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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; national security</title>
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		<title>Hagel Ouster Won&#8217;t Solve the Obama Foreign Policy Crisis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/hagel-ouster-wont-solve-the-obama-foreign-policy-crisis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hagel-ouster-wont-solve-the-obama-foreign-policy-crisis</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:45:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hagel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[resignation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245965</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real problem remains in the White House. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/458110428-1024x682.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245966" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/458110428-1024x682-412x350.jpg" alt="458110428-1024x682" width="338" height="287" /></a>Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel has resigned his position under pressure from the Obama White House. According to one senior administration official, “He wasn’t up to the job.” Of course, if competence were the standard, President Obama himself should resign.</p>
<p>Hagel is being made the fall guy for Obama’s own national security failures, including not forcefully addressing the ISIS threat at a more opportune time to destroy ISIS. After all, it was Obama who derided the jihadist militants earlier this year as being akin to a junior varsity team.</p>
<p>Obama had precipitously pulled all American troops out of Iraq in 2011, against the advice of his military advisers, which helped create a vacuum filled by ISIS. Then he watched and did nothing while ISIS racked up victory after victory in Iraq during the last year, ignoring warnings from Iraqi government officials, U.S. intelligence and U.S. military leaders. Hagel added his own warning, declaring that ISIS represented an “imminent threat to every interest we have.”</p>
<p>Finally, in response to mounting criticism from home and abroad that he was showing no leadership while multiple global crises were exploding around him, President Obama first ordered air attacks on ISIS positions in Iraq while telegraphing to the enemy what he would not do. Then he expanded the air attacks to parts of Syria, while gradually increasing the number of U.S. troops he was willing to send back to Iraq, ostensibly to play a non-combat role.</p>
<p>Incredibly, senior administration officials are reported by the <i>New York Times</i> to have claimed, as justification for the pressure on Hagel to resign, that Hagel lacked the skills to deal with the ISIS threat. It was Obama – not Hagel – who had so recklessly minimized the ISIS threat in Iraq when it could have been dealt with more readily. And it was Obama – not Hagel – who admitted he had no strategy to deal with the ISIS threat in Syria. Hagel had his eyes open and saw the ISIS threat more clearly. Obama looked away as long as he could. But Hagel takes the fall.</p>
<p>President Obama chose Hagel for the Pentagon chief post in the first place to serve as the nominal Republican in his cabinet. Hagel also shared Obama’s skepticism about the Iraq War. Hagel’s combination of actual war experience as a Vietnam veteran and his cautiousness in committing American troops to vaguely defined missions suited Obama’s own inclinations. After having experienced the strongly opinionated Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, who went on to criticize the president in his memoir, Obama appears to have wanted someone he thought would focus more on internal management of the Pentagon than embroiling himself in national security policy debates.</p>
<p>Opposition to Hagel’s nomination among his former colleagues in the Senate and among some analysts stemmed in part from the remarks he has made about the Iraq War over the years and his evident anti-Israel bias. Questions were also raised about his overall fitness for the job. Hagel did himself no favors in that regard with his widely criticized poor performance during his Senate confirmation hearings. Nevertheless, Hagel was eventually confirmed as defense secretary by the Senate in a 58-41 vote.</p>
<p>During his relatively brief tenure, Hagel served as Obama’s manager of a diminishing U.S. military footprint. Hagel oversaw the draw-down of troops in Afghanistan that Obama had ordered, and began the process of looking for ways to trim the Pentagon’s budget.</p>
<p>However, on matters of national security and crafting responses to emerging threats such as ISIS, Hagel never made it into the inner circle of decision-makers in the Obama administration. He is reported to have remained mum during cabinet meetings, as he concluded that his advice was not being taken seriously by those who had the president’s ear. Hagel is said to have provided his advice to Obama in one-on-one phone calls, but he was still relegated to the outer periphery of influence on Obama’s final decisions.</p>
<p>While Hagel came across during his Senate confirmation hearings and in some public appearances since he became defense secretary as tentative and unsure of himself, he is no shrinking violet. He has at times expressed the kind of sharp-edged skepticism about the direction that the current president is taking the country’s military and national security that he displayed as a senator regarding former President George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq War.</p>
<p>For example, Hagel wrote a memo to National Security Adviser Susan Rice last month raising concerns about the administration’s Syria strategy, particularly how to best deal with Syrian President Bashar Assad while simultaneously fighting ISIS in Syria.</p>
<p>Rice is at the heart of Obama’s inner circle and does not take kindly to disagreements with her patron’s policies. “I guess I could be a testosterone-driven, territorial kind of personality in this role,” Rice was quoted by the <i>New York Times</i> last month as having said. “My view on this is that it’s an asset to have a partner down the hall.”</p>
<p>Hagel did not have that kind of access to the president. He had also been losing patience with what he regarded as interference on his own turf by an inexperienced White House national security team.</p>
<p>Said Senator John McCain, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee: “I know that Chuck was frustrated with aspects of the Administration’s national security policy and decision-making process. His predecessors have spoken about the excessive micro-management they faced from the White House and how that made it more difficult to do their jobs successfully. Chuck’s situation was no different.”</p>
<p>During an interview with Charlie Rose last week, Chuck Hagel’s frustration seemed to have boiled over. Hagel expressed concern about the military’s declining capability under President Obama’s watch.  “I am worried about it, I am concerned about it, Chairman Dempsey is, the chiefs are, every leader of this institution,” Hagel said, referring to the Pentagon. Then, in a not-too-subtle slap at the dithering that Obama brings to decision-making when a quick response from a capable and confident leader is required instead, Hagel added that “the main responsibility of any leader is to prepare your institution for the future. If you don’t do that, you’ve failed. I don’t care how good you are, how smart you are, any part of your job. If you don’t prepare your institution, you’ve failed.”</p>
<p>President Obama has displayed a thin skin time and time again. Truly believing that he is always the smartest person in the room, Obama wants yes-people around him. Hagel, for all his faults, did not fit that mold.</p>
<p>During a White House ceremony Monday at which Hagel’s resignation was officially announced, Obama said he and the defense secretary had determined it was an “appropriate time for him to complete his service.” Obama’s praise for Hagel as an “exemplary defense secretary” rings no truer than all of Obama’s other statements on a variety of topics. Hagel served as Obama’s scapegoat. Sadly, this president’s national security failures will continue.</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>Kerry: Global Warming World&#8217;s &#8216;Most Fearsome&#8217; Threat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/kerry-global-warming-worlds-most-fearsome-threat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kerry-global-warming-worlds-most-fearsome-threat</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 04:30:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ebola]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[threat]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243005</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the face of Ebola and ISIS, the Obama administration reveals its real priorities. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/132156075_21n1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/132156075_21n1-402x350.jpg" alt="132156075_21n" width="291" height="253" /></a>Speaking at the Wind Technology Testing Center in Boston Massachusetts on October 9<sup>th</sup>, the windsurfer and windbag-in-chief himself, Secretary of State John Kerry, pronounced that climate change, if left unaddressed, will result in the end of times: “Life as you know it on Earth ends,” Kerry said. Last February, Kerry claimed that climate change was the world’s &#8220;most fearsome&#8221; weapon of mass destruction. Not nuclear arms in the hands of the terrorist sponsoring regime of Iran or in the hands of ISIS or al Qaeda. Climate change is the real number #1 national security threat, according to Kerry.</p>
<p>Perhaps Kerry should take his head out of the clouds and take a hard look at the stark reality on earth that we are facing today. Think Ebola and global jihad for starts.</p>
<p>The World Health Organization called the Ebola outbreak &#8220;the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times.&#8221; The Ebola epidemic has already killed more than 4,000 people, mostly in the West Africa. But the Ebola virus has spread to other parts of the world, including the United States. A Liberian man who had traveled to the U.S. has already died of Ebola in a Texas hospital. Now we learn that a nurse who treated him at the hospital is infected herself with the virus.</p>
<p>As usual, the Obama administration is scrambling to deal with the crisis by holding lots of meetings and taking half-hearted measures. It has refused to heed calls by an increasing number of people, including a leading epidemiologist, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/06/epidemiologist-stop-the-flights-now/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">David Dausey</span></a>, who works on controlling pandemics and said that we must do “whatever it takes to keep infected people from coming here.” This should include an immediate ban on travel from the countries with the largest rates of infection to the United States. A majority of Americans agree, according to an NBC News online survey. Instead, the Obama administration is more worried about such bans being seen as racist and disrupting the economies of the affected countries in West Africa than protecting the American people and easing their fears.</p>
<p>“We don&#8217;t want to isolate parts of the world,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, earlier this month. John Kerry said that “we need borders to remain open,” while calling as usual for multilateral action by African nations to deal with the crisis. They are wrong. Except for vital medical supplies transported on military aircraft to help stem the further spread of the disease in West Africa, the borders should be closed. The breeding ground in West Africa for Ebola must be fully isolated lest the deadly disease turn into a global pandemic. To paraphrase John Kerry, an unchecked Ebola contagion will bring an end to many lives including possibly in the United States &#8211; a lot sooner than climate change.</p>
<p>ISIS is on the outskirts of Baghdad. It is also on the verge of capturing the key city of Kobani near the Turkish border. While apoplectic and apocalyptic all at the same time about climate change, Kerry sees the jihadist conquests as just part of the “ups” and “downs” there are “in any kind of conflict.” He has talked about so-called &#8220;climate refugees.&#8221; However, despite the threat of imminent ISIS conquest of Kobani and the flood of real refugees attempting to escape slaughter at the hands of the jihadists in Syria, Kerry said that the U.S. has other strategic objectives. “As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani, you have to step back and understand the strategic objective,” he remarked. Exactly what that strategic objective is, neither Kerry nor President Obama have been able to clearly explain.</p>
<p>Last month at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Kerry told reporters that the U.S. was getting all that it needed in the way of support from Turkey. But that was not true. Turkey has been dragging its feet ever since Kerry made that remark. Only in just the last several days has Turkey finally agreed to allow the use of its bases by coalition forces fighting against ISIS. Turkey still is preventing Kurds living in Turkey from joining their besieged Kurdish colleagues in Syria to save Kobani. And although Turkey is the NATO member most directly threatened on its border by ISIS, its Islamist government has not been willing to date to contribute any of its own ground troops to fight ISIS and prevent an invasion across its border. If Turkey is invaded by ISIS, will it expect the U.S. and other NATO members to come to its aid with air and ground combat forces under the collective security provisions of the NATO treaty?  What good is Turkey as a member of NATO and purported “ally” of the United States anyway so long as it is led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who shares ISIS’s supremacist Islamist ideology, if not its methods, and has his own caliphate ambitions?</p>
<p>As for what is happening in Iraq – a direct consequence of the Obama administration’s decision to pull all U.S. troops out of the country in 2011 against the advice of military and policy advisers – Kerry said that it is up to the Iraqis to deal with what Kerry himself acknowledged was “an existential threat” to their country. U.S. airstrikes remain too little too late. And military supplies for the Kurds in Iraq to use in serving as the boots in the ground against ISIS in Iraq continue to be supplied through Baghdad rather than directly to the Kurds themselves.</p>
<p>During this past week’s international donor conference in Cairo concerning Gaza reconstruction, Kerry said casually that “There will be ups and there will be downs over the next days as there are in any kind of conflict.” But the conflict with ISIS is not just “any kind of conflict.” And ISIS and its jihadist cohorts are no ordinary combatants with local territorial, political or economic grievances. They are the carriers of the global ideology of Islamic supremacism that threatens, again to paraphrase Kerry, to end life as we know it in a civilized world.</p>
<p>Next to the immediate threats posed by Ebola and global jihad, climate change pales by comparison.</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>Hold Obama and the Democrats Accountable for the Terrorist Threat</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/hold-obama-and-the-democrats-accountable-for-the-terrorist-threat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hold-obama-and-the-democrats-accountable-for-the-terrorist-threat</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2014 04:58:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terror]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War on Terror]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242531</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The urgency of indicting the Democratic Party for its dereliction of duty. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/140528-obama-west-point-mn-1155_a321bf5f75359e045403b1c5436f31aa.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242534" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/140528-obama-west-point-mn-1155_a321bf5f75359e045403b1c5436f31aa-438x350.jpg" alt="140528-obama-west-point-mn-1155_a321bf5f75359e045403b1c5436f31aa" width="327" height="261" /></a>Originally published at <a href="http://www.redstate.com/diary/DavidHorowitz/2014/10/06/hold-obama-democrats-accountable-terrorist-threat/">RedState.com</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Since 1945 Republicans have not won the popular vote unless national security was the primary issue. But security issues were virtually absent from the 2008 and 2012 elections. This gave victories to Barack Obama, the most anti-military president in American history. Fortunately, the prospects for 2016 are looking marginally better because Republicans are now actually focusing on the fact that an anti-military presidency has ominous consequences for the 300 million Americans whose safety is the primary responsibility of the commander-in-chief.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">That said, there is much to be desired in the Republican message, which is tepid, diffuse and easily missed. When Politico wrote a story about the recent change in Republican strategy it was all about the shift away from the tax-cutting emphasis of recent years, <a style="color: #b82026;" href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/republicans-shift-away-from-tax-cutting-mania-111359.html?hp=f2">rather than towards the national security issue</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So let me describe the reality we are actually facing, which is a necessary preface to the way the Republican Party should be framing its strategy and should be emphasizing the dangers of having a Democratic president like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton – or for that matter a Democratic Congress – leading us in wartime.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I will leave out of this wartime equation the threats from Russia and China, which Obama and the Democrats have done so much to foster. I will focus only on the threat posed by Islamic jihadists, who at this moment can easily penetrate the borders that Obama and the Democrats have done so much to wreck. And carry with them chemical and biological weapons, and – if Iran builds the bombs which Obama the Democrats have made almost inevitable – nuclear weapons as well.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This is easily the greatest terrorist threat in our history, far greater than what transpired before and after 9/11. ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist armies now control territory (and attendant resources) from Afghanistan through Iraq Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Somalia and other regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Why has this happened? Because Obama and the Democrats have waged a ten-year war against the war on terror, against American military strength, against an American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the very idea that Islamic forces have declared war on us. For ten years Democrats have been determined to treat terrorists as individual criminals, arrest them and try them in American courts where they will have all the protections of the American legal system that they are seeking to destroy. So hostile has Obama been to the very notion of a “War on Terror” that he has purged the very term from the official government vocabulary and replaced it with “overseas contingency operations” which describes exactly nothing.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To create the power vacuum which Islamic jihadists have filled, Obama had to defy the advice of his Secretary of Defense and his intelligence advisers. He did this in part by absenting himself from nearly half his daily intelligence briefings, and in part by saying no to absolutely crucial measures that his military staff proposed for countering the threat from ISIS and other terrorist groups. Obama saw to it that America would relinquish its military base in Iraq (a country that strategically borders on Afghanistan, Syria and Iran) or to keep the 20,000 American troops stationed there as his Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff urged him to do.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Obama hated the Iraq War so much that he was willing to betray all the American soldiers who gave their lives to keep Iraq out of the clutches of Iran and safe from the terrorist threat. If Obama had just listened to the advice of his military staff, there would be no ISIS today. Obama’s deliberate, calculated surrender of Iraq (and soon Afghanistan) and failure to stop Syria’s Assad when he crossed Obama’s red line is the greatest and gravest dereliction of duty in the history of the American presidency.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And make no mistake, Obama was not alone. For ten years the Democrats have been sabotaging the war on terror, beginning with their disgraceful scorched earth campaign against President Bush and the War in Iraq and continuing with their full-throated cry for the abandonment of Iraq after Bush had won the peace and contained the terrorist threat. Their support for Obama’s appeasement of Iran and Hamas, his support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and his diplomatic assault on Israel, America’s only true ally in the Middle East, is not only a national disgrace but the heart of the crisis that is looming on the international horizon.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If Republicans fail to articulate the sources of this crisis, and specifically to indict Obama, Hillary and the Democrats for their betrayal of America’s interests and their failure to protect the American people then Republicans electoral prospects will be dim, and with them, their country’s future.</p>
