RUTHFULLY YOURS

Secretary of State John Kerry is becoming increasingly frantic as he takes his case for the deeply flawed Iran nuclear deal around the country.

His latest argument, that congressional disapproval of the deal will be the “ultimate screwing” of Iran’s clerical Supremo – and that we should care – verges on hysteria.

Whether it’s hysterically funny or a psychotic condition would be a tough call, if only the stakes weren’t so high for our security and the security of our friends and allies, starting with the Iranian people.

John Kerry has much to hide on his ties to Iran. As I revealed more than ten years ago, Mr. Kerry has long been sympathetic to the Islamist regime in Tehran.

In June 2002 – just nine months after the 9/11 attacks on America – Mr. Kerry headlined a fund-raising gala for the American-Iranian Council, a pro-regime lobbying group seeking to roll back U.S. sanctions and promote U.S. investment in Iran.

It was his birthday and Obama was grouchy.

“It’s my birthday and I’m going to be blunt,” Obama told the Jewish leaders meeting with him. When they complained that, “Words have consequences, and when they come from official sources, they can be even more dangerous,” he was unapologetic. “If you guys would back down, I would back down from some of the things I’m doing,” he warned.

By that he meant that if they stopped objecting to the Iran deal, he would stop accusing critics of his nuclear sellout to Iran of being money-grubbing warmongers.

Obama complained, “It’s been a really busy day. You’d think they’d be nicer to me on my birthday.”

His busy day had consisted of a meeting with the ineffectual UN Secretary General, lunch with Biden and a photo op in the East Room. But he also had reservations at Rose’s Luxury, an expensive Capitol Hill restaurant where ordinary people wait for hours to get in.

Hillary Clinton was wrong about radical Islam and she is wrong in her lack of understanding the immense complexity of the American- Russian relations

Let’s clear up a potential misunderstanding from the very beginning: the uniqueness of the strategy behind the election campaign 2016 of the former Secretary of State Clinton involves two layers of silence.

The first one is practiced by Ms. Clinton who for the first time in the history of presidential elections rejects any form of contact with the press. As far as the second layer is concerned, it involves deliberate silence of the sycophantic press with regard to the problem areas plaguing the record of the Senator or Secretary of State Clinton.

Similarly to her approach from 2008, she expects 2016 to be the year not of her election but rather of her coronation. In 2008, it was Barack Obama who prevented the coronation. In 2016, there is a chance for the Republican candidate to perform the same function.

A father in Dubai took his family to the beach for a picnic and some fun in the sun, only to have the day turn into needless tragedy.

The father’s daughter began to drown a short distance from shore when lifeguards began the attempt to rescue her. But the father — who is apparently very strong — restrained the lifeguards from doing their job because “he prefers his daughter being dead than being touched by a strange man.”

Speaking to Emirates 24|7, Lt. Col Ahmed Burqibah, Deputy Director of Dubai Police’s Search and Rescue Department said that this incident took place at a beach in Dubai.

“This is one of the incidents which I cannot forget.

“It shocked me and many others who were involved in the case.

(New York Observer columnist Lisa Schiffren is one of the smartest journalists I know. A one-time Republican speechwriter, Lisa has written widely for conservative publications. I’m honored to offer this gem as a guest essay — DG).

Scene: A wood paneled room, no windows, the late hour at which posh N.Y. fund raising dinners end. Hillary Clinton enters to find three middle aged, intelligent looking women seated at a long table. Tea and cookies are proffered.

Good evening Secretary Clinton. May we call you Hillary? Thank you for coming to see us. You are wondering why we have summoned you. We dislike intervening in domestic politics. But…things are a bit dire at the moment. We believe that we can help you, and you can help us.

We see that your support is down. Voters don’t trust you. They don’t think you understand their problems. That nasty piece of work, the Grand Vizier Valerie Jarrett, has leaked information about forthcoming indictments for your transgressions at the State Department. She has boxes of evidence. The accusations of financial corruption are piling high.

We know this is upsetting. But you must be coming to understand that you are not going to be President of the United States. It is possible that you will not even win your primary.

For the record, it was always going to be an uphill struggle. Your presidency seems to cycle between your two parties every eight years. We wanted you to have it in ‘08. We expected you to win your primary and the general. We were shocked to see a great party nominate someone whose disdain for America was on full display.

To adapt BuzzFeed, 10 ways Hillary tried to buy young voters.

Hillary Clinton has something for everyone in President Obama’s political coalition, and this week her target is millennial voters. On Monday the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, er, candidate rolled out a $350 billion proposal that she says will make college more affordable. The irony is that she plans to ramp up the federal subsidies that have for decades driven up the cost of a higher education.

Her campaign is selling the New College Compact as ground-breaking, but you’ll recognize the path: debt-free public education for all as a taxpayer entitlement. The plan would ladle federal money on states whose public universities guarantee loan-free education and community college. Mrs. Clinton would also expand a program that allows borrowers to cap repayments based on what they earn, among other ideas. She’ll pay for this frat party the only way Democrats know: taxing the wealthy.

