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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Vietnam</title>
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		<title>Back in Saigon: The Senate Intelligence Committee Report</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/back-in-saigon-the-senate-intelligence-committee-report-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=back-in-saigon-the-senate-intelligence-committee-report-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/back-in-saigon-the-senate-intelligence-committee-report-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CIA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[report]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Torture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247269</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left revives an old tradition of besmirching the CIA in a time of crisis abroad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/o-CIA-SYRIAN-REBELS-facebook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247270" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/o-CIA-SYRIAN-REBELS-facebook-450x322.jpg" alt="A man crosses the Central Intelligence A" width="362" height="259" /></a>The Senate’s misleadingly dubbed “torture report,” an executive summary of which was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a shameless and dangerous act of political grandstanding and moral preening. The investigative report of the CIA’s long-suspended interrogation program reflects nothing more than just how firmly the progressive mind is stuck in the old Vietnam War paradigm, their master narrative of American crime and left-wing righteousness. Once more, we see how reactionary is the ideology of the left, their minds unable to accommodate historical change, new ideas, or even coherent thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #313131;"><span style="color: #000000;">Jose Rodriguez, a 31-year veteran of the CIA who ran the interrogation program, has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-once-urged-the-agency-to-do-anything-to-fight-al-qaeda/2014/12/05/ac418da2-7bda-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">detailed</span></a> the hypocrisy and untruths of the report. He reminds us that in the aftermath of 9/11, lawmakers demanded that the intelligence agencies do everything possible to stop another attack. Indeed, Feinstein in May 2002 told the <i>New York Times </i>that “</span><span style="color: #272727;">we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.” In her comments on the Report’s release, however, Feinstein referred to the Geneva Convention and said, </span>“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, (including what I just read) whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Twelve years later, the political advantages of moral preening have trumped the recognition that hard choices have to be made sometimes to fulfill the federal government’s highest duty, which is to keep the citizens safe.</p>
<p>Rodriguez also explodes the report’s canard that the enhanced interrogation techniques were not legally sanctioned. They were in fact reviewed in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and in 2009 were investigated by Eric Holder’s DOJ, which did not file charges. Rodriguez also debunks the claim that the CIA withheld information concerning their use from government officials. Rodriguez should know, since he was there when the CIA briefed Senator Feinstein and House Representative Nancy Pelosi on the techniques. And he exposes the lie that EITs did not yield vital information, an assessment also contradicted by ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden, who said of the charge that it “is so untrue” that it “actually defies human comprehension. We detained about 100 people, we had a Home Depot-like warehouse of information from those people.” Former CIA chiefs James Woolsey, Porter Goss, George Tenet, and, with shrewd equivocation, Leon Panetta, along with ex-Attorney General Mike Mukasey and current CIA chief John Brennan, have confirmed that EITs did provide valuable intelligence.</p>
<p>Yet the central fallacy of the report is that the EITs  “amount[ed] to torture,” as Feinstein announced on the report’s release. But government policy follows the law as written and established by Congress, not what “amounts” to the law in someone’s subjective estimation. Such sophistic language compromises the report’s description of EITs. The techniques cited––threats, sleep deprivation, “physical assault,” stripping detainees naked, putting them in “stress positions”––are all obviously frightening and painful. But they are not “torture” under U.S. law. Nor is waterboarding, Exhibit A in the left’s indictment of U.S. heinous behavior. That’s why Feinstein slyly says that EITs “amount” to torture rather than explicitly calling them torture, and why she cites international conventions on torture rather than the U.S. law.</p>
