The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

 During the later years of the Obama era, I had many posts with this title. Evidence was ample that Iran had not done much beyond complying with the narrowest interpretation of the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. There'd certainly been no change of heart, no desire on Iran's part to begin to really act like a well-intentioned member of the international community. When two US Navy patrol boats were captured by Iran in the Persian Gulf, their crew members photographed on their knees with their hands behind their heads, on the day Obama was to give the State of the Union address, or when the Ayatollah Khameini or top-ranking Quds Force or Revolutionary Guards spokesmen continued the rhetoric about the US being Iran's number one enemy, or when Iran continued to build ever-more powerful missiles, or when it would get caught shipping materiel to terrorist groups, I'd write a post with this title.

The reason was to hammer home a basic point of sensible foreign policy: you don't appease rogue regimes that have repeatedly declared that you are their enemy.

Pulling out of the JCPOA was one of the handful of laudable policy moves to come out of the Trump administration in my estimation.

But I feel pretty sure Trump did it from a transactional motivation rather than from adherence to the above-mentioned principle. He thinks in terms of deals, and saw the JCPOA as a bad one.

And then he put his signature inconsistency on display by making an abrupt turn from longstanding US policy toward North Korea and setting up and participating in the summits with Kim Jong-Un. We had to listen to gushing rhetoric about beautiful letters and North Korea's enormous potential, knowing full well there'd be no resulting change in that country's stance. 

If the JCPOA was driven at least largely by Obama's and Kerry's narcissistic determination to be seen as visionary peacemakers, Trump's overtures to Kim were that determination on steroids. 

And, no surprise here, it was all for naught:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened to expand his nuclear arsenal as he disclosed a list of high-tech weapons systems under development, saying the fate of relations with the United States depends on whether it abandons its hostile policy, state media reported Saturday.

 

Kim’s comments during a key meeting of the ruling party this week were seen as applying pressure on the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has called Kim a “thug” and has criticized his summits with President Donald Trump.

 

The Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying the “key to establishing new relations between (North Korea) and the United States is whether the United States withdraws its hostile policy.”

The Kim regime has the same basic stance it's had for decades:

He again called the U.S. his country’s “main enemy.”

“Whoever takes office in the U.S., its basic nature and hostile policy will never change,” he said.

So when some drool-besotted Trumpist starts in with the list of supposedly great accomplishments of the Very Stable Genius and gets to this subject, you can respond, "I think we can take that one off." 

  

Saturday roundup

The congregation of an Episcopal church in a little hamlet in the hills of southern Indiana gets played for saps:

A few days after the election of Donald Trump, a church community in Indiana was shocked to find that someone had spray-painted ugly and un-Christian things on their church.

St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom, Ind., was vandalized with Nazi slogans, anti-gay slurs, and Donald Trump graffiti on November 12, 2016 -- but it wasn't from a hateful Trump supporter.

After a six-month investigation, the Brown County prosecuting attorney’s office determined that it was the congregation’s own organist—a Hillary Clinton supporter and gay activist—who did the deed. The culprit, 26-year-old George Nathaniel Stang of Bloomington, is also the person who first reported the vandalism to police last November.

It was immediately thought to be a hate crime because the small Episcopal Church is a progressive congregation that welcomes gays. The graffiti spray painted on the church walls read “Heil Trump” and “Fag Church.”

But during their inquiries police quickly came to feel that the vandalism was done by someone familiar with the church and began looking at the crime as an inside job. After an investigation, police arrested Stang.

The church organist allegedly admitted to the crime telling police he did it because he wanted to “mobilize a movement after being disappointed in and fearful of the outcome of the national election.”

In a three-page confession entered into court documents, Stand reportedly said he was trying to spark his congregation into activism.

“I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good, even if it was a false flag,” he wrote according to court records. “To be clear my actions were not motivated by hate for the church or its congregation. I, of course, realize now, this was NOT the way to go about inspiring activism.”

Brilliant David French essay at NRO in which he examines the sociocultural cudgels that could be used to explain the death of Bob, a fictional middle-aged American with high blood pressure, a divorce, an inability to stay abreast of changes in his career field and other problems that boil down to the choices he's made in life.

Squirrel-Hair doubles down on his praise for Australia's health care system. If some of his highest-profile water-carriers had either acted like the conservatives they claimed to be or kept their populist-nationalist traps shut, we could have had Ted.

Remember those bad actors from Iran that post-America under the Most Equal Comrade released in order to sweeten the nuke deal? Well, the House Oversight Committee is going to investigate the matter.

Leaked emails are now a feature of the French election. Whodunnit?

Perpetual adolescence, a societal problem that's been addressed at least since 2004 when Joseph Epstein wrote a Weekly Standard piece about it, followed in 2007 by Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up, is still with us. One of the handful of US Senators that could rightly be called great human beings, Ben Sasse, revisits the subject in a WSJ column called "How to Raise an American Adult." He says there are five main components to the project that parents should impart to their offspring: resist consumption, embrace the pain of work (that is, do something dirty and physically demanding even if it takes time away from the extracurricular activities the college you're applying to wants to see), connect across generations, travel meaningfully, and become truly literate.

Helps make a couple of post-American foreign-policy fronts more understandable

Tony Badran at Tablet sheds some light on the seeming incoherence of the Most Equal Comrade's Syria policy. He told Iran he'd do nothing to p--- that country off when it came to Syria. That's how important the "agreement" on Iran's nuclear ambitions was to the MEC.

