Sultan Knish

The Tolerance Surplus

2009-07-12T22:28:00.000-04:00

If you ask American, Israeli and European liberals and leftists what the key problem with Islam is, they will answer that there is a lack of tolerance. Not of course a lack of tolerance on the part of the throat-slitters, car burners, gang rapists, car bombers and hate preachers of Islam. On the contrary they will assert that there is a great tolerance deficit on the part of Western nations toward Islam.

In a rational political calculus, we take for granted that the people blowing up synagogues, stabbing their sisters to death for wearing jeans, and kidnapping and beheading people they don't like, are the ones suffering from a tolerance shortage. But to a progressive brutal violence by a minority is always a symptom that they are being oppressed, rather than that they are the ones doing the oppressing.

Since progressives tend to define minority status as proof of oppression, violence is simply another way that the minority responds to being oppressed. So if a pair of well off middle class Muslim professionals drive a car bomb over to a Scottish airport, clearly they were reacting to a whole boatload or planeload of oppression. Perhaps they were outraged over a terrorist being downed by a drone, or saw the name of Allah in an ice cream cone, or maybe it was all the unveiled women. Those are just details in the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that every First World nation is oppressive and racist. Muslim violence is comeuppance or blowback, and the only solution is to be more and more tolerant of Muslims.

Having classified Western nations as always being in the wrong, and Muslims as being always in the right, where reasonable people see a failure to fight terrorism, progressives see a failure to fight intolerance.

Given a mandate, conservative governments will try to get to grips with violent Islamists. Liberal governments will try to get to grips with anyone who criticizes Islam. And naturally it becomes a good deal more difficult to point out that Muslim violence is a serious problem, when you've passed laws prohibiting anyone from making any mention of Muslims and violence in the same sentence.

This has the convenience of making it illegal to point out the stupidity of progressive policymaking, which is something that their fellow People's Democratic regimes routinely do, at least until everyone begins starving to death. Tens of thousands dead in America, Europe, Israeli and Australia has not done much to chip away at the insistence of multiple governments that Islam is a religion of peace. And even conservatives have adopted the liberal mantra that Islamic violence is something carried out by splinter groups, in response to not being tolerated enough. The solution being more cowbell, or more tolerance. But so far the "Hug them until they love us" approach has not yielded any dividends, except more bombs and bullet holes, and bodies in morgues.

The progressive insistence on a black and white worldview, and on locating the locus of evil within their own society, has made it impossible for the vast majority of them to even consider the possibility that the violent, reactionary, patriarchal and misogynist ideology they should be fighting is Islam, not Christianity or Judaism.

But the problem with expecting people to think outside the box of their beliefs, is that it's simply easier for them not to. For progressives the problem remains not Islam, but people who aren't tolerant enough of Islam. Which creates a rush to feed the "intolerant ones" to the Muslim Crocodile of Peace, in the hopes of being eaten last.

So, Israeli leftists offer up the settlers as the problem. Europe offers up Israel as the problem. European leftists offer up European conservatives. America offers up Europe, Israel and anyone it can lay its long foreign policy mitts on. The Crocodile of Peace grins, chews and demands more.
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The shocking truth though is that the problem has never been a tolerance deficit, but a tolerance surplus. Tolerance is all very well good, but there are some things that shouldn't be tolerated. Murder, rape, car bombings, airplane hijackings and Imams preaching all of the above under the green flag of Islam top the list. The more the tolerance surplus grows, the worse the violence becomes.

Urban policymakers found this out the hard way when they tried to tackle crime by blaming society, not the criminals. Prisons became revolving doors. Cops became social workers. Crime became rampant. It took a new generation of conservative politicians to pass mandatory sentencing laws, victim rights bills, restore the death penalty and stop coddling criminals. And so the tolerance surplus was closed.

Until the tolerance surplus with Islam is closed, the violence that Islam brings to our shores will continue.

The Jewish Problem

2009-07-11T22:12:00.003-04:00

The Jewish problem has always been around. When Jews lived in their homeland, Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and then Arabs again, swept through Israel with the sword and the torch. Over and over again, the Jewish population of Israel was murdered and enslaved, the land was emptied and renamed, new populations were imported to take their place. Then the subjugating empire would fall, the Jews would return, reclaim their holy places, build new homes, plant vineyards and cultivate fields. And the cycle would begin again.

In exile, the Jewish problem did not go away. Islamic Arab rulers barred the Jews from even approaching the site of the Temple. Medieval Europe penned Jews into Ghettos. Czarist Russia had the Pale of Settlement. The liberals of the French Revolution proclaimed that the Jews were to assimilate and cease to be a separate people. As the counterrevolution, Nazi Germany began with plans to expel the Jews and ended with wholesale genocide. Jews fleeing the Nazis found the gates to Western nations barred on the ground that they all had enough Jews already, and to Israel, on the grounds that the British authorities did not want to upset the Arabs, who were already sympathetic to Nazism.

The year now is 5769 or 2009. And the Jewish problem still persists today, because for those who see the existence of Jews as the problem there will always be a Jewish problem.

Barely was the modern State of Israel rebuilt, that the world decided that the Jewish refugees of Nazism were the oppressors, and the Palestinian Arabs under Mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husayni who worked with Hitler on the Holocaust, were their victims.

This would become the conventional narrative of the latest phase of the "Jewish Problem". The Jewish problem being of course that there are Jews. The greatest threat to peace in the Middle East today, the world declares, is that there are Jews living in towns in Judea and Samaria. These towns are called "settlements" and they "prejudice the outcome" of the peace process, in a way that apparently all the Arabs towns and villages in parts of Israel do not.

If an Arab builds a house, his rights to do so are defended. If a Jew builds a house, he's a threat to peace. Never mind that there is no peace and no peace process, for the simple reason that the Hamas and Fatah terrorists that the world wants to hand a state to, keep trying to kill Jews.

To a diplomat however that only demonstrates that this is a Jewish problem. After all the terrorists are trying to kill Jews. Clearly the Jews are the problem.

The Obama Administration's two big overseas agendas are to keep Jews from living where he doesn't want them to in their own country, and to keep Israel from defending itself against Iranian nuclear attack. As usual it is not the Islamic Arab terrorists trying to kill Jews nor Iran's nuclear weapons program that is the problem-- it is the attempts by Jews to not be killed by them that is the threat to peace.

And of course there are always Court Jews who rush to their aid, not the aid of the Jews, but the aid of those who keep plugging away at the Jewish problem. Alan Dershowitz repurposed a suggestion from Yousef Munayyer, of the pro-Hamas American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee that Jews in settlements be forced to build only vertically, up instead of out. "Let them vertically" or piled one on top of the other, in a truly postmodern architectural vision of a ghetto as skyscraper.

100 story glass and steel ghettos are not likely to solve the Jewish problem. They only make for a better target. The problem is not the settlements, because it is not a settlement problem, but a Jewish problem.

Hitler's problem was not that there were Jews living in Germany, but that there were Jews living, period. When the Jews left Germany, Hitler's armies followed them to the West and to the East. Even to the Middle East, as Hitler vowed to the Mufti of Jerusalem, that his goal in the region would be to wipe out the Jews in Israel. Islam's problem is not that there are Jews living in parts of Judea and Samaria. Neither Hamas nor Fatah are prepared to recognize the rights of Jews living in any part of Israel, or the right of Israel to exist. Not even with the settlements gone.

The Jewish problem cannot be solved by moving Jews to ghettos, vertical or horizontal. Because it is not a problem caused by where Jews live, but by living Jews. Fatah and Hamas, and their ancestor the Mufti, have worked hard to solve the problem of living Jews. Obama is helping them solve that problem by once again viewing it as a "Jewish problem", rather than the problem of those who hate Jews too much to live and let live.

Diplomacy has tried to replace "the cycle of violence", with "the cycle of appeasement", but one naturally enough feeds the other. Israel has spent a generation since the Yom Kippur War trying to appease its enemies, only to learn that not even turning over land several times its own size, is appeasement enough. Jews in the West have worked hard to appease every minority with a grudge against them, and have still failed to learn that no amount of appeasement is ever enough.

A century of rhetoric, philosophy, debate and angst boils down to one simple fact. There is no way to solve a problem if you fail to define it. The Jewish problem is a problem not of Jews, but of those who want to kill Jews. There is no solution to the problem except to prevent them from accomplishing that task.

While some plan skyscraper ghettos and are convinced that the solution is some tough love from Obama to stop Jews from being such a problem-- the simple answer is that there is no answer, but that we go on living. Life is not such a complex equation, it can be understood in simple enough terms. When people consider you a problem, preventing them from doing whatever they can to "solve that problem" is your solution.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - The New Constitution will be Made in China

2009-07-10T09:57:00.006-04:00

(Obama shakes hands with fellow Muslim dictator and terrorist supporter, Khadafi.)

Obviously Obama and Khadafi do have a lot in common. Both have Marxist and Muslim affiliations, both support and aid terrorists... and both were born in Africa. Still Obama's chummy meet and greet with Khadafi has saddened and angered many of the family members of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

WASHINGTON - President Obama and Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy shook hands Thursday, infuriating families of victims in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 by Libyan intelligence agents.

The grip-and-grin was caught on camera during the G-8 summit of world leaders in Italy. Khadafy was there as head of the African Union.

The encounter came as families who lost loved ones aboard the doomed plane met with officials in Washington and the British Consulate in Manhattan to protest the potential release of the lone terrorist convicted in the bombing.

"This thing with Obama happened on the same day that we spilled our guts to his own administration that this killer should not be released! I'm disgusted and disappointed. Obama sent the wrong message," said Stephanie Bernstein, 58, of Bethesda, Md., who lost her husband, Michael, 36, a lawyer who hunted Nazis for the Justice Department.

"It will be a real horror show now if they release Megrahi," added Flynn, who broke down in a conversation with the Daily News. Both Bernstein and Flynn voted for Obama.

Shortly before the handshake, White House National Security Council member Denis McDonough said Obama would greet any leader who approached him.

"I don't think he's given much consideration to whose hand he'll shake or whose hand he'll not shake," McDonough said.

Oh I'm sure Obama gave plenty of consideration to the subject, and had say the interim President of Honduras shown up, the odds would weigh heavily against him getting a handshake.

But that's par for the course. And the handshake with Khadafi is not even the worst Obama photo op to come out of the G-8 summit, there was this gem that demonstrated how Obama is working to bring back dignity to the Presidency, something his supporters kept complaining was lacking under Bush.

The media has discovered the photo and is busy spinning things Obama's way, but it's not the only such incident involving Obama at the G-8 summit. It's not particularly important in and of itself, just another demonstration of how low the Trash in Chief is dragging America.

So, Obama came to the summit. His freeloading family got another free trip at taxpayer expense, all dressed up in black as if they were headed to a funeral, and absolutely nothing was accomplished, as Obama's global warming plan fell apart when India and China refused to trash their economies to accommodate environmentalist zealots and eco-profiteers.

Another Obama trip. Wasted.

But speaking of environmental zealots, Zombie Time and Front Page Magazine have a shocking look at the radical face of Obama's new Science Advisor, read environmental guru, John Holdren. It's one of those things that demonstrates how thin a line there is between Nazi eugenicsm and radical Environmentalism,

There are the forced abortions (something I don't think that's what the Pro-Choice movement expected from Obama)

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

Good news folks. The new Constitution will be Made in China.

One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it

I don't think the Pro-Choice movement will be fond of that one either. Or this...

"Involuntary fertility control
...
A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
...
The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births. "

And then Holdren embraces his Inner Nazi Bureaucrat

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

And in 2009, Obama nominated Dr. Mengele as his Science Advisor. Reading quotes like this can't help but remind one of the feasibility discussions and memos of the Final Solution.

In his book Holdren asks,

In today's world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

Why indeed not? It's not as if we're entitled to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That's the sort of thinking that gets you sent to the Sterilization Camps.

The Confederate Yankee has more commentary and summation, for those who don't want to read through the whole thing. Holdren also called for a totalitarian world state and world police, and the whole Fascist goody basket of swastika flavored treats.

Suffice it to say this is about as close to Nazism in America as any Presidential advisor has gotten in a long time. Bush cabinet members such as Gonzalez were burned in effigy for far more views and painted as monsters. Meanwhile the media insists on painting Holdren as a brilliant scientist. A brilliant scientist who has views translated from the original German.

Ir's ironic that the Washington Post can run headlines such as "In Honduras, One-Sided News of Crisis", when in fact it's the US media that operates the way the Iraqi Minister of Information did, spewing back the same propaganda over and over again, regardless of the reality of the situation.

We truly have lived to see US news run on the standard of Saddam Hussein's Iraq with praise for the beloved leader Hussein, and hysterical smears and rants against his enemies. Which this week was Sarah Palin. I'm not even going to bother digging through the latest demented smears, which rely on using her daughter's ex-boyfriend as a top source.

Meanwhile in more Jihad aiding and abetting news, a Der Spiegel story on the German government's attempt to rescue the crew of a captured freighter from Somali pirates reveals how Obama's National Security Advisor James L Jones aborted the rescue, thereby aiding and abetting the Islamic pirates, and sabotaging an ally's attempt to stand up to them.

On April 25, Olaf Lindner, head of the GSG-9, practiced for the planned rescue mission with 200 elite team members aboard the US helicopter carrier Boxer. They were 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Harardhere, out of sight of the pirates, and they had helicopters, reconnaissance drones and diving equipment at their disposal. "We're ready," Lindner cabled to Berlin.

The cancellation of the freighter rescue operation represents a heavy setback for German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a Christian Democrat (CDU), and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat (SPD). The two ministers were intent on ending this hostage crisis militarily, if at all possible, and they had the backing of Chancellor Merkel, who had asked for regular updates. Schäuble and Steinmeier, weary of the dollar diplomacy of the past few years, were eager to set an important international precedent -- to let the world know that the Germans are no longer willing to pay up when blackmailed by gangsters and terrorists, and that they are capable of a more forceful response.

Schäuble and State Secretary Hanning criticized the military officials for wavering too long. By then, the consensus of the first few days among government officials had fallen apart. Hanning, dissatisfied with the Bundeswehr's handling of the matter, turned to the Americans for help, and the Interior Ministry requested the use of the USS Boxer.

Senior officials at the Foreign and Defense Ministry were not enthusiastic about the idea. Defense Minister Jung's state secretary felt that the German ships were sufficient, and the Foreign Ministry was opposed to depending on the help of others. The diplomats feared that the Americans would insist on taking a more offensive approach against the pirates, but no one anticipated that they would, in fact, eventually take precisely the opposite position.

Before the German interior minister could give the order for the GSG-9 to carry out its mission, James Jones, the United States National Security Advisor, ended the operation with a call to the German government. The risk was too high for the US. "Boxer" was ordered back to Mombasa.

Uh huh. I just bet.

While the media is once again busy smearing Obama's main female opponent, in Afghanistan, Sharia has agreed to compromise by modifying a law that forced women to submit to marital rape, to force them to do household chores. I suppose we could speak out more, but Obama has just nominated a Science Advisor who proposed forcibly sterilizing women.

Who knew that by 2009, the Obama Administration would be giving the Taliban a run for their money in the area of feminism.

Meanwhile J Street is growing shrill over the Obama Administration's advocacy of ethnic cleansing for Jews in Israel. Jevsektsia Street's director Isaac Luria, gave his internet goon squad marching orders to attack Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi , the executive director of the Israel Project, for pointing out the Obama Administration's ethnic cleansing drive against Jews.

Isaac Luria laughably cites a quote from Doug Bloomfield, of the PA Prime Minister;

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said this week that Jews would be welcome to live in the Palestinian state and enjoy the same rights Israeli Arabs enjoy in Israel.

Now considering that Christian Arabs, who at least are ethnic Arabs, have been running like hell out of PA controlled territories, to the point that they're now a tiny minority... the odds that Jews would enjoy equal rights is about the same as the rights Jews enjoyed in Nazi Germany.

This is the same PA which torched the Synagogues in Gaza after Israel withdrew. Whose newspapers repeatedly call for the murder of Jews. This is the same PA which is headed by a Holocaust denier.

Finally since there is no such thing as an Arab Muslim country where Jews enjoy equal rights, something Isaac Luria knows quite well, his vicious hate campaign against Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi is based on a blatantly false premise. Had Isaac J Luria been an American liberal, he might get a pass for being ignorant and deluded. However Isaac J Luria has spent enough time in Israel to know better. Certainly Jevsektsia Street head Jeremy Ben Ami knows better.

But if Isaac J Luria is convinced that Jews could live safely and equally under Palestinian rule, I recommend that he put his money where his mouth is by moving to Ramallah for a month, without any protection of journalistic credentials or embassy contacts. Otherwise he can shut the hell up.

Finally Yoram Ettinger closes with a brief op ed on Can Israel Afford to Concede the Mountain Ridges of Judea and Samaria (West Bank)?

Caroline Glick meanwhile delivers another solid article, Numbering the days of dictators

In the face of all of this, the Obama administration has been disturbingly timid. The White House's most consistent response to North Korea's belligerent moves has been to ignore them and hope North Korea decides to behave itself.

Matching their meekness toward Iran, the G-8 leaders responded to Pyongyang's most recent provocations with an announcement that they would like to become friends with Kim Jong Il. As Obama put it, "It's very important for the world community to speak to countries like Iran and North Korea and encourage them to take a path that does not result in a nuclear arms race in places like the Middle East."

OVER THE past several weeks, as the regimes in Pyongyang and Teheran have become ever more brazen in demonstrating their belligerent contempt for the West, the prevailing wisdom has argued that the West has no good options for containing or defeating them.

The traditional take on North Korea is that the world's leading missile and nuclear proliferator poses less of a burden to global stability than a post-regime North Korea filled with millions of starving people who have been cut off from the world for 60 years. By this thinking, the world is better off living with a psycho-state capable of fomenting a global nuclear war than caring for its victims.

That of course has been the theme lately from Obama's Jewish leftist supporters. AKA Learning to Live with a Nuclear Iran. A quote that should properly be treated as a Chamberlain paraphrase.

Looking Back on the Life of Barack Obama

2009-07-08T17:20:00.004-04:00

Looking Back on the Life of Barack Obama

(CNN) Celebrity News Network - Now with More Holograms! - August 13, 2038

He Taught us to Laugh, He Made Us Believe, and then He Took All Our Money

He was the first black President of the United States, and he also became its last President when in 2019, after his term in office had been extended indefinitely by HR:0666 or "The Hope and Faith in Obama's Everlasting Presidency Act" (Holo-Link), he was forced to leave office because the government had run out of money to pay for itself.

Though he lived a very public life, few could agree on even the basic facts of his life, such as where he was born, who his father was, or what his real name was, or even what race and gender he was. For a man who spent most of his life before the camera, his death leaves us with few answers about who Barack Obama (Holo-Link) really was. Obama himself did not help matters by using multiple names, multiple birthplaces and even passports.

The bestselling Presidential biographies of Obama, from Edmund Morris' "America's Greatest Con-Man" to Michael Beschloss' "Obama: Citizen of the World" cover the range of opinions on Obama's presidency. And long after the fall of the United States, there is still no real consensus by former Americans on who Obama really was.

Yet to many Barack Obama represents a nostalgic time in history, the last years when such diverse nations as the Confederate States of California (Holo-Link), the Republic of New Hampshire, the People's Republic of Minnesota, the Empire of Texas, El Reino de Aztlan and the Arch-Duchy of Upper New York were all part of one single nation that stretched from coast to coast.

