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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; lie</title>
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		<title>The Police Brutality &#8216;Epidemic&#8217; Lie</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-police-brutality-epidemic-lie/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-police-brutality-epidemic-lie</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/the-police-brutality-epidemic-lie/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 05:40:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brutality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[epidemic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nypd]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[STATISTICS]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248430</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Misinformation that kills. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Police-IMG_4105.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248432" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Police-IMG_4105-397x350.jpg" alt="Police-IMG_4105" width="330" height="291" /></a>Recently, I claimed that everyone—politicians, academics, and media commentators—who promoted the idea that police brutality is a national “epidemic,” or even a “growing concern,” as one self-styled libertarian put it, share some culpability for the murders of the two NYPD officers who were gunned down in their vehicle right before Christmas.</p>
<p>More specifically, they are responsible, obviously, not for intending or consciously encouraging the murder of police, but for creating a climate for police officers that’s even more hostile than that in which officers must spend their days and nights.  After all, we don’t need Richard Weaver to inform us that “ideas have consequences.”  Even simpletons and liars will concede this much.</p>
<p>And only simpletons and liars can deny that this idea—the idea of a “pandemic” of police brutality sweeping the nation—has the consequence of endangering police officers.</p>
<p>Yet this idea isn’t just dangerous.</p>
<p>It is also a lie.  And it is a huge lie at that.</p>
<p>“Police brutality” is an all-purpose piece of rhetoric that, as such, can mean anything and everything—and, thus, nothing at all. When anti-police misologists—a “misologist” was the word that the 18<sup>th</sup> century philosopher Immanuel Kant used when referring to an enemy of reason—sound off about “police brutality,” they are referring to the police’s unjustified use of force.</p>
<p>Now, all but anarchists concede that police are authorized to use force when necessary and when it’s proportionate to the situation in question. When, however, the force deployed is unnecessary and/or excessive, then the force is unjustified. This—the unnecessary and/or excessive use of force—is “police brutality.”</p>
<p>So, is this a growing national phenomenon, an epidemic?</p>
<p>Not even close.</p>
<p>According to the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), in 1999, of 44 million people who had face-to-face interactions with police officers, less than one-half of one percent was “threatened with or actually experienced force.”</p>
<p>Notice, the assertion here isn’t that less than one-half of one percent—it bears repeating: one-half of one percent!—was subjected to the use of unjustified force; the claim is that of 44 million, this miniscule fraction of people were either threatened with—threatened with—or subjected to the use of force per se.</p>
<p>What this in turn means is that the number of people who were “brutalized” by police is even smaller than “less than one-half of one percent.”</p>
<p>According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), of a national population estimate of roughly 240, 000,000 comprised of people of 16 years of age or older, of those who dealt with the police in some capacity in 2002, 2005, and 2008, 1.5%, 1.6%, and 1.4%, respectively, were either threatened with or subjected to force by the police.</p>
<p>In 2008, 22% of those falling into the latter group admitted that they “argued with, cursed at, insulted, or verbally threatened the police.”  Twelve percent reported that they were “disobeying” and/or “interfering” with police.</p>
<p>Of the 84% of people who felt that the threat or use of police use force was “improper,” only 14% filed a complaint.</p>
<p>To further underscore just what a whopper of a lie is the notion that “police brutality” is a nationwide epidemic, consider this: Among those included in the class of people who have had to deal with police are those who have called on the police for assistance.  And among those who have done so, about 85 percent claimed to have been “satisfied with the police response.”  Moreover—shocker of shockers!—Hispanics (86%) and blacks (85%) were slightly more satisfied than were whites (83%). Finally, about 90 percent of people who requested police assistance said that they would do so again.</p>
<p>Only in the fevered imagination of the cop-hating ideologue is “police brutality” a national crisis, or any sort of crisis.</p>
<p>Of course, none of this is to deny that there are bad cops.  Genuinely abusive police officers, like those who abuse their power and authority anywhere, deserve to be crucified.  But there is zero justification for abstracting from these relatively few instances a rule encompassing police officers generally.</p>
<p>Numbers aside, just some rudimentary common sense—a rare commodity nowadays, and practically nonexistent among the police-hating ideologues—should determine that in this Age of the Camera—a time in which everyone and their mother is armed with surveillance apparatus—the police have no real option but to be better behaved than ever before.</p>
<p>Jeremy Bentham described the doctrine of “natural rights” as “nonsense on stilts.”  The dogma—and make no mistakes about it, for the anti-police misologists, this is nothing less than a dogma—that “police brutality” is an epidemic, a crisis, blah, blah, blah, is indeed nonsense on stilts.  But it is more than this: It is nonsense that kills.</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>America&#8217;s Rape Hoax Epidemic</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/americas-rape-hoax-epidemic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=americas-rape-hoax-epidemic</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/americas-rape-hoax-epidemic/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2014 05:30:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[duke lacrosse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hoax]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rolling stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UVA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247705</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why we must refuse to let the UVA rape hoax story be sent down the memory hole. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/uva-2-800.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247706" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/uva-2-800-450x337.jpg" alt="uva-2-800" width="346" height="259" /></a>In response to the total implosion of Rolling Stone&#8217;s preposterous story about a fraternity gang-rape at the University of Virginia, the media have reverted to their Soviet-style reporting. They&#8217;re not even saying: We&#8217;re choosing not to talk about UVA because it&#8217;s a side show. It&#8217;s more like: UVA? That&#8217;s a school?</p>
<p>Not only did the UVA gang rape turn out to be a hoax, but then President Obama&#8217;s own Department of Justice completed a six-year study on college rape, and it turns out that instead of 1-in-5 college coeds being raped, the figure is 0.03-in-5.</p>
<p>Less than 1 percent of college students are the victim of a sexual assault &#8212; 0.6 percent to be exact &#8212; not to be confused with the 20 percent, or &#8220;one in five,&#8221; claimed by feminists and President Obama.</p>
<p>But neither the DOJ report, nor the UVA rape hoax have dissuaded Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill from pushing their idea that the nation is in the grip of a college rape epidemic.</p>
<p>This week, Gillibrand dismissed the UVA outrage, saying, &#8220;Clearly, we don&#8217;t know the facts of what did or did not happen in this case.&#8221;</p>
<p>Actually, we know quite well what happened in this case. A disturbed young woman invented a fake boyfriend and a fake gang-rape to get attention, and an incompetent journalist acted as her transcriber. It was a total hoax &#8212; just like the Duke lacrosse case, the Jamie Leigh Jones case, the Tawana Brawley case, and every other claim of white men committing gang-rape.</p>
<p>Gillibrand and McCaskill: Perhaps the accusations against Dreyfus were overblown, but that doesn&#8217;t mean there&#8217;s not an epidemic of Jews selling secrets to the Germans!</p>
<p>We are truly in the middle of a rape epidemic: an epidemic of women falsely claiming to have been raped.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s said that &#8220;women never lie about rape!&#8221; But the evidence shows that women lie about rape all the time -– for attention, for revenge and for an alibi. All serious studies of the matter suggest that at least 40 percent of rape claims are false.</p>
<p>The U.S. Air Force, for example, examined more than a thousand rape allegations on military bases over the course of four years and concluded that 46 percent were false. In 27 percent of the cases, the accuser recanted. A large study of rape allegations over nine years in a small Midwestern city, by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University, found that 41 percent of the rape claims were false.</p>
<p>To put it in terms Kirsten Gillibrand would understand, two in five women claiming to have been raped are lying.</p>
<p>So why are we always being hectored: Only 2 percent of rape allegations are false!</p>
<p>That oft-cited number comes from Susan Brownmiller&#8217;s 1975 book, &#8220;Against Our Will&#8221; &#8212; which sourced the claim to a mimeograph of a speech by a state court judge, who made a passing remark about a New York police precinct with an all-female rape squad. Nothing more is known about whether this was an actual study, and if so, what was examined, how the information was collected or the actual results. Nor can any trace of the speech, the precinct or the data be found.</p>
<p>In Women&#8217;s Studies classes, that figure is called a &#8220;home run.&#8221;</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why the feminists are so anxious to move on from the UVA nonsense rape story. They want to move on now so they can come back to it later, when everyone&#8217;s forgotten, and start citing UVA as their No. 1 example of the fraternity gang-rape culture.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s crucial that we get a letter in the file that says, &#8220;This was total B.S.&#8221; Otherwise, the UVA hoax will remain in an open file, marked &#8220;unresolved.&#8221;</p>
<p>All we&#8217;re hearing now is, Enough! Enough! Don&#8217;t be a bad winner. All this coverage is putting Jackie in a precarious emotional state. If you were a gentleman, you would drop the subject.</p>
<p>Then in three months, they&#8217;ll be bringing up the UVA gang rape as proof of a college rape epidemic. In six months, the case will show up in feminist textbooks.</p>
<p>Wait a minute! That was a hoax!</p>
<p>We didn&#8217;t agree it was a hoax. We conceded nothing.</p>
<p>The Duke lacrosse case proves that. In an unusual move, after that gang-rape turned out to be yet another hoax, the players refused to accept the case being dismissed for &#8220;insufficient evidence,&#8221; which is how prosecutors usually drop charges. They insisted on being declared &#8220;innocent.&#8221;</p>
<p>This, the attorney general did. He also denounced the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, and saw that he was disbarred.</p>
<p>A few years went by, and then, this year, some douchebag wrote a book that claims &#8220;something happened&#8221; in the Duke case between the players and the stripper (who has since been convicted of murder). The book got a rave review from The New York Times.</p>
<p>With feminists, either you lose or the game was rained out.</p>
<p>So before anyone moves on from UVA, we need to get it in writing that this case was a hoax. Jackie&#8217;s got to apologize to the fraternity; UVA&#8217;s president has to not only apologize, but pay restitution to the Greek system for shutting it down for an entire semester; and Rolling Stone authoress Sabrina Rubin Erdely has got to swear that she will never, ever write again.</p>
<p>She cannot be an &#8220;investigative journalist.&#8221; She cannot even write movie reviews. Remember, Sabrina: No means no.</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>To the Left, Lying About Rape Is Just Dandy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/to-the-left-lying-about-rape-is-just-dandy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-the-left-lying-about-rape-is-just-dandy</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:16:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jackie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lena Dunham]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rolling stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UVA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247111</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Lena Dunham and the Rolling Stone do harm to actual rape victims. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/720x405-AP811265161227.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247112" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/720x405-AP811265161227-389x350.jpg" alt="UVa Fraternity" width="319" height="287" /></a>This week, Rolling Stone printed an editor&#8217;s note retracting one of the most highly praised pieces of investigative journalism in its history. That piece, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, alleged that several members of the University of Virginia fraternity Phi Kappa Psi, had raped a 19-year-old student named Jackie, including with foreign objects, as she lay on a floor covered with broken glass. The article resulted in the university suspending the fraternity&#8217;s activities, and national outrage over the so-called &#8220;rape culture&#8221; on campus.</p>
<p>That rape culture supposedly leads to one in five women being sexually assaulted on campus — a faulty statistic from a poll that didn&#8217;t even ask women if they were raped or sexually assaulted, and instead defined sex while inebriated at any level as rape. With regard to reported rape, the federal government reports a rate of just 1.3 per 1,000 Americans. That is, of course, far too high. But it is not a rape culture by any plausible definition.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the narrative of women as victims of brutish male society must be forwarded at all costs, for political purposes. If Americans are brutish sexists waiting to rape unsuspecting women, bigger government becomes a necessity. That&#8217;s why President Obama has cited that one-in-five statistic, and suggested that America experiences &#8220;quiet tolerance of sexual assault.&#8221;</p>
<p>In order to forward that narrative, all rape stories are treated as fact sans investigation of any kind. And so Jackie&#8217;s story of gang rape received plaudits across the media landscape.</p>
<p>Then it fell apart.</p>
<p>The Washington Post quickly debunked the story. According to the Post, the fraternity says there was no event the night Jackie was allegedly raped, Jackie&#8217;s friends &#8220;have not been able to verify key points in recent days,&#8221; and one of the men named in Jackie&#8217;s report stated that &#8220;he never met Jackie in person and never took her out on a date.&#8221;</p>
<p>As the Rolling Stone report collapsed, members of the left jumped to defend Jackie.</p>
<p>Sally Kohn of CNN.com tweeted that people should stop questioning Jackie&#8217;s story: &#8220;While aspects of UVA rape story now in question, still unsettles me that pouncing by skeptics mirrored sort of doubt rape victims often face.&#8221; Feminist Melissa McEwan wrote, &#8220;If Jackie&#8217;s story is partially or wholly untrue, it doesn&#8217;t validate the reasons for disbelieving her.&#8221;</p>
<p>Under this logic, Atticus Finch was the villain in &#8220;To Kill a Mockingbird.&#8221; After all, how dare he question the rape allegations of a victimized woman and defend Tom Robinson?</p>
<p>But for the left, it&#8217;s narrative first, facts second.</p>
<p>The same holds true regarding allegations made by HBO star Lena Dunham, who wrote of her own alleged rape at the hands of an Oberlin &#8220;college Republican&#8221; named Barry. When it turned out that Barry, a readily identifiable person from Dunham&#8217;s days at Oberlin, did not rape her, the media largely went silent; Dunham still has not spoken on the issue.</p>
<p>Narrative first. Facts second.</p>
<p>Here is the reality: All decent human beings believe that rape is evil. They also believe that false allegations of rape are wrong. These two positions are not mutually exclusive. They complement one another. False rape allegations do actual rape victims a tremendous disservice: to lump in false accusations of rape with true accusations of rape makes people more skeptical of rape victims generally, a horrible result. Rape should be taken seriously; rape accusations should be taken seriously. That means taking factual questions seriously, not merely throwing the word &#8220;rape&#8221; around casually, without evidence, and without regard for truth.</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>WaPo: Believe Rape Accusations Even If They’re False</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/wapo-believe-rape-accusations-even-if-theyre-false/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wapo-believe-rape-accusations-even-if-theyre-false</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:32:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UVA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington Post]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246931</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Don’t let facts get in the way of the agenda.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/uva-melting-down-after-explosive-rape-article-660x400.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246933" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/uva-melting-down-after-explosive-rape-article-660x400-450x343.jpg" alt="uva-melting-down-after-explosive-rape-article-660x400" width="367" height="280" /></a>As the shocking allegations of a fraternity party gang rape at the University of Virginia come unraveled, progressives whose cause is to condemn America for a so-called “rape culture” have chosen to double down in defense of the apparent falsehood. The <i>Washington Post</i> even ran an astoundingly un-American piece that suggests we should believe rape accusations, <i>regardless of whether they are true</i>.</p>
<p><i>Rolling Stone</i>, the music and politics magazine that can stay relevant only by sexualizing everyone (including terrorists – remember its <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/17/rolling-stone-features-boston-bombing-suspect-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-on-cover/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">dreamy cover photo</span></a> of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?), broke the lurid story only to have it fall apart thanks to <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/05/rolling-stones-botched-account-of-a-uva"><span style="color: #0433ff;">unconscionably sloppy journalism</span></a>. But progressives cannot let the truth get in the way of the agenda, so Zerlina Maxwell rushed to fill the breach with the aforementioned <i>WaPo </i>piece initially entitled “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/no-matter-what-jackie-said-we-should-automatically-believe-rape-claims/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims</span></a>” (“Jackie” is the victim’s pseudonym).</p>
<p>The thrust of Maxwell’s piece is that “the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” She begins by saying that many people</p>
<blockquote><p>will be tempted to see [the collapse of the UofV gang-rape allegation] as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.</p></blockquote>
<p><i>Exactly</i> – look at what happened to them. But then she goes on to reject that reasonable restraint: “In important ways,” she wrote, “<i>this is wrong</i>. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says” [emphasis added] – after all, false accusations are “exceedingly rare,” she claims. But then she quotes an FBI statistic that 2-8% of allegations are false; that is not “exceedingly rare.”</p>
<p>In any case, it wouldn’t matter if the figure were only 1% &#8211; in this country we don’t suspend the presumption of innocence just “to offer our hand of support to survivors.” Maxwell disagrees: “The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.”</p>
<p>It should go without saying, especially to someone with a law degree like Maxwell, that we shouldn’t be “punishing serial rapists” if they haven’t yet been proven to <i>be</i> serial rapists. She has created a false choice between believing and disbelieving the accused. It is not the job of law enforcement to believe or disbelieve a victim’s story; it is their job to determine if a crime has been committed, to investigate it, to examine the evidence, and then to act accordingly. Maxwell wants to reverse that process; too bad if the accusation falls apart under later scrutiny.</p>
<p>And what of the man she’s willing to falsely if temporarily accuse of the ugly crime of rape? Well, he would have “a rough period” for the duration of the investigation, Maxwell generously concedes. For example, he might lose some Facebook friends – yes, she actually wrote that. But when his name is cleared everything will return to normal. Certainly no one would suggest that a real rape victim’s trauma is not significant, but Maxwell is willfully ignoring the damage done to a man falsely smeared as a sexual predator.</p>
<p>Her op-ed was so stunningly and self-evidently wrong that it <a href="http://soopermexican.com/2014/12/06/why-wapo-changed-headline-to-zerlina-maxwells-insane-rape-allegation-opinion-article/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">incurred a wave of Twitter wrath</span></a> and negative comments, resulting in either Maxwell or the <i>WaPo</i> editors backing off and replacing “automatically” in the headline with “generally,” which is little improvement.</p>
<p>“Democratic strategist” Maxwell is of the school of thought, and I use that word loosely, that we live in a rape culture and if only we taught men not to rape, then women would be relieved of the burden of having to protect themselves from it (“strategist,” by the way, is the title given to someone has no official authority or function except to serve as a media mouthpiece for talking points).</p>
<p>Rape culture is the theory that sexual assault becomes normalized when a culture condones the objectification and trivialization of women. Radical feminists have managed to push the term to the forefront of our conversations about the sexes today, promoting the ugly notion that all men are literal or latent rapists who need to be deprogrammed out of their acculturated misogyny.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/miss-usas-self-defense-empowerment/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">I’ve written before for FrontPage</span></a>, America doesn’t have a rape culture any more than we have a murder culture. We have a culture that considers both to be heinous violent crimes. We have a culture so unforgiving of rape that even <i>false</i> accusations of it ruin men’s lives. We don’t “teach” men to rape, and the vast majority of American males would never even consider such a depraved act.</p>
<p>According to 2013 Bureau of Justice <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&amp;iid=4594"><span style="color: #0433ff;">statistics</span></a>, the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations in this country declined 58% from 1995 to 2010. To cite this is absolutely not to trivialize the terrible violation that is rape; it is not to suggest that anything more than zero sexual assaults is acceptable; and it is not to encourage complacency. It is only to emphasize that not only are we not enmeshed in a rape culture, but things seem to be improving significantly.</p>
<p>However, there are violent deviants who will and do rape, and the world will never rid itself of that evil minority. That’s just reality, but it’s not the utopian reality that progressives insist upon. To believe that we can simply teach that rape is unconscionable – which we already do – and that the crime will then disappear is a childish and useless utopian fantasy.</p>
<p>When a pregnant teenager in the Sudan <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/18/sudan-pregnant-alleged-rape-victim-charged-adultery"><span style="color: #0433ff;">faces death</span></a> by stoning for being gang-raped, <i>that</i> is a rape culture. But a privileged Western woman like Zerlina Maxwell is insanely focused on smearing innocent men in order to peddle the myth that American culture is little better.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong> on the <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<strong> Fighting the Culture War</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v5gR4E5UPB8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></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 Real Racist Conspiracy In Ferguson</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-real-racist-conspiracy-in-ferguson/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-real-racist-conspiracy-in-ferguson</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-real-racist-conspiracy-in-ferguson/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2014 05:56:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Darren Wilson]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246561</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The disturbing level of community deceit that led to the false story of Michael Brown's death. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ferguson-protesters.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246562" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ferguson-protesters-450x337.jpg" alt="ferguson-protesters" width="375" height="281" /></a>After a grand jury in St. Louis, Missouri, voted against the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of 18-year-old black man Michael Brown, President Obama gave a short address to the nation. In it, he said he understood why some would feel disappointed at the verdict — an odd statement, given that all available evidence showed that Brown had robbed a convenience store, attacked Wilson in his vehicle, attempted to grab his gun and charged Wilson before Wilson shot him.</p>