 . . .  it is a byproduct of America’s overriding desire to clinch a nuclear deal with Iran, which was meant to allow America to permanently remove itself from a war footing with that country and to shed its old allies and entanglements in the Middle East, which might also draw us into war. By allowing Iran and its allies to kill Syrians with impunity, America could demonstrate the corresponding firmness of its resolve to let Iran protect what President Barack Obama called its “equities” in Syria, which are every bit as important to Iran as pallets of cash.

And just like it sold its Iran policy through a public “echo chamber” of paid “experts” from organizations like Ploughshares and quote-seeking journalists and bloggers, some of whom also cashed White House-friendly nonprofit checks, the White House deliberately constructed an “echo chamber” to forward its Syria policy. The difference between the two “echo chambers” is that, absent any wider debate or the need for congressional approval, the Syria version was much more narrowly targeted at policy wonks and foreign-affairs writers, and the arguments it echoed were entirely deceptive in their larger thrust—the point of the Iran Deal was, in fact, to do a deal with Iran—rather than simply incomplete or false in their specifics.
America’s Syria policy can, therefore, be best understood not in the terms most familiar to Mideast analysts, such as “getting Assad to step aside” or “supporting the moderate opposition” or “paving the way to a peaceful transition and elections.” Rather, it is a strategic-communications campaign tightly run from the White House, whose purpose was and is to serve as a smokescreen for an entirely coherent and purposeful policy that comes directly from the president himself, but which he and his aides did not wish to publicly own. The goal of the president and his closest aides is to convince the Iranians that we would meet our commitments to them while confusing and obscuring the real reasons behind the president’s set decision of nonintervention in Syria from American legislators and the public alike.

You can't act on consistent principle when your overriding aim is to secure a legacy as the One Who Ushered In the Age of Unicorns and Rainbows.

Post-America, the world's biggest, wealthiest banana republic

Supremely important piece by Jed Babbin at The American Spectator today.

How's this for a money line?

The differences between Obama’s America and Maduro’s Venezuela are defined only by degree.

His overall point is that the architects who have brought post-America to this point are Madame Bitbleach and the Most Equal Comrade. Each are driven by particular ratios of power-lust and a planned-decline ideology.

In Hillionaire's case,  the power-lust is predominant, and has led to corrupt behavior and a knack for intimidating impartial institutions we probably have never seen in this nation's history:

The newly-released FBI documents on the investigation of Hillary Clinton make it clear beyond argument that the fix was in and that the FBI never had any intention of recommending that she should be prosecuted for her crimes.

That is very hard to write. I have had very good friends among the agents of the FBI, men of unshakeable dedication to the fair enforcement of the law. But that is no longer the FBI’s goal, as just a few references to the documents published last week reveal.

First, you had to notice that the FBI agreed that there would be no videotape of its interview of Clinton. Not only would there not be a videotape, but no court reporter would be present to record a transcript. That itself is highly unusual, but there is far more, and far worse.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, had to have participated in sending classified material to Clinton on her private and unsecured “clintonemail.com” email system. Yet when the FBI questioned Clinton, Mills was permitted to attend as one of Clinton’s lawyers. That is not only unethical under the Bar’s unenforced ethics standards, but obviously a huge violation of the most elementary of FBI procedures that requires witnesses — and possible suspects — to be questioned separately in isolation from one another.

Clinton told the FBI that she relied on others’ judgment in sending her sensitive information on the unsecured email system. She also claimed that as a result of a head injury she didn’t recall key events such as being trained by the State Department on handing classified information or retaining records in accordance with federal law.

Clinton, as a U.S. senator, served on the Armed Services Committee from 2003 to 2009. She was a member of three subcommittees, including the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. In that capacity, she would have been instructed on how to handle highly-classified information and a great deal of it would have passed through her hands. She would have had many occasions to handle it and to transmit it among her colleagues and staff and executive branch officials. Further training by the State Department would have been unnecessary for her to know how such information had to be protected against disclosure.

Clinton’s obvious lie was one of many she told the FBI. Let’s remember that on at least one occasion, she told her State Department staff to remove the classified markings on some material and send it “in the clear” on an unsecured channel — her private email system.

The FBI found that Clinton had used a multitude of Blackberry and other personal devices while she was secretary of state. Thirteen of them are missing and have never been recovered. Anyone who has used a Blackberry or other personal email device can testify that they last for years. Clinton, while she was secretary of state, apparently got a new one every six or eight weeks. All of those devices, given the frequency of her communications, would have had classified information on them.

How compromised was the FBI in its balancing act between its actual mission and the hot breath of the Clinton machine on its neck?

 . . . in his July statement, FBI director Comey said that of Clinton’s State Department emails, “…110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. “

Comey’s statement included the fact that, “Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.” Clinton knew or should have known that the subject matter of those emails was classified because, for example, some discussed coming drone strikes against terrorists.

For all of Clinton’s lies, and there are far too many to recount, the worst lie of all was Comey’s. He said that there was no precedent for a prosecution of someone who had behaved as Clinton had and that no responsible prosecutor would bring charges. (Former CIA directors John Deutch and David Petraeus each pled guilty to mishandling classified information. Deutch was pardoned in 2001 by Bill Clinton.)

Comey also said that there was evidence that Clinton and her staff had handled classified information in an “extremely careless” way. Title 18 Section 793(f) says that anyone who is “grossly negligent” in handling classified information is guilty of a federal felony.
If we cannot trust the FBI to enforce the law, and we cannot, America is now characterized by one of the two facts defining a banana republic.

