RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘So the Obama administration lied about the nuclear deal with Iran. We knew that already.”

That’s the message several conservative friends e-mailed me in response to David Samuels’s New York Times article on May 5 profiling Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.

Although Samuels’s article confirms what many Iran experts have said about the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, his profile of Rhodes is important because it explains the unprecedented incompetence, deceitfulness, and extreme partisanship of Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), and it further reveals that the president has allowed his NSC staff to run his foreign policy.

I have three main observations about the Rhodes profile.

The NSC Was Engaged in Systematic Lying to Ram Through the Iran Nuclear Deal

I have long argued that just about everything the Obama administration has said about the nuclear talks with Iran and the nuclear agreement have been exaggerations or outright falsehoods. Rhodes confirmed one of the most important of these deceptions.

According to Samuels, the Obama administration was “actively misleading” Americans by claiming that the nuclear deal came about because of the rise in 2013 of a moderate faction in Iran, with the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Samuels says this claim was “largely manufactured” by Rhodes to sell the nuclear deal to the American people even though the “most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012.”

Rhodes confirmed what most experts have long known: Rouhani did not represent the rise of a new moderate government in Iran. Supreme Leader Khamenei, a hard-liner, handpicked him to be on a slate of presidential candidates. Rouhani answers to Khamenei.

In November 2013, I wrote at National Review Online that the U.S. had made a major concession in May 2012 to allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium, and that this concession led to the November 2013 interim nuclear agreement with Iran. The White House made this concession before Rouhani won the July 2013 Iranian presidential election. Rhodes has now confirmed this. The Obama administration invented the moderate-Rouhani-faction story to create the illusion that it was taking advantage of a sudden opportunity to get a nuclear deal with a new moderate Iranian government. The White house’s story succeeded in distracting attention from the huge concessions it was offering to Tehran.

The Samuels article also contradicts recent accounts by aides to John Kerry and Hillary Clinton about what roles the two secretaries of state played in forging the Iran deal. In a September 2015 Politico article, Kerry and his aides attributed the deal to two years of intense U.S. diplomacy that included 69 trips across the Atlantic. In a May 2, 2016, New York Times article, journalist Mark Landler described former secretary of state Clinton’s reported leadership and caution on the nuclear talks with Iran; Landler contrasted this with a much more aggressive approach by Kerry while he was still in the Senate.

A recent book in the Yale University Press series on “Jewish Lives,” a biography of the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, opens provocatively: “Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?” Perhaps not, a reader of the book might well conclude. Disraeli has always been a challenge, to Jews and non-Jews, contemporaries as well as biographers. But rereading the man himself, I was reassured that he was entirely worthy of a place in “Jewish Lives” (and justified the significant space I gave him a few years ago in my The People of the Book).

Though formally Anglican—his father had him baptized when he was 12, before the rite of bar mitzvah—Disraeli identified himself, and was generally identified, as a Jew. He bore a conspicuously Jewish name, changing his father’s D’Israeli only by removing the apostrophe. He made no secret of his heritage in his speeches and writings, and flaunted it in his person, deliberately cultivating a Jewish appearance. And his novels dramatized a politics imbued with Judaism and a “New Crusade” that would restore Christianity to its Jewish origins. All of this in mid-Victorian England, when Jews were the villains of novels and the butt of satirists, when they could not even have a seat in Parliament let alone climb to “the top of the greasy pole,” as Disraeli put it. (Not one has since climbed it; there has been no Jewish prime minister in the nearly century-and-a-half since his death.)

While climbing that pole, Disraeli wrote no fewer than 15 novels, his first in 1826 at the age of 21 and his last the year before his death in 1881, with another, unfinished one published posthumously. His father, Isaac D’Israeli, a writer, scholar, and man-about-town (who never converted), once cautioned his son: “How will the Fictionist assort with the Politician?” But assort they did. In 1833 in a private journal, Disraeli implicitly responded to the familiar charge that the novels were frivolous, unrealistic fantasies. Vivian Grey, he said, “portrayed my active and real ambition”; The Wondrous Tale of Alroy “my ideal ambition”; Contarini Fleming “my poetic character.” The trilogy was “the secret history of my feelings.”

