RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a brilliant speech before Congress, arguing that the agreement President Obama is so desperate to strike with Iran is a “very bad deal.”

President Obama had turned Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress into a sophomoric beauty contest, complete with plaintive whines about “fairness.” With his thin-skinned resistance to the Israeli leader’s appearance, Obama created an international ruckus, which only served to publicize Netanyahu’s address. Not agreeing to meet with the Prime Minister, sending various proxies out of the country on bogus missions (Biden’s exile to Uruguay postponed by the flu?), bad-mouthing the Israeli leader and his GOP hosts; the White House even “sternly” warned Netanyahu not to divulge details of the proposed nuclear deal. Whatever Mr. Obama’s intentions, the outcome surely could not have been what he had hoped.

Mr. Netanyahu’s approval rating among Americans has soared – up ten points since 2012, and hitting all-time highs. While Republicans tend to have the most favorable opinion of the Israeli leader, the gains in popularity were registered across all political parties.

Embarrassingly, Netanyahu’s favorability ratings are better than Obama’s. Both have 45 percent of the public expressing positive support for them, but Netanyahu is looked upon unfavorably by only 24 percent of the public, compared to 50% from Obama.

If you want to infuriate a liberal, question his patriotism. He’ll sneer, mock and ridicule the question. And then when he is up against the wall, he will mumble that the real patriots don’t need to wear flag pins because they covertly perform their patriotism in the dead of night when no one is looking.

He may even trot out that fake Jefferson quote about dissent being the highest form of patriotism. No, Teddy Roosevelt didn’t say it either. He did however say that “Patriotism means to stand by the country… It does not mean to stand by the president… save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country.”

And he meant it, ruthlessly attacking Woodrow Wilson until Democratic Senator William J. Stone called the former president “the most seditious man of consequence in America”.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414735/wonderful-m-stanton-evans-rip-quin-hillyer?target=topic&tid=3269
There will be much, much more to write on this topic in the next few days, but let me be one of the first here at NRO to lament the passing of one of the great men of the conservative movement, in some respects the founding father of conservative reporting (slightly different from conservative opinion writing), and a truly wonderful human being, M. Stanton Evans. Steven Hayward wrote an absolutely beautiful tribute to Evans at Powerline, here. For now, let it suffice, until I and others here can find the right words to honor the man who did so much for conservatism and for our country.
Quin Hillyer

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3026/M-Stanton-Evans-1934-2015.aspx
Stan Evans passed away early this morning. He was a great and remarkable and path-breaking American writer. He was an especially dear friend. I find it is in some ways difficult to separate the two — his great life’s work and his dear friendship — because I was greatly privileged to have been blessed by both. … More to come.RIP. Diana West
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/m-stanton-evans-pioneer-of-conservative-movement-dies-at-80.html?_r=0
M. Stanton Evans, Who Helped Shape Conservative Movement, Is Dead at 80 by Adam Clymer
Mr. Evans was the editor of The Indianapolis News, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, a radio and television commentator, a journalism teacher and the author of a raft of books, including a defense of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, in his anti-communist crusade.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/414788/stan-man-evans-jay-nordlinger
Stan the Man Evans by Jay Nordliinger

I would like to relate just two memories. He had one of the driest and best wits in the West. I wish you could have heard him say the following, deadpan. It was all in the delivery, believe me. “You always hear that you’re supposed to start out liberal, then become conservative at some point. My view is, you should start out conservative, then get more conservative over time.”