<p>Then Obama dropped a doozy: &#8220;We need to recognize that this is not just an issue in Ferguson, this is an issue for America &#8230; there are problems and communities of color aren&#8217;t just making these problems up.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama did not specify what problems he wanted to discuss. Nor did he explain why Ferguson&#8217;s issues were America&#8217;s. But the largest lie was the notion that &#8220;communities of color&#8221; don&#8217;t make problems up.</p>
<p>Because in Ferguson, that&#8217;s precisely what a community of color did.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of the Brown shooting, grand jury documents show, witness intimidation and lying became the order of the day. Witness after witness told police that local thugs were intimidating those who had seen the events. One witness told police, according to the St. Louis Police Investigative Report, that threats &#8220;had been made to the residents of Canfield Green Apartment Complex.&#8221; This witness said that &#8220;notes had been posted on various apartment buildings threatening people not to talk to the police, and gunshots were still being fired every night.&#8221;</p>
<p>The witness wasn&#8217;t alone. Other witnesses stated that supposed witnesses were lying to the media about events, that others who had seen the events were &#8220;embellishing their stories&#8221; in order to convict Wilson.</p>
<p>One witness stated, &#8220;You have to understand the mentality of some of these young guys they have nothing to do. When they can latch on the something they embellish it because they want something to do.&#8221;</p>
<p>Some 16 witnesses testified that Brown&#8217;s hands were up when he was shot, which was factually false according to the autopsy. Another 12 witnesses said that Wilson shot Brown from behind — again, false according to the autopsy. One witness testified that Wilson used both a Taser and a gun — false. Another said that Brown had kneeled before Wilson shot him. When confronted with the fact that the physical evidence made such an account impossible, the witness acknowledged he hadn&#8217;t seen the event, and then asked if he could leave the grand jury because he was &#8220;uncomfortable.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside her apartment complex in New York. The entire nation gasped in horror when it learned that supposed witnesses had not called the police.</p>
<p>Fifty years later, the nation completely ignores the fact that an entire community apparently lied, facilitated lying or intimidated witnesses in order to put an innocent man behind bars, because he happened to be white. At least Kitty Genovese&#8217;s neighbors didn&#8217;t actually murder her. Members of the Ferguson community tried to murder Darren Wilson by putting him on death row. Meanwhile, President Obama and those in the media who played up the original narrative cheered them on.</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>Downing Street Gruber</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/downing-street-gruber/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=downing-street-gruber</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:20:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245646</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the ObamaCare architect's statements are worse than the Downing Street memo.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/jonathan-gruber-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-245647" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/jonathan-gruber-1.jpg" alt="jonathan-gruber-1" width="240" height="240" /></a>Isn&#8217;t Jonathan Gruber worse than the Downing Street memo?</p>
<p>Gruber, who was paid half a million dollars to design Obamacare, is on tape bragging about how the Democrats relied on &#8220;the stupidity of the American voter&#8221; to pass that law. Which, ironically, was sort of a stupid thing to say on camera.</p>
<p>By now there are so many tapes of Gruber explaining how Obamacare fooled stupid Americans that they&#8217;re being released as a boxed set in time for Christmas.</p>
<p>Gruber, who will hereafter be known as &#8220;the architect of Obamacare,&#8221; said:</p>
<p>&#8220;If you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in &#8212; if you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. &#8230; Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Downing Street memo consisted of minutes from a July 2002 meeting of British labor, defense and intelligence officials during the run-up to the Iraq War, in which the MI6 head, Richard Dearlove, reportedly said that &#8220;Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.&#8221;</p>
<p>These notes from a British cabinet meeting were called the smoking gun of Bush&#8217;s lying his way into war.</p>
<p>The Downing Street memo was written about in dozens of New York Times articles &#8212; including six hysterical Frank Rich op-eds. It has been mentioned more than a hundred times in The Washington Post. It was covered on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;Nightline,&#8221; by George Stephanopoulos on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week,&#8221; on NBC&#8217;s &#8220;Meet the Press&#8221; &#8212; even on the &#8220;Today&#8221; show. It was discussed nightly on MSNBC, where Keith Olbermann covered it like it was Kim Kardashian and he was the E! Network.</p>
<p>By contrast, this week, NBC&#8217;s Chuck Todd dismissed the Gruber tapes as &#8220;a political story&#8221; and The New York Times said of Gruber: &#8220;In truth, his role was limited.&#8221; (NYT, March 28, 2012: &#8220;Mr. Gruber helped the administration put together the basic principles of the proposal, (then) the White House lent him to Capitol Hill to help congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.&#8221;)</p>
<p>But when the Downing Street memo came out, conservatives weren&#8217;t allowed to say, Yeah, well, the British memo writer didn&#8217;t have anything to do with the president&#8217;s decision to go to war &#8212; even though that guy really didn&#8217;t have anything to do with it.</p>
<p>Those weren&#8217;t Tony Blair&#8217;s notes. They were a secretary&#8217;s interpretation of the MI6 chief&#8217;s interpretation of the Bush administration&#8217;s argument to the United Nations. It&#8217;s like a movie review, written by someone who knew someone who had seen the movie.</p>
<p>The memo writer also wasn&#8217;t being paid $400,000 by the Bush administration to make Iraq War policy. Jonathan Gruber was paid that much &#8212; plus another several million from the states &#8212; to design Obamacare.</p>
<p>You don&#8217;t pay a half-million dollars to someone who is only peripherally involved in making policy. (Unless we&#8217;re talking about Obama himself.)</p>
<p>There was no tape of Bush and Blair running around saying: Trust this guy &#8212; the memo writer is our guide! But that&#8217;s what Obama, Nancy Pelosi, then-Sen. John Kerry and other Democrats said about Gruber.</p>
<p>&#8211; Kerry on Oct. 1, 2009: &#8220;(Gruber) has been our guide on a lot of this &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; Pelosi on Nov. 5, 2009: &#8220;Our bill brings down rates &#8212; I don&#8217;t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber&#8217;s MIT analysis &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; Obama&#8217;s Organizing for Action website, until the tapes surfaced: &#8220;Jon Gruber, who helped write Obamacare &#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Gruber had more than a dozen meetings at the White House during the drafting of Obamacare. The Downing Street memo writer had no meetings at the Bush White House. Even the guy he was quoting had only one.</p>
<p>The outrage over the Downing Street memo concerned the claim &#8212; in the memo writer&#8217;s words &#8212; that the intelligence was being &#8220;fixed&#8221; around a policy. Although a number of commentators claimed that the British meaning of &#8220;fixed&#8221; is more like &#8220;arranged,&#8221; let&#8217;s assume &#8220;fixed&#8221; implies trickery.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s still one word! Gruber has given six different speeches rambling at length about how Obamacare was intended to deceive &#8220;stupid&#8221; voters.</p>
<p>You can&#8217;t say the Downing Street memo was a totally legitimate news story, but that the Gruber tapes are meaningless.</p>
<p>Ninety-nine percent of Americans were utterly unaffected by the invasion of Iraq &#8212; other than to be made safer, until Obama threw our victory away. Every American is affected by Obamacare.</p>
<p>The bald-faced lies told to pass Obamacare expose not only that law, but all Democratic economic claims. When Obama boasts that it will be a huge boon to the economy to give amnesty to millions of low-wage workers, who won&#8217;t pay income taxes but will need a lot of government services, remember: Obamacare was supposed to save money, too.</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>Ben Shapiro: The Myth or The True Story of Michael Brown, Gentle Giant</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/ben-shapiro-the-myth-or-the-true-story-of-michael-brown-gentle-giant/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ben-shapiro-the-myth-or-the-true-story-of-michael-brown-gentle-giant</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2014 04:57:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro exposes the truth behind the media-created myth of Gentle Giant Michael Brown, the unarmed teen gunned down in cold blood by a white racist cop for the crime of walking while black. Except that every part of that story is a lie. See the video and transcript below:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KMSO0CXnYtE" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>TRANSCRIPT: </strong></p>
<p>Everything you know about Michael Brown is a lie. The media, the politicians, the race-baiters &#8211; they all told you the story of the innocent young, unarmed black teen, the Gentle Giant, murdered in cold blood by a vicious white cop representing the evil establishment.</p>
<p>Al Sharpton, who is always first on the scene when a black person is killed by a white – or, in the case of St. Trayvon of the Blessed Hoodie, a white Hispanic – described Brown as a “gentle giant,” too. Over at Daily Kos, a writer described St. Michael as a “big guy who his family called their ‘Gentle Giant’…built to be a high school football player – direct from central casting – but Mike was too timid for the sport. According to friends and family, he had never been in a fight in his life.” CNN, The Daily Mail – all of them called him a “gentle giant.”</p>
<p>And the man who deprived the world of this “gentle giant” was, of course, Officer Darren Wilson.</p>
<p>Originally, we were told that Wilson shot Brown from behind, after pulling over the “gentle giant” for walking in the middle of the street – a situation President Obama would later term “walking while black.” Supposedly, Wilson pulled the 6’5”, 289-lb. Brown through his driver’s side window, but Brown escaped and ran away from this mad emissary of police brutality. Wilson then allegedly shot the fleeing Brown from behind, at which point Brown turned around, raised his hands in the universal sign of surrender, and perished in a hail of bullets.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the reality. All of this was a lie.</p>
<p>The first crack in the myth of St. Michael, the Gentle Giant, came in the form of a security tape, taken just minutes before the fatal confrontation with Officer Wilson.</p>
<p>According to police reports, the Gentle Giant, who had never been in a fight and was too timid to play football, grabbed a small attendant and slammed him into a display case. He also stole a box of Swisher Sweets, which are cheap cigars.</p>
<p>The next crack in the St. Michael story,  The New York Times reported that Michael Brown “was no angel.” The report explained that he “dabbled in drugs and alcohol” – which, presumably, is why he stole a cheap box of Swisher Sweets from that convenience store, since Swisher Sweets are routinely used to smoke pot. Indeed, Brown’s system was chock full of THC during the incident with Officer Wilson, the autopsy showed.</p>
<p>The New York Times report also explained that Brown “had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar.”</p>
<p>Here’s a sampling of St. Michael’s music, culled by Gateway Pundit:</p>
<blockquote><p>My favorite part is when that body hits the ground.</p>
<p>I soak em up like I’m wringing out a sponge</p>
<p>Talking down make me shoot off your whole tongue</p></blockquote>
<p>The words of the blessed saint.</p>
<p>The media and politicians cried bloody murder when this information began to tarnish the candle-lit altar they&#8217;d built for St. Michael – just because St. Michael had strong-arm robbed a convenience store, done drugs, and cut some vile rap videos didn’t mean he deserved to be shot!</p>
<p>Which, of course, was true. But the rest of the mythical tale of the martyrdom of St. Michael began falling apart, as well.</p>
<p>Officer Wilson’s side of the story began to come out, in dribs and drabs: after pulling Brown over, Wilson said, Wilson tried to get out of his car – Brown shut the door on him, then pushed himself through the driver’s side window. He went for Wilson’s weapon, whereupon Wilson fired the gun in the vehicle. Brown ran. Wilson chased him. Brown then turned around and ran toward Wilson, whereupon Wilson shot him several times.</p>
<p>According to the Washington Post, “more than a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses have provided testimony…that supports Wilson’s account of the events….blood spatter analysis, shell casings and ballistics tests – also support Wilson’s account of the shooting, the Post sources said.”</p>
<p>Now, a new autopsy report revealed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – the same newspaper that originally termed Brown a “Gentle Giant” – showed that Brown’s body had a “graze wound” on his thumb; the wound contained matter “consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm.” That can only happen at close range – so close, in fact, that there was no stippling – a patterning of gunpowder that will not appear within an inch of the gun barrel. In other words, as San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Judy Melinek said, “this guy is reaching for the gun.”</p>
<p>The autopsy backs up the altercation at the car as well – Brown’s skin was found on the exterior of the vehicle.  CNN reports that blood from Michael Brown was found on Wilson’s uniform, police car, and gun.</p>
<p>The autopsy even gives shows that Brown was shot with his hands up. According to the autopsy report, the gunshot wound to St. Michael’s “upper dorsal right arm” demonstrated that the direction of the shot was “slightly upward, backward and leftward.” That means, according to Melinek, the shot “traveled from the back of the arm to the inner arm, which means Brown’s palms could not have been facing Wilson.”</p>
<p>The rage continues, of course, because facts don&#8217;t matter when myths have already taken root. Benjamin Crump, the Brown family lawyer &#8211; he was also the Martin family attorney &#8211; said that “family and supporters will not be persuaded by the autopsy report or eyewitness statements,” according to the Washington Post. And, of course, local politicians have pledged that the evidence won’t change anything.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the disciples of Michael Brown pay tribute to his Gentle Giantness by fighting over how to capitalize on his supposed martyrdom. Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, reportedly got into a fight with Brown’s grandmother and cousin when she found them selling Michael Brown merchandise. The altercation ended, apparently, with another unnamed person hitting Brown’s cousin in the face with a pipe or pole, resulting in his hospitalization. The suspect then stole a box from the scene containing some $1,400.</p>
<p>But never mind – the legacy of Michael Brown, Gentle Giant, will go on. Another martyr has joined the Racial Testament. Another fake black mark on white racist police forces everywhere. And the left’s aggressive construction of the myth of St. Michael the Gentle Giant ensures that more young black men will see police as the enemy, that confrontations will escalate, and that the left will have many more future opportunities to add to their perverse canon.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>From Arafat and Abbas to Hamas: Lying and Crying for Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michael-widlanski/from-arafat-and-abbas-to-hamas-lying-and-crying-for-terror/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=from-arafat-and-abbas-to-hamas-lying-and-crying-for-terror</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2014 04:09:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Widlanski]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[blame]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cry]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Palestinian blame-game. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ar.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-237397" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ar.jpg" alt="ar" width="220" height="300" /></a>Dear President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon:</p>
<p>Save yourselves lots of time, anguish and jet fuel, by learning a short saying in Arabic that sums up the current crisis in Gaza.</p>
<p><em>&#8220;Darabni wa-baka, sabaqni wa-ishtaka.&#8221; </em></p>
<p>It is a rhyme in Arabic that means:</p>
<p><em>&#8220;He hit me and quickly cried: &#8216;He attacked me,&#8217; he lied.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>It aptly describes the way Palestinian thugs and leaders—from the PLO&#8217;s Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas to the maniacs of Hamas—attack or try to cheat someone and then rush to complain about being beaten up or victimized.</p>
<p>It is a form of misconduct perfected by Yasser Arafat. It is why other Arabs distrust the Palestinians and see them as hypocritical and ungrateful cry-babies.</p>
<p><strong>ARAFAT&#8217;S MOTTO: Hit hard, complain harder:</strong></p>
<p>This pattern began in 1967 when PLO chief Arafat slipped into Jordan, disguised in women&#8217;s clothing, asking refuge from King Hussein. Within two years, Arafat and his terrorist colleagues had taken over the country, directing traffic in Amman and blowing up hijacked planes in Jordan&#8217;s airports.</p>
<p>At the last minute, King Hussein rallied his army and saved his country. Arafat and his thugs cried and wailed how the King massacred Palestinians in the &#8220;Black September&#8221; of 1970. Then, they ran to Lebanon where they took over another country, brutalizing all who stood in their way:  Christians, Druze, Shiite and Sunni moderates.</p>
<p>Until Arafat and the PLO came to Lebanon, it was called &#8220;The Switzerland of the Middle East&#8221;—an imperfect democracy that usually worked.</p>
<p>Arafat fixed that.</p>
<p>The PLO destroyed Lebanon&#8217;s delicate balance and frail democracy, sparking a Muslim-Christian civil war.</p>
<p>For 12 years, Arafat and his colleagues ceaselessly attacked Israel from the refuge of Lebanon, using rockets, mortars and cross-border terror raids, killing hundreds, storing their arms in UN schools or neighborhood houses.</p>
<p>Does that sound familiar?</p>
<p>In June 1982, after the PLO broke ceasefires brokered by US officials (including a Palestinian attack on an Israeli ambassador), Israel evicted Arafat from Lebanon.</p>
<p>Arafat cried and lied about &#8220;Israel&#8217;s inhumanity.&#8221; Western media echoed his words. The Lebanese Red Cross (Crescent) run by Yasser Arafat&#8217;s brother, Fathi, said Israel had massacred thousands, and had made 600,000 homeless in southern Lebanon (a number larger than the entire population of that region).</p>
<p>Forced out of Jordan and then Lebanon, the PLO went to Tunisia, sometimes pretending that it had changed its wicked ways. Naïve &#8220;peace activists&#8221; in the US and Israel coached Arafat to say the word &#8220;peace&#8221; in English and French. It worked.</p>
<p>Arafat managed to fool Israel, and, in 1993, it signed &#8220;The Oslo Accords,&#8221; which Arafat immediately violated, smuggling arms into Gaza and the West Bank.</p>
<p>Within months, Arafat&#8217;s Fatah group and Hamas were both competing who could hurt Israel more with shootings and suicide attacks.</p>
<p>In 1996 Arafat launched his own &#8220;Tunnel War&#8221; against Israel, claiming an Israeli archeological dig in Jerusalem was a conspiracy to collapse the Al-Aqsa Mosque. About 20 Israelis and 50 Palestinians died in Arafat&#8217;s Tunnel War.</p>
<p>In 2000, Ehud Barak offered Arafat almost all the West Bank and all of Gaza. Arafat refused, launching another war he called The Al-Aqsa Intifada. He claimed the Arabs were attacked by Ariel Sharon who allegedly &#8220;desecrated&#8221; the Al-Aqsa Mosque with his shoes. Again Arafat lied, and again hundreds died.</p>
<p>In 2005, Israel removed its army and all 10,000 of its own citizens from Gaza—hoping the move would be seen as another peace gesture. One hundred per cent of Gaza was put in the hands of Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat&#8217;s successor as PLO chief. But Gazans saw Abbas as weak, and the power of the rival Hamas movement grew.</p>
<p>Abbas tried to hold Gaza by promising Hamas (Fatah Day Speech—January 1, 2005)   that they could all join their rifles together in attacking <em>al-Ikhitilal al-Isra&#8217;ili&#8211;</em>&#8220;The Israeli Occupation&#8221;—a code-word for Israel itself.</p>
<p>US Secretary of State Condi Rice ignored Israeli pleas that Hamas—which swore Israel&#8217;s destruction—not be allowed to run in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Rice now admits her mistake, but it is too late.</p>
<p>Hamas fastened an iron grip on Gaza. Its thugs literally threw Abbas supporters out of the windows of government buildings in Gaza. Hamas began building and smuggling rockets, as well as digging tunnels into Israel for a future war. Hamas forced children, whose bodies are small and flexible, to dig at the point of gun.</p>
<p>More than 160 children died digging for Hamas, according to a Palestinian journal. CNN and The New York Times did not report it. UN Human Rights Commission did NOT object. Mahmoud Abbas did NOT file complaints to the International Court of Justice, where he loves to lodge complaints against &#8220;Israeli inhumanity.&#8221;</p>
<p>Abbas and Turkish Islamist dictator Recep Erdogan complained that Israel—which supplied cheap or free electricity and water to Gaza—was trying to &#8220;starve&#8221; Gaza, by trying to supervise a quarantine of illicit items for the Hamas war machine.</p>
<p>But you do not need to remember all of this history.</p>
<p>Just remember the Arabic saying: <em>&#8220;Darabni wa-baka, sabaqni wa-ishtaka&#8221; </em>and it means: <em>&#8220;He hit me and cried: &#8216;He attacked me,&#8217; he lied.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Dr. Anna Geifman</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> this week discussing &#8220;Life in Israel Under Siege,&#8221; &#8220;<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/anna-geifman/who-is-killing-palestinian-children/">Who is Killing Palestinian Children</a><span style="text-decoration: underline;">?&#8221;,</span> and much <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">more: </span></span><strong><br />
</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/-Rpug8-FL58" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Taqiyya about Taqiyya</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/taqiyya-about-taqiyya/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taqiyya-about-taqiyya</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 04:49:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[court trial]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Ezra Levant’s recent court trial -- and what it exposes about the Islamic doctrine permitting Muslims to lie to non-Muslims. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/raq.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-223195" alt="raq" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/raq.jpg" width="268" height="188" /></a>I was recently involved in an interesting exercise—examining taqiyya <i>about</i> taqiyya—and believe readers might profit from the same exercise, as it exposes all the subtle apologetics made in defense of the Islamic doctrine, which permits Muslims to lie to non-Muslims, or “infidels.”</p>
<p>Context: Khurrum Awan, a lawyer, is suing Ezra Levant, a Canadian media personality and author, for defamation and $100,000.  Back in 2009 and on his <a href="http://ezralevant.com/">own website</a>, Levant had accused Awan of taqiyya in the context of Awan’s and the Canadian Islamic Congress’ earlier attempts to sue Mark Steyn.</p>
<p>For more on Levant’s court case, go to <a href="http://www.StandWithEzra.ca">www.StandWithEzra.ca</a>.</p>
<p>On behalf of Awan, Mohammad Fadel—professor of Islamic Law at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law—provided an expert report to the court on the nature of taqiyya, the significance of which he portrayed as “a staple of right-wing Islamophobia in North America.”</p>
<p>In response, Levant asked me (back in 2013) to write an expert report on taqiyya, including by responding to Fadel’s findings.</p>
<p>I did.  And it had the desired effect.  As Levant put it in an email to me:</p>
<blockquote><p>It was an outstanding report, very authoritative and persuasive. Of course, we don’t know what the plaintiff’s [Awan’s] private thoughts about it were, but we do know that after receiving the report, he decided to cancel calling his own expert witness [Dr. Fadel]—who happens to be a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer. After reading your rebuttal, he decided he would rather not engage in that debate.</p></blockquote>
<p>My expert report follows.  In it, I quote relevant portions of Fadel’s expert report (<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/other-matters/mohammad-fadels-expert-report-on-taqiyya/">which can be read in its entirety here</a>).  Most intriguing about the professor’s report is that it’s a perfect example of taqiyya about taqiyya.  By presenting partial truths throughout the report, Fadel appears to have even employed taqiyya’s more liberal sister, tawriya.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center">Accordingly, readers interested in learning more about the role of deception in Islam—and how to respond to those trying to dismiss it as an “Islamophobic fantasy”—are encouraged to read on.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center"><b>Raymond Ibrahim’s Expert Report on <i>Taqiyya</i></b></p>
<p><b>Instructions</b>: I have been asked to assess a report concerning the doctrine of <i>taqiyya</i> in Islam, written by one Mohammad Fadel; and, if I disagreed with any parts of it, to explain why—objectively, neutrally, and in a non-partisan manner.  My findings follow.</p>
<p align="center"> <b>Introduction</b></p>
<p>The Islamic doctrine of <i>taqiyya</i> permits Muslims to actively deceive non-Muslims—above and beyond the context of “self-preservation,” as is commonly believed.</p>