The federal government has a fundamental responsibility to provide for the nation’s defense. Until recently, the government has fulfilled that role almost exclusively through nuclear deterrence and conventional military forces. But a new type of warfare—in cyberspace—is emerging as a top threat to America.

In recent years, foreign actors have used sophisticated technologies to acquire the personal files of millions of federal employees, to gain access to the private information of multibillion-dollar U.S. businesses, and to tap into the control center of the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York, among many other known cyberattacks.
Yet Washington has no clear policy for responding to a cyberattack. If an attack against the U.S. occurs through conventional military means, the policies are clear. These guidelines must be broadened to include the cyber domain.

Current U.S. policies permit the Defense Department to respond to a cyberattack against military forces and infrastructure. But the U.S. doesn’t have a clear policy governing the Pentagon’s response to a similar attack against critical civilian infrastructure.

If an attack occurs today, would the U.S. be able to respond in a timely manner? In the cyberworld, an attack can occur in mere milliseconds, requiring an appropriate response in real time. That might not be possible if explicit policies are not in place.

During a Feb. 9 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, I asked Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, whether it would be helpful to have a definition of what constitutes an act of war in cyberspace. He replied that if the military had a “much fuller definition of the range of things that occur in cyber space, and then start thinking about the threshold where an attack is catastrophic enough or destructive enough that we define it as an act of war, I think that would be extremely helpful.” CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.philoliva.com/issues-1/

The number one job of the federal government is to defend the country against foreign enemies.

The national economy is weak. Over 94 million Americans are out of work, incomes have been stagnant for years and 49% of recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed.

I co-authored an economic plan that was called “A Plan for New York Revival” by the Wall Street Journal, adding that it would “lift the state’s flagging economy” if enacted. The plan focused heavily on cutting taxes and regulations, investing in infrastructure, accelerating hi-tech start-ups, and modernizing our workforce with the necessary skills and training.

I support an E-Verify system, enhanced surveillance on the border, increased border patrol and a crackdown of sanctuary cities that refuse to comply with federal immigration law.

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‘This is a good, quick read with insightful analysis of strategies needed to defeat global jihad.”

Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks showed that the “totalitarians are back. This time the dictatorship invokes the name of God, as opposed to the working class or the Führer, but they are back, and they will either kill us or enslave us.” So writes Dr.Sebastian Gorka in his new book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, an excellent strategic primer for the free world’s current struggle against a totalitarian foe, namely global jihadists.

As Gorka recently explained at a Heritage Foundation presentationin Washington, DC, he views jihadism in a broader history of totalitarianisms like the Communism his father fought against in postwar Hungary. “As an immigrant who chose to become an American and the son of parents who had to fight for their freedom, I understand 9/11 differently from those for whom the threat of totalitarianism is purely abstract,” he writes. Given his personal insight, he finds that the “similarities between groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State and USSR are too numerous and fundamental to be ignored.”

Discussing Muhammad, Gorka explains that Islam’s “founder was at the same time a political leader, a military commander, a self-proclaimed prophet. Islam, then, is by its nature and its origins a theocracy.” While Jesus famously taught of the distinction between Caesar and God, “this seminal Christian idea finds no counterpart in foundational Islam.” Groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State “are not in fact ‘perverting’ religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.” Given jihadism’s doctrinal basis in Islam, “our current enemy predates even fascism and communism…we have been at war with the jihadists since at least the Barbary Wars of the eighteenth century.”

