RUTHFULLY YOURS

Demonstrating her profile in cowardice, Hillary Clinton waited to explain in detail her support for President Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran until it no longer mattered politically what she said. She held back until Obama had secured enough support from Democrats to sustain a veto of a resolution of disapproval of the deal and possibly enough votes in the Senate to filibuster the resolution to death. “By now, the outcome of the deal in Congress is no longer in much doubt,” Hillary declared in her remarks at the Brookings Institution on September 9th.

A real leader aspiring to be president and commander-in-chief should have weighed in with her opinion while “the outcome of the deal” was still up in the air. But that’s not the way the presumed front runner for her party’s presidential nomination operates. Everything she does is calculated to enhance her own image. To make up for her procrastination in explaining why she endorsed the deal and how she would implement it as president, Hillary used her speech to pose as a tough commander-in-chief should Iran dare to test her.

“I support this deal. I support it as part of a larger strategy towards Iran,” Clinton said. “We have to say ‘Yes – and.’ ‘Yes, and we will enforce it with vigor and vigilance.'”

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.

Memories of the day, twenty-two years ago, when the Oslo Accords were signed—and of the price Israel paid for that “terrible mistake.”

As happens every year at this time, I can’t help dwelling on the events of the day, twenty-two years ago, when the Oslo Accords were signed by Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of the state of Israel, and the PLO chieftain Yasir Arafat, thereafter to be known as president of the new Palestinian Authority. This year, my memories of September 13, 1993 have been triggered by a passage in Ally, Michael Oren’s recently published account of his term as Israel’s ambassador to the United States between 2009 and 2013.

The most important parts of Oren’s book recount his dealings—fraught, frequently contentious, even abusive—with the Obama administration and the American president. That Oren is a professional historian and trustworthy witness only underlines the significance of what he reveals about this agonizing period in America-Israel relations. But along the way he also tells his own personal story: the story of how an American Jewish boy fulfilled his adolescent dream of moving to Israel and entering a life of service to his people.

That there is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions in refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous African nations for Europe cannot be denied. That the causes of these flights are an insurgent, ISIS-run Islamic Caliphate that now controls territory In Syria and Iraq larger than Great Britain, ruthless dictators like Bashar al Assad in Syria and Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Sudan, and Islamic terrorism throughout the region is also undeniable. And we know that Islamic terrorist organizations will not let this crisis go to waste. They will insert terrorists and martyrs among the fleeing refugees, thereby increasing risks to the West.

The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) have said there were 14.4 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2014, a 25% increase from 2013. Almost all have come from the Middle East and Africa, chased out by fear, famine and pestilence. Additionally, the number of internally displaced persons is put at 38.2 million. The situation has worsened in 2015.

The photograph of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach near the town of Bodrum this past week tore at the heart strings of those in the West. It brought a personal element to one of the greatest human tragedies in recent times. This boy, with his Velcro sneakers and red shirt, could have been our son or grandson. In fact he was Syrian, trying to reach Europe when the boat he was on capsized, drowning him, his five-year-old brother and his mother. His father, Abdullah, alone of the family survived. But will that knowledge effect they way we treat the causes of this migration from Hell? Will we finally admit that those being tortured, killed and chased from their homes are not a consequence of “violent extremism,” but are victims of Islamic terrorism? Will we reconsider the role we have played in abetting this horror?

It’s time to give preference to immigrants who are unlikely to use welfare programs.
Two new reports from the Center for Immigration Studies show very high rates of welfare use by immigrants. The first, released last week, looked at all immigrant households, legal and illegal, and found that 51 percent accessed one or more welfare programs.

This week we released a second report, looking at the same data but separating out legal and illegal immigrants. While we found that illegal-immigrant households make significant use of welfare, here I want to focus on the far bigger problem of legal immigrants’ welfare use. Three-quarters of all immigrant households using welfare are headed by legal immigrants. Legal immigration is a discretionary policy that is supposed to benefit the country; we can allow in or keep out anyone we want. Yet our current legal-immigration system has produced a flow of immigrants in which a large share cannot support themselves or their children.

To study immigrant welfare use, we used the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. Like other researchers, we identified legal and illegal immigrants based on various questions in the survey. We estimated that 49 percent of households headed by legal immigrants used one or more welfare programs in 2012, compared with 30 percent of households headed by the native-born. Legal immigrants have significantly higher use rates than native-born households overall and for cash programs, food programs, and Medicaid; use of housing programs is about the same as for natives. Among legal-immigrant households with children, the rate of welfare use is an astonishing 72 percent. There is no evidence that these numbers represent fraud; instead, they represent a profound problem with the selection criteria we use to admit legal immigrants.

