RUTHFULLY YOURS

The world is poorer for his passing, but his searing and accurate appraisals of Soviet evil will stand as enduring indictments of those calculating apologists and useful idiots who persist, even now, in making their excuses for Stalin and his murderous tyranny.
How important are obituaries? And do they serve any significant purposes other than informing us that someone important has died and comforting the bereaved that the worth of his life has been widely recognized? I’ve had cause to ponder that in the days since my friend Robert Conquest died and obituaries, tributes, and reflections on his work and life have flooded the internet. Among these are the obituary on Quadrant Online to which John Whitworth contributed here and an earlier piece by John on Conquest’s poetry and literary criticism. And there are more to come. Quadrant on paper will be publishing assessments by Clive James and Peter Coleman in our next issue.

From the most detached viewpoint this attention is richly deserved. Conquest was the single most important historian of the Soviet Union and its crimes while also being eminent in other fields, notably literature and criticism, and not least an influential advisor to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at a key turning-point in the Cold War. One can hardly sum up such a life in a single article, especially when the task has to be completed by journalism’s arbitrary deadlines. No single obituarist can mention everything. So one or two achievements may fail to be mentioned anywhere. I may be mistaken but I don’t believe that any obituary has yet mentioned Bob’s highly readable but also profound 1980 book, We and They, which examines the differences between civic and despotic cultures and the importance of which, alas, did not vanish with the end of the Cold War.

The well-publicised “secret meeting” recently held in Jordan between Israel’s newest negotiations Minister Silvan Shalom and perennial PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat is but the latest in a 20 years old meaningless talkfest that has seen little tangible signs of ending the 100 years old Jewish-Arab conflict – despite two offers made by Israel in 2000/2001 and 2008 and rejected by the Palestinian Authority.
Talks have been conducted on Israel’s side within a framework comprising the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2003 Bush Roadmap (with 14 documented Israeli reservations.)

Mahmoud Abbas’s approach to those Israeli reservations should have sounded alarm bells from the start:

“They don’t interest me …

We do not accept each side picking and choosing only those specific elements that are convenient for them in the road map.

Here is an assessment that mirrors my own preferences….rsk

After the Republican convention in 2012, one commenter at Instapundit wrote: Romney was not my first, second, or third choice, but I will crawl over ground glass to vote for him.

That has stayed with me ever since; it rang true for me as well [1]. With the field for the 2016 Republican nomination as crowded as it is, the exercise of ranking and re-ranking the candidates is surely one that many interested voters (and pundits) will be conducting on a frequent basis. After the first debates, now is the perfect time to start. This is where my personal-preference ranking of the GOP candidates stands, along with notes about why I have placed them in that particular spot.

1. Marco Rubio: I am firmly in his camp and a donor to his campaign. As a Floridian I’ve been following his career for several years, and I think he is one only three actual contenders for the nomination. I know the commenters are going to beat him up (and me as well) because of his dalliance with the “Gang of 8” on immigration reform. Well, what can I say: I agree with Senator Rubio and disagree with the peanut gallery. Marco’s actual overall record is as conservative as anyone in the field. What makes Marco so attractive as a candidate is that he brings conservatism together with an optimistic outlook and rhetorical skills.

The general election is going to boil down to convincing about 5-6% of the electorate (that won’t be paying attention until about two weeks out). I believe Rubio has the right stuff to make that convincing closing argument.

2. Scott Walker: He is also one of whom I consider to be the three actual contenders. There’s a lot of talk on social media of a Walker/Rubio ticket; one can see why that’s so attractive. Both are from purple states that are needed to win in 2016. Walker is a strong candidate with executive experience who took on the trade unions and the Democrats and won. If you’re looking for “a fighter,” nobody has proven more tangibly that he can fight the American left and come out victorious than Walker.

3. Rick Perry: I think he’s a much better candidate than what he showed in 2012 (because of his back surgery, etc.). He’s a former governor with a strong fiscal record and jobs record in a big and important state. Texas has stood defiant against all the hope-and-change rhetoric and ensuing malaise that much of the country has endured. I also like the way he’s taken took on Trump and his crass remarks.

Why do polls show that racial relations have gotten much worse under Barack Obama, who won the White House with over 95% of the black — and 45% of the white — vote?

A recent New York Times/CBS News poll [1] just revealed that about 60% of Americans feel race relations are not good. Some 40% think that they will become even worse. Yet when Obama was elected, 66% of those polled felt race relations were generally OK. All racial groups, according to recent polling, believe that Obama’s handling of racial relations has made things worse since 2009. Another recent Pew poll confirms these tensions, and suggests whites are now about as pessimistic as blacks.