<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>Embassy Shutdown Ends with a Whimper as Embassies Reopen</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/embassy-shutdown-ends-with-a-whimper-as-embassies-reopen/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=embassy-shutdown-ends-with-a-whimper-as-embassies-reopen</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 11 Aug 2013 14:32:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soft power]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yemen]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200106</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The State Department announced on Sunday that it would extend closings already in place for a celebration at the end of Ramadan out of "an abundance of caution."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1376088670000-AP-Mideast-Jordan-US-Embassy-Security.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-200107" alt="1376088670000-AP-Mideast-Jordan-US-Embassy-Security" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/1376088670000-AP-Mideast-Jordan-US-Embassy-Security-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>I have to wonder what the point of the mass shutdowns was. We don&#8217;t seem to have encountered a major terrorist attack and indeed shutting down the embassies would have revealed our intelligence sources and scuttled any planned attack. In some ways that&#8217;s not a bad thing, but it just means that we&#8217;ll be less prepared for the next one.</p>
<p>So far the threat appears to have centered on Yemen. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/09/embassies-reopen-state-department/2637515/">The Yemeni embassy is the only one</a> staying closed. If so why the mass shutdown?</p>
<blockquote><p>Eighteen of 19 of U.S. embassies and consulates across the Middle East, Asia and Africa closed recently will reopen on Sunday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki announced in a statement released Friday evening.</p>
<p>The U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, will remain closed, Psaki added, because of continuing concerns about a threat for potential terrorist attacks by al Qaeda.</p>
<p>The U.S. consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, which shut down yesterday do to a separate threat also will remain closed, Psaki announced in the statement.</p>
<p>&#8230;<br />
The State Department announced on Sunday that it would extend closings already in place for a celebration at the end of Ramadan out of &#8220;an abundance of caution.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s nice that the holidays of the Religion of Peace lead even their greatest appeasers in the diplomatic corps to exercise an overabundance of caution.</p>
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		<title>Social Breakdowns, SWAT, NSA and the Police State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/social-breakdowns-swat-nsa-and-the-police-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=social-breakdowns-swat-nsa-and-the-police-state</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/social-breakdowns-swat-nsa-and-the-police-state/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:55:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NSA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[TSA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192567</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Effective programs that are in any way suggestive of targeting get expanded and broadened to spread the pain creating a police state that harasses everyone to prove that no one is being discriminated against.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/polstat1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-192568" alt="polstat1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/polstat1-266x350.jpg" width="266" height="350" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/350505/no-copbad-cop-mark-steyn">Mark Steyn commented on the NSA </a>controversy to say that,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more pre-screening in its immigration system — by, say, according a graduate of a Yemeni madrassah a little more scrutiny than a Slovene or Fijian. The president has unilaterally suspended the immigration laws of the United States, and his attorney general prosecutes those states such as Arizona who remain quaintly attached to them. The ID three of the 9/11 hijackers acquired in the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia and used to board the plane that day is part of a vast ongoing subversion of American sovereignty with which many states and so-called “sanctuary cities” actively collude.</p>
<p>&#8230;</p>
<p>Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public. That’s not an arrangement that is likely to end well.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>In a way that is the larger point here. A social breakdown can only be controlled by a police state that is applied across the board to everyone.</p>
<p>The TSA is just the most visible element on the kind of universal police state that will try and struggle to cope with the elephant in the room. If you think it&#8217;s bad in the US, it&#8217;s much worse in the UK, where surveillance of every kind is even more pervasive.</p>
<p>And all this is just a bigger/smaller version of what originally happened with inner cities where the problem couldn&#8217;t be focused or targeted, only hit with big broad spectrum solutions. These solutions went too far and violated too many rights, but they were so broad that no one could complain about discrimination.</p>
<p>Effective programs that are in any way suggestive of targeting get expanded and broadened to spread the pain creating a police state that harasses everyone to prove that no one is being discriminated against.</p>
<p>We have 3 tension points. Personal freedoms. Discrimination. Violence. Everyone has agreed that we can&#8217;t, at least officially, accept violence, whether it&#8217;s crime or terrorism. The elites have all agreed that we can&#8217;t accept discrimination. There&#8217;s only one more point that can give. And it&#8217;s personal freedoms.</p>
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		<title>Big Brother Barack</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-brother-barack-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=big-brother-barack-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-brother-barack-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jun 2013 04:54:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Collection]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[data]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NSA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[phone records]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Secret]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Verizon]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192396</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's dragnet serves as an ominous reminder that inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/flickering.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192420" alt="flickering" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/flickering.jpg" width="276" height="390" /></a>A stunning <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order">report</a> by the Guardian newspaper published late Wednesday evening reveals that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans who are customers of Verizon, one of the nation&#8217;s largest telecom companies. The top-secret <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order">order</a>, obtained by the paper, requires Verizon to submit to the NSA, &#8220;on an ongoing daily basis…all call details or &#8216;telephony metadata&#8217; created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.&#8221; Moreover, the paper reports that Americans&#8217; communication records &#8220;are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk&#8211;regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.&#8221;</p>
<p>The parameters of the exposed surveillance program are indeed massive, indiscriminate and involve no conditions of probable cause or reasonable suspicion of terrorist activities. Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/us/us-secretly-collecting-logs-of-business-calls.html?hp&amp;_r=1&amp;">granted</a> the order on April 25, directing Verizon to collect the data only until July 19, unless the blanket order is extended. The so-called &#8220;metadata&#8221; includes</p>
<blockquote><p>comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g. originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number,etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call.</p></blockquote>
<p>The content of the conversations are not covered. Neither is the name, address or financial information for a subscriber or customer. Yet the targets of this seizure &#8212; Americans &#8212; are clear in that the above order does <i>not</i> include calls made between foreigners. Furthermore, none of these limitations would stop the NSA from putting together a clear picture of who called who, how and when the call was made, and from what location.</p>
<p>Vinson&#8217;s order clearly states that while the application was initiated by the FBI, Verizon&#8217;s &#8220;Custodian of Records&#8221; shall turn the data over to the NSA. Yet section 2.3,  “Collection of Information&#8221; included in <a href="http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html#content">&#8220;Executive Order 12333-United States Intelligence activities,&#8221;</a> specifically limits the NSA&#8217;s collection of data to &#8220;foreign intelligence or counterintelligence&#8221; sources, further stipulating that data collection within the United States</p>
<blockquote><p>shall be undertaken by the FBI or, when significant foreign intelligence is sought, by other authorized agencies of the Intelligence Community, provided that no foreign intelligence collection by such agencies may be undertaken for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of United States persons.</p></blockquote>
<p>Thus, the NSA is in violation of its own charter.</p>
<p>Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group, contends that, “absent some explanation I haven’t thought of, this looks like the largest assault on privacy since the N.S.A. wiretapped Americans in clear violation of the law” during the Bush administration. “On what possible basis has the government refused to tell us that it believes that the law authorizes this kind of request?” she asks.</p>
<p>On its face, however, the Obama administration&#8217;s cell phone surveillance is vastly more abusive than the Bush wiretapping program, which was leaked to the press in 2006 and discontinued in 2007. The Bush administration defended those efforts at the time, stressing that the NSA was focused <a href="http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm?csp=1">exclusively</a> on international calls in connection to al Qaeda operatives and post-9/11 terrorism. &#8220;In other words,&#8221; Bush explained at the time, &#8220;one end of the communication must be outside the United States.&#8221; In 2007, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez sent a <a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20060117gonzales_Letter.pdf">letter</a> to the Senate Judiciary Committee, affirming that a FISA court judge authorized the targeting of international communications where there was probable cause that &#8220;one of the communicants is a member or agent of al Qaeda, or an associated terrorist organization.&#8221;</p>
<p>Even the far-left ACLU recognizes the tremendous difference between the Bush-era and Obama-era programs. Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/05/nsas-verizon-spying-order-specifically-targeted-americans-not-foreigners/">noted</a>, “In many ways it’s even more troubling than [Bush era] warrantless wiretapping, in part because the program is purely domestic,” he explains.  &#8220;But this is also an indiscriminate dragnet. Say what you will about warrantless wiretapping, at least it was targeted at agents of Al Qaeda. This includes every customer of Verizon Business Services.”</p>
<p>Prior to publishing its revelations, the <i>Guardian</i> contacted the NSA, the White House and the Justice Department for comment. All of them declined to say anything. So did Verizon, but that is completely expected. The order expressly states that</p>
<blockquote><p>no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or the NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this order other than to: a) those persons to whom disclosure is necessary to comply with such Order; b) an attorney to obtain legal advice or assistance with respect to the production of things in response to the Order; or c) other persons as permitted by the Director of the FBI, or the Director&#8217;s designee.</p></blockquote>
<p>As several news sources note, Verizon may represent the tip of the iceberg. It remains a distinct possibility that other phone carriers, as well as giant Internet entities such as Google, Facebook, or Microsoft or any other ISPs, may be under surveillance&#8211;and that such surveillance may have been taking place far longer than the three months granted in the specific order.</p>
<p>Furthermore, officials have been dishonest about the nature of these programs. On March 15, 2012, an <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1">article</a> in <i>Wired</i> magazine chronicled the construction of the NSA&#8217;s top-secret Utah Data Center. The article also contended that the agency &#8220;has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens,&#8221; and &#8220;established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.&#8221;</p>
<p>Five days later, during a budget hearing in Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/20/nsa-chief-denies-wireds-domestic-spying-story-fourteen-times-in-congressional-hearing/">questioned</a> NSA director general Keith Alexander about whether the agency was conducting the kind of domestic surveillance outlined in the article. During the ensuing exchange, Alexander denied the charge fourteen times, insisting that any and all domestic surveillance would have to be conducted by the FBI. “Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead,” responded Alexander. “If it were a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead. It could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We’re not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.”</p>
<p>This latest revelation makes a mockery of that testimony.</p>
<p>On July 9, 2012, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/07/09/by-the-numbers-heres-how-often-att-sprint-and-verizon-hand-over-users-data-to-the-government/">released</a> a series of letters from major phone carriers responding to his demand they provide information on how often and under what circumstances they released information to the government. In addition to Verizon, companies such as Sprint, AT&amp;T, T-Mobile, MetroPCS and Cricket  revealed they had answered a staggering <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/cell-carriers-see-uptick-in-requests-to-aid-surveillance.html?_r=2">1.3 million requests</a> for data. Moreover, those requests represented annual increases of between 12 percent and 16 percent over the previous five years. “I never expected it to be this massive,” said Markey. ACLU attorney Chris Calebrese noted that much of that data collection, like the effort revealed by the <i>Guardian</i> on Wednesday, was completely indiscriminate. “Just the sheer volume of orders is amazing, but a significant chunk are dumps from entire cell towers,” he said at the time. “That means tons of people’s information is being grabbed with a single one of these orders.”</p>
<p>The latest court order seemingly confirms numerous, but vague, warnings issued by U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) regarding the scope of the Obama administration&#8217;s surveillance efforts. For more than two years, both these members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been sounding the alarm regarding the &#8220;secret legal interpretations&#8221; used by the administration to justify a level of domestic surveillance so broad, Americans would be &#8220;stunned&#8221; by the revelations.</p>
<p>Yet as recently as March 12, 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/06/06/Three-Months-Ago-Director-of-National-Intelligence-Testified-Gov-Does-Not-Collect-Data-On-Americans">denied</a> any such domestic surveillance was taking place in an exchange with Sen. Wyden:</p>
<blockquote><p>Senator Ron Wyden: &#8220;Does the NSA collect any kind of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?</p>
<p>Clapper: &#8220;No, sir.&#8221;</p>
<p>Wyden: &#8220;It does not?&#8221;</p>
<p>Clapper: &#8220;Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently, perhaps…&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Late yesterday afternoon, White House spokesman Josh Earnest <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/06/us-usa-wiretaps-verizon-idUSBRE95502920130606">defended</a> the administration&#8217;s efforts. “The intelligence community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to public statute with the knowledge and oversight of Congress,&#8221; he contended. A senior administration official speaking on condition of anonymity, also justified the effort. &#8220;Information of the sort described in the <i>Guardian</i> article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,&#8221; he argued.</p>
<p>Members of both political parties supported that contention. &#8220;It&#8217;s called protecting America,&#8221; said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). &#8220;If we didn&#8217;t do it, we&#8217;d be crazy,&#8221; said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-NC).</p>
<p>However, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/jim-sensenbrenner-nsa_n_3397440.html">sent</a> a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder expressing precisely the opposite, a viewpoint undoubtedly shared by many Americans. “I do not believe the released FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act,” he wrote. “How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?” In a press release accompanying the letter he made it clear where he stood. &#8220;Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American,&#8221; it stated.</p>
