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Another of Secretary of State John Kerry’s “Hail Mary” diplomatic deal is well on its way to collapsing, this time in Syria. A seven-day cease-fire was supposed to start Monday across Syria, under an agreement signed last week by Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. Multiparty talks to end the war were to follow. But fire is yet to cease, though attacks have diminished in parts of the country. The lull in the half-decade-old civil war wasn’t enough, however, to launch the main task of the week. The United Nations was to start delivering humanitarian aid to civilians in...

Supreme Court: Senate Democrats demanding that Republicans let President Obama pick a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia appear to be counting on the public's short attention span. But there's no statute of limitations on rank hypocrisy. "The Senate's constitutional duty to give a fair and timely hearing and a floor vote to the president's Supreme Court nominees has remained inviolable." That was Sen. Harry Reid in a Washington Post op-ed this week condemning any effort by the GOP to block President Obama from naming a successor to conservative stalwart Scalia. He went on to write that "the consequences of blocking...

To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran's Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories. In January 1968, LBJ's last year, 82 sailors of the Pueblo were captured by North Korea and held hostage with Captain Lloyd "Pete" Bucher, and abused and tortured for a year before release. In the final 444 days of the Carter presidency, 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, and released only when Ronald Reagan raised his hand to take the oath. In 2001, under...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: John F. Kerry (who served in Vietnam, by the way) has thanked the Iranians for taking our sailors hostage and humiliating them. The audio sound bite will be coming up in due course. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I'm not kidding on this, either. John Kerry thanked Iran for humiliating our sailors, one of whom was a woman, by the way. He thanked 'em for rescuing 'em, thanked 'em for humiliating them. Well, that's what he thanked 'em for. He thanked the Iranians for capturing Americans engaged in harmless activity on a boat. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here, you gotta...

If representatives of the nearly 200 nations gathered in Paris for the UN Conference on Climate Change had instead formed a coalition to fight a real threat -- Islamic terrorism -- they might have accomplished something useful. Instead, what they came up with is a document that even Secretary of State John Kerry, in a rare moment of candor, confessed is pointless. Here's Kerry: "...The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of...

Media magnate Rupert Murdoch blasted American diplomatic and foreign policy under President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in a speech in Manhattan Monday night. Murdoch told an audience at a Plaza hotel dinner held in his honor by the Hudson Institute that Kerry's recent comments about the terrorist assault on Paris' Charlie Hebdo newspaper were outrageous. "For a US secretary of state to suggest that Islamic terrorists had a 'rationale' in slaughtering journalists is one of the low points of recent Western diplomacy and it is indicative of a serious malaise," he said. Kerry had made the comments...

This story broke last week, just as millions of Americans were tuning out of the news cycle for Thanksgiving. Given the seriousness of the subject matter, it deserves a re-up. National Review reports: President Obama didn't require Iranian leaders to sign the nuclear deal that his team negotiated with the regime, and the deal is not "legally binding," his administration acknowledged in a letter to Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) obtained by National Review. "The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document," wrote Julia Frifield, the State Department assistant...

Most people reading that headline probably think what in God’s name could possibly be beneficial about a group of maniacs tearing up one of the most unstable areas of the world, while mass murdering thousands of people (mainly their co-religionists) in gruesome manners. Some of us live by the Spamalot song: Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. In this case there are at least two direct benefits of ISIS. The first and the most prominent is the complete dismantling of the idea that peace in the Middle East will come if only the Israelis will make peace with...

Israel’s political leaders have rightly expressed anger at the US State Department’s hostile characterizations of the Palestinian terrorist onslaught. Secretary of State John Kerry’s claims, parroted by his spokesmen, that Israel is either entirely to blame for Palestinian terrorism or shares the blame equally with the Palestinians, are baseless lies. Kerry and his spokesmen have alleged that the current Palestinian convulsion of murderous violence is a product of “a massive increase in settlements.” Yet as Haaretz reported this week, Israel has built fewer homes for Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria since 2009, when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (and President...

<p>Contrary to the principles of American foreign policy of the last 70 years, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tacitly invited Russia to "help" monitor things in the Middle East. Now they are learning that there are lots of Middle East scenarios far worse than the relative quiet Iraq that the Obama administration inherited in January 2009 -- and soon abandoned.</p>

RUSH: Now, Syria. Let me see if I can make sense of this for you. 'Cause what's happening in Syria, based on what we learned yesterday about Putin -- and what he said to the UN about us abandoning our role, our moral leadership there -- as best I have been able to assemble this, here is what's happening. Over the past few weeks we have learned that Russia is sending military planes and soldiers to Syria. We didn't like it. When asked about it by the United States, Russia said, "Mind your own business; it's none of your business....