As a parting shot, the FBI also found that several email accounts that Clinton had communicated with while secretary of state had been intercepted (hacked) by hostile foreign actors, but that they couldn’t determine if Clinton’s email was hacked.
Russia, China, Iran and al-Qaida will have intercepted Clinton’s emails as a matter of policy. If she isn’t guilty of the federal felony described by Title 18 U.S. Code Section 793(f), I’ll eat her classified emails.

And, oh, by the way, Clinton sent classified information on her private email system after she left the secretary of state job. (That’s a separate crime, but who’s counting?) The bad guys surely have those emails as well.

In the Most Equal Comrade's case,  we're looking at a man with a more coherent core ideology than that of Hillionaire (although, to be sure, her Alinskyite roots still shape her way of operating). The MEC is and always has been focused on the Great Leveling Project, both domestically and abroad. He wants to hobble post-America's energy robustness, and thereby its economy (and is willing to sherd the Constitution to do so) and he wants to knock it down a peg on the world stage, even if it means a mortal enemy gets a nuclear arsenal:

The other revelation last week was David Albright’s report on President Obama’s nuclear deal.

Mr. Albright’s Institute for Science and International Security (not to be confused with the other ISIS) reported that the international commission running Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran has, in secret, allowed Iran to pretend to obey the deal’s conditions while violating them.

Albright’s report says that by the deal’s effective date, Iran was obligated to perform certain tasks in order to qualify for relief from the international sanctions that had been imposed. Among them was the disposal of low-enriched uranium (LEU), a limitation on its “hot cells,” and the shipment out of Iran of “heavy water” (deuterium oxide).

Iran didn’t dispose of, by shipment to another nation or otherwise, the required amount of LEU, leaving it more than enough to further enrich it to produce nuclear weapons. The “hot cells” — which can be used to produce plutonium, another key ingredient of some nuclear weapons — hadn’t been reduced in size to prevent the plutonium production. And the heavy water had been shipped to Yemen, where it remains under Iranian control.

Under the awful Corker Amendment (more fully discussed here) all side agreements, secret or not, were required to be disclosed to the senate. As a couple of senators have said publicly — and one to told me directly but privately — they weren’t.

Over the weekend, Obama signed the latest economy-killing global warming deal. Both the BBC and the Washington Post reported the event as U.S. ratification of the deal. Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that only the Senate can ratify a treaty.

Which results in the definition of Obama’s Iran deal being precisely concurrent with the other factor defining a banana republic. Obama’s autocratic foreign policy has been conducted in secret, and in opposition to our national security interests.

The two most powerful figures in post-America's Freedom-Hater party.

Makes it a little trickier for us individual citizens to maintain some kind of control over our fate, doesn't it?

Thursday roundup

Leon Wolf at RedState gets to the heart of the matter of Squirrel-Hair's waffling on immigration: eventually those high-profile Bots who made the issue their pet obsession will attempt to wash their hands of the S-H defeat by claiming he went mushy on it. But that won't be why he loses, since most Pub voters don't place a high priority on it:

Trump is losing Virginia and Colorado by double digits, and Trump simply does not have a path to victory without those states. In other words, on the day Trump made his "pivot" on immigration, he was already on the path to a virtually certain total defeat.

Here are the facts that people like Coulter do not like to acknowledge: illegal immigration is not a big deal to most people in this country. Polls consistentlyshow that "illegal immigration" is the main concern of about 6-8% of voters, which puts it barely within the top 10 of issues voters care about; and even among those voters, Hillary wins nearly half - which makes sense. For some portion of the people who view immigration as their most important issue, Trump is (or has been, until yesterday) about the worst candidate imaginable.

Here's how disconnected from reality the Ingrahams and Coulters are from the actual real world in which people live - as Dan McLaughlin noted here before in an exhaustive post, "amnesty" (as they define it) is a majority position among Republican primary voters. That particular majority, however, tends to be the actual silent majority; the "deport them all and let God sort them out" wing is the loud, obnoxious, more single-minded minority. Trump isn't going to lose the election because he is taking a position that is opposed by only a minority of voters in his own party and is supported by huge margins among the population at large, and it's absurd to suggest otherwise.

Bottom line is that a year from now, some yahoo is going to come up to you and suggest that the reason Trump lost the election is because he softened on immigration. Just know that the reason they are telling you this is because they are wanting to sell you more books about how, if everyone only listened to them, Republicans would win elections and everything would be great again. It sounds tempting, but it just isn't true.

Eli Lake at Bloomberg says a comprehensive look at the Most Equal Comrade's Iran policy since he's had his grip on post-America's throat explains why he sat on his hands when the 2009 uprising at least increased the possibility of getting rid of the Islamic Republic regime with its grip on Iran's throat: The MEC was obsessed with a legacy as a lightworker, a visionary astride the globe bringing unicorns, rainbows and an era of a true "international community" to humankind:

Obama from the beginning of his presidency tried to turn the country's ruling clerics from foes to friends. It was an obsession. And even though the president would impose severe sanctions on the country's economy at the end of his first term and beginning of his second, from the start of his presidency, Obama made it clear the U.S. did not seek regime change for Iran.  

It's debatable whether the U.S. ever did support such a policy. But it's striking the lengths to which Obama went to make good on his word. As Solomon reports, Obama ended U.S. programs to document Iranian human rights abuses. He wrote personal letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei assuring him the U.S. was not trying to overthrow him. Obama repeatedly stressed his respect for the regime in his statements marking Iran's annual Nowruz celebration.

His quest to engage the mullahs seems to have influenced Obama's decision-making on other issues too. When he walked away from his red line against Syria's use of chemical weapons in 2013, Solomon reports, both U.S. and Iranian officials had told him that nuclear negotiations would be halted if he intervened against Bashar al-Assad.