<p>Just consult the <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002340----000-.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">statute</span></a> covering torture in the U.S. Code, which defines it as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control,” and further clarifies “severe mental pain or suffering” as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.” The key words are “intended” and “severe.” As Marc Thiessen concluded in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Courting-Disaster-America-Barack-Inviting/dp/1596986034/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1418248906&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=marc+thiessen"><span style="color: #0433ff;">analysis</span></a> of the EITs and their legality, “The fact is, <i>none</i> of the techniques used by the CIA meet the standard of torture in U.S. law. This is for two reasons: because the CIA interrogators did not <i>specifically intend</i> to inflict severe pain and suffering; second, because they did not <i>in fact</i> inflict severe pain and suffering.” And in 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder agreed, when he testified before Congress that waterboarding U.S. military personnel as part of their training was not torture: “It’s not torture in the legal sense because you’re not doing it with the intention of harming these people physically or mentally.”</p>
<p>This simple legal reality is why Feinstein in her statement depends on imprecise adjectives like “visceral,” “ugly,” “brutal,” and “harsh”––to create a cloud of emotion that hides the fact that EITs were not illegal and were not torture. Furthermore, if Feinstein and other critics think this point is a sophistic evasion and that these techniques <i>are</i> torture, then they should call on Congress to change the law rather than rewriting history to suggest that the CIA did something illegal.</p>
<p style="color: #313131;"><span style="color: #000000;">But fact and reality are not as important as politics and the leftist melodrama of America’s historical crimes. Thus Feinstein said her report reveals behavior that is “</span>a stain on our values and on our history,” and Senator John McCain said they are violations of our “ideals.” So just how is attempting to keep America safe by interrogating terrorists according to the law, with doctors and psychologists present to monitor the terrorist’s well being, a “stain”? In the real world beyond our borders, genuine torture is used daily without the sort of legal limits or oversight imposed on our interrogators. And most of the time, the torture is not used to gain life-saving information, but to punish political enemies, terrorize political opponents, or just indulge sadistic cruelty. That is a real “stain.”</p>
<p style="color: #313131;">As for our “ideals,” such a low bar for indictment as waterboarding––which killed no one, and which several journalists volunteered to undergo––means, <span style="color: #000000;">as Max Boot has suggested, </span>that the Allied strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, which killed 650,000 to a million civilians with high explosives, nuclear bombs, and incendiaries, was an even grosser and more heinous “stain” on our “ideals” than sleep deprivation and scary threats. Where was the investigation of strategic bombing after World War II, or the pontifications on the Senate floor of how we Americans were “better” than such practices? Are we now just morally superior to those Americans who accepted the “awful arithmetic” and defeated 2 racist, brutal, totalitarian regimes? Or how about Obama’s droning to death over 3600 terrorists, including nearly 500 civilians, actions not subject to the legal review the EITs were? Dead terrorists are bad sources of intelligence of the sort gleaned by using EITs. Will we see a future investigation that condemns these drone executions as a “stain on our values and history” and “ideals”? It seems that “values” and “history” are defined by which party is in control of the government and stands to benefit politically by pointing out how they’ve been defiled.</p>
<p><span style="color: #313131;">But apart from politics, this report and its rollout </span>are just another act in the progressive melodrama of America’s sin and guilt for crimes committed when morally superior liberals aren’t running the show. And exhibit number 1 for progressives of a certain age is the Vietnam War. That’s why the conflict in Iraq was shoehorned into the Vietnam paradigm as soon as ambitious Democrats like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry, who had all voted for the war, began noticing the traction Howard Dean was gaining from opposing the war.</p>
<p>Thus the 1964 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Gulf of Tonkin</span></a> resolution authorizing the escalation of the war in Vietnam found its parallel in Bush’s alleged “lies” and “false intelligence” about Hussein’s WMDs (“Bush lied, millions died!”). The charge that Vietnam was benefitting the “military-industrial complex” and its lust for profits and resources was duplicated in allegations that the Halliburton Corporation and Dick Cheney were really after Iraq’s oil (“No blood for oil!”). Anti-war critics like I.F. Stone and the Berrigan brothers were reincarnated as the buffoonish Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. The anti-war movement of the Vietnam era reappeared as International ANSWER, Code Pink, and various other outfits protesting the war in Iraq. Clichés like “escalation” and “quagmire” resurfaced in media commentary, and atrocities like My Lai were searched for in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.</p>
