RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should: We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in 1902 after the Boers humiliated the British Army in the first round of the Boer War. America should express the same gratitude towards China, which has humiliated America in the South China Sea. By exposing American weakness without firing a shot, Beijing has taught Washington a lesson which the next administration should take to heart.

Last year I asked a ranking Pentagon planner what America would do about China’s ship-killer missiles, which reportedly can sink an aircraft carrier a couple of hundred miles from its coast. If China wants to deny the American navy access to the South China Sea, the official replied, we can do the same: persuade Japan to manufacture surface-to-ship missiles and station them in the Philippines.

It didn’t occur to Washington that the Philippines might not want to take on China. The country’s president-elect Rodrigo Duterte explained last year (as David Feith reported in the Wall Street Journal), “America would never die for us. If America cared, it would have sent its aircraft carriers and missile frigates the moment China started reclaiming land in contested territory, but no such thing happened … America is afraid to go to war. We’re better off making friends with China.”

It isn’t only the Philippines who see the obvious. China claims the support of 40 countries for its position that territorial claims to the South China Sea should be resolved by direct negotiations between individual countries, rather than before a United Nations tribunal constituted under the UN Convention on Law of the Seas, as Washington wants. A joint statement by the foreign ministers of China, Russia and India after a meeting in Moscow last month supported China’s position.

The 7th Fleet was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the South China Sea after World War II, relying on a weapons system now more than nine decades old, namely the aircraft carrier. That was before China fielded its DF-21 “carrier killer” surface-to-ship missile. The latest iteration of the missile, designated DF-26, reportedly has a range of 2,500 miles. New technologies, including lasers and rail guns, might defeat the new Chinese missiles, but a great deal of investment would be required to make them practical, as a January report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued.

The Obama administration used the Ploughshares Fund to plow through Congress’s and the public’s perception of threats to our national security. It used this and other organizations to harrow its critics and to plant disinformation to undermine the security of the United States from within and without.

In 2015, it used the Ploughshares Fund that prides itself on supporting “ the smartest minds and most effective organizations to reduce nuclear stockpiles, prevent new nuclear states, and increase global security,” to pay off useful idiots in the press and NGOs to advocate the “White House Narratives on the Iran Nuclear Deal,” and to undermine Israel’s opposition. Its board chairperson Mary Lloyd Estrie boasted in its 2015 annual report that $7,322,110 in grants paid for “the absolutely critical role that civil society played in tipping the scales towards this extraordinary policy victory.”

Creating this “echo chamber,” as Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes boasted to the New York Times Magazine, helped the White House to achieve this national and international deception. In 2015, to silence Israeli opposition, Ploughshares Fund gave the pro-Palestinian J-Street, $576,500, and more than $281,000 to the National Iranian American Council to promote the deal.

Other recipients of grants to publish analysis and briefings supporting the Obama deal with Iran, include the Arms Control Association $282,500; the Brookings Institution, $225,000; and the Atlantic Council, $182,500. Princeton University got $70,000 to support former Iranian ambassador and nuclear spokesman Seyed Hossein Mousavian’s “analysis, publications and policymaker engagement on the range of elements involved with the negotiated settlement of Iran’s nuclear program. The ‘Gulf 2000 Project’, Columbia University received $75,000,” To support analysis, reporting and other efforts to inform the debate about Iran’s nuclear program and international diplomatic approaches to verifiably prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies ($50,000).

John Kerry’s Department of State is responsible for functions that are so essential to the well-being of America and Americans that the Secretary of State is in the line of succession to the U.S. Presidency.

On May 6, 2016 Time Magazine published the transcript of the commencement address Kerry delivered at Northeastern University.

Here is an important excerpt from his remarks:

“I think that everything that we’ve lived and learned tells us that we will never come out on top if we accept advice from soundbite salesmen and carnival barkers who pretend the most powerful country on Earth can remain great by looking inward and hiding behind walls at a time that technology has made that impossible to do and unwise to even attempt,” Kerry said. “The future demands from us something more than a nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of a past that did not really exist in any case.”