Obama eventually did get a nuclear deal with Iran. Solomon's book shines in reporting the details of the diplomacy that led to the 2015 accord. American diplomats held two sets of negotiations with Iran -- one public channel with the British, Chinese, European Union, French, Germans, Russians and the United Nations -- and another, bilateral track established through the Sultanate of Oman. In 2013, U.S. officials shuttled on public busses between two hotels in Geneva to conduct the two tracks before telling their negotiating partners about the formerly secret channel to Iran.

Eventually, the Iranians wore down the U.S. delegation. At the beginning of the talks in 2013, the U.S. position was for Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure. By the end of the talks in 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry and his team "agreed that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint."

Other U.S. red lines were demolished too. The final deal would allow the U.N. ban on Iranian missile development to phase out after eight years, and the arms embargo against Iran to expire after five. Iran would not have to acknowledge that it had tried to develop a nuclear weapon, even though samples the Iranians collected at its Parchin facility found evidence of man-made uranium.

The Oregon state legislature has an agenda of planned decline on steroids:

The green energy warriors have pretty much taken over the state legislature in the Beaver State for more than the past decade and they’ve managed to pass all sorts of interesting laws. One of them was a rule which says that all coal fired power will be eliminated by 2020… a deadline which is pretty much right around the corner. The Boardman Coal Plant is scheduled to shut down completely in the next few years and at that point there will be little besides wind turbines in terms of in-state power generation. What could possibly go wrong? (Fox News)

The massive coal-fired plant in Boardman, Ore., is just four years away from being shut down for good – at that point, Oregon coal production will be no more, after the state became the first in the nation to completely ban coal power.

The mandate, signed into law earlier this year, was the result of an environmentalist-fueled push by the Democrat-controlled legislature. Under the plan, coal production will end once the Boardman plant shutters in 2020 – utilities would still be able to buy coal power from out of state for another 10 years, until a 2030 deadline to end coal use entirely.

But the phase-out already has groups warning that residents are headed for big rate increases and brownouts.

The first thing the residents can prepare to do is tighten their purse strings. Energy generation remains in the realm of the free market and in order to comply with these state mandates, energy is going to cost more. The utility companies don’t simply suck up those increased costs, so they get passed on to the consumer. But if the citizens of the state are willing and able to pay energy bills which may double their current rates, that’s up to them I suppose. Of course, it’s the lowest income residents who will bear the brunt of that damage as usual.

But what will be more interesting to observe is not the bottom line people are paying, but if the lights will stay on at all. Coal currently provides more than a third of Oregon’s energy needs. The total energy provided by wind turbines accounts for… eight percent. And it’s a highly unreliable eight percent because that production drops to nearly zero every time the wind stops blowing. There are nowhere near the number of new wind turbine projects under construction right now to make up that gap even if you could ensure steady breezes blowing all year long.

"Science guy" my tail end:

William Sanford Nye’s scientific bona fides consists of an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell, and a stint at Boeing. But you can be anything you want on television, and in the late 1980s, hard at work pursuing a career in comedy, Nye landed a recurring bit as Bill Nye “the Science Guy” on Almost Live!, a Seattle-area sketch-comedy television show, and a role as Christopher Lloyd’s laboratory sidekick on Back to the Future: The Animated Series. Nye then leveraged that success into his namesake PBS Kids show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which from 1993 to 1998 filmed 100 half-hour episodes, each focused on a particular topic (dinosaurs, buoyancy, germs, &c.) and accompanied by a parody soundtrack (e.g., Episode 75, on invertebrates: “Crawl Away,” by “S. Khar Go” — a parody of “Runaway” by Janet Jackson). Somehow, because of this, Nye is now the go-to authority on exoplanets and dark matter and whether we are living in a computer simulation — and, of course, environmental policy.

I may have more on the Squirrel-Hair immigration waffle later today. The schadenfreude is too delicious to resist, especially the fact that Coulter's book In Trump We Trust comes out the very week that this goes down.

Post-America's enemies do not fear it - today's edition

Our partner in patty-cake - the one the "agreement" with which that has caused the State Department as well as Ben Rhodes of the White House to lie to the post-American cattle-masses - is still dripping with contempt for us:

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Friday Tehran had no intention of cooperating on regional issues with its main enemies, the United States and "evil" Britain.

Khamenei also accused Washington of not being committed to a nuclear deal reached between Tehran and six major powers, including the United States, in 2015 that aims to curb the country's disputed nuclear program.

The post-American State Department's denial was palpable:

Asked about Khamenei's remarks, U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said he did not really have a response.
"His rhetoric is always somewhat hyperbolic and so we take it with a grain of salt and don't necessarily rise to the bait," Toner told reporters.

So I guess Secretary Global-Test can go on exhorting European businesses to do deals with Iran, providing it with more money with which to sponsor terror and test missiles.

And on the Sunni side of jihad, Ramadan could be an interesting time this year:

The Islamic State is urging jihadists in the United States and Europe to carry out terror attacks during what a group spokesman promised would be “the month of conquest and jihad.”

A U.S. government advisory warned that ISIS attacks, either directly sponsored or simply inspired by the group’s rhetoric, could be carried out during Islam’s month of Ramadan that begins June 5.

The threatened attacks were announced in an ISIS video made public May 21.

In the video, ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani called on jihadists to “get prepared, be ready … to make it a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers…especially for the fighters and supporters of the caliphate in Europe and America.”

