RUTHFULLY YOURS

The one thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common these days is nostalgia for a pre-Obama era. The leading candidates of both parties serve as shorthand for a time before the era of Obama. The last names Bush and Clinton summon up nostalgic visions of their family’s previous administrations.

The Bush and Clinton political express is moving forward not because these families have become dynasties, but because the majority of Americans want to go back to a time before Obama.

Hillary and Jeb are not popular on their own merits. To Democrats, Hillary seems to offer a return to the Bill Clinton days when the economy was up and the country didn’t hate them. To Republicans, Jeb seems to offer a way back to the clearer issues of the Bush years when domestic politics had been temporarily taken off the table. After two terms of Obama’s unfiltered left-wing radicalism on domestic and foreign policy, the potential matchup will return to the triangulation of the Bush-Clinton years with Jeb adopting liberal ideas on domestic policy to appeal to Democrats and Hillary pretending to take a tougher stance on foreign policy and national defense to appeal to Republicans.

The White House portrait of a crumbling terror group is contradicted by documents seized in the bin Laden raid.

In the early-morning hours of May 2, 2011, a small team of American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the high white walls of a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The team’s mission, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, had two primary objectives: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and gather as much intelligence as possible about the al Qaeda leader and his network. A bullet to bin Laden’s head accomplished the first; the quick work of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team accomplished the second.

It was quite a haul: 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives and a dozen cellphones. There were DVDs, audio and video tapes, data cards, reams of handwritten materials, newspapers and magazines. At a Pentagon briefing days after the raid, a senior military intelligence official described it as “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”

Congress’s entire Benghazi investigation, we now know, was based on an incomplete record.

Hillary Clinton has made some disingenuous statements over her political career, but none remotely compare to the tweet she issued Wednesday night: “I want the public to see my email,” she said. This requires—how to say it—a willing suspension of disbelief.

Mrs. Clinton was referring to the gracious permission she had just bestowed upon the State Department to release her email correspondence as the nation’s former top diplomat. She’s only in a position to grant such favors because it turns out all of her correspondence as Secretary of State was conducted on private email, run out of a server she alone controlled. The Clinton camp has spent this week explaining that none of this was untoward, that no laws were broken, and that she’s being transparent.

Lack of common profile poses test for those seeking to curb recruitment into militant group

“Militant”….and “Islamic State Members” ?????Why avoid the term Islamic terrorists?….rsk

Federal authorities investigating suspected Islamic State supporters in all 50 states have found no clear pattern to the type of American inspired to try to join the militant group, complicating efforts to thwart terror recruiting.

Some common threads exist, such as the fact that would-be recruits are often in their teens or early 20s and use social media to express support for Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. But overall, the group is broad, covering people who were raised Muslim and those who converted, married and single people, male and female, rich and poor, U.S.-born citizens and recent immigrants.

An estimated 180 Americans have traveled or attempted to travel to the civil war in Syria, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said this week. Not all of those, however, are believed to have joined extremist groups.

What was her response? She says she felt Netanyahu “insulted” American intelligence:

“That is why, as one who values the U.S. – Israel relationship, and loves Israel, I was near tears throughout the Prime Minister’s speech – saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States as part of the P5 +1 nations, and saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran and our broader commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation.

“Today, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated something we all agree upon: a nuclear armed Iran is unacceptable to both our countries. We have all said that a bad deal is worse than no deal, and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons is the bedrock of our foreign policy and national security. As President Obama has said consistently, all options are on the table for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran.”

Why Nancy Pelosi Almost Wept During Netanyahu’s Speech — on The Glazov Gang
An analysis of Obama’s absence — and an administration’s betrayal.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/why-nancy-pelosi-almost-wept-during-netanyahus-speech-on-the-glazov-gang/

South Korea lives under a US security umbrella. Both on a conventional and nuclear level, South Koreans are dependent on the US to deter North Korea from attacking them and overrunning their country.

