RUTHFULLY YOURS

The GOP in 2016 can consolidate five years of historic election victories—or blow it.

How many Republican presidential candidates can dance on the head of an elephant? The answer arrives Thursday evening as Fox News stages the party’s first primary debate. In fact, so many people have piled into the GOP primary that Fox has divided them into Medallion Gold, lifting off in prime time, and Medallion Silver in afternoon economy.

Trivia question: When is the first Democratic primary debate? Answer: The party hasn’t scheduled one yet.

President Obama’s Iran deal has been losing support in the polls and on Capitol Hill, and so on Wednesday he tried to reason with his critics. “It’s those hardliners [in Iran] chanting ‘death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal,” he said in a speech at American University. “They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus.”

So Republicans in Congress equal Revolutionary Guards in Tehran. Nice. Name-calling and immoral equivalence are always the best way to win over skeptics.

In truth, Mr. Obama isn’t trying to persuade anyone. He’s trying to keep enough partisan Democratic support across the country so he can hold one-third of the House and Senate. That’s all he needs to implement his deal. This explains his other rhetorical tactic Wednesday, which was to equate opposition to his deal with a vote for war in Iraq in 2003 and a lust for war generally. He’s essentially banking on the Senate’s Elizabeth Warren wing to save him from what is building into a bipartisan majority repudiation of the deal.

Stance complicates the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe into suspected nuclear-military program

WASHINGTON—Iran so far has refused to allow United Nations inspectors to interview key scientists and military officers to investigate allegations that Tehran maintained a covert nuclear-weapons program, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said in an interview Wednesday.

Iran’s stance complicates the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe into Tehran’s suspected nuclear-military program—a study that is slated to be completed by mid-December, as required by the landmark nuclear agreement forged between world powers and Iran on July 14 in Vienna.

On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest’s tremendous body of work — and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the “intelligentsia” — has been and will remain a guiding inspiration. In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest.

Some relevant passages from the book follow.

p. 94

British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46

President Obama, in his desperation to save his Iran deal, has taken to attacking its opponents in personal ways. He has accused critics of his deal of being the same Republican warmongers who drove us into the ground war against Iraq and has warned that they would offer “overheated” and often dishonest arguments. He has complained about the influence of lobbyists and money on the process of deciding this important issue, as if lobbying and money were not involved in other important matters before Congress.

These types of ad hominem arguments are becoming less and less convincing as more Democratic members of Congress, more liberal supporters of the President, more nuclear experts and more foreign policy gurus are expressing deep concern about, and sometimes strong opposition to, the deal that is currently before Congress.

David Harris is the executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC)

When the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was announced in
Vienna on July 14, AJC issued a press release indicating that we would
first study the full text and its implications, and then take a
position on the deal, as the U.S. Congress launched into its 60-day
review period.

Over the past three weeks, AJC engaged in a very intensive,
open-minded, and thorough process of external consultations and
internal deliberations, involving many lay and staff leaders.

Obama attacks his critics (guess who) as ignorant, deceptive and trying to pull a fast one on the American people.

This critical period during which Congress is mulling over the nuclear deal made by U.S. negotiators and their P5+1 partners with Iran has turned into a hotly contested debate between those committed to preventing the deal from being approved and those who are desperate to ensure that it will be approved.
Yesterday, Aug. 4, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke to thousands of Americans and explained why he believes the deal is a bad one. It boiled down to “Keep or Cheat.” However Iran decides to act under this agreement, it will attain nuclear threshold status.
Today President Barack Obama gave a midday televised speech from American University in Washington, D.C.. During the speech he ridiculed those who criticize the deal, and explained why, according to him, the choice is either the deal or war.

President warns US Jews that without nuclear pact, America will have to attack Iran — and Israel will bear the brunt of the response.

WASHINGTON — If the US Congress shoots down the Iranian nuclear deal, America will eventually be pressured into a military strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities, which will in turn increase terror against Israel, US President Barack Obama told Jewish leaders Tuesday, a source who was present at the meeting said.

During the two-hour meeting, Obama said it was legitimate for opponents of the deal to lobby lawmakers to reject it, but added that a discussion focused on personal attacks, rather than the merits of the deal, could jeopardize the coherence of the American Jewish community and ultimately the resilience of US-Israel relations, according to Greg Rosenbaum, the chair of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

The FBI has begun looking into the security of Hillary Clinton’s private email setup, contacting in the past week a Denver-based technology firm that helped manage the unusual system, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing two government officials.
The FBI last week also contacted Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, with questions about the security of a thumb drive in his possession that contains copies of work emails Clinton sent during her time as secretary of state, the Post said.

The Republican candidates for president will gather on a stage in Cleveland, Ohio, tomorrow evening for the first official debates of the 2016 campaign — the main event at 9 p.m. Eastern time for the ten candidates with the highest standing in the polls, and an earlier debate, at 5:30 p.m., for the others. Even with not all the candidates on the stage at one time, each candidate can expect no more than ten to twelve minutes to make his or her case. During that time, we can expect the moderators to cover the usual ground: ISIL and the War on Terror, immigration, taxes, gay marriage, Obamacare. In response, most of the candidates will regurgitate their talking points and stump speeches. The outcome will likely be decided on the basis of who makes the best quip or the biggest gaffe.

But there are some other, more basic questions that I wish someone would ask.