RUTHFULLY YOURS

All of a sudden, Hillary’s not feeling the love from Democrats
It’s almost as if Democrats are starting to realize that Benghazi is going to take down their formerly presumptive 2016 nominee.

Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times:

Progressive darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren repeated her Shermanesque pledge Sunday and vowed not to run for president in 2016, but she declined to endorse her party’s clear frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

Rick Moran, AT:

It looks like Vice President Joe Biden is dead serious about running for president in 2016. During a closed door speech before wealthy Democrats in South Carolina, Biden took a shot at the Clinton administration’s economic policies in what was described as an “Elizabeth Warren-type” address. (snip)

Biden, a potential 2016 candidate, said the unraveling of middle-class financial security began in “the later years of the Clinton administration,” not under George W. Bush, CNN reported Saturday.

On CNN panel yesterday, there was this interesting comparison on Biden’s remarks (via Noah Rothman, Mediaite):

“This is sort of the case that then Senator Barack Obama made against Hillary Clinton back in ’08,”The Atlantic’s Molly Ball said.

We all remember how that worked out.

While I do not discount Hillary’s lust for power, the plain fact is that she is not an attractive candidate. She has none of the charm of her husband, and has accomplished nothing positive in her Senatorial or State Department careers. Benghazi is an open sore, and it could well get badly infected.

John Kerry began the year trying to bring representatives of the Assad regime together with rebel leaders in Geneva to end the civil war in Syria.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike one.

Next, the secretary of state worked tirelessly to create a framework agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, with a view to settling their differences once and for all.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike two.

This week, U.S. negotiators and their counterparts from the P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany—will meet in Vienna with Iranian negotiators to work out the details of a final nuclear agreement.

You know where this is going.

There’s been a buzz about these negotiations, with Western diplomats extolling the unfussy way their Iranian counterparts have approached the talks. Positions are said to be converging; technical solutions on subjects like the plutonium reactor in Arak are being discussed. Last month Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamad Javad Zarif said there was “50 to 60 percent agreement.”

All this is supposed to bode well for a deal to be concluded by the July deadline. If the Iranians are wise, they’ll take whatever is on the table and give Mr. Kerry the diplomatic win he so desperately wants. Time is on Tehran’s side. It can sweeten the terms of the agreement later on—including the further lifting of sanctions—through the usual two-step of provocation and negotiation.

The Obama crowd too often responds to critics and to world affairs like self-absorbed adolescents.

As American foreign policy continues its long string of failures—not a series of singles and doubles, as President Obama asserted in a recent news conference, but rather season upon season of fouls and strikes—the question becomes: Why?

Why does the Economist magazine put a tethered eagle on its cover, with the plaintive question, “What would America fight for?” Why do Washington Post columnists sympathetic to the administration write pieces like one last week headlined, “Obama tends to create his own foreign policy headaches”?

The administration would respond with complaints, some legitimate, about the difficulties of an intractable world. Then there are claims, more difficult to support, of steadily accumulating of minor successes; and whinges about the legacy of the Bush administration, gone but never forgotten in the collective memory of the National Security Council staff.

More dispassionate observers might pick out misjudgments about opportunities (the bewitching chimera of an Israeli-Palestinian peace, or the risible Russian reset), excessively hopeful misunderstandings of threats (al Qaeda, we were once told, is on the verge of strategic defeat), and a constipated decision-making apparatus centered in a White House often at war with the State and Defense departments.

There is a further explanation. Clues may be found in the president’s selfie with the attractive Danish prime minister at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in December; in State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki in March cheerily holding up a sign with the Twitter TWTR +5.90% hashtag #UnitedForUkraine while giving a thumbs up; or Michelle Obama looking glum last week, holding up another Twitter sign: #BringBackOurGirls. It can be found in the president’s petulance in recently saying that if you do not support his (in)action in Ukraine you must want to go to war with Russia—when there are plenty of potentially effective steps available that stop well short of violence. It can be heard in the former NSC spokesman, Thomas Vietor, responding on May 1 to a question on Fox News about the deaths of an American ambassador and three other Americans with the line, “Dude, this was like two years ago.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579491643733173318?mg=reno64-wsj

Documents reveal a lawless attempt to block an Alaska mine project.

A basic precept of American democracy is that petitioners before their government receive a full and fair hearing. The Obama Environmental Protection Agency is in urgent need of that remedial civics lesson.

