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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; president</title>
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		<title>Ronald Kessler on the Secrets of the Secret Service</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/ronald-kessler-on-the-secrets-of-the-secret-service/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ronald-kessler-on-the-secrets-of-the-secret-service</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Dec 2014 05:50:23 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Investigative reporter discusses his fascinating new book "The First Family Detail."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor&#8217;s note: Below are the video and transcript to Ronald Kessler&#8217;s address at the Freedom Center&#8217;s Dec. 10, 2014, gathering of the Wednesday Morning Club. </em></p>
<p><strong><em>To order Ronald Kessler&#8217;s &#8220;The First Family Detail,&#8221; click <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Family-Detail-Presidents/dp/0804139210">here</a>. </em></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114316988" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Thank you so much for having me.  And it&#8217;s a real honor to be with such sophisticated people who understand everything, know everything.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And as you can tell from the titles of my books, I like to probe secret organizations, secret subjects.  And this sometimes gets me into trouble.</p>
<p>One of my books, called &#8220;Moscow Station,&#8221; revealed that a KGB archivist had defected from Russia to the FBI.  And I knew that he was safe, and revealing this would not jeopardize him.  But nevertheless, the FBI started a leak investigation.  And I heard about it from the inside.  I heard the agents were going to come out and try to interview me.</p>
<p>And I went through in my mind how I would greet them &#8212; I would offer them coffee, I would schmooze them.  And of course, I would try to develop them as sources.</p>
<p>And a few days later, I was in my house in Potomac, Maryland, which is a quiet suburb; very few people ring the bell.  And I had this idea &#8212; since I&#8217;ve written so many books about the FBI, and covered it for so long, and interviewed so many agents, that I have an idea of what FBI agents look like, which is pretty silly.</p>
<p>But nevertheless, the bell rang, I opened the door.  And there were these two very intense-looking young men with narrow ties, white shirts.  And I said &#8212; well, where have you guys been?  I&#8217;ve been expecting you, come on in.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And they looked at me a little &#8212; almost a little afraid, a little strangely.  And they held out these pamphlets, the &#8220;The Watchtower.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I like a challenge.  The fact that these are secret organizations, and also very important organizations that can engage in abuses that are so important to our national security &#8212; all that attracts me.  And in the case of the Secret Service, it is really the most secret of all the organizations, even more so than the CIA or the FBI, both of which I&#8217;ve written about.</p>
<p>And I began with a tip about mismanagement by the Secret Service.  And then, as I got into it, I found that was really the tip of the iceberg.  But at the same time, I got the cooperation of the Secret Service.  I think they felt that I would tell an honest story, which is what I try to do.</p>
<p>For example, with the FBI, when they do good, as they have since 9/11 &#8212; we have not had a successful foreign terrorist attack since 9/11, and it&#8217;s largely because of the FBI that I say that.  And that is unusual in journalism today, even though I&#8217;m actually much younger than Michael thinks.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But on the other hand, when they engage in abuses, I reveal that.  In the case of the FBI, I revealed that William Sessions, the FBI director, had been engaging in abuses of all kinds, and I exposed that.  And that led to his dismissal by President Clinton.</p>
<p>In the case of the Secret Service books, I&#8217;ve now written two.  They both reveal the deficiencies in the agency and also what agents see behind the scenes.  I know this is too tawdry for all of you to hear, but there&#8217;s quite a bit that they see.</p>
<p>For example, actually before the first chapter, I began with a prologue which reveals that Bill Clinton has a mistress who has been unofficially codenamed by agents &#8220;Energizer.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And Energizer was chosen because the first letter of every family&#8217;s codename is always the same.  So in the case of the Clintons, Bill is &#8220;Eagle,&#8221; and Hillary is &#8220;Evergreen.&#8221;  And so the mistress, busty blonde mistress, became &#8220;Energizer.&#8221;</p>
<p>And as soon as Hillary leaves the home in Chappaqua, Energizer shows up.  Unlike Hillary, who&#8217;s so nasty to agents that being assigned to her detail is considered a form of punishment &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; the mistress is very nice to agents.  She&#8217;ll even bring them cookies sometimes.</p>
<p>One day, during the summer, she brought cookies, she drove up to the gate.  The agents are instructed not to ever ask for her ID or log her in, whereas even Clinton relatives have to be logged in.  And she held out this platter of cookies through the window of her vehicle to the agent.  And he noticed that she was wearing a low-cut tank top.  And he described in great detail her breasts, that they&#8217;re enhanced.  There was no question in his mind.  And so we have every single detail in this book, &#8220;The First Family Detail.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the case of Hillary, she&#8217;ll just make life miserable for agents.  She&#8217;ll blow up at them.  They can never do anything right.  She&#8217;ll even complain when the limousine goes over a bump in the road.  Being assigned is considered the worst assignment in the Secret Service to be assigned to Hillary&#8217;s detail.</p>
<p>And so yes, these stories are titillating; yes, they&#8217;re revealing.  But they also tell you something about our leaders and who we should be electing for President.  Should we elect someone who treats other people in such a shabby way, who at the same time claims to be compassionate, to care about the little people?  She&#8217;s going to be a champion of the middle class?  And yet, she cannot treat agents who are there to protect her, and even take a bullet to protect her, with decency.</p>
<p>And people just, you know, sort of ignore this.  They look at how well someone speaks, they look at what someone promises.  They&#8217;ll ignore the track record &#8212; for example, the fact that President Obama spent 20 years listening to the anti-white, anti-America, anti-Israel rantings of Reverend Wright.  People just &#8212; you know, they&#8217;re in denial.</p>
<p>My most liberal friends, my most liberal family members, say they would&#8217;ve walked out if they&#8217;d heard that, in any situation.  And yet, Obama exposed his kids to that, as well as, of course, Michelle, who was even more entranced by Reverend Wright.</p>
<p>Joe Biden &#8212; he goes back to his home in Wilmington several times a week on Air Force Two.  And that has cost our taxpayers $1 million since he took office.  And this is in the book.  I got it from the Air Force under the Freedom of Information Act.  And yet, nobody in the mainstream media has picked this up.</p>
<p>You know, it&#8217;s one thing to go back home a few times a year.  But he has a job in Washington, he has a home, paid for by taxpayers, in Washington, with five navy stewards who make pastries every night and cater to all of his wishes.  Both homes have pools.  He has no business going back and forth, sometimes even twice a day, on Air Force Two.  Sometimes, he&#8217;ll even go back to Wilmington, and then come back just for the day to play golf with Obama at Andrews Air Force Base, and then go back to Wilmington.</p>
<p>The fact that he has a pool is intriguing.  Because he has a habit of skinny dipping.  And this offends female Secret Service agents.  They signed up to take a bullet for the President, but not to see Joe Biden run around naked.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And on top of all that &#8212; and this is probably the worst of all &#8212; when he goes up to Wilmington, Biden instructs his agents to keep the military aide with the nuclear football for unleashing a nuclear counterstrike at least a mile behind in the motorcade.  Biden, like most politicians, is fixated on his image.  He wants to maintain the image of the regular Joe, working-class guy.  So he doesn&#8217;t want to have a long motorcade when he goes to Wilmington.</p>
<p>But the result is that if Obama were taken out, we would be defenseless against a nuclear attack.  Because, of course, there wouldn&#8217;t be time for the nuclear football to catch up with Biden.  Height of irresponsibility.  The worst judgment you can imagine.  And again, the mainstream media have ignored this revelation in the book.</p>
<p>The book is nonpartisan.  It says that Obama and his wife do treat agents with respect and consideration.  On the other hand, agents have been dismayed to overhear Michelle urge her husband to be more aggressive in attacking Republicans and in siding with blacks in racial controversies, which of course we see him do over and over again.</p>
<p>And I think that certainly has contributed to the violence and the rioting.  Because he&#8217;s essentially sanctioning the idea that we&#8217;re all racists.  And of course, that goes back to Reverend Wright.  That was exactly his mindset.  And we&#8217;re seeing it now with President Obama.</p>
<p>Going back to President Johnson &#8212; he was probably the most outrageous of all.  When he was Vice President, he was late for an appointment with JFK.  The agent was driving him along Pennsylvania Avenue &#8212; it was rush hour.  And he told his agent to drive up on the sidewalk to get there faster.  Well, the sidewalk was full of people coming out of office buildings.  The agent refused, of course, as he should&#8217;ve.  And Johnson took a newspaper and hit this agent on the head and said &#8212; you&#8217;re fired.  This is all on the record; at least half of the material in the book is on the record.</p>
<p>Johnson was having sex with five of his eight secretaries.  One time his wife, Ladybird, caught him having sex in the Oval Office with one of his secretaries.  And Johnson blew up at the Secret Service and said, you should&#8217;ve warned me, and insisted that they install a buzzer system to warn him in the future, if he was having sex and Ladybird was in the area.</p>
<p>He would also sit on the toilet and defecate as he&#8217;s being briefed by aids.  He would give press conferences in Texas and begin urinating in front of female reporters, as well as male reporters.  Of course, none of this was ever reported at the time.</p>
<p>The first time that the press began to report the sexual activities and other unpleasant activities of presidents and candidates was with Gary Hart, with the Donna Rice incident.  But actually, that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Agents who were protecting Donna Rice found that Hart&#8217;s buddy, Warren Beatty, would arrange to have these gorgeous starlets show up at Warren Beatty&#8217;s home in LA.  And Hart would go there, and they&#8217;d all jump in a hot tub.  Not with Warren Beatty, just the girls.  And Gary Hart &#8212; they&#8217;d jump in the hot tub, the girls would undress.  They&#8217;d stay overnight.  And the agents would go &#8212; there&#8217;s a 10, there&#8217;s a 9, there&#8217;s a 10, there&#8217;s a 9.  They were just totally overwrought by the gorgeous starlets.</p>
<p>Jimmy Carter, again, was this guy who pretended to be a jolly peanut farmer, a man of the people, a populist.  But behind the scenes, he was so nasty to agents that he would tell them he didn&#8217;t want them to say hello to him in the morning on the way to the Oval Office.  It was just too much bother to say hello back to another human being.  What kind of a person is that?</p>
<p>And he would pretend to carry his own luggage in front of the cameras, to try to show that he&#8217;s a man of the people.  But then, as soon as the cameras were gone, he would give the luggage to aides to carry, or the luggage was empty in the first place.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Carter would sometimes show up in the Oval Office at 5:00 in the morning and tell the Press Office to tell the press that he was in there working hard for the American people at 5:00 a.m.  But then he&#8217;d nod off to sleep on the couch in the Oval Office.</p>
<p>So, you know, again and again, we fall for these charades.  And the press just keeps focusing on the horserace.  They don&#8217;t look at character.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s something that we look at in our daily lives all the time.  We don&#8217;t choose a friend who would be nasty to other people, we don&#8217;t choose a new employee who would treat other people indecently.  And yet, here we have people who, you know, just cannot be trusted.  And it comes out eventually in their policies and in the way they interact with the country.  The other side is that the &#8212; in this book &#8212; the Secret Service has become so lax, and engages in so much corner-cutting, that everywhere you look, they&#8217;re really risking an assassination.</p>
<p>One thing in the book that hasn&#8217;t been picked up by the press is that on a regular basis, agents under pressure from either the Bush or the Obama White House or from campaign staffs will let people into events without magnetometer or metal detection screening.  It&#8217;s just like letting passengers into an airplane without doing that.  And if everybody did that, they would be fired and possibly prosecuted.</p>
<p>But the Secret Service management &#8212; it&#8217;s the management that&#8217;s at fault, not the agents, who really are brave and dedicated; they&#8217;ll take a bullet for the President &#8212; but the management has this arrogant culture that says &#8212; we&#8217;re the great Secret Service, we can take care of any problem.  We don&#8217;t have to even lock the front door of the White House.  And therefore, we can let people into events without magnetometer screening.</p>
<p>And when I confronted a high-ranking Secret Service official about this, he hemmed and hawed.  First he was saying &#8212; you know, now we have magnetometers, it&#8217;s much safer.  And I said &#8212; well, what about the times when you don&#8217;t use them, when you let people in under pressure?  Because there&#8217;s a line outside, and the staff says &#8212; let them in, let them in; and sure enough they let them in.</p>
<p>And then he started making excuses.  They&#8217;re wonderful at making excuses.  And he said &#8212; well, you know, if someone comes in without magnetometer screening, we keep those people further back.  Well, of course, in one second, you could have five terrorists come in with grenades and run from the back of an event and take out the President.  These are things that are just common sense.</p>
<p>And when you see what the Secret Service said after the penetration of the White House by Gonzales, which was &#8212; first of all, they lied about where he was apprehended &#8212; they said that he was stopped at the door; he actually penetrated the whole White House. They said he was not armed; that was a lie, he was armed with a knife.  And then they said &#8212; the Secret Service director, Julia Pierson, said that the agents exercised tremendous restraint in not killing him.  Well, is that what they&#8217;re there for, to exercise restraint?</p>
<p>I can tell you, FBI officials were horrified at that comment and laughing at it.  Because absolutely, he could&#8217;ve had explosives, he could&#8217;ve had WMD.  They wouldn&#8217;t know it until the White House was blown up.  And you have to use lethal force if everything else has failed.</p>
<p>And why did it fail?  Well, the guy who was supposed to release a canine unit, as they call them &#8212; and I did interview a canine unit when I was doing the book &#8212; they introduced me to one, and he went around and found explosives &#8212; that guy was on a personal cell phone call in his van.</p>
<p>But why would all this happen?  Why would you have agents hiring prostitutes?  Why would you have the uniform division letting the Salahis, the glamorous couple, into the White House; along with a third intruder, Carlos Allen, which is a story that I also broke &#8212; why would they be doing that?  Because you have this broken management culture.  And these agents say &#8212; well, management is breaking the rules.  They&#8217;re taking risks with assassinations; why should we do whatever we feel like doing?</p>
<p>This is just basic in any organization, that if you don&#8217;t maintain the right standards at the top, the whole place is going to crumble.  And that includes the infrastructure.  They don&#8217;t polygraph agents the way the FBI does, they don&#8217;t have the latest intrusion devices at the White House itself.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s this myth that somehow if you push the perimeter of the White House gate further back, somehow we&#8217;re not going to have access to the President.  Hey, nobody has access to the President, unless they have an appointment and have been cleared by the Secret Service.  And I don&#8217;t see that there&#8217;s anything to be lost by pushing that perimeter back.</p>
<p>You could have 30 ISIL terrorists come in with grenades from all directions.  And to keep the perimeter where it is now is simply asking for trouble.</p>
<p>The question often is asked of me &#8212; how do I get them to cooperate?  Usually, I water-board them, that works pretty well.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But I think that, as I said before, I do tell an honest story.  They respect that.  I think it&#8217;s pretty unusual in journalism today, given all the slant that you see.  And also, I&#8217;m genuinely interested in what they do.  I love to hear about profiling.  Before it became a nasty word, I broke the first story about FBI profiling in 1985.  And I think they think I already have a lot of sources, I already know a lot.  And they figure they might as well cooperate.</p>
<p>In my previous book, the secrets of the FBI, Bob Mueller, the FBI director, personally approved giving me access to their most secret tool, which is how they break into homes and offices to plant bugging devices &#8212; all court-authorized, of course.  But it&#8217;s an incredible story.  And let&#8217;s say they want to break into an embassy or some other secure location, or a mafia home, they will essentially case the joint for about two weeks beforehand.  They&#8217;ll watch who goes in, who goes out.</p>
<p>And on the night of the break-in, they&#8217;ll have agents watch at the homes of those people to make sure they don&#8217;t go back to the premises.  And if they do, oh, there&#8217;ll be a little traffic accident, or there&#8217;ll be a little ticket written.  Because the agents might dress in police uniforms in order to delay anybody going back.</p>
<p>The agents will bring in their own dust, in case they disturb any dust on a coffee table or a desk.  They will take a photo of any dog on the premises, and show that photo to a veterinarian who&#8217;s on contract.  And he prescribes just the right amount of tranquilizer to shoot into the dog with a dart gun.  And at the end of the break-in, they wake up the dog, because they don&#8217;t want any sleepy dogs around to create suspicion.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s say they want to put bugs in an office suite.  They&#8217;ll go in during the day and take control of one of the elevators; they go to elevator school.  And they&#8217;ll go up on the roof of the elevator in the middle of the night, get off, go in the suite, put the bugs in.  And they actually showed me a real bug, it&#8217;s about the size of a postage stamp.  And it will record for 20 hours, or transmit, as you wish.  And then, during the day, they&#8217;ll get back in the elevator, they&#8217;ll come back.  They&#8217;ll go out wearing business suits, and nobody&#8217;s the wiser.</p>
<p>And then, one other technique is &#8212; let&#8217;s say they want to put a bug in a home in the middle of the night.  They will take a photo of the front of the house.  They&#8217;ll blow that up into a huge tarp, drape that over the front of the house, so that any bystanders walking by will think that&#8217;s the front of the house.  But in fact, the agents are behind the tarp, defeating the alarms, defeating the lock systems; and they&#8217;ll put the bugs in.</p>
<p>And just one anecdote about this is they were to put bugs in a mafia hangout in Philadelphia.  It was an electronics store that was actually a front for the mafia.  And they couldn&#8217;t go &#8212; they didn&#8217;t want to go in the back door to put in bugs, because often that could be booby-trapped.  So they would have to go in the front.  But the front overlooked an all-night bar.</p>
<p>So how do they go in without being seen by the patrons?  They borrowed a city bus.  The agents got on the bus.  They rode in front of the premises.  They got out, they put the hood of the bus up to make it look as if it had broken down.  They went in, they defeated the locks and the alarm systems.  The bus then went around the block to pick them up.</p>
<p>And it went by a bus stop.  And there were two patrons in the bar waiting for the bus.  And the bus went whizzing by them, and they were furious.  And they went running for the bus.  And they got in as the agents were getting in, in front of the premises.  And the agents were all from different offices, including from this secret team called Tac-Ops that puts in bugs.  And they didn&#8217;t realize that these guys don&#8217;t belong with them.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So then, a few of the agents, started taking off their weapons and their pit walkie-talkies, and these guys got scared, you know.  And they started ringing to get off &#8212; ding-ding-ding, let me off, let me off.  And the agent who was driving the bus said &#8212; hey, guys, stop bothering me, I&#8217;m having enough trouble driving this bus.</p>
<p>But then, another agent got up, and he had a shotgun over his shoulder.  And they started ringing again &#8212; ring, ding-ding-ding, let me off, let me off.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And finally, the agent who was driving figured out what was happening.  Let them out, they went running down the street, and nobody ever heard from them again.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>One other book that I did is mentioned in the New York Times today, and other publications, because the Senate Intelligence Committee&#8217;s report cites my interaction with the CIA when I did this book, &#8220;The CIA At War,&#8221; along with a New York Times reporter.  So it couldn&#8217;t be too bad if a New York Times reporter was involved.  And has the spin that somehow the CIA was leaking material about what they had done with the enhanced interrogation and how effective it was to me and to this New York Times reporter.</p>
<p>Well, the reality is I went to the CIA to get cooperation in the book.  They arranged a number of interviews on a lot of subjects.  Some of the interviews had to do with this.  It wasn&#8217;t as if I was being bamboozled by the CIA.  I corroborated what I used with the FBI.  But the implication is if the White House agrees to an interview, or the CIA or another institution agrees to an interview, somehow that means you&#8217;re already being propagandized and you shouldn&#8217;t listen to anything.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s in fact what this Democratic staff did.  They refused to interview any of the CIA officials or officers involved in this whatsoever.  And in addition, they excluded the Republicans.</p>
