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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; foreign policy</title>
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		<title>Rep. Jim Bridenstine: &#8216;Weakness Is Provocative&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rep-jim-bridenstine-weakness-is-provocative/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rep-jim-bridenstine-weakness-is-provocative</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:51:02 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[GOP congressman unveils the chaos unleashed by America's retreat abroad at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Congressman Jim Bridenstine&#8217;s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114410255" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Rep. Jim Bridenstine: </strong>A lot of people might remember, it wasn&#8217;t too long ago, I went down to a military base in my state called Fort Sill.  I went down there to visit with the commanding general, and the reason I went is because the Department of Defense is being gutted right now.  The fires brigades and the air defense artillery folks that work down there, they&#8217;re getting cut drastically, and so I went down there and I wanted to meet with the commanding general, and when I was down there I said, hey, I&#8217;d like to take a visit of the UAC facility that&#8217;s here at Fort Sill, and the commanding general said you can go, but I&#8217;m not going to go with you.  If you would, by show of hands, do you remember this incident by chance, if you&#8217;d raise your hand if you&#8217;re remember.  I went down to Fort Sill to visit the UAC facility and I got rejected.  I got rejected.  Here I am a member of Congress, a representative of the people, a federal representative of the people going to a federal facility and seeing a federal mission, and they told me I couldn&#8217;t come in. They said you could come back in three weeks.  In three weeks you can come back and we&#8217;ll take you on a tour, and I said I&#8217;ve got to talk to somebody in your chain of command because this is not right, and you know what they said, they said, sorry, here&#8217;s the number for the guy in my chain of command and it was the Deputy Director of Communications, who also told me you&#8217;ve got to wait three weeks and we&#8217;ll take you on a tour, to which we immediately said, I told my staff I&#8217;m not one of these guys that runs to the media for every opportunity.  I don&#8217;t do that, but in this particular case, the First Amendment was given to us for a purpose, and it&#8217;s to petition the federal government, and I never realized that as a member of Congress I would be one of the people having to petition the federal government using the First Amendment.</p>
<p>In the next week and a half, we did 72 interviews on television. Seventy-two.  We were tired, but I can tell you this, after a week and a half we get an email from Health and Human Services and they said we&#8217;d like to take you on a tour of the HHS facility at Fort Sill housing the unaccompanied alien children.  It only took 72 interviews and a week and a half, and then they sent another email, and I&#8217;d ask everybody to get quiet because what this next email said is critically important.  I want you to listen to this.</p>
<p>The next email we got from HHS said we&#8217;re going to take you on a tour, but you can&#8217;t ask any questions, you can&#8217;t talk to the personnel that work there, you can&#8217;t talk to the staff, you can&#8217;t talk to the children, you can&#8217;t talk to the medical personnel.  We&#8217;re going to show it to you but you can&#8217;t ask any questions, to which we responded with an email of our own that we&#8217;re going to treat your restrictions the way the president is treating the law of the United States as a suggestion, and we gave them a list of everybody we expected to talk to once we got inside of this facility, and we got in and we started asking questions.  The No. 1 question I asked was how many children here have been abused.  We had a great panel with Dr. Fleming and Louie Gohmert and Jeff Sessions regarding the crisis on the southern border and immigration.  We had this great conversation.  Loved every minute of listening to these great folks talk about this issue, but here is why I have such a big concern.  The reports coming out of Lackland Air Force Base is as many as a third of the young girls had been abused, and when I talk about abuse I&#8217;m talking about sexual, I&#8217;m talking about horrible things that have happened to these young girls, and by the way they&#8217;re 12 years old.</p>
<p>So I wanted to find out in my state at Fort Sill the HHS facility how many of the children there had been abused, and I asked them, how many have been abused?  Well, we don&#8217;t have those numbers.  So I asked somebody else, how many children here have been abused?  Well, we don&#8217;t have those numbers.  I couldn&#8217;t get an answer.  Finally I asked a contractor and the contractor said it&#8217;s well over 25 percent, and then another contractor said, sir, it is well over 25 percent, and friends, here&#8217;s what everybody in this room needs to understand, the question is where is this abuse occurring?  It&#8217;s not happening in these facilities.  The abuse is occurring on the way to the United States, and the reason it&#8217;s occurring is because the children that were coming across our southern border, they already have parents that have been smuggled into the United States illegally, hundreds of thousands of them in 2014, and they made a decision that they want their family to come, including their children, and so they hire a coyote down in Mexico, and the coyote goes down to Central America to bring the children up to the northern border, and here&#8217;s what happens, and people in this room understand this.  The GAO has indicated, has said that we have operational control of over 44 percent of our southern border.  That means 56 percent of our southern border is not under operational control, and if we don&#8217;t control it, friends, somebody else does.  In this particular case, it&#8217;s controlled by drug cartels, transnational criminal organizations and when those children get to the northern border of Mexico, the southern border of the United States, then those transnational criminal organizations say we need more money.  If you&#8217;re going to come into the United States &#8212; and by the way, if you control the southern border of the United States you can make a ton of money, and they are doing it.</p>
<p>And so the children get up there, and the organized crime says they need $10,000.00 and we&#8217;ll let you across the border.  How many of these children do you think have $10,000.00 on them?  They call their parents, their parents don&#8217;t have $10,000.00.  They barely had enough money to pay the coyote, and ultimately the children have to come up with $10,000.00 and the drug cartels will get their money.  So they force the children into slave labor.  The force the children into prostitution.  Some of the children disappear altogether and it goes from smuggling into human trafficking, and some of the children just get killed.</p>
<p>People don&#8217;t realize it, friends, but there are, estimates are 70,000 to 100,000 dead bodies in Northern Mexico as a direct result of our open southern border.  We talk about all the crisis in the Middle East, Syria and Iraq.  Horrible stuff happening there, but on our southern border we&#8217;ve got 100,000 dead bodies just south of our border, and friends, here&#8217;s the deal.  When the organized crime starts making all of this money, which they are making a ton of money right now, they destroy civil society in northern Mexico.  Friends, if you&#8217;re a judge, and I know Louie Gohmert is a judge, you understand this as well as anybody.  If you&#8217;re a judge, a police officer, a politician, a mayor in northern Mexico, in many cases you are either on the payroll of the organized crime or you are dead, which is why there&#8217;s this 70,000 to 100,000 dead bodies, many in mass graves in northern Mexico right now.  The southern border is a national security issue as much as it is anything, and I&#8217;m going to talk for a second about civilized society and how it&#8217;s being lost because we&#8217;re unwilling to actually enforce the law.  The Secure Fence Act, which was passed before I got there, requires 100 percent operational control of the southern border, and yet the president doesn&#8217;t enforce that law.</p>
<p>But here&#8217;s the situation, I used to mention in the bio, I&#8217;m a Navy pilot.  I flew combat in Afghanistan in 2002.  I flew combat in Iraq in 2003. In 2010, I joined a reserve squadron and I started flying counter-narcotics missions in Central and South America.  My squadron alone, VAW77, the world famous Night Wolves, we used to bust $2 billion worth of cocaine every year on the high seas, $2 billion.  My squadron was one of many units in the military that did this kind of operation.  My squadron got eliminated.  That means $2 billion worth of cocaine is coming into our country that didn&#8217;t use to come into our country and $2 billion worth of cash is going to organized crime in northern Mexico and Central America.  What do you think that does to those countries?  And by the way, my squadron was one of many military units that have been cut under the sequester, and it is decimating the Department of Defense, in ways right now that the American public doesn&#8217;t realize, but I&#8217;ll give you an example.</p>
<p>Nicaragua calls the United States and they say we&#8217;re losing our civil society here in Nicaragua, our judges, our politicians, our police officers.  We&#8217;ve got high crime rates.  The organized crime is controlling our country.  We need your help with some counter drug operations, to which the United States says, sorry, can&#8217;t help you.  Who does Nicaragua call next?  The Russians.  The Russians are more than happy to provide the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets.  The Russians are more than happy to provide the ships on the ocean, to do the counter-narcotics operations.  The only thing the Russians are asking in return is military basing.  Do they want military basing for those assets to encounter drug operations?  No.  They want military basing for long-range strategic bombers in our hemisphere, and by the way, Nicaragua is not the only country in our hemisphere under negotiations for long-range strategic bombing for Russian bombers right now.  You&#8217;ve got Cuba and Venezuela.  Friends, all of this is a national security issue.</p>
<p>The other day, I looked up Homeland Security.  There&#8217;s leaked information from Homeland Security of how many folks have come across the southern border from Guinea and Sierra Leone and Liberia.  Friends, it&#8217;s almost 500 people that have been caught coming across the southern border in 2014 from those three countries which have the greatest outbreak of Ebola.  Almost 500 people caught.  The GAO says that one out of every five gets caught, which means there&#8217;s thousands in this country from those countries that are just unaccounted for completely.  Friends, the southern border of the United States is a national security issue.  It&#8217;s a national health security issue, and here&#8217;s the important thing I want everybody in this room to take away: The children are victims.  It is not their fault, and we don&#8217;t not like them.  The humanitarian thing to do, the right thing to do, the thing that will save lives and protect them is to enforce the law.</p>
<p>So when you think about foreign policy and national security, friends, it starts right here at home and I just talked about Nicaragua and the Russian military basing that is potentially going to occur there because of our absence, and I want to be really clear about what Russian is up to.  They&#8217;ve invaded Georgia.  They’re occupying South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia.  They&#8217;re moving the borders towards Tbilisi.  They&#8217;ve got 80,000 troops in Armenia.  They&#8217;ve cancelled energy contracts with Azerbaijan.  That&#8217;s all in the south caucuses.  You go over to Eastern Europe, the Baltic States.  Remember the Baltic States enthusiastically joined the European Union and NATO at the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Well, because of that Russia had to cut off their energy in the dead of winter.  People had to suffer.  People had to die.  In Poland in the Czech Republic they were building a missile defense shield.  Why were they building a missile defense shield in Poland?  It had nothing to do with the Russians.  It’s because Iran is building longer range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and the Europeans said, we’ve got to have a missile defense shield to which Vladimir Putin said, if you keep building that missile defense shield, he said this through his generals, he said, we&#8217;re going to have nuclear war in Poland and the Czech Republic, and I&#8217;m sure everybody in this room remembers when the President of the United States met with Medvedev after that incident. He said wait until after my next election.  I&#8217;ll have the flexibility to bring down that missile defense shield and guess what happened.  He got elected.  The missile defense shield came down and then the Russians moved very quickly to give Edward Snowden asylum.  Friends, here is the lesson, and every lesson of history teaches this: Weakness is provocative and the more we demonstrate weakness the more we will be taken advantage of and the more provocative the enemies of the United States will be.</p>
<p>Then we get to Ukraine, Yanukovych.  This was Thanksgiving.  It was a year ago.  Yanukovych was trying to enter into an agreement with the European Union.  It was social reform, political reform, economic reform.  He wasn&#8217;t joining the European Union, but it included trade, and if you remember Vladimir Putin himself flew to Kiev on our Thanksgiving Day and he said if you sign that agreement we&#8217;re going to cut your energy off, and remember it was going into winter.  It was Thanksgiving Day and they did this before December 31, 2005.  In Ukraine people suffered, people died, they did it in 2009 as well.  So now Yanukovych makes the decision okay I&#8217;m going to align with Moscow temporarily.  Why?  Because he wants to keep energy for his people through the winter.  His people revolt.  Why?  They want freedom.  They want independence.  As people revolt Kiev gets set on fire and then Russia uses that as an excuse to invade and occupy Crimea and make no mistake, regardless of what the State Department says, Russia is now occupying broader eastern Ukraine.  That is happening right now and let&#8217;s talk about where else Russia is active. They&#8217;re helping the Assad regime in Syria, propping them up.  The Mullahs in Iran.  They&#8217;re going around the sanctions because Russia is enabling it.  19,000 nuclear centrifuges in Iran.  I&#8217;m sorry, there is no peaceful nuclear program that needs 19,000 nuclear centrifuges, and under the President&#8217;s P5+1 Joint Plan of Action they&#8217;re going to continue to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 9,000 plus nuclear centrifuges. They&#8217;re not even mentioning the heavy water reactor for plutonium in Iraq. The facility in Parchin which is responsible for creating the devices that can fly on long-range missiles, and I&#8217;m talking about of course nuclear capabilities. None of these are being talked about in the P5+1 Joint Plan of Action on Iran and I&#8217;m going to anchor here for one second.</p>
<p>There is a reason what the President is doing right now to accommodate Iran is wrong and it is because it is extremely dangerous and destabilizing for the best ally the United States has in the Middle East, Israel.  And I will say this on Israel, the Land of Judea and Samaria is not occupied territory.  It belongs to the Jewish people who have had a relationship with that land for over 4,000 years.  And neither the President of the United States or the United Nations has any authority to give that land away.  Only Israel has the authority to negotiate over the land that belongs to Israel, period, end of story.  So you think about what&#8217;s happening in the world and you see that weakness is indeed provocative.  When you think about what Russia is doing, and by the way here&#8217;s an easy answer on the Russian issue.  People don&#8217;t realize this.  Russia relies on energy for 53 percent of its revenue to the Kremlin.  Fifty-three percent of the revenue to the Kremlin is from the export of energy and 84 percent of that energy is going to Eastern Europe, who by the way send ambassadors to my office in Washington, D.C. asking us to send our energy because they no longer want to be dependent on Moscow.  There is an easy way to solve this crisis.  We could dry up 53 percent of Russia&#8217;s revenue simply by exporting American energy.  And interestingly, it&#8217;s not Moscow that&#8217;s preventing us from exporting American energy.  It&#8217;s Washington, D.C.  Friends there are solutions here and, by the way, here&#8217;s the thing: That&#8217;s not a sanction, that&#8217;s allowing the free market to be free, and I know people in this room believe in free markets.  It doesn&#8217;t require firing a shot. It doesn&#8217;t require a sanction, and, oh, by the way, Russia has recently seen fit to send long-range bombers to the Gulf of Mexico.  I don&#8217;t know if you guys have read these reports, and interestingly they&#8217;re defense minister came back and said, well, that&#8217;s not going to work as long as energy prices are about $80.00 a barrel.  We can&#8217;t afford to do this.  Friends energy prices are going to come back and it&#8217;s up to the United States to actually fill the void that everybody understands is happening in Eastern Europe as it relates to energy.</p>
<p>I want to, I&#8217;m going to close here.  I know Ann told me not to take a long time so I&#8217;m not going to take a long time.  I want to close here. Actually, I&#8217;m going to say one thing.  I have to talk about ISIS.  I have to talk about the Middle East and then I&#8217;m going to close.  I flew combat in Afghanistan in 2002.  I flew combat in Iraq in 2003.  Our Americans, in 2002, or, actually, I don&#8217;t &#8212; it was early in the war &#8212; we damaged a guy named al-Zarqawi.  He was a Lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden.  You guys probably remember al-Zarqawi.  It was compliments of a 500-pound bomb, compliments of the United States Air Force, that damaged al-Zarqawi, and as a Navy pilot that pains me to say that the Air Force dropped that weapon, and I say that with all due respect to Governor Rick Perry who&#8217;s in the front row here who&#8217;s an Air Force pilot himself.  We&#8217;re good, he says we&#8217;re good.  Thank you. sir.  But here&#8217;s the important thing: al-Zarqawi was in Afghanistan, he was part of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He was a Lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden, and when we damaged him, his ribs, his leg &#8212; he went to Uday Hussein&#8217;s hospital in Iraq.  That&#8217;s where he went to get his care, and at Uday Hussein&#8217;s hospital he got cured and then he became the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and ultimately he was killed compliments of two 500-pound bombs of the United States Air Force, but not before he trained his own lieutenant, al-Baghdadi, who now is the leader of ISIS.  Friends, this is an al-Qaeda affiliated force.  All of the authorities necessary to destroy it currently exist, and the President shouldn&#8217;t go on TV and give us a laundry list of everything he won&#8217;t do and, oh, by the way, when he gives us that laundry list he&#8217;s giving it to the enemies of the United States.  What he should do is he should go on TV and tell us what he&#8217;s already done to eliminate this threat, and it could have been eliminated, and if you go back to 2006 when Obama was a senator, he said these words.  He said a precipitous withdraw from Iraq would lead to &#8220;chaos, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide.&#8221;  He said it would engulf broad swaths of the Middle East and endanger the United States of America.  Senator Obama in 2006.  Then he ran for President.</p>
<p>Well that message wasn&#8217;t going to work when you&#8217;re running for President, so then he said it was an unjust war.  That we took our eye off the ball, which was Afghanistan, and he&#8217;s going to be the President that would end this war.  Then he became President, and if you look at what happened next, he had his own Iraq team.  Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus.  They said keep 20,000 to 24,000 troops in Iraq.  Keep them because we&#8217;ve had all these gains from the surge.  If you remember the Iraqi economy was growing. Things were at peace.  You had an inclusive government, stability and his team said keep 20,000 to 24,000 troops.  You have to have that or else we&#8217;re going to lose the gains of the surge, and the President said, no, I promised something else, give me a different plan, and they come back with a different plan, and they said keep 10,000 troops.  It&#8217;s going to require more risk.  By the way, when they say more risk, for those of us in the military that means more of us are going to suffer.  It will require more risk, but we can sustain the gains of the surge with 10,000 troops.  The President said, no, I promised something else.  Then it was the President himself in a phone call with Malaki who said that any status of forces agreement we come to has to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament, and, friends, for those of us in the military the status of forces agreement is how we have diplomatic immunity.  It is how when we fight in a foreign country we fall under American law not under foreign law, and that&#8217;s critically important if you want to have a foreign fighter.  And the President, in a phone call with Malaki &#8212; historically all the status of forces agreement is, is an exchange of diplomatic letters.  It&#8217;s our State Department and their diplomats saying we&#8217;re going to exchange diplomatic letters, Americans have diplomatic immunity.  That&#8217;s all it had ever been, but because the President wanted a zero-two presence in Iraq, ultimately he said it has to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament, knowing full well that the Iraqi Parliament can&#8217;t agree on what day of the week it is, let alone how many American troops need to be in Iraq.  The agreement was scuttled.  Every last troop came home.  And just as Senator Obama predicted in 2006, chaos, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide.  It engulfs broad swaths of the Middle East and it&#8217;s a danger to the United States of America.</p>
<p>Al-Baghdadi has said himself that the next confrontation will be directly against the United States of America.  Friends, al-Qaeda was a terrorist organization.  ISIS is a caliphate.  It has an army.  It is well trained.  It is well financed.  It is well equipped.  They&#8217;re recruiting from throughout the world and they are looking for people that have American passports, and indeed they have recruited hundreds of Americans to join their ranks, many of which the administration has already admitted have come back to the United States.  Friends, this is a very real threat.  It has to be taken seriously, and what I will tell you is this: This idea that we are going to train and equip so-called &#8220;moderate Syrians&#8221; is not gonna work.  Here&#8217;s what they said, we&#8217;re gonna have 5,000 troops in a year; 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels in a year.  By the way, a lot of them have already fled and turned over weapons to ISIS and 5,000 &#8212; I gave a speech, in fact, I talked to Mike at the Red State Convention down in Fort Worth, Texas.  I hear a clap for Fort Worth. And at the time in that speech I was talking about how dangerous ISIS was because they&#8217;ve got 15,000 troops in their army.  Well now the CIA unclassified is saying that it&#8217;s 30,000 troops in a matter of just a couple of months, and again now they&#8217;ve got heavy armor, American tanks, Abrams Tanks, with ISIS flags flying on the top.  This idea that we&#8217;re gonna train and equip so-called moderates, it hasn&#8217;t worked.  If you look at what weapons they have right now, it&#8217;s because we train and equip the Iraqi Army, which fled at the first conflict.  Friends, this is going to require American leadership, and this is a critically important thing that America has to understand.  Without us, it&#8217;s only going to grow, and the longer we wait the worse it gets, and I want to be clear again why this is so dangerous not only to us, but ISIS has its sights set on Israel.  This is a threat to Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Now, sure.  I would like to, I&#8217;m gonna close now.  At this time I really am.  I see Mike standing over here.  I might take a few more minutes just to upset Ann Coulter.  Okay here&#8217;s a &#8212; I&#8217;m in such trouble.  When I first got elected a friend of mine came to me and he said, he worked really hard, he delivered all kinds of signs throughout the neighborhood.  I challenged an incumbent Republican in a Republican primary which is very difficult and it&#8217;s very hard to find friends when you&#8217;re doing that, but this guy was loyal to me from day one, he worked really hard and we overcame millions of dollars and 11 years of incumbency, and he said I will never ask from you for anything, but I just want one thing I said, and he said, it&#8217;s the only thing that I will ever ask for, he said I want you to get a group, a bipartisan group, Republicans and Democrats alike, and I want you to go down to Arlington National Cemetery and sit there for an hour together and reflect on all the sacrifice that has been given for this nation, and a couple of months ago we made that happen.  Four hundred thousand markers.  Hill after hill, row after row, mile after mile.  Freshman class Republicans and Democrats alike reflecting on the sacrifice and, friends, that is a very small portion of all the sacrifice that has been given for this great country.  One of the markers, there is a gentleman named Martin Treptow who fought in World War I.  Ronald Reagan talked about him in his first inaugural address, and he died on the Western Front delivering messages back and forth between battalions, and when they recovered his body they found on him a journal and in that journal they found these words.  It said &#8212; and he was a barber from Illinois who got drafted.  His words said:  &#8220;America must win this war.  Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure.  I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.&#8221;</p>
<p>It wasn&#8217;t just a few weeks ago now I went down to a funeral for a friend of mine who died in the Middle East, and this was in Georgia, and my whole squadron &#8212; he got, he was sent, what we call individual augmentation.  He&#8217;s a Navy pilot, but he got sent on the ground to the Middle East, and there he died.  So we were at his funeral.  My whole squadron, VAW77, the Night Wolves, my squadron, which no longer exists to do the counter-drug operations that I&#8217;ve already talked about, but all the Night Wolves gathered and we spent time talking about our friend.  The last time I saw these guys I was just a pilot in the squadron and here I am with my buddies and now I&#8217;m a member of Congress.  Thanks.  And they looked at me and they said, &#8220;Jim, our country is in peril.  We have threats all over the world that will change the landscape for the next generation,&#8221; and it&#8217;s not just foreign, it&#8217;s also domestic.  They said, &#8220;We are willing&#8221; &#8212; they&#8217;re not with 77 anymore, but they&#8217;re all still serving in the reserves somewhere &#8212; &#8220;we are willing, but we&#8217;ve got to have leadership.  We need somebody that will stand up and tell us what needs to be done, &#8217;cause right now we are not feeling it.&#8221;  Friends there is an entire country of people who served this nation in uniform and every single one of them feels the way Martin Treptow felt when he wrote that in his journal and I got to tell you as a member of Congress who&#8217;s serving his first term, I got to tell ya, that is the one thing more than anything else that gives me hope and I really do have a lot of hope.  What is right about America, and I know this has been said before, can fix what is wrong about America and there&#8217;s an entire nation of people that are willing to do the right thing knowing that we need to handoff to the next generation what we ourselves inherited.  Thank you so much for having me.  It&#8217;s an honor to be here.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Assault on the Military</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-assault-on-the-military/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-assault-on-the-military</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-assault-on-the-military/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2014 05:15:06 +0000</pubDate>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246147</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A distinguished panel diagnoses the frightening state of American defenses at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion “Obama&#8217;s Assault on the Military,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112671257" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> What I want to hear from your guy&#8217;s perspective is on all the issues we could be looking at in defense and foreign policy and everything now, what are you hearing and what do you think is important for folks to know.  So maybe, Jerry, can start with you.</p>
