RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Meanness” is defined as unkindness, spitefulness and unfairness. It can also suggest stinginess, as in depriving students of contrary opinions and of ignoring their need to be challenged and to think independently. The word describes today’s political and cultural environment, one characterized by divisiveness between the elite who govern and the masses that are governed. When George Bush exclaimed “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” he was referring to those who were committing acts of terror or who were harboring terrorists. Now it means Republicans, or at least it does to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Unlike most countries, the United States is a nation of immigrants – we come from all places, races and religions. The heritage we share is the history of our founding, which was based on the concept that “all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers by the consent of the governed.” It is a heritage of ideas. Whether our ancestors were present in Philadelphia, or whether we arrived in the past decade, it is the knowledge that our basic rights do not come from government, but from a larger power, and that government is subservient to the people. It is that that distinguishes Americans. No matter our political differences, no matter whether we are conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican we share this history. We have an obligation to encourage its persistence. But today that sense of commonality seems at risk.

He supports partial-birth abortion, cozies up to the Clintons and frames the issues in a perspective that, with a couple of notable exceptions, tag him as more Democrat than Republican. Yet the candidate beneath that preposterous pompadour continues to lead the GOP field and dominate the headlines.
Let’s do a little play-by-play and compare Jeb Bush’s positions with Donald Trump’s current left-leaning views. Jeb has a single serious one—immigration—while also boasting a robust gubernatorial record of tax cuts, defending the sanctity of life, and a slew of issues that should, by rights, strike chords with the GOP activist base that turns out in force for the primaries. Trump, on the other hand, fails on what should be the two deal-breakers for the rank-and-file: he’s a Planned Parenthood supporter and an advocate for universal healthcare.

Over the past 15 years, Trump has supported partial-birth abortion, plus Obama’s stimulus package. If that was not enough to condemn him, he openly expressed the ill-advised desire for Hillary Clinton to lead U.S.-Iran negotiations! He has also bragged repeatedly about his friendship with the Clintons, and how much he has donated to their various causes—often, it seems, in exchange for access and favours. Bush’s new anti-Trump ad makes those points — although not so far, according to the polls, to his advantage.

Next, consider that Bush is seen by many as a RINO, as in ‘Republican in name only’, even though it is an objective fact that he is more conservative than Trump and has been for years. I’m not shilling for Bush, by the way, just noting an empirical truth. It’s also objectively true to say that the Republican Party’s activist base has become increasingly hardline in its advocacy of conservative principles. They tried to torpedo Mitt Romney twice for “flip-flopping” on abortion and have ousted senior moderate Republicans in favour of Tea Party darlings. Why is it that these same proud and rock-ribbed conservatives are falling in behind Trump, the leftmost candidate in the GOP field?

Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of angry young men in Budapest demand they be allowed to proceed to Germany, where Angel Merkel thinks she has room for some 800,000 this year alone. Lousy poster children for the invasion of Europe, the BBC opts instead to focus on the fetching Ms Nour.
Now on my way back to Australia, the BBC’s take on the European refugee crisis sticks in my mind. Or, is it in my craw?

“Haven’t they a right to travel?” queried the BBC anchorwoman in conversation with a correspondent reporting from outside Budapest’s chief railway station. Only in my dreams did the correspondent respond by saying, “Sure they do — if you no longer think that having travel documents is a requirement to travel internationally, and that European law can be causally set aside.”

Hungary is acting absolutely in keeping with European law. Others, such as Greece, funnelling asylum seekers on, are not. Asylum seekers have the option to register at centres on Hungary’s border where they can apply for asylum. This, of course, does not suit them. The cameras show hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Syrian asylum-seekers/refugees/economic migrants — choose your descriptor according to ideology and preference — demonstrating outside the terminus, chanting in unison: “Where do we go? Germany!” Note that they are not chanting Wohin gehen wir, Deutschland! (Google translation, be warned), as what they seek is a far wider audience than German speakers alone. They are mostly young men, with the odd woman in a head scarf among them. From that, I safely take it, I think, that they are Muslims not Christians.

Good job, Mr. President, Sen. Mikulski, congressional Democrats, and GOP leadership.

Senator Barbara Mikulski has announced that she will vote in favor of President Obama’s Iran deal. Sen. Mikulski’s support is critical because she becomes the 34th Democrat to announce that she will vote yea. Under the Corker framework so ingeniously conceived by Republican leadership in Congress, this means Obama’s deal cannot be defeated – under the legislation Congress is deemed to endorse the agreement unless it can muster a now unattainable 67 Senate votes (and a similar two-thirds of the House) to enact a resolution of disapproval over Obama’s veto.