<p>One of the few books exclusively devoted to the subject, <i>At-Taqiyya fi&#8217;l-Islam</i> (“Taqiyya in Islam”) make this unequivocally clear. Written (in Arabic) by Dr. Sami Mukaram, a former Islamic studies professor at the American University of Beirut and author of some twenty-five books on Islam, the book demonstrates the ubiquity and broad applicability of <i>taqiyya </i>in its opening pages:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Taqiyya</i> is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it … We can go so far as to say that the practice of <i>taqiyya</i> is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream … <i>Taqiyya</i> is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.<a title="" href="#_edn1">[1]</a></p></blockquote>
<p>The following report is written as a response to Mohammed Fadel’s report (henceforth referred to as MFR) which deals with the topic of <i>taqiyya</i> and its place and usage in Islamic jurisprudence.   Because MFR is written in a premises-conclusion format, the following report will follow MFR’s numbering schemata, pointing out which premises are agreeable and which are not—offering correctives to these latter resulting in an antithetical conclusion.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Numbers/Premises of MFR in Order:</b></p>
<p><b>1-3</b>: Preliminary statements.</p>
<p><b>4</b>: Agreed.</p>
<p><b>5</b>:  Agreed, with the following caveat:  To many Muslims, jihad, that is, armed struggle against the non-Muslim, is the informal sixth pillar.   Islam’s prophet Muhammad said that “standing in the ranks of battle [jihad] is better than standing (in prayer) for sixty years,”<a title="" href="#_edn2">[2]</a> even though prayer is one of the Five Pillars, and he ranked jihad as the “second best deed” after belief in Allah as the only god and he himself, Muhammad, as his prophet, the <i>shehada</i>, or very First Pillar of Islam.<a title="" href="#_edn3">[3]</a></p>
<p>All this indicates jihad’s importance in Islam—and thus importance to this case, since, as shall be seen, <i>taqiyya</i> is especially permissible in the context of jihad or struggle to empower Islam and/or Muslims over non-Muslims.</p>
<p><b>6</b>: Agreed.  <i>Qiyas</i>, or analogical reasoning, the practice of finding antecedents in the teachings of the two revelatory sources (Qur’an and Hadith) and rationalizing their applicability to modern phenomena, also belongs to <i>usul al-fiqh</i>, or Islam’s roots of jurisprudence.  It gives more elasticity to Islam’s rules (a major theme throughout this report).  <i>Qiyas</i>, for example, is the way al-Qaeda and other jihadi organizations justify suicide attacks: although killing oneself is clearly forbidden in Islam, in the context of jihad—in the context of trying to empower Islam—suicide attacks are rationalized as legitimate forms of stealth warfare, since those giving their lives are not doing so out of despair but rather for Islam (as in Qur’an 9:111).<a title="" href="#_edn4">[4]</a></p>
<p><b>7-19</b>: Generally agreed (or indifferent to: some information in these numbers is not necessarily germane to the issue at hand and did not warrant confirmation).</p>
<p><b>20</b>:  <i>“Normative Islamic doctrine places strong emphasis on the obligation to speak the truth.”</i></p>
<p>This is the first of many statements/premises that are only partially true.</p>
<p>For starters, Islamic jurisprudence separates humanity into classes.  The rules concerning the relationship between a Muslim and a fellow Muslim differ from the rules concerning the relationship between a Muslim and a non-Muslim.</p>
<p>First there is the <i>umma</i>—the “Islamic nation,” that is, all Muslims of the earth, irrespective of national, racial, or linguistic barriers.  Many of the Qur’an’s and Hadith’s teachings that appear laudable and fair are in fact teachings that apply only to fellow Muslims.</p>
<p>For example, although the Qur’an’s calls for Muslims to give charity (<i>zakat</i>) appear to suggest that Muslims may give charity to all humans—in fact, normative Islamic teaching is clear that Muslim charity (<i>zakat</i>) can only be given to fellow Muslims, never to non-Muslims.<a title="" href="#_edn5">[5]</a></p>
<p>As for legal relations between Muslims and non-Muslims—or <i>kuffar</i>, the “infidels” (<i>kafir</i>, singular)—within the Islamic world, these fall into two main categories: first, the <i>harbi</i>, that is, the non-Muslim who does not reside in the Islamic world; if at any time a Muslim comes across him in the Muslim world, according to classic Islamic doctrine, he is free to attack, enslave, and/or kill him (the exception is if he is <i>musta’min</i>—given a formal permit by an Islamic authority to be on Muslim territory, such as the case of the many foreigners working in the Arabian Peninsula).<a title="" href="#_edn6">[6]</a></p>
<p>Second is the <i>dhimmi</i>, the non-Muslim who lives under Muslim domination (for example, all the indigenous Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Berbers, etc. whose lands were conquered by Muslims beginning in the 7<sup>th</sup> century).   By today’s standards, the rules governing the <i>dhimmi</i>, most of which are based on the so-called “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/western-ignorance-of-the-conditions-of-omar/">Conditions of Omar</a>” (sometimes the “Pact of Omar”) are openly discriminatory and include things such as commanding non-Muslims to give up their seats whenever a Muslim wants it.<a title="" href="#_edn7">[7]</a></p>
<p>It is, then, in this divisive context that one must approach the Qur’an, keeping in mind that most of the verses discussing human relations are discussing intra-relations between Muslims, not Muslims and non-Muslims.  For examples of the latter, see Qur’an 9:5, 9:29, 5:17, and 5:73 for typical verses that discuss relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, verses which have further abrogated the earlier, more tolerant ones. <a title="" href="#_edn8">[8]</a></p>
<p>As for the Qur’an verses listed in MFR 20—which are meant to support the statement that “Normative Islamic doctrine places strong emphasis on the obligation to speak the truth,” a close reading, supported by mainstream Islamic exegeses, demonstrates that the true function of those verses is to portray true believers (Muslims) and Islam’s prophets as the epitome of honesty and sincerity.  Significantly, none of the verses mentioned in MFR 20 actually <i>exhort</i> Muslims to be honest and truthful, including to fellow Muslims, in the same vein as, for example, unequivocal statements such as <b><sup>“</sup></b>Do not lie to one another” (Colossians 3:9) and “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exodus 20:16).</p>
<p>The fact is, other Islamic teachings and caveats have permitted Muslims to deceive even fellow Muslims.  For example, the doctrine of <i>tawriya</i> allows Muslims to lie in virtually <i>all</i> circumstances provided that the lie is articulated in a way that it is technically true.</p>
<p>The authoritative <i>Hans Wehr Arabic-English Dictionary</i> defines <i>tawriya</i> as, “hiding, concealment; dissemblance, dissimulation, hypocrisy; equivocation, ambiguity, double-entendre, allusion.” Conjugates of the trilateral root of the word, <i>w-r-y</i>, appear in the Quran in the context of hiding or concealing something (e.g., 5:31, 7:26).</p>
<p>As a doctrine, “double-entendre” best describes <i>tawriya’s</i> function. According to past and present Muslim scholars (several documented below), <i>tawriya</i> is when a speaker/writer asserts something that means one thing to the listener/reader, though the speaker/writer means something else, and his words technically support this alternate meaning.</p>
<p>For example, if someone declares “I don’t have a penny in my pocket,” most listeners will assume the speaker has no money on him—though he might have dollar bills, just literally no pennies.</p>
<p>This is legitimate according to Islamic law, or <i>shari‘a</i>—the body of legal rulings that defines how a Muslim should behave in all circumstances—and does not constitute “lying.”</p>
<p>In a fatwa, or Islamic decree, popular Sheikh Muhammad Salih al-Munajid asserts that, “<i>Tawriya</i> is permissible if it is necessary or serves a <i>shari‘a</i> interest.”  As mentioned, empowering Islam is one of the highest <i>shari‘a</i> interests <a title="" href="#_edn9">[9]</a> (hence why jihad, so lauded by Islam’s prophet as aforementioned, is sometimes seen as the “sixth pillar”).</p>
<p>After surveying the consensus of the Islamic community (<i>ijma</i>, a root source of Islamic jurisprudence, as MFR 6 correctly indicates) Sheikh al-Munajid concludes by saying: “<i>Tawriya</i> is permissible under two conditions: 1) that the words used fit the hidden meaning; 2) that it does not lead to an injustice” [“injustice” as defined by <i>shari‘a</i>; empowering Islam through <i>tawriya</i> or empowering a Muslim against an infidel is certainly not an injustice from an Islamic point of view].</p>
<p>Otherwise, it is permissible for a Muslim even to swear when lying through <i>tawriya</i>. Munajid, for example, cites a man who swears to Allah that he can only sleep under a roof (<i>saqf</i>); when the man is caught sleeping atop a roof, he exonerates himself by saying “by roof, I meant the open sky.” This is legitimate. “After all,” Munajid adds, “Qur’an 21:32 refers to the sky as a roof [<i>saqf</i>].”</p>
<p>By way of modern examples, and because some Muslims hold it to be a “great sin”<a title="" href="#_edn10">[10]</a> to acknowledge Christmas (since doing so validates Christianity, a different message than Islam), one Muslim cleric recently appeared on video counseling Muslims to tell Christians, “I wish you the best,” whereby the latter might “understand it to mean you’re wishing them best in terms of their [Christmas] celebration.” But—here the sheikh giggles as he explains—“by saying <i>I wish you the best</i>, you mean in your heart <i>I wish you become a Muslim</i>.”<a title="" href="#_edn11">[11]</a></p>
<p>As with most Muslim practices, <i>tawriya</i> is traced to Islam’s prophet Muhammad. After insisting Muslims “need” <i>tawriya</i> because it “saves them from lying,” and thus sinning, in a video, Sheikh Uthman al-Khamis adds that Muhammad often used it.<a title="" href="#_edn12">[12]</a> Indeed, Islam’s prophet is on record saying “Allah has commanded me to equivocate among the people inasmuch as he has commanded me to establish [religious] obligations”; and “I have been sent with obfuscation”; and “whoever lives his life in dissimulation dies a martyr.”<a title="" href="#_edn13">[13]</a></p>
<p>More specifically, in a hadith, Muhammad said: “If any of you ever pass gas or soil yourselves during prayers [thus breaking ablution purity, or <i>wudu‘</i> <a title="" href="#_edn14">[14]</a>], hold your nose and leave”<a title="" href="#_edn15">[15]</a>: Holding one’s nose and leaving implies smelling something offensive—which is true—though it implies someone other than the offender is responsible.</p>
<p>Following their prophet’s example, many leading Muslim figures have used <i>tawriya</i>, such as Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal, founder of one of Islam’s four schools of law, practiced in Saudi Arabia (the teachings of which have spread far and wide among the world’s Muslims, thanks to Saudi funding). Once when Hanbal was conducting class, someone came knocking, asking for one of his students. Hanbal answered, “He’s not here, what would he be doing here?”<a title="" href="#_edn16">[16]</a>—all the time pointing at his hand, as if to say “he’s not in my hand.” The caller, who could not see Hanbal’s hands, assumed the student was simply not there and left.</p>
<p>Sheikh Muhammad Hassan,<a title="" href="#_edn17">[17]</a> another very popular Egyptian cleric (who once said Islam forbids Muslims from smiling to infidels, except when to Islam’s advantage <a title="" href="#_edn18">[18]</a>) and Dr. Abdullah Shakir,<a title="" href="#_edn19">[19]</a> are also on record justifying <i>tawriya</i>. In recorded videos they both give the example of someone knocking on your door, you do not wish to see them, so a relative answers the door saying, “He’s not here,” and by “here” they mean the immediate room, which is true, since you will be hiding in another room.</p>
<p>On the popular Islam Web,<a title="" href="#_edn20">[20]</a> where Muslims submit questions and Islamic authorities respond with a fatwa, a girl poses her moral dilemma: her father has explicitly told her that, whenever the phone rings, she is to answer saying “he’s not here.” The fatwa solves her problem: she is free to lie, but when she says “he’s not here,” she must mean in her mind that he is not in the same room, or not directly in front of her.</p>
<p>Despite their deceptive natures, and in accordance to mainstream Islamic teaching, none of the aforementioned examples of <i>tawriya</i>—beginning with Islam’s prophet and followed  by Islam’s doctrinaires, past and present—are considered lies.</p>
<p>This is significant.</p>
<p>Furthermore, that <i>tawriya</i>, which allows Muslims to deceive fellow Muslims, is legitimate according to <i>shari‘a</i>, should be indicative of how much leeway there is for Muslims when speaking to non-Muslims—considering that Islam also teaches Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims and to have enmity for non-Muslims, as in the doctrine of <i>wala’ wa bara’</i>.<a title="" href="#_edn21">[21]</a></p>
<p>­­<b>21</b>: Again, the statement that <i>“The Prophet Muhammad also emphasized the importance of honesty as a central principle of Islam,”</i> followed by the hadith <i>“Honesty leads to righteousness…”</i> is only valid in the context of Muslim to Muslim relations.</p>
<p>Again, because <i>tawriya</i> is techincally not lying, as Islamic consensus holds—provided the words fit the meaning used to mislead others—it is considered permissible, or <i>mubah</i>, though a minority categorize it as “disliked,” meaning that its performance is not a sin, though not performing it is rewarded (as MFR 17 correctly indicates).</p>
<p>As for the Islamic prophet himself—whose example is to be upheld as closely as possible by Sunni Muslims (<i>sunna</i> meaning “example”)—above and beyond the aforementioned, according to a canonical hadith, it is well known that he permitted lying in three scenarios: to reconcile quarreling parties, to one’s wife, and in war, or jihad.<a title="" href="#_edn22">[22]</a></p>
<p>It is the third of these categories, jihad, that is relevant here.</p>
<p>According to one Arabic legal manual devoted to jihad as defined by the four schools of Sunni Islamic law, “The <i>ulema</i> [“scholars”] agree that deception during warfare is legitimate … deception is a form of art in war.”<a title="" href="#_edn23">[23]</a>  Moreover, according to Dr. Mukaram, the foremost expert on <i>taqiyya</i>, this deception is classified as <i>taqiyya</i>: “<i>Taqiyya</i> in order to dupe the enemy is permissible.”<a title="" href="#_edn24">[24]</a></p>
<p>This Muslim notion that “war is deceit” goes back to the Battle of the Trench (year 627), which pitted Muhammad and his followers against several non-Muslim tribes known as Al-Ahzab. One of the members of Ahzab, Na‘im ibn Mas‘ud, went to the Muslim camp and converted to Islam. When Muhammad discovered that the Ahzab were unaware of his conversion, and thus defection, he told Mas‘ud to return and try to get the Ahzab forces to abandon the siege. It was then that Muhammad memorably declared, “For war is deceit.” Mas‘ud returned to the Ahzab without their knowing that he had switched sides and intentionally began to give his former kin and allies bad advice. He also went to great lengths to instigate quarrels between the various tribes until, thoroughly distrusting each other, they disbanded, lifting their siege.<a title="" href="#_edn25">[25]</a></p>
<p>A more compelling expression of the legitimacy of deceiving non-Muslims is found in the following authentic anecdote from the Muslim prophet’s life. A poet, Ka‘b ibn Ashraf, offended Muhammad with his verse, prompting the latter to exclaim, “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?” A young Muslim named Muhammad ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that in order to get close enough to Ka‘b to assassinate him, he be allowed to lie to the poet.</p>
<p>Muhammad agreed.<a title="" href="#_edn26">[26]</a></p>
<p>Ibn Maslama traveled to Ka‘b and began to denigrate Islam and Muhammad. He carried on in this way till his disaffection became so convincing that Ka‘b took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, Ibn Maslama appeared with another Muslim and, while Ka‘b’s guard was down, killed him.<a title="" href="#_edn27">[27]</a></p>
<p>Accordingly, normative Islam teaches that deceit is integral to jihad: Ibn al-Arabi declares that “in the Hadith [sayings and actions of Muhammad], practicing deceit in war is well demonstrated. Indeed, its need is more stressed than the need for courage.” Ibn al-Munir (d. 1333) writes, “War is deceit, i.e., the most complete and perfect war waged by a holy warrior [<i>mujahid</i>] is a war of deception, not confrontation, due to the latter’s inherent danger, and the fact that one can attain victory through treachery without harm [to oneself].” And Ibn Hajar (d. 1448) counsels Muslims “to take great caution in war, while [publicly] lamenting and mourning in order to dupe the infidels.”<a title="" href="#_edn28">[28]</a></p>
<p>In short, the earliest historical records of Islam clearly attest to the prevalence of <i>taqiyya</i>—deception and betrayal, as in the case of the poet Ka‘b —as a form of Islamic warfare against the non-Muslim infidel.  And this is still a legal strategy for Muslims vis-à-vis non-Muslims—especially if the lying is rationalized as a form of jihad to empower Islam or Muslims.</p>
<p>Furthermore, early Muslims are often depicted in early Islamic texts as lying their way out of binds—usually by denying or insulting Islam or Muhammad—often to the approval of the latter, his only criterion being that their intentions (<i>niya</i>) be pure.<a title="" href="#_edn29">[29]</a> During the centuries-long wars with Christians, whenever and wherever the latter were in authority, the practice of <i>taqiyya</i> became even more integral and widespread.</p>
<p>Professor Mukaram states, “<i>Taqiyya</i> was used as a way to fend off danger from the Muslims, especially in critical times and when their borders were exposed to wars with the Byzantines and, afterwards, to the raids of the Franks and others.”<a title="" href="#_edn30">[30]</a>  The widespread use of <i>taqiyya</i> was one of the main reasons that prompted the Spanish Inquisition: hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had feigned conversion to Christianity secretly remained Muslim, conspiring with North African Muslim tribes to reconquer the Iberian Peninsula.<a title="" href="#_edn31">[31]</a></p>
<p><b>22-23-24</b>:  Partially agreed. These three sections deal primarily with the importance for a Muslim to uphold his covenant (a presumably immaterial point in the case at hand).  Covenants are in fact to be honored according to mainstream Islamic teaching.  Even so, however, and as with the general ban on lying, caveats abound:</p>
<p>Consider the role of covenants between Muslims and non-Muslims in the context of the perpetual nature of jihad: based on the 10-year treaty of Hudaybiya (628), ratified between Muhammad and his Quraish opponents in Mecca, mainstream Sunni jurists are agreed that ten years is the maximum amount of time Muslims can be at peace with non-Muslims; once the treaty has expired, the situation needs to be reappraised.</p>
<p>Based on Muhammad’s example of breaking the treaty after two years (by claiming a Quraish infraction), the primary function of the truce is to buy weakened Muslims time to regroup before renewing the offensive. <a title="" href="#_edn32">[32]</a>  According to <i>shari‘a</i> law expert Dr. Majid Khadurri, “By their very nature, treaties must be of temporary duration, for in Muslim legal theory, the normal relations between Muslim and non-Muslim territories are not peaceful, but warlike.” <a title="" href="#_edn33">[33]</a> Hence “the <i>fuqaha</i> [jurists] are agreed that open-ended truces are illegitimate if Muslims have the strength to renew the war against them [non-Muslims].”<a title="" href="#_edn34">[34]</a></p>
<p>Some of Sunni Islam’s four schools of law (or <i>madhahib</i>), such as the Hanafi, assert that Muslim leaders may abrogate treaties merely if it seems advantageous for Islam.<a title="" href="#_edn35">[35]</a> This is reminiscent of the following words of Prophet Muhammad as found in a canonical <i>hadith</i>: “If you ever take an oath to do something and later on you find that something else is better, then you should expiate your oath and do what is better.”<a title="" href="#_edn36">[36]</a></p>
<p>Nearly 1400 years after Muhammad abrogated the covenant with the Quraish, Yasser Arafat, soon after negotiating a peace treaty criticized as conceding too much to Israel, addressed an assembly of Muslims in a mosque in Johannesburg justifying his actions by referring to Muhammad’s example: “I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraish in Mecca.”<a title="" href="#_edn37">[37]</a> In other words, like Muhammad, Arafat gave his word only to annul it once “something better” came along—that is, once the opportunity to renew the offensive to empower Islam came along.</p>
<p>In short, the idea of making covenants with non-Muslims revolves around Muslim capability. This is made clear in an authoritative Sunni legal text, <i>Umdat as-Salik</i>, compiled by a 14<sup>th</sup> century Egyptian scholar, Ahmad Ibn Naqib al-Misri: “There must be some benefit [<i>maslaha</i>] served in making a truce other than the status quo: ‘So do not be fainthearted and call for peace when it is you who are uppermost’ [Qur’an 47:35].” <a title="" href="#_edn38">[38]</a></p>
<p><b>25-26-27</b>: These sections finally deal directly with the topic of <i>taqiyya</i>.  Again, because they are built atop some invalid premises, they are only partially correct.</p>
<p>Thus,  <i>“A Muslim who is subject to severe religious persecution—which exposes him to a reasonable fear of death or severe bodily injury unless he renounce Islam—is permitted, but not required, to renounce Islam verbally even though he remains inwardly a faithful Muslim.”</i></p>
<p>This is true. However, fear of religious persecution is hardly the only criterion to justify deception in Islam, as demonstrated above.</p>
<p>Accordingly, the assertion from MFR 26 that <i>“Significantly, however, he [Muslim] is only permitted to lie about his religious belief if he is subjected to severe persecution, e.g., loss of life or severe bodily pain”</i> is plainly false.</p>
<p>As mentioned, according to <i>shari‘a</i> law, deception is permissible in several contexts above and beyond the question of self-preservation against persecution.</p>
<p>Furthermore, MFR mentions Qur’an al-Nahl (16:106), which discusses the permission for Muslims to dissemble their identity if persecuted by non-Muslims, as the primary verse justifying <i>taqiyya</i>.  In fact, Muslim jurists often point to another verse, Qur’an 3:28, which better captures the overall nature of <i>taqiyya</i> in a more applicable context: “Let believers [Muslims] not take infidels [non-Muslims] for friends and allies instead of believers. Whoever does this shall have no relationship left with God—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.”<a title="" href="#_edn39">[39]</a></p>
<p>The exegesis of Qur’an 3:28 of Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (d. 923), author of one of the most standard and authoritative Qur’an commentaries throughout the Islamic world, follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>If you [Muslims] are under their [non-Muslims’] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue while harboring inner animosity for them … [know that] Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels rather than other believers—except when infidels are above them [in authority]. Should that be the case, let them act friendly towards them while preserving their religion.<a title="" href="#_edn40">[40]</a></p></blockquote>
<p>Regarding Qur&#8217;an 3:28, Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), another standard authority on the Qur’an, writes, “Whoever at any time or place fears … evil [from non-Muslims] may protect himself through outward show.” As proof of this, he quotes Muhammad’s close companion Abu Darda, who said, “Let us grin in the face of some people while our hearts curse them.” Another companion, simply known as Al-Hasan, said, “Doing <i>taqiyya</i> is acceptable till the Day of Judgment [i.e., in perpetuity].”<a title="" href="#_edn41">[41]</a></p>
<p>Other prominent scholars, such as Abu Abdullah al-Qurtubi (1214-73) and Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), have extended <i>taqiyya</i> to cover deeds. In other words, Muslims can behave like infidels and worse—for example, by bowing down and worshiping idols and crosses, offering false testimony, and even exposing the weaknesses of their fellow Muslims to the infidel enemy—anything short of actually killing a Muslim. <a title="" href="#_edn42">[42]</a></p>
<p>[<b>Note</b>: Although MFR 25 correctly asserts that “there are occasions in which it is permitted, <i>or even required</i>, to lie,” nowhere in the report are examples offered of when it is “required” for Muslims to lie.]</p>
<p><b>28-29</b>:  <i>“In no case, as far as I know, have Muslim theologians taken the position that it is generally permissible, much less obligatory, for Muslims to lie to non-Muslims, whether in matters regarding religious belief or secular practices…”</i>  And (#29), <i>“…there is no doctrinal basis in authentic Islamic teachings to support the claim, made by Ezra Levant and others … that </i>taqiyya<i> is anything other than an exceptional doctrine justified under circumstances of extreme duress that are simply inapplicable to Muslims living in Canada and the United States.”</i></p>
<p>The many references above (with endnotes below) from the Qur’an, from the sayings and deeds of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, and from the decrees and consensus of past and present Islamic authorities, demonstrate otherwise.</p>
<p>As for the idea that <i>taqiyya</i> is “an exceptional doctrine justified under circumstances of extreme duress,” it is well to remember that the premiere authority on <i>taqiyya</i>, Dr. Mukaram, asserts that:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Taqiyya</i> is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it … We can go so far as to say that the practice of <i>taqiyya</i> is mainstream in Islam, and that those few sects not practicing it diverge from the mainstream … <i>Taqiyya</i> is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.<a title="" href="#_edn43">[43]</a></p></blockquote>
<p align="center"><b>Conclusion</b></p>
<p>Deception—known under the broad term <i>taqiyya</i>—is permissible in Islam, above and beyond the limited issue of self-preservation.  This assertion is not “Islamophobic”; it is true.  From a legalistic point of view, and as seen especially via the concept of <i>tawriya</i>, as long as deceptions are technically true (“I don’t have a penny in my pocket,” only dollars), they are not even considered lies.  The prophet of Islam, Muhammad—the example that Sunni Muslims especially pattern their lives after—regularly made use of deceit. In order to assassinate a poet (Ka‘b ibn Ashraf) who offended him, Muhammad permitted a Muslim to lie to the poet.  Muhammad is further on record giving license to breaking oaths (“if something better” comes along) and openly lying (without even employing <i>tawriya</i>) to one’s wife and in war.  As for the latter, which assumes a perpetual nature in the guise of the jihad against the non-Muslim in order to make Islam (and Muslims) supreme (e.g., Qur’an 8:39), deception and lies are certainly permissible.</p>
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<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref1">[1]</a> Sami Mukaram, <i>At-Taqiyya fi</i> &#8216;<i>l-Islam</i> (London: Mu&#8217;assisat at-Turath ad-Druzi, 2004), p. 7, author&#8217;s translation.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref2">[2]</a> John Calvert, <i>Islamism: A Documentary and Reference Guide</i> (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008),  p. 197.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref3">[3]</a> Sahih Bukhari: <em>Volume 1, Book 2, Number 26:</em><em> </em><a href="http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/002-sbt.php#001.002.026">http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/002-sbt.php#001.002.026</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref4">[4]</a> See Raymond Ibrahim, <i>The Al Qaeda Reader</i> (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pgs. 141-144 where al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri tries to rationalize suicide attacks through <i>qiyas</i> and in the context of deceit.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref5">[5]</a> Shaykh Faraz Rabbani, “Zakat Cannot Be Given To Non-Muslims,” Sunni Path, Question ID 1527: <a href="http://qa.sunnipath.com/issue_view.asp?HD=1&amp;ID=1527&amp;CATE=5">http://qa.sunnipath.com/issue_view.asp?HD=1&amp;ID=1527&amp;CATE=5</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref6">[6]</a> Majid Khadduri, <i>War and Peace in the Law of Islam</i> (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 162-163.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref7">[7]</a> Mark Durie, <i>The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude, and Freedom</i> (Australia: Deror Books, 2010), pgs. 40, 141-146.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref8">[8]</a> David Bukay, “Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam,” <i>Middle East Quarterly</i>, Fall 2007, pgs. 3-11: <a href="http://www.meforum.org/1754/peace-or-jihad-abrogation-in-islam">http://www.meforum.org/1754/peace-or-jihad-abrogation-in-islam</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref9">[9]</a> Sheikh Muhammad al-Munajid, “When Is Tawriya Legitimate,” <i>Islam Q&amp;A</i>, Fatwa no. 27261: <a href="http://islamqa.info/ar/ref/27261">http://islamqa.info/ar/ref/27261</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref10">[10]</a> “Saying Merry Christmas is worst [<i>sic</i>.] than fornication or killing someone,” Islamic scholar.  YouTube: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=FFW3ZNC8sjw">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=FFW3ZNC8sjw</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref11">[11]</a>  “Don’t say Merry Christmas, say I wish you the best, meaning I hope you come to Islam,” Islamic scholar. YouTube video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=-ssc7MB32Sk">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=-ssc7MB32Sk</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref12">[12]</a> Sheikh al-Khamis, “The Ruling on Tawriya and Lying.”  YouTube: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0XZxF7uvSo">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0XZxF7uvSo</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref13">[13]</a> Sami Mukaram, <i>Al Taqiyya Fi Al Islam</i> (London: Mu’assisat al-Turath al-Druzi, 2004), p. 30.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref14">[14]</a> “Does little amount of gas (a bubble) break wudu,” <i>Qibla</i>, Question ID:7260: <a href="http://spa.qibla.com/issue_view.asp?HD=1&amp;ID=7260&amp;CATE=102">http://spa.qibla.com/issue_view.asp?HD=1&amp;ID=7260&amp;CATE=102</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref15">[15]</a> <i>Sunan Abu Dawud</i> (one of the six canonical hadith collections), 681: <a href="http://library.islamweb.net/newlibrary/display_book.php?flag=1&amp;bk_no=74&amp;ID=649">http://library.islamweb.net/newlibrary/display_book.php?flag=1&amp;bk_no=74&amp;ID=649</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref16">[16]</a> “What to do in the following situations,” <i>Islam Door</i>: <a href="http://www.islamdoor.com/k/297.htm">http://www.islamdoor.com/k/297.htm</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref17">[17]</a> “What is the difference between lying and obfuscating?” YouTube: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUcTJPS2po4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUcTJPS2po4</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref18">[18]</a>  Raymond Ibrahim, “Sharia’s Sinister Smiles,” <i>RaymondIbrahim.com</i>: <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/sharias-sinister-smiles/">http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/sharias-sinister-smiles/</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref19">[19]</a> “Fatwa concerning lies and their circumstances.”  YouTube: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAjSTsieQg">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEAjSTsieQg</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref20">[20]</a>  <a href="http://fatwa.islamweb.net/fatwa/printfatwa.php?Id=39152&amp;lang=A">http://fatwa.islamweb.net/fatwa/printfatwa.php?Id=39152&amp;lang=A</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref21">[21]</a> See “Loyalty and Enmity” in Raymond Ibrahim, <i>The Al Qaeda Reader</i> (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pgs 63-115.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref22">[22]</a> Imam Muslim, “Kitab al-Birr wa&#8217;s-Salat, Bab Tahrim al-Kidhb wa Bayan al-Mubih Minhu,” <i>Sahih Muslim</i>, rev. ed., Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, trans. (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 2000).</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref23">[23]</a> Ahmad Mahmud Karima, <i>Al-Jihad fi&#8217;l Islam: Dirasa Fiqhiya Muqarina</i> (Cairo: Al-Azhar, 2003), p. 304, author&#8217;s translation.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref24">[24]</a> Mukaram, <i>At-Taqiyya fi</i> &#8216;<i>l-Islam</i>, p. 32.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref25">[25]</a> Mukaram, <i>At-Taqiyya fi</i> &#8216;<i>l-Islam</i>, pp. 32-3.</p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref26">[26]</a> <i>Sahih Bukhari</i>, Hadith no. 4271: <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/bukhari/bh4/bh4_274.htm">http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/bukhari/bh4/bh4_274.htm</a></p>
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<p><a title="" href="#_ednref27">[27]</a> Ibn Ishaq, <i>The Life of Muhammad</i> (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 367-8.</p>
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<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref28">[28]</a> Raymond Ibrahim, <i>The Al Qaeda Reader</i> (New York: Doubleday, 2007), pp. 142-3.</p>
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<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref29">[29]</a> Mukaram, <i>At-Taqiyya fi</i> &#8216;<i>l-Islam</i>, pp. 11-2.</p>
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<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref30">[30]</a> Ibid., pp. 41-2.</p>
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<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref31">[31]</a> Devin Stewart, &#8220;<a href="http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/neareast/andalusia/pdf/8.pdf">Islam in Spain after the Reconquista</a>,&#8221; Emory University, p. 2, accessed Nov. 27, 2009.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref32">[32]</a> Denis MacEoin, &#8220;<a href="http://www.meforum.org/1925/tactical-hudna-and-islamist-intolerance"><i>Tactical Hudna and Islamist Intolerance</i></a>,&#8221; <i>Middle East Quarterly</i>, Summer 2008, pp. 39-48.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref33">[33]</a> Majid Khadduri, <i>War and Peace in the Law of Islam</i> (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1955), p. 220.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref34">[34]</a> Ahmad Mahmud Karima, <i>Al-Jihad fi&#8217;l Islam: Dirasa Fiqhiya Muqarina</i>, p. 461, author&#8217;s translation.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref35">[35]</a> Ibid., p. 469.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref36">[36]</a> <i>Sahih al-Bukhari, </i><em>Volume 9, Book 89, Number 260</em><em>: </em><a href="http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/089-sbt.php#009.089.260">http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/089-sbt.php#009.089.260</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref37">[37]</a> Daniel Pipes, &#8220;<a href="http://www.meforum.org/480/lessons-from-the-prophet-muhammads-diplomacy"><i>Lessons from the Prophet</i><i> </i><i>Muhammad&#8217;s Diplomacy</i></a>,&#8221; <i>Middle East Quarterly</i>, Sept. 1999, pp. 65-72.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref38">[38]</a> Ahmad Ibn Naqib al-Misri, <i>Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law </i>(Beltsville: Amana Publications, 1994), p. 605.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref39">[39]</a> See also Quran 2:173, 2:185, 4:29, 16:106, 22:78, 40:28, verses cited by Muslim jurisprudents as legitimating <i>taqiyya</i>.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref40">[40]</a> Abu Ja&#8217;far Muhammad at-Tabari, <i>Jami&#8217; al-Bayan &#8216;an ta&#8217;wil ayi&#8217;l-Qur&#8217;an al-Ma&#8217;ruf: Tafsir at-Tabari</i>(Beirut: Dar Ihya&#8217; at-Turath al-<i>&#8216;</i>Arabi, 2001), vol. 3, p. 267, author&#8217;s translation.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref41">[41]</a> &#8216;Imad ad-Din Isma&#8217;il Ibn Kathir, <i>Tafsir al-Qur&#8217;an al-Karim</i> (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-<i>&#8216;</i>Ilmiya, 2001), vol. 1, p. 350, author&#8217;s translation.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref42">[42]</a> Mukaram, <i>At-Taqiyya fi</i> &#8216;<i>l-Islam</i>, pp. 30-7.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ednref43">[43]</a> Sami Mukaram, <i>Al Taqiyya Fi Al Islam</i> (London: Mu’assisat al-Turath al-Druzi, 2004), p. 7.</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>ObamaCare&#8217;s Ruthless Assault on the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:15:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219272</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And our health. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219279" alt="healthcare.gov__0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0-450x310.jpg" width="270" height="186" /></a>Liberals are winning wild praise for their candor in admitting problems with Obamacare. It shows you the level of honesty people have come to expect of our liberal friends. Now, liberals are applauded for not lying through their teeth about something.</p>
<p>What are they supposed to say? <i>This Obamacare website is fantastic! And really, haven&#8217;t you already read all the magazines in your current doctor&#8217;s office anyway?</i></p>
<p>The New York Times has described Obama&#8217;s repeated claim that you could keep your insurance plan and keep your doctor under Obamacare as a mere slip of the tongue: &#8220;Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that.&#8221;</p>
<p>Misspoke? How exactly does one misspeak, word for word, dozens of times, over and over again?</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t misspeaking &#8212; it was a deliberate, necessary lie. Even Democrats couldn&#8217;t have voted for Obamacare if Americans had known the truth. It was absolutely vital for Obama to lie about people being able to keep their insurance and their doctors.</p>
<p>Of course, it was difficult for voters to know the truth because every time Republicans would try to tell them, the White House and the media would rush in and call the critics liars.</p>
<p>The White House posted a specific refutation of the &#8220;disinformation&#8221; about not being able to keep your doctor or insurance plan. That claim, the website said, was being disseminated by Republicans &#8220;to scare people.&#8221;</p>
<p>Their proof consisted of a video of Obama <i>clearly </i>stating, &#8220;If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you&#8217;ve got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.&#8221;</p>
<p>A video of someone asserting the very fact in dispute does not rise to the level of &#8220;evidence,&#8221; but it was more than enough for MSNBC.</p>
<p>Even when pretending to be critical of Obamacare, liberals lie about the real problems. They tell us they&#8217;re worried about the percentage of young people signing up for Obamacare. The mix of young and old people in Obamacare is completely irrelevant. It won&#8217;t help if a lot of young people sign up because their premiums are negligible.</p>
<p>To keep the system afloat, what Obamacare really needs is lots of healthy people, preferably healthy older people. Their premiums are astronomical &#8212; and they won&#8217;t need much medical treatment.</p>
<p>Premiums are set by your age, not your health. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you never go to the doctor. Obamacare punishes you for having a healthy lifestyle. The Obamacare tax is a massively regressive poll tax on the middle-aged and the middle class.</p>
<p>Apart from those who are subsidized, everyone pays the exact same amount in penalties or insurance premiums for his age group. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you don&#8217;t make as much money as Bill Gates. Any 58-year-old male who doesn&#8217;t qualify for a subsidy will pay the same Obamacare tax as Gates.</p>
<p>When Margaret Thatcher tried to impose the same tax per person, as a &#8220;community charge,&#8221; there were riots in the street.</p>
<p>Our extremely progressive tax system, where nearly half the country pays no income tax at all, and the other half pays about 40 percent of their income, may not be fair. But most people also don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s fair to tax a guy making $80,000 a year the identical amount as one making $80 million a year. That&#8217;s exactly what Obamacare does.</p>
<p>With Obamacare, the Democratic Party has foisted the most regressive tax possible on America. This ruthless assault on the middle class is all so we can have a health care system more like every other country has.</p>
<p>Until now, the United States has had the highest survival rates in the world for heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Cancer comparisons are the most useful because all Western countries keep careful records for this disease.</p>
<p>For all types of cancers, European men have only a 47.3 percent five-year survival rate, compared to a 66.3 percent survival rate for American men.</p>
<p>European women have only a 55.8 percent chance of being alive five years after being diagnosed with any type of cancer, compared to 62.9 percent of American women.</p>
<p>American survival rates for breast, prostate, thyroid and skin cancer are higher than 90 percent. Europeans do not have a 90 percent survival rate for one of those cancers.</p>
<p>The European rates are even worse than they sound because many cancers are not discovered until the victim&#8217;s death &#8212; twice as many as in the U.S. All those cancers were excluded from the study.</p>
<p>Canadian cancer survival rates aren&#8217;t much better than the European rates &#8212; and they&#8217;ve been able to sneak into to the U.S. for treatment! Women in the U.S. have a 61 percent survival rate for all cancers, compared to a 58 percent survival rate in Canada. Men in the U.S. have a 57 percent survival rate compared to 53 percent in Canada.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why your insurance premiums have to go through the roof and your Obamacare tax is the same as Bill Gates&#8217;. So across the world, we&#8217;ll all be equal, dying of cancer, heart disease and diabetes as often as everyone else.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not that Obama doesn&#8217;t believe in American exceptionalism; it&#8217;s that he wants to end it.</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>Lying Liberal Liars</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/lying-liberal-liars/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lying-liberal-liars</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Nov 2013 04:35:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211148</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama’s lie proves liberals can’t be trusted.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/n-HEALTH-CARE-OBAMA-large570.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211239" alt="Barack Obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/n-HEALTH-CARE-OBAMA-large570.jpg" width="270" height="211" /></a>Every morning the media paws through a dictionary looking for the most innocuous ways to describe Obama&#8217;s big health care lie.</p>
<p>According to the <i>New York Times</i>, Obama &#8220;misspoke&#8221; when he said over and over again that if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. But unlike the times that the smartest man to ever put up his feet on the table in the Oval Office thought that Austrian was a language or that the United States had 57 states, he wasn&#8217;t misspeaking.</p>
<p>44, as Politico likes to call him, was doing what 1 wouldn&#8217;t do after he chopped down a cherry tree. And to call a lie, misspeaking, is itself a lie.</p>
<p>Rob Ford didn&#8217;t misspeak when he claimed not to be on crack, despite being on crack. Barack Obama didn&#8217;t misspeak when he promised to let you keep your health plan, when he had no intention of letting you do any such thing. And the <i>New York Times</i> didn&#8217;t misspeak when it tried to pass that lie off as a mere slip of the tongue.</p>
<p>The <i>New York Times</i>, which never hesitated to call George W. Bush a liar, switched up its euphemisms and began calling Obama&#8217;s lie an &#8220;incorrect promise&#8221;. <i>NBC News</i> called it a &#8220;promise they couldn&#8217;t keep.&#8221; The <i>Associated Press</i> called it an &#8220;inflated promise.&#8221;</p>
<p>A few of their more honestly dishonest colleagues in the media argued that Obama did the right thing  because he could never have pried the health plans of Americans out of their grubby little hands if he hadn&#8217;t promised them that his government takeover of healthcare wouldn’t affect them. Some of the pundits making that argument included those on Obama&#8217;s regular reading list.</p>
<p>The excuse that Obama lied blatantly about the impact of a law he wanted to pass in order to pass it will no doubt be a great comfort to those gun owners who were willing to trust that his crusade against gun rights would stop where he told them it would and those Republican supporters of amnesty for illegal aliens who believed that he really would secure the borders once he got his millions of newly minted Democratic Party voters.</p>
<p>If Obama lied to pass one law, what sensible argument can any of his supporters make for believing him the next time he promises, “If you like your guns, you can keep your guns” or “If you like your borders, you can keep your borders”?</p>
<p>Obama wasn&#8217;t the first politician to lie. He won&#8217;t be the last. But most politicians who lie don&#8217;t have an army of reporters swarming around them to explain that they didn&#8217;t lie, but just inflated their misspeaking. One man did not get up in front of the microphones and cameras and lie over and over again. The entire liberal establishment lied. And it&#8217;s still lying.</p>
<p>The media’s lies and excuses, even more than the original Obama lie, reveal why liberals can never be trusted.</p>
<p>If Obama had only lied about being on crack or with an intern, that might be an impeachable act, but an understandable human failing. But he wasn&#8217;t lying to cover up something shameful that he did. He lied because he didn’t think Americans deserved to keep their health plans… or the truth.</p>
<p>Obama lied because he is a liberal.</p>
<p>That Obama would lie was an inevitable as the sun rising in the morning and the taxman coming in the spring. The lie was baked into the nature of the progressive movement that he identified with and its social experiments with human lives for the greater good that he participated in.</p>
<p>Lying isn&#8217;t incidental to a liberal. Liberal is another word for liar. Someone who believes, as Obama and his media cronies do, that Americans are too stupid and ignorant to be trusted to choose their own health care, isn&#8217;t about to trust them with the truth.</p>
<p>Liberals don&#8217;t believe that the people they lie to are their equals. If they did, not only wouldn&#8217;t they lie to them, but they wouldn&#8217;t subscribe to a skewed leftist take on liberalism that compels them to take away choices from people for their own good.</p>
<p>You don&#8217;t take away someone&#8217;s right to choose unless you think that they are inferior to you.</p>
<p>If you think that the next person over can run his life just as well as you run yours, then there&#8217;s no reason to take over his life and to lie to him about it. But if you think that he’s probably a racist moron who worships the flag and clings to his gun and bible and can&#8217;t be trusted to buy a car, raise his kids, drink a large soda and see a doctor; then you&#8217;re probably a liberal.</p>
<p>And a liar.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives respect people&#8217;s choices. Liberals don&#8217;t. And if you don&#8217;t respect someone&#8217;s choices; you don&#8217;t respect them.</p>
<p>If you think that the average person is a moron, then the only answer is to set up to a totalitarian system to nudge the marching morons into the death panels for their own greater good while lying to them that the death panelists are really the judges for the next hot talent competition.</p>
<p>If ordinary people don&#8217;t deserve the basic decency of being allowed to make decisions about their own health care, then they also don&#8217;t deserve the basic decency of not being lied to their faces about those decisions being taken away from them.</p>
<p>If Obama had trusted and respected Americans, he wouldn&#8217;t have lied to them about ObamaCare. But if he had really trusted and respected them, he wouldn&#8217;t have inflicted ObamaCare on them.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s crime isn&#8217;t the lie. The lie is the cover-up of the crime. The crime is that Obama packaged a tax, a welfare program and a government takeover of health care together and called it reform.</p>
<p>The media has shown that Obama&#8217;s lie was no isolated incident by lying about the lie for the same reason that he told the lie. The health plan lie wasn&#8217;t the lie of one politician protecting his reputation; it was the big lie of a liberal establishment protecting its agenda.</p>
<p>The liberal media manipulates its readers, listeners and viewers the same way that liberal governments manipulate their citizens. Unlike Clinton&#8217;s lie, Obama&#8217;s lie was not one man&#8217;s mistake, but a movement&#8217;s arrogance. And not only hasn&#8217;t Obama stopped lying about his lie, but the media and the rest of his movement haven&#8217;t stopped lying about his lie.</p>
<p>Obama’s big health care lie shows why liberals can&#8217;t be trusted. Any movement that believes its members are superior to ordinary people cannot be trusted to represent them or to tell them the truth.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <strong></strong> <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> about Obama&#8217;s Destructive Agenda, his Muslim Brotherhood Romance, the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin saga, and much, much more:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hpyoCFF-iL8" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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 Haunting Design of ObamaCare &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/when-obama-said-hes-sorry/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-obama-said-hes-sorry</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Nov 2013 04:00:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210635</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president's true objectives in implementing his health care plan.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obama2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211361" alt="obama2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obama2.jpg" width="280" height="246" /></a>This week&#8217;s Glazov Gang was joined by an All-Star Cast: <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>, National Director of <a href="http://politichicks.tv/">PolitiChicks.tv</a>, <strong>Basil Hoffman</strong>, a Hollywood Actor (“The Artist”) and <strong>Monty Morton</strong>, a Conservative Entrepreneur.</p>
<p>The Gang gathered to discuss <em>The Haunting Design of ObamaCare, </em>shedding light on the president&#8217;s true morbid objectives in implementing his health care plan.</p>
<p>The Gang also focused on <em>When Presidents Lie</em><em>,</em> Obama&#8217;s peculiar &#8220;apology,&#8221;<em> </em>the myriad ingredients and consequences of the ObamaCare nightmare, and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/kOgOWhp_fCs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/oFlCNxH1rhI" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>To watch previous <i>Glazov Gang</i> episodes, </b><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>ACORN Redux: The ObamaCare Navigators Nightmare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/the-obamacare-navigators-nightmare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obamacare-navigators-nightmare</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2013 04:55:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210550</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Videographer James O'Keefe exposes the network of crooks helping to impose the health care law. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/healthcare.gov_2-620x401.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210561" alt="healthcare.gov_2-620x401" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/healthcare.gov_2-620x401-450x291.jpg" width="270" height="175" /></a>The undercover videographer who helped to kill ACORN is now turning his powerful lens on Obamacare &#8220;navigators,&#8221; showing how left-wing groups break the law and defraud taxpayers by pushing Obamacare exchanges.</p>
<p>The undercover investigators of Project Veritas, the nonprofit created by ACORN slayer James O&#8217;Keefe III, are going after the almost 50,000 Obamacare “navigators,” whom the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says are supposed to “serve as an in-person resource for Americans who want additional assistance in shopping for and enrolling in plans” on the Obamacare exchanges. Left-wing activists have scooped up more than $67 million in grants nationwide to hire the navigators, a payoff to ACORN and other radical outfits that helped win Barack Obama the presidency.</p>
