RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and won’t see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days. Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me.

The leaders of almost all the other 28 NATO member countries have made time for Stoltenberg since he took over the world’s largest military alliance in October. Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway, met Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa to discuss the threat of the Islamic State and the crisis in Ukraine, two issues near the top of Obama’s agenda.

SEOUL — If international sanctions on Iran are lifted pronto — a condition Iran is demanding as part of any nuclear deal — how hard might it be to reimpose them, in the likely event that Iran cheats? For a glimpse of just how tough it could be, take the case of Iran’s Bank Mellat, headquartered in Tehran, but with a branch in Seoul — where, during a recent trip to South Korea, I dropped by for a look.

Occupying spacious quarters on the 13th and 14th floors of a high-rise office building in Seoul’s busy Gangnam district, this branch of Bank Mellat appeared to have no customers on the premises. That was no surprise, because for several years now, Bank Mellat in Seoul has been under sanctions by the U.S., United Nations and the South Korean government.

You’ll have to forgive President Obama. The leader of the free world is still having difficulty accepting that the Israeli people get to choose their own prime minister, never mind his preferences.

The latest White House tantrum in the wake of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election last week took the form of a speech delivered Monday by Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, in which he declared that “an occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end.”

When a chief of staff speaks in public, especially as the keynote speaker at a scheduled event, the President has signed off. In this case the audience was also carefully chosen: the annual conference of J Street, a left-leaning Jewish lobbying group that has never met an Israeli concession it didn’t like. Which makes it all the more distressing that Mr. McDonough would talk about Israel in language usually associated with Palestinian terror groups.

For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream.

It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate.

Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn’t gotten that wish.

Netanyahu’s victory hit hardest in Tel Aviv where, as Haaretz, the paper of the left, reports, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.”

My friend and e-pal DPS sent me a column posted below on Stephen Decatur- a hero of the Barbary Wars.

As President Obama bows in fulsome tributes to Moslem nations but guts our military, I harken to the words often incorrectly attributed to Patrick Henry or Charle Pinckney, but stated by Senator Robert Goodloe Harper- Federalist from Maryland- in response to the millions in tributes that America was paying to the Arab pirates of the Barbary Coast.

“”Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.”

Robert Goodloe Harper (January 1765 – January 14, 1825), a Federalist, was a member of the United States Senate from Maryland, serving from January 1816 until his resignation in December of the same year. He also served in the South Carolina House of Representatives (1790–1795), the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina (1795–1801), and in the Maryland State Senate.

Free speech is dandy, writes London Review of Books’ Mary-Kay Wilmers, who nevertheless reckons that riling the head-lopping acolytes of a seventh-century warlord goes beyond the pale. By her logic, it is safe to label her a coward and cultural quisling because she won’t reach for a sharp knife.

Dear Ayatollah, Yes, I know your lot commits butchery on a grand scale; engages in the most godawful terrorism; executes people for the merest trifles; ill-treats women; and, given half a chance, would have us with our posteriors uppermost paying homage five-times a day to a vengeful deity conjured up by a seventh-century illiterate warlord. But, still and all, there is no excuse for our use of hurtful words. Yours Ingratiatingly…

I was skimming through the February 5 edition of the London Review of Books when I came across a letter expressing disappointment with the tepid response of the magazine to the Charlie Hebdo attack. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers responded to the letter. She began this way: “I believe in the right not to be killed for something I say, but I don’t have a right to insult whomever I please.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/why-the-left-never-looks-back-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ari David, the host of the Ari David Show Podcast.

Ari discussed Why the Left Never Looks Back, analyzing how the Left’s schemes engender mass human suffering — and why progressives learn and admit nothing. The discussion occurred within a focus on Finding Out I Was a Communist and How I Escaped, in which Ari shared how he found himself imprisoned within the political faith — and how he found his way out.

“Forget 50 years of occupation. Six years of Obama’s occupation of the White House must end.”

Is that the White House Chief of Staff or the Chief of Staff for the PLO? Hard to tell the difference these days.

White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough showed up at J Street, an anti-Israel group funded by a lot of the same left-wing billionaires as Obama, e.g. George Soros, to denounce Israel and praise the work of the anti-Israel org.

After delivering some standard talking points about how great the economy is these days (for anyone who works for the government), McDonough bashed Republicans for not being supportive of Israel.

(Yes, the errand boy for the guy who spent the past week threatening Israel is accusing Republicans of not being supportive of Israel. George Orwell, please pick up the white courtesy phone.)

“To achieve this, the United States has long advocated direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly endorsed a two-state solution. Over the course of President Obama’s administration, most recently with the tireless efforts of Secretary Kerry, the United States has expended tremendous energy in pursuit of this goal,” McDonough said.

First: I have met and spoken with Ted Cruz on a number of occasions, and I like him very much. Second: I am not enthusiastic about the possible presidency of a first term Senator who has never really governed. Third: I am glad he chose to run and inject some real conservative national and foreign policy issues into the GOP debate. There would not have been a Ronald Reagan without the earlier campaign of Barry Goldwater- so I see Cruz as galvanizing a return to conservative policies….rsk
Much of the political world went into full freakout mode yesterday as crusading conservative Ted Cruz became the first candidate from either of the major parties to formally announce he is running for president in 2016.

The ritual denunciations of Cruz, the junior Republican senator representing Texas, from all across the fruited plain quickly piled up. Since he assumed office in January 2013, Cruz has come under intense fire from the Left and from a few corners in the GOP. Some of the criticism is well thought out but much of it doesn’t rise above the level of schoolyard taunts. Some consider it a negative that Cruz, like Barack Obama, began running for president soon after becoming a U.S. senator.

His willingness to buck members of his own party –and to openly criticize other Republicans– when his conservative principles require it has won him legions of admirers across America, but few friends in official Washington. GOP leaders don’t like him because he questions what they stand for, tries to force them to honor their promises, calls them “squishes,” and works to derail their legislative priorities. He has even tried to engineer mini-rebellions in the House by whipping House members to vote against GOP leadership. Finding sympathetic lawmakers is like shooting fish in a barrel because Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) disappoints conservatives nearly every day.

After the 1938 Munich conference, First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper resigned in protest from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet. In his speech before the Commons, Cooper put his finger on the cause of Chamberlain’s failure: “The Prime Minister has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more open to the language of the mailed fist.” A few weeks earlier, Churchill had used a metaphor similarly apt for Obama’s approach to Iran, ISIS, Russia, and numerous other adversaries: the British and the French, Churchill said, “presented a front of two overripe melons crushed together; whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel.”

Bibi Netanyahu’s victory in last week’s election has reprised that contrast, now between the feckless Obama and his foreign policy delusions, and the Israeli leader who sees clearly the nature of an enemy that for nearly 7 decades has tried to destroy his country. And Netanyahu has made clear, most dramatically in his speech before Congress, that what is needed today to slow down the mullah’s march to a nuclear bomb is the “mailed fist” and the “gleam of steel.” But this administration is no more heeding such warnings than the British and French governments did Cooper’s and Churchill’s. A misplaced belief in “sweet reason,” and a moral fiber as stiff as “two overripe melons crushed together” today enable the same sort of delusions and wishful thinking that paved the way for Chamberlain’s appeasement.