<p>So the whole thing is a joke.  And what they have done is they&#8217;ve cherry-picked a few things, an email here, an email there.  That&#8217;s not the way you present how an investigation proceeded, you know.  If you think of gathering facts about any subject, it&#8217;s a very complex process.  You know, you may be impressed by one fact, you may hear about a fact and ignore it.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the way the whole Watergate investigation proceeded.  I sat next to Carl Bernstein during Watergate at the Washington Post.  Woodward would come over every night, and they would write their stories together.  I would overhear what they were saying &#8211; they were knocking on doors until midnight.  And you see some critics on the right who are claiming that they embellished what they did, that they made up Deep Throat, that they didn&#8217;t really reveal the important stories.</p>
<p>That is B.S.  Because I was there, I saw what they did.  And they never claimed that Deep Throat gave them everything, but rather every now and then, he would give them a clue.  He would say &#8212; you&#8217;re on the right track.  And given the fact that the reporters and the Post were really, really scared of what might happen &#8211; they were being threatened by Mitchell &#8211; this reassurance and these clues every now and then helped their investigation.</p>
<p>And I actually was the first to present real information indicating who Deep Throat was before he came out.  I was doing another FBI book called &#8220;The Bureau.&#8221;  I went to interview Mark Felt, who turned out to be Deep Throat, in California.  And his daughter greeted me and said &#8212; you know, there&#8217;s this guy, Bob Woodward, who was out here about a year ago.  And he went to lunch with my father.  And you know what?  He came in a white limousine, but he had the limousine parked 10 blocks away, and then he walked to our house.  Well, that was a tipoff right away this is Deep Throat.  There&#8217;s no way Woodward would&#8217;ve done that otherwise.</p>
<p>And this daughter was sort of a flowerchild; she didn&#8217;t even recognize who Woodward was.  She knew he was a reporter, but didn&#8217;t know anything about Watergate and whatnot.</p>
<p>So, I&#8217;ve been into a lot of interesting subjects.  One other subject is in one of my books, just about the FBI&#8217;s counterintelligence program, the only book about how they catch spies.  I interviewed Karl Koecher and his wife, Hana, in Prague after they had been caught by the FBI and returned to Czechoslovakia.</p>
<p>Karl was a mole in the CIA, you don&#8217;t hear much about it.  But he was a very effective mole.  And one of his methods, besides being a very high-level translator, was that he and his gorgeous blonde wife, Hana, would go to orgies and sex parties with White House people, Defense Department people.  And of course, those people would feel compromised, because they were at these parties that they shouldn&#8217;t be attending.  Because they could be blackmailed.  And so they would get bits of information from them, as well as enjoying the parties.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Hana actually &#8212; Hana enjoyed the parties more than Karl.</p>
<p>The first part was where they refused to cooperate because of &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> (Inaudible) was just gossip.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Oh, yeah.  Well, they are not supposed to talk about what they see behind the scenes.  And that&#8217;s just an understanding.  And after I revealed the prostitution scandal, they required agents to sign documents saying that they would not disclose anything.</p>
<p>And so, yeah, I would say the majority did not want to talk about that.  But others did.  And you know, it&#8217;s a legitimate point to say that maybe protectees would be a little more cautious about having agents near them if they think they&#8217;re going to reveal what they&#8217;re doing in their private lives.  But the other side is &#8212; A, we should know about the character of our leaders and prospective leaders; and B, if they&#8217;re engaging in something, some kind of subterfuge which they could be blackmailed for, they shouldn&#8217;t be running for office in the first place.</p>
<p>And in fact, when you&#8217;re talking about having sex, the agents are not there anyway.  For example, with Monica Lewinsky, she was in the Oval Office with Bill Clinton; the agents never saw what was actually happening.  So that&#8217;s my, you could call it, excuse for revealing these secrets.</p>
<p>And of course, the other side of exposing the shortcomings, the corner-cutting, is that they could change these practices overnight.  It&#8217;s not like when the AP revealed that the CIA had a source in Yemen who was telling them about prospective plots to blow up airplanes.  In that case, there was not news.  The CIA was doing its job.  There was no abuse.  There was no failure.  Just the opposite &#8212; it was a success.  And by compromising that source, we lost potential lives.  Because that source could no longer report on what was happening.  I thought that was outrageous.</p>
<p>But in the case of the Secret Service, they could change these practices overnight, they could stop the corner-cutting.  They could ask for more money, which I think is necessary.  Their budget is only $1.6 billion a year, which is the price of one stealth bomber.  And yet, they not only protect the President and others, the Vice President; but they also do counterfeit investigations and other financial investigations.</p>
<p>So there was an expose in the classic sense, where you hope for reform.  And I think it is contributing to the understanding of what&#8217;s wrong with the Secret Service.  It&#8217;s not just some error here and there; it&#8217;s a culture that has to be changed.  And I think the only way to do that is to bring in a director who was from the outside, such as a former high-ranking FBI official, who will shake things up, who will not be beholden to interests within the agency, who will understand that &#8212; yes, you have to polygraph agents, which is what the FBI does.  And that&#8217;s my purpose in writing these books.</p>
<p>Yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Oh, hello?  Over here.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Oh, sorry.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> That&#8217;s okay.</p>
<p>You talked about the Energizer for Bill. But what about Hillary?  What&#8217;s she up to?</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Well, maybe she&#8217;s so nasty because she&#8217;s not up to anything, you know.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>She is not up to anything.  You know, there are rumors about her being a lesbian, and agents say that&#8217;s not true.  But I have a whole chapter in the book about Hillary&#8217;s nastiness.  It&#8217;s just unbelievable, including her chief of staff, who&#8217;s been in the news because her husband was &#8212; is Anthony Weiner.  Just as nasty, you know.  Do you know who I am, she would say to an agent when she doesn&#8217;t have proper ID.  Just high-handed arrogance.  Nasty, nasty people.  It&#8217;s unbelievable.</p>
<p>And you know, you wonder &#8212; there are so many millions of people in this country who have qualifications that are similar, who are lawyers, who are not people who are nasty to people, and who understand that companies actually do create jobs.  And she said companies don&#8217;t create jobs.  You understand that you should not respect your enemies.  She said we should respect our enemies.  What kind of a &#8212; who would vote for anybody like that, even for dogcatcher?</p>
<p>You know, that&#8217;s how broken our politics is.</p>
<p>Yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Well, I have a question, just quickly &#8212; it sort of goes to Georgette&#8217;s question &#8212; and then my real question.  But does Hillary know about the Energizer?</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Well, she does now.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But, you know, agents feel that they have a political partnership, and it&#8217;s not a real marriage.  And that&#8217;s why they&#8217;re staying together.  That&#8217;s why she stays with Bill.  You know, she&#8217;s power-hungry.  That&#8217;s what she wants.  And she&#8217;ll overlook all of this in order to achieve power.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Okay.  My initial question is &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Your real question.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> &#8212; it became apparent after 9/11 that there wasn&#8217;t a lot of cooperation between the FBI and the CIA.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Right.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> There was a lot of rivalry and competition.  So I&#8217;m wondering, has that changed?  What is the state at the relations between these two agencies?</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> That has totally changed.  And now, if you don&#8217;t cooperate, you&#8217;re in trouble.  Whereas before, it was the other way around.  Part of the problem was there was the so-called wall that said that you can&#8217;t &#8212; CIA can&#8217;t talk to the FBI and vice-versa, which is just something that a bureaucrat under Janet Reno came up with.  It was not based on any legal precedence whatsoever.  Previous cases had gone down to appeals without any problem.  But he just decided to write this, and then they all accepted it.  And so they stopped talking to each other, it was unbelievable.</p>
<p>But now, Bush established the Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia, where CIA and FBI sit side-by-side, 24 hours a day, analyzing information.  So they&#8217;re talking to each other all day long now.  And there is very good cooperation.  And that&#8217;s one reason we have not had another attack.</p>
<p>Every few months, you see in the papers arrests by the FBI of terrorists.  And that&#8217;s the bottom line.  That&#8217;s why &#8212; that&#8217;s the result of this cooperation and the result of the FBI&#8217;s efforts and CIA&#8217;s efforts.  And yet, all we hear in the press is demonizing these people, who are working to protect us, who are not paid a whole lot compared with what they could get in the private sector.  And it&#8217;s just outrageous, in my opinion.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> I would like your comments, please, on the First Ladies, the last several First Ladies, of what the agents think about them; as well as their spouses.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Right.  Well, the first First Lady that comes to mind is Pat Nixon.  She had a big alcohol problem.  It got worse when they left the White House.  One time, at San Clemente, an agent heard rustling in the bushes at night.  He cocked his shotgun.  And it turned out it was Pat Nixon, totally drunk, crawling on the ground, trying to find her house.</p>
<p>And she and Nixon never talked.  They would play golf together, but they wouldn&#8217;t say a word throughout the whole golf game.</p>
<p>Nixon was a very strange guy, as you might&#8217;ve surmised.  One day, he was watching TV at San Clemente.  An agent was watching through a window at the home.  And Nixon was feeding his dog dog biscuits.  And then he took one of the biscuits and put it in his mouth and ate it.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Oh, my God.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Another time &#8212; you know, he loved to have fireplaces going all through the summer.  And at one time, he forgot to open the damper.  And so the whole house filled with black smoke.  And there was something about &#8212; let&#8217;s see, how&#8217;s this go?  One of the agents said &#8212; where is the son of a bitch, referring to Nixon?  Didn&#8217;t know where Nixon had gone.  And Nixon overheard this, you know.  And Nixon said &#8212; son of a bitch is over here.</p>
<p>So, Nixon did have a sense of humor.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Betty Ford also had, as you know, both a drug and a drinking problem.  Sometimes she would be so inebriated when she was in the White House, they&#8217;d have to actually hold her as she went out of Air Force One.  Ford seemed to be oblivious to all this.</p>
<p>But to her credit, when she left the White House, she not only went to a rehab center, but she established the Betty Ford Clinic.  And agents admire that.  She&#8217;s spent a tremendous amount of time establishing that to help other people.  So unlike Pat, who never helped anybody with this problem, Betty Ford did.</p>
<p>Ford, of course, had this reputation of being clumsy.  The press beat up on him all the time.  And that was another myth.  He was a former high school football player.  He was a remarkable skier.  The Secret Service would assign their best skiers to go skiing with him in Colorado.  One of the agents would ski backwards to sort of taunt him.</p>
<p>But on the other hand, Ford &#8212; especially after he left the White House &#8212; turned out to be incredibly cheap.  He would tip caddies in California a dollar or two dollars.  He would have bellhops with carts full of luggage for both of them at the Plaza New York, and he would tip a dollar.  He would try to get gifts.  He would try to, you know, take golf sets from people in Japan who invited him for talks.  So that was the other side of Gerald Ford.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s see, who else?  Well, Ronald Reagan and Nancy.  Ronald Reagan was just as genuine as he appeared to be on TV, just as gracious.  He would &#8212; whenever he went into Air Force One, he would greet the pilots and the copilots in the cockpit.  Jimmy Carter did that only once during his whole four-year term.</p>
<p>One day, Reagan was coming down &#8212; about to go into the elevator in the residence in the White House.  And an aide came up and told him about the Donna Rice affair with Gary Hart, and it was going to be in the paper the next day.  And Reagan said &#8212; well, boys will be boys.  And then he went up in the elevator with this agent.  And then he said to the agent &#8212; but boys will not be President.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Nancy could be cold and difficult.  Of course, she was very loyal to her husband.  She seemed to not like it when he would schmooze with agents.  And she would give him instructions &#8212; you know, you wear your gloves, you wear your hat.  And sometimes he would agree, and sometimes they would get in a fight over it.</p>
<p>And one time actually, at the ranch, they were about to go horseback riding, which Reagan loved to do, and she didn&#8217;t like it so much.  She liked to be with her friends in Beverly Hills.  And he would ring a bell for her to come out to go horseback riding.  She wasn&#8217;t coming out.  So he went inside.  And next thing agents knew was that the telephone reception at the house, at the ranch, had stopped.  And it turned out that Reagan had seen her talking to one of her friends in Beverly Hills on the phone, and just got enraged, and took the phone and threw it on the floor.  And so, that was the end of the telephone connection.</p>
<p>So, Reagan was human, like all of us.  I interviewed agents who were with him after he left office.  He would make it a point of going out to schmooze with them.  And then, of course, when he got Alzheimer&#8217;s, they started to notice the difference.  But that was only after he left office, not when he was in the White House.  He remembered the names of every agent and was, you know, the genuine article.  And I think that is reflected in the success of his presidency.  Because people do sense &#8212; you know, I think, even with Hillary, even without knowing what goes on behind the scenes &#8212; people do sense that she&#8217;s not a very nice person.</p>
<p>Any other First Ladies that you wanted to ask about?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> The Bushes.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Ah.  Well, Laura was just beloved by agents.  She would make it a point of going back to the ranch the day after Christmas Day, so that the agents could be with their families, and would ask about their families.  George Bush, very similar.</p>
<p>Of course, he loved to go running, and the agents would have to assign their fastest runners.  When his father, George H.W. Bush, was Vice President, he was in the Vice President&#8217;s residence at the Naval Observatory.  And during the day, the naval stewards, as I said, would make pastries and cookies.  And then they would hide them, because the agents would come out in the middle of the night and steal some of them.</p>
<p>So one morning, at 3:00 a.m., one of the agents was looking for the cookies in the kitchen.  And he heard this voice behind him &#8212; where are the cookies?  And he turned around, it was George Bush.  And so, together they went looking for the cookies.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They had them together with milk.</p>
<p>And Barbara Bush &#8212; same.  Very decent.  She would even offer to do the laundry of agents when they were up at Kennebunkport.  She would make sure that agents wore hats.  If they didn&#8217;t have a hat, she would insist that her husband go and get his hat and give the hat to the agent.  Just very, very decent, admirable people.  And we need more of those in the White House.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Think we have time for one last question.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> Hi.  I just would like to have your comments on what appears to me to be an increasingly governmentalized media, especially television, and how it seems to resemble Pravda more than the media I was used to.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Yeah.  You know, I&#8217;m just as perplexed as you are.  I can&#8217;t understand it.  It&#8217;s just a trend.  You could say it&#8217;s because of more pressure because of the Internet.  But that doesn&#8217;t excuse anything.</p>
<p>And I think the Washington Post, as Michael mentioned, has been doing a very fair job lately.  It&#8217;s really turned around.  And I think ultimately, that&#8217;s going to help its circulation and its pickup on the web.  Because people do want to be able to trust the information that they get.  New York Times, not so much.  Quite the opposite.</p>
<p>But you know, it perplexes me.  Why would Rolling Stone, for example, run the story without talking to the so-called assailants of this woman who claimed she was raped?  How could anybody in his right mind not do that?  You know, it&#8217;s beyond me.  Maybe they&#8217;re on marijuana, I don&#8217;t know.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Ronald Kessler:</strong> Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</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>Hillary Wants to be President, She Just Doesn’t Want to Run</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillary-wants-to-be-president-she-just-doesnt-want-to-run/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillary-wants-to-be-president-she-just-doesnt-want-to-run</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillary-wants-to-be-president-she-just-doesnt-want-to-run/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2014 05:30:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247420</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Even Hillary isn’t ready for Hillary.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hillary.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247423" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/hillary-450x300.jpg" alt="Hillary Clinton Awarded The 2013 Lantos Human Rights Prize" width="242" height="161" /></a>Ready for Hillary, the campaign before the campaign which has churned out <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/ready-for-hillarys-3-creepiest-items-will-give-you-nightmares/">some creepy t-shirts</a> and a terrible country song, is $11 million in debt, and Hillary still isn’t ready.</p>
<p>While Hillary was delivering six figure speeches at heavily indebted universities, Ready for Hillary was burning through a giant pile of money trying to stir up Obama level enthusiasm for their uncharismatic candidate by selling fifty dollar champagne glasses emblazoned with a giant H, a Hillary Clinton cat collar and a Hillary Clinton Christmas tree ornament.</p>
<p>Ready for Hillary wasn’t ready to deliver the overpriced crap it was hawking with customers complaining that their items weren’t delivered and that no one was answering their emails. Usually politicians wait until after they get elected to start ripping people off, but Hillary is too broke to wait that long.</p>
<p>Despite advertising a “Hillary for the Holidays” set of Hillary champagne glasses and ornaments, her organization is already $11 million in debt. Apparently not that many people want to scare small children by hanging a Hillary Clinton ornament from their Christmas tree.</p>
<p>Like Ready for Hillary, Hillary isn’t ready. Instead she postponed her campaign until the spring of 2015 after having promised to decide on the first of the year. Back then Hillary was claiming that she would “have to be convinced that I have a very clear vision with an agenda of what I think needs to be done.”</p>
<p>Serious candidates don’t ask someone else to flatter them into believing that they have a clear vision. That’s the opposite of what a clear vision is.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton spent two decades clearing her way to the White House. If you take her at her word, then she already spent a fortune running for president without ever having a “clear vision” or an agenda of what needs to be done.</p>
<p>Even Hillary isn’t Ready for Hillary.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton doesn’t like running for things. Instead she likes having them reserved for her. In the White House she got to make policy without running for office. Giuliani’s illness spared her the bother of having to run a real Senate campaign. Hillary got the Secretary of State gig in exchange for backing Obama in ’08 and got frontrunner status for ’16 thanks to her husband’s efforts for him in ’12.</p>
<p>The one time that she faced a tough campaign, she lost.</p>
<p>Now she wants a clear path to the nomination. And then she wants an easy election. Hillary doesn’t want to campaign. She wants to get the job by just showing up the way that she gets a <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/why-hillary-clinton-will-lose-again/">constant stream of awards</a> on everything from Hispanic leadership to AIDS to the oceans by just showing up.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton is great at receiving awards for doing absolutely nothing. What she isn’t any good at is making a case for why she deserves anything except an indictment.</p>
<p>Her book tour turned into a public relations nightmare despite a friendly press when she made one gaffe after another, claiming to have been flat broke and then trying to paste that over, culminating in poor book sales and a multi-million dollar loss for her publisher. During the midterm election, her campaign appearances helped sink Democratic candidates after she claimed that businesses don’t create jobs.</p>
<p>So instead Hillary Clinton has gone on padding her bank account with highly profitable and heavily controlled appearances at private events. At these appearances Team Hillary scrutinizes and controls every aspect of her appearance from the color of her armchairs to demanding that those who paid extra to be photographed with her be ready and posed so that she can just walk in and out of the photo.</p>