Prior to serving in Congress, Representative McSally served 26 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 2010 as a full Colonel. She is the first female fighter pilot to fly in combat and first to command a fighter squadron in combat in United States history.Rep. McSally is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and after training to fly the A-10 Warthog, flew her first combat mission to Iraq while deployed from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in 1995. During that assignment, she flew nearly 100 combat hours in support of Operation Southern Watch in the Middle East.Rep. McSally was next selected to become an A-10 Instructor Pilot in the 358th Fighter Squadron, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to serve in that role.

In 1999, Rep. McSally was chosen to participate in the Air Force’s Legislative Fellowship Program, serving on the staff of Senator Jon Kyl as national security advisor on issues including terrorism, cyber security, and missile defense.After serving as a Legislative Fellow, Rep. McSally was assigned to Saudi Arabia to oversee combat search and rescue operations over southern Iraq and Afghanistan. While there, Rep. McSally was on the leadership team that planned and executed the initial air campaign in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.

In 2001, Rep. McSally became a Flight Commander and then the Director of Operations in the 612 Combat Operations Squadron at 12th Air Force Headquarters at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. She deployed twice back to the Middle East, holding leadership positions at the Combined Air Operations Center for Operations Southern Watch, Enduring Freedom, and then Iraqi Freedom.While stationed in Saudi Arabia, Rep. McSally challenged a discriminatory Pentagon policy that required servicewomen to wear Muslim garb when traveling off-base. She fought for a total of eight years to get the policy changed, eventually culminating with filing McSally vs Rumsfeld in court. She then helped to successfully shepherd legislation that was signed by the President and into law ending the demeaning policy.

In 2004, Rep. McSally took over as commander of the 354th Fighter Squadron, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to command a combat aviation unit. In that role, she was responsible for deploying her squadron anywhere in the world in 24 hours’ notice. As Squadron Commander, Rep. McSally flew for 225 combat hours, leading her A-10 combat team during Operation Enduring Freedom from September 2005 to February 2006. For her combat leadership, Rep. McSally was awarded the Bronze Star and her squadron was awarded the Air Force Association David C. Schilling Award for the most outstanding contribution in the field of flight in 2006.

During her military career, Rep. McSally flew 2,600 flight hours, including over 325 combat hours, earning six air medals. After her time in the military, she taught and mentored senior military officials from around the world as a Professor of National Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany.

Rep. McSally holds Masters Degrees from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the U.S. Air War College in Public Policy and Strategic Studies, where she graduated #1 in her class of 261 senior military officers.

Just for the record….Randy Forbes is a strong supporter of Israel and ranked -6 by the American Arab Institute….rsk
The images from earlier this year are still appalling: ten American sailors, on their knees with their hands behind their head, held at gunpoint aboard a broken-down patrol boat by paramilitary forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The capture and detainment of those ten U.S. Navy sailors on January 12, 2016, came at the start of a year in which America’s foreign policy has been at a crossroads. In the State of the Union address he delivered the very next day, President Obama spoke of living in a time of extraordinary change, with the international system led by the United States under growing strain. In his speech, the president conceded that we are living in increasingly dangerous times but dismissed “all the rhetoric about . . . our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker” as “political hot air.” With humiliating footage of our captured sailors still playing on the news, however, it was hard to deny that our nation faces a number of worrisome problems.

Around the world, we see a number of threatening actors — nation-states and other groups alike — with growing capabilities and diminished regard for international laws and norms. Iran’s illegal detainment of ten U.S. sailors was only the latest malicious action by a rogue regime that continues to brazenly support terrorism, develop and test ballistic missiles, and threaten oil exports from the Gulf. ISIS remains uncontained, and from remote villages in Pakistan to the cultural capitals of Europe, extremists have been successfully plotting and executing horrific terrorist attacks. Putin has annexed Ukraine, buzzed our ships and airplanes, threatened our NATO allies, and elevated Russian submarine activity and nuclear saber-rattling to Cold War levels. In Asia, China is amassing military power and slowly but steadily securing de facto control of the nearby seas, while North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and delivery systems that can reach the United States.