The EPA inspector general’s office last week announced it will investigate the agency’s February decision to commence a pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine project, a jobs-rich proposal to develop America’s largest U.S. copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says her decision to strike down Pebble before it received a hearing shouldn’t worry other developers because Pebble is a “unique” threat. She needs to say this because the truth might chill billions of dollars in investment in the U.S.

The IG is looking into internal EPA documents that we’ve also obtained that show agency officials were maneuvering to kill Pebble more than five years ago, and that EPA’s main concern was building a façade of science and procedure to justify it.

This story goes back to the debate over the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave the Army Corps of Engineers the power to evaluate projects and issue permits. Congress gave EPA only a secondary role of reviewing and potentially vetoing projects (with cause) under Section 404c. EPA has long chafed at this secondary role, which has made it harder to nix projects approved by the Corps.

EPA’s decision to initiate a veto process before Pebble had even received an Army Corps review is a disturbing first—and a flouting of the law. The internal documents refute EPA’s repeated claims that it began this process only in “response to petitions” from local Native American tribes in May 2010, and that peer-reviewed science drove its veto.

Emails show that EPA biologist Phillip North, based in Alaska and working on Pebble, was in 2008 advocating that his agency bring down the 404c hammer. “The 404 program has a major role” with Pebble, wrote Mr. North to Patricia McGrath, EPA’s regional mining coordinator for Alaska, in August 2008. By August 2009, Mr. North was pushing for EPA’s annual mining retreat to include a discussion about vetoing the project: “As you know, I feel that [Pebble] merit[s] consideration of a 404C veto.” The retreat included that discussion, though Pebble’s developer hadn’t yet applied for a permit.

Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-SC) Select Committee to investigate the 9-11-2012 attacks in Benghazi was established by HR-567, which passed by a vote of 232-186 last Thursday. It’s supposed to be made up of seven Republicans and five Democrats. Speaker Boehner appointed Gowdy as chairman and Susan Brooks (Indiana), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Mike Pompeo (Kansas), Martha Roby (Alabama), Peter Roskam (Illinois) and Lynn Westmoreland (Georgia) as the Republican members. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal) has, so far, declined to appoint any Democrats to the committee.

Gowdy evidently had considerable influence in drafting the bill. It gives the select committee a very broad mandate to investigate everything that led up to, and occurred during and in the aftermath of the attacks, including specifically “…internal and public executive branch communications about the attacks on United States facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.” The committee is also mandated to issue a report of its investigation that details its findings. Now comes the hard part, which will have to be a long and detailed investigation.

There are three obstacles to the committee’s investigation. The first is the fact that — though unwisely — Pelosi and the Dems may try to boycott the committee’s work in order to drive a political narrative that it is a witch hunt. The second is the entire Obama administration’s dedication to the cover-up of its malfeasance, its abuses of power, and its efforts to avoid any accountability for its actions. The third challenge is the media’s eager complicity in the ongoing cover-up of the Obama administration’s actions.

Pelosi and the Democratic caucus met for hours on Friday without apparently coming up with an agreement on how they will participate. They’re caught in a dilemma of their own making. Having aided and abetted the Obama cover-up, they don’t want to be seen to be giving the Gowdy Committee credibility by participating in the investigation. Their options aren’t good.

First, they can only boycott the committee’s work at their — and Obama’s — peril. Because the committee’s mandate is so broad, the Dems will have to face the fact that Obama’s entire national security apparatus — Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, and the president himself, along with a large number of their subordinates — will have to be subpoenaed by the committee. The Dems can’t fail to be in on these sessions because Obama, Hillary, and the rest must have already demanded that the Dems be present to ask questions calculated to defend them. The Dems’ task will be to ask argumentative questions crafted to protect the witnesses and becloud every aspect of the interrogations.

That’s a given, and the Republicans will have to deal with it by asking real questions — not the kind of mini-speeches Joe Biden used to indulge himself in during hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he lost his train of thought and ran out of time. Gowdy will have to require that his Republicans ask every question in a way to reveal facts and avoid those self-indulgent speeches.

More than 20 years after its release, the critics are still raving for “Schindler’s List.” President Obama gave Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film a thumbs-up Wednesday at a dinner for the Spielberg-founded USC Shoah Foundation, on whose behalf Spielberg presented Obama with the Ambassadors for Humanity Award.