<p>It also dictates that as little as possible of her appearance will be made public. At <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/if-you-want-hillary-clinton-youre-going-to-need-crudite-humus-and-300000/">a UCLA speech</a>, Team Hillary only allowed a two-minute highlight clip to be made public while stipulating that it would have to be taken down before the election. That’s a privilege afforded to her by a university system run by party pal Janet Napolitano. It won’t work that way when Hillary is appearing at a county fair in Iowa.</p>
<p>There will be no censorship, no prestaged photos and no plates of Crudités and hummus. Hillary will have every word out there, she’ll have to smile when the camera is on her and chew corn dogs. For a wealthy and privileged politician who has gotten used to a life of luxury suites and cocktail parties, the campaign trail is a long tall slice of hell. And Hillary Clinton wants to delay it for as long as possible.</p>
<p>The Hillary non-campaign dissuades Democrats from running by convincing them that the nomination is already locked up in her closet along with the awards from Elton John and the Queen of Spain without tempting them into running by showing just how poorly she campaigns. Despite being ridiculously famous, Hillary Clinton is hoping to stay an enigma so no one realizes how clueless she really is.</p>
<p>Ready for Hillary is a third rate version of Obama’s campaign, trying to wrap her in the same aura of history and iconography without having the first clue about such basics as language, design and history. Hillary Clinton’s pre-campaign strategy is to echo what other people are saying. Whenever an issue comes up, Hillary waits until some kind of consensus forms before she offers up her clear vision.</p>
<p>If the consensus changes, so does her vision.</p>
<p>When she does say something controversial, she’s only echoing someone more controversial, as was the case when she ripped off Elizabeth Warren’s “You didn’t build that” rant to declare that businesses don’t create jobs. And then she quickly walked her statement back. That’s Hillary’s idea of a clear vision.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton’s endless pre-campaign gives her the best of both worlds. Hillary can cash in with little accountability. She can engage the public and the press entirely on her terms. And her political rivals treat her as inevitable because she hasn’t actually gotten into the thick of a campaign. If she had her way, she would announce her candidacy on the day before the election.</p>
<p>And while she can’t do that, she can delay her campaign for as long as possible.</p>
<p>Hillary will be ready to run at the last minute or when another candidate emerges as a serious threat. If any Democrats still think that Hillary will be a change from the golf-and-teleprompter administration, they had better think again. Hillary Clinton may not spend her time on the golf course, but she won’t be spending it doing anything like work either. Her time as Secretary of State showed us that much.</p>
<p>Secretary of State Hillary Clinton liked the glamorous aspects of her job, like flying around the world to meet with famous people, but had no use for the boring stuff like dealing with desperate requests for security from her own people in Benghazi. As President, Hillary will follow the Obama itinerary of photo ops with world leaders and celebrities while blowing off the rest of her job and blaming Congress.</p>
<p>Unlike Obama, Hillary is even blowing off her campaign. That’s a level of entitlement too far even for her privileged party.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton has only two political assets. One is her name. The other is the desperate need by many working class Democrats to believe that the horrors of the Obama years could have been averted if Bill Clinton had won through her and restored the prosperity of the nineties. It’s a sad delusion when applied to a woman who spent the Obama depression partying with the rich while ignoring the poor.</p>
<p>Even now she is delaying her campaign as long as possible to avoid having to mingle with the victims of her party’s economic policies.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Hillary’s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/hillarys-bad-politics-and-worse-ideas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillarys-bad-politics-and-worse-ideas</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:45:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247037</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Three key statements that should automatically disqualify Clinton from being president.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141124111023-hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247039" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141124111023-hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-story-top-450x344.jpg" alt="141124111023-hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-story-top" width="341" height="261" /></a>Once again Hillary Clinton has given the Republicans some suicidal soundbites they should stash away for 2016 in the likely event she is the Democratic candidate for president. A review of some of her recent statements reveals that Clinton is not just entitled, money-grubbing, unlikeable, unpleasant, and unaccomplished. Nor do they just show that she is a political dunce who has obviously learned nothing from her politically brilliant husband. More seriously, they expose her commitment to failed ideas and dangerous delusions.</p>
<p>First there was the “What difference at this point does it make!” she practically shrieked to Senator Ron Johnson during a January 2013 hearing on the Benghazi debacle that unfolded on September 11, 2012. Clinton had told the grieving parents of the victims during the transfer of remains ceremony at Andrews Air Force base that they died because of “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Four Americans, including an ambassador, had been murdered on her watch, but she refused to explain to the Senate why she blamed the hapless maker of a YouTube video, who spent a year in jail.</p>
<p>This evasion is significant, for within hours of the attack it was clear that it had been a carefully coordinated, well-planned assault, not the spontaneous reaction to a video. Soon it also became known that ambassador Stevens had repeatedly requested increased security, but had been denied by officials in the State and Defense Departments. As Secretary of State, Clinton was ultimately responsible for those decisions made by State, as well as for the astonishing failure to notice the escalating violence in the months before the attacks, or the significance of the anniversary of 9/11, or the immediate evidence that the attack was not a spontaneous reaction to a video that had been on YouTube for weeks.</p>
<p>But in her response to all this evidence of negligence and post facto political spin, all she could do was indignantly declare that all these failures were irrelevant. In 2016, this footage of the arm-waving, shrill Clinton transparently trying to misdirect the Senators and the citizens from her patent incompetence should be played and replayed in political ads.</p>
<p style="color: #0b0b0b;"><span style="color: #000000;">Next came the more recent revelation of her embarrassing economic ignorance, shameless pandering to her left-wing base. At a campaign event in October, attended also by lefty heartthrob Elizabeth Warren, Clinton lectured, “</span>Don’t let anybody, don’t let anybody tell you that, ah, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs. You know that old theory, trickle-down economics. That has been tried, that has failed. It has failed rather spectacularly.”</p>
<p style="color: #0b0b0b;">Somehow Clinton missed the 1980s, when economic and tax policies that encouraged business investment led to spectacular growth. As the Laffer Center <a href="http://www.laffercenter.com/supply-side-economics/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">explains</span></a>,</p>
<p style="color: #383838;">“According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1982-1999 was one continuous mega-economic expansion.  In fact, as it stretched into 2007, this 25 Year Boom saw a tripling in the net wealth of U.S. households and businesses from $20 trillion in 1981 to $60 trillion by 2007.  When adjusted for inflation, more wealth was created in this 25-year boom than in the previous 200 years. This sustained economic growth is not only impressive on its own, but even more astonishing as it compares to the period immediately preceding it.  In the 10 years from 1972-1982, recessions were deep and recoveries were short.  In fact, throughout American history, the nation’s economy has been in recession or depression roughly one-third of the time.  But from 1981-2005, the annual growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) in the U.S. was 3.4 percent per year, and 3.8 percent per year during the 1983-1989 Reagan expansion alone.”</p>
<p style="color: #383838;">Compare that to the performance of Obama’s economic policies over the last 6 years, when intrusive regulatory regimes like Dodd-Frank and a runaway EPA, Obamacare’s highjacking of the health-care industry, the trillion-dollar stimulus squandered on crony socialist projects like “green energy,” and the anti-business rhetoric of Obama’s “you didn’t build that,” have all led to sluggish <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/11/the-obama-economic-record-the-worst-five-years-since-world-war-ii/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">economic growth</span></a>, metastasizing debt, declining income for the middle class, an explosion in entitlement spending, and nearly 20 million unemployed and under-employed.</p>
<p style="color: #383838;">Contrary to Clinton’s Keynesian superstitions and dirigiste magical thinking, what has “failed spectacularly” has been progressive economic policies that think parasitic politicians and unaccountable government bureaucrats can manage a complex, dynamic <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/peterferrara/2012/11/16/its_economic_growth_not_redistribution_that_lifts_everyone_including_the_poor"><span style="color: #0433ff;">economic system</span></a> better than a free market that incentivizes people to actually build businesses that create jobs and increase wealth. And just as spectacularly incompetent is Hillary’s political tin ear that lets her make such a statement just to curry favor with a narrow base of anti-capitalist fundamentalists, when she surely must know that come the 2016 presidential election, those words will be pinned to the Obama albatross sure to be hanging around her neck.</p>
<p><span style="color: #383838;">Finally, there is the bizarre statement at Georgetown last week about improving our foreign policy with what she called “smart power”:  </span>“Using every possible tool and partner to advance peace and security. Leaving no one on the sidelines. Showing respect even for one’s enemies. Trying to understand, in so far as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view. Helping to define the problems, determine the solutions.” She then added a banal cliché of modern feminism, suggesting that the lack of women negotiators and signatories was responsible for the failure of many peace treaties. After all, women are naturally more empathetic and sensitive to others’ “point of view,” one of those Victorian stereotypes that feminists used to tell us were sexist insults.</p>
<p>These comments embody everything that is wrong with a modern foreign policy based on Kantian delusions about a global “harmony of interests,” the notion that all peoples are just like us and want all the same goods such as peace, prosperity, political freedom, and respect for human rights. If they behave differently, it’s because they just don’t know these goods are in their best interests, or they have been traumatized by history, particularly the depredations of Western colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation, which are the causes of their violent aggression and brutality. Thus if we “understand” and “empathize” with the roots of our enemies’ behavior, they will see the light and abandon aggression and tyranny.</p>
<p>This is the same delusion that Obama based his foreign policy on, as evidenced by his infamous “apology tour,” on which he donned the hair shirt of Western sin and groveled before foreign audiences. It’s the application to foreign affairs of the two-bit psychologizing that dominates the public schools, where boosting self-esteem and “empathizing” with punks and bullies are the favored mechanisms for teaching and civilizing young people. It utterly lacks any understanding of the tragic constants of human nature and the wisdom accumulated by the human race since the ancient Greeks and Hebrews––that, as Machiavelli said, “all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.”</p>
<p>For all her alleged foreign policy toughness, Clinton’s philosophy embodies the bad utopian ideals that have enabled much of the disorder afflicting the world since their spectacular failure in preventing World War I. We hear the same delusions in the words of Neville Chamberlain after Hitler’s <i>Anschluss</i> of Austria in March 1938, when he told the House of Commons, “We should take any and every opportunity to try to remove any genuine and legitimate grievance that may exist,” and then imagined telling Hitler, “The best thing you can do is to tell us exactly what you want for your Sudeten Deutsch.” Such blind “empathy” and “understanding” and “respect” for Germany’s “grievances,” of course, in 6 months culminated in the debacle of Munich and the devastating sequel of World War II.</p>
<p>Contrary to Clinton and Obama, enemies like Vladimir Putin, ISIS, Bashar al Assad, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping are not the global village’s wayward teenagers “acting out” because they don’t know their own best interests and suffer from insufficient self-esteem and “respect.” They are hard, brutal men, vicious and ruthless, who know exactly what they want, and who possess beliefs alien to Western ideals like liberal democracy, human rights, tolerance, and a preference for diplomatic words and “mutual understanding and respect.” In their “perspective” and “point of view,” violence is a tool of international relations, and a legitimate instrument for achieving their aims and interests. And they have nothing but contempt for our schoolmarmish empathy and respect, which they correctly interpret as civilizational weakness and a failure of morale. All they respect is force. That’s the most important truth we need to “understand.”</p>
<p>These 3 statements reveal political beliefs and character flaws that should automatically disqualify Hillary Clinton from being president. And even if we attribute them to rank ambition and venal opportunism rather than sincere belief, their sheer political stupidity and lack of prudence bespeak a mind and character unfit for leading the most powerful country on the planet.</p>
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		<title>Obama vs. Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/obama-vs-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-vs-us</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/obama-vs-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2014 05:35:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245393</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Have we reached the "post-Constitution" stage of our history? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245394" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-12-obama-438x350.jpg" alt="2014-10-12-obama" width="332" height="265" /></a>Suppose you saw a person driving his car on the wrong side of a highway, against the traffic. Would you call him a stupid and/or incompetent driver? You say, &#8220;Williams, what kind of question is that? Of course he&#8217;s one or the other!&#8221; I&#8217;d say, &#8220;Hold your horses. What are his intentions?&#8221; If the driver&#8217;s intentions are to cause highway calamity, one can hardly call his actions stupid or incompetent. Given his intentions, he is wisely acting in a manner to achieve his objectives.</p>
<p>This observation lies at the heart of my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell&#8217;s column last week, in which he says, &#8220;Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past.&#8221; After suffering an elective trouncing at the polls, President Barack Obama issued Congress an ultimatum, saying that if it doesn&#8217;t enact the kind of immigration law that he would like, he will unilaterally issue an executive order to change the nation&#8217;s immigration laws. This threat, along with other abuses of his office, is not a sign of presidential stupidity or incompetence.</p>
<p>Obama is doing precisely what he promised during his 2008 presidential campaign, to cheering and mesmerized crowds: &#8220;We are going to fundamentally change America&#8221; and &#8220;We will change America. We will change the world.&#8221; Obama is living up to those pledges by subverting our Constitution and adopting the political style of a banana republic dictator. He showed his willingness to ignore the Constitution when he eliminated the work requirement in welfare reform laws enacted during the Clinton administration. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was enacted by Congress and hence is the law of the land. Obama has used executive orders to change the law on several occasions. Ask yourself whether our Constitution permits the president to unilaterally change a law enacted by Congress. For a president to do so is for him to behave like a banana republic dictator.</p>
<p>As Sowell says, &#8220;people who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.&#8221;</p>
<p>The recent elections, which gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, clearly indicate a repudiation of much of Obama&#8217;s agenda. But the question is whether the Republican majority has the courage to act on that repudiation and stop the president from running roughshod over the Constitution. Because Article 1 of the Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, there is not much a president can do without a budget appropriation. The question is whether Congress has the guts to exercise its power.</p>
<p>We can rightfully condemn the president for picking and choosing which laws of the land he will obey and which he won&#8217;t, in violation of the Constitution&#8217;s Article 2, but is his administration&#8217;s executive branch that much of an exception to the other branches of the federal government — the legislative and judicial branches?</p>
<p>The legislative branch is bound by Article 1 of the Constitution. Section 8 of Article 1 delineates the scope of congressional power to tax and spend. Nowhere within Article 1, Section 8 is Congress granted the authority to tax for at least two-thirds of the federal budget.</p>
<p>The courts are bound by the Constitution&#8217;s Article 3. Part of the courts&#8217; responsibility is to ensure that the executive and legislative branches of government uphold the Constitution. In that respect, the courts have been grossly derelict, particularly during and after the New Deal era.</p>
<p>Seeing as all branches of federal government ignore most of the provisions of the Constitution, I think we can safely say that we&#8217;ve reached the post-Constitution stage of our history. Washington politicians are not to blame. It&#8217;s the American people who&#8217;ve lost their love and respect for our Constitution. Washington&#8217;s politicians are simply the agents for that contempt.</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>Hillary’s $100 Million Hollywood Makeover</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillarys-100-million-hollywood-makeover/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillarys-100-million-hollywood-makeover</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2014 04:55:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241468</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What it takes to give "Madame Secretary" a human face.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/o-HILLARY-CLINTON-facebook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241469" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/o-HILLARY-CLINTON-facebook-450x332.jpg" alt="Key Speakers At The Clinton Global Initiative" width="313" height="231" /></a>The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia described the reforms which resulted in the Prague Spring as &#8220;socialism with a human face.&#8221; The <i>New York Times</i> calls <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/even-the-new-york-times-vox-and-huffpo-pan-cbss-hillary-clinton-show-madam-secretary/">Madam Secretary</a>, CBS&#8217;s extremely expensive prime time contribution to the Hillary campaign, &#8220;Hillary with a human face.&#8221;</p>
<p>A network series can cost between $3 and $4 million an episode. Assuming that Madam Secretary runs even one season, instead of being canceled ignominiously like Commander in Chief, the 2005 attempt at giving Hillary a human face, it will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million.</p>
<p>That’s double the $46 million that Hillary’s campaign spent on TV ads against Obama and it gives the Hillary 2016 campaign over 20 hours of prime time network unpaid ad space. If the series lasts long enough to run through the whole campaign that will double to $200 million. But the Hillary 2016 campaign is expected to cost around $2 billion. CBS’s $100 million donation is only a drop in a big bucket.</p>
<p>There’s more than a whiff of Kim Jong-Il, Stalin and Saddam Hussein about needing so many actors to portray a current politician. But Madam Secretary reeks of political insecurity. A similar series about Obama would have been worshipful. Madam Secretary is nervously revisionist. It’s desperately trying to glue an appealing human face over the Hillary mask that Hillary Clinton wears over her real face.</p>
<p>Hillary won’t be able to get anyone to play Hillary Clinton once she actually runs for office. Lori McCreary, the executive producer of Madam Secretary, said <a href="http://dailysignal.com/2014/09/19/benghazi-moment-inspired-tvs-madam-secretary/">that she was inspired to create</a> the $100 million Hillary infomercial by watching the Benghazi hearings. Her obvious unspoken thought was that the scene of Hillary doing her best Khrushchev imitation while self-righteously covering up the brutal murder of four Americans would have gone much better if someone else had been playing Hillary.</p>
<p>Hillary isn’t very good at playing Hillary the way that Obama was at playing Obama. The Obama character was a charming rogue who could always find the right put down to dismiss criticisms of his inexperience and extremism. No one could have played the fake Obama better than the real Obama.</p>
<p>Hillary’s liberal supporters wish that she could play the Hillary of their imagination as well as Obama portrayed their imaginary Obama. Two years before the Hillary campaign, they recruited Geena Davis to be Hillary’s human face in Commander in Chief. Now they know that they can’t count on more than a season of Hillary TV so they waited this long to debut Tea Leoni as Hillary in Madam Secretary.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton isn’t the first Clinton to get an airbrushed fictional Hollywood substitute. Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin debuted a fictionalized version of Bill Clinton’s sex scandals with The American President. Not only did Michael Douglas class up the Clintons by playing Bill, but he was conveniently enough a bachelor romancing a liberal woman of his own class. It had as much to do with the reality of Bill’s groping frenzies as Madam Secretary’s take on Benghazi has to do with Hillary shopping for bad art while leaving a band of unpaid Islamic terrorists to “protect” the diplomatic mission in Benghazi.</p>