In Senator Ted Cruz’s excellent Senate floor speech against President Obama’s catastrophic Iran deal, he urged Republican leadership – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) – to reject the claim that Congress must vote on the deal in the next few days. He is absolutely right. By the unambiguous terms of the Corker law, the period for congressional review of the Iran deal has never begun because Obama has failed to provide the entirety of it.

This maneuver has the normally sensible Jen Rubin ballistic. At her Washington Post blog, Jen inveighs that Cruz is guilty of a “singular act of betrayal of anti-Iran forces” that has “incensed” at least one unidentified official of a pro-Israel group, who insists, “If you loathe the deal, the only course of action is to demand an up or down vote on the resolution of disapproval.”

That is ridiculous. If you loathe the deal, as Cruz plainly does (watch his speech if you have any doubt), the objective should be to derail the deal. By contrast, Jen and her sources, including Josh Block of the Israel Project, maintain that the objective is to move as quickly as possible to a vote on the resolution of disapproval – a vote that anti-Iranian forces will lose thanks to the truly loathsome Corker review process that enables Obama’s deal to win with just 34 votes. Obama already has commitments from 42 Democrat

With increasingly implausible excuses, she just keeps digging herself a deeper hole. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s purported state of mind made perfect sense as she became America’s top diplomat on January 21, 2009.

“I was not thinking a lot when I got in,” Clinton reminisced with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday. Reflecting on her early days as secretary of state, Clinton added, “There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. I didn’t really stop and think what kind of e-mail system will there be.”

Naturally, Clinton wanted to pursue urgent diplomatic matters, such as launching a “Russian reset” with Vladimir Putin, managing America’s difficult relationship with Syria’s Bashar Assad (whom she referred to as “a reformer”), and tightening security at U.S. diplomatic outposts, not least the consulate at Benghazi, Libya.

If only Clinton’s behavior matched her sentiments.

Given this pressing business, it would have been logical for Clinton to rely on the State Department’s normal e-mail procedures. She would have received a state.gov e-mail address. Her classified messages would have zipped exclusively along secure government connections and landed on encrypted federal servers. All of this would have been tended to by diplo-geeks under her command, during regular office hours.

In nearly all of his speeches on the campaign trail, Ben Carson sketches the following scene: When a four-year-old boy was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1985, doctors across the city of Atlanta told his parents to prepare for the end. But the couple, armed with what Carson calls “an unshakeable faith,” journeyed with their son from Georgia to Johns Hopkins University’s Pediatric Neurosurgery Center in Baltimore.

There, after troubling scans and an unsuccessful operation, even Carson warned the couple there was little hope for their son. In Carson’s telling, the parents responded firmly, “The Lord is going to heal him, and he’s going to use you to do it.” Carson went on to remove the tumor. He calls the event a “revelation.”

The patient, Christopher Pylant, calls it a “miracle.”

Now 34 years old and living in Lakeland, Fla., Pylant has devoted his life to God. A graduate of Southeastern University with a degree in practical theology, he ministers to Christian congregations and youth groups across Florida. Two years ago, he published a book, along with his late father, Neal Pylant, called A Touch from Heaven: A Little Boy’s Story of Surgery, Heaven and Healing. Carson wrote the foreword.

“I feel very honored that Dr. Carson tells my story,” Pylant says. “I feel blessed to be a part of his life, to have even a small portion of the impact on him that he’s had on me.” Since his surgery 30 years ago, Pylant says the two have maintained a “great rapport.” When he graduated high school, Pylant says he sent Carson a photograph that Carson later kept on the desk in his office.

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) provided air support for a revolt underway in the House today, as he called on Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to stop the Iran deal by refusing to hold a vote on the agreement.

Cruz’s mention of GOP leadership drew boos at Wednesday’s rally against the Iran deal on Capitol Hill, which he helped organize. “Hold on: I come not to bury Caesar but to praise him,” Cruz said, quoting from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “I want to give a path forward. There are two men in Washington, D.C., who can defeat this deal. Their names are Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner.”

Cruz noted that Obama has not provided Congress with side agreements negotiated between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, as required by the legislation that established a process for Congress to review the larger deal. “What that means is that all that has to happen is for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to say, ‘The congressional review period has not started. Under federal law it is illegal for Obama to lift sanctions,’” he said. “Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can stop this deal if they simply enforce . . . federal law.”

Do you remember Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier.

In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else.

Publicity-seeking special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald persuaded a Washington, D.C., jury to find Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators — not the supposed crimes for which he was originally targeted by the media.

Apparently, the very suspicion of improper behavior by high public servants once warranted vigorous legal inquiry — by supposedly independent and autonomous prosecutors.

In the eight-plus years since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.