Who cares if Bush pere et fils will skip the convention? They can sup with James Baker and their Saudi pals instead and sulk over the findings of Saudi complicity in 9/11 that incriminates the Bushies.Message to the GOP…..Trump won in a democratic process of primaries. Now the question is who is worse Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? Ben Weingarten has some suggestions for thinking it through.
5 CRITICAL QUESTIONS UNDECIDED CONSERVATIVES MUST ASK TRUMP

By: Benjamin Weingarten

– See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/05/5-critical-questions-undecided-conservatives-must-ask-trump#sthash.3sapmDUv.dpuf

To conservatives shell-shocked at the jarring conclusion of the Republican Primary and those in despair over the prospect of a Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton general election, many are struggling with the same Hobson’s choice ironically lamented by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in reference to the options in the GOP field.

There are several questions those of us dedicated to advancing individual liberty, private property rights, the rule of law and a Kirkpatrickian defense must consider in the coming days and weeks. We must decide whether or not we can in good faith pull the lever for a candidate anathema to many of us personally and antithetical to us politically and ideologically.

Before we begin, let us stipulate that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be an extension of the Obama years – that is, an utter disaster for the country. None of the below questions are meant to imply that any Republican or conservative should make the unconscionable decision to vote for the pox on the body politic that is Hillary. But they are meant to serve as a framework for determining whether – given the stakes of growing existential threats and the dominance of regressive progressivism – we can in good faith vote for a lesser of two potential evils, or should give no sanction to any potential evil at all.

The following are five critical questions with which undecided conservative voters must grapple:

Can we in good conscience vote for someone who is not only left on most issues but is personally petty, narcissistic and arguably sociopathic, and who engenders the support of a percentage of fans who are truly detestable and who will be used to smear the conservative movement more broadly?

Trump has argued for, among other things, touchback amnesty, socialized medicine, tariffs that will increase the costs of goods for Americans, liberal use of eminent domain if it means more tax revenue, commitment to maintaining the welfare state generally and entitlement status quo specifically, opening up libel laws as a means of threatening the press (thereby chilling free speech), openness to job-killing minimum wage increases, retrenchment from America’s leadership role abroad while increasing spending on public works projects at home, “neutrality” vis-à-vis Israel versus the Arabs, continued support of Planned Parenthood and a host of other positions at odds with core conservative principles. He has undeniably shown himself to be an egotistical, dishonest philanderer prone to bullying and rashness. Many of these character defects are celebrated by his most rabid fans on social media, some of whom truly are the neo-Nazis and white supremacist caricatures that the Left loves to paint genuine conservatives as being. The invocation of “America First,” meant to troll #NeverTrump folks while tickling his most bigoted supporters should not have been lost on anyone. It is unfair to judge a person by the fans they attract, but Trump’s strongman utterings and praise for Vladimir Putin are clearly intended to stir up fans with whom no conservative would ever want to associate or be associated. Moreover, Trump’s apparent encouragement of violence and intimidation lends further credence to an inaccurate image of conservatives. Plenty of flawed human beings may make great presidents, but Trump presents a unique combination of problems substantively and stylistically. Holding your nose for Trump is qualitatively different than holding your nose for Romney or McCain.
If Trump’s administration was to discredit conservatism, would that do more damage to the cause than a Hillary presidency?

WHY I RAN FOR SENATE

***No, I’m not a career politician. (I had never run for anything until being elected to the U.S. Senate fifteen months ago, and I ran precisely because I actually want to make America great again.)
***No, I’m not a lawyer who has never created a job. (I was a business guy before becoming a college president in my hometown.)
***No, I’m not part of the Establishment. (Sheesh, I had attack ads by the lobbyist class run against me while I was on a bus tour doing 16 months of townhalls across Nebraska. Why? Precisely because I was not the preferred candidate of Washington.)
***No, I’m not concerned about political job security. (The very first thing I did upon being sworn in in January 2015 was to introduce a constitutional amendment for term limits – this didn’t exactly endear me to my new colleagues.)
***No, I’m not for open borders. (The very first official trip I took in the Senate was to observe and condemn how laughably porous the Texas/Mexican border is. See 70 tweets from @bensasse in February 2015.)
***No, I’m not a “squishy,” feel-good, grow-government moderate. (I have the 4th most-conservative voting record in the Senate: https://www.conservativereview.com/members/benjamin-sasse/ http://www.heritageactionscorecard.com/membe…/member/S001197 )