<p>The American President, like Madam Secretary, understood that it had to get rid of Hillary.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party has once again built up an elaborate pageant around a candidate. Gender will be swapped in for race. It’s a massive production that began with Hillary <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/why-hillary-clinton-will-lose-again/">receiving virtually every award known to man</a> and is meant to end with her political coronation that will secure the party’s image as progressive barrier-breakers. But Hillary doesn’t seem to know her lines and neither do her stand ins.</p>
<p>A professional actress playing Hillary could do better, but even Hillary substitutes don’t come out that much more popular than Hillary.</p>
<p>The Hillary Clinton book, written by someone else, was a flop. The Hillary Clinton book tour to sell the book was also a flop. The reviews are in for Madam Secretary and the word on the critic street is flopsville. No one really likes watching propaganda infomercials that take no risks and offer no rewards.</p>
<p>Commander in Chief went through three showrunners and barely one season. Madam Secretary will try to wring as much sympathy as it can out of her confrontations with the mean Dick Cheney substitute, scenes of her shoveling horse manure (all-too appropriate) and trying to balance work and family, but there’s only so much Hillary cynicism that even liberal television critics seem to be able to stomach.</p>
<p>The <i>Huffington Post</i> describes Madam Secretary as “contrived, predictable and seemingly allergic to ambiguity and subtext.” That’s also a really good description of Hillary Clinton. The two fictional Hillary Clintons, played by Tea Leoni and Hillary Clinton, have that much in common. They’re shallow creatures who would rather fish for sympathy votes and ratings than actually stand on their own merits</p>
<p>At press events, Tea Leoni insists that her Hillary lookalike is really based on Henry Kissinger. Hillary Clinton launched a book tour with stops at the Hamptons by claiming to have been flat broke. There’s something about being Hillary that makes one snap and tell crazy lies because the truth is just too awful.</p>
<p>The truth is that CBS, whose <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/cbss-hillary-clinton-show-madam-secretary-to-ref-benghazi/">boss was a big Hillary donor</a> last time around, is dropping a fortune on an illegal campaign commercial for a mediocre candidate who has never held any public office that she didn’t receive based on her husband’s political connections. The truth is that Hillary Clinton’s politics are both radical and boring and covering them up along with her corrupt dealings has made her paranoid.</p>
<p>The biggest threat to the creators of Hillary infomercials has been Hillary. Hillary Clinton disapproves of experiments to create a Hillary with a human face the way that Moscow disapproved of efforts to create Socialism with a human face. Like Brezhnev, Hillary responded by sending in the tanks.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/lights-camera-hillary/">CNN tried to develop a Hillary documentary</a>. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/cnn-joins-nbc-in-producing-hillary-propaganda-flick/">NBC wanted to air a Hillary Clinton miniseries</a> which would have tasked Diane Lane with giving Hillary a human face. CNN and NBC were forced to abort after threats from David Brock, Hillary’s paranoid Media Matters attack dog, ended the Hillary Spring.</p>
<p>As the temperatures fall and the leaves die on the trees, CBS’s Madam Secretary is all that’s left.</p>
<p>Charles Ferguson, the leftist hack behind the CNN doc, attempted to reach Hillary to speak with her. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/cnn-hillary-documentarian-calls-cancellation-of-film-a-victory-for-the-clintons/">&#8221; He was told</a>, “Over my dead body.”</p>
<p>That’s the real Hillary and it’s why she so desperately needs a human face. The real Hillary isn’t a mother figure. She’s <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillary-clinton-helped-child-rapist-get-off-attacked-12-year-old-victim/">the lawyer who laughed about how she freed the rapist</a> of a 12-year girl who had been beaten into a coma. The real Hillary isn’t the open box thinker of Madam Secretary; she’s a hack who did her best to stay under the radar during her time as Secretary of State to protect her political ambitions.</p>
<p>Hillary is a creature of masks because what is underneath is both banal and evil. Socialism with a human face from the Communist Party didn’t fix Communism. Sticking Tea Leoni, Geena Davis or Diane Lane’s face on Hillary Clinton won’t make her human. It makes her an inhuman Hollywood Frankencreation.</p>
<p>Obama could play Hollywood’s idea of a fictional president. Hillary Clinton just freezes up and her smile turns into a grimace as she sits waiting for an assistant to feed her the next scripted line.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on this week&#8217;s Glazov Gang discussing <strong>&#8220;ISIS Rising&#8221;</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9E8gGysQZzU" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Welcome to the Executive Dictatorship</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/welcome-to-the-executive-dictatorship/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welcome-to-the-executive-dictatorship</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/welcome-to-the-executive-dictatorship/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:40:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[impeach]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234825</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America's elected tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cons.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234826" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cons.jpg" alt="cons" width="255" height="203" /></a>The Constitution is dead.</p>
<p>Long live the executive dictatorship.</p>
<p>There is almost nothing the president of the United States cannot do. This week, we found out President Barack Obama&#8217;s IRS not only targeted conservative nonprofit applicants with impunity but then destroyed the emails that could have illuminated the process behind such targeting. Meanwhile, the attorney general — the executive officer charged with fighting government criminality — continues to stonewall an independent prosecutor, maintaining along with his boss that there is not a &#8220;smidgen of corruption&#8221; in the IRS.</p>
<p>On the southern border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been converted from a policing agency to a humanitarian-aid agency, as the Obama administration encourages thousands of unaccompanied minors to flood Texas and Arizona. Those illegal immigrants are being shuttled around the southwest and released into the general population, and told by activists that they are just months away from amnesty.</p>
<p>Across the seas, Obama is unilaterally destroying America&#8217;s anti-terror infrastructure. Iraq has become the preserve of the al-Qaida offshoot ISIS and the Iranian-connected Shiite government — the specific outcome the United States originally wanted to avoid in the country. Afghanistan will soon devolve back into a Taliban-led cesspool for terror. And the Obama administration continues to fund a Palestinian government that includes terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that has now kidnapped an American citizen, along with two other Israeli boys.</p>
<p>Nobody in the executive branch has been punished for Benghazi, Libya, Fast and Furious, serious national security leaks to major news outlets, violations of civil rights by the National Security Agency or any other major scandal.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has seized authority to regulate health care, carbon emissions and labor relations in unforeseen ways.</p>
<p>And no one will stop the executive branch. Impeachment will not solve the problem of a 3 million-strong regulatory branch in which accountability is a fantasy. The legislature has no interest in stopping the growth of the executive, given that legislators seek re-election by avoiding responsibility, and granting more power to the executive avoids such responsibility. And the judiciary seems unwilling to hem in the executive branch at all, given its decisions on the Environmental Protection Agency and Obamacare.</p>
<p>So what&#8217;s left? An elected tyranny in which the whims of the president and all of his men decide the fate of millions. The founders would have fought such a government with every fiber of their being — and, in fact, they did fight such a government. The question now is whether state governments, elected officials and the people themselves will be willing to take the measures necessary to do the same.</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>Meet Ruby Rivlin, Israel’s New Strong, Nationalistic President</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/meet-ruby-rivlin-israels-new-strong-nationalistic-president/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=meet-ruby-rivlin-israels-new-strong-nationalistic-president</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:30:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Knesset]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ruby Rivlin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233724</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new era of Israeli politics? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2197021463.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233725" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2197021463-450x260.jpg" alt="2197021463" width="296" height="171" /></a>On Tuesday afternoon, Israel elected a nationalist President &#8212; Likud Party Knesset Member Reuven (Ruby) Rivlin who defines himself in two ways: A man of Jerusalem and a student of Zionist prophet <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/zeev-jabotinsky-and-the-belgium-terror-attack/"><span style="color: #346f99;">Ze’ev Jabotinsky</span></a>.<i> </i>He is devoted to strengthening the entire land of Israel, including the settlements of Judea and Samaria and an opponent of the creation of a Palestinian Arab state.</p>
<p>Fitting with his long-standing history as a proud, <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/04/17/the-top-10-toughest-living-jews/"><span style="color: #346f99;">tough Jew</span></a>, Rivlin accepted the position as the 10<sup>th</sup> President of Israel and placed a skullcap on his head and recited a prayer from the Torah. He is respected, thought highly of and as a man born in Jerusalem, a descendant of great Rabbis. Israel’s President is largely a ceremonial position &#8212; but the world can expect to see a strong Israeli occupying the office of President.</p>
<p>Some highlights and comments worth noting:</p>
<p>Rivlin has noted on numerous occasions that “The heart of the dispute in our region is not just one of local territorial disputes,” but an &#8220;all-over Arab-Jewish dispute.”  He continued: “Only after we solve the Arab-Jewish conflict and can be confident that the Arab countries recognize Israel and our right to live here in security, can we address the conflict between ourselves and the Palestinians, with whom we are destined to live together.” “We will not, under any circumstances, allow the establishment of a neighboring state that will be a genuine threat on our existence.”</p>
<p>“We have returned to our homeland over the past 200 years in order to stay here. We want real peace, not fake, short-term ‘Peace Now,’ which is liable to be nothing more than an illusion.”</p>
<p>The man is a nationalist who stands strong – as he proclaimed when he was speaker of the Knesset in 2010, “We will not apologize for having liberated Hevron or building Jerusalem. We hereby declare for all to hear: This city will have its defenders! Even if there are those amongst us who have become weak, and who are replacing Zion with Uganda and wish to divide King David’s City – we will not sit by quietly when people come to try to divide this city.”“It is no coincidence that every additional Jewish home in the City of David, the Old City and elsewhere in Jerusalem, shakes the world to its foundations…. The blood of the Hadassah nurses [murdered by an Arab mob in Jerusalem in 1948] cries out from the mountains of Jerusalem. Who dares to divide the ever-united city!? It is the legacy of the fallen that from this mountain we will again take this oath: ‘If I forget thee, o Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.’”</p>
<p>In speeches to “settlers,” Rivlin notes, “You, my brothers, are pioneers.” Tellingly, Dani Dayan, representative of the residents of Judea and Samaria noted yesterday, “Ruby is a true friend of <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/judea-and-samaria-are-israel/"><span style="color: #346f99;">Judea and Samaria</span></a>, an honorable man whose election is a victory of the whole, beautiful and good land of Israel. “The State of Israel secured a nationalistic President, the scion to a family who built the land, who sees before him the right way to head, without forgetting the path of our fathers, the past and our history.”</p>
<p>Rivlin has said that if Jews cannot live safely in Hebron, neither should Arabs be able to live safely in nearby Abu Sneneh. “But when a playground becomes the murder site of a ten-month-old baby, diplomatic considerations must take a back seat to the need to protect our citizens&#8217; lives.&#8221;</p>
<p>When President Obama visited Jerusalem and spoke at the Convention Center rather than the Knesset, Rivlin said: “Three American presidents [Carter, Clinton and Bush] have spoken on the Knesset stage, as well [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat and leaders from Europe. President Obama should speak to the people of Israel through its elected representatives.” He added, “President Obama decided not to visit the Knesset, a decision which is in bad taste….The Knesset is a symbol of Israeli sovereignty, and with all due respect to the president, it cannot be ignored.”</p>
<p>In a speech in the Knesset where he urged fellow Knesset members to not cede land, Rivlin said, “Don&#8217;t you realize that the moment we retreat from one of our fundamental beliefs and dreams, there will no longer be or remain the Zionist entity that we so much wanted to see as the sprouting of our Redemption?&#8221;</p>
<p>“We will not apologize – not for conquering Katamon or Jaffa or Tzfat, nor for liberating Hevron, and not for building Jerusalem our capital.”</p>
<p>World: Meet Ruby Rivlin.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Elastic Clause of the Constitution</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/j-christian-adams/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/j-christian-adams/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:45:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[J. Christian Adams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elastic clause]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219809</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Haven't you heard of the constitutional power that entitles the president to do whatever he wants? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/American-Constitution.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219829" alt="American-Constitution" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/American-Constitution-450x336.jpg" width="315" height="235" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/02/26/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/?singlepage=true">PJ Media</a>.</strong></p>
<p>If college students listened to Mark Levin or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rush-Revere-Brave-Pilgrims-Time-Travel/dp/1476755868">Rush Limbaugh</a>, they would receive a better American history education than they are getting from their professors. I <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Emory-College-Republicans/336452723042661">recently spoke at Emory University</a>, where one student defended all of President Obama’s unconstitutional actions by invoking the Elastic Clause of the Constitution.</p>
<p>Citing the Elastic Clause could indeed justify a wide range of administration actions, except for one problem – it doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>But you couldn’t tell that to the student at Emory University who came to my speech last week on Obama’s abuses of power. He persisted in defending the actions through the Elastic Clause, as if the be-all, end-all provision was common knowledge.</p>
<p>From the sound of it, the Elastic Clause must be common knowledge in faculty lounges.</p>
<p>The Elastic Clause, he persisted, gives the president the power to address a wide range of issues through executive prerogative. It allowed the government, he said, to adapt to new circumstances unlike the age when the Founders wrote the Constitution.</p>
<p>Of course the Founders did include an “elastic clause” of sorts, namely Article V, which gives the people and the states the power to amend the Constitution.</p>
<p>But he wasn’t speaking of something quite so stiff and formal. He wasn’t referring to something that required broad assent. He was referring the Elastic Clause that allows the president to swiftly respond to needs as they arise – sort of like Mussolini and Mugabe did.</p>
<p>He was serious. He really believed the Elastic Clause was real. But the constitutional literacy of a different student was even worse. With a straight face, she defended the exercise of executive power and the issuance of executive orders as constitutional because of the inaction of Congress.</p>
<p>“It’s part of the Constitution that if the Congress doesn’t act, then the president can issue executive orders to fix something,” was her argument.</p>
<p>Even more frightening, the person saying this is an officer of the campus Democrats. A little totalitarian in training.</p>
<p>Naturally, this was all quite an eye opener. I’m no fool when it comes to the institutional left and their corrosion of the system. But to have a student debate me over a verifiably fictional constitutional provision, to have a student presume I was the one making things up when I said the Elastic Clause didn’t exist – that blazed new territory.</p>
<p>All of this illustrates the dangerous rot occurring on campus, facilitated in large part by the faculty. All signs point to their success. Students are learning the lexicon of the institutional left and producing tragic-comedy like <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/02/25/black-ucla-law-students-complain-about-equality/">complaining about equalit</a>y at UCLA, and worse. My appearance at Emory was sponsored by the <a href="http://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a> and the College Republicans. Recognize that groups like these are fighting an uphill battle on campus. But without them, college campuses would be intellectually monolithic.</p>
<p>The talk at Emory wandered into the small discrete psychological components of tyranny as described brilliantly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Investigation/dp/0813332893"><em>Gulag Archipelago</em></a>. No doubt Mr. Elastic Clause and College Democrat Vice President Edict had never heard of the Nobel Prize winning description of where elastic ideas can lead.</p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn’s great book of the 20th century describes the <em>small ideas</em> of totalitarianism, and the camouflaged embryonic consent that individuals give to tyranny over time. Tyranny isn’t just about gruel with potato peelings day after day and bullets to the back of the head.</p>
<p>I presume Mr. Elastic Clause and Ms. College Democrat Officer will never read <em>Gulag</em>, but if they did, they would learn the story of Georgi Osorgin. Osorgin was imprisoned in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovki_prison_camp">Solovetsky Islands</a> in the early 1920s. The date was important because American leftists (such as some Democrats of the 1960s) like to pin the mass murder system only on Stalin. But Solzhenitsyn documents that the gulags were a necessary part of Lenin’s vision of the International Brotherhood. Without terror, his system would not work.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Osorgin was to be shot, but he begged his jailers for a few more days because his wife was coming to visit him at the gulag. Osorgin’s wife visited him, then as her boat pulled away from Solovetsky Island, keeping his part of the bargain, he undressed to be shot. Niceties were part of the gulag in the early days because nobody really knew where the fledgling system was headed.</span></p>
<p>Solzhenitsyn:</p>
<blockquote><p>But still, someone did give them those three days. The three Osorgin days, like other cases, show how far the Solovetsky regime was from having donned the armor of a<em>system</em>. The impression is left that the air of Solovki strangely mingled extreme cruelty with an almost benign incomprehension of where all this was leading, which Solovetsky characteristics were becoming the embryo of the great Archipelago and which were destined to dry up and wither on the bud. After all, the Solovetsky Islands people did not yet, generally speaking, firmly believe that the ovens of the Arctic Auschwitz had been lit right there and that its crematory furnaces had been thrown open to all who were ever brought there. (But, after all, that is exactly how it was!)</p>
<p>People there were also misled by the fact that all their prison terms were exceedingly short: it was rare that anyone had a ten-year term, and even five was not found very often, and most of them were three, just three. And this whole cat-and-mouse trick of the law was still not understood: to pin down and let go, and pin down again and let go again. . . .</p>
<p>Here too, on the first islands of the Archipelago, was felt the instability of those checkered years of the middle twenties, when things were but poorly understood in the country as a whole. Was everything already prohibited? Or, on the contrary, were things only now beginning to be allowed? Age-old Russia still believed so strongly in rapturous phrases! And there were only a few prophets of gloom who had already figured things out and who knew when and how all this would be smashed into smithereens.</p></blockquote>
<p>I explained to the students that a <em>written</em> Constitution, free from the phony Elastic Clause and power for a president to issue edicts, is what keeps them free. It is what lets them have fun and have a good life. Structural constraints on the power of government allow people to experience joy, worship God, build dreams and fulfill potential. Our Constitution does not have an Elastic Clause for a very good reason. It was established to be <em>inelastic</em> absent the consent of three quarters of states. It was established to lay down fundamental ironclad <em>restraints</em> on the power of government, especially the executive branch.</p>
<p>Some are <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/09/23/why-the-fuss-obama-has-long-been-on-record-in-favor-of-redistribution/">trying to redefine freedom</a> away from this ideal and toward freedom from want.</p>
