RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the 2016 presidential election ends up a contest between 1992’s surnames — Bush vs. Clinton — we will have failed in some way as a republic.

The case for Jeb Bush is not exactly clear, though he enjoys an advantage vis-à-vis Mrs. Clinton in that the case against Herself is as clear as can be: She’s inept and dishonest.

Bush was a good governor of Florida — a long time ago, politically speaking. Things were different then: His time as governor coincided with a real-estate bubble that relieved him and other Florida leaders of the need to make a great many pressing financial decisions, and larger decisions about the structure of government.

Has Hillary Clinton been lying about her email system and did she violate the laws against mishandling classified material? Coverage of Clinton’s email scandal has been focused on those questions, but shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the nature and scale of the damage to American national security caused by Hillary’s carelessness with classified information? We’re not focused on the details of the security damage because it’s difficult to know whether and to what extent Hillary’s communications were intercepted, and more difficult still to make public whatever our intelligence agencies may have figured out on that score.

But maybe we already know enough to conclude that Hillary’s email scandal constitutes one of the most serious American national security disasters on record. The Daily Beast has a story out speculating that the email scandal may soon spread to the White House. Interesting as that question is, this passage seems more significant:

“There’s a widely held belief among American counterspies that foreign intelligence agencies had to be reading the emails on Hillary’s private server, particularly since it was wholly unencrypted for months….senior counterintelligence officials are assuming the worst about what the Russians and Chinese know.”

Hillary Clinton’s second race for the presidency is only about a quarter through, but she already seems to be causing general fatigue.

The lurid revelations about the Clinton Foundation proved that it was not so much a charity as a huge laundering operation. Quid pro quo donations from the global rich and powerful fueled the Clintons’ jet-setting networking.

In between political campaigns, the foundation provided sinecures for out-of-work Clinton politicos. This is hardly proof of Hillary’s grass-roots progressivism.

Then came Clinton’s e-mail fiasco. No one knows how the current investigation of her alleged misuse of e-mail accounts, servers, and classified information will end up. But most people accept that it was an unnecessary and self-induced scandal, brought on both by her paranoia and habitual expectation of being exempt from the law.

The overlooked source of the nation’s illegal immigration problems that people are finally talking about.

On August 31, 2015 Reuters reported on Governor Christie’s August 31, 2015 statement that if elected president, he would engage Fed-Ex to track illegal aliens to make certain that aliens who violate their terms of admission are located. The title of the Reuter’s article was, “Christie defends plan to monitor immigrants like FedEx tracks parcels.” The article began with the following excerpt:

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie pushed back on Sunday against “ridiculous” criticism of his proposal to track foreign visitors the way FedEx Corp tracks packages, saying government needs private-sector expertise to tackle illegal immigration.

“I don’t mean people are packages, so let’s not be ridiculous,” the New Jersey governor told an interviewer on Fox News Sunday who pointed out that foreigners do not have labels on their wrists.

The notion that the private sector is intrinsically better than the government is wrong. As you will shortly see, more than ten years ago, a private corporation, Accenture, was given the contract to implement such a tracking system.

Governor Christie is certainly right that we must be able to find aliens who go missing in the United States. He is also absolutely correct that people are not packages. People who ship packages want those packages to get to their customers; customers want their packages to be delivered. Finally, packages are incapable of moving on their own. Packages do not hide or use false aliases or bogus addresses.

Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland has pushed President Obama’s nuclear appeasement deal with Iran over the top. With her decision to vote in favor of the deal, Obama now has the support of the 34 senators he needs to uphold his expected veto of a congressional resolution of disapproval. If enough craven Democrats back a planned filibuster to prevent a vote on the floor of the Senate, Obama will not even have to use his veto pen.

The nightmare of a financially secure nuclear armed Iran, legitimized by the Obama administration and its international partners, is about to envelop us.

Ironically, Obama warned in a speech he delivered on September 1st in Alaska that a potentially bleak future could lie ahead, in which “there’s not going to be a nation on this Earth that’s not impacted negatively.”

Iran has barred famed musician and conductor Daniel Barenboim from entering the country because of his Israeli citizenship, thwarting his plan to lead a performance in Tehran, media have reported.

Barenboim, the 72-year-old general music director of the Berlin State Opera House, said on Thursday he was in talks with Iran about a concert, in what would have been a major example of cultural diplomacy.

But an Iranian culture ministry spokesman, Hossein Noushabadi, said an investigation meant Barenboim could not enter the country for security reasons, though the Berlin orchestra was welcome.

“We have no problem with the German orchestra coming to Iran, but we are opposed to the person leading that group,” Noushabadi told news agency ISNA.

