RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jeb Bush is cleaning up a mess he helped create. It’s a distraction from what he’d rather be doing, which is building an “aura of inevitability” around his soon-to-be presidential campaign. He’s spent the past week distancing himself from the speech that one of his foreign policy advisers, former secretary of State James Baker, delivered to the annual meeting of J Street, the liberal fringe group that pushes tough policies against Israel.

Baker’s speech couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Obama administration is in the midst of a campaign to demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, greeted Netanyahu’s election victory with abuse and threats to abandon Israel to the anti-Semites at the U.N., and is hurtling toward a flawed nuclear agreement with Iran. Having a former high-ranking Republican official tell moldy anecdotes and agree that Israel is responsible for the standstill in the peace process only legitimized J Street and suggested a division in GOP ranks when there isn’t any. The speech risked confirming the suspicions of conservatives and Republicans that Bush isn’t really one of them. Two advisers to national political figures appeared at the J Street conference: White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and James Baker. Surely this White House is company the Bush crew doesn’t want to keep.

Harry Reid is retiring. Whatever happens to his Senate seat in 2016, this is good news for Republicans and it is good news for America. Good riddance, Harry. Good bloody riddance. Today we will hear a lot about Reid’s “service” to the Senate and to the American people. Ha! “Service” indeed. The truth of the matter is that Harry Reid is a stone-cold killer who has damaged Washington considerably, who has elevated his own political preferences above the institution he was elected to protect, and who has made worse the partisan rancor that our self-described enlightened class claims to abhor.
The greatest service he can do America is to go away. From a purely Machiavellian perspective, there is a strong case to be made that Reid has been the most effective federal politician in the United States over the last decade or so. In order to protect the president and to advance his movements’ goals, Reid has been willing to diminish the influence, power, and effectiveness of his own institution; in order to thwart his opponents, he has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to play dirty — a capacity that sets him apart even from other harsh players such as Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz, and Dick Durbin; and, in order to satisfy his own need to feel powerful, he has perfected the scorched earth approach that has kept Obama’s presidency on life support since November of 2010 (in my estimation, the Democratic party’s success during the 2013 shutdown was the product of Reid’s obstinacy and resolve, not Obama’s).

From the June 2, 2014, issue of NR Editor’s Note: To mark Harry Reid’s announcement that he plans to retire in 2016, NR is running Kevin D. Williamson’s 2014 cover piece on the Nevada senator.

There are 53 Democrats in the Senate, plus two nominal independents who associate with them, and this clown caucus has chosen, since 2007, to place itself under the malignant leadership of Harry Reid, Washington’s answer to Frankenstein’s monster — stitched together out of the worst bits of Roger Chillingworth, Joe McCarthy, and Droopy — a teacup tyrant who has filled his own pockets to the tune of $10 million while decrying the allegedly baleful influence of the wealthy on politics, a man who has done violence to ethical standards left and right, using campaign funds for personal expenditures and trying to hide payments channeled to his granddaughter, who takes to the Senate floor to make patently false, malicious, and increasingly loopy claims about his political rivals, and who is leading a partisan assault on the Bill of Rights. If America needs a(nother) good reason to hand Democrats their heads come November, then they would do well to study the career of Harry Reid (D., Ritz-Carlton), the Sheriff of Nottingham to Barack Obama’s Prince John.

Harry Reid is in some ways a laughable figure, and one of his few charms is that he is known to make self-deprecating observations about his own unprepossessing nature. His obsession with Koch Industries and the intimations of venality that surround him might be grounds for annoyed eye-rolling if they were not of a piece with his audacious war on the most important of our fundamental constitutional liberties. The cheap histrionics, the gross hypocrisy, the outright lies, misusing campaign funds to tip his staff at the Ritz $3,300 — all of that would be just about bearable, but the shocking fact is that Harry Reid and his Senate Democrats are quietly attempting to repeal the First Amendment. And that elevates Senator Reid’s shenanigans from buffoonery to villainy.

President Obama’s decision to avoid congressional scrutiny of his emerging nuclear deal with Iran led 47 GOP senators to write a letter warning Iran – and the president – that the Senate expects to be consulted. A subsequent bipartisan letter signed by 367 members of the House of Representatives also urged the president to consult Congress. A look at major 20th-century strategic arms accords lends decisive weight to the position taken by Congress.

It is apparent that if President Obama inks a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, it will be in the form of an executive agreement, to escape the inconvenience of submitting it to the Senate as a treaty. Given the two-thirds supermajority treaty consent requirement of Article II of the U.S. Constitution – formal legal ratification occurs only if the president signs – the president’s giveaway deal with Iran, if reached, would face a brick wall in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Islamic State is providing “fresh oxygen” to extremist groups in Muslim-majority Indonesia, says National Police Inspector-General Tito Karnavian. And that is stirring worries that terrorist attacks, which have fallen off in recent years, could make a resurgence if people going to fight with Islamic State, sometimes referred to as ISIS or ISIL, return home with a hardened sense of militancy and sophisticated combat training. Police say 159 Indonesian citizens that they’ve identified have gone abroad to join the terrorist group–but they believe the actual number is far larger.