<p>The NSA clearly exceeded its legal mandate. The dishonest statements of officials involved with the program indicate the government was aware of the bounds it was overstepping. But the dishonesty is dual in nature. While the Obama administration has been declaring the war on terror dead and gone, a relic of a bygone era, it has been secretly implementing extraordinary measures <em>against Americans</em>, and it has done so on the basis of the dire exigencies of the jihadist threat. And while posturing, as always, as a &#8220;progressive&#8221; force, this leftist administration is, once again, engaging in &#8220;Big-Brother&#8221; 1984-style tactics &#8212; revealing, in true leftist tradition, that inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out. The scandal-ridden atmosphere has become so rotten and disturbing that even the <em>New York Times</em><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/06/new-york-times-editorial-board-says-administration-has-lost-all-credibility/"> has noted</a> that this is an administration that has lost all credibility.</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>An Untrustworthy Administration Undermines Even Legitimate National Security Measures</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/an-untrustworthy-administration-undermines-even-legitimate-national-security-measures/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-untrustworthy-administration-undermines-even-legitimate-national-security-measures</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/an-untrustworthy-administration-undermines-even-legitimate-national-security-measures/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:41:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew McCarthy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192382</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In writing about the Verizon story that is spilling out now, Andrew McCarthy makes a very important point. Now, we begin to see the wages of having an administration that abuses its awesome powers, then, as night follows day, stonewalls and misleads Congress and the public. Crucial national security measures, which operate on the forgiving [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/obama331.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-192358" alt="obama33" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/obama331.jpg" width="360" height="273" /></a></p>
<p>In writing about the Verizon story that is spilling out now, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/350331/phone-record-gathering-story-blown-out-proportion-andrew-c-mccarthy">Andrew McCarthy makes a very important point. </a></p>
<blockquote><p>Now, we begin to see the wages of having an administration that abuses its awesome powers, then, as night follows day, stonewalls and misleads Congress and the public. Crucial national security measures, which operate on the forgiving assumption that government officials will conduct themselves honorably, are put at risk&#8230;</p>
<p>This is why it’s so critical to have a trustworthy president and administration – including an attorney general Congress can trust to provide truthful, accurate and complete information. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the Obama administration – with its serial lawlessness, authoritarian abuses of power to harass dissenters, and pattern of misleading and stonewalling Congress – has so grossly violated the public trust that it is unfit to exercise the executive’s awesome investigative authorities.</p></blockquote>
<p>While the majority of McCarthy&#8217;s piece is dedicated to his explanation of what happened based on his time as a Federal Prosecutor, the point that I have excerpted from his opening and conclusion is more important in a way.</p>
<p>An untrustworthy administration undermines national security, just as an abusive police force undermines law enforcement, by creating mistrust.</p>
<p>National security only works when people trust those in charge. Partisan politics began the fragmentation of national security after JFK and LBJ. Liberals gave in to the left and disowned their part in things like the Vietnam War and embraced an anti-war identity. That led them to political defeats and eventually a belated success with the Carter Administration which was one of the worst things to happen to national security until today.</p>
<p>That pattern repeated with the Iraq War and Obama. Like Carter, Obama has tried to have it both ways on national security and that is an unsustainable policy. Worse still, Obama&#8217;s record of domestic abuses isn&#8217;t in line with Carter, it&#8217;s not even in line with Clinton. It&#8217;s becoming downright Kennedyesque.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve had this debate with drones. Even though there is no serious expectation of drones being used domestically, people don&#8217;t trust Obama with them. That doesn&#8217;t mean that there&#8217;s anything wrong with using drones to kill terrorists. There isn&#8217;t. But mistrust of an unethical government extends into all areas, even legitimate ones.</p>
<p>A government that breaks faith in several areas will have mistrust spill into every area. Once you have abused a number of powers, then you will rightly be considered suspect in all of them.</p>
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		<title>Senator Ted Cruz: Confronting The Threat of Radical Islam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/senator-ted-cruz-confronting-the-threat-of-radical-islam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=senator-ted-cruz-confronting-the-threat-of-radical-islam</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/senator-ted-cruz-confronting-the-threat-of-radical-islam/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 04:53:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Cruz]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189852</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A great American leader shines disturbing light on Obama's failures to defend America.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ted-cruz.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-189932" alt="ted cruz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ted-cruz.jpg" width="220" height="275" /></a><em>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of Senator Ted Cruz&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Texas Weekend. The inaugural event took place May 3rd-5th at the Las Colinas Resort in Dallas, Texas.</em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/66133890" height="250" width="425" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz: </strong> We need leaders like Ted Cruz.  And that&#8217;s why we are honored to have him on the platform today.  (applause)</p>
<p><strong>Ted Cruz: </strong> Thank you.  Thank you very, very much.  Thank you very, very much.  It is great to be joining you all this evening.  You know, I will observe, David, Washington is a strange, strange place.  People are very, very surprised when you actually go there and do what you said you were going to do.  (laughter)</p>
<p>I want to start by observing for all of you non-Texans, I apologize that Louie Gohmert is so soft-spoken.  (laughter)  That he has no opinions or courage or willingness to charge into the fray.  And no sense of humor whatsoever.  For the love of God, tell a joke once, Louie.  (laughter)</p>
<p>I will point out that he described being mistaken for James Taylor.  I haven&#8217;t had that experience.  (laughter)  But I have, in fact, been on an airplane once when a page went over asking for Tom Cruise to please come up.</p>
<p>And I walked up fairly sheepish.  I said, &#8220;I&#8217;m &#8212; I think maybe you&#8217;re looking for me.&#8221;  (laughter)  You have never seen so many disappointed flight attendants.  (laughter)  Yes, it was, they&#8217;re just, like, &#8220;Oh.&#8221;</p>
<p>And I have to admit, Louie, your story of your five-year-old also remind me or Caroline, our eldest, who&#8217;s five.  And in the course of the senate campaign there was one Saturday morning about 6:30 in the morning.  And I was at home in the bedroom and I was on the phone doing a radio interview.</p>
<p>And Caroline came bursting into our room to come play with mommy and daddy.  And Heidi, my wife, ran over and grabbed Caroline, pulled her out and said, &#8220;Not now, sweetie.  Not now.  Daddy&#8217;s doing a radio interview.&#8221;  Caroline crossed her arms and she said, &#8220;Politics, politics, politics.  It&#8217;s always politics.&#8221;  (laughter)  So, Louie, I feel your pain.  (laughter)</p>
<p>And, you know, Bill, I have to say the <i>Star Wars</i> analogy at the end I thought was really quite compelling and I&#8217;m really waiting for the next presidential cycle when we can put Bill on national television and have him do a Jedi mind trick.  (laughter)  These aren’t the candidates you&#8217;re looking for.  (laughter)</p>
<p>And I will confess as I sat there, I had an image suddenly of Jimmy Carter saying, &#8220;Barack, I am your father.&#8221;  (laughter)  And let me say additionally, the host of this gathering, David Horowitz, is a man who is utterly fearless.  (applause)</p>
<p>And that is a very, very rare commodity.  You know, David reminds me of a Texan, Chuck Norris.  (laughter)  Now, some people wear Superman pajamas.  Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.  (laughter)  And Chuck Norris wears David Horowitz pajamas.  (applause)</p>
<p>But David is someone who understands we&#8217;re fighting to take our country back.  He understands the severity of the threat in significant part because he&#8217;s been on the other side.</p>
<p>You know, we were visiting over dinner about how couple of months ago Jane Mayer in <i>The</i> <i>New Yorker Magazine</i> wrote a nasty hit piece.  And David knew about that because he&#8217;s had a nasty hit piece written on him by her as well.  Where she recounted that some time ago I&#8217;d talked about the fact that Barack Obama was four years ahead of me at Harvard law school.</p>
<p>And I made the point that when he and I were both students there were more Communists on the Harvard law school faculty than there were Republicans.  There were quite a few who were self-described Marxists.</p>
<p>And she wrote this as a sensational, horrible Joe McCarthy has returned because this is terrible.  And then the media all went crazy.  I have to admit, our response in our office is we put up on Facebook a clip from <i>Casablanca</i> that MSNBC is shocked, shocked to discover there are Marxists at Harvard.  (laughter)</p>
<p>I&#8217;m just impressed they think it&#8217;s a bad thing.  (laughter)  Hey, that&#8217;s making real progress.  If they&#8217;re running away from it, I am glad of it.  My favorite was actually this obscure blogger that was attacking me and said, &#8220;Cruz just doesn&#8217;t understand the difference between Marxist and Marxian.&#8221;  (laughter)</p>
<p>I confess that is correct.  I have utterly no idea what the difference is between Marxist and Marxian.  And I would welcome anyone to make that argument to the American people.</p>
<p>I want to thank you all for being here.  I want to thank you all for being engaged in the fight to turn our country around because it is &#8212; we are facing enormous perils.  We are facing enemies abroad and at home.</p>
<p>And everyone&#8217;s here because we love this country.  We love what the United States of America has meant for the world.  And we are committed to doing everything we can to preserving this nation as a bacon &#8212; beacon of freedom to the world.</p>
<p>What I want to talk to you all tonight about is three different things.  Number one, defending national security.  Number two, preserving US sovereignty.  And number three, restoring growth and opportunity.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s start with national security.  The major focus of this gathering.  We have all sorts of challenges.  We have a challenge that you all have done a terrific job examining.  The challenge of radical Islamic terrorists.</p>
<p>And what a sad statement that we are living in a country where the president of the United States is unwilling to utter the words radical Islamic terrorist.  You&#8217;re not going to win a war on terror if you&#8217;re not aware you&#8217;re fighting a war on terror.</p>
<p>And we have perils across the globe.  We have number one the nation of Iran which I think may well pose the greatest national security threat to this entire country as Iran is proceeding by all appearances headlong towards developing nuclear weapons capacity.</p>
<p>And a nuclear Iran poses, in my opinion, an existential threat to this nation and to the nation of Israel.  And if there&#8217;s one principle we have learned from history it&#8217;s that bullies and tyrants don&#8217;t respect weakness.  The only thing they respect and understand is strength.</p>
<p>And one of the things that is so concerning about this president&#8217;s foreign policy is that I think it is hard to imagine that the Iranian leaders are doing anything but scoffing at the prospect of any serious repercussions from their proceeding to gaining nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>That is extraordinarily dangerous not just for what it would do for the region.  Because once Iran acquired nuclear weapons we would immediately see proliferation throughout the region.  And that&#8217;s just what we need is a bunch of nations with unstable governments and major radical Islamic elements in their society have nukes throughout the Middle East.</p>
<p>But it also exponentially increases the chances that those weapons would tragically be used against the nation of Israel or the nation of the United States.  There are only two places those weapons would be used.</p>
<p>A second threat that has been driven home recently is you look at North Korea.  North Korea&#8217;s a nation that has nuclear weapons.  It is a nation whose leader is explicitly and openly drawing up targeting plans to launch those nuclear weapons to US cities.</p>
<p>One of the cities they targeted was Austin.  (laughter)  I have to admit, I was speaking at a gathering in Austin and someone from Austin observed that it must&#8217;ve been a mistake.  They could not have meant to target the People&#8217;s Republic of Travis County.  (laughter)</p>
<p>But, you know, look it is easy to make light of this.  Because we don&#8217;t think they have the technology to miniaturize their nukes and put them on an ICBM and get them here.  So they probably can&#8217;t do that.  Isn&#8217;t that comforting?</p>
<p>Although, again, our intelligence services are disagreed on that.  So some of our intelligence services think in fact they can do it.  Others in the intelligence community think they can&#8217;t.  So there&#8217;s a reasonable disagreement.</p>
<p>But think of the consequence.  We have an unstable new leader who we don&#8217;t understand publicly declaring hostilities and an intention to target and potentially fire nuclear weapons at US cities.  These are dangerous times.</p>
<p>And what does the President of the United States do?  He sends John Kerry.  By the way, how much better would it be if he&#8217;d sent John O&#8217;Neill?  (applause)  Now, John O&#8217;Neill would get their attention.  (laughter)</p>
<p>But he sent John Kerry to offer a peace offering that we&#8217;ll pull down our missile defense from the Pacific if they agree to back down slightly for the moment sort of.  (laughter)  That&#8217;s what you call effective negotiation.</p>
<p>And one of the things that underscored is just about a month ago was the 30 year anniversary of Ronald Reagan&#8217;s SDI speech.  How many of you all remember that speech?  You remember the reactions of the Left?  Of the newspapers, of the academy.  <i>Star Wars</i>.</p>
<p>This was a crazy cowboy war in space.  Cannot happen.  I have to admit, I thought of that back in December when I traveled to the nation of Israel.  And it was right after they had just seen an incredible rocket attack.</p>
<p>Thousands upon thousands of rockets and the Iron Dome system, the missile defense system there had intercepted nearly 90% of the rockets that were coming in to kill their citizens.  And it reminded me, how many of you remember the analogy in the &#8217;80s, it&#8217;s like a bullet hitting a bullet.  It is impossible.</p>
<p>Let me tell you something, you guys go home to your computers.  Let me encourage you to google the following.  Iron dome wedding.  It&#8217;s one of the most amazing videos.  It is a home video that was taken of a wedding occurring in Israel.</p>
<p>And the wedding photographer, you hear the music, people are celebrating.  And a whole wave of rockets comes in.  And the wedding photographer just goes up and you see them being intercepted by the Iron Dome missile one after the other after the other.  And it looks like fireworks over the wedding.  It is a spectacular video and demonstration of what can be done.</p>
<p>And the first thing that occurred to me when we see North Korea targeting US cities is, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t we have missile defense along the Pacific that if some lunatic fires an ICBM we can take it down and we can retaliate in a way that no lunatic would do so and threaten the United States of America?&#8221;  (applause)</p>
<p>And a third example that you all have talked about already quite a bit is Benghazi.  You know, Benghazi is something the more you look at it, the worse it gets.  We had about two months ago a hearing in the Armed Services Committee.  And we got a fair number of questions answered.</p>
<p>We had Leon Panetta, the outgoing Secretary of Defense.  And we had General Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff both testify.  We discovered a lot of things.  Number one, we discovered that during the attack of Benghazi the President received one briefing ten to 15 minutes long at the &#8212; in the first hour of the attack. And after that, neither the Secretary of Defense nor the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had any other conversations with President Obama.</p>
<p>We learned that during the entire time of the attack, neither the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor the Secretary of the Defense had any conversations whatsoever with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>We learned that the Defense Department had sent additional defenses to Yemen at the request of the embassy there but didn&#8217;t send it to Benghazi because State never requested those additional defense.</p>
<p>But the Defense Department said had additional forces been sent there, that attack could&#8217;ve been prevented.  We learned that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said it was, quote, surprising that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she didn&#8217;t know that our ambassador had requested additional security because it was not safe in Benghazi.</p>
<p>We learned that after the attack occurred for 22 days the site remained unsecured.  Because the State Department never requested the Defense Department to go in and secure the site.  And as a result you had news crews like CNN walking on and discovering secure documents because we didn&#8217;t bother to lock it down.</p>
<p>We learned quite a bit and yet there are a lot of open questions.  To date, Congress has yet to hear from the survivors of Benghazi.  The people who were there.</p>
<p>And by the way, we also learned the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he thought it was obvious, immediately obvious that it was a coordinated terrorist attack because when the rooftop of the annex received multiple incoming mortar shells, spontaneous protestors don&#8217;t have the ability to fire multiple mortar shells and hit a single rooftop.</p>
