RUTHFULLY YOURS

BEIRUT—Islamic State is holding dozens of Christians in the southeastern Syrian province of Homs, Syrian Orthodox community leaders said on Friday, after it captured the town of Qaryatain in its efforts to establish a stronghold outside the major city of Homs.

The seizing of Christians came as Islamic State fighters entered the town on Wednesday, after attacking Syrian-regime checkpoints by detonating three suicide bombs, according to Islamic State media.

The precise number of Christians rounded up in the raid wasn’t clear. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group, said more than 230 people were kidnapped, among them 60 Christians. Residents of nearby towns said the numbers kidnapped couldn’t be verified and some victims may be staying in their homes under orders from Islamic State.

“We have no communication with them, as land lines and mobile lines are being cut off,” said Bishop Philip Barakat, an Episcopal vicar in Homs city, the capital of Homs province.

Forget the hair and the ranting. We need to examine what Trump’s actually saying.

Offering the politically disenchanted a doorway to a utopian Neverland, Donald Trump can rant, joke, and flip-flop to his heart’s content. All he needs to do is speak with more confidence than his opponents.

But even if they like his personality, Mr. Trump’s supporters should examine his policy positions more closely — in particular, his foreign-policy positions. Because they might not like what a Trump presidency would mean. Were a President Trump to do what candidate Trump says he would do, two things would almost certainly occur.

First, America would enter a global tariff war with China, Mexico, and any other nation that failed to bow to Trump’s majesty. This would collapse American export markets, kill hundreds of thousands of jobs, and lead to far higher costs for the basic goods American families buy every day.

There were some low moments during the debates yesterday, both from the candidates (I often want to ask Rick Perry the question that Jules Winnfield asks that poor idiot in Pulp Fiction right before things go bad: “English . . . do you speak it?”) and from the moderators, too (“So, Dr. Carson, you’re black . . . ”). But the lowest moment was the big cheer Donald Trump got for his Rosie O’Donnell line and for his follow-up denunciation of political correctness.

That was a low moment for two reasons. First, it was a lie, albeit a lie that may have been offered in jest: Trump’s ungallant behavior hardly has been restricted to O’Donnell. Second, political correctness is in this case a dodge: The complaint isn’t that Trump violated some rarefied code of conduct dreamed up this morning by the dean of students. As Megyn Kelly reminded him: “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’ . . . You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees.” If you think that saying that sort of thing is merely a violation of political correctness and effete coastal liberal etiquette, try it on some dry-land cotton farmer’s wife or daughter and see if you live to boast of your free-spiritedness.

The Iran Deal Just Got Even Worse
The sanctions regime President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry vowed to step up has already collapsed. The mullahs are already scooping up billions in unfrozen assets and new commerce, and they haven’t even gotten the big payday yet.

Obama’s promises of “anytime, anywhere” inspections have melted away as Tehran denies access and the president accepts their comical offer to provide their own nuclear-site samples for examination. Senator John Barasso (R., Wyo.), a medical doctor, drew the apt analogy: It’s like letting a suspect NFL player provide what he says is his own urine sample and then pronouncing him PED-free.#

And now even the Potemkin verification system has become an embarrassing sham, with Iran first refusing to allow physical investigations, then declining perusal of documentation describing past nuclear work, and now rejecting interviews of relevant witnesses.

It’s almost a month since the Iran nuclear talks brought forth the July 14th deal in Vienna — a.k.a. the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Since then a multitude of articles and congressional hearings have exposed major fatal flaws in this deal. Yet, so bad is this agreement that you can flip almost randomly to any page, and find yet more problems. It’s a multi-dimensional catastrophe. The more you examine it, the worse it gets.

For instance, you probably haven’t heard much about Annex III, Section D, which carries the benign-sounding heading of “Nuclear Safety, Safeguards and Security,” and elaborates in item 8 on how America and its partners will tutor Iran in “nuclear safety culture and best practices.” Why, what could be wrong with that?

Marco Rubio presents a strong and stirring vision of a greater America than we’ve ever seen, for more people than ever.

Marco Rubio in person is like his book, America Dreams – inspiring, passionate, engaging, personal and a public policy proposal firehose. He brought all of that to RedState Gathering in Atlanta Friday, and the crowd of conservatives responded enthusiastically.