What has happened to racial relations?

Crime. A small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty — no more than 3-4% of the general population — is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed. Blacks are 5-8 times more likely to commit rather suffer an interracial crime, which makes up less than 10% of most violent crime. Both the analysis and solution have become taboo subjects. Writing the above is a near thought crime.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.

For Donald Trump, the Iranian nuclear deal is like a business contract, like one would negotiate with a realtor on Central Park West.

The Iran nuclear deal will lead to a nuclear holocaust, Donald Trump warned Sunday. Still, if he’s elected president, the GOP front-runner won’t “rip up” the deal as some of his Republican primary opponents have said they would. Speaking in a prerecorded interview Sunday morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said he’d “police” the deal to mitigate its impact.

Trump questioned claims that the deal could simply be cancelled once it has gone into effect. “It’s very hard to say, ‘We’re ripping it up,” he argued

This is where Trump is wrong. As an Executive Agreement, it is not binding on the next president like a treaty.

“Iran is going to be unbelievably rich and unbelievably powerful and Israel is in real trouble,” Trump warned. “[Iran is] going to have nuclear weapons. They are going to take over parts of the world that you wouldn’t believe. And I think it’s going to lead to a nuclear holocaust.”

Iran gets money that should be used to pay its terror victims.

The giveaways in President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal keep piling up. By handing $100 billion or more in frozen funds to Tehran, the deal would not only fill the coffers of Iranian terror proxies. It would also abandon American victims of terrorism waiting to collect tens of billions of dollars in compensation owed to them by Iran.

Over two decades U.S. federal courts have found the Iranian government liable for orchestrating or supporting the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers U.S. Air Force facility in Saudi Arabia, and multiple shootings and suicide bombings in Israel, among other attacks. Judges have awarded some $45 billion in damages to hundreds of plaintiffs such as Embassy bombing survivor Anne Dammarell and the widow and orphaned children of Hamas bombing victim Ira Weinstein.

The candidate is promoting currency devaluation—he should ask Argentina and Brazil how that worked out.
To hear Donald Trump tell it, China is run by a cabal of geniuses who outsmarted the U.S. last week by cutting the purchasing power of their fellow Chinese citizens with a devaluation of the yuan.

“They’re killing us. Now they’re going to take more jobs . . . I mean it’s ridiculous,” the presidential hopeful told Fox News the day after China let its currency slip a measly 2% against the dollar. The yuan subsequently lost another 1%.

Japan is also run by a band of Asian Einsteins, according to Mr. Trump. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe “is a great leader,” who is “cutting the hell out of their currency, cutting, cutting, cutting.” As a result, Mr. Trump explained, “they’re back. Japan is back.”

The fast-talking Wharton alumnus didn’t say what he would do as president when trading partners announce that their currencies are to be marked down in relation to the dollar. But he suggested that devaluation is making China and Japan wealthier and more competitive and the U.S. poorer. China does it, in his view, because “they have no fear of us.”

While media coverage has focused on a half-dozen of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal emails containing sensitive intelligence, the total number of her private emails identified by an ongoing State Department review as having contained classified data has ballooned to 60, officials told The Washington Times.

That figure is current through the end of July and is likely to grow as officials wade through a total of 30,000 work-related emails that passed through her personal email server, officials said. The process is expected to take months.

The 60 emails are among those that have been reviewed and cleared for release under the Freedom of Information Act as part of a open-records lawsuit. Some of the emails have multiple redactions for classified information.

To say Sen. Bernard Sanders has struck a chord with Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire would be an understatement, and local party leaders in those key early primary states believe the Vermont senator and self-described socialist’s appeal is growing stronger each day.

Mr. Sanders, who is seeking the White House as a Democrat, has been drawing thousands to recent campaign rallies and has crafted a populist message that centers heavily on themes of income inequality and economic fairness. Political analysts say his pitch, strikingly similar to that of progressive hero Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, is exactly what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wants to hear from a candidate.

Defending the Iran nuclear deal he negotiated in Vienna, Secretary of State John Kerry has repeatedly asserted something that has been much ignored in the discussion surrounding it — that all options which the United States possesses today to stop Iran going nuclear will be there for a future U.S. president in 10 years. Similarly, President Obama breezily assures us, “The same options that are available to me today will be available to any U.S. president in the future.”

Were it only true.

The major options available to the president in the face of an Iranian nuclear threat are covert (sabotage, cyberwarfare) and military (precision airstrikes with bunker-busting bombs). Mr. Obama has these at his disposal today. But his successor is unlikely to have them in 10 years.