His Life

Born in a hospital in Kenya or Hawaii, Barack would learn to use multiple names and identities from an early age. Traveling from country to country, the young Obama or Soetoro, would quickly become adept at blending in from one milieu to another. This skill would be crucial in his political career, allowing Obama to instantly invent new biographies and win the trust of his audience. If there is one thing his biographers agree on, it's that he had a genuine gift for sensing what his audience wanted to hear. Unfortunately like most con artists, he lacked the same ability for long term financial planning, that he did for short term schemes to extract money from an increasingly gullible American public.

There is no denying that Obama cheerfully used fraud and strong arm tactics throughout his political career, but the chief weapon in his arsenal was flattery. Many of his supporters remember the special feeling of being made to feel that he was their friend. As one former aide wrote, "He taught us to laugh, he made us believe, and then he took all our money".

This conflicted legacy helps explain Barack Obama's popularity, even after his corruption and abuses of power destroyed the United States government, ending the era of the United States for good-- he was ranked 4th on the prestigious Dow Jones' "Most Likable Celebrities in North America in 2019" index (Holo-Link).

It helped that Obama left the White House voluntarily after learning that there would be no more money left for his trips abroad, and that due to the failure of the Federal Reserve and the secession of 23 states from the Union, no national budget would be possible. He did of course leave with everything of value in the White House that his family and associates could grab or pry out of the walls, but by then most Americans were too busy dealing with the problems of the Great Partition to notice. Even the farewell party that burned down most of the White House seemed a small thing in the wake of the Detroit Food Riots or the discovery of the Red River Gulag (Holo-Link).

Still his popularity afterward enabled Obama to begin several successful careers in the entertainment industry, including a long-running stint on the soap opera General Hospital, his own line of shammy infomercials and a music career with such nostalgia singles as, "Where's Da Money", "Where All Da Money Go" and "What Happen to All Da Money?"

Even today viewers watching old fashioned television can still catch commercials of Obama in his older years, holding up a shammy cloth, dipping it in a spilled pool of olive oil and telling the audience to have faith that the mess would be gone. Even his famous tagline, "At a price that won't bankrupt you, unlike me" was meant to be a good humored reference to his controversial two and a half terms in office.

America's Leaders Send Their Condolences

From the Confederate States of California's Prime Minister Perez Hilton (Holo-Link), to King Lamar Alexander II of the Constitutional Monarchy of Tennessee, and all across the nation, America's leaders sent their condolences on the death of the last President of the United States.

Even the combatants in New York's Twenty Year Civil War interrupted their fighting, as New York City President Al Sharpton and Arch-Duke Molinaro sent their condolences.

In Arizona, Obama's former political rival, the 102 year former Senator, John McCain, sent his own condolences. Once considered too old compared to Barack Obama, McCain noted ironically that he had in fact outlived him, while also passing along the wishes of his now 126 year old mother. As well as his daughter Meghan McCain, off in space as the First Woman on Mars (Holo-Link).

From the United States of Alaska, to the Democratic People's Republic of Minnesota, from the bloody trench warfare of Westchester County to the farthest South American outposts of the Empire of Texas, the messages of sympathy came in tribute on the passing of the man who had made their existence possible.

Remembering Obama

All across the land formerly known as America, millions are choosing to remember Obama in their own way. From the vigils held in front of the Apollo Theater, where the musical, "Barack Superstar" has been running for almost three decades straight, even under artillery fire from Englewood during the Tri-State War, to the ceremonial million dollar burnings in the Republic of New Hampshire, where crowds burn the infamous "million dollar bills" with Obama's portrait on them that were issued during the 2017 devaluation which made ten thousand dollars equivalent to a single Euro, no one can ignore the death of America's last President.

CFN, the Celebrity Funeral Network, is reported to have won the bidding rights to the Obama funeral, and plans are underway to hold a three day funeral, to be broadcast from the spot where Chicago once stood. And corporate sponsors have already lined up to cover ad buys for the flowers, vehicles for the funeral train and logos for the coffin itself.

After the ceremonies, the speakers, the guest musical performers and the services by an Imam, African Liberationist Minister and Reform Rabbi, Obama's funeral plane is expected to fly low over every major American city still standing, inciting riots, mass panic and all the chaos and destruction necessary for a proper sendoff to the man who destroyed America.

A Complicated Legacy

Like the best of con artists, Obama had a way of reflecting people's expectations back at them. Despite living one of the most public lives of his generation, through millions of interviews, his own talk show and even a sex tape, no one could really claim to know him.

Survived only by one racist white granddaughter, Ariana Michaela Stover, a member of the New Klu Klux Klan, his real legacy remains the political and economic chaos he so cheerfully spawned. To his contemporaries, Obama became a symbol of hubris, a byword for the arrogance of a generation that valued style over substance, and allowed radical politics to outshout basic common sense. To a generation that has grown up after the fall of the United States, Obama is part of a baffling archeology of symbols and figures that have no value except for entertainment purposes. (Holo-Link)

In the end it may be that there was no real Obama, only a man who served as a metaphor for a culture that had lost touch with its roots and its own identity, that embraced change for the sake of novelty and had become incapable of paying attention to anything that was not sufficiently entertaining enough. Obama was a symptom of America's collapse, rather than its cause.

This has been another fine holo-cast from CNN Celebrity Network News. Stay with us for more coverage of celebrities. Their lives, their deaths, their weddings and their funerals. And remember our 1000th viewer today wins a special prize. So stay with us. Because you don't want to miss a thing.

The Cost of Global Warming Greed

2009-07-07T22:31:00.004-04:00

How do you make money? You could build a factory that makes chairs or open a store that sells chairs. But of course if you're in the government, you make money by finding new sources of tax revenue, which helps justify giving yourself a salary hike. But what if you're not officially in the government? That's what pork is for, and while environmentalists don't seem to like cows very much, they do love their pork.

"Green" is more like pink thanks to the kind of pork embedded in Obama's stimulus package. The billions ladled out for everything from green jobs to making buildings green to green energy helped shove whopping fistfuls of money into the pockets of environmental consulting groups and companies.

Tesla Motors, a much hyped company which doesn't so much produce cars as magazine articles about itself, got nearly half a billion in federal funding. This for a company that makes six figure sports cars assembled in the UK and powered by shopping carts full of laptop batteries that virtually no one has actually driven. Not to mention a company with an embattled leadership, embroiled in numerous lawsuits, which prior to the 465 million in Federal funds was firing its employees through text messages, because it was down to 9 million dollars in the bank.

Is there really a good reason why half a billion dollars in Federal funds should be paying for luxury sports cars for the rich and famous to be assembled by British workers, whose key corporate investor is Mercedes Benz? Of course there is, because Tesla is "Green" and "Green" is unquestionable.And the same people who view the Ford Explorer as "immoral" for popularizing suburban family SUV's, think that a six figure sports car powered by over 6000 laptop batteries is as "moral" as it gets.

"Green" is not about science, it is about the color of money. It is about greed and class. To understand "Green" and the entire absurdity of man-made global warming, you don't need to look at charts and figures. You just need to look at Al Gore's net worth, which went from around 2 million to over a 100 million dollars. Gore didn't make that money building homes for orphans, he made that money by promoting a crisis and investing heavily in the companies that would stand to profit from it.

Imagine a man standing by the shore on a calm sunny day. He begins to cry, "Flood, flood", and though the river remains still, after an hour or two, people begin to worry whether he might be right. And that's when he opens his "Flood Prevention" concession. That isn't only Al Gore's moneymaking scheme, it's how to make money by creating a crisis that doesn't actually exist. And in the process, environmental stocks have become the new defense stocks. All that was required was to ram through a bill to tax every American in order to fight a war on carbon emissions.

And that's where pork becomes outright loot, because the Al Gores of the Global Warming Panic industry aren't satisfied with waiting for crumbs of pork from the table of congress. What's a few billion here and there when you have to keep lobbying legislators for it. Instead they want to take it directly from you. Taking money from government is big business, but taking money from the pocket of every American, now that is mega-business.

Enter Cap and Trade, in which Al Gore's Wall Street buddies will make billions trading something even more worthless and unreal than mortgages taken out by people who couldn't actually afford them. They'll trade carbon emissions, getting businesses to pay for their "carbon emissions", which of course means you'll be paying for them every time you buy a product, not to mention pay your energy bill. Of course trading carbon emission is a lot like trading in how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's an artificial market created and enforced by government legislation. It has no actual value. Not even the value of a Fannie Mae mortgage. Which is the whole point.

Cap and Trade will create a "product" that no one needs, and will then insure that it's in demand. The companies set up to profit from it will cash in. The average American will be ponying up the cash for it, one way or another. The Wall Street people who have pre-ordered Teslas will be able to take them for a drive. You'll have to settle for a CAFE mandated matchbox car that's death on wheels in any collision with the Tesla.

Since the standards will have to be made more stringent all the time to save the earth from carbon emissions, which is a lot like proposing to save the earth from hydrogen or oxygen emissions, the artificial market will maintain its demand. Every time a factory becomes more "efficient" and invests money in becoming greener (which if they're politically connected will be underwritten by Federal grants), the standards will be tightened. The only answer of course will be to buy more carbon credits.

To understand the totalitarian insanity of this, imagine that you were told that every time you breath out, you are actually destroying the world with your carbon dioxide emissions. The solution will naturally be to regulate your carbon dioxide emissions, which must fall below a pound a day, a ratio to be achieved by limiting your mobility and productivity. Of course if your breathing goes above the metered range, you can buy the right to breathe some more from your friendly neighborhood carbon emissions dealer.

But none of this is really about saving the earth, is it. The same planet which survived collisions with huge chunks of rock from outer space, regular volcanic eruptions and Earth Day concerts, is in no danger whatsoever from the fourth most abundant element in the universe. It's about greed. And it's about class. It's about the sort of people who drive Teslas and Priuses, and the sort of people who drive Ford Explorers and Hummers. It's about the sort of people who make money through hard work, and the sort of people who make money by convincing the government to hand over a share of their money to them. In the name of the Environment.

And with nearly a trillion in carbon credits to be auctioned off in the first seven years alone, we're all set to sail into the "Green Economy." The Green economy being a vapor economy built on reselling worthless government mandated tokens that will allow some companies to stay in business. Like most socialist schemes, Cap and Trade presumes that government control will prevent the bubble from bursting. In reality like the housing boondoggle, this latest unholy mixture of socialist capitalism will make fortunes for a handful and wreck the economy on a scale yet unseen and perhaps unimagined. With the financial sector still reeling and a number of banks and institutions under outright government control, the Obama Administration's green plans will mean easy money for them now, and another financial disaster later.

The problem with mixing socialism and capitalism is that you can't actually force people to buy things. Nor can you force factories to remain in cap and trade nations. And if you can't keep the golden goose alive long enough to bleed him dry, you're left with a third world "People's Democracy" economy. Which is why the real cost of global warming greed will be the destruction of the last remains of American industry and manufacturing.

You can tax people, but you can't make them work for a living. You can take over companies, but you can't make them innovative or profitable. And you can steal and loot, but sooner or later, even Washington D.C. will have to face the fact that the economy is not a closed system, and if you spend enough time fattening your own wallet and bailing out and stimulating your contributors, you will kill the golden goose and be left to play Kim Jong Il, with a lot of power and no economy to exercise it over.

Cap and Trade has outsourced Federal taxation to Wall Street, just in time for Wall Street to be Federalized. The result is an abomination that's two parts capitalist, three parts socialist, and rabidly greedy. By banking on a phony crisis, the environmental lobby and the Obama administration have transformed taxation into a commodities market. The resulting alliance makes it hard to tell apart the private sector from the government, not that there's any point in even trying, because in the final result it's the big promoters of a phony crisis, such as Al Gore, that will profit, and the rest of us who will lose out.

What is the Two State Solution supposed to Solve anyway?

2009-07-06T22:38:00.004-04:00

With all the talk about a Two State Solution, the question should be asked, what is it coming to solve anyway?

If it's coming to solve terrorism, it's not clear how a state run by a government consisting of two terrorist organizations that are dedicated to the destruction of Israel, neither of whom are ready to recognize Israel or stopping terrorism... will stop terrorism.

Nor has Obama or any of the currently enthusiastic backers of the "Two State Solution" offered any realistic plans for how terrorism will end. And yet turning two terrorist groups into the government of a new country is certain to make their existing terrorism a good deal worse. Especially since neither Hamas nor Fatah are ready to concede the right of a Jewish state to exist on the remaining land.

So clearly the Two State Solution is not here to stop terrorism, it's likely to only make it worse. This also kills any notion that the "Solution" will stabilize the Middle East. How can the Middle East be stabilized by any solution that makes terrorism, the current source of much of the regional instability, worse?

Creating a country run by two terrorist organizations will mean an open terrorist haven in the Middle State. This is no small problem when you consider that not only Hamas and Fatah, but even larger terrorist groups such as Al Queda, have found a base within the autonomous territories of the Palestinian Authority. If that is the situation now, imagine how bad it will get with open borders, an accessible port and airport? Not to mention all the arms that the new state of Palestine will be able to buy with international loans.

And the instability will not simply remain within Israel's borders. Hamas is a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to overthrow Egypt's government and replace it with an Islamic state. Palestinian Arab terrorism has long been a destabilizing factor in Jordan and Lebanon's politics. What they lacked before was a secure national base of operations. Something that the "Two State Solution" will finally provide them with.

The US and its allies have spent countless blood and treasure struggling to clean up Afghanistan for the last 7 years. It would be the worst kind of folly to then turn half of Israel into the new Afghanistan. But that is exactly what the "Two State Solution" would accomplish, carving out a danger zone dominated by Sunni and Shiite terrorist groups looking to export their vision of Islam through the bullet and the bomb.

Osama bin Laden's best possible birthday present would be if the US were to force Israel to set up a new Afghanistan in Gaza and the West Bank, allowing him to recreate the murderous chaos of Iraq.

So if the Two State Solution will not end terrorism or being stability to the Middle East, what exactly will it solve? Diplomats say it will move the "stalled peace process" forward, but then their fallacy has always been to treat the peace process as an engine pulling a Palestinian state into place, greased by Israeli concessions. Every time the Palestinian Arab terrorist groups revert to type, and Israel locks down the area in self-defense, the diplomats declare that the "peace process" is stalled and demand more concessions from Israel.

This disastrous approach has led to the current fragmented Fatah/Hamas terrorist camps on the land gotten from previous Israeli concessions, the Israeli Separation Wall meant to keep their terrorism at bay, and the constant state of war. But like Sisyphus turned international mediator, the diplomats keep assuming that more of the same will make things better, when in fact it won't. By ignoring the general corruption, violence and dishonesty on the Palestinian Arab side-- the international peacemakers have insured that the process would fail at every point and turn. Their "See No Evil" approach insured that the process would fail at every point and turn, a failure that has not only been disastrous for Israel, but equally disastrous for Palestinian Arabs.

And yet Obama is bent on repeating that same process in spades, once again disproportionately pressuring Israel, while ignoring Fatah and Hamas' refusal to negotiate in good faith, recognize the State of Israel, end their own domestic human rights abuses and terrorism.

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, and Obama has demonstrated in no way that he has learned anything from the history of America's interventionist Middle East "Peace Process" which at no point during its 17 years under 3 Presidents has produced anything resembling peace. There is no reason to anything that now will be any different.

So if the Two State Solution won't stabilize the region, end terrorism or lead to peace... what in the world will it solve?

It might be argued that the Two State Solution will at the very least create a Palestinian state. And it might indeed do that. Just maybe. The odds of it are long though, when you consider that the current Palestinian autonomous territories are split between two warring terrorist factions, Hamas and Fatah.

The only thing that has preserved Fatah thus far is US backing. But how long will the US be able to save Fatah from Hamas? And since Hamas is not motivated by Palestinian nationalism, but the creation of a regional Islamic caliphate, its real goal would be to make Gaza part of a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt. A similar plan would likely follow for Jordan and the West Bank, once Hamas is able to shove Fatah out of the way, as it did in Gaza.

Then there's the fact that the Palestinian territories are wholly funded entities of the UN, the US, Israel and Iran; who provide what there is in the way of money, food, jobs, power, medicine and all the other basic necessities that prevent the locals from turning to cannibalism.

The two biggest employers in the Palestinian territories are the UNWRA and the Palestinian Authority, whose funding comes from the US and Europe. Those are pretty much also the only employers, aside from various Israeli companies who bring day laborers across the border, often on construction projects. Paradoxically the very same construction projects in the Settlements and Jerusalem, that the Obama administration is furiously working to shut down. That of course would mean that the only major source of jobs in the Palestinian territories would be US and European funded bureaucracies, such as the UNRWA, that would have no reason to exist once a Palestinian state was created.

Which means that if a Palestinian state were created, it could not exist for 5 minutes without a workforce paid for by the US and the UN. A workforce that mostly consists of militia gangs who express their displeasure at not being paid with their AK-47's.

Any reasonable person would agree that this is not a workable plan for a state. At this point a Fatah run Palestinian state would be a fiction propped up by the US. A Hamas run Palestinian state would be a fiction propped up by Iran. Neither would be a workable political entity that could care for its people and manage their affairs.

So if the Two State Solution can't even create a Palestinian state, what can it solve? Absolutely nothing.

How Many More Birthdays Does America Have Left?

2009-07-05T21:56:00.000-04:00

As America celebrates its 233rd birthday, it is worth taking a moment to ask, How many more birthdays does America have left?

The fireworks burn bright. The flags wave high. There are proud salutes and marching bands. There are hot dogs and frankfurters. But those are the trappings, and what is inside them? Yesterday I passed by numerous smoking grills, fireworks and cheerful families. There was only one minor detail wrong. The flag that hung behind them was the Puerto Rican flag, not the American flag.

One minor detail that showcases how little easy it is to throw away the substance of America, when you have already replaced everything meaningful with empty showmanship. When you have done that, throwing out the few things that remain becomes very easy. Absurdly easy then to wrap socialism or communism in the red, white and blue, to shoot off firework displays around it while waving the flag. And when you do it long enough, no one will even bother to notice whose flag it is you're waving.

A news headline reads, "Tea party protests marr independence day". As if Independence Day were not there precisely for things such as the Tea Party protests, more than for consuming fast food, watching the lights in the sky and cheering when an unelected socialist leader delivers his carefully scripted address. But that is how a nation falls. That is how a nation dies. Before its cities burn and its name dies, its soul dies first. And when the soul is dead, all that is left is a corpse being propped upright by the cheering crowds.

How many birthdays then does America really have left? Every birthday is also a mark of mortality. A time to look ahead and wonder, "when?" The Roman Republic endured for almost 500 years, twice as long as America has to date. The Empire that succeeded it could not even manage 450 years. Many historians expected America to follow the Roman pattern, going from Republic to Empire. Instead America seems to have skipped over the heyday of the Empire to hurry forward to its waning twilight years.

Like many democracies America has indeed fallen prey to a "Bread and Circuses electorate", which as always vote in corrupt governments willing to promise grand scale giveaways at someone else's expense. But the retreat from Empire means that American socialism is not premised on looting and raiding other people's lands, but rather domestic wealth redistribution.

There is a shadow over America, but it is a shadow cast by a tottering monolith, the great edifice of government being erected higher and higher by hundreds of millions of willing and unwilling slaves, sweating and toiling for the promise of "better and cheaper everything brought to you by the government of the United States."