<p>That it is becoming fashionable to reject our particularly American version of freedom deserves an overpowering response.</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>Our First African American President</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/our-first-african-american-president/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=our-first-african-american-president</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2013 04:05:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[African American]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Destructive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206708</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It is very sad how Obama will be judged. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/of.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-206710 aligncenter" alt="of" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/of-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Attribution for photo and quote: <a href="http://beforeitsnews.com/obama/2013/08/barack-obama-basically-dishonest-incompetent-and-corrupt-it-is-very-sad-that-our-first-african-american-president-will-be-judged-in-history-as-the-most-inept-corrupt-wasteful-subversiv-2454790.html">Click here</a>.</strong></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>Rand Paul Wins Michigan Straw Poll</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/rand-paul-wins-michigan-straw-poll/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rand-paul-wins-michigan-straw-poll</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2013 04:25:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Mauro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Chris Christie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elizabeth Warren]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Rand Paul]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205162</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Could Christie catch up? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/130724_rand_paul_ap_328.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205184" alt="130724_rand_paul_ap_328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/130724_rand_paul_ap_328.jpg" width="233" height="181" /></a>Senator Rand Paul <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/rand-paul-michigan-poll-97167.html">won a Michigan Republican Party straw poll</a> over the weekend, doubling the share of rival Governor Chris Christie. The victory overshadows a mostly unnoticed change in the race for the GOP presidential nomination: Christie is back on top as Senator Ted Cruz’s rise pulls away from of Paul’s support.</span></b></p>
<p>The event is somewhat of a proving ground for 2016 aspirants. Paul, Governor Scott Walker, Governor Bobby Jindal and Senator John Thune all spoke there. The result was a landslide victory for Paul with 188 votes, followed by Christie (82), former Governor Jeb Bush (42), Walker (39) and Texas Senator Ted Cruz (36).</p>
<p>The result was most disappointing for Walker, Jindal and Thune because each spoke at the event and lost to candidates who weren’t even in attendance.</p>
<p>The state of the race has subtly shifted since my <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/the-gop-national-security-debate-of-2016-begins/">July 29 analysis</a> when Paul was the frontrunner by any measure. The dynamics of the race still favor him, but Cruz’s gain is coming at his expense and it has enabled Christie to regain a slight lead.</p>
<p>Paul had taken the lead, but now <a href="http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/cnn-17953">CNN&#8217;s latest poll</a> has Christie back in the top spot with 17%, followed by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan with 16%. Paul has fallen to 13%, followed by Bush (10%), Senator Rubio (9%), Cruz (7%) and Santorum (5%).</p>
<p>Christie is <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cnn-poll-conservatives-christie/2013/09/16/id/525886">favored</a> by 28% of moderates and only 8% of conservatives. His strength is derived from dominating the moderate vote as more conservative Republicans are divided amongst themselves. This is how McCain and Romney won the nomination in the last two presidential nomination cycles.</p>
<p>A similar shift has happened in New Hampshire, where Paul had been <a href="http://freebeacon.com/majority-of-n-h-voters-support-keeping-gitmo-open/">leading</a> with 22% to Ryan’s 18%. The <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/09/clinton-leads-dems-paul-and-christie-tops-among-republicans-in-nh.html">latest PPP poll</a> shows Paul retains a slim lead with 20%, but Christie is right behind him with 19%. They are followed by Bush (14%), Senator Ayotte (12%), Cruz (10%), Rubio (7%), Ryan (7%), Jindal (3%) and Santorum (2%).</p>
<p>Paul and Christie offer <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/the-gop-national-security-debate-of-2016-begins/">competing visions on national security</a> but they are each already deploying their own electability arguments.</p>
<p>The numbers are presently on Christie’s side. The only match-up that the GOP currently wins in the polls is Christie vs. Biden. In that case, the GOP is ahead by 4%.</p>
<p>Clinton defeats all GOP candidates in the critical battleground state of Virginia, but Christie <a href="http://www.argojournal.com/2013/09/poll-watch-harper-polling-r-virginia.html">ties her.</a> He’s <a href="http://www.argojournal.com/2013/09/poll-watch-quinnipiac-virginia-2016.html">one percent behind her</a> in another. In a head-to-head with Biden, Christie wallops him in Virginia by 12%. Paul, on the other hand, barely gets by with a 1% lead.</p>
<p>Paul can reasonably argue that his name identification is not as high as Christie’s and that his new vision for the Republican Party has not been presented to the public yet. Paul believes that focusing on privacy issues and reformation of drug laws will win him the youth vote.</p>
<p>Polls regarding the National Security Agency surveillance controversies have changed. In July, <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limits-on-nsa-surveillance-program/">50% of Americans supported the NSA programs</a> with 44% opposed. The numbers were the opposite for Republicans. Now, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/poll-public-concerns-rise-spying-privacy-20214081">almost 60% oppose</a> the NSA programs. More broadly, <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/164591/americans-belief-gov-powerful-record-level.aspx">60%</a> believe the federal government is too powerful.</p>
<p>Christie earlier positioned himself as being tougher on national security than Paul, but it looks like this maneuvering is going to backfire unless his position changes.</p>
<p>In addition, none of Christie’s adversaries have mentioned his troublesome associations with Islamists. Just last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/cair-muslim-brotherhood-front-honors-gov-chris-christie">honored Christie</a> for his confrontational attitude with so-called “Islamophobes.”</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/christie-bent-including-islamists-security-forums">four Islamists on Christie&#8217;s Muslim outreach committee</a> continue to meet with top N.J. law enforcement officials. They were even given a briefing on how non-profits can get Homeland Security grants.</p>
<p>On the Democratic side, Clinton continues to dominate. Her language has changed recently. Whereas she previously expressed disinterest in running for the White House, even going so far as to say she won’t make a run, she is now says she is <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/hillary-clinton-2013-9/#print">wrestling with the decision.</a></p>
<p>Nationally, Clinton has the support of <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/16/politics/2016-poll-deep-dive/index.html">65% of Democrats</a>, followed by Biden with 10%. The conventional wisdom is that Biden will be the strong, perhaps insurmountable, frontrunner for the Democratic nomination if Clinton doesn’t run.</p>
<p>New polls show that Senator Elizabeth Warren is creeping up on Biden. In the national poll just referenced, Warren is only three points behind Biden. Cuomo follows with 6% and O’Malley has 2%. You can read my article about O’Malley’s concerning stances on Islamism <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/democratic-maryland-governor-prepares-2016-presidential-bid/">here.</a></p>
<p>In New Hampshire, Warren is only <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/09/clinton-leads-dems-paul-and-christie-tops-among-republicans-in-nh.html">one percent behind Biden</a> in a race that includes Clinton. If she does not run, she is the clear alternative to Biden. He gets 36% and she gets 20%. Keep in mind, Biden’s support is probably at a ceiling because of his name recognition but Warren is just getting started.</p>
<p>The takeaway at this time is that Christie’s support is stable and has done the best job of uniting a faction of the Republican Party behind him (the moderate one). The fate of Christie’s candidacy depends upon whether another candidate can unite the conservatives behind him as the alternative.</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>So Long, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/so-long-mahmoud-ahmadinejad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=so-long-mahmoud-ahmadinejad</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Jul 2013 04:23:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hassan Rouhani]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mahmoud Ahmadinejad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Zionism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look back at the Iranian president's legacy of fanaticism and Jew hatred. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/iran12n-1-web.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198823" alt="iran12n-1-web" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/iran12n-1-web-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>In less than a week, on August 3<sup>rd</sup>, the Iranian people will bid farewell to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be replaced by Hassan Rouhani, another regime-insider. The mainstream perception, and the argument supported by many analysts, is that next week will mark the end of Ahmadinejad’s political career. This argument is inaccurate due to the fact that the clerics and political figures in Iran’s gilded circle routinely continue their anti-Western, anti-U.S., and anti-Semitic statements and policies either through regime politics or behind the geopolitical and media scenes.</p>
<p>Ahmadinejad himself publicly stated that he does not intend to retire from politics after leaving office. As a result, Ahmadinejad and his anti-Semitic, incendiary, and inflammatory beliefs will continue to guide and shape Iran’s policies. In addition, according to the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ahmadinejad can even run for presidency again in four years and win the votes of the hardliners, Basij, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Furthermore, president-elect Hassan Rouhani – an insider and founding father of Iran’s repressive theocratic regime who is well-known for being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” – will continue Ahmadinejad’s policies.</p>
<p>Yet, it is crucial to reflect on Ahmadinejad’s eight years in office and presidential legacy, as some of Ahmadinejad’s most incendiary, anti-Semitic, inflammatory and provocative policies are a strong representation of the beliefs, policies, and political stance of the Iranian regime:</p>
<ul>
<li>The most outrageous, history-defying, and anti-Semitic announcement was publicly released during Ahmadinejad’s speech in Tehran. In reference to his argument that the Holocaust did not occur, Ahmadinejad explained, “They [Western governments and Israel] launched the myth of the Holocaust. They lied, they put on a show and then they support the Jews. The pretext for establishing the Zionist regime is a lie … a lie which relies on an unreliable claim, a mythical claim, and the occupation of Palestine has nothing to do with the Holocaust.&#8221;</li>
<li>The second belief includes an insult to the American people and those families who lost their loved ones in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Ahmadinejad repeatedly declared that the American government orchestrated the attacks to kill its own people. In one of the speeches to the United Nations in September 2010, Ahmadinejad stated, “Some segments within the American government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime… The majority of the American people, as well as most nations and politicians around the world, agree with this view.&#8221;</li>
<li>The next anti-Semitic belief includes the repeated threats of wiping Tel Aviv off the world map. In a speech to the World Without Zionism student conference in Tehran, October 2005, Ahmadinejad stated, &#8220;Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation&#8217;s fury.&#8221; In other statements and comments to reporters in Tehran, April 2006, he further stated, &#8220;We say that this fake regime [Israel] cannot logically continue to live … Open the doors [of Europe] and let the Jews go back to their own countries.&#8221; In addition, in his comments on Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration, May 2008, Ahmadinejad stated, “Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken.&#8221;</li>
<li>Ahmadinejad also reiterated the Iranian regime’s policy of creating and utilizing suicide bombers. In his comments during a visit to a training camp, April 2007, Ahmadinejad stated that &#8220;Iran can recruit hundreds of suicide bombers a day. Suicide is an invincible weapon. Suicide bombers in this land showed us the way, and they enlighten our future.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
<p>The list of Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic, incendiary, and Islamist remarks and beliefs go on. However, there are also domestic repressive policies. In addition to the aforementioned foreign policies, Ahmadinejad strengthened the power of the Basij, Iran’s militia organization, the intelligence Etela’at, the “moral” police, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps by passing more rigid, constraining, and Sharia-based laws. Freedom of speech, press, and assembly were completely confined under Ahmadinejad’s eight years of presidency. The number of political prisoners exponentially increased, more journalists and activists were arrested, the extent of torture, rape, discrimination and executions heightened (according to Human Rights Watch), and oppositional newspapers were shut down.</p>
<p>Ahmadinejad is also notorious for his denial of human rights – such as when he denied that a gay population existed in Iran – turning him into one of the most ridiculed presidents of his time. In a speech at Columbia University in New York, September 2007, Ahmadinejad claimed, &#8220;In Iran, we don&#8217;t have homosexuals like in your country … In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don&#8217;t know who&#8217;s told you that we have this.&#8221;</p>
<p>The crucial point is that – although some liberals would argue that the aforementioned beliefs are only limited to Iran’s hardliners – these ideologies are strongly held across the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political spectrum, including by moderates, reformists, and centrists. Any political figure or party that wishes to survive in Iran’s theocratic politics and any political party or figure that is allowed to hold positions in Iran has already proved their loyalty to and support for the regime’s fundamental anti-American, anti-Semitic, and Sharia law-based beliefs.</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>Eye on 2016</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/eye-on-2016/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=eye-on-2016</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2013 04:49:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan Mauro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2016]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iowa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poll]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rand Paul]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rubio]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=196957</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Clinton, Paul lead as Rubio falls.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/130626_hillary_clinton_rand_paul_martin_omalley_ap_328.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196958" alt="130626_hillary_clinton_rand_paul_martin_omalley_ap_328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/130626_hillary_clinton_rand_paul_martin_omalley_ap_328.jpg" width="235" height="195" /></a>The early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign are already underway. Hillary Clinton has held a steady, arguably insurmountable lead for the Democratic nomination, while the Republican nomination is much more fluid. Senator Rand Paul is the frontrunner, thanks to a drop in support for Senator Marco Rubio in Iowa over immigration reform.</span></b></p>
<p>At this point, Clinton can essentially walk in and take the Democratic nomination. In Iowa, <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/07/paul-clinton-early-leaders-in-iowa.html">wins an incredible 71%</a> of the vote. Of course, pundits will argue that Clinton seemed inevitable in 2008, but that was only because it was assumed that then-Senator Obama would not run. Today, there is no one with the super-stardom of Obama on the Democratic Party stage at all.</p>
<p>If Clinton decides not to run, the race (and the general election) becomes more interesting.</p>
<p>Biden is the clear favorite, taking 51% of the vote in Iowa, compared to 13% for Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, 9% for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and 6% for Newark Mayor Cory Booker. The latter three have not received the attention that Biden has, so their numbers are more likely to reflect a floor, while his tend to reflect a ceiling.</p>
<p>The most important polls to look at are in Iowa and New Hampshire, as their results dramatically shift the national polls. By this measure, Paul is the frontrunner as he leads in both states. His position poll-wise is the one most comparable to Romney’s during his successful 2012 bid for the nomination.</p>
<p>In February, PPP had Rubio <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/02/looking-ahead-to-2016-nationally-and-in-iowa.html">tied</a> with Huckabee for the lead in Iowa (each at 16%). Paul was right on their heels (15%), closely followed by Jeb Bush (14%), Chris Christie (12%) and Paul Ryan (10%). The bottom tier was New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez (4%), Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (3%) and Texas Governor Rick Perry (3%).</p>
<p>PPP noted at that time that Rubio’s strength came from “very conservative”  voters; the primary voters most in disagreement with him on immigration reform. He has <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/12/Rubio-Drops-to-5th-in-Iowa-Poll">fallen 5%</a> in Iowa and is now in fifth place; quite a dramatic shakeup.</p>
<p>The beneficiaries from Rubio’s slip and the replacement of Huckabee with Senator Ted Cruz in the poll options are Paul (18%), Christie (16%) and Ryan (15%). Interestingly, Ryan’s support increased by five points even though he <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/07/11/paul-ryan-quietly-pushing-immigration-reform-in-house/">also supports the immigration reform plan.</a> Fortunately for him, Rubio has more closely associated with it, but that would change after the first primary debate.</p>
<p>Bush’s support in Iowa is holding steady at 14%, while Rubio has fallen to 11% and Cruz debuts with 10%. Last year’s winner of the Iowa Caucus, former Senator Rick Santorum, only has 6%. The bottom tier is Jindal (2%) and Martinez (1%), the latter of which seems unlikely to run.</p>
<p>There hasn’t been a poll in New Hampshire for a month, but the <a href="http://freebeacon.com/majority-of-n-h-voters-support-keeping-gitmo-open/">most recent one</a> also shows Clinton and Paul ahead.</p>
<p>For the Democrats, Clinton has the support of 61%. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick comes in third, making him the biggest threat to Biden in New Hampshire if she declines to run.</p>
<p>Paul led in New Hampshire by four points with 22%, ahead of Ryan with 18%. Christie and Rubio were tied for third with 17% and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had 2%. It can be assumed that Rubio has also slipped here as well, bringing him down to fourth place.</p>
<p>There are some other polls that give us a glimpse of the makeup of the future campaign.</p>
<p>Christie wins the electability argument. He still <a href="http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-institute/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=1921">loses</a> to Clinton by 6%, but he has a wide lead of 11% over Biden. Paul, on the other hand, loses to Clinton by 12% and ties Biden. In the critical battleground state of Ohio, Christie <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/307873-poll-clinton-christie-tied-in-ohio">ties Clinton</a> but crushes Biden by 18%. Paul loses to Clinton by 3% and defeats Biden by 9%.</p>
<p>Rubio’s electability argument rests upon his ability to win over Latino voters. However, Clinton <a href="http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/11/17706095-poll-rubio-popular-with-latinos-but-not-as-popular-as-clinton-obama?lite?ocid=twitter">defeats</a> him among Latinos by 38% and Biden wins by 32%. Rubio is the most popular GOP candidate among Latinos, leading Christie by 15% but the general election match-ups show his selection would not trigger a decisive shift. However, 40% of Latinos did not know Rubio or had no opinion, leaving a lot of room for upward movement.</p>
<p>Polls actually show that Bush is more electable than Rubio and he may be able to argue that he’d be more popular among Latinos. In Florida, Clinton <a href="http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/hillary-clinton-beats-out-jeb-bush-and-marco-rubio-new-q-poll-florida">defeats</a> Bush by 7% and Rubio by 12%. Biden loses to Bush by 4% and Rubio wins by 2%.</p>
<p>Another significant development is Perry’s decision not to run for re-election; a move that is widely interpreted as interest in a presidential bid.</p>
<p>Perry improved in the debates following his infamous gaffe, but he’s having a hard time convincing voters that he will not make that mistake again. A poll in his own state found him in <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_TX_703.pdf">sixth place</a>, 20% behind Cruz. PPP <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2013/01/clinton-could-win-texas-in-2016.html">finds</a> that Clinton beats him by 8% in Texas, a must-win state for the GOP.</p>
<p>The takeaway from this analysis of the polls is that there’s a high price to pay among GOP primary voters for supporting anything seen as amnesty. National polls aside, Paul is now the frontrunner and Rubio isn’t.</p>
<p>You can’t be considered one of the frontrunners if you are in fifth place in Iowa and fourth place in New Hampshire. Team Rubio should be worried.</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>The Truth About Iran&#8217;s New &#8216;Centrist&#8217; President</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/the-truth-about-irans-new-centrist-president/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-truth-about-irans-new-centrist-president</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2013 04:15:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hassan Rouhani]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic  Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[khomeini]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=194441</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Exposing a Khomeini true believer. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Hassan-Rouhani-press-conf-008.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-194443 alignleft" alt="Hassan Rouhani press conference" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Hassan-Rouhani-press-conf-008.jpg" width="211" height="166" /></a>Western liberal media have recently contributed in creating the narrative that the newly-elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, is the political figure destined to resolve Iran’s heightened political, economic, strategic, and diplomatic tensions with the Western world. Specifically, media suggest that Rouhani may solve Tehran’s nuclear defiance in the face of the international community, its stance towards Tel Aviv, its support for Assad’s brutal and authoritarian regime, as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran’s unconditional military, financial, intelligence, and advisory support to regional and international non-state actors classified as terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas.</p>