A report by the State Department-led Overseas Security Advisory Council said the threat could be credible because three deadly terror attacks took place last year shortly after Adnani issued a similar call to arms.

“According to Islamic practice, sacrifice during Ramadan can be considered more valuable than that made at other times, so a call to martyrdom during the month may hold a special allure to some,” the report said.

There is no information indicating a specific ISIS attack is being planned, although the threat of attacks remains significant, the report said.

The report, produced by the State Department’s diplomatic security office, said there is no data to indicate Ramadan witnesses increased terrorism, “but as [ISIS] remains focused on expanding conflict, it is likely to continue to seek to carry out attacks during the holy month.”

Ramadan includes a period of fasting for Muslims and is held each year during the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar.

The summer of unicorns and rainbows is upon us.

 

Gestures of contempt in return for outstretched hands - today's edition

There's a pattern to this, is there not? The Most Equal Comrade and his nomenklatura play patty-cake with a sworn enemy of America, culminating in an agreement, and the other party immediately steps up the contemptuous rhetoric:

President Raul Castro warned Cubans on Saturday that the United States was determined to end Cuba's socialist revolution despite restoring relations and a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama, saying one-party Communism was essential to defend the system.

"We must be alert, today more than ever," Castro said, speaking in front of a giant portrait of his brother Fidel Castro at the inauguration of the Communist Party's first congress in five years.

Speaking for over two hours, Castro used a defiant tone that belied the breakthrough between the Cold War enemies. He said Obama's desire to end U.S. sanctions was welcome but just a change of "method", in reference to efforts by Washington to bring political change to Cuba ever since the Castro brothers toppled a pro-American government in 1959.

Obama and Castro announced in December 2014 they would end decades of hostility and normalize relations. But on a historic trip to the island last month, Obama angered the government with a speech broadcast directly into Cubans' homes calling for more political freedom and democracy in the one-party state.

Castro and his lieutenants, many of them in their 70s and 80s, faced some discontent ahead of the congress among younger members who are critical of their slow delivery on promised economic reforms in the past five years and a lack of transparency on discussions.

"The key function of the congress is a message that the Obama visit has not changed anything. To reduce expectations," said Bert Hoffman, a Latin American expert at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies.

Once again, what was the point of this "normalization" exercise?

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

The Most Equal Comrade is so obsessed with creating a legacy of a visionary astride the world stage bringing harmony and "equality" to all that he's willing to be treated with contempt by all the dictators to whom he reaches out.

Case in point: Cuba:

Even some supporters of President Barack Obama’s moves to strengthen relations with Cuba are questioning the timing of his planned visit to the Communist island next month, after arrests of dissidents by Raul Castro’s government reached a five-year high.

Obama vowed Thursday that he’ll promote human rights during his historic visit, the first by a sitting American president since 1928. But more than a year of warming relations between the nations, separated by just 90 miles, have so far failed to slow the Cuban government’s crackdown on political dissidents.

The Madrid-based Cuban Observatory on Human Rights said 1,474 people, including 512 women, were “arbitrarily” detained in January. The arrests have been climbing since the December 2014 announcement that the two governments would improve ties.

“A presidential visit should occasion a broader progress on the human-rights agenda. And I haven’t seen any changes on that front,” said Christopher Sabatini, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs who has supported the rapprochement.

Talk about cart before horse. You don't explore rapprochement until you see some movement toward basic decency on the part of the regime you've been enemies with.

Our partner in patty-cake - today's edition

The latest details about how far post-America's humiliation went during the Navy-boat incident:

Now we have a new revelation, yet to hit our American news media, and ask yourself, just how long did this story play in our media cycle? 

As reported by Tasnim News, “Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Navy Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said the forces extracted a lot of information from the confiscated cell phones and laptops of the US sailors recently captured by Iran after intrusion into the country’s territorial waters. 

We have extracted extensive information from their (American sailors’) laptops and cell phones,” Admiral Fadavi said in a parliamentary session in Tehran on Monday. The IRGC commander went on to say that the information can be made public if a decision is made to that effect. 

Admiral Fadavi also noted that the IRGC has filmed the capture of the US sailors for several hours, the release of which would bring humiliation to the United States. If US officials say they are angry with and frustrated by the footage released, they would be 100 times more embarrassed if the IRGC releases other films of the capture, the Iranian commander said. Iran does not seek to humiliate any nation, he said, but stressed that if they want to humiliate Iran, the IRGC would publish the footage and make them even more embarrassed and humiliated.”

Why isn't this above-the-fold front-page news?

Our partner in patty-cake - today's edition

This pattern of post-American goodwill being responded to with contempt on Iran's part manifests itself again:

In mid-January, the John Kerry-led State Department hailed Iran’s release of U.S. sailors they’d captured as proof of warmer relations thanks to Team Obama’s Smart Power™: 

The State Department, however, didn’t appreciate Iran’s leader later going out of his way to publicly demonstrate that the “warmer” relations are as cold as ever:

If Iran’s supreme leader awarded medals to Iranians who detained U.S. sailors during an incident in January, it’s “unconscionable,” a State Department spokesman said Monday.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei awarded the Order of the Fat’h medal to Rear Adm. Ali Fadavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy, as well as four commanders who seized two U.S. Navy botas and detained the sailors for 14 hours before releasing them, Reuters reported Monday after Iran’s state media reported the news one day before.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said he could not confirm whether the ayatollah doled out the awards, but condemned the possibility.

Sorry John Kirby, but Ayatollah Khomeini put a photo of the awards ceremony in his tweet about it.

Now, what do you have to say?