America has become an Empire, but not an Empire that rules over foreign lands, but an Empire of bureaucracy, of endless departments and administrations, of mountains of paper forms and ant-hives of regulators, organizers, inspectors and administrators. The American experiment of freedom and self-government has been conquered and overthrown by legions of bureaucrats, its population chained by a myriad of regulations and its dream of the "land of the free" twisted into a nightmare. And below all the offices promising "free bread" and collecting endless taxes to pay for it, are the circuses, the tawdry celebrity carnivals, the sleazy smirk of Hollywood and the endless scream of Reality TV echoing among concrete canyons, sprawling suburbs and dusty hills.

Chained below the mountain of paper are ideas and words like "initiative", "innovation", "industry" and "a government of the people by the people." Somewhere beneath that great pile of paper lie a few stray documents such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But they are just papers at the bottom of the pile, much less regarded than the forms and regulations that weigh them down and bury them. They are simply "traditions", like the flag and the firecrackers. And traditions without meaning quickly become disposable.

Yet these documents are not just traditions, they were meant to define its principles and place limits on its government to insure that Americans would be a free people living in a free land, rather than living out the sad mockery of the home of the fee and the land of the slave that Obama and his ilk mean to turn it into.

And when those documents are paid tribute to, but not read, and certainly not governed by. Then they can just as easily be replaced by other documents and the fiat of activist judges. And when the flag is simply viewed as an arrangement of colors and shapes, rather than representing the unity of individual states within a system of federated states... it is easy enough to replace it with any other flag, whether it is the Puerto Rican flag, the Mexican flag or the U.N. flag.

And that is exactly how to kill the soul of a nation and how to destroy America. The soul of a nation lie in its principles, its laws and its history. When those are dead, all that remain are symbols that no one will know how to read anymore, just as most people ignore the symbols on coins and dollar bills, or the statues leaning against ancient government buildings. The greatest ally of tyranny is ignorance. Its second greatest ally is greed.

To survive, to live to see many more birthdays, Americans must triumph over those who voted in the name of ignorance and greed, not to mention socialist self-righteousness. Whether or not America will survive to see a 300th birthday will depend on whether the nation's steps will move toward rebirth or redefinition.

Those who have placed Obama upon his pedestal have been working toward redefinition for a very long time. To see an American in Name Only, a nation with no values or principles, but diversity and centralization. Their America will be a mockery of the United States of America, just as the debauchery and degeneracy of Imperial Rome was a mockery of the Roman Republic.

For America to not only survive, but to thrive as a nation following in the footsteps of its Founders, whose Independence celebrations are not a hollow cocktail of diversity without principle of substance, America must be reborn along the standards of its founding documents. Only going back to America's roots can save America from the crimes of its leaders and the folly of its youth.

What It Will Take to Win the War

2009-07-04T23:08:00.001-04:00

WWII was the high point of the long Western history of war. In it the best armed forces of industrial civilization collided and fought for years, deploying the latest technologies and throwing unprecedented numbers of of men, tanks and planes into the battle. It was the kind of war never to be repeated again.

For the following decades the US and the USSR, the victors of the war, would develop increasingly better military technologies and stare across the globe at each other armed with large quantities of weapons that could never be used. Instead both sides armed smaller countries and in that way fought restrained proxy wars with each other across the world.

The UN armies in Korea and the American army in Vietnam fought as if they were refighting WW2 against another large well armed Western state, much as British armies invaded Afghanistan and fought using the same neat squares of men and cavalry charges that had served them so well in the Napoleonic wars. Great generals adapt to a battlefield, ordinary generals fight by the book resulting in terrible losses until they finally learn to adapt. This is how it was for the Americans in Korea and Vietnam and for the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Israeli and American soldiers emerge from a complex lineage. The American army was born from militias and Indian fighters who copied the tactics of their Indian allies and enemies, firing at the British from behind trees, moving quickly and attacking unexpectedly. Tactics the British, who relied on using large forces to seize and hold territory, could not usefully respond to. While the British took entire cities, including New York, they found that they could not control the land without hunting down and defeating the Colonial armies. Relying on their usual tactics, they paid a high price for simply trying to move armies across upstate New York. The Americans had learned to adapt and make do with limited resources and spur of the moment decisions. Their boldness and adaptability paved the way for transforming the ragged bands the British regulars had sneered at, into the army the mightiest empire in the world couldn't defeat.

The Israeli army emerged out of the original Shomrim, civilian patrols who watched farms and orange groves, carrying crude rifles, riding horses and even disguising themselves as Arabs to protect villages and homesteads from Arab raids. Refined by Orde Wingate, an eccentric officer despised by the British high command, he initiated many of the tactics the Israeli army still uses today including officers leading from the front, small units that operate off the land and use simple misdirection to strike at the enemy. These are still main features of Israel military tactics today.

From the war of 1948, the IDF increasingly adapted itself to fighting not bands of Arab fighters, but large well-armed Arab armies. The Yom Kippur War was to Israel and the Arabs what WW2 was to Europe, a massive devastating conflict that brought home the message to the Arabs that the war could not be won by large scale military assaults. Instead the fighting would be left to terrorist groups, a return to the same kind of armed bands the predecessors of the IDF had fought during the days of the Mandate. The kind of armed Indian bands that the Colonial Settlers had cut their teeth fighting.

The last two wars in Lebanon were so costly precisely because the IDF was fighting Arab bands again, though they may have been disguised with Marxist and Islamist tags, and its generals had forgotten that the key to defeating them lay in the tactics of those young men who dressed like Arabs and rode on horseback to intercept murderous groups of Arab bandits. Increasingly the last decade with the creation of a Palestinian state demanded a reeducation in the way of such a war.

When American soldiers wanted to find out how to engage in urban warfare in an Arab city, they watched Israeli soldiers operating in Jenin and put those same tactics to use in Fallujah cutting open holes in houses, blasting their way in and taking the enemy by surprise. Israel's war with Palestinian terrorists has provided much of the tactical and occasionally even technological methodology for US forces in Iraq. It's why Israeli and American casualties fighting armed Muslim bands are far smaller than that of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Israel and America have adapted, but the essential way of war they are fighting is misguided. They may only be suffering 10 percent of the casualties relative to the enemy forces, but those are still unacceptable losses when fighting an enemy force that does not care about its losses.

Islamic terrorists in Iraq and now Lebanon have taken a severe beating but they can always replace the lower ranked canon fodder while the higher ranked terrorists are spirited from hideout to hideout and emerge afterward crowing triumphantly, much as the Viet Cong did. Israeli and American tactics allow for greater flexibility, penetration and adaptation, but they still come down to fighting modified guerrilla warfare against guerrillas and terrorists operating on their own terrain. The enemy can always just retreat and wait, carry out a handful of attacks, appeal to the world and wait till you leave.

An AP headline read, "Victory for Hizbullah May Be Survival." By contrast victory for Israel requires either eliminating Hizbullah or damaging it so badly it won't pose a threat for some time. The latter might be more possible if Hizbullah wasn't just a tool of Iran which can count on Iran to aid and resupply it the moment Israel leaves. The former would require conquering Lebanon. Similarly victory for America requires building a stable Iraqi government that can hold its own, while victory for Iraqi terrorists is as simple as preventing America from doing it.

Imagine one person trying to build a house of cards while all the other person has to do is knock it down. That is essentially America and Israel's military dilemma. The way out of that dilemma was essentially closed to them in the latter half of the 20th century and that is a massive saturation bombing campaign combined with an invasion that treats everything on the ground as an enemy. It would have been the default tactic of any military, but a domestic fifth column operating out of the press and political institutions now make that impossible. While Islamic terrorists are free to torture, mutilate and behead and still count on the world's support, every American policing action and Israeli bombardment results in shrill hysterical condemnation and media coverage.

By the Vietnam era the tactics regularly used by the UN forces in Korea were the object of horror and condemnation (not however tactics used by the Viet Cong.) Civilization had turned on itself and the intellectual elites of the Western world were occupied in enthusiastically cheering on and empathizing with its destroyers. But letting those very same people place chains on your military doctrine to ensure the approval of public opinion is utterly futile since these people will never approve and the crippling result leaves your military trapped in a bloody and futile struggle with armed bands that fade in and out of the conflict, always garnering sympathy and never providing you with an actual victory.

And the very people who chained down the military, treat your defeats as proof of the futility of solving things on the battlefield, when it is only proof of the futility of fighting wars with your hands tied behind your back.

If the West is to reverse its own decline it must abandon half-measures and when confronted with an enemy fully fight back. When the enemy hides among a civilian population there will be significant collateral damage but the reality is that the enemy could not hide successfully among the civilian population if they did not have the support of a major segment of that civilian population. German troops could not hide in French villages. Israeli soldiers could not hide in Palestinian villages firing shells. Enemy troops can hide in a location because there is sufficient sympathy and allegiance on the ground for them to operate there. That makes them part of the war and the enemy's operations and makes them valid targets. You can't win a war against guerrillas except by destroying all possible bases of support for them and their infrastructure.

It is least often that soldiers lose wars and most often generals lose wars by the extent that they tie the hands of the men in the field. It would be good to remember that the extent to which we are merciful to the enemy population is the extent to which we are cruel to our own soldiers. In war against an enemy force that hides among enemy civilians, we have a choice between their lives and ours. For a long while now we've been choosing their lives over the lives of our soldiers and our casualty rolls reflect that tragic betrayal.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - America, Iran, Europe, Israel and a Great Big Kettle

2009-07-03T11:48:00.006-04:00

If the week before was revolutionary, this week seemed more chaotic, spread between the frenzied media coverage of the World's Most Famous Pedophile, the Iranian protests were pushed to the background. So was America's Largest Tax Ever and only a little news coverage remained available for the settling of Minnesota's stolen Senate election. An unfortunate reminder of what happens when elections are decided by Democratic courts, instead of by the voters. After all this, the proper place for Al Franken to hold his victory celebration would be at a cemetery, because without all the dead voters, not to mention the voters who never existed, the clown of Minnesota would never be pulling down a six figure taxpayer funded salary.

Iran meanwhile has gone back to its two favorite targets, England and foreign embassies, with plans to try Iranian staffers from England's embassy. No word yet on whether the Newsweek staffer will be tried, but considering how England folded when its sailors were captured by Iran, it seems perfectly clear that Iran decided England was a safe target.

Meanwhile news is emerging on ousted Honduran would be dictator Zelaya's ties to cocaine trafficking.

The regime that ousted Manuel Zelaya in Honduras claimed Tuesday that the deposed president allowed tons of cocaine to be flown into the Central American country on its way to the United States.

"Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission of appropriate authorities and bring thousands of pounds ... and packages of money that are the fruit of drug trafficking," its foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, told CNN en Espanol.

"We have proof of all of this. Neighboring governments have it. The DEA has it," he added.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Rusty Payne in Washington said he could neither confirm nor deny a DEA investigation.

Honduras and other Central American nations have become major transshipment points in recent years for Colombian cocaine, particularly as Mexico's government cracks down on cartels.

The drugs arrive in Honduras on noncommercial aircraft and, increasingly, in speedboats, from Venezuela and to a lesser extent Colombia, according to the Key West, Florida-based Joint Interagency Task Force-South, which coordinates drug interdiction in region. The boats tend to make short hops up Central America's coast.

In its most recent report on the illicit narcotics trade, the U.S. State Department said in February of Honduras that "official corruption continues to be an impediment to effective law enforcement and there are press reports of drug trafficking and associated criminal activity among current and former government and military officials."

In October, Zelaya proposed legalizing drug use as a way of reducing the violence.

Now Chavez was deeply involved with the FARC narcoterrorists in Venezeula. The suborning of several Latin American nations with leaders like Zelaya who had close ties to Chavez and shared a common left wing agenda-- was meant to pave the way for drug smuggling operations into the US.

Considering that FARC had contacts with some Obama people, and Chavez is best buds with Prince Barry, it might be worth asking how much of Obama's dirty campaign cash was drug money, and if that isn't why the Obama Administration is so feverishly backing Zelaya's restoration to power, in order to keep the drug pipeline open?

All the while Michelle Obama is keeping Air Force One warm

Michelle Obama Takes her Girls to London for Fish and Chips truly change we can believe in -- or as was said during the campaign, "We are the change we have been waiting for."

Imagine Laura Bush doing this when 15,000,000 Americans are looking for a job

On Sunday, President Obama flew back to the United States on Air Force One. His wife, two daughters and her mother did a bit of shopping in Paris before taking their own Boeing 757 (C-32) over to London to do some sight seeing.

We all remember Obama’s admonishment to corporate CEO’s in February: “You can’t get corporate jets, you can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers dime.”

Apparently that doesn’t apply to his wife. The London Times opened its description of Michelle’s visit this way: Motorcycle outriders, armoured Chevrolets and bullet-headed men in raincoats crisis-crossed London yesterday as Michelle Obama and her daughters spent a second day on an unofficial visit to the capital. The Times went on to describe that when Michelle and the girls arrived at Westminster Abbey, the building was closed to tourists with people already in told to “wait against the wall.” An American visiting the Abbey said “Right then I knew it was probably someone from our ‘royal family’.”

Michelle’s motorcade shut down the London street above as the First Lady of the World and her children go for Fish and Chips at a pub in Mayfair. The entourage inside the restaurant was 15 people while dozens more wait outside. Include the dozens of Air Force personnel to fly and service the plane, embassy personnel and other staff and we are talking about a serious expenditure of tax payer dollars. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have lost their jobs and won’t be able to take their family on a summer holiday. Despite their circumstances they’ll still be expected to fork over the tax dollars to pay for Michelle’s trip.
Tell your friends about this -- it's their money being spent!!

But speaking of political scum, one of the dirtiest Congressmen, Robert Wexler, crawled out of a sewer to try and convince Jews and Israelis to back Obama's War on Settlements, by promising that the "temporary freeze" would call the Arab world's bluff, whatever that means. Of course Israel has been calling the Arab world's bluff through concession after concession for 17 years now, which hasn't helped Israel any. Maybe it should be the Arab world's turn to start calling Israel's bluff by offering up all of the Palestine Mandate territory to Israel.

As for Wexler, he might want to look at the protests happening under his own window instead.

Not to be outdone, O.J. Simpson defense attorney Alan Dershowitz popped up to try and defend Obama on Israel, while working to popularize a suggestion from American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee leader Yousef Munayyer arguing that the settlement freeze should be horizontal not vertical.

I believe there is a logical compromise on settlement growth that has been proposed by Yousef Munayyer, a leader of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League. "Obama should make it clear to the Israelis that settlers should feel free to grow their families as long as their settlements grow vertically, and not horizontally," he wrote last month in the Boston Globe. In other words, build "up" rather than "out."

First of all ,Dershowitz repurposing a suggestion from Yousef Munayyer alone should kick the stuffing out of his pro-Israel credibility. Yousef Munayyer has written op eds legitimizing Hamas, while claiming that “Abu Ghraib set the bar for obscene inhumanity”. The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has close ties to radical anti-Israel groups, including AL-AWDA. It openly supports Hamas.

Scores of senior ADC officials have expressed positive views toward terrorist organizations.

In 1994, during one of the main peaks of Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, then-ADC President Hamzi Moghrabi said, "I will not call [Hamas] a terrorist organization. I mean, I know many people in Hamas. They are very respectable. … I don't believe Hamas, as an organization, is a violent organization."

Discover the Networks notes that two years later, Moghrabi's successor, Hala Maksoud, defended the Hezbollah terrorist group.

"I find it shocking," Maksoud said, "that [one] would include Hezbollah in … [an] inventory of Middle East 'terrorist' groups."

In 2000, new ADC President Hussein Ibish characterized Hezbollah as "a disciplined and responsible liberation force."

When Israel released Hezbollah prisoners in early 2004, Imad Hamad, ADC's Midwest Regional Director, openly celebrated the freedom of "the heroes," as noted by Mideast scholar Daniel Pipes.

That's who Alan Dershowitz is taking his ideas from. (And of course Obama's old pal Rashid Khalidi is in the mix here.) Dershowitz may be given a bit of a pass, since he clearly didn't research Yousef Munayyer well enough to even get the name of his organization right, writing League instead of Committee. But that kind of sloppiness suggests that the rest of Dershowitz's article was similarly poorly researched.

But to actually address the suggestion that growth can only be vertical, "Let The Jews Live Vertically", this kind of growth would first of all require the demolition of existing homes to build new ones. That means displacing current residents and forcing them into multi-family housing.

Second of all it would be a good deal more expensive. Third of all vertical housing is much more vulnerable to missile and rocket fire from the Palestinian Authority. Fourth of all it takes a good deal more time to construct. Fifth of all, vertical housing is a poor way to accommodate natural growth by individuals, and in fact would create a far more permanent presence by Israel in the territories, making it counter-intuitive from the other side.

Sixth of all large parts of Jerusalem and larger settlements such as Maaleh Adumum are already heavily on the vertical side. Aside from demolishing them to build 60 story buildings, not much vertical growth is possible there, without horizontal growth.

Seventh of all, vertical growth will still require horizontal growth. Any half-decent city planner understands this. Vertical growth will require accompanying infrastructure to accommodate it, much of which, such as roads and utilities, will have to be vertical. In fact vertical growth drives much larger horizontal growth, which is how cities grow in the first place. You cannot have vertical growth without horizontal growth. Not in real life. Not in real towns. Not unless you deprive people of basic needs and put up barbed wire keeping them inside. Which is what Yousef Munayyer wants. It's what Obama no doubt wants, but it's not what Alan Dershowitz should want.

Eight of all, a lot of homes in the settlements have gardens and orchards. They grow their own food. It's a part of life in that setting. To American liberals it's called things like sustainability. Unless Dershowitz has a plan for making vertical orchards, it would helpful if he actually thought through the suggestions he receives from terrorist supporters before conveying them in a national forum.

Finally, if Jews should be limited to vertical growth. So should Arabs. The day Arabs are told that they can only build vertically, not horizontally, is the day we can agree to the same proposal.

Other reactions to Dershowitz's callous stupidity and ignorance can be found at American Thinker, with Laurie Regan analyzing the flaws in Dershowitz's claims about Obama's support for Israel.

Melanie Philips calling Dershowitz out on giving Obama a pass over his moral equivalence between the refugee camps and the Holocaust.

And at Yourish.com, a general roundup of reactions.

Meanwhile the New York Senate race that's getting interesting, and once again showing off Obama's political weakness in New York. After losing his appointee of choice, Princess Caroline, Obama was forced to back Senator Scumbag Schumer's pony, Kirsten Gillibrand. Obama successfully muscled out Rep Steve Israel who had considered running against her in the primary. But instead now Gillibrand will face Congresswoman Maloney in the primary.

Maloney's obvious advantages are name recognition, plus a name that people can spell, and the home field advantage in New York City. And she's got Bill Clinton headlining her fundraiser. That's not too shabby, even though Willie doesn't have quite the draw he used to, especially when Gillibrand will likely be able to call on Obama.

But Maloney now has a small lead in the polls over Gillibrand, which is fairly quick work. But then Gillibrand is viewed by many New Yorkers as a appointee of crazy dysfunctional New York Governor Patterson. Maloney by contrast comes with a solid political pedigree. To those in the know, Gillibrand looks like Schumer's puppet, and the way she has acted since her appointment only reaffirms that. Schumer has been gaining far too much influence within the party, and his ruthless assault on Martin Connor, replacing the respected longtime Democratic State Senator with one of his obnoxious junior aides, using ugly and crude campaign tactics, has won Schumer more enemies than friends in the local party establishment. After all who knows which one of them Schumer will replace next with his aide, his speechwriter or his waterboy.

