RUTHFULLY YOURS

LONDON Anne Applebaum writes a biweekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. She is also the Director of the Global Transitions Program at the Legatum Institute in London.

Several times lately — often enough for it to have become a distinct pattern — I’ve found myself part of a heated discussion, somewhere in Europe. Maybe it’s at a dinner or a conference; maybe the topic is Russia, Libya or the economic crisis in Greece. But at some point, someone looks up in wonder. “Isn’t it odd: We haven’t mentioned the United States once!” Yes, everyone agrees, it’s odd! And then the subject changes again.
Few here doubt that American influence in Europe is shrinking, along with American engagement in the world, though the explanations differ. Some date the decline quite precisely, to the Iraq war in 2003 and to the Bush administration that launched it. That was the moment when Europe divided over whether to support the United States; worse, those who did paid a high price afterward. Certainly Tony Blair never quite recovered from his decision to join the invasion, and Britain’s newly reluctant foreign policy is partly a product of the war, too.

Others blame the current administration, with equally good cause. President Obama’s failure to defend his own “red line” in Syria and his admitted lack of strategy against the Islamic State have left many wondering whether he’s interested in the Middle East at all. The same problem exists with regard to Russia, where there is a strange split between NATO military leaders, who are publicly very blunt in their assessment of Russian maneuvers over the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia, as well as in Ukraine, and the strangely sanguine White House. While Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, warns of “revanchist Russia,” Obama lightly dismisses Russia as a weak “regional power” that poses no larger threats.

‘We need to stop the flow of secret, unaccountable money,” Hillary Clinton said Saturday during her vaunted campaign “do over.”

That she said this without a trace of irony is no real surprise. Ever since the release of “Clinton Cash” — which documented the Clintons’ love of secret and unaccountable money — the couple’s reaction has been to pretend the scandal has nothing to do with them.

Appearing on CNN, Bill Clinton claims that the millions the Clintons made from speeches paid for by foreign individuals and entities who had business before Hillary’s State Department were innocent and coincidental.

“[Hillary] was pretty busy those years,” Clinton said. “I never saw her study a list of my contributors, and I had no idea who was doing business before the State Department.”
Bill added: “No one has ever asked me for anything…I never thought about whether there was any overlap.”

Besides, as Bill explained, in a Bloomberg interview last week, “Has anybody proved that we did anything objectionable? No.”
Modal Trigger

Well, there you have it. Everything is on the up-and-up. Americans should just move along.

But they can’t. And they won’t. Not until, that is, Hillary Clinton begins explaining her myriad conflicts of interest in granular detail, especially since there are no e-mails or server to corroborate Bill’s claims of her innocence.

Separated from the throng of Clinton supporters, journalists shuffled forward like livestock through a cattle chute, smiling Hillary volunteers watching their every move.

Blocked by yellow tape, metal barriers, and security officers, reporters could see — but not speak to — the crowds lined up along the shoreline of New York City’s Roosevelt Island for the Democratic frontrunner’s triumphal campaign relaunch. Black SUVs with tinted windows streamed past checkpoints manned by men in suits, while journalists and supporters ran a gauntlet of airport-style security, complete with metal detectors and police bag checks.

At the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the island’s southern tip, journalists were corralled into a press area fenced in by metal barriers on all four sides. Without “special clearance,” one staffer informed a reporter, mingling with the crowd was strictly forbidden.

In America, class resentments center on money.
‘Yes, I am ‘nouveau riche,’ but then, it’s the ‘riche’ that counts, now isn’t it?” So declared Jim Williams in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. And in the American context, that is broadly true: There are at least two senses of the word “class,” and Americans in general care a great deal less about either of them than we do about money. Rich is rich is rich is rich: You can be a rich vulgarian in a line of rich vulgarians (Donald Trump) or a striver from Brooklyn (Jay Z) or a Chicago bus driver who figures out that options traders don’t actually know what they’re doing and makes a truly gigantic pile of money (Joe Ritchie), and in each case Americans will celebrate your success.

Forget that she lies incessantly and stands for virtually nothing that’s discernible other than her own self-interest, Hillary Clinton is one of the most boring public speakers extant. I have heard better speeches at high school, maybe even grammar school, graduations than HRC gave in New York Saturday in the second — or is it the third — debut speech of her campaign.

