RUTHFULLY YOURS

Introduction

President Obama seems anxious to shore up his legacy in several disparate areas: concluding a nuclear deal with Iran; reaching an international climate accord in Paris in December 2015; phasing out fossil fuels for electric generation in favor of wind and solar; and also: shoring up Obamacare before the inevitable cost explosion; irreversibly changing the ethnic and moral make-up of the US – and of the economy; destroying the middle class and making a larger fraction dependent on government hand-outs. Obviously, many books can be written on these topics and on others, like immigration, race relations, education, gun control, and the generally increasing involvement of the feds in state and local affairs.

Here I will comment briefly on the first three topics: Iran, Paris, and Electric power. All three are controversial, with the public and Congress largely opposed to the White House (WH). It may take only one veto over-ride to bring down all of Obama’s initiatives; it depends mainly on coalitions forming among angry Democrat senators. [More on that below.]

Unlike so many terrorists, Osama Bin Laden didn’t take all of his secrets to the grave. The Navy SEALs who hunted him down also brought back from his Abbottabad hideout many files on al Qaeda’s plans as well as its cooperation with Iran. The question is why the public hasn’t been allowed to see them.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Dick Cheney quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Flynn saying there are “letters about Iran’s role, influence and acknowledgment of enabling al Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran as long as al Qaeda did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The former DIA director has also said Congress should seek all bin Laden documents related to Iran because they are “very telling.”

Here’s an example from one file that has been released. In a memo to bin Laden, an al Qaeda operative talks about another who is ready to travel:

“The book’s shabby scholarship is a sad commentary on the state of our universities, and one wonders why Viking saw fit to publish it. Viking has an admirable history of printing some of the best authors of the English language. Pity they spoiled their own narrative with this one.”

The best thing about The Two-State Delusion is its title. Political elites worldwide have clung to the “two state solution” for decades, most recently in the fruitless diplomacy of Secretary of State Kerry in 2013 and 2014. But while Padraig O’Malley is right in saying more of the same will go nowhere, his analysis of the problem stands reality on its head.

O’Malley is a professor at the University of Massachusetts who “has spent his career helping to solve conflicts,” according to the back page blurb. He started with Ireland, moved on to South Africa, and has now landed in Israel. Hopefully, he’ll skip to another conflict quickly. In a world full of bad books about the Arab-Israeli conflict, this one stands out.

The book’s theme is that Palestinian and Jewish narratives are irreconcilable, which is true. The trouble is that O’Malley has his own narrative, which corresponds almost entirely to the Palestinian narrative, even those elements that are patently false. Take, for example, the Palestinian assertion that they have been “the indigenous population in Palestine without interruption for 1,500 years.” O’Malley first presents this as part of the Palestinian narrative, which is fair enough. But later it becomes (repeatedly) absorbed into his own account. Here is O’Malley in his own voice: “Neither the Zionist project nor the state that it created ever recognized the indigenous Palestinians as a distinct people for whom Palestine had been their homeland for 1,500 years.”

This was an interesting panel at the Hudson Institute over the summer concerning Egypt’s fight against ISIS and other Islamists and a possible descent into chaos.

Egypt’s future has recently been called into question by many experts who are asking if this chaotic country can continue to add any value to the region. That very issue was the hot button topic of a recent panel, “The Future of Egypt: A Somalia on the Nile or a Stable, Robust U.S. Ally in the Region?” The event – hosted at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. – was participated in by Center for American Progress Egypt expert Mokhtar Awad, who verbalized his fear that Egypt could become the Middle East’s next crisis.

Awad painted a bleak picture of the complex security situation in Egypt, one that consists of “multiple-threat theaters and multiple-threat actors” who operate for many different reasons in many different places. He and his fellow panelists drew attention to Egypt’s indigenous, Sinai-based jihadist groups that have links to international jihadi organizations. For instance, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis (ABM) reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on Nov. 2, 2014, forming the ISIS Wilayat Sinai (Sinai Province).

A massive rise in immigration next year could trigger a devastating crisis in Britain’s schools, housing and welfare services, according to a secret Government report leaked to The Mail on Sunday.
The document reveals that every Government department has been ordered to draw up multi-million-pound emergency plans after being told public services face catastrophe as a result of the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans pouring into Britain.
Special investigation
• Polish children dumped by parents heading for Britain
It also warns that a ‘step change’ in the level of immigration next year could make things even worse, triggering an angry backlash across the country.
The disclosure comes as The Mail on Sunday reveals that the new wave of immigration is causing as much social strife in Eastern Europe as it is in Britain.
Our investigation found Poles are dumping children in local care homes so they can travel to Britain. Some reportedly killed themselves after being left behind.

