RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ahead of Tuesday’s Wisconsin presidential primaries, U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was in Israel, the destination he chose for his first foreign trip since assuming his post at the end of October.

In meetings with Israeli leaders — and in an interview with Times of Israel editor David Horovitz — Ryan reaffirmed his commitment to the Jewish state and his opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran. He also stated, in no uncertain terms, that — contrary to increasing rumor and pressure — he is not going to end up becoming the Republican nominee at what threatens to be a contested GOP convention. Nobody really believes he means it, however, because he had been equally adamant about not wanting the position he is currently occupying.

But, while distraught Americans from both parties are obsessing over whether Donald Trump can win the nomination — and if he does, whether he can beat likely Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — the Obama administration is being given a free pass to get away with murder, figuratively. More literally, it is enjoying the benefit of the doubt caused by the distraction of the public away from the havoc the White House and State Department are continuing to wreak, which is enabling the actual death of a lot of people in the present, and a whole lot more in the future.

The terrorism of the Islamic State group is only a tiny part of this, though it seems to be the only jihadist organization that gets a rise out of Westerners, whom it makes no bones about targeting for mass murder. Indeed, as the suicide bombings in Brussels on March 22 indicated, Europeans and Americans only wake up when a lot of people with whom they can identify get slaughtered senselessly. That this kind of thing is going on routinely everywhere else in the world barely elicits a yawn.

But as evil as ISIS is, it is still small fry compared to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, with tentacles reaching far and wide. And now, thanks to the Obama administration, it also has multibillions of dollars at its disposal with which to build its nuclear arsenal. Nor does it hide its ambitions to wipe Israel off the map and its loathing for America, the “great Satan.”

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made this clear to the point of warning his own underlings to follow suit.

“Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors,” he said last week.

How has the Obama administration responded to this and previous Iranian muscle-flexing, abduction of American sailors, celebration of U.S. abdication and assertion that nothing Tehran does violates the nuclear agreement?

It has conceded to Iran on every point. Or worse.

As was revealed in a piece by Adam Kredo in The Washington Free Beacon on Monday, “Congress is investigating whether the Obama administration misled lawmakers last summer about the extent of concessions granted to Iran under the nuclear deal, as well as if administration officials have been quietly rewriting the deal’s terms in the aftermath of the agreement.”

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) told Kredo that “the gap between [the administration’s] promises … and today’s scary reality continues to widen. We are now trying to determine whether this was intentional deception on the part of the administration or new levels of disturbing acquiescence to the Iranians.”

He was referring to issues such as Iran’s ballistic missile testing, which the administration initially said constituted a violation of nuclear-deal codifier U.N. Resolution 2231, and then backtracked. Perhaps even more disturbing were statements from the Treasury Department indicating that international business transactions with Iran could be done in dollars — releasing the ban in place on Iran’s access to the U.S. financial system.

In other words, not only was the deal America made with the devil a dangerous one to begin with, but apparently, we don’t know the half of it.

This sentiment was expressed in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday by United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba, who wrote that, in spite of President Barack Obama’s claim about the world being safer place as a result of the nuclear deal, “The Iran we have long known — hostile, expansionist, violent — is alive and well, and as dangerous as ever.”

It is this sorry situation, and the Democrats who brought us here, that Americans must keep in mind come November, no matter who the Republican candidate is.

Ruthie Blum is the web editor of The Algemeiner (algemeiner.com).