RUTHFULLY YOURS

When, in 2012, I authored a cautionary tale about the dangers of a nuclear Iran, I never imagined a U.S. president who would, just a few years later, actively try to strengthen Iran’s geopolitical and financial position while providing international legitimacy to the Iranian nuclear program. But sometimes truth is scarier than fiction.

In my thriller, 35 Israeli submariners must decide what to do after Iran gets the bomb. In an unexpected twist on fiction, a small group of undecided members of Congress may similarly have to determine the course of history. They represent the last chance for a democracy to reject the nuclear appeasement of the Ayatollahs. There are reportedly 26 Senate Democrats currently in favor of President Obama’s Iran deal, so eight more are needed to sustain Obama’s veto of a Congressional resolution disapproving of the Iran agreement.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In ways both subtle and blunt, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign is sending a message to Vice President Joe Biden about his potential presidential campaign: This won’t be easy.
As Biden ponders a challenge to Clinton for the Democratic nomination, she has rolled out a string of high-profile endorsements in the early-voting contests of Iowa and South Carolina and scheduled an onslaught of fundraisers across the country in the effort to throw cold water on a possible Biden bid.
Donors who have publicly expressed support for a Biden run have been contacted by the Clinton team, according to donors and Democratic strategists who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private conversations. Even Clinton herself has made a few calls, they said, to express her disappointment.While Clinton and her team speak warmly of Biden in public, they have taken steps to show their dominance over the party’s establishment and President Barack Obama’s political infrastructure in hopes of quietly discouraging the vice president from entering the race.

The indoctrination of the next generation has emerged as a primary goal of the Islamic State.

The indoctrination of children has emerged as a primary goal of the Islamic State. Brainwashing children at a very young age to the ideology of the extremist group is the most effective way to assure its continuation and fill its rank and file in the next decade.

The horrifying video below shows a very young child dressed in signature Islamic State gear brandishing a large knife and beheading a teddy bear. The child receives kudos and encouragement from an adult in the background.

He forced the 24-year-old woman to get in his car at gunpoint. He took her to his apartment, where he raped her and bragged about how he had killed ten people. He also explained that since he was a Swedish citizen, he was now free to rape because he could not be deported.

“He of course realizes he is risking a very long prison sentence in the end, and should do whatever he can to avoid it, like get in a car and travel through Europe. That’s a pretty safe bet, considering the open borders.” — District Attorney discussing an accused murderer, released pending trial.

When asked if there might be terrorists and war criminals that have already been granted asylum in Sweden, Immigration Service Director General Mikael Ribbenvik said: “Yes, that is unfortunately the case.”

The obvious risk that they might commit terrorist acts, killing hundreds of Swedes, apparently makes no difference.

It is surprising that the Islamic State’s use of chemical warfare has taken this long. On August 11, ISIS shelled the northern Syrian town of Marea, with Mustard gas mortars. The specific effects of this deadly gas were almost immediately evident. Moreover, Mustard gas can be easily detected. There are several lightweight chemical agents detectors. The least sophisticated can “scan the surrounding environment in a 360 degree radius, and at a “distance of 5 kilometers for Mustard gas, and other known chemical warfare agent vapors.“

But the Pentagon and the White House said nothing. Instead of ringing the alarm bells, it took ten days for the chief of staff for Operation Inherent Resolve (the Combined Joint Task Force to fight ISIS), Marine Brig. Gen. Kevin Killea, to respond to Fox News commentator, Gen. Lucas Tomlinson, that “It is going to take us a couple of weeks to do the full testing…to figure out what was contained in or on those mortar rounds before we make a determination on exactly what it was, potentially how much it was and maybe even where it came from.”

Jeb Bush is struggling. Conservatives loath his support for the Common Core and open borders but let me suggest that his RINO (Republican In Name Only) credentials hardly stop there. Despite frequent claims of being a “real conservative” on his signature issue of improving public education, don’t believe him. More alarming, Jeb seems oblivious to the liberal character of these proposals. No wonder so many conservatives are uneasy—he talks one way, acts another and seem oblivious to the perniciousness of what he is trying to accomplish.
Consider Bush’s plan to reform K-12 education recently offered in Manchester, NH. He began by claiming—“I am the most outspoken Republican candidate for president in favor of high standards and accountability for public schools.” He then turned to a problem that bedeviled policy-makers for half a century while soaking up billions, all to no avail—the dreadful academic performances of inner-city black and Hispanic students, the academic bottom of the bottom.