<p><strong>Jerry Boykin: </strong>Yeah, one of the things that I was very concerned about going into this year&#8217;s election was the fact that there was not enough being said about national security.  There was not enough attention paid, and by the way, for those of you veterans who are Marines, I want you to know that I don&#8217;t use big words so you&#8217;ll be okay.  All right and if you do have a problem with something that I say, just get with one of the Army veterans and he&#8217;ll translate it for you so.  I know I&#8217;m in trouble.  I was very concerned about a lack of focus on the national security, and obviously we&#8217;re here to talk about the military and I think that one of the things that people are not paying enough attention to is the destruction of our military.  I mean that&#8217;s kind of the title of our &#8212; our military is being devastated at the same time that all of our enemies, all of our potential adversaries are ramping up.  Nobody&#8217;s coming down but America, so what am I concerned about Jim?  I&#8217;m concerned about the fact that our military will not be capable of meeting the threats of the future and America is not focused on it and thank God for ISIS because if it wasn&#8217;t for ISIS there would have been no focus and no attention.  I&#8217;ll say this as a final thing.  Our military&#8217;s been at war for 13 years.  Our military is broken.  They&#8217;re tired.  Suicide is at an all-time high.  PTSD is rampant and families are falling apart at the seams, but we&#8217;re going to send 4,000 people to fight Ebola.  Now, let me just say I don&#8217;t know what glue our President has been sniffing, but if you really want to protect America, close that southern border and stop the terrorists from coming across.</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>Yeah, always a tough act to follow.  He is the senior guy here, by the way.  Name of the panel with the discussion is Obama&#8217;s assault of the U.S. Military.  That has an underlying assumption that he has a strategy against our military, and I would tell you that, that&#8217;s probably a falsehood as well because obviously he has a difficult time with strategy and articulating a strategy.  The difference between the ways, means and the ends, so what I think we&#8217;re suffering through is through a series of increments of benign neglect, where we&#8217;re not getting the attention but still being used.  I agree whole-heartedly with General Boykin, with Jerry that you can send people to Western Africa, but you certainly are going to add more advisors, but tie their hands and this has not been a discussion topic.  I think this is probably be something very good to take forward, and I think McKinnon said it today that it would be dead on arrival.  Congressman McKinnon said today that any more advisors going into Iraq without the proper rules of engagement to fully engage and beyond their advice is going to be dead on arrival into Congress and the same thing with any AUMF, and in terms of applied use of military force.  That also, unless it&#8217;s got the right rules of engagement, these kind of discussions are just on the periphery.</p>
<p>The real discussion is we&#8217;ve been used and used and used well beyond the capacity.  We have not recapitalized our force, our equipment manning, and it is now evident, and a systemic break across the force of the suicide rate as Jerry said, and also, I think you&#8217;ve got a combination of substance abuse, PTSD and the other injuries that we don&#8217;t really know what&#8217;s happened.  I think we talked about it last year a combination of traumatic brain injury being heavily researched, but very little done about so far.  That also fits into the PTSD portion, and then the substance abuse just has caused I think almost one veteran a day and I don&#8217;t know I forgot the numbers.  I just heard it, just a phenomenal amount of suicides, not just in the active military force, but also in the veteran force as well.  And these are system failures of wanting to use the force, but not wanting to renew the force and this is a conversation.  This is both Army officers, all army officers, the force that we love, being used and used and spent.  We&#8217;ll never say no to a mission, but we want to have the right things to do to them and that&#8217;s a conversation that needs to take place whole-heartedly.  Good place to start it is this year, but it&#8217;s got to be carried back to the people who can help make the decision.</p>
<p>We have opportunity now with the change in the Congress and the Senate, and I hope that we use that wisely.  It&#8217;s our moment.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> Yeah, we should get back to that point because I think it&#8217;s really key as to where we go from here.  Because I&#8217;d like to take that same question from a different direction, which is part of the reason why the force is stressed out is because of all the things we&#8217;re sending them to do.</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>Right.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> So this President&#8217;s remarkable.  I mean he&#8217;s an incredible strategist.  He&#8217;s managed to make every part of the world less safe for us, which is &#8212; how do you do that?</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>Yeah, good way of looking at it.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> But actually, one of the things that we&#8217;ve been doing at the Heritage Foundation is if you actually look at, there&#8217;s two curves.  As the world&#8217;s getting increasingly less safe, but if you actually look at all the documents that the Pentagon has produced consistently since 2010, it all tells you that the world&#8217;s getting safer and it&#8217;s all because of Obama and therefore we can spend less, have a smaller military and everything else and we haven&#8217;t had a real honest strategic assessment &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>That&#8217;s fair.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> &#8211; since the President came in office. It&#8217;s extraordinary.  So one of the things that we&#8217;ve been doing is developing something called the Index of Military Strength, which is every year beginning this year, we&#8217;re going to issue a report that says this is where we stand today, and part of that is not only looking at the state that your military is in.  I want to get to that, but part of it&#8217;s also looking at the things you have to deal with in the world.  Where are the trouble spots you have to go in the state of where your adversaries are?  So one of the decisions that we made, when we were doing this, and what would be great, is we said well look, lots of bad things can happen lots of places in the world, but there are three parts of the world that are just absolutely vital, you just cannot get wrong and that is Europe and the Middle East and Asia.  And so we really focused on those three, and of course there&#8217;s no good news coming from any of them, but I&#8217;d be interested from your perspective is if you were talking to a new congressman or senator or somebody that was interested in running for President, and they asked you the question what&#8217;s the most dangerous part of the world, what really keeps you up at night, what do you really worry about?  What you&#8217;d answer.</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>I&#8217;m still and probably will be for a long time, I&#8217;m extremely concerned about Iran and will continue to be concerned about a nuclearized Iran because what that is going to do to the rest of the Mid East in terms of a potential nuclear arms race.  That&#8217;s what keeps me up at night that we continue to, you know, they buy time with negotiations and that time gives them more time to do whatever they want to do sub-surface, no pun intended.  That continues and the mixed message you get from Washington is, hey, this is great.  We have, the State Department&#8217;s wonderful about it, and I think besides the existential threat to Israel, you have got a grander threat to the rest of the Mid East.  You&#8217;re going to have the Saudis, you&#8217;re going to have Kuwaitis.  The rest of them are going to say, if that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going to happen over there, we&#8217;re going to need to deter as well.  We can&#8217;t rely on anybody else we&#8217;ve seen.  And that&#8217;s also part of the witness of the Obama administration establishing red lines that you do not commit to, commit force or anything to, and have those red lines just become pink.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> So November 24 is the deadline for a nuke deal.</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>It is.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> What do you think&#8217;s going to happen?</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>They&#8217;re going to push it off to the right again.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>I think they will.  They&#8217;ll find some way.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano:</strong> Play rope-a-dope.</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano: </strong>Continue to get sanctions.</p>
<p><strong>David Fridovich: </strong>Correct.  Because they&#8217;re happy with that, they can live through the sanctions.  They just want to extend the time.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano: </strong>Well, yeah, true, Jerry, because we talked about this because one of the reasons why Iran has to be our friend is they&#8217;re going to help us out with ISIS.  And I know that&#8217;s an issue that you&#8217;ve got some concern about.</p>
<p><strong>Jerry Boykin: </strong>Yeah, I do.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano: </strong>I just ask the questions, folks.</p>
<p><strong>Jerry Boykin: </strong>Listen, this whole strategy of shifting our focus to the Pacific Rim, look, China&#8217;s a problem.  China&#8217;s a huge threat economically more than anything else probably, but we&#8217;re never going to get out of the Middle East.  We&#8217;re never going to get out of the Middle East first and foremost because we are dependent upon Middle East oil.  If we would drill here drill now, build a pipeline, become energy independent, we could get away from that.  And that&#8217;s a huge problem for us, but there&#8217;s another reason that we&#8217;re never going to get out of the Middle East, and that&#8217;s this little speck of land there called Israel.  We made a commitment to Israel in 1948 that we&#8217;d be there if they needed us.  Okay, this President, and I have &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano: </strong>Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Jerry Boykin: </strong>&#8211; and I want you to understand my children are Jewish.  Their mother is a Jew, so I am very passionate about Israel, but the idea that this President has not been anti-Semitic is absolute nonsense, and when I discuss this with my Jewish friends, they act like I&#8217;m an idiot.  We are going to be in the Middle East forever because we have made a commitment to Israel that we must fulfill and Israel is now, every time we ignore the threats of things like ISIS and the Iranian nuclear program and the serious threats coming out of Syria and other parts of the Middle East, every time we ignore that we do that by risking the future of Israel.  So I think that we are going to stay tied to the Middle East.  We have to stop Iran.  We cannot avoid this and this administration thus far has done absolutely nothing to stop Iran.  In fact, I think Jim would tell you the same thing.  They&#8217;re actually cooperating with Iran and Iran&#8217;s going to have a nuclear warhead and when they do, the first target is Israel.  The second target is Saudi Arabia and what&#8217;s America going to do about it?</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano: </strong>Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Jerry Boykin: </strong>And the answer is thus far absolutely nothing.</p>
<p><strong>James Carafano: </strong>And I mean you can have this thing that they&#8217;re not disengaged from the Middle East, but, for example, you can think what you want about Benghazi and why those four men died and why it went down the way it did and what kind of response should have been in place, but the reality is today the footprint that the U.S. military has to respond in that part of the world is smaller.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Oh great &#8211;</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Smaller than it was on the day those four guys died.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">David Fridovich: </b>Yeah, greatly reduced.  Right, yeah.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>So let&#8217;s go, let&#8217;s do that.  Let&#8217;s look at this from the other perspective of because the challenges in the Middle East are only on top of the problems we have with the rest of Russia and a rising China and a proliferating transnational terror threat.  Let&#8217;s look at the capabilities we bring to the table.  Let me ask you what part of the force you worry about the most, and for me this is a really personal issue.  There&#8217;s this thing called the hollow force, which is when you have a military and it maybe it looks fine on paper until they actually have to do anything and then people die.  So by my account, I&#8217;ve already been through this three times and I count my dad&#8217;s service.  My dad fought in the Korean War, and what we did in Korea was horrific, sending men into battle with sneakers and machine guns that didn&#8217;t work and ammunition that was rusted shut.  We survived that experience.  We had this horrific hollow force in the 1970s coming out of Vietnam, Jimmy Carter&#8217;s military.  I used to call it the Okay Army.  They were already old guys by then, but that was the one I was commissioned in.  Everything was okay.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>What?  You talking about us?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>No, no it really was an Okay Army.  I didn&#8217;t have the troops I needed to train with but that was okay because we didn&#8217;t have any money to train with, and that was okay because we didn&#8217;t have any equipment to train on so everything was fine as long as we didn&#8217;t actually have to fight anybody.  Ronald Reagan did this and we all lived through that military, some miraculous effort to rebuild the U.S. military, arguably the finest military that&#8217;s ever been put in the field, and then under President Bill Clinton, the military was going hollow again.  I remember being with the Army Chief of Staff when the senior guys came in to talk about a deployment in Kosovo and they said we have to send 15,000 guys to Kosovo.  That&#8217;s going to break the back of the Army, that was a 15,000-man deployment and we&#8217;re heading off the cliff when 911 happened, but now if you look what&#8217;s happened the last 6 years.  The threat of the hollow forces is I think a greater than error and the difference between 2012 and 2016.</p>
<p>In 2012, we could have had a different President, could have made different decisions.  He could have fixed some alliances.  He could have made some investments, we&#8217;d have been fine.  In 2016, I think it&#8217;s going to be broken and just being real.  So I&#8217;d be interested from your perspectives, what part of the force do you worry about the most and why?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>There is no constitutional right to serve in the United States Military, it&#8217;s a privilege, but nobody has a constitutional right to serve, which is why we need to stop all this nonsense we call social experiments inside of our military.  We&#8217;ve got to stop it.  There&#8217;s no such thing as fairness in a war.  We got to stop it.  We&#8217;re destroying the readiness of our military.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Thanks.  So let me turn to the far left of the panel.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>Oh my gosh.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>That&#8217;s painful you know that don&#8217;t you?</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>Well, from their perspective he&#8217;s on the far left.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">David Fridovich: </b>I know that I got that part too.  Of the more parochial, I&#8217;m much more concerned about the Army and primarily because while you do defend sea lanes communication and all that converse and all that, the Navy seems to be doing all right.  My parochialism has to do with the land force and the unnecessary requirement to actually occupy and interface with people on the surface of the earth, land, and also because special operations forces draw their force primarily from the Army.  If it goes from 570,000 to 420 or less, we won&#8217;t be able to maintain the two forces, the operational force, the divisions that Jerry talked about and the institutional force that creates and trains and grows young soldiers into older soldiers and capable leaders.  Which is also something that I found over the course of 37 years that&#8217;s unique to our military that we really do look after our middle management and understand that&#8217;s how things actually get done in the force that those lieutenant colonels and majors and colonels really run the force with that great NCO background that executes the orders.  That&#8217;s unique to us.  Foreign armies strive to that, to get there, but they don&#8217;t have that.  That&#8217;s being broken right now.  I also see a U.S. military in the hole that&#8217;s just kind of handcuffed because of sequestration; we used to be able to say we&#8217;re going to fight two wars.  We&#8217;re going to do a win or a hold and win.  No one can sight &#8212; and then from there you could figure out how many divisions and how many fleets and how many Air Forces you needed to do all that.  We don&#8217;t have a strategy we can wrap our brains around.</p>
<p>I believe the service keys are really handcuffed at this moment.  They couldn&#8217;t tell you, and I think the Army&#8217;s been beaten up a lot lately about telling their story what they&#8217;re supposed to look like in the future primarily because we don&#8217;t have a national military strategy.  We don&#8217;t have a national strategy.  We keep coming back to those words that what is it you want us to do.  If it&#8217;s these &#8220;eaches,&#8221; we&#8217;ll put together forces, but at a certain point you&#8217;re going to reach into that bucket and they&#8217;ll be nothing there, or if it&#8217;s there it&#8217;s not trained and ready.  That goes to your point, Jim, about the hollow force.  So it&#8217;s the point about what is it in the long term you envision this force doing, whether that long term be &#8212; I&#8217;d be happy with 6 months from now.  I&#8217;d be really happy with 3 or 5 years from now, we could build a force not just use a force.  And like I said earlier, we have to recapitalize the force itself.</p>
<p>The other part that I think that we&#8217;re missing is as the youth of the America looks, and I think this is your point about the privilege to serve, what is it that draws them to the military?  I think that&#8217;s a key part.  If they see the way the veterans are treated, they&#8217;re not that much more willing to come, so that&#8217;s the other part, the end state of how we do on the end in taking care of our veterans, whether they served 3 or 4 years or whether they served 30-odd years, but that&#8217;s the whole human dynamic to this, but it comes back to what&#8217;s the direction.  And we get our direction, we get the money from Congress, we get the direction from the President, and that&#8217;s again, that&#8217;s what&#8217;s lacking.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Yeah.  So I&#8217;m going to put one more on the table, which is the state of our nuclear and missile defense forces.  And Chuck Hagel came out and said he&#8217;s very worried about the state of our nuclear forces.  Chuck Hagel is a brick.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>Yeah, that&#8217;s true.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>If Chuck Hagel is woken up and worried about something, then you ought to be very, very afraid.  So we have about 10 minutes.  I want to put one more question out there because for me it&#8217;s really important and then I want to get in as many of your questions as we possibly can, so be ready.  So this is a really quick &#8212; so here&#8217;s my prediction: 2016, everybody running for President is going to be running against Obama&#8217;s defense and foreign policy.  Even if Joe Biden&#8217;s the candidate for the Democrats, he&#8217;s going to be.</p>
<p>Because everybody look at this, you look at what&#8217;s going on around the world today.  Nobody can say this is working.  Nobody can say our military&#8217;s better off, so they&#8217;re all going to find their way to see their thing, which I think&#8217;ll be a change for conservative Republican candidates differentiating their brand from a sense, from what the Democrats are going to say.  Because they&#8217;re all going to say, we&#8217;re going to do better than Obama too so just real quickly from both you guys.  What would you advise people to say about how they&#8217;re going to rebuild the American military and our presence to the world?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>Well, first of all, we&#8217;ve got to stop these budget cuts, they&#8217;re devastating our military.  Secondly, we&#8217;ve got do what we should have done when we went into this and that is start with an understanding and appreciation of who the enemy is in the future and then what the risks are and determine what we&#8217;re risking, we&#8217;re willing to take. So after you&#8217;ve done that we can come up with a reasonable, logical budget to include cuts in the defense budget.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Right.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>But we didn&#8217;t start with that.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">David Fridovich: </b>That&#8217;s not that difficult.  I mean, that&#8217;s, what you describe is exactly the way it&#8217;s supposed to happen.  What are the threats or the long-term threats?  What are the forces that you need to go ahead and manage those threats in, defeat them without apology, defeat them?  Unconditional surrender is a very good term and then to take that and say this is the best case and let&#8217;s say what the requirements are to get the force that we&#8217;re going to need to do this and it&#8217;s a total joint force as well.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>Let me say this and I&#8217;ll stop.  I could save the Pentagon a $1 billion this afternoon.  At 3:30, I can walk down the hall of the Pentagon and anybody&#8217;s that not in their office, I can fire them and they&#8217;ll never know they&#8217;re gone and we&#8217;ll save $1 billion this afternoon.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Can I get some hands? Some hands, yeah. Questions?  Yeah, question over here.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>But my concern is for the VA, for the veterans and how they are taken care of at the Veteran&#8217;s Administration and the care that is given to them, and also I&#8217;m concerned about the fact that I understand that Obama put out some type of literature to the veterans and end of life choices so that they would not take advantage of medications and medical equipment to shorten their life.  Because the administration realized that, they could save a lot of money if veterans did not enjoy a long life.  I&#8217;m concerned about that and my question is will Israel do &#8212; I have a shirt that one of my kids came back from Israel that says, &#8220;Don&#8217;t worry America, Israel&#8217;s behind you.&#8221;  Do we anticipate Israel doing the dirty work for the rest of the world with this wonderful relationship that Obama has built with Netanyahu and so forth?  And then and probably will come to pass that Israel has to do this.  What do you think?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>So let me ask Jerry if you want to just briefly &#8211;</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>Here&#8217;s what will happen, I think Israel is going to have to strike because America won&#8217;t and when that happens Iran will try to shut down the Straits of Hormuz.  The Saudis will go behind closed doors, open a bottle of wine, drink it and high five each other and then go to the U.N. and condemn Israel.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Yeah.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>But they&#8217;ve got to do it, they&#8217;re reaching a point where there&#8217;s no, there&#8217;s no option.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>But they&#8217;ll be a &#8212; there&#8217;s another question over there and let me ask while we&#8217;re doing it.  Dave, you want to talk give me a brief assessment what you think of the new VA leadership?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Not much.  I mean, I saw the 60 Minute thing and I think this President picks people who are going to get along with him, and not give share bad news.  It&#8217;s just, the service chiefs are like that.  I think the VA chief is like that.  I think General Shinseki, a man I still admire.  He used the military model where he trusted people.  He didn&#8217;t know everybody.  It&#8217;s not the same model, he got caught very short and I think a lot of veterans paid the price because of that.  It&#8217;s a difficult place to fix.  It&#8217;s going to take a long, long time.  The effort that you make is a phenomenal effort and all those other organizations, to include, now as a member of a Jewish organization, I appreciate what you do for us as well, all the other organizations but it&#8217;s a matter of, we&#8217;re going to have to have a concerted effort.  Again, it goes back to what is it you want it do.</p>
<p>And I will tell you, General Shinseki shared this with me, he said, this is well in his first term there, he said that he&#8217;s got the best job in the world.  He loves it because he&#8217;s taking care of the military.  What he didn&#8217;t realize was, he had been the Chief Staff of the Army, he could take care of that 570,000-person force.  Now he&#8217;s got the entire Department of Defense from World War II veterans all the way to the War on Terror veterans.  Population is immense with about a $440 billion budget not enough and here&#8217;s a man with great skills.  It&#8217;s going to take a concerted effort, so one guy for a couple months is not enough.  But it&#8217;s going to take groups like this asking those tough questions of their legislators and of the President to make sure they stay on task.  I&#8217;m not going to say you owe me, but I saw you, all the veterans and I know you all, this is a family crowd when it comes to that.  That&#8217;s the thing that stands between us and being a completely different country.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Right.  $22 million  and second largest federal budget.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yeah, I was wondering what is your opinion on the traditional lack of leadership to fight for the military by the highest levels of management in the military.  The shut up and do your duty mantra, it&#8217;s repeated over and over by the highest levels, that the generals are so worried about doing their duty, which means keeping my job that they don&#8217;t fight for the fighting force.  There has been no mention of anything about the VA crisis that&#8217;s been going on for 30-plus years from the generals themselves.  Is there any way that they can have their male parts put back on them so that they can fight for their troops?</p>
<p><b>James Carafano: </b>Well, let me ask Jerry if he still has his male parts?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>Yeah.</p>