His delusional statement that it is impossible and unwise to look inward or attempt hide behind walls should give us all a serious “cause for pause.” His blatantly globalist philosophies are diametrically opposed to oath of office and responsibilities and America’s best interests.

It is, perhaps understandable that Kerry, a key member of the Obama administration would not want Americans to “look inward” because looking inward will disclose the rot and dysfunction that America is now suffering from. Record levels of heroin addiction, a rapidly shrinking middle class, wage suppression and contrary to labor statistics, record levels of unemployment by working age Americans.

On May 12, 2016 CBS News posted an Associated Press report, “Middle class shrinks in 9 of 10 US cities as incomes fall.”

As for “hiding behind walls”- metaphorically, our borders are America’s walls. With the growing threats posed by ISIS and other international terrorist organizations and transnational criminal gangs and organizations, our borders must be secured and seen for what they truly are- our first and last line of defense. I discussed these issues in my recent video, Michael Cutler Moment: Obama’s Pathway to the ‘Borderless World’.

During his commencement address Kerry referenced the Boston terror attack- stating:

And as we were reminded earlier, you are still mourning the tragic loss of Victoria McGrath and Priscilla Perez Torres. Even before, on Patriot’s Day 2013, when Victoria was among those hurt by a terrorist’s bomb, this community felt the weight of a wounded world. So this morning, we grieve and we celebrate all at the same time.

The Iran nuclear agreement “was a great example of diplomacy,” stated former American ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, James F. Jeffrey, at an April 12 Middle East Policy (MPEC) Council Capitol Hill panel. While this presentation concerning “The Saudi-Iranian Rivalry and the Obama Doctrine” continued MPEC’s Iran deal promotion, the panelists’ arguments remained as depressingly unconvincing as before.

Jeffrey’s fellow former American ambassador (to Oman) and MPEC’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Richard Schmierer, proclaimed:

[The] historic nuclear deal…addressed the fundamental and destabilizing challenge of a potential Iranian nuclear weapons capability, but it also opened the possibility of a more deep-seated change in Iran: the possibility that Iran’s leaders would use the economic benefits and the potential renewed economic access to the international community deriving from the nuclear agreement to change the country’s behavior.

For Jeffrey, this diplomatic success resulted from concrete economic and military measures “backed up by really tough sanctions that cut Iran’s oil exports by over 50 percent”; spoken in reference to President Barak Obama’s efforts to end Iranian nuclear weapons proliferation. Additionally, the nuclear agreement was supposedly “backed up with the red line that this one people actually believe, that the United States, including Obama, would act” in case of Iranian proliferation.

Yet Jeffrey’s analysis of the Islamic Republic that took over Iran in the 1979 revolution as a rogue regime made it suspect as a credible negotiating partner willing to sustain agreements. “Iran fundamentally is not happy with, does not accept, and is trying, at least in its own neck of the woods, to overthrow the international order,” he noted. RAND Corporation analyst Alireza Nader stated that while officially supporting the nuclear agreement, Saudi officials fear that “rather than forcing or compelling Iran to modify its behavior, that the agreement will actually embolden it.”

Arab Gulf States Institute fellow Fahad Nazer cited Saudi officials who worried that their regional competitor, Iran, “has had this policy of exporting its ideology and its revolution for some 40 years.” Adding that “Iran is one of the few countries or regimes around the world that has been implicated in the attempts to assassinate” diplomats. He cited the past Iranian plot to kill in Washington, DC, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, currently the Saudi foreign minister.

Nonetheless, like Schmierer, Nader entertained long-term hopes for Iran, which “has a sophisticated, forward-looking population that wants and demands change.” Nader believes that “one of the trends in Iran is greater nationalism, Iranians who say that they’re Iranian first and are not necessarily followers of the Islamic Republic.” Adding that “increased secularization in Iran” has produced “resentment of the Islamic Republic as an Arab phenomenon.”

In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier warned Adolf Hitler that if the Third Reich invaded Poland, a European war would follow.

Both leaders insisted that they meant it. But Hitler thought that after getting away with militarizing the Rhineland, annexing Austria, and dismantling Czechoslovakia, the Allied appeasers were once again just bluffing.