<p>Undercover investigators from Project Veritas captured taxpayer-paid Obamacare promoters on video <a href="http://m.nationalreview.com/article/363699/truth-about-navigators-john-fund"><i>telling</i></a> health care insurance applicants to lie about preexisting medical conditions.</p>
<p>A new video shows an Obamacare navigator employed by the National Urban League in Texas counseling an investigator to be untruthful when completing documentation needed to apply for health care insurance on the Obamacare exchanges. The league took in $376,000 from the federal government for its navigator work.</p>
<p>“You lie because your premiums will be higher,” one navigator tells the undercover journalist, who advised the person that he occasionally smokes. “Don’t tell them that. Don’t tell ’em.”</p>
<p>When the investigator pretends to be a low-income university employee with unreported cash income that, if declared, could endanger his eligibility for federal premium subsidies, the navigators advises, “Don’t get yourself in trouble by declaring it now.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, it didn’t happen,” says another navigator. Another adds, “Never report it.”</p>
<p>The video also shows Project Veritas visiting Enroll America, a nationwide nonprofit group that is encouraging millions of Americans to sign up for health insurance coverage on Obamacare exchanges.</p>
<p>As John Fund notes in a National Review Online article, Daniel Clayton of Enroll America says the group is &#8220;purely nonprofit. It’s not partisan, non-political.&#8221; But when Brian Pendleton, also of Enroll America, was introduced at a speaking engagement, Enroll America was called &#8220;the official group for the DNC [Democratic National Committee].&#8221;</p>
<p>O&#8217;Keefe, Fund reports, says Enroll America &#8220;appears to be sharing data and working directly with an explicitly political group called Battleground Texas, activities that [O'Keefe] notes &#8216;are prohibited unless certain conditions are met.&#8217; Adrian Bell, the regional field director for Battleground Texas, proudly notes the group was &#8216;started by President Obama’s national field director&#8217; and is &#8216;dedicated to turning Texas blue.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>The release of the video has already <a href="http://www.myfoxdfw.com/story/23950361/one-fired-three-suspended-after-undercover-health-care-video">produced</a><i> </i>promising results. The Urban League of Greater Dallas fired one person and suspended three others shown in the video exhorting health care applicants to lie. The group stated it &#8220;does not condone, nor would we ever sanction, misleading the public or any individual who seeks our assistance about any issue, and particularly in this case, an issue as critical as health care.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called for the navigators program to be halted after he watched the video. &#8220;This behavior is unacceptable, and is yet another broken piece of a deeply flawed system,&#8221; Cornyn said.</p>
<p>&#8220;We have so much footage, so many offices,&#8221; O&#8217;Keefe <a href="https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/400087546069536768">wrote</a> of his new Obamacare navigator sting operation on his Twitter account. &#8220;So many employees. So much fraud caught on tape. We&#8217;re going to release them all one by one.&#8221;</p>
<p>O&#8217;Keefe is following the same highly successful rollout strategy the late Andrew Breitbart used in fall 2009 that disseminated O&#8217;Keefe&#8217;s videos showing ACORN wrongdoings and kept ACORN employees&#8217; criminal behavior in the forefront of each new day&#8217;s news cycle. Breitbart would release a video showing misdeeds in an ACORN office in one city and then ACORN would lie, denying the behavior or claiming it was carried out by rogue employees. On another day Breitbart would release a video from an ACORN office in another city showing similar unethical or unlawful behavior and ACORN would again offer dishonest spin on the new video. Several more videos were released this way, and each time ACORN shot itself in the foot by trying to explain away what viewers&#8217; lying eyes had observed.</p>
<p>This culminated in a farcical National Press Club<i> </i><a href="http://spectator.org/articles/40701/bertha-lies">media event</a><i> </i>in which ACORN&#8217;s then-chief organizer Bertha Lewis claimed that shadowy forces had somehow conspired to harm her poor little innocent group.</p>
<p>Even left-wing <i>Washington Post</i> columnist Dana Milbank openly mocked Lewis at the time, finding himself in the unaccustomed position of defending Republicans. &#8220;In creativity, the ACORN boss&#8217;s denials were matched only by her assignments of blame &#8230; [s]he blamed her predecessor &#8230;  [s]he blamed the powerful &#8230; [a]nd most of all, she blamed Republicans,&#8221; accusing them, ridiculously, of what she called &#8220;modern-day ACORN McCarthyism.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Breitbart approach paid off, devastating the organized crime syndicate that used to employ Barack Obama as a trainer and as its attorney.</p>
<p>The undercover videos shot by O&#8217;Keefe and his then-partner Hannah Giles in mid-2009 showed ACORN employees across the nation giving helpful advice on how to lie to the government, commit tax fraud, and trick banks into providing loans for brothels catering to pedophiles. The videos helped to kill off the group which had been hit the year before with the revelation of a million-dollar embezzlement scandal and cover-up involving its founder Wade Rathke.</p>
<p>Later that year Congress, which had given ACORN about $79 million in grants over the years, approved a law permanently pulling ACORN off the ever bounteous public teat. The 400,000-member organization filed for bankruptcy in November 2010. ACORN&#8217;s largest division, ACORN Housing, changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America to distance itself from the tarnished ACORN brand but still ended up <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/acorn-housing-finally-in-foreclosure/">collapsing</a> in 2012 despite receiving sizable cash injections from the Obama administration.</p>
<p>Remnants of the ACORN network are involved in providing Obamacare navigators too.</p>
<p>United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 100 in New Orleans, is reportedly providing navigators in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. In 1979, ACORN created the United Labor Unions, which it used to organize low-wage, fast-food, and home healthcare workers in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.</p>
<p>ULU 100 is headed by ACORN founder Wade Rathke, a corrupt union ringleader who orchestrated massive campaigns involving identity fraud in furtherance of voter fraud and who covered up a million-dollar embezzlement involving pension funds. Now his navigators have unfettered access to confidential information on thousands of people seeking health insurance. ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is the nonprofit group that knowingly hired felons convicted of identity theft to work on voter registration drives, giving them custody of sensitive voter information.</p>
<p>As I showed in my ACORN/Obama expose, <a href="http://tinyurl.com/vadumbook"><i>Subversion Inc.</i></a>, ACORN is also infamous for hiring felons without bothering to do background checks, storming hospital emergency rooms and city council chambers, using voter fraud to turn graveyards across the nation into Democratic electoral strongholds, using mob violence against bank executives and other shakedown targets, and for ruthlessly exploiting its own employees and going to court to seek an exemption from minimum wage laws.</p>
<p>Fund reports that ULU Local 100 is</p>
<blockquote><p>a &#8220;sub-grantee&#8221; providing navigators for the Southern United Neighborhoods group, which received a $600,678 grant to promote Obamacare enrollment. It also received a $270,193 grant for similar work in Arkansas and a $486,123 grant for Louisiana. Marcel Reid, a former dissident board member of ACORN who broke with the group in 2008 over its questionable practices, told me earlier this year, &#8220;ACORN is forming new groups under new mismanagement, and if Wade Rathke is involved in any of them, it spells trouble.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Enrollment isn&#8217;t going so well at HealthCare.gov.</p>
<p>In the month of October, signups on the Obamacare health insurance exchanges for Medicaid, the joint federal-state welfare program that provides health insurance for the poor, vastly<i> </i><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/31/in-first-month-the-vast-majority-of-obamacare-sign-ups-are-in-medicaid/">outnumbered</a> signups for private insurance.</p>
<p>“When we first saw the numbers, everyone’s eyes kind of bugged out,” said Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. “Of the people walking through the door, 90 percent are on Medicaid. We’re thinking, what planet is this happening on?”</p>
<p>To make matters worse, flaws in the HealthCare.gov website <a href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/medicaid-for-al-qaeda-obamacare-flaw-allows-anyone-on-earth-to-fraudulently-enroll-through-healthcare-gov/?singlepage=true">reportedly allow</a><i> </i>ineligible individuals anywhere in the world to sign up for Medicaid.</p>
<p>The exchanges themselves are artificial, bureaucrat-created cartels that merely mimic free, competitive markets, perhaps well enough to dupe some people into believing they&#8217;re engaging in actual eBay- or Amazon-style commerce. It&#8217;s not really shopping, of course, if you have a gun to your head.</p>
<p>Speaking of guns to the head, felons may tapping into confidential personal data stored at HealthCare.gov.</p>
<p>Responding to questions from Sen. Cornyn during a recent congressional hearing, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said it is “possible” that convicted criminals are among Obamacare navigators, who have access to Americans&#8217; personal information.</p>
<p>&#8220;Isn&#8217;t it true that there is no federal requirement for navigators to undergo a criminal background check,&#8221; said Cornyn, &#8220;even though they will receive sensitive personal information from the individuals they help to sign-up up for the Affordable Care Act?”</p>
<p>Sebelius replied, “That is true. States could add an additional background checks and other features, but it is not part of the federal requirement.”</p>
<p>Cornyn asked, “So a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them?”</p>
<p>Sebelius answered, “That is possible.”</p>
<p>As <i>FrontPage</i> previously predicted, enrollment has turned into a dangerous free-for-all because Obamacare &#8220;navigators&#8221; are barely regulated at all. By the way, the only reason there are any &#8220;navigators&#8221; is to help the Left, as HHS Secretary Sebelius has more or less admitted. Imposing rules would only interfere with community organizers&#8217; ability to wreak havoc and spread the gospel of so-called social justice.</p>
<p>Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal previously<i> </i><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/acorn-crooks-on-the-march-for-obamacare/">warned</a> that the Obamacare navigator program, like all of Obamacare, is deeply flawed.</p>
<p>&#8220;‘Navigator’ is a crafty name, but in reality, there are very few restrictions on who they are, and what exactly they are supposed to be doing,&#8221; Jindal says. &#8220;‘Navigators’ are supposed to be hired to help consumers understand the law and the insurance coverage provisions in the new health exchanges. Sounds like a job for a rocket scientist.&#8221; He continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>The &#8220;navigators&#8221; are prohibited from having financial ties to an insurance company, but other than that there are few constraints. Union organizers and community activists are among the types that are allowed to be hired as &#8220;navigators,&#8221; and having prior experience working in the health care field doesn’t seem to necessarily be a pre-requisite for the job. I wonder what percentage of these &#8220;navigators&#8221; will be partisan Democrats?</p></blockquote>
<p>Sebelius<i> </i><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/community-organizes-mobilize-to-save-obamacare/">has been looking</a><i> </i>to radical left-wing community organizers to fill navigator ranks since at least early last year. In April 2012 she tried to recruit activists at the national convention of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN).</p>
<p>“In our country what we know is health care inequality [has been] one of the most persistent forms of injustice but over the past three years, as Rev. Sharpton reminded us, we have begun to turn the tide,” Sebelius said at the time. “Now is not the time to turn back.”</p>
<p>The Left has spent the last few weeks rushing to Obamacare&#8217;s defense as implementation of the law flames out spectacularly in real time.</p>
<p>Pseudojournalist Alex Seitz-Wald, whose calling is to lie about conservatives and devise new and inventive spin to defend professional leftists, previously lied again and again about ACORN and the O&#8217;Keefe sting, falsely accusing O&#8217;Keefe of performing misleading edits on the ACORN videos in 2009.</p>
<p>Now,<i> </i><a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/health-care/the-fight-of-obamacare-s-navigators-against-republican-hurdles-20131030">according to</a><i> </i>Seitz-Wald, it&#8217;s <i>Republicans&#8217;</i> fault that Obamacare navigators are corrupt and incompetent.</p>
<p>GOPers are throwing up unnecessary roadblocks meant to stop navigators from performing their noble, selfless tasks, the former Salon reporter writes.</p>
<blockquote><p>But whether by fees, background checks, tests, extra training, certifications, threats of civil penalties, or delays, Republican legislatures and officials in at least 17 states across the country have thrown up all manner of bureaucratic roadblocks in front of the program. The officials say the regulations are necessary to protect consumers and their personal information, but health care reform advocates say the regulations, adopted only in states controlled by Republicans, are just part of a multipronged campaign to obstruct the implementation of the Affordable Care Act at every turn.</p></blockquote>
<p>Nice try.</p>
<p>Thanks to the excellent, public-spirited work of James O&#8217;Keefe and Project Veritas, Seitz-Wald and the other paid professional liars of the left-wing legacy media are going to have to spin harder than that.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Kathleen Sebelius&#8217;s Mea Culpa Tour</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/kathleen-sebeliuss-mea-culpa-tour/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kathleen-sebeliuss-mea-culpa-tour</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/kathleen-sebeliuss-mea-culpa-tour/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Nov 2013 04:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Sebelius]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the public isn't buying it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/kathleen_sebelius_js_605.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209882" alt="kathleen_sebelius_js_605" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/kathleen_sebelius_js_605.jpg" width="224" height="189" /></a>The real-life version of &#8220;Groundhog Day&#8221; moved from the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week to the Senate Finance Committee yesterday, as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/06/Sebelius-faces-lawmakers-anew-on-health-care-law">brought</a> her mea culpa tour to Congress&#8217;s upper chamber. Despite the miserable rollout of President Obama&#8217;s &#8220;signature achievement,&#8221; Sebelius insisted that the <a href="http://healthcare.gov/">healthcare.gov</a> website had improved dramatically, even as she was forced to concede that &#8220;we&#8217;re not there yet&#8221; with regard to full functionality.</p>
<p>Senators from both parties held Sebelius&#8217;s feet to the fire. Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) insisted the HHS Secretary must be &#8220;candidly, fully, totally&#8221; honest with Congress about the repairs, &#8220;so that we don&#8217;t wake up at the end of November and find out we&#8217;re not there yet.&#8221; He <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/06/us-usa-healthcare-delay-idUKBRE9A50PT20131106?feedType=RSS&amp;feedName=healthNews&amp;rpc=451">expressed</a> his disappointment that administration officials never foresaw problems with the website. &#8220;When we asked for updates on the marketplaces, the responses we got were totally unsatisfactory,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We heard multiple times that everything was on track. We now know that was not the case.&#8221;</p>
<p>Baucus knew that was the case long before yesterday. The chief architect of the healthcare bill openly <a href="http://nationalreview.com/corner/363249/baucus-train-wreck-comment-being-twisted-malign-obamacare-andrew-johnson">expressed</a> his reservations to Sebelius at a hearing last April, when he told her he &#8220;saw a huge train wreck coming down.&#8221; That &#8220;train wreck&#8221; line was widely reported. Not so widely reported was Baucus&#8217;s reservations about the contractor hired by Sebelius. &#8220;I&#8217;m just worried that&#8217;s going to be money down the drain,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Baucus was prescient about one of the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/21/technology/obamacare-website-contracts/">six largest</a> contractors involved insetting up the website. HHS <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/">awarded</a> a no-bid contract to CGI Federal, the U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian company. A top executive at CGI, Toni Townes-Whitley, was First Lady Michelle Obama&#8217;s Princeton classmate. Moreover, HHS hired them despite a track record of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362255/obamacares-magical-thinkers-mark-steyn">failure</a> with regard setting up far smaller operational websites in Canada. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) <a href="http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/bill-nelson-tells-sebelius-to-hold-obamacare-contractors-responsible---/2151172">deflected</a> blame away from Sebelius and onto the contractors for the website’s shortcomings. &#8220;I want you to burn their fingers and make `em pay for not being responsible and producing a product that all of us could be proud,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Nelson is aiming at the wrong target. On October 30, Bob Laszewski, who heads a consulting firm for big insurance companies, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/politics/obamacare-white-house-pressure/">contended</a> that the Obama administration is &#8220;exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet&#8221; about the problems associated with the rollout. Despite denials by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, health-care consultant Larry Thompson <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/363161/insurance-executives-speak-out-against-aca-anonymously-eliana-johnson?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter">seconded</a> that assessment, telling National Review that insurance company executives &#8220;are afraid to say anything because they don’t want HHS all over them.”</p>
<p>Last week, House Oversight Committee chairman Darryl Issa (R-CA) was forced to <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57610277/issa-subpoenas-sebelius-for-healthcare.gov-documents/">subpoena</a> Sebelius for documentation regarding the rollout, because she refused to provide it without being forced to do so. And yesterday, Issa unveiled documents obtained from ObamaCare contractors revealing the October rollout was <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/11/06/documents-show-first-days-of-obamacare-rollout-worse-than-initially-realized/?hpt=hp_t2">far more</a> chaotic than previously reported.</p>
<p>In other words, the &#8220;most transparent administration in history&#8221; is back in stonewalling mode, and Nelson is attempting to obscure where the real blame for this failure should be placed.</p>
<p>Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) blasted Sebelius for the administration&#8217;s &#8220;cavalier attitude,&#8221; and its &#8220;broken promises&#8221; with regard to the millions of Americans who are seeing their insurance plans changed or cancelled. &#8220;More and more promises made at the time this law was passed are now crumbling under the weight of reality on a daily basis,&#8221; he said. “While I am glad that you are accepting responsibility for this disastrous rollout, I would have preferred that you and the rest of the administration were honest with us to begin with.&#8221; Hatch wants Sebelius to update Congress once a month regarding all progress being made. “No more excuses,” he warned her. “No more spin, just give us the truth.”</p>
<p>Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) was equally <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-sebelius-obamacare-delay-20131106,0,1021952.story#axzz2jtHgxYpD">blunt.</a> “The website’s not working, fine. But the law is not working,” he contended. He noted that many Americans will face far higher prices for insurance premiums when the law is fully in effect next year. Sebelius countered that premium prices are 16 percent lower than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated they would be. Yet when Crapo asked the Secretary if that meant prices for insurance would be lower next year compared to this year, Sebelius admitted it did not.</p>
<p>Whether or not the law is working, Sebelius dismissed any possibility it would be delayed. &#8220;Delay is not an option,&#8221; she insisted. &#8220;We are still at the beginning of a six-month open enrollment that ends at the end of March, and there&#8217;s plenty of time to sign up for the new plans.&#8221;</p>
<p>That sentiment runs contrary to the one <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/24/dems-join-call-to-delay-obamacare-mandate-amid-website-failures/">expressed</a> by members of both parties, particularly Democrats up for re-election in 2014. It would appear they are beginning to understand the lethal political liability of a law that may cause as many as <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/31/obama-officials-in-2010-93-million-americans-will-be-unable-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/">93 million</a> Americans to lose their current insurance policies.</p>
<p>Democrats may have gotten even more nervous when Republicans expressed concerns about the security and testing of the website. Staying true to form, Sebelius <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/kathleen-sebelius-obamacare-senate-hearing-99449.html">insisted</a> that administration officials and security consultants saw no reason for delays. “No one suggested the risks outweighed the importance of moving forward,&#8221; she declared. She also <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57611063/sebelius-obamacare-delay-is-not-an-option/">noted</a> that experts have run &#8220;a series of diagnostics, looked at the entire system and determined that <a href="http://HealthCare.gov/">HealthCare.gov</a> is fixable and it isn&#8217;t fatally flawed.&#8221; That would be the same website that <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57611202/departing-obamacare-security-official-didnt-sign-off-on-site-launch/">never</a> received a single end-to-end security test prior to its launch.</p>
<p>Yet the website remains only part of the problem. During questioning by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Sebelius was forced to <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/06/sebelius-back-in-hot-seat-on-capitol-hill-over-rocky-rollout-obamacare/">admit</a> there is nothing in the federal regulations that would prevent a <i>convicted felon</i> from becoming an ObamaCare navigator. “Isn’t it true there is no federal requirement for navigators to undergo a criminal background check, even though they will receive personal information from the individuals they help to sign-up up for the Affordable Care Act?” Cornyn asked. “That is true,” Sebelius replied. “States could have an additional background check and other features, but it is not part of the federal requirement.” Cornyn continued. “So a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them?” Sebelius answered, “This is possible.”</p>
<p>Moving from the possible to the highly probable, yesterday the FBI <a href="http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy-policy/2013/11/05/fbi-gears-up-as-nearly-17m-poised-to-get-obamacare-tax-credits/">revealed</a> that they believe the “potential for crime in health care reform is huge,” including estimates of tax credit fraud projected to surpass $20 billion&#8211;because ObamaCare insurance subsidies will be doled out on the honor system.</p>
<p>The next shoe to drop was Sebelius&#8217;s <a href="http://www.kmbz.com/Sebelius-Obamacare-Sign-Ups-Will-Be-Quite-Low-/17705697">admission</a> that when the administration does release the enrollment figures for ObamaCare, they will be dismal. “The enrollment numbers which we will release next week, which will be the first month of enrollment, are likely to be quite low given that struggles people have had getting access to the site and getting information,” Sebelius conceded. “I’m hoping that with the site improvement we’ll see more robust numbers, but until the site is fully improved and we really kind of open up the doors wide to a lot of people, we’re going to have I think a struggle getting significant numbers to sign up,” she added.</p>
<p>Without significant numbers of enrollments&#8211;<a href="http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2013/11/05/what-happens-if-young-people-dont-sign-up-for-obamacare/">including</a> at least 2.7 million younger, healthier Americans out of the seven million people the system needs to sign up in year one&#8211;insurance premiums are likely to increase significantly in order to cover the pool of policyholders who are older and unhealthier. Rising premiums will discourage even more younger, healthier people from signing up, especially since the alternative fines are far cheaper. As the process repeats itself, a &#8220;death spiral&#8221; ensues.</p>
<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303661404579178231174626314">According</a> to the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, current enrollees are &#8220;older than expected so far.&#8221; Furthermore, the fallback excuse&#8211;that younger healthier Americans will shy away from the glitchy, federally-run website, while older sicker Americans persevere&#8211;isn&#8217;t holding true. Smoother-running state exchanges are also seeing an ominous signup pattern. In Connecticut and Kentucky, both of which have enrolled more than 4,000 people, those older than 55 comprise the largest segment of ObamaCare enrollees, &#8220;much older than industry actuaries say they had anticipated.&#8221; And while the law contains a provision allowing the government (read: taxpayers) to reimburse insurers for some losses, unless the pool of enrollees meets the right age-related criteria, those reimbursements may not prevent insurers from losing money.</p>
