RUTHFULLY YOURS

As buzzards circled around Hillary Clinton’s dying campaign over the weekend, Vice President Joe Biden met with left-wing darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren (aka Fauxcahontas) in his residence at the Naval Observatory.

CNN reported that Warren and Biden “discussed economic policy during a meeting that lasted about two hours.”

A person familiar with the discussion told CNN that “the presidential campaign or Biden’s future” was not the focus of the discussion.

Uh-huh. He singled out Senator Warren to have a private meeting with him on economics — just out of the blue for no particular reason whatsoever.

Beloved by liberal Democrats, Warren decided to sit out a campaign of her own, but she has yet to formally endorse a candidate. In an interview on Friday, she told WBZ in Boston: “I don’t think anyone has been anointed.”

Well — no one has been anointed YET.

Jeb Bush seems to have a self-destructive impulse. No, not the same self-destructive mechanism that causes Scott Walker to announce contradictory policy positions with the speed of a tennis ball machine, but rather the urge to express sentiments that seems to show him to be more sympathetic to illegal aliens than he is to American citizens.

This urge could first be seen with his comments that illegal immigration is an “act of love.” Never mind the thousands of illegals who have taken jobs from Americans and consumed our taxpayer dollars for education and health care, and the thousands more who have committed crimes, including murder. That was extremely tone-deaf. But it was only one comment.

Now Bush has done it again. He’s gone to the border, presumably to show that even he would be tough on border security. Instead, he’s made headlines by saying the Asian illegal aliens, not Hispanic ones, are the real problem.

Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond on Sunday reopened Britain’s embassy in Tehran nearly four years after it was shuttered following a mob attack reminiscent of the 1979 assault on the U.S. Embassy. Accompanying Mr. Hammond were European business leaders eager to join the ayatollah gold rush—notwithstanding President Obama’s promise of “snap-back” sanctions if Iran cheats on the nuclear deal.

In November 2011 a mob overran the British outpost, breaking windows and trashing the compound. The mullahs never apologized for failing to protect the embassy, and the “Death to England” graffiti is still on the walls. Yet at a news conference with his Iranian counterpart, Mr. Hammond said the embassy will serve as a “practical channel for being able to engage on the very many issues that are of concern and the very many issues that we have shared interests.”

“What’s Vice President Joe Biden up to?” asks Bloomberg View’s Jonathan Bernstein, who answers: “He appears to be inventing a new form of presidential campaigning: The perpetual trial balloon”:

Biden has consistently declined to say whether he’s running or not. The deadline for his decision is always vaguely off in the future, long after other candidates (in both parties) have officially announced or dropped out of the running. The vice president has declined to do the things that candidates do: He has no staff in Iowa or New Hampshire. On the other hand, stories keep leaking about a possible late bid for the presidency.

We’re not sure about that. Last month we noted a Puffington Host report that was fairly specific about a deadline: “Biden is still very much considering a bid for the White House, people close to Biden say, and will make a final decision at the end of the summer, targeted for September.”

The hints are growing stronger that Joe Biden might decide to run for President after all, and there’s no reason we can’t join the frolic among the tea leaves. Especially fascinating is what a Biden run would signal about Hillary Clinton’s political and legal vulnerability over her emails and Clinton Foundation donations.

The Vice President met privately with Elizabeth Warren on Saturday, a meeting no doubt leaked by the Biden team. The Massachusetts Senator is the patron saint of the Democratic left these days and Mr. Biden would love her support if he does run. Then on Sunday our colleagues in the Journal’s Washington bureau reported that the Veep is leaning toward a run. Other media reinforced the story.

The first attempt to de-radicalize an Islamic extremist is happening in Minnesota right now, and it resembles high-school civics more than religious deprogramming.

An American citizen who pleaded guilty to supporting ISIS was ordered by a federal judge to leave jail—and go to a halfway home instead. That rehab center was run by a group that had no prior experience with would-be Islamic terrorists, The Daily Beast has learned.