<p>That can only be an organized military attack, which he said he knew the instant it occurred.  Now, if you look at some of the news that has broken in the last week it has gotten substantially worse.</p>
<p>We now know that there were four self-described whistleblowers within the State Department, several of whom have retained counsel.  And they are alleging that they have been threatened retaliation if they describe what happened in Benghazi.</p>
<p>Just today <i>The Weekly Standard</i> reported the change in the talking points that the intelligence community presented versus what the State Department edited.  The first talking points from the intelligence community said this was an attack with major elements of Al Qaeda.</p>
<p>And I would encourage all of you to go and read that <i>Weekly Standard</i> article that is out today and just read the memos side by side.  Because the intelligence community wrote what occurred and then State edited it all out.  And what was an organized terrorist attack that took the lives of four Americans became a spontaneous protest against some silly, ridiculous internet video.</p>
<p>And the administration sent the UN ambassador on five Sunday shows to tell the American people statements that were categorically false.  And that by all appearances now they knew were categorically false.</p>
<p>Now, I am encouraged that on Wednesday the House will be having an additional hearing.  And I think it &#8212; I hope it will be a revealing hearing.  There needs to be real accountability.</p>
<p>And by the way, Hillary Clinton said, &#8220;What does it matter whether it was terrorism or not?&#8221;  You know, there&#8217;s some statements that are self-refuting.  Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, said, &#8220;Benghazi was a long time ago.  Can&#8217;t you guys forget about it?&#8221;  He didn&#8217;t say that, but that&#8217;s what he meant.</p>
<p>But what we haven&#8217;t heard anything about is a single person apprehended.  A single person killed who was responsible for Benghazi.  What does this administration effectively say when there is no effort to track down and apprehend or kill the attackers who murder the sitting US ambassador for Americans?  It encourages those attacks all the more.</p>
<p>What do you think Iran and North Korea think as they watch that?  Say, &#8220;Well, gosh, you can attack Americans with impunity.&#8221;  And apparently what happens instead is the State Department will apologize for an internet video.</p>
<p>That only encourages further violence.  These are dangerous times.  And I encourage all of you, this is a group that is focusing on the underlying root core issues.  Is focusing on being serious about protecting our national security.  And I encourage that because these are times when not many in Washington seem focused on doing that.</p>
<p>Let me talk about a second priority.  Preserving US sovereignty.  One of the methods that those on the Left have used to attack this country is not through bullets and bombs.  It&#8217;s through undermining the institutions of rule of law in our country.  And making us more and more subject to international institutions.</p>
<p>Before I was elected to the US Senate I served as the Solicitor General of Texas, the chief lawyer for the State in front of the US Supreme Court.  And the biggest fight in my tenure as Solicitor General was a case called Medellin versus Texas.</p>
<p>Medellin began with a horrific crime where two teenage girls were horribly murdered in Houston in 1993.  But the case took a very, very strange turn because the World Court, the judicial arm of the United Nations, issued an order to the United States to re-open the convictions of 51 murderers across this country.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s the first time in the history of this country any foreign court has ever tried to bind the US justice system.  Texas stood up and fought the World Court.  I had the honor, I argued this case twice in front of the US Supreme Court.</p>
<p>On the other side were 94 nations, all of which came in against us.  All of which argued that the US justice system should be completely subservient to the United Nations and the World Court.</p>
<p>And also on the other side, sadly, was the President of the United States.  And it was actually President George W. Bush.  Now, I will say as an aside, I got my start in politics working for George W. Bush on his presidential campaign.  I remain a big fan of his in many respects.</p>
<p>Indeed, I met my wife, Heidi, on the Bush campaign.  We were one of eight marriages that came out of that campaign.  (laughter)  So a lousy joke that I&#8217;ve told all over the State of Texas is, &#8220;Whatever else anyone thinks of George W. Bush, in our house he will always be a uniter and not a divider.&#8221;  (laughter)</p>
<p>But in this instance, he received some really, really poor advice because George W. Bush signed a two-paragraph order that purported to order the state courts to obey the World Court.  And so Texas stood up and we fought the United Nations.  We fought the World Court, we fought 94 nations and we fought the President of the United States.</p>
<p>Who I would note, by the way, was the former governor of Texas.  Was a Republican.  And a friend.  And yet nonetheless, the State of Texas went before the US Supreme Court and I had the honor of representing the State saying the President has no authority whatsoever under our Constitution to give away US sovereignty.  (applause)</p>
<p>And by a margin of six to three the US Supreme Court agreed.  Ruled the World Court has no authority in our courts and the President has no ability to make our courts subject to the World Court of the United Nations.  (applause)</p>
<p>And I would point out as a quick aside that in Texas we were willing to stand up against a Republican president, against the former governor of Texas, even though he was a friend and a good man.  Where are the Democrats standing up against President Obama&#8217;s abuse of power?</p>
<p>Fifty-five Democrats in the Senate and yet crickets chirping as we have had a president disregard the Constitution over and over and over again.  It&#8217;s a real question about our democratic system when one of the two major parties treats it as a partisan game rather than recognizing any limits on presidential authority.</p>
<p>About six weeks ago I was proud to stand side by side with my friend Rand Paul in a 13-hour filibuster on this administration&#8217;s drone policy.  (applause)  Other than Ron Wyden, not a single Democrat joined us in that.</p>
<p>Does anyone doubt if it had been President George W. Bush that every Democrat would&#8217;ve been there lighting their hair on fire?  (laughter)  That we would&#8217;ve been debating impeachment proceedings if it were a Republican president implementing the exact same policy.</p>
<p>And yet the Democrats apparently did not choose to do anything to hold the President accountable to the Constitution.  Third and final point, first two were foreign.  The third and final one is domestic.  Restoring growth and opportunity.</p>
<p>First two were pessimistic.  I hope the third will be far more optimistic.  By the way, one of the great things, Louie, of going third, is all of my jokes are funnier when people have had three glasses of wine.  (laughter)  There is a method to the madness.</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert: </strong> I&#8217;m still not setting my hair on fire, though.  (laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Ted Cruz: </strong> I thought that&#8217;s how you got that way.  (laughter)  I think the top priority of every elected official should be restoring economic growth.  Economic growth is the precondition to solving every other problem we have.</p>
<p>You know, the last four years our economy has averaged 0.9% growth a year.  There&#8217;s only one other period since World War II of four consecutive years of less than 1% growth.  That was 1979 to 1982.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s coming out of the Jimmy Carter era.  Same failed economic policies, out of control spending, out of control debt, out of control taxes and out of control regulations.  And it produced the identical stagnation.</p>
<p>Every other problem depends on getting growth back.  If you want to see the 23 million American people out of work back to work, we&#8217;ve got to have growth.  If you want to turn around our out of control deficits and our unsustainable debt, you have got to have growth.</p>
<p>If you want to ensure that we remain the strongest military force in the world to protect our national security, we must have growth.  There&#8217;s a reason just a few years ago the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the greatest national security threat to this country was our national debt.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll tell you when I was traveling overseas I met with a CIA station chief in one of our foreign bases.  And I asked, &#8220;What do you see as the greatest threat?&#8221;  And given all of these threats, I envisioned all sorts of things.</p>
<p>And the immediate response that was given to me was the national debt and the economy of this country.  Which was really striking for someone on the ground dealing with serious hostiles but yet he said, &#8220;Look, if we don&#8217;t have the economic strength.&#8221;</p>
<p>How did we win the Cold War?  Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviets.  If we bankrupt ourselves, that&#8217;s how we undermine our national security.  And I think economic growth should be a bipartisan objective.</p>
<p>Republicans and Democrats should be willing to work together to get growth back.  And of all the reasons growth matters, the most important is that growth is integral to opportunity.</p>
<p>For a long, long time I&#8217;ve been arguing for what I call opportunity conservatism which is that every principle we as conservatives talk about should focus like a laser on opportunity.  On easing the means of assent up the economic ladder.</p>
<p>You know, a lot of folks have agonized about why we lost.  Why Republicans lost in 2012.  And I think it comes down to two words:  47%.  And I don&#8217;t mean the comment.  Look, I think Mitt Romney is a good and decent man.  And anyone can make an ill-advised comment.</p>
<p>What I mean is the narrative in the last election.  The narrative of the last election was the 47% of this country who are not paying income tax, who are dependent on government, we don&#8217;t have to worry about them.</p>
<p>I got to tell you, I can&#8217;t think of an idea more antithetical to what we as conservatives believe than that.  For one thing, it buys into the notion of the Left that the economic pie is fixed.  That it never changes.</p>
<p>And if that&#8217;s right, the arguments for wealth distribution make a lot of sense.  If the economic pie never changes, it&#8217;s very hard to justify so few having so much more than so many.  What we understand as conservatives is the economic pie isn&#8217;t fixed.</p>
<p>That it is growing and dynamic and indeed the free market system in the United States of America has been the greatest engine for wealth creation, for opportunity, for prosperity in the history of the world.</p>
<p>In my view, Republicans should be the party of the 47%.  Look at unemployment right now.  Unemployment is not evenly distributed.  College graduates right now, unemployment&#8217;s 3.8%.  If you&#8217;re a high skilled college graduate, you got a pretty robust labor market.</p>
<p>Those without high school degrees, unemployment&#8217;s 12%.  Hispanics, it&#8217;s nearly 10%.  African Americans, 14%.  Young people age 16 to 19, it&#8217;s over 25%.  You know, one-third of young people aged 25 to 29 have moved back in with their parents.  Makes a lot of parents excited.  (laughter)</p>
<p>The people who have been hurt the most by the Obama economy are the most vulnerable among us.  Because look, when you pound small businesses with taxes, with regulations, job killing regulations, who do you think gets hurt?</p>
<p>You know what, the CEOs do fine.  John and Sherry, you all are wonderful.  You all are doing fine.  (laughter)  Relatively speaking.  But when you pound small businesses the people that lose their jobs are those starting to climb the economic ladders.</p>
<p>Those are the people that get laid off or never get hired to begin with.  Take something like Obamacare, and by the way I think we need to repeal every single word of Obamacare.  (applause)</p>
<p>But who&#8217;s getting hurt by Obamacare?  If you&#8217;re a young person right now, you&#8217;re coming out of school because of Obamacare the odds are substantially higher you&#8217;re not going to find a job because more and more small businesses are not hiring or are laying people off.</p>
<p>If you do get a job, the odds are substantially higher your employer&#8217;s not going to offer health insurance because more and more employers are dropping health insurance because of Obamacare.</p>
<p>And if you&#8217;re lucky enough to get a job that has health insurance it is absolutely certain your premiums are going to be substantially higher.  Three years ago when Obamacare passed, President Obama promised the American people the average American family&#8217;s premium would drop $2,500.</p>
<p>Has anyone seen that happen?  And that was, by the way, by the end of his first term.  He gave a time commitment for the date on which that would happen.  In fact, the average American family&#8217;s premium has gone up by $3,000.  $5,500.</p>
<p>And who do you think gets hurt the most in that?  Look, the rich can afford another $5,500.  They&#8217;re not happy about it but they can afford it.  Someone who is struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table, $5,500 out of their pocket is a major hardship.</p>
<p>Seniors, there are 14.8 million seniors on Medicare Advantage.  A heavy percentage of which are low income.  38% of Hispanic seniors are on Medicare Advantage.  Because of Obamacare, half of them are going to lose their Medicare Advantage.  Seven million seniors.</p>
<p>Why is it that Republicans don&#8217;t ask President Obama, &#8220;Why are you taking away the Medicare Advantage from half of the 38% of Hispanic seniors that are relying on it?&#8221;  Why are low income seniors getting hammered by this failed policy?</p>
<p>When we debated the Obamacare repeal on the floor of the Senate I read a newspaper article from Oklahoma about a single mom there who was working at a fast food restaurant.  And she described how she and all of her co-workers had their hours forcibly reduced to 29 hours a week because their employer would go out of business otherwise.</p>
<p>And what this single mom said was, &#8220;Look, I have two little kids at home.  I can&#8217;t feed my kids on 29 hours a week and neither can the other single moms who are working here.&#8221;</p>
<p>We need to understand that the most successful way to lift people up is a robust economic system, is economic growth, is a system &#8212; two-thirds of all new jobs come from small businesses.  When you have stagnation, the people at the bottom get hammered.</p>
<p>We need to champion lifting them up because there&#8217;s no nation on earth that has allowed so many millions to come from all over the world with nothing and achieve anything.</p>
<p>And I would note two things in conclusion.  One, in my life as in all of your lives, the ideas of opportunity are not abstract.  This is not an academic university seminar.  We all understand this in our own lives.</p>
<p>For me, my dad&#8217;s from Cuba.  He grew up in Cuba.  As a kid, when he was 14 he began fighting in the Cuban Revolution.  Actually fighting alongside Fidel Castro.  He didn&#8217;t know Castro was a Communist.  None of the kids did.</p>
<p>But he spent four years fighting in the revolution.  When he turned 17, he was thrown in prison and tortured.  My dad was beaten almost to death.  Today my father is a pastor here in Dallas.  Many of you all know him.</p>
<p>To this day his front teeth are not his own because they were kicked out of his mouth in a Cuban jail when he was a teenager.  He fled Cuba in 1957.  He came to Texas, landed in Austin.  He was 18, couldn&#8217;t speak English, had $100 sewn into his underwear.  And he washed dishes making $0.50 an hour to pay his way through the University of Texas.</p>
<p>He got a job, started a small business, worked towards the American Dream.  Now, my dad has been my hero my entire life.  But you know what I find most incredible about his story?  How commonplace it is.</p>
<p>Every one of us here has a story just like this.  We could walk up here one at a time and tell the exact same story because all of us are the children of those who risked everything for freedom.</p>
<p>And I think that&#8217;s the most fundamental DNA of what it means to be an American is to value freedom and opportunity above all else.  That&#8217;s what&#8217;s being threatened.  That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re here fighting.</p>
<p>And the last point I&#8217;ll make is change can come quickly.  It&#8217;s easy to get down at the status quo.  To hear horror after horror after horror and think there&#8217;s nothing we can do.  I want you to think back to 2005.  2005 George W. Bush had just been re-elected president.</p>
<p>Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and we had a large majority of the governorships all over the country.  Democrat consultants were going on television publicly crying in their beer talking about a, quote, permanent Republican majority.</p>
<p>That was 2005.  2006 we lost Congress.  2008 Barack Obama was elected.  2009 Obamacare passed.  And here we are today.  Politics can change fast.</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;m convinced Republicans are in a very good position to win a majority of the Senate in 2014 if we stand for principle.  And I can tell you in the next two years I intend to work very, very hard to make that happen.</p>
<p>We can turn this around and it can happen quickly.  And so I will tell all of you, I am honored.  I am humbled.  I am blessed to be able to stand with you to stand shoulder to shoulder as together we&#8217;re working to preserve freedom, to preserve this nation as a shining beacon of hope and change.  As a shining city on a hill for the world.  Thank you and God bless you.  (applause)</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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		<title>John Kerry&#8217;s Peculiar Priorities</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/secretary-of-state-john-kerrys-alarming-priorities/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=secretary-of-state-john-kerrys-alarming-priorities</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Feb 2013 04:50:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debut]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Debut speech as Secretary of State pushes foreign "investment" and global warming action in a world saturated with Islamic jihad and totalitarian danger.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/secretary-of-state-john-kerrys-alarming-priorities/kerry-for-fpm-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-178460"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-178460" title="Kerry for FPM" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Kerry-for-FPM1-240x350.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="350" /></a><strong>Editor’s note: The graphic on the left is created by our IllustWriter <a href="http://fawstin.blogspot.com/">Bosch Fawstin</a>. Visit his site <a href="http://fawstin.blogspot.com/">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Al Qaeda and its affiliates are running all over North Africa and the Middle East while remaining a serious threat to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Approximately 70,000 Syrians are dead in a civil war exploited by Iran, Russia and Islamist jihadists.  Egypt is an economic basket case, ruled by an increasingly unpopular authoritarian Islamist regime. Iran is getting ever closer to achieving its nuclear arms ambitions. North Korea has just exploded its third and most powerful nuclear bomb and is also developing inter-continental missile technology, which its military has said is &#8220;targeted&#8221; for the United States.  China is engaging in cyber attacks on U.S. companies and government agencies. The &#8220;reset&#8221; of relations with Russia is reset in reverse.</p>
