John Hinderaker explains why Obama’s Nuclear Agreement is a great deal for the Iranians.

[W]hat does Iran get?

First, and most important, it gets in excess of $100 billion in currently-frozen assets. This will happen in the near future, on or about the agreement’s Implementation Date. I think this prospect is what is making Iran’s leaders so jubilant. With that money, they can step up their support for allies in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and their support for terrorism everywhere. (By way of perspective, the entire United States military budget for the current fiscal year is only $560 billion.) To the extent that they spend some of it at home, it will help cement their position domestically.

Second, the agreement grants Iran international legitimacy. Since the revolution of 1979 and the seizure of America’s embassy in Tehran, Iran has been treated as a rogue state. Under the agreement, that status comes to an end. Investment in Iran will be permitted and likely will flourish. Sanctions will be removed and Iran’s nuclear program will not only be tolerated, it will be explicitly recognized and to some degree supported by the international community. The agreement contemplates that upon implementation, “the Iranian nuclear programme will be treated in the same manner as that of any other non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].” It is hard to overstate how important this legitimacy is to the regime.

The third benefit to Iran’s rulers is perhaps the most important, and is closely linked to the first two. The agreement guarantees that, at least for the foreseeable future, the mullahs will remain in power. Realistically, the only way Iran could be denied a nuclear arsenal in the long term is through regime change. Early in the Obama administration, that seemed like a plausible scenario, but the administration declined to aid, or even encourage, anti-regime forces when such support might have made a difference. Now, with the mullahs both flush with cash and blessed with international legitimacy, their grip on power is probably stronger than ever. Nuclear weapons will follow, sooner or later, at a time of the regime’s choosing. And in the meantime, Iran’s ability to make mischief in the Middle East and around the world (e.g., through its newfound alliance with Venezuela) has been greatly enhanced.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersch has a major exposé in the London Review of Books revealing the astonishing and extraordinarily scale of Barack Obama’s lies regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden. Hersch is a hard-core radical anti-American leftist but, in this case, I expect he’s telling the truth.

And the truth seems to be:

1. Osama bin Laden was being held in Abottabad as a prisoner of ISI, the Pakistani Intelligence Service, which was using him as a hostage to keep al Qaeda from attacking Pakistan. The Saudis were funding his detention.

2. There was no courier trail. A former Pakistani intelligence spilled the beans to the CIA in order to get the offered reward.

3. The Pakistanis knew we were coming, and reluctantly agreed to let the US conduct the hit under threat of loss of US aid.

4. There was no heroism and no firefight. Osama had no guards. He was a helpless invalid and a prisoner and the Seals were under orders simply to kill him out of hand.

5. Osama was not in touch with, or directing, al Qaeda operations, and there was no treasure trove of intelligence.

6. Barack Obama then completely broke his word to the Pakistanis. There was supposed to be a delayed announcement that Osama had been killed by a drone strike on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush, no mention of the house in Abottabad, and no clues whatsoever of Pakistani involvement or cooperation. By exploiting the killing of Osama for personal prestige immediately and abandoning the agreed-upon “drone strike” story, Obama double-crossed Pakinstan’s Intelligence Service, leading to a four-year-long rupture in relations.

7. There was never any burial at sea or Islamic service. Osama was literally shot to pieces, and the Seals happily tossed body parts out of the helicopter while flying home over the Hindu Kush.

Wow!

David Samuels, in an important essay, argues that Osama bin Laden out-strategized a series of dimbulb American administrations, astutely predicting precisely how they would respond.

judging from his last known private letter, dated April 25, 2011, Bin Laden died a happy man. “What we are witnessing these days of consecutive revolutions is a great and glorious event,” he mused, after watching the fall of the secular, Western-backed regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, which he watched on CNN, before the daring Navy SEAL raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. “[T]hanks to Allah things are strongly heading toward the exit of Muslims from being under the control of America.”

Even at this late date, it seems difficult for American policymakers to grasp exactly how Bin Laden’s mastery of the inherently paradoxical logic of warfare—a logic very different than the linear cause-and-effect style of reasoning that governs normal life and electoral politics alike—allowed a man without a country, heavy weapons, or even broadband Internet access to reshape the world to his advantage. The clarity of Bin Laden’s strategic insight, which now seems obvious, also suggests that the dynamic that he deliberately set in motion is still unfolding, in ways that he foresaw before his death—ways that continue to roil the Middle East and will continue to pose a threat to the safety of Americans at home. …

Bin Laden was never shy about explaining what he was doing and why. His public statements about his strategic logic and goals in targeting “the far enemy” remained remarkably consistent, from his first fatwa against America until the last letter he wrote before his death. In his 1996 “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” published soon after the Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia, he explained that “it is essential to hit the main enemy who divided the Ummah”—the Muslim world—“into small and little countries and pushed it, for the last few decades, into a state of confusion.”

America’s response to an attack would be to get sucked into a war, he predicted—and when the going got tough, the United States would cut and run. Responding to then-U.S. Defense Sec. William Perry, who had called the Khobar bombers cowards and had sworn not to give in, Bin Laden asked, “Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place on 1983 AD (1403 A.H). You were turned into scattered pits and pieces at that time; 241 Marine soldiers were killed.” …

In public and private following the Sept. 11 attacks, he returned to the same themes, over and over again, in at least three-quarters of his public statements and in private letters to other jihadists that were seized from his compound in Abbotabad and later made public. “The goal is to weaken America until it can no longer interfere in Muslims affairs,” he explained, in a letter whose contents were entirely typical of his communications. “Once the American enemy has been defeated, our next step would be targeting the region’s leaders who had been the pillars of support for that American hegemony.”