Security expert Sidney Jones, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, says some of these people are taking their families. “It is a serious problem, and it’s getting bigger,” she said. What impact could ISIS have on Indonesia, and how is the government working to curb the danger? Here’s the short answer.

White House leaves open the possibility of letting the United Nations set a deadline for a Palestinian state

The U.S. exerted new pressure against Israel by leaving open the possibility of letting the United Nations set a deadline for a Palestinian state, in what would be a departure from using American veto power to protect its close Mideast ally.

The prospect of a U.N. Security Council resolution arose Friday when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Paris would introduce a measure setting a deadline for a negotiated settlement of the conflict and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, possibly within two years.

“For Netanyahu to embrace Obama’s policies on Iran and the Palestinian issue would spare him the wrath of the White House, but would distance him from Middle East reality, dooming the Jewish State to destruction.”

Defense, scientific and commercial cooperation between the US and Israel is surging unprecedentedly, in defiance of the unbridgeable gap between the worldviews of President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu.

For example, 250 major US high-tech companies maintain research and development centers in Israel, which has become a major source of cutting-edge innovative technologies, improving US competitiveness, increasing US exports and expanding US employment. In 2014, Israeli startups raised an all-time record of $3.4bn, mostly from US investors. Israel operates hundreds of US military and homeland security systems, providing the US defense industries with critical lessons of operation, maintenance and repairs, which dramatically upgrade the quality of these systems and their global competitiveness, improving US research and development, exports and employment. US-Israel cooperation in the areas of cyber, nano and space technologies is rising sharply. Israel provides the US with intelligence, exceeding the intelligence provided to the US by all NATO countries combined. The formulation of US battle tactics, in general – and urban warfare. in particular – is based largely on Israel’s battle experience. Joint US-Israel air force exercises are conducted regularly. US Army units on their way to Afghanistan are trained by Israeli experts in urban warfare, car bombs, suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

American aircraft went into action against Islamic State positions in Tikrit on March 25 in direct support of a stalled Iraqi offensive. The following day General Lloyd Austin, top commander in the Middle East, told Congress that he would like his forces to protect the Syrian “moderate” rebels who are currently trained and armed by the U.S. Also this week a major new theater was opened in Yemen, where a Sunni Arab coalition started sustained air strikes against Shia rebels with Washington’s explicit support.

The alarming aspect of these new developments is that the U.S. role appears to be entirely reactive and not based on a coherent long-term strategy. The engagement in Tikrit has the obvious short-term objective of countering Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, rather than inflicting a decisive defeat on the IS. According to a report in Thursday’s New York Times, President Obama approved the airstrikes, requested by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, on the condition that Iranian-backed Shiite militias move aside to allow a larger role for Iraqi forces that have worked closely with U.S. troops. They went into action only after Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who has been advising anti-IS forces around Tikrit, was reported to have left the area:

What country deserves more condemnation for violating human rights than any other nation on earth? According to the U.N.’s top human rights body, that would be Israel.
Last week, Israel was the U.N.’s number one women’s rights violator. This week it is the U.N.’s all-round human rights villain.
The U.N. Human Rights Council wrapped up its latest session in Geneva on Friday, March 27 by adopting four resolutions condemning Israel. That’s four times more than any of the other 192 UN member states.
There were four resolutions on Israel. And one on North Korea — a country that is home to government policies of torture, starvation, enslavement, rape, disappearances, and murder – to name just a few of its human rights violations.
Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Syria. Where the death toll of four years of war is 100,000 civilians, ten million people are displaced, and barrel bombs containing chemical agents like chlorine gas are back in action.
Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Iran. Where there is no rule of law, no free elections, no freedom of speech, corruption is endemic, protestors are jailed and tortured, religious minorities are persecuted, and pedophilia is state-run. At last count, in 2012 Iranian courts ordered more than 30,000 girls ages 14 and under to be “married.”
And what did that one resolution on Iran say? Co-sponsored by the United States, it was labelled a “short procedural text,” consisting of just three operative paragraphs that contained not a single condemnation of Iran.
The Israel resolutions, on the other hand, were full of “demands,” “condemns,” “expresses grave concern,” and “deplores” – along with orders to “cease immediately” a long list of alleged human rights violations.
Ninety percent of states – inhabited by 6.6 billion people – got no mention at all. Countries like China, Qatar, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. For the UN, there was not one human rights violation worthy of mention by any of these human rights horror shows.

Barbara Lee is Rated +7 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
On Wednesday, California Democrat Barbara Lee proposed a resolution in the House of Representatives that claims women will eventually be forced into prostitution in order to obtain life-sustaining food and water for their families.

Lee introduced House Concurrent Resolution 29, warning that women will be forced into “transactional sex” to get enough food and clean water — all because global warming will create “conflict and instability” in the world.

“Women will disproportionately face harmful impacts from climate change,” Lee’s resolution reads. It continues claiming, “Food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.”

Lee’s document goes on to urge Congress to agree on the “disparate impacts of climate change on women,” and goes on to demand that Congress use “gender-sensitive frameworks in developing policies to address climate change.”