Now Gillibrand is begging for donations, supposedly to stave off a Republican race against Pataki, but that doesn't seem to be happening, instead she needs the dough to face off against Maloney, and the money that Carolyn Maloney can count on as a popular NYC based Congressman. With the Republican party in the doldrums, statewide and nationwide, the real threat is from within.

Schumer, who was the puppet master behind Franken, now has to fight a civil war, and he may find a struggle within the establishment on behalf of a woman few of them know or like, a good deal tougher than destroying Coleman through outright fraud. With Rangel attacking Obama over his interference in the New York Senate primary, the entire thing has become a losing proposition for Prince Barry, who not only lost his Princess Caroline, but is scrambling to shore up support for the woman who displaced her.

Since this is a primary election, the deciding factor will be in the hands of a small number of committed registered Democrats, many of them tied up with the Democratic establishment. A disproportionate amount of those votes will be in New York City, home base for Maloney, enemey territory for Gillibrand. To top that off, Gillibrand's poorly thought out Israel bashing will create problems with Jewish voters, while her rapid abandonment of her conservative positions will alienate many upstate Democrats who might have been more committed to her.

As Arlen Specter discovered after his defection from the Republican party because its tent wasn't big enough, the Democratic party's tent is very small and packed with infighting. The civil war begun by Dean has only exploded with Obama, and its ripple effects can be seen through the party.

In the general blog roundup meanwhile, Soccer Dad shows that Netanyahu's approval ratings have been trending up, while Obama's are trending down

WND has special postcards for Obama's birthday and a Free Our Health Care petition.

Oh My Valve covers the EU reactions to Iran's staffer arrests.

Ted Belman over at Israpundit has a look at Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick's solution for Israel's woes and it begins with cutting an activist judiciary down to size.

Jihad Watch meanwhile looks at what importing Islam to America will bring for gay rights and the infamous Dr. Butt will still go on practicing, despite his Dental Office Jihad.

The New Centrist raises the question of Obama's abandonment of democracy abroad.

George H.W. Bush followed in the footsteps of Reagan. President Clinton also made democracy promotion a centerpiece of his foreign policy. Liberal pundits often conveniently forget that Clinton was a steadfast advocate of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a U.S. law that called for regime change in that county.

Obama has made it clear that he values diplomacy and discussion over the promotion of, well, just about anything. On the topic of democracy promotion he is noticeably silent if not opposed to the concept. Example One, witness his vacillation regarding the recent events in Iran.

George H.W. Bush followed in the footsteps of Reagan. President Clinton also made democracy promotion a centerpiece of his foreign policy. Liberal pundits often conveniently forget that Clinton was a steadfast advocate of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a U.S. law that called for regime change in that county.

Obama has made it clear that he values diplomacy and discussion over the promotion of, well, just about anything. On the topic of democracy promotion he is noticeably silent if not opposed to the concept. Example One, witness his vacillation regarding the recent events in Iran.

Rather than side with democratic institutions and the rule of law in Honduras, our president declared the state’s actions “illegal” and had Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claim, “We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law, to reaffirm their democratic vocation, and to commit themselves to resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue”.

These statements were made less than a day after the so-called coup. Compare that to the long week of violence it took for Obama’s administration to condemn what was happening in Iran.

What these three examples show, a mere six months into Obama’s first term, is a severe break with the continuity in foreign policy of the past two decades, a break with democracy promotion as a foreign policy goal of the United States. This is the change many Americans voted for. But is it the sort of change you really believe in?

The real question though is if Obama supports Diplomacy Uber Alles, then what goal is all that diplomacy aimed at achieving, besides getting some of the world's worst dictators to like us? And what goals has it actually achieved?

With dead democracy protesters in the streets of Tehran, accelerating nuclear programs by both North Korea and Iran, continuing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan-- the answer would seem to be absolutely nothing.

Obama has not managed to get more foreign troops serving in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. He has not made any part of the world more stable. Instead he has delivered self-glorying high profile speeches such as the one in Cairo, which accomplish nothing except to burnish his own ego and image.

And that is what Obama's diplomacy really does. It hurts the US and our allies. It helps Obama.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country, and Honduras, Israel, Taiwan and pretty much everyone else, can do for you.

What does Freedom mean Anyway?

2009-07-01T22:37:00.006-04:00

With the 4th of July coming up, it is easy to get distracted by all the flag waving, the tricolor banners and the emphasis on national independence, to forget that the American Revolution was caused by the political abuse of power, rather than by a pure striving toward national independence. Rather than an independence movement on the grounds of national identity, the American Revolution saw British citizens revolting against incursions on their rights and freedoms by a distant and powerful government.

The 4th of July commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, not a military victory that marked the end of British rule such as the Battle of Yorktown or the anniversary of the beginning of American government with the United States Constitution or Washington's inauguration-- all of which would seem to be legitimate dates as well. Instead it commemorates a document which created no specific governmental authority, but instead lays out as its key doctrine, freedom.

The Declaration of Independence argues that rights are natural, and do not require a divinely appointed intercessor between man and G-d, in the form of a monarch. It states that the people of the United States do not derive their laws from being the subjects of a king, but from natural rights inherent in every human being, and that above all else they have the right to live, to be free and to pursue the course of their lives as they see fit.

This was a bold statement to make in a time when government received its authority from tradition and held its people as subjects, when church and state were intertwined so that the state held religious and even divine authority. The Declaration of Independence rejected the sanctity of government, instead putting forward the idea that government is nothing more than the consensual agreement of people as a tool for maintaining their affairs.

In a few short words what the 4th of July marks is a document that stated that henceforth in America, the people would not be creature of their government, but the government would be a creature of the people. The Declaration of Independence was not simply a declaration of national independence or the independence of the thirteen states-- it was a declaration of individual independence. It stated that not only did each American have rights and freedoms independent of any government, but that the government was his to make or unmake.

And yet the average American of 2009 is far more a creature of the government, than a colonial of 1769 ever was.

Thanks to the tattered remains of the Constitution the American of 2009 has managed to maintain some key political freedoms that his counterpart in 1769 did not have, but for all that his life is a tightly regimented and heavily taxed affair, overseen by a distant central government and its "multitude of New Offices" and their "swarms of Officers to harrass our people and eat out their substance" that the Declaration had complained about. Except today we call them Czars.

All this happened because Americans spent far too much time celebrating the forms of government, while forgetting the substance of their rights. Generations view the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as sacred documents, without actually understanding the fundamental principles that they embody. Meanwhile an activist judiciary has worked hard to create new "rights" out of whole cloth in the Constitution to be administered by the government, only to take away the plain rights that actually do exist in the Constitution. Government has become centralized and absolute.

We can still vote in legislators and executives, within the narrow parameters of a two party system in which both parties are absolutely committed to the expansion of government power. We cannot however vote away the bureaucracy, the "multitude of new Offices" and "swarms of Officers", who rule our lives directly, and whose numbers constantly keep growing without number.

The American political system has become a self-perpetuating interest group run by lawyers for the benefit of their supporters. A group that considers constitutional literalism to be outmoded and views government as a nanny caring for people who cannot properly care for themselves.

The British monarchy saw colonials as childlike subjects. The American government today sees them as self-destructive infants, too stupid to know what is good for them. The fundamental doctrine of tyranny in American today is no longer the divine authority of the king, but the temporal authority of the social worker. Both are premised on the incompetence and inequality of the ruled in relation to the rulers.

It is a given that people who cannot take care of themselves without help are inferior to those who care for them. And whatever pretty words it may be dressed up in, those who are cared for have less freedom and independence than their self-appointed caretakers.

And so the nanny government constantly searches for new ways to project its subjects from themselves, while finding ways to turn a tidy profit on the arrangement. Are the pesky subjects smoking? Are they eating fatty foods? Are they driving fast cars, building houses not up to code and using plastic bags? Are they gambling, drinking and using insensitive language? Don't they know it's not good for them. "There oughta be a law" and sooner or later there is.

American government began as a tool with limited power, a hacksaw or an ax, and has since become a giant power jack of all trades with 300 different drills, saws and instruments built in, but which is too heavy to actually move anywhere or do anything with. But our fascination with the tool we had drove us to do what humans always do with tools, improve them to be able to do more. And government began doing more. Year by year, decade by decade and century by century, it grew larger and more powerful. And there came a day when no one knew how to shut it off anymore.

What does freedom mean anyway? Freedom as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the 4th of July means freedom from government. The freedom to choose and shape laws and to treat government as a tool, rather than a master.

For now we still have ballots and voting booths. We can elect and unelect politicians. And when we elect the "wrong ones", the media and cultural establishment will smear them and tear them apart until we see reason and elect the men and women that they support. For now we still have that. But there were ballots and voting booths and in the USSR. There are ballots and voting booths in Iran. The key question is not simply who counts the votes, but do the votes actually count?

Democracy alone means that those who vote have a degree of control over the election of candidates. How much control they have depends on factors such as how open the nomination process is, how much influence raw money has on elections and help determine how much power vested interests exercise over the system, rather than the actual constituents.

In American politics, democracy has become a game in which winning the popular vote is the final goal. Those are the rules of the game that the various corporations, lobbies and special interest groups continue to play by in order to get what they want. For now. It is not inconceivable that they might at one date decided that they would be better served by modifying the rules of the game.

When the Republican governor of California and the Democratic assembly failed to win the public's constant for new taxes on the ballot, the immediate response from many pundits was to argue that the people of California had failed to make the right decision, and with adduced proof from their previous votes against illegal immigrants and gay marriage, should no longer be able to vote on ballot measures.

In East Germany, Erich Honecker once stated that the government had lost confidence in the people, and that they would have to regain the government's trust. There may come a time when the government loses confidence in the American people. As the King of England once lost confidence in his subjects.

Against that day, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

That is what freedom means. Government is either a slave of the citizenry or its master. In a free nation, government is a slave. In a slave nation, it is a master.

Confronting the New Islamic Imperialism

2009-06-30T22:18:00.004-04:00

Talk of colonialism and imperialism is all the rage when academic leftists sit down to critique the problems of terrorism and the clash of civilizations. But where a century ago terms such as colonialism and imperialism were easy enough to define, back when European governments held actual colonies and protectorates in Africa, Asia and the Middle East-- what do the terms actually mean today?

There are no European colonies today. And the lands that are at the center of the controversy are themselves non-Muslim. When Muslims attack Europe, America or Israel... it may very well be imperialism and colonialism, but it is no longer European imperialism and colonialism, but Islamic imperialism and colonialism.

It is Islamic ideologies and nations that seek Lebensraum, that work to expand their way across borders and even oceans, to create colonies on foreign soil, spread their religion at the expense of native beliefs and hold governing power abroad.

Today it is no longer the European who sails to foreign countries to spread the faith and "civilize the savages", it is the Muslim. The new Cecil Rhodes' and William Walker's are a lot more likely to be based out of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Their oppression and ruthless is equally directed at Europeans, as at Africans, Jews, Filipinos and any number of native peoples who stand in their way.

Long before the sun stared without setting down on the British Empire, Islamic Empires had been carved with brutal unyielding force across the face of the globe. Long before the American South saw a single slave, Muslim slave traders were moving human cargo back and forth, kidnapping and seizing slaves from Africa to the English coastline.

Islamic imperialism and colonialism was there long ago until recent times. The current clash of civilizations is the product of the Islamic attempt to revive those ancient empires they consider to have been wrongly taken from them.

To argue as the left does, that Islamic terrorism is the product of oppression, is as absurd and false as describing Nazi violence as the product of oppression. Any honest academic should have as much sympathy for Bedouin Muslim territorial claims to Israel or Spain, as he would for French claims to Algeria. Yet the academic double standard treats European colonialism as illegitimate, and Islamic colonialism as legitimate.

This brings us to the obscene charade in which the world denounces one of the Middle East's native peoples for managing to form their own country and defend its narrow borders against its former Bedouin Muslim conquerors. Only the ugliest forms of historical revisionism could paint the Jews as foreign interlopers with no rights to a piece of land that is recognized as theirs by three of the world's major religions... and the Muslim Bedouin hordes who overran the land, wiping out native religions and cultures as the "oppressed peoples".

This sort of obscene political farce goes on all over the world. Muslims today hold equal rights in Europe, America, Israel and Australia. By contrast Europeans, Americans and Jews are inferior under the law throughout the Muslim world. Muslims have free access to Jerusalem and Rome. Jews and Europeans have no access to Mecca, despite the fact that it had a substantial Jewish presence, before being massacred and enslaved by the murderous warlord, Mohammed, who is also considered by Muslims to be their ultimate prophet.

When the likes of Jimmy Carter bellow that Israel is guilty of Apartheid, while ignoring that his Saudi sponsors have actual Apartheid, not simply for non-Muslims, but even for Muslim women-- they perpetuate the agenda of Islamic Imperialism.

When American or European civil rights groups raise a storm over some remark made to a Muslim-- while turning a blind eye to the fact that these very same Muslims are importing the vilest bigotry, misogyny, anti-semitism, homophobia-- the teachings of Islamic Imperialism inherent in the Koran, the resulting rapes, murders, hate crimes and bombings become the fruits of Islamic Colonialism.

What is the awful and terrible crime being committed by Western nations, the acts of colonialism and imperialism against the Muslim world. It is nothing more than the desire to survive. To not be murdered by bigoted savages in bomb vests determined to resurrect their lost slave empires at any cost. The desire to be free in one's own country from bombings, robberies and gang rapes by Muslim youths who have been told by their Imams that under Koranic law they have a right and a duty to fight the infidel and seize what belongs to him.

Checkpoints, walls of separation, immigration restriction; these are what academics use to charge the West with imperialism and colonialism, while turning a blind eye to the fact that these measures are only defenses on home soil against Islamic imperialism.

Survival has become the new colonialism and imperialism in the West. We have come to that out of a failure to confront the new wave of Islamic imperialism. Just as Nazi Germany's reign of terror was born out of the guilt of the Allies and their failure to hold Nazism to account-- Islamic imperialism is the product of guilt and cowardice. It will take courage and moral certainty to confront Islamic Imperialism, to fight back and hold it to account.

Obama: A Profile in Cowardice

2009-06-29T22:44:00.000-04:00

Meet Barack Hussein Obama. The man who turned his own middle name into a no-go zone during the election, only to bring it out of the closet when he trotted down to a Muslim country. The man whose associates labeled talk about his Muslim background as racist, only to proclaim his Muslim background loudly and proudly from the podium of a Muslim country.

There's a word for a man like that. Coward.

Meet Obama, the bright young Senator with a phony biography geared to playing up his biracial angst for the college campuses. Who promised his leftist volunteers an end to rendition, detentions, eavesdropping and a whole bundle of other things, only to pull a bait and switch on them.

After all tools like that come in handy, even if they're less likely to be used against Muslim terrorists, than they are against Tea Party protesters.

Meet Barack Obama, the man who was going to bring an end to the American coercion of other countries. No more would the White House tell the rest of the world what to do. Except of course to dictate where Jews can live in Israel, how the Honduran judiciary can operate and who can head the Muslim community in Greece.

Of course Obama has drawn the line somewhere. He has drawn the line against standing up to Ahmadinejad, Chavez or any Socialist or Muslim tyrant. Instead Obama has browbeaten America's democratic allies, in support of Muslim and Socialist tyrannies. You can read that as Obama putting his own political and religious loyalties ahead of America's interests. Or you can read it as the act of a craven coward who hopes to sacrifice America's remaining allies in order to win over America's enemies.

When the Iranian youth came out to protest against Ahmadinejad, Obama mumbled and fumbled for something to say. He dragged it out long enough to send a loud and clear message to the Iranian regime, that America would not interfere no matter what they did. And the regime got the message. Obama cannot be held completely responsible for the ruthless crackdown that has followed, but some of the blood is certainly on his well manicured hands and sleeves.

As the supposedly most cyber-aware fellow in the White House, Obama could have followed up on the British effort to provide social networking access to Iranian protesters, or on the one proposed by Senator John McCain, the man the media lambasted as tech-illiterate and out of touch. He could have imposed sanctions on Nokia for aiding in the repression of political dissidents and compelled them to make the plans for the technology they sold to Iran, public.

Harnessing America's status as a world power and his own supposed global goodwill, Obama could have organized an international diplomatic response to the crackdown. He could have made any nuclear negotiations contingent on the treatment of the protesters. He could have done a dozen things, but aside from making a series of fumbling statements when his inaction became humiliating even for his own party, Barack Hussein Obama did nothing.

Behold the man. Behold the coward.

By contrast when Honduras' legislature and supreme court acted to remove President Manuel Zelaya, a close ally of Chavez, who had fired the head of the army and attempted to stage a coup by violating the Constitution, Obama and his people have been working around the clock to restore Zelaya to power, even while stating that they want the whole thing to be "free from external influence and interference" (the hypocrisy on that line alone is almost enough to choke even Chavez himself). The question is why?

But of course it's not that difficult of a question. Not when you think like a coward. Not when you think like Obama.

Why wouldn't Obama panic at the sight of a Congress and Supreme Court removing a left wing Socialist President who violated the Constitution in pushing to make himself el-presidente for life, by violating term limits. Let alone the military dumping said President across border.

Obama no doubt has nightmares of waking up on a C-31 transport to Kenya, after enough of his wrongdoing leads him to being booted out of the White House by what remains of the American legislative and judicial infrastructure.

Today Manuel "ALBA" Zelaya. Tomorrow it could be Barry "Hussein" Obama. And Barry knows better than anyone else the full catalog of lies, crimes and scandals brewing beneath his regime. Obama's rise to power has been part of an American hemisphere trend that covers the likes of Chavez, Zelaya, Correa, Silva and even the return of Kerry's old buddy, Ortega, to power in Nicaragua. What all of them have in common with Obama is a left wing socialist agenda that ignores the rule of law. An attack against Zelaya, could in Obama's mind be seen an attack against him equally.

If the rollback of socialist tyranny begins in Honduras, it might spread. If Brazil, Venezeula and Ecuador follow-- might not the democractic revolution spread to America as well, and make the Prince of Chicago's throne shakier than ever?

That is how a coward thinks, and Obama is nothing if not a coward. And like all cowards, he knows how little he deserves what he has, and how easy it would be for him to lose it all. A gang of greedy and deluded followers, and a nationwide 24/7 propaganda blitz can only do so much. After all there isn't a socialist tyrant in the hemisphere who hasn't had the same thing. And yet the latest of them is enjoying a well deserved vacation in Venezuela.

Heavy hangs the head that wears the ill-gotten crown. From one corner of the globe to another, Obama flits back and forth, delivering speeches and posing for photos. Like a rat rubbing against a rosebush, hoping some of the loose petals will attach themselves to him so that he can appear more like a rosebush and less like a rat, Obama hopes that going through the motions of being a world leader will actually get people to confuse him with a world leader.

Yet his mumbling silence on Iran speaks far more eloquently about the sort of man Obama is, than all his scripted speeches ever could. Obama has been compared to JFK, but what he represents is no profile in courage, but a profile in cowardice. A liar and a manipulator who serves his own ends first and his host country's, last. Who proclaims, Ask not what I can do for your country, Ask what your country can do for me. And above all else, a craven coward.

WWJCD - What Would Jimmy Carter Do?

2009-06-28T22:09:00.004-04:00

In Obama's fumbling response to the June Revolt in Iran, it was not hard to see that he was relying on the not particularly time-honored maxim of WWJCD, or What Would Jimmy Carter Do?

WWJCD is a handy tool for Democratic Presidents to make the worst possible foreign policy decisions at a critical time, with the worst possible consequences for the United States. Having picked up where Jimmy Carter left off by pandering to Islamic terrorists in general, and Iran in particular, it is little wonder that WWJCD is such a valuable guide for Barack Hussein Obama.

If your embassy is taken hostage by Islamic terrorists, WWJCD says that you should;

A. Kill the terrorists

B. Praise the terrorists

C. Apologize to the terrorists

D. Praise the terrorists, apologize to them and promise to never open an embassy without their approval again.

If you answered D. then you're really in tune with the spirit of Jimmy Carter and the ideals of WWJCD. If you answered C. you're only a Cindy Sheehan. If you answered B. you qualify for Patty Murray at most. And if you answered A. you haven't been eating your granola and arugula.

Now say that an Islamic terrorist group hijacks 4 planes, flies two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and tries to fly a fourth into the White House, killing over 3,000 Americans.

Do you;

A. Kill the terrorists

B. Explain that the terrorists were motivated by justified anger at the foreign policy decisions of the Port Authority police and Cantor Fitzgerald Securities

C. Apologize to the terrorists for putting up towers that are larger than any Mosque, which is something that Sharia law forbids infidels to do.

D. Free the captured terrorists and send them home to commit new acts of terrorism against you.

E. All of the above, except A.

If you answered E. then the spirit of Dhimmi Carter is truly with you.

Finally, if an American ally is threatened by one of America's enemies, do you;

A. Support your ally

B. Oppose your ally

C. Demand that your ally make extensive concessions to terrorists in order to appease your enemies.

D. Apologize for having allies. Apologize for having enemies and terrorists. Apologize for your country even existing in the first place.

That's right, it's another D for Dhimmi. But these days it could just as well be an O or a big fat zero. Not that it matters much. Both the D and the O are a border without nothing inside, which is a good summary for both administrations.

Had Jimmy Carter possessed a sense of style and an abjectly worshipful press, we would be calling him Barack Obama, no Hussein please. Deprive Obama of his teleprompter and fuse him together with Joe Biden, and you'd get Jimmy Carter. Somewhere after Carter, Mondale, Jerry Brown and Howard Dean; American's leftists realized that they would have to repackage their socialist candidates in a less flaky package. That's why Obama is on the ticket and Joe Biden, a worthy successor to the lunatic likes of Carter, Brown and Dean, is in the background telling knock knock jokes.

When is Jimmy Carter not a punchline? When you harness all the resources of Hollywood and the dying dinosaur media to make him look good. Keep him slim, African-American and tethered to a teleprompter. Cover him in more haloes than all the frescoes in the Vatican, photograph him next to Superman, tall buildings and with his head tilted back as if he's waiting for the dentist to finally drill that tooth. Give him his own model to lip sync his praises on YouTube and his own logo and slogan. And when you've done all that and six months in, he still has no idea what he's doing because he's following WWJCD, then you'd better hope all the photo ops at local eateries can somehow save the day.

Somehow the left and the Democratic party drew the wrong conclusion from the Carter Administration's "One Term One Hit Wonder" which is that it wasn't Carter's policies that failed, but his public image. That Reagan beat Carter on style not on substance. And so with Obama they spent their time tinkering in the lab, swapping in Carter's brain from a jar, until finally they threw the switch, saw the lightning bolt flash, heard the thunder, and cried, "It's alive. It's alive. The defeatist policies of left wing socialism are alive at last!"

But it wasn't just style that failed Carter. As terrible and embarrassing as his public presence was, it managed to get him elected once. Carter's policies failed on substance, just as Obama's policies are. Obama has invested so much energy into the style of his presentation, that like an executive who has worked for months on the perfect pie charts, he puts it up on the screen, only to realize that there's no money to pay for anything on the pie chart.

Perhaps the worst disaster of the last half century of American politics and business has been to confuse presentation with performance. Smiling CEO's who went to the trendy self-help guru have tanked major corporations and parachuted away trailing a golden canvas printed on million dollar bills. Politicians who looked the part and acted confident talked their way into office and away with the national debt and anything else lying around the premises.

Obama is the culmination of that error, his election is a political fall from grace for American democracy into the mire of the politics of the mob, as had always been darkly predicted for the American experiment. And there he sits now, carefully conscious of his artificial pose, his lighting and his diction-- even as his own clue for what to do comes from WWJCD.

An Understated Stoning

2009-06-27T22:30:00.000-04:00

The reviews of “The Stoning of Soraya M.", a movie that tells the true story of a woman being stoned to death in fundamentalist Iran, are in... and the critics seem to have a common complaint, that the movie is just too outraged by the whole stoning business.

At the Boston Globe, critic Wesley Morris complains that “The Stoning of Soraya M." is "less a movie than a blunt instrument, a bit of political parable, a bit more outrage, and nary a scrap of real drama or finesse."

In other words there just isn't enough finesse to the whole blunt stoning business. It lacks the kind of nuance that a John Kerry or Barack Obama could bring to the story of a woman being stoned to death.

At Slant Magazine, Nick Schager posits that the movie, "...requires a defter hand than that shown by Nowrasteh, who—aside from a nicely surrealistic aside involving a travelling carnival troupe—resorts to such overblown histrionics (wailing music, kneeling characters beseeching the heavens, Saturday Morning serial-evil villains, an embarrassing "triumphant" coda)"

Yes sadly there just aren't enough surrealistic asides, instead there are evil villains, regional music and kneeling characters praying. Which continues the theme of "there's just not enough nuance".

At the Village Voice, Vadim Rizov dismisses it as a movie for those people "ambivalent about whether stoning women to death is a cruel punishment or not... self-congratulatory fare for people who feel more 'politically conscious' when reminded that women in the Islamic world can have it rough". Because naturally the only justification for a movie dealing with the consequence of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran is for people who are "ambivalent" about it. Meanwhile good progressives who are already know about it and have dismissed the issue in favor of more vital stuff, like agitating for Leonard Peltier, can sneer at anyone who still cares about it for not being truly "politically conscious" like them.

Scott Tobias at the Onion A.V. Club however discards with all the ducking and weaving of the previous reviews to say what they really mean;

It takes zero political courage to speak out against the obvious barbarism of public stonings or the oppressive patriarchy of sharia law , but the film whips out the megaphone anyway, eager to extrapolate the martyrdom of an innocent woman into a broader condemnation of the Muslim world.

Get that? It takes zero political courage to speak out against Sharia law. Which the growing death toll in Tehran testifies to. Now though it takes zero political courage for Hollywood to attack the War on Terror, the Onion A.V. Club praised "In The Valley of Elah", Uncovered: The War on Iraq, War. Inc, Body of War, Stop Loss and just about any half-assed rant against the Bush Administration hammering the same message into the ground. By contrast with Phil Donahue's propaganda piece or an MTV movie against the war, “The Stoning of Soraya M." clearly lacks "political courage."

Except of course the slams from left wing movie critics demonstrate the exact opposite, that it takes far more political courage to create a movie condemning the murder of countless women in Iran... than it does to trot out another self-congratulatory Hollywood movie or documentary based on a mostly fictional article in a trendy magazine some producer read while waiting for his dentist's appointment.

The arrogance of a white liberal film critic condemning an Iranian-American filmmaker for lacking political courage by making a movie protesting against the abuse of women in Iran is truly stunning. So stunning that I suspect Tobias would never get it. In his narrow leftist little world the only Iranians who have political courage are those who denounce George W. Bush.

Tobias complains that the movie extrapolates this to the entire Muslim world, which of course naturally takes even less political courage, what with criticizing Islam being a criminal offense in much of the Muslim world. He follows this up with a series of by the book leftist smears that remind you that the progressive left so often trades in dogmatic ideological condemnations for actual original thought, that no content remains.

"The Stoning Of Soraya M. has a neocon’s sense of good and evil, which could politely be called “moral clarity,” but is more accurately described as narrow, tone-deaf, and thoroughly banal."

This is a variation on the complaint that "The Stoning of Soraya M." isn't nuanced or subtle enough, it has a sense of good and evil, rather than being broadminded and sophisticated enough about stoning women to death.

How would one go about making a broadminded and sophisticated take on stoning a woman to death. I suspect that it would involve her husband working for the CIA and the oil companies, and the entire movie turning on the revelation that it was American colonialist involvement in the region that was responsible for her suffering. Plug in a guest starring role for George Clooney as a slimy oil executive and CIA agent, it would be a lock for next year's Oscars.

Now that would be true "political courage".

With a more shrill outlet at his disposal, Tobias takes the offensive with a preemptive attack of "neo-con", which follows up his earlier claim that the movie is an attack on the entire Muslim world. Which of course means that supporting it makes you a genocidal warmonger just like George W. Bush.

Tobias finishes this off with, "There’s no denying the dramatic force of the killing—just as no right-thinking person would endorse the odious practice, or the outrageous miscarriage of justice that leads to it. But Nowrasteh constantly overplays his hand, not realizing that some horrors speak for themselves."

But of course how exactly do horrors speak for themselves anyway? And isn't "some horrors speak for themselves" really just a subtle way of saying, "shut the hell up about those horrors already, because these aren't the horrors we're interested in."

All this call for nuance, for an understated stoning, was absent when it came to the shrillest anti-war movies and documentaries. Which was par for the course when it came to lambasting the Bush Administration. But when it comes to “The Stoning of Soraya M.", it's suddenly a time for nuance, for subtlety, for being broadminded and sophisticated about it. It's not a time to be blunt about what happens to women like her under Islamic law.

Tobias claims that "no right-thinking person would endorse the practice" and yet by attacking a movie on the subject matter alone, as Tobias, Morris and Rizov do... that is exactly the message being sent. They may not endorse stoning a woman to death, but they endorse a politically enforced silence on the topic, a whitewashing by default.

It isn't murder, it isn't an outrage, it's "the practice." What better way to render a gruesome act into neutral colors than to describe it as "the practice."

And it is of course precisely reactions like this that justify The Stoning of Soraya M's so called heavy-handedness, and its forcible outrage. Because the truth of the matter is not nuanced or sophisticated or deft. It isn't sipped over cocktails or reduced to a neutral formula. It isn't "the practice", it's blood, bone and flesh being spilled, broken and torn.

It's a good rule of thumb that people want to see blunt depictions and and an uncompromising stand on the things that outrage them, and want to see finesse, nuance and deftness on the things whose blunt depiction make them too uncomfortable and conflict with their politics.

It's why progressives wallow in endless depictions of Bush's decision making and the hunt for WMD's, because it diverts them from having to deal with the reality of Saddam's brutality and the extent to which their anti-war activism was complicit in it. And remains complicit in dictatorships all over the world.

It's why the reality of Islamic law is such an uncomfortable subject that it has to be finessed by claiming that only the naive and the unsophisticated need to see a movie about it. The progressives have condemned it. Finished, now let's move on. But no, the killing continues and we can't move on.

So if “The Stoning of Soraya M." can remind morally deadened progressives of the blunt reality of the "practice" they would rather deftly finesse, so much the better.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - World's Most Famous Pedophile Dies, World Mourns

2009-06-26T12:09:00.004-04:00

With the week coming to a close, Iran's regime has somewhat predictably decided to escalate the crackdown, reversing their brief deescalation. That deescalation of course had given the Iranian opposition enough time to find its feet and gain some confidence, and refuse to give up. This has once again demonstrated that the Iranian Islamic Republic which overthrew the Shah, had learned very little from that overthrow, and are repeating many of the Shah's mistakes.

While Putin and Medevev, unlike Jimmy Carter, can be expected to back the Ayatollahs to the hilt, with Russian TV mimicking Iran's stream of anti-opposition propaganda (predictably picked up by politicians like Ron Paul, who also backed Putin on Georgia), the problem isn't simply limited to the supply of firearms. There are only so many protesters the authorities can massacre, particularly since their reliance on Basji militia and imported Iran backed Arab terrorist groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas, reveals a basic weakness.

But besides the support of the Supreme Council, Ahmadinejad has caught one more lucky break with the death of the World's Most Famous Pedophile.

If there was one thing sure to distract major portions of the free world, from someone else's struggle for freedom, it's the death of a major celebrity. Particularly a depraved one.

The House has already held a moment of silence for Michael Jackson, which is really nice of them to take a break from spending America deep into debt, in order to remember a man who had so much money he could molest as many kids as he wanted and pay off them by the millions. There's some sort of lesson to be learned from that, but it's probably not worth learning.

This pathetic national disgrace interrupted a debate on whomping Americans with the highest energy tax in history, so that Rep. Jesse Jackson jr, who was willing to pay out six figures to Governor Blagojevich for a Senate seat, could offer a tribute, from one unconvicted criminal to another.

Meanwhile Obama was desperate to get in on the pedophile action, but he had no problem. No reporter actually asked him anything about Michael Jackson. This made Obama really sad, since no celebrity story is complete without the Prince of Chicago being involved in it. Sadly this time the Obama Camp couldn't prep a Huffington Post reporter to ask the question...

So Robert Gibbs held another press conference and still no one asked him about Michael Jackson! This was shocking as the death of a celebrity is a common fodder at White House press conferneces. So Robert Gibbs tactfully suggested that reporters were too shy to ask the TOTUS about Michael Jackson, and delivered a statement from Obama on the death of Michael Jackson.

It's hard to even process the depth of this pathetic charade. Is it the inability of Obama to stay out of any story, or the desperate need to get out a statement on a subject that doesn't actually concern him in any way?

In America's present day celebrity oriented culture, we expect the media to behave like fools. We expect something better from our elected officials. Or at least we did before they turned into celebrities too.

While the Iranian government is hitting bottom, so are we. The same House of Representatives that did not hold a moment of silence for Neda or any of the victims of terrorism, held one for the world's most famous pedophile.

Is there really anything left to say after that?

American political culture is a consenquence of America popular culture. By corrupting the latter, the former has also been corrupted. It is why the unacceptables of 20 years ago become acceptable with each generational turn of the wheel.

If Michael Jackson has any political relevance, it is that he shares one thing with Obama, he was and is a symptom of cultural degeneration. Once upon a time Americans would not have elected an admitted cocaine user to the White House. But before that could change, drug abuse had to become legitimized through popular culture. And it did.

Once upon a time a pedophile would have been beyond the pale in popular culture. People like Michael Jackson, Roman Polansky and Woody Allen proved that didn't have to be the case. The only question remains, when will we elect our first pedophile to the White House?

Hey, as long as he's cool and the kids love him, right? That's how we got the guy we have now.

In the general roundup, the Scottish flag is now apparently racist, as Scotland gets to enjoy the same political correctness already enjoyed by millions of Americans.

The result was an e-mail to all staff warning that such nationalistic displays could "intimidate non-Scottish colleagues".

The e-mail, from Alexandra Miller, director of customer services, said: "I am very disappointed to see that (staff] continue to have inappropriate material bedecking their workstation. This includes several saltires and a lion rampant, and the personalisation of a chair with red tartan."

Ms Miller reminded employees of the policy of not having anything on desks which could be regarded as "sexist or racist".

Note that the left's association of anything nationalistic with racism continues, even if it is in a context that makes absolutely no sense. Is the Scottish flag sexist? Is it racist? If it's a national flag of a non-third world country, the message seems to be that it is.

Newt Gingrich's American Solutions site has a petition to stop the Energy Tax

Maggie's Notebook comments on the absurdity of Michael Jackson's death hijacking the nation's news coverage

Michael Jackson is dead. From Fox News to the BBC, it has already been decided, this is the major issue of the day. Forget about nuclear proliferation. Forget about escalating threats and impending confrontations. Forget about the Global War on Terror. The Western World has spoken, they have made their priorities known. The Western World has decided what is truly important today, and what is not. And you, Ahmadinejad, and you Kim Jong Ill, just don't have what it takes to compete with this current crisis.

I haven't actually watched any of the news coverage, and it's times like this that make me glad I no longer bother with television and get my news online. Watching even serious news programs, or supposedly serious news programs turn into cheap tabloids is a dispiriting and depressing sight for any citizen of a democratic country.

Meanwhile Israpundit has Elliot Abrams article disproving Hillary Clinton's claim that there was no agreement made with Israel on settlements.

It is true that there was no U.S.-Israel “memorandum of understanding,” which is presumably what Mrs. Clinton means when she suggests that the “official record of the administration” contains none. But she would do well to consult documents like the Weissglas letter, or the notes of the Aqaba meeting, before suggesting that there was no meeting of the minds.

Mrs. Clinton also said there were no “enforceable” agreements. This is a strange phrase. How exactly would Israel enforce any agreement against an American decision to renege on it? Take it to the International Court in The Hague?

Regardless of what Mrs. Clinton has said, there was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to break the deadlock, withdraw from Gaza, remove settlements — and confront his former allies on Israel’s right by abandoning the “Greater Israel” position to endorse Palestinian statehood and limits on settlement growth. He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze.

For reasons that remain unclear, the Obama administration has decided to abandon the understandings about settlements reached by the previous administration with the Israeli government. We may be abandoning the deal now, but we cannot rewrite history and make believe it did not exist.

The key point of course is that there is nothing Israel can do to enforce any such agreement, but that inherently makes any agreement with the Obama Administration worthless. Which is why it's a shame that Netanyahu appears to be going soft now, dismantling checkpoints which help save lives, and pulling back.

He is making the same mistake he did back in his first term.

Whcih is why this Arutz 7 article is an important reminder of the real face of Israel's "peace partners"

Members of Fatah put on a show recently boasting that Fatah leads other organizations, particularly Hamas, in anti-Israel terrorism. The event was attended by former Palestinian Authority leaders.

The performance was videotaped and shown on Fatah TV -- the television station cpntrolled by Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority

In the pro-Fatah performance, actors portrayed a classroom setting in which pro-Fatah students debated their pro-Hamas classmates and teachers over which of the two groups deserved most credit for attacks on Israel. The play includes a segment in which pro-Fatah students criticize Hamas for failing to attack Israel more frequently since taking control of Gaza:

The full article contains the video itself.

At Forbes Magazine, Anna Bayefsky takes Obama to task for his failures on human rights

A week later there were multiple casualties, injuries and threats, and 46 million voters wrenched away from that doorway to freedom that had opened--if only a crack. But when the president was asked Tuesday: "Is there any red line that your administration won't cross where that offer [to talk to Iran's leaders] will be shut off?" He answered: "We're still waiting to see how it plays itself out."

And when asked again, "If you do accept the election of Ahmadinejad … without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?" He answered: "We can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places."

And asked again: "Why won't you spell out the consequences that the Iranian people…" He answered: "Because I think that we don't know yet how this thing is going to play out."

And yet again: "Shouldn't the present regime know that there are consequences?" He answered: "We don't yet know how this is going to play out."

Also at Forbes, Joel Kotkin looks at challenges to Obama from the left

Glenn Greenwald at Salon meanwhile notes that the Washington Post fired one of its most popular liberal columnists, who regularly criticized Obama. Froomkin's statement seems to suggest that he was fired precisely because the Post no longer wanted a White House Watch in the Obama era

I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t "working" anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well. I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I'll have to try to do it someplace else.

