RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s tempting to say that Obama’s chickens have come to roost. However, this is more like the vampires have come home to do a lot more than roosting.

Reality always has the last word and the situation in Syria speaks for itself, as we see in news reports:

Russian warplanes began bombarding Syrian opposition targets in the war-torn nation’s north Wednesday, following a terse meeting at which a Russian general asked Pentagon officials to clear out of Syrian air space and was rebuffed, Fox News has learned.

A U.S. official said Russian airstrikes targeted fighters in the vicinity of Homs, located roughly 60 miles east of a Russian naval facility in Tartus, and were carried out by a “couple” of Russian bombers. The strikes hit targets in Homs and Hama, but there is no presence of ISIS in those areas, a senior U.S. defense official said. These planes are hitting areas where Free Syrian Army and other anti-Assad groups are located, the official said.

According to a U.S. senior official, Presidents Obama and Putin agreed on a process to “deconflict” military operations. The Russians on Wednesday “bypassed that process,” the official said.

“That’s not how responsible nations do business,” the official said.

The Fox News report that the Teamsters have decided not to endorse Hillary Clinton’s candidacy at this time, shortly after her pronouncement of her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, does not surprise and shows the peril of trying to be all things to all constituencies.

On the one hand, there is a need to placate environmentalists and climate change true believers who oppose the pipeline from Canada. Among them is billionaire Tom Steyer, an eco-zealot who has pledged his fortune in support of Democratic candidates who want to repeal the Industrial Revolution who want us to rely on solar power even when the sun doesn’t shine and wind turbines when there’s nary a breeze.

On the other hand, there is a need for the support of unions who can provide the foot soldiers as well as money for a campaign for the White House. The Teamsters could be just hedging their bets in anticipation of a Joe Biden candidacy in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s slipping e-mail scandal-plagued campaign. But the need for union jobs Keystone XL that would create is also a compelling reason.

In announcing her opposition to Keystone XL, Hillary Clinton cited concerns over the pipeline’s impact on the environment and climate change:

“And I oppose it because I don’t think it’s in the best interest of what we need to do to combat climate change. I will be rolling out in a few days my plan for a North American approach to fighting climate change and clean energy. Because for me, we need to be transitioning from fossil fuels — I know it will take time — to clean renewable energy.”

It is sometimes said that in negotiations with foreigners, American leaders play checkers, while their wilier opponents play chess. There is perhaps some truth to this, as American leaders sometimes chase short-term political results, a consequence of democratic governance and constantly changing leadership. By contrast, despotic Persians are credited with inventing chess, and in modern times autocratic Russians have been its master, and so it is tempting to say of President Obama’s dealings with those two countries that the analogy holds.

But that is way too charitable. As Vladimir Putin skillfully reasserts Russian power and influence in the Middle East with Islamic Persian Iran as a willing partner, a more apt analogy might be that while the Russians and Iranians move their chessmen, isolating and threatening opposing pieces, Obama is not even at the table, but rather childishly looking on, as he pushes diplomatic dirt around the Middle East sandbox.

For over 150 years, a primary objective of Western diplomatic and military strategy was to keep the Russians out of the Middle East and Southwest Asia. In the 1850s, the British and French went to war in Crimea to protect the Ottomans from Russian predation and to preserve the balance of power. Later, the so-called “Great Game” centered on similar British efforts to frustrate Russian domination of Iran and Afghanistan. A century later, the United States took up the task, offsetting Russian influence in newly socialist Arab dictatorships by backing Israel and more traditional Arab monarchies in the Middle East, while openly and successfully opposing the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan.

Campuses pay commissions to build foreign enrollment but sometimes get phony applications, ghostwritten essays.

Like many U.S. colleges, Wichita State University wants more foreign students but isn’t a brand name abroad.So the school, whose mascot is a muscle-bound wheat bundle, in late 2013 started paying agents to recruit in places like China and India. The independent agents assemble candidates’ documents and urge them to apply to the Kansas school, which pays the agents $1,000 to $1,600 per enrolled student.

Overseas applications “shot up precipitously,” says Vince Altum, Wichita State’s executive director for international education.

But there is a down side: Wichita State rejected several Chinese applications this year from an agency it suspected of falsifying transcripts, Mr. Altum says, adding that it terminates ties with agencies found to violate its code of conduct by faking documents.

Paying agents a per-student commission is illegal under U.S. law when recruiting students eligible for federal aid—that is, most domestic applicants. But paying commissioned agents isn’t illegal when recruiting foreigners who can’t get federal aid.

So more schools like Wichita State are relying on such agents, saying the intermediaries are the most practical way to woo overseas youths without the cost of sending staff around the world. No one officially counts how many U.S. campuses pay such agents, most of whom operate abroad, but experts estimate at least a quarter do so.

Mr. Graff is professor of English and history at Ohio State University.

Universities have always engaged in relentless self-promotion. But the relationship between rhetoric and reality has become ever more tenuous, and the line separating honest aspiration from fabrication fainter.

The Ohio State University, where I teach, is a particularly dramatic example of this devolution. Not that it is alone—since its claims to uniqueness are based on imitating others.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the university’s slogan, “Do Something Big,” morphed into “Do Something Great.” The urging of the former was deemed too ambiguous.