England and France declared war two days after Hitler entered Poland.

Once hard-won deterrence is lost, it is almost impossible to restore credibility without terrible costs and danger.

Last week, Russian officials warned the Obama administration about the installation of a new anti-ballistic missile system in Romania and talked of a possible nuclear confrontation that would reduce the host country to “smoking ruins” and “neutralize” any American-sponsored missile system.

Such apocalyptic rhetoric follows months of Russian bullying of nearby neutral Sweden, harassment of U.S. ships and planes, warnings to NATO nations in Europe, and constant threats to the Baltic states and former Soviet republics.

China just warned the U.S. to keep its ships and planes away from its new artificial island and military base in the Spratly archipelago — plopped down in the middle of the South China Sea to control international sea lanes.

Technically speaking though, it’s her husband’s terrible North Korean strategy. Obama used it to help Iran get billions while letting it steam ahead to the bomb. Now Hillary will call it Obama’s strategy so no one remembers how badly her husband botched North Korea.

One of Hillary Clinton’s top priorities as president would be to use sanctions to pressure North Korea to negotiate limits on its nuclear program, according to Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser. The strategy would mimic the Obama administration’s approach to Iran.

Except North Korea already has nukes. Thanks to Bill Clinton. At least the Obamanoids can still claim that Iran won’t get the bomb because it hasn’t officially test donated. North Korea has.

Jake Sullivan, the head of the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy advisory team, was one of two officials who began secret negotiations with Iran in 2012 that eventually resulted in the nuclear agreement that Iran struck last summer with six world powers. He told an audience Monday evening at the Asia Society in New York that Clinton is planning a similar strategy to deal with North Korea’s nuclear program.

If you loved how well Hillary Clinton dealt with Russia and Iran, just wait till you see how she does with North Korea. I assume D.C. will be nuked during her reelection campaign.

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

A blank Word document stares out from the computer screen. An individual sits before it – the essayist at work? Not really. No one sits down to write without some idea – perhaps muddled – of what they want to say. A working title is affixed, along with a date that often proves to be optimistic, and a rubric is sometimes added. The latter adds wit and helps focus wandering minds. The concept, at this early stage, assumes the shape of a globule of mercury or a tube of Silly Putty. Sculpting tangled ideas into something concise and readable requires choosing the right words, having them mean what they were meant to mean. Essayists don’t have the latitude of Humpty Dumpty. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll has Mr. Dumpty say to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

We writers of essays don’t want to leave readers puzzled like Alice, so we must be clear in what we write. Obfuscation is the province of politicians, not essayists. The purpose of the latter is to make thoughts intelligible, as they get transported from mind to paper. (The former operate in the hope that they will appeal to those who read carelessly and listen inattentively.)

Periods, colons, semi-colons, commas, dashes and parentheses are not there to look pretty, but to add clarity to what is written. Even the lowly apostrophe is defended by the Apostrophe Protection Society! Lynne Truss wrote in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, that punctuation is “the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape.” Edward Estlin Cummings, better known as e e cummings, chose to write poetry in lower case letters and without punctuation. He was an artist. We are mechanics, not dilettantish virtuosos who obscure the meaning of what they write. We are more like photographers than contemporary artists. The meaning of what we write should be clear, not left to the reader’s interpretation.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/17/michael-cutler-moment-obamas-pathway-to-the-borderless-world/This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.

Mr. Cutler discussed Obama’s Pathway to the “Borderless World,”unveiling how the Radical-in-Chief is opening America to Islamic terrorists and transnational criminals.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/17/michael-cutler-moment-obamas-pathway-to-the-borderless-world/

The high dudgeon of the Never Trumpsters is so ridiculous. The best they can offer is a sad list of also rans who lost. Do conservatives really want to subvert the popular, democratically chosen candidate when the mother of political evils is the other choice? Puleez! I like and respect Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. He has a great future in the GOP? Why squander resources on a quixotic quest when he has so much to bring to the Senate?

Andy McCarthy and Roger Kimball are among some conservatives whose disdain for Trump was known. They have both come around to conceding that Hillary Clinton is worse. …Far worse…..rsk