Secretary Global-Test to the world: That's right, post-America is a foolish nation ripe for obliteration

Some candor from Davos, from a guy who usually speaks in the flimsiest of platitudes:

Iran has been making out like a bandit since the nuclear deal was announced last year. Among the many fears about the deal was that the sanctions relief money that would accompany it would find its way into some rather unsavory hands quickly and easily. Today, John Kerry did nothing to assuage those concerns. While in Davos, Switzerland, he spoke with CNBC about what could happen:

When asked about whether some the $150 billion in sanctions relief to Iran would go to terrorist groups, Kerry reiterated that, after settling debts, Iran would receive closer to $55 billion. He conceded some of that could go to groups considered terrorists, saying there was nothing the U.S. could do to prevent that.“I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists,” he said in the interview in Davos, referring to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. “You know, to some degree, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”

In other words, the likelihood that it will find its way into the hands of one terrorist group or another is so high that our Secretary of State is not even bothering to lie about it or cover it up. It’s probably going to happen, he says, and there’s really just nothing we can do about it.
If you need any indicator of how serious Barack Obama and his administration is about opposing the Iranians and fighting terrorism in the Middle East, especially in the last year of his Presidency, this should be more than enough. There are many reasons for ISIS’ success, but one of them, if you will recall, is that they ended up being armed along with the so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels (or, rather, many of those rebels ended up becoming ISIS). Now, we have tacit admission that this is all but certainly going to happen on the Iranian side as well.

Clearly, this is a case of the emperor wearing no clothes, but in the fable, the empire wasn't in immediate danger of obliteration.

 

Post-America's partner in patty-cake - today's edition

Take in the full implication of the previous post, the one about the cutting loose of funds tied up in international court because the deal with the US was made before Iran's revolution (when its very nature was "fundamentally transformed") and how the MEC is spinning it as a good deal because the Iranian regime wanted a lot more.

Now take in this news item:

A senior Iranian military commander in charge of the country’s Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed that the 10 U.S. sailors who were recently captured and subsequently released by the Islamic Republic “started crying after [their] arrest,” according to Persian language comments made during military celebrations this weekend.

Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the IRGC, which is responsible for boarding the U.S. ships and arresting the sailors, claimed in recent remarks, the “American sailors started crying after arrest, but the kindness of our Guard made them feel calm.”

Hossein went on to brag that the incident provides definitive evidence of the Iranian military’s supremacy in the region.

“Since the end of the Second World War, no country has been able to arrest American military personnel,” the commander said, according to an independent translation of his Persian-language remarks made Friday during a “martyrs’ commemoration ceremony” in Isfahan.

Hossein wasn't the only one ladling out the contempt:

Meanwhile, during Friday prayers in Iran, a commander of the IRGC unit that detained the U.S. boats and claimed that the American military cowered when faced down by Iranian troops.
“I saw the weakness, cowardice, and fear of American soldiers myself. Despite having all of the weapons and equipment, they surrendered themselves with the first action of the guardians of Islam,” Ahmad Dolabi, an IRGC commander, said in Persian-language remarks at a prayer service in Iran’s Bushehr providence.
“American forces receive the best training and have the most advanced weapons in the world,” he added. “But they did not have the power to confront the Guard due to weakness of faith and belief.”
Dolabi emphasized that the Obama administration formally apologized over the incident, a claim that senior White House official continue to dispute.

The air swirling the planet is rich with the stench of post-American weakness, and post-America's enemies' appetites are whetted.

 

Post-America funds its own endangerment

The Most Equal Comrade's regime keeps taking shamelessness to new levels. Above and beyond the freed-up money from the lifted sanctions, post-America is going to spit in the face of all the 1979-1981 hostages and their loved ones:

 The United States is to repay Iran a $400 million debt and $1.3 billion in interest dating to the Islamic revolution, Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday.

The repayment, which settles a suit brought under an international legal tribunal, is separate from the tens of billions of dollars in frozen foreign accounts that Iran can now access after the end of nuclear sanctions.
But the timing of the announcement, one day after the implementation of the Iran nuclear accord, will be seen as pointing to a broader clearing of the decks between the old foes.
US President Barack Obama defended the settlement in a televised statement from the White House, saying it was for "much less than the amount Iran sought."
"For the United States, the settlement could save us billions of dollars that could have been pursued by Iran. There was no benefit to the United States in dragging this out," he said.
Kerry said the claim was in the amount of a $400 million trust fund used by Iran to purchase military equipment from the United States prior to the break in diplomatic ties, plus $1.3 billion in interests.

Just a damn minute. Isn't interest forbidden in Islamic doctrine?

And the MEC's dog vomit about how it's "much less than the amount Iran sought," like post-America got some kind of great deal, is emblematic of just how alternative his universe is.

This bonus from the mullahs' bitch is going to fund a whole lot of missiles.

 

About that prisoner swap . . .

We may be getting back some post-Americans whose return we've been insisting on for a while, but did you doubt there was a price?

The Obama administration pressured Interpol to cease pursuing the terrorists behind the Jewish Center bombing in Argentina as part of the deal.

Hearing that, as part of swap, US pressured Interpol to cease pursuing bombers of the Jewish center in Argentina. https://t.co/QGVYra6Kik

— Omri Ceren (@cerenomri) January 16, 2016

There's suspicion that the very Iranians we swapped to get the post-Americans back are the perps in the Argentine bombing.

