RUTHFULLY YOURS

Blowing up the Middle East in order to save it—that’s the logic at work.

The Iran deal is supposed to prevent a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East. So what better way to get that ball of hopefulness rolling than by arming our regional allies to the teeth?

“The U.S. is specifically looking at ways to expedite arms transfers to Arab states in the Persian Gulf and is accelerating plans for them to develop an integrated regional ballistic missile defense capability,” the Journal’s Carol Lee and Gordon Lubold reported Monday. The goal, they add, is to prevent the Saudis “from trying to match Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.”

Let’s follow this logic. If the Iran deal is as fail-safe as President Obama claims, why not prove it by giving the Saudis exactly the same nuclear rights that Iran is now to enjoy? Why race to prevent an ally from developing a capability we have just ceded to an enemy? What’s the point of providing the Saudis with defense capabilities they presumably don’t need?

One year before World War Two broke out, members of the British Parliament, save for a tiny few, were cheering Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who had returned from Germany triumphantly proclaiming, “Peace in our Time,” while holding a forlorn and fluttering piece of paper with Adolf Hitler’s name on it.

One man rose in that once august chamber. Turning to face the Prime Minister, who still believed in the spurious terms of the Munich Agreement, he thundered these words:

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor, you chose dishonor and will have war.” That man was Winston S. Churchill.

The Second World War broke out on September 3rd, 1939 and Hitler’s signature on that fluttering piece of paper was proven to be as worthless as all such words uttered by tyrants and despots ever are. Untold millions thus perished needlessly in that most terrible war.

Gerald Walpin is a New York Attorney, formerly a federal Inspector General, nominated by President G.W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate, and is author of The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution (Significance Press 2013).

Chief Justice Roberts’ recent words for a unanimous bench reflect his Court’s protective regard for free speech rights: “the guiding First Amendment principle [is] that the ‘government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content’.”

Yet, a report card for the Roberts Court’s eleven years would reflect only a B+ grade for adhering to that standard: enforced in most, but not all, cases.

This is a crisis that came and went in a wink within twenty-four hours. If you blinked, you missed it.

On July 19th Daniel Greenfield on FrontPage ran a story about Amazon wanting an author to remove his book from its sales platform, with its cover featuring the Confederate battle flag, “I never thought any of my books would be on the banned book list.” Michael Dreese has written several books about the Civil War, and especially about the Battle of Gettysburg, apparently from both sides of that watershed conflict. The book, This Flag Never Goes Down: 40 Stories of Confederate Battle Flags and Color-Bearers at Gettysburg, published by Thomas Publications in 2004, has been up on the Amazon platform for at least eleven years. It has an Amazon best-seller ranking, as of this writing, of 17,006.

Now, I have very, very few bones to pick with Daniel Greenfield. In this instance, I think he erred on the side of enthusiasm in his article. It looked like “censorship.” He jumped the gun. He is probably about as ambivalent about the Confederate battle flag as I am about it and also the Roman Eagle carried by Rome’s armies. They’re old symbols and their time and governments are long past. He wrote:

The rally taking place in New York City’s Times Square on Wednesday, July 22, is being called ‘the Civil Rights fight for American Jewry,’ by at least one of the organizers.

Thousands are expected to show up to hear the more than a dozen headliners explain in detail why the nuclear program deal agreed to by the P5+1, led by the U.S. negotiators, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is a dangerously bad one that must be stopped. Buses are bringing people in from Philadelphia and Delaware, and people from as far away as Chicago have committed to coming.
The NYC rally to stop the Iran deal is still necessary despite the UN Security Council vote because American sanctions can still do severe damage to a transgressing Iran.

It was a bomb that switched off all the colors and turned everything the gray dust of black and white. It was the fire that came from the darkest nightmares of Shiva the destroyer. It was the end of the gods; it was death after death.

It was more than the 100,000 people killed by a single explosion, more than the geometric science of annihilation. Nothing survived. All living things but also buildings, concrete, and steel were turned into deadly powder that could poison with mortal radiation anything or anybody for years.

Even though the Corker-Cardin bill (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act) gives Congress 60 days to review the new nuclear agreement with Iran, the U.N. Security Council approved the agreement this morning by passing a U.S.-drafted resolution.

I believe this was a tactical error by the Obama administration which will significantly increase congressional opposition to the Iran deal.

Obama officials have tried to downplay the significance of the Security Council vote by claiming the Iran agreement won’t be implemented for 90 days, which will give Congress 60 days to review it.

Congress will hold the first of several hearings on Obama’s Iran deal this Thursday, with some Democrats likely to join unified Republicans in opposing the disaster negotiated in Vienna. Getting the votes to send a disapproval to Obama’s desk should be doable. The two-thirds majority needed to override a certain Obama veto is harder to obtain, but not impossible.

GOP aspirants to the presidency have all expressed opposition to the deal. When he joined the race last Monday, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker promised to end the appeasement scheme with Tehran on “day one” of his administration if elected. Other candidates have promised to kill the accommodation early in their tenure if elected, except for one: Jeb Bush.

Speaking on Friday in what was seen as a pointed jab at Walker specifically, Jeb vowed not to signal the end of a deal at the outset of his notional presidency. His excuse: the lack of a fully emplaced national-security team at that time, whose confirmation would take the better part of a year. In remarks similar to his scolding of the party on amnesty and Common Core, Jeb told a Nevada audience: “If you’re running for president, I think it’s important to be mature and thoughtful about this.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton shed her usual sunny demeanor last week and snarled at Republicans in general and one presidential candidate in particular.

“Republican governors like Scott Walker have made their names stomping on workers’ rights, and practically all Republican candidates would do the same as president,” Clinton growled at Manhattan’s New School. “I will fight back against these mean-spirited, misguided attacks. Evidence shows that the decline of unions may be responsible for a third of the increase of inequality among men. So, if we want to get serious about raising income, we have to get serious about supporting union workers.”

Later that day, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka snapped, “Scott Walker is a national disgrace.”

If there’s one thing workers value, it’s work. And on this score, Wisconsin’s Republican governor has delivered.

In the immediate aftermath of Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez’s killing of four Marines and wounding of at least three other people, there was a noticeable effort to portray the jihadist as an all-American boy from small-town Tennessee. With just a bit of digging, however, a different picture is emerging. The New York Times reported Friday morning that Abdulazeez had spent about seven months in Jordan last year.

As is their wont in cases where Muslims kill Americans, investigators hastened to point out that overseas stays in a region rife with Islamic radicalism are not necessarily suggestive of terror ties . . . even if the traveler, on his stateside return, promptly shoots up military installations while the Islamic State and al-Qaeda urge Muslims to shoot up military installations.

Abdulazeez was technically a Jordanian national when his parents brought him to the United States from Kuwait as an infant in 1990. Sometime during his childhood, he became a naturalized American citizen. Yet the family appears to self-identify as Palestinian, a conclusion I’ll explain in due course.