In my very first speech to the Senate, I told my colleagues that “The people despise us all.” This institution needs to get to work, not on the lobbyists’ priorities, but on the people’s: https://youtu.be/zQMoB4aUn04?t=3m8s

Now, to the question at hand: Will I pledge to vote for just any “Republican” nominee over Hillary Clinton?

Let’s begin by rejecting naïve purists: Politics has no angels. Politics is not about creating heaven on earth. Politics is simply about preserving a framework for ordered liberty – so that free people can find meaning and happiness not in politics but in their families, their neighborhoods, their work.

POLITICAL PARTIES

Now, let’s talk about political parties: parties are just tools to enact the things that we believe. Political parties are not families; they are not religions; they are not nations – they are often not even on the level of sports loyalties. They are just tools. I was not born Republican. I chose this party, for as long as it is useful.

If our Party is no longer working for the things we believe in – like defending the sanctity of life, stopping ObamaCare, protecting the Second Amendment, etc. – then people of good conscience should stop supporting that party until it is reformed.

VOTING

Now, let’s talk about voting: Voting is usually just about choosing the lesser evil of the most viable candidates.

“Usually…” But not always. Certain moments are larger. They cause us to explicitly ask: Who are we as a people? What does the way we vote here say about our shared identity? What is actually the president’s job?

THE PRESIDENT’S CORE CALLING

The president’s job is not about just mindlessly shouting the word “strong” – as if Vladimir Putin, who has been strongly bombing civilian populations in Syria the last month, is somehow a model for the American presidency. No, the president’s core calling is to “Preserve, Protect, and Defend the Constitution.”

Before we ever get into any technical policy fights – about pipelines, or marginal tax rates, or term limits, or Medicare reimbursement codes – America is first and fundamentally about a shared Constitutional creed. America is exceptional, because she is at her heart a big, bold truth claim about human dignity, natural rights, and self-control – and therefore necessarily about limited rather than limitless government.

THE MEANING OF AMERICA

America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world because our Constitution is the best political document that’s ever been written. It said something different than almost any other government had said before: Most governments before said that might makes right, that government decides what our rights are and that the people are just dependent subjects. Our Founders said that God gives us rights by nature, and that government is not the author or source of our rights. Government is just our shared project to secure those rights.

Government exists only because the world is fallen, and some people want to take your property, your liberty, and your life. Government is tasked with securing a framework for ordered liberty where “we the people” can in our communities voluntarily build something great together for our kids and grandkids. That’s America. Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of speech – the First Amendment is the heartbeat of the American Constitution, of the American idea itself.

I had a terse conversation with a Brahman from Boston who started the conversation with:….”You could not possibly vote for Trump….” Now, I am no fan of Trump….in fact, I despise him, but I find it amusing that the woman voted for Ted Kennedy- a plagiarist, a liar, a criminal, a philanderer, and a serial harasser of women. Remember the Kennedy-Dodd “sandwich?” Ted and his pal Chris Dodd, while they were Senators once kept a waitress in a diner pinned between them and fondled her until they were separated by force and threats to call the police. And both of those distinguished legislators actually tried to run for president.

She ended the conversation by warning: ” You and the GOP and your conservatives are finished.” Now there’s an overstatement. The old GOP is the Gone Old Party-but I have great faith in the talent of many Republican legislators, and in the next few months I hope to highlight them. One of my favorites is Senator Benjamin Eric “Ben” Sasse Of Nebraska…. a college professor, an intellectual, and a true conservative.