We’ve always known she was a secretive, entitled scofflaw. Now even the New York Times has noticed. Even in the most myopic corners of the Democratic party’s vast and ruthless political machine, the radar is picking up a faint cri de coeur. “Is Hillary really our best choice?” beeps the signal in the darkest parts of the night. And then, before it can provoke too much restlessness or dissension in the ranks, it fades and disappears under the weight of present expectations. In the coming weeks, whenever the progressive soul is at its most restive, this question will haunt the skeptics with a renewed and discomfiting vigor.
Political scandals are never more penetrating than when they confirm a set of pre-existing suspicions, and Hillary’s latest imbroglio is a doozy of election-changing proportions. Sarah Palin was so gravely injured by her inability to name her daily newspaper because the failure served only to buttress the widespread presumption that she was an intellectual lightweight. The endless batch of “elitist!” arrows that were cast at John Kerry in 2004 found their target because, deep down, Americans worried sincerely that he was too effete to be commander-in-chief.
This being so, the news that Hillary Clinton broke a series of federal laws in the name of her own pride will presumably pursue the candidate all the way to the next election. Hillary’s error, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza proposes today, is damaging precisely because it “plays into everything people don’t like about her.” Worse still, the charge was first heard within the pages of the friendly New York Times. The facts of the affair are refreshingly simple. When Hillary became secretary of state, she was required by law to obtain a government e-mail address and to conduct her official business through it at all times. She didn’t.

This new word ‘Islamophobia’ should be consigned to the dustbin of etymological mishaps. The Oxford Dictionary disagrees in its politically correct way, but harbouring a prejudice against religious despotism in no way reflects a tendency to the bigoted and irrational
I looked up the meaning of phobia in my Concise Oxford Dictionary. It is defined as ‘an extreme or irrational fear of something’. I had always thought it meant an extreme and irrational fear. But, I bow to the Oxford in these matters.

Certainly my dictionary was consistent when it came to words like claustrophobia and hydrophobia. However, consistency disappeared when it came to the modern word homophobia. Extreme and irrational are now indeed linked by ‘and’ rather than ‘or’. Moreover, no longer is phobia encompassing a ‘fear of’ but an ‘aversion to’. Disconcerting?

Get over it, I told myself. The English language must move with the times. And so it has with the comparatively recent mass migration of Muslims into the West. The very modern made-up word ‘Islamophobia’ has entered the language. A strange word is this to be sure. So far as I know it is unique in attaching phobia to a religion. I haven’t heard of phobia being attached, say, to Hinduism or Sikhism or Taoism or Hinduism or Buddhism. I looked it up.

Benjamin Netanyahu only made one mistake in another stellar performance in front of Congress today. The Israeli PM neglected to give an initial shout-out to Nancy Pelosi as he did to Harry Reid, causing the now House minority leader to walk off in a snit [1] and call his speech “insulting.” Oh, well, even the most seasoned politicians like Bibi blow it sometimes.

But you know he did a good job because some desperate Democratic backbencher from Kentucky named John Yarmuth got all incensed [2] in his post-speech statement (no, he didn’t attend), accusing Bibi of being like a kid at Disneyland trying to get everything he wants, including extra ice cream. Obviously Yarmuth (a former Republican and a Jew — go figure) missed the key point. Obama and Kerry already were about to give the Iranians everything they want.

Well, not quite. Because when you give the Iranians everything they want, they just want more. And, lo and behold, in the midst of the uproar over Netanyahu’s speech, along comes none other than Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif to set matters straight [3]:

Our leftie friends at Mother Jones put it this way:Benjamin Netanyahu just mansplained Iran to Obama

Er, okay. Glad you said that because there’d be no end to it if some rightie guy sneered that Obama was our first female president.

For what it’s worth, I prefer mansplaining to ‘Bamsplaining, where he peddles a lot of gaseous pap interrupted by cheap digs at straw men and all delivered in that set-your-watch-by-it left-right prompter-swivel. (To stick with the Mother Jones shtick, real men don’t use prompters.)

But, if this was “mansplaining”, it was a big man doing the ‘splaining. The shout-out to Harry Reid, the “my long-time friend John Kerry” schmoozeroo, all this was brilliant – not because everyone doesn’t understand how fake it is, but because the transparent fakery underlines how easy it is to be big and generous and magnaninmous and get the snippy parochial stuff out of the way to concentrate on what really matters.