Post-America's shame - and really scary vulnerability

The incident involving the riverine boats in the Persian Gulf is starting to look off-the-charts bad:

The Swedish-designed Combat Boat 90 can make the sharpest of turns at high speed, stop nearly on a dime, maneuver like magic and, with its Rolls-Royce jet-propulsion system, can speed along at over 45 miles an hour in rivers and shallow coastlines while transporting 18 amphibious troops.

But what good is any of that if it falls into enemy hands?

There is something fishy about how such a high-tech U.S. craft can "stray accidentally into Iranian waters due to a navigation error," as Defense Secretary Ash Carter described it on Thursday to Univision. The Pentagon had previously claimed engine trouble for an incident that's humiliated the U.S., as Iranian video showed to the world 10 American sailors on their knees at gunpoint.

A retired operations commander for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, Christopher Harmer, told CNN the capture constituted "a severe failure," charging that "either the naval leadership put these sailors in an impossible situation, or the sailors are professionally incompetent." Harmer has researched the increased lethality of Iran's submarine fleet for the Institute for the Study of War.

That one of the sailors would appear in an Iranian video apologizing may have actually violated the military's Code of Conduct, which requires that a detainee give name, rank, serial number and age, but "evade answering further questions" and "make no oral or written statements disloyal" to his country "and its allies or harmful to their cause."

Harmer told the Washington Times, "the U.S. Navy looks extraordinarily incompetent. ... In its ability to transit boats without violating Iranian waters, they look incompetent to know how to deal with a mechanical malfunction, and now that they've been taken into custody, they're apologizing."

Harmer told CNN there was "no reason for a small vessel to be out that far and especially without escorting ships around it," and "the Navy has to explain why you have small ships transiting 300 miles of open ocean."

Iran claims its Revolutionary Guard Corps seized the CB90's GPS gear and that it revealed U.S. espionage. As reported in Defense News, House Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine who served in the Iraq War, claimed there was no way the Iran military "didn't reverse engineer, or look at and copy everything that they possibly could" of the two commandeered boats' high-tech equipment.

The whole damn world - our "allies," or perhaps more accurately, those nations that were our allies until they saw how "fundamental transformation" plays itself out on the world stage, our adversaries and our enemies - is taking stock of the deepest implications of this.

There will be more such provocation, rest assured.

Post-America's partner in patty-cake - today's edition

How's this for a feather in the mullahs' cap?

Iranian state-controlled news outlet Tasnim released video Wednesday afternoon that shows a U.S. sailor apologizing for purportedly infringing upon Tehran’s sovereignty.

On Tuesday, Iran seized two U.S. naval boats, arguing they illegally entered Iran’s territorial waters. The Pentagon said they encountered mechanical troubles, forcing their boats to go off course.

“It was a mistake, it was our fault, and we apologize for our mistake,” an unidentified sailor told the Iranian interviewer, who then asked him if his GPS system penetrated Iran. “I believe so,” he responded.

And this:

In another segment of the interview, the sailor held by the Iranians is asked, “How was the Iranian behavior with you?” He responds, “The Iranian behavior was fantastic while we were here. We thank you very much for your hospitality and your assistance.”

“Did you have special problem” with us, the interviewer asked. “We have no problem, sir,” the U.S. sailor responded. 

Count on this having immediate repercussions throughout the Middle East.

And Iranian responses to the post-American outstretched hand have gone from contempt to outright North Korea-style brinksmanship:

Iranian Fars News reported:

Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi blamed the US navy for its excited and unprofessional moves after Iran arrested 10 US marines for trespassing on its territorial waters, warning that his forces’ coast-to-sea missiles were awaiting orders to hit the American aircraft carrier deployed in the region.
The IRGC seized two US Navy boats on Tuesday and detained them on Iran’s Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. Nine men and one woman arrived in Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf illegally when they were captured by the IRGC Navy.

Following the capture, two US and French aircraft carriers as well as their accompanying fleets and military choppers started maneuvering near Iranian waters.

“The USS Truman Aircraft carrier showed unprofessional moves for 40 minutes after the detention of the trespassers, while we were highly prepared with our coast-to-sea missiles, missile-launching speedboats and our numerous capabilities” and were ready to strike them in case they made a hostile move, Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said after Iran released the detained US marines.

Iran also warned the reckless moves by the US could trigger war. 

And let this in fully:

President Barack Obama not only ignored the massive 2009 uprising in Iran known as "the Green Revolution," he ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to refrain from offering the movement any assistance.

In 2009, the Islamic regime of Iran was at a tipping point. For months on end, beginning in June, millions of Iranians had poured into the streets to protest the sham reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Green Movement, as it was called, struggled forward with mass demonstrations and civil disobedience while the nominal leaders of the uprising were systematically arrested, subjected to kangaroo courts, torture and imprisonment. The police and the Basij brutally suppressed the protesters using batons, pepper spray, axes, sticks and firearms. As many as 150 protesters were slaughtered that June.  The most widely known victim of the regime's brutality was innocent onlooker Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot dead in the street during one of the massive protests. Her last moments were caught on a video that went viral around the world. The president's famous response? He went out for ice cream.

Obama was handed a unique opportunity in history to be the sort of inspirational and transformative figure Ronald Reagan was for Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall fell. All he had to do was say and do the right things to denounce the illegitimate Iranian government and stand with the people in the street.

But he didn't. 

The original source for the information, a report by Jay Solomon in the Wall Street Journal, is behind a paywall, but it's linked at the PJ Media article, if you have a WSJ subscription.

There has never been a more poisonous figure in this nation's history than the Most Equal Comrade.

