RUTHFULLY YOURS

We have had some fine foreign-affairs thinkers in our time: Henry Kissinger, Richard Pipes, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz. But as a feckless European leadership tries to figure out what to do about a flood of Middle Eastern refugees (at least some of whom probably are not refugees but ISIS infiltrators), take a minute to appreciate that underrated American foreign-policy guru, Robert Frost:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down. I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

One has to admire the Burkean conservatism at work there: Confronted with the poet’s idealism, the flinty atavistic old farmer, ever mindful of the proverbs of his fathers, sets about rebuilding the damaged stone fence because it is there. Frost, it is worth noting, wrote “Mending Wall” some years before G. K. Chesterton (both men were born in 1874) published his famous advice to never knock down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.

A new poll released Monday shows just how fast Hillary Clinton’s star has fallen within her own party: The once-presumptive front-runner has lost a full third of her support among registered Democrats since July.

The poll, conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post, shows a precipitous drop in Clinton’s polling numbers from two months ago, when 63 percent of Democrats supported her. An ongoing e-mail scandal, questions about her trustworthiness, and the general anti-establishment fervor of the American electorate have combined to lower that number to just 42 percent today.

The drop is particularly pronounced among women, once seen as Clinton’s key constituency. Though 71 percent of women Democrats supported Clinton in July, just 42 percent back the former secretary of state today.

Socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s victory to become the new leader of Britain’s Labour party doesn’t have an exact parallel in the United States.

But just imagine if the nominee of the Democratic party was selected by a vote of party members. Say that Bernie Sanders decided to run, but he needed the backing of 35 of his fellow Democrats in Congress to be considered. He was so extreme, though, that he didn’t have their support. Then 14 Democrats — either out of pity or a desire to broaden the debate — “lent” him their names so he could get on the ballot. Sanders then shocks everyone by riding — all the way to victory — the surge of new, left-wing members. A raft of moderate party officials then refuse to work with him, and the threat of civil war suddenly hangs over the party.

That’s what just happened in Britain. After Labour’s stunning defeat at the hands of the Conservatives last May, many Labour supporters came to the conclusion they hadn’t been left-wing enough. They pointed to Scotland, where Labour was wiped out by the Scottish National party, a group of nationalists even more left-wing than them. So why not go with Corbyn? After all, many of his Labour supporters actually make the argument that none of his opponents for the leadership could have won the next general election in 2020 anyway.

Last Friday, the British Labour Party introduced an “assisted dying” bill into parliament. The following day, in an attempt to demonstrate that they stood squarely behind the measure, the party’s members elected Jeremy Corbyn as their new leader.

Since 1974, Labour has won only three elections — all of them under the moderate stewardship of Tony Blair. By selecting a rabble-rousing socialist to lead it into the future, the British Left has sent a clear message to the public at large. That message? That it is happy to lose in perpetuity if it can moan and emote along the way. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell worried aloud that his coveted socialist agenda would never be realized if its implementation were to remain in the hands of the “prigs.” “It would help enormously,” Orwell concluded, “if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled.” “If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly,” then — and only then — would the Left have a shot at power. Combining the mien of a burned-out geography teacher at a third-rate comprehensive school with the speaking style of a self-satisfied undergraduate Trotskyite, Jeremy Corbyn is precisely the kind of socialist Orwell feared. One can only imagine how he’d suffer if he were alive to watch his rise.

The next president and Congress will inherit what President Obama left behind. Whether Democrat or Republican, the president will have no choice other than to try to undo much of what Obama has wrought. But can he or she?

THE MIDDLE EAST
The policy of “leading from behind” and the crudity of “We came, we saw, he [Qaddafi] died” have left a human tragedy in Libya. Backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was an inexplicable choice, and it almost ruined the country. The United States did not need to hound and jail an innocent video maker in order to concoct a myth to cover up the culpable lax security in Benghazi. Yemen was strangely declared a model of our anti-terrorism efforts — just weeks before it ignited into another Somalia or Congo. ISIS was airily written off as a jayvee bunch as it spread beyond Syria and Iraq. There is little need to do a detailed comparison of Iraq now and Iraq in February 2009 (when it was soon to be the administration’s “greatest achievement,” a “stable” and “self-reliant” nation); the mess in between is attributable to Obama’s use of the aftermath of the Iraq War for pre-election positioning. Ordering Assad to flee while ignoring the violence in Syria and proclaiming a faux red line has now tragically led to a million refugees in Europe (and another 4 million in the neighborhood) and more than 200,000 dead. Israel is now considered not an ally, not even a neutral, but apparently a hostile state worthy of more presidential invective than is Iran. We have few if any reliable friends any more in the Gulf. Iran will become a nuclear power. The only mystery over how that will happen is whether Obama was inept or whether he deliberately sought to make the theocracy some sort of a strategic power and U.S. ally. The Middle East over the next decade may see three or four additional new nuclear powers. The Russia of kleptocrat Vladimir Putin is seen in the region as a better friend than is the U.S. — and certainly a far more dangerous enemy to provoke.