<p>In short, Secretary of State John Kerry assumes his office facing some of the most challenging foreign policy issues in a generation. One might think that his first major foreign policy address would deal with the clear and present dangers facing the United States and the free world today, such as the proliferation of nuclear arms into the wrong hands, the Arab Spring-Turned-Winter or global terrorism, which cost Ambassador John Christopher Stevens and three other Americans their lives last September 11th.</p>
<p>But that would be too much to ask. Instead, Kerry decided to use his speech on February 20th at the University of Virginia to indulge in clichéd generalities about the importance of State Department foreign &#8220;investments&#8221; (i.e., foreign aid), promotion of American values abroad, and the need to tackle climate change. He also threw in for good measure a warning about budget cuts and the looming sequester.</p>
<p>&#8220;Some might ask why I’m standing here – why I’m starting here – a Secretary of State making his first speech in the United States,&#8221; Kerry said. &#8220;They might ask, &#8216;Doesn’t diplomacy happen over there, overseas, far beyond the boundaries of our own backyard?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>A good question, but John Kerry gave an answer that is more fitting for a high school social studies teacher:</p>
<blockquote><p>The reason is very simple: I came here to underscore that in today’s global world, there is no longer anything foreign about foreign policy. More than ever before, the decisions we make from the safety of our shores don’t just ripple outward – they also create a current right here in America&#8230;.</p>
<p>In this age, when a shrinking world clashes with calls for shrinking budgets, it’s our job to connect the dots for the American people between what we do over there and why it matters here at home – why the price of abandoning our global efforts would be exorbitant – and why the vacuum we would leave by retreating within ourselves will quickly be filled by those whose interests differ dramatically from our own.</p></blockquote>
<p>Kerry said that before he embarks on his first trip abroad this weekend it was important to speak at home about the importance of our &#8220;investment&#8221; in foreign aid.  Never mind the many billions of dollars wasted on corrupt regimes, failed assistance programs, a bloated United Nations, etc.  More tax dollars for foreign aid is an investment essential to helping our businesses compete abroad, he argued.</p>
<p>&#8220;Eleven of our top 15 trading partners used to be beneficiaries of U.S. foreign assistance,&#8221; Kerry said.  Whether he was including in this total aid from the Marshall Plan to re-build Europe after World War II was not clear, although he mentioned the Marshall Plan towards the end of his speech. But one thing is for sure. The aid we are squandering today in the underdeveloped world is going to do little more than create more dependency.</p>
<p>Kerry also singled out a number of countries where he claimed the State Department was instrumental in obtaining foreign purchases and investments that helped American companies. For example, he heralded the &#8220;success in Canada, where State Department officers there got a local automotive firm to invest tens of millions of dollars in Michigan, where the American auto industry is making a remarkable comeback.&#8221;</p>
<p>Ironically, Kerry&#8217;s State Department could return the favor to Canada very quickly by giving final approval to the long-stalled Keystone pipeline to transport oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Canada is the United States’s most important trading partner. Kerry has a long-standing interest in the pipeline and will be personally leading the State Department&#8217;s review of the project. The first foreign leader Kerry met with as Secretary of State was with Canada’s foreign minister, John Baird, in early February, with whom he reportedly discussed the Keystone pipeline project.  However, Kerry gave no indication which way he was leaning on the recommendation he will eventually make to President Obama.</p>
<p>Recall that Kerry told his University of Virginia audience how important it is for the State Department &#8220;to connect the dots for the American people.&#8221;</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s help him connect some dots of his own regarding the Keystone pipeline. The pipeline project would connect to thousands of more jobs for Americans. It would increase our connection with our neighbor to the north, rather than alienate them, and connect our supply of oil to a friendly, reliable source.  It would help disconnect us from dependence on the volatile Middle East for oil. Less dependence on OPEC will enhance our national security.</p>
<p>What is preventing Secretary of State Kerry from connecting these dots?  His hyper-focus on climate change, which he said &#8220;may be the only thing our generations are remembered for&#8221; if we don&#8217;t rise to the challenge.</p>
<p>Kerry has been on the forefront of the climate-change-is-a-national-security-threat theme for years. In July 2009, for example, then-Senator Kerry convened a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing to focus on how climate change was supposedly linked to national defense.  At the hearing, Kerry <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2009/07/kerry_panel_loo.html">called</a> climate change &#8220;a grave and growing threat to &#8230; America&#8217;s national security.&#8221; The committee heard testimony on the specter of &#8220;climate conflicts,&#8221; and Kerry himself compared the threat to <a href="http://grist.org/article/2009-07-22-national-security-support-climate-bill-john-warner/">9/11</a>. In his first major speech as Secretary of State at the University of Virginia, he linked climate change to &#8220;standing up for American jobs and businesses and standing up for our American values.&#8221;</p>
<p>Endangering an already fragile economy with immediate drastic measures to deal with a complicated, multi-faceted long-term problem does little to help our national defense or to create more American jobs. Holding up a favorable recommendation on the Keystone pipeline because of its possible impact on climate change is counter-productive, since Canada will only turn to environmentally unfriendly China to purchase its oil.</p>
<p>Finally, Kerry couldn&#8217;t resist using the phrase &#8220;world citizens&#8221; in his University of Virginia speech. It is reminiscent of his declaration during the 2004 presidential campaign that America&#8217;s decision to go to war must pass &#8220;the global test&#8221; &#8211; whatever that means.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s hope that Kerry&#8217;s debut speech as Secretary of State is not indicative of how he will perform on the global stage. But with the radical Obama administration behind him, the outlook is pessimistic.</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>Defending Our Country</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Feb 2013 04:52:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The missing issue in the presidential election and why it is vital to retrieve it.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/defending-our-country/stk102498m_marines-fold-an-american-flag-after-it-was-raised-in-memory-of-a-fallen-soldier-posters_main/" rel="attachment wp-att-177163"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-177163" title="stk102498m_Marines-Fold-an-American-Flag-after-It-was-Raised-in-Memory-of-a-Fallen-Soldier-Posters_main" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/stk102498m_Marines-Fold-an-American-Flag-after-It-was-Raised-in-Memory-of-a-Fallen-Soldier-Posters_main.jpg" alt="" width="240" height="180" /></a>Republicans have been a minority party for all but twelve of the years since the Second World War, as voters have preferred Democratic promoters of the welfare state over Republican proponents of fiscal restraint. But the same electorate has reversed itself when it came to protecting the American homeland. They have regularly crossed party lines to support Republicans in every presidential election where national security was an issue.</p>
<p>Thus while voters made Democrats the majority party in the people’s House for 38 of the 42 years of America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, in the majority of those years (28 of 42), they elected a Republican to be their commander-in-chief. Moreover, three of the four Democrats who did make it to the White House – Truman, Kennedy and Johnson – were militant anti-Communists and military hawks, holding views indistinguishable from Republicans on national security. The fourth, Jimmy Carter, was a former naval officer and beneficiary of the Watergate scandal. He was also a foreign policy disaster, who served only one term before being defeated by Ronald Reagan. In the entire post-war period from 1945 to the present, the only Republican presidential victory in which national security was not a major issue was the 2000 election of George W. Bush, and in that election Bush lost the popular vote.</p>
<p>To sum up: When Republicans win national elections, it is because the American people trust them with the nation’s security, and don’t trust their Democratic opponents.<strong> </strong>Another<strong> </strong>important aspect to this Republican electoral dominance on national security is that the Republican Party is a diverse coalition and its factions are capable of sitting out elections if the issues that divide them come to the fore. But concern for the nation’s safety has historically proven to be a powerful force pulling together the disparate elements of the Republican coalition and unifying its constituencies. When the security of the country is a major issue in national campaigns, it pushes other divisive issues into the background.</p>
<p>The conventional wisdom holds that “It’s the economy stupid!” (a Democrat is the one who said that). But the lesson of postwar electoral history is clear. Republicans win national elections when they put national security issues at the center of their campaigns.</p>
<p>Accomplishing this should not be difficult in a post 9/11 world in which Americans have been attacked on American soil, in which the number of states openly supporting Islamist terror has steadily grown, and in which the most dangerous Islamist regime – Iran – is about to acquire nuclear weapons. The present global outlook, with governments falling to Islamist parties in the Middle East and violent conflicts proliferating, should make national security a priority issue for both parties. Indeed, today’s world provides eerie parallels to the early Cold War conflicts, and with implications equally dire.</p>
<p>Yet in the 2012 campaign for the White House Republicans failed to make these threats a political issue, while Democrats were only too happy to pretend they were under control.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>The Republicans’ “October Surprise”</strong></p>
<p>To fully appreciate the current disorientation of the Republican Party, one need only consider how central these issues could have been in the fall of 2012 as the election approached:</p>
<p>In the four years since Obama’s first inauguration almost three times as many Americans died in Afghanistan as in the eight years that Bush conducted the war, and with still no prospect of victory in sight. Under Obama’s failed leadership, there were more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels” across the globe, a twenty-five percent rise over the years in which the fighting in Iraq was at its height. In the face of this bloody Islamist offensive, Obama was claiming that the war against al-Qaeda had been essentially “won” and the terrorist threat was subsiding.<a title="" href="#_ftn1"><strong><strong>[1]</strong></strong></a> The Obama administration had officially dropped the term “Global War On Terror” in favor of an Orwellian euphemism, describing terrorist hostilities as “overseas contingency operations.” This was a practical implementation of its policy of denying the religious nature of the Islamic war against the West, and minimizing the Islamist threat.</p>
<p>Denial was evident in Obama’s foreign policy towards the Middle East’s most dangerous actor, Iran, the chief world sponsor of terror, responsible for supplying jihadists with the IEDs that caused most of the American fatalities in Iraq. Because Obama was eager for rapprochement with Iran’s Islamist regime, his administration dragged its feet on sanctions designed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. And Obama was silent when hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets of the capital to call for an end to the dictatorship, thus passing up a crucial opportunity to end the regime.</p>
<p>An egregious domestic example of administration policy was its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic (who three years later has still not been brought to trial). The Fort Hood terrorist had successfully infiltrated the America military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West had been promoted to U.S. Army Major. Not only was the Obama administration unconcerned with the infiltration of its military by an avowed enemy, it classified the Fort Hood massacre as an incident of “workplace violence,” a Kafkaesque expression of its policy of denial.<a title="" href="#_ftn2"><strong><strong>[2]</strong></strong></a> Neither the troubling signals set off by these official cover-ups nor the facts about the growing Islamist threats were featured in the Republican presidential campaign.</p>
<p>In 2012 Republicans were handed an “October surprise” that provided them with a golden opportunity to address the issue. On the anniversary of 9/11, Islamic jihadists staged demonstrations and launched attacks against the American embassies in Egypt and other countries. In Libya, al-Qaeda terrorists overran an American consular compound and murdered the American ambassador and three brave staffers. The attack took place in a country that had been recently destabilized by administration policies. As a senator, Obama had denounced a military intervention in Iraq authorized by both houses of Congress and a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution. As president, he invoked the principle of non-intervention to justify his passivity in the face of governmental atrocities in Syria and Iran. But in Libya he authorized an invasion in a country that posed no threat to the United States, failing to even notify Congress or the U.N. Obama’s unilateral invasion destabilized the country and led directly to the rise of the local al-Qaeda, which planted its flag atop the same American Embassy it later destroyed.</p>
<p>Before his overthrow, the dictator Moammar Gaddafi warned that his demise would unleash the forces of the Islamic jihad not only in his own country but throughout North Africa – a prophecy quickly realized. In the aftermath of Obama’s aggression, al-Qaeda was able to take control in Mali of an area twice the size of Germany. In Tunisia and Egypt jihadist parties emerged as the ruling parties, doing so with the acquiescence and even assistance of the Obama Administration. In Syria, a savage civil war erupted, killing tens of thousands and pitting a fascist regime allied to Iran against rebel forces aligned with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.</p>
<p>As these disasters unfolded, the White House not only did not oppose the Islamists but armed and enabled them – in the case of Egypt with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and F-16 bomber jets. Obama had intervened in Egypt, the largest and most important country in the Middle East, to force the removal of its pro-American leader. It then promoted the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascension to power by portraying it as a “moderate” actor in the democratic process. Throughout the deteriorating Middle East situation, the chief beneficiary of America’s financial, diplomatic and military support was this same Muslim Brotherhood, the driving force behind the Islamist surge, the creator of Hamas, and the spawner of al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>To allay concerns about the emergence of the Brotherhood, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the following justification for its acceptance by the White House: &#8220;We believe that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful, and committed to non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency.&#8221;<a title="" href="#_ftn3"><strong><strong>[3]</strong></strong></a> In these words, she was referring to an organization whose spiritual leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi, had recently called for a second Holocaust of the Jews, “Allah willing, at the hands of the believers,” and a party that was calling for the establishment of a Muslim caliphate in Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish state.<a title="" href="#_ftn4"><strong><strong>[4]</strong></strong></a></p>
<p>Soon after Clinton’s endorsement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was elected Egypt’s new leader. Secure in the American administration’s support, he wasted no time in abolishing the constitution and instituting a dictatorship with no serious protest from the United States. Only months before this burial of what was left of Egypt’s democracy, the new dictator had been visited by then Senator John Kerry – now Clinton’s successor. Kerry assured the world that the new Muslim Brotherhood regime was “committed to protecting fundamental freedoms.”<a title="" href="#_ftn5"><strong><strong>[5]</strong></strong></a></p>
<p>Just as Obama misread Egypt and Libya, so he misread Syria. Both Clinton and Kerry had promoted the ruthless dictator Assad as a political reformer and friend of democracy. They did so just as he was preparing to launch a war against his own people. Meeting with Assad, Kerry called Syria “an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.”<a title="" href="#_ftn6"><strong><strong>[6]</strong></strong></a> Shortly thereafter the dictator began a series of massacres of his own population, which resulted in tens of thousands of fatalities and international calls for a humanitarian intervention – which Obama simply ignored.</p>
<p>In Libya, an American ambassador and three American heroes had been murdered by al-Qaeda on the anniversary of 9/11, with no American response. The battle over the embassy had lasted seven hours. President Obama had learned about the attack within an hour. The embattled Americans inside the compound begged for help from U.S. military assets, which were stationed only an hour away. But in one of the most shameful acts in the history of the American presidency, help was denied, and the Administration went into cover-up mode, pretending for weeks afterwards that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Mohammed Internet video, whose director they put in jail.</p>
<p>In the election fall of 2012, Obama’s policies were imploding all over the Middle East; his campaign claim that he had defeated al-Qaeda was brutally exposed as so much window-dressing for his campaign; his administration was supporting a totalitarian force that was the self-declared enemy of America and the West and with his help had taken over the largest nation in the Middle East. Yet the Republican presidential campaign was all but silent in the face of these debacles and their ominous implications for America’s future.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>The Problem Is Greater Than Any Individual or Party Faction</strong></p>