<p>To support this argument, Western liberal media repeatedly make the following three points: first of all, they refer to Hassan Rouhani’s presidential campaign slogan, which is to pursue “constructive interaction” with the rest of the world, including the United States, Israel and European Union. Secondly, they refer to Rouhani’s nickname within Iran: “the Diplomatic Sheikh.” Thirdly, an overwhelming majority of liberal media assert that Rouhani is not an Islamist hardliner or traditionalist, but rather, a centrist. As a result, allegedly, a bright and promising era will commence for Tehran-Western relationships with Rouhani’s presidency.</p>
<p>It is crucial to address some of the significant inaccuracies that comprise the liberal narrative surrounding Iran’s newly-elected president. Hassan Rouhani is not a renegade reformer; rather, Rouhani is deeply woven in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political fabric. If Hassan Rouhani’s background – including his personal life, Persian-written books and career – are closely examined, it becomes evident that he is one of the founding fathers of the Islamist regime. In his early ages as a teen, Rouhani took religious courses on Islamist and Sharia law and actively participated in anti-West, anti-U.S., anti-Israel, anti-“imperialism,” and anti-Shah campaigns as well as various religious extremists’ Shiite sermons. He caught the attention of Ayatollah Rooh Allah Khomeini – the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran – when he became an outspoken protester against the West, capitalism, democracy and the Shah. While gaining popularity among the Islamic Shiite fundamentalists, Rouhani then became the mouthpiece of Ayatollah Khomeini.</p>
<p>Rouhani received a significant welcome by Iran’s Islamist establishment and clerics. He was then particularly quick to climb the theocratic political ladder, first serving in Iran’s new parliament and then monitoring the state media where he was responsible for censoring any kind of information that was perceived as detrimental to the ruling of the clerics and Ayatollahs. Afterwards, he built a strong friendship with Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is currently sought by the Argentinian government for ordering the 1994 AMIA bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Rouhani was then appointed as Rafsanjani’s top national security adviser during his 1989-97 presidential tenure. Additionally, Rouhani has also served as the Islamic Republic of Iran’s top nuclear negotiator.</p>
<p>Moreover, before becoming president, Rouhani was promoted during his political career to become the representative and mouthpiece of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – the current most powerful hardliner in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since 1989, Rouhani served as the Supreme Leader’s representative in the Supreme National Security Council. He has also been member of other fundamentalist and Islamist institutions in Iran, including the Assembly of Experts since 1999,the Expediency Council since 1991, and head of the Center for Strategic Research since 1992.</p>
<p>Additionally, and most significantly, the fact that Rouhani was qualified by Iran’s authoritarian Guardian Council – which barred 98% of the candidates from running for the 2013 presidency –sends a formidable indication that he is ideologically aligned with the Islamist fundamentalists. Moreover, when Rouhani was the top nuclear negotiator and advisor to the Supreme Leader, he and Iranian leaders continued to defy the international community, arm Assad’s regime, spin the centrifuges, enrich their nuclear program and provide financial, military, advisory and intelligence support to terrorist groups. It is thus unrealistic to argue that Rouhani will alter his fundamental Islamist ideologies and become an advocate for human rights, democracy, and secularism overnight.</p>
<p>Finally, in his most recent speeches after his election as the 11<sup>th</sup> president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Rouhani has already clearly stated the Islamic Republic of Iran’s inalienable right to continue enriching its nuclear program, spin its centrifuges and obtain nuclear capabilities. He also has yet to even slightly condemn Assad’s violent suppression on citizens, which has thus far caused more than 93,000 deaths. Any political figure or cleric who is allowed to become the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran comes from the Islamist establishment.</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>Fourteen Questions For Shimon Peres</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dbedein/fourteen-questions-for-shimon-peres/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fourteen-questions-for-shimon-peres</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:05:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Bedein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace Process]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[shimon peres]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yasser Arafat]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193748</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How would the president of Israel explain his failed legacy? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Shimon_Peres_at_2009_WEF.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-193905 alignleft" alt="'Gaza: The Case for Middle East Peace': Shimon Peres" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Shimon_Peres_at_2009_WEF-450x346.jpg" width="270" height="208" /></a></p>
<p><em>The big &#8220;event&#8221; this week In Israel is the &#8220;celebration&#8221; of the 90th birthday of Shimon Peres and the conference that was organized in connection with this.  That is the same conference Stephen Hawking decided to boycott, joining the BDS terrorists.</em></p>
<p><em>Bill Clinton pulled up his britches to attend and lots of Hollywood stars are attending, perhaps the one getting the most press being Barbara Streisand.  The funniest story about the &#8220;stars&#8221; I think is <a href="http://www.israellycool.com/2013/06/18/photo-of-the-day-109/">this one</a> about Sharon Stone. Robert De Niro is also in Israel, although in the past he made disgusting anti-Israel statements.</em></p>
<p><em>The best commentary on the festivities in Israel is the “Fourteen Questions for Shimon Peres&#8221; piece below by David Bedein.</em></p>
<p><em>I myself still think that the two most amazing facts about Shimon Peres are these:</em></p>
<p><em>1.  That he managed to spend so many years over the past decades in Israeli political life while at the same time pursuing his acting career and playing the Montgomery Burns character on &#8220;The Simpsons&#8221; TV show;  and</em></p>
<p><em>2.  The fact that Peres did not spend the past two decades in prison.  His Oslo &#8220;peace process&#8221; has directly produced close to 2000 murdered Israelis, and I think that in any normal country he would have been charged with hundreds of counts of depraved indifference second degree murder.</em></p>
<p><em>&#8211; Dr. Steven Plaut, pundit and professor of Business Administration at the University of Haifa, Israel.</em></p>
<p>***</p>
<p>The President of Israel, Shimon Peres, pushing 90, celebrates his longevity with a birthday bash this week that includes thousands of invited guests and hundreds of reporters.</p>
<p>It behooves the journalists who cover the Peres birthday event to hold Peres accountable for policies that Peres stands for. In the media, longevity allows for long memories.</p>
<p>1. In 1981, Peres opposed and tried to interfere with Menachem Begin’s 1981 decision to bomb Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi nuclear reactor. Does Peres have any regrets for his opposition to the destruction of that nuclear reactor?</p>
<p>2. Peres is proud of the Oslo peace accord which he helped facilitate between Israel and the PLO on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993. However, on October 7, 1993, the left-wing newspaper Al HaMishmar revealed that the PLO would not ratify that accord, and, indeed, the PLO has never ratified that accord. Instead of heeding the Al HaMishmar report, Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, dispatched his Deputy Minister, Yossi Beilin, to fly to Tunis to thank Arafat for ratifying the Oslo accord, which Arafat and the PLO never did. Why does Peres promote an unratified accord?</p>
<p>3. In 1994, Rabin, Peres, and Arafat made an agreement that Arafat’s armed forces would comprise no more than 9,000 inductees, and that any Palestinian under arms would first have to be vetted by Israeli intelligence to ensure that he did not have a background in terrorist activity. Yet as early as December 1993, it was discovered that the PA had drafted two Arab residents from the Arab village of Tequa who had murdered the curator of the Herodian, David Rosenfeld, in 1982. In December 1995, Arafat announced that his commanders for Ramallah and Nablus were men who planted bombs in Jerusalem’s Zion Square on July 5, 1975, killing thirteen people. As of 1995, the PA armed forces counted as many as 19,000 people under arms by 1995 and now at least 30,000. Since 1995, the IDF acknowledges that it no longer knows who has been recruited into the PA security force. Can Peres answer the question as to whether the PA armed forces now includes volatile terrorists within its ranks?</p>
<p>4. Throughout 1994 and 1995, when private agencies produced videos of Arafat’s speeches where Arafat expressed support for Jihad to liberate Palestine, Peres implored Israel TV not to air Arafat’s speeches in the Arabic language. Peres also asked the US Congress not to view the videos of what Arafat was saying in Arabic. Does Peres express regret for trying to obfuscate Arafat’s message in the Arabic language?</p>
<p>5. In December 1994, when Peres and Rabin conducted a briefing for the media in Oslo before they both received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Arafat, I asked them if Arafat had fulfilled his commitment to crush the Hamas. Both Rabin and Peres indicated that he would do so. A few hours later, when I asked Arafat the same question as to whether the PLO leader would crush the Hamas, Arafat’s response was clear: “Hamas are my brothers. I will handle them in my way.” And Arafat did handle the Hamas – by bringing them into his new regime, as full coalition partners. In May 1995, Arafat’s security forces announced that they would provide Hamas with arms. In December 1995, Arafat invited the Hamas to join his provisional regime. In 1996, Arafat appointed Hamas officials to run the religious departments and schools under his authority. By fall 2001, the IDF confirmed that Islamic terror groups train and operate in the full view of the Palestinian Authority security services, and that the Islamic terrorists get a clear message that their activity operates with the full blessing of Arafat’s regime. The promise of the Oslo process was that Arafat would crush the Hamas, not co-opt the Hamas. Does Peres feel today that Arafat betrayed him?</p>
<p>6. Norwegian statesmen Kare Kristiansen resigned from the Nobel Prize committee because of the Nobel Prize bestowed upon Arafat. The same Kare Kristiansen told the Norwegian media that Peres had promised financial remuneration to fellow Nobel Prize Committee member Terje Larsen in order to ensure that he would share the Nobel Peace Prize with the late Prime Minister Rabin. In 2002, I interviewed Mr. Kristiansen and he explicitly affirmed that he had witnessed the deal made between Peres and Larsen which assured Larsen that he would be “well rewarded for his efforts.” How does Peres respond to the allegation that he paid good money for the Nobel Peace Prize?</p>
<p>7. The Palestine National Council meeting in April 1996 did not vote to nullify the PLO charter to destroy Israel. However, Peres proclaimed that Arafat did fulfill his promise to amend the PLO charter. It turned out that the resolution that Arafat had told Peres that they would pass was not even brought up for a vote. What is Peres’s current perspective of the PLO charter, which was never changed?</p>
<p>8. In March 2007, when a new “Palestinian unity government” was formed to include Hamas and the Fatah in a coalition government, Peres declared that “only with economics can we make peace.” Peres went on to say that if members of terrorist groups perceive economic incentives, they will cease to be terrorists. Does Peres truly believe that a terrorist organization, which acts upon a deep-rooted ideology, can be enticed by a good business opportunity to abandon the path of terror?</p>
<p>9. Peres repeats over and over that the “gap between Israel and the PA is very small,” while consistently describing Abbas as “Israel’s hope for peace.” However, Peres refuses to comment on the war curriculum that Abbas and the PA ministry of education have introduced in the PA. Peres consistently refuses to say if he has even reviewed the new PA school books, which have introduced a curriculum of war for the next generation of Palestinian Arab school children. On March 1, 2000, Peres addressed an international colloquium for the Jewish media, where Peres announced that the PA had adopted a PA school curriculum for peace. When I pointed out to Peres that the curriculum that he had quoted from had been vetoed by the PA, Peres moved away from the microphone and said “I know.” Why will Peres not comment on the current PA curriculum of war?</p>
<p>10.     Before the Gaza retreat, Peres, then deputy Prime Minister, announced on July 7th, 2005 that the American government had allocated $2 billion to cover the costs of disengagement. That assurance was quoted by the mainstream Israeli media for months to come. However, on July 12th, 2005, the spokesman for the US treasury department told Israel’s leading business newspaper, GLOBES, that the US was not giving one penny for the Disengagement Policy. Where did Peres get the idea that the US would fund the Israel retreat from Gaza?</p>
<p>11.     Before Israel’s 2005 retreat from Gaza, Shimon Peres accused southern Israelis of “stoking hysteria” about the rockets and asked, “What’s the big deal?” while describing the Kassam missile as harmless. “Kassam Shmassam,” said Peres. Since then, the southern region of Israel has suffered 29,000 aerial attacks from Gaza and 49 people killed over the past ten years, what is Peres’s perspective on the assurances that he gave the people of southern Israel before Israel withdrew its civilians, soldiers, and bases from Gaza?</p>
<p>12.     In 2011, Shimon Peres dispatched a <a href="http://conference.jstreet.org/system/storage/166/17/f/206/president_shimon_peres_letter_of_support.pdf">letter </a>of praise to J Street, one day after J-Street called on the US to support the PLO resolution at the UN Security Council calling for the halt of settlement construction, including east Jerusalem, which the Obama administration vetoed after all other permanent members voted in favor. Does Peres have any second thoughts about sending such a letter of support to J Street?</p>
<p>13. On January 4, 2013, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, delivered a new year’s message in which he lauded Adolf Hitler’s Arab ally, Haj Amin Al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, as someone whose legacy should be &#8220;emulated” by the Palestinian people. Since Israel’s President Shimon Peres never stops in his adulations of Abbas, Peres was asked if he would condemn Abbas’s praise of the Mufti, yet Peres refused comment on Abbas’s praise of the Mufti. Why would Peres not condemn Abbas’s praise of the Mufti?</p>
<p>14. Peres continually endorses an independent Palestinian state under the leadership of Abbas, as a Palestinian state that would coexist as a peaceful neighbor with Israel. Yet UNRWA remains in tact, maintaining 5 million Arab refugees and their descendants in “temporary” refugee camps, under the premise and promise of the right of return to Arab villages that no longer exist within Israel. Why does Peres not support a change in the UNRWA mandate, which contradicts his vision of a “two state solution”?</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>Obama Takes the &#8216;Moderate&#8217; Iranian President&#8217;s Bait?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/will-obama-take-the-moderate-iranian-presidents-bait/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-obama-take-the-moderate-iranian-presidents-bait</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Jun 2013 04:40:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ayatollah khamenei]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hassan Rouhani]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193599</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Beware the "reformer" smokescreen. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/18912237.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193605" alt="18912237" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/18912237.jpg" width="269" height="187" /></a>The Obama administration is using the election of Iran&#8217;s new president-elect, Hassan Rouhani, as an excuse to consider resuming negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Iran is cleverly running the clock, using the election of the moderate-appearing Rouhani as bait to lure the Obama administration and its European allies into another round of useless talks while Iran forges ahead to develop a nuclear arms arsenal.</span></b></p>
<p>Rouhani, a cleric, had served as the Supreme National Security Council chairman under Presidents Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997) and Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), and was Iran&#8217;s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005.  He is perceived as a &#8220;moderate&#8221; compared with the other candidates who ran for president against him. However, everything is relative. Hundreds of reformist and pragmatic candidates, and all women, were barred from running. Rouhani was the last so-called &#8220;reform&#8221; candidate standing.</p>
<p>Denis McDonough, President Obama&#8217;s chief of staff, said on the CBS program &#8220;Face the Nation&#8221; this past Sunday that he sees Rouhani&#8217;s election &#8220;as a potentially hopeful sign.&#8221;</p>
<p>For his part, Rouhani is doing all he can to stoke the Obama administration&#8217;s interest in resuming talks. &#8220;The idea is to engage in more active negotiations with the 5+1, as the nuclear issue cannot be resolved without negotiations,&#8221; president-elect Rouhani said during his press conference on June 17th, referring to the UN Security Council&#8217;s five permanent members plus Germany.</p>
<p>There are &#8220;many ways to build trust&#8221; with the West, Rouhani added. &#8220;Our nuclear programmes are completely transparent. But we are ready to show greater transparency and make clear for the whole world that the steps of the Islamic Republic of Iran are completely within international frameworks.&#8221; Rouhani pledged to follow a &#8220;path of moderation and justice, not extremism.&#8221;</p>
<p>At the same time, Rouhani complained that the U.S. and European Union sanctions against his country were unfair and unjustified, and he vowed that the &#8220;period is over&#8221; for Iran to consider ending its uranium enrichment program.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Iranian nation has done nothing to deserve sanctions. The works it has done has been within international frameworks. If sanctions have any benefits, it will only benefit Israel. It has no benefits for others,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Using Rouhani&#8217;s election as Iran&#8217;s next president as an excuse for the Obama administration to chase the rabbit of further fruitless negotiations is a fool&#8217;s errand.  Whatever negotiating position Rouhani would like to pursue, his hands are tied by Iran&#8217;s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who calls all of the shots.</p>
<p>As explained by an Iranian Christian leader quoted by Joel Rosenberg, author of The 12th Imam series and expert on the Middle East:</p>
<blockquote><p>We must remember that Khamenei is the supreme power and will make all the important decisions. This includes relationship with the west and nuclear program&#8230; Khamenei and the clergy have set up a power structure so that there are layers of protection for them. They use the government as their puppet (a front) to implement their national and international wishes. But if something goes wrong, they have the government to blame for it.</p></blockquote>
<p>In any case, Rouhani is an insider. He is reported to be very close to Khamenei and has been serving as a member of the Expediency Discernment Council, an advisory body to Khamenei. He is also a member of the Assembly of Experts, a body vested with authority to elect and remove the Supreme Leader.</p>
<p>&#8220;Dr. Rouhani is absolutely in the pro-regime camp. He is loyal to the Ayatollah Khamenei and is committed to obeying his wishes and orders,&#8221; the Iranian Christian leader,  Dr. Hormoz Shariat (known as the &#8216; the Billy Graham of Iran&#8217;), is quoted as telling Joel Rosenberg.</p>
<p>Rouhani is no fan of political dissent. In July 2010, for example, he strongly denounced the Green Movement protesters who were demonstrating in support of the Arab Spring. In any event, as president, Rouhani will have little to say about how Iran&#8217;s Revolutionary Guards, Ministry of Intelligence or Basij militia handle dissenters.</p>
<p>In terms of demeanor and rhetoric, Rouhani is expected to project a far more reasonable image than the outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Indeed, Rouhani was highly critical of Ahmadinejad and refused to serve in his administration. However, a shift in style does not mean a shift in substance.</p>
<p>Rouhani sees negotiations as merely a tactic to buy time in advancing Iran&#8217;s nuclear program. It is worth noting that Ayatollah Khamenei had specifically requested his appointment as Iran&#8217;s chief nuclear negotiator in 2003, a post he retained until Ahmadinejad came to power.</p>
<p>In an in-depth interview given to the Mehrnameh periodical in May 2012 to mark the publication of his book, <i>National Security and Nuclear Diplomacy</i>, Rouhani said that during Iran&#8217;s voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment, which Rouhani negotiated with the European Union in 2003, Iran&#8217;s nuclear program made major advances. He declared in the interview that no matter who is elected president of Iran, &#8220;Iran’s position on nuclear technology will not change.&#8221;</p>