<p><b>James Carafano: </b>It&#8217;s what it says here, I mean.  How are you?</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>I wrote an op-ed yesterday.  I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve seen it, if you haven&#8217;t go to Breitbart and that was the whole focus on my op-ed and what I said was it is time for some generals and admirals to walk in and lay their stars on the table and tell the President I will no longer preside over the demise of this military.  It is time.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>But that is the last thing they want to do.  They need to be inside the machine to fight.  They don&#8217;t need to pinching out and walk away.  Maybe one, but they all just need instead of speaking up and risking their reputation on what they know is right.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>Presumably you&#8217;d rather have a Leon Panetta that stays there, supports bad policies, and then gets out and writes a tell-all book.  No, the courageous thing to do is to standup and say I will not support this.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Fighters fight and they need to fight from the inside in the &#8211;</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>Yeah, that&#8217;s a copout.  That&#8217;s an absolute copout.  That&#8217;s a copout.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Gentlemen, thank you.  Jim, thank you.  It&#8217;s good to see you.  The last time I saw Jim was at a congressional hearing, where we testified together, but one quick point and then two quick questions.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>But I was innocent though.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>That&#8217;s what they all claim.  You mentioned about the southwest border, as a former INS agent, we&#8217;re leaking everywhere.  We&#8217;ll talk about that tomorrow, but the southwest needs to be secured, but the whole system is permitting terrorists to enter and imbed themselves right now.  The two quick questions, No. 1, there&#8217;s been seemingly a purge of officials within the Army, which I find very disconcerting, so I&#8217;d love your comments on that.  Item No. 2, apparently, China has done a great job of stealing our technology with their new aircraft and so forth.  How do we address that issue?  So first, what do you read into the purge and second, how do we deal with this problem with the Chinese stealing our technology?  Thank you and thank you for your service gentlemen.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Pick one and I&#8217;ll give him the other one.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Give him the other one, he&#8217;s pretty good.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>Which one you want?</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">David Fridovich: </b>He&#8217;s pretty good.  Stealing technology goes both ways, it does, but what we know from the open source is that we can find it is state sanction.  It&#8217;s state run, and they just give a very good blank face and shrug their shoulders and go, okay.  Yeah, we got it.  I don&#8217;t think that new fighter that you&#8217;re talking about is the one that they, they showed it off, but I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s really the one that they really have is their highest level and I think you&#8217;re probably aware of that as well, but the technology, we&#8217;ve got to do a better job inside our own military defense industrial complex to secure it, and I think that&#8217;s a real issue.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Do you think having the students at our school with the Chinese students &#8211;</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">David Fridovich: </b>Absolutely.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>They&#8217;re within the top ten number of students in our schools and I worry about the fact that we&#8217;re training our enemy.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">David Fridovich: </b>Yes, it&#8217;s a great question and I&#8217;m in agreement with you.  It&#8217;s by design when you have that large of a population.  You have that large of a population you can almost mandate I want all of 100 million of you take this test.  The top 10 percent, 10 million, the top 1 percent of that become those engineers, get visas, go to America, go to Stanford, Cal Poly etc., etc. on the West Coast, MIT, Harvard, the whole area on the East Coast and inculcate and take back and then also get jobs in those places after a while.  So yeah, I would say it&#8217;s by design and because they&#8217;re generational, they can take their time and do it.  They&#8217;re very patient unlike us.  So yeah, I&#8217;m in agreement with you.  I&#8217;d love to talk more about just that, but part of the weaknesses and inherent weakness in our own system.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Yeah, I&#8217;m going ask Jerry to address the &#8212;  I didn&#8217;t want to jump on the cyber thing real quick because this is one area where Congress says, oh, we can actually get together and legislate on this.  And so there is a potential for legislation in the next Congress and the answer is these are serious threats so be careful what you ask for.  The Internet is the greatest engine of liberty and freedom and economic development that mankind&#8217;s ever created.  We don&#8217;t want to turn it over to the government to control it.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>Right.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>We don&#8217;t need an Obamacare version of cybersecurity.  We don&#8217;t need a Dodd-Frank version of cybersecurity, so whatever legislation they pass it should do no harm.  I mean, the President&#8217;s already has policies that tax the Internet, bad idea to have net neutrality, which is nothing about being neutral.  It&#8217;s about empowering some people and disadvantaging everybody else, and about turning the Internet over to the United Nations and countries like China and Russia to run.  These are all incredibly bad ideas something we should be very, very concerned about.  Michael, we need to do a cyber-panel next time.  Okay purges.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>The purging, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s what you think it is.  It&#8217;s not what you see, it&#8217;s what you don&#8217;t see.  A lot of these generals and admirals needed to go because they&#8217;d been involved in some pretty bad behavior so they needed to be fired.  Now, that said, there&#8217;s been a state of people getting into trouble.  So you have to ask yourself how did they get into these senior positions?  And I think it&#8217;s what you don&#8217;t see.  What you don&#8217;t see are those really good young brigadiers and major generals and rear admirals that are passed over because they are considered to be not supportive of the President&#8217;s agenda and people who will support it are put into those positions and then their real character comes out.  So that&#8217;s what I see as being the bigger concern about the purge.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Yeah, I want to say how often on David Horowitz&#8217;s panel do you hear about purging and male parts, really? So we have, okay.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Question here, what if anything should we do about ISIS?  Do we care if ISIS wins or Iran wins or Syria wins?  Anybody who wins is bad anyway, why should we waste our treasure fighting ISIS?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>So there&#8217;s an ancient Chinese saying the enemy of my enemy can also be my enemy and they all need to die, but Jerry?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>Well, first of all it&#8217;s important to understand that ISIS, once they&#8217;ve accomplished what they&#8217;re trying to accomplish in Iraq and Syria, where do you think they&#8217;re going to go next?  Some would speculate they&#8217;re going to go into the Persian Gulf, but I speculate their next big target for credibility globally is Israel.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Is Israel.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>So I go back to what I&#8217;ve said, we&#8217;ve got to support Israel.  Now, if our blood and treasure, trust me, it means a great deal to me.  That said, we either fight ISIS there or we fight them on the streets of America.  It&#8217;s just that plain and simple and when, thank you, but when the members of Congress standup and say as Chaffetz did and who was the other one?  Was it Jordan or something?  Forget who it was.  ISIS is in America.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Yeah.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>We&#8217;ve caught a dozen of them coming across the border.  Ask Robert Spencer. They&#8217;re in America.  ISIS is in America and more are coming because they&#8217;re coming into the South America and Central America and they&#8217;re making their way up across our border.  They&#8217;re coming across our border.  Their Korans, prayer rugs and terrorist training manuals in the &#8212; on the American side of the border.  We fight them there or we fight them here.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Yes, and Dr. Bob, they said that they were coming.  They said, I mean they gave us a message.  It just said, hey, look we&#8217;re coming and we&#8217;re running that play, get ready, and again, like I cited before, generationally, they&#8217;ll wait a long time, but they&#8217;ll get here.  Make it an away game, kill them there, and be prepared to kill them here.</p>
<p><strong>Ken Timmerman: </strong>Generals, Ken Timmerman, I wanted to ask you a question about Benghazi.  I spoke to people at Africa Command when I was doing my book Dark Horses: The Truth about What Happened in Benghazi.  You know that General Carter Ham has said two things to Congress.  The first is that they looked at the possibility of doing an overflight over the annex and they said that it wouldn&#8217;t make any difference so let&#8217;s not do it, and the second thing he said, when he was asked by Jason Chaffetz precisely, why didn&#8217;t you do everything you possibly could have done to bring forces to bear at the Benghazi?  His answer was we were never asked.  I wondered what your opinion is of General Ham.</p>
<p><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>Go ahead, David.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Well, because I do have my male parts, in that situation I&#8217;ll be honest with you, I don&#8217;t know.  I know him very well.  We were brigadiers.  We were in the same cohort together, and I would up until that point I&#8217;d say, a good man.  Obviously, you&#8217;re getting a mixed message.  So am I.  I don&#8217;t know what happened.  I know that the part of the force that we come from would have made every attempt to get there no matter who was on the ground doing what.  We don&#8217;t care the odds, the rest of it, we&#8217;ll get there, we&#8217;ll get them out.  He&#8217;s lived that.  We&#8217;ve all had those get on the helicopter and go moments and you don&#8217;t second-guess.  You have Americans in trouble.  I&#8217;m getting chills now.  You have Americans in trouble, you go, and you take everything possible to get them out.  So I don&#8217;t know what happened and I don&#8217;t know why the mixed message, but that is clearly a mixed message, so if we&#8217;re both leaving confused that&#8217;s the answer.  Sorry.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>There was, for those of you who don&#8217;t know, Mr. Timmerman has written a pretty dog gone good book on this, haven&#8217;t you?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>So we have copies out, there&#8217;s copies in the &#8211;</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>And it&#8217;s a good book and thanks for your question.  I think the military&#8217;s going to get pinged on this thing.  I think the military&#8217;s comfortable.  I think the military could have gone and could have made a difference and they didn&#8217;t, and this idea that we weren&#8217;t asked is a hyphenated word for that and in mixed company I won&#8217;t use it, but I&#8217;ll just say nonsense. Okay? The military could have gone and the idea that we left those four men there when they, when said look William Tecumseh Sherman said to Ulysses S. Grant in a letter on the 8th of March 1864, when he came out of Tennessee, he said I knew wherever I was that you thought of me and that you would come if I got in a tight spot.  That&#8217;s in American English that&#8217;s, an American value, violated at Benghazi.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Yeah, so we&#8217;re going to keep going until Mike gives me the high signs.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Two quick things, how can we address the restrictive rules of engagement for our troops and sort of, what I see as a cultural shift in our military?  It&#8217;s anecdotal but I think that even West Point is much more liberal in its mindset now.  Can you talk about those things please?</p>
<p><b>David Fridovich: </b>The rules of engagement, commanders do have the right to push back on the rules of engagement that they need.  So they go into an environment and you&#8217;re asking me to do X.  I mean, I lived this in the Southern Philippines.  They said hey, here are the state and we go okay and we would go back and we would get very creative with the rules engagement so much so that when yeah, Paul Wolfowitz showed up to visit us to visit us in the Southern Philippines we briefed him.  We were very honest.  We&#8217;re transparent, we said here&#8217;s the situation and he said okay.  I&#8217;d wish you wouldn&#8217;t get as creative as you are to get the work done, but what do you need from me to get that done and we told him what we needed and we got re-written rules of engagement when Rumsfeld was on leave, which was the Secretary Defense.  And he signed, I mean that&#8217;s what happens and he signed the order and shot it out.  We were good.  It might have been just an afternoon off, but it was enough.</p>
<p>Commanders have the responsibility in the field and operationally to go back and say you&#8217;re putting these guys in harms&#8217; way here&#8217;s, what I need and keep pushing.  And saying, because it&#8217;s not yes, the President&#8217;s going to say hey, I&#8217;m assuming the risk.  He&#8217;s not assuming the risk.  It&#8217;s that force on the ground, it&#8217;s that force in the sea, on the air that&#8217;s assuming the risk and they need to know.</p>
<p>So when we jump out of an airplane, you have two parachutes, a main that&#8217;s supposed to work and a reserve.  You don&#8217;t ask permission to pull your reserve.  If the main&#8217;s not working, you know what you&#8217;re supposed to do to save your life.  Why would we ever put people in a situation where they don&#8217;t have that choice, and that&#8217;s what I believe in and I believe commanders.  This is where it gets to the other gentleman&#8217;s comment, commanders to safeguard the thing that they love, the force, have got to go back and say wait a minute.  Here&#8217;s the situation.  We&#8217;ve assessed the ground situation.  It&#8217;s real.  Here&#8217;s what we need to be able to safeguard our force.  Nothing you, nothing a commander or even the commander in chief can ever say well, limit the soldiers&#8217;, sailors&#8217;, airmen, Marines&#8217; inherent right of self-defense, and that&#8217;s the start point of everything.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>I really want to add though that you can talk about culture all you want, this generation of soldiers like every generation of Americans is the greatest generation.  They&#8217;re an unbelievable group of young men and women.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Yeah.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>I remember a couple years ago coming to a Horowitz event and they had Tibor Rubin here, who is an incredible Medal of Honor winner from the Korean War, and you ask how can anybody have that kind of courage and the truth is all of them have that courage.  And this generation of kids, they are the best that you could ask for and God bless them the ones that fight for us, they really are.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yes and thank you.  I would just like to submit that everything that&#8217;s been discussed here is just the symptoms, and that one only need read Obama&#8217;s own books and then read Dinesh D&#8217;Souza&#8217;s analysis of those books to conclude that this is not an accident.  This guy I wish he were incompetent.  He is not incompetent.  He&#8217;s the most competent President we&#8217;ve ever had.  They just think that you want to go to Los Angles but he&#8217;s headed for Moscow.  This guy is malevolent and somebody like the Heritage Foundation or someone should start telling the truth.  This is not an accident.  You say foreign policy looks ad hoc, no.</p>
<p>If your goal is worldwide chaos, this guy gets an A plus.  If your goal is to destroy America, if your guy &#8212; I spent my whole life in the financial services business.  We were dominant, with Dodd Frank, but he&#8217;s killed it.  He&#8217;s destroyed financial services.  He&#8217;s tried to destroy the energy industry, but it&#8217;s too hard to control.  See the reason too big to fail was to make them all bigger, because you can control five big guys.  These oil and gas people, you can&#8217;t control, that&#8217;s what his problem has been.  But when are we going to face the fact that this is all intentional.  This is not an accident.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Yeah.  I don&#8217;t think the panel disagrees, so one last question.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>I wanted to ask now that we have &#8211; look I was on the board at Visitors of West Point 30 years ago and I used to lecture at the National War College.  What&#8217;s happening in the Army particularly in the military, but the Army most particularly, is really frightening.  What I have not seen and I&#8217;m going to ask you this question, I&#8217;ve not seen from the House Armed Services Committee, that the Republicans have controlled, and I&#8217;m wondering now that the Senate Arms Services Committee will be chaired by John McCain, the man who said that Samantha Power and Ms. Rice were perfect for their jobs.</p>
<p>What do you feel, will the Senate Republicans, will anybody stand up and take on and investigate what is in fact you&#8217;re describing the hollowing out, the purging of the military, the turning it into &#8212; all bureaucracies have leadership that is &#8212; people would rather get ahead than care about their country or anything else, and we&#8217;ve seen that now presently at the top of the military.  When will we, well, do you have any confidence in that?  Do you have any belief that we will see that coming out of this newly Republican-controlled Congress?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Jerry on that.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Jerry Boykin: </b>I think that what you will see is you will see a sincere effort to stop the sequestration cuts as a first order of business and think that they are recognizing now that those cuts are way too deep and that they&#8217;re going to hollow out our military.  Now, will they succeed?  I don&#8217;t know.  Will Obama sign legislation?  I don&#8217;t know, but I think that you&#8217;ll see an effort to do that.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>That&#8217;s, my question is, all right, I agree on the sequestering, that&#8217;s one thing, I&#8217;m asking a different question. Will they go into what is a preplanned and clearly being executed effort to hollow out the moral leadership in the military particularly the Army?  Besides the sequestering, I want to know when you expect the Republicans, if ever, to standup on this issue and do you have any confidence in John McCain, as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee will do that?</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">Jerry Boykin: </b>No.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>James Carafano: </b>Well, let&#8217;s just poll the panel. No.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>No.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>Okay so you&#8217;re 3 for 3. But actually, you bring up the really the most important point.  We always say what is our President doing?  What is our Congress doing?  And what really matters is what are we doing, all right?  So the most famous battle in American history is maybe Gettysburg, and at Gettysburg, the Union stood because one guy at the far left of the flank, who was just a guy.  He wasn&#8217;t a general, he wasn&#8217;t a President, he wasn&#8217;t a congressman.  He might have even been drafted.  He was just a guy and he was standing there, and they said if the Confederates get around you we will fall and if we fall, the army will fall and if the army falls the nation will fall and that person stood their ground.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>David Fridovich: </b>Yeah.</p>
<p><b style="color: #323333;">James Carafano: </b>So when you ask whose going to save this country?  Who&#8217;s going to make sure that the men and women that defend us have what they need then look around yourselves at the table because we are them. Thank you.  Thank you everybody.</p>
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		<title>Hold Obama and the Democrats Accountable for the Terrorist Threat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/hold-obama-and-the-democrats-accountable-for-the-terrorist-threat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hold-obama-and-the-democrats-accountable-for-the-terrorist-threat</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2014 04:58:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242531</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The urgency of indicting the Democratic Party for its dereliction of duty. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/140528-obama-west-point-mn-1155_a321bf5f75359e045403b1c5436f31aa.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242534" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/140528-obama-west-point-mn-1155_a321bf5f75359e045403b1c5436f31aa-438x350.jpg" alt="140528-obama-west-point-mn-1155_a321bf5f75359e045403b1c5436f31aa" width="327" height="261" /></a>Originally published at <a href="http://www.redstate.com/diary/DavidHorowitz/2014/10/06/hold-obama-democrats-accountable-terrorist-threat/">RedState.com</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Since 1945 Republicans have not won the popular vote unless national security was the primary issue. But security issues were virtually absent from the 2008 and 2012 elections. This gave victories to Barack Obama, the most anti-military president in American history. Fortunately, the prospects for 2016 are looking marginally better because Republicans are now actually focusing on the fact that an anti-military presidency has ominous consequences for the 300 million Americans whose safety is the primary responsibility of the commander-in-chief.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">That said, there is much to be desired in the Republican message, which is tepid, diffuse and easily missed. When Politico wrote a story about the recent change in Republican strategy it was all about the shift away from the tax-cutting emphasis of recent years, <a style="color: #b82026;" href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/republicans-shift-away-from-tax-cutting-mania-111359.html?hp=f2">rather than towards the national security issue</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So let me describe the reality we are actually facing, which is a necessary preface to the way the Republican Party should be framing its strategy and should be emphasizing the dangers of having a Democratic president like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton – or for that matter a Democratic Congress – leading us in wartime.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I will leave out of this wartime equation the threats from Russia and China, which Obama and the Democrats have done so much to foster. I will focus only on the threat posed by Islamic jihadists, who at this moment can easily penetrate the borders that Obama and the Democrats have done so much to wreck. And carry with them chemical and biological weapons, and – if Iran builds the bombs which Obama the Democrats have made almost inevitable – nuclear weapons as well.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This is easily the greatest terrorist threat in our history, far greater than what transpired before and after 9/11. ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist armies now control territory (and attendant resources) from Afghanistan through Iraq Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Somalia and other regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Why has this happened? Because Obama and the Democrats have waged a ten-year war against the war on terror, against American military strength, against an American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the very idea that Islamic forces have declared war on us. For ten years Democrats have been determined to treat terrorists as individual criminals, arrest them and try them in American courts where they will have all the protections of the American legal system that they are seeking to destroy. So hostile has Obama been to the very notion of a “War on Terror” that he has purged the very term from the official government vocabulary and replaced it with “overseas contingency operations” which describes exactly nothing.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To create the power vacuum which Islamic jihadists have filled, Obama had to defy the advice of his Secretary of Defense and his intelligence advisers. He did this in part by absenting himself from nearly half his daily intelligence briefings, and in part by saying no to absolutely crucial measures that his military staff proposed for countering the threat from ISIS and other terrorist groups. Obama saw to it that America would relinquish its military base in Iraq (a country that strategically borders on Afghanistan, Syria and Iran) or to keep the 20,000 American troops stationed there as his Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff urged him to do.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Obama hated the Iraq War so much that he was willing to betray all the American soldiers who gave their lives to keep Iraq out of the clutches of Iran and safe from the terrorist threat. If Obama had just listened to the advice of his military staff, there would be no ISIS today. Obama’s deliberate, calculated surrender of Iraq (and soon Afghanistan) and failure to stop Syria’s Assad when he crossed Obama’s red line is the greatest and gravest dereliction of duty in the history of the American presidency.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And make no mistake, Obama was not alone. For ten years the Democrats have been sabotaging the war on terror, beginning with their disgraceful scorched earth campaign against President Bush and the War in Iraq and continuing with their full-throated cry for the abandonment of Iraq after Bush had won the peace and contained the terrorist threat. Their support for Obama’s appeasement of Iran and Hamas, his support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and his diplomatic assault on Israel, America’s only true ally in the Middle East, is not only a national disgrace but the heart of the crisis that is looming on the international horizon.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If Republicans fail to articulate the sources of this crisis, and specifically to indict Obama, Hillary and the Democrats for their betrayal of America’s interests and their failure to protect the American people then Republicans electoral prospects will be dim, and with them, their country’s future.</p>
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		<title>Islamic State Rape: ‘Just Another Form of Warfare’?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/islamic-state-rape-just-another-form-of-warfare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamic-state-rape-just-another-form-of-warfare</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:54:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241722</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An article in "Foreign Policy" magazine demonstrates why U.S. Mideast policy is a disaster. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lm.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241727" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lm-450x298.jpg" alt="lm" width="299" height="198" /></a>In light of the ongoing nightmare that is the Islamic State, <em>Foreign Policy</em>, a magazine somewhat reflective of the establishment, has published an article that <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/foreign-policy-magazine-covers-up-syrian-sex-jihad/">once again</a> demonstrates why U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is a disaster: because analysts and policymakers, unable or unwilling to grapple with foreign concepts, opt to articulate them through familiar Western paradigms.</p>
<p>Titled “<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/16/the_islamic_state_of_sexual_violence_women_rape_iraq_syria">The Islamic State of Sexual Violence</a>” and written by Aki Peritz and Tara Maller—“We both worked as CIA analysts focused on Iraq’s insurgency and counterterrorism during much of the war”—the <em>Foreign Policy</em> (<em>FP</em>) article opens with this telling sentence: “Of the many terrifying stories emerging from Islamic State-occupied Iraq and Syria, the violence directed toward women is perhaps the most difficult to contemplate.”</p>
<p>This is an odd assertion. Of all the atrocities committed by the Islamic State, is sexual violence against women <em>really</em> “the most difficult to contemplate”? After all, deplorable as sexual violence against women is, it is also one of the most common features of warfare since the beginnings of recorded history. It should not be too “difficult to contemplate.”</p>
<p>Instead, one would think that public beheadings and mutilations—<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/beheading-infidels-how-allah-heals-the-hearts-of-believers/">with sadistic pictures of the victims posted online</a>—would be more “difficult to contemplate.” One would think herding off 1500 “infidel” men and <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/graphic-video-islamic-terrorists-executing-civilians/">coldly shooting them in the head</a> to cries of “Allahu Akbar” would be more “difficult to contemplate.” One would think that forcing religious minorities <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/western-ignorance-of-the-conditions-of-omar/">to convert to Islam or die</a>—with <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/christians-crucified-again-for-refusing-islam/">Christians crucified for refusing to embrace Islam</a>—would be more “difficult to contemplate.”</p>
<p>But in the very next paragraph we encounter the reason why <em>FP</em> highlights female sexual abuse while ignoring the truly more “difficult to contemplate” atrocities committed by the Islamic State: to exonerate Islam from the deeds of the Islamic State:</p>
<blockquote><p>IS claims to be a religious organization, dedicated to re-establishing the caliphate and enforcing codes of modesty and behavior from the time of Muhammad and his followers. But this is rape, not religious conservatism. IS may dress up its sexual violence in religious justifications, saying its victims violated Islamic law, or were infidels, but their leaders are not fools. This is just another form of warfare….</p></blockquote>
<p>That last sentence is what <em>FP</em> wants readers to leave with—“This is just another form of warfare.” The authors chose the most generic atrocity committed during war, one that is common to all cultures and civilizations—sexual violence, enslavement, and rape—to condemn the Islamic State with. The result is that the Islamic State looks like “just another” enemy combatant.</p>
<p>While the authors are correct in saying that the Islamic State is “dedicated to re-establishing the caliphate,” the follow up assertion, “and enforcing codes of modesty and behavior from the time of Muhammad and his followers” is immensely loaded and misleading. So is the statement “But this is rape, not religious conservatism.”</p>
<p>The authors invoke Western standards of “modesty and behavior” without letting readers know that Islamic notions of “modesty and behavior” differ significantly and are wholly based on Islamic law, not “natural” law.</p>
<p>And Islamic law, or Sharia, permits the enslavement, selling, and rape of infidel women captured during the jihad, as they are seen as legitimately gained booty, or in the Koran’s phraseology, “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/are-slave-girls-in-islam-equivalent-to-animals/">what your right hands possess</a>” (another teaching that might be more “difficult to contemplate” than generic wartime rape itself).</p>
<p>Here is how the late <a href="http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2007/05feb07/05obit.html">Majid Khadduri</a>, “internationally recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on Islamic law and jurisprudence,” explained the idea of “spoils” in his <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=UHWd6gLZsFIC&amp;q=ghanima#v=snippet&amp;q=ghanima&amp;f=false"><em>War and Peace in the Law of Islam</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The term spoil (<em>ghanima</em>) is applied specifically to property acquired by force from non-Muslims. It includes, however, not only property (movable and immovable) but also persons, whether in the capacity of <em>asra</em> (prisoners of war) or <em>sabi</em> (women and children).… <em>If the slave were a woman, the master was permitted to have sexual connection with her as a concubine</em>.</p></blockquote>
<p>Accordingly, Sheikh Yasir al-‘Ajlawni  says that Muslims fighting to topple “infidel” president Bashar Assad in Syria are permitted to “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/new-fatwa-permits-rape-of-non-sunni-women-in-syria/">capture and have sex with</a>” all non-Sunni women, including Shia Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Yazidis.</p>
<p>Before him, Egyptian <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/raped-and-ransacked-in-the-muslim-world/">Sheikh Ishaq Huwaini</a> lamented how during the heydays of Islam, “You [could] go to the market and buy her [enslaved, infidel concubines for sale]….  In other words, when I want a sex-slave, I go to the market and pick whichever female I desire and buy her.”</p>
<p>Kuwaiti political activist <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/muslim-woman-seeks-to-revive-institution-of-sex-slavery/">Salwa al-Mutairi</a> advocated for the formal reinstitution of sex-slavery.  She said on video that Islam’s greatest authorities from Mecca, the city of Islam, all confirmed the legality of sex-slavery to her.  According to the Kuwaiti woman:</p>
<blockquote><p>A Muslim state must [first] attack a Christian state—sorry, I mean any non-Muslim state—and they [the women, the future sex-slaves] must be captives of the raid. Is this forbidden? Not at all; according to Islam, sex slaves are not at all forbidden…. the free [Muslim] woman has to be married properly to her husband, but the sex-slave—he just buys her and that’s that….  For example, in the Chechnya war, surely there are female Russian captives. So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait; better that than have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations. I don’t see any problem in this, no problem at all.</p></blockquote>
<p>Some years back, when Sheikh Gamal Qutb, former Grand Mufti of Al Azhar, the most authoritative Islamic institution, was asked on live Arabic-language television if Islam permits sex slaves, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islams-public-enemy-1/">he refused to give a direct answer</a>, preferring to prevaricate.  When pressed for a clear answer by the determined host, he became hostile and stormed off the set.</p>
<p>Moreover, recall that only a few months ago, Boko Haram—a Nigerian Islamic organization that <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/nigerian-sex-slaves-disrupt-obama-narrative-on-islam/">also believes Allah permits sex slavery</a>—made headlines when it abducted nearly 300 “infidel” schoolgirls to be sold on the sex slave market. Its leader <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/05/world/africa/nigeria-abducted-girls/index.html">declaring</a> on video, “I abducted your girls. I will sell them on the market, by Allah….There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.”</p>
<p>Nonetheless, <em>FP</em> continues casually invoking Western standards to explain distinctly Islamic phenomena:</p>
<blockquote><p>IS claims to be a group of holy warriors, crafting a new world order. But the rampant sexual criminality exposes its hypocrisy and extreme brutality…. It gives the lie to the group&#8217;s claim that they are pure of heart.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Islamic State’s “rampant sexual criminality exposes its hypocrisy and extreme brutality”? “Pure of heart”? Really?</p>
<p>As mentioned, Islamic law makes crystal clear that conquered “infidel” sex slaves are one of the rewards for those waging jihad.   It’s not open to debate. It’s in the Koran, was practiced by the prophet of Islam—whom Muslims are encouraged to emulate in all ways—and is a common fixture of Islamic history. Exercising their Islamic right to own and copulate with slaves taken as booty during the jihad is hardly seen as “rampant sexual criminality,” “hypocrisy and extreme brutality,” nor does it have anything to do with “pure hearts.”</p>
<p>The naivety of this <em>FP</em> article is astounding and displays a staggering level of ignorance concerning Islam’s rules of war. Of course, that it was written by two former CIA analysts focused exclusively on Iraq, a Muslim nation, helps explain why that nation is in the deplorable state it’s in.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Raymond Ibrahim</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discussing</em><span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title " dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Raymond Ibrahim on ISIS's Islamic Inspirations."><em><strong> ISIS&#8217;s Islamic Inspirations</strong>:</em> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/bFkGgNsqQ_4" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
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		<title>Obama Will Fight ISIS by Arming ISIS</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-will-fight-isis-by-arming-isis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-will-fight-isis-by-arming-isis</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Sep 2014 04:55:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240758</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We can’t defeat terrorists by arming terrorists.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-11-at-12.46.36-AM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240761" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Screen-Shot-2014-09-11-at-12.46.36-AM-418x350.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-09-11 at 12.46.36 AM" width="293" height="245" /></a>“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. A few centuries later his fellow Englishman, Winston Churchill, quipped, “The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.”</p>
<p>It’s not true of the United States, but it is true of Barack Obama who, having exhausted every alternative that involved appeasement or pretending that ISIS wasn’t a threat, has decided to do the right thing.</p>
<p>As long as he gets enough applause for doing it.</p>
<p>With his approval ratings, particularly on American leadership and national security, lower than Assad’s, he decided to exploit September 11 to butch up his foreign policy image.</p>
<p>After spending the last few years ignoring ISIS, he delivered a carefully timed speech vowing to take it on. The speech might have been a little more credible if it had not come from the man whose inaction allowed ISIS to take over parts of Iraq and Syria and who early this year was dismissing it as a JV team.</p>
<p>The scoundrel who lied and claimed that he had defeated Al Qaeda has been reborn again as a patriot who is promising to… defeat Al Qaeda. Even his usual boast of defeating Al Qaeda has been carefully walked back to a claim of having defeated “much of al-Qaida’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.</p>
<p>That brief moment of near honesty is diminished only by the fact that the war on Al Qaeda had moved on to the Middle East long before Obama even took office. It was Obama who decided to divert away from fighting Al Qaeda in the Middle East on a failed attempt to defeat the Taliban and an even more failed attempt to negotiate peace with the “moderate” Taliban.</p>
<p>Obama’s strategy is a kitchen sink approach that promises air strikes for the patriots and multilateral coalitions for the appeasers. There will be coalitions with Sunni Arabs and with a new “inclusive” Iraqi government. There will be coalitions with everyone. A UN session will be chaired. Syria will be bombed and “terrorists who threaten our country” will be hunted down.</p>
<p>And all of it will happen without a single American soldier being put at risk.</p>
<p>It’s an utterly incoherent and calculatedly unobjectionable speech by a failing politician that fails to address why we’re in this mess and what past policies we have to rethink to get out of it.</p>
<p>In a telling sign, Obama’s giant goodie bag of ISIS proposals also includes arming ISIS.</p>
<p>“Across the border in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight, I again call on Congress, again, to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters,” Obama said. “We must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.”</p>
<p>It was the Syrian crisis that turned ISIS into an army. Some of the groups now loyal to ISIS once fought alongside the Syrian opposition that he would like to arm.</p>
<p>Some still do.</p>
<p>Not only does Obama know this, but he refrained from fully committing to arming the Syrian rebels precisely because there was no way to do so without risking the weapons falling into the hands of ISIS.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton wrote in <i>Hard Choices</i> that he had refused to arm the rebels. Last year Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had testified that Obama had vetoed a proposal to provide weapons to them.</p>
<p>At a press conference Obama had said, “We have seen extremist elements insinuate themselves into the opposition, and you know, one of the things that we have to be on guard about &#8212; particularly when we start talking about arming opposition figures &#8212; is that we are not indirectly putting arms in the hands of folks that would do Americans harm.”</p>
<p>Reports in the <i>New York Times</i> suggested that the administration had not been able to find any “moderates” who could safely be armed with heavy weapons because the actual fighters on the ground are all Islamic Jihadists.</p>
<p>Now Obama is not only reversing one of the few sensible things he did and championing a policy that he knows quite well is wrong, but is also attempting to make Congress complicit in his destructive folly.</p>
<p>Obama was willing to give F-16 jets to the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. If he was holding off on heavy weapons transfers to the Jihadists in Syria, it was because he knew that there was a very high risk that those weapons would end up being used against Americans. And that he would pay a political price.</p>
<p>ISIS became much more lethal when it acquired American equipment that had been provided to the Iraqi military. ISIS allies in Syria had already been photographed with American humanitarian aid and when the Jihadists of the Islamic Front turned on the Free Syrian Army that is the typical vector for US aid, it easily seized their supplies and warehouses.</p>
<p>While the FSA isn’t ISIS, parts of it are aligned with ISIS and the other parts are jockeying for power.</p>
<p>Some Jihadist commanders with the FSA and other non-ISIS groups fight ISIS and its allies. Others are its allies. Telling them apart is hard even with a map and a room full of charts. Fighters drift back and forth. The “moderate” Syrian rebel that we arm and train today will be the “extreme” terrorist tomorrow and there is absolutely no way to tell where a weapon that we provide will end up.</p>
<p>Arming the Syrian opposition is the same thing as arming ISIS. The Syrian Jihadists fighting it don’t “reject its extreme ideology” as much as they’re angling for their piece of the Caliphate. The Al Nusra Front was fighting ISIS before it pledged allegiance to ISIS. The Sunni opposition consists of a lot of wannabe Caliphs trying to collect enough bakeries and oil wells to cash in for a Caliphate.</p>
<p>Obama insisted once again in his speech that ISIS is not Islamic. “No religion condones the killing of innocents&#8230; ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.”</p>
<p>The vision of Islam, past and present, has been the slaughter of all who stand in the way of the religion’s supremacy. But the attempt to portray ISIS as a unique entity that is detached from all other Islamic terrorist groups is a misleading effort to justify an incoherent policy.</p>
<p>“These terrorists are unique in their brutality,” Obama claimed. “They execute captured prisoners. They kill children. They enslave, rape and force women into marriage. They threatened a religious minority with genocide.”</p>
<p>There isn’t anything unique about these things. Wahhabi Jihadists have been doing all of them for centuries. And these tactics date back to Mohammed.</p>
<p>ISIS isn’t unique in its brutality. It’s unique in its successes. And its successes can be credited to Obama’s Arab Spring and his refusal to admit that his policy of ignoring Iraq had failed.</p>
<p>“America is safer,” Obama claims. But that’s a lie.</p>
<p>America is less safe than ever. Not just because of ISIS, but because of a leadership that allows such crises to become severe threats because it refuses to address what they really are.</p>
<p>Obama’s speech promises action against ISIS while denying what it is. If Obama follows through on his policy, instead of defeating ISIS, he will arm it. It’s an old mistake being repeated all over again.</p>
<p>We can’t defeat terrorists by arming terrorists.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Global Map, 2017</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-global-map-2017/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-global-map-2017</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-global-map-2017/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2014 04:56:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama's radical transformation hasn't stopped with America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/world-on-fire-creative-commons.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240660" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/world-on-fire-creative-commons.jpg" alt="world-on-fire-creative-commons" width="314" height="228" /></a>Barack Obama pledged to radically transform America when he took office. He didn&#8217;t stop at America. President Obama&#8217;s greatest legacy may be the radical reshaping of the global map.</p>
<p>Fast forward three years. Here&#8217;s where we stand.</p>
<p>Given Europe&#8217;s failure to stand up to Russian aggression in Crimea, Russia&#8217;s borders have expanded to include Eastern Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan and larger portions of Moldova. As of 2014, Russia had consolidated its hold on Transnistria, the Eastern region of Moldova, which is heavily Russian; Russia had annexed Crimea; Russia had placed troops inside Eastern Ukraine.</p>
<p>But it didn&#8217;t stop there. Russia began squeezing Georgia again, and pro-Russian regimes are consolidating their power in Kazakhstan and Belarus. Belarus asked the Russian government to place 15 warplanes inside the country in 2014; Kazakhstan got into a tiff with Russia over comments Putin made unsubtly suggesting a possible invasion of the country, then complied with Putin&#8217;s demands when the West did nothing.</p>
<p>Thus far, Putin has not invaded any NATO countries. But that could change, given the high Russian population in Latvia and Estonia.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Jordan&#8217;s kingdom has fallen, replaced by a radical Islamist regime. That Palestinian Arab regime has attempted to consolidate its power by forming an alliance with Hamas in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. In Lebanon, the Iranians and Syrians have effectively annexed southern Lebanon. Israel&#8217;s only quiet border is now its southern border with Egypt.</p>
<p>In Syria, Bashar Assad has retained a measure of power by essentially conceding territory to ISIS in the eastern part of the country; after a halfhearted intervention against ISIS, the international community went quiet as ISIS formed its sought-after caliphate in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.</p>
<p>In response, Iran essentially invaded southern Iraq, and Turkey launched covert action against the Kurds in order to prevent the formation of a broader Kurdistan encompassing parts of Turkish territory.</p>
<p>With the withdrawal of the United States and its allies from Afghanistan, Pakistan has once again made its presence felt. The Taliban have effectively taken control of large swaths of territory, with the help of the Pakistani regime, which has shifted leadership but not position with regard to radical Islam.</p>
<p>In the most stunning international move, China has threatened full-scale annexation of Taiwan, barring access to the South China Sea from Western countries and cutting off Taiwan&#8217;s trade routes. The West has refused to leverage China, fearing financial retaliation. China has made similar moves against the Philippines.</p>
<p>Come 2017, this will be President Obama&#8217;s legacy: a world of redrawn borders, all to the benefit of some of the worst regimes on the planet. When America retreats from the world, its enemies expand.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Foreign Policy of Empty Words</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-foreign-policy-of-empty-words</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 04:30:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[For America's enemies, actions speak louder than rhetoric. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240426" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001-450x337.jpg" alt="1393766471000-AP-Obama-Budget-001" width="316" height="237" /></a></p>
<p><em>“When force threatens, talk is no good.”</em></p>
<p>That line from John Ford’s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by “forever debating the question and never making any progress” and issuing “empty decrees.” “All words, apart from action,” Demosthenes warned, “seem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.” We’ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues.</p>
<p>Just in the last few weeks we have heard a lot of bluster about Islamic State, the rampaging jihadists in northern Iraq who have left in their wake a trail of traditional Muslim mayhem–- sectarian cleansing, forced conversion, slaving, rape, torture, slaughter, and Koran-inspired beheadings, including two American journalists. In response to these decisive deeds, Obama has thundered that he will “degrade and destroy” the “cancer.” In an op-ed co-written with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he has vowed that the allies “will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” His vice president Joe Biden, with his usual trite hyperbole, has threatened, “We will follow them to the gate of hell until they are brought to justice.” And Secretary of State John Kerry, after the beheading of journalist James Foley, has warned, “The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.” “By whom” is the question the passive voice artfully leaves unanswered.</p>
<p>To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration’s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in our enemies. Or to put it in my old man’s more earthy terms when I smarted off, “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash.” Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.</p>
<p>Indeed, the deeds necessary to back these loud boasts have been few. That should not surprise us, since Obama has said and done much to tell the world that we will not act decisively, relying instead on verbal processes and gestures of force like bombing some trucks to create a telegenic illusion of action. He started his presidency with the “apology tour,” on which he called the U.S. “arrogant, dismissive, derisive,” confessed that we are “still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” proclaimed that we “will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,” confessed that “too often we set [our] principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford” and so “we went off course,” and promised that we “are working to improve our democracy.” How could such a tainted and flawed state have the moral authority to act with the confidence and decisiveness that his recent rhetoric implies?</p>
<p>Likewise his domestic deeds have undercut the capacity to enforce his tough foreign policy words. Because of cuts to the military budget––inspired in part by his desire to reduce the U.S. to merely one unexceptional member of an international coalition that supposedly can maintain global order and create collective security––our military capacity is destined “to be an increasingly hollow force,” as Bret Stephens writes, “with the Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest—and smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.”</p>
<p>Commensurate with this undercutting of America’s armed forces have been Obama’s empty bluster and careless language, something dangerous coming from the Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military power in history. “Leading from behind” in Libya, the vanishing “red line” in Syria, the juvenile scolding of Putin “that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters,” the “no strategy” gaffe about the “jayvee” jihadists of the Islamic State–– all were instantly refuted and discredited by facts on the ground created by hard men of brutal action. Libya is not a democracy, but the jihadist version of Road Warrior. Syria’s Bashar al Assad is winning in Syria by slaughtering close to 200,000 men, women, and children. The Islamic State still controls northern Iraq and Syria, and still sits at the gates of Baghdad. And Putin has snatched Crimea and is closing in on eastern Ukraine. Throw in Obama’s penchant for berating allies like Israel, ignoring the interests of others like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, undercutting vulnerable states like Poland and the Czech Republic, and appeasing genocidal mullahs in Iran, and is it any surprise that his words “inspire greater distrust” in everyone except our enemies?</p>
<p>Of course, Obama’s habit of using words to substitute for politically risky deeds is universal in the West. We just saw a NATO confab in which a lot of big talk for the reporters end up so much smoke when the details are parsed. NATO leaders have agreed “to establish a so-called spearhead force of several thousand troops designed to move into trouble spots at short notice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. Talk about closing the barn door after the Russian bear has got loose. I’m sure Putin is trembling over the thought of “several thousand” NATO troops that someday might materialize to stop his adventurism. If NATO isn’t acting now, what makes anyone think this special “spearhead force” will act in the future, even if NATO members do create it? As Charles Krauthammer writes, the force “is a feeble half-measure. Not only will troops have to be assembled, dispatched, transported and armed as the fire bell is ringing, but the very sending will require some affirmative and immediate decision by NATO. Try getting that done. The alliance is famous for its reluctant, slow and fractured decision-making.”</p>
<p>And haven’t we heard this sort of braggadocio before from Europe? Remember the 60,000-man “rapid reaction force” the EU was going to create so that they could avoid any further embarrassment of having “cowboy” Americans pull their foreign policy irons out of the fire, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo? Given that only three European NATO members honor the 2% of GDP minimum for military spending, it’s unlikely that the money for creating this alleged “deterrent” will ever be budgeted, not with EU economies in the doldrums, and widespread grumbling over “austerity” budgets. No wonder that, as the Journal reports, “most details of the force . . . remained to be settled.” But don’t worry, NATO leaders have “committed” to spending the 2% on defense they “committed” to in 2002 and subsequently ignored. Better read the fine print: the commitment is non-binding and will be implemented over a 10-year period. Who knows how much more of the old Soviet Empire Vladimir will have taken back by then.</p>
<p>“Word, words, words,” as Hamlet says. But words useful for politicians who want to avoid the risk and uncertainty of action, and don’t want to face disgruntled voters at the polls. And when this perennial calculus is joined to the progressive belief that an exploitative, racist, neo-imperialist America is disqualified by its sins from being the guarantor of global order and stability, you get the world we are rapidly becoming––a Darwinian jungle of feral violence, illiberal hegemons, thug-nations, and nuclear-armed terrorist states.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s &#8216;Managing&#8217; of ISIS &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-managing-of-isis-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-managing-of-isis-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:00:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Radical-in-Chief's disdain for American victory.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ob6.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240503" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ob6-450x337.jpg" alt="ob6" width="288" height="216" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s Glazov Gang was guest hosted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/MPHaus.US">Michael Hausam</a> and joined by <strong>Mark Tapson</strong>, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, <strong>Mike Munzing,</strong> a Tea Party Activist and <strong>Jennifer Van Laar, </strong>a writer at <a href="http://www.ijreview.com/">Independent Journal Review</a>.</p>
<p>The guests gathered to discuss <strong>Obama&#8217;s &#8216;Managing&#8217; of ISIS</strong>, analyzing the Radical-in-Chief&#8217;s disdain for American victory:<strong><br />
</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/8SnHe4yf750" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Miserable Failure</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-miserable-failure/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-miserable-failure</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2014 04:14:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Isolated, angry and in denial.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/o31.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239951" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/o31-333x350.jpg" alt="President Obama Makes Statement On The Sequestration" width="248" height="261" /></a>It was always obvious what Obama’s supporters wanted. They weren’t willing to settle for a Hillary, just another politician who would punch the clock, deliver tepid speeches and push their leftist agenda.</p>
<p>They wanted someone larger than life. A head made for Mount Rushmore and a body that would be cast in statues across the country. Speeches meant to be studied in classrooms for the next hundred years.</p>
<p>They compared him to JFK and Reagan. He was treated as the icon that his backers wanted him to be. His election was supposed to be a watershed moment in American history.</p>
<p>Instead it ends in miserable failure.</p>
<p>At home, Obama is caught in a desperate tug of war with Republicans. He won the budget battle by sending park rangers to shut down national monuments. His last ditch gamble for holding on to the Senate is using racial tensions in Ferguson to promote black voter turnout.</p>
<p>And if he wins, all he’ll have is what he has now.</p>
<p>This is how shoddy and tawdry the reality of Hope and Change has become. Trapped in a corner, Obama is dragging out the dirtiest Chicago politics. He’s trying to hold off the inevitable by using the same types of tactics that the crooked mayor of his hometown would.</p>
<p>There’s no inspiration here. No words that will resound across time. Just dirty rats on a sinking ship.</p>
<p>Blame Congress has become the new Blame Bush. ObamaCare is a slow motion disaster that requires constant course corrections to keep it from coming apart. It’s not the new Social Security or Medicare. It’s the new HMO; a clumsy construction that most Americans are unhappy with.</p>
<p>Obama’s only power comes from his abuse of his authority, but what one man does, another man can undo. Instead of creating a lasting legislative legacy, Obama’s executive orders and legislation by administration are a house of cards that his successor can topple with the same pen and phone.</p>
<p>They seem intimidating in the way that the actions of tyrants are, but tyranny can be undone with tyranny. What Obama failed to do was build a consensus. He didn’t change the course of American history. He didn’t win the hearts and minds of Americans. Now he’s reduced to vandalizing America.</p>
<p>Obama said that Putin’s actions in Ukraine weren’t a sign of strength, but a sign of weakness. There is some truth to that. Putin’s economic policies have failed and he was unpopular at home. But the Obama tyrannical reign of phone and pen also isn’t a sign of strength. It’s a sign of weakness.</p>
<p>Like Putin, Obama has run out of options.</p>
<p>Unpopular with voters, shunned by his own party in battleground states, he rules by executive order and parties with influential executives while ignoring his responsibilities.</p>
<p>That’s not Reagan. It’s not JFK. It’s not even LBJ.</p>
<p>Stumbling to the microphone in a tan suit, he admits that he has no strategy for ISIS. Why should he? A few months ago he was calling a force that controls much of Iraq and Syria a junior varsity team while claiming credit for defeating Al Qaeda. Now his spokesman insists that the US is not at war with ISIS.</p>
<p>What Obama says has no relationship to reality. It’s always been that way. It’s only becoming obvious to those talking heads inside his media bubble now.</p>
<p>Obama’s foreign policy consisted of a flowchart of how things were supposed to work. There was an arrow from “Outreach” to “Reconciliation” to “New Middle East”. Instead Iraq is on fire. Libya is on fire. Syria is on fire. Everyone else is either mocking him or begging for his help without seriously expecting him to do anything useful.</p>
<p>And the flowchart doesn’t mention any of it.</p>
<p>ISIS was supposed to be a JV team. Iraqis are supposed to reconcile. ISIS isn’t supposed to be at war with the United States. Like most ideologues, Obama confuses what his reading of the inevitable forces of history says should happen with what is actually happening. Political Islam was supposed to stabilize the Middle East. Instead the future will be defined by a clash between national armies and Islamist militias.</p>
<p>Removing US troops from Iraq was supposed to fix the problem. The best anti-colonialist scholarship said it would. Instead combined with the Arab Spring, it let Al Qaeda take over much of the country.</p>
<p>But what else was an ideological fanatic big on theory and short on life experience going to do?</p>
<p>Obama is Fareed Zakaria. He’s Thomas Friedman. He’s Paul Krugman. He read all the books and he talks a good game so that it’s easy to miss the fact that his ideas don’t have much to do with real life.</p>
<p>Friedman babbling about the flattening world, Krugman pretending that money is infinite and Zakaria jumping from one ridiculous globalist idea to another sound good in a lecture hall or a column.</p>
<p>But only an idiot would actually listen to them.</p>
<p>Obama’s speeches sounded good, but only idiots would elect a man with no life experience, no executive experience and no meaningful experience of any kind for speaking well, instead of doing well.</p>
<p>Of course Obama doesn’t have a strategy for ISIS. Why would he?</p>
<p>ISIS wasn’t supposed to happen. His schedule, in between golfing and fundraising, had amnesty and Global Warming unilateral orders penciled in. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine also wasn’t on the schedule. Killing missile defense and being incredibly flexible were supposed to fix that.</p>
<p>As a last resort, sanctions, the universal failure of global diplomacy, were supposed to keep this from happening. But like everything else that Obama tried, they didn’t work.</p>
<p>Obama doesn’t live in the world of “What is” but the world of “What should be”. Inspiration does come from the world of “What should be”, but when it isn’t grounded in the world of “What is” then it manifests as insanity or leads to miserable failures.</p>
<p>The difference between the brilliant architect and the lunatic on the street corner is that while both of them know “What should be”, only one of them knows “What is”.</p>
<p>Obama’s inspiration came from “What should be”. He never did understand “What is”. His followers thought and think that “What is” can be waved away, ignored or beaten down as a last resort. That is what he is doing now with his executive orders and his unilateral rule. He is trying to salvage his miserable failure as a leader by forcing his way on the whole country.</p>
<p>It hasn’t made him popular. It hasn’t made his way into the American Way. It has isolated him. The American people have rejected him in poll after poll. Now the media is slowly accepting their verdict.</p>
<p>And no, he doesn’t have a strategy for that.</p>
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		<title>Hillary’s Two-Faced Foreign Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillarys-two-faced-foreign-policy</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Aug 2014 04:53:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239113</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama rerun.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/hill3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239152" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/hill3-450x270.jpg" alt="hill3" width="293" height="176" /></a>Ever since Hillary broke with Barack over the virtues of doing stupid stuff, the editorial columnists have been pretending that she has some new and exciting foreign policy.</p>
<p>She doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>The left has denounced her as an interventionist. They just can&#8217;t explain how she is any more of an interventionist than her boss who bombed Libya, is bombing Iraq and wanted to bomb Syria. And all that is without mentioning his attempt to implement the Arab Spring&#8217;s regime changes.</p>
<p>The closest thing to a disagreement between them was over Syria and considering that Obama was days away from getting into Syria, that&#8217;s not much of a firewall.</p>
<p>Hillary took a cheap shot at Obama. The media spent so much time discussing the hugging summit that it completely ignored the fact that it was a cheap shot with no substance to it. Hillary and Obama have the same ideological DNA and get their ideas from the same narrow circles. Hillary doesn&#8217;t have a better or worse foreign policy. They both have the same foreign policy.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton is trying to distance herself from the foreign policy of an administration in which she served as Secretary of State. Hillary is trying to distance herself from her own approach to international relations. That&#8217;s a level of schizophrenia that is a bit extreme even for a woman who sheds accents, identities and sports team affinities the way that a snake sheds its skin.</p>
<p>Hillary isn&#8217;t disavowing Obama. She&#8217;s disavowing Hillary.</p>
<p>The new Hillary is suddenly pro-Israel after spending years berating the Jewish State. She suddenly realized the importance of having a coherent foreign policy after having the same confused position on Iraq as John Kerry. And she&#8217;s somehow more of an interventionist than Obama even though they were both intervening in the exact same places.</p>
<p>Hillary is an interventionist. But so is Obama.</p>
<p>The non-interventionist, like the pacifist, is a mythical woodland creature who appears in the fables of many cultures. He isn&#8217;t however to be found in the vicinity of Washington D.C.</p>
<p>Break down the arguments of the non-interventionist and you will find a set of conspiracy theories explaining why every previous intervention was motivated by bad faith, secret agendas and racism. The non-interventionist doesn&#8217;t reject intervention; instead he contends that every previous intervention failed because it was carried out at the behest of the banks, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, the Jews, American arrogance and the oil industry.</p>
<p>But the non-interventionist who makes it into the White House is free to intervene as much as he likes because his motives are pure. He isn&#8217;t trying to secretly build oil pipelines or put money into Haliburton. By assigning evil motives to all his predecessors, he never actually learns anything from them and instead intervenes out of an unrealistic sense of self-confidence in his own judgment.</p>
<p>Because he is certain that they were evil and he isn&#8217;t, he believes that he can do no wrong.</p>
<p>A true non-interventionist would reject intervention wholesale. Our fake non-interventionists turn up their noses at it when their political opponents do it. But once they have the power, they intervene out of entirely pure motives like helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over countries.</p>
<p>Obama is a non-interventionist because he spends a lot of time hesitating and apologizing for each intervention. He doesn&#8217;t however bother getting permission from Congress or even UN approval. Why should he? His motives are pure.</p>
<p>Hillary&#8217;s crime is that she currently sounds somewhat less apologetic and uncertain about intervention, but that&#8217;s not policy, that&#8217;s pose. Hillary&#8217;s husband boasted on the day before September 11 that he passed on killing Bin Laden because of the collateral damage. And Bill Clinton is more of a hawk than his wife.</p>
<p>Anyone who thinks that Hillary is a hawk has forgotten how American personnel in Benghazi were left in a precarious security situation on her watch. It&#8217;s quite possible that Hillary might decide to bomb Syria. But don&#8217;t expect her to bomb in defense of American national interests.</p>
<p>She&#8217;s not that kind of interventionist.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton knows that many voters are unhappy about American weakness. They don&#8217;t actually want war, but they want someone in the White House whom Putin will take seriously. And they know that isn&#8217;t Obama.</p>
<p>Hillary is temporarily talking tough to convince them that she&#8217;s the woman to make Vladimir respect America again. That doesn&#8217;t mean that she can stand up to Putin any better than Obama. Or that she will. But she needs uncertain Democrats to believe that the new boss will be different than the old boss, when the new boss is really the old boss in a pantsuit and with worse posters.</p>
<p>Unfortunately Democrats and Republicans don&#8217;t currently differ very much on foreign policy. Where they differ is orientation. And that&#8217;s more significant than it sounds.</p>
<p>Both Obama and McCain would have backed the Arab Spring, but McCain would have done it out of a misguided sense that it was in America&#8217;s national interest, while Obama did it to undermine American national interests.</p>
<p>The significance is not so much in the outcome as in attitude and in the tools that they use.</p>
<p>Obama and McCain would have both bombed Libya, but Obama holds the military in contempt and treats it that way. Obama and McCain would have both endorsed the Arab Spring, but Obama did it in a way that signaled American weakness. That is why Obama&#8217;s approach has weakened America even more than the actual outcome of his policies.</p>
<p>A country can survive bad policy. We&#8217;ve had bad foreign policy for much of the 20th century. But a leader who communicates that the bad policy is a symptom of national weakness is a disaster on a whole other scale. Both Carter and Reagan made mistakes, but Carter and Reagan sent two very different messages about American power even while they made their mistakes.</p>
<p>Leadership isn&#8217;t always about what you do. It&#8217;s about how you communicate your values.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton is trying to package her old Obama policies with a new attitude, but underneath is the same old lefty radical who smooched Arafat&#8217;s wife, brought a Reset Button to Russia and apologized to Pakistan for a YouTube video.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve already seen Hillary&#8217;s foreign policy on display in Pakistan, Russia and Benghazi. All the cheap shots at Obama won&#8217;t change the fact that Hillary&#8217;s foreign policy is another Obama rerun.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Treachery and Republican Silence</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/obamas-treachery-and-republican-silence/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-treachery-and-republican-silence</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 09 Aug 2014 07:04:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238195</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When will they stop pretending this is a normal presidency?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ob61.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238205" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ob61-404x350.jpg" alt="ob6" width="129" height="112" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="www.nationalreview.com">NRO Online</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s new book, &#8220;</strong><span id="productTitle" class="a-size-large"><strong><em>Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left</em>,&#8221; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1621572560/ref=nosim/nationalreviewon">click here</a>.</strong><br />
</span></p>
<p>Barack Obama deliberately set out to lose the war in Iraq, and he did. He defied the advice of his joint chiefs of staff to secure America’s formidable military presence and keep 20,000 troops in country, and left Iraq to its own devices and the tender mercies of Iran. In doing so, he betrayed every American and Iraqi who gave his life to create a free Iraq and keep it out of the clutches of the terrorists.</p>
<p>Iraq is now a war zone dominated by the terrorist forces of the Islamic State, whose rise Obama’s policies fostered. Both his secretaries of state praised the animal Bashar Assad as a “reformer” and a man of “peace,” helping him to thwart his domestic opposition. The Islamic State was born out of the Syrian chaos that ensued.</p>
<p>Far worse was Obama’s open support for America’s mortal enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, spawner of al-Qaeda and Hamas. During the “Arab Spring,” Obama essentially put America’s weight behind the legitimization of this murderous organization that had been outlawed for 40 years for its assassinations and conspiracies against the Egyptian regime. Secretary of State Clinton gave totally unfounded assurances to the world that the Brotherhood was ready to become part of the democratic process and give up its 90-year holy war against infidels, Jews in particular but also — and explicitly — America. During the Brotherhood’s brief tenure as the government in Egypt Obama gave these genocidal zealots more than a billion dollars in American aid and F-16 fighter-bombers that could easily reach Israel’s major population centers, which for 60 years the Brotherhood had sworn to destroy.</p>
<p>By his feckless interventions in the Middle East, and his tacit support for the chief organization of Islam’s terror war against the West, Obama has set the Middle East on fire. All the violence in the crescent from Gaza to Iraq, including Hamas’s genocidal war against Israel, has been encouraged by Obama’s support for the Brotherhood and hostility toward the Jewish state.</p>
<p>Characteristic of this encouragement was his illegal intervention in Libya, which violated every principle that Obama and the Democrats invoked to attack President Bush and undermine America’s war against the Saddam regime and the terrorists in Iraq. Thanks to Obama, Libya is now in the hands of the terrorists and thousands of Libyans are fleeing to Tunisia and Egypt. Thanks to Obama, the Christian communities of Iraq, which date back to the time of Christ, are being slaughtered.</p>
<p>Because of Obama’s aversion to America’s role as a keeper of international peace, the tyrant Putin has been able to swallow Crimea and threaten the rest of Ukraine. Since his election in 2009, Obama’s policies have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people and will result in the deaths of tens of thousands more. Thanks to his efforts to destroy America’s borders, Americans may be included in this grim toll. Certainly, Americans are now threatened by terrorists as never before.</p>
<p>Where is the Republican opposition? Why are Republicans still treating Obama as though his were a normal presidency and not a national disgrace? Why are there no indictments of Obama for the carnage he has enabled?</p>
<p>There is one foreign policy area where Republicans have shown some fight: Benghazi. But the fight here has been over an inquiry — important in its own right, but not a political challenge to Obama’s efforts to sabotage and degrade the country he is supposed to lead.</p>
<p>We know the basic facts. Obama’s team was trying to monitor and recapture the weapons we had helped supply to Islamist militias in Libya. That was Ambassador Stevens’s mission. No security was provided because Stevens’s mission had to be secret and plausibly deniable in the middle of an election in which Obama was running on the cynical lie that the war on terror had been won. During the battle waged by American heroes against the terrorists’ assault in Benghazi, the president and his secretary of state went A.W.O.L. and left these brave Americans to die. Instead of honoring them and hunting down their killers, Obama then took off for a fundraiser in Las Vegas. This was surely the most shameful individual act by a president in the history of the White House.</p>
<p>Having abandoned these American heroes and their families, Obama and his minions then lied to the American people about the terrorist attack and used it as an occasion to defend the Prophet Mohammed in a U.N. address to the world. This series of acts showed Obama’s contempt for the American military, contempt for the American people, and sympathy for America’s enemies, an attitude that has been revealed over and over again.</p>
<p>When will Republicans gather the courage to start speaking truth to power?</p>
<p><i>— David Horowitz is the author of the newly published book </i><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1621572560" target="_blank">Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left</a><i>.</i></p>
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		<title>Obama and the U.N.’s Alternate Universe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obama-and-the-u-n-s-alternate-universe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-and-the-u-n-s-alternate-universe</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:55:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237215</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The administration turns 2,500 years of human knowledge on foreign affairs on its head. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PH2008011001836.jpg"><img class="alignleft wp-image-237280 " src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PH2008011001836.jpg" alt="NA-PETRAEUS" width="313" height="243" /></a>Barack Obama has managed to push American foreign policy into an alternate universe in which everything the human race has learned over the past 2500 years about human nature, aggression, and its deterrence has been stood on its head. He is not solely to blame for this. For 150 years the West had indulged the illusion that human nature is progressing away from our violent past toward a world of reason in which conflict can be resolved and negotiated away without force or the credible threat of force. But Obama and his foreign policy team have completely detached this idea, serially mugged by the violent reality of the last century, from any recognition of morality or even fact. The result is the disastrous decline in American global authority and influence.</p>
<p>The administration’s handling of the current war between Israel and Hamas is no doubt one of the most shameful examples of such a corruption of intellect and failure of moral nerve. Indeed, one has to go back to September 1938 and the despicable British and French abandonment of Czechoslovakia during the run-up to the Munich conference to find supposed allies treating a friend so shabbily and working on the side of its enemies. As Germany bullied and threatened Czechoslovakia, the British thought the solution was “for Prague to get a real twist of the screw,” while the French threatened that if the Czechs were “unreasonable” about defending their country, France “considered herself released from her bond.”</p>
<p>Fast-forward 76 years to Obama’s FAA forbidding U.S. flights to Ben Gurion airport, giving Hamas a propaganda victory; John Kerry’s off-mike mocking of Israel’s historically unprecedented attempts to avoid civilian casualties; and both Obama and Kerry pressuring Israel for “an immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire,” which evokes England’s demand in 1938 that the Czechs “go forthwith to the very limit of concession.” The only effects of such a “cease fire” would be to rescue Hamas by leaving its remaining rockets and tunnels in place, and those already destroyed to be replenished by Iran and funded by the subsequent “humanitarian aid” that would flow into Gaza.</p>
<p>Yet Obama’s behavior today is more despicable than was England’s in 1938, even if it is unlikely to have consequences as globally destructive as Chamberlain’s appeasement. At that time Hitler was an autocrat and thug, yet he was the legitimately elected head of the biggest state in Europe. Hamas is nothing other than a tiny gang of fanatic murderers, a group sanctioned as a terrorist organization by our own State Department. Its major state sponsor, Iran, is identified by that same State Department as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, with American blood on its hands for the last 35 years. Hamas’s charter identifies its purpose as the genocidal destruction of Israel, and the group has never shown any interest in the fantastical “two-state solution” or in living “side by side with Israel in peace.”</p>
<p>Only in an alternate universe does an American administration have even indirect diplomatic contact with such terrorists, or with its state sponsors and funders, let alone pressure a loyal and valuable ally into offering concessions to a common enemy, an outlaw that scorns the international laws of war, willingly sacrifices its own children and wives, and has made it clear that it does not ever want any accommodation with Israel, only its destruction. Only in an alternate universe does a liberal democracy ruled by law send $47 million to a gang of murderers, and indulge a cowardly moral equivalence that does not discriminate between genocidal terrorists and a legitimate state exercising its right to defense. Only in an alternate universe does a president who sends drones thousands of miles to kill terrorists and everybody around them, including 250 civilians by some <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/01/23/more-than-2400-dead-as-obamas-drone-campaign-marks-five-years/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">estimates</span></a>, criticize Israel’s “disproportionate response” when it seeks to destroy terrorists who live next door and rain rockets down on its people, and unlike Obama, it tells civilians the attack is on the way.</p>
<p>The bizarrerie, however, extends far beyond the morally bankrupt policies of the Obama administration. We also had this past weak another surreal spectacle at the laughably denominated U.N. Human Rights Council. It issued a resolution titled “Ensuring Respect for International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” which alone is replete with Orwellian distortions of reality, since Gaza is not “occupied” by the Israelis. They turned it over to the Palestinians in 2005, after dismantling 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza and 4 in Judea and Samaria. What they got in return has been over 11,000 rockets fired against their citizens.</p>
<p>As for “respect for international law,” other than a brief, general condemnation of Hamas’s barrage of rockets fired against Israel’s cities and civilians, the whole resolution focuses on Israel’s alleged violations, such as the “deliberate targeting of civilians and other protected persons and the perpetration of systematic, flagrant and widespread violations of applicable international humanitarian law and international human rights law in situations of armed conflict constitute grave breaches and a threat to international peace and security.” As Churchill said of Hitler’s preposterous lies about his bullying of the Austrian chancellor, “One can hardly find a more perfect specimen of humbug and hypocrisy . . . What is astounding is that it should have been regarded with anything but scorn by men and women of intelligence in any free country.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we don’t have leaders of Churchill’s calibre to expose the UNHRC’s nonsense and duplicity in its resolution. The word “deliberate” is a lie, of course. Civilians are dying in Gaza because Hamas deliberately and flagrantly uses them as shields, places its ammo dumps, rockets, and fighters in and under mosques, residences, hospitals, and schools, and prevents Gazans from heeding Israel’s many and varied warnings that a site is going to be destroyed, even <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=835910373087389&amp;id=213694968642269"><span style="color: #0433ff;">beating them</span></a> when they try to flee. As for violations of “international law,” Andrew McCarthy <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383808/laws-war-matter-gaza-andrew-c-mccarthy"><span style="color: #0433ff;">details</span></a> specifically how everything Israel has done in its defence is consistent with international law, and everything the “unlawful combatants” of Hamas has done is in deliberate and flagrant violation of it.</p>