<p>Democrats who were apoplectic over Bush’s war in Iraq for its interventionist agendas and alleged unilateral approaches, were silent over Obama’s unauthorized and disastrous interventions in the Middle East. Less explicably, Republicans were silent as well. At the Party’s convention in Tampa, its nominee Mitt Romney failed to mention the Muslim Middle East and devoted only one sentence to the observation that in order to appease America’s enemies, Obama had thrown America’s only real ally in the region, Israel, “under the bus.” Romney did not mention Obama’s role as enabler of the Muslim Brotherhood or the millions of dollars his administration had given to the Palestinian jihadists on the West bank and in Gaza whose official goal was the destruction of the Jewish state. He did not mention the calls by the Islamist leaders of Egypt and Iran for the destruction of the Jewish state and the completion of the job that Hitler started.</p>
<p>Romney addressed exactly two sentences to Obama’s appeasement of the Russians and abandonment of America’s East European allies in reneging on America’s commitments to their missile. The rest of his remarks about national security (approximately 160 words in their entirety) were these:</p>
<blockquote><p>I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators.  Every American was relieved the day President Obama gave the order, and Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden. But on another front, every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran&#8217;s nuclear threat.<a title="" href="#_ftn7"><strong><strong>[7]</strong></strong></a></p></blockquote>
<p>It was the wrong tone, to begin with; it didn’t convey the crisis nature of the international situation, the mounting threats to America, the danger posed by Obama’s ongoing appeasement of America’s jihadist enemies. But the substantive details were even deficient. There was no mention of Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood or the front-page disasters of his policies in Libya and Syria – and this during the last weeks of a campaign to elect the nation’s next commander-in-chief.</p>
<p>It would be a serious mistake to regard this election debacle as exclusively &#8212; or even mainly &#8212; the fault of the Republican candidate and his campaign, or what their critics have referred to as “the Republican establishment.” The silence over these matters was hardly Romney’s problem alone. It was a problem of the party as a whole.  Super Pacs, forbidden by law to communicate with the campaign, but wielding hundreds of millions of dollars to shape the anti-Obama message also failed to focus on the national threats that Obama’s policies were encouraging.</p>
<p>One of these Super Pacs, Crossroads, was headed by Karl Rove who could fairly be linked to a Republican establishment, but the other, Americans for Prosperity, was outside the party apparatus and culture, and represented an independent conservative viewpoint. Neither of these Super Pacs created the focus on the Obama foreign policy disasters that was necessary for the Republican candidate to win the election. They agreed with the general consensus that the economy would be the decisive issue in the campaign. The conventional wisdom was wrong, as is often the case. One poignant instance with particular resonance was the campaign of 1980.  Jimmy Carter who presided over a basket case economy was leading Ronald Reagan by seven points in the last months of that race until the Iran-hostage crisis blew up in his face.</p>
<p>It is true that Romney made the situation measurably worse by his strategic decision to hug Obama on the issues in their foreign policy debate. But it is far from certain that any of the other potential nominees for president would have conducted their campaigns differently. At one time or another there were a dozen Republican candidates for the nomination that Romney won and they participated in 19 public debates. There were candidates for social conservatism, candidates for fiscal responsibility and job creation, for libertarian principles and moderate values. But there was not one Republican candidate for an aggressive assault on Obama’s disastrous national security decisions.</p>
<p>The failure of Republicans to grasp the one issue – national security – that had won them virtually all their presidential victories since 1952 was a problem that had its origins in the Bush administration’s failure to defend the Iraq War in the face of the Democrats’ attacks (a subject I will return to in a moment). When the Iraq War became a bad war, Republicans lost the national security narrative.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>The extent of the Republican problem regarding national security can be seen in an incident that took place four months before the election when Representative Michele Bachmann and four other Republican House members sent a letter to the Justice Department’s Inspector General asking him to look into the possibility of Islamist influence in the Obama Administration. The letter expressed concern about State Department policies that “appear to be a result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.”<a title="" href="#_ftn8"><strong><strong>[8]</strong></strong></a> The letter then listed five specific ways in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had actively assisted the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent to power in Egypt, producing a decisive shift in the Middle East towards the <em>jihadist</em> element.</p>
<p>The letter specifically asked for an inquiry into the activities of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and principal adviser on Muslim affairs. Abedin’s family – her mother, late father, and brother were all identifiable leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. For twelve years prior to being hired by the State Department, Abedin herself had worked for an organization founded by a major Muslim Brotherhood figure, Abdullah Omar Naseef, one of the three principal financiers of Osama bin Laden. The organization, run by her mother, was dedicated to promoting Islamic supremacist doctrines and Muslim majorities in non-Muslim countries. Another Muslim Brotherhood figure occupying a high place in the Obama Administration was Rashad Hussain, Deputy Associate White Counsel with responsibilities in the areas of national security and Muslim affairs, and there were others.</p>
<p>The fact that the Obama Administration had entered a tacit alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, furthering its agendas in Egypt and the Middle East was concern enough; that there were identifiable Islamists such as Huma Abedin and Rashad Hussain occupying high level positions of influence on matters regarding national security and Muslim affairs provided reasonable grounds for an inquiry.<a title="" href="#_ftn9"><strong><strong>[9]</strong></strong></a></p>
<p>The reaction to the Bachmann letter was quite different, however. When the letter surfaced, she and her colleagues were raked over the coals and savagely attacked as McCarthyites and “Islamophobes,” generally beneath contempt. These attacks came not only from <em>The Washington Post</em>, leading Democrats, and such well-known apologists for Islamists as Georgetown’s John Esposito, but also from Republicans John McCain and John Boehner. Without bothering to address the facts the Bachmann letter presented, McCain said: “When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches vicious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are, in ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poor because of it.” Said Boehner, “I don’t know Huma, but from everything that I do know of her she has a sterling character. Accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.”</p>
<p>The terms “McCarthyite,” “Islamophobe” and their equivalents are bludgeons wielded to shut down inquiry into subversive behaviors that overstep the bounds of legitimate criticism and dissent. The same concern about reckless accusations doesn’t seem to apply, on the other hand, to leftists themselves. They can get away with baseless claims, for example, that a Republican president “betrayed us” in Iraq (Al Gore), conducted a war that was “a fraud” (Ted Kennedy) or “lied while people died” (Democrats generally).<a title="" href="#_ftn10"><strong><strong>[10]</strong></strong></a></p>
<p>The success of Democratic attacks on that war have created a situation in which Republicans find themselves at a loss for words when it comes to holding Democrats to account over a wide range of national security issues. Consider how Romney was unable to confront Obama over his surrender of Iraq during the presidential debate. The issue was Obama’s failure to negotiate an American military presence following the enormous sacrifices that had been made – 35,000 casualties and 3 trillion U.S. dollars &#8212; to keep Iraq free of terrorists and independent of Iran. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had requested an American military base with 20,000 troops to prevent this from happening. Here is how Romney attempted to raise the issue and was backed down by Obama:</p>
<blockquote><p>Romney: …Number two, with regards to Iraq, you and I agreed, I believe, that there should have been a status of forces agreement. Did you —</p>
<p>Obama: That&#8217;s not true.</p>
<p>Romney: Oh, you didn&#8217;t — you didn&#8217;t want a status of forces agreement?</p>
<p>Obama: No, but what I — what I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down. That certainly would not help us in the Middle East….</p>
<p>Romney:  That was your posture. That was my posture as well. I thought it should have been 5,000 troops…. The answer was, we got no troops  whatsoever.</p>
<p>Obama: This is just a few weeks ago that you indicated that we should still have troops in Iraq.</p>
<p>Romney: No, I didn&#8217;t. I&#8217;m sorry, that&#8217;s —<a title="" href="#_ftn11"><strong><strong>[11]</strong></strong></a></p></blockquote>
<p>In other words Romney backed down from even his minimalist suggestion of 5,000 troops, and failed to confront Obama on his betrayal of all the Americans who had given their lives to keep Iraq independent and free. He did so, because he did not want to be seen as a “war monger” for insisting that America should have a military presence in a country strategically situated between Iran and the Arabian peninsula, which thousands of Americans had died to keep free. But Romney was not alone in this failure to hold Obama to account. When the betrayal took place earlier in the election year, not a single Republican said that it had.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Recapturing the National Security Narrative</strong></p>
<p>It is possible to pinpoint the moment when Republicans lost the national security narrative – and specifically their role as defenders of the homeland. The Democrats, once the party of “cold war liberalism” lost this narrative long ago with the McGovern campaign and its self-flagellating theme, “America Come Home.” Obama has attempted to recapture it with drone attacks on suspected terrorists, a half-hearted commitment to the war in Afghanistan, and a counter-productive intervention in Libya. But these gestures pale by comparison to the support he has given to the Muslim Brotherhood, along with his failures to back the democratic movements in Egypt and Iran.</p>
<p>The moment when Republicans lost their hold on the national security issue was June 2003, just three months into the Iraq War and six weeks after the regime had fallen. In that month, the Democratic Party launched a national campaign against the White House, claiming that Bush had lied to the American people to lure them into a war that was “unnecessary,” “immoral” and “illegal.”</p>
<p>Until that moment, the conflict had been supported by both parties and was regarded by both as a strategic necessity in a larger war that Islamic terrorists operating from safe harbors in a rogue state had launched. Following the attacks of 9/11, President Bush declared that America would regard as enemies, any regimes providing support for terrorists. Even before that, removing the Saddam regime had become a specific U.S. policy in October 1998 when a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed the Iraq Liberation Act.</p>
<p>Saddam had launched two aggressive wars, had murdered 300,000 Iraqis, had used chemical weapons on his own citizens and had put in place an active nuclear weapons program, thwarted only by his defeat in the first Gulf War. As of 2002, his regime had defied 16 UN Security Council resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce and stop Iraq from pursuing its ambition to possess weapons of mass destruction. In September 2002, the UN Security Council added a 17<sup>th</sup> resolution, which gave the regime until December 17 to comply with its terms or face consequences. When Iraq failed to comply, Bush made the only decision compatible with the preservation of international law and the security of the United States by launching a pre-emptive invasion to remove the regime. The Iraqi dictator was provided the option of leaving the country and averting war. He rejected the offer and the United States-led coalition entered the country on March 19, 2003.<a title="" href="#_ftn12"><strong><strong>[12]</strong></strong></a></p>
<p>The use of force in Iraq had been authorized by both houses of Congress, including a majority of Democrats in the Senate. It was supported with eloquent speeches by John Kerry, John Edwards, Al Gore and other Democratic leaders. But in June 2003, just three months into the war, they turned against an action that they had authorized, and began a five-year campaign to delegitimize the war, casting America as its villain. This was an unprecedented betrayal of their country’s national interest, and its troops on the battlefield.</p>
<p>With the support and protection of Democratic legislators, the <em>New York Times,</em> the <em>Washington Post</em>, and the major TV networks, conducted a relentless five-year propaganda campaign against the war, taking minor incidents like the misbehaviors of guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and blowing them out of proportion so that they became international scandals damaging their country’s prestige and weakening its morale. Left-leaning news media leaked classified national security secrets, destroying three major national security programs designed to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.<a title="" href="#_ftn13"><strong><strong>[13]</strong></strong></a> Every day of the war without exception, media provided front-page coverage of America’s body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan fueling a massive “anti-war” movement, which attacked America’s fundamental purposes along with its conduct of the war. The goal of these campaigns was to indict America and its leaders as war criminals who posed a threat to the international community. It was a fundamental break with the post-war bi-partisan foreign policy, made even more unpalatable by the fact that the war was one they had authorized and supported.</p>
<p>An equally important fact about this development was that the Democrats’ decision to oppose the war had nothing to do with the conflict itself. No change on the battlefield had taken place to precipitate the 180-degree turns of John Kerry and John Edwards, who eventually became the Democratic Party’s standard bearers in the 2004 presidential election. The reason Kerry and Edwards abandoned America’s troops in the field was to win a Democratic primary campaign in which an anti-war candidate, Howard Dean, was leaving them far behind. Dean’s campaign was propelled by the anti-American, “anti-war” left that had also opposed America’s war in Vietnam, and every American military action since then. A poll taken in the pivotal month of June 2003 showed Dean with 44% of the primary poll, anti-war leftist Dennis Kucinich with 24%, and Kerry trailing with 6%.  By reversing his stand on the war, and attacking his own country as an immoral aggressor, Kerry was able to overtake Dean and eventually to win the Iowa primary and the Democratic nomination.<a title="" href="#_ftn14"><strong><strong>[14]</strong></strong></a></p>
<p>The principal theme of the Democrats’ campaign against the Iraq War was that “Bush lied” in order to persuade them to support an invasion that was unnecessary, illegal and immoral. The claim had nothing to do with the war or the truth. It was the only way Democrats could explain the otherwise inexplicable (and unconscionable) fact that they had turned against a war they had supported in order to further their partisan ambitions – first to gain the support of their leftwing primary base, and then to gain a political edge over a sitting president who also happened to be the commander-in-chief in a frustrating conflict.</p>
<p>The truth was that Bush could not have lied to John Kerry or the congressional Democrats about the cause of the war – specifically about Saddam’s possession of nuclear weapons &#8212; because Kerry and other Democrats sat on the Senate and House Intelligence committees and had access to the same intelligence data that Bush relied on to make his case for the war. When the Democrats authorized and supported the war, they knew everything that Bush knew. The claim that he lied to get their support was in fact the biggest lie of the war. Its only purpose was to discredit the President and turn the country against him.</p>
<p>Still, Republicans didn’t lose control of the national security narrative because Democrats betrayed a war they had authorized. They lost it because they never held the Democrats to account for their betrayal. They never suggested that the Democrats’ attacks on the war were deceitful and unpatriotic. They failed to answer the Democrat attacks by exposing the lie, or by describing their reckless accusations about the immoral and unnecessary nature of the war as the disloyal propaganda it was. The Bush Justice Department failed to indict those who leaked the classified information that destroyed three national security programs, though they were clearly violating the Espionage Act. It was considered too politically risky to do so. The words “betrayal” and “sabotage” – the appropriate terms for Democrat attacks on the motives of the war were never used. No one accused Democrats of conducting a campaign to demoralize America’s troops in the field, even when Kerry during a presidential debate called it “the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time.” (How would that sound to a 19-year-old Marine facing down Islamic terrorists in Fallujah?)</p>
<p>The result of this failure of Republicans to defend the war and more particularly to put Democrats on the defensive turned a good war into a bad war. It turned a disloyal opposition into a patriotic movement. If the war against a dictator who had launched two wars, defied 17 UN Security Council resolutions, and murdered 300,000 of his own people was an illegitimate war, then American resistance to any rogue state could be portrayed as a reckless and unjustifiable aggression. In losing the political war over Iraq, Republicans also lost the national security narrative. And that is why they are tongue tied today when it comes to issues of war and peace. Call it “the Iraq War Syndrome.”</p>
<p>Although the Joint Chiefs had suggested that a military presence in Iraq was necessary to keep it free of Iran’s control, the demand for such a presence was now problematic. When 2008 presidential candidate John McCain suggested that maintaining troops in a postwar Iraq was a prudent measure, candidate Obama attacked him as a warmonger. “You know,” Obama said, “John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years.”<a title="" href="#_ftn15"><strong><strong>[15]</strong></strong></a> This refrain became a constant theme of the winning Obama campaign – Republicans are warmongers.</p>
<p>That is why three years later, when Obama surrendered Iraq to Iran no Republican accused him of betraying the Americans who gave their lives to make Iraq independent and free, although he had. That is why Romney was unable to make that case in the presidential debate, even though Iraq had by then fallen under the sway of Iran and was providing a land conduit for Iranian weapons headed for Syria.</p>
