Morning Briefing: A Nation of Laws No More

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That Dead Boy is Barack Obama's Fault ISIS did not exist when George W. Bush left the White House. ISIS did not exist in the first few years of Barack Obama's time in the White House. ISIS only became a thing when the White House, out of pride and arrogance, decided it was better to placate the left by withdrawing all troops from Iraq rather than help the Iraqis maintain their stability. A young boy has died, washed up on the shores of Europe. His picture has shocked the world and his death is direct result of Barack Obama fleeing the Middle East, tail tucked between his leg, so he could pridefully say he ended a war he never wanted. The boy is dead because Barack Obama chose to abdicate American leadership in the world. Read More

A Nation of Laws No More Anthony Kennedy decided to insert his will and morality into the discussion and shut up everyone else. He thought he could shut down the conversation. He only made it angrier. We are not a democracy, but an oligarchy. And we are not a nation of laws. The republic may continue, but without the moral leadership necessary to bind the leaders and citizens to the same laws. Read More

My Problem With Jeb Bush's Candidacy From a philosophical level it seems a pretty damning indictment of our republic that twenty-three years after Bush v. Clinton the republic is not able to raise up any new leaders better than a Bush or a Clinton, including from the intervening other Bush years. Read More Sponsored

The New, Terrible Face of the Refugee Crisis Lost in the mass coverage of the American tragedy in Roanoke last week, one of the largest humanitarian crises of the last century has been unfolding in Europe. As a direct result of the Obama Administration's fecklessness in the Middle East, and their complete inability to check the rampage of ISIS across Iraq and Syria, millions of innocent people have fled across the Middle East towards Europe, which is completely unable to handle the massive surge of humanity. At times like this, human traffickers and other kinds of evil people capitalize on misery and suffering, without regard (generally speaking) for the safety or well being of their human cargo. We covered last week the story of 71 Syrian refugees who were found dead in the back of a truck in Austria, abandoned by their driver to rot in the sun. Yet even this horrifying story was barely able to crack the wall-to-wall Roanoke coverage (which, frankly, wasn't even coverage but was instead gun control advocacy from the word "go"). Read More

Obama's gun law enforcement at work: sell 55 illegal guns, get one year probation The Obama administration's hostility to firearms is well documented. Fast & Furious was a failed 'gun walking' operation in Arizona that has racked up a body count in the low hundreds. In Milwaukee, where this story takes place, the feckless ATF did another gun walking operation that featured epic incompetency and lots of felons with perfectly good firearms. It is hard to write this kind of thing off to happenstance anymore. We are sure, well beyond a reasonable doubt, that the purpose of Fast & Furious was to provide violent felons with weapons, so they could kill people, so more laws would be passed to curtail the purchase and possession of firearms. It is not inconceivable that the same purpose was in effect in the Milwaukee operation. In the words of Rahm Emanuel, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste." It is difficult to find any benign reason why an administration that professes to be fixated on reducing gun violence lets someone like Mills off with one year probation. And if he wants a firearm, he just needs to find where the ATF is running an operation and he's set. Read More

Sponsored Trump Signs Loyalty Pledge. So What? The cable news networks are all breathlessly reporting that after a one-on-one meeting with Reince Priebus, Donald Trump has signed a pledge in which he promises to support the eventual Republican nominee, regardless of who it might be. I am sure that in the corridors of the RNC national headquarters, they are all slapping themselves on the back confident that eventually Trump will fade away and that they have averted a third party disaster. Read More

Biden and Christie agree: Obama is responsible for deaths caused by Iran Well, not in so many words but the effect is the same. One of the components of the Iran nuclear deal is that it gives Iran unconstrained access to well over $100 billion in cash. Another component of the deal is that even though Iran is on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror, Iran's support of terror was not an item of discussion. In fact, eight GOP senators voted with the Democrats to defeat an amendment that would have made Obama certify Iran wasn't engaged in terrorism against either the US or US citizens. Read More

President Obama Sends More Blood Money to Planned Parenthood Butchers After months of investigative videos have uncovered the legally questionable and morally reprehensible sale of murdered babies' body parts by Planned Parenthood, President Obama is taking action. The Hill has a report on this major step by the Administration that has thus far ignored the burgeoning scandal with the largest abortion provider in America: "The Obama administration on Wednesday awarded more than $1 million in grants to Planned Parenthood to help promote ObamaCare . . . ." Wait, what? Read More

Hillary Clinton staffer takes the Fifth Slowly, but surely, the net encircling the Clinton Crime Family is being drawn tight. Yesterday, the Washington Post agreed with most of America: Hillary is lying about the scope of her transmission of classified information on he decidedly non-classified email server. Word has seeped out of State that Hillary's inner circle pressured (successfully it seems) State IT personnel to be allowed to transmit classified information on smartphones and tablets that were not designed for that purpose. State Department FOIA staff, apparently stung at the massive amount of secret information appearing in Hillary's emails, have started using the FOIA exemption for "deliberative process" to redact classified information in order to reduce the amount of classified documents identified to the public. Read More Sponsored

Sincerely yours, Erick Erickson Editor-in-Chief, RedState