<p>Even if Iran&#8217;s new president-elect Hassan Rouhani wanted to steer Iran&#8217;s nuclear policies in a fundamentally different direction, which is hardly likely, he will have no power to do so. Hardliner Ayatollah Khamenei will continue to be in charge, which means no real change. Thus, the Obama administration will be wasting more precious time if it is lured by Rouhani&#8217;s siren song, as Iran progresses towards achieving its ambition of a nuclear arms capability.</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>Iran&#8217;s Puppet Presidency</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/majid-rafizadeh/irans-puppet-presidency/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irans-puppet-presidency</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:37:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ahmadinejad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ayatollah Khomeini]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the hope for a new direction for the Islamic Republic is futile. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ali-khamenei-6a71cbfcd6f06487.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193539" alt="ali-khamenei-6a71cbfcd6f06487" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ali-khamenei-6a71cbfcd6f06487-450x350.jpg" width="270" height="210" /></a>Iran’s presidential election has invoked significant excitement among some liberal Western and Eastern analysts; the enthusiasm lies in the hope that the next president of Iran would be a reformist, rather than from the hardliner, traditionalist, or Islamic principlist camp. These analysts argue that as the hardliners and principlists – who are loyal to the Supreme Leader and oppose any dialogue with the United States, Israel, and the West – are unwavering in their pursuit to obtain nuclear weapons, if a reformist comes to power, they can resolve Iran’s human rights abuses, support of terrorist groups, and nuclear defiance towards the international community. However, this argument lacks logical and sophisticated depth. The premise behind these kinds of statements by analysts are flawed for the following several crucial reasons.</p>
<p>First of all, Iran’s political structure is strictly run by institutions which were established by the founding father of the Islamist state, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. These institutions include the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the Basij (with more than 7 million members, the Basij is the largest volunteer paramilitary militia in Iran), and Ettela’at, Iran’s notorious intelligence agency. All of these institutions are directly monitored and guided by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, to whom the high officials and commanders directly report. Moreover, these institutions receive a high number of benefits from the Supreme Leader and are extremely loyal to him. This kind of shrewd political apparatus can be compared to that of North Korea under Kim Jong-un.</p>
<p>Iran’s foreign and domestic policies are also controlled by the Supreme Leader, under the guidance of the aforementioned powerful institutions. As a result, Iran’s presidency can be regarded as a peripheral, shallow, depthless, and perfunctory position – a superficial political figure that is only granted the authority to set the tone in national and international platforms for the Supreme Leader. When it comes to making policies, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran – although also from the gilded circle of the ruling clerics – is a powerless figure.</p>
<p>Secondly, climbing the political ladder in the Islamic Republic of Iran requires specific personal characteristics and qualifications. If a political figure’s ideologies, policies and tendencies do not comply with those of the ruling cleric and the Supreme Leader, he/she will be thwarted from succeeding in their political career. Tactics that have been utilized to accomplish this include imprisonment, torture, blackmailing, and assassination. As a result, the political figures that have been capable of running for presidency are those who have significantly proven their loyalty and compliance with the Islamist revolutionary ideals. The most significant ideals include antagonism towards the United States and Israel, imposing Shari law throughout the country and across Iran’s borders, arming terrorist militia groups, supporting Assad’s sect-based and police regime, and seeking to become a regional and international hegemon.</p>
<p>Thirdly, and more fundamentally, even if those political figures who challenge the Supreme Leader are able to register for presidential candidacy, they will inevitably become immediately disqualified by the Guardian Council – an authoritarian body that consists of 12 non-elected members who are directly or indirectly appointed by the Supreme Leader. As Kambiz, a 24-year-old computer engineering student at Tehran University, told me: &#8220;I am not going to vote. Many of my friends will not vote too. All these candidates are the same. We trusted Khatami (the reformist), but he was one of them and did not stand for us. Rafsanjani, Mashaei and the rest [of the conservatives] are all supporters and beneficiaries of the current corrupt and theocratic regime.&#8221;</p>
<p>Fourthly, major issues that the Islamic Republic of Iran faces – such as enriching uranium and confronting Israel and the United States – have been matters of consensus across all of Iran’s political spectrum, among hardliners, principlists, centrist, moderates, and reformists alike.</p>
<p>When considering the major political and ideological spectrums, all the members of the reformist, hardliner, principlist, centrist, and moderate political camps share identical policies and strategies. The only difference lies in the shrewd political language that each camp uses. While the hardliners – such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and current presidential candidate Jalili – publicly attack the West and use inflammatory and provocative language to express their intentions, the reformists are much more sophisticated political statesmen, employing softer tones in order to manipulate the international community and achieve the objectives of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Supreme Leader.</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>Where’s the Patriotic Wrath Over Benghazi?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/wheres-the-patriotic-wrath-over-benghazi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wheres-the-patriotic-wrath-over-benghazi</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Jun 2013 04:35:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Americans murdered]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192274</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why have Americans forgotten -- or simply don’t care?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ben55.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192275" alt="ben55" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ben55-450x262.jpg" width="270" height="157" /></a>Remember Benghazi? When al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists murdered a U.S. ambassador on the anniversary of the al-Qaeda jihadist murder of 3000 Americans? When the jihadists killed two ex-Navy Seals, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, when like the Spartans at Thermopylae they valiantly fought against an attack on the CIA annex? Remember how the Obama administration serially lied about the perpetrators of the attack, blaming it on an obscure Internet video, in order to save the president’s triumphalist foreign policy campaign-narrative that al Qaeda had been “rocked back on its heels”?</p>
<p>Apparently many Americans have forgotten, or simply don’t care. A recent poll showed only 24% think that Benghazi is the most important controversy afflicting the Obama administration, while 45% pick the IRS scandal, a particularly egregious example of bad behavior, to be sure, but one common ever since the IRS was created. Perhaps that 45% is concerned on principle over the attempt to use government to limit political expression, but even still, it’s troubling that a political offense is considered more important than the administration’s getting our fellow Americans murdered and then lying in order to cover it up.</p>
<p>Something has happened to this country when we are indifferent to the deaths of brave Americans who have been murdered by our sworn enemies, and blasé about our president and his flunkeys’ lying about that tragedy for political gain. Something is off when we leave unchallenged the lame excuse that the most powerful military in the history of the world armed with the most advanced weapons could not help their comrades because it was decided that a relief force couldn’t “get there in time,” even though no one knew how much time those soldiers had, which in the event was several hours. And we have suffered a colossal failure of patriotic nerve when we are not enraged that whether there was time or not, out forces weren’t ordered to descend on those fanatics and exact a fearsome price in blood for killing Americans. Bill Clinton ran away from Mogadishu in 1993, but at least our soldiers before they left made the enemy pay about 2000 dead for killing 18 Americans.</p>
<p>But we have long gotten used to seeing our enemies kill Americans without cost. Iran and its jihadist proxies like Hezbollah have been killing Americans for 30 years, including 241 in the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iranians have continued to kill Americans and have provided armor-penetrating explosives to the jihadist insurgents. But Iran has faced no punishment other than diplomatic bluster and ineffective sanctions. We need to learn the wisdom of the old Arab saying that cats act like lions when lions act like cats.</p>
<p>Yes, after 9/11 there appeared to be a return of righteous wrath over the murder of our fellow citizens. That momentum was enough to rout the Taliban from Afghanistan and dismantle the psychopathic regime of Saddam Hussein. But in less than a year the flags were gone and the impatience with the normal mistakes, unforeseen consequences, and brutal costs of war had sapped that outrage from a critical mass of Americans. The anti-war Democrats gained traction, and George Bush barely was reelected, mostly because John Kerry was a long-time political hack utterly lacking in personality and brains. But in 2006 Democrats took over Congress, and in 2008 a political tyro running on an anti-war platform captured the presidency. By then 9/11 was ancient history, even though the same enemy was continuing to kill Americans.</p>
<p>Worse yet, that same president has squandered the deaths of our soldiers fighting in Iraq by pulling out our troops despite the ongoing threat of sectarian violence that everyday pushes Iraq closer to Iran and gives a new generation of jihadists valuable battle-field training. He is on track to make the same mistake in Afghanistan in 2014, again wasting over a decades’ worth of American blood and creating the opportunity for a Taliban resurgence. Meanwhile his foreign policy of Islamophilic appeasement and wishful thinking have lead to America’s retreat from the region, with the promise of even more dead Americans as al-Qaeda and its affiliates metastasize in North Africa and the Middle East. Yet despite this geopolitical malfeasance that has lead to the deaths of Americans and that will lead to even more dead in the future, the president gets a pass from amnesiac voters.</p>
<p>Just compare our current patriotic malaise to the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese made a preemptive attack on a military target against another nation it considered a threat to its interests––nothing so exceptional in world history. Yet the outrage among Americans was intense enough to send hundreds of thousands to recruiting stations in order to avenge the deaths of our people, and to carry them through 4 years of brutal, vicious combat. In 1941 and early 1942, even the leftwing <i>The</i> <i>Nation</i> magazine sounded like fire-eating hawks. Jonathan Daniels, a novelist and editor who in the Forties wrote a weekly column for <i>The Nation</i>, thundered, “When could there be a better time to be an American than in an hour when an American has the privilege to stand up to the full meaning of that word?” No doubt in Daniels’s mind about what an American is. In tones that today’s <i>The Nation</i> would condemn not just as reactionary but as hurtful and sexist to boot, Daniels went on, “It is an hour for elation. Here is the time when a man can be what an American means, can fight for what America has always meant––an audacious, adventurous society for a decent earth.” Daniels concluded, “We are alive––rudely awakened. That is not basis for fear but sign that our destiny survives. We are men again in America.”</p>
<p>Yes, the left wanted America in the war because Hitler had attacked their communist patron the Soviet Union. But even if writers like Daniels had darker motives, the fact that they felt compelled to be aggressively patriotic in public speaks much about the America of 1941. Consider the contrast with <i>The Nation</i> writer Jonathan Schell after 9/11. According to Schell, we must understand “the sources of the hatred that the United States has incurred in a decade of neglect and, worse, neglect of international affairs,” as well as “the failure of our own leadership and the role our government has chosen to play in the world.” He also worried about “an enraged blind superpower” and what it might do in response, adding that “it will take months to know what happened, far longer to feel so much grief, longer still to understand its meaning.” Later he frets over the “grief-stricken, nervous, uncertain interval” between the attacks and the U.S. response, and notes a “profound, unmistakable unease” in the land. In short, a stew of therapeutic banalities and cringing self-hatred, without any notion of patriotic solidarity with fellow Americans unjustly murdered, and any particle of righteous anger to punish those who commit such acts.</p>
<p>The indifference to the Benghazi attacks reflects the erosion of patriotic fellow feeling over the last several decades, and of the conviction that our country embodies virtues, ideals, and beliefs that are good and just and better than the alternatives. These ideals, moreover, bind us one to the other, so that an attack on any one of us is an attack on all, for we share an identity based on those ideals. We have lost the sense that we are a national family, one created not by blood but by those goods like freedom, equality, and individual rights.</p>
<p>Instead, a corrosive mélange of “vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias,” as Churchill put it in 1933, the idea that patriotism and nationalism are evils to be exorcised in order to achieve the progressive utopia, have spread beyond the elite of intellectuals into the larger culture, including the curriculum of the schools. Now many of us no longer know what it means to be an American, which is the foundation for that love of country––which includes necessarily our affection for and loyalty to our fellow citizens––without which no country, but especially a great power, can long survive. Instead of believing we are American lions, we now are content to be internationalist cats.</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>What Did Nixon Do?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/what-did-nixon-do/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-did-nixon-do</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 28 May 2013 04:27:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[enemies list]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Impeachment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=191071</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Reflecting on a Republican president oversold as a villain -- and Obama's vastly more scandalous misdeeds.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NixonObama_ReutersAP_0513_660.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-191073" alt="NixonObama_ReutersAP_0513_660" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NixonObama_ReutersAP_0513_660-450x273.jpg" width="270" height="164" /></a>Although Richard Nixon left office under a cloud for trying to subvert the democratic process for his own political advantage, Barack Obama&#8217;s behavior has been far more serious in its corruption and blatant attempts to manipulate the electoral process by unethical and unconstitutional means.</p>
<p>Nixon, bad as he may have been, has been oversold as a villain. He serves as a convenient bogeyman for left-wing historians and journalists to spew self-serving narratives in which they paint him as a devil and themselves as victims. It would, therefore, do well to review some of the facts of what really transpired in the Nixon presidency and how they stack up against Obama&#8217;s unprecedented malfeasance:</p>
<p>First, the much-vaunted &#8220;enemies list&#8221; that was maintained by Nixon is more the stuff of myth than underhanded politics. In his 1979 book, <em>Blind Ambition</em>, Nixon White House counsel John Dean explained that the list consisted merely of names of individuals not welcome at White House functions. White House chief of staff H.R. &#8220;Bob&#8221; Haldeman singled out about 20 people on the list for IRS audits and other official torments, “but no action had been taken as far as I knew,” Dean wrote.</p>
<p>So what did President Nixon actually do?</p>
<p>In his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) concluded that the purpose of the series of acts that collectively constituted Watergate was “[t]o destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.”</p>
<p>As Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the original Watergate story, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/woodward-and-bernstein-40-years-after-watergate-nixon-was-far-worse-than-we-thought/2012/06/08/gJQAlsi0NV_story.html" target="_blank">wrote</a> last year, &#8220;At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nixon and his aides, Ervin said, had “a lust for political power” that “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”</p>
<p>The three articles of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 <a href="http://watergate.info/impeachment/articles-of-impeachment" target="_blank">accused</a> Nixon of violating &#8220;his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.&#8221;</p>
<p>The first article of impeachment referenced the June 17, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters then located in the Watergate office complex in the nation’s capital. Ahead of the approaching November election, the five burglars&#8217; purpose was &#8220;securing political intelligence.&#8221;</p>
<p>After the break-in, Nixon used</p>
<blockquote><p>the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although Nixon had apparently not been aware of or authorized the DNC break-in before it was carried out, audio tapes made by the president&#8217;s secret recording system revealed that he attempted to cover up the incident and other illegal activities that had taken place during his administration. After extensive litigation the Supreme Court unanimously held that the president had to produce the recordings for investigators. He complied.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/obamas-irs-gate/" target="_blank">second article of impeachment</a> against Nixon detailed how he allegedly used the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies and their employees against those he perceived as his political enemies.</p>
<p>According to the impeachment resolution, Nixon used the IRS to obtain</p>
<blockquote><p>confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although Nixon reportedly <a href="http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/14/anger-over-irs-audits-of-conservatives-anchored-in-long-history-of-abuse/#ixzz2USjzufuf" target="_blank">encouraged</a> a clandestine IRS program called the “Special Services Staff” to probe his political adversaries and plague them with audits, the tax-collection agency&#8217;s bark at the time was apparently worse than its bite insofar as Democrats were concerned.</p>
<p>Nixon endorsed but then quickly <a href="http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=tom_charles_huston_1" target="_blank">backed away</a> from an ambitious crackdown on left-wing organizations urged by his aide, Tom Charles Huston. Nixon approved Huston&#8217;s plan on July 14, 1970 but by July 27 he had changed his mind and rescinded approval for it after FBI director J. Edgar Hoover voiced objections.</p>
<p>Huston later lamented that dealing with the IRS was fraught with peril. “Making sensitive political inquiries at the IRS is about as safe a procedure as trusting a whore,” since the Nixon administration at the time had no “reliable political friends at IRS.”</p>
<p>Later in September 1971 Nixon ordered White House aide John Ehrlichman to direct the IRS to look into the tax returns of all those thought to be seeking the 1972 Democratic presidential nod, including Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).</p>
<p>“Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon said. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”</p>
<p>Nominated as IRS commissioner by Nixon, Johnnie Mac Walters headed the IRS from Aug. 6, 1971, to April 30, 1973. Nixon White House counsel John Dean gave Walters an envelope containing the names of about 200 prominent Democrats to harass.</p>
<p>Walters refused to target the individuals. “The story is interesting because the IRS wouldn’t do it,” <a href="http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20130526/NEWS/305260011/Defying-president?gcheck=1" target="_blank">said</a> Tim Naftali, former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “It didn’t happen, not because the White House didn’t want it to happen, but because people like Johnnie Walters said ‘no.’”</p>
<p>Contrast Walters with left-wing bureaucrat Lois Lerner, head of the tax exempt organizations division at the IRS, who apparently did the Obama administration&#8217;s bidding, harassing conservative groups and funders. Lerner testified before Congress last week and after ostentatiously protesting her innocence invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to continue testifying.</p>
<p>Returning to Nixon, even if he had used the IRS in the way described in the second article of impeachment, he was simply doing what presidents had done for the previous 40 years. This is not to excuse Nixon&#8217;s behavior, but it hardly seems fair to single him out for doing what had long been the norm in Washington.</p>
<p>The first known instance of an administration snooping around in its enemies&#8217; tax records for intelligence purposes happened during the presidency of Republican Herbert Hoover (1929-33). FBI director J. Edgar Hoover tried to dig up dirt on a conservative group called the Navy League. He found nothing.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, even if the FBI chief had found anything, his actions were apparently not unlawful. The &#8220;confused drafting&#8221; of a section in a 1910 appropriations act &#8220;actually authorized presidents to use tax records any way they saw fit,&#8221; writes author David Burnham. The law stated tax records &#8220;were to be open for inspection &#8216;only upon the order of the President under rules and regulations to be prescribed by the Secretary of the Treasury and approved by the president.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>The loophole was closed only after the Watergate scandal. &#8220;Partly because of the curious wording of what really was an open records law, few Americans have understood that, from 1910 until 1976, the IRS routinely made tax information available to almost any federal or state agency that requested it.&#8221; (A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS, by David Burnham, Random House, 1989, p.228)</p>
<p>What may have been unethical in Nixon&#8217;s day, is clearly illegal in the Obama era. Presumably Obama, conversant as he is in the law, knows this.</p>
<p>The third article of impeachment accused Nixon of obstructing the congressional investigation into his administration&#8217;s conduct. It stated that he &#8220;failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued&#8221; by the House Judiciary Committee and &#8220;willfully disobeyed such subpoenas.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nixon did in fact refuse to comply with congressional demands and went out of his way to hinder investigations into his misconduct. Facing seemingly certain impeachment in the House and removal from office after a trial by the Senate, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.</p>
<p>Now what has President Obama done?</p>
<p>Obama may not stand accused of breaking into his enemies&#8217; offices to gain an unfair electoral advantage, but he has engaged in tactics aimed at unfairly suppressing the Republican vote.</p>
