RUTHFULLY YOURS

For those of us who predicted the inevitable, watching Donald Trump verbally wander into a field of face-whacking garden rakes like Sideshow Bob fills one with a mixture of schadenfreude and affirmation. We knew it was coming, but it still feels good to be proven right.

Of course Trump wouldn’t hesitate to attack John McCain’s war-hero status. Trump’s bottomless insecurity cannot countenance the idea that his critics have any legitimacy. Of course Trump won’t apologize — because his dog-and-pony show is predicated on the idea that he “tells it like it is” and “fights.” He’s the omniscient master of The Apprentice. He can’t behave like the Biggest Loser.

The Trump squall is not over, alas. But it’s nonetheless obvious that we will someday soon look back on this as the beginning of the end of Trumpmania.

Ames, Iowa
A smoldering policy dispute over the Iran deal between two frontrunners for the Republican nomination caught fire over the weekend, as the campaigns of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and former Florida governor Jeb Bush traded accusations of bad faith and the candidates themselves engaged in a pointed back-and-forth about how a newly elected president should handle the deal.

Speaking to reporters here Saturday after an appearance at the Family Leadership Summit, Walker said the next president will need to be prepared to take aggressive action against Iran, “very possibly” including military strikes, on the day he or she is inaugurated, and said he would not be comfortable with a commander in chief who is unwilling to act aggressively on day one of a new presidency. In his announcement speech at the beginning of the week, Walker had promised to ‘terminate’ the Iran deal on day one of his presidency, and Bush, at a town hall four days later, said ending the deal on the first day of a new administration was unrealistic and suggested that promises to do so, while politically appealing, reflected a lack of seriousness.

Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R)was a member of Congress from 1995 to 2003, and he served as Maryland’s governor from 2003 to 2007. He is currently a partner at the firm of King & Spalding.

On the Iranian threat to Israel: “The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat. . . . Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.”

On health care: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.”

On Syria’s WMD: “We have been very clear to the Assad regime — but also to other players on the ground — that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”

On capitalism: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Give the president this much: At least he didn’t call the Chattanooga, Tenn., shooting workplace violence.

Speaking from the Oval Office just hours after the attack, President Obama did not once use the word “terrorism” in relation to the assault by Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez on military sites in Chattanooga.
Contrast his statement with that of U.S. Attorney Bill Killian at his news conference after the attack. The situation “is being treated as a terrorism investigation,” Killian said. “It is being led by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. And we will continue to investigate it as an act of terrorism until proof shows us otherwise” (emphasis added).

Why couldn’t Obama have said that? If the FBI is treating this as an act of terror, why isn’t the president of the United States?

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and Congressmen Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) issued a press release today on a startling discovery they made during a July 17 meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency officials in Vienna: There are two secret side deals to the nuclear agreement with Iran that will not be shared with other nations, with Congress, or with the U.S. public.

One of these side deals concerns inspection of the Parchin military base, where Iran reportedly has conducted explosive testing related to nuclear-warhead development. The Iranian government has refused to allow the IAEA to visit this site. Over the last several years, Iran has taken steps to clean up evidence of weapons-related activity at Parchin.

The other secret side deal concerns how the IAEA and Iran will resolve outstanding issues on possible military dimensions (PMDs) of Iran’s nuclear program. In late 2013, Iran agreed to resolve IAEA questions about nuclear weapons-related work in twelve areas. Iran only answered questions in one of these areas and rejected the rest as based on forgeries and fabrications.

On Sunday, I reviewed the reported evidence here at PJ Media on what we knew about Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the killer who gunned down four Marines and one Navy sailor in Chattanooga last Thursday, as both investigators and the media puzzled over his possible motive.

For many in the media, the motive remains elusive:

And as our friends at the Washington Free Beacon have chronicled, this is a point that the media is at great pains to let you know.

Secretary of State John Kerry admitted to Al-Arabiya that it’s “very disturbing” how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continues talking about destroying the U.S. and Israel after signing the P5+1 nuclear agreement.

Kerry said he would be pitching Gulf partners on “all of the ways in which this agreement, in fact, makes the Gulf states and the region safer.”

“I will also discuss with them at great length the things that the United States of America is going to do, working with them, in order to push back against the terror and counterterrorism efforts and other activities in the region that are very alarming to them,” he said, adding “it’s a chance for them to ask me any misgivings they have.”

US President Barack Obama hailed the recently concluded nuclear agreement in Vienna between the P5+1 world powers and Iran as a step towards a “more hopeful world.”

On July 14 CNN cited President Obama’s claim that, “This deal is not built on trust. It’s built on verification.” This nuclear agreement, however, seems to be predicated more on this administration’s proclivity towards building on hope. The Obama administration is hoping that an inspection regime by the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will accomplish under this agreement what the UN has failed to do for decades under the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) treaty. Their ultimate hope is that this agreement will foster political change within Iran during the coming decade – postulating that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may pass away and that a more vibrant Iranian economy will enable the “moderates” in Iran to gain power and change the nature of the regime. According to the administration’s thinking, this nuclear agreement will provide a back wind for Iran’s “moderate” President Rouhani to overcome the “hardliners” of the regime, and that an economic boom would force the Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the bedrock of the Ayatollah’s support, to yield to the Iranian people’s demand for a relationship with the West, and thus end its hostility towards the US, particularly when US and Iranian interests, according to the Obama administration, converge on “defeating ISIL.”

Charming Chuck is running for re-election in 2016…..rsk

How the senator from New York could change the game in Congress if he has the guts.

In April 2010, following a series of deliberate slights and insults by the Obama administration directed at Israel and its prime minister, including a threat by the State Department that the depth of the US-Israel alliance would depend on the progress of peace talks, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s ranking Democrat and Obama ally placed a call to the White House. The senator had had just about enough. He informed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in no uncertain terms that the administration’s conduct was “counterproductive” and its attacks on Israel needed to stop immediately. But he didn’t stop there. He told the White House that if the State Department didn’t retract its deleterious statement concerning the US-Israel alliance, he would publicly “blast” the administration. The pressure worked and the White House backtracked.

Obama did everything he could to undermine Nigeria’s Christian president Jonathan Goodluck in his fight against the Islamic terrorists of Boko Haram. The administration kicked and screamed against even naming Boko Haram a terrorist organization. Every offer of aid was undermined with more claims that Nigeria was violating Muslim civil rights.

Finally Obama got what he wanted. Nigeria’s former Muslim dictator was “elected” and began promptly Islamizing key portions of the military. Then he came to Washington D.C. for a victory lap.

Obama on Monday offered strong support for Nigeria’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, saying he had a “clear agenda” for defeating the militant Islamist group Boko Haram and was working to root out corruption.