<p>And don’t forget the investigative assault on the CIA by Senator Frank Church’s committee following the 1975 North Vietnamese victory in Vietnam, a report that weakened the CIA and compromised its effectiveness in ways that helped pave the way for the 9/11 attacks. Now it finds a new iteration in the Senate Intelligence Committee report and the dishonest media coverage besmirching the CIA. The immediate result has been to endanger our agents and intelligence assets abroad.  It still waits to be seen how much damage will ensue to the morale and future practice of the brave men and women who try to keep us safe.</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>Jesse Ventura Swoons Over Fidel Castro and Che Guevara</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/jesse-ventura-swoons-over-fidel-castro-and-che-guevara/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jesse-ventura-swoons-over-fidel-castro-and-che-guevara</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/jesse-ventura-swoons-over-fidel-castro-and-che-guevara/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:00:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Castro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Che Guevara]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jesse Ventura]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237728</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What has Fidel ever done that's "inhumane"?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140729-jesse-ventura-1427_45df380f4821c3fbf603ff8619fbe4a4.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237729" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140729-jesse-ventura-1427_45df380f4821c3fbf603ff8619fbe4a4-450x300.jpg" alt="140729-jesse-ventura-1427_45df380f4821c3fbf603ff8619fbe4a4" width="261" height="174" /></a>Maybe it’s just a coincidence that somebody like Jesse Ventura is also a major fan of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara? (Or <i>claims</i> to be for the publicity value among the “hip”?)</p>
<p>Recalling his visit to Cuba and meeting with Fidel Castro in 2002 Ventura grew misty-eyed: “Fidel Castro looked into my eyes and told me I was a man of great courage…Maybe he (Castro) saw a little of him in me.”</p>
<p>Recall the Cowardly Lion’s reaction when the Wizard grants him <i>“the NERVE</i>.” Well, Jesse Ventura’s moronic gloating outdoes even the lion’s <i>(“Shucks, folks, I’m speechless..ha-ha…Ain’t it the truth! Ain’t it the truth!”</i>)</p>
<p>And this imbecile and buffoon (or is it master fraud and expert showman?) was elected governor of a populous and prosperous state, and honored by Harvard University with the title of  “Visiting Fellow,” to say nothing of his career as media host  and author.</p>
<p>“And I’ll tell you another thing that shows me a little bit more about Castro” also revealed Ventura in an interview. “The main downtown building in Havana has this huge flat wall and it has got a huge portrait on it. It’s not Castro. It’s Che Guevara. The biggest photograph in downtown Havana was a mural on a wall of Che. Now if Castro was such an egomaniac and all this, wouldn’t he put himself up there instead of Che?”</p>
<p>For a man with Ventura’s (mostly self-) vaunted “street smarts,” Fidel Castro’s blandishments of (the conveniently dead) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1595230270/ref=s9_asin_image_1-1966_p/103-5425239-0953451?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_s=center-1&amp;pf_rd_r=1QKFYRWWEX7QKY38DXMK&amp;pf_rd_t=101&amp;pf_rd_p=278240701&amp;pf_rd_i=507846"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Che Guevara</span></a> should be a cinch to plumb. Didn’t Don Barzini send the biggest and fanciest flowers to Don Corleone’s funeral?</p>
<p>The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported how on his Cuba visit Ventura spoke at the University of Havana where he “exhorted students to dream big and work hard to achieve success!” Here one blinks, looks again—and gapes. You long to believe otherwise, you grope for an extenuation, you hope you misread—but it’s inescapable: A man elected as governor of a populous and prosperous U.S. State (and a “Harvard Visiting Fellow”) cannot distinguish between the subjects of a Stalinist police state and the attendees of an AmWay convention.</p>
<p>Ask anyone familiar with Communism. To achieve “success” in such as Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom, you join the Communist Party, you pucker up and stoop down behind Fidel and his toadies and smooch away. (Either that or jump on a raft.)</p>
<p>So come to think of it, Jesse Ventura indeed had much to teach those Havana U. students. On his Cuba visit he performed brilliantly.</p>
<p>Years later when, during an interview, The Daily Caller’s Jaime Weinstein suggested to Ventura that Castro runs a very inhumane dictatorship, a “shocked” (or expertly performing?) Ventura gasped:  “They have the highest health care of any Latin American country! … What has he (Fidel Castro) done that’s inhumane?”</p>
<p>For the benefit of the esteemed academics who granted Ventura’s “Visiting Fellowship” at  Harvard<i> </i>University&#8217;s  John F. Kennedy School of Government  here’s a few fully- documented  items that might address their esteemed “Visiting Fellow’s” question:</p>
<p>Fidel Castro’s regime jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror, murdered more Cubans in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered Germans during its first six and came closest of anyone in history to starting a worldwide Nuclear war. In the above process Fidel Castro and Che Guevara converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe and a huge influx of immigrants into one that repels Haitians and boasts the highest <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;">suicide rate in the Western Hemisphere.</span></a></p>