<p>In his first speech after 9/11, President Bush had said America would regard as enemies any states that provided safe harbors for terrorists. There are now nearly a dozen such harbors including Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Mali, Iran, Egypt and Palestine. Far from considering them hostile, the White House is currently providing several with economic and even military aid. We are not only losing the war with enemies whose stated goal is our destruction, but we are led by an appeasement party that is making our situation worse by the day. The only way to reverse this trend is to mount a campaign to educate the electorate about the threat posed by Islamic supremacists, and about the Obama administration’s perilous role in furthering their evil ambitions.</p>
<div><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref1"><strong><strong>[1]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref2"><strong><strong>[2]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/fort-hood-massacre-judge-removed-for-forcing-nidal-hasan-to-shave-his-beard/</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref3"><strong><strong>[3]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-cornerstone-of-regional-stability-and-peace</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref4"><strong><strong>[4]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/11/the-worlds-most-popular-muslim-preacher-yusuf-al-qaradawi-asks-allah-to-destroy-the-jews.html</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref5"><strong><strong>[5]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/john-kerry-still-wrong-after-all-these-years/</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref6"><strong><strong>[6]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/kerry-frequent-visitor-syrian-dictator-bashar-al-assad_690885.html</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref7"><strong><strong>[7]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/08/30/full-text-of-romneys-speech/</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref8"><strong><strong>[8]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/huma-abedin-and-the-muslim-brotherhood-bachmann-vs-mccain/</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref9"><strong><strong>[9]</strong></strong></a> “Conspiracy of Brothers”, Frank Gaffney, January 7, 2013, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/conspiracy-of-brothers/</span>.<br />
<em>The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration</em>, Frank Gaffney, 2012, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://www.frontpagemag.com/upload/pamphlets/mb-in-wh.pdf</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref10"><strong><strong>[10]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,110830,00.html</span>; <span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=16183</span>; <span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2006/03/02/bush_lied,_people_died/page/full/</span></p>
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<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref11"><strong><strong>[11]</strong></strong></a><strong> </strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/us/politics/transcript-of-the-third-presidential-debate-in-boca-raton-fla.html?pagewanted=3&amp;_r=0</span><strong></strong></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref12"><strong><strong>[12]</strong></strong></a> This history is recounted in David Horowitz, <em>Unholy Alliance</em>, 1994</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref13"><strong><strong>[13]</strong></strong></a> See David Horowitz &amp; Ben Johnson, <em>Party of Defeat</em>, 2008; Dougals Feith, <em>War and Decision</em>, 2009</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><strong><strong><a title="" href="#_ftnref14">[14]</a> </strong></strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2004</span></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref15"><strong><strong>[15]</strong></strong></a> <span style="text-decoration: underline;">http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/mccains_100year_war.html</span></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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		<title>FACT CHECK: Obama&#8217;s National Security Claims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/fact-check-obamas-national-security-claims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fact-check-obamas-national-security-claims</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/fact-check-obamas-national-security-claims/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:53:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war in afghanistan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142008</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Even though Obama ran in 2008 on a promise to make the world love us again, this time around he's taking a page from Bush by ignoring the world and trying to run on a national security record. His multiple failures in global diplomacy don't give him the option of running on his record empowering Islamists, but his national security record is just as bad.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Obama-Marine-one-salute.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-142555" title="Obama-Marine-one-salute" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Obama-Marine-one-salute-300x162.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="162" /></a></p>
<p>Even though Obama ran in 2008 on a promise to make the world love us again, this time around he&#8217;s taking a page from Bush by ignoring the world and trying to run on a national security record. His multiple failures in global diplomacy don&#8217;t give him the option of running on his record empowering Islamists, but his national security record is just as bad.</p>
<p>On his campaign website, Obama&#8217;s boasts are ambiguous and dishonest at the same time. Fact checking them is child&#8217;s play.</p>
<blockquote><p>When President Obama took office, the U.S. was engaged in two wars and faced terrorist threats at home and abroad.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: <em>Misleading</em></p>
<p>This ambiguous statements implies that this is not the case today.  And it isn&#8217;t. Now the US has lost both wars. The terrorist threats have not gone away and were mainly faced by passengers on planes and the maligned NYPD.</p>
<blockquote><p>President Obama is committed to strengthening America’s leadership by maintaining a strong military and staying true to our values and ideals.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: False.</p>
<p>Obama has<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/alan-w-dowd/a-smaller-defense-by-design/"> actually pushed some of the deepest cuts </a>of the military to date. Those cuts have been described as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/obama-cuts-defense-to-the-bone-and-then-some/2012/01/05/gIQACn7HdP_blog.html">going right down to the bone</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>President Obama fulfilled his promise to responsibly and safely bring our troops home from Iraq, and is making sure returning servicemembers have the support they need.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: <em>False</em></p>
<p>Iraq is in the throes of a civil war and Al Qaeda bombings are taking a heavy toll. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/the-center-for-american-progress%E2%80%99-war-on-veterans/">Obama&#8217;s proposed cuts to Tricare</a> would <a href="http://freebeacon.com/obama-to-soldiers-pay-up/">also devastate health care for returning servicemembers</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>On May 1st, President Obama signed a historic Strategic Partnership Agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that will help us to complete our mission and end the war in the Afghanistan as fast as we safely and responsibly can. By 2014, America’s combat mission in Afghanistan will end.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: <em>Misleading/False</em></p>
<p>If the mission is defeating the Taliban, then the mission has indisputably failed. If the mission was signing a meaningless agreement, then it succeeded. But we could have signed the agreement without losing over a thousand soldiers in Afghanistan. The Taliban have not been defeated and no one contends that they have been.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Why the World Hates Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/why-the-world-hates-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-the-world-hates-obama</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/why-the-world-hates-obama/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Aug 2012 23:35:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soft power]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142000</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama has gone in assuming that his anti-colonial resentments, so aptly documented by Dinesh D'Souza, will give him something in common with Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Putin. This was his mistake.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/obamabowstochina1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-142419" title="obamabowstochina" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/obamabowstochina1-300x177.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="177" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a good thing that Obama isn&#8217;t running on his foreign policy record, because it&#8217;s every bit as bad as his economic record. The Obama 2012 website only lists National Security as an issue. That is already a backhanded admission that the only thing he can run on is Bin Laden.</p>
<blockquote><p>No U.S. president since John F. Kennedy has come to office with more global goodwill than Mr. Obama; no U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has been so widely rebuked.</p></blockquote>
<p>So <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444914904577615300669832384.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h">writes Bret Stephens</a> and lists some of the highlights of the rolling disaster.</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="yui_3_2_0_6_1346242869276611">His failed personal effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. His failed personal effort to negotiate a climate-change deal at Copenhagen in 2009. His failed efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that year and this year. His failed effort to improve America&#8217;s public standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech. His failed reset with Russia. His failed effort to strong-arm Israel into a permanent settlement freeze. His failed (if half-hearted) effort to maintain a residual U.S. military force in Iraq. His failed efforts to cut deals with the Taliban and reach out to North Korea. His failed effort to win over China and Russia for even a symbolic U.N. condemnation of Syria&#8217;s Bashar Assad. His failed efforts to intercede in Europe&#8217;s economic crisis. (&#8220;Herr Obama should above all deal with the reduction of the American deficit&#8221; was the free advice German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble offered this year.)</p>
<p id="yui_3_2_0_6_1346242869276629">In June, the Pew Research Center released one of its periodic surveys of global opinion. It found that since 2009, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. had slipped nearly everywhere in the world except Russia and, go figure, Japan. George W. Bush was more popular in Egypt in the last year of his presidency than Mr. Obama is today.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The big glaring problem with Obama&#8217;s approach is that he has gone in assuming that his anti-colonial resentments, so aptly documented by Dinesh D&#8217;Souza, will give him something in common with Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Putin. This was his mistake.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s hostility to American power may make the Swedish Nobel committee love him, but it only earns him contempt from enemies and allies. Like most of the left, Obama is unable to distinguish between realpolitik and ideology. He is unable to understand that being on the left does not mean he has something in common with Islamists and Communists. It means he is their useful idiot.</p>
<p>Strong nations or nations wishing to be strong don&#8217;t respect appeasement from their enemies, they despise it. Americans may see Obama as a foreigner, but foreigners see him as an American. Americans may see him as a Muslim, but Muslims see him as an apostate. Obama&#8217;s soft power has won him no respect, because the countries whose respect he wants to win with soft power, despise soft power.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s global failure is emblematic of the foreign policy failures of the left. The American left sees the world in terms of American politics. They think that the reason that other countries hate us is because we are on the right, rather than on the left. But other countries see us in terms of their politics. They don&#8217;t react to what we do, they react to what they want.</p>
<p>Our soft power has fed their perceptions of their own strength. The more that Obama appeases Iran, the stronger Iran thinks it is and the more likely it is to get into a conflict with the United States because of that false perception of strength.</p>
<p>This is a basic lesson that the left never learns.</p>
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		<title>Caroline Glick Kicks Off Scoop Jackson and Jon Kyl Lecture Series</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/caroline-glick-kicks-off-scoop-jackson-and-jon-kyl-lecture-series/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=caroline-glick-kicks-off-scoop-jackson-and-jon-kyl-lecture-series</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/caroline-glick-kicks-off-scoop-jackson-and-jon-kyl-lecture-series/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Aug 2012 04:35:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=139538</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Freedom Center's new joint venture with the Center for Security Policy begins with great success.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor&#8217;s note: below is the video from the inaugural Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson and Jon Kyl National Security Lecture Series, which took place July 19th at the U.S. Capitol. Senator Jon Kyl&#8217;s introductory remarks are followed by a lecture from keynote speaker, Caroline Glick. </em></p>
<p><strong>Introductory Remarks from Sen. Jon Kyl:</strong></p>
<p><iframe width="610" height="343" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mhWy2_M0W80?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Caroline Glick&#8217;s Lecture: </strong></p>
<p><iframe width="610" height="343" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/I8Gqqq0KR98?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></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 Leaks and Their Catastrophic Consequences</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/obamas-leaks-and-their-disastrous-consequences/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-leaks-and-their-disastrous-consequences</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jul 2012 04:32:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[dianne feinstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=138446</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How long before someone pays the ultimate price?  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/FE_DA_120611obama425x283.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-138449" title="FE_DA_120611obama425x283" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/FE_DA_120611obama425x283.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>The White House was on the receiving end of some well-earned criticism regarding national security leaks from both sides of the aisle. On Monday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/23/democratic-sen-feinstein-suggests-some-leaked-info-came-from-white-house/">criticized</a> White House operatives for the leaks. &#8220;I think the White House has to understand that some of this is coming from their ranks,&#8221; she said, even as she absolved President Obama himself. &#8220;I don&#8217;t believe for a moment that he goes out and talks about it,&#8221; she added. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was far more direct. Seizing on Feinstein&#8217;s comment, he <a href="http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2012/07/mitt-romney-vfw-veterans-obama-/1">slammed</a> the president during his speech at a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in Reno, Nevada. &#8220;What kind of White House would reveal classified material for political gain? I&#8217;ll tell you right now: Mine will not,&#8221; he promised.</p>
<p>Romney also assailed the president for his defense cuts. “Don’t bother by the way trying to find a serious military rationale behind any of that, unless that rationale is wishful thinking,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Strategy is not driving the president’s massive defense cuts. In fact, his own secretary of defense warned that these reductions would be ‘devastating.’ And he is right,” he added.</p>
<p>But he was most <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/07/24/romney-blasts-obama-on-intel-leaks/">incensed</a> about the leaks. Taking note of Feinstein&#8217;s admission, Romney observed, &#8220;Lives of American servicemen and women are at stake. But astonishingly, the administration failed to change its ways. More top-secret operations were leaked, even some involving covert action in Iran. This isn’t a partisan issue; it’s a national security crisis.”</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Feinstein attempted to minimize the political damage. Yesterday she released a <a href="http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=f0d82dd6-6268-4cbe-bacf-a9240f22a813">statement</a> expressing her &#8220;disappointment&#8221; that Romney would use her remarks to &#8220;impugn President Obama or his commitment to protecting national security secrets. I know for a fact the president is extremely troubled by these leaks. His administration has moved aggressively to appoint two independent U.S. attorneys. There is an investigation under way, and it is moving forward quickly,&#8221; she stated. “I know we are in a campaign season, but I hope the investigation proceeds without political accusation or interference from anyone.”</p>
<p>Mitt Romney has <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/239861-romney-goes-after-obama-on-intel-leaks">other ideas.</a> “It is not enough to say the matter is being looked into, and leave it at that,” he contended. “It is unacceptable to say, ‘We’ll report our findings after Election Day.’” After accusing the White House of leaking classified information for political gain, he demanded &#8220;a full and prompt investigation by a special counsel” of the breaches. “Whoever provided classified information to the media, seeking political advantage for the administration, must be exposed, dismissed, and punished,” Mr. Romney said in his Reno speech. “The time for stonewalling is over.”</p>
<p>He also addressed Feinstein&#8217;s backtracking, saying she had been given “the Cory Booker treatment” by the White House. Booker, the mayor of Newark and a rising star in the Democrat party, first referred to administration attacks on Bain Capital as “nauseating” before changing his tune &#8212; after a private meeting with White House officials.</p>
<p>Romney&#8217;s call for a special prosecutor echoes the <a href="http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/26/12419687-gop-senators-ask-wheres-outrage-on-intel-leaks?lite">demand</a> made last month a by group of Republican senators who also believe the White House orchestrated the release of intel for political gain, and are equally skeptical the two ostensibly &#8220;independent&#8221; attorneys appointed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) can conduct an independent investigation. At issue are three separate leaks. The first one involved the details of the Navy SEAL&#8217;s successful raid on bin Laden&#8217;s compound and other U.S. missions in Pakistan. The second one involved the outing of a British double-agent who thwarted another &#8220;underwear&#8221; bomb attack. The third leak concerned the details of America&#8217;s cyberwar against Iran&#8217;s nuclear program.</p>
<p>And despite the president&#8217;s contention last month that it was &#8220;offensive&#8221; to suggest that anyone in his administration is purposely releasing classified information, it is clear that such indignation is at odds with reality. On CBS&#8217;s &#8220;60 Minutes,&#8221; Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7396619n">confirmed</a> that Pakistani Dr. Shikal Afridi helped locate Osama bin Laden. British and Saudi officials were furious about the leaks that <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/11/underwear-bomb-plot-mi6-cia-leaks">exposed</a> their double-agent, with former CIA agent Michael Scheur calling them &#8220;despicable&#8221; and &#8220;tragic.&#8221; Robert Grenier, former head of CIA counter-terrorism, contended that British agents must be exasperated &#8220;with their American friends, who are far more leak-prone than they.&#8221; With respect to the cyberwar against Iran&#8217;s nuclear program, an incredibly detailed <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all">story</a> about it was attributed to &#8220;current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts.&#8221; And as Judicial Watch discovered, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/05/25/why-isnt-undersecretary-of-defense-michael-vickers-being-prosecuted-for-outing-seal-team-6s-commander/">disclosed</a> the identity of SEAL Team 6′s commander to Hollywood producers making a movie about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The movie&#8217;s original release was scheduled for October, just before the election, but was postponed.</p>
<p>The leaks have been incredibly damaging. Dr. Afridi has been sentenced to 33 years in prison for helping us locate bin Laden. British intelligence services, MI6 and MI5 have been compromised. So have Navy SEAL operational methods. Iran now <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/06/07/obama-administration-playing-dangerous-game-with-intelligence-leaks/">knows</a> more about how we conduct cyber warfare than ever before, and can take steps to prevent it. Enemies have been given unprecedented access to the top-secret processes regarding the way our intelligence agencies conceive and carry out missions. Revealing the identity of agents in the field has compromised their safety, and severely <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/RonaldKessler/al-Qaida-classified-leaks-Pakistan/2012/06/07/id/441615">reduced</a> the likelihood of further cooperation by those with the capability to infiltrate terrorist cells, or provide critical information on their operations.</p>
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		<title>National Security: Comparing the Candidates</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/ryan-mauro/where-the-gop-candidates-stand-on-national-security/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=where-the-gop-candidates-stand-on-national-security</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Nov 2011 04:33:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Mauro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[GOP Presidential Primary debate]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=113498</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Differences over Afghanistan, Syria &#038; Pakistan aired. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Picture-25.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-113499" title="Picture-25" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Picture-25.gif" alt="" width="375" height="247" /></a></p>
<p>The Republican presidential candidates had their final national security-specific debate on November 22. The contenders respectfully disagreed on leaving Afghanistan, military action in Syria, foreign aid to Pakistan and illegal immigration. The debate gave national security voters the most detailed presentation yet of what each candidate has to offer.</p>
<p>The biggest sparks flew over the Patriot Act, where Newt Gingrich had his stand-out moment. Ron Paul used the prosecution of Timothy McVeigh as proof that treating terrorists as criminals is a workable approach. Gingrich replied, “Timothy McVeigh succeeded,” paused and continued, “That’s the whole point.”</p>
<p>“I don’t want a law that says after we lose a major American city, we sure are going to find you. I want a law that says if you try to take out an American city, we’re going to stop you,” he said.</p>
<p>On the Patriot Act, Herman Cain said he supported it but would be open to revisions. Ron Paul unsurprisingly opposes it. Jon Huntsman refused to take a stance, only saying that we must work “very carefully” in handling civil liberties and that the U.S. must uphold its values.</p>
<p>The second biggest disagreement was over the handling of illegal immigrants, where Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann took aim at Gingrich. Every candidate favors securing the border, but Gingrich believes we should not deport illegals who have been here for a long time, have families and have not committed any additional crimes. He said he was “prepared to take the heat” for a “humane” policy and that the political party that promotes family values shouldn’t split up the families of illegal immigrants. Romney and Bachmann accused him of favoring amnesty and said he would encourage further illegal immigration. Rick Perry sided with Gingrich.</p>
<p>The third disagreement was over withdrawing from Afghanistan. Jon Huntsman advocates an immediate drawdown to 10-15,000 troops to train Afghan security forces, gather intelligence and handle special operations. Mitt Romney asked him if that meant he’d bring the troops home next week, and Huntsman replied, “Did you hear what I just said?”</p>
<p>Romney was the most hawkish on Afghanistan, even though he supports President Obama’s timeline for a complete withdrawal by 2014. His policy is only different than Obama’s in that he wants to bring home the troops sent as part of the surge in December 2012, whereas Obama is bringing them home by September. Santorum criticized Huntsman, saying he was fulfilling the predictions of radical Islamic leaders.</p>
<p>The last big disagreement was over foreign aid to Pakistan. Rick Perry says he won’t give a single penny to Pakistan until its behavior changes. Bachmann said that Pakistan is “too nuclear to fail” and a complete cut-off in assistance could result in loose nukes. She also mentioned that China would replace U.S. influence in Pakistan. Rick Santorum agreed with Bachmann.</p>
<p>On Iran, the candidates were united with the predictable exception of Ron Paul. Gingrich called for an energy independence program that would pursue all forms of alternative energy and a strategy to defeat radical Islam that includes regime change in Iran. He said the U.S. could “break” the regime within one year if it cut off the supply of gasoline to Iran and sabotaged its only refinery. He will only support military action against Iran that has the objective of bringing down the regime.</p>
<p>Gingrich said there are only three choices: Regime change without war, regime change with war, or a nuclear-armed Iran. He also made the point that if the U.S. doesn’t support Israel, it makes it more likely that Israel will use nuclear weapons in a campaign to stop Iran from going nuclear.</p>
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		<title>Andrew C. McCarthy: Kill or Capture? &#8211; National Review Online</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/andrew-c-mccarthy-kill-or-capture-national-review-online/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-c-mccarthy-kill-or-capture-national-review-online</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:15:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=50909</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A few years ago, I got into an argument with an expert on military operations. I had written a white paper proposing the creation of a national-security court for terrorism cases. In the paper I criticized the trend to “judicialize” warfare, arguing that, in our system, judgments about the detention and treatment of alien enemy [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A few years ago, I got into an argument with an expert on military operations. I had written a white paper proposing the creation of a national-security court for terrorism cases. In the paper I criticized the trend to “judicialize” warfare, arguing that, in our system, judgments about the detention and treatment of alien enemy combatants are the preserve of the political branches, not the politically unaccountable courts. It was not my overall thesis to which the military expert took exception. The point of contention had to do with the incentives the legal system creates for soldiers.</p>
<p>I contended — and still contend — that the leftists who were pushing for judicial intrusion into the capture, detention, and interrogation of enemy operatives were subverting the human-rights agenda they purport to serve. There are many scenarios in which our forces are in a position either to kill or to capture the enemy, situations in which both are valid options under the laws of war. In a kill-or-capture situation, capture is the more merciful option. From an intelligence perspective, it may also be the more advantageous. The underlying objective of international humanitarian law is to civilize warfare. Yet, I posited, by freighting capture with judicial second-guessing, rather than leaving the matter to the sound discretion of our professional warfighters, the Left was virtually guaranteeing that more combatants would be killed. As Justice Clarence Thomas has observed, a Hellfire missile targeted at a jihadist who has not been given notice or an opportunity to be heard is an extremely prejudicial termination of his due-process rights.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/425301/kill-or-capture/andrew-c-mccarthy">Kill or Capture? &#8211; Andrew C. McCarthy &#8211; National Review Online</a>.</p>
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		<title>Ralph Peters: Miranda wrongs &#8211; NYPOST.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/ralph-peters-miranda-wrongs-nypost-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ralph-peters-miranda-wrongs-nypost-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:34:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49548</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber.With fumbling terrorism czar John Brennan walking point, administration spokesmen attacked those who believe that treating would-be suicide-bomber Umar Abdulmutallab the way we handle shoplifters harms our national security.The White [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber.With fumbling terrorism czar John Brennan walking point, administration spokesmen attacked those who believe that treating would-be suicide-bomber Umar Abdulmutallab the way we handle shoplifters harms our national security.The White House position is a PR blend of lies, half-truths and ignorance. Let&amp;apos;s strip out the politics and lay out the facts from an intelligence professional&#8217;s perspective:</p>
<p>* <em>The administration claims Abdulmutallab is now cooperating</em>. That&#8217;s either dishonest or idiotic &#8212; or both.</p>
<p>If he <em>is</em> cooperating, jeez, you don&#8217;t <em>tell</em> the terrorists. Why on earth leak it that the guy&#8217;s blabbing, thus warning the enemy? Could the administration &#8212; just possibly &#8212; be playing politics?</p>
<p>* <em>Even if he&#8217;s talking now, Abdulmutallab won&#8217;t provide actionable intelligence</em>. It&#8217;s too late: His contacts had time to vacate the premises and alter their modes of operation.</p>
<p>The best information that a low-level operative like the Jockey-shorts jerk possesses is highly perishable &#8212; the captive isn&#8217;t privy to long-term plans, just the immediate details of his mission and a few basic contacts.</p>
<div id="TixyyLink" style="border: medium none; overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">
Read more: <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/miranda_wrongs_egxhnVBB6OBzXUN9DJuvTJ#ixzz0f4LLNGmG">http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/miranda_wrongs_egxhnVBB6OBzXUN9DJuvTJ#ixzz0f4LLNGmG</a></div>
<p>via <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/miranda_wrongs_egxhnVBB6OBzXUN9DJuvTJ">Miranda wrongs &#8211; NYPOST.com</a>.</p>
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		<title>Andrew C. McCarthy: The Attorney and the General &#8211; National Review Online</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/andrew-c-mccarthy-the-attorney-and-the-general-national-review-online/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-c-mccarthy-the-attorney-and-the-general-national-review-online</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:12:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48532</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, penned a superb op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday. Succinctly, he tallies the wages of having Attorney General Eric Holder make national-security decisions. Unlike the attorney general, Hayden is a real general, and very much worth heeding. He shows that these decisions have been premised on left-wing political [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, penned a superb op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday. Succinctly, he tallies the wages of having Attorney General Eric Holder make national-security decisions. Unlike the attorney general, Hayden is a real general, and very much worth heeding. He shows that these decisions have been premised on left-wing political calculations that always shortchange intelligence collection and the pursuit of American interests. Holder’s judgments are not based on what America’s safety requires or on what the law maximally permits U.S. intelligence to do in wartime.</p>
<p>As Hayden points out, the policy decisions that President Obama has allowed Holder to make are significant — not only taken one by one, but in their cumulative effect on the ethos of our intelligence agencies. “Intelligence officers,” he writes, “need to know that someone has their back.” After Holder forced the release in April of classified memos prepared by Bush Justice Department lawyers, laying out interrogation tactics and the legal rationale for permitting them, “CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not.”</p>
<p>The paralysis wrought by this decision transcends the narrow subject of interrogations. All intelligence collection is infected. If you can’t/don’t collect intelligence in a war against a secretive, transnational jihadist network, you stand to lose — and a lot of Americans stand to die. Thus, Hayden concludes, “Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department’s perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne.”</p>
<p>via <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/423597/the-attorney-and-the-general/andrew-c-mccarthy">The Attorney and the General &#8211; Andrew C. McCarthy &#8211; National Review Online</a>.</p>
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		<title>Andrew C. McCarthy: Rigging the Numbers on Terror &#8211; National Review Online</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/andrew-c-mccarthy-rigging-the-numbers-on-terror-national-review-online/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-c-mccarthy-rigging-the-numbers-on-terror-national-review-online</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:20:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Administration]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48402</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.The president seems more poised to move [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this hole of its own making.The president seems more poised to move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases.No such luck. Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/423463/rigging-the-numbers/andrew-c-mccarthy">Rigging the Numbers &#8211; Andrew C. McCarthy &#8211; National Review Online</a>.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Destructive Course</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/obama%e2%80%99s-destructive-course/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama%25e2%2580%2599s-destructive-course</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:26:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A disappointing speech from a disappointing president. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48007" title="ra2113827274" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ra2113827274.jpg" alt="ra2113827274" width="400" height="267" /></p>
<p>Historically, State of the Union speeches leave no trace. Their impact on presidential approval ratings is nil. Their utility, therefore,  is in what they reflect about the presidential character and the presidential course. Last night President Obama gave a speech that was at times quite eloquent, and on occasion rhetorically empty. But at all times it was the speech of a man who is deeply partisan and dangerously arrogant and is determined to stay a course which has already damaged his party, weakened his country at home and exposed it to attack from abroad.</p>
<p>Over and over again the President demonstrated a troubling disconnect from reality, striking in the leader of a political democracy, and indicative of a narcissism that appears to be greater than President Clinton’s. “I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight,” he said at the outset of his speech. This in a country with 17 million unemployed, a political majority that is unable to govern, and a national security apparatus that couldn’t identify a terrorist whose own father had turned him in.</p>
<p>In the course of his speech, as Charles Krauthammer observed, the President attacked “Washington” seven times in the name of the people, as though he and his party were not Washington, as though the course he had set for his party and his country was not the source of the people’s rage. Taken as a whole it was an hour-long campaign speech, in which he broke precedent to attack not only the previous Republican Administration and all the Republicans in the chamber but even the Supreme Court justices present as well. And then – as though he had not done that – he scolded the entire assemblage for being politicians instead of non-partisan statesmen, and for running “permanent campaigns.”</p>
<p>But the most disturbing passage of his speech was also the most eloquent, the peroration at the end. In this flourish as throughout his speech there was the world and then there was Obama. In the world “Each time a CEO rewards himself for failure … people’s doubts grow.” But in the mind of Obama, no failure is his. If voters have rejected his plans for the future that is their deficiency not his. “I campaigned on the promise of change … But remember this … I never suggested that change would be easy.” The cowardice and weakness of his own party and the voters who have deserted him are to blame. And they have betrayed not only him but through him the Republic itself. “If people had made that decision 50 years ago, or 100 years ago or 200 years ago we wouldn’t be here tonight. The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain.” <em>L’etat c’est moi.</em></p>
<p>The philosopher Martin Buber once wrote: “Woe to the people whose leader has no teacher.” In a democracy, the people must function as their leader’s teacher. But Obama has no faith in the American people, and in particular the people who supported him. And therefore there will be no correction of the destructive – and self-destructive — course he has undertaken.</p>
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