It is worth repeating that Republicans rationalized this abdication of their duty to use their constitutional powers to block Obama’s empowerment of America’s sworn enemies by claiming that the legislation ensured that Congress would get to review the deal. This, of course, was always preposterous:

(a) Congress has many tools – the power of the purse, the ability to block Obama appointments and legislative priorities, the power to conduct oversight hearings, the capacity to raise public alarm in media coverage – that could have pressured Obama to reveal the deal’s terms;

As the White House secured their last needed vote to block a veto override in the Senate on the nuclear deal, Iran unleashed a double-pronged attack: vowing to block inspector access to some sites, and vowing to continue preparations to destroy Israel.

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said today that the International Atomic Energy Agency — which inked confidential deals with Tehran that Congress has not been able to see — would not be able to see all the facilities it wants to.

“Iran does not plan to issue permission for the IAEA to inspect every site,” Dehqan said in an interview with al-Mayadeen news network on Wednesday, reported the semi-official Fars News Agency.

Europe has simply collapsed and surrendered — hoping the crocodile will eat it last.

It was V.I. Lenin who sneered that the last capitalist would sell communists the rope to hang him with. That’s what happened in the Soviet Empire, which ran Eastern Europe for half a century. But even in the 1930s most European nations were ready to surrender preemptively to the Nazi war machine.

Today Europe has suicidally imported more than 50 million Muslims — just as Obama wants us to do here. With America failing to provide international leadership, Europe has simply collapsed and surrendered — hoping the crocodile will eat it last.

Remember how well that worked the last few times?

Since 1945 Europe has been unwilling to defend itself, relying on the US-Anglosphere alliance to pull its chestnuts out of the fire. In the case of Islam, Europe is pre-emptively bowing to the Muslim onslaught. While ordinary people no longer believe pro-immigration propaganda, the ruling class knows it can ignore the people. People with common sense are powerless.

As bad deals go, it’s hard to do worse than the “Minsk II” cease-fire signed in February between Kiev and Moscow. First the Kremlin reneged on its promises to stop fighting by Russian forces and Kremlin-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine. Now Kiev’s attempts to implement its half of the deal are sparking a political crisis among the good guys in this fight.

That was clear after Monday’s grenade attack outside the Parliament building in Kiev, which killed three and injured dozens. The attack appears to be an isolated incident, but it highlights the extent to which Kiev is struggling to maintain law and order as nationalist discontent rises and the government fights a war that the Minsk agreement was supposed to have ended.

Iran did not go mad and threaten to hit all NATO installations in Turkey because it wanted 3.5 million Turkish citizens to die from the chemical warhead of a Syrian missile. It went mad and threatened because it viewed the defensive NATO assets in Turkey as a threat to its offensive missile capabilities.

Iran’s reaction to the NATO assets in Turkey revealed its intentions to attack. It could be a coincidence that the U.S. and Germany (most likely to be followed by Spain) have decided to withdraw their Patriot missile batteries and troops from Turkey shortly after agreeing to a nuclear deal with Iran. But if it is a coincidence, it is a very suspicious one. Why were Assad’s missiles a threat to Turkey two and a half years ago, but are not today?

Apparently, NATO allies believe, although the idea defies logic, that the nuclear deal with Iran will discourage the mullahs in Tehran from attacking Israel.

Hillary Clinton has tried to confuse the public about the definition of “classified,” but some in the press corps are cutting though the fog. We’re learning, in particular, that Mrs. Clinton’s self-serving decision to use a private email server for official communications may have resulted in far greater mishandling of classified information.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Mrs. Clinton wrote and sent on her private server at least six emails that contained classified information. This destroys Mrs. Clinton’s statement that she never sent any classified information. It also blows up her campaign’s diversionary argument that nothing she sent or received was “marked” as classified.

Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State, with greater knowledge than anyone in her operation about national security secrets, and with a duty to protect such information. Whether the classified material she was sending or receiving was marked as such makes no difference to an official’s obligation. Mrs. Clinton knew this.

Meanwhile, Fox News reports that State Department lawyers have been hiding the extent to which Mrs. Clinton handled classified material on her server. According to the Fox account, career State employees initially marked four Clinton emails as classified. State Department lawyers then stepped in to recategorize the emails as “deliberative.” This meant they couldn’t be viewed by investigators from Congress.

The Obama network wants control of the party they won from the Clintons.

Here’s the short reason for the boomlet to get Joe Biden into the race: Hillary’s just not fun anymore.

Set aside whether she ever was. Let’s divide humanity into two groups: normal people and politicians. What makes the political class flutter about Joe Biden is a little different than what excites the rest of us.

On Labor Day weekend, more than 99% of the American population will unwind with family and friends, picnics, the beach and baseball. Not the politicians. Every elected politician in America, from Podunk town mayors to super PAC-backed candidates for the presidency will be pressing flesh with strangers. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is going to spend Friday afternoon with his new best friends in Contoocook, N.H.

Why do they do it? Because they love it. Politicking is the only thing they do. And standing nearby in politicking’s upper divisions this weekend will be aides, abandoning normal life for the same reason. They love it.