble action, reflecting limited capability to withstand opposition, by US Presidents, to Jewish construction beyond the pre-1967 armistice line. Moreover, succumbing to US pressure has yielded more, and rougher, pressure. Thus, they have constrained the development of Jerusalem’s infrastructure of transportation, housing and employment – which constitute a prerequisite for transforming Jewish emigration into robust Jewish immigration – since it requires construction on substantial, state-owned land, available within the largely unpopulated boundaries of reunited Jerusalem, not in the limited parameters of pre-1967 Jerusalem.

On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama fulfilled a lifelong dream he has spent nearly seven years in office trying to realize.

It is a very different dream from that of Martin Luther King Jr., whom Obama invokes whenever it feeds his own visions of a particular form of grandeur.

This is not to say that rising from modest means to becoming the head of the United States and, by extension, the leader of the free world, is not already about as grand as one can get. But it is America’s greatness — not Obama’s — that enabled him to make it to the White House in the first place.

His ability to pull it off a second time, in spite of a bad economy and the sweeping radicalization of the Middle East, is a measure of how well he had already implemented the methods of his mentor, “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky, of infiltrating the country’s institutions and destroying them from within.

The Saudis are planning to establish themselves as the Arab world’s undisputed military superpower…. At this rate Saudi Arabia will soon replace Egypt as the Arab world’s most significant military power.

The Saudi royal family is determined to secure the overthrow of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one of Iran’s most important regional allies, and any attempt by Riyadh to deepen its involvement in the Syrian conflict is likely to result in direct military confrontation with Iran.

The tragedy of all this for the Obama administration is that, had it not been for its obsession with doing a deal with Iran, Washington could have formed a useful strategic alliance with Riyadh to defeat common foes, such as Islamic State (ISIS,Isil) in Syria and Iraq.