RUTHFULLY YOURS

— Kim R. Holmes is a former assistant secretary of state for international organizational affairs. His views are his alone and do not reflect the views of any organization.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss foreign-policy issues with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Beforehand, I didn’t know him personally and so didn’t know what to expect. Well, here is what I found: Walker has the potential to be a great foreign-policy president. Here’s why.

The first thing I learned is that Scott Walker is eager to talk about foreign policy. He relishes discussing the ins and outs of an issue and shows a curiosity that frankly I wish many of our senators had. He engages precisely at the level a president should, asking tough questions about the strategic importance of an issue, and his keenest interest is in finding how to improve America’s position in the world. There isn’t an apologize-for-America bone in his body.

Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe and his appointees to the Virginia State Board of Elections seem determined to ensure that felons and non-citizens can illegally register and vote in elections without getting caught.

In April 2015, Governor McAuliffe vetoed House Bill 1315, which would have required jury commissioners to retain information from individuals not qualified to serve as jurors for reasons that would also disqualify them from voting, such as

not being a citizen of the United States
no longer being a resident of the Commonwealth
being a resident of another county or city in the Commonwealth
having been convicted of a felony and having not provided evidence that their right to vote has been restored, or
having been adjudicated incapacitated.

The Obama administration is expected to announce today new restrictions on U.S. power plants that are, in the words of the New York Times, “the strongest action ever taken in the United States to combat climate change.” In reality, the new regulatory regime is no such thing, a fact that ought to inform the years-long political and legal fight that the president’s unilateral rulemaking inevitably will provoke.

The president will instruct U.S. power plants to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by just under one-third (32 percent). How that is to be achieved and at what cost is . . . not Barack Obama’s problem. States will have until 2018 — comfortably remote from any presidential election — to submit their plans, and until 2030 to implement them.

Dana Point, Calif. – Senator Ted Cruz on Sunday got perhaps the most enthusiastic applause of any Republican presidential candidate to appear before the 450 donors drawn to Southern California for the Koch brothers’ summer conference with a point-blank denial of global warming.

Politico’s Mike Allen moderated a question-and-answer session with the Texas senator, who said of global warming simply, “The data and facts don’t support it.”

The Texas senator, who dominated his time on stage, leaning into Allen and at one point waving off a question from the moderator, went on to deliver a full-throated denial of global warming and a scathing evisceration of its proponents. The riff showcased Cruz in all of his rhetorical glory – relentless, uncompromising, and witty, talking about an issue on which many Republicans have softened. Cruz at times grate on conservatives, but the off-the-cuff riff was something his supporters will surely point to as a high-point of the campaign season and a reason why this is their guy.

Allen asked Cruz if he is concerned by a Boston Globe story published on Saturday that suggests Republicans will pay a price in 2016 for their skepticism about climate change. Cruz’s response? “Not remotely.”

General Petraeus misused classified info — and look at what happened to him.
Hillary Clinton is running two races: one for president and one to keep information about her private e-mail server and activities as secretary of state from public view as long as possible, preferably until she is back in the White House in 2017.

Last week, we learned more about the extent of the Clinton cover-up. Acting on a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, cracked down on the delay tactics exercised in the effort to build a moat around her e-mails. He ordered Clinton and two of her closest aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to “describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.” He also ordered them to confirm that that “they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department.” And if “all such information has not yet been produced,” they are ordered to produce it “forthwith.”

It will be a herculean task to convince enough House and Senate Congressmen and women to vote in enough numbers to defeat Obama’s noxious Iran deal and overcome his threatened veto.

This catastrophic sell out, if it proceeds, will provide the Iranian mullahs with an eventual nuclear arsenal and an immediate $150 billion dollars which will not go to build Iranian hospitals or schools.Instead it will enrich Iran’s terror proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Islamic terrorist movements, which in turn will condemn untold numbers of Jews, Christians, as well as Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and many others to death and destruction.

I wanted to have these two article edits naming the scholar mentioned by Haqqani, which he later identified for me.

“He noted, for example, the 20th century, Oxford-educated Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq for whom the initial Muslim community under Muhammad in seventh-century “Medina was not really a state in the modern sense.”….

In Raziq’s view, Haqqani stated, the “purpose of Islam is piety and not power” and the “whole notion of an Islamic state is flawed.””

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“We can give up the business of saying that this has nothing to do with Islam,” stated Hudson Institute scholar Hassan Haqqani while discussing jihadist violence at Washington, DC’s American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on July 21. Haqqani and AEI’s conference “Islamic Extremism, Reformism, and the War on Terror” examined insightfully radicalism’s literal rootedness in Islam and its reform prospects to a conference room filled with about 80 listeners.

Notwithstanding prevalent “political correctness,” AEI moderator Danielle Pletka stated that the atrocious Islamic State (in Iraq and Syria, or ISIL) “may not be the form of Islam that should be, but it is, in fact, certainly a form of Islam.”

John Kerry giveth and Barack Obama taketh away. After a few days of hearings ‎in U.S. House of Representatives and Senate committees and subcommittees, opponents of the Iran nuclear ‎deal were hoping for an extension of hearings, if for no other reason, than to keep ‎the secretary of state on the hot seat. The more Kerry spoke, the greater were the ‎doubts among wavering Democrats about the agreement. Kerry’s performance ‎combined some of his worst tendencies — a disdain for anyone challenging what he ‎regards as his received wisdom, and an inability to make a case, in this instance for ‎a bad deal that he himself negotiated.

Civilizations normally go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.

It’s easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.

Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.

The barbaric civilization is the simplest of all. It runs on kinship. Pre-rational, it operates on explosions of emotion. It has no concept of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It holds life cheaply and kills casually. It loathes outsiders and has no universal laws. It is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery.

For the ISIS rapists, for the British and European Muslim rapists, the sex act is not a means to celebrate life, but to celebrate death, and the potency of their evil.

On July 29th Jihad Watch ran an interesting article by Ralph Sidway of the Facing Islam blog, “’The Nightmare’ – Europa and the Incubus.” The Gothic painting illustrating his column, by German-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, depicts an incubus sitting atop the limp and helpless body of Europa. The mythical Europa is more notoriously noted for having been carried off by Zeus in the guise of a bull. Sidway dwells in the metaphor that Europe is instead being conquered and ravished by an ugly ogre or incubus – or by Muslims. It has been abducted, as well, and is daily ravished by Islam. He begins:

Sometimes an image — a metaphor — is much more effective at presenting truth than even the most persuasive argument or laying out of facts. ‘The Nightmare’ is such an image.