Earlier today, Pope Francis spoke outside the White House. In his speech, he addressed several things, such as the importance of religious freedom and the need to protect the planet. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is Catholic, tweeted his approval of the pontiff's remarks, including those about "protecting the vulnerable." The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) couldn't help but (gently) remind Kerry that "vulnerable" includes the unborn. Kerry has publicly stated that he disagrees with the Church's teaching on abortion, and has consistently voted in support of abortion rights. . @JohnKerry Agree, John. @Pontifex reassures all of...

Secretary of State John Kerry would like to assure Iran that even if it violates the terms of the gratuitous concessions "thrown in as add-ons" to the nuclear deal, the regime won't be in violation of the deal as a whole. Remarkable:Kerry Admits Iran Can Flout Weapons Embargo Without Violating Nuclear Deal Specifically, the arms embargo is not tied to the snapback; it is tied to a separate set of obligations. So they are not in material breach of the nuclear agreement for violating the arms piece of it. Not to worry, Kerry explains, because there are "other sanctions" the US...

The lowest moment from what was probably the lowest speech of his presidency — so far. David Harsanyi, watching this, asks a good question: Imagine what would have happened if Bush had said that Democrats were caucusing with Saddam Hussein?— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) August 5, 2015 The GOP opposes the nuclear deal because they think it’s too favorable to Iran and not favorable enough to America. The hardliners in Iran’s parliament oppose the deal for the opposite reason. Insofar as they both want the deal to fail, I suppose that’s “common cause.” But then, as Harsanyi says, it must also...

RUSH: "Senator Tom Cotton and Congressman Mike Pompeo Discover 'Backroom' Iran Deals Not Shared with Congress." Not surprised, right? It turns out the US made a secret side deal with Iran on two of the more important sticking points in the negotiations. Number one, the inspection of a military base where Iran had done major nuclear weapons research in the past, and, number two, the requirement that Iran tell us about their past nuclear work, which is necessary in order to for there to be a baseline for the inspectors. I mean, we have to know how far they've made...

The just-announced Iran deal confirms critics' worst fears: It hands an epic victory -- replete with twelve figures in sanctions relief -- to an outlaw, anti-American regime, it confers the West's blessing upon Iran's nuclear program, and it crosses numerous so-called "red lines" in doing so. The accord leaves Iran's vast nuclear infrastructure virtually entirely intact. Its restrictions automatically begin to phase out after a decade. It (almost immediately) pumps more than $100 billion into the regime's economy, providing Tehran with desperately-needed resources to step up its habitual terrorism abetment and toxic regional meddling. It eschews the sort of solid  anytime/anywhere snap inspections regime...

We awoke Tuesday morning to learn that history had indeed repeated itself. The lessons of Neville Chamberlain’s failed diplomatic effort were not studied nor learned by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. The claims of “peace in our time” are empty if dependent upon the goodwill of despots, dictators, theocrats, and autocrats – of which the Iranian regime can be classified. There are those who seek to compare this agreement to President Reagan’s with the Soviet Union. There is a major difference. The Soviet Union was not a theocracy run by clerics who embrace the necessity of...

Imagine if, on September 12, 2001, I had written a column predicting that within less than 15 years, the president of the United States would be offering the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism a path to nuclear weapons and tens of billions of dollars. You’d have thought me a lunatic. But that’s what President Obama means to do. What’s gumming up the works? Every time Secretary of State John Kerry thinks he has found a creative way to cave in to some Iranian demand, the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, comes up with a new “red line.” Just to be clear:...

RUSH: Did you hear about John Kerry? Do you know how old John Kerry is? It's tough, you know. You can't tell a horse's age when you look it, and since Kerry looks like a horse, it's tough. But he's 71 years old. Now, would somebody tell me something? What is a 71-year-old man, secretary of state, doing riding a bicycle -- or, alternatively, windsurfing off Nantucket? Why is somebody riding a bicycle while in the midst of sensitive negotiations and attempting to secure nuclear weapons for Iran? Exercise? BS. He's doing that for the photo-op, trying to look hip...

The first thing one needs to know about the nuclear deal with Iran is that it is not, in fact, a deal. You might be confused about this point, given that so many news outlets refers to a "deal" that doesn't exist. In fairness, many do so simply for expediency's sake. The various parties to the talks did come away with an agreement, but it was an agreement to haggle more about what a deal might look like. We don't have a good word for such things, so people use "deal" as a placeholder. But in any other realm of...