<p>Under Obama, the Department of Justice gave free rein to ACORN and similar left-wing voter fraud factories, refusing to investigate their many wrongdoings. DoJ let the New Black Panther Party off scot-free for physically intimidating Philadelphia voters.</p>
<p>The Obama administration appeared to violate the civil rights of nearly 200,000 U.S. soldiers around the world by deliberately <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/obama’s-military-voter-suppression-campaign/" target="_blank">disenfranchising</a> them because they tend to vote Republican. Although the administration has moved with lightning speed to attack desperately needed state voter identification laws, last year it seemed barely aware of its obligations under the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2009.</p>
<p>The law was created to help deployed soldiers, many of whom are constantly on the move, to exercise the right to vote that they fight to protect. The law requires the Pentagon to create an “installation voting assistance office,” or IVAO, for every military base close to a combat zone.</p>
<p>IVAOs are supposed to help military personnel navigate the labyrinth of often confusing voting rules of the nation’s 55 states and territories. But IVAOs can’t help anybody vote if they don’t exist. As of September last year, in half of the 229 overseas military installations Obama&#8217;s Department of Defense hadn’t even bothered to set up the IVAO facilities that the law mandated.</p>
<p>Obama’s IRS targeted conservative “social welfare” nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status under section 501c4 of the Internal Revenue Code. Evidence establishes that hundreds of groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement were bullied and intimidated from engaging in constitutionally protected political activism. Some conservative groups were made to wait years for a tax-exempt status determination while the Barack H. Obama Foundation and various liberal groups sailed through the process at breakneck speed.</p>
<p>Who knows how many people failed to donate or become active in those right-leaning groups and what impact this IRS skulduggery had on Republican voter turnout last November.</p>
<p>As commentator Michael Barone observes, the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal “were both about winning elections under false pretenses.”</p>
<p>With Benghazi, “[a] deliberate effort to mislead the voters was launched,” Barone writes. “Clinton, White House press secretary Jay Carney, and the president himself talked about a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video — even though no evidence of that came from Benghazi.” The CIA’s talking points on Benghazi were manipulated by the White House and the Department of State, and Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice was wheeled out to peddle the lies on television.</p>
<p>“This attempt to mislead the electorate worked,” Barone concludes. “It seems a stretch to say that it determined the outcome of the election. But it certainly helped the Obama campaign.”</p>
<p>Obama created a grotesque system of unaccountable federal &#8220;czars&#8221; overseeing vast swaths of U.S. government policy without being confirmed by the Senate, as the Constitution requires.</p>
<p>Obama invaded Libya without congressional authorization and on a flimsy pretext. He unconstitutionally recess-appointed Richard Cordray as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He refused to enforce the provisions of the presumptively constitutional Defense of Marriage Act.</p>
<p>In the Fast and Furious scandal, Obama supplied Mexican drug cartels with guns to encourage a wave of violence that would create a public clamor for tougher gun regulations. Hundreds of Mexicans and a U.S. border patrolman died as a result. Attorney General Eric Holder has been cited with contempt of Congress for failing to cooperate with the congressional investigation of the scandal.</p>
<p>Obama has used executive fiat to illegally gut a workfare law and give certain illegal immigrants blanket amnesty. The president also rigged the GM and Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings to unfairly enrich his friends in the United Auto Workers at the expense of higher-priority creditors such as bondholders and suppliers.</p>
<p>Then there is the still-developing scandal surrounding the surreptitious confiscation of telephone records from the Associated Press, a direct assault on the First Amendment. The U.S. Department of Justice secretly procured two months’ worth of telephone logs for journalists at AP, the world’s largest news-gathering organization. Apparently the records were seized as part of an investigation into national security-related leaks.</p>
<p>The administration is also investigating Fox News reporter James Rosen for daring to report what intelligence sources told him about North Korea.</p>
<p>Obama has also done many things that are at least arguably impeachable and are definitely radically un-presidential.</p>
<p>Obama has been particularly aggressive on the propaganda front. His White House asked Americans to report their neighbors who were opposed to Obamacare to the email address of <a href="mailto:flag@whitehouse.gov" target="_blank">flag@whitehouse.gov</a>. In the National Endowment for the Arts <a href="http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/85512/" target="_blank">scandal</a>, Obama used federal taxpayer resources to press artists to create art to advance his political agenda.</p>
<p>Obama has undermined trust in the justice system by trying to intervene on behalf of his personal friend, Harvard law professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. In 2009 after admitting he didn&#8217;t know all the facts of the case, Obama said the Cambridge, Mass., &#8220;police acted stupidly&#8221; in arresting Gates when they investigated a reported break-in at his home. Obama injected race into the situation by offering that &#8220;separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-American and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.&#8221;</p>
<p>After the <em>Citizens United</em> decision opened the door to corporate campaign contributions, Obama gave speeches belittling and browbeating the Supreme Court. He even did so in the presence of Supreme Court members.</p>
<p>President Obama may yet live to regret these remarks. If he is impeached in the House and tried in the Senate, the trial will be presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Secretary of State Huma Abedin?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/secretary-of-state-huma-abedin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=secretary-of-state-huma-abedin</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/secretary-of-state-huma-abedin/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2013 04:56:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anthony weiner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Huma Abedin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mayor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secretary of state]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Inseparable from Hillary Clinton, how high will the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrator go?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/full_1308239855humahillary.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187686" alt="full_1308239855humahillary" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/full_1308239855humahillary.jpg" width="273" height="211" /></a>In 2017, Huma Abedin may be the wife of the mayor of New York City or the National Security Adviser to the President of the United States. It’s even possible that she might be both.</p>
<p>Huma Abedin’s husband, Anthony Weiner, was once the front-runner for the top job. Weiner’s career was temporarily torpedoed by a sex scandal, but a weak campaign field has tempted him back into the race and already positioned him at the number two spot.</p>
<p>Weiner’s competition is a lesbian City Council speaker, who is seen as a Bloomberg toady, a Comptroller who may soon be headed to jail for campaign finance fraud and a radical leftist Public Advocate who quotes Che and whose wife once claimed to be a lesbian.</p>
<p>In that company, Weiner no longer looks as freakish as he once did and with a $4.3 million war chest, he could win by drowning his Democratic opponents in cash and then fundraising all over again during the general election when he becomes the only alternative to a Republican mayor.</p>
<p>Bloomberg proved that even an unpopular candidate despised by most voters could win elections by flooding community and interest groups with cash and Weiner’s biggest asset isn’t even his war chest; it’s his connection to the Clintons. Weiner’s connection to a Clinton White House means more money for the city and that is something that his party and most community groups are eager to get a taste of.</p>
<p>The woman at the heart of that connection is his wife. Media reports say that Huma Abedin is the one to decide whether Weiner runs and the existence of the New York Times Magazine image rehab profile makes it clear that she has already decided. But no one really believed that Huma Abedin would have stayed married to a formerly promising politician who would never again run for public office.</p>
<p>The only thing standing between Huma Abedin and Gracie Mansion is Joe Lhota, a balding Giuliani official and Weiner’s likely Republican opponent, whose biggest asset is the Giuliani brand.  Lhota is pitching himself as a libertarian alternative to the Bloombergian nanny state, but the chances are still good that the Clinton machine will roll over him on Election Day.</p>
<p>For most politicians, Gracie Mansion is the last stop of their political careers. Ed Koch, the last mayor to try and move to higher office, couldn’t make it. Lindsay took a shot at the White House in 1972 and Weiner likely has dreams of following in his footsteps. It’s an unlikely project, but if Weiner climbs into the top spot in the city, it will only be as a stepping stone to higher office.</p>
<p>By then Huma Abedin is likely to have an even bigger place in the political sun. Bill Clinton traded his support in the last election for the coronation of his wife. Hillary Clinton does have a likability problem, despite the media’s best efforts to pretend otherwise, and she lost the last time she was the inevitable candidate for the Democratic Party nomination. But 2016 could be her year.</p>
<p>The prospective Democratic presidential candidates for 2016 include such charismatic figures as Joe Biden, Maryland Governor Martin “Rain Tax” O’Malley and New York’s Machiavellian governor Andrew Cuomo. It’s the kind of race that even Hillary might be able to win. And then it’s up to the Republican Party to put up a candidate who can communicate better than any of its candidates have in the last generation.</p>
<p>President Hillary Clinton is almost certain to take along Huma Abedin. The two women were virtually inseparable and politicians like to keep their close confidants and aides by their side. Huma Abedin served as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Hillary Clinton during her Secretary of State days. Jake Sullivan, the last man to hold it before the Kerry era, moved on to become the State Department’s director of policy planning and then became the national security advisor to Joe Biden.</p>
<p>Moving Huma Abedin over into a job like the director of policy planning would allow her to reshape the State Department’s foreign policy worldview. And from there it would not be impossible to move her up to National Security Advisor or even Secretary of State.</p>
<p>Both of those positions might be a little too high profile for Abedin who works best in the shade. A 2007 Observer profile of her struggled to dig up any information on her official role, and whether with Clinton or Weiner, she has stuck to the background part.</p>
<p>The controversy that flared up over her background shows why she avoids the spotlight. With close family members, including her parents, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-dark-muslim-brotherhood-world-of-huma-abedin-2/">involved in the Muslim Brotherhood</a> and her own work at their <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1615">Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs</a>, which was set up by the Saudis and Muslim Brotherhood to build a fifth column of Islamization within the United States; Huma Abedin has every reason to be the woman behind the man or the woman behind the woman.</p>
<p>The Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Muslim Brotherhood player who has been accused of funding Al Qaeda front groups, is not an ideal mention on any resume. And yet few Republicans have been willing to challenge Huma Abedin when she was serving as the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Secretary of State. Would they be willing to challenge an emboldened Secretary of State Huma Abedin?</p>
<p>Obama has set a precedent that background checks are passé. So who’s going to do one on Huma Abedin?</p>
<p>By 2014, Huma Abedin may be married to the mayor of the biggest city in the country. By 2018, she may be the National Security Advisor.</p>
<p>It would be a rapid ascension, but the process of moving agents of influence up the ladder has shredded the normal seasoning process that would usually required for the top spots. The Center for American Progress’ Denis McDonough went from being an aide to an advisor to the Deputy National Security Advisor to the Chief of Staff in a handful of years. It would not be too hard to imagine Abedin making the same rush up the ladder while the media gushes at her ambition and her posh designer handbags.</p>
<p>In an age of terror and appeasement, Huma Abedin’s Muslim background is her best credential. The close collaboration between the Obama and Clinton foreign policy infrastructure and the Muslim Brotherhood makes her own Muslim Brotherhood background another plus.</p>
<p>What seems like treason to most ordinary Americans is ideologically convenient to a political and diplomatic clique that believes empowering “moderate” Islamists is our best defense against Al Qaeda. Placing Huma Abedin in a position where she can shape American foreign policy would be their show of sincerity to the Brotherhood.</p>
<p>None of this is inevitable. Another Twitter scandal could sink Weiner’s comeback and a more likable Democrat could pull together enough support and media adoration to challenge Hillary Clinton. And the work of researchers and investigators could still sink Huma Abedin the way it sank Susan Rice.</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>What a Romney Presidency Would Look Like</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/what-a-romney-presidency-would-look-like/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-a-romney-presidency-would-look-like</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2012 04:50:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Presidency]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[win]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=164180</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How he would clean up the mess. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/what-a-romney-presidency-would-look-like/rom/" rel="attachment wp-att-164183"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-164183" title="rom" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/rom.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="241" /></a>If Mitt Romney is elected 45th president, he will be spending a lot of time cleaning up the mess that President Obama leaves behind.</p>
<p><em>If</em> Wednesday morning, or next week, or next month, or whenever the election is resolved, America wakes up to President-elect Romney, the soon-to-be Chief Executive will start plotting the course of his fledgling administration.</p>
<p>The most important thing Romney can do from the moment his election is (hypothetically) declared is to project confidence and show America and the rest of the world that the country is back from the abyss after four bleak years of autocratic rule by a corrupt Marxist caudillo the likes of which the U.S. had never before seen.</p>
<p>Romney needs to act quickly to assure nervous markets that he is going to reverse Obama’s reckless spending policies, balance the federal budget, strengthen the greenback, and bolster America’s shrinking military might. He needs to let the nation’s Islamofascist enemies know he means business.</p>
<p>Unlike Obama, Romney likes Israel and wants it to survive and thrive.</p>
<p>A President Romney would act quickly to chuck the wreckage of Obama’s foreign policy overboard. Romney will not be afraid to project American power overseas and he certainly will not bow to foreign leaders, a disgraceful Obama habit. Romney will make it clear that he truly believes in American exceptionalism, unlike his predecessor &#8212; whose childhood mentor was a Communist Party USA operative.</p>
<p>He will get tough on the Palestinians and my guess is he will reduce foreign aid to them. He will send a message one way or another to the mullahs in Iran that they should drop their plans to develop nuclear weapons. He will want to aid the rebels in Syria, probably a bad idea for the U.S. because it will clear the way for the transformation of Syria into a fundamentalist Islamic state. Perhaps he can be shown the light before he acts on this matter.</p>
<p>Romney has promised to get tough on China, the Communist nation from which we import so many goods. It’s unclear what this actually means. Duties? Sanctions? We’ll see.</p>
<p>Romney is likely to do some saber-rattling in front of the Chinese which they will ignore because, well, that’s what they do. A Romney administration will be much less passive toward China than the Obama administration was.</p>
<p>Romney probably will follow through on his oft-repeated promise to reduce federal spending, cut regulatory red tape, and begin to reform Medicare and Social Security, those ever-popular albatrosses that keep weighing down the nation.</p>
<p>Before he takes office, though, the outgoing Congress will meet in a lame duck session to deal with leftover “fiscal cliff” issues, including whether the Bush-era taxes rates should be extended and if the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts approved by the congressional “super committee” on fiscal affairs will be avoided. The cuts fall heavily on the Pentagon and Romney has vowed to protect military spending. The deadline imposed by the super committee is Nov. 23.</p>
<p>While a President-elect Romney would have no official role during the lame duck session, his views might be taken into account by lawmakers, or some of them anyway. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has already loudly dismissed the idea of working with Romney.</p>
<p>Romney’s vow to dump Ben Bernanke, the bungling Keynesian who runs the Federal Reserve, is a wonderful idea. The problem is Bernanke’s term of office doesn’t run out until January 2014. Romney needs action on the economy now and Bernanke doesn’t have to do his bidding.</p>
<p>Romney can apply pressure to Bernanke in the meantime to gradually tighten the money supply and raise interest rates, both of which would be good for the economy after an extended period of virtually “free” money in a nearly zero-interest environment. Whether that pressure would move Bernanke is anyone’s guess. Romney can also work with the new Congress to restrain, or better yet, cut federal spending. The government may have to run out of money and shut down a few times, but chances are it will happen.</p>
<p>Romney will have to prepare a proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year in his first two weeks in office. Federal bureaucrats are already working on it right now but Romney will have an opportunity to make some modifications to it. Whatever shape the budget takes, it will get twisted and turned over and spindled as it works its way through the congressional appropriations process. If Romney doesn’t propose enough cuts, perhaps a newly Tea Party-energized Congress will force him to confront the issue.</p>
<p>Romney is likely to try to follow through on his promise to repeal Obamacare, though he can’t erase the hated government health care legislation from the statute books on his own. Whether it will be 100 percent repealed in the end is unclear. Many Republicans have spoken favorably of the Obamacare provisions banning “discrimination” based on preexisting medical conditions and allowing children to stay on their parents’ health insurance to age 26. Romney has said there are parts of Obamacare he likes.</p>
<p>Romney vows to sign an executive order that paves the way for the federal government to issue Obamacare waivers to all 50 states. He favors allowing states to create their own health care reforms plans to suit their residents.</p>
<p>“The federal government’s role will be to help markets work by creating a level playing field for competition,” according to Romney’s campaign website. It’s unclear what that means. Forcing states to remove barriers to the interstate sale of health insurance would help bring down premiums quickly.</p>
<p>A complicating factor here is that Romney is pals with former Utah Gov. Michael O. Leavitt, an intelligent, kind-hearted, honest, thoroughly decent, competent man who also happens to have some pro-big government tendencies.  I first met the moderate Leavitt years ago when he locked horns with then-Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore as a member of the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce.  Gilmore, the chairman of the commission, opposed making it easier for states to collect sales tax for Internet-based transactions while Leavitt worked to clear the way for such tax collections.</p>
<p>After leaving the governorship, Leavitt served as President George W. Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator from 2003 to 2005 and as Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2005 to 2009. Leavitt now serves as a co-leader of the Nutrition and Physical Activity Initiative at the <a href="https://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1188312765.pdf">Bipartisan Policy Center</a>, a think tank that is somewhere between the political left and the mushy middle.</p>
<p>Leavitt is also making money off the state insurance exchanges mandated by Obamacare. His consulting firm, Leavitt Partners, works with states to create the exchanges that are supposed to begin operating by 2014. If Leavitt somehow prevails on Romney to preserve the exchanges, the new president will get an earful from conservatives.</p>
<p>Romney will have to deal with the aftermath of any midnight pardons President Obama may sign as he turns out the lights in the Oval Office.</p>
<p>Attorney General <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2357">Eric Holder</a>, who could, conceivably, be forced out of office before Inauguration Day, may advise the outgoing president on executive clemencies. Holder vetted the Clinton administration’s 176 last-minute pardons in January 2001. He was  deeply involved in Clinton’s extremely controversial pardons of Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists.</p>
<p>In June, Holder was held in criminal contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives in a 255-67 vote for refusing to turn over documents tied to the bungled Fast and Furious gun-running operation. This was the first time a U.S. attorney general had ever been held in criminal contempt by the House.</p>
<p>Legal proceedings against Holder, the worst and most corrupt U.S. attorney general in recent decades, could be initiated after he leaves office. President Romney might not be supportive of such efforts out of fear of appearing vindictive. But he ought to support them because Holder should be brought to justice.</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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