It was problem after problem, cliché after cliché until you couldn’t listen anymore. Needless to say, there wasn’t a fresh idea. No new solutions to these problems on offer, only generalities. (In case you didn’t know it, she’s for equal pay for women and supports people with disabilities.) This was a generic speech out of the last twenty years. I kept wondering who were these automatons waving their flags in the audience. Maybe they were worried about the high cost of Ambien. Elect Hillary and we won’t need a sleeping pill ever again.

No sooner has Hillary Clinton taken a veiled swipe at Marco Rubio in her humdrum reset speech today, than Rubio and his team are back on YouTube with an attack of their own that makes the Florida senator look far more vigorous (or should I say vig-gah-russ?) than the former secretary of state.

This is good news for Republicans who have long complained that their candidates are sleepy in their responses, if they ever get to them at all. But, as we all know, Rubio likes to speed.

When President Barack Obama made the historic announcement in the White House East Room about the killing of Osama bin Laden, the air was thick with irony. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was there, and her husband’s notorious narcissism and cavalier attitude about governance had allowed bin Laden to escape–in 1998, three years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

In his stunning 2003 book Dereliction of Duty, Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a presidential aide and carrier of the “nuclear football,” describes President Clinton’s gross irresponsibility toward national security. Patterson tells how, in the fall of 1998, the watch officer in the White House Situation Room notified the president’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, that they had located bin Laden and had “a two-hour window to strike.”

Here is Patterson’s chilling account:

In a classic Friday-afternoon document dump, a CIA memo written by then-agency head George Tenet in 2005 has been released, incriminating the Bill Clinton administration in crippling anti-terror efforts. Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times writes:

The Clinton administration had bankrupted the intelligence community and refused to let the CIA prioritize anti-terrorism over other major priorities in the late 1990s, leaving the agency stretched too thin in the days ahead of the 2001 terrorist attacks, former Director George J. Tenet said in a 2005 document declassified Friday.

Mr. Tenet, who was head of the agency at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks and has taken severe criticism for not anticipating and heading them off, said in the document that he took the threat of Osama bin Laden very seriously, and put major effort into trying to penetrate al-Qaeda, beginning as far back as 1998.

Clearly, Tenet is covering his posterior. But:

“Even though senior policy makers were intimately familiar with the threat posed by terrorism, particularly those in the previous administration who had responded to major attacks, they never provided us the luxury of either downgrading other high priority requirements we were expected to perform against, or the resource base to build counterterrorism programs with the consistency that we needed before September 11,” Mr. Tenet wrote.

Toward the end of my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc), there’s a section called “Last Laughs” – because in the future there will be no jokes. I’m glad to see the bigshots are catching up to it. From The Hollywood Reporter:

Jerry Seinfeld: Political Correctness Will Kill Comedy

Not sure about his tense there. It’s already killed off a not insignificant chunk of it. Mr Seinfeld’s generation can still raise a titter at carefully selected comedic material, but among the pajama boys and safe-space snowflakes jokes are micro-aggressions and punchlines need trigger warnings:

“I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC,'” said Seinfeld.

He continued, “I’ll give you an example: My daughter’s 14. My wife says to her, ‘Well, you know, in the next couple years, I think maybe you’re going to want to be hanging around the city more on the weekends, so you can see boys.’ You know what my daughter says? She says, ‘That’s sexist.'”

Countering the ‘shrinking Palestine Maps’ scam
One of the most pernicious and common scams propagated by anti-Israeli activists is the so-called ‘shrinking maps’ of Palestine (see bottom of this article). As with most anti-Israel propaganda (like “Israelis are baby-killers” whereas in fact Israel does everything to avoid any civilian casualties while Palestinians specifically target young children; and “Israel is an apartheid state” whereas Israel is the only country in the Middle East to provide full rights for all religious groups while the Palestinian Authority allows no Jews at all) the claims are a perfect inversion of reality.

In 2010 I decided that the best way to counter these maps was to show the following alternative (I could not find anything like this on the web so I developed it myself – there have been copies since). The map demonstrates the extent to which it is Israel that has been shrinking since 1973, in its desperate but increasingly futile hope to trade ‘land for peace’: