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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Atlantic</title>
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	<item>
		<title>Obama vs. Netanyahu: Who&#8217;s the Real Coward?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/obama-vs-netanyahu-whos-the-real-coward/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-vs-netanyahu-whos-the-real-coward</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Atlantic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chickenshit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coward]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jeffrey goldberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244168</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two world leaders compared. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Young-Obama-Young-Bibi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244169" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Young-Obama-Young-Bibi-381x350.jpg" alt="Young Obama Young Bibi" width="281" height="258" /></a>On May 8, 1972, while &#8220;Barry&#8221; Obama was soaking up the Hawaiian sun, Palestinian terrorists (who else?) hijacked Sabena flight 571 from Vienna to Tel Aviv. A plan was quickly devised to rescue the hostages utilizing Israeli Special Forces of the vaunted Sayeret Matkal. Benjamin Netanyahu and his brother Yoni, both members of Sayeret Matkal, volunteered for the operation and <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=3842"><span style="color: #0433ff;">fiercely argued</span></a> with each other over which one would participate. The final decision was left to Sayeret Matkal’s commander, Ehud Barak, who chose Bibi.</p>
<p>The commandos boarded the plane dressed as airline technicians and quickly overpowered and neutralized the terrorists while securing the hostages. Bibi was wounded during the assault and while carried off to the tarmac was greeted by his brother who half-jokingly stated, “You see, I told you, you shouldn&#8217;t have gone.” Yoni was tragically killed four years later while leading the successful Entebbe rescue mission.</p>
<p>Obama of course never served in the military and one could even say <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-obama-doctrine-undermine-the-military-coddle-enemies-and-distance-friends/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">harbors disdain</span></a> for our servicemen and women. While Benjamin Netanyahu was charging terrorists and freeing hostages, Obama was busy smoking marijuana and attending prep school. The contrast between these two leaders, one fearless and self-sacrificing, the other perpetually narcissistic and self-absorbed, could not be greater.</p>
<p>Obama’s minions, however, see it differently. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/the-crisis-in-us-israel-relations-is-officially-here/382031/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">recent column</span></a> revealed the deep level of animus the administration holds for Netanyahu with senior White House aides disparaging the prime minister with boorishly offensive pejoratives. One profanity in particular – “chickensh*t” – attributed to a senior official, has <a href="http://twitchy.com/2014/10/28/whos-chickensht-again-after-bibi-smear-wh-spanked-with-cold-truth-photos/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">caused a storm</span></a> and stands out as rather ironic considering Obama’s lack of military service and <a href="http://observer.com/2014/08/barack-obamas-toothless-and-feckless-foreign-policy/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">pusillanimous foreign policies</span></a>.</p>
<p>Goldberg’s analysis of Israel’s policies with respect to both Iran and the so-called settlements is fundamentally flawed on several levels but the salient point of the article concerning Obama’s visceral dislike for Netanyahu remains accurate. What is perhaps even more disturbing than the current state of affairs between the two leaders is that Obama wishes to air the dirty laundry, which in turn emboldens Israel’s enemies like the Islamic Republic of Iran and encourages Palestinian intransigence. There is no question that the official, who courageously hid behind the veil of anonymity, knew that Goldberg would write about rupture and disclose the abusive and undiplomatic terminology employed.</p>
<p>Goldberg, accurately described by Ben Shapiro as a man whose nose is permanently embedded in Obama’s colon, places most of the blame for spiraling relations squarely on Netanyahu. While acknowledging that the creation of a Palestinian state at present would be dangerous, Goldberg nevertheless chides Netanyahu for initiating construction beyond the Green Line and continues with the tired line that such initiatives undermine the prospects for a so-called “two-state solution.”</p>
<p>Omitted in Goldberg’s analysis, however, is the fact that it was Netanyahu who in 2009 declared an unprecedented unilateral 10-month settlement freeze in the hope of spurring on the anemic “peace process.” Also omitted is the fact that in 2013 at Obama’s urging, Netanyahu phoned the Islamist anti-Semite Recep Tayyip Erdogan to apologize for the deaths of IHH terrorists during the Mavi Marmara incident. Both of these goodwill gestures, extremely unpopular among Netanyahu’s political base, backfired.</p>
<p>In the case of the former, instead of embracing Netanyahu’s bold peace initiative, Mahmoud Abbas, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/the-palestinian-endgame-exposed/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">dragged his heels</span></a> for nine months before responding, ensuring that there would be virtually no time for substantive progress. In the case of the latter, Netanyahu’s apology was reciprocated with an <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/time-to-part-ways-with-erdogan/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">avalanche of anti-Semitic vitriol</span></a>.</p>
<p>On Iran, Obama has caused the unravelling of an effective sanctions regimen, all while formulating a plan that virtually ensures and legitimizes Iranian enrichment initiatives, despite that regime’s penchant for lying through its teeth. Obama knows that his plan won’t sit well with Congress and is therefore formulating ways to sidestep the legislative branch. That maneuver not only demonstrates contempt for U.S. allies, but, more troubling, contempt for the United States Constitution.</p>
<p>If Obama, by employing profanity toward Israel’s prime minister, was attempting to influence Israeli political discourse, he is in for a rude awakening. Israelis cherish their 66-year, mutually beneficial relationship with the United States, which is based on shared moral values and strategic interests. But as has been demonstrated countless times, Israelis are no pushovers and don’t take kindly to threats. Menachem Begin’s popularity soared when he faced off against Jimmy Carter and the same thing will likely happen in this unfortunate and needless confrontation.</p>
<p>As for the anonymous senior official, my experience has taught me that there is no greater coward than the anonymous complainer.  He will whine and moan behind the veil of anonymity but in this instance has brought yet more shame and disgrace upon a quickly unraveling administration unable to cope with its own disastrous shortcomings and failures.</p>
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		<title>U.S.-Israel Relationship in Crisis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/u-s-israel-relationship-in-crisis-1/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=u-s-israel-relationship-in-crisis-1</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2014 04:57:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Atlantic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chickenshit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jeffrey goldberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244128</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The sickness behind Washington's verbal assault on Netanyahu.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ShowImage.ashx_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244114" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ShowImage.ashx_-434x350.jpg" alt="ShowImage.ashx" width="301" height="243" /></a>The Obama administration’s contemptible hostility towards Israel has descended into the proverbial cellar.  According to an October 28<sup>th</sup> article appearing in <i>The Atlantic</i> by Jeffrey Goldberg, a high-level Obama administration official has recently added &#8220;chickensh*t&#8221; to other derisive terms used in ad hominem verbal attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, such as “recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and ‘Aspergery.’”</p>
<p>Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to the latest diatribe in his remarks to the Knesset on October 29<sup>th</sup> that &#8220;I am being attacked because I am willing to defend the State of Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>Needless to say, other Israelis were more direct in expressing their outrage at the reported epithet. For example, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said that “severe curse words against the Israeli prime minister are harmful to millions of Israeli citizens and Jews worldwide.&#8221; Former Israeli United Nations Ambassador Dan Gillerman described such name calling as “shameful,” “abusive,” and “counter-productive.”</p>
<p>The White House has tried to do some damage control regarding the &#8220;chickensh*t&#8221; remark, as it usually does after stepping into its own mess. U.S. National Security Spokesperson Alistair Baskey said in response to the latest imbroglio that “such comments are inappropriate and counter-productive. We do not believe there is a crisis in the relationship. The relationship remains as strong as ever and the ties between our nations are unshakable.&#8221;</p>
<p>With all due respect, Mr. Baskey, the relationship between Israel and the United States is at a historic low. The White House’s petty vindictiveness was illustrated again just last week when Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon was given a cold shoulder by various high-profile Obama administration officials, who were instructed not to meet with the defense minister during his visit to Washington. These officials included Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan Rice.  Aside from a routine meeting with his counterpart Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Defense Minister Ya’alon did manage to meet with the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, despite attempts by the administration, which came too late, to block the meeting. In any event, Ambassador Power focused her attention during the meeting on the settlements issue.</p>
<p>As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in his article in <i>The</i> <i>Atlantic</i>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The relationship between these two administrations &#8212; dual guarantors of the putatively &#8220;unbreakable&#8221; bond between the U.S. and Israel &#8212; is now the worst it&#8217;s ever been, and it stands to get significantly worse after the November midterm elections. By next year, the Obama administration may actually withdraw diplomatic cover for Israel at the United Nations, but even before that, both sides are expecting a showdown over Iran, should an agreement be reached about the future of its nuclear program.</p></blockquote>
<p>While Jeffrey Goldberg correctly identified the problem, he mistakenly blamed Prime Minister Netanyahu as the main cause of the problem. Goldberg parroted the Obama administration line that, if it were not for the Israeli government’s settlements policies, a peaceful two-state solution would be achievable. He referred to what one Obama administration official described as the administration’s “red-hot anger” at the Israeli prime minister “for pursuing settlement policies on the West Bank, and building policies in Jerusalem, that they believe have fatally undermined Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace process.”</p>
<p>Indeed, Secretary of State John Kerry has gone public in blaming the Jewish state and its settlements policies for the failure of his feckless pretentions to be a peacemaker between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  He even went so far as to repeat without any rebuttal, at a White House reception earlier this month held in honor of a Muslim holiday, a contention that Israel’s intransigence was contributing to the rise of jihad in the Middle East.</p>
<p>The crisis in the once close relationship between the two countries originates from the very top of the Obama administration. President Obama himself has set the tone for the unprecedented verbal assaults from members of his administration on the leader of the only real democracy in the Middle East, and one of the United States’ closest allies – until now.</p>
<p>Back in November 2011, for example, Obama and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy were caught on an open microphone complaining about the Israeli prime minister. After Sarkozy said that he “can’t stand” Prime Minister Netanyahu and called him a “liar,” Obama replied: &#8220;You&#8217;re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 2010, Obama is reported to have snubbed Prime Minister Netanyahu, declining to join the Israeli leader and his delegation for a White House dinner.</p>
<p>Obama came into office in 2008 with a decidedly pro-Palestinian bias. He absorbed the anti-Semitic rhetoric of his long-time pastor in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright, and of his friend from his teaching days at the University of Chicago, Rashid Khalidi.</p>
<p>Khalidi was a big fan of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist organization, the PLO.  He described Israel as a “racist” state and “basically an apartheid system in creation.” In 2003, at a farewell dinner for Khalidi, who was about to leave the University of Chicago for a position at Columbia University, Obama hailed Khalidi’s insights as an influence on his own thinking. Khalidi later returned the favor, telling pro-Palestinian audiences that Obama deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat, stating: “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances.”</p>
<p>From the beginning of his first presidential term, President Obama signaled his intention to come down hard on Israel by initially demanding a complete freeze on settlements – including on any growth in existing settlements. He also outlined his concept of a final peace agreement that would require Israel to withdraw virtually entirely to the pre-June 1967 lines, but with no reciprocal requirement that the Palestinians renounce completely once and for all its assertion of a so-called “right of return” of millions of &#8220;refugees&#8221; to lands within pre-June 1967 Israel.  He has clearly bought into the self-serving narrative of Palestinian victimhood.</p>
<p>All that the Obama administration wants to talk about are Jewish settlements, failing even to distinguish between actual settlements in the West Bank and expansion of housing for Israelis living in certain Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem that happen to fall within the revisionist construct of a divided “East Jerusalem” that the Obama administration helps to perpetuate. Historically, Jerusalem has been an undivided city that has had a Jewish majority population and has in the past been the capital for the Jewish people. Jordan’s illegal occupation between 1948 and 1967 resulted in the artificial division of Jerusalem that the Palestinians, with help from the Obama administration, seek to make permanent. Jerusalem is whole again as it should be, but – unlike during the years of Jordan’s occupation – the holy sites are open to worshipers of all faiths.</p>
<p>During an “emergency” United Nations Security Council meeting convened on October 29<sup>th</sup> to discuss Israeli plans to build more Jewish housing in “East” Jerusalem, the U.S. representative speaking to the Council called Israel’s “unilateral” actions, including in Jerusalem, “deeply concerning” and provocative. This followed the usual Israeli-bashing by the United Nations bureaucracy. United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, said during the meeting that &#8220;Israel&#8217;s construction plans in East Jerusalem &#8211; if they go ahead &#8211; raise grave doubts on its willingness to promote peace.&#8221;</p>
<p>Israel wants peace, but not how the Palestinians, backed by the Obama administration and the Palestinians&#8217; allies at the United Nations, would define it.</p>
<p>Gaza was a test case of the Palestinians’ ability and willingness to establish a model for an independent state after Israel withdrew completely in 2005 and turned over economic resources and responsibility for security to the Palestinian Authority. As has happened so often when the Palestinians had a chance for a truly peaceful two-state solution, they blew the opportunity. Hamas, whose genocidal charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews worldwide, took over Gaza in 2007 and turned it into a launching pad for above-ground rocket and underground tunnel attacks against Israeli civilians living in Israeli towns and cities. In Jerusalem itself, just last week, a Hamas affiliated jihadist deliberately drove his car into a group of pedestrians, killing a 3-month old baby, who, it turns out, was an American citizen. The response from Palestinian President Abbas’s Fatah party was to call the baby murderer a “heroic martyr.” A Hamas spokesman called the murder a “natural response” to the “invasion of our land by the Jews.”</p>
<p>Abbas did not express outrage or remorse over the senseless murder of the baby. Indeed, his own incendiary remarks calling for the use of “any means” to stop Jews from visiting or worshipping at the Temple Mount may have helped incite this violent attack. Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent member of the PLO Executive Committee, added her own fuel to the fire by saying that allowing Jews to visit the Temple Mount (which is holy to Jews as well as to Muslims) is a “declaration of war against Islam.” President Obama himself did not speak out publicly regarding such inflammatory rhetoric, the subsequent murderous attack itself or the disgusting reaction of the Palestinian leadership to the attack.</p>
<p>Abbas and the Hamas leadership play “good cop-bad cop” in terms of tactics, but their end-game is the same – the extinguishment of Jewish self-determination in any lands the Palestinians falsely consider their birth-right. There is no room for any Jewish state anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, in their own vision of the region.</p>
<p>The Obama administration turns a blind eye to the Palestinian pathology of hatred of Jews, some of which is rooted in Islamic supremacism. Preached in mosques and taught in Palestinian schools to poison the minds of generations of Palestinians, such hatred prevents the realization of any true two-state solution which recognizes the right of self-determination of the Jewish people as well as the Palestinian people to live side by side in peace and security.</p>
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		<title>Let’s Get Small</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/let%e2%80%99s-get-small/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=let%25e2%2580%2599s-get-small</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:42:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Atlantic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[carbon footprint]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[physical size]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Small]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=127401</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Smaller people for a smaller carbon footprint.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/short.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-127438" title="short" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/short.jpg" alt="" width="460" height="288" /></a></p>
<p>The manmade global warming alarmists now suspect that all our efforts to reverse imminent planetary disaster may be inadequate and ultimately futile. Always thinking outside the box, they’re suggesting more radical sacrifices than simply upgrading light blubs and trading in gas-guzzlers for Priuses. Forget <em>badgering</em> people to be more energy-efficient, some global warming strategists are asking; why not <em>genetically alter</em> them to be so? “Let’s get small” doesn’t refer just to Steve Martin’s <a href="http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76nmono.phtml">old comedy routine</a> anymore; now it’s a call to bio-engineer <em>smaller humans</em> for a reduced carbon footprint.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/how-engineering-the-human-body-could-combat-climate-change/253981/">an online interview</a><em> </em>for <em>The Atlantic</em>, S. Matthew Liao, professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University, expresses skepticism about the efficacy of our current attempts to mitigate climate change, and theorizes that “voluntary” human engineering is one possible solution. He is the principal author of the new <a href="http://www.smatthewliao.com/2012/02/09/human-engineering-and-climate-change/">paper</a> “Human Engineering and Climate Change,” in the scholarly journal <em>Ethics, Policy &amp; Environment</em>. In it, he and his co-authors propose possible bio-medical modifications to ensure that humans tread less heavily on Mother Gaia.</p>
<p>For example, Liao says, reducing our consumption of meat could have significant environmental benefits. One solution could be a pill that triggers mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat and ultimately creates in us an aversion to meat altogether. Other techniques are more complicated both medically and ethically; Liao and his cohorts even considered the possibility, for example, of giving humans “cat eyes”:</p>
<blockquote><p>The reason is, cat eyes see nearly as well as human eyes during the day, but much better at night. We figured that if everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn&#8217;t need so much lighting, and so you could reduce global energy usage considerably.</p></blockquote>
<p>Then there is the issue of our inconvenient physical size:</p>
<blockquote><p>[The] larger a person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people – for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on.</p></blockquote>
<p>In order to reduce a person&#8217;s environmental footprint substantially, then, Liao and his partners theorize that parents might submit to genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to give birth to smaller, “less resource-intensive” children. The authors believe that such human engineering solutions may actually be “liberty enhancing,” especially in contrast to “crude prescriptions” like China&#8217;s “one child” policy:</p>
<blockquote><p>What we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that&#8217;s the case… human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.</p></blockquote>
<p>That’s the global warming community’s concept of “liberty-enhancing” – a population control policy that gives people the magnanimous option of three undersized children, two mediums, or one basketball player.</p>
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		<title>The World’s Oldest Sickness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-solway/the-world%e2%80%99s-oldest-sickness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-world%25e2%2580%2599s-oldest-sickness</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jun 2010 04:02:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=62138</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Gaza flotilla incident reminds us that the destiny of the Jew is to be eternally unsafe in this world.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/anti.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-62242" title="anti" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/anti.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="409" /></a></p>
<p>The world is sick again with an old disease for which no cure has ever been found. It tends to go into remission here and there at various times but it invariably reappears, as virulent as ever, developing new strains as the bacillus adapts to the antibiotics of reason, shame or distraction. The disease is called anti-Semitism and it can afflict even those who would seem best prepared to resist it. Few are immune.</p>
<p>It can assume racial forms, the Jew regarded as a quasi-human deformity, as rodent, monkey or <em>untermensch</em>. International jurist Jacques Gautier, who finds it “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uug1x_OTyr4">shameful</a>” that under the dispensation of the Human Rights community it is understood that Arabs will have legal and political rights in Israel while it is accepted that Arab countries can be <em>judenrein</em>, concludes that Jews do not enjoy human rights because they are not reckoned as <em>human</em>. Why extend the norms and principles that presumably govern human behavior and the relations between states to a people and a state tacitly considered as beyond the pale, as not quite “like us”? This is how double standards are implicitly justified. Judaism has also been condemned as a cultural and economic perversion that contorts the structure of society. This is a very old story. Indeed, whatever manifestation it assumes, anti-Semitism has been with us almost as far back as human memory goes. What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/ANTI-SEMITISM-LONGEST-ROBERT-S-WISTRICH/dp/041365320X">longest hatred</a> is also the world’s oldest sickness.</p>
<p>It is, in fact, best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. Ironically, their victims are precisely those who do not suffer from the plague that has contaminated its bearers—except, of course, for those apostate Jews who are sick with the same morbid distemper. The list of such despicables would fill the devil’s Rolodex. But they too must eventually succumb to the fury of the demented carriers of the pathology. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/business/global/19drugs.html">Teva</a>, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.</p>
<p>In <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Semite-Jew-Exploration-Etiology-Hate/dp/0805210474/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269178463&amp;sr=1-1">Anti-Semite and Jew</a></em>, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. For Sartre, anti-Semitism is founded in the “fear of the human condition”—of solitude, responsibility for oneself, and the terror of contingency. The Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human along the entire spectrum from the empirical to the ontological—an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution and a convenient repository of all we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. As such he has been zoned for apartheid, whether metaphysical or social. Sartre concludes that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”</p>
<p>For all his innovative phrasing, Sartre is really playing variations on the grizzled notion of the Jew as scapegoat, derived from <em>Leviticus</em> 16, which is true enough—witness the current U.S. administration’s treatment of Israel which, as historian Moshe Dann <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/is-obama-using-israel-as-a-scapegoat-for-his-foreign-policy-failures/">suggests</a>, is a species of <em>collective</em> scapegoating to cover its own foreign policy failures. Philosopher René Girard adds a certain twist to the etiology of this recurrent sickness and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Sacred-Ren%C3%A9-Girard/dp/0801822181/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269178277&amp;sr=1-3">proposes the concept</a> of “ritual mimesis” or “mimetic victimage,” an ironic conflict-management elucidation of the scapegoat philosophy. In Girard’s thinking, the violence <em>between groups</em> in a given society is resolved by projecting it upon a third party—the Jew—who is then expelled.</p>
<p>In <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eliot-Anti-Semitism-Literary-Form-Second/dp/0500282803/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272197911&amp;sr=1-3">T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form</a></em>, Anthony Julius suggests an interesting comparison/contrast between Homeric mythology and anti-Semitism. They both “offer explanations intended to make sense of puzzling misfortunes in human life, the one by the intervention of the gods, the other by the intervention of the Jews.” The trouble is that “Jews are not malign Olympians who dispose of humankind by manipulative wizardry.” But tell that to the anti-Semite, who craves an easy explanation for what he does not comprehend in the larger world or cannot resolve in his own circumscribed life. By making the Jew responsible for all he cannot clarify, come to terms with or vanquish, the anti-Semite forfeits both courage and morality. What will he do when the Jew is no longer there? He would be like the parasite that has devoured its host and now faces starvation.</p>
<p>This suggests another definition of anti-Semitism. <em>Anti-Semitism is a form of spiritual parasitism</em>, the always tempting resort of the human leech who feeds his appetite for security, justification and self-acquittal from the life-blood of others—in this case, of course, from the body of the Jewish people. Put less offensively, anti-Semitism is blind ignorance, both of the world and the self. Psychologists like to call this psycho-reflex “projection” or “cathexis,” but these terms don’t even begin to cover the malice inherent in so invidious an emotional investment or to parry what Wistrich in his recent book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Obsession-Anti-Semitism-Antiquity-Global/dp/1400060974/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272987204&amp;sr=1-1">A Lethal Obsession</a></em>, has identified as a “Judeophobic virus.”</p>
<p>Today, anti-Semitism has adopted a new expression, dubbed by Robin Shepherd in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0297856642/ref=sr_1_1/180-7579365-3343620?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272987899&amp;sr=1-1">A State Beyond The Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel</a></em> as “neo-anti-Semitism” which is “virulently anti-Israeli”. The Neurozone is gravely compromised, but the syndrome is making significant inroads on this side of the Atlantic as well. While not entirely ridding itself of its racial and socioeconomic baggage, neo-anti-Semitism converges on the Jew-as-Zionist, associated with the state of Israel as the modern embodiment of a discredited colonial enterprise. The purveyors of this claim affect not to be anti-Semitic, but their protestations are not convincing. It looks more like lying by ancillary focus.</p>
<p>The proof resides not only in the fact that Israel is unfairly and disproportionately singled out for opprobrium while flagrant and undoubted human rights offenders are generally given a free pass. It is also evident in the fact that Israel is conceived as no ordinary colonialist power. Israeli Jews are regarded as reviving the pestilence of Nazism, cleansing, or approving of the cleansing, of ethnic populations, aka the Palestinians—which is nothing short of a gross misreading of the historical archive and a wrenching misrepresentation of the present circumstance. For despite the fictions of a perjurious world, there can be no question that the Jewish people enjoy a religious, historical and <em>legal</em> right to their homeland, as Jacques Gautier, who spent twenty years studying the issue of ownership, as attorney and legal specialist Howard Grief in his <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Foundation-Borders-Israel-International/dp/9657344522/">The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law</a></em>, and as many others have established beyond the slightest doubt. The effort to deny what is the cadastral address of the Jewish people is a pattern of what Melanie Phillips has called, in her new book of that title, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-Turned-Upside-Down-Global/dp/1594033757/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1271700557&amp;sr=1-1">The World Turned Upside Down</a></em>.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the accusation that Israel is the new SS is the contemporary distortion of the theme of Albert Camus’ <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Plague-Albert-Camus/dp/0679720219/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269197629&amp;sr=1-1">The Plague</a></em>, an obvious allegory of the Nazi invasion of Europe and North Africa. The wrinkle added to this fabric of defamation is that Jews <em>have no right to any kind of power or authority</em>. As Bernard Lewis writes in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Semites-Anti-Semites-Inquiry-Conflict-Prejudice/dp/0753800330/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269183330&amp;sr=1-1">Semites &amp; Anti-Semites</a></em>, Jews have no business being anything other than, at best, “a tolerated subject minority.” Therefore, “by appearing as conquerors and rulers the Jews have subverted God’s order in the universe.” This calumny, says Lewis, is both the Muslim and “the fashionable leftist or progressive line.” But it is only a symptom or manifestation of the same old sickness. To paraphrase Stephen Toulmin in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cosmopolis-Modernity-Stephen-Edelston-Toulmin/dp/0226808386/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1273011114&amp;sr=1-1">Cosmopolis</a></em>, it is, in effect, “the narrative of a past episode reflected in a more recent mirror.”</p>
<p>And yet the mystery persists. But whatever theory we advance to decrypt what may be largely unfathomable or at least not wholly explicable, one thing is certain. Anti-Semitism is here to stay. Jessica may elope with Lorenzo but she or her children or grandchildren will one day be forced to accept the indelible fact of origins. Anti-Semitism is not a contagion that, like Daniel Defoe’s description in <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Journal-Plague-Written-Citizen-Continued/dp/1151166510/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1269197558&amp;sr=1-1">A Journal of the Plague Year</a></em> of the catastrophe that visited London in the year 1665, will ever be “enervated and its malignity spent.” This is because anti-Semitism is unlike other forms of irrational hatred and operates under a different set of laws, which appear to be immutable.</p>
<p>Indeed, today once again, as we confront a new world-generation of venomous and commissurotomized anti-Semites, we might plausibly conclude that anti-Semitic sentiments and irruptions, in virtue of their millennial repeatability, have become entrenched in human consciousness as a <em>natural</em> inevitability. As I have <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hear-O-Israel-David-Solway/dp/0973406534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272375783&amp;sr=1-1">written before</a>, “It is something that it is perceived in the depths of the psyche to have moved from the dimension of history over into the structure of nature. It is as if anti-Semitism has now become part of our synaptic equipment.”</p>
<p>As a result, the destiny of the Jew is to be eternally unsafe in this world, despite the narcotic of assimilation or the illusion of self-rejection. The time seems invariably to come when the Jew is thrown back on his identity and regarded not as a human being or as an ordinary citizen but as, <em>ab ovo</em>, a Jew. After which, measures are adopted. Of no other people can this be said. And this is why the Jewish people cannot afford the luxury of historical amnesia, self-betrayal or the hallucination of ultimate security, but must remain vigilant, conscious and always prepared for the resurgence of the plague.</p>
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		<title>Never Letting a Serious Crisis Go to Waste</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dov-fischer/never-letting-a-serious-crisis-go-to-waste/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=never-letting-a-serious-crisis-go-to-waste</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dov-fischer/never-letting-a-serious-crisis-go-to-waste/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:00:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dov Fischer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=61850</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will Obama exploit the BP oil fiasco to further his environmentalist agenda?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/photo_1268888322112-4-0_77266_G.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-61963" title="photo_1268888322112-4-0_77266_G" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/photo_1268888322112-4-0_77266_G-300x191.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="191" /></a></p>
<p>White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel gained notoriety for declaring his credo: “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow" target="_blank">You never want a serious crisis to go to waste</a>.” In other words, when there is tragedy and suffering, intense human pain and disaster, a political expert enjoys a unique opportunity to push the least popular parts of his agenda past a distracted electorate.</p>
<p>No sooner had President Barack Obama entered the White House than the Emanuel Doctrine was put into motion with the 1,073-page $787 billion “stimulus bill” that had to be <a href="http://www.nwfdailynews.com/opinion/bill-15375-welfare-people.html" target="_blank">rushed through Congress, seemingly overnight</a>.  As <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/26/joe-barton/Congress-getting-little-review-of-stimulus-bill/" target="_blank">Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) said</a>: “We have not had a single hearing on anything in front of us&#8230;.We’ve been told that even one hearing would be one too many, and that we have a single day to approve these five complex propositions that will affect the lives of millions.”</p>
<p>Faced in January 2009 with a looming national financial catastrophe, as a crash in the residential real estate market prompted a grave Wall Street crisis, the Obama White House detected cover to raid the public till and reward staunch Democrat loyalists under the rubric of a “stimulus bill.”  Beneath the public radar and buried within <a href="http://bailout.uslaw.com/?p=453" target="_blank">the bill’s 1,073 pages</a>, the “stimulus” allocated <em>inter alia</em> $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half a billion dollars for people interested in researching “global warming,” even <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html" target="_blank">at least $18 million for the website</a> that reports how the “stimulus” funds are allocated.  Overturning a prime achievement of the Clinton Administration, the “stimulus” <a href="http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2009/02/Welfare-Spendathon-House-Stimulus-Bill-Will-Cost-Taxpayers-787-Billion-in-New-Welfare-Spending" target="_blank">restored key elements of the welfare practices</a> that America had abandoned. Over time, the “stimulus” has trickled down to fund $233,825 for <a href="http://stimuluswatch.org/2.0/awards/view/2798/explaining-the-african-vote" target="_blank">explaining voting patterns in Africa</a> and $363,760 for two jobs “<a href="http://stimuluswatch.org/2.0/awards/view/21694/develop-real-life-stroies-that-underscore-job-and-infrastructure-related-to-arra-research-findings" target="_blank">[d]evelop[ing] &#8216;real life&#8217; st[or]ies</a> that underscore job and infrastructure related to [the Stimulus Bill] research findings.”</p>
<p>In sum, there was crisis – thus opportunity.  The sweaty-palms sense of crisis that demanded virtually overnight passage before Congressional representatives could read its encyclopedic contents has long since proven exaggerated.  The vast majority of the bill’s funds still have not stimulated anything.  Much of it still has not been infused into the economy.</p>
<p>This is the Emanuel Doctrine:  never let a crisis go to waste.  This doctrine similarly was implemented after <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/19/brown-coakley-massachusetts-business-healthcare-senate.html" target="_blank">the ObamaCare health measure had been all-but-abandoned</a> when Scott Brown surprisingly defeated Attorney-General Martha Coakley in the race for United State Senator from Massachusetts.  Soon after, unexpectedly, a national pseudo-crisis emerged when Anthem Blue Cross, a California health insurer, sought to raise its health premiums by <a href="http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2010/2/5/anthem-blue-cross-to-hike-premium-rates-for-individual-policy-holders.aspx" target="_blank">as much as 39 percent</a>.  The crisis was not wasted by Washington.  Within days, ObamaCare was rushed back onto the House calendar.  Forgotten amid the federal legislative carnage that followed – most recently credited with helping bring down <a href="http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/05/senior-house-democrat-rep-david-obey-to-resign/" target="_blank">Rep. David Obey</a>, <a href="http://img.thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/91307-stupak-to-retire" target="_blank">Rep. Bart Stupak</a>, and Sen. Arlen Specter – is that <a href="http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2010/4/30/anthem-blue-cross-to-withdraw-planned-rate-hikes-could-refile-soon.aspx" target="_blank">Anthem Blue Cross ultimately withdrew their rate-hike request</a> as the California insurance oversight system effectively regulated as intended.</p>
<p>Considered in the light of this prior experience, it becomes understandable why the Obama Administration has opted to curtail oil-exploration, suspending and rescinding permits, in response to the tragic Deepwater Horizon oil rig spill off the Gulf  of Mexico.  The story is fresh in the public mind. In raw numbers, eleven have died, and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/27/AR2010052701957_2.html?wpisrc=nl_headline&amp;sid=ST2010052704421" target="_blank">between 18 million and 39 million gallons</a> of oil have gushed along America’s Gulf Coast, already exceeding the <em>Exxon Valdez</em> disaster that spilled nearly 11 million gallons of oil into the waters along Alaska. One of America’s fiercest Democrat partisans, New Orleans resident James Carville, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gulf_oil_spill" target="_blank">went on an extraordinary tear</a> last week against the Obama Administration:  “The President of the United States could’ve come down here. He could’ve been involved with the families of these 11 people&#8230;.These people are crying. They&#8217;re begging for something down here, and it just looks like he&#8217;s not involved in this. Man, you got to get down here and take control of this. Put somebody in charge of this and get this thing moving. We&#8217;re about to die down here.” Observing that “[t]he political stupidity of this is just unbelievable,” Carville emphatically repeated his call: “There&#8217;s a thousand things that he could do. He just needs to get down here and start doing something, people are dying.”</p>
<p>By last Thursday, the <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll" target="_blank">daily Rasmussen tracking poll</a> revealed that 26 percent of Americans strongly approve of the President’s job performance, while 42 percent strongly disapprove, giving Mr. Obama a Presidential Approval rating of minus-16.  A <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_pl2270" target="_blank">USA Today/Gallup survey</a> found that 53 percent of Americans rate his handling of the crisis as “poor” or “very poor” while only 43 percent still are satisfied.  Nevertheless, Americans continue to support oil exploration. By a <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_state_surveys/texas/65_in_texas_still_support_offshore_drilling" target="_blank">significant margin, Texas voters</a> still want more offshore oil drilling.  <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/offshore_drilling/64_favor_offshore_oil_drilling" target="_blank">Similar percentages hold nationally. </a> However, for this White House, proceeding with new drilling would “waste” the crisis.</p>
<p>If Obama’s goal were to evaluate ecologically responsible alternatives to drilling for oil a mile below the gulf’s surface, the White House could <a href="http://www.anwr.org/ANWR-Basics/Top-ten-reasons-to-support-ANWR-development.php" target="_blank">reconsider exploring for oil and natural gas in ANWR</a>, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the north Alaskan coast.  Of ANWR’s 19 million acres, there is enormous potential in a small section, the “10-02 Area,” which still would leave 92% of ANWR untouched. Only one-ten-thousandth of ANWR – a section smaller than LAX airport – actually would have surface drilling rigs. ANWR exploration could pump scores of billions of dollars into the national economy, create half a million great-paying jobs, and reduce American fuel-import expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars.  Moreover, the local caribou population fare <a href="http://alaskaspirit.com/alaska-travel/the-trans-alaska-pipeline-the-must-see-attraction-for-the-caribou/" target="_blank">better around oil pipelines</a> than environmentalists ever expected.</p>
<p>The Obama White House also could focus its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster by intensifying federal efforts to clean the environmental catastrophe to Louisiana’s fishing waters, and by <a href="http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/gov_bobby_jindal_state_will_co.html" target="_blank">moving rapidly to approve</a> Gov. <a href="http://www.wwl.com/Jindal---We-won-t-wait-for-federal-permission-to-s/7163295" target="_blank">Bobby Jindal’s almost-frantic pleas for federal permission to erect more protective sand berms</a> along the coast.  However, prior crisis behavior by this White House – whether prompted by a devastating Wall Street collapse or an outlier health insurer inordinately applying to raise rates by 39 percent – reflects that President Obama deems moments like these as unique <em>opportunities</em> for “<a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/obamas_transformative_powers.html" target="_blank">transformative</a> social change.”  Thus, we may well anticipate an intensified effort in the near term to resuscitate the moribund “<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124588837560750781.html" target="_blank">Cap and Trade</a>” bill which would add <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504383_162-5314040-504383.html" target="_blank">between $1,761 and $3,100 in annual energy costs</a> for most American homes.</p>
<p>For the President’s <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100528/ap_on_bi_ge/us_gulf_oil_spill_obama_glance_2" target="_blank">longer-range vision</a> of this crisis, we again encounter his determination to pursue ideological goals that <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/56_don_t_want_to_pay_more_to_fight_global_warming" target="_blank">clash with the American people’s concerns</a>.  He is now stopping new oil exploration: suspending plans for exploratory drilling off the Virginia and Alaska coasts; stopping 33 exploratory drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico, and; continuing a six-month moratorium on all permits for offshore drilling.  Although our Outer Continental Shelf contains <a href="http://www.mms.gov/offshore/" target="_blank">as much as 86 billion barrels of oil</a>, with possibly <a href="http://www.mms.gov/offshore/220.htm" target="_blank">130 million barrels off the coast of Virginia</a> alone, the President’s response means that we instead will continue importing <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2175rank.html" target="_blank">approximately 13.5 million barrels daily</a> – more than twenty percent of that <a href="http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/portal/rielcano_eng/Content?WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT=/elcano/elcano_in/zonas_in/ari+74-2006" target="_blank">from the Persian Gulf dictatorships</a> – at prices that now hover around $70 a barrel. We will send Arab Gulf despots some $175 million daily or some $65 billion a year, even as our deficit-driven economy starves for capital, and as our unemployed search for good-paying jobs at home.</p>
<p>Our nation consumes more than <a href="http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption" target="_blank">20 million barrels of oil daily</a>, importing nearly <a href="http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us-united-states/ene-energy" target="_blank">sixty percent</a> from foreign countries whose production standards are far less friendly to the polar ice caps than ours.  <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Earth/Saudi_Arabia_dirtiest/articleshow/3816750.cms" target="_blank">Saudi Arabia, for example, ranks last</a> as the dirtiest emitter of greenhouse gases among the 57 countries rated on one NGO’s “Climate Change Performance Index.” Moreover, our imported oil necessarily arrives in tankers – the petroleum obviously cannot be delivered any other way – and those tankers pose <a href="http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/biggest-oil-spills-in-history" target="_blank">even more extreme environmental risks</a>.  The 1979 <em>Atlantic Empress</em> tanker spilled 88.3 million gallons of oil.  The <em>ABT Summer</em> tanker spilled 78 million off the Angola Coast in 1991.  The <em>Castillo de Bellver </em>spilled 78.5 million.  The <em>Amoco Cadiz</em> tanker lost 68.7 million gallons off France’s Brittany coast.  The <em>Odyssey</em> spilled 43 million off Nova Scotia. The <em>Haven </em>poured 42 million gallons in the waters outside Italy.  <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001451.html" target="_blank">The list goes on.</a> Yet oil-importing tankers have not been suspended from sailing America’s waters.  Nor do we suspend air travel after a tragedy in the sky nor rail transportation after a train wreck.</p>
<p>President Obama has long opposed new oil exploration. In <a href="http://www.ontheissues.org/SenateVote/Party_2005-288.htm" target="_blank">November 2005</a>, he voted against oil and gas leasing in the Alaskan Coastal Plain.  On April 20, 2007, rolling out his “Initiative to Combat Global Warming,” he told students in New Hampshire that “[i]t will take a grassroots effort to make America greener and <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/2007/04/20/barack_obama_unveils_initiativ.php" target="_blank">end the tyranny of oil</a>.”  Weeks later, he told a crowd: “<a href="http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/05/obama_the_age_of_oil_must_end.html" target="_blank">The age of oil must end</a>.” In his <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/presidential.debate.transcript/index.html" target="_blank">second Presidential Debate</a> against John McCain, he stated: “[W]e can&#8217;t simply drill our way out of the problem. And we&#8217;re not going to be able to deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming.”</p>
<p>Now, with a crisis too opportune to waste, the President has chosen not to respond with a comprehensive proactive approach to America’s energy choices.  He could have encouraged safe new exploration by directing his Interior Secretary henceforth to administer and enforce competently the safety regulations already on the books, but which his <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/04/AR2010050404118.html" target="_blank">Minerals Management Service ignored on his watch</a> during the construction of Deepwater Horizon. He could reconsider opening ANWR to drilling, encourage efforts to expand clean-coal technology, and even order a prioritized review aimed at reviving the construction of nuclear power plants in America. (America has <a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-04/28/content_438216.htm" target="_blank">not built a new nuclear power plant in more than thirty years</a>, even as France’s <a href="http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html" target="_blank">sixteen nuclear power plants generate nearly 80 percent</a> of that country’s electricity.) Instead, this Administration, which knows that <a href="http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2008/07/14/4425084-drilling-debate-part-2" target="_blank">it can take ten years</a> from licensing exploration until newly discovered oil reaches market, is prepared to risk laying the foundations for a future crisis by presently deterring new exploration and instead tilting disproportionately at windmills.</p>
<p><em>Dov Fischer is a legal affairs consultant and adjunct professor of the law of civil procedure and advanced torts. He was formerly Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and writes extensively on political, cultural, and religious issues.  He is author of general </em><em>Sharon</em><em>’s War Against Time Magazine and blogs at <a title="blocked::http://www.rabbidov.com/ http://www.rabbidov.com/" href="http://www.rabbidov.com/" target="_blank">www.rabbidov.com</a></em></p>
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		<title>Dissecting Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/victor-davis-hanson/dissecting-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dissecting-obama</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/victor-davis-hanson/dissecting-obama/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 May 2010 04:20:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Victor Davis Hanson]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A close look at the president's clueless post-modernism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obama-clueless.png"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59713" title="obama clueless" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obama-clueless.png" alt="" width="335" height="280" /></a></p>
<p><em>Editors’ note: </em><em>This is a transcript of a speech delivered by Victor Davis Hanson a<em>t the recent </em></em><em>David</em><em> </em><em>Horowitz</em><em> </em><em>Freedom</em><em> </em><em>Center</em><em>’s Santa Barbara Retreat. It was </em><em>given without a prepared text. To watch the video of the speech, <a href="http://www.davidhorowitztv.com/retreat/2010/297-hanson">click here</a>.<br />
</em></p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  As for that reference in the introduction to being a student of Greek and Latin: I would think about being a classicist a lot when I came home to farm at 26.  I just got my Ph.D., and my father and a brother (who was really a cynic) talked at length. And at one point, I said, “Well, I passed my exam; my thesis is finished.”</p>
<p>And one said, “What can you do with it?”  And I replied, “I think I can translate the San Francisco Chronicle into Greek now.”  And one replied &#8212; he was quoting, I think Johnson or someone, “You know, that’s sort of like a dog that can walk on two legs; it’s impressive, but what’s the use?”  So that’s that—I have an ambiguous relationship with classics.</p>
<p>This afternoon, I thought I would just walk through for 25, 30 minutes, very informally, the highlights of the Obama foreign policy— and then open it up for questions.  And one has to be very careful in criticism, because I think with Obama too often critique becomes an emotional response in that we sometimes lose concentration of the nature of the transformation that he’s actually doing.  And I know no one wishes to fall into that fallacy of Pavlovian opposition.   Sometimes it’s health care “reform” or the apology tour can become so aggravating that one doesn’t look at each issue empirically. That is always a danger, because there really is something called Obama derangement syndrome, and I would not wish to suffer from it.  We would not wish want to become the mirror-image of the Bush haters.</p>
<p>Anyway, what is the general philosophy that guides this President abroad?   I think there are four or five elements, and I’d like to just go briefly through them and then apply them to specific policies and countries—and see if we can spot their presence.  One, of course, is that he’s a post-modern President.  That’s a fancy word for saying a culture that arose after the modern period, the so-called the post- modern period.  And within it is a belief system that incorporates things like utopian pacifism.  He seems to believe that as a child of the Enlightenment that if very brilliant, smart, educated, technocratic people get together, they can adjudicate differences rationally and without rancor, and that we can leave our Neanderthal past of emotions behind—especially to the degree that we are led and enthused by people like himself that were properly educated, properly cool, properly charismatic with the less fortunate who sometimes cause trouble and are misunderstood.</p>
<p>Mr. Obama believes in a sort of moral equivalency; that is, morality cynically is to be adjudicated only by those who have power.  And just as there’s sort of a Mason-Dixon Line economically in the United States between those of, say, 200,000 in income and above and those below (and above at that divide, you become “them”), so too that applies to the world at large.  The United   States is the $200,000 income winner, and all the other countries are, as is true in the U.S., in need of Obama’s sympathy and redistributive attention.  So we have an obligation to help the other countries because somehow we became wealthy at their expense.</p>
<p>And, of course, he’s a multiculturalist.  All of Europe, we in America, we are all burdened with an imperialistic, colonial past; in contrast, people of color, the downtrodden, the other are in need of special consideration by virtue of their poverty or lack of access to global power.  (Compare our respective attention toward a  Syria and Israel, and one learns that consensual government and freedom does not enter into the equation.) That’s part of his ideological background that he brings into his foreign policy.</p>
<p>Second, Obama does seem to like George Bush.  He believes that most problems abroad did not pre-date George Bush, and they didn’t post- date pre-George Bush—instead, they were exclusive to George Bush.  And that’s an important distinction because Obama will sometimes adopt Bush&#8217;s anti-terrorism policies, but he won’t dare say that he’s doing that,  because to do so would, of course, give some credit to George Bush.  That ambiguity makes clear a lot of things that seem contradictory, as we’ll get to in a minute.</p>
<p>Yet a third element in his foreign policy is omnipotent debt.  If you are going to borrow in the first 14 months three trillion dollars, and increase the aggregate US debt burden from 11 to 14 trillion dollars, and if you submit a long-term budget process that’s going to get us to 20 trillion in eight years, then you’re going to have less options abroad, in reference to defense, a sort of the weakening the sinews of war as Cicero talked about in the relationship of Roman preparedness to finance.</p>
<p>We simply are not going to have the capital to fund present defense and aid outlays, and people are already anticipating that overseas.  Obama is going to have to make cuts and we know where he won’t make cuts and where he will—another air squadron, yes to cuts; another health care addendum, no. China pays attention more than we do to that reality.</p>
<p>And then the fourth element in his foreign policy;  it’s sort of made up as he goes along, because, after all, if we had this present discussion in 2002, nobody in this room would know who Barack Obama is.  So he’s a late arriving phenomenon without a lot of foreign policy experience.  Indeed, we almost know nothing about his past.  We know nothing about his education at Columbia.  We don’t really know what he did at Harvard.  We don’t know much about him at all in the Senate. Much of what he promised in the campaign simply did not happen. In reference to his past intimacy with a Bill Ayers or Rev. Wright, he simply was not wholly truthful.</p>
<p>Well, let’s look at how these principles are presently guiding the U.S.  We had a very stimulating talk last night by Senator Kyl concerning Obama’s ideas about nuclear weapons.  None of us—in regard to Obama’s non-proliferation summit—none of us lose any sleep tonight that France or England is a nuclear power.  We understand that it’s not nuclear weapons, per se, but who owns them that is the problem.</p>
<p>Nobody loses sleep that Israel is going to preempt and nuke Pakistan. To the degree that a country is invested in the world, even an autocratic China (they don’t necessarily have to be consensual), is not an imminent nuclear threat.</p>
<p>There were two nuclear threats in the world when that summit took place, and they were North Korea and soon to be Iraq—and they were not there.  It reminds me of the old adage about bureaucrats; they always go after the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen, and neglect the felonies of the criminal, because the latter takes moral courage and effort, and the former is easy and trivial. So you bring all these leaders together to D.C. that aren’t threats, and you ignore for the most part the two things that would make you either not liked in the world or require a bad/worse choice scenario; that is, confronting Iran or North Korea.</p>
<p>The second thing to remember about nuclear weapons is that it’s always nice to say that we should have a world without nuclear weapons.  Yet more people have been killed by machetes since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  We lost a million people in Rwanda.  Did we want to outlaw machetes?  If people wish to kill on a mass scale, there is always a mechanism to do it.  Nuclear weapons are one, one especially scary tool, but not the only one So how have we dealt with dangerous, brave new weapons in the history of civilization? The Greeks were horrified by missile weapons.  Strabo records an inscription to the effect, “Thou shalt not use missile weapons.”  Spartans were horrified by artillery.  Agisilaos, the King of Sparta, wept when he saw artillery.  He said in effect, “Manhood is gone.”</p>