Considering that Froomkin's next to last column was harshly critical of Obama, from a left wing perspective, it's not too hard to figure out why he was let go. Greenwald and co. can try to blame it on the neo-cons, but it's not the neo-cons who have a problem with criticism of Obama. Nor do they run the Washington Post.

Gateway Pundit meanwhile makes an excellent point about the Sanford case

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) answered an ad placed in a Washington, D.C. homosexual paper, the Washington Blade, by Stephen Gobie, a male prostitute. Gobie became Barney Frank’s live-in sexual companion, and was soon running a male prostitution ring from Barney Frank’s condo. Today Frank chairs the Financial Services Committee.

Rep. Mel Reynolds (D-IL) was indicted for sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse for engaging in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer that began during the 1992 campaign. Despite the charges, he continued his campaign and was re-elected that November. Reynolds initially denied the charges, which he claimed were racially motivated. He was convicted on 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt)- in a 1985 television appearance Leahy disclosed classified information that one of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's telephone conversations had been intercepted. The information that Leahy revealed had been used in the operation to capture the Arab terrorists who had hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed American citizens, and the Union-Tribune claimed that Leahy's indiscretion may have cost the life of at least one of the Egyptian operatives involved in that operation. Because of his several leaks he was forced to step down from his seat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Today he is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) kills girl . Leaves her in pond to drown. Today he is second longest serving member (next to the former kleagle) in the Senate.

Of course there are almost as many tears being shed for Ted Kennedy, as for Michael Jackson.

Is it really any surprise in a culture that celebrates the worst of human behavior?

Finally, view Jew with a View, an excellent article by Jack Englehard, "Obama's Jewish Experts"

A few days ago, George Mitchell once again expressed his position, and opposition, even to “natural growth” in Judea and Samaria. Both Mitchell and Hillary Clinton speak for themselves and for President Barack Obama, who’s made this – Jewish life in the “settlements” – his priority above all other international disputes.

Even the language is disturbing. Mitchell – top Middle East envoy along with Clinton – explained that the controversy centered on “the number of Jewish births.”

Where have we heard this before? To my mind, as someone who was born under similar conditions, in France under Vichy, where Jews were kept within “restricted zones,” this sounds too much like Verboten!

When I hear American diplomats, and Obama himself, count the number of children allotted per Jewish family, at the same time measuring Jewish growth by the inch, the images that come to mind, to my mind, are of an earlier time, though not so long ago, when the Third Reich confronted the “Jewish Problem” by way of the Nuremberg Laws and the Wannsee Conference.

I picture Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. They, too, were “Jewish Experts.”

Indeed, and the entire premise of leveraging blame on Israel for the terrorism directed against it, was very much the attitude of those who may not have perpetrated the Holocaust, but nevertheless allowed it to happen... because they felt that the Jews were to blame for the Nazi persecutions of them.

That is an attitude that Ben Hecht ably chronicled in A Guide for the Bedeviled, writing that they were like a policeman interrogating a corpse demanding to know what he had done to upset his murderer. There are no shortage of corpse interrogators in the liberal ranks, in the foreign service or in the Obama Administration all certain that the only way to solve the Middle East's problems with Muslims, is to make whatever lands Muslims consider to be theirs, Judenrein.

The Two State Solution is a Victory for the Proxy War against Israel

2009-06-24T21:44:00.010-04:00

When Hitler wanted to carve up Czechoslovakia he began by demanding the Sudetenland, inhabited by the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia. The world thought this was entirely reasonable and Czechoslovakia was forced to give in. Of course Hitler did not simply want the Sudetenland, anymore than he simply wanted the Rhineland. He was after a much vaster program of conquest.

By coining the term "Volksdeutsche" Hitler created an artificial identity for large numbers of Czechs, Poles and citizens of other Eastern European nations. He used that identity to create regional fifth columns that engaged in terrorism and then used them as justification to invade and seize other nations. Only by the time his ambitions reached Poland did Western Europe wake up to realize what their appeasement toward Nazi Germany had wrought.

By the time it was all over nearly 80 million were dead, a continent lay in ruins, Eastern Europe was in the hands of the Communists and Western Europe's Great Powers would never come into their own again.

"Palestine" like Volksdeutsche is an artificial identity created in order to maintain a fifth column and use them to conduct a proxy war against Israel, by the same Arab Muslim powers who had tried and fail to defeat Israel on the battlefield.

The tactic of course long predates and postdates Hitler. Alexander the Great made use of it in his conquests. The Russians used it only last year when they wanted to invade Georgia. But in the post-WW2 era it has most effectively been employed against Israel.

The absurdity of taking a Greco-Roman name for the region and trying to turn it into two things it never was, a nation and an ethnic identity, would have been inconceivable without heavy backing from both the Soviet Union and Western liberals. But by painting the genocidal urge of both Arab Marxists and Islamists as a drive to liberate "Palestine", the proxy war by Arab terrorists backed by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and more recently by Iran, was successfully repackaged by an oppressed people to liberate a land that never existed.

As "Volksdeutsche" gave Hitler the right to carve up and eventually annex Czechoslovakia, "Palestine" has given the Muslim world and assorted leftists the right to carve up and destroy Israel under the pretext of aiding the "Palestinian People."

In 1937, Awni Abd al-Hadi told the Peel Commission stating, "Palestine is a term the Zionists invented.... Our country for centuries was part of Syria,"

As late as 1980 the Jordanian Prime Minister stated, "The Palestinians and Jordanians do not belong to different nationalities. They hold the same Jordanian passports, are Arabs and have the same Jordanian culture."

In 1977, Zuheir Mohsen, head of the second largest militia within the PLO and once considered a potential successor to Arafat, stated the premise of the proxy war quite frankly;

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

Arafat himself expressed the same basic idea in his infamous U.N. speech in 1988, saying, "The State of Palestine is an Arab State; its people are an integral Part of the Arab nation."

Hamas' Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahour repeated it in an Economist interview in 2008;

He certainly would not now “accept the reality” of Israel, as some of his senior colleagues have hinted. It may, instead, become “an eternal issue”, he says, looking ahead to a distant future when, “like your European Union”, the Arab nation will form one state across its historic lands, joining up with other Muslim nations such as Turkey. “We [Palestinians] were never an independent state in history,” he notes. “We were part of an Arab state and an Islamic state.”

That "Great Arab State" or "Great Islamic State", or Caliphate, has always been the endgame. Palestine is to the Caliphate, what the Sudetenland was to Hitler's Thousand Year Reich.

Israel is a stubborn little non-Arab non-Muslim state that stands in the way of the great dream of the Caliphate, a vast Muslim empire stretching across the Middle East into Turkey, Asia and even the heartland of Europe itself.

The fury directed at Israel from the Muslim world is in direction proportion to Israel's obstruction of this messianic vision of an Islamic Arab ruled Ummah stretching across the entire globe and fulfilling the vision of Mohammed.

It was never about "Palestinian rights", because not only is there no Palestinian people, but the refugee camps were themselves created by the Arab world as a first stage for the proxy war.

They began by alternately luring and badgering Arabs out of Israel during the War of Independence, for example;

"Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit....It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."

The Economist, October 2, 1948

And naturally as renegades they would have been treated the same as the Jews, or perhaps even worse, during what was then seen as the "inevitable conquest" of Israel by the neighboring Arab states. At the very least that would mean the loss of property and land. At most it would mean outright massacre.

Once out they became refugees, kept in camps, and maintained as displaced persons, to serve as fodder for both terrorist recruitment and world outrage against Israel. As succinctly stated by UNRWA Director Ralph Galloway in 1958, "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die."

After two lost wars, the "open sore" was transformed into a new Palestinian nation that had never existed but was being suppressed by Israel. Palestinian Terrorism became global, as part of a proxy war conducted by Arab states against Israel, itself part of a proxy war being conducted by the USSR against the West. With the fall of the USSR, the proxy war has shed its Arab Marxist colors in favor of Arab Islamist ones, replacing Fatah, once backed by Arab Socialist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, in favor of Hamas, backed by Islamist regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Two State solution is the Sudetenland solution, carving up Israel and creating a sovereign and legally independent terrorist regime at war with Israel... inside Israel. With weapons flowing from around the Middle East and Pakistan through open borders, the real job of destroying Israel will finally begin.

Supporting the Two State solution means quite simply supporting the endgame of the proxy war against Israel. The solution has nothing to do with Palestinian rights or stabilizing the Middle East. There is no "tough love" in it, as Obama insists, or love of any kind. It is simply the final phase in the destruction of Israel, which itself is only one phase in the creation of a global Islamic empire.

Advocating the Two State solution means advocating genocide and ethnic cleansing. It means destroying the Middle East's only democracy to make way for a monstrosity that would be the worst of the Taliban writ large across the region and the globe. It means stoning, amputation and a thousand uncounted brutalities. And most of all it brings WWIII or a global clash of civilizations that much closer.

There are two kinds of people who support the Two State Solution. Those who know what they support and those who do not.

Why Iran's June Revolt Emphasizes Obama's Absence of Leadership

2009-06-23T22:46:00.000-04:00

The Bush Administration's guiding policy on the Middle East was that stability comes from aiding and promoting the spread of Democracy. The Obama Administration's guiding policy on the Middle East is that stability comes from discarding or even outright suppressing Middle Eastern democracies, particularly if they are not run by Arab Muslims, as sources of instability in the region.

The Bush Administration pursued a military war to overthrow a tyrant and liberate Iraq. The Obama Administration is pursuing a diplomatic war against Israel to overthrow a democratic government and establish a terrorist state. The contrast between the Bush and Obama administrations is the contrast between America's ideals in action and the same cynical pandering to Muslim dictatorships, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, that has the Middle East a source of terrorism in the first place.

The advocates of stability naturally turn out to be the greatest supporters of appeasement, giving the murderous squeaky wheels whatever grease they think will keep them from going on homicidal purges. This failed policy dominated the Clinton Administration, which shelled out aid to the Taliban, took nothing but cosmetic action when Saddam attempted to assassinate a former United States President and actually wound up going to war to create a new Muslim state in the Balkans. Naturally pressuring Israel to create a Palestinian Arab terrorist state in the middle of one of the most prosperous countries in the Middle East was high on the agenda, and was Bill Clinton's most admired foreign policy accomplishment.

17 years later, the Palestinian territories are a festering sore filled with Islamist terrorists who are continually innovating new terrorist tactics that have then been used against Allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile the breakup of Yugoslavia has led to a vast drug and human smuggling pipeline into the heartland of Europe. Members of the Clinton backed KLA, which financed itself through the drug trade, have become crime bosses all through Europe... those who haven't gone on to become Islamist terrorists that is. It was left to the Bush Administration to deal with Saddam Hussein and with Osama Bin Laden, but not before the latter managed to kill 3000 Americans.

So much for stability.

As an advocate of bringing stability by appeasing tyrants and terrorists, Obama's fumbling response to the Iranian street protests is exactly what one would expect from a man who took Democracy off the table in Cairo and pushed diplomacy with the regime of the Mullahs as his foreign policy agenda.

The Iranian June Revolt has badly upset the Obama applecart, which was working to appeasing Muslim tyrannies by forcing concessions from Israel, while pandering to the Iranian regime. And now in the absence of leadership America has no useful response to make. Rather than demonize the Iranian street protests against Ahmadinejad, the way that it demonized the Venezulean street protests against Chavez, the left has increasingly chosen to side with them. This leaves Obama stuck fumbling for increasingly bolder statements on the riots to appease his domestic supporters, even as he tries to reassure the rest of the Muslim tyrannies that the United States would never interfere in their internal affairs. (A privilege apparently reserved by Obama for Israel, Greece, Germany and other Democratic nations.)

The June Revolt in Iran is bursting through the illusion that Obama is any kind of leader. The illusion of Obama's leadership has been maintained through scripted speeches, head thrust back poses and prominent liberal figures enthusiastically praising his leadership. But the real test of leadership is a crisis. And in this crisis, Obama has sat on the sidelines, gone for ice cream, fumbled and done absolutely nothing.

During the election, Biden predicted, "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy... Remember, I said it standing here, if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy... He’s going to have to make some really tough - I don’t know what the decision’s going to be, but I promise you it will occur."

He then called on the donors to be prepared to rise to Mr. Obama’s defense because he will need to make some difficult and unpopular choices in response. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

Biden's likely reference was to the Bay of Pigs, which occurred several months after JFK took office. It was sabotaged by Kennedy's refusal to provide aid and naval support to the Cuban liberation forces, resulting in the deaths of both Cuban fighters and American personnel on the ground. That "difficult and unpopular" choice was only partially later redeemed by Kennedy's actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1940 Kennedy had responded to Churchill's While England Slept, a warning against appeasement, with Why England Slept, a defense of the appeasement propounded by his father, Joe Kennedy. As President, Kennedy discovered that America did not have the luxury of sleep, and learned from his mistakes. What he did not need however, was the uncritical support that Biden asked on behalf of Obama. Real leaders don't need to be pandered too or given uncritical support, they need to be challenged.

That is why Obama is not a leader. Beneath his media haze, Obama is a little man sitting in a big chair, distributing graft to his backers, and tiptoeing around the world to promise America's enemies that America is no longer a threat.

But the fight for freedom is not limited to America. It never was. Obama chose to keep America on the sidelines, to enable tyranny and suppress freedom. Nevertheless with the June Revolt, freedom has sprung up anyway.

Should We Support or Oppose Iran's June Revolution

2009-06-22T22:53:00.000-04:00

Various anti-Jihad bloggers and columnists are going head to head on the issue. As some have pointed out, the leading Iranian opposition figures such as Rafsanjani and Mousavi are not significantly better than Ahmadinejad himself, being involved in terrorism abroad and the development of nuclear technology.

Those are all valid arguments, but there is another argument. Before taking power, Khrushchev was a butcher and a mass murderer. He was a loyal Stalinist and even once he seized power as Premier, he engaged in a belligerent war of words, as well as a proxy war with the United States and Europe. He hammered his shoe on the podium and declared, "We Will Bury You." He continued Stalin's murder of Jews and conducted a new campaign against Christianity in the USSR.

Nevertheless despite all that, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and the worst atrocities of Communism, in doing so created a division that broke the mold of the infallible and all-powerful Soviet leader, and the USSR itself. This helped lead to Khrushchev's own removal from power, followed by a series of increasingly weaker leaders culminating in Gorbachev and the collapse of the USSR.

Thus it would have been entirely correct in the 1950's to point out that Khrushchev was a monster and a dedicated Communist who sought the destruction of the West and the perpetuation of totalitarian rule at home-- he was also a key element in the reform and eventual collapse of the USSR.

It would have also been fairly accurate to pass a similar judgment on Gorbachev toward the end of the 20th century. Despite his best efforts to present a positive reformer's face to the West, Gorbachev was a dedicated Communist and a totalitarian leader, the protege of a key Stalin ally who hoped to gather in all of Western Europe into an EU style arrangement under Russian leadership.

In turn Russia's August Revolution could have easily been dismissed as crowds of Russians who were seeking not the fall of the USSR, but the restoration to power of a Communist dictator. Except that what they actually achieved was the fall of the USSR at the hands of a man who himself had made a career as a high ranking Communist official.

While Iran is not the Soviet Union, and the June Revolt is not the August Revolution, there are some valid parallels.

In the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini's death, the Islamic Republic lost its own version of Stalin and Lenin rolled into one. The death of their chief ideologue exposed rifts and conflicts within the power structure of his disciples and associates, none of whom could replace him. Much as the aftermath of Stalin's death created a shaky power structure with the likes of Khrushchev, Beria, Molotov and Bulganin scrambling for power. Like the Russian people who felt that those who came after Stalin were small corrupt men who betrayed the legacy of the Communist revolution, a similar sentiment exists among Iranians who view Khomeini's Islamic revolution as a flawless standard which Iran's current rulers have betrayed with their corruption and vested interests.

Within this structure the Revolutionary Guard holds the role of the NKVD, a power pseudo-military organization with its own structure and loyalties. The clergy play the role of the Communist party, containing both progressive and reactionary elements. Like the NKVD, the Revolutionary Guard has successfully sowed terror abroad in the name of its ideology. Its growing power in the face of domestic instability may lead it to either take power, or as in the USSR in the aftermath of Beria's downfall, be dismantled into a safer more controllable creature of the state.

What all this means for us is that the June Revolution is a symptom of Iran's instability, the Iranian public's loss of faith in the authorities, and the regime's increasingly corrupt and weakened nature. While Mousavi may be no matter than Ahmadinejad from our perspective in the short term, in the long term, either his ascension or suppression is likely to lead Iran away from Islamic totalitarianism.

Reform has been in the wind in Iran for some time now. Most ordinary Iranians may not be ready to jettison the whole Islamic Republic, but large numbers of the young generation want a great deal more social and political freedoms, as well as an end to the corruption of the inheritors of the Islamic Revolution. That desire for change is genuine, and it is likely to ultimately lead to the same place that it did in the Soviet Union.

For those outside Iran, domestic instability is likely to reduce the regime's ability to sow mischief abroad. If the Revolutionary Guard and its associated regional Shiite militias, not to mention Sunni fellow travelers such as Hamas, have to be hard at work in Tehran, they will be less capable of planting IED's in Iraq, shelling Ashkelon or shipping new rockets to the Taliban.

And taking on an oppressive domestic role will lessen their long term organizational base of support and survival at home, once the reformers do take power.

Whether Ahmadinejad remains in power, or Mousavi replaces him, no matter what domestic changes happen with the Supreme Council, whoever comes out on top will have to appease the people by redirecting portions of the military budget to civilian in a tough economy, swapping out guns for butter, which will again reduce the amount of harm Iran is able to wreak abroad.

Finally the protests themselves and their suppression demonstrate to the world the reality of what an Islamic regime looks like. The protesters may be chanting Allahu Akbar, but the regime they are fighting is one that came to power and holds power through treating Islamic as a means of political supremacy. Those European and American Muslims who hanker for Sharia and Islamic states might well consider the reality before their eyes.

Whether or not we are seeing Iran's Berlin Wall or only its Tienanmen Square, the Iranian regime will never be the same as it was. The resulting changes will almost certainly weaken the regime, if not entirely bring it down. Which is why it is entirely sensible to support Iran's June Revolution, though without forgetting that Mousavi is no saint and that Iran's reformers, like Khrushchev and Gorbachev, are not entirely distinguishable from its monsters.

While it might be easy to write off the protests and the protesters because of that, this would be shortsighted. The protesters are genuinely idealistic and they are fighting against an actual injustice and an unjust system. The aftermath of their protests may leave us with no better a situation than Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, or China after Tienanmen Square, but nevertheless both present day Russia and the People's Republic of China are vastly preferable to what came before.

We personally cannot change what is going on in Iran now, but we can bear witness and speak out, for nothing to emboldens a tormentor as the silence of those watching his crimes.

Obama's Post-Capitalist America

2009-06-21T21:53:00.000-04:00

We don't have to work too hard to envision what Obama's Post-Capitalist America will look like, because it's here already. The basic ingredients bureaucratization and overregulation have already destroyed sizable chunks of American industry and business over a number of decades. Now with nationalization on the table, we're getting the first glimpses of what the American auto industry and medicine will look like, nationalized.