It is proof of Bin Laden’s mastery of the unexpected logic that animates strategic thought, and of the glaring inability of America’s political leaders to think strategically, that not one but two American presidents have faithfully acted their roles in his geo-political script: George W. Bush, the hawk, with his open-ended and heavy-handed occupation of Iraq; and Barack Obama, the dove, with his precipitous and wholesale withdrawal of American military forces and influence from the Middle East. Both men—and their many advisers—should have known better.

Read the whole thing. It’s depressing reading and hard to argue with.

Hat tip to Claire Berlinski.

Jonathan V. Last notes just how much of the politics of members of the contemporary community of fashion consists of nothing more than signals affirming loyalty and group membership.

Why do reporters ask politicians what they think about evolution? Practically speaking, no one really cares what a senator or a congressman-or even a president-thinks about evolution. But what a politician says about evolution is a handy signal to certain types of voters telling them what they’re supposed to think. So if you’re a nice, well-educated cog in the Goldman Sachs machine who thinks that, generally speaking, public-sector unions are harmful, that the federal government is operating in a suboptimal manner, and that the mullahs of Iran probably shouldn’t be allowed to have nuclear weapons, you might consider voting for someone like that tough, can-do governor from Wisconsin.

But then someone asks the governor whether or not he “believes in evolution” and he doesn’t answer by jumping up and down chanting and “Darwin! Darwin! Darwin!” And suddenly you understand: This guy isn’t really like you. Better to let Iran have nukes.

You got the signal loud and clear.

President Obama has always been skilled at sending out very precise, targeted signals, whether it’s to mainstream swing voters or to his liberal base. But the group Obama works hardest at signaling to is the young, Millennial hipsters who were so vital to his 2008 victory over Hillary Clinton.

As a substantive matter, Obama’s presidency has been terrible for these people. High unemployment numbers for recent graduates. No bending of the curve on college tuition prices. An entitlement system that gets less solvent by the day. And a new healthcare regime that’s an explicit transfer of wealth from younger, healthier workers to older folks and the unemployed.

Yet Obama has made sure to signal that, despite everything, he’s really on their side. We see these signals in the big show he makes each year of filling out his NCAA bracket. (It’s not like there’s a war on or anything.) We see it in his choice of bffs. And above all, we see it in his TV habits, where Obama goes out of his way to let it be known that he’s a huge fan of HBO and Millennial darling shows such as Game of Thrones and True Detective.

Read the whole thing.

Obama’s body servant, Reggie Love, carries the papers.

Business Insider serves up today juicy details from Reggie Love’s Power Forward: My Presidential Education, a memoir of the 21-year-old Duke University sports star’s experience of working as Barack Obama’s personal body servant.

Love got to fetch and carry for his Obamaness, buy Obama’s clothes, serve Obama’s meals, babysit his children, and even shoot basketball hoops with the great man.

When Love made mistakes, we learn, the wrath of Obama could be terrible.

The night before Love’s first official trip as Obama’s “chief of stuff” he made a trip to a local supermarket to buy black and silver Sharpie’s, black pilot G2 Gel Roller pens, Trident chewing gum, and trail mix. Mulling over the plethora of trail mix options Love recalls, “Salted or dry roasted? Sweet or spicy? With or without dried fruit or candy? I realized I hadn’t a clue what the man (Senator Obama) would like. I also had an accompanying thought: how much could it possibly matter? He’d be grateful regardless, right?” Turns out, the trail mix selection did matter to Obama. Hours later Love flew with the senator on a commercial flight from D.C. to LaGuardia. While on the flight Love offered Obama the bag of trail mix. “The senator opened the bag of trail mix I’d bought and proceeded to pick out every M&M, holding them all in his palm like pieces of candy-coated toxic waste. ‘I’m not going to eat these,’ he said while pushing his hand in my general direction. ‘Do you want them?’ he asked, wrinkling his nose. ‘No thank you, sir,’ I answered, then made the first of what would be thousands of notes to self: No candy with the trail mix.”

Walt Kowalski had an M1 Garand in “Gran Torino” (2008), but he must have somehow managed to bring his home from Korea personally.

The Garand rifle was the primary US long-arm used in WWII, making it a favorite of collectors. Garands are also favored for high power rifle match shooting. High demand makes Garands fairly expensive.

You have to jump through the hoop of belonging to certain gun clubs and participating in certain kinds of target match competitions before you can buy a Garand from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, and a decent one will still cost you over a thousand dollars.

Mr. Mosin Crate offers some Garands for sale from time to time. He just posted a new batch of mostly post-Korean-War 1950s examples which looked generally well-used, and they were all going for $800+.

Meanwhile South Korea is sitting on nearly a million Garands and M1 carbines supplied by the American taxpayer as military aid during the 1950s and 1960s, and Century Arms in Vermont is eager to import them to sell to American target shooters and collectors, but Barack Obama in August of 2013 issued one of his famous executive orders banning the importation of surplus military weapons by private companies.

The White House announced:

Today, the Administration is announcing a new policy of denying requests to bring military-grade firearms back into the United States to private entities, with only a few exceptions such as for museums. This new policy will help keep military-grade firearms off our streets.”

I seriously doubt that a Garand has ever actually been used in the commission of crime anytime in several decades.

Last summer, Century Arms laid off 41 employees as a direct result of the Korean deal falling through.

Let’s hope that the Republican Congress will do something about all this.