<p>I could say something of the same thing about arquebuses, fiery weapons, poison gas—all of them.  Each time we have a frightening new weapon, there has been a righteous international effort to outlaw them.  Even poison gas was not outlawed in World War II, contrary to what we think; it lack of use on the battlefield was due only to deterrence.  In other words, all global prohibitions have all failed— not surprising without a global enforcer of utopian edicts.</p>
<p>Well then, what stops a dangerous new weapon from killing large numbers of people?  Two things: one is deterrence: one side usually— hopefully, a constitutional state or consensual society—has a greater stock of dangerous weapons and tells a would-be adventurous bad actor, “don’t do it or else!”  That’s worked pretty well in the post- Hiroshima age.  Or they’ve counted on technology for a defensive response—bigger walls, thicker armor, anti-missiles defense.  There’s no reason—given that human nature is constant throughout the ages— that won’t be true with nuclear weapons. We have both deterred their use and are working on counter-weapons, antiballistic missile systems to encounter a bad actor’s arsenal who might use them.</p>
<p>Obama seems rather clueless to that, especially the truism that countries that wouldn’t use a bomb would probably abide by an agreement and countries who would use it, would not.</p>
<p>If we look at terrorism, or I should say the War on Terrorism, it’s very interesting Obama is mimicking George Bush.  If we went back to Obama-2002 as a legislator, as a senator in 2006 and from 2007 onward, as a candidate, I could give you the locale and the date in which he serially did the following:  he criticized the Patriotic Act; he criticized tribunals; he criticized renditions; he criticized predator drone attacks; he criticized Iraq; he criticized the war in Afghanistan; he criticized Guantanamo Bay, and on and on.</p>
<p>But that outrage was all predicated on just two considerations &#8212; excuse me, I think three truths.  One, by 2006, these critiques resonated with the American people, and they were very, very important to waging a winning campaign, and, therefore, Obama would wholeheartedly embrace them.  Two, Obama sensed that the Bush protocols were of some utility to keep us safe (we hadn’t been attacked since 2001).  And, three he was utterly cynical in that he knew that both he and others on the Left had no real intrinsic objections about any of these protocols— other than the fact that they were connected with George Bush.</p>
<p>If you doubt such cynicism on my part, look what happened after January 20th, 2009.  Obama embraced almost every single protocol.  The Bush-Petraeus Plan now is in operation in Iraq.  He escalated in Afghanistan.  He has allowed as many renditions as Bush did.  He’s accepted the principle of tribunals.  Guantanamo is “virtually” closed.  In other words, it’s not closed, it’s just “virtually” closed.  There have been more predator assassinations in Afghanistan in one year than Bush approved in eight.  Think of that strange logic.  We’re going to beat our breast over three detained terrorists— mass murderers—because they were waterboarded; but we’re going to blow up a suspected terrorist, his wife, children, grandparents, and everybody around him as collateral damage—and that is defensible.</p>
<p>In other words, Barack Obama knew, A, that when he became President, these were necessary protocols that had kept us safe, and, B, that as soon as he became the author and his signature was upon them, Cindy Sheehan would be a distant memory, Michael Moore would be quite forgotten.  There would be no more Hollywood movies like Rendition.  There would be no films like Redacted.  There would be no more Toronto</p>
<p>Film Festival award-winning docu-dramas about killing a President.  Alfred Knopf would not publish a novel about how to kill the President.  All that would vanish.  And that’s pretty much where we are on the War on Terror.  It was quite brilliant in some sense, this cynical appraisal that the outraged Left was merely partisan not principled.</p>
<p>If we were to look at Iran, there was always only really one nonviolent way to stop Iran from becoming nuclear.  The only real way to do it without great tumult was to encourage the grassroots demonstrations of last spring and summer that might have led to some type of real rebellion against the Republican Guard.  Obama did not do that; he voted “present”.  Why?  Because such an idea of supporting grassroots, egalitarian, consensual reform perhaps is connected in his mind with an imposition of democracy in the Middle East, the so-called despised neo-con view: who are we, after all, as good multiculturalists, good moral equivalency proponents, to suggest that we know that our democracy, that Greek-based, Western word, would be any better or any worse than any other indigenous form of governance?  So suddenly when the president sees people embracing Western democracy in an almost pro-American fashion, it causes Obama to pause.</p>
<p>Any country that was suspicious of America, and did not like the United States during the era of Bush, was apparently right, and anyone that did, was suspect.  So Colombia, Israel, Britain—something’s wrong with those nations. Unlike Obama himself, they liked the United   States under George Bush.   Iranians demonstrating are somewhat suspicious.</p>
<p>So we voted “present” on the demonstrations, as Obama is well equipped to deal with an anti-American strongman, but not so with pro-American, pro-Democratic reformers.</p>
<p>Remember in the Al Arabiya interview, the first one he gave, Obama said in effect that a charismatic person of nontraditional ancestry like himself—and he mentioned his middle name, Hussein—something had been absolutely taboo during the campaign—would resonate with people in the Middle East.  In his way of thinking, only a non-traditional, charismatic, rhetorician of African-American ancestry could deal with a revolutionary figure like an Ahmadinejad .So there was no utility, no singularity in supporting pro-American reformers; anyone could do that. But a Chavez? An Assad? Only an Obama is up to the task.</p>
<p>And again, Obama didn’t understand the danger of Iran.  (When you see administration flaks writing articles suggesting that we can deter Iran, you know that it’s pretty much a done deal that Iran is going to become nuclear.)  Yet the problem isn’t whether we can deter them or not (you can argue about whether the theocrats really want to find the missing imam and have paradise and thus are not subject to the laws of deterrence.)</p>
<p>No, the problem is that if they are nuclear, they will cause a collective, continual, non-stop sense of dread in Israel.  People will never know whether they can be deterred or not.  They’ll never know from one day to another what a theocrat will say. All that will have a cumulative effect, as we heard last night, quite presciently by the Senator—that more people will want to emigrate out of Israel, that more people live tense and unhappy lives.  It’s sort of putting a gun to somebody’s head, and saying, “I’m going to turn the six-bullet chamber and see whether the one bullet fires—maybe or maybe not.  It’s a form of nuclear Russian roulette, and it will have an emotional toll on Israel.  Obama doesn’t seem to get that.</p>
<p>Secondly, he doesn’t understand the historical role of the United   States toward Israel.  The rules of the game were pretty much the same for the last 40 to 50 years, at least since the 1967 war.  The Arab world had oil.  The Arab world embraced terrorism.  The Arab world had numbers.  Therefore, most countries abroad made the necessary calculations and favored Israel’s opponents.  That included everybody from France to Germany to Turkey to the entire Middle East to the Russians.</p>
<p>The United States alone—being an exceptionally moral place— felt, given the Holocaust and given the propensities of some nations in the world, and given the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish community after the 1967 war from the major Arab capitals, that there was no one else to protect this tiny, quite special country.    Therefore, we, alone, will do something that, in terms of realpolik may or may not be in our national interests, but it surely reflects our values.  And, therefore, we won’t nominate partisans like Charles Freeman or Samantha Power to posts of key importance in the Middle East.  We don’t quibble over settlements in Jerusalem, since we know that in any two-state solution, that Arabs will be free to live in Israel while any Israeli who wants to become a citizen of Palestine and reside in the West Bank’s may have to have his head examined, because he’ll reside in mortal danger.</p>
<p>In short, an asymmetrical situation—we of good sense and good will, we all knew that.  Mr. Obama either does not know that or does not care, or believes there is a moral equivalence between a PA or Hamas strongman and an elected Israeli government.</p>
<p>So we witness the first time, I think since Harry Truman’s initial support, that we have an Administration that not only doesn’t appreciate the role of Israel, but pretty much has leaned toward its opponents.  And so far this is all academic.  We can quibble about settlements, or, who was snubbed today or that Biden blew his temper. All that is trivial and doesn’t matter, because none of these fissures will become apparent until the next war takes place.</p>
<p>But, but, when the next war takes place, watch out—and there will be another war. There’s always a war more likely when the United States distances itself a bit from Israel because it gives the green light to bad actors, whether they’re in Lebanon or Syria or on the West Bank or in the Arab world in general.  So, there will be another war, and then we will see Obama’s true attitude when questions come up like, “Are you going to immediately supply F16 replacement parts or delay a bit?”  “Are you going to give bunker busters now or next year?”  Are you going to supply patriot missile battery replacements or hold out for a concession?”  And that will be the make-or-break moment.  There will be 1973 hysterics over whether we should/should not supply quickly/slowly/not at all key points to an Israel at war.</p>
<p>Let us turn to the larger powers of the world, especially three—India, China, and Russia.  These same four or five principles in his foreign policy stand out once again.  Take India, for example. It saw over 60 percent of Indians express a positive view of the United   States during the Bush Administration, which, after all, was supportive of free trade; India expanded its exports.  It did have a colonial past, but it’s a confident nation that wishes to take on anyone in a global free market.  It’s an English-speaking, pro-American ally—and therefore, it’s sort of now suspect, especially due to its rivalry with Islamic Pakistan.  So if you look at Indian-U.S. relations, they’re not as good as they were, as if we are troubled that Bush was once popular there.</p>
<p>In opposition to that, look at Russia.  Anybody in this room senses that it still has a 19th-Century sense of self, albeit empowered by oil. If it is not to recapture, at least it seeks to reestablish, a sphere of influence in the former Soviet Republics and perhaps even in Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>Again, Obama’s way of thinking seems to be that since Russia was recently anti-American, and anti-Bush, therefore, it’s somebody to reach out to, given their shared, mutual suspicion of the last eight Bush years. So we’re reaching out; that means that if you were in the Ukraine or if you’re in Georgia or if you’re in Poland or Czechoslovakia, you are a de facto neutral now.  We’re not interested in you as much as we are with the Russians. Please do not find yourself in a crisis, because we will not adjudicate it on the basis of shared democratic values, but rather realpolitik reach-out to Russia.</p>
<p>And then there is China, and here’s where we grasp the importance of the spiraling debt.  We don’t really know what Obama feels about pressuring China on Tibet or human rights.  On the one hand, they pose still a supposedly revolutionary regime.  Anita Dunn, after all, said a hero of hers was Mao.</p>
<p>But the Dali Lama, human rights, Tibet—all these questions play second fiddle to the one sword over our heads, and that’s U.S. debt.  When China holds over a trillion dollars of US bank notes, and, more importantly, anticipates very quickly to own another trillion, then America really has lost a lot of leverage or foreign policy options with China. I think it’s very telling that this administration is essentially saying to the Chinese, “I know that 400 million Chinese, of a billion person population, have no access at all to health care, and have never gone to a Westernized doctor, but we would still like to borrow another trillion dollars from you so we can have a socialized medical system for our own.&#8221;  That’s an untenable foreign policy—asking a rival to finance what we demand for ourselves, and what they would not consider for their own.</p>
<p>Among the first things the Chinese inquired about on their recent visit to Washington was about healthcare, because they’re starting to see that their citizens are supposed to work 12 hours a day and accumulate cash to lend us at low interest and to expand the entitlements that they themselves don’t have and have no plan on extending for their own population.  Again, I cannot stress enough that’s untenable.</p>
<p>If we look at Europe, it’s very fascinating what’s happened—summed up by &#8220;Be careful what you wish for.&#8221;  We all know that the Europeans, especially the proverbial European Street, are still in love with Obama, especially his efforts to adopt a European paradigm.  At least, they felt that he is now a partner in statism, and they the model.  He has become a Christian Democrat or a socialist Democrat, so all is wonderful.</p>
<p>Not quite. Note that the European leadership itself is very skeptical.  Karen mentioned that we went on a trip two years ago, and had a reception at a garden residence  in Versailles. It was there a French officer said to me, “Hey, everybody loves Obama, no problem.  But remember, we’re the Obama; there’s not room for two of us!”  And what he meant by that was that European leaders had understood the rules of the game, and they were essentially and cynically that the United States runs a raucous, wide-open, free-spending, capitalist, free-trading economy and that sucks in European goods, is very innovative, remains the fountainhead for western technology and innovation, western finance, and is also the key to the trans-Atlantic alliance. It’s really an American-dominated alliance, and we subsidize the defense of Europe.  And then in exchange for that somewhat embarrassing situation, out of envy the Europeans ankle-bite us in Der Spiegel or in Le Monde.</p>
<p>So this same French general went on to the effect, “Don’t you guys understand the relationship?  You’re supposed to take care of Iran, and we’re supposed to make fun of you the next day in Le Monde, and everybody’s happy.  And then we don’t get nuked.  That’s the story.  Does this Obama understand that?”  And this was before Obama was elected.</p>
<p>What we see now is that Obama didn’t understand that relationship, and the Europeans are getting their worst nightmarish dream come true. In other words, we’re going to have more of a static, controlled-economy that will not buy as much European goods; it will start to entertain something like the  state-aided Toyota, Citroen, or Mercedes-like auto industries—part government/part state—that will try to demonize companies like a rival Toyota.  We in America at last will start acting like European and Japanese state-subsidized partnerships between government and industry, and that’s not in the European’s interest.</p>
<p>We will also start, as these deficits start to climb, we will also start to question, why in the world, as true-blue statists and socialists, do we embrace so much military expenditure protecting Europe. That inevitably will come up.  As a corollary there is no more special trans-Atlantic relationship in general as it pertains to Britain.  A member of the Obama team put it something like this, “We don’t think there’s anything special in it.”  And that can be seen from the trivial—to the snubbing of Mr. Brown or sending back the bust of Churchill—to the profound.</p>
<p>But the Europeans really did get what they wanted, and they’ve now got somebody who does not believe that the Western tradition, in general, and the European role in it, in particular, are anything exceptional, other than we both have a questionable past plagued by racism and colonialism.  And so I think that we are going to have real divides between Europe and ourselves.</p>
<p>We could go on and on and on like this in tracing how the assumptions of the last thirty years in the academia and on the left have now been reified in the foreign policy of President Obama.  But let me just finish by suggesting that we’ve been here before.  I’ve been reading a great deal again about the administration of Jimmy Carter.  And what I was struck was this: while everybody tends to make fun of Jimmy Carter’s outreach and therapeutic foreign policy, that was not so, at least in the beginning. Go back and read what people were saying, not in 1979, but during 1977 and ’78.  Many were infatuated with Jimmy Carter.  His polls on foreign policy were running 55 to 60 in the positive percentiles.  He gave a heralded Notre Dame speech about the no &#8220;inordinate fear&#8221; of Communism.  He had warned the Argentines about human rights.  He had shown distance from the Shah.  I think it was UN Ambassador Andrew Young had said flattering things about Khomeini.  After Nixon, all that meant we were to be liked again abroad.</p>
<p>Indeed, everybody, except our enemies,  thought that the world was coming together and that there was no downside from all this ecumenicalism.   There wasn’t—at least for a while.</p>
<p>But what we didn’t realize in 1977 and 1978, was that the bad actors in the world were watching very carefully, and in effect saying, “Who is going to test this utopian fool first?”  Then suddenly, 1979 came along, and the Chinese decided they were just going to invade Vietnam and punish them as they saw fit.  And then we saw that the Russians had no fear of backing insurrections throughout Central  America.  And then we saw how brashly they invaded Afghanistan.  And then we saw there was something called Radical Islam.  And then we saw that there was going to be hostages taken in Teheran, and we couldn’t really do something about this terrible year 1979— other than ration gasoline and boycott the Olympics.  And within about six to seven months, the entire world became chaotic.</p>
<p>I think that’s what the lesson is.  Most adventurers in the world today are in a holding pattern.  They’re watching very carefully the US policy on nuclear weapons, disarmament, our attitudes toward traditional alliances like NATO, our attitude toward Venezuela vs. Colombia, our attitudes toward domestic terrorist attempts by radical Islamists.  What will we do about the South Koreans’ worries? The changing scenarios that we see with Japan? And they’re coming to the conclusion that if one were a North Korea or a  China, vis-à-vis, Taiwan, or a Russia, vis-à-vis, the Ukraine, or you’re Mr. Chavez, vis-à-vis, Colombia, or you’re Turkey, vis-a-via, Greece and Cypress—in any of these traditional hotspots—gone now is the old fear that George Bush or his predecessors might be a little crazy and you never knew what they were going to do—except that aggression might earn you a firm and potentially catastrophic response.</p>
<p>And so we’re in a waiting game, for we have sowed a very dangerous crop, and now we’re waiting for a bitter harvest, in a fashion like the year 1979. I fear it is going to just take one gambler to call Mr. Obama’s bluff and in essence, call our hand, and say what you’re going to do about it?  And that choice will determine whether that’s the end of such a dangerous gambit or an invitation to many, many more.</p>
<p>Thank you very much.  I think if anybody has a question or two, I’ll be happy to answer them.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> We have an alliance with non-Communist China. We are supposed to go to war with them and defend them if mainland China attacks them.  What do you think Obama will do in the case there is an attack by China?  Do you think we should get out of that alliance we have with Taiwan?  What is your advice on that?</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  I think Obama would say to China, “this doesn’t make sense.”  Taiwan is heavily invested in China.  It’s counterproductive in theory.  And that argument is absolutely sound; it would make no sense, such aggression.  But it would be the same argument once made to Hitler of “you shouldn’t go into Poland.  There’s no need to go into Poland.  You have plenty of lebensraum.&#8221;  Look at, today— Germany’s got a larger population, and smaller territory.  They didn’t need then—and they do not need now, living room—as if reason had anything to do with September 1939.</p>