Their frustration is palpable. All those sparkling, witty gambits by conservative pundits to denigrate Trump supporters — as, for example, when National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote in a column that Trump supporters are “engaged in the political version of masturbation: sterile, fruitless self-indulgence” — has earned little more than approbation from their own kind — as when Commentary’s Noah Rothman, for example, responded with equally sparkling wit: “Man. This piece. @KevinNR grabs Trump supporters by the … well, you know.”

Do they ever. But no matter how many conservative websites take the dirty thang forward — “Donald Trump Is Porn for Nativists” The Federalist recently declared — Trump’s support continues to rise.

And that’s what’s so frustrating for these gentleman-pundits. Unable to reckon with Trump — namely, with his unique ability to bring the crisis of the immigration invasion to national attention, giving last-ditch hope to many that he is a man who will actually do something about it — their strangely, sexually framed hostility has proved to be (borrowing from their thesaurus) impotent.

Could this be how the elite’s New Man, from metrosexual to Girly Man, reacts on confronting the unreconstructed, un-focus-grouped leadership style of Donald Trump? This notion began to cross my mind even before I read a piece by Kent G. Bailey, professor emeritus of clinical psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, who writes at WND.com that Trump takes “primal maleness to levels unseen for at least half a century. The everyday people of America long for strong warrior male leadership of the kind that has sustained the human race from the dawn of time.”

http://acdemocracy.org/unbiased-reporting-on-isis-and-the-global-jihad/ News that White House pressure on military and intelligence brass have led to massaging the truth about the United States led coalition success in defeating ISIS, did not come as a surprise. Especially so, since independent sources have been providing a different picture. Commenting on the ongoing investigations into pressuring intelligence analysts to “adjust” their […]

This post first appeared at the Commentary blog on August 24.

J.J. Goldberg at the Forward has been running a campaign to persuade Americans that Israel’s intelligence community is at odds with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Iran deal. Not only the preponderance of retired professionals, but also currently serving ones, dissent from Netanyahu’s read of the deal. Netanyahu can’t silence the former, but he’s given a “gag order” to the latter—to no avail. Military intelligence has even produced a “surprising,” “game-changing” assessment that undermines him completely, according to which the “upsides [of the deal] aren’t perfect,” but “the downsides aren’t unmanageable…. The disadvantages are not too calamitous for anyone to cope with them.” Military intelligence sees “an imperfect but real opening in Iran. It believes that opportunities are being lost.” Netanyahu’s own “diagnosis doesn’t match his own intelligence.”

It’s all polemical and politicized nonsense.

A real expert, Emily Landau (at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv) has already taken Goldberg to the woodshed about the retired professionals (Goldberg has a weird predilection for calling them “spooks”). Landau, without naming the names of these “experts,” points out that Iranian politics and nuclear issues are well beyond the expertise of most of them. Not everyone with a pension and an opinion is equal. And most of those who think that Israel should back off a fight over the deal still think it’s a bad one. They just argue that it’s inevitable anyway, so why provoke Barack Obama? This isn’t support for the deal, it’s resigned acquiescence. (The military correspondent of The Times of Israel did a parallel debunking, after the White House began to tweet similar claims.)

Why do American diplomats sign their essays Anonymous whenever they have something large and upsetting to say? Why not Publius? It was Anonymous, anyway, who published a commentary on the Islamic State in the New York Review of Books of August 13—Anonymous, who is said, by the editors, to be “formerly an official of a NATO country,” which could mean Canada, of course, or Estonia. But the United States does seem probable. And Anonymous is said to be someone with “wide experience in the Middle East.” An expert, therefore, accustomed to the sobrieties of power. Anonymous, then—how does Anonymous account for the Islamic State? With what analysis? Anonymous is at a loss. Anonymous confesses to “bafflement.” This is large, and it is upsetting.