Creeping socialism has steadily made American businesses less competitive and more dependent on government funds. Environmentalism is only the latest and most destructive incarnation of government initiatives that have on the one hand crippled businesses, and on the other hand transformed them into beggars looking for a government handout. Going "green" for businesses means added expenses on the one hand, and government subsidies on the other, turning a "Green" business into a post-capitalist socialist enterprise that is not competitive but exists on government subsidies. A model that will insure that American businesses follow European businesses into obsolescence.

The planned obsolescence of American business is high on Obama's agenda. And it is a process that began with the overregulation and taxation of business that killed American industry, driving factories overseas and business to cheaper overseas competitors. The Obama administration's focus on the environment is meant to use environmental regulations to dismantle what's left of American industry, beginning with coal and ending everywhere else. Those industries that remain will be union run, government subsidized dinosaurs, more at home in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, than in the booming America of the 20th century.

However American domestic businesses will not fare much better either. The already shaky retail chains will have a great deal of trouble surviving an ongoing recession. Aside from the discount superchains, they require increasing prosperity to drive consumer spending. Detroit serves as a preview of what American cities will look like if Obama gets his way.

They call this the Motor City, but you have to leave town to buy a Chrysler or a Jeep. Borders Inc. was founded 40 miles away, but the only one of the chain's bookstores here closed this month. No national grocery chain operates a store here.

The city's 22.8% unemployment rate is among the highest in the U.S.; 30% of residents are on food stamps.

"As the city loses so much, the tax base shrinks and the city has to cut back services," said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan. That causes such hassles for retailers as longer police-response times, as well as less-frequent snow plowing and trash pickup.

A city devoid of retail chains, people left without groceries, malls and bookstores. All that remains are the dollar stores. And no tax base either. The cycle feeds itself and it's going nationwide. When enough businesses close and enough jobs are lost, the entire system begins to implode. The government can keep spending money for some time, businesses can't.

The Obama administration's plan to bulldoze portions of major American cities in order to centralize them further, will reduce the ghost town effect and the standard of living and potential for economic recovery. Environmentalists will be pleased to see the hive effect in action, and the pesky suburbs, which people used to try and escape dysfunctional urban city management, rolled up; no one else will be.

Meanwhile the partially government subsidized housing market will both make it easier for the government to control where people live and remove the "market" part of the housing market. Government intervention in the housing market created the current economic crisis. Meanwhile government regulation will help create a wide gap between government subsidized housing and independent home ownership, a gap further widened by growing property taxes from cities and communities whose budgets have been widened by stimulus funds that have run out. That same gap can already be seen in many major American cities and bedroom communities

The paradoxical result is that more people will have houses, but fewer people will be able to have any real mobility, both physical and social. This social reengineering of American life will leverage government control of housing to recreate the worst Soviet experiments in artificial neighborhoods and cities.

Consumer choices will drastically decline, individual options will be limited, but people will be able to take comfort in knowing that their choices and options are determined by a higher authority somewhere in Washington D.C. There will be housing, but it will be government subsidized housing. There will be stores, but their prices will be artificially set and unions will play a large part in owning and running them. There will be businesses, but they will be cottage industries subsidized by the government and dependent on foreign workers and imports.

American business, industry and the free market will be dead in Obama's Post-Capitalist America.

The question becomes, why kill business? Government spending depends on the golden egg of taxation that comes from the goose of commerce. Throttle the goose, and where will the golden eggs come from?

That is a reasonable question, but the same people ready to run up a 10 trillion dollar deficit built on debt to China are not the people you should expect reasonable thought from. The socialist drive all along has been to reconstruct society and centralize it through government. Asking the same people who think Cuba represents a successful revolutionary experiment about finance is like asking a morbid alcoholic who will pay for the whiskey when he gets fired from his job.

Socialism is about social control. Capitalism is a key obstruction toward that end. It was the rise of the merchant and the accompanying middle class that helped bring an end to the nobility and monarchies of Europe. The American Revolution was driven by the wish of free people to keep their economic independence from an outdated centralized monarchy that was out of touch with their needs and realities.

The free market allows people to be independent of government, it allows for the "American Dream" of social mobility, aspiration and freedom. It permits people to work their way up, build a better life for their children and go from the "huddled masses" of Emma Lazarus' poem, to leading comfortable independent lives in the middle class.

That same middle class which the left has always hated and roared against. Because the bourgeois represents something very dangerous for would be tyrants, personal independence. That is why tyrants must seize control of a country's economy, smother it outright or distribute it among their friends who will then turn into a bribe factory, as is the case under Russia's Putin.

A free economy means freedom. All tyrants know this. Obama knows this. It is why socialism and the free market have been such intractable enemies. The free market is a knife at the throat of tyranny. And socialism is a knife at the throat of the free market.

Destroying the "American Dream" of financial success and personal freedom, is the only way that the left can take over the United States... and replace it with their own "Soviet Dream" of centralized government control, enforced social justice and power to the commissars\community organizers.

Obama's Post-Capitalist America is meant to be the triumph of socialism, and the emergence of a new America that will have nothing in common with the old except a handful of totems and icons, a flag, a 4th of July fireworks display and a name. To get there, America is to be plunged into poverty and misery, its businesses are to be destroyed, corrupted through regulation into socialist entities or nationalized outright. Its citizens are to be goaded with an endless barrage of propaganda into a state of numb mindlessness and its institutions are to be taken over, just as the barbarians seized Rome.

That is what we are seeing now in Obama's War on America, a war he is fighting by attacking the American Dream. Knowing that to kill a nation's dreams is also to kill its soul.

A Nation of Independent Voters

2009-06-20T23:05:00.000-04:00

Lately the percentage of independent voters has been growing, at the expense of the Republican voter. And it might be worth taking the time to ask why. Voters identify with a party because they feel that it does or does not represent them. But whose interests does the Republican party actually represent?

In the aftermath of the 2008 election, the Democratic party has quite clearly demonstrated who they represent. Unions, radical socialists, people who expected the government to pay for everything and environmentalists who want to use global warming as a pretext for controlling people's daily lives.

The Republican party is finding its voice in opposition to this radical socialism, as it usually does when in the opposition, the problem is that its alternative, both in the 2008 Presidential election and in general, is moderate socialism. And while moderate socialism is preferable to radical socialism, in the same way that a merely angry doberman is preferable to a rabid doberman, it raises the question of whose interests the Republican party actually represents.

While it is the Democratic party that has repeatedly hijacked the Constitution to implement socialism, it is the Republican party that has gone along with it. FDR's radical changes to the nature of American government would not have endured had Eisenhower not chosen to perpetuate them and build upon them. So too with LBJ and Nixon. Or Clinton and George W. Bush. The real problem with the Republican party is that it has tried to represent a voice of reason, instead of a voice of counter-revolution, when it comes to the socialism of the Democratic party.

As Theodore Lowi aptly described in The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, it was the willingness of Republican administrations to approve the social liberal bureaucratic coups of their Democratic predecessors that made socialism in the United States possible. As a result instead of a two party system representing two separate philosophies of government, the two party system became a struggle between the radical socialists and the moderate socialists. Is it any wonder then that even so many Republican voters want out?

While the Republican party has been working to seize a center that the Democrats are constantly tugging to the left, more and more voters have decided that neither party represents their interests. Winning them back will require the Republican party to break with the political conformity of the past and embrace a new philosophy of governing, not simply in the rhetoric of the opposition, but in the reality of day to day government.

The unprecedented growth of government has resulted in unsustainable spending and taxation, along with a sharp decline in individual freedoms. It is inevitable that to have big government, the American people must pay for it, both in money and in liberty. In the process both parties have forgotten that power corrupts, arguing that power in a socially beneficial aim does not corrupt. Naturally there are no shortage of examples otherwise.

The American experiment was founded on curtailing the power and scope of government. In the late 19th and 20th century that experiment began to move sharply in reverse, expanding government at the expense of states rights and individual rights. Yet what large numbers of independent voters is a resentment toward the power and scope of government. Republican candidates have often capitalized on that resentment, but failed to actually reverse the growth of government.

Federal government works by compromise, and compromise means the willingness to trade one favor for another, one piece of pork for another, getting one billion taxpayer dollars to be spent by approving another billion taxpayer dollars to be spent by someone else. This form of compromising is what created the raging monster of the National Debt as congressmen have been happy enough to get along by spending along. This way one senator's district can get funding for a bridge to nowhere in exchange for another senator's district getting an airport it doesn't need, in exchange for a defense contractor in a third senator's district getting a contract to produce a submarine the Navy doesn't actually need or want.

Republicans have just as eagerly pursued this form of bipartisanship, and as a result spending has gone through the roof. Under Obama, this form of spending is no longer bipartsan, it is however bigger than ever.

In order to take back America and win back independent voters, the Republican party's politicians would have to do something that goes against the nature of any leader, to take power in order to give power, to win elections to office only to curtail and limit the power of that office. Such a course of action is difficult but necessary, if America is to survive as something other than an EU style bureaucracy living beyond its means and its commercial structures composed of retailers reselling Chinese products and companies competing for Federal dollars or ameros. And it would transform politicians into leaders.

The city of Cincinnati was named after the Roman, Cincinnatus, famed for his willingness to give up power. George Washington used Cincinnatus as his example, giving the Presidency a fundamental contrast with the monarchy that had ruled before him. To reclaim the Republic, Republicans must take the lead in acting more like Washington and less like FDR. Because if they continue playing the moderate socialist to Obama's radical socialist, the alternative will be the absolute triumph of socialism and the end of the United States of America.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Iran Takes a Step Forward, America Takes a Step Back

2009-06-19T18:04:00.003-04:00

The Iranian election dominated this week's news, with large numbers of student and youth demonstrators refusing to accept the rigged election results.

While the outcome of the current Iranian crisis will have a limited impact outside Iran in the short term, it may have a far larger one in the long run. While the protests began as something more akin to the Venezuelan protests over Chavez's media hijacking last year, they have already passed the point of Tienanmen Square. And while we are not quite at the Tehran version of the Berlin Wall, whether or not they get there will depend on the actions of the Iranian regime.

The regime assumed that a quick and harsh initial crackdown would silence the most vocal protesters and drive the rest underground. It's a tactic that often works, unless enough pressure has been building up so that it instead generates an explosion. That is what happened in Iran, resulting in growing protests and much larger dissent at the top.

Had the protests been mainly student riots and marches, they could have been suppressed. However they reflected a split within the oligarchy of the Iranian Islamic Republic itself over a boiling stew of ethnic, political and economic issues.

Iran's regime today looks a lot like what Nazi Germany might have looked like had it survived into the 1980's, with Hitler dead and his old cronies scrambling for power. Inside and outside the corridors of power there are no shortage of old Khomeini associates. Those outside the corridors of power want change. Those inside the corridors want to maintain the status quo and line their own pockets.

The death of Khomeini terminated the relative totalitarian stability of the Iranian Islamic Republic, leaving power increasingly up for grabs. A similar situation in the Post-Stalin USSR resulted in the erosion of leadership and growing conflicts that eventually tore down the party and the regime from the inside.

Ahmadinejad was thought to be the regime's best bet for avoiding that kind of fate, offering a great deal of hostility toward the west, combined with pop culture appeal at home and some small liberalizations backed by a revolutionary guard background and militia ties. But now the Ahmadinejad train has gone very badly off the rails.

At some point during the election, the regime made the decision to rig the results. Had they done so early enough, the change would not have been so jarring. Instead it appears to have been a panicked reaction in response to the realization that Ahmadinejad was going to lose.

And whether that decision was made at the level of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or not, the ball finally rolled back to him.

The regime now has a limited number of choices to make.

1. It can pursue a comprehensive crackdown on all protesters, resulting in either the successful suppression of the protests, or leading to the fall of the regime entirely. The old lessons of the Shah are not entirely lost on the men who helped overthrow him.

A full scale crackdown at this juncture, even if it temporarily succeeds, would likely do so at a heavy death toll. The People's Republic of China survived a similar crackdown by pushing enough economic and social liberalization so that the next generation would up not caring. Iran does not quite have the same option, particularly when it comes to social liberalization.

2. Khamenei can conduct an investigation, bring forward a few scapegoats and announce Mousavi as the true winner by a small margin, or propose a compromise option of some sort along the Zimbabwe model.

This of course would involve a serious personal loss of prestige, as well as a clear demonstration of weakness by the regime. It would avoid a short term explosion, but the long term consequences would wind up demonstrating the power of the protesters to compel the government to surrender to their will. And would in turn be quite destructive as well.

3. Play a waiting game, allow the protesters to discharge their energy, keep Ahmadinejad where he is, make some daily life concessions that would make people's lives easier.

Overall it would appear that the regime went with this third option.

After the failure of the initial limited crackdown, Khamenei chose to embrace a slightly more conciliatory tone. The violence was toned down and a limited recount of some sort was promised.

The problem with this approach is that it only emboldened the protesters who have begun to learn their true power. The protests have only become more comprehensive. Secret police have been outed on blogs. And more high ranking regime critics have stepped forward.

In response Khamenei is now threatening bloodshed if the protests don't stop. This strongly suggests that despite being the inheritor of the revolution, he is actually making the same exact mistakes as the Shah's government did.

After using brute force, he showed weakness, only to now threaten brute force again. The cycle is not unusual, but it does make a failing system of authority that lacks confidence in exercising its authority.

The reason for that is that Khamenei knows quite well that the younger generation in Iran is deeply dissatisfied. The limited reforms trotted out under Ahmadinejad, such as letting women attend soccer games, have only whetted their appetite for more. Life in Iran is based around a series of hypocrisies, in which homes have satellite dishes and Western movies are downloaded through the internet, but outwardly Iran is supposed to be a deeply religious republic.

The bottom line is that the Iranian regime lacks confidence in its public support, and even in the support of its military. The failure to deploy the military strongly suggests that Khamenei suspects that the outcome of attempting to use troops on the marchers might resemble the fall of the Soviet Union more than Tienanmen Square. And that conclusion is only further backed by the use of Hizbollah and Hamas Arab terrorists imported to attack the crowds. Another sign of brutality and weakness that can only further destabilize the situation.

As it stands now Khamenei and the regime's insiders are not ready to retreat, but neither do they appear ready for a full scale assault. Their waiting game has only made the situation worse. Now they have to choose between options 1 and 2, a full scale assault or a limited surrender.

Meanwhile in domestic Western political coverage, many of the same leftists and liberals who chose to ignore or justify Chavez's similar crackdown on Venezuelan students, have broken with the regime and taken vehement stands, including Andrew Sullivan and the Huffington Post.

Many sites do continue to underplay the coverage, and the American news media appears to be providing much less coverage of the situation, than their British counterparts, probably to avoid embarrassing Obama over his weak response.

It is ironic that Obama was elected as a major speaker and a supposed voice of conscience, only to be unable to do more than mumble a few random words in Iran's direction. The successfully unanimous congressional vote, opposed only by perennial tyranny lover Ron Paul, criticizing Iran, was itself a rebuke to Obama.

If Iran was the crisis that Biden warned us about, Obama has already failed miserably. If the Iranian regime falls, Obama will be remembered mainly for standing on the sidelines and doing nothing. The man who traveled all across the world giving speeches, had nothing to say when the people of Iran risked their lives fighting for freedom.

Meanwhile in the roundup,

Israpundit's Jerry Gordon takes Obama to task for missing an opportunity on Iran and Bill Levinson covers Ron Paul's failed vote.

Paul Williams at Canada Free Press looks at Jimmy Carter, the real father of the Islamic revolution

Carter’s real legacy remains in Iran with the Islamic Revolution and the rise of the murderous mullahs.

Before Jimmy entered the White House, America’s closest friend and ally in the Muslim world was Iran’s Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ascended to the Peacock Throne as shah (the Persian word for king) in 1941.

The shah modernized Iran by launching the so-called “white revolution,” a massive attempt to Westernize the Persian country through the construction of roads, railways, airports, dams for power and irrigation, agribusiness, pipelines for the oil companies, steel and petrochemical plants, heavy metallurgy, and public health, education, and welfare programs. He bolstered the expansion of U.S. business and industry throughout Iran; shared he spoils of his country’s oil reserves with Britain and the United States; endorsed (at the request of President Eisenhower) the Baghdad Pact to ward off the spread of communism in the Middle East, and never voted against America in the United Nations.

By the 1960s, Iran’s back-alley bazaars became transformed into Fifth Avenue shops. Rock ‘n roll blared from the radio stations. Movie theaters showed the latest Hollywood flicks, and programs like Rawhide and I Love Lucy played on Iranian television. Restaurants served beer and hotdogs. Nightclubs and casinos catered to foreign tourists, foreign contractors, and foreign military advisers.

And let’s remember that the shah, unlike the fat Mid Eastern despots and dictators, never asked or received a dime in U.S. foreign aid.

But not all Iranians were pleased with the changes. The Shi’ite clerics viewed the democratic changes as diabolic. The straw that broke the camel’s back came with the shah’s democratic ruling that Iranian officials were free to take their oath of office on whatever holy scripture they preferred - - including the Christian Bible. The mullahs under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rose to condemn the shah in mosques and seminaries and to demand his removal from the throne.

Enter Jimmy Carter.

Instead of supporting America’s ally, Jimmy, true to his form as a turncoat, supported the Ayatollah as a “fellow man of religion.” Andrew Young, Carter’s ambassador to the UN, went so far as to call Khomeini, who sanctioned sex with cows and camels, a “misunderstood saint.”

When Khomeini launched his evil revolution, Carter refused to provide the shah with any kind of military assistance despite the pleading of the shah.

Instead, Jimmy demanded that he release from prison all the murderous mullahs and militant radicals who were bound and determined to overthrow the government and to impose an intransigent interpretation of shariah (Muslim law) on every Iranian.

The shah acquiesced to this demand and the rest in history.

The Ayatollah - - Carter’s misunderstood saint - - came to power and launched a bloodbath that resulted in the deaths of twenty-thousand pro-Western Iranians. Churches and synagogues were razed, cemeteries desecrated, and shrines vandalized and demolished. The judicially murdered included the 102 year-old Kurdish poet Allameh Vahidi and a 9 year-old girl convicted of “attacking revolutionary guards.” Women were reduced to servitude. They lost their rights to attend school, to initiate divorce, or to retain custody of their children. When they appeared in public, women were obliged to wear the hijab (the traditional Islamic head cover). All American music was outlawed. The movie theaters were shut down; the nightclubs closed. To top things off, the Muslim militants overran the U.S. embassy in Teheran and seized sixty Americans as hostages.

Good ole Jimmy responded by his infamous “malaise speech” of July 15, 1979 in which the former peanut former expressed his belief that America had lost its guts and remained in a state of near senility.

Read it all

Maggie's Notebook meanwhile has a look at the ACORN run around

Amendments presented by GOP included two blocking A.C.O.R.N. - or any group - from getting Federal funds while under Federal indictment. This was among those not allowed as was one related to investigating Nancy Pelosi's claim that the CIA lied to Congress. If there were any doubt of the un-Democratic party's heavy-handed tactics - to rush through reckless spending at a breakneck unexamined pace - that was eliminated today

Daled Amos has his own take on Twitter and the Iranian revolution

At Right Wing News, another Obama nominee who doesn't believe paying taxes is patriotic

Gateway Pundit reveals that Obama is unsurprisingly waiting on the Iranian regime...