Early in his remarks, he grabbed the third-rail and talked about reforms to Social Security that would not only preserve it for future generations (including his own) without affecting current retirees (like his Mom), but would also lead to an economic revival by relieving the crushing weight of debt from our economy.

His youth, he says, will set him off from Hillary Clinton, but his forward-looking, innovative, technology-embracing attitude may do so even more. The best jobs of the 21st century will be here in America if we break the higher-education monopoly, refocus on vocational education, and realize that though we’ll be ordering our McDonald’s meals from a touchscreen, the people who make those touchscreens will make a lot more money.

Over the last 7 years of the Obama era, Barack Obama and his team have regularly responded to serious questions with flippant responses. Don’t Americans deserve better than the flippancy Obama and his top officials dish out to us?

The below compendium is just a sample (or a smidgen in Obama terminology).

When asked why his trillion-dollar stimulus produced far fewer “shovel ready jobs” than he promised to urgently promote its passage, Barack Obama laughed off the issue: “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” The laughter will be little solace for taxpayers on the hook to pay back the debt that financed that union-enriching boondoggle.

When asked about the risk of terrorism arising from his abandoning Iraq, he flippantly dismissed these concerns by comparing the resurgent Al Qaeda to a “Jayvee team” that “puts on Lakers uniforms… that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” His flippancy — his lack of concern and interest in dealing with Islamic terrorism — has led to the rise of what has become the richest terror group in the world.

The long U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt is likely drawing to a close. What once worked to assure stability in the region and keep the oil flowing will not work in the face of Iranian nuclear capability, and the administration is disinclined to rethink a workable strategy. The United States will likely reengage, but only when the resulting chaos spreads to our shores, as it surely will.

How different it was twenty-five years ago this month, when President Bush (41) said Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait “would not stand.” American and allied forces rushed to the battlefield despite concerns about Iraq’s unconventional weapons — primarily poison gas, which had already been used against the Kurds in the north. But Israel provided a counter-threat to Saddam, letting him know that if Israel were threatened with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons it would join the war. It was a threat Saddam took seriously, as his nuclear program at Osirak had been destroyed by Israel a decade earlier.

We prisoners know the blasts were necessary to end the war. No Japanese soldier or civilian was preparing to surrender in August 1945.

What does it mean to fight to the end? In April 1942, it meant fighting until my tank battalion and I were forced to surrender at the Battle of Bataan. For everything else that followed I only fought to survive: the Bataan Death March, brutal transport aboard a “hell ship” to Japan, and slave labor in a Mitsui coal mine.
For my imperial Japanese enemy, in contrast, to fight to the end meant to give his life in a presumably noble and glorious fashion. He would die for the emperor—who ruled by divine right—confident that he would be enshrined with his ancestors for his efforts in defense of a mythic civilization. There could be no surrender and no negotiated peace. Death itself was beautiful, and death alone was honorable.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, upended this belief. The bombs showed the Japanese the devastating and ultimately inglorious outcome of their fight. The bombs offered no true opportunity for confrontation and no chance of death with honor; they promised only obliteration.

A Very Model Moral Panic. Preposterous charges against an L.A. preschool set off a wave of copycat cases—with dire consequences.
In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine testified on behalf of an elementary-school teacher who had been accused of being a pedophile. A child had told his mother that the teacher had taught them about “boobies and dicks” and had drawn a picture on the blackboard that sounded suspiciously to the mother like an image of an ejaculating penis. The police had raced to the classroom and confiscated the damning evidence: several copies of “Moby-Dick.” What the teacher had drawn was a whale and its spout.

Looking back, we can see that the only boobies involved in this case were the adults. But whenever we are in the midst of a moral panic, as we were in the 1980s, we feel that our alarm is reasonable and that punitive solutions are appropriate. Dicks? That child knew the word “dicks”? Cancel sex ed! Run that teacher out of town!

Waves of sexual hysteria sweep across our nation with depressing regularity. Each one seems to come out of thin air, wreaks enormous havoc, subsides and is forgotten. Each is regarded as an anomaly. I have no doubt that 30 years after the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, parents tried to teach their children about the Un-Puritan Activities Committee’s interrogations that led to the executions of 20 people, the imprisonment of 150 others, and accusations against an additional 200. “George, sit down here so I can tell you how Giles Corey was pressed to death by these crazy people,” I can hear a parent say. “Aw, Ma,” young George probably replied, “that was so 17th century.”