“Vision 2020: Access, affordability and excellence” is the tagline of the new president, Michael Drake. (He is an ophthalmologist.) This translates into freezing in-state tuition, increasing efforts to privatize major assets, offering small grants to undergraduates, and creating “economies and efficiencies.” Those most often mentioned are purchasing toilet paper from one vendor and doing color-copying double-sided. Not mentioned are substantial staffing reductions, nor the overabundant and overpaid administrators whose reduction is promised but not realized. Staff and faculty salary increases continue at lower than national and peer-institution averages.

Mr. Meyers writes on photography for the Journal. His photo book “Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan” was published earlier this year by Damiani.

An exhibition about Soviet photography and film showcases astounding artistic accomplishments that served a vile end.

‘The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film” at the Jewish Museum has several rooms of stunning photography from the 1920s and ’30s, and if you do not know the history of Russia in the 20th century, you will leave the exhibition at the Jewish Museum buoyed. If you do know the history of the “Evil Empire” you can only weep that such artistic accomplishment served such a vile end.
Nowhere is this dichotomy more intense than in Soviets, the room devoted to portraiture. Georgy Zelma’s “Three Generations in Yakutsk” (1929), Max Penson’s “Untitled (Turkmen in Telpeks)” (late 1930s) and Georgy Petrusov’s “Asiatic Sailor” (c. 1935-36) are arresting pictures of ethnic minorities—and also agitprop disseminated to remind Russians of the peoples they dominated and to show the captives’ gratitude. “The Poet Anna Akhmatova” (1924) was taken by Moisei Nappelbaum, the dean of Russian portraitists. She is shown in profile like a patrician in a Renaissance painting, with her aquiline nose and her soulful expression offset by her stylish headgear and her left hand clutching at her beads. It is a fabulous image and, like most of the works in the exhibition, a wonderful print, but who can look at it without thinking of Akhmatova, the greatest Russian lyric poet since Pushkin, decades later standing with other women outside a St. Petersburg prison in the snow and cold, hoping for glimpses of their loved ones? Akhmatova’s son, a hero of World War II, was arrested because Stalin feared heroes were most likely to challenge him. Her first husband had been executed in 1921.

The oddest moment in the second GOP debate was when the first thing Donald Trump did was to launch an assault on Sen. Rand Paul, who was standing about three miles away at the end of the podiums: “Well, first of all, Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage. He’s number 11, he’s got 1% in the polls, and how he got up here, there’s far too many people anyway.” Ummm, what was that all about?

Since that Sept. 16 debate, as measured by the RealClearPolitics polling average, Mr. Trump has lost about a quarter of his support, down to 23% from 30% on the eve of the debate. In this week’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, he is at 21%.

It’s not going to get better. The Trump numbers are going to drift sideways, or fall.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump tweeted that getting his business out of Atlantic City before the casinos collapsed was “great timing.” The moment has come for the timing master to recognize it’s Atlantic City all over again. For his phenomenal presidential campaign, it’s time to go.

President Obama gave Raúl Castro the expected gift of a handshake photo-op this week, conferring legitimacy on the 56-year-old dictatorship with a bilateral meeting. But could Mr. Obama’s courtship of the Castros be so passionate that he’d even abstain from an anti-U.S. resolution at the United Nations?

That’s the recent scoop from the Associated Press, which reported that the Obama Administration is debating whether to let the U.N. condemn the U.S. trade embargo without a peep of protest. What a stunning turn that would be. Cuba and its pals roll out the condemnation every year in the General Assembly, and the U.S. routinely votes against it.

For the U.S. to abstain now would essentially endorse a denunciation of America by an assembly that includes some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. This goes well beyond Mr. Obama’s famous “apology” tours for alleged past U.S. sins. He would be apologizing for a law currently on the books that has been supported by members of both parties for years and that Mr. Obama has taken an oath to uphold and enforce.

Archive of messages turned over to officials begins weeks into the start of her tenure.

WASHINGTON—About two months of emails from the start of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state are missing, and federal officials haven’t been able to recover them.

An archive of records that Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential front-runner, turned over to the State Department doesn’t begin until March 18, 2009, though she took office as secretary of state in late January of that year. The missing emails raise more questions about her stewardship of official documents during her tenure and whether there is a complete record of the early diplomatic efforts of President Barack Obama’s administration.

The potential significance of the missing emails, which Mrs. Clinton’s aides acknowledge and say she no longer can retrieve, came to light last week when a chain of online correspondence between her and former Gen. David Petraeus was found on Defense Department servers. Those messages, which included work-related personnel matters, dated to the period missing from Mrs. Clinton’s records.

Christians, Kurds and Yazidis in the shelters are being attacked by Muslims with increasing frequency and ferocity.

“I fled from the Iranian secret service because I thought that in Germany I could finally live my faith without persecution. But in the refugee shelter, I cannot admit that I am a Christian, or I would face threats… They treat me like an animal. They threaten to kill me.” — An Iranian Christian in a German refugee shelter.

“We have to dispense with the illusion that all of those who are coming here are human rights activists. … We are getting reports of threats of aggression, including threats of beheading, by Sunnis against Shiites, but Yazidis and Christians are the most impacted. Those Christian converts who do not hide their faith stand a 100% probability of being attacked and mobbed.” — Max Klingberg, director of the Frankfurt-based International Society for Human Rights.

“We are observing that Salafists are appearing at the shelters disguised as volunteers and helpers, deliberately seeking contact with refugees to invite them to their mosques to recruit them to their cause.” — Hans-Georg Maaßen, head of German intelligence.