The speech was mean-spirited and dishonest — and may have been counterproductive.

President Obama’s speech last week advocating congressional approval of the Iran deal was mostly made-up history mixed with invective. Indeed, he talked far more roughly about his congressional partners than he did about our Iranian enemies, who have worked so hard to kill Americans over the last 35 years.

Obama assured us that in the past a “nonproliferation treaty . . . prohibited nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.” One wonders, then, how India, China, North Korea, and Pakistan ever obtained them, given they were all forbidden to do so under “new agreements” forged by Democratic and Republican presidents. Is there much logic in the assertion that the intelligence was flawed when we went to war with what proved to be a non-nuclear Iraq, but that we can trust the same intelligence agencies to apprise us precisely of the nuclear status of Iran?

“After two years of negotiations,” Obama went on, “we have achieved a detailed arrangement that permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb.”

‘My name . . . comes from the word shomer, guardian, watcher. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov, and I believe God actually gave me that name. One of my roles, which is very important in the United States Senate, is to be a shomer — to be Shomer Yisrael [guardian of Israel]. And I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.”

These are the words of Senator Charles Schumer, soon-to-be minority leader of the United States Senate, the most powerful Democrat in Congress. Senator Schumer has given this speech, or some iteration of it, hundreds of times at synagogues, Jewish community centers, and media outlets across the country. Many of my friends were at a similar gathering at the Aventura Turnberry synagogue in Miami in 2008, when Senator Schumer used his Hebrew name, shomer, to assure the congregants, many of whom were wary of voting for Senator Barack Obama, that President Barack Obama would be a friend to Israel. As he often is, Senator Schumer was persuasive and magnetic, leaving most of the voters who walked out of Turnberry that night feeling safe and secure — sensing themselves, in a word, shamur, that is, protected by their shomer.

Now, years later, Senator Schumer, self-proclaimed shomer of the Jewish people, is our only remaining hope to defeat a nuclear agreement with Iran that would, if ratified, alter the balance of power in the Middle East, condone the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program, infuse the Iranian terror machine with hundreds of billions of dollars with which to finance its proxies, and, for all practical purposes, prevent the United States from castigating the ayatollahs for future violations of their nuclear obligations.

If what senior Iranian officials are saying is true, the Obama administration’s duplicity in explaining its nuclear negotiations with Iran is even more staggering than we realized.

In a new report, MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) reveals that, according to Iranian officials, the Obama administration initiated secret negotiations with Iran not after the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani, but rather in 2011 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still Iran’s president.

That means the administration did not wait to reach out until Iran was governed by Rouhani, the purportedly “pragmatic” moderate the Obama administration contrasts with Iranian “hardliners” who supposedly oppose the Iran deal. It reached out when Ahmadinejad, an unapologetic “Death to America, death to Israel” hardliner, was running Iran’s government.

To be clear, these distinctions are nonsensical. In Iran, the president is not in charge; the president is subordinate to the nation’s sharia jurists, the chief of whom is “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As I observed last week, Khamenei is a hardliner through and through. So is Rouhani — a protégé of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s jihadist regime. Rouhani, a close friend and adviser of Khamenei, has been a staunch advocate of Iran’s nuclear program and a leader in crushing dissident protests.

Seventy years ago first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, were obliterated. Three generations later the grand-strategic consequences of those events can be discerned with reasonable clarity. They are by no means uniformly bad.

The claim that the destruction of two large cities and the killing of over two hundred thousand humans was justified in order to prevent an even greater carnage on both sides, resulting from the putative U.S. invasion of Japan in late 1945, is historically disputable and morally unsustainable. The horror itself—including the unexpected effects of radiation and fallout—has had a salutary impact on the great and minor powers alike in the ensuing decades, however. It is arguable that its deterrent effect has spared the world a major war costing millions of lives.

In most bipolar confrontations known to history—from Assyria versus Egypt, Persia vs. Greece, Athens vs. Sparta, and Rome vs. Carthage onwards—coexistence (peaceful or otherwise) was not an option. In a classic bipolar model, America and the USSR likely would have gone to an all-out war some time 10-15 years after 1945, a war probably no less destructive than the one preceding it. The constraints against first use of nuclear weapons, and the related fear of escalation leading to their inadvertent application, introduced an element of caution and moderation on both sides—the “nuclear taboo.” A complex system of informal checks and balances within the political, military and bureaucratic apparata operated in different ways on different sides of the Iron Curtain, but its effects were broadly similar. It was in evidence in the U.S. for the first time in the critical Korean winter of 1950-51, when President Harry Truman overruled General Douglas MacArthur. President Eisenhower did say in 1955 that nuclear weapons could be used “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else,” but during the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis he admitted that, with the bomb, “you cross a completely different line.” That line was in Central Europe and in the homeland then, and it had remained there until the fall of the Wall. Restraint was notably present on both sides during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: ideological differences and divergent strategic interests were transcended by mutually compatible rational calculations. Neither side seriously considered the possibility of preemptive attacks thereafter, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s fleeting “madman” threats to Hanoi notwithstanding.