RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

A professor at the University of Texas at El Paso wrote a manifesto saying that animal-rights activists must rise up and commit “illegal raids” and “sabotage attacks” in order to save the world from a “mass extinction.”

In a 2009 piece for the Animal Liberation Front titled “Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation By Any Means Necessary,” associate professor of philosophy Steven Best says that groups like PETA are just not radical or progressive enough. After all, they work with corporations (boo!) “in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing nonhuman animal holocaust.”

Best explains that capitalism is “destructive,” the state is a “corrupt tool,” and keeping animals enslaved will definitely lead to a “mass extinction” — and so basically it’s just not enough to go vegan or adopt a rescue puppy.

This afternoon, Rick Perry issued a statement and offered a proposal on “sanctuary cities” that instruct their police department to not cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

“In Texas, we have a long history of welcoming immigrants from all over the world, immigrants who have helped make our economy the strongest in the country. It’s not fair that some people try to jump the immigration line by coming across our border illegally. One of the core responsibilities of the federal government is to secure the border. As the recent tragedy in San Francisco has shown us, it’s important for the federal government and local governments to be able to cooperate to apprehend illegal immigrants with criminal histories. San Francisco—and many other cities in America run by left-wing governments—have become ‘sanctuary cities’ that choose to openly defy U.S. immigration law and prevent cooperation with federal authorities. Perversely, the federal government subsidizes this behavior by sending Justice Department funds to cities that intentionally harbor illegal immigrants in their jails. This has to end.”

Kathryn Steinle, the 32-year-old woman shot in San Francisco last week, was killed by a Mexican criminal, but she was a victim of American lawlessness. Her killer should never have been on the streets of San Francisco; Immigration and Customs Enforcement should have deported him (for the sixth time, as it happens).

But they couldn’t, because San Francisco, and many other states, counties, and municipalities across the country, don’t like our immigration laws, so they interfere in the enforcement of them — sometimes with deadly consequences.

San Francisco is a “sanctuary city,” meaning that its local law enforcement often doesn’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities trying to hold or deport aliens. In this case, the city’s sheriff released Steinle’s killer in April without notifying ICE, which had a detainer order out for the man, meaning the city should have held him until ICE took custody of him.

In Hillary Clinton’s CNN interview on Tuesday (which I discussed with Megyn Kelly that evening), Mrs. Clinton rolled out a string of misrepresentations in defense of her improper e-mail practices. She flatly misrepresented that there was no law to govern her conduct. As we have discussed repeatedly in these pages since March, however, federal criminal statutes, federal record regulations, State Department handbooks, and Mrs. Clinton’s own directions to State Department personnel all plainly governed and prohibited her egregious conduct.

A brief recap of how some of those rules apply here lays her “no law” claim to waste:

Mrs. Clinton’s maintenance and exclusive use of a private e-mail address to conduct official business violated State Department regulations (in place since at least 2005), which required that such business be conducted whenever possible over official servers in order to protect the security of sensitive State business. (See 12 Foreign Affairs Manual 544.3(a): “It is the Department’s general policy that normal day-to-day operations be conducted on an authorized AIS, which has the proper level of security control to provide nonrepudiation, authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information.”) For what it’s worth, the White House also claims that Mrs. Clinton violated the Obama administration’s e-mail policy prohibiting private e-mail accounts. Mrs. Clinton herself reportedly cabled State Department employees stationed overseas in 2011 to direct them not to use private e-mails to conduct official business. And she removed at least one ambassador from his post, in part, because of his use of commercial e-mail systems to conduct State business.

Hillary Clinton lies.

This is a widely acknowledged fact among people who pay attention and aren’t on her payroll. Nearly 20 years ago, New York Times columnist William Safire wrote, “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation – is a congenital liar.”
Younger folks probably have little to no memory of the lies Safire had in mind, though some might have heard about Hillary Clinton’s infamously implausible explanation for how she managed to make a 10,000 percent profit in cattle futures simply by reading the Wall Street Journal.

Suffice it to say that she’s been honing her craft for decades. And that’s turning into a problem for her, perhaps her biggest problem.

After ducking the press for months, Clinton sat down for an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar. It was a savvy choice. Keilar covers the Clinton campaign and has every incentive not to offend her famously vindictive sources 16 months before the election.

Obama the triple-loser…

Obama is delusional. He told a group from the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative that he is proudest of three accomplishments: 1) the economic recovery, 2) Obamacare, and 3) his foreign policy.

Narcissism is narcissism. It’s egotism that loves the reflection of its own ego. But when it spills over into the president’s warped perception of reality and the reality of the world depends on his clarity, then he, our president, has endangered the world.

Boasting about accomplishments that he has not achieved is mild psychosis with possible deleterious results. Taking credit for three disasters is a failure to perceive the results of his actions.

We owe so much to the Hellenic culture of the ancients, not least the simple moral lessons of their fables and epics. Somehow, modern Greeks opted to ignore the advice their forebears bequeathed to all humanity. If only they had stopped their ears against the siren song of the spendthrift left.

Greece is an amazing country with history to match. The rest of the world owes Greeks big-time for their bequest of immortal literature, theatre, art, democracy, science, medicine, philosophy, travel, the alphabet. At the risk of sounding like the heroine’s father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the fact is that a great many things in our modern lives have been borrowed or adapted from the Greeks. Hellenic culture is regarded as one of the three foundation stones of Western civilisation, the trifecta being Jewish monotheism, Roman law and Greek democracy. That legacy highlights Greek culture’s contribution to the way we live, think and behave. Another gift is the lessons we ought to draw from Greece’s default on the country’s debt.

In 1970, Israel’s power projection forced a rollback of the Soviet-backed Syrian invasion of pro-US Jordan. The Syrian invasion aimed at toppling the Hashemite regime, and then surging into Saudi Arabia, which would have given the USSR a dramatic triumph, while devastating US economic and military interests.

In the 1967 War, Israel obliterated the Egyptian military, aborting an attempt by the pro-Soviet Egypt to topple the pro-US Arab oil-producing regimes.

In 2015, Israel is the only stable, reliable, predictable, capable, democratic and unconditional ally of the US.