<p>But in Obama’s way of thinking, states go to war for logical purposes, they don’t go to war for the irrational, for age-old honor and fear and sense of stature and pride. Yet so often that’s what they actually do go to war for.  So in his rational world view, there’s no mechanism to account for the irrational other than the appeal to soaring rhetoric and legal logic.  So I think he would say to China, “This absolutely doesn’t make sense.”  And they would say, “Maybe it doesn’t, but we’re going to do it anyway for the pleasure of it, if we please.”</p>
<p>And I don&#8217;t think we have prepared the American people to say, “Are you willing to lose an  American life to protect Taiwan,” because, to do that, Obama would have to make this argument: if you do not support Taiwan, then you probably won’t support the Philippines, and you probably won’t support South Korea, and you probably won’t support Japan.  And what’s going to happen is that you’re going to turn a Democratic and capitalist sphere of prosperity and freedom into a Communist China sphere of influence.  And that is just one scenario.</p>
<p>The other is that Japan— which, if we don’t ensure deterrence, I predict could make 4,000 nukes tomorrow and they would work like Hondas, they would not work like North   Korea’s. So you would have a nuclear Japan, a nuclear Taiwan, and a nuclear South Korea.  That could be good or bad, but that’s what you would have—a far more volatile region.</p>
<p>So every one of those places has enormous symbolic importance.  I think what Bush did was let people know not to do rash things, because we’re unpredictable and we might do something harsh if you try something stupid.  Obama in essence signals in advance, “The world is a logical place, we’re rational fellows, I’m going to talk to you the way I did my Harvard Law dean.”  And, unfortunately, so many people in the world that cause trouble simply think with their reptilian brains.  They don’t have a therapeutic view of the world or Obama’s refined sense of self.</p>
<p><strong>Manny Klausner</strong>: When you cataloged a lot of the things that Obama has done since he came in and when you focused on his antipathy to Bush, but his pursuit of Bush policies. . . .</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  Yes.</p>
<p><strong>Manny Klausner</strong>: I’d like to ask if you could amplify a little bit your thoughts as to whether Obama is cynical, rather he’s ruthlessly devious and manipulative, how much does he exemplify of the Salinski approach to using the words of the other side that you don’t believe in, but you just try to seduce people or mislead them, and you lie through your teeth because the end justifies the means?</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  I think he’s mostly cynical in terms of the War Against Terror.  I think he understood once he was President, at least, or maybe even in the campaign when he was briefed, that the reasons that we had not been attacked from September 11th onward, were  due to things like tribunals and renditions and predators and  elements of the Patriot Act. We inflicted a crushing defeat on Al Qaeda in Anbar Province.  We killed, off the record the military will tell you, we killed thousands of people in Iraq who had bad intent, not just in Iraq, but elsewhere.</p>
<p>So this policy of anti-terrorism, however it was character by the left, was actually working as we see.  So Obama came into office and informed people came to him and said, “You know what?  These predators are killing a lot of suspects who need to be killed.  And, you know what?  I don&#8217;t know what to do with Guantanamo.  Where are we going to put these guys?  All the people overseas who want it closed don’t want to take their own citizens.  They’re telling us off the record they don’t want them.  And you know what?  We’re doing renditions all over the world.  And you know what?  This Petraeus-Bush Plan in Iraq seems to be working.  There was almost nobody killed in December.  Can you imagine that?  There was lots of Americans killed in Chicago, but almost no Americans in Iraq.”</p>
<p>And so they came to him, and Obama said, no problem, that he would adjust the narrative.  I’m not saying he said this.  But he was thinking, no problem, I didn’t really mean all this stump shrillness anyway.  All I have to do is just adopt these protocols—never give anybody credit who created them, and then in some cases &#8220;virtually&#8221; close things.  I’ll virtually close Guantanamo.  I’ll virtually try KSM in New   York.  And I will change the relevant names to overseas contingency operations against man-made disasters, and I’ll outlaw the term Islamic extremism.  And, he thought, the left is so bankrupt that they won’t say a thing.  And Hollywood will never make another Rendition or Redacted or Rendition. And Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan will be ancient history. And they will not dare criticize me for doing what Bush did because they don’t want to lose universal healthcare, amnesty, or cap and trade or question my godhead. So he sized up the left perfectly.  He absolutely did.  I think that’s cynical.  Yet in some sense I’m glad he did.</p>
<p>And by the way, there’s a corollary for Republicans and conservatives— they’re bewildered.  They don’t know on the one hand, whether to get angry at him because he tarred and feathered George Bush on really key issues of national security.  We had over 200,000 people fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, while that opportunist ran around the country declaring the surge was lost.  He droned on before Petraeus in the hearings.  He in essence made fun of all these things.  But on the other hand, he now as president has kept them and they’re working. That’s amazing.</p>
<p>So conservatives are really in a quandary.  I think that was cynical.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Do you foresee any consequences to Obama announcing that he will not use nuclear weapons even if we’re attacked with chemical and biological weapons?</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  Yes, I think it’s unfortunate. And what I mean by that is, if I could reduce or distill the logic to, say an Iran, it seems to be something like: &#8216;there’s no need to get a nuclear weapon.  Even if you let some anthrax off or use nerve gas agents in an attack, we’re still not going to nuke you.  So why would you want a nuclear weapon?&#8217;</p>
<p>I think the problem with that logic is that if you start saying all that in advance when Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, Iran, rather than thinking, “Wow, these are really magnanimous people that are trying to reach out to us”, their attitude instead will probably be, “If he’s going to reach out and give us all this assurance before we have a nuclear weapon, just think what he’ll do after we have one.”</p>
<p>And that’s the danger.</p>
<p>So some of this is symbolic, rather than changing radically US policy.  But symbolic gestures are what can cause war so often.  Any other questions?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member</strong>: Towards the end of your talk, you were mentioning how we’d been here before and you were talking about Jimmy Carter.  And I was just wondering, do you think it’s the same?  Because it seems to me it’s much worse this time, you know.</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  The same what?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member</strong>:  Well, do you think we’re facing the same level of danger or chaos in the world?  It seems like it’s much worse this time than what happened when Jimmy Carter let everything fall apart.</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  Well, for all the talk about the end of the Cold War, what was dangerous about Jimmy Carter was he failed to grasp the rise of Radical Islam.  And you can talk about Lebanon.  You can talk about the East Africa bombings.  You can talk about the USS Cole, the first World Trade  Center.  But all of those incidents in a strange sense go back to one incident.  Radical Islam came on the scene with the storming of the US Embassy and the rise of Khomeinism.</p>
<p>Had Jimmy Carter said privately to the Khomeini regime, “You’re going to release the hostages, and if you don’t do it, you’re not going to have a military, an Air Force, a Navy, or the Republican Guard in the next 15 days,” then I think the regime would have balked. We could have taken out their entire air force in a matter of hours in 1979.</p>
<p>But even if such defiance did not save the hostages (and I think it would have earned their release), it would have saved more lives than were lost in the subsequent three decades.  So most of our problems with Radical Islam came from the bad example of the Iranian hostage crisis—as the hostage-taker Mr. Ahmadinejad knew from the start.</p>
<p>There were other things that were stupid, the Iran Contra and all that.  But, nevertheless, that was a key moment.</p>
<p>And if you look Russia—Russia’s not supposedly Soviet-like in intent anymore—but if you look again, it still has nuclear weapons, it still has territorial ambitions, it still frightens Eastern  Europe.  And you add China into the equation with all its capital and financial clout, and I think the world is just as dangerous as it was in 1979, if not more so, given U.S debt and tentativeness.</p>
<p>And there’s one other thing—I am not a big fan of Jimmy Carter, in fact, I think he perhaps proved to be one of the worst of American Presidents that we’ve ever had.  But, compared to Barack Obama, he came into office with executive experience.  He was in the Navy.  He was a one-term governor of Georgia.  Mr. Obama has no similar executive experience whatsoever.  We knew a little bit about Carter. We know in comparison nothing about Barack Obama.  It’s one of the most stealthy Presidencies I’ve ever seen.</p>
<p>If we asked John McCain, during the campaign, for information, he released his entire US Naval Academy transcript.  He released thousands of pages of his medical records, and on and on.  We got one paragraph of summation of the Obama medical records.  We got no transcript from Occidental, none from Columbia.  We don’t know anything about his undergraduate record.  He could be much smarter or much slower than we suspect, but we wouldn’t know and we’re not going to know.  We’re never going to know.  We do know that with Mr. Ayers and Rev. Wright what we don’t know was far greater than what we did know. Yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member</strong>:  Victor, I’m ashamed to say this.  But you write a lot faster than I read, and I haven’t, most especially, read the piece that Karen mentioned that might touch on this.  But one of the things you didn’t address, and I would really invite you to explore with us is one aspect of the threats that you have very well described otherwise that is, I think unique in history, though you would be able to better judge than I, is the internal threat in this country arising from the so-called stealth Jihad or civilization Jihad Dawal.</p>
<p>And to the extent that what we’re seeing in terms of the suppression of our understanding or even our ability to discuss this enemy of, I call it Sharia I think the best term, is, in part, at least, a function of the agenda of those promoting this kind of program.  Have we seen something like this before in history?</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson:</strong> I don&#8217;t think so.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member</strong>:  And what do you think we should best be doing about it?</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  No, I don&#8217;t think so.  In   2009, as you know, there were more terrorist attempts, plots uncovered, in any year since 9/11.  So we do know that all of the Al Arabiya interview, the myth making in Cairo in June where an Islamic pedigree was adduced for everything from the Enlightenment to the Renaissance, a General Casey saying that his big fear was that diversity would be a casualty of the Major Hasan assault—all of that stuff, the report from the former Secretary of the Army that Islamic terrorism was equivalent to other sorts of extremism.  All of that proved of no utility because we still had a plot uncovered to blow up a subway, the so-called panty bomber Christmas Day, the Ft.  Hood killing, and more still to come.</p>
<p>Raymond Ibrahim was here yesterday, and if you look at his Al Qaeda Reader, what’s fascinating about Bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri is that they list all the reasons that caused 9/11.  I counted them.  There were 19.  Yet they include things like the lack of campaign finance reform and the failure to sign Kyoto Treaty.  (Laughter)</p>
<p>So what I’m saying is that these people really do monitor what they think our response will be.  And whether it’s fair or not, a lot of them think that Obama is more than usual sympathetic to front-line states against Israel, that he bought into the argument that Israel weakens American security elsewhere.  That he bought into the idea that Islam was a catalyst for western achievement.  He bought into the idea that he wants to close Guantanamo. All that is very dangerous because it suggests to the unhinged that if you do something, you may not face the same kind of consequences that you otherwise would.  The  fact that you probably will, doesn’t matter; it’s the perception. That’s what scares me.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member</strong>:  Dr. Hanson, I think on a practical level, the issue I’d be most curious to hear you synthesize is your observation that Obama’s sort of multicultural narcissism rejection of Europe as an Anglo-Colonial type of system, how you reconcile that with his seeming infatuation with Europe economically, the growing welfare state collectivist continent.  How those things fit together.</p>
<p><strong>Victor Hanson</strong>:  Well, it actually is not a dichotomy, or a polarity as we might think, and here&#8217;s why.  He does not embrace Europe, Churchill, the Anglo-American alliance that saved civilization in World War II, the uniquely European Enlightenment, the Renaissance,  all the things that made Europe so singular today and in the past.</p>
<p>What he instead embraces is a generation of 1968 in Europe, who  themselves have rejected their own past; the Schroder-type statists, the Green Party Movement in Germany, the hard left in Britain, the anti-American French elite. What he sees is that there is a western elite that has rejected the western tradition.  And, therefore, he can be like them.  He can be a state-socialist like them.  He can be an anti-American like them, and he doesn’t have to like them.</p>
<p>So yes, there is a contradiction, he’s pro-new Europe as anti-old Europe, and yet he rejects Europe as a historical force, he rejects the old Europe and he likes the socialist, anti-Europe new Europe.  Odder still, he flies around in this jet and he promises a hundred billion here and a hundred billion there. and he talks about this summit and everybody’s coming to him for advice, in all of that, he never makes the obvious connection: Why is it that I, Barack Obama, have the most influence in the world?  Why is it that I get to make the decisions?  Why is it that I have the most sophisticated military?  Why is it that my economy is what everybody’s looking to?</p>
<p>He never succeeds to make the connection that the reason is that we have a singular, exceptional Constitution.  The capitalist system produces goods and services like none other.  We have a civil society.  We solved the multiracial problem.  This is the most amazing contribution.  And all that has translated into all these prerogatives— wealth, leisure, opportunities—that Obama enjoys, both before and as President.  And, therefore, every time we go by a grave, we want to thank God for those people who died in Okinawa or thank God at for those who fell Shiloh.  And he doesn’t get that—that he is a beneficiary of a most generous successful tradition whose logic result is his own privilege.</p>
<p>So all that he does comes on the fumes of all these generations who did this. And our president of all people doesn’t have enough character or insight to at least acknowledge that he is a beneficiary of all this.  And I think that’s the most shameless thing about it, a sense of indifference to the very protocols and traditions that allow a U.S. president to have power and influence unrivaled in the word—all impossible if much of Mr. Obama own agenda had been enacted in the past. Thank you.</p>
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		<title>Explaining Different Racial Groups and Different Achievements</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Apr 2010 04:01:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=57519</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A major part of any group's environment is the culture that they have inherited from the past.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/grad.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-57521" title="grad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/grad.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="310" /></a></p>
<p>The blatant and undeniable fact that different racial, ethnic and other groups have had radically different economic and intellectual achievements for centuries, in countries around the world, has led to widely varying theories and widely varying political and other reactions.</p>
<p>A hundred years ago, during the Progressive era in the United States, the dominant explanation was that different genes made different races either more capable or less capable. Similar views prevailed on the other side of the Atlantic, among people on both the left and the right, many of whom urged eugenics, in order to prevent &#8220;inferior&#8221; groups from reproducing.</p>
<p>The problem with this explanation was that it ignored the great changes in the relative positions of races over the centuries. In medieval times, Europeans could not match the achievements of the Chinese, but in later centuries their relative positions reversed— and there was no evidence of any fundamental change in the genes of either the Chinese or the Europeans.</p>
<p>Much was made of the fact that, within Europe, &#8220;Nordics&#8221; were prospering more so than the peoples of Mediterranean Europe. But, a thousand years earlier, the reverse was true. A 10th century Muslim scholar pointed out that the farther north you go in Europe, the more pale the people become and the &#8220;farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.&#8221;</p>
<p>However much such words might be dismissed or condemned today, there is no reason to say that these words were untrue as of the time they were said. So many things that have been said about race may have had some basis as of a given time, even if the sweeping conclusion that these are immutable traits does not stand the test of time.</p>
<p>Today&#8217;s racial dogmas are no more realistic, when they try to dismiss or downplay behavioral and performance differences among racial and ethnic groups, blaming different outcomes on the misdeeds of others. Nothing is easier to find than sins among human beings.</p>
<p>But the fatal misstep is to assume that those sins must be the reason for the differences we see.</p>
<p>The more fundamental question that almost never gets asked is whether there was ever any realistic basis for expecting different racial, ethnic or other groups to all have the same skills and orientations, even if they all had the same genetic potential and there were no injustices.</p>
<p>Those who see differences among groups as being due to environment, rather than heredity, too often think of environment as the current immediate surroundings. But a major part of any group&#8217;s environment is the culture that they have inherited from the past.</p>
<p>One of a number of factors that has made Western Europeans more prosperous than Eastern Europeans is that Western Europe was conquered by the Romans, so that Western European languages acquired Roman letters, centuries before the languages of Eastern Europe had written versions.</p>
<p>Being conquered by the Romans was one of those historic happenstances with enduring consequences. For those who were conquered, it could be a traumatic experience, for the Romans could be both brutal and oppressive.</p>
<p>Their abuses in Britain caused a massive uprising of the Britons, who were slaughtered by the thousands. Nevertheless, even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, &#8220;We owe London to Rome.&#8221;</p>
<p>The enduring cultural advantages that the peoples of Western Europe acquired as a result of being conquered by Rome in no way justifies the Romans morally. But the fact is that the advantages that Roman civilization brought to Western Europe allowed Western Europeans to advance earlier and faster in a wide range of endeavors.</p>
