RUTHFULLY YOURS

The trade bill failed a major procedural vote on Tuesday, with every Senate Democrat save one blocking debate on what President Obama continues to call an economic priority. The 52-45 liberal blockade doesn’t mean trade-promotion authority is dead. But preventing a setback from becoming a rout will require a Republican salvage operation to rescue Mr. Obama from the consequences of his governing methods.

The politics of trade require Presidents to cultivate coalitions from the center out, building a majority between statist progressives and the protectionist right. But that is not Mr. Obama’s thing. His instincts are to govern from the left, treat Members of Congress as peasants who must bow before his superior wisdom, and then assail the motives and character of his opponents.

Jeb Bush, in contrast with some of his prospective rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, is an old political pro. He first ran for office more than two decades ago and served two terms as governor of the third most populous state. Politics and public service are in his blood: His generation of Bushes is the third to serve in elected office and the fourth in government.

So how did he make such a rookie mistake?

WSJ.com has the transcript, from an interview with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly. Regarding Iraq, she asked him: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”

His reply was unequivocal: “I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”

Kelly pressed: “You don’t think it was a mistake?” Bush acknowledged “mistakes took place”: Prewar intelligence was “faulty”; “we didn’t focus on security first” after toppling the Baathist regime; and that lack of security prompted “the Iraqis” to turn against the U.S.

“By the way,” Bush continued, “guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush. . . . So just for the news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”

Then again, it might. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, in a piece titled “Jeb Bush’s Disastrous Defense of the Iraq War,” compares George W. Bush favorably with his younger brother:

Such inaccurate portrayals that seek to downplay the Muslim persecution of Christians are standard for the BBC.

“[T]he French and the US, with their regional allies… persevere in error, commit strategic, grotesque mistakes … instead of recognizing that their guaranteed support to jihadist groups has led us to this chaos and has destroyed Syria, making us regress 200 years.” — Syrian Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo.

“The Saudi Arabian government has reportedly passed a law that imposes the death penalty on people caught smuggling Bibles into the majority-Muslim country. … This means that anyone handing out any kind of religious literature that is not of Islamic faith can legally be executed” — Samuel Smith, The Christian Post.

All churches in Cairo must be demolished. — The Islamic State.

Tens of thousands of deleted emails. Eighteen-and-a-half minutes of missing tape. As one who worked closely with former President Nixon during the last years of his life, I find the comparisons between him and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be insulting — to Nixon.

If Mrs. Clinton would like to survive her current growing implosion, she may want to take a page from Nixon’s playbook. Yes, the same Nixon she worked to impeach as a young attorney on the House Judiciary Committee (until she was let go by the Democratic counsel who said she was a “liar” and “an unethical, dishonest lawyer.”)

Sister Helen Prejean, the Roman Catholic nun who has made her career campaigning against capital punishment and ministering to those on death row, spent five visits with Boston bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev and testified that he had “sympathy for his victims.” Despite evidence to the contrary revealed during the trial at which the killer sat impassively, registering no emotion at the anguish of victims and their families, Sister Helen sensed pain in Tsarnaev’s voice and could feel his sincerity when he said that “no one deserves to suffer like they did.” The question, as Hillary Clinton famously said, is what difference does it make?

Sister Helen’s objection to capital punishment presumably isn’t limited to the possibility of wrongful conviction; in this case, the defense admits that their client is the right man, the killer of three and the maimer of 264 other victims whose lives will remain forever changed by the physical damage and trauma caused by his treacherous deeds. Tsarnaev, of course, is a Muslim whose allegiances remain with those who have murdered 10,000 Christians in Indonesia alone from 1998 – 2003 and whose victims keep growing with daily massacres of non-Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East. So we have a killer who continues to hold his religious beliefs and has never denied that he was one of the two people who prepared and detonated the nail-studded bombs intended to kill and mutilate the people of Boston. Had Tsarnaev not expressed what Sister Helen calls “regret,” would he be less deserving of her support? Did she visit him five times in order to be sure that she heard those gratuitous and self-serving words?

Free speech, like all of our Constitutional rights, is something we have to use. If it isn’t used, and used as the Founders intended it to be used, it will disappear.