“Meanness” is defined as unkindness, spitefulness and unfairness. It can also suggest stinginess, as in depriving students of contrary opinions and of ignoring their need to be challenged and to think independently. The word describes today’s political and cultural environment, one characterized by divisiveness between the elite who govern and the masses that are governed. When George Bush exclaimed “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” he was referring to those who were committing acts of terror or who were harboring terrorists. Now it means Republicans, or at least it does to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Unlike most countries, the United States is a nation of immigrants – we come from all places, races and religions. The heritage we share is the history of our founding, which was based on the concept that “all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers by the consent of the governed.” It is a heritage of ideas. Whether our ancestors were present in Philadelphia, or whether we arrived in the past decade, it is the knowledge that our basic rights do not come from government, but from a larger power, and that government is subservient to the people. It is that that distinguishes Americans. No matter our political differences, no matter whether we are conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican we share this history. We have an obligation to encourage its persistence. But today that sense of commonality seems at risk.

He supports partial-birth abortion, cozies up to the Clintons and frames the issues in a perspective that, with a couple of notable exceptions, tag him as more Democrat than Republican. Yet the candidate beneath that preposterous pompadour continues to lead the GOP field and dominate the headlines.
Let’s do a little play-by-play and compare Jeb Bush’s positions with Donald Trump’s current left-leaning views. Jeb has a single serious one—immigration—while also boasting a robust gubernatorial record of tax cuts, defending the sanctity of life, and a slew of issues that should, by rights, strike chords with the GOP activist base that turns out in force for the primaries. Trump, on the other hand, fails on what should be the two deal-breakers for the rank-and-file: he’s a Planned Parenthood supporter and an advocate for universal healthcare.

Over the past 15 years, Trump has supported partial-birth abortion, plus Obama’s stimulus package. If that was not enough to condemn him, he openly expressed the ill-advised desire for Hillary Clinton to lead U.S.-Iran negotiations! He has also bragged repeatedly about his friendship with the Clintons, and how much he has donated to their various causes—often, it seems, in exchange for access and favours. Bush’s new anti-Trump ad makes those points — although not so far, according to the polls, to his advantage.

Next, consider that Bush is seen by many as a RINO, as in ‘Republican in name only’, even though it is an objective fact that he is more conservative than Trump and has been for years. I’m not shilling for Bush, by the way, just noting an empirical truth. It’s also objectively true to say that the Republican Party’s activist base has become increasingly hardline in its advocacy of conservative principles. They tried to torpedo Mitt Romney twice for “flip-flopping” on abortion and have ousted senior moderate Republicans in favour of Tea Party darlings. Why is it that these same proud and rock-ribbed conservatives are falling in behind Trump, the leftmost candidate in the GOP field?

Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of angry young men in Budapest demand they be allowed to proceed to Germany, where Angel Merkel thinks she has room for some 800,000 this year alone. Lousy poster children for the invasion of Europe, the BBC opts instead to focus on the fetching Ms Nour.
Now on my way back to Australia, the BBC’s take on the European refugee crisis sticks in my mind. Or, is it in my craw?

“Haven’t they a right to travel?” queried the BBC anchorwoman in conversation with a correspondent reporting from outside Budapest’s chief railway station. Only in my dreams did the correspondent respond by saying, “Sure they do — if you no longer think that having travel documents is a requirement to travel internationally, and that European law can be causally set aside.”

Hungary is acting absolutely in keeping with European law. Others, such as Greece, funnelling asylum seekers on, are not. Asylum seekers have the option to register at centres on Hungary’s border where they can apply for asylum. This, of course, does not suit them. The cameras show hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Syrian asylum-seekers/refugees/economic migrants — choose your descriptor according to ideology and preference — demonstrating outside the terminus, chanting in unison: “Where do we go? Germany!” Note that they are not chanting Wohin gehen wir, Deutschland! (Google translation, be warned), as what they seek is a far wider audience than German speakers alone. They are mostly young men, with the odd woman in a head scarf among them. From that, I safely take it, I think, that they are Muslims not Christians.

Good job, Mr. President, Sen. Mikulski, congressional Democrats, and GOP leadership.

Senator Barbara Mikulski has announced that she will vote in favor of President Obama’s Iran deal. Sen. Mikulski’s support is critical because she becomes the 34th Democrat to announce that she will vote yea. Under the Corker framework so ingeniously conceived by Republican leadership in Congress, this means Obama’s deal cannot be defeated – under the legislation Congress is deemed to endorse the agreement unless it can muster a now unattainable 67 Senate votes (and a similar two-thirds of the House) to enact a resolution of disapproval over Obama’s veto.

It is worth repeating that Republicans rationalized this abdication of their duty to use their constitutional powers to block Obama’s empowerment of America’s sworn enemies by claiming that the legislation ensured that Congress would get to review the deal. This, of course, was always preposterous:

(a) Congress has many tools – the power of the purse, the ability to block Obama appointments and legislative priorities, the power to conduct oversight hearings, the capacity to raise public alarm in media coverage – that could have pressured Obama to reveal the deal’s terms;