<p>In a similar way, the fact that people of African ancestry in the United States have a far higher standard of living than the people of African ancestry still living in sub-Saharan Africa, is due to injustices and abuses inflicted on black Americans&#8217; ancestors.</p>
<p>Causation and morality are two different things, however much they get confused today by politicians and the media.</p>
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		<title>Drill, Maybe, Drill</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/rich-trzupek/drill-maybe-drill/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=drill-maybe-drill</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/rich-trzupek/drill-maybe-drill/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:09:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rich Trzupek]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=56996</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama gives the green light to offshore drilling, but does it go far enough?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/oil-rig-evelyn-patrick.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56999" title="oil-rig-evelyn-patrick" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/oil-rig-evelyn-patrick.jpg" alt="" width="420" height="315" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The Obama administration opened up some of the nation’s shores to offshore drilling on Wednesday, a move that seemed more political than practical. Ironically, environmentalists and conservatives inadvertently found common ground when criticizing the plan: it won’t do all that much to create true energy independence. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell praised the move, but qualified his support by noting that it was &#8220;a small one that leaves enormous amounts of American energy off limits.” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune felt much the same way, for different reasons of course, saying that &#8220;drilling our coasts will [do] nothing to lower gas prices or create energy independence.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama opened up offshore drilling along much of the Atlantic coast and in the Cook Inlet in Alaska. The drilling ban remains in place along the Pacific coast and most of Alaska, while more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico remains under study. Accordingly, this is merely a partial measure, as both McConnell and Brune imply. But, Brune’s assertion that more drilling will do nothing to lower gas prices is likely incorrect. Gas and oil prices depend in large part on the futures market and the prospect of more supply down the road, even a little more, will help to depress futures prices. Back in 2008, when gasoline prices were over four dollars per gallon, president Bush moved to open up offshore drilling. That announcement had the desired effect. Gasoline prices dropped, not because there was an immediate increase in supply, but because the market responded to the prospect of increased supplies down the road.</p>
<p>It’s worth remembering how the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/02/campaign.wrap/">Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responded</a> when Bush pushed for more offshore drilling in 2008:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The president has failed in his economic policy, and now he wants to say, &#8216;but for drilling in protected areas offshore, our economy would be thriving and the price of gas would be lower.&#8217; That hoax is unworthy of the serious debate we must have to relieve the pain of consumers at the pump and to promote energy independence.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Did Speaker Pelosi complain about Obama’s drilling initiative in similar terms, or at all? You don’t need Google to answer that question. Yet, the last sentence in Pelosi’s 2008 attack still largely applies, for if Obama’s plan isn’t actually a hoax, it doesn’t go nearly far enough towards fulfilling the worthy goal of energy independence. This move feels like a bargaining chip, but – having already flipped it onto the table – it’s hard to see how this ploy will help the administration. Ideally, Obama would like to pass a comprehensive energy bill that includes cap and trade, or some other form of greenhouse gas reduction measures. Now that he has “given in” on offshore drilling, does the president expect Republican support for an energy bill in return? That seems an unlikely scenario, given how unpopular greenhouse gas reduction measures are among the public and the GOP.</p>
<p>Environmental groups are upset with the president over his latest move, but their anger will pass, especially with new motor vehicle fleet fuel efficiency standards going into effect and as Obama pushes cap and trade back into the spotlight. Both moves will go a long way to soothing hurt feelings. Still, it was amusing to hear the rhetoric from the environmental crowd after the president relaxed the offshore drilling ban. &#8220;Short of sending Sarah Palin back to Alaska to personally club polar bears to death, the Obama administration could not have come up with a more efficient extinction plan for the polar bear,&#8221; <a href="http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/04/01/general-us-obama-drilling_7480716.html?boxes=Homepagebusinessnews">Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity complained</a>.</p>
<p>The <em>Christian Science Monitor</em> had to reach back <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/0401/Obama-and-offshore-drilling-a-crude-move">more than forty years</a> to find an environmental incident it could use to smear offshore drilling: “In 1969, off Santa   Barbara, Calif., 3 million gallons of crude oil bubbled up from the seabed after a blowout on an oil-drilling platform,” the <em>Monitor</em> said in an April 1 editorial. The fact that they had to dig that deeply in the archives to find a significant incident is a testament to how much drilling technology has evolved. In fact, some scientific data indicates that <em>not drilling</em> hurts the environment more than doing so. A <a href="http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=412">1999 study by the University of California, Santa Barbara</a> concluded that offshore drilling reduces oil seepage on the ocean floor, by reducing pressure on undersea petroleum reservoirs.</p>
<p>If the president wants to increase domestic energy production with more than just a token gesture, there’s a number of substantive moves that he could make, but the sorts of policies that would markedly boost homegrown energy in the long run are precisely the sorts of policies that would send the green faction of his base screaming over the edge of sanity in righteous horror and indignation, rather than seeing them merely grumble about a relatively minor change in policy that will be forgotten in a week or two.</p>
<p>If Obama really wanted to boost domestic energy production and give the economy a shot in the arm, opening up ANWR would be a nice start. Tapping the vast petroleum reserves locked away under federal lands in the west would be another fine move, as would drilling along the Pacific coast, the Gulf of Mexico and further into Alaskan enclaves. We all know that none of this is going to happen. Still, if the president isn’t going to go “all in” as far as domestic gas and oil production is concerned, I suppose we must be grateful that he tossed a chip into the pot, even if it’s one that is relatively unimportant to him.</p>
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		<title>The True Face of J Street</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/moshe-phillips/the-true-face-of-j-street-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-true-face-of-j-street-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:03:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Moshe Phillips]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is it really "pro-Israel" to call out for talks with Hamas?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/heschelgreen.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53732" title="heschelgreen" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/heschelgreen.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="329" /></a></p>
<p>J Street, the controversial pressure group, explains on the &#8220;About Us&#8221; page on its official website that &#8220;J Street is the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.” Since its inception in 2008, J Street has undergone growth that must be considered no less than remarkable.</p>
<p>In large part, the success of J Street has occurred without any serious investigations into how this group grew so incredibly fast and just where it came from.</p>
<p>Jeffrey  Goldberg, writing for <em>The Atlantic </em>on October 27, 2009, stated “J Street grew organically, and continues to grow organically.” Goldberg’s essay was published during J Street’s first conference. The conference was held near Capitol Hill and 1,500 delegates attended. An October 29m, JTA news service report stated “activists had meetings in 210 of the 535 lawmakers&#8217; offices on the Hill, including about 100 meetings with the lawmakers themselves…”</p>
<p>Organic? How could such a new group create such a powerful infrastructure and nurture such impressive contacts so quickly? There should be no doubt that J Street came from somewhere. The question is from where?</p>
<p>The  statement on the &#8220;<a href="http://www.jstreet.org/about/about-us">About Us</a>&#8221; page goes on to state:</p>
<blockquote><p>“J Street was founded to change the dynamics of American politics and policy on Israel and the Middle East. We believe the security and future of Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people depend on rapidly achieving a two-state solution and regional comprehensive peace. Our mission is to promote meaningful American leadership to achieve peace and security in the Middle East and to broaden the debate on these issues nationally and in the Jewish community.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>On J Street  website’s “Myths and Facts about J Street” page, J Street declares:</p>
<blockquote><p>“J Street&#8217;s Advisory Council consists of over 170 prominent Americans &#8211; including three Former Members of Congress, 28 Rabbis, a number of former Jewish community leaders and professionals, and many others.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Researchers with the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans For A Safe Israel/AFSI initiated a study of the rabbis connected to J Street in order to understand just what the backgrounds of “former Jewish community leaders” involved in J Street are. What light can be shed on J Street’s agenda by examining its structure and organization?</p>
<p>Being Philadelphia based, AFSI researchers had prior familiarity with many of these players. A large number of J Street rabbis have played senior leadership roles in the Pennsylvania based Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the locally headquartered network of Jewish Renewal organizations. A cadre of these individuals were also leaders of the now defunct Philadelphia chapter of New Jewish Agenda, which was specifically noted for its radical stance &#8212; even in that radical group.</p>
<p>The results  of the AFSI research into these rabbis is startling.</p>
<p>A JTA report from October 25, 2009 stated that “The left-wing lobby J Street is absorbing Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom&#8217;s chapters and rabbinic wing.”</p>
<p>The national president of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom at the time of the merger was Steve Masters. Masters is a Philadelphia attorney and a former leader of the Philadelphia Chapter of the New Jewish Agenda. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street, was introduced by Masters at a local kick-off event in Philadelphia on February 4, 2010.</p>
<p>Many of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s rabbis were among the founders and key activists of New Jewish Agenda including Rabbi Gerald Serotta, Arthur Waskow, Rabbi Everett Gendler and others. Serotta, Waskow and Gendler are also all involved in a group called Jewish Fast For Gaza – but more on that later. Waskow attended the February 4, 2010 event also.</p>
<p>It is well worth noting that many of these rabbis were first involved in an organization called Breira (meaning alternative) that was universally opposed by almost all sectors of the American Jewish community. I. L. Kenen the founder of AIPAC claimed that Breira &#8220;undermined U.S. support for Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>The majority of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom/J Street rabbis hold radical views that go far past anything that even Breira advocated in its hay day.</p>
<p>Half of the  rabbis on J Street’s Advisory Council were members of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s  Rabbinic Cabinet &#8211; before the merge.</p>
<p>There is a very significant overlap between the rabbis from Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom and the Jewish Fast for Gaza group. Fast for Gaza made its first public announcement in July 2009. Rabbi Brian Walt was listed as the contact for the group’s initial press release. Walt is a member of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.fastforgaza.net/statement">Fast  for Gaza group purpose</a> is &#8220;To call upon Israel, the US, and the international community to engage in negotiations without pre-conditions with all relevant Palestinian parties &#8211; including Hamas &#8211; in order to end the blockade…&#8221;</p>
<p>Here are  the facts:</p>
<p>More than half of the seventy-eight rabbis listed on the Fast for Gaza website are also members of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet. Put another way, about 12.5 % of all of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet are involved with the Fast for Gaza and call for talks with Hamas.</p>
<p>For example, Rabbi Arthur Green is listed by J Street as an Advisory Council member. Green is a former dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) and was a prominent member of Breira. Another Advisory Council member is the former president of RRC, Rabbi David A. Teutsch. Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, a former director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, is on Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet and is a “Rabbinical Supporter of the Fast for Gaza”. Teutsch too attended J Street’s February 4, 2010 event.</p>
<p>Breira. New Jewish Agenda. Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom. Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Is J Street really just old wine in a new bottle? Has this wine turned to vinegar? Where are the likes of I. L. Kenen among today’s American Jewish leaders to stand up to J Street? An article on the website of the <em>Forward</em> newspaper (December 9, 2009) states that Israel&#8217;s Ambassador Michael Oren recently publicly labeled J Street as &#8220;a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments. It&#8217;s significantly out of the mainstream&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Ambassador Oren should have been applauded for his statement. And loudly. After all, shouldn’t it be apparent to even the casual observer that forces within the highest echelons of the Obama Administration and/or the Democratic Party are assisting J Street, or perhaps even pulling its strings?</p>
<p><em>Moshe Phillips is a member of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel/AFSI. The chapter&#8217;s website is at: <a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/www.phillyafsi.com" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">phillyafsi.com</span></a> and Moshe&#8217;s blog can be found at <a href="http://phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com/" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com</span></a>.</em></p>
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		<title>Seven Miracles that Saved America &#8211; by David Forsmark</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/seven-miracles-that-saved-america-by-david-forsmark/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=seven-miracles-that-saved-america-by-david-forsmark</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:10:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=44450</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new book examines the overwhelming odds the U.S. beat to become a nation.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-44481" title="miracle" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/miracle.gif" alt="miracle" width="450" height="473" /></p>
<p><em>Seven Miracles that Saved </em><em>America<br />
Why they Matter, Why We Should Have Hope</em></p>
<p>By Chris Stewart and Ted Stewart<br />
Shadow Mountain, $27.95, 311 pp.<br />
Review by David Forsmark</p>
<p><em>“In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine protection &#8212; Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. &#8230; I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs the affairs of men!&#8221;</em></p>
<p align="right"><strong><em>—Benjamin Franklin, 1787</em></strong></p>
<p><em>&#8220;There is no overwhelming proof, but deep inside we know. And to those who believe, it also seems clear that these events took place with the direction and purpose. Despite our weaknesses, which are many, and our failings, which have existed since our inception, God has been willing to intervene so that this nation might survive.” </em></p>
<p align="right"><strong><em>&#8211; Chris and Ted Stewart, 2009</em></strong></p>
<p>The Founding Fathers regularly wrote that they considered themselves to be doing God’s work in establishing the United States. This habit was not just confined to the conspicuously devout, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams but also to such secular saints as Jefferson and Franklin, the so-called Deists.  More to the point, they fervently believed &#8212; and often asserted &#8212; that God in his Providence actively intervened in events to make their efforts successful.</p>
<p>Today, we often dismiss such rhetoric as “just the way people talked back then” and explain how politicians of a certain era used it to rally an overwhelmingly religious populace behind them.</p>
<p>In their terrific new book, <em>Seven Miracles that Saved America: Why they Matter, Why We Should Have Hope, </em>former Air Force officer Chris Stewart and his brother, U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart, argue forcefully that the Founders not only <em>meant</em> what they said, but they were <em>right</em>.</p>
<p>The Stewarts look at seven instances in which overwhelming odds had to be beaten for the United States to exist in its current form. While some might argue over their meaning or the significance of some of their “miracles,” the unlikely circumstances that saved the day in several cases will have even a hardcore secularist taking a second look:</p>
<p>·         The extraordinary unlikelihood that America was colonized due to the efforts of an ambitious navigator with humble beginnings  &#8211; rather than perhaps the greatest fleet ever assembled for just such a purpose&#8211; which “discovered” North America about 70 years before Columbus.</p>
<p>·         The million-to-one odds that saved the English colonization of America as a fleet crossing the Atlantic arrives in Jamestown minutes before it was to be abandoned.</p>
<p>·         The fortuitous fog that saved Washington’s army that was as well-timed &#8212; and accurate &#8212; as any artillery smokescreen.</p>
<p>·         The discovery of the Japanese fleet heading toward Midway in the vastness of the Pacific during World War II by an American reconnaissance airplane extending its search well beyond its operational range.</p>
<p>While this book makes a theological and political point, the emphasis in <em>Seven Miracles that Saved America </em>is on storytelling. The Stewarts employ an unusual device &#8212; novelizing part of each chapter, much like the Shaaras or Alan Eckert — while sticking to known facts and actual quotes. This makes for an extremely engaging, if rather quirky, narrative.</p>
<p>The authors open with the fascinating — and not well known account &#8212; of how America should have been colonized by the Chinese, rather than by Western Europeans.  Even if the Chinese did not discover the American continents, though it seems likely they <em>should</em> have, with their massive fleet and more advanced technology.</p>
<p>However, the glorious fleet that was sent on a mission of discovery, returned to a China that had changed and become inward-focused and xenophobic. The records of the exploration were burned, and the fabled fleet was left to rot, along with China’s expansionist ambitions.  (For more on this, check out last year’s interesting, if flawed, book, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/dp/0061564893/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1261012960&amp;sr=8-1">1421</a>.)</em></p>