Thanks to “Steven’s remarkable film,” the president observed, “the world eventually came to see and understand the Holocaust like never before. . . . That’s what stories do. We’re story-telling animals. That’s what Steven does.”

It’s what Barack does too:

I have this remarkable title right now–President of the United States–and yet every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls in Nigeria or children caught up in the conflict in Syria–when there are times in which I want to reach out and save those kids–and having to think through what levers, what power do we have at any given moment, I think, “drop by drop by drop,” that we can erode and wear down these forces that are so destructive; that we can tell a different story.

Obama’s “remarkable title” is itself an example of the power of story telling. It is a commonplace that he rose to prominence almost entirely on the strength of his biography (which Bill Clinton once disparaged as a “fairy tale”). In 2011, when he was at one of his political low points, critics on the left insisted his failure was one not of leadership or of policy but of story telling.

Now here he is telling a story–a story about telling stories. The moral of this story is that leadership is a matter of telling stories. That is partly true–we do not mean to gainsay the hortatory and informative elements of political leadership–but Obama seems to be citing the power of stories as an excuse for inaction.

The proposed EPA standard is very close to levels that are found naturally in some regions of the country.

Over the past several decades the U.S. has achieved remarkable success in reducing air pollution. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the country has reduced six common air pollutants by 72% since 1970. These reductions are credited with achieving meaningful public-health benefits, from improved respiratory health to increased life expectancy.

Yet with this success we now face a critical question: Will further decreases in air pollution to levels that approach those that occur naturally necessarily result in additional public-health benefits? This question gets to the heart of the EPA’s current evaluation of whether the existing National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone is sufficient to protect public health. Ozone is a colorless, odorless gas that is not directly emitted into air, but is formed when sunlight reacts with two other pollutants: volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides. These come from many natural sources (plants, forest fires) as well as human-made sources (cars, industrial facilities, power plants).

The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, a panel of scientists and public-health experts charged by Congress with advising the EPA, met in March to discuss the agency’s evaluation of the link between ozone and respiratory illnesses such as asthma and other health issues. The hope is that, with robust public input, the EPA and the committee will arrive at conclusions that accurately reflect the current state of scientific research on ozone. The stakes are significant: The EPA itself estimates that more-stringent standards could cost businesses up to $90 billion annually.

Currently the EPA standard for ozone in the air is 75 parts per billion, the strictest level since the standard was established in 1971. In 2008 the EPA determined, and a federal court agreed, that this standard protects public health. But now the EPA says that 75 ppb is not protective enough and is recommending a change to between 60 ppb and 70 ppb. Meanwhile, the overwhelming body of scientific evidence indicates lowering the current ozone standard will not provide added health benefits beyond those achieved with the current standard.

A coalition of American Muslim leaders came together at a press conference Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to condemn Boko Haram’s (BH) April 14 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls. Yet the participants’ deficient frankness about Islamic doctrine made their denunciations ring hollow.

“Islam is not the problem,” insisted Ahmed Bedier, a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Tampa chapter founder. “No one is buying their story,” Bedier argued with respect to Islamic claims of BH. He dismissed them as “just another con” whose “ideology comes from nowhere” in a country known for scams.

Bedier’s assessment might surprise BH’s leader, Abubakar Shekau. Known as “Darul Tawheed,” an expert in monotheism, Shekau studied under a cleric and then at Borno State College of Legal and Islamic Studies. A profile also describes Shekau’s predecessor, deceased BH founder Mohammed Yusuf, as a “charismatic, well-educated cleric who drove a Mercedes as part of his push for a pure Islamic state in Nigeria.”

“We didn’t ask if Christianity is the problem” with respect to Uganda’s brutal Lord’s Resistance Army, Bedier analogized. Yet human rights abuses in Islam’s name, especially against women and girls, extend beyond Nigeria. Survey results report the “Arab Spring” had a detrimental impact on women, including the reemergence of child marriage in Syria. Women’s rights are also a concern in both European Islamic immigrant communities and in Brunei after its recent introduction of sharia law, including stoning for adulterous women.

BH likewise appeared to CAIR-Maryland Vice President Zainab Chaudry as a “vicious cult.” BH’s “maniacal and suicidal interpretation of Islam” also drew condemnation from Johari Abdul-Malik, an imam at northern Virginia’s Dar al-Hijrah mosque. BH is “madness masquerading as religion,” Imam Mahdi Bray agreed, and its crimes violate “core Islamic teachings,” said Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) analyst Hoda Elshishtawy.

