RUTHFULLY YOURS

Commentators are probably right in assessing that Brianna Keilar’s CNN interview with Hillary Clinton was not quite the love-in that many of us anticipated. (See Jim Geraghty’s review of the Clinton interview, here.) Still, you have to mourn the media’s lack of self-respect: as Jim pointed out in Wednesday’s Morning Jolt, Mrs. Clinton blatantly lied when she claimed, “I’ve never had a subpoena” from a congressional committee regarding Benghazi. There was nothing subtle about it. Clinton was totally banking on CNN’s inclination to let her slide.

Well, they don’t call it the Clinton News Network for nothing. It is the network of Candy Crowley, who in the middle of a presidential candidates’ debate couldn’t restrain herself from inappropriately challenging – and misleadingly correcting – Mitt Romney’s remarks about Benghazi. But somehow, when Benghazi came up in a one-on-one media interview setting, CNN couldn’t bring itself to call Mrs. Clinton on an obvious lie.

It’s not supposed to be an air superiority fighter. So why are the Air Force and the Navy pretending it will be?The jet is incapable of defending itself or American troops on the ground.

America’s military is being redefined but not by changes in strategy or evolutions of the threats we face. The redefinition is the unplanned result of budgetary constraints and bad choices of weapon systems we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to buy.

The two effects of this redefinition combine to make their sum greater than their parts. First, there are missions our forces are in the process of abandoning because their shrinking size doesn’t allow performance of them. Second, the ability to perform essential missions is being dangerously abandoned in the design of the most expensive weapons we are buying.

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For example, the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (the LCS, known in defense circles as the “little crappy ship”) is supposed to operate in shallow coastal waters. But as the Defense Department’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation said, it’s so lightly armed and armored it won’t survive in combat. Nevertheless, the little crappy ship is still being bought at a cost of about $475 million each.

Years before the killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco, sanctuary cities were a hot issue in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign. And as it happened, the three top figures in today’s Democratic party — Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton — were all running for president and were all grilled, in a single debate, about their stands on the question.

Only one — Biden — said he would not allow cities to defy federal immigration law. Obama sidestepped the question but managed to leave the clear impression he would allow sanctuary cities to continue. And Clinton made clear she would leave sanctuary cities untouched.

Australia’s Minister for Communications – Malcolm Turnbull – has sought to play down the threat Islamic State poses to world peace and security with these few throwaway unsubstantiated sentences during an address to the Sydney Institute on 7 July:

“… Da’esh is not Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan or Stalin’s Russia. Its leaders dream that they, like the Arab armies of the 7th and 8th century, will sweep across the Middle East into Europe itself.

They predict that before long they will be stabling their horses in the Vatican.

We should be careful not to say or do things which can be seen to add credibility to those delusions.”

Turnbull used the term “Daesh” – instead of Islamic State – on 16 occasions during his address.

Hillary Clinton has run a carefully stage-managed campaign so far in which she has repeatedly met with pre-selected crowds and avoided answering questions from the press. In the wake of her email scandal, several polls have shown that voters don’t believe she is an honest person, even if many are still willing to vote for her.

So it was a big deal this week when candidate Clinton gave her first big national televised one-on-one to CNN. Some have focused on the fact that she “played the victim,” blaming political opponents for many of her self-created problems. But more fundamentally, here are three falsehoods she told in the interview:

“I didn’t have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages”

Obama may have forgotten about “war with Islam,” but war with Islam has not forgotten about him.

President Obama recently gave a speech at the Pentagon about our efforts against ISIS that confirmed he has little awareness of the real world our enemies inhabit. The talk reprised the usual received wisdom and unchallenged orthodoxy that comprise most of the foreign policy establishment’s ideas about Islamic jihadism and how we should fight it. Consider the following particularly egregious examples:

Ideologies are not defeated with guns; they’re defeated by better ideas–– a more attractive and more compelling vision.

Muslim extremists and jihadists pretend to be asylum seekers and apply for asylum in Europe, according to reports from intelligence and security services since the mid-1990s. The then Dutch Domestic Security Service BVD (now the AIVD) reported in May 1998 that radical Muslims from Tunisian, Egyptian and Algerian terrorist organizations had applied for asylum in the Netherlands. “These asylum seekers can count on the support of local sympathizers.” And in April 2001 the BVD/AIVD warned of “Islamic war veterans” posing as people who “are looking for asylum or illegal migrants who seek refuge in Western countries who will continue the fight or support it.”

In March 1996 a conference about fighting terrorism took place in the Egyptian Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. The Egyptian government was worried about radical Muslims who had been granted asylum in England. Some of them were involved in the preparation of terror attacks. The then British Prime Minister John Major declared shortly after the conference that he would make the rules for granting asylum stricter, but nothing was done.

Only the final deadline will be deadly.

“We are certainly not going to sit at the negotiating table forever,” John Kerry said. That was last year around the time of the final deadline which had been extended from July 2014.

“New ideas surfaced” in the final days, he claimed and “we would be fools to walk away”. That’s also the theme of every sucker caught in a rigged card game, MLM scheme and Nigerian prince letter scam.

Smart people walk away after getting cheated. Only fools stay.

The Obama administration has trapped America. It is now ever clearer that current negotiations will not achieve a reliable, verifiable halt to Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. Absent such terms, a non-nuclear Middle East rests on Iran’s “good faith” and on Iran’s neighbors’ faith in her — both thin reeds. No magic rescue looms. Very hard choices and dark fates may await.

What if the Obama administration suddenly switched its approach on negotiations and sanctions? Sadly, it is almost certainly too late to force Iran to abandon its long-coveted goal. Three obstacles bar an effective reversal: Iran is so close it can taste nuclear-weapon status; the world is no longer willing to credit and follow President Obama’s “red lines”; and any new sanctions would take months to enact and years to bite.

If you are a legislator and the words “tearful plea” find themselves attached to your name in the headlines, you are doing it wrong.

Jenny Horne is a Republican representative in the South Carolina state house who on Thursday gave a weepy speech in which she implored her colleagues to vote to take down the Confederate battle flag, which became a focal point of sustained criticism right around the time the state started electing Republican governors instead of the Democrats who hoisted that flag in the first place.

Her sobbing theatrics constitute an excellent example of what is wrong with American governance, as does the subject of her incontinence, for that matter. There is the usual sentimental personalization of the issue — Horne demanding that her fellow legislators vote her way or insult “the widow of Senator Pinckney and his two young daughters” — and the second-rate thespianism: “I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to” — raising her voice to a shriek —“do something meaningful.”