<p>&#8220;What has Cuba ever done to us?!” the again “shocked” (or masterfully miming?) “Harvard Visiting Fellow” gasped recently on his show On the Grid. “We&#8217;ve been practicing terrorism against them!”</p>
<p>“War against the United States is my true destiny,” Fidel Castro had confided in a letter to a friend in 1958. “When this war’s over I’ll start that much bigger war.”</p>
<p>“Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely <i>why</i> I urged Khrushchev <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Longest-Romance-Mainstream-Media-Castro/dp/1594036675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376276049&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+longest+romance+humberto+fontova"><span style="color: #0433ff;">to launch them!”</span></a></p>
<p>But for the purposes of this discussion let’s overlook the above trivialities, as they’re obviously regarded by Harvard’s esteemed academics. Instead let’s focus on the fact that Jesse Ventura claims some sort of “fellowship” with American servicemen, especially Viet-Nam veterans. (Granted, this fellowship is–to put it mildly—not fully reciprocated.)</p>
<p>So again, for the benefit of the esteemed academics who granted Ventura’s “Visiting Fellowship” at Harvard<i> </i>University&#8217;s John F. Kennedy School of Government, we’ll  mention a few items to highlight their “Visiting Fellow’s” ignorance (or expert burlesque?) To wit:</p>
<p>In 1967 Fidel Castro sent several of his regime&#8217;s most promising sadists to North Vietnamese prison camps to instruct the Vietnamese reds in finer points of their profession. Testimony during Congressional hearings titled, &#8220;The Cuban Torture Program; Torture of American Prisoners by Cuban Agents&#8221; held on November 1999 provide some of the harrowing details.</p>
<p>The communists titled their torture program &#8220;the Cuba Project,&#8221; and it took place during 67-68 primarily at the Cu Loc POW camp (also known as &#8220;The Zoo&#8221;) on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. In brief, this &#8220;Cuba Project&#8221; was a Joseph Mengelese experiment run by Castroite Cubans to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human can endure before cracking.</p>
<p>The North Vietnamese—please note!&#8211;never, <i>ever</i> asked the Castroites for advice on combat. They knew better. Unlike director Steven Soderbergh, they saw through the whole &#8220;Che as Guerrilla&#8221; hoopla for what it was and is: a Castroite hoax to camouflage the Inspector Clousseau-like bumblings of an incurable military idiot&#8211;and more specifically, Castro&#8217;s own hand in the idiot&#8217;s offing.</p>
<p>No, the North Vietnamese sought Castroite tutelage only on torture of the defenseless, well aware of the Castroites expertise in this matter.</p>
<p>For their experiment the Castroites chose twenty American POWs. One died: Lieutenant Colonel Earl Cobeil, an Air Force F-105 pilot. His death came slowly, in agonizing stages, under torture. Upon learning his Castroite Cuban affiliation, the American POWs nicknamed Cobeil&#8217;s Cuban torturer, &#8220;Fidel.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;The difference between the Vietnamese and &#8220;Fidel&#8217; was that once the Vietnamese got what they wanted they let up, at least for a while,” testified fellow POW Captain Ray Vohden USN. “Not so with the Cubans. Earl Cobeil had resisted &#8216;Fidel&#8217; to the maximum. I heard the thud of the belt falling on Cobeil&#8217;s body again and again, as Fidel screamed &#8220;you son of a beech! I will show you! Kneel down!&#8211;KNEEL DOWN!” The Cubans unmercifully beat a mentally defenseless, sick American naval pilot to death.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Earl Cobeil was a complete physical disaster when we saw him,&#8221; testified another fellow POW, Col. Jack Bomar. &#8220;He had been tortured for days and days and days. His hands were almost severed from the manacles. He had bamboo in his shins. All kinds of welts up and down all over; his face was bloody. Then &#8216;Fidel&#8217; began to beat him with a fan belt.”</p>
<p>According to the book <i>Honor Bound</i> the tortures of U.S. POWs by Castro’s agents were <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/fidel.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in Hanoi.”</span></a></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>You Bet This Is Swiftboating</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/you-bet-this-is-swiftboating/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=you-bet-this-is-swiftboating</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/you-bet-this-is-swiftboating/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:01:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deserter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Swiftboat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234382</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Washington's disturbing response to real servicemen telling the truth about a dishonorable comrade. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/bergdahl-videoSixteenByNine600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234383" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/bergdahl-videoSixteenByNine600.jpg" alt="bergdahl-videoSixteenByNine600" width="248" height="190" /></a>While the Obama administration tortures the Benghazi raid suspect into a false confession that a YouTube video made him attack our embassy, let&#8217;s review what his &#8220;capture&#8221; is meant to distract us from:</p>
<p>(1) The IRS&#8217; Lois Lerner claims her computer crashed, destroying all her emails to the White House, congressional Democrats and the Department of Justice, at the very height of the IRS&#8217; targeting of tea party groups. Six other IRS officials now claim their emails are also missing. (Have they tried shutting down their computers and restarting?)</p>
<p>Rosemary Woods erased part of a White House tape nearly half a century ago, and Chris Matthews is still talking about it.</p>
<p>(2) Soon after he became president, Obama pulled every last troop out of Iraq, despite the fact that the war was over and we had won. Now Iraq is on fire, torn apart by terrorist invaders. We still have more than 100,000 troops in defeated Axis powers Germany, Italy and Japan. But Obama couldn&#8217;t leave a few troops in Iraq simply to preserve our victory. Now it&#8217;s gone.</p>
<p>(3) In the worse deal in history, Obama traded five hardened terrorists &#8212; specifically chosen by the Taliban &#8212; for an American who is a probable deserter.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t whine about not &#8220;knowing&#8221; if Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter. It&#8217;s not a big secret. The Pentagon investigated Bergdahl&#8217;s disappearance back in 2010 and concluded that he had walked away from his unit of his own free will. This guy did everything but fill out one of those &#8220;change of address&#8221; postcards redirecting his mail to the local Taliban post office.</p>
<p>The left has reacted to the embarrassing truth about Bergdahl by:</p>
<p>(a) Denouncing Republican congressmen who initially posted happy tweets about Bergdahl&#8217;s release, and then deleted those tweets &#8212; probably on orders from Fox News!</p>
<p>(b) Accusing Bergdahl&#8217;s displeased Army comrades of &#8220;swiftboating.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yes, exactly. This is precisely what &#8220;swiftboating&#8221; is: The truth about a serviceman from the people who actually served with him. Similarly, the attacks on John Kerry came from the men he served with, not the Republican Party.</p>
<p>To the contrary, John McCain, who never served with Kerry, called the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth &#8220;dishonest and dishonorable.&#8221; (You nominated him!) President Bush requested that they take their ads off TV.</p>
<p>The only prominent Republican to defend the Swifties was former Sen. Bob Dole &#8212; a genuine World War II hero &#8212; who told CNN:</p>
<p>&#8220;One day (Kerry&#8217;s) saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he&#8217;s standing there, &#8216;I want to be president because I&#8217;m a Vietnam veteran.&#8217; Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn&#8217;t the only one in Vietnam.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is precisely because the truth about Bergdahl didn&#8217;t come out until after he had been released that Republican members of Congress initially sent out those &#8220;Welcome back!&#8221; tweets. They didn&#8217;t know the truth about Bergdahl, and neither did most people, until his fellow soldiers spoke up. Even people in his own hometown ended up canceling a Bergdahl homecoming celebration in response to the accusations of his platoon.</p>
<p>Bergdahl&#8217;s comeuppance didn&#8217;t come from some right-wing Wizard of Oz in the fevered brains of MSNBC hosts: It came from members of Bergdahl&#8217;s own unit in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>The reason these soldiers hadn&#8217;t said anything until Bergdahl&#8217;s release was that, as a condition of leaving Afghanistan, they were required to sign gag orders prohibiting them from discussing Bergdahl. (It&#8217;s strange; liberals usually don&#8217;t like gag orders, but they don&#8217;t seem to mind this one.)</p>
<p>After Bergdahl&#8217;s release &#8212; heralded by a ceremony in the Rose Garden that included a shout-out to the Taliban &#8212; the soldiers decided those agreements were moot.</p>
<p>It apparently never occurred to Obama that the troops Bergdahl abandoned would not be popping champagne corks at the news of his release. (Nor did it occur to Rolling Stone. The 2012 article about Bergdahl spoke of the &#8220;hope&#8221; of Bowe&#8217;s old unit that &#8220;a deal could get done&#8221; with the Taliban for his safe return. Remember the good old days when you could get reliable military intel from a left-wing music magazine written by half-brights?)</p>
<p>Democrats should just stop talking about the military. Whenever they do, they sound like Republican men talking about rape.</p>
<p>Democrat adventures with the military have included that ridiculous photo of little Mike Dukakis in the tank. There was Bill Clinton&#8217;s letter explaining that he needed a nuanced way to dodge the draft during Vietnam in order to &#8220;maintain my political viability.&#8221; We had John Kerry, who thought it would be a great idea to remind Americans that he was the guy who came back and crapped on his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. John Kerry, reporting for duty.</p>