Although Secretary Global-Test is a strong contender:

After two US Navy gunboats were seized by Iranian forces, John Kerry made it clear on our position:

I want to thank the Iranian authorities for their co-operation and quick response. These are always situations that everybody here knows have an ability, if not properly guided to get out of control and I'm appreciative for the quick and appropriate response of the Iranian authorities. All indications suggest or tell us that our sailors were well taken care of and provided with blankets and food and assisted with their return to the fleet earlier today. And I think we can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago and in fact, it is clear that today this kind of issue was able to be peacefully resolved and officially resolved and that is a testament to the critical role that diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure and strong. And that is really at the core of what I am here to talk about today.

The Democrat party is an enemy of the United States of America, every bit as much as Iran, North Korea, ISIS or al-Qaeda.

How to stop the Most Equal Comrade's explicit tilt toward Iran?

You'll derive great encouragement from a piece by Robert Sklarof at The Algemeiner on how Congress might block the Iran "deal." Momentum seems to be building among those who see it as a real possibility:

Support is building for the US House of Representatives to muster the courage to block implementation of the flawed “deal” with Iran, and the only way to do so is to enjoin the administration from dropping sanctions.

This was the message delivered in a just-published op-ed by Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge.

A bipartisan group of 105 congressmen wrote to US President Barack Obama asking that he freeze the Iran nuke deal, since “the Iranians have already violated critical provisions on multiple occasions just months into the agreement.”

Ferment among legislators has delayed emergence of a consensus view that would yield a concrete proposal as to how to follow through on this request.

There is no alternative. To save Western civilization, the House must enjoin Obama from implementing the Iranian nuke pact.

Sklarof thinks the most effective route is a lawsuit that would be filed by the House on the basis that the way the "deal" was "finalized" runs counter to the Corker-Cardin Act.

A prototype suit has in fact been crafted:

 . . . a model filing was formulated in November, based on causes- of-action:

* The pact has not been signed by anyone — including Iran — so it is unenforceable.

* It is a treaty rather than an executive agreement or political commitment.

* It undermines American support for Israel’s right to exist and survival, ignoring the unambiguous “sense” of Congress, as articulated in Corker-Cardin.

* It was improperly implemented through passage of the Corker-Cardin Bill, due to fundamental misrepresentations and withheld data.

* It violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

* Neither the pact nor Corker-Cardin contains a “severability” clause and, thus, if any component of either document is flawed, the entire pact cannot be portrayed as having been approved.

Concern that such a filing could yield a protracted battle that would ultimately have to reach the Supreme Court is misguided, for an injunction would stop Obama from releasing the funds in the interim, and the above bullet-points underscore the narrative that this out-of-control president must be restrained.

Because this deal is interwoven with Obama’s Islamophilic foreign policy, undermining his unholy alliance with Iran and Russia could finally unravel what has proven to be a series of failed “friendship” gambits with sworn enemies and disheartening distancing efforts with loyal friends. 

It's those friendship gambits and disheartening distancing efforts that have Tony Badran of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies disturbed, and that the first arena of difficulty therefrom is going to be the patty-cake among "stakeholders" over the Syrian multi-layered civil war:

The claim that the Saudis were damaging the supposed Syrian "peace process" [by executing radical Shiite cleric Nimr] sounds surreal on its face. But it is quite revealing, not just about how the White House defines success, but also about its overall policy in Syria.

The administration believes it has achieved a critical diplomatic feat by bringing Iran into the diplomatic talks over Syria and that this constitutes a major breakthrough in itself. "The United States has succeeded in leading the international effort to bring all sides together to try to bring about a political resolution inside of Syria," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a briefing after the Saudi-Iranian spat. The way the administration sees it, for a true discussion to take place, all so-called "stakeholders" in Syria must be gathered around the table in order to reach a settlement.

The administration's self-congratulation aside, it's worth exploring what this means in practice. By declaring Iran a legitimate "stakeholder," the White House is not only saying that Syria is a recognized Iranian sphere of influence, but it also is recognizing Iran's "stake" as legitimate. In fact, President Obama stated explicitly last month that the solution in Syria should be one that allows the Iranians to ensure "that their equities are respected."

This begs the question of what, exactly, is Iran's "stake" or "equities" in Syria? The answer is straightforward: Iran's interest is to maintain a logistical bridge to Hezbollah through which it could supply the group with missiles and arms, thereby enabling it to continue to threaten U.S. allies like Israel and destabilize the region. The White House's legitimization of Iran as a stakeholder in Syria risks licensing Iran to continue arming Hezbollah.

But this was hardly the only cost of President Obama's policy. The key for safeguarding Iranian interests in Syria is ensuring the continuity of the Syrian President Bashar Assad regime. And so, in order to obtain Iranian "buy-in," the administration abandoned what's supposed to be the main objective in Syria, which is the removal of Assad and his regime. Assad, the administration now concedes, gets to stay on for an indefinite period as part of an indeterminate "transitional period." In other words, when it comes to Syria, not only did Obama force Iran down his allies' throat -- he also fully endorsed its position.

Now, to top it off, the administration is attacking the Saudis for supposedly jeopardizing a process designed to safeguard Iran's unchanged objectives in Syria. As the White House sees it, the Saudis' only job is to bring the Syrian opposition to the table essentially to sign a surrender. What's more, as part of this process, Iran, which has underwritten and partaken in Assad's mass slaughter, gets a say in determining which opposition groups are listed as terrorists.

Of course, the SOTU is tonight. It will be interesting to see if the Most Equal Comrade does any explicit tilting toward Iran and away from longtime Mideast allies.

 Memo to Senator Toomey and his bunch: Keep your thinking caps on, and move forward at the first opportunity.