<p>The next chapter, <em>The Miracle at Jamestown</em>, continues the discussion of the religious and cultural nature of those who colonized America and why it was important. While the Stewarts propose the obvious, that those who followed Columbus were culturally very different than the navy of Zheng He, the authors assert it was also very important that a Protestant presence be established in America. They contend the competition among Christian sects led to the religious diversity and tolerance that formed the basis of the United States.</p>
<p>Their story of how close Jamestown came to failure and abandonment is gripping reading.  How it was saved is one of the more convincing cases for the word “miracle” in the book—along with the “mysterious fog” that saved Washington’s army in New York in the Revolutionary War, allowing him to pull off a Dunkirk-like evacuation and live to fight another day.</p>
<p>Many might put the circumstances of extraordinary events down to the American character that results from free men, for the first time in history, being allowed to operate on principles of liberty.  It’s not unusual, for instance, to hear the term “the miracle of the Constitution.”  It’s just unusual — today, at least — for it to be meant as literally as the Stewarts’ assert.</p>
<p>This is particularly true in the chapters in which the authors see the hand of God in the timing of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan assuming the presidency in times of crisis.</p>
<p>Easily the most controversial chapter &#8212; and the most likely to raise the ire of some country club Republicans, much less Democrats — is the chapter saying that Ronald Reagan not only won the Cold War but also saved America.</p>
<p>The Stewarts, however, point out that George H.W. Bush, while a good man, <em>did</em> call the Reagan economic agenda “voodoo economics” during the Republican primaries. Even if Bush 41 truly was aboard, he would not have had the political oomph to push it through a Democrat-controlled Congress.</p>
<p>More importantly, Bush was from the “realist” foreign policy tradition, which would have looked for “stability” and détente over real change. The most persuasive point the authors make here is to remind us that, after all of Reagan’s successes in putting the USSR on the ropes, Bush ordered a “reassessment” of U.S. relations with the Soviets upon taking office.</p>
<p>While the first Bush administration was “reassessing,” communism collapsed, and 41 was too surprised to even celebrate the Berlin Wall coming down, as Reagan had predicted.</p>
<p>Of course, such pivotal battles as Gettysburg and Midway had hundreds of little moments that one could argue “changed the course of history.” In the case of Midway, for example, the authors are persuasive in their argument that nearly every one of those moments miraculously went the Americans’ way.</p>
<p>In the case of Gettysburg, for instance, they could easily have titled the chapter, “The Miracle of Friendly Fire.”  Had Stonewall Jackson, the South’s best tactician and Lee’s greatest commander been with him at Gettysburg … who knows?  Jackson was easily the most important figure in American military history to be mistakenly shot by his own troops.</p>
<p>Those of a determinedly secular mindset may be apt to dismiss this book too quickly.  Even if you reject the premise out of hand and prefer to think of it as “<em>Seven Statistically Wildly Improbable Coincidences that Saved </em><em>America</em><em>,”</em> this book is worth your time.</p>
<p>In each case, the Stewarts do a masterful job of setting the stage of not only why the odds were stacked against the outcome we take for granted but also in reminding us of what was at stake.  Each chapter, it could be argued, is as good a one-chapter treatment of a momentous time as you are likely to find anywhere—particularly setting the stage for the Civil War, and demolishing the notion that slavery was a side issue.</p>
<p>Which brings us to the authors’ ultimate point. As bad as things seem now, America has been much closer to the precipice in its history. The Stewarts write that if God did not let the nation fail, or fall to its enemies then, there is no reason to suppose he is done with America yet.</p>
<p>The end may not be near after all.</p>
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		<title>Andrew Sullivan Unhinged &#8211; by Peter Collier</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/petercollier/andrew-sullivan-unhinged-by-peter-collier/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-sullivan-unhinged-by-peter-collier</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/petercollier/andrew-sullivan-unhinged-by-peter-collier/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:09:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43748</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The blogger as slavish Obama apologist.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43749" title="sullivan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/sullivan.gif" alt="sullivan" width="450" height="299" /></p>
<p>Andrew Sullivan seems increasingly unhinged these days. The creepy, Torquemada-like obsession with Sarah Palin continues as he rummages through her book in a deranged act of <em>explication de texte</em>, functions as a one man birther movement laying out loony speculations about the owners of the orifices out of which Trig and Tripp slid, and continues to worship the sleazy dudeitude of Levi Johnson.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Sullivan slavishly justifies Obama on every count, including his administration’s sneaky efforts to smuggle “progressives” into policy making positions under the radar of Congressional scrutiny. Recently it was support for his appointment of Hannah Rosenthal as head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Because she seems to share some part of his own fanged venom for Israel, Sullivan sees her as a Promethean truth teller being shut down by what his soul mate Pat Buchanan once called “the amen corner.”</p>
<p>After my old friend Ron Radosh rightly criticized her for attacking Israel’s U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren as a result of critical remarks he made about the egregious organization J Street, Sullivan hit him as a “neo con likudnik.” But when Sullivan tuned in to his own esteemed <em>Atlantic</em> colleague Jeffrey Goldberg for an opinion, Goldberg instead confirmed Radosh’s position, indicating that he was absolutely baffled that Rosenthal should make someone like Oren the first target of what is supposed to be a campaign against anti-Semitism. (Doesn’t she find a crusade worth undertaking in the way that the new addiction to Jew hatred has migrated from the Middle East to Europe and is presently getting established in our own country, where people like Sullivan can experiment with Walt-Mearshemerism as a no fault gateway drug?)</p>
<p>Even when Sullivan is good he’s bad. Today he gives good coverage to cell phone images of the bloody street action in Teheran. (And indeed, he has been good on Iran in all the months since the election was stolen.) But even here, his pro-Obama contextualizing of events neutralizes his support of the protestors. What moral does he draw from their incredible bravery in defying the regime’s street thug murderers? That the world is lucky to have “Obama’s reticence” at this critical moment because by not criticizing the obscene Iranian regime, our President “removes from Ahmadinejad the convenient weapon of demonizing the protests as pawns of the Great Satan.”</p>
<p>Take a moment to get this straight: it’s a good thing we have a president who, to keep himself pure for that ultimate negotiation on nukes that will never come, refrains from using some of that synthetic eloquence of his to put us on the side of people who are getting cut down in the streets. By such scurvy logic, it was wrong of Ronald Reagan to go to Moscow and speak to and about the dissidents and their heroic struggle against totalitarianism because it might have given ammunition to wardens of the gulag. And wrong to have been unequivocally on the side of Solidarity. And so on.</p>
<p>Word smuggled out of Teheran has told us that the protestors themselves would like a little U.S. affirmation so they won’t feel they are dying in the dark. And the citizens of our own country could certainly use the reassurance about the values we stand for, via a word or two in behalf of the demonstrators, especially after being subjected to a punishing year-long Presidential apology tour for American exceptionalism. But from Obama we get only beseeching admonitions that are far too little and always too late and always undermined by the reluctance with which they are delivered. This has become a vain, small-minded and morally anemic presidency that only someone like Andrew Sullivan could love.</p>
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		<title>Security reviews under way after airliner attack &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/security-reviews-under-way-after-airliner-attack-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=security-reviews-under-way-after-airliner-attack-ap</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:44:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43706</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Investigators piecing together a brazen attempt to bring down a trans-Atlantic airliner said Sunday the suspect tucked a small bag holding his deadly concoction on his body, using an explosive that would have been easily detected with the right airport equipment. His success in smuggling and partially igniting the material on Friday&#8217;s flight to Detroit [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Investigators piecing together a brazen attempt to bring down a trans-Atlantic airliner said Sunday the suspect tucked a small bag holding his deadly concoction on his body, using an explosive that would have been easily detected with the right airport equipment.</p>
<p>His success in smuggling and partially igniting the material on Friday&#8217;s flight to Detroit prompted the Obama administration to promise a sweeping review of aviation security.</p>
<p>Adding to the airborne jitters, a second Nigerian man was detained Sunday from the same Northwest flight to Detroit after he locked himself in the plane&#8217;s bathroom. Officials reported that he was belligerent but genuinely sick, and that, in an abundance of caution, the plane was taken to a remote location for screening before passengers were let off.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091228/ap_on_go_ot/us_airliner_attack;_ylt=AsFZ7PiETVkdlpYCigRZHzqs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTNpN3EwOWxiBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkxMjI4L3VzX2FpcmxpbmVyX2F0dGFjawRjY29kZQNtb3N0cG9wdWxhcgRjcG9zAzEEcG9zAzIEcHQDaG9tZV9jb2tlBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcnkEc2xrA3NlY3VyaXR5cmV2aQ--">Security reviews under way after airliner attack &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Marijuana and Conservatism Debate &#8211; by FrontPagemag.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/frontpagemag-com/the-marijuana-and-conservatism-debate-by-frontpagemag-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-marijuana-and-conservatism-debate-by-frontpagemag-com</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/frontpagemag-com/the-marijuana-and-conservatism-debate-by-frontpagemag-com/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=43121</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Professor Mary Grabar and NewsReal's David Swindle go toe-to-toe on the right response to the war on drugs.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-43122" title="marijuana flag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/marijuana-flag.jpg" alt="marijuana flag" width="350" height="344" /></p>
<p><strong>Professor and writer Mary Grabar had a recent piece at Pajamas Media responding to the death of a man who choked on a baggie of marijuana. Grabar wrote a critique of libertarians&#8217; advocacy for legalized marijuana in response. FrontPage&#8217;s Associate Editor, David Swindle, engaged Grabar in debate at NewsReal Blog. Grabar was gracious enough to respond at NewsReal. FrontPage presents this dialogue thus far. </strong></p>
<p><strong>David Swindle:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/libertarians-need-to-rethink-support-for-drug-legalization/" target="_blank">At Pajamas Media today Mary Grabar</a>, a thoughtful writer and an acquaintance, has an effective piece in response to a recent tragic death which has reopened an important issue that’s not discussed nearly enough:</p>
<blockquote><p>A truly sad story about a 23-year-old Panama City man dying while being subdued by Bay County sheriff’s deputies has reawakened the debate about the legalization of marijuana. On December 11, 2009, Andrew Grande choked on a plastic bag full of marijuana as police attempted to arrest him on a violence charge. A video shows police valiantly trying to <a href="http://www.newsherald.com/news/want-79863-nobody-beach.html"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">save his life</span></a> once it became apparent that he was having difficulty breathing.</p>
<p>Two talk show hosts in Panama City have been discussing the case in the early morning hours — and revealing a divide on the right. <a href="http://burniethompson.com/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Burnie Thompson</span></a> of WYOO, the libertarian, has called Grande “<a href="http://www.talkradio101.com/archives/AM/AM-Tue-12-15-hour__01.mp3"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">a casualty of the war on drugs</span></a>” and contended that because marijuana is illegal, Grande felt “compelled” to swallow a bag of it to avoid punishment.</p></blockquote>
<p>Mary then presents a number of pro-drug war arguments and rebuttals to common libertarian, pro-legalization points. She highlights the traditional role of alcohol and the countercultural nature of marijuana. She points out that marijuana use  hampers,</p>
<blockquote><p>the work ethic, emotional engagement, sexual inhibition, and the ability to reason.</p></blockquote>
<p>She notices that her stoner students who advocate for drug legalization do so in an incoherent fashion. She invokes conservative icon Barry Goldwater. (However she fails to mention that <a href="http://reason.com/archives/1997/02/01/prescription-drugs">Goldwater supported medicinal marijuana</a> in his later years.)</p>
<p>I’m sorry Mary but I remain thoroughly unpersuaded.</p>
<p>The arguments for drug legalization are numerous, and so as to avoid being dismissed as one of Prof. Grabar’s Jeff Spicoli students I’ll focus on one. (If Mary would like to engage the issue further then perhaps I’ll offer more.)</p>
<p>A single question for which all self-described “conservatives” should have a fairly similar answer: what is the purpose of the government as the founders intended?</p>
<p>The federal government does not exist to make the world better. It’s not here to eliminate poverty. (Look at inner city ghettos to see how effective the Left’s efforts have been.) It’s not supposed to try and make sure that more people can buy homes. (Look at the economic crash of 2008.) The founders never intended a government which would <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=180&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">require all citizens to buy health insurance</a>. (Look into a crystal ball of how the next few years will turn out.) When government is shifted toward bringing about some form of utopia it <em>fails</em>.</p>
<p>The purpose of government is to protect a free society. It’s to allow for a country in which the individual is sovereign, in which every man and woman can pursue his own destiny as they see fit. If they want to create jobs and raise families they can. If they want to destroy themselves then that’s their freedom.</p>
<p>So how does throwing people into jail for growing and consuming a plant fit into this understanding of government?</p>
<p>It does not.</p>
<p>Thus it makes sense that Goldwater was hardly the only important conservative whose opinion of marijuana softened over the years. William F. Buckley, Jr. went even further, advocating full-blown legalization in 2004. Perhaps it’s best <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200406291207.asp" target="_blank">we close with some of his words</a> on the subject:</p>
<blockquote><p>And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or — exulting in life in the paradigm — committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?</p>
<p>Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening, in the matter of marijuana. There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of these — 87 percent — involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10-15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone. Most transgressors caught using marijuana aren’t packed away to jail, but some are, and in Alabama, if you are convicted three times of marijuana possession, they’ll lock you up for 15 years to life. Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in <em>National Review</em>, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Such reforms would hugely increase the use of the drug? Why? It is de facto legal in the Netherlands, and the percentage of users there is the same as here. The Dutch do odd things, but here they teach us a lesson.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Mary Grabar:</strong></p>
<p>I will respond to your post, David, because it, like many of the posts in response to my column points to a very important divide in the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=156&amp;type=issue" target="_blank">conservative</a>/libertarian  movement.  Thank you for the opportunity.</p>
<p>Your post also points to a war of ideas, a war that conservative strategists have ignored to their peril.  We lost the last election because we lost the culture war.  I make that claim based on my experience of teaching college for almost twenty years.  I have been in the middle of the culture wars, have seen its impact on young people and seen it played out on the political field.  Make no mistake about it: The Left strategized for the long term and outlined their plans in 1962 in the <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6723" target="_blank">Port Huron Statement</a>.</p>
<p>Conservatives  have been playing defense ever since.  My tenured Leftist colleagues  declare victory publicly and loudly.</p>
<p>Many,  including those on our side, have simply forgotten the traditions and  values that inform the fight. <img title="More..." src="http://newsrealblog.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p>Many of the young have been brought up on the liberalism now reigning in our culture.  It is a culture that says that all values are relative, that all matters of morality are a function of personal choice.  This also seems to be the tack of a certain strain of libertarianism.</p>
<p>These libertarians rightly want to be left alone to live their lives.  They want to be free to make their own decisions about health care and how they spend their money.  They want to be free to protect themselves with firearms.  I agree with all these goals.</p>
<p>But I often see something very reactionary in the responses that are made whenever laws affecting such social issues as drug use or prostitution come into play.  An apt display is radio talk show host Burnie Thompson’s reference to Andrew Grande [who swallowed the bag of marijuana] as “a casualty of the war on drugs.”  The statement, of course, ignores a central tenet of libertarianism, which is personal responsibility.</p>
<p>I think it also points to a certain absolutist world view, which goes something like “if we put any restrictions on marijuana all our freedoms are at peril.”  But this absolutist worldview is based on an either/or fallacy.  It promotes anarchy more than libertarianism.  It assumes that we are a society of atomistic individuals; it can exist only in a cultural vacuum.  The fact that I am accused of advocating “collectivism” because I favor keeping marijuana illegal I think is indicative.</p>
<p>It  is displayed, I think, by your proclamation,</p>
<blockquote><p>“The federal government does not exist to make the world better.  It’s not here to eliminate poverty. . . . It’s not supposed to try and make sure people can buy homes. . . . The founders never intended a government which would require all citizens to buy health insurance. . . . When government is shifted toward bringing about some form of utopia it fails.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I agree on all these points, but fail to see how they are connected to the legalization of marijuana.  Certainly, our government regulates substances it deems dangerous, doesn’t it?  It regulates certain drugs by prescription and outlaws others that are deadly.  That government regulation of a substance considered harmful will necessarily lead to infringements on all our freedoms seems to be a slippery slope argument.</p>