<p>And now we have Obama, who gazes upon deserter Bowe Bergdahl and thinks his return will be a feel-good American story.</p>
<p>So maybe the guy deserted. Hasn&#8217;t Obama pushed girls, gays and transgenders on the military? Why the pushback this time?</p>
<p>The Democrats&#8217; only concept of how to support the troops is to treat them like their other constituent groups &#8212; single women, blacks and the poor &#8212; and offer them more government benefits.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m fairly certain what the troops would really prefer is to be left alone by liberals.</p>
<p>How about no free college tuition &#8212; and not forcing the military to accept open homosexuality? How about fewer increases in military pensions &#8212; and no Defense Department-funded transgender operation for gay traitor Bradley Manning? How about skimping on PTSD therapists &#8212; and no girl generals?</p>
<p>The military doesn&#8217;t ask for a lot. Soldiers just want to do their job, which is to kill people and break things, not to be nurturing to women, gays and traitors.</p>
<p>The troops don&#8217;t complain much, but when they do, there is nothing more devastating than a real &#8220;swift boating.&#8221;</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>Lessons on the New Left from the Hanoi Hilton</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 05:45:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ho chi minh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jane Fonda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tom hayden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Torture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219906</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A POW's memories of communist torture camp collaborators Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fondapic1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219907" alt="fondapic1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/fondapic1-450x321.jpg" width="315" height="225" /></a>C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb recently interviewed Lee Ellis, author of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leading-Honor-Leadership-Lessons-Hilton/dp/098387932X">Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton</a>.</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> The book is a valuable primer on history that many Americans have forgotten or know only in part. </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leading with Honor</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> is also an introduction to characters all Americans should get to know better, such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Ellis came to know the pair under different circumstances.</span></p>
<p>In November of 1967 Ellis was shot down on a mission to destroy the guns that protected the Quang Khe ferry that supplied the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the Hoa Lao prison, which POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, Ellis learned firsthand about North Vietnam and its systematic torture of American POWs. As the author notes, the North Vietnamese tortured more than 95 percent of American POWs including eight tortured to death. Ellis describes the “Pretzel,” one of the regime’s favorite tortures:</p>
<blockquote><p>After the prisoner’s legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint. Then the torturer would push the bound arms up and over the head, while applying pressure with a knee to the victim’s back. During the torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs to go sleep but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear. When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the &#8220;dead&#8221; limbs, causing excruciating pain.</p></blockquote>
<p>POW Mike McGrath provides a sketch of the practice. The North Vietnamese also used handcuffs that could be ratcheted down tighter until they cut off circulation, even cut into the muscle and on some men, “deep enough to expose bone.” But the torture wasn’t all physical.</p>
<p>The captors piped in propaganda and, Ellis explains, “the afternoon broadcasts were especially disheartening because they featured Americans spouting words that could have been written for them in Moscow and Hanoi.” American <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1334">Tom Hayden</a> “was a regular speaker,” later joined by his wife “film star Jane Fonda.” For this pair, the American POWs were war criminals and their reports of torture were lies.</p>
<p>Ellis charitably calls Fonda an “anti-war activist,” but she and Hayden were not against war in general. They only opposed American participation in a war against the North Vietnamese regime they served as propagandists. Hayden was their voice in the cells of the Hanoi Hilton and Fonda partied it up with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft squad. But unlike “Axis Sally,” Mildred Gillars, who served jail time for broadcasting Nazi propaganda, “Hanoi Jane” suffered not at all. Her money and prestige helped Hayden gain public office in California.</p>