Ms. Pulley, a 2000 graduate of West Point, is a former captain in the U.S. Army.

With Capt. Kristen Griest and First Lt. Shaye Haver recently becoming the first female soldiers to complete Army Ranger School, demands for the complete integration of women in the U.S. military are growing. In 2013 then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta officially lifted the ban on women serving in ground-combat roles. On Jan. 1, 2016, all branches of the military must either open all positions to women or request exceptions.

As a former captain and airborne soldier in the Army’s Second Infantry Division Support Command, I say be careful what you wish for. Overturning a long-standing tradition in a martial organization like the U.S. military will undoubtedly have unintended consequences. I am particularly concerned with demands that the Army permit women to join its Infantry Branch.

Don’t misunderstand, I was thrilled when Capt. Griest and First Lt. Haver earned their Ranger tabs. I was especially pleased when Army cadre and peers assured me that the Ranger School’s high standards were maintained. As a woman, I support equal rights to a sensible point. At the same time, women must acknowledge that equality does not mean selective equality. I wish it did. I want to see those hard-charging, superwomen sisters of mine pursue every career opportunity the military offers men. No doubt they can do it—and do it well. But Ranger School for these two exceptional individuals is not the same as allowing women to serve in the infantry.

Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of Britain’s Labour Party is being cheered on the right as a gift—as close as you get in politics to a guarantee that your side will win an election that’s still five years out. Mr. Corbyn leans so far left that he might not be able to assemble a parliamentary shadow cabinet, never mind a governing majority.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the political ascent of a man who admires Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and keeps company with Holocaust deniers is another milepost in Britain’s long decline amid a broader unraveling in the West.

The phrase “Only a Clinton” entered our lexicon in the nineties. Ever since then the unsinkable Clintons have continued spewing outrageous lies and ridiculous ploys that only a Clinton could get away with.

Hillary Clinton tried campaigning for the White House without actually taking positions on anything. Iran was a particularly touchy subject because the Democratic Party has two constituencies that are sharply divided on the issue. Jewish voters oppose the deal while left-wing voters back it.

Hillary Clinton couldn’t pander to both at the same time. Or could she?

Hillary Clinton endorsed the deal while in true “Only a Clinton” style running against it. She endorsed the deal using militant rhetoric that threatened Iran with war. Her message is that she endorses a deal that gives Iran near zero breakout time to the bomb and lets it self-inspect and fund terrorists, but that she’ll be the toughest terror deal supporter you ever saw. No one will be tougher on that deal than her.

Only a Clinton.

This isn’t the first time that Hillary Clinton pulled that particular scam. Trying to get Americans to forget about her infamous “Reset Button” photo, she compared Putin to Hitler. (But if Putin was Hitler, that would have made her Neville Chamberlain or, considering her politics, Vyacheslav Molotov.) It was over the top and even the media took her to task for it.

Hillary Clinton has vowed to crack down on for-profit colleges. Very interesting. We wonder if she or her aides have looked at the new “college scorecard” that the Obama Administration released on the weekend.

The online tool, which provides data on college costs, graduation rates, average graduate debt and future earnings, is intended to help would-be students make more informed decisions. Who knows if kids will be enlightened, but the scorecard is a better alternative to the ratings plan that the White House scrapped over the summer to tie student aid to the government’s value judgments.

A major political goal of the scorecard is to steer students away from for-profit colleges, which educate a disproportionate share of low-income and non-traditional students like single parents. As a result, for-profit schools don’t perform as well as nonprofit and public colleges on measures like debt and graduation rates on the Obama scorecard.

Some readers will remember the disputes during the last decade when the journalists were hauled before the farcical “Human Rights Commissions” of Canada and asked to explain why they had ever said anything that the state commissars did not agree with. Best of all is that the members of the Commission do not have to wait for anybody to complain to them before they act.

The Commission is allowed to head out all by itself and search for things that are offensive. One must wonder whether it may just – wholly unforeseeably – be a government department which continuously finds work to justify its existence?

The Tribunal is planning to keep a publicly available list of people found guilty of “hate speech” — like a sex-offender database. Presumably this means that members of the public can check that they are not living in the proximity of anybody who is likely to express him-or-herself with words.