The Muslim terrorists’ attack on Pamela Geller’s “Draw Mohammed” contest in Garland, Texas ended in the welcome and deserved deaths of the attackers before they could harm any of the participants. It also has resulted in a fit of knuckle-rubbing denunciations of Geller and the event even among conservatives. The media’s message – including from the conservative media — is entirely wrong.

Liberals, like the idiots of MSNBC, say that Geller’s event was “hate speech” which they contend isn’t protected by the First Amendment. Some on the conservative side say the event was needlessly provocative, an abuse of free speech and – in one faux-conservative Washington Post columnist’s terms – “baiting the field” for the terrorists.

But the facts, and our constitutional jurisprudence, indicate exactly the opposite: it was necessarily provocative. And, buried in that intellectual framework, is not just an essential defense of free speech that Geller’s event forced us to recognize but also the broader concept that it was an essential defensive act in the ideological war in which we’re engaged.

Two seemingly unconnected recent events but in reality intimately connected are sure signs that the war on terrorism is being lost.

Of course, we must begin with that old Chinese adage: When a fish starts rotting, it stinks first from the head. President Obama has undeclared the war on terrorism, refusing even to name the enemy. But it takes two to tango — and the Islamic terrorists cling to their effort to inflict hurt on the United States whenever and now, alas, wherever, they can.

The recent attack in Garland, Texas, revealed what the general public only had guessed: There are resident terrorists — some U.S. born, others naturalized citizens, some of Muslim descent, others converts to Islam — ready to spring into action. Whether, indeed, the Garland two were under the discipline of Daesh, the Islamic State, claimed or “lone wolves” operating on their own may be irrelevant. FBI Director James Comey confirms our worst fears: There are hundreds if not thousands of American Daesh sympathizers.

Last week, the Lausanne framework deal between the P5+1 powers and Iran on Iran’s nuclear program was concluded and immediately talked up as a good deal by President Barack Obama. But President Obama’s advocacy ran into factual and logical difficulties –– for example, how can the President claim that “every pathway” to an Iranian nuclear weapon is “cut off” until Iran at least signs dismantling its nuclear program –– not least because Iran flatly denied many of his claims.

But even if the deal was devoid of basic flaws –– for example, Iran is to retain intact all its centrifuges, nuclear facilities and ballistic missile R&D programs, while being free of unfettered inspections –– and even were Iran to adhere to it, the deal nonetheless is actually a disaster, for two reasons:

The wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors were fought for many years on the battlefield between armies. In recent decades the arena of conflict has shifted from hand-to-hand combat to a war of narratives.

Everybody agrees that the current affluence of Israel, its modern infrastructure and economy were developed by the Jews. The Palestinian Arab narrative is that as the ancient, indigenous people of Palestine they feel dispossessed and they deserve to take over Israel’s riches. Jewish claims to their heritage in the land of Israel are supported by abundant archaeological artifacts and historical records.

Meanwhile, there are no records to support the Palestinian narrative. In history, art and literature there is no trace at all of any Muslim people referred to by anybody as “Palestinians.”

For the second time in as many years, grass roots pro-Israel New Yorkers held a rally outside the NYC UJA Federation building and blasted their shofars to bring attention to what they are describing as a deficiency of leadership.

More than a hundred people showed up to hear speeches criticizing the NYC UJA-Federation, especially its president, Alison Doctoroff, for giving their hecksher to organizations that seek to financially harm Israel, and to join in the 100-strong Shofar blowing intended to focus attention on the problem.

The pro-Israel activists were protesting the decision made by the UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council leadership to allow groups which support boycotts of such iconic Israeli products as SodaStream and Ahava to once again march in the NYC Celebrate Israel Parade.

Beth Gilinsky, the president of the National Conference of Jewish Affairs, one of the organizational supporters, has been trying for many years to galvanize what passes for institutional Jewish leadership in the United States to take strong affirmative positions on behalf of Jews and the Jewish State. She sees the BDS (Boycott of, Divestment from and Sanctions against Israel) campaign as the latest anti-Semitic strategy, one for which too many Jews have fallen.