Lemon Lime Moon asks if America is in a stupor

Gates of Vienna looks at the divide between the Obama Administration's visions and the reality

The Keli Ata blog looks at the little outpost on the Israeli prairie

Only Challenging Islamic Supremacism can Reform Islam

2009-06-17T22:35:00.000-04:00

In Cairo, Obama masterfully laid out the Islamist narrative, evoking a world in which Muslim cultural superiority to Europe and America gave way to European and American physical supremacy over the Muslim world. Like all forms of flattery aimed at Islamic supremacists, this was naturally the worst possible approach to reform Islam.

Reform requires first destroying the myths, and then seeing what is wrong and working to fix it. Instead Western liberals insisting on perpetuating the myth of Islamic greatness overturned by the European and American barbarians. And if indeed Muslims were superior to Europeans, the only reform that is truly justified is the Wahhabi "reform" of turning back the clock of history to Caliphates and strict Islamic jurisuprudence. Certainly not Westernization reforms that would only mean imitation the "degraded West".

This perverse logic is the inescapable outcome of supporting the Islamist view of history, it is a logic that dictates more conflict, more violence, more terror and more brutality as the Wahhabi backed elements within the Muslim world look to turn back time and restore "the greatness of Islam that once was".

No ideology or nation can reform without criticism. To pander to Islam is to strenghten its worst qualities, to affirm its superiority, its righteousness and its appetite for world domination. By contrast only challenging Islamic supremacism holds out any form of reforming Islam.

In the Islamist narrative that Obama endorsed in Cairo, Muslims are the victims of a European world that neglected their greatest gifts and tarred them with unjust accusation. In the true history, Islam was built on half-savage bandits carving out a worldwide empire through the sword, pillaging the cultural treasures of far greater civilizations, and taking credit for the genius of Rome, Greece and India.

Where the Islamist narrative encourages Muslims to revert to type, to see themselves as wronged victims who must rebuild an incorruptible ummah and "civilize" the whole world under Islam, the post-Islamist critical narrative would encourage Muslims to turn their backs on mainstream Islam in favor of more reformist Islamic movements such as the Ahmadis, ruthlessly suppressed by Pakistan's Islamist Haq regime.

Little wonder then that the Saudi propogated Wahhabi Islam insists on promoting the Islamist myth of a lost glorious empire, or that Obama is happy to take up the narrative. That narrative is the best possible means for perpetuating and increasing Islamic violence, terrorism and expansionism.

Just as the willingness of Western liberals to accept the National Socialist mythology of an innocent wronged Germany reclaiming her dignity and lost territories helped bring on World War II, flattering Islam can only bring on a greater global conflict between Islamists seeking their lost caliphate and those free nations and peoples determined to resist them.

The need by Western liberals to constantly find fault with their own countries and favor with that of the enemy, takes the form of actively collaborating in creating and promoting the artificial histories of victimology that are then used to defend the violence and wars unleashed by that same enemy in pursuit of "justice".

Furthermore by restraining and even banning criticism of Islam, Western liberals themselves close off the path to Islamic reform. As it stands now, Islam is the only religion both in the West and in Muslim countries that hears nothing but praise about itself, without a word of criticism being tolerated. What better affirmation could there be of Islamic supremacism than that?

Both the Muslim and the Non-Muslim who hear Orthodox Judaism, the Catholic Church, Evangelical Christians, Mormons, and many others routinely mocked and dragged through the mud, while Islam and Muslims are treated as above criticism-- cannot help but draw the conclusion that Islam is superior to all other religions.

It is inconceivable that any religion or ideology could be responsible for ongoing terrorism and violence in dozens of countries around the world, a death toll approaching a million in the 20th century alone, and still be considered above criticism.

The resulting path is not hard to follow. By flattering Islam, we are discouraging the reform of Islam, and ultimately flattering ourselves to death. Treating Islam as superior, will insure that Muslims act superior to us. Pretending that violence is something apart from Islam will only empower Muslims to ignore the consequences of their own actions. And finally accepting the Islamist myth means accepting our own inferiority, which inevitably results in Muslims treating the more compliant of us as Dhimmis and the more independent as Kufirs. The slaughter, the conquest and the wars follow naturally from there.

Only by challenging Islamic supremacism can we defend ourselves and challenge Muslims over their morals, history and future.

There Is No "Reset Button" for History

2009-06-16T21:35:00.004-04:00

A fundamental tenet of the liberal approach to foreign policy has been that the attitudes of other countries are not shaped by their own beliefs and motivations, but rather purely as reactions to good or bad diplomacy.

Not only is the sheer arrogance of such a diplomatic worldview reserved only for superpowers or ex-superpowers, but that same arrogance ensures its failure. If the neo-conservative belief that the Middle East's Muslim dictatorships could be reformed with a show of force and some determination presumed to do too much with limited leverage; the liberal view that everything can be brought into harmony with an apologetic and open diplomatic tone presumes to do twice as much with no leverage at all.

When Hillary Clinton came bearing a "Reset Button" for Russia, she projected that same delusional belief that history has a reset button and that the expansionism of aggressive nations and ideologies can be put away with the right word. But of course history has no reset button and those who want Lebensraum will only be emboldened by an America all too eager to showcase its weakness.

Obama's Cairo speech similarly went long on flattery toward Muslim egos and short on leverage. In return he received the same kind of slap from Iran, that North Korea had been ladling out to the Clinton Administration. The rigged election and the brutal suppression of dissidents in Tehran's streets was a bloody demonstration that nations like Iran are driven by ideological and political goals that will not be set aside with a kind word or a diplomatic reset button.

For liberals to cope with Obama's utter failure on the diplomatic front, they must disabuse themselves of their long cherished idea, that all of America's global problems stem from George W. Bush's militarism or conservatism. Nor is the Islamic Jihad that expresses itself in the form of terrorism a knee jerk reflex reaction to American foreign policy. Rather it is the fundamental expression of over a 1000 years of Muslim history and belief, as embedded in the Koran.

A liberal view of foreign policy that insists on treating terrorism as an Islamic reaction to a Western provocation, repeats Chamberlain's folly of perceiving Hitler's expansionism as purely a reaction to the injustices of WW1 that would go away once properly appeased.

When diplomats insist that the Middle East can be stabilized by rolling Israel back to before the 1967 war, they repeat Chamberlain's folly in believing that history has a reset button, and that giving totalitarian states back some of their pride by giving them back more territory, even if it has to be carved out of an independent and prosperous nation like Czechoslovakia or Israel, will stabilize the region.

But history has no reset button, and the Middle East can no more be stabilized by carving up Israel, than Muslim expansionism and aggression toward the West can be put away in a box with some of Obama's well chosen flattery. Islamic expansionism and hostility toward the West did not begin in 1948 or 1919. It is a very old Jihad that awaits only the right circumstances in which to catch fire and burn again.

Nor can bringing a mislabeled "reset button" to Russia change the fact that its current regime is nothing more than a capitalist makeover for the USSR, along the lines of the People's Republic of China. A reset button will not wash away the radioactive toxins in London, the ongoing murders of Westerners in Moscow or the Russian troops and mercenaries straining at the least to gobble up the liberated territories of the old Warsaw Pact again... as we recently saw for ourselves in Georgia.

Rather than learning the lessons of history, liberals have found it more convenient to blame them on conservatives, on capitalism and on their own middle class for wanting to be secure and well off. Their pursuit of open handed diplomacy however has only led them to be the weakest players in a zero sum game.

While liberals rejoice because the government has changed in Washington D.C., nothing has changed in the Middle East, where power and wealth fuel political and military goals. History has not gone away because of the 2008 Presidential election. Nor has the world changed. Elections may change American goals and tactics, they do not change the tactics and goals of our enemies, they only mediate them. Obama's victory has served not as a reset button, but as a loud whistle warning everyone in the seamy bar that a pigeon has just walked into the room waiting to be plucked.

There is no reset button for history. Luckily in a democratic country there is one for bad leaders. In 2012, Obama's "historic" victory may itself become history.

The Obama vs Netanyahu Opening Match

2009-06-15T22:53:00.000-04:00

Watching Obama and Netanyahu deliver their speeches is a good deal like watching two poker players underplay their hand. The game has just begun and both are being very careful in what they do.

Obama wants to grind Israel under, while avoiding the public perception that he is grinding Israel under. So after levering pressure on Israel, Barack Hussein Obama headed off for a photo op at Buchenwald, in what even his great-uncle called a political move.

Obama doesn't actually need the Jewish vote to win in 2012, unless things get so bad that Florida becomes as critical a deciding factor as it was in 2004. And while many prominent ethnically Jewish liberals would stick by Obama, even if he began delivering his speeches in German accompanied by torchlight parades, high profile defections could quickly become inconvenient.

While LA and Chicago have been enamored of Obama, New York has never been. When the always moderate Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations stated that even Obama's strongest Jewish supporters are concerned about his positions on Israel in one interview, and in another stated "I can tell you this: I don’t sleep at night because of some of these issues that have come to the fore", it was a warning sign of just how tenuous support for Obama is among the old line New York Jewish organizations.

New York's political leaders, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have never embraced Obama. His victory came at their expense, by defeating Hillary Clinton. I recall the local Democratic political club agitator handing me an election leaflet with her thumb over Obama's name, telling me, "we don't like him." This animosity only broadened with the sabotage of Obama's princess, Carolyn Kennedy, shot at at New York's Senate seat. This was followed by a backlash to Obama shutting down Rep. Steve Israel's bid to run against Gildenbrand in the Democratic Senate primary election. That makes for fertile political ground in which to cultivate grievances and gives leaders like Hoenlein more boldness when questioning Obama.

On Israel, Obama would like to exceed Carter, without running into Carter's image problems. That means lots of Jewish positive photo ops, and minimizing the public conflicts. The dirty work gets shoveled off onto Hillary, who has a longer history with Jewish groups from her time as a Senator in New York. Above all else, Obama wants to be loved and adored. His public image is all he has, and he has no intention of risking it in a knock out drag down fight with Jewish activists.

Yet no matter how he dressed up his opening round of attack on Israel, the backlash is coming his way.

Netanyahu however faces a terrible dilemma. While Obama can expect to sit in the Oval Office for four years, Netanyahu is leading a coalition of opposites that can come apart at a moment's notice, and leave him with nothing to hold on to. Keeping together a coalition that covers the left wing Labor party, Netanyahu's own conservative Zionist Likud party, the loudmouths at Yisrael Beiteinu and two religious parties... would be no small task even in the best of times. And this is not the best of times.

Virtually any decision Netanyahu makes will alienate a sizable portion of his governing coalition. His only real advantage is that his most troublesome coalition partners are busy squabbling with the non-coalition parties they split with, as best exemplified by Labor's own mini-civil war. Netanyahu's oversized cabinet of 30 ministers and a coalition composed of people who can't stand each other and don't agree on anything is a page taken from Sharon's playbook. Sharon though had a friendly US administration. Netanyahu has the most hostile US administration in history on his back.

Just to make things worse, Israel is experiencing its own economic crisis, and while Netanyahu's experience as a financial reformer should prove invaluable, fiscal reforms mean alienating coalition partners. A coalition combining secular leftists and religious parties contemplating economic reforms is a great deal like a paranoid schizophrenic with multiple personalities trying to order from a menu.

Yet Netanyahu has been doing better than expected. Getting the majority of Israelis to back his stance on natural growth in settlements represents a significant political setback for the Israeli left and the Obama administration. Obama's minions had zeroed in on settlements as the best bet for playing divide and conquer with American and Israeli Jews. They failed badly in Israel, with only the far left backing Obama.

Netanyahu's next step was to deliver a speech laying out the Jewish right to Israel, debunking Obama's Cairo speech, and accepting a two state solution on the same condition that Israel has presented repeatedly, an end to the armed terrorist gangs and their war on Israel.

Here Netanyahu failed to take in the lessons of history, which is that foreign diplomats listen for Israeli concessions while discarding their context. Netanyahu may have been speaking conditionally, but what the press and the Obama Administration heard was an opening concession to a Palestinian Arab state run by Fatah and Hamas terrorists.

The backlash from the right in Israel was inevitable. They had never trusted Netanyahu, and with good cause. His readiness to buckle to Bill Clinton had destroyed his credibility among conservative Zionist activists. His return to power in a coalition with the likes of Barak and Bayit Yehudi was not exactly a ringing endorsement of his bona fides. The destruction of the outposts in response to the Obama Administration, pro forma as it may be, was an ugly start. And his concession to a two-state solution was the final nail in the coffin.

Nevertheless Netanyahu is forced into a complicated balancing act. While the right may favor a more public split with Obama, it is a gamble that Netanyahu is unwilling to take. Such a bold step may break his coalition and do unknown amounts of damage to Israel's economy. Instead Netanyahu underplayed his hand by giving Obama next to nothing, while using his initial refusal to make it seem like a great deal. Netanyahu, as he sees it, has committed to the creation of a Palestinian Arab state that will give up on terrorism. This is likely to happen around the same time that pigs fly over Gaza.

Meanwhile Obama's pressure on Israel has resulted in his growing unpopularity, an unpopularity which Netanyahu can then leverage to resist Obama. With even Peres defending natural growth in settlements, only the increasingly deranged Livni of the Kadima Party, is left to take on Obama's position. And if there is any better way to poison your image than to be associated with Kadima and Livni, it would have to be the imbecilic Amir Peretz, currently claiming credit for Hezbollah's electoral defeat in Lebanon.

Israeli politicians embracing Obama can't help but marginalize themselves, which will allow Netanyahu to maintain a coalition even in the face of pressure from the White House. Obama's messianic style has always played badly in Israel, a country that likes bottom line, rough and tumble politicians, war heroes and big men who roll up their sleeves and get dirty. In Israel Obama has gone from a curiosity to a hostile figure very quickly. And while the views of a bar of drunken expats on a video circulated via an anti-Israel site are not representative of Israelis as a whole, outside of a handful of yuppies and Haaretz and Jerusalem Post columnists, the view of Obama from Israel trends toward the negative.

Of course to keep it together, Netanyahu has to keep playing for time. His best ally remains the willingness of Hamas and Fatah to sabotage any peace plan by overplaying their hand, and demanding too much. He knows no real American help can be expected on Iran, but he still holds out hope that he can maintain a positive relationship between America and Israel.

And so in the opening match, neither Obama nor Netanyahu are prepared to let hostilities between the two governments go public. Obama is determined to pressure Netanyahu behind the scenes, a tactic that worked extremely well for Bill Clinton. Netanyahu must now show that he is not simply older, but wiser. That he has learned from his mistakes with the Clinton Administration, and will avoid making any concessions on the ground.

If Netanyahu allows himself to be pressured into signing more agreements and turning over land, he will be moving along a one way path to legalizing the creation of a terrorist state in Israel. A state that Israel will not be able to defend itself against without dismantling it. A state that Iran will exploit to conduct its proxy war with Israel, to tie Israel down until Iran's nuclear program leads to deployable nuclear weapons.

That is the way the game has begun and will play out. With Obama facing domestic economic turmoil, Israel becomes an appealing distraction. Netanyahu has to make it clear that targeting Israel will damage Obama's popularity at home, to make his country less of an appealing target for the Prince of Chicago. Maintaining mini-conflicts can drain the Obama Administration's focus and willingness to struggle with Israel. If Netanyahu can do that, he can outplay and outwait Obama. If he can't, he will be facing a much worse repeat of his first administration.

Tehran's Answer to Obama

2009-06-14T21:53:00.000-04:00

When Obama went to Cairo, it was to signal a new era in America's relationship with the Muslim world. No longer would the United States deal from a position of strength, but from a position of weakness. His speech, filled with unctuous flattery toward the mythology of Islamic Supremacism was only the icing on the cake that had begun with Obama's post inauguration prioritization of Islamic affairs and media outlets, the bailout of Sharia finance banks, the diplomatic track toward Iran and the intimidation of former allies such as Denmark and Israel into kissing the ring of Islam.

Now Tehran replied with a rigged election that returned the homicidally deranged Ahmadinejad back to power and cracked down on the opposition. The message is very clear. In return for Obama agreeing to deal from a position of weakness, Iran will now deal with the United States from a position of strenght.

In Cairo, Obama tossed aside any interest in democratizing the Muslim world. And Tehran showed what it thinks of democracy. Obama delivered his mea culpa for America's vigorous fight against terrorism, and Tehran returned to power the public face of terrorism in the Middle East.

While D.C. may think that Obama's victory represents the triumph of soft power, Tehran recognizes only one kind of power. The Mullahs see Obama's victory as a final defeat for the Bush era War on Terror, a defeat they helped mastermind by backing Shiite militias in Iraq, aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, and using Hezbollah and Hamas to disrupt Lebanon and Israel. With Iran left standing as a major regional power, Ahmadinejad's reelection is the regime of the Mullahs hanging up their own "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Had McCain or some stronger US President been sitting in the Oval Office, Iran might have actually tried to buy time for its nuclear program using the charade of a Tehran Spring and the victory of an Islamist, but comparatively reformist candidate. Ahmadinejad's reelection is a sign of confidence that the regime of the Mullahs has nothing to fear from the United States, because there is no regime too odious for Obama to crawl before, and no enemy leader too ugly to play the diplomatic game with.

If diplomacy is the traditional art of saying "nice doggie" while looking for a big stick, Tehran knows that Obama will never use the stick he has, and is stuck saying "nice doggie" over and over again. And if the Mullahs press hard enough, he may even be ready to give over parts of Iraq to the Mullahs, and maybe even parts of Afghanistan too. Not to mention preventing Israel from taking any action against the brewing nuclear program that will allow Iran to become the supreme regional power, with a touch of genocide to boot.

Like North Korea, Iran's diplomacy is nothing more than an increasingly arrogant litany of "nice doggie", while it finds more sticks to hit us with. With the rise of Obama, Iran is dispensing with the "nice doggie" part of the ritual and openly scrounging for sticks.

Outside of the D.C. and Brussels echo chambers, speeches by world leaders serve as a means for powerful men to convey their intentions. When Ahmadinejad talks about destroying Israel, he is saying what he plans to do. By contrast when Obama gives speeches, he conveys no intentions at all. His Cairo speech was long on flattery toward the Muslim world, but had no sticks in it. It was all "nice doggie", which in the Middle East translates it into the servile flattery that the weak offer to the strong.

As the leading Muslim power in the Middle East today, Iran sees the ball as being in its court now. With Obama looking for a quick way out of Iraq and Afghanistan, a quick fix Palestinian Arab state, and a fast resolution to making the Muslim world love us-- the Obama Administration has turned America into a weak and needy beggar, with no leverage except to offer billions of dollars to anyone willing to promise to help.

Why shouldn't the leading terrorist regime in the Middle East laugh when it sees the Obama Administration spending tens of millions of dollars to convince Palau to take in some of the terrorists of Guanatanamo Bay. A nation that behaves that way toward its enemies is not a serious threat. Why shouldn't it sneer when Obama begs for America's admission to the Dar Al Islam under false pretenses, by calling the United States one of the world's largest Muslim nations.

In Cairo, Obama acknowledged the supremacy of the Muslim world. Naturally acknowledging the superiority of people who already hate you because they view themselves as superior to you, did not actually achieve anything except to weaken the United States and strenghten the morale of her enemies. Just as going to the Reichstag in 1939 to inform the Nazi regime of the superiority of the Aryan race would not have done anything to prevent war, but rather such a blatant show of weakness would have helped bring it on, Obama's Cairo speech has served as a signal to the tyrannies of the Muslim world, that the United States is now in an inferior position vis a vis them. Tehran is simply the first answer to that show of weakness. It will not be the last.