<p>But despite the clear and unambiguous truth that Israel is waging a legal defensive war, in the alternate universe of the U.N., the Human Rights Council votes “to urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry, to be appointed by the President of the Human Rights Council, to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law” and “to establish the facts and circumstances of such violations and of the crimes perpetrated and to identify those responsible, to make recommendations, in particular on accountability measures.”</p>
<p>If such an investigation does take place, expect a reprise of the discredited Goldstone Report, issued by the U.N. after the Israelis’ 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead against Gaza’s rockets, and later renounced by its own author. As Goldstone himself admitted, the UNHRC’s “history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted,” so can we can expect this new report to slander Israel in order to prepare the way for international lawfare against its leaders, including war-crimes charges and suits filed in the International Court of Justice. But past history does not cut any ice in the alternate universe of the U.N. Where else could anyone pass with a straight face a resolution on human rights from a council that includes notorious human-rights violators like China, Congo, Cuba, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela? At least the U.S. voted against the resolution, unlike Euro-weasels like France, Great Britain, Austria, Germany, and Italy, who bravely abstained.</p>
<p>Yes, we all know the U.N. is a morally bankrupt, corrupt congeries of international thugs and creeps, along with invertebrate Western states who mask their fear and appeasement with the Kabuki dance of international diplomacy. But only in an alternate universe does the U.S. spend one minute on a nakedly ideological outfit like the UNHRC, or give half a billion dollars a year to an organization like the U.N., the purpose of which is to damage America’s security and interests at every turn.</p>
<p>And let’s not forget the media. They report casualty numbers from the current conflict, including the number of civilians killed, without a caveat that these numbers come from Hamas or their U.N. minions, or that terrorists don’t wear uniforms and hence are frequently counted as “civilians.” The media abandon their critical faculties despite the Palestinian Arabs’ long history of <a href="http://arabisraeliconflict.info/arab-israel-facts/fact-7-palestinian-suffering"><span style="color: #0433ff;">exaggerating</span></a> such statistics, faking photogenic atrocities like the Jenin massacre and the IDF’s killing of Mohammed Dura, and tweeting gruesome images of dead women and children killed in other conflicts like <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/07/09/Pro-Hamas-Use-Pictures-From-Syria-Haiti-Against-Israel"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Syria</span></a>, or even taking scenes from horror <a href="http://pamelageller.com/2014/07/relying-bbc-propaganda-methods-hamas-uses-horror-film-still-fake-teenager-killed-gaza-israel.html/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">movies</span></a>, and claiming they happened in Gaza. Only in an alternate universe would a media presumably dedicated to getting the story right and distrustful of information it can’t confirm themselves repeat as fact what actually is propaganda, or at least preface such information with a statement like, “According to Hamas spokesmen” when reporting casualty numbers.</p>
<p>A foreign policy based on illusion leaves our country vulnerable to various global autocrats, thugs, and terrorists. Those shrewd, hard men (see Putin, Vladimir) know how to manipulate our delusions and exploit our weaknesses, particularly our leaders’ penchant for substituting diplomatic words for military deeds to serve their short-term political needs. This illusion of action creates complacency of the sort we experienced in the 90s, when we lived in an alternate reality where al Qaeda’s declarations of war and terrorist attacks were treated as criminal matters rather than acts of war. And we all remember how gruesomely we were reintroduced to reality.</p>
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		<title>Israel, Hamas and Obama’s Foreign Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/israel-hamas-and-obamas-foreign-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-hamas-and-obamas-foreign-policy</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2014 04:21:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237444</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From Iran to Palestinian terrorists, the president makes clear what side he's on. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Obama-Abbas-Netanyahu.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237452" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Obama-Abbas-Netanyahu-450x324.jpg" alt="Obama-Abbas-Netanyahu" width="269" height="194" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-world-Israel-Hamas-and-Obamas-foreign-policy-369338">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning – however defined.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But then the telephone rang. And Obama told Netanyahu that Israel must lose. He wants an unconditional “humanitarian” cease-fire that will lead to a permanent one.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And he wants it now.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And by the way, the eventual terms of that cease-fire must include opening Hamas-controlled Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel and ending Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza coast. That is, the cease-fire must allow Hamas to rebuild its arsenal of death and destruction quickly, with US political and financial support.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Until Obama made the call, there was lingering doubt among some Israelis regarding his intentions. Some thought that US Secretary of State John Kerry might have been acting of his own accord last Friday night when he tried to force Israel to accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But then Obama made his phone call. And all doubts were dispelled.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Kerry is just a loyal steward of Obama’s foreign policy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama is siding with Hamas, and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Qatar and Turkey, against Israel, and its Sunni Arab supporters – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It is Obama who demands that Hamas have open borders so it can resupply, and receive billions of dollars – starting with an immediate cash injection of $47 million from US taxpayers – so it can pay North Korea for more missiles and import building materials to reconstruct its tunnels.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The fact that the US’s current preference for genocidal, Jew-hating jihadists over the only liberal, pro-American, stable US ally in the Middle East is a White House position, rather than that of a rogue Secretary of State was actually exposed even before Obama’s phone call.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Sunday CNN’s Candy Crowley interviewed Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. She asked him what the administration thinks Israel can do to prevent civilians from being killed in Gaza beyond what it is already doing. Rhodes replied, “I think you can always do more.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, Rhodes said that no matter what precautions Israel takes to try to minimize Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza, the administration will never be satisfied. The White House will never acknowledge that Israel is in the right, or that it is fighting a moral war against a barbaric foe. And since the administration will never be satisfied, Israel can expect to be condemned by various UN bodies, including the Security Council, because no matter what it does to try to earn the support of the administration, it will never receive such support.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The discovery that the Obama administration is entirely in Hamas’s corner hit all of Israel hard. But it hit the Left the hardest. Few on the Right, which recognized Obama’s hostility from the outset of his presidency, were surprised.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for political leaders, the government cannot risk giving the administration justification for its anti-Israel policies, so senior ministers have all said nothing.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Consequently, the harshest criticisms of the administration’s pro-Hamas position were heard from quarters where rarely a peep of criticism for Obama has been heard.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Israeli Left went ballistic.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Haaretz, the far-left broadsheet that has seldom taken issue with even the harshest rejections of Israel’s rights, went bananas after its reporter Barak Ravid received the details of Kerry’s cease-fire agreement. As Ravid put it, Kerry’s document, “might as well have been penned by Khaled Mashaal. It was everything Hamas could have hoped for.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ravid continued, “What Kerry’s draft spells for the internal Palestinian political arena is even direr: It crowns Hamas and issues Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a death warrant.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And that is really the crux of the issue. The crowd at Haaretz is far more wedded to the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas than it is to the government of Israel. And the administration’s support for Hamas exposed the PLO as an irrelevance.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the paper’s Amos Harel wrote the next day, Kerry’s pro-Hamas behavior convinced the Egyptians and other actors that the administration is “continuing its secret love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Left understands that the administration’s behavior has destroyed it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Leftists can no longer say that Israeli territorial withdrawals will win it international support.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They can no longer say that Israel will receive US support if it places the security of Palestinian civilians above the security of its own civilians and military forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They can no longer say that the PLO is the answer.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Israeli Left has been Obama’s ace in the hole since he first ran for office, fresh from the pews in Jeremiah Wright’s anti-Semitic church. They were the grease in the wheels that legitimized the administration’s anti-Israel pressure group J Street. They were the ones who could be counted on to tell the US media and the American Jews that Netanyahu is to blame for Obama’s hostility.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet, rather than backtrack, and try to save the Israeli Left, the administration doubled down on Monday, releasing a series of statements condemning the Israeli media’s condemnations of Kerry’s pro-Hamas position.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">By Monday afternoon, the administration went so far as to say that by criticizing Kerry, Israel’s media were endangering their country’s alliance with the US.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, through his actions, Obama demonstrated that his “love affairs with the Muslim Brotherhood in the region,” are so central to his foreign policy calculations that he is willing to destroy the Israeli Left in order to strengthen the Brotherhood.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this leads us to the larger point about Obama’s foreign policy, which his Sunday night telephone call to Netanyahu revealed. As rattled as Israelis are over Obama’s decision to support Hamas against Israel, Netanyahu made clear in his remarks Monday night that Israel has no choice but to keep fighting until we defeat this barbaric enemy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu didn’t mention Obama, but it was obvious that he was respectfully refusing to hand Israel’s head on a platter to Hamas’s friend in the White House.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And while it is hard for Israel to ignore Obama, it is impossible for Americans to ignore him. He runs their foreign policy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Americans are the ones who need to be most alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For the past five years, Americans from all quarters have concluded that the manifold failures of Obama’s Middle East policies – from Iraq to Iran, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and beyond – owe to a combination of Obama’s personal disinterest in foreign affairs and his presumed preference for withdrawal and isolationism over engagement.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama himself has often encouraged this perception with his endless golf games and his talk about fighting “the war at home.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s open, public engagement in Hamas’s war against Israel shows that the popular assessment is wrong.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama is as involved in the Middle East as all of his immediate predecessors were. He is personally leading US policy on every front. Kerry is not an independent actor.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The problem is that in every war, in every conflict and in every contest of wills that has occurred in the Middle East since Obama took office, he has sided with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, against America’s allies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Under Obama, America has switched sides.</span></p>
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		<title>Why Obama Ignored Iraq</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/why-obama-ignored-iraq/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-obama-ignored-iraq</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jul 2014 04:57:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama isn’t opposed to war. He’s opposed to America.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Iraq-Jihadist-flag_2947305b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235727" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Iraq-Jihadist-flag_2947305b-418x350.jpg" alt="Iraq-Jihadist-flag_2947305b" width="306" height="256" /></a>ISIS marching through Iraq has smashed the media’s taboo against criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. Substantive discussions are taking place about why his foreign policy is such a miserable failure.</p>
<p>And they mostly miss the point.</p>
<p>Liberal journalists still proceed from the fallacy that there was a foreign policy debate between neo-conservative interventionists and liberal non-interventionists. These are a series of digested Bush era talking points that have no relationship to reality since Bush’s foreign policy on Iraq carried over from Bill Clinton. It’s why Hillary gets so uncomfortable when she has to discuss her vote on Iraq.</p>
<p>The liberals weren’t non-interventionists who insisted on multilateralism and UN approval before acting. Obama, like virtually every other Democrat, disproved that myth as fast as he could. Nor were they even opponents of the Iraq War until opposing the war became politically convenient.</p>
<p>Obama however isn’t on this map at all. It’s not that he is an opponent of intervention. The Libyans can tell you that. It’s that his reasons for intervening fall completely outside the grid of national interests.</p>
<p>The anti-war activist as pacifist is largely a myth. There are a few anti-war activists who oppose all wars, but mostly they just oppose America. Obama, who got his foot up the political ladder by flirting with the anti-war movement, falls into that category. Obama isn’t opposed to wars. He’s opposed to America.</p>
<p>Obama is an ideological interventionist, not a nationalist interventionist. And despite his multilateralist rhetoric, he isn’t your usual globalist either. Instead he uses national and international power as platforms for pursuing ideological goals without any regard to national or international interests.</p>
<p>That is true of both his foreign and domestic policy.</p>
<p>Obama’s foreign policy is issue oriented, just like his domestic policy is. There is no national agenda, only a leftist agenda. America is just a power platform for pursuing policy goals.</p>
<p>Domestically, Obama does not care about fixing the economy. The economy is a vehicle for pursuing social justice, environmental justice and all the many unjust justices of the left. It has no innate value. Likewise national security and power have no value except as tools for promoting leftist policies.</p>
<p>Obama thinks of the ideological issue first. Then he packages it as a national interest for popular consumption. It’s a Wilsonian approach that is not only far more extreme than the policies of most White House occupants have been, but also more detached.</p>
<p>Wilson couldn’t understand that American power couldn’t exist without a national interest. Obama and his staffers see America as just another transnational institution that they happen to be running, not all that different than a corporation, non-profit or UN body. They don’t see it as a country, but a series of policymaking offices that reach across the country and the world.</p>
<p>It’s a globalized mode of thinking that is common among Eurocrats, but has never been represented in the Oval Office before.</p>
<p>Obama doesn’t just oppose America. He disregards it as an outmoded institution. When confronted with the border crisis or the rise of ISIS, he doesn’t see them in terms of American interests or even world interests, but in the narrow terms of leftist ideology.</p>
<p>He will use national and international institutions to promote LGBT rights or Green Energy. He won’t however get involved in actively using them for national security unless he absolutely has to in order to protect his own political power.</p>
<p>To a transnational mindset, institutions exist to promote issues. America is only of value to the extent that it can promote the left’s agenda. To the extent that it doesn’t, America is dead weight.</p>
<p>Once Bush was out, Iraq ceased to matter because it was no longer a packaged issue. It couldn’t be broken down into a simplistic Blame Bush policy agenda. And so Obama stopped paying attention.</p>
<p>Now Iraq is getting in the way of the things that he really cares about, such as illegal alien amnesty, dismantling Israel and transsexual bathrooms, because these are ideologically meaningful issues to him. And like every other obstacle, whether it was the national debt or the VA scandal, he pretends to take them seriously until a sufficient amount of time passes and he can dismiss them as “phony scandals”.</p>
<p>Obama didn’t just ignore Iraq because he wanted to avoid any connections to a war that he had helped make unpopular. He ignored Iraq because it had nothing to offer his ideology. If Iraq had a secular dictator, he might have been interested. If Islamists were fighting to take over from that dictator, there would have been planes and diplomats flying over Baghdad before you could shout, “Allah Akbar.”</p>
<p>It’s why he backed the Islamist overthrow of Arab governments, but not the popular protests against Islamist governments in Iran or Turkey.</p>
<p>But Iraq was a battle between Sunni and Shiite Islamists, backed by the Saudis and Iran. Even the left has trouble picking a side between two anti-American Islamic factions who are divided over theological issues, instead of practical things like dialectical materialism and the discourse of othering. In a pinch they pick the Iranian side as being more anti-American, but the prospect of American intervention on the same side as the Shiites confuses them even further and they have to go lie down in a dark room.</p>
<p>When there is no clear ideological guide, Obama takes meetings with generals, tunes them out, plays with his phone and delays doing something for as long as possible. That was the pattern in Afghanistan and Syria. Ideologues can’t function without an ideological orientation. When the ideological value of a problem is unclear, Obama either freezes up, like a robot whose manual was misplaced, or ignores it.</p>
<p>Obama’s only approach to Iraq came from Bush era opposition. Without Bush to push against, he had no idea what if anything should be done about Iraq. He still doesn’t. Instead he resorts to the antiquated attacks on Bush because it’s the last time that Iraq made any sense to him. It was the last time that the left had successfully packaged Iraq into a simple scenario in which there was only one right choice.</p>
<p>Ideologues are not big on independent thinking. When everything is politicized, they lose the ability to see the things that can’t be neatly assigned to one side or another.  America is being run by a blinkered ideologue who ignores issues that fall outside his ideological spectrum.</p>
<p>Those problems that he doesn’t cause directly and intentionally through his ideology, he causes indirectly and unintentionally by being unable to operate outside his ideology except in an emergency. Like the difference between the pilot who flies a plane deliberately into a mountain and the one who accidentally flies it into a mountain, there is a gap in motivation, but not in outcome.</p>
<p>History will not record why Obama screwed everything up. It will only record that he did it.</p>
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		<title>A Report Card on a Radical-in-Chief &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/a-report-card-on-a-radical-in-chief-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-report-card-on-a-radical-in-chief-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jul 2014 04:47:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Glazov Gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disaster]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domestic policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Monty Morton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[report card]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235539</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The troubling verdict is in on Obama's domestic and foreign policy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/rc.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235541" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/rc-450x243.jpg" alt="rc" width="278" height="150" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by conservative entrepreneur and walking encyclopedia <strong>Monty Morton, </strong>who came on the show to provide <strong>A Report Card on a Radical-in-Chief, </strong>outlining how Obama&#8217;s<span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"> domestic and foreign policy is crippling America:</span></span><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbvIxIcLOKc" target="_blank" rel="nofollow nofollow"><br />
</a></span></span><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftTagList" class="fbPhotoTagList"></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/YbvIxIcLOKc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second episode with</span></span><strong> Nick Adams</strong>,</span></span> an internationally renowned Australian speaker, lecturer, author, and media commentator. He is best known for his work in the field of American exceptionalism.</p>
<p>He came on the show to discuss his new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936488841/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1936488841&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=s0231-20%22%3EThe%20American%20Boomerang:%20How%20the%20World%27s%20Greatest%20%27Turnaround%27%20Nation%20Will%20Do%20It%20Again%3C/a%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=s0231-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1936488841"><em>The American Boomerang: How the World’s Greatest ‘Turnaround’ Nation Will Do It Again</em></a>.</p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"> Don&#8217;t miss it! </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/4ZH1NM9TvO0" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Dependent States of America &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-dependent-states-of-america-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-dependent-states-of-america-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2014 04:20:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[domestic policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[weakening America]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235347</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A disturbing report card on how a Radical-in-Chief's domestic and foreign policy is crippling America.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/obama_holder.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235354" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/obama_holder-450x300.jpg" alt="obama_holder" width="306" height="204" /></a>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by conservative entrepreneur and walking encyclopedia <strong>Monty Morton, </strong>who came on the show to discuss <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Dependent States of America</strong>, providing a disturbing report card on how a Radical-in-Chief&#8217;s domestic and foreign policy is crippling America:</span></span><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbvIxIcLOKc" target="_blank" rel="nofollow nofollow"><br />
</a></span></span><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftTagList" class="fbPhotoTagList"></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/YbvIxIcLOKc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second episode with</span></span><strong> Nick Adams</strong>,</span></span> an internationally renowned Australian speaker, lecturer, author, and media commentator. He is best known for his work in the field of American exceptionalism.</p>
<p>He came on the show to discuss his new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936488841/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1936488841&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=s0231-20%22%3EThe%20American%20Boomerang:%20How%20the%20World%27s%20Greatest%20%27Turnaround%27%20Nation%20Will%20Do%20It%20Again%3C/a%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=s0231-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1936488841"><em>The American Boomerang: How the World’s Greatest ‘Turnaround’ Nation Will Do It Again</em></a>.</p>
<p><span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"> Don&#8217;t miss it! </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/4ZH1NM9TvO0" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<title>Partisan Politics, Bad Ideas &amp; the Bergdahl Swap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:45:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[release]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War on Terror]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233369</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the controversial exchange encapsulates everything that is wrong with Obama's foreign policy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233370" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png" alt="aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped" width="272" height="245" /></a>President Obama’s exchange of 5 high-ranking Taliban murderers for a soldier who possibly was a deserter and collaborator encapsulates everything that is wrong with this administration’s foreign policy. The serial failures of the past 5 years reflect a toxic brew of partisan politics and naïve ideology.</p>
<p>The staging of the announcement last Saturday in the Rose Garden obviously was intended to milk every drop of photogenic pathos and political gain from a decision rife with moral hazard and questionable legality. To reap political advantage from this disaster of a deal, lies and half-truths were necessary for creating the narrative behind the picture of Obama flanked by Bergdahl’s joyful, if somewhat bizarre, parents. Contrary to the president and his supporters, Bergdahl was not a “hero” or “prisoner of war.” Nor had he served with “honor and distinction,” or been “captured on the battlefield,” as the terminally mendacious Susan Rice said on a Sunday morning news-show.</p>