<p>New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have already experienced a death spiral. Like ObamaCare, older, sicker people could not be charged more for coverage than younger, healthier people. As a result, premiums in those states rose to double and triple the national average.</p>
<p>Finally, there was the subject Sebelius was undoubtedly eager to avoid. Several Republicans hammered away at the HHS Secretary regarding the president&#8217;s promise that if you liked your healthcare plan, you could keep your healthcare plan. Like a good soldier, Sebelius <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/kathleen-sebelius-obamacare-hearing-takeaway-more-bad-news-99479_Page2.html">embraced</a> the administration&#8217;s despicable effort to re-write history. “The president’s promise was written into the law from day one, and that was the grandfather clause,” she insisted.</p>
<p>Republican committee members weren&#8217;t buying it. “There weren’t any caveats on that at the time. It’s not like there were any asterisks or footnotes,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD). “We know that lying to Congress is a crime, but unfortunately, lying to the American people is not,” <a href="http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/06/21336093-sebelius-gets-grilled-by-both-democratic-and-gop-senators">said</a> Cornyn. Even Democrat Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) voiced the frustration of  “a couple million people, sadly, who are not going to be able to keep the policies that they want and are facing large increases in premiums.”</p>
<p>Yet is was Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KA) who encapsulated the fears, frustrations and anger felt by the millions of Americans regarding both ObamaCare and the unfettered arrogance of an administration determined to impose their will on the public, irrespective of the disastrous consequences that have ensued:</p>
<blockquote><p>Madame Secretary, you yourself know that this law has serious problems. You delayed over half of the mandate deadlines. You did it for employers, for unions, and for small business, but not for the exchanges&#8230;nor for millions of Americans that are losing their health care..Your main goal should have been to protect Americans, to lessen their risk, and to ensure their safety, but in your zeal to implement this law, not warnings, not advice, not counsel would deter you from implementing the exchanges. You have said America should hold you accountable, which is why today, Madame Secretary, I repeat my request for you to resign.</p></blockquote>
<p>With any luck, the American public will turn that request into a demand.</p>
<p><strong>Don’t miss this week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em>, which exposes <em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/">ObamaCare’s Dirty Little Secret</a></em>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Tour of Lies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obamas-tour-of-lies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-tour-of-lies</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obamas-tour-of-lies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Nov 2013 04:25:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The president asks the country to send his dozens of prior statements down the memory hole. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/1030-OBAMA-OBAMACARE-BOSTON-INSURANCE_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209749" alt="1030-OBAMA-OBAMACARE-BOSTON-INSURANCE_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/1030-OBAMA-OBAMACARE-BOSTON-INSURANCE_full_600-450x300.jpg" width="270" height="180" /></a>President Barack Obama is a liar. Not a person who &#8220;misspoke,&#8221; as the <i>New York Times</i> editorial board <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/insurance-policies-not-worth-keeping.html?_r=2&amp;hp=&amp;adxnnl=1&amp;rref=opinion&amp;adxnnlx=1383680025-ijbsJRTuP/Zd7+nTKRkZgQ">ridiculously</a> asserted last Sunday. His promise that if Americans liked their healthcare plan they could keep it &#8212; made on at <i>least</i>  23 separate, <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/video-obama-keep-your-plan-compilation.html">videotaped</a> occasions &#8212; was not the &#8220;half true&#8221; statement the equally corrupt <a href="http://politifact.com/">politifact.com</a> website <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/29/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-under-his-health-care-law-those-/">contended</a> it was. Nor did the president make a &#8220;campaign pledge which did not hold up to the realities of governing,&#8221; as shameless TV host Bill Maher <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2013/11/02/wasserman-schultz-obamas-you-can-keep-your-plan-was-not-lie-maher-thinkshttp://www.foxnews.com/">declared</a>, before further noting it was a &#8220;moral complexity&#8221; he is &#8220;okay with &#8217;cause I&#8217;m not twelve.&#8221; It was a bald-faced lie. And on at least <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/30/obamas-pledge-that-no-one-will-take-away-your-health-plan/">one occasion</a> in June of 2009, it included a completely unambiguous qualifier: &#8220;if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, <i>period.&#8221; </i>(Italics mine). Yet Monday, in an Orwellian moment that provided the public with an unprecedented look at the president&#8217;s utter lack of credibility, Obama <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/05/obama-denies-you-can-keep-it-videotaped-promises/">insisted</a> he never made any such promises.</p>
<p>“What we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” Obama declared at the St. Regis hotel, in a room  containing around 200 of his staunchest Organizing for Action (OFA) supporters. He then went on defending the indefensible. “If we had allowed these old plans [to continue]… then we would have broken an even more important promise&#8211;making sure that Americans gain access to health care that doesn’t leave them one illness away from financial ruin,” he remarked. “So the bottom line is, is that we are making the insurance market better for everybody.”</p>
<p>Note the use of the word &#8220;we.&#8221; &#8220;We&#8221; didn&#8217;t make the same promise to the American people over and over and over again. Barack Obama did. &#8220;We&#8221; is a great indication the president is more than willing to once again absolve himself of responsibility, should this transparent effort to literally re-write history fail to gain the support of the American public.</p>
<p>Thankfully, it is an effort being undermined by revelation after revelation. On Monday, the AP <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_OVERHAUL_ANGST?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2013-11-03-07-39-37">revealed</a> at least 3.5 million Americans have had their insurance policies cancelled so far. &#8220;So far&#8221; is a critical phrase for a number of reasons. As AP notes, &#8220;data is unavailable in a (sic) half the states.&#8221; Assuming the data is identical, getting the other half of it would theoretically double the cancellation total to 6 million.</p>
<p>Fortunately, an Obama administration talking point, or more accurately, a pathetic attempt to mitigate the damage regarding the president&#8217;s mendacity, inadvertently provided a far more accurate picture of how many Americans <i>they</i> expect will be losing their coverage. &#8220;We&#8217;re talking about 5 percent of the country,&#8221; <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/10/29/jay-carney-were-only-talking-about-five-percent-of-people-losing-their-health-plans-n1733027">explained</a> White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.</p>
<p>Five percent of the country equals 14 million people.</p>
<p>Yet even that number is pales in comparison to what Forbes Magazine&#8217;s Roy Avik <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/10/31/obama-officials-in-2010-93-million-americans-will-be-unable-to-keep-their-health-plans-under-obamacare/">discovered</a>. He notes that page <a href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2010-06-17/pdf/2010-14488.pdf">34,551</a> of the Federal Register, Vol. 75, No. 116&#8211;dated Thursday, June, 17, <i>2010</i>&#8211;reveals a great deal about what this administration knew and when they knew it. “In total, approximately 66 percent of small employers and 48 percent of large employers made a change in either cost sharing or premium contribution during 2009 that would require them to relinquish grandfather status if the same change were made in 2011,” it states. Avik reveals that the cancellations resulting from these subsequently non-grandfather plans in the employer-based market, coupled with the estimated losses in the individual market, raises the number of people who <i>can&#8217;t </i>keep their current plan if they like it up to a mind-boggling <i>93 million </i>Americans.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s almost one third of the entire country.</p>
<p>Moreover, the notion that Barack Obama might have been &#8220;unaware&#8221; his promise was untruthful was <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303843104579172002892623382">exploded</a> by the <i>Wall Street Journal.</i> They reveal that while the president was out making his pitch to the American people<i>, </i>White House officials &#8220;discussed whether that was a promise they could keep,&#8221; ultimately deciding &#8220;the assertion was fair.&#8221;</p>
<p>Their twisted rationale was best expressed by an unnamed former official. &#8220;You try to talk about health care in broad, intelligible points that cut through, and you inevitably lose some accuracy when you do that,&#8221; the official said. Jim Margolis, a media adviser to Obama&#8217;s campaigns in 2008 and 2012, made a similar assessment. &#8220;With 20/20 hindsight, maybe this should have been parsed more carefully,&#8221; he contended. Nonetheless, he reached the same destination &#8220;The president&#8217;s statement seems fair,&#8221; he decided.</p>
<p>Former senior White House advisor David Axelrod sunk even lower, claiming there was no intention to mislead the public, and that the failure of the <a href="http://healthcare.gov/">healthcare.gov</a> website is the real reason so many Americans are angry. &#8220;The great misfortune here is that the website debacle occurred at the same time as this issue arising,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Because, if the website hadn&#8217;t gone down, then lots of these people would be going online and figuring out, &#8216;Hey I&#8217;m getting a better insurance policy, and I&#8217;ll have to pay less money for it.&#8217; But they can&#8217;t, because the website is down.&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, Americans would have been OK with being lied to, as long as they could have gotten cheaper insurance.</p>
<p>Administration officials buried themselves still deeper, insulting the public in the process. They told the <i>Journal </i>there was some second-guessing involved in reaching their decision, discussing the possibility that Obama &#8220;might use more in-depth discussions, such as media interviews, to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches.&#8221; Yet they determined such details could &#8220;clutter&#8221; the president&#8217;s message, &#8220;confusing&#8221; Americans in the process. Some officials <i>did</i> object to the president&#8217;s assertions, but they were reportedly overruled by political aides.</p>
<p>In other words, they decided to lie by omission, because they believed Americans were too stupid to handle the truth. And once again, remaining true to form, the White House claims it never knew about the dissenters.</p>
<p>The <i>Washington Post&#8217;s</i> Mark Theissen, who worked in the Bush White House, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-obamas-dishonest-presidency/2013/11/04/841947c6-4561-11e3-b6f8-3782ff6cb769_story.html">reveals</a> the utter nonsense behind such a claim. After explaining the &#8220;staffing process&#8221; that determines whether anything even remotely questionable can be included in a speech by the president, noting that every line &#8220;is reviewed by dozens of senior officials, who offer comments and factual corrections,&#8221; he reaches an inexorable conclusion. “This was an (sic) premeditated deception,&#8221; he declares. &#8220;This wasn’t something Obama ad-libbed. It was a line in a presidential speech that was carefully reviewed by the entire White House senior staff. Obama’s political advisers were told by his policy aides the statement was inaccurate&#8211;but they decided to let Americans believe the falsehood.&#8221;</p>
<p>Like Obama himself, the president&#8217;s defenders are also engaged in Orwellian endeavors. “There was nothing about what President Obama or that I or any other Democrat supporting the Affordable Care Act said that was not true,&#8221; declared DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (Wasserman Schultz herself is a documented liar, caught on <a href="http://lonelyconservative.com/2012/09/debbie-wasserman-schultz-caught-in-another-lie/">videotape</a> attributing a statement to Israeli ambassador Michael Oren she subsequently denied making). The best the <i>Huffington Post&#8217;s</i> Jason Linkins <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/if-you-like-your-plan-you-can-keep-it-_n_4175715.html">can do</a> is take the president mildly to task for his &#8220;glib pronouncement,&#8221; even as he wonders &#8220;whether the media&#8217;s overarching attention to finding some cheap gotcha moments to bedevil political figures for a newscycle or three doesn&#8217;t end up adding to the confusion.&#8221; And while the National Journal&#8217;s Ron Fournier <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/white-house/lying-about-lies-why-credibility-matters-to-obama-20131105">criticizes</a> Obama for &#8220;misleading the public about his deception,&#8221; he subsequently concludes that on &#8220;history&#8217;s scale of deception, this one leaves a light footprint. Worse lies have been told by worse presidents, leading to more severe consequences, and you could argue that withholding a caveat is more a sin of omission.&#8221;</p>
<p>Since Fournier failed to identify any of those worse lies, one is left to ponder what particular &#8220;sin of omission&#8221; has resulted in more severe repercussions than the possibility of 97 million Americans losing their health insurance.</p>
<p>What one is not left to ponder is the depth to which the president and his apologists will sink to defend Obama’s outright lying, all of which can be reduced to the American left&#8217;s ultimate rationalization: we will get what we want by any means necessary. Thus they will furiously attempt to deflect reality, insisting that the president&#8217;s lie either doesn&#8217;t matter, or even worse, is justifiable because Americans can get <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HEALTH_OVERHAUL_WHITE_HOUSE?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2013-11-05-13-00-23">cheaper</a> insurance policies, they were being ripped off by what the left has taken upon itself to <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/obamacare-canceled-health-insurance">define</a> as “lousy” insurance policies (even as they couldn&#8217;t care less what policy holders <i>themselves</i> think), or that Americans simply <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jack-coleman/2013/11/05/americans-doughnuts-cheap-insurance-and-other-bad-things-sneers-mother">don&#8217;t know</a> what&#8217;s best for themselves.</p>
<p>They will even go so far as to <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2487518/Stage-4-cancer-sufferer-unhappy-Obamacare-gets-White-House-pushback.html">belittle</a> a stage 4 cancer patient named Edie Littlefield Sundby, because she had the temerity to pen a <i>Wall Street Journal</i> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579171710423780446">editorial</a> revealing that she is losing both her insurance and her oncology doctors because of ObamaCare. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer used his official Twitter account to disseminate a blog by Think Progress blaming the woman&#8217;s insurance company for pulling out of the California market, rather than the reality that ObamaCare itself prompted the move.</p>
<p>Remarkably, Obama himself used market turnover as his rationale for contending he never lied to the American public. “People are acting like this is some new phenomenon… every year there was churn in this individual market,” he told his supporters Monday night. “We decided we need to build something better, no matter how hard it is.”</p>
<p>And no matter how much lying it takes to get there. It remains to be seen if this is the final straw for the American public. The latest Gallup <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Job-Approval.aspx">poll</a> shows Obama&#8217;s approval ratings have fallen below 40 percent. &#8220;Obama has rebranded himself as a liar, forever. He will carry this new label to his grave,&#8221; <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/11/02/how-obama-crossed-the-line-from-bulls-t-to-dishonesty/">writes</a> the <i>NY Post&#8217;s</i> Kyle Smith. It is a new label that will be heavily reinforced by a critical mass of videotaped statements, <i>none</i> of which contain any mention of his new “if it hasn’t changed” qualifier&#8211;along with one cancelled policy after another, affecting millions.</p>
<p>Yet the true measure of this president comes down to one immutable reality. Faced with a choice of admitting he lied and apologizing to the public, or doubling down on thoroughly documented lie, he chose to double down. There&#8217;s only one reason he would do that: because he thinks he can get away with it. If he&#8217;s right, this nation truly has been &#8220;fundamentally transformed.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Don’t miss this week’s <em>Glazov Gang</em>, which exposes <em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/">ObamaCare&#8217;s Dirty Little Secret</a></em>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Sebelius&#8217;s Big Day of Big Lies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/sebeliuss-big-day-of-big-lies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sebeliuss-big-day-of-big-lies</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2013 04:50:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[President Obama was never dishonest with the American people? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/kathleen-sebelius-to-congress-whatever.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209154" alt="kathleen-sebelius-to-congress-whatever" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/kathleen-sebelius-to-congress-whatever-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Those Americans who watched Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius&#8217;s testimony yesterday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee might be forgiven for thinking they were in an alternate universe. Despite her assertion that Americans <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/30/sebelius-health-care-house-hearing/3308771/">should</a> &#8220;hold me accountable&#8221; for the ongoing debacle, Sebelius later claimed she was never warned by anyone that the scheduled roll out of the <a href="http://Healthcare.gov/">Healthcare.gov</a> website would be the disaster it turned out to be. Furthermore, she stood by the assertion that the president has been &#8220;keeping his promise&#8221; with regard to the idea that Americans who liked their insurance policies could keep them. Fittingly, <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/10/30/sebelius-on-whether-obama-is-responsible-for-obamacare-whatever-n1733368">during</a> the entire three and a half hours the Secretary testified, the <a href="http://Healthcare.gov/">Healthcare.gov</a> website was down.</p>
<p>Sebelius&#8217;s contention that she was not warned of the problems with the website is a lie. CNN <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/29/politics/obamacare-warning/index.html">reveals</a> they obtained a confidential report showing that while website creator CGI executives were publicly testifying about achieving milestones, they warned the administration a month before the launch that there were &#8220;a number of open risks and issues&#8221; associated with the website.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly, Americans are far more interested in the far bigger lie perpetrated by this administration, highlighted by the <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/sebelius-denies-obama-broke-promise-that-americans-can-keep-current-insurance">exchange</a> between Sebelius and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). “Before, during and after the law was passed the president kept saying if you like your health care plan, you can keep it, so is he keeping his promise?” asked Blackburn. “Yes, he is,” Sebelius replied. When Blackburn noted the reality that 300,000 people in Florida and 28,000 in Tennessee had their policies terminated, Sebelius contended that &#8220;they can get health insurance.&#8221;</p>
<p>The president didn’t promise people they could <i>get</i> health insurance. &#8220;No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you&#8217;ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,&#8221; Obama <a href="http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2013/10/30/gop_says_obama_broke_health_care.htm">said</a> in remarks made to the American Medical Association in 2009.</p>
<p>In 2010, after the law&#8217;s enactment, Obama <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/30/obamas-pledge-that-no-one-will-take-away-your-health-plan/?hpid=z1">made</a> the same promise. “And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.” he said.</p>
<p>Nothing <a href="http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/28/21213547-obama-admin-knew-millions-could-not-keep-their-health-insurance?lite">changed</a> in 2012. “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance,” reiterated Obama.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, it was Press Secretary Jay Carney&#8217;s turn when he <a href="http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/29/21237370-white-house-president-didnt-mislead-on-insurance-promise">claimed</a> the president &#8220;was clear about a basic fact. If you had insurance that you liked on the individual market, and you wanted to keep that insurance…you could,” he contended. The <a href="http://Whitehouse.gov/">Whitehouse.gov</a> website made the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/healthreform/healthcare-overview">same</a> assertion as recently as <i>yesterday.</i> &#8220;If you like your plan you can keep it and you don’t have to change a thing due to the health care law.&#8221;</p>
<p>As NBC News <a href="http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/28/21213547-obama-admin-knew-millions-could-not-keep-their-health-insurance?lite">reports,</a> the Obama administration knew as early as 2010 that assertion was a lie. Despite promising that some insurance policies in non-compliance with the current law would be &#8220;grandfathered&#8221; into the bill, the Department of Health and Human Services tightened the provisions for that grandfathering three months <i>after</i> the bill&#8217;s passage. If any part of a policy was significantly changed, such as a deductible or copay, it no longer qualified for grandfather status.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/30/obamas-pledge-that-no-one-will-take-away-your-health-plan/?hpid=z1">According</a> to the <i>Washington Post</i>, &#8220;significant&#8221; meant as little as a $5.00 change in one&#8217;s copay, &#8220;plus the medical cost of inflation&#8221; (which would have been $5.20 based on last year&#8217;s inflation rate of 4 percent), or <i>any</i> increase in the coinsurance rate above what it was when the law went into effect on March 23, 2010. Moreover, in the bill itself, there was a statement noting that the normal turnover in the insurance market would cause “40 to 67 percent” of customers to lose their policies.</p>
<p>Despite this reality, Sebelius essentially <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/politics/obamacare-sebelius/">testified</a> the American public was not only aware of these technical changes, but that they represented a &#8220;wide corridor&#8221; allowing Americans to keep their existing policies. Thus, contended Sebelius, the president was being truthful.</p>
<p>The <i>Post</i> inadvertently reveals the utter absurdity of that contention, noting that those technical changes Sebelius cites are contained in Vol. 75 of the <a href="https://webapps.dol.gov/federalregister/PdfDisplay.aspx?DocId=23967">Federal Register</a>, dated June 17, 2010, three months after the bill was passed, and the regulations themselves are listed on pages <i>34,560 through 34,562.</i></p>
<p>At a later point in her testimony, Sebelius contradicted herself, conceding that Americans remain largely uninformed about the healthcare bill, heartily <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/melanie-hunter/congressman-obamacare-can-save-me-money-subsidizing-my-33-yr-old-son">agreeing</a> with Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) that a &#8220;real marketing campaign&#8221; was necessary to make sure Americans, especially the young who must sign up to keep the system viable, get better informed about the healthcare website.</p>
<p>Doyle was at least affable. Most of his Democratic colleagues were far more interested in praising and protecting Sebelius, as well as castigating Republicans, than getting answers about the problems plaguing the roll out of the program. Republicans were alternately accused of &#8220;sabotaging the bill,&#8221; &#8220;rooting for failure,&#8221; and being on &#8220;the wrong side of history.&#8221; Democrats further extolled the virtues of ObamaCare, and the great benefits it was providing to millions of Americans, even as Sebelius steadfastly refused to release any figures regarding the number of people who have actually signed up for insurance. When asked if the administration would lift a gag order and allow insurance companies to provide those numbers to the public, Sebelius said no.</p>
<p>One of the more pointed <a href="http://freedomslighthouse.net/2013/10/30/gop-rep-mike-rogers-during-sebelius-testimony-obamacare-website-not-secure-will-you-shut-down-the-system-for-end-to-end-security-tests-video-103013/">exchanges</a> occurred between Sebelius and Rep. Mike Rodgers (R-MI). Addressing security issues with the website, Rodgers got Sebelius to admit that she did not know whether or not each code fix being added to the website was tested for security. Sebelius insisted that security is &#8220;an ongoing operation,&#8221; yet when Rodgers asked if the system had been tested &#8220;end to end,&#8221; Sebelius didn&#8217;t know the answer.</p>