<p>Like many of my detractors, you point to the harmlessness of the drug.  But people are not thrown “in jail” for “growing and consuming a plant.”  Surely, you would have to agree that marijuana is not just a “plant” that you would grow in your garden, like spinach.  In fact, a better analogy might the one of growing poppies to produce opium.</p>
<p>Part of the absolutism is the refusal to acknowledge any of the dangers associated with marijuana or the concessions I made about the dangers of alcohol.  In my column I compared smoking marijuana to drinking alcohol, which I think is apt, depending on the strain of marijuana.  Both are used socially, both are relaxants, and both can be addictive.  The debate centers on legality.</p>
<p>Although marijuana is illegal, the punishment for its possession (alone) usually is very light. What legalization proponents (including William F. Buckley) don’t say is that many of those perpetrators serving prison sentences supposedly for “drug possession” have pled their cases down or are repeat offenders with long histories of other crimes, including violent crime.  So in effect they are not serving sentences for smoking a joint in their living rooms as many imply.</p>
<p>Those who do smoke in their homes (without any punishment I might add) say, “Look, I smoke every day and pull in six figures and pay my taxes, don’t beat my wife or kids, etc., etc.” That may be true.  It is also true for functioning alcoholics.</p>
<p>Again, the similarities between the two substances, and I revert back to an argument based on tradition and specifically our Judeo-Christian heritage.  I openly—and non-relativistically—assert that it is a heritage that is superior to all others.  I base my arguments on this premise.</p>
<p>The fact that I am accused of being a theocrat for simply invoking our cultural heritage and advocating for its values again points to an absolutism on the part of these libertarians, and I think, implicitly a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundations of our culture.  Many of my detractors are absolutely hostile to the mere mention of the Bible or of why we should pay attention to it.</p>
<p>Such an attitude I think springs from an ignorance of history and a lack of appreciation for the roots of our culture, the very culture that supported the founding of this republic.  Like T.S. Eliot in “The Idea of a Christian Society,” I make the argument on a broad philosophical basis.  You can be an atheist and still appreciate the virtues of our Christian heritage.  If you are philosophically honest, you will see that, as a worldview, Christianity was the first that admitted that “all men are created equal.”  I came upon this fact, not in reading some religious tract, but an article by Francis Fukuyama in the liberal magazine the Atlantic.</p>
<p>In order to invoke the founding fathers, one needs to understand the cultural tradition they drew from.  They read deeply and drew upon the rich traditions of Western thought.  They agree with George Washington as he says in his Farewell Address, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. . . .  Who that is a sincere friend [to our form of government] can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”  I believe I was pointing beyond the isolated use of marijuana to the foundations.</p>
<p>Barry  Goldwater in <em>The Conscience of a Majority</em> bemoaned the decay of morality, of the acceptance of the once “unthinkable” that “eventually could bring about the destruction of our free society”:  “The ‘unthinkable’ says automatically that because of ‘changing times’ we not only must alter our old methods of living, but we also must change all of our previously held attitudes.  Thus, you find a vicious and growing attack directed at every tradition, every standard and belief—no matter how fundamental it might be to an ordered society of freedom and justice. . .”  I think we see this now with libertarian arguments that argue along lines divorced from tradition, standard, and belief.  The “unthinkable” also concerns those behaviors that on their face have no harmful effects.  One of these might be public nudity.  I can imagine an “unthinkable” scene, of nude citizens in the public square smoking joints.  It’s funny, but logically consistent with the arguments of those who would legalize marijuana and all other non-harmful behaviors. Our culture since Goldwater’s writing has accepted many, many other once “unthinkable” acts, usually to the detriment of our society.</p>
<p>For  arguments based on practical reasons, I encourage readers to look up  the comments of my friend Tina Trent who <a href="http://crimevictimsmediareport.com/" target="_blank">blogs  on crime</a>.  She gives many good reasons why legalization won’t lower crime rates.  In my column, I also linked an article that indicated that the legalization of marijuana in certain states has given young people the idea that it is safe.  It is not safe.  It has serious health effects.  It is addictive.  I personally know people who smoke it every day.  They started young.  One started after being in a motorcycle accident and used it for pain.  These are people who are supporting themselves, true.  But they are people who are operating way below capacity, who have lost the ability to think logically or to care enough to argue logically.  Their emotional relationships are shallow.  They have lost initiative and that fighting spirit that defends the idea of liberty.</p>
<p>Why  now put the imprimatur of legality on a substance that does this?</p>
<p>One of the things that sets our culture above others is that we are a nation of laws—reasonable laws.  And laws for possession of small amounts of marijuana need to remain at the misdemeanor level.  This does not take away our freedom to use drugs in a legitimate manner, nor detract from our other freedoms.</p>
<p>The culture warriors of the 1960s used a multi-pronged approach to effecting a change in “consciousness.”  One of those was to present the “unthinkable” in libertarian terms.  Nudity, sex out in the open, orgies, destruction of public places, desecration of art—why not?  The acceptance of all kinds of behavior, including some extremely self-destructive behavior, by my students worries me.  They cannot articulate reasons why some behaviors—even those that seemingly affect only individuals—should be condemned.  They cannot articulate reasons why our culture is superior to others.</p>
<p>Conservatives need to focus on educating young people who have been kept in ignorance about how our culture and country have provided them the freedoms they now enjoy. As Goldwater said in 1964, there is no freedom without law and order. The debate about drug laws entails larger questions about cultural values.  To argue in an arid, absolutist manner is to indicate a certain disregard for our heritage.</p>
<p>As I see it, this debate really is about more than whether or not you smoke a joint in your living room—which for all practical purposes neither I nor the cop on the street much cares about.  What I do care about is this one more capitulation in the Culture Wars.</p>
<p><strong>David Swindle:</strong></p>
<p>Mary Grabar&#8217;s response in our debate about drug criminalization has clarified her opposition to marijuana legalization in an important way. She concluded her essay with these words:</p>
<blockquote><p>As I see it, this debate really is about more than whether or not you smoke a joint in your living room—which for all practical purposes neither I nor the cop on the street much cares about.  What I do care about is this one more capitulation in the Culture Wars.</p></blockquote>
<p>Mary is certainly intelligent and reasonable enough to acknowledge what is plainly obvious: marijuana is not functionally different in its effects than alcohol or tobacco and we should not be too concerned with adults using it responsibly in their own homes.</p>
<p>So why keep it banned? Why all the numerous arguments highlighting marijuana&#8217;s negative qualities? Simple: because in Mary&#8217;s estimation to allow legalization would be to grant a victory to the counterculture. And, well, we as conservatives can&#8217;t have that. Or can we?<img title="More..." src="http://newsrealblog.com/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif" alt="" /></p>
<p>Here&#8217;s an argument that might be rather counter-intuitive: conservatism and counterculture are in no way mutually exclusive. I&#8217;ve blogged about this before here in <a href="http://newsrealblog.com/2009/07/23/comedy-central-douglas-rushkoff-talks-corporations-with-stephen-colbert-draft/" target="_blank">talking about author Douglas Rushkoff&#8217;s brand of Robert Anton Wilson-influenced libertarian counterculture</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Wait a second,&#8221; some people must be thinking. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t the counterculture the same as the Left?&#8221;</p>
<p>Sort of. Not really. No. The Left as defined by <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/">Discover the Networks</a> and the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">Freedom Center</a> is a political movement. The &#8220;counterculture&#8221; is a cultural movement. The two frequently overlap (they certainly did in the &#8217;60s when both had their heyday), and countercultural thinkers and leftist thinkers are often friendly. (Hence, Rushkoff frequently recruits feminist author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf">Naomi Wolf</a> to write blurbs for his books.) Counterculturalists are more about shifting the culture, not the political system. They promote their art, music, film, drugs, sexuality, spirituality, and philosophical ideas while often passing on the political sphere.</p>
<p>A good example of the difference is in the person of David Horowitz. In the &#8217;60s he was a leftist, not a counterculturalist. He argued for a Marxist political system while basically adopting the cultural norms (nuclear family, no dope smoking) of American society.</p></blockquote>
<p>Is the Conservative Movement a political movement or a cultural movement? Is it about conserving the political ideas of the founders or the Judeo-Christian, &#8220;traditional&#8221; culture of the founders? (This is hardly an either/or decision.) And if it is about preserving a traditional culture, is it going to use the tyrannical power of government to do it? (And spend billions of taxpayer dollars?)</p>
<p>My answers to these questions should be obvious. I&#8217;m concerned about defeating the Left&#8217;s political machinations. And that should be the primary concern of conservatives. It&#8217;s not pot-smoking counterculturalists that are sending Guantanamo detainees to Illinois. The push for socialized medicine comes from leftists. (<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2282" target="_blank">Harry Reid</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1313" target="_blank">Howard Dean</a> are in no way &#8220;counterculture.&#8221;) And the political fight against these problems can only be won by a functioning coalition comprised of many peoples with many cultures who are united by a common <em>political</em> understanding of the role of government &#8212; the one I articulated in my previous post.</p>
<p>Mary wrote in her rebuttal that,</p>
<blockquote><p>We lost the last election because  we lost the culture war.</p></blockquote>
<p>No we didn&#8217;t. John McCain lost to <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511" target="_blank">Barack Obama</a> because of politics, not culture. Obama was a more exciting candidate who ran a much more effective campaign. It&#8217;s that simple.</p>
<p>A conservatism that can win is one which understands itself and defines itself as a <em>political</em> movement, not a cultural one. To do otherwise is to begin to destroy a functioning coalition that has been vital to defending America since Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., and Ronald Reagan brought it together in the 20th century. Conservatism must take the same approach to culture as the Constitution does &#8212; neutrality. Such an attitude worked for the document which has guided and protected our country for centuries and it will work for the Movement who has the same objective.</p>
<p><strong>Mary Grabar is invited to respond further if she so chooses.</strong></p>
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		<title>Christopher Hitchens: Arthur Koestler’s manic intellectual career &#8211; The Atlantic</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/christopher-hitchens-arthur-koestler%e2%80%99s-manic-intellectual-career-the-atlantic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christopher-hitchens-arthur-koestler%25e2%2580%2599s-manic-intellectual-career-the-atlantic</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:17:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[I cannot recall a book title that was less well-shaped to its subject. Far from being a “skeptic,” Arthur Koestler was a man not merely convinced but actively enthused by practically any intellectual or political or mental scheme that came his way. When he was in the throes of an allegiance, he positively abhorred doubt, [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I cannot recall a book title that was less well-shaped to its subject. Far from being a “skeptic,” Arthur Koestler was a man not merely convinced but actively enthused by practically any intellectual or political or mental scheme that came his way. When he was in the throes of an allegiance, he positively abhorred doubt, which he sometimes called “bellyaching.” If he was ever dubious about anything, one could say in his defense, it was at least about himself. He was periodically paralyzed by self-reproach and insecurity, and once wrote a defensive third-person preface to one of his later novels The Age of Longing in which he described its style as modeled on that of a certain “A. Koestler,” whose writing, “lacking in ornament and distinction, is easy to imitate.” The author himself was written off as “a much afflicted scribe of his time, greedy for pleasure, haunted by guilt, who enjoyed a short vogue and was then forgotten, like the rest of them.”</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/hitchens-koestler">The Zealot &#8211; The Atlantic December 2009</a>.</p>
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		<title>All the President&#8217;s Climategate Deniers &#8211; by Michelle Malkin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/michellemalkin/all-the-presidents-climategate-deniers-by-michelle-malkin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=all-the-presidents-climategate-deniers-by-michelle-malkin</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:07:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[With pursed lips and closed eyes and ears, the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-40174" title="climategate" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/climategate.jpg" alt="climategate" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>&#8220;The science is settled,&#8221; we&#8217;ve been told for decades by zealous proponents of manmade global warming hysteria. Thanks to an earth-shaking hacking scandal across the pond, we now have mountains of documents from the world&#8217;s leading global warming advocacy center that show the science is about as settled as a southeast Asian tsunami. You won&#8217;t be surprised by the Obama administration&#8217;s response to Climategate.</p>
<p>With pursed lips and closed eyes and ears, the White House is clinging to the old eco-mantra: The science is settled.</p>
<p>Never mind all the devastating new information about data manipulation, intimidation and cult-like coverups to &#8220;hide the decline&#8221; in global temperatures over the last half-century, they say. The science is settled.</p>
<p>Never mind what The Atlantic&#8217;s Clive Crook, after wading through the climate science e-mail files of the U.K.&#8217;s Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, called the overpowering &#8220;stink of intellectual corruption&#8221; — combined with mafia-like suppression of dissent, suppression of evidence and methods, and &#8220;plain statistical incompetence&#8221; exposed by the document trove. The science is settled.</p>
<p>Never mind the expedient disappearance of mounds of raw weather station data that dissenting scientists were seeking through freedom of information requests from the Climatic Research Unit. The science is settled.</p>
<p>In March, President Obama made a grandiose show of putting &#8220;science&#8221; above &#8220;politics&#8221; when lifting the ban on government-funded human embryonic stem cell research. &#8220;Promoting science isn&#8217;t just about providing resources — it&#8217;s about protecting free and open inquiry,&#8221; he said during the signing ceremony. &#8220;It&#8217;s about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it&#8217;s inconvenient — especially when it&#8217;s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda — and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yet, the pro-sound science president has surrounded himself with radical Climategate deniers who have spent their entire professional careers &#8220;settling&#8221; manmade global warming disaster science through fear mongering, intimidation and ridicule of opponents.</p>
<p>— Science czar John Holdren, who will testify on Capitol Hill this week at a hearing on Climategate, infamously hyped weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich. He made a public bet against free-market economist Julian Simon, predicting dire shortages of five natural resources as a result of feared overconsumption.<br />
He lost on all counts. No matter.</p>
<p>Holdren&#8217;s failure didn&#8217;t stop him from writing forcefully about mass sterilization and forced abortion &#8220;solutions&#8221; to a fizzling, sizzling, overpopulated planet. And it didn&#8217;t stop him from earning a living making more dire predictions.</p>
<p>In 1986, Ehrlich credited Holdren with forecasting that &#8220;carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.&#8221; He went on to Harvard and the White House. On the &#8220;Late Show with David Letterman&#8221; earlier this year, Holdren fretted that his son &#8220;might not see snow!&#8221;</p>
<p>Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist and Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball notes that Holdren turned up in the Climategate files belittling the work of astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division. Holdren put &#8220;Harvard&#8221; in sneer quotes when mocking a research paper Baliunas and Soon published in 2003 showing that &#8220;the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.&#8221; First, deny. Next, deride.</p>
<p>— Energy Secretary Steven Chu picked derision as his weapon earlier this year when peddling the Obama administration&#8217;s greenhouse-gas emission policy. &#8220;The American public … just like your teenage kids, aren&#8217;t acting in a way that they should act,&#8221; The Wall Street Journal quoted Chu. He dismissed dissent by asserting that &#8220;there&#8217;s very little debate&#8221; about the impact of &#8220;green energy&#8221; policy on the economy.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s &#8220;very little debate,&#8221; of course, because dissenters get crushed.</p>
<p>— The Obama team&#8217;s chief eco-dissent crusher is climate czar Carol Browner. She oversaw the destruction of Environmental Protection Agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge&#8217;s order during the Clinton years requiring the agency to preserve its records.</p>
<p>Over the past year, the EPA has stifled the dissent of Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the agency who questioned the administration&#8217;s reliance on outdated research on the health effects of greenhouse gases. Recently, they sought to yank a YouTube video created by EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams that is critical of cap-and-trade. Browner reportedly threatened auto execs in July by telling them to &#8220;put nothing in writing … ever&#8221; about their negotiations with her.</p>
<p>And she is now leading the &#8220;science is settled&#8221; stonewalling in the wake of Climategate. &#8220;I&#8217;m sticking with the 2,500 scientists,&#8221; she said. &#8220;These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real.&#8221; Book-cookers are good at making it seem so.</p>
<p>In any case, last year, more than 31,000 scientists — including 9,021 Ph.D.s — signed a petition sponsored by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine rejecting claims of human-caused global warming.</p>
<p>But hey, who&#8217;s counting? The science is settled.</p>
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