“We need to unite across all faith lines,” Bray said, with ecumenical concern for the kidnapping victims, “until all our girls are brought home.”

United States foreign policy has been defined lately by serial failures. Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and appears to be preparing a reprise in eastern Ukraine, and possibly in the Baltic states. Syrian strongman Bashar al Assad is poised to win the civil war in Syria at the cost so far of over 200,000 dead. Negotiations with Iran over its uranium enrichment program have merely emboldened the regime and brought it closer to its goal of a nuclear weapon. And yet another attempt to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has failed. In all these crises the U.S. has appeared weak and feckless, unable to direct events or achieve its aims, even as its displeasure and threats are scorned.

The responsibility for these setbacks is often laid at the feet of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. The political calculations, ideology, and character flaws of both do indeed deserve much of the blame for America’s weakness and ineffectiveness abroad. Yet another factor is larger than any one individual, administration, or party––the flawed and often incoherent ideals shaping our understanding of interstate relations and our expectations of state behavior. Those ideals comprise a set of global norms that assume a universal morality shared by all countries despite the variety of cultures, religions, and governments in the world’s 196 nations. And those norms in turn are embodied in the international order that encompasses the various multinational institutions, tribunals, organizations, conventions, declarations on human rights, and treaties, the purposes of which is to regulate state behavior, deter or stop oppression and violence, promote peace and prosperity, and adjudicate conflict.

Official remarks and commentary on the current crises have been informed by this notion of a global consensus about which state behaviors are legitimate and which are not. John Kerry’s comments on Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, for example, scolded Putin, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped up pretext.” Similarly, President Obama protested, “Russia’s leadership is challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident––that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future,” for such aggression “is not how international law and international norms are observed in the 21st century.”

Critics of the president’s handling of the crisis have endorsed this same international order they feel has been weakened by the U.S.’s timid or inept response. Fareed Zakaria of The Washington Post referred to “broader global norms––for example, against annexations by force. These have not always been honored, but, compared with the past, they have helped shape a more peaceful and prosperous world.” So too David Rivkin and Lee Casey in The Wall Street Journal evoked “the three basic principles of international law, reflected in the United Nations Charter and long-standing custom,” which “are the equality of all states, the sanctity of their territorial integrity, and noninterference of outsiders in their international affairs.”

On Friday, April 25, on the way back to his dorm room, Brandeis student Daniel Mael passed a group of his peers with whom he had previously engaged in civil discourse about the state of Israel and the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although they had often disagreed on many aspects of this issue, according to Mael, he felt that it was necessary to extend a hand of graciousness and respect to them in the name of civil and polite discourse. After all it was the Sabbath, and politics should never interfere with showing kindness to your fellow man.

And so, that Friday night, Mael wished these students a “Shabbat Shalom.” Yet Instead of responding with the same respect and cordiality Mael afforded her, according to witnesses present, Talia Lepson, a J Street U Brandeis board member, shrieked at Mael, “Jews hate you!” and “You’re a [expletive deleted]bag!” It was also reported that another unidentified male in the group echoed Lepson’s words, again hurling the vulgar epithet at Mael.

Understandably taken aback by this verbal lashing and feeling unsafe in such a hostile environment, Mael filed an incident report with the university police. He also wrote at length about it on his Facebook page, wondering why this simple act of saying ‘Shabbat Shalom’ elicited such a hateful response. Yet by the time the Sabbath was over, he put the incident out of his mind. Thinking it had passed, he began to focus on more important things like taking finals and finishing the semester.

But he was wrong.

That following Sunday afternoon, J Street National posted a blog on its website denying the incident had occurred. Moreover, they accused Mael of making up the story and claimed that he was the one harassing them. They wrote that he had engaged in a “campaign of personal intimidation and harassment” and implored others to distance themselves from “this blogger and others with a history of conduct driven by malice and deceit.”

But suggesting that Mael would make up a story which witnesses corroborated and then proceed to report that same story to the police is risible. He would not only be incriminating himself but the people with him who witnessed the incident.

According to Mael, he was deeply upset by this slander. It was bad enough to have been verbally attacked on campus. It was worse to have the perpetrators blatantly lie about it on a national forum and suggest that he should be shunned by th