RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gloating is premature however much one delights in her gaffes. The GOP is in disarray with no real frontrunners except for a backburner Rand Paul….rsk

Whatever it is that has projected Hillary Clinton to the front of the Democratic party line, it is not a talent for politics. Thus far, Clinton’s governmental achievements consist of having won election to the Senate in a state she couldn’t possibly have lost, having been appointed to a cabinet position by a president who had little choice, and . . . well, that’s about it really. Earnest challenges, meanwhile, have swiftly floored her. Conventional wisdom suggests that the unique combination of Barack Obama’s preternaturally adroit campaign skills and the country’s exhaustion with the Iraq War precipitated her 2008 collapse. But one is starting to wonder. Before her inevitable 2016 campaign has even begun, her numbers continue to drop — she is now at 52 percent approval, down from 70 percent in December 2012. All told, the last five days cannot have done much to stem the tide.

Clinton started the week by telling Diane Sawyer that she and her husband had been “dead broke” when they left the White House, and had thus been put in the devastating position of not knowing how they were going to fund the purchase of the many mansions that life in Pennsylvania Avenue had led them so desperately to covet. Later, in an attempt to let the public know just what a responsible leader she’d be, Clinton answered Sawyer’s question on Benghazi by first stopping the buck and then cutting it into many pieces. “I take responsibility,” she allowed. “But I was not making security decisions.”

“You should blame me as long as you don’t blame me,” then? “Hard Choices” indeed.

Since that rather rocky start, she has bounced boisterously from gaffe to gaffe, with no demonstrable loss of energy. On the Today show on Wednesday, Clinton implied that her support of the Bergdahl deal served as a solid example of the sort of difficult decisions she’d been asked to make in the past, and might perhaps be asked to make in the future. In the meantime, her team continued to confirm off the record that she hadn’t been comfortable with the swap at all and thus should not share any of the blame. (This, you might notice, is a theme.) Clinton proved unwilling, too, to flesh out exactly why the decision had been such a tough one for President Obama. That Bergdahl may have been a deserter “doesn’t matter,” she explained, because we bring our soldiers home regardless. More important, perhaps, she posited that the five hardened Taliban leaders that the United States traded in exchange “are not a threat to the United States” but only “to the safety and security of Afghanistan and Pakistan.” If so, one wonders why it was such a difficult call to release them.

Chaos.

That summarizes the situation on America’s southern frontier, as well as Obama’s freeing of almost 104,000 illegal-alien criminals last year. He clearly doesn’t give a damn about shielding Americans from the public-health and public-safety dangers posed by those who breach the border, including deadly felons now walking American streets.

Waves of unaccompanied children are washing over the border with growing intensity. And many are bearing dangerous diseases.

Illegals are heading into the general population, even after testing positive for tuberculosis. “The feds are putting them on public transportation to God knows where,” a law-enforcement official recently told columnist Michelle Malkin.

“We are starting to see chicken pox, MRSA staph infections; we are starting to see different viruses,” Texas-based Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera explained to ABC’s KNXV-TV in Phoenix. “There’s been an outbreak of scabies that’s been going on for the past month.” Scabies is a contagious, intensely itchy skin infection caused by microscopic, burrowing, egg-laying mites. Border Patrol officers have contracted it while handling the flood of illegal-alien children.

In the Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, sick and healthy illegals are separated by a strip of yellow tape that reads: “Police line. Do not cross.”

In May 2013, an illegal, age 28, was diagnosed with rabies while detained in southern Texas. “He was in his cell, and his throat hurt so bad, he was spitting on the floor,” Ryan Wallace of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. After the Guatemalan died, doctors had to evaluate 742 individuals who had been in contact with him.

I’ve just written Faithless Execution, a book positing that there is such a solid legal case of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the president that the time is ripe to build a political case for his impeachment. I have argued, moreover, that the president’s policy of appeasing and empowering Islamic supremacists has been a national-security catastrophe, catalyzing a jihadist resurgence across the Middle East.

It is pretty safe to say I am no fan of Barack Obama’s. But it is just as safe to say that for Beltway Republicans to blame Obama alone for the implosion of Iraq — which is now being overrun by the same Sunni jihadists those Republicans have championed in Syria and Libya — is shameful.

Look, I will stipulate that the president’s signature recklessness is abundantly evident in Iraq. He heedlessly withdrew U.S. forces, making no effort to preserve the security gains they achieved in routing al-Qaeda, even as it became obvious that the withdrawal had evaporated those gains and invited the terror network to return with a vengeance.

Still, it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush. And it was not Obama who turned Iraq into an Islamic-supremacist state seething with anti-American and anti-Semitic hatred. Long before Obama came to power, Iraq was an Islamist country, rife with Sunni and Shiite militants who agreed on little else besides their devotion to sharia and their abhorrence of the West.

In late 2008, several weeks before Obama entered the Oval Office, I wrote here about the status of forces agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration was then entering into with the ingrate Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. Even then, Iraq was pulling ever closer to the terrorist regime in Iran while American troops continued fighting to protect Maliki’s fledgling government from al-Qaeda jihadists — jihadists that the insidious mullahs were also supplying with money, training, and IEDs.

In the SOFA, the Bush administration agreed to strict withdrawal deadlines that invited al-Qaeda to catch its breath, wait out the United States, then resume the jihad as Americans were leaving — the better to make it look to the world like they were chasing us out. All American combat operations were to cease in mid 2009; and, at the end of 2011, all American forces would pull out of Iraq. The 2008 SOFA is the basis for the American withdrawal that Obama so anxiously consummated. It is what promised a resumption of Islam’s eternal, internecine bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites that now has Iraq on the verge of collapse.

To listen to Republicans and those who foolishly repeat their revisionist history, you would think Obama inherited the Iraq so delusionally envisioned by Islamic-democracy-project devotees: a free, pluralistic democracy that would be a reliable counterterrorism ally and a thorn in totalitarian Iran’s side.

SINCE WW2 WE HAVE NOT ENDED ANY WARS WITH VICTORY…NOT KOREA, NOT VIETNAM, NOT IRAQ, NOT AFGHANISTAN…..AND THE LEGACY OF THAT POLICY IS CLEAR IN KOREA WHERE IKE LEFT THE KIM DYNASTY IN THE NORTH IN PLACE AND NOW IN IRAQ…..RSK
What if, after all the blood and treasure expended in the Normandy invasion and expelling the Nazis from France, the United States had simply declared victory and gone home?
Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great leaders of the western alliance against the Nazis, understood that such an outcome was impossible to contemplate because more than territory was at stake in the war.
And in the lead-up to the war and especially once the United States was in the war, Roosevelt educated the American public, and the American military, for a long war against the darkness of Nazi ideology, “There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future–and that freedom is an ebbing tide. But we Americans know that this is not true.”
Roosevelt prepared Americans for a war to preserve our way of life, not to simply reclaim the territory Hitler and his dark legions had conquered.
And contrary to much of today’s conventional wisdom about American public opinion in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, Americans understood what was at stake.