Abdullahi Yusuf of Minnesota was allowed to depart from jail and stay at a halfway home after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS in January. (Yusuf was stopped at the airport trying to fly to Turkey in May 2014, at age 18.) Once inside the halfway home, Yusuf was to be “de-radicalized” through regular meetings with a counselor whose curriculum looked more like a high-school civics course than religious deprogramming.

Last week, the Associated Press (AP) reported on a heretofore secret agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) allowing Iran to carry out its own, unsupervised inspections of its suspected nuclear site at Parchin. A number of media outlets and nuclear-weapons experts responded by claiming—without evidence—that the AP had based its story on a forged document. Suggestions followed that Benjamin Netanyahu was behind the forgery. Tom Nichols writes:
Iran Deal Truthers
A bizarre and silly social media attack on the Associated Press’ big scoop reveals much about the politicization of expertise.
Sometimes, it’s easy to miss the good old days of the print media. (And yes, I am aware of the irony that you just read that sentence online in The Daily Beast.) In those halcyon days, the diligence required to challenge a story made it more difficult to impugn the integrity of the journalists involved. Accusations of sloppiness, mendacity, or outright fraud usually had to be grounded in something beyond partisan anger. And tarring an entire news organization as unwitting—or worse, willing—participants in a conspiracy was not a charge made lightly by responsible people.

Social media and internet publishing have changed all that.

Late last week, the Associated Press found itself on the receiving end of a kind of Iran Deal “trutherism,” in which people upset by an AP report on one of the Iran Deal’s side-agreements have taken on the same role as the 9/11 “truthers” who were “just asking questions” about conspiracies. They’re not making direct accusations, but the implications are hard to miss. And like the 9/11 truthers, the conspiracies point to the country beloved by truthers everywhere: Israel.

Before we step through that looking glass, let’s back up and review the events of the last few days for a moment.

For years, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has worked to make Israel an international pariah. Happily, it’s started seeing some serious pushback.
In Spain, Jewish-American reggae singer Matisyahu did indeed perform Saturday at the Rototom Sunsplash festival. The organizers re-invited him after they’d canceled — a disinvitation pushed by the BDS crew, which had insisted he endorse Palestinian statehood.
An international uproar forced the festival’s hand — after all, organizers (and BDSers) hadn’t insisted on a litmus test for any non-Jewish performers.
No less than Oprah Winfrey stood up to the thugs, too. A BDS “delegation” showed up at her magazine’s New York offices this month, carrying a letter urging Oprah to publicly reject Israeli jeweler Lev Leviev’s products.
The star had worn Leviev diamonds on the cover of O magazine’s May issue, the 15th anniversary edition. But the BDSniks smear Leviev with charges of stealing Palestinian land and committing human-rights abuses in Angola.

The Italian navy rescued 3,000 “migrants” aboard more than a dozen boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday. Like hundreds of thousands of others before them, they were taken to Europe for de facto permanent settlement. At the same time, any semblance of border control along the southeastern land route has collapsed. Thousands of migrants stormed across Macedonia’s border also on Saturday, overwhelming security forces who threw stun grenades and used batons in a futile bid to stem their flow. So much for Macedonia declaring a state of emergency on August 20 and announcing that it was sealing its borders.

In July over 50,000 persons from the Middle East and Afghanistan are estimated to have reached Greece’s extended coastline by boat from Turkey. The Turks have done nothing to impede their initial entry from Syria and Iraq, followed by a long transit across Anatolia and departure by sea. The Greeks have been chartering ships to take them from the inundated Aegean islands to Salonika, and facilitated their transit further north.

Lead performers in “Cabaret” sing “Money makes the world go round.” Little did these performers know about the Middle East where money not only makes the world go round but props up dictators like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Iran is presently spending billions to keep him in power and prosecute a war in which more than 230,000 people have been killed and poison gas has been employed.

Moreover, should the “treaty” with Iran be consummated this sponsor of global terrorism will receive at least $100 billion in sanctions relief. Not only will this money be used for Assad, but it will bankroll Hezbollah and Hamas with a new generation of rockets and weapons.