RUTHFULLY YOURS

Can Charles Schumer ever be master of the Senate? It’s hard to imagine on the basis of the lackluster nature of his opposition to President Obama’s nuclear-arms deal with the regime in Iran.

“Master of the Senate” is the title of the volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson that covers LBJ’s leadership in the upper house of Congress. It includes his maneuvering to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Bill.

What a ruthless, manipulative, bombastic, cunning leader LBJ was. He twisted arms, threatened, cajoled, pontificated and sulked — and outworked his colleagues, too — to get his way in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Particularly on a matter of conscience, like civil rights. Can anyone imagine LBJ taking the kind of powder that Mr. Schumer is taking now on Mr. Obama’s plan to appease Iran?

LBJ, of course, didn’t face the kind of gutter attacks that Mr. Schumer is facing. The New York Post, in an important editorial on Monday, reported that “anti-Semitism is all over the drive to make Chuck Schumer shut up about his opposition to the nuke deal.”

The administration has been pulling out all the stops. Yet with every passing day, what I at first called “Schumer’s finest hour” is turning into a shocking collapse, as the senator privately shrinks from the fight.

Swiss to lift ban on transport of Iranian crude oil and other sanctions beginning Thursday. Is it inviting other countries to flout the sanctions through it?

Even before Iran has met conditions contained in the Nuclear Iran deal, the ever-eager Swiss have begun lifting sanctions on Iran in a show of support for the Nuclear Iran deal negotiated by the U.S. and its P5+1 partners with Iran. They are also darn happy with their good relations with Iran.

The Swiss Federal Council announced the decision it reached on Aug. 12 to officially list sanctions beginning on Thursday, Aug. 13. The Swiss government had been engaged in direct dialogue with Iran and had already suspended the sanctions in Jan. 2014.

In opinion pieces in Italian daily Corriere della Sera and German paper Die Welt, Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid lambasts international community’s eagerness to embrace Iran while turning against Israel • Nuclear deal has made the West appear weak, he says.

Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid leveled harsh criticism at Europe over the weekend, stating in opinion pieces in two major European newspapers that the EU’s policy of preferring Iran over Israel was “scandalous.”

It’s the 14th edition of Paris Plages, a charming operation that transforms the banks of the Seine, from the Quai du Louvre all the way to rue de Crimée, into a summer playground. From mid-July to mid-August the quais are dressed up as sandy “beaches” with deck chairs, picnic tables, fun & games, rental bikes for kids, restaurants, cafés, ice cream stands, a lending library, and—for want of a dip in the river—a stretch of cool-off mist. It’s all done in nice French taste with a pretty blue & white striped and bright yellow color scheme, t-shirted monitors, and an international crowd.

One day each summer a guest country is invited to bring an exotic accent to the Paris Plages river beach. Tomorrow, August 13th, it’s Tel Aviv sur la Seine and, don’t you know, the slithery creatures are climbing up the riverbanks, determined to strangle the very thought of Tel Aviv and the Israel that goes with it. From pseudo-intellectual analyses of the stalemate in the peace process, attributed exclusively to Israel, to ill-concealed threats to smash up the whole thing if the City Hall doesn’t cancel it, the “debate” spins around a few simplistic notions. Should Tel Aviv be coddled because it’s not really Israel, it’s more of a Levantine Paris on the Mediterranean, populated by peace-making leftist gay-friendly secular progressives who detest Netanyahu like we do, or should Tel Aviv be kicked off the river bank until it can be kicked out of the world, no less guilty than the last baby-burning Occupier on a West Bank hilltop whose army massacred all of Gaza one year ago.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that reason, not blind adherence to Islam’s sacred verses, must guide Muslims to a better way. While her optimism is admirable, those who share her convictions would do well to recall that, if Europe is her model, the process was neither quick nor yet complete
In the June Quadrant, Daryl McCann provided a thoughtful reflection on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s newly published manifesto, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (Fourth Estate, 2015). He drew attention to the divergent reviews it has been getting, from ironical praise to angry condemnation. While generally supportive of her stance, he noted in passing that “in her heart of hearts Ayaan Hirsi Ali remains an apostate and her true sympathies are for those who, like herself, are daring and fortunate enough to escape”. No one reading her book, I believe, could avoid reaching the same conclusion.