<p>Rodgers did. He had documentation stating that the website would be rolled out despite the fact that security was only partially completed and that &#8220;this constitutes a risk that must be accepted before the marketplace day one operations.&#8221; Rodgers was incensed. &#8220;You accepted a risk on behalf of every user of this computer that put their personal financial information at risk, because you did not have even the most basic end-to-end test on the security of this system,&#8221; he said. When Rodgers asked if Sebelius would commit to shutting down the system until an end-to-end test of security was conducted she declined, and insisted that ongoing testing is underway. In other words, no end-to-end test has been conducted, and Americans’ confidential information remains at risk &#8212; all of which is apparently fine with Sebelius.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is fine because Sebelius has her own healthcare plan, a point <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/30/sebelius-rejects-enrolling-obamacare-exchanges/">emphasized</a> by Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO). He told Sebelius that he had rejected the Cadillac coverage offered Congress, and enrolled in a plan in the individual market, only to discover that plan was being discontinued due to ObamaCare. He asked the Secretary why she hadn&#8217;t subjected herself to a similar experience, drawing the only applause during the entire hearing. Sebelius claimed she wasn&#8217;t eligible, because she was covered by her employer.</p>
<p>The <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/30/sebelius-said-it-would-be-illegal-for-her-to-buy-obamacare-thats-not-quite-right/">discovered</a> that Sebelius was wrong. She could get coverage, but it wouldn&#8217;t be as good as the deal as she gets now. After further challenges by other Republicans, Sebelius <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/kathleen-sebelius-hot-mic-dont-do-this-to-me-obamacare-testimony-2013-10">contended</a> she would “gladly join the exchange” if she didn’t already have her federal plan.</p>
<p>In other words, she can, but she won&#8217;t.</p>
<p>With help from Democrats, the Secretary repeatedly extolled the virtues of ObamaCare, noting that even those who are losing their current insurance will be getting a better, more comprehensive product instead. That has been the fallback answer for this administration, even as it has been revealed that <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57609737/obamacare-more-than-2-million-people-getting-booted-from-existing-health-insurance-plans/">more</a> than two million Americans are losing their current healthcare plans, a total more than <i>triple</i> the number signing up for ObamaCare. &#8220;What we&#8217;re seeing now is reality coming into play,&#8221; said industry expert Larry Levitt, of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Many Americans are unaware that this is occurring because ObamaCare mandates 10 minimum standards, whether Americans need a particular kind of coverage or not.</p>
<p>Representative Renee Ellmers (R-NC) <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/362627/gop-rep-asks-sebelius-why-single-men-need-maternity-coverage-andrew-johnson">drove</a> that point home at the hearing, noting that some single men have to have maternity coverage included in their policy. Sebelius stated that this was necessary because &#8220;an insurance policy has a series of benefits whether you use them or not.&#8221; Thus, those buying insurance must pay for coverage they will never use, so other people can have coverage. In other words, in addition to taxpayer subsidies included in ObamaCare, those buying insurance are also subsidizing other insurance purchasers.</p>
<p>During the course of the hearing, Sebelius promised the website would be completely operational by November 30, but admitted there are no fallback options for those who have lost their insurance, even if they are unable to sign up for a new policy before their current one runs out.</p>
<p>As far as Sebelius taking responsibility for the current failure of the website, one should remember a similar statement was made by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with regard to Benghazi. Clinton&#8217;s acceptance of responsibility amounted to exactly nothing. Since Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest <a href="http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/10/30/obama-complete-confidence-sebelius/">announced</a> late yesterday afternoon that the &#8220;President has complete confidence in Secretary Sebelius,&#8221; she is likely to &#8220;suffer&#8221; the same fate.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, as is always the case with this administration and their media sycophants, the real action on healthcare is occurring largely under the radar. While Americans are having difficulty keeping old policies or buying new ones, Medicaid enrollment&#8211;as in enrollment in a single payer government run healthcare program&#8211;is <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505267_162-57609254/medicaid-enrollment-spike-a-threat-to-obamacare-structure/">exploding</a>. The numbers are stark. In Washington, 87 percent of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled in the healthcare system signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, it was 82 percent of 26,000 new enrollments, and New York, Medicaid accounts for 64 percent of that state’s 37,000 new enrollments. &#8220;Medicaid experts say they&#8217;re not sure why they&#8217;re seeing the lopsided enrollment numbers, but point out it&#8217;s easier to enroll in Medicaid than private insurance,&#8221; reports CBS, apparently oblivious to obvious correlation.</p>
<p>What some Americans are <i>not</i> oblivious to is the threat this represents. &#8220;Either the private insurance enrollments come up somewhere around the expected amount or there&#8217;s going to be a problem. &#8230; You need a volume and you need a mix of people that are healthy as well as high users in private insurance, in order to have it be sustainable,&#8221; said Gail Wilensky, a former Medicaid director.</p>
<p>What Americans need to ask themselves is this: is the chaos surrounding the implementation of the healthcare bill, coupled with the explosion of Medicaid enrollments enabled by the same bill, happening by accident or design? “My commitment is to make sure that we’ve got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as President,&#8221; <a href="http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/time-choosing/2013/oct/25/obama-has-failed-designing-system-was-intended-fai/">said</a> Barack Obama in 2007, at an SEIU union Healthcare Forum. Obama envisioned a 10 to 15 year rollout, and some critics contend the current ineptitude is happening too fast for Americans to swallow a wholesale transition to single-payer government run healthcare.</p>
<p>Yet millions of people losing healthcare coverage, with dim prospects of finding affordable alternatives at this moment in time, could conceivably alter that equation. If there is one thing the massive expansion of the welfare state has proven, it is the reality that a record-breaking number of Americans are willing to be subsidized by their fellow Americans. Furthermore, demonizing private insurance companies that many Americans already hold in contempt, to the point where they would be driven into bankruptcy, is certainly not unimaginable. The president did his part yesterday <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/30/obama-blames-bad-apple-insurers-for-canceled-insurance-plans/">blaming</a> “bad apple” insurance companies for canceling plans.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Americans, the demonization may amount to little more than piling on: there is a good possibility the quality of current enrollment is already producing a death spiral in the industry.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has promised to reveal the number of enrollees in the new system the middle of next month. It could be one of the more historic announcements in recent history, as Americans will likely discover just how much of Barack Obama&#8217;s promise to &#8220;fundamentally transform the United States of America&#8221; has been realized. In the meantime, Sebelius and company will ostensibly be trying to &#8220;fix&#8221; the current system. The fix as they say, may already be in.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>What Did Nixon Do?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/what-did-nixon-do/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-did-nixon-do</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/what-did-nixon-do/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 May 2013 04:27:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[enemies list]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Impeachment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[power]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Reflecting on a Republican president oversold as a villain -- and Obama's vastly more scandalous misdeeds.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NixonObama_ReutersAP_0513_660.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-191073" alt="NixonObama_ReutersAP_0513_660" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NixonObama_ReutersAP_0513_660-450x273.jpg" width="270" height="164" /></a>Although Richard Nixon left office under a cloud for trying to subvert the democratic process for his own political advantage, Barack Obama&#8217;s behavior has been far more serious in its corruption and blatant attempts to manipulate the electoral process by unethical and unconstitutional means.</p>
<p>Nixon, bad as he may have been, has been oversold as a villain. He serves as a convenient bogeyman for left-wing historians and journalists to spew self-serving narratives in which they paint him as a devil and themselves as victims. It would, therefore, do well to review some of the facts of what really transpired in the Nixon presidency and how they stack up against Obama&#8217;s unprecedented malfeasance:</p>
<p>First, the much-vaunted &#8220;enemies list&#8221; that was maintained by Nixon is more the stuff of myth than underhanded politics. In his 1979 book, <em>Blind Ambition</em>, Nixon White House counsel John Dean explained that the list consisted merely of names of individuals not welcome at White House functions. White House chief of staff H.R. &#8220;Bob&#8221; Haldeman singled out about 20 people on the list for IRS audits and other official torments, “but no action had been taken as far as I knew,” Dean wrote.</p>
<p>So what did President Nixon actually do?</p>
<p>In his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) concluded that the purpose of the series of acts that collectively constituted Watergate was “[t]o destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.”</p>
<p>As Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the original Watergate story, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/woodward-and-bernstein-40-years-after-watergate-nixon-was-far-worse-than-we-thought/2012/06/08/gJQAlsi0NV_story.html" target="_blank">wrote</a> last year, &#8220;At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nixon and his aides, Ervin said, had “a lust for political power” that “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”</p>
<p>The three articles of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 <a href="http://watergate.info/impeachment/articles-of-impeachment" target="_blank">accused</a> Nixon of violating &#8220;his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.&#8221;</p>
<p>The first article of impeachment referenced the June 17, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters then located in the Watergate office complex in the nation’s capital. Ahead of the approaching November election, the five burglars&#8217; purpose was &#8220;securing political intelligence.&#8221;</p>
<p>After the break-in, Nixon used</p>
<blockquote><p>the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although Nixon had apparently not been aware of or authorized the DNC break-in before it was carried out, audio tapes made by the president&#8217;s secret recording system revealed that he attempted to cover up the incident and other illegal activities that had taken place during his administration. After extensive litigation the Supreme Court unanimously held that the president had to produce the recordings for investigators. He complied.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/obamas-irs-gate/" target="_blank">second article of impeachment</a> against Nixon detailed how he allegedly used the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies and their employees against those he perceived as his political enemies.</p>
<p>According to the impeachment resolution, Nixon used the IRS to obtain</p>
<blockquote><p>confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although Nixon reportedly <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/14/anger-over-irs-audits-of-conservatives-anchored-in-long-history-of-abuse/#ixzz2USjzufuf" target="_blank">encouraged</a> a clandestine IRS program called the “Special Services Staff” to probe his political adversaries and plague them with audits, the tax-collection agency&#8217;s bark at the time was apparently worse than its bite insofar as Democrats were concerned.</p>
<p>Nixon endorsed but then quickly <a href="http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=tom_charles_huston_1" target="_blank">backed away</a> from an ambitious crackdown on left-wing organizations urged by his aide, Tom Charles Huston. Nixon approved Huston&#8217;s plan on July 14, 1970 but by July 27 he had changed his mind and rescinded approval for it after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover voiced objections.</p>
<p>Huston later lamented that dealing with the IRS was fraught with peril. “Making sensitive political inquiries at the IRS is about as safe a procedure as trusting a whore,” since the Nixon administration at the time had no “reliable political friends at IRS.”</p>
<p>Later in September 1971 Nixon ordered White House aide John Ehrlichman to direct the IRS to look into the tax returns of all those thought to be seeking the 1972 Democratic presidential nod, including Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).</p>
<p>“Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon said. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”</p>
<p>Nominated as IRS commissioner by Nixon, Johnnie Mac Walters headed the IRS from Aug. 6, 1971, to April 30, 1973. Nixon White House counsel John Dean gave Walters an envelope containing the names of about 200 prominent Democrats to harass.</p>
<p>Walters refused to target the individuals. “The story is interesting because the IRS wouldn’t do it,” <a href="http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20130526/NEWS/305260011/Defying-president?gcheck=1" target="_blank">said</a> Tim Naftali, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “It didn’t happen, not because the White House didn’t want it to happen, but because people like Johnnie Walters said ‘no.’”</p>
<p>Contrast Walters with left-wing bureaucrat Lois Lerner, head of the tax exempt organizations division at the IRS, who apparently did the Obama administration&#8217;s bidding, harassing conservative groups and funders. Lerner testified before Congress last week and after ostentatiously protesting her innocence invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to continue testifying.</p>
<p>Returning to Nixon, even if he had used the IRS in the way described in the second article of impeachment, he was simply doing what presidents had done for the previous 40 years. This is not to excuse Nixon&#8217;s behavior, but it hardly seems fair to single him out for doing what had long been the norm in Washington.</p>
<p>The first known instance of an administration snooping around in its enemies&#8217; tax records for intelligence purposes happened during the presidency of Republican Herbert Hoover (1929-33). FBI director J. Edgar Hoover tried to dig up dirt on a conservative group called the Navy League. He found nothing.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, even if the FBI chief had found anything, his actions were apparently not unlawful. The &#8220;confused drafting&#8221; of a section in a 1910 appropriations act &#8220;actually authorized presidents to use tax records any way they saw fit,&#8221; writes author David Burnham. The law stated tax records &#8220;were to be open for inspection &#8216;only upon the order of the President under rules and regulations to be prescribed by the Secretary of the Treasury and approved by the president.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>The loophole was closed only after the Watergate scandal. &#8220;Partly because of the curious wording of what really was an open records law, few Americans have understood that, from 1910 until 1976, the IRS routinely made tax information available to almost any federal or state agency that requested it.&#8221; (A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS, by David Burnham, Random House, 1989, p.228)</p>
<p>What may have been unethical in Nixon&#8217;s day, is clearly illegal in the Obama era. Presumably Obama, conversant as he is in the law, knows this.</p>
<p>The third article of impeachment accused Nixon of obstructing the congressional investigation into his administration&#8217;s conduct. It stated that he &#8220;failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued&#8221; by the House Judiciary Committee and &#8220;willfully disobeyed such subpoenas.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nixon did in fact refuse to comply with congressional demands and went out of his way to hinder investigations into his misconduct. Facing seemingly certain impeachment in the House and removal from office after a trial by the Senate, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.</p>
<p>Now what has President Obama done?</p>
<p>Obama may not stand accused of breaking into his enemies&#8217; offices to gain an unfair electoral advantage, but he has engaged in tactics aimed at unfairly suppressing the Republican vote.</p>
<p>Under Obama, the Department of Justice gave free rein to ACORN and similar left-wing voter fraud factories, refusing to investigate their many wrongdoings. DoJ let the New Black Panther Party off scot-free for physically intimidating Philadelphia voters.</p>
<p>The Obama administration appeared to violate the civil rights of nearly 200,000 U.S. soldiers around the world by deliberately <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/obama’s-military-voter-suppression-campaign/" target="_blank">disenfranchising</a> them because they tend to vote Republican. Although the administration has moved with lightning speed to attack desperately needed state voter identification laws, last year it seemed barely aware of its obligations under the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2009.</p>
<p>The law was created to help deployed soldiers, many of whom are constantly on the move, to exercise the right to vote that they fight to protect. The law requires the Pentagon to create an “installation voting assistance office,” or IVAO, for every military base close to a combat zone.</p>
<p>IVAOs are supposed to help military personnel navigate the labyrinth of often confusing voting rules of the nation’s 55 states and territories. But IVAOs can’t help anybody vote if they don’t exist. As of September last year, in half of the 229 overseas military installations Obama&#8217;s Department of Defense hadn’t even bothered to set up the IVAO facilities that the law mandated.</p>
<p>Obama’s IRS targeted conservative “social welfare” nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status under section 501c4 of the Internal Revenue Code. Evidence establishes that hundreds of groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement were bullied and intimidated from engaging in constitutionally protected political activism. Some conservative groups were made to wait years for a tax-exempt status determination while the Barack H. Obama Foundation and various liberal groups sailed through the process at breakneck speed.</p>
<p>Who knows how many people failed to donate or become active in those right-leaning groups and what impact this IRS skulduggery had on Republican voter turnout last November.</p>
<p>As commentator Michael Barone observes, the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal “were both about winning elections under false pretenses.”</p>
<p>With Benghazi, “[a] deliberate effort to mislead the voters was launched,” Barone writes. “Clinton, White House press secretary Jay Carney, and the president himself talked about a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video — even though no evidence of that came from Benghazi.” The CIA’s talking points on Benghazi were manipulated by the White House and the Department of State, and Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice was wheeled out to peddle the lies on television.</p>
<p>“This attempt to mislead the electorate worked,” Barone concludes. “It seems a stretch to say that it determined the outcome of the election. But it certainly helped the Obama campaign.”</p>
<p>Obama created a grotesque system of unaccountable federal &#8220;czars&#8221; overseeing vast swaths of U.S. government policy without being confirmed by the Senate, as the Constitution requires.</p>
<p>Obama invaded Libya without congressional authorization and on a flimsy pretext. He unconstitutionally recess-appointed Richard Cordray as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He refused to enforce the provisions of the presumptively constitutional Defense of Marriage Act.</p>
<p>In the Fast and Furious scandal, Obama supplied Mexican drug cartels with guns to encourage a wave of violence that would create a public clamor for tougher gun regulations. Hundreds of Mexicans and a U.S. border patrolman died as a result. Attorney General Eric Holder has been cited with contempt of Congress for failing to cooperate with the congressional investigation of the scandal.</p>
<p>Obama has used executive fiat to illegally gut a workfare law and give certain illegal immigrants blanket amnesty. The president also rigged the GM and Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings to unfairly enrich his friends in the United Auto Workers at the expense of higher-priority creditors such as bondholders and suppliers.</p>
<p>Then there is the still-developing scandal surrounding the surreptitious confiscation of telephone records from the Associated Press, a direct assault on the First Amendment. The U.S. Department of Justice secretly procured two months’ worth of telephone logs for journalists at AP, the world’s largest news-gathering organization. Apparently the records were seized as part of an investigation into national security-related leaks.</p>
<p>The administration is also investigating Fox News reporter James Rosen for daring to report what intelligence sources told him about North Korea.</p>
<p>Obama has also done many things that are at least arguably impeachable and are definitely radically un-presidential.</p>
<p>Obama has been particularly aggressive on the propaganda front. His White House asked Americans to report their neighbors who were opposed to Obamacare to the email address of <a href="mailto:flag@whitehouse.gov" target="_blank">flag@whitehouse.gov</a>. In the National Endowment for the Arts <a href="http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/85512/" target="_blank">scandal</a>, Obama used federal taxpayer resources to press artists to create art to advance his political agenda.</p>
<p>Obama has undermined trust in the justice system by trying to intervene on behalf of his personal friend, Harvard law professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. In 2009 after admitting he didn&#8217;t know all the facts of the case, Obama said the Cambridge, Mass., &#8220;police acted stupidly&#8221; in arresting Gates when they investigated a reported break-in at his home. Obama injected race into the situation by offering that &#8220;separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-American and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.&#8221;</p>
<p>After the <em>Citizens United</em> decision opened the door to corporate campaign contributions, Obama gave speeches belittling and browbeating the Supreme Court. He even did so in the presence of Supreme Court members.</p>
<p>President Obama may yet live to regret these remarks. If he is impeached in the House and tried in the Senate, the trial will be presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Welcome to Obamastan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/melanie-phillips/welcome-to-obamastan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welcome-to-obamastan</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/melanie-phillips/welcome-to-obamastan/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 04:44:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Melanie Phillips]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Stevens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hearing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189204</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A world in which America no longer protects human freedom and Islamist tyrants rule. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Benghazi-attack.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189242" alt="Benghazi-attack" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Benghazi-attack-450x337.png" width="270" height="202" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.melaniephillips.com/obamastan">MelaniePhillips.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Fort Hood, Benghazi, the Boston bombings, Iran/Syria, Israel. The pattern is unmistakeable; the danger to America is exponentially increasing; the scandal is deepening into something nearer to a national crisis.</p>
<p>The Obama administration is playing down the Islamist threat to the US and the free world, empowering Islamists at home and abroad, endangering America and betraying its allies &#8212; and covering up its egregious failure to protect the homeland as a result of all the above, while instead blaming America for its own victimisation.</p>
<p>What is coming out in the Benghazi hearings would be jaw-dropping if it had not been apparent from the get-go that the administration failed to protect its own people in the beseiged American mission where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff were murdered in 2012, then lied about the fact that this was an Islamist attack, and then covered up both its failure and its lie. (Apparent, that is, to some &#8212; but not to the American media, most of which gave the Obama administration a free pass on the scandal in order to ensure the smooth re-election of The One).</p>
<p>But the administration has form on this &#8212; serious, continuing form. After the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, in which an Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas shouting ‘Allahu akhbar’, not only was it revealed that his radicalisation and extremist links had been ignored but the Department of Defense and federal law enforcement agencies classified the shootings merely as an act of ‘workplace violence’.</p>