Obama could have done this. He could have said yesterday, “Hey, my good friend Bibi and I don’t see eye to eye on everything, but I’d have to be an awfully thin-skinned insecure narcissistic little dweeb to make that a capital offense, wouldn’t I? So, since he’s in town anyway, I’ve asked him to swing by the White House for an hour to shoot the breeze – and maybe we can have that dinner we missed out on the last time, right, Prime Minister? Hur-hur-hur.”

In loosing off all the phony-baloney bipartisan crapola, Netanyahu reminded us how easy it is to play the game, and how small and petty Obama is by comparison. And then, without ever saying it directly, he went on to lay out (or, if you’re as touchy as Mother Jones, “mansplain”) how pathetic it is to be that small and petty at this tide in the affairs of man.

Mother Jones is right to that extent: it was a man’s speech, delivered at times with oblique but intentional Churchillian flourishes – “some change, some moderation,” as he said of Rouhani’s Iran.

Netanyahu was especially strong on the mullahs’ expansionism. He pointed out that Iran now controls four regional capitals – Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad and Sana’a. The P5+1 negotiatiors talk about Iran “re-joining the community of nations”. Au contraire, a not insignificant number of the community of nations have joined Iran. How many more capitals would a nuclear Teheran be exercising control of?

On Monday, The New York Times reported that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton never — not once — used her official State Department email address for her official communications. Instead, she utilized a private email account, effectively protecting her emails from public scrutiny. The Washington Post then broke the news that Hillary had registered her email address the same day her confirmation hearings for secretary of state began. In other words, Hillary knew she would be secretary of state conducting official business, and coincidentally opened a private email account at the same time to guard her from Freedom of Information Act requests.

Sure, Hillary Clinton has a nasty history with crucial documents going missing — she is the only first lady in American history fingerprinted by the FBI, and the FBI found missing documents with her fingerprints on them in the White House personal quarters. But the media SuperFriends quickly activated to protect Hillary. Glenn Thrush of Politico tweeted that Hillary must have relied on incompetent staffers and lawyers. Ron Fournier of National Journal tut-tutted that this made her “no better” than Republicans. Of course, the media also ignored Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman handing millions to the Clinton charity just before Hillary’s big run.

In yet another damning revelation underscoring her unfitness for the presidency, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account to conduct government business during her four-year tenure as Secretary of State. According to State Department officials, Clinton may have violated the Federal Records Act requiring correspondence by government officials to be retained as part of the agency’s records.

A National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) bulletin issued in 2013 makes it even clearer. Explaining that there may be times when the use of a personal email account is necessary, “such as in emergency situations when Federal accounts are not accessible or when an employee is initially contacted through a personal account,” the bulletin notes that employees “should not generally use personal email accounts to conduct official agency business.” However, if they do, they must “ensure that all Federal records sent or received on personal email systems are captured and managed in accordance with agency recordkeeping practices.” Clinton never had a government email address during her stint as Secretary of State, and her aides did nothing to preserve those personal emails on State Department servers.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy will go down in U.S. history as one of the most dangerously inept ever. Created by equal amounts of ignorance, arrogance, and partisan politics, the president’s policies have left behind a world in which rivals and enemies are on the march, while allies and friends are endangered and alienated. He deserves the opprobrium with which future history should load him.

But focusing on individuals and their personal flaws can prevent us from seeing the larger bad ideas that transcend any one person or party. We justly remember British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as the architect of the 1938 Munich conference that paved the way for Hitler’s aggression. And indeed, Chamberlain’s flaws of character––most important a vanity about his personal powers of persuasion that blinded him to Hitler’s brilliant diplomatic misdirection about his true intentions––contributed to that debacle. But we should also remember the delirious public joy that greeted Chamberlain when he returned to England, and the global acclaim he received for avoiding war with Germany. Millions of people thought Chamberlain had heroically succeeded because many shared the assumptions and ideas that drove his decisions.