Hirsi Ali seeks to appeal to as many Muslims as possible to embrace modernity and tolerance, but what she seeks is not the Reformation. It is the Enlightenment. She evokes Locke and Voltaire, not Luther and Calvin, when she speaks most forthrightly about the principles and values that should prevail.

How Obama’s outreach to Cuba is encouraging oppression of its people.

In a stinging rebuke to their (self-proclaimed) U.S. benefactors, Cuban dissidents wore Obama masks this weekend while peacefully demonstrating against the ever-increasing repression in Cuba.

“It’s his (Obama’s) fault, what is happening,” stressed Cuban dissident and former political prisoner Angel Moya. “The Cuban government has grown even bolder. That’s why we have this (Obama) mask on. Because it’s his fault.”

As these Cuban dissidents (and their “hardliner-right-wing” U.S. allies) had repeatedly warned, Castroite repression has cranked up in precise proportion to Obama’s new Cuba policy.

Here in the U.S. the phrase “I told you so” usually comes with a smirk. For Cuban dissidents it’s a different story. All the clubs, truncheons and machete blades landing on their bodies makes for extremely difficult smirking.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accidentally spilled a million gallons of mine waste into Colorado’s Animas River yesterday. The river’s befouled waters turned a bright yellow, their acidity increasing by 100-fold, as officials warned of risks to fish and cautioned that the contaminated sludge could irritate human skin.

“The water is a nasty color yellow, sort of putrid-looking,” a volunteer with the La Plata County search and rescue team tells National Review by phone. Because the county draws some of its water from the Animas, the city has imposed water rationing, he said. And, he explained, the spill will also have an effect on the county’s tourism industry, which relies heavily on rafting, kayaking, and fishing in the river. “The sheriff decided that because we don’t know what’s in the water, he ordered no one can go in the water,” he said.

‘Endangered Species Condoms’ Distributed at Colleges to Push Population Control The Center for Biological Diversity swears it’s “not anti-human.”
Hundreds of thousands of “endangered species condoms” provided by the Center for Biological Diversity have been distributed on college campuses to push population control, or, as the center puts it, the need for people to “stop hogging the planet.”

Under a “Why Condoms?” heading on the project’s website, the center explains:

Our runaway population growth is too often ignored by the public, the media and even the environmental movement. Endangered Species Condoms offer a fun, unique way to break through the taboo and get people talking about the link between human population growth and the wildlife extinction crisis.

Hillary Clinton is in trouble. Or more accurately put, she should be in trouble — very big trouble, in fact. The latest from the Department of Justice is that, yes, they have seized Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server and an accompanying thumb drive. The FBI has reportedly confiscated copies of the same e-mails from Hillary’s lawyer because it deemed the information contained in them too sensitive for him to keep.

While attempting to defend the indefensible, a Clinton spokesman said that this merely shows that the former secretary of state is cooperating with a “security inquiry.” That pathetic spin was meant to prevent the American people from recognizing there is not just smoke but fire to the Hillary e-mail scandal.

In a column on Tuesday and follow-up post on the Corner, I relate that beginning in 2011, President Obama secretly enticed the Iranian regime to the bargaining table by communicating that he was open to abandoning longstanding American opposition to Iran’s claimed “right” to enrich uranium. This news comes to us from a new MEMRI report, which elaborates that Obama relied on then-senator John Kerry to grease the wheels for his entreaty to Iran’s leader.

Why Kerry?

Though he was surely a key Obama ally on Capitol Hill, Kerry was not in the administration. The president already had a compliant secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who was dutifully implementing his appeasement policies. He also had any number of subordinate administration officials capable of passing messages. So why would Obama choose Kerry as his emissary to alert Iran to a dramatic shift in American policy?

Clearly, there are two reasons: Obama needed someone outside the administration, and Kerry’s status and track record made him a natural.