<p>Weeks after the Boston marathon terrorist atrocity, there is still no explanation of why the FBI did not act against the Tsarnaev brothers, despite having had one of them on their books as a dangerous Islamic radical after a warning from Russian intelligence; and why, as the House Homeland Security Committee <a href="http://homeland.house.gov/press-release/hearing-confirms-information-not-shared-boston-police-prior-marathon-bombings">heard yesterday</a>, the FBI didn’t pass on their suspicions about the brothers to the Boston police.</p>
<p>Even now, the US authorities are playing down or even dismissing  Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremist Islamic views. Whether or not the brothers had links to foreign extremists is still unclear. But what is bizarre is the authorities’ belief that if they did not have any such links, they cannot have had any religious motive.</p>
<p>Despite evidence such as Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s outbursts at a Boston mosque, where he denounced clerics&#8217; references to Thanksgiving and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as ‘contrary to Islam’, the brothers were described by Philip Mudd, the former Deputy Director of National Security at the FBI and the former Deputy Director of the Counterterrorist Centre for the CIA, as merely ‘angry kids’. Mudd <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-25/charlie-rose-talks-to-philip-mudd">told Charlie Rose</a>:</p>
<p>‘They may be disenfranchised. They may have had a bad experience at school. They may not have friends, and they say, “Look, we want to do something.” This tactic of terrorism is a tactic of the 21st century.<b> </b>I don’t necessarily think these are real jihadi terrorists. I think they’re angry kids.’</p>
<p>You really do have to pinch yourself. How in heaven’s name can a guy like Mudd, with his background in so-called intelligence, possibly come up with anything quite so stupendously shallow? It is precisely such angry, isolated, disturbed kids who are vulnerable to Islamist preachers who target, groom and manipulate them &#8212; whether in person or through the internet &#8212; to believe that ‘Islam is the answer’ and that they are its soldiers engaged in holy war against the unbelievers.</p>
<p>The wilful and perverse refusal to acknowledge the religious nature of this holy war &#8212; and worse, to lay the blame for such terrorism on the the society that is its victim &#8212; is what lies behind the Benghazi scandal.</p>
<p>The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings this week produced testimony from Gregory Hicks, the former deputy to the murdered Ambassador Stevens, that was simply devastating for the Obama administration and its former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton &#8212; who infamously erupted, under questioning last January about the nature of the attack,</p>
<p>‘What difference, at this point, does it make?’</p>
<p>Well, Mr Hicks has started to provide the answer. Despite repeated calls for more security to combat the clear threat of jihadi attack on the US mission, Mrs Clinton’s State Department had farmed out its security to none other than a jihadist group. When the fatal attack started, Mr Hicks vainly appealed for fighter jets to buzz the besieged compound. As<a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/article3759503.ece"> the Times (£)</a> reported:</p>
<p>‘When a team of four special forces troops were about to leave Tripoli, at Mr Hicks&#8217;s request, their leader had to stand them down because he was not cleared by senior military chiefs to travel. Mr Hicks said the furious officer told him: “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has shown more balls than someone in the military.”’</p>
<p>Disingenuously, the Pentagon says in response that no forces could have arrived in time to mount a rescue. But there was more lethal testimony from Mr Hicks.</p>
<p>After the attack, the Obama administration claimed that it had resulted from a protest that had got out of hand over an anti-islam YouTube video. But Mr Hicks testified that it was known from the start that it was a jihadi attack which had nothing to do with that video. The <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324244304578471361393154072.html">Wall Street Journal reported</a>:</p>
<p>‘Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli, recalled his last conversation with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who told him, &#8220;Greg, we&#8217;re under attack.&#8221; Mr. Hicks said he knew then that Islamists were behind the assault. In other words, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice&#8217;s public claim at the time that an anti-Islam YouTube video spurred the assault was known inside the government to be false when she and White House spokesman Jay Carney said it.</p>
<p>‘Mr. Hicks said he briefed Mrs. Clinton that night, yet the father of victim Tyrone Woods says she later told him that the YouTube video maker would be “prosecuted and arrested” as if he were responsible for Benghazi. Stranger still, Mr. Hicks says Mrs. Clinton&#8217;s then chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered him not to give solo interviews about the attack to a visiting Congressional delegation.’</p>
<p>Mr Hicks further claims that he was instructed by officials not to talk to congressional investigators, and then demoted after he asked why senior Clinton aides had blamed the attack on a video protest. Again, officials have denied his claim of demotion. But the cat is now out of the bag. The Times (£) <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/article3759503.ece">reports</a> that an e-mail has surfaced  revealing that senior State Department figures — including Ms Clinton — knew within 24 hours that the group responsible for the Benghazi attack was linked to Islamic terrorists.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, from the beginning of this affair there have also been persistent questions about quite what the US mission was actually doing in Benghazi. Now the Washington Times has <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/8/inside-the-ring-china-reins-in-north-korea/#ixzz2Spo2f3rx">reported this</a>:</p>
<p><b>‘</b>A U.S. intelligence official tells Inside the Ring that the hearing and congressional inquiries have failed to delve into what the official said is another major scandal: CIA covert arms shipments to Syrian rebels through Benghazi.</p>
<p>‘Separately, a second intelligence source said CIA operations in Libya were based on a presidential finding signed in March 2011 outlining covert support to the Libyans. This source said there were signs that some of the arms used in the Benghazi attack — assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades — ended up in the hands of the terrorists who carried out the Benghazi attack as a result of the CIA operation in Libya.</p>
<p>‘The unanswered questions — that appear unasked by most congressional investigators — include whether the CIA facility in Benghazi near the diplomatic compound and the contingent of agency officers working there played a role in the covert transfer through Turkey of captured Libyan weapons or personnel to rebels fighting the Bashar Assad regime in Syria.</p>
<p>‘“There was a ship that transported something to Turkey around the time Ambassador Chris Stevens met with a Turkish diplomat within hours of his murder,” the official said. “Was the president&#8217;s overt or covert policy to arm Syrian rebels?”’</p>
<p>Was it indeed. If it was, then Benghazi might turn out to be yet another and particularly terrible example of the damage Obama has wrought upon the security of America and the free world.</p>
<p>This is a President who, by persisting with the charade of negotiation with Iran over its race to manufacture its nuclear bomb, has allowed it to become the dominant power in the region.</p>
<p>That is why Iran’s puppet Assad, who has just accrued hundreds of Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists to help him win his bloody civil war, has been able to slaughter more than 80,000 Syrians and use chemical weapons against them &#8212; while Obama himself may have ineptly armed al Qaeda inside Syria. For the Washington Times<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/8/inside-the-ring-china-reins-in-north-korea/#ixzz2Spp27RpJ"> report</a> goes on:</p>
<p><b>‘</b>The official said congressional investigators need to ask whether the president indirectly or directly helped bolster al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Jabhat al-Nusrah front rebel group in Syria and whether the CIA ran guns and other weapons captured in Libya to the organization.</p>
<p>‘“Every troubling Middle East-Southwest Asia country — Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and now maybe Syria — where the Obama administration made a significant policy push has gone over to Islamists that are now much more hostile to the United States,” the official said.’</p>
<p>Precisely.</p>
<p>The Benghazi attack was not just appalling in itself; nor was there merely almost certainly a catastrophic failure by the Obama administration to protect its people, and then a mighty cover-up of that failure. Benghazi also serves as a symbol of America’s tragic abandonment, under the Obama administration, of its historic mission to protect life and liberty both in its own homeland and in the free world.</p>
<p>Welcome to Obamastan.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama &amp; Clinton&#8217;s Benghazi Lies Exposed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obama-clintons-benghazi-lies-exposed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-clintons-benghazi-lies-exposed</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Apr 2013 04:53:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[report]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187194</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New tell-all report unveils the administration's deceit. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/clinton-obama630.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187197" alt="clinton-obama630" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/clinton-obama630-450x320.jpg" width="315" height="224" /></a>A searing new <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_documents/130423_Libya-Progress-Report.pdf">Interim Progress Report</a> released by the GOP chairmen of five House committees reveals the disturbing extent of the Obama administration&#8217;s deceit and manipulation over the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. As the 43-page document details, not only was gross incompetence to blame for the success of the attack that cost four Americans their lives, but a concerted effort at the highest levels of government was undertaking to cover up the debacle, deceive the public and shield officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama, from responsibility.</p>
<p>Ranking Democrats on the same five committees, who said they were not included in writing the report, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/23/house-gop-administration-blew-benghazi-response/">dismissed</a> it as politically motivated. “You are sacrificing accuracy in favor of partisanship,” they said in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).</p>
<p>Hardly. Dividing the timeline into three sections &#8212; before, during and after the attack &#8212; the report paints a damning picture of the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, which knew &#8220;the threat environment in Benghazi was high and that the Benghazi compound was vulnerable and unable to withstand an attack, yet the Department continued to systematically withdraw security personnel.&#8221;</p>
<p>The smoking gun revealed in the report &#8212; contrary to Hillary Clinton&#8217;s congressional testimony that requests for additional security in Benghazi never reached her &#8212; was that &#8220;an April 2012 State Department cable bearing Secretary Hillary Clinton’s signature acknowledged then-Ambassador Cretz’s formal request for additional security assets but ordered the withdrawal of security elements to proceed as planned.&#8221; A Senate report, &#8220;Flashing Red: A Special Report on the Terrorist Attack at Benghazi,&#8221; released on December 31, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/31/politics/benghazi-senate-investigation">confirmed</a> the lack of security, citing &#8220;extremely poor security in a threat environment that was &#8216;flashing red.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>President Obama was blamed for the lack of security as well, in that he &#8220;failed to proactively anticipate the significance of September 11 and provide the Department of Defense with the authority to launch offensive operations beyond self-defense.&#8221; The report noted that the Intelligence Community was not to blame for anything, in that they &#8220;collected considerable information about the threats in the region, and disseminated regular assessments to senior U.S. officials warning of the deteriorating security environment in Benghazi, which included threats to American interests, facilities, and personnel.&#8221;</p>
<p>The 2013 report&#8217;s most scathing assessments concern the post-attack response by the Obama administration that &#8220;willfully perpetuated a deliberately misleading and incomplete narrative that the attacks evolved from a political demonstration caused by a YouTube video.&#8221; The report excoriated the administration&#8217;s so-called &#8220;talking points,&#8221; revealing that</p>
<blockquote><p>after a White House Deputies Meeting on Saturday, September 15, 2012, the Administration altered the talking points to remove references to the likely participation of Islamic extremists in the attacks&#8230; removed references to the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya, including information about at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi.</p></blockquote>
<p>Furthermore, the report states, &#8220;Senior State Department officials requested&#8211;and the White House approved&#8211;that the details of the threats, specifics of the previous attacks, and previous warnings be removed.”</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/2012/10/benghazi-timeline/">timeline</a> following the attack reveals a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign that began with the president, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice peddling the YouTube video story, even as government emails surfacing six weeks later revealed that both the State Department and the White House were told <i>during</i> the attack that terror group Ansar al-Sharia took credit for it. The video charade continued until September 19, when Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, became the first administration official to label Benghazi a terrorist attack, even as Obama continued to push the video lie a day later. On September 24, during a taping of &#8220;The View,&#8221; the president still refused to label Benghazi a terrorist attack. “We’re still doing an investigation,” he said.</p>
<p>As the facts became known, Clinton <a href="http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2012/10/199196.htm">blamed</a> &#8220;the fog of war&#8221; for her initial lies, while White House spokesman Jay Carney <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/10/10/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-10102012">claimed</a> the White House was giving out the best information it had at the time, but the information had “evolved.&#8221;</p>
<p>Other lies by the administration are also forcefully rebutted in the 2013 report, including claims that the talking points were altered to protect classified information of the FBI investigation, noting that the FBI itself  “approved a version of the talking points with significantly more information about the attacks and previous threats than the version that the State Department requested,&#8221; and that even &#8220;limited due diligence&#8221; of an Intelligence Committee (IC) report would have made it clear that &#8220;the situation was more complex than the narrative provided by Ambassador Susan Rice and others in the Administration.&#8221;</p>
<p>The final post-attack conclusions noted that the administration&#8217;s decision to conduct an FBI investigation, as opposed to one by military or other intelligence sources, &#8220;contributed to the government&#8217;s lack of candor&#8221; and &#8220;significantly delayed U.S. access to key witnesses and evidence and undermined the government’s ability to bring those responsible for the attacks to justice in a timely manner. &#8221;</p>
<p>That delay was underscored by the reality that 15 days after that attack, it was reported by CNN that the FBI was still <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/26/world/africa/libya-investigation">waiting</a> to get access to the area. That would be the same CNN that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/22/world/africa/libya-ambassador-journal">found</a> ambassador Christopher Stevens&#8217; journal on the floor of the unsecured compound &#8212; three days after the attack.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the White House pushed back Wednesday, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/24/white-house-clintons-signature-benghazi-cable-stan/">accusing</a> Republicans of creating a political distraction. White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden claimed that the report goes over old ground and that some of its conclusions conflict with those reached during an internal investigation conducted by the State Department itself. “The State Department’s Accountability Review Board&#8211;the independent body charged with reviewing the attacks and evaluating the interagency response&#8211;released its report which specifically found that the interagency response was ‘timely and appropriate’ and ‘helped save the lives of two severely wounded Americans,’ while also making important recommendations to improve security that we are in the process of implementing,” she said.</p>
<p>Hayden is, unfortunately for the Obama administration, misrepresenting reality. The thrust of the State Department’s Accountability Review Board’s report was completely different. &#8220;Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department &#8230; resulted in a special mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,&#8221; it said.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton supposedly <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/23/hillarys-opening-statement-on-benghazi-i-take-responsibility/">took</a> &#8220;full responsibility&#8221; for those deficiencies &#8211;responsibility <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/23/clinton-on-benghazi-story-confusion-what-difference-does-it-make-video/">best described</a> by Clinton herself in a testy exchange with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, when he accused her of blaming non-existent protests for the deaths of four Americans. “What difference at this point does it make?” Clinton asked.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the four officials ostensibly terminated because of their mistakes leading up to the attack <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/benghazi_penalties_are_bogus_ncP7RZx5uTIgDPbTp5WtoN?utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_content=International">remained</a> on the State Department payroll. And while spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Clinton “has accepted [Assistant Secretary of State] Eric Boswell’s decision to resign as assistant secretary for diplomatic security, effective immediately,” she neglected to mention that Boswell gave up only the presidential appointment as assistant secretary, not his other assignments. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) illuminated reality. “State Department officials proclaimed &#8230;that heads would roll&#8230;Now we see that the discipline is a lie and all that has happened is the shuffling of the deck chairs.”</p>
<p>White House spokesman Jay Carney defended Clinton, contending that her signature on the damning cable mentioned above was standard procedure for all diplomatic cables, essentially meaning that<i> any</i> State Department cable has the head of the Department&#8217;s signature on it. &#8220;In this way, Secretary Clinton and others before her signed hundreds of thousands of cables&#8221; as secretary, he said. &#8220;Efforts to politicize this have failed in the past and they are not helpful to the broad national security interests we share.&#8221; Neither is the fact that Carney is apparently suggesting that Clinton signed something she didn&#8217;t read, despite the deadly consequences that occurred as a result.</p>
<p>Regardless, the Republican chairmen weren&#8217;t buying it. &#8220;An April 19, 2012, cable bearing Secretary Clinton’s signature acknowledged requests for additional security, but nevertheless ordered the withdrawal of security assets to proceed as planned,” they said in a letter to the White House. “Given the gravity of this issue, we request that you immediately make the April 19, 2012, State Department cable public.” So far the White House has not responded.</p>
<p>Despite the stonewalling, House Republicans will press on. On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/04/24/new-benghazi-hearings-called-after-administration-whistleblowers-come-forward/">announced</a> that the investigation into Benghazi will continue next month. This part of the investigation is likely to become compelling, because it will include testimony from whistleblowers within the administration. “Next month, the Oversight Committee will convene a hearing on the Benghazi terrorist attacks to examine evidence that Obama Administration officials have attempted to suppress information about errors and reckless misjudgments,” said Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA). “The American people still don’t have the full truth about what happened both before and after the murders of four brave Americans.”</p>
<p>Adding fuel to Issa&#8217;s fire are the <a href="http://freebeacon.com/unsatisfactory-response/">allegations</a> made by former special ops forces that the revelations contained in the current report don&#8217;t go far enough, especially regarding why the administration seemingly abandoned its responsibility to protect those who came under attack. “As a former soldier it pains me to think that for hours upon hours and more hours they waited in vain for someone to come to their rescue,” retired Special Forces Col. Jamie Williamson told the <i>Washington</i> <i>Free Beacon. </i></p>
<p>Williamson is the cofounder of <a href="http://www.opsecteam.org/mission.html">OPSEC</a>, a non-profit organization that protects US special ops forces and intelligence operatives from &#8220;political exploitation and policies, and the misuse of classified information, that unnecessarily exposes them and their families to greater risk and reduces their effectiveness in keeping Americans safe.&#8221; The group is asking critical questions that remain unanswered, such as “why were no U.S. military assets immediately deployed in response?” and “why did the commander of Africom tell a member of Congress that he had available assets but was never given order to deploy them?”</p>
<p>In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 7, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/panetta-defends-military-response-libya-attack-150227323.html">insisted</a> assets could not have reached the scene in time. Yet Panetta and Dempsey were <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/22/facts-and-questions-about-what-happened-in-benghazi/">not alerted</a> about the attack until almost an hour after it began, and they didn&#8217;t raise the issue with Obama until their previously scheduled 5 p.m meeting, one hour and 18 minutes after the attack began. Moreover, Africom commander Carter Ham <a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/10/top-africom-leader-general-carter-ham-was-never-ordered-to-save-us-men-in-benghazi-video/">told</a> Rep. Jason Chaffetz he was never given the order to secure the consulate in Benghazi. And according to Fox News, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/1027/Benghazi-attack-Urgent-call-for-military-help-was-denied-by-chain-of-command">neither</a> was a Special Operations team in Sigonella, Italy, despite being only two hours from Benghazi.</p>
<p>OPSEC also illuminated another potential hazard for the administration, claiming that the 20-30 survivors of the attack have been intimidated into remaining silent. “They’re afraid and reasonably so,” said Williamson, who says his group has had direct contact with them. “It appears there has been overt or subtle intimidation and they’re afraid to come forward with their stories.”</p>
<p>A March 1 letter <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/middle-east-north-africa/288059-gop-may-subpoena-benghazi-survivors">sent</a> to Secretary of State John Kerry by Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Jim Gerlach (R-PA) demanded the names and contact information for “as many as 30” Americans that were injured in the attack “so that we can make appropriate arrangements.”</p>
<p>OPSEC and other like-minded organizations are calling for a Watergate-like select committee to investigate. Rep. Wolf has been the primary advocate for such a committee, and has garnered the support of 120 lawmakers who believe that such a committee, which would have the power to issue subpoenas compelling key officials to testify, is vitally necessary.</p>
<p>Four dead Americans, 20-30 survivors, and every other American frustrated with the media-abetted lying perpetrated by the Obama administration deserve nothing less. Those on the left who deride the effort to get to the bottom of this scandal have certainly demanded much more for far less serious transgressions. That they would reject the same effort here reveals a level of ideological bankruptcy and hypocrisy that is nothing short of appalling.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>AWOL</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bosch-fawstin/awol/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=awol</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Feb 2013 04:55:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bosch Fawstin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Cartoon Corner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[AWOL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bosch fawstin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hope]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[How can you inspire “HOPE” if you’re not even there?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;HOPE&#8221; was a lie, never more than for four Americans who were killed in Benghazi when Obama went AWOL. This is the first in a series of Obama/Benghazi AWOL cartoons I&#8217;ll be doing for Front Page.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bosch-fawstin/awol/awol-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-177086"><img class="aligncenter  wp-image-177086" title="awol" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/awol2.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="500" /></a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <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">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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