Last Friday, US Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman scolded South Koreans for being too nationalist. In her words, “Nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it’s not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy.”

The South Koreans interpreted her remarks as criticism of their President Park Geun-hye for her refusal to reinstate reunification talks with North Korea due to Pyongyang’s refusal to discuss the dismantlement of its nuclear program.

Sherman negotiated the US’s nuclear pact with North Korea in the 1990s. The North Koreans used the deal as a smokescreen behind which they developed nuclear weapons while receiving financial assistance from the US which paid off the regime for signing the deal.

1. Imagine if valiant Czechoslovakian President Edvard Benes’ was able to directly warn Britain’s Parliament of Hitler before Neville Chamberlain made his foolhardy trade of the Sudetenland for the fantasy of Hitler’s peaceful intentions and promises. While some would have remained unable to see past their own blindness perhaps enough would have awakened to forcibly cut off the march of the twentieth century’s most evil regime.

2. Much is made of the nuclear deal’s supposedly agreed upon “sunset clause” that ultimately frees the Islamic Republic of Iran to run its nuclear program as it sees fit. Rumor has it that President Obama sought twenty years but the Iranians at least refused any period longer than ten. (Some rumors now suggest Iran has even rejected ten.) Unnoticed in all of this is the significance of ten years for an Islamic regime. Sharia requires that no treaty, or more appropriately truce (“Hudna”), be longer than ten years. Truces in Sharia are by definition temporary as the greater war that guides the expansion of Islam is perpetual. Mohammad, the model for all Muslims, entered into a ten year pact with Mecca which became the basis for this rule. While Obama fantasizes his deal will stop a war, Iran’s demand signals and reconfirms that for it this is a war which must continue following the end of the truce unless its enemy (us) surrenders and submits. While Obama tries to sell his deal as the best path to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as Netanyahu stated, this deal, when coupled with the regime’s theology, would “all but guarantee” that it gets such weapons.

Political speech is about leadership, which looks to the future. It is about conquering hearts and minds. Great political leaders must have the vision to look through the detritus of the present to a preferred path to the future. They must have the knowledge to inform, the eloquence to energize and the ability to persuade their audience. Such individuals and their speeches are rare. We think of Pericles’ Funeral Oration in 430BC and Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796, or Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863 and the power of his Second Inaugural in 1865. We remember Churchill in June 1940, when England stood alone in the hours at a time Europe had gone dark. And we should also recall the less-well-known speech that same month when Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Zionist activist and soldier, spoke to an overflow crowd at New York’s Manhattan Center of the need to raise a Jewish army to combat the “giant rattlesnake” that was Nazism.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech may not have risen to those lofty levels, but it was a good one. Mr. Obama’s hissy-fit raised its notoriety. It was gracious, and powerful in the clarity of its admonitory message. He presented his vision in vivid and frightening detail, as he should. He began by thanking America for backing Israel, and especially America’s Presidents, “from Harry Truman to Barack Obama.” He thanked Congress for the “Iron Dome,” which protected millions of Israelis from thousands of Hamas rockets last summer.

Tonight begins the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Like so many Jewish holidays, it is an inconvenient fit for liberal clergy and parishioners who insist that Jewish values consist of social justice.
There is no peace process conducted with Haman, the chief villain of the Purim story. No one tries to understand his point of view or figure out how much bowing he will accept in exchange for calling off the genocide.

Instead he and his fellow conspirators must die.

Purim is a reminder that real Jewish values are not a suicide pact or a soppy tale of moral ambiguity and bleeding heart empathy for genocidal monsters.

Jewish holidays mark historical events by testifying to a G-d of history who is less concerned with feelings and tolerance, than with justice and truth.

Mordechai, like most Jewish Biblical figures, makes for a terrible progressive role model. He doesn’t compromise. Even after Haman has passed his decree, he still won’t bow to him. He causes the crisis and resolves it by being uncompromising.