RUTHFULLY YOURS

Foreign-policy failures have a way of compounding, and that’s what seems to have happened as U.S. officials said Thursday they believe that Islamic State militants used mustard gas this week against Kurdish forces in Iraq.

The sources told Journal reporter Adam Entous that the mustard gas was probably obtained in Syria. Bashar Assad’s government admitted in 2013 to having stockpiles of mustard gas and other banned poisons. President Obama has since claimed often that his deal that year with Vladimir Putin removed those weapons from Syria. But recently U.S. intelligence has said it believes the government hid some caches from international inspectors. That’s the first U.S. failure.

The second is Mr. Obama’s refusal to act with enough dispatch and force against Islamic State. He promised a year ago to degrade and destroy ISIS. But the jihadists have since been able to expand their writ in Iraq, taking the city of Ramadi in May. It’s hardly surprising that jihadists who drown men in cages would resort to using chemical weapons. They will use whatever they can to hold and expand their caliphate.

Hillary feels compelled to issue an everyone-remain-calm memo 15 months before the election.
The Titanic was a beautiful ship. It was a colossus—the culmination of decades of wisdom and design. It was financed and booked by the world’s rich and famous. It was unstoppable. And because it was, it steamed full ahead. Until it sank.
Democrats are this week beginning to freak out that Hillary Clinton is their Titanic, and to debate whether they might be better off on this 2016 political crossing in a less awesome, but more prudent, boat. The debate is overdue. The Clintons are masters at projecting invincibility and lulling their passengers into blanking the danger signs. But holes in a hull have a way of focusing minds.
It’s never a good sign when your party’s putative nominee feels compelled to send out an everyone-remain-calm memo 15 full months before an election. Campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri’s reassurance to supporters was classic Clinton—the perfect combo of airy dismissal (Server? FBI? It means nothing!), misdirection (this whole “classified” thing is really “complicated”), table-turning (Republicans hide things too, you know), and attack (this is just a “partisan witch-hunt”). Still, you don’t send out 700-word explanatories unless party leaders and donors are lighting you up with panic calls.
When Mrs. Clinton handed over her private email server to the Justice Department, Democrats sniffed vulnerability and took a wider look around. What they see is polls showing more than half of America now holds an unfavorable view of their front-runner, and that a mere one-third of the country trusts her. They see surveys showing her only tied with top-tier Republicans in a general matchup—down from a 10-point advantage in May—and losing head-to-head in key battleground states.

As furor builds over the EPA disaster in Durango, Colorado, I would like to propose a just solution. Given that the EPA is an unaccountable, job-killing, river-polluting behemoth, Congress ought to pass a ban on its onshore operations.

Joking aside, while political figures try to brush this fiasco under the table without heads actually rolling or the EPA compensating taxpayers for the environmental damage it caused, the point should be made that the federal government should be held not just to an equal standard as private enterprise, but a higher one.

After all, public servants are accountable to all of us. Private individuals are not.

Yet Democratic Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper argues the exact opposite:

The link between Jewish nationalism and Jewish settlements is crucial.

Jewish nationalism, Zionism, the reestablishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael, the homeland of the Jewish people, rooted in Torah, the Bible and Jewish history, echoed in prophetic and rabbinic writing and in prayer, is the most invigorating dynamic in Jewish life in modern times. The uniqueness of Israel as a Jewish state is not only that it is connected to the Bible, documented history going back four millennia, but that it is the vehicle for the third Jewish commonwealth, a modern expression of Jewish civilization.

It is no coincidence that the rebuilding of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of former Jewish civilizations and where, by definition, all “settlements” exist, is contended. And it is no wonder that it is in this area, filled with religious Zionists, that Jewish nationalism is strongest, most vivid and unequivocal. Until 2005, the area of Gush Katif would also have been included in this panorama, and it is for that reason that the 2005 evacuation of Jews from the Gush, known as “the Gaza disengagement,” is correctly seen as an attack on religious Zionism. The link between Jewish nationalism and Jewish settlements is crucial.

Middle East expert Ilan Berman points out that for Iran, trading with Europe is actually the perfect self-defense, a virtual guarantee that it will not face military attack if it cheats on its obligations under the nuclear deal.

Sanctions will also be lifted on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s $95 billion business empire, as well as on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which operates a vast network of companies and industries. No wonder European media outlets are referring to Iran as the “new El Dorado,” the “chance of a century,” and the “last untapped market.”

“Conducting business with the Iranian regime means to finance the nuclear program, the annihilation threats against Israel, Holocaust denial, the export of Islamist terror and the oppression of the Iranian population.” — Stop the Bomb, Austria.

“Everyone is looking at Iran with greed.” — Senior French official.

European politicians and business leaders, resembling the running of the bulls in Spain, are falling over themselves in a rush to secure the “first-mover” advantage in Iran’s $400 billion economy.

Under the nuclear deal reached in Vienna on July 14, international sanctions will be removed on Iran’s banking, energy and trade sectors if Tehran agrees to certain curbs on its nuclear program.

The lifting of sanctions on Iran, a market of 80 million consumers (the second-largest market in the Middle East after Turkey in terms of GDP) creates the potential for staggering business opportunities.

Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, maintained in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, has finally been taken by the FBI, five months after it emerged that, as secretary of state, she used it systematically to conduct government business. The seizure of the server, along with electronic copies of its contents maintained by her private lawyer, is in connection with a criminal investigation into the mishandling of classified information. It is being dressed up by a reeling Clinton campaign as Hillary’s “voluntary”​ surrender of the server in connection with a “security inquiry.”

All we can say is, “It’s about time.”

It has been obvious since March both that the server should have been seized by the government and that Clinton’s extra-governmental communications system — designed to undermine record-keeping requirements that enable government to make disclosures in response to congressional, judicial, criminal, and public requests — is a major national-security breakdown.

Clinton held one of the highest offices of the United States, and communications involving high-level intelligence were a routine part of her job. Despite her protestations to the contrary, it was inevitable that classified information would be exchanged in her “private” e-mails and stored on her “private server.”

It was probably inevitable that the woman always at Hillary Clinton’s side would one day be sucked into the vortex of suspicion and scandal surrounding the Democratic presidential frontrunner. For top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, that day seems to have arrived.

Though rumors of impropriety have swirled around Abedin for over two years, in the past two weeks they’ve snowballed into concrete allegations. Last week, the State Department inspector general claimed that the trusted Clinton confidant owes the government nearly $10,000 for violating rules regarding vacation and sick leave. And in court on Monday, Hillary Clinton admitted Abedin had an e-mail account on the now-infamous private server run out of Clinton’s house while she was secretary of state, and that the account “was used at times for government business.” State Department investigators say they’ve now expanded a probe into Clinton’s use of private e-mail to include “top aides,” meaning Abedin is almost certainly under federal investigation for the possible exchange of unsecured, classified data.

Despite a glacial government response time, multiple investigations into Abedin’s simultaneous employment at the State Department and a consulting firm tied to the Clintons are also approaching their peak. Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has already accused Abedin of leveraging her dual public and private roles to “deliver favors” for key Clinton Foundation donors.

The coarser and cruder Donald Trump becomes, and the more ill-informed on the issues he sounds, the more he coasts in the polls. Apparently, a few of his targets must be regarded as unsympathetically as their defamer.

Trump is rightly mocked for cynically spreading quid pro quo money around. But he quickly counters that his critics — from Hillary Clinton to his Republican rivals — have all asked him for such cash or for favors.

Trump preps little. He has no real agenda. And he makes stuff up as he goes along. For such a New York brawler, he has thin skin, smearing his critics, often in creepy fashion. How can a former Democrat, once a pro-choice, pro-amnesty liberal and a supporter of single-payer health care, remain the godhead of the conservative base for weeks on end?

The answer is that Trump is a catharsis for 15 percent to 20 percent of the Republican electorate. They apparently like the broken china shop and appreciate the raging bull who runs amok in it. Politicians and the media are seen as corrupt and hypocritical, and the nihilistic Trump is a surrogate way of letting them take some heat for a change.

Hillary Clinton’s spinmeisters are working overtime to deal with the latest developments in her ongoing e-mail scandal. They have an increasingly tough road to hoe as the Clinton cover-up begins to unravel.

The FBI investigation of the handling of classified information on Hillary’s personal e-mail account, which she used for all her government business while serving as Secretary of State, is underway. Her campaign announced on August 11th that she has directed her aides at long last to turn over to federal investigators her private server and a thumb drive containing copies of her e-mails. Hillary’s campaign is trying to portray her decision as evidence of her cooperative spirit. This is utter nonsense, considering that she has refused to turn over her server for months to any independent third party. Last March, during a press conference she held at United Nations headquarters shortly after the e-mail scandal first broke, Hillary declared that “the server will remain private.” Moreover, her lawyer David Kendell, who had possession of the thumb drive, said that the server and its backup located at a technology company in Colorado had been wiped clean. If that is true, and the e-mails she has not already turned over cannot be retrieved through technical means, Hillary could be in hot water on obstruction of justice grounds alone.

For a Party whose obituary has been written, Republican candidates showed themselves to be a lively, diverse and talented group. Among the seventeen on stage Thursday evening were a woman, an African-American, an Indian-American and two Hispanics. They ranged in age from 44 to 69. They included Senators and Governors, both current and past, business people and a brain surgeon. They are more representative of today’s polyglot United States than the bland, old, White folk who comprise those running on the Democrat ticket. Like Mark Twain once wrote about himself, death notices for the GOP are premature.

The debate continued in editorials, columns, on talk shows and in the blogosphere. While a Gallup Poll of likely Republican voters determined Marco Rubio and Scott Walker the winners, Donald Trump became the most discussed participant. While he enjoys belittling others, Mr. Trump has a thin skin. His responses to Megyn Kelly’s questions were incendiary and ungracious. He is not a nice man. Nevertheless, he continues to feed off the discontent that seems pervasive – for some good reasons – in much of the Country. Throughout the debate, Mr. Trump looked like he had bitten into a lemon that was especially sour. He is not my choice and I suspect his fame will fade, but I can understand why so many are fed up with Washington and the cronyism that has become worse over the past six and a half years. The Left, of course, loves the possibility of “the Donald,” as a split among Republicans raises their prospects. In the same manner, Republicans cheer on Bernie Sanders, because he might do the same to Democrats. Both are in the position to become spoilers or king-makers. Which will it be?