<p>In fact, evidence continues to mount that Bergdahl voluntarily left his post to connect with English-speaking Taliban, a move consistent with his renunciation of his citizenship and disgruntled anti-American emails. Whether he is just a flake, as his earlier biography and strange comments suggest, or had more sinister motives will become clearer as more information surfaces. He may even be a traitor. His team leader on the night he disappeared, former Army Sergeant Evan Buetow, has told CNN that radio intercepts revealed that Bergdahl was looking for the Taliban, and that after his capture, the Taliban’s attacks on Americans became “far more directed.”</p>
<p>The serious questions about Bergdahl were known to the administration, if only from a 2012 <i>Rolling Stone</i> article. Yet consistent with Obama’s foreign policy approach, facts are never an impediment to political advantage, as his record shows. The Benghazi disaster was created by politics and covered up for political reasons. Beefing up security for the diplomatic mission was nixed because it contradicted the political narrative that the multilateral “leading from behind” removal of Ghaddafi had started Libya on the road to Jeffersonian democracy and peace, when in reality it had unleashed hundreds of feral jihadists gangs now armed with missiles and other weapons. Likewise blaming the attack on an obscure video rather than an al Qaeda franchise reinforced the “al Qaeda on its heels” and “bin Laden dead” memes peddled during the presidential campaign in order to prove the success of Obama’s anti-Bush foreign policy.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">So too the Bergdahl weeper is another episode in the “end the wars and bring the troops home” political narrative demonstrating the superiority of “</span>collective action” and “diplomacy and development, sanctions and isolation, appeals to international law, and, if just, necessary and effective, multilateral military action,” as Obama said at West Point, over George Bush’s alleged trigger-happy, blood-for-oil, Halliburton-enriching unilateralism. Just don’t think about the 6 soldiers who died looking for Bergdahl, or the violation of legal protocols for releasing Guantanamo detainees, or the dismissal of the concerns of the intelligence community, or the snubbing of Congress in making the deal, or the moral hazard of paying ransom to hostage-takers. Never mind that under Obama’s watch Iraq is once again an inferno of sectarian violence and is fast becoming a satellite of Iran. Just forget that the Taliban, given a date-certain for our withdrawal, are poised to reassert control over large swaths of eastern Afghanistan, squandering the sacrifices made by our troops. Those facts must be obscured in order to achieve a political advantage. So too the enormous risk to our soldiers’ lives and our national interests that attends the release of 5 battle-hardened jihadist murderers does not figure in political calculations for firing up the base ahead of the midterm election.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Politics may be all there is to Obama’s foreign policy. With some justification, he may calculate that despite a few occasional bleats of protest, the ovine press corps will always watch his back and deliver the political dividends his actions seek. The scandal of Benghazi––both the incompetence that lead to 4 dead Americans, and the blatantly dishonest cover-up afterwards––that unfolded a few months before the 2012 elections should have put his reelection at risk. Yet with an indifferent press corps downplaying the story, and partisan hack Candy Crowley watching his back during the presidential debates, the worst scandal of his presidency had no effect on the election. So we shouldn’t be surprised that team Obama thinks this latest shameless political stunt will work too. As Guy Benson at <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/06/03/nyt-bergdahl-left-a-desertion-note-n1847046"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Townhall.com</span></a> analyzes the Obama crew’s thinking, “<span style="color: #000000;">They figured that the feel-good nature of the ‘POW’ returning home narrative would be blindly seized upon and enabled by a media exhausted by the egregious VA scandal story. Unpleasant details would be whitewashed or mostly ignored, and the only real outrage would emanate from the usual suspects on the Right. They thought they could counter critiques of the nature and terms of the trade with faux-indignant questions about whether skeptics were in favor of ‘leaving Americans behind.’” In short, the White House’s political <i>modus operandi</i> on every bonehead decision for the past 5 years.</span></p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Yet there is also an ideology behind Obama’s foreign policy, one shared by most progressives. This naïve view assumes the whole world is just like us, wants freedom, human rights, leisure, and prosperity as much as we do, and is kept from achieving those boons by environmental forces, lingering superstitions like religion, and the fallout from historical crimes most of which have been committed by the West. <span style="color: #000000;">Thus </span>it assumes America’s guilt and need to atone for its neo-colonial and neo-imperialist sins, and its racism, plunder of resources, and militarist adventurism, the very attitude struck in Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech. Then follows the imperative for American withdrawal and retreat, a dangerous dereliction of global duty rationalized with the magical thinking of “international law,” “engagement,” “multilateralism,” “smart diplomacy,” “sanctions,” “international pressure,” and all the other camouflage for an unwillingness to make the tough, risky choices necessary in a hard world of bad men. This ideology bespeaks a monumental failure of imagination, and a parochial inability to understand that different peoples and cultures have different mores and goals.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Every one of Obama’s foreign policy debacles reveals this shopworn idealism. It explains the impulse to rely on negotiations and concessions with enemies like Iran, who only yield at the point of a gun; the reliance on bluster and bluff with killers like Bashar al Assad, who can read every tell announcing a weak hand; or the feeble threats of disapproval from an international community issued to Vladimir Putin, whose past brutal behavior in Chechnya and Georgia shows that he cares nothing for the estimation of some imagined “international community” that still wants to buy his oil. And now comes Obama’s absurd claim that releasing 5 seasoned killers will “<span style="color: #000000;">open the door for broader discussions among Afghans about the future of their country by building confidence that it is possible for all sides to find common ground.” That Obama thinks the Taliban––who brutally murdered their own people in a soccer stadium, stone homosexuals, throw acid in the face of schoolgirls, honor-kill their own wives and daughters, and blow up women and children–– can have any “common ground” with anyone not sharing their barbarous religious ideology is profoundly delusional. </span></p>
<p>As the Bergdahl fiasco shows yet again, partisan politics and bad ideas make for a world dangerous to our interests and security.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>John Bolton: &#8216;The Biggest Threat to National Security Is in the White House&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/john-bolton-the-biggest-threat-to-national-security-is-in-the-white-house/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=john-bolton-the-biggest-threat-to-national-security-is-in-the-white-house</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2014 04:55:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[John Bolton]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226695</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Amb. John Bolton discusses the threat within at the Freedom Center's Texas Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: Below are the video and transcript to Ambassador John Bolton&#8217;s address at the Freedom Center&#8217;s 2014 Texas Weekend. The event took place May 2nd-4th at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/96452968" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Daniel Pipes:</strong> Please join me in welcoming John Bolton.</span></p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>John Bolton:</strong> Thanks, Daniel.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m always delighted to be able to be part of a Freedom Center event.  The work that everybody does is just so important, and becomes more important.  So for all of you who are supporters, believe me, it&#8217;s support that&#8217;s put to very good use.  I can assure you of that.</p>
<p>I wanted to talk for just a little bit tonight about some of the problems that the United States and its friends in the world face.  And I&#8217;m acutely conscious that I&#8217;m the only thing now that stands between you and dinner.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So I&#8217;ll try and make these remarks as pointed as I can.</p>
<p>It is a very dangerous time for the United States and its friends in the world.  And in large measure, it&#8217;s not because of the individual crises that we see in the world around us.  The biggest threat to our national security is sitting the White House.  And it&#8217;s &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>It&#8217;s something that we never could&#8217;ve predicted.  It&#8217;s unquestionably the case in my view that the President&#8217;s the most radical President that we&#8217;ve ever had, and not just on domestic issues.  He has a fundamentally different view of America&#8217;s place in the world than any other President in history, to the point where I think most of us already look back at the Jimmy Carter Administration in the late 1970s as the good old days.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Which tells you something right there.</p>
<p>So before I get into some of the specifics, I want to talk about what it is about this President that makes him different, and the particular reasons that his worldview is so contrary to our national interest.</p>
<p>I think, to start with, it&#8217;s important to understand that the basic concept is he just doesn&#8217;t believe in American exceptionalism.  Now, this is a subject that&#8217;s controversial sometimes even with our friends when we talk about American exceptionalism.  My view it&#8217;s not a statement or a belief in American superiority; it&#8217;s a recognition that our history has been fundamentally different from virtually every other country around the world.</p>
<p>And it wasn&#8217;t the United States or its citizens that first proclaimed American exceptionalism; it was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who, in &#8220;Democracy in America,&#8221; his insightful analysis of the United States in the first part of the 19th century, said that it may be said of the Americans that they are truly exceptional, in that no other democratic people will repeat their experience.  And it&#8217;s right.  And it has shaped our view of America and America&#8217;s role in the world.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s sometimes controversial.  But the fact is that it&#8217;s been so widely shared among Americans that nobody&#8217;s ever really given it serious thought, until we got Obama.  And the views that he picked up during his time at Columbia and Harvard Law School, and working as a community organizer in Chicago, have made him fundamentally different.</p>
<p>Now, it&#8217;s quite interesting &#8212; in his first trip to Europe as President, a British reporter asked him if he believed in American exceptionalism.  That&#8217;s how apparent it was to the rest of the world that he didn&#8217;t that the reporter actually put the question to him.  And Obama&#8217;s answer, which a number of people have commented on since 2009, is worth reviewing again as we look at the policies he pursues today.  In response to this question, he said &#8212; yes, I believe in American exceptionalism, just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.</p>
<p>Now, let&#8217;s parse this sentence, which is classic Obama.  In the first third, he says &#8212; yeah, I believe in American exceptionalism.  So all those people who say that I don&#8217;t are wrong.  But then, in the second two thirds of the sentence, he takes it back by referring to the British and Greek views.</p>
<p>You know, there are 193 countries in the United Nations.  And he certainly could&#8217;ve gone on &#8212; just as the Papua New Guineans believe in Papua New Guinean exceptionalism &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; just as the Burkina Fasians believe in Burkina Fasian exceptionalism.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The point&#8217;s clear.  If everybody&#8217;s exceptional, then nobody&#8217;s exceptional.  And that&#8217;s what he really thinks.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s not the first Democratic Party leader to believe that.  I think if you go back to 1988, George H.W. Bush said about Michael Dukakis &#8212; &#8220;my opponent believes that the United States is a nice country out there somewhere on the UN roll call between Albania and Zimbabwe.&#8221;  In other words, just one more country.  That&#8217;s what they think.</p>
<p>And so, in his view, since America&#8217;s not exceptional, since we&#8217;re not different than any other country &#8212; we have our interests, they have their interests &#8212; he looks at American strength as part of the problem in the world &#8212; that we&#8217;re too much &#8212; we&#8217;re too assertive, too dominant, too successful, really, over the years.</p>
<p>And so in the Obama view, because our strength is part of the problem, one way to get to a more peaceful, more stable environment is for the United States to withdraw, to be less assertive, to be less in the world.</p>
<p>Now, I think this is like looking at the world through the wrong end of the telescope.  It&#8217;s not American strength that&#8217;s the problem; it&#8217;s American weakness that&#8217;s the problem.  And certainly, Obama is proving that on a daily basis.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s not, though &#8212; although his policies get you to a declining, withdrawing America, it&#8217;s not that he&#8217;s an isolationist, in the sense that we see a rising isolation in some parts of the Republican Party; he&#8217;s a multilateralist.</p>
<p>And he doesn&#8217;t view what happens in the world through a nationalist prism.  He said &#8212; and these are really chilling words, when you think about it &#8212; he said in 2009, in his first speech to the United Nations &#8212; it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009, more than at any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared.  No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.  No balance of power among nations will hold.</p>
<p>Now, that is a statement that essentially says everything that we&#8217;ve seen in, you know, roughly 100,000 years of human history doesn&#8217;t apply anymore.  Coincidentally, 2009, more than at any point in human history, when Barack Obama becomes President &#8212; which is when history begins for Barack Obama &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; these are core beliefs of his.  And they are reflected in his policy.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve worried for a long time what he meant when he said no world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.  I wondered, what is he talking about there?  What does he really mean?  And the more I looked it, it finally came to me &#8212; he&#8217;s talking about us.  He&#8217;s talking about us.  We&#8217;re one nation elevated over another, that&#8217;s not going to succeed.  So his determination is to make sure that in fact we are not the dominant power in the world.</p>
<p>Now again, this is not the first person to hold this view.  I think it&#8217;s very similar to what Woodrow Wilson believed, and caused us so much trouble.  Wilson said, in his famous Fourteen Points speech &#8212; the interests of all nations are also our own.  He talked about peace without victory in 1918.  And Wilson said &#8212; there must be not a balance of power, but a community of power.  And he wasn&#8217;t even a community organizer.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Not organized rivalries, but an organized common piece based on &#8212; listen to this &#8212; the moral force of the public opinion of the world.</p>
<p>Now, nobody&#8217;s ever told us how to get the public opinion of the world, unless you&#8217;re Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama and you know it.  I mean, it speaks to you.  This is a very, very precarious and dangerous basis for a President of the United States to make policy.  It is detached from the interest and views of the American people.  Because he&#8217;s listening to the public opinion of the world.</p>
<p>Now, the opposite view on this was expressed very clearly at the time by Theodore Roosevelt, when he was asked &#8212; well, what do you think of this business of making the world safe for democracy?  And Roosevelt, the Republican Roosevelt, said in response &#8212; first, we&#8217;re to make the world safe for ourselves.</p>
<p>And that is the real bedrock, or should be the bedrock, of American foreign policy.  We can&#8217;t shape the rest of the world, but we can shape it adequately to defend ourselves and to defend our interests around the world.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why when I hear within the Republican Party voices that hark back to the isolationism of the 1930s, I get worried.  Because by moving away from the Theodore Roosevelt view, they end up &#8212; although they start with a very different analytical premise &#8212; they end up in the same place as Barack Obama &#8212; that it&#8217;s America that causes the problems, and that if indifference to the world, withdrawing from the world, makes us less provocative, that that&#8217;s what we ought to do.</p>
<p>You know, that leads to a real absence of thinking about American national security.  We already see in the Democratic Party, they don&#8217;t have a national security wing anymore.  There&#8217;s no Scoop Jackson wing, there isn&#8217;t even a Joe Lieberman wing anymore.</p>
<p>And yet, we see within the Republican Party today a view of America&#8217;s place in the world that will fundamentally leave us in the same position as the Obama view, which is a weaker, less outward-looking, declinist America.</p>
<p>This is fundamentally the opposite of Ronald Reagan&#8217;s view of the world &#8212; the view that brought us to a successful conclusion in the Cold War, which rejected multilateralism, which rejected isolationism and which, in the phrase that Reagan used over and over again, was based on peace through strength.  That is, to achieve American objectives without the use of military force.</p>
<p>It is a way that protects America and its friends and allies because of the strength, military, political and economic, of our position.  It dissuades and deters adversaries from trying to take advantage of us.  And it recognizes that you are best able to achieve peace when you are strong &#8212; that it&#8217;s not American strength that&#8217;s provocative; it&#8217;s American weakness that&#8217;s provocative.  And that&#8217;s something that Obama, and some people in the Republican Party today, unfortunately, have never really understood &#8212; that it&#8217;s the first duty of the sovereign, as Adam Smith said, to protect the society against the violence of other societies.</p>
<p>So it&#8217;s a basic chore of government, and it&#8217;s something that really our way of life, our standard of living in the United States, depend on.  Whatever minimal order and stability there is in the world &#8212; and there&#8217;s very little of it &#8212; is because of the United States and its structure of alliances.  If we don&#8217;t fulfill that role, you&#8217;re going to have others attempting to fill the void, or you&#8217;re going to have anarchy.  And it&#8217;s going to be the worse for us here.</p>
<p>Now, many people complain &#8212; and rightfully so &#8212; that other countries benefit from this and don&#8217;t pay their fair share, they don&#8217;t bear their fair share of the burden; that&#8217;s true.  And it&#8217;s something we should try and fix.  But let&#8217;s be clear &#8212; we&#8217;re not doing this for them; we&#8217;re doing it for us.  And there isn&#8217;t anybody else that can cover our back if we&#8217;re not able to do it.</p>
<p>And I&#8217;m afraid that the proof of this is something that we see around us in the world almost everywhere.  And I think that, in fact, I worry that over the next three years, the pace and the scope of the challenges that the United States faces is going to grow.  Because our adversaries and our friends have watched the Obama Administration in its first nearly five years in office.  They fully understand what the President&#8217;s about.  And those who want to take advantage of us understand that the 2016 election may bring something very, very different.  So if you want to move on your agenda contrary to American interests, this is the time to do it.</p>
<p>And you can pick so many places around the world where this is evident.  Let&#8217;s just start with Russia and Ukraine.  You know, this problem has been evident for quite some time.  If you go back to 2006, when he was last president of Russia, Vladimir Putin said &#8212; the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century and a tragedy for the Russian people.  He was saying even then that his objective was to reestablish Russian hegemony within the space of the former Soviet Union.  Not necessarily to take it over again, because I don&#8217;t think he wanted the problems that the newly independent republics had.  But he wanted Russian domination.</p>
<p>And I think the West understood that.  I think that&#8217;s one reason we expanded NATO membership to Eastern and Central Europe.  I think it&#8217;s why we put the Baltic Republics in NATO.  But we failed to follow our own logic.  We left a gap between NATO&#8217;s eastern border and Russia&#8217;s western border &#8212; Ukraine, Georgia, and other countries.</p>
<p>George W. Bush moved to try and fill that gap in April of 2008 &#8212; to bring Georgia and Ukraine on a clearly defined path to NATO membership, to end the ambiguity and to allow those countries to join the West, and to pick up that space for Europe and the United States.  The Europeans, even then fearful of what Russia might do with their oil and gas supplies, rejected the Bush proposal.</p>
<p>And four months later &#8212; this is kind of like a laboratory experiment you don&#8217;t often get in international affairs &#8212; four months later, the Russians invaded Georgia and carved off two provinces of Georgia that they still hold onto.</p>
<p>Now, at the time of that Russian attack, Barack Obama, candidate for President of the United States, was asked what he thought about it.  And his first response &#8212; he later walked away from it, but his first response was to call on both Russia and Georgia to exercise restraint.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I mean, just think about that for a minute.  He had to &#8212; as I say, he had to reverse that position.  But in the Kremlin, they took very careful note of what his first reaction was.</p>
<p>So, Obama comes into office.  He could be thinking about the strategic implications of what Russia had just done in Georgia.  But instead, he spends his time pressing the famous reset button, giving up bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, where we would&#8217;ve put missile defense assets to protect the United States itself, to protect us in the homeland, against the potential for ballistic missile attack with nuclear warheads from rogue states in the Middle East.  He gave that up.  Because the Russians were afraid of it.</p>
<p>He gave the Russians the New START Arms Control Treaty.  Very ill advised.  He gave concession after concession to the Russians in controversy after controversy.  And as was entirely predictable and in fact predicted by some of us, the Russians did what they did during the Cold War.  They took one concession after another.  They put it in their pocket and said &#8212; what have you got for me next?</p>
<p>So Obama today is utterly unprepared for what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine.  Putin suffered a setback when the Yanukovych government was overthrown.  And he&#8217;s systematically, for the past three months, going about reversing that.  And he&#8217;s accomplishing it.  Even the New York Times today had to admit that the economic sanctions the President&#8217;s put in place have been utterly ineffective in deterring Russian conduct.</p>
<p>And let&#8217;s be clear what Putin has done here.  First, in 2008 &#8212; but even more boldly in the past few months &#8212; he has used military force on the continent of Europe to change international boundaries.  And in response, the West has done nothing.  So that the signal to Putin and all the other former Soviet Republics is basically &#8212; you&#8217;re on your own.</p>
<p>Moreover &#8212; and we have to acknowledge the problem &#8212; the European response, if anything, has been weaker than Obama&#8217;s.  That&#8217;s not an excuse for anybody.  It&#8217;s a cause of a cyclical problem, where Obama can say &#8212; well, you know, the Europeans really aren&#8217;t up for tough sanctions.  And therefore, I don&#8217;t have to do anything.  And the Europeans can say &#8212; well, the Americans aren&#8217;t leading.  So we&#8217;re not going to lead, either.  And this downward cycle simply encourages Putin to continue his agitation, his destabilizing of Ukraine, to achieve the objective he wants, which is regime in Kiev that&#8217;s compliant with his wishes.</p>
<p>But the signal to others, to the Baltic Republics who are NATO members, leaves them in fear.  Because they now worry that Obama, even though they&#8217;re NATO members, won&#8217;t protect them, either.  And I think Putin didn&#8217;t start out this way.  But he sees a chance &#8212; potentially, potentially &#8212; to shatter the NATO alliance, something he never could&#8217;ve dreamed of four or five years ago.</p>
<p>So when you add to the internal problems of the European Union, the possibility of the post-Cold War arrangement in Europe coming unstuck, I think is rising.  And it&#8217;s rising in substantial measure because of the absence of any American leadership.</p>
<p>Now, there&#8217;s no country in the world watching what&#8217;s happening in Ukraine, other than the participants themselves &#8212; nobody watching it more closely than China.  Because China is engaged in its own expansionist effort in the waters off its seacoast.  And this is an issue vastly underreported in the United States, even with the President&#8217;s recent trip to Asia.  It&#8217;s like it just &#8212; it&#8217;s too hard for people in the media to cover.</p>
<p>Certainly, Obama didn&#8217;t give them any reason to cover it while he was in Asia, because he simply repeated the same policies that his administration has pursued for five years.  And they are policies that are failing in the face of an increasingly assertive China.</p>
<p>You know, in the government, and even in American business circles, there&#8217;s a kind of a mantra that China&#8217;s engaged in a peaceful rise, and it&#8217;s going to be a responsible stakeholder in world affairs.  Well, okay.  That&#8217;s possible; a lot of things are possible.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not the most likely scenario by a long shot.  In fact, China&#8217;s modernizing its army, it&#8217;s building up its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons capabilities.  It&#8217;s creating a blue-water navy for the first time in 600 years.  It has one of the world&#8217;s &#8212; certainly the most aggressive and one of the most sophisticated programs in cyber warfare.  It has developed anti-satellite weapons to blind our capabilities to surveil China from space.  It has extensive development of what are called anti-access area denial weapon capabilities to push the US Navy back from the Western shores of the Pacific, where we&#8217;ve been dominant since World War II.  And all the while, it is making territorial claims in the East and South China Sea that make what the Russians are doing in Ukraine look timid.</p>
<p>Now, people say that these claims are these little rocks and reefs and islands that are barely above water at low tide, and that&#8217;s true.  But they&#8217;re not the issue.  The issue is whether China can break free of the island chain that prevents it from getting out into the Pacific, and whether they can turn the South China Sea into a Chinese lake, taking it from being international waterways to being Chinese water.</p>
