RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is a crisis that came and went in a wink within twenty-four hours. If you blinked, you missed it.

On July 19th Daniel Greenfield on FrontPage ran a story about Amazon wanting an author to remove his book from its sales platform, with its cover featuring the Confederate battle flag, “I never thought any of my books would be on the banned book list.” Michael Dreese has written several books about the Civil War, and especially about the Battle of Gettysburg, apparently from both sides of that watershed conflict. The book, This Flag Never Goes Down: 40 Stories of Confederate Battle Flags and Color-Bearers at Gettysburg, published by Thomas Publications in 2004, has been up on the Amazon platform for at least eleven years. It has an Amazon best-seller ranking, as of this writing, of 17,006.

Now, I have very, very few bones to pick with Daniel Greenfield. In this instance, I think he erred on the side of enthusiasm in his article. It looked like “censorship.” He jumped the gun. He is probably about as ambivalent about the Confederate battle flag as I am about it and also the Roman Eagle carried by Rome’s armies. They’re old symbols and their time and governments are long past. He wrote:

The rally taking place in New York City’s Times Square on Wednesday, July 22, is being called ‘the Civil Rights fight for American Jewry,’ by at least one of the organizers.

Thousands are expected to show up to hear the more than a dozen headliners explain in detail why the nuclear program deal agreed to by the P5+1, led by the U.S. negotiators, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is a dangerously bad one that must be stopped. Buses are bringing people in from Philadelphia and Delaware, and people from as far away as Chicago have committed to coming.
The NYC rally to stop the Iran deal is still necessary despite the UN Security Council vote because American sanctions can still do severe damage to a transgressing Iran.

It was a bomb that switched off all the colors and turned everything the gray dust of black and white. It was the fire that came from the darkest nightmares of Shiva the destroyer. It was the end of the gods; it was death after death.

It was more than the 100,000 people killed by a single explosion, more than the geometric science of annihilation. Nothing survived. All living things but also buildings, concrete, and steel were turned into deadly powder that could poison with mortal radiation anything or anybody for years.

Even though the Corker-Cardin bill (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act) gives Congress 60 days to review the new nuclear agreement with Iran, the U.N. Security Council approved the agreement this morning by passing a U.S.-drafted resolution.

I believe this was a tactical error by the Obama administration which will significantly increase congressional opposition to the Iran deal.

Obama officials have tried to downplay the significance of the Security Council vote by claiming the Iran agreement won’t be implemented for 90 days, which will give Congress 60 days to review it.

Congress will hold the first of several hearings on Obama’s Iran deal this Thursday, with some Democrats likely to join unified Republicans in opposing the disaster negotiated in Vienna. Getting the votes to send a disapproval to Obama’s desk should be doable. The two-thirds majority needed to override a certain Obama veto is harder to obtain, but not impossible.

GOP aspirants to the presidency have all expressed opposition to the deal. When he joined the race last Monday, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker promised to end the appeasement scheme with Tehran on “day one” of his administration if elected. Other candidates have promised to kill the accommodation early in their tenure if elected, except for one: Jeb Bush.

Speaking on Friday in what was seen as a pointed jab at Walker specifically, Jeb vowed not to signal the end of a deal at the outset of his notional presidency. His excuse: the lack of a fully emplaced national-security team at that time, whose confirmation would take the better part of a year. In remarks similar to his scolding of the party on amnesty and Common Core, Jeb told a Nevada audience: “If you’re running for president, I think it’s important to be mature and thoughtful about this.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton shed her usual sunny demeanor last week and snarled at Republicans in general and one presidential candidate in particular.

“Republican governors like Scott Walker have made their names stomping on workers’ rights, and practically all Republican candidates would do the same as president,” Clinton growled at Manhattan’s New School. “I will fight back against these mean-spirited, misguided attacks. Evidence shows that the decline of unions may be responsible for a third of the increase of inequality among men. So, if we want to get serious about raising income, we have to get serious about supporting union workers.”

Later that day, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka snapped, “Scott Walker is a national disgrace.”

If there’s one thing workers value, it’s work. And on this score, Wisconsin’s Republican governor has delivered.

In the immediate aftermath of Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez’s killing of four Marines and wounding of at least three other people, there was a noticeable effort to portray the jihadist as an all-American boy from small-town Tennessee. With just a bit of digging, however, a different picture is emerging. The New York Times reported Friday morning that Abdulazeez had spent about seven months in Jordan last year.

As is their wont in cases where Muslims kill Americans, investigators hastened to point out that overseas stays in a region rife with Islamic radicalism are not necessarily suggestive of terror ties . . . even if the traveler, on his stateside return, promptly shoots up military installations while the Islamic State and al-Qaeda urge Muslims to shoot up military installations.

Abdulazeez was technically a Jordanian national when his parents brought him to the United States from Kuwait as an infant in 1990. Sometime during his childhood, he became a naturalized American citizen. Yet the family appears to self-identify as Palestinian, a conclusion I’ll explain in due course.

Rick Perry is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He served as governor of Texas from December 2000 to January 2015. He is currently running for president.

Being president of the United States is serious business, not a reality TV show.

This is especially true for the next president, who will have a big job ahead after the failures of the Obama administration. Our challenges are too complex — and the future of our country too important — to let egos, inflated rhetoric, and emotion take the place of thoughtful discussion.

I made the case recently for why GOP policies are the best to create opportunity across the country for families of all backgrounds. I’ve held up my home state’s reforms in economic, education, and sentencing policies as examples of conservative governance that have made life better for minorities in Texas compared with other places around the country. And I’ve been honest about our party’s shortcomings — including my own — in engaging all Americans in our conversations about the future of this nation.

About 2.5 million people have immigrated to the United States illegally since President Obama took office, 790,000 of them in the last two-and-a-half years, according to a new analysis of immigration and census data.

The data marks an improvement over illegal immigration rates from 2000 to 2006, when 500,000 to 600,000 people entered the country illegally each year. But it nevertheless shows just how far the country still is from stemming the tide of illegal immigrants, according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which conducted the new analysis.

“While the level of new illegal immigration is lower than a decade ago, the enormous ongoing scale of illegal immigration is a clear indication that the United States has not come close to controlling it,” CIS says. “The evidence indicates that, in the last few years, about 400,000 new illegal immigrants snuck into the country or overstayed a temporary visa each year.”

A generous person might say that this is unimportant — that in Iran, chanting “Death to America” is like throat-clearing.

Surely only an uncharitable person would wonder why Iran’s rulers are buying the technology they would need to repel any attack on their nuclear project at the same time as they are promising the Americans that they are not developing nuclear weaponry.

What exactly is it that the Obama administration thinks has changed about the leadership of Iran? Of all the questions which remain unanswered in the wake of the P5+1 deal with Iran, this one is perhaps the most unanswered of all.

There must, after all, be something that a Western leader sees when an attempt is made to “normalize” relations with a rogue regime — what Richard Nixon saw in the Chinese Communist Party that persuaded him that an unfreezing of relations was possible, or what Margaret Thatcher saw in the eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev, which persuaded her that here was a counterpart who could finally be trusted.