RUTHFULLY YOURS

Her Madameship continues to underwhelm.

Hillary Clinton gave a big economics speech here on Monday and the snap reaction among Wall Street investors, economists and ardent financial reformers who thrill to the soak-the-rich rhetoric of Bernie Sanders was a collective: “Meh. What’s next?”

Clinton laid out the soft contours of a “growth and fairness economy” in a speech designed to appeal to struggling middle-class workers with promises of higher pay and more generous federal policies.

But she left out many hard specifics on tougher tax policy toward the rich and corporate America. And she offered limited pledges to crack down on big Wall Street banks while hitting her strongest notes promising to toss rogue bankers in prison while ripping recent worker productivity comments from Jeb Bush.

Former United States security advisers and officials are coming out of the woodwork to warn that the president is failing the American people on national security matters.

On Sunday, Richard Clarke, a former adviser to four presidents on national security, and Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security, chided the president for not paying enough attention to security matters.

Late last month, a group of prominent American security advisers — including five with ties to the Obama Administration — warned that the Iran nuke deal was failing to provide adequate safeguards.

Clarke said on ABC’s Face the Nation that the Obama administration was guilty of “almost criminal negligence” for allowing China’s massive cyber attack on the U.S. government.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he wants to see a “Medicare for all” single-payer healthcare system in America and defended gun manufacturers during a public policy forum in Arlington.

A member of the audience asked Sanders about his stance on gun control, criticizing his vote to protect gun manufacturers from lawsuits.

Sanders refused to apologize for the vote.

“If somebody has a gun and somebody steals that gun and shoots somebody, do you really think it makes sense to blame the manufacturer of that weapon?” he said. “If somebody assaults you with a baseball bat, you hit somebody over the head, you’re not going to sue the baseball bat manufacturer.”

Last March, California Governor Jerry Brown declared that those who wished existing federal immigration law to be enforced — in the manner that would have saved the late Kate Steinle from a five-times deported, seven-times released felon illegal alien – were:

[A]t best … troglodyte, and at worst … un-Christian.

In California, if one assumes that the law as written should be followed, one is dubbed either a cave-dweller or an apostate. Meanwhile, sophisticated non-troglodytes in San Francisco have a sheriff — with a criminal record of his own — release a repeat felon and often-deported illegal alien, and that act is proof of his enlightenment.

Did Ms. Steinle rate any editorialization from the president or his administration in the manner of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown? In all these cases, the allegation is that the state was culpable for the death of an innocent. But Ms. Steinle had no prior criminal record or brushes with the law, and was walking and not in a fight or in the process of being arrested, so therefore her death did not rise to the level of a Ferguson or Baltimore “teachable moment.”

We know what ISIS believe, what they do, where they are, and what they want. Do we really need to waste another ounce of breath debating what proper nouns or acronyms best describe those who march under the black flag? Just send in the drones already
In the July 4 Spectator, Rod Liddle wrote a typically amusing little piece on the interminable row over what to call the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Islamic State/Daesh. Advocates of the various names have highly suspicious reasons for doing so. President Obama refuses to use ISIS, because it would inevitably draw attention to the fact that the Syrian opposition his administration funded was largely assimilated into ISIS. Center-right establishment politicians prefer Daesh, arguing that the Islamic State is neither Islamic, nor a state.

What authority Tony Abbott or David Cameron has to adjudicate what’s authentically Islamic, we’ve yet to determine. So, for the sake of cogency, Liddle has thrown a fifth alternative into the mix: ‘Really Horrible People Who Have Nothing to do With Islam’. Though, understanding that it’s a bit of a mouthful, Liddle suggests that we stick with the Islamic State, rather than jumping through loops to protect Muslims’ feelings or defend the honor of the Islamic religion.

The ritualistic rally-cries of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” — and the burning in effigy of the leaders of Israel, America, and Saudi Arabia — underscore the basic lie that underpins Quds Day: the Iranian regime is focused on Iran’s revolutionary extremist agenda, not on the welfare of Palestinian Arabs.

Quds Day has become a day in which Iran and protestors in other societies attack the legitimacy of the state of Israel (“The Little Satan”) and continue to threaten the United States (“The Big Satan”).

“Muslims in Sweden will become more and more degraded … so instead of putting on a T-shirt and going to the most hated place for Allah just to stand there and do dawah [missionize], you should go there with a bomb instead. … Now is the time to show who the earth belongs to!!! … Save yourself from narr [hellfire] by killing a kafir.” — Mikael Skråmo, Swedish convert to Islam.

If the 18-year-old had been a Swedish citizen, the Security Service would not have been able to stop him from going to Syria: it is not yet illegal in Sweden to travel to join ISIS or any other terror group. They would have had to be content with seeing him off, and perhaps politely asking for an interview if and when he came back.

“Or maybe we won’t be lucky. Maybe there’s no special providence for nations drunk on hope, led by fools.”

In formal rhetoric, prolepsis means the anticipation of possible objections to an argument for the sake of answering them. So let’s be proleptic about the Iranian nuclear deal, whose apologists are already trotting out excuses for this historic diplomatic debacle.

The heroic case. Sure, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an irascible and violent revolutionary bent on imposing a dark ideology on his people and his neighborhood. Much the same could be said of Mao Zedong when Henry Kissinger paid him a visit in 1971—a diplomatic gamble that paid spectacular dividends as China became a de facto U.S. ally in the Cold War and opened up to the world under Deng Xiaoping.

President Barack Obama has effectively shredded the foreign-policy playbook that had guided the U.S. on the world stage for decades.

WASHINGTON—With the signing of a historic agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, President Barack Obama has effectively shredded the foreign-policy playbook that had guided the U.S. on the world stage for decades.

Now comes another hard part.

He must turn to selling the deal to a skeptical Congress, and to managing relationships in a volatile Middle East, where the notion of an emboldened Iran has rattled longtime U.S. allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Some of the core milestones for the implementation of the agreement, sealed in Vienna on Tuesday, will overlap with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the one that will choose Mr. Obama’s successor, ensnaring them in an unpredictable political dynamic. And after more than three decades of hostility and mistrust between the U.S. and Iran, American officials are uncertain how compliant Tehran will be over the deal’s time frame.

Desire for agreement “stronger than anything else,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says.

TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the agreement between Iran and six world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program is a “historic mistake.”

“Wide-ranging concessions were made in all of the areas which should have prevented Iran from getting the ability to arm itself with a nuclear weapon,’’ Mr. Netanyahu said. “The desire to sign an agreement was stronger than everything else.”

The comment reflects the Israeli leader’s long-standing public criticism of the U.S. and European negotiators in the talks with Iran.