<p>What difference does that make?  Well, if you&#8217;re in Japan or South Korea or Taiwan, all of your oil from the Middle East comes through the South China Sea.  So if China makes that a territorial lake, they&#8217;ve got their hands around the throats of the economy of Japan and the other countries, and puts them in an enormous position to affect Southeast Asia, which is obviously &#8212; all of the trade and investment and commerce we have with East and Southeast Asia is at risk.  And this is at a time when the American Navy has the lowest number of warships at sea since 1916.</p>
<p>And you know, Romney tried to raise this during the debate with Obama.  And Obama&#8217;s response was again &#8212; it&#8217;s very revealing.  He didn&#8217;t have an answer; he had snark.  He said &#8212; well, you know, our ships are much more sophisticated than the ships of 1916.  We have submarines, we have aircraft carriers.  So, you know, you&#8217;re just counting numbers.</p>
<p>Well, that would be a good answer if the ships of our adversaries had been built in 1916.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Unfortunately, they&#8217;re not.  They&#8217;re building ships that are just as sophisticated as ours are.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s where the blindness of Obama&#8217;s vision is so important.  He just doesn&#8217;t see how declining American strength affects others &#8212; the Japanese are very worried, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, obviously, most worried of all.  The Indians are now very worried about what this rising Chinese capacity means.  And they see no answers from the United States.  And when they look at Ukraine, and they see actual military territorial aggression, and no American response, you can imagine what conclusion they draw.</p>
<p>But to me, the biggest threats that we face in the near term are the continuing threats of international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction &#8212; nuclear weapons especially.</p>
<p>And here, the Obama Administration has failed completely.  They&#8217;ve failed to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, they&#8217;ve made a deal with Iran that essentially legitimizes Iran&#8217;s uranium enrichment capability.  Iran made superficial, easily reversible concessions on its nuclear program.  And in return, they blew a hole through the international sanctions, which were not slowing down the nuclear weapons program but were imposing a cost on the Iranian economy.</p>
<p>They&#8217;ve done nothing in the White House to stop the North Korean program.  And there&#8217;s ample evidence that Iran and North Korea are cooperating on ballistic missiles for sure, and quite possibly on the nuclear weapons side as well.</p>
<p>This is, again, a huge lesson to our adversaries &#8212; to any would-be nuclear weapon state &#8212; that if you are simply persistent enough, you too can have nuclear weapons.  And the threat that that poses to Israel, to friendly states in the Middle East, is really extraordinary.</p>
<p>You know, Israel is a small country.  Half a dozen nuclear detonations &#8212; there is no more Israel.  That&#8217;s why Ariel Sharon once described it to President Bush as the threat of a nuclear holocaust.  And he was not exaggerating.</p>
<p>The Iranian nuclear weapons program is not Israel&#8217;s problem; it&#8217;s our problem.  Because we&#8217;re the only country ultimately that can stop would-be proliferators from getting the capability.  And yet, we&#8217;re doing nothing, which is why the spotlight is on Israel to take the very hard decision, whether they will, as they have twice before in Israel&#8217;s history, strike a nuclear weapons program in the hands of a hostile state.</p>
<p>Frankly, if I were in Israel, I&#8217;d have done this five years ago.  And I think they&#8217;re wasting time.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And I think it will be incredibly important for the United States to come to Israel&#8217;s defense if we wake up one morning and find that they are already attacking Iran.  This will be an entirely legitimate exercise of Israel&#8217;s inherent right of self defense.  And the United States ought to say that immediately after we learn that the attack has begun.  We ought to resupply Israel militarily immediately.  And frankly, we ought to do a lot more.  I just don&#8217;t think the Obama Administration will do anything.</p>
<p>And the Iranians understand that.  They don&#8217;t believe the President when he says all options are on the table.  I don&#8217;t even think the President believes the President &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; when he says that.</p>
<p>And the Iranian nuclear threat is not simply a regional threat in the Middle East.  It forms the basis of the risk of a perfect storm with terrorists &#8212; that Iran would supply nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda or others that they don&#8217;t need a ballistic missile to deliver, that they can put in a boxcar, put in a ship, sail it into any harbor in this country or anywhere in the world and detonate it.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s where, really, the threat of international terrorism remains so acute.  Now, we&#8217;ve had developments just this week on one of the central issues of the war on terrorism &#8212; the attack on Benghazi on September the 11th, 2012, with the revelation of what we knew all along &#8212; that the White House had no intention of being candid about what happened in that attack.  But also, today, as I think most of you probably heard, Speaker Boehner has finally announced the formation of a select committee in the House which will unify &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; the investigative efforts from six committees, six committees, into one.</p>
<p>And as I said to a few of you before dinner, I was at the Justice Department when we had to face in the Reagan Administration the Iran Contra select committee.  And let me tell you, it is a powerful, powerful tool in the congressional arsenal.  And the fact that we&#8217;re finally going to have it, I think, could make a real difference.</p>
<p>But the fundamental point on the ground in the region remains that the threat of international terrorism is just as acute today as it was before 9/11.  The administration&#8217;s own Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said as much two months ago in testimony before Congress.  It&#8217;s a different structure for al-Qaeda than it was before the first 9/11.  But if anything, it&#8217;s a graver threat because it&#8217;s metastasized into countries all over the region.  And other terrorists have come along.  We&#8217;ve seen what they&#8217;ve been able to do in Iraq, what they&#8217;re doing today in Syria.</p>
<p>And so the whole approach of the administration, which is to say &#8212; well, we&#8217;ve hurt al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we were able to kill Osama bin Laden &#8212; and therefore, what they define as core al-Qaeda has been weakened.</p>
<p>Now, it&#8217;s not like al-Qaeda sat around in caves in Afghanistan drawing corporate organization charts and working out exactly how they were going to do things.  They had objectives.  They knew that different people would be attracted to their efforts for different reasons, and they accepted that.  And that&#8217;s what&#8217;s happened since 9/11.</p>
<p>While Obama has focused on defining terrorism down to Al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda down to core al-Qaeda, and core al-Qaeda down to Osama bin Laden so he can take credit for it; the rest of the terrorists have been ignoring this esoteric discussion and conducting terrorist operations.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s what the attack in Benghazi was, and why it was such a threat to the administration&#8217;s entire tissue fabric of argument that al-Qaeda was on the run, Osama bin Laden was dead and General Motors was alive.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They knew that if people really understood what had happened at Benghazi, the American public would understand that the threat of international terrorism is very real.</p>
<p>So the whole argument about how they had failed to understand that Libya was dissolving into anarchy, that the terrorists had come back to use it for training and for base camps; and that therefore, the notion that the Arab Spring had brought progress to the Middle East and reduced the threat of terrorism was fundamentally wrong.  They did nothing in the months before the September 11th attack to build up capabilities in the region to protect not just our diplomats but American citizens who are even more vulnerable than people in the embassies and consulates.</p>
<p>You know, in February of 2011, we withdrew all civilian personnel from Libya.  This was at the time Khadafi was about to fall.  Things were very dangerous.  We didn&#8217;t have naval assets that could bring those people out.  We had to rent a ferryboat in Greece and bring it to Tripoli to pull the Americans out.</p>
<p>So from February of 2011 to September of 2012, what did we do to put capabilities in the region to protect Americans who might be at risk?  Zero.  That&#8217;s what we did.  Zero.</p>
<p>You know, Americans don&#8217;t realize that the Sixth Fleet, our Mediterranean fleet, on a permanent basis, consists of one ship &#8212; the flagship in Italy.  The rest of the Sixth Fleet is whatever happens to be going between the Strait of Magellan and the Suez Canal at any given time.  We don&#8217;t have the capability in the Mediterranean anymore.  And that&#8217;s the result of years of budget cuts.  And it is a tragedy, and it&#8217;s embarrassing.  And we saw the impact on 9/11 in Benghazi.</p>
<p>Could we have done anything on that day?  People whose military judgment and understanding out of respect say no.  I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s an excuse; I think it&#8217;s a confirmation that we failed in the months before that attack to be ready for it and to protect Americans in danger elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East.</p>
<p>But the worst part of it is not the failure before 9/11, not the failures on 9/11; but the failures since the attack in Benghazi.  And this to me is both the most troubling and the most indicative of what&#8217;s wrong with the Obama foreign policy.</p>
<p>You know, an American ambassador in a foreign country not only presides over an embassy staff from all different departments &#8212; Agriculture, Defense, as well as State &#8212; the ambassador is the President&#8217;s personal representative to the country where he or she is accredited, the President&#8217;s personal representative.  When the ambassador drives around the capital city, the American flag flies from the right front fender of their car.  Everybody knows what the American ambassador does.</p>
<p>So, let&#8217;s be clear &#8212; what happened in Benghazi, with four Americans being murdered, was a tragedy for all of them.  But in particular, it showed that the terrorists could kill the personal representative of the President of the United States and have nothing happen to them &#8212; that under Barack Obama, you can murder his personal representative and get away scot free.</p>
<p>That is a terrible lesson for the terrorists, the state sponsors of terrorists, and our adversaries generally, to learn.  It is a sign for 20 months &#8212; 20 months!  We&#8217;ve done nothing.  Not only have we not arrested anybody; there&#8217;s no revenge, no retaliation, no retribution, and no prospect that anything&#8217;s going to happen.</p>
<p>So this signal of American weakness, I think, is something they understand in the Kremlin.  They understand it in Beijing, they understand it in Tehran, they understand it all around the world.  They understand it in the capitals of our allies, too &#8212; that if the Obama Administration won&#8217;t even go after people who are killing his representative, who are they going to come to defend?  How can you trust the word of the United States to meet its commitments when they won&#8217;t even defend their own people?</p>
<p>This is something that I think we need much more discussion of at the national level.  And maybe this select committee will help jog the national media into doing it.</p>
<p>But fundamentally, it&#8217;s for American citizens.  You know, we get the kind of government that we deserve.  And if we don&#8217;t make national security a higher priority going forward, if we don&#8217;t insist that our candidates for President and Senate and House explain to us how they&#8217;re going to protect America, then we&#8217;re not doing our job.</p>
<p>So I think, looking forward to this November, looking forward to the 2016 election, we&#8217;ve got to re-center this debate.  And we&#8217;ve got to demand of candidates at the presidential and congressional level that they explain whether or not they agree with Ronald Reagan&#8217;s view of peace through strength, and that a strong America is the best way not only to protect our interests, but to protect our interests and preserve the peace.  This is absolutely critical to ourselves and our friends around the world.</p>
<p>Thank you very much.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
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		<title>The Obama Undoctrine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-obama-undoctrine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obama-undoctrine</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-obama-undoctrine/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2014 04:58:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Foreign policy that stands for everything and nothing. And has accomplished nothing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226482 alignleft" alt="BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Afghanistan is lost, Iraq and Libya are in the middle of civil wars, Russia is carving off pieces of Ukraine and China is escalating its conflict with the rest of Asia. There isn’t a single element of Obama’s foreign policy that has proven successful. Instead it’s been one international disaster after another.</span></p>
<p>Obama just smiles into the camera and announces that “America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world.” Anyone who disagrees is engaging in partisan politics. Or reading statistics.</p>
<p>Having signed off on Iran’s nuclear program while its Supreme Leader boasts that the holy war will only end with America’s destruction, he claims that the “odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low.”</p>
<p>“From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations,” he proclaims. Meanwhile Russia and China humiliate our European and Asian allies for their worthless alliance hub.</p>
<p>“When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help,” he boasts.</p>
<p>And yet the masked men go on occupying buildings and Boko Haram goes on killing Nigerians. America has never been stronger than under Obama. And yet it’s incapable of actually doing anything, except maybe joining New Zealand, Sweden, Taiwan, Israel and Chile in providing disaster aid to the Philippines.</p>
<p>And if that doesn’t work, he can always sanction the typhoon. It should do as much to stop the wall of water it as it did to stop Russia and Iran.</p>
<p>Obama’s speeches come from a world that exists only inside his own teleprompter. Another leader might have been reeling from a string of international failures, but he boldly triumphs over reality. The worse things are, the bigger the party he throws to celebrate his victories.</p>
<p>Obama’s speech focuses on Afghanistan, but never mentions the Taliban. Imagine an FDR speech that pretended that Japan didn’t exist. That’s the depth of denial it takes for Obama to claim victory.</p>
<p>After using up the lives of 1,600 American soldiers fighting the Taliban without ever defeating them, he takes a victory lap for defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when the CIA had told him back in 2009 that there were at most 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Thousands of Americans have been lost to an enemy whose existence Obama won’t even acknowledge as he takes another victory lap for losing another war.</p>
<p>With the VA scandal reminding everyone that he doesn’t just throw away the lives of soldiers abroad, but also at home, Obama is changing the subject with one Mission Accomplished speech after another. Like a politician caught with his mistress who begins taking his wife everywhere, he is suddenly in love with the military and can’t get enough photo ops with anyone wearing a uniform.</p>
<p>Even if they work for the post office.</p>
<p>In Obama’s teleprompter reality, a withdrawal is equivalent to success. Setting a withdrawal timeline with no regard for results deserves a victory parade. He wants credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of his term. Not only is he repeating the timeline mistake of his disastrous surge, but the timeline is once again pegged to a political, rather than a strategic, date.</p>
<p>Obama takes credit for troop removals, rather than outcomes. But if he doesn’t care that Al Qaeda in Iraq is more powerful than ever or that the Taliban control the future of Afghanistan, why didn’t he immediately withdraw the troops? Are we supposed to cheer his inability to either commit to winning a war or pull out? Is indecisiveness the virtue of a great leader?</p>
<p>Do we really need more applause lines about how long it took him to lose a war?</p>
<p>The West Point commencement address dresses up past failures as new successes and lays out a vision for the future by a lame duck leader who has failed at every foreign policy initiative. The address is an expanded version of his 2002 anti-war speech as a Chicago state senator that first brought him to the attention of his future backers. It straddles an awkward line between anti-war and interventionism.</p>
<p>Twelve years later, Obama hasn’t changed.</p>
<p>He’s still posturing as a fake centrist by setting up interventionist and isolationist straw men on both sides. Instead of defending his policies on their merits, he tries to make them seem reasonable by depicting his critics on the right and the left as extremists. After six years of foreign affairs failures, Obama is still talking as if he’s the &#8220;reasonable&#8221; centrist trying to steer a&#8221;‘sensible common sense&#8221; path.</p>
<p>At least those are the favorite buzzwords that his speechwriters throw in to influence the “folks.”</p>
<p>Obama wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants applause for being an interventionist and for being a non-interventionist. In one sentence he sounds like JFK and in another like Eugene McCarthy.</p>
<p>He wants to send in the troops and then get credit for pulling them out. He wants to threaten other countries and then appease them at the negotiating table. He wants to set red lines he doesn’t stand behind and apply sanctions that mean nothing. And he wants to pass off this game in which the bad guys always win and America always loses as his smart power doctrine.</p>
<p>That’s not a doctrine. That’s an undoctrine.</p>
<p>The Obama Undoctrine is all things to all people. It respects international opinion, except when it doesn’t. It doesn’t believe in military solutions, but sometimes it does. It believes in taking military action to protect our interests, rather than foreign human rights, except when it believes the opposite.</p>
<p>In Libya, Obama sent in the jets when Libyans in Benghazi were threatened, but not when Americans in Benghazi were threatened.</p>
<p>The world may look to America for help, but Americans shouldn’t.</p>
<p>The shiny new Obama Undoctrine proposes such groundbreaking ideas as partnering with countries fighting terrorism. This is a bold new idea from the &#8217;50s. Other bold new ideas include using international institutions like the League of Nations, ahem, the United Nations, to stop new wars from starting.</p>
<p>Anyone who wants an example of the “leadership” and “strength” of the Undoctrine should look at Iran. That’s not some nasty Republican sneering at the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>It’s Obama’s assertion in his address.</p>
<p>After admitting that any nuclear agreement with Iran is a long shot, he says of his appeasement, “This is American leadership. This is American strength.”</p>
<p>Obama’s idea of American leadership and strength is being repeatedly humiliated and led around by the nose by a bitter enemy determined to obtain nuclear weapons in order to destroy the United States.</p>
<p>If that’s Obama’s idea of leadership and strength, just imagine his idea of weakness.</p>
<p>Then there’s NATO. He describes it as “the strongest alliance the world has ever known.” That would have sounded more impressive before NATO staked out Ukraine for the bear and went home.</p>
<p>And if you want something more effective, try the UN. While Obama cuts the military to the bone, he will be “investing” more money in UN peacekeeping operations.</p>
<p>If we’re going to spend all that money on a military, it should be one that doesn’t run away at the first sign of trouble. That way we would at least be getting some bang for our buck. But maybe a small army of child molesters spreading cholera that runs away at the first sign of trouble embodies the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” Obama declared. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”</p>
<p>Or as his nursery school teacher probably put it, “You’re special. Just like everyone else.”</p>
<p>This mess of contradictions is the Obama Undoctrine. It stands for everything and nothing. And it has accomplished nothing.</p>
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		<title>Obama, Hillary and Kim Kardashian</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-hillary-and-kim-kardashian/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-hillary-and-kim-kardashian</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 23 May 2014 04:31:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[accomplishments]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hillary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Kardashian]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226137</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hillary's accomplishment is being Hillary.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hillary87.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226138" alt="hillary87" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hillary87.jpg" width="309" height="206" /></a>Occasionally someone pranks an unwitting MSNBC panelist or a bunch of teenagers by asking them to name a single Hillary accomplishment. Even though Hillary has piled up more awards than Charles de Gaulle, nothing comes to mind. An editorial in the <i>Chicago Tribune</i> has the writer asking a group of Chicago leaders the same question about Obama&#8217;s foreign policy.</p>
<p>Silence follows.</p>
<p>Obama and Hillary don&#8217;t just suffer from a shortage of accomplishments. They&#8217;re also burdened with a surplus of failures. Benghazi worries so many Hillary supporters because there is nothing to balance it against. There is no, &#8220;But look at all the good she did.&#8221; Hillary didn&#8217;t do any good. She didn&#8217;t do much of anything except tour countries and pose for photos.</p>
<p>As a Secretary of State she made a perfectly adequate First Lady.</p>
<p>Obama talks the teleprompter talk, but when you look at the results they&#8217;re universally awful. Whether it&#8217;s the things that he only pretends to care about, like the VA, or the things he does care about, like Obamacare, after the splashy ribbon cutting ceremony comes the disastrous mess.</p>
<p>Like every other summer blockbuster, it’s great marketing for a terrible product. And just like the summer blockbuster, Obama&#8217;s policies are treated as disposables to be forgotten about. Scandal management consists of Obama making a serious face and promising to take this serious problem very seriously before heading out for a round of serious golfing.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t cry for Hillary and don&#8217;t write off Obama. Achievement of the old kind is overrated. It&#8217;s not about how high your GPA is but how many politically correct extracurriculars you have. In politics, just like in college, diversity and style increasingly count for more than achievement.</p>
<p>Post-American politics are also post-achievement politics. The morality of progressivism is more important than the substance of progress.</p>
<p>From the Sociology major who keeps thinking that she should volunteer at a soup kitchen to the most powerful man in the country who keeps saying that he wishes he could do something about all these problems, the left thinks that wanting to do something is what makes you a good person. It doesn&#8217;t matter if what you&#8217;re doing does any good. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you succeed.</p>
<p>The politics of the left are narcissistic. Its members are less concerned with changing the world than with being good people by wanting to change the world. That&#8217;s what Obama received his premature Nobel Peace Prize for, not for what he did, but for what he talked about doing.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not the things that Obama has done that the left loves him for. It&#8217;s his empty talk, his worthless words and his teleprompter visions.</p>
<p>There are two Obamas. One is the real politician. The other is the imaginary Obama of 2007; a figment of David Axelrod&#8217;s imagination layered over with bizarre art and visions that transformed him into a superhuman being of light before he ever set foot in the Oval Office.</p>
<p>This Obama can never fail because he doesn&#8217;t really exist. It&#8217;s this Obama who makes the public appearances on the front pages while the other Obama&#8217;s policies are discussed somewhere in the meatier parts of the paper. The imaginary Obama shows up on American Idol while the other Obama sends vets to cemeteries. And to millions of Americans, the imaginary Obama is more real than his destructive real life counterpart. The idea of Obama is more real than his policies.</p>
<p>The imaginary Obama has his counterpart in a reimagined Hillary.</p>
<p>Hillary&#8217;s lack of achievement as Secretary of State gives her a purity that she lacked when she went from the Senate to the campaign trail. It&#8217;s easier for the left to project its visions onto a blank space that spent a few years touring the world than on Senator Clinton who had actual political positions. Like Obama, she is free to be anything. She too can lower the oceans or raise them, fix all the things that her predecessor broke and usher in a new age of world peace.</p>
<p>If Hillary Clinton had successfully brought peace to the Middle East or negotiated an important territorial accord in Asia, those things would actually disqualify her. They would be real world achievements that could be critiqued and taken apart. They would highlight her flaws as a real diplomat and a real human being. But having done nothing, even while four Americans were dying, she is flawless. A perfect void of nothingness that the left can project everything on.</p>
<p>That purity of blankness is why Obama approaches every scandal as if he had just heard about it on the evening news. It&#8217;s as if every day in office is his first day. It&#8217;s important that he have no specific track record, just the vague one of fighting for the right things like gay rights, illegal aliens and 3D printer hubs. Not to mention gay illegal aliens running 3D printer hubs.</p>
<p>Forget the last three scandals. Obama is still Miss America. He wants to feed all the hungry children and bring world peace. It&#8217;s all intentions and no results. If he&#8217;s in a red state, he might mention killing Bin Laden, but mostly it&#8217;s all visionary talk about investment, opportunity and reaching out. He&#8217;s still running for office with no track record on a platform of hope and change.</p>
<p>Obama and Hillary run on a personal history made out of lies while refusing to run on their track records. They want everyone to know their fictionalized life story while refusing to discuss the things they actually did while in office. They become icons who represent all minorities or all women, but who cannot be held accountable for anything that they did as individuals.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t ask Obama or Hillary about Benghazi. Dude, don&#8217;t you know that was two years ago? Ask them what they think about Kim Kardashian or Donald Sterling or racial injustice in America. Ask them what their favorite movie or song is. Treat them like celebrities, not politicians. Don&#8217;t ever ask them what they achieved. It&#8217;s like asking Kim Kardashian what she achieved.</p>
<p>She&#8217;s famous and they&#8217;re famous. And they&#8217;re all famous for being famous. Hillary Clinton will run for the White House on a platform of being famously famous. As the Kim Kardashian of national politics, she&#8217;s the inevitable nominee. Her accomplishments are self-referential. Hillary&#8217;s accomplishment is being Hillary. She deserves to be the nominee because she is Hillary.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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