RUTHFULLY YOURS

The humiliating denouement to America’s involvement in Yemen came over the weekend, when U.S. Special Forces were forced to evacuate a base from which they had operated against the local branch of al Qaeda. This is the same branch that claimed responsibility for the January attack on Charlie Hebdo and has long been considered to pose the most direct threat to Europe and the United States.

So who should Barack Obama be declaring war on in the Middle East other than the state of Israel?

There is an upside-down quality to this president’s world view. His administration is now on better terms with Iran—whose Houthi proxies, with the slogan “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam,” just deposed Yemen’s legitimate president—than it is with Israel. He claims we are winning the war against Islamic State even as the group continues to extend its reach into Libya, Yemen and Nigeria.

He treats Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.

“Do you remember the pride bordering on chills you experienced when Neil Armstrong stepped off Apollo 11’s lunar landing module onto the moon’s surface in 1969? We were the world leader in space exploration!Under the Obama regime, space operations have been supplanted by outreach to Muslims and support for the global warming agenda.With the space shuttle in storage, the U.S. must rely on a tyrannical Communist regime with a 10 to 1 tactical nuclear weapons advantage over the U.S. (thanks to unilateral disarmament) to place astronauts in orbit.Sad beyond words!

Janet Levy,Los Angeles”

THE BATTLE FOR NASA

The debate over America’s human presence in space has begun.Since the start of the Obama Administration, NASA’s emphasis has altered dramatically, as financial support for exploration and space operations, including human flight, has been slashed by 7.9%. Meanwhile, earth science, including both legitimate research as well as questionable endeavors primarily designed to bolster the President’s climate change agenda, experienced a 41% increase. A General Accounting Office study found that “NASA had not matched resources to requirements” for programs related to human space flight.

In addition to funding shifts, ideological changes were imposed as well. NASA chief Charles Bolden made a bizarre remark in 2010 that one of NASA’s chief goals was to reach out to Moslems.

Critics have not hidden their disdain for the course NASA has been given under the current White House. John L. Casey, a former White House space policy advisor, stated in a recent exclusive interview on the Vernuccio/Novak Report that NASA was engaging in “data doctoring” to support global warming theory advocates and essentially ignoring its core mission.

Michael Hayden led the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009 and the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005. Olli Heinonen is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

As negotiations between Iran and the great powers press forward, Secretary of State John F. Kerry seems to have settled on this defense of any agreement: The terms will leave Iran at least a year away from obtaining a nuclear bomb, thus giving the world plenty of time to react to infractions. The argument is meant to reassure, particularly when a sizable enrichment capacity and a sunset clause appear to have already been conceded. A careful assessment, however, reveals that a one-year breakout time may not be sufficient to detect and reverse Iranian violations.