Brandon Marshall, the New York Jets wide receiver and occasional sports commentator, charges that the National Football League is racist [1]. He alleges that the league favors white players over black athletes like him, especially white marquee quarterbacks.

Aside from the fact that Marshall recently signed a three-year contract for $27 million — and, for example, African-American lineman Marcell Dareus just concluded a contract extension with the Buffalo Bills for six years at $100 million — examine Marshall’s whimper in light of the demography of the National Football League.

Currently, African-Americans comprise about 12% of the population. Yet they make up about 67% of the current meritocratic, but allegedly racist NFL roster. In the quota parlance of affirmative action engineering, they are “overrepresented” in one of America’s most prestigious and compensated industries at over five times their percentages in the general population. Nor are blacks just the purported grunts on the battlefield of the league; they make up 16% of the head coaches and 24% of the league’s general managers.

President Obama and his rancid leftist allies have subjected America to a blizzard of lies. Nothing that leaves his mouth even remotely parrots the truth, but typically stands truth on its head. The propaganda infrastructure spanning media, Hollywood, non-profit institutions and the halls of academia then erects a virtually impenetrable wall of disinformation to advance the lie.

They have just foisted on us a “deal” with Iran that threatens to create a holocaust, the likes of which America, and perhaps the world, has never seen. As Iran chanted “death to America” and “death to Israel,” this “deal” somehow skirted the advice and consent role reserved to the U.S. Senate. While we are afflicted with many feckless, incompetent and corrupt Republican Senators — never mind the Democrats — the “deal” could have never obtained the requisite approval of 2/3ds of senators. The lies about the “deal” are too numerous to catalog, and before the ink has even dried, Iran has suddenly “discovered” massive stockpiles of uranium it never knew it had!

Introduction

President Obama seems anxious to shore up his legacy in several disparate areas: concluding a nuclear deal with Iran; reaching an international climate accord in Paris in December 2015; phasing out fossil fuels for electric generation in favor of wind and solar; and also: shoring up Obamacare before the inevitable cost explosion; irreversibly changing the ethnic and moral make-up of the US – and of the economy; destroying the middle class and making a larger fraction dependent on government hand-outs. Obviously, many books can be written on these topics and on others, like immigration, race relations, education, gun control, and the generally increasing involvement of the feds in state and local affairs.

Here I will comment briefly on the first three topics: Iran, Paris, and Electric power. All three are controversial, with the public and Congress largely opposed to the White House (WH). It may take only one veto over-ride to bring down all of Obama’s initiatives; it depends mainly on coalitions forming among angry Democrat senators. [More on that below.]

Unlike so many terrorists, Osama Bin Laden didn’t take all of his secrets to the grave. The Navy SEALs who hunted him down also brought back from his Abbottabad hideout many files on al Qaeda’s plans as well as its cooperation with Iran. The question is why the public hasn’t been allowed to see them.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Dick Cheney quoted former Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Flynn saying there are “letters about Iran’s role, influence and acknowledgment of enabling al Qaeda operatives to pass through Iran as long as al Qaeda did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The former DIA director has also said Congress should seek all bin Laden documents related to Iran because they are “very telling.”

Here’s an example from one file that has been released. In a memo to bin Laden, an al Qaeda operative talks about another who is ready to travel:

“The book’s shabby scholarship is a sad commentary on the state of our universities, and one wonders why Viking saw fit to publish it. Viking has an admirable history of printing some of the best authors of the English language. Pity they spoiled their own narrative with this one.”

The best thing about The Two-State Delusion is its title. Political elites worldwide have clung to the “two state solution” for decades, most recently in the fruitless diplomacy of Secretary of State Kerry in 2013 and 2014. But while Padraig O’Malley is right in saying more of the same will go nowhere, his analysis of the problem stands reality on its head.

O’Malley is a professor at the University of Massachusetts who “has spent his career helping to solve conflicts,” according to the back page blurb. He started with Ireland, moved on to South Africa, and has now landed in Israel. Hopefully, he’ll skip to another conflict quickly. In a world full of bad books about the Arab-Israeli conflict, this one stands out.

The book’s theme is that Palestinian and Jewish narratives are irreconcilable, which is true. The trouble is that O’Malley has his own narrative, which corresponds almost entirely to the Palestinian narrative, even those elements that are patently false. Take, for example, the Palestinian assertion that they have been “the indigenous population in Palestine without interruption for 1,500 years.” O’Malley first presents this as part of the Palestinian narrative, which is fair enough. But later it becomes (repeatedly) absorbed into his own account. Here is O’Malley in his own voice: “Neither the Zionist project nor the state that it created ever recognized the indigenous Palestinians as a distinct people for whom Palestine had been their homeland for 1,500 years.”