<p>The war in Vietnam continued after the United States pulled out in 1973 and in 1975 South Vietnam fell to the Communists.  Hayden and Fonda celebrated the victory and remained uncritical of a Stalinist regime more repressive than its Soviet sponsors. Fonda even sought to slam the door on the “boat people” who fled the regime. Hayden called their defenders, such as Joan Baez, tools of the CIA.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, one of Tom Hayden’s comrades, John Froines, was recently the subject of a <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/2013/11/24/5938492/dan-morain-from-an-obscure-panel.html">glowing profile in the <i>Sacramento Bee</i></a> describing him as a “social justice and civil rights advocate” but a stickler for facts and completely impartial.</p>
<p>Froines was a minor Zelig-like figure in the New Left but achieved a measure of fame for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was acquitted on rioting charges and, armed with a PhD in chemistry from Yale, went on to work for the federal government. He later landed in California, where his Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants used suspect data to impose an onerous regulatory regime that punishes California workers</p>
<p>Froines’ panel championed a study by Hien Tran of the California Air Resources Board, who claimed to have a PhD from UC Davis. Actually, Tran bought his degree from a diploma mill in a New York UPS office. Froines also fought epidemiologist James Enstrom of the UCLA School of Public Health, who exposed Tran’s fakery and pointed out problems in his study.</p>
<p>Even so, Froines was duly reappointed to the panel by Assembly Speaker John Perez who claimed to have earned a degree from UC Berkeley, a claim backed by state officials and federal Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. But that too was wrong. Perez, a “Chicano Studies” major, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Assembly-Speaker-John-Perez-a-Cal-dropout-not-2371239.php">did not earn a degree at UC Berkeley</a>. In politically correct California, a virtual one-party state, the falsehood hurt him not at all.</p>
<p>The California Environmental Protection Agency honored John Froines in a private ceremony and the Italian city of Capri gave him the prestigious Ramazzini Award as a “public health hero.” New Left hero Tom Hayden went on to teach at UCLA and Occidental College. And Jane Fonda of course remains a Big Star.</p>
<p>To find out how Tom and Jane came across from the cells of the Hanoi Hilton, and to learn what kind of regime they defended, readers might consult <i>Leading with Honor</i> by Lee Ellis. Yes, there’s a lesson or two in there somewhere.</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 Forest of Assassins</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/the-forest-of-assassins/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-forest-of-assassins</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/the-forest-of-assassins/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 05:08:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assassins]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[forest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214481</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A novel of the SEALs and the Vietnam War.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Forest-Assassins-David-Forsmark-ebook/dp/B00HDC7TK2/ref=sr_1_1"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-214483" alt="book_thumb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/book_thumb.jpg" width="203" height="300" /><i>The Forest of Assassins</i></a> is an action-packed novel by <a href="http://www.davidforsmark.com/">David Forsmark</a> and Timothy Imholt, based on the still-classified true story of SEAL operations and the beginning of the Vietnam war. In addition to being a <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/davidforsmark/">FrontPage</a> <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/david-forsmark/">contributor</a>, Forsmark is the owner and president of Winning Strategies, a full service political consulting firm in Michigan. Formerly a longtime book, movie and concert reviewer for the <i>Flint Journal</i> and the popular culture critic for <i>Credo</i>, his work has also appeared in <i>National Review Online</i>, <i>St. Austin Review</i> and elsewhere. Imholt is a PhD in nuclear physics from MIT who works in the defense industry. Before that, he was an Army sniper. He is a candidate for Congress, running against Niki Tsongas in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>I asked David for some background on, and insight into, the story and the reality behind it.</p>
<p><b>Mark Tapson</b>: How did the idea for this novel come about? And why a novel rather than a nonfiction work? How much of the book is fiction?</p>
<p><b>David Forsmark</b>: Back when I was doing lots of writing for a local paper, I got a call from a retired Navy veteran who had an idea for a <i>Sand Pebble-</i>style epic story. He had been stationed on a destroyer in the harbor in Shanghai when it fell to the Communists, and had gotten a taste of the great duty the American military had in the International Zone during the heyday of gunboat diplomacy.</p>
<p>We became good friends while working on that, and I realized he had a better true story to tell, but he could not write a memoir. He had been one of the first Navy SEALs. When he was sent to Vietnam it was still an experimental unit, and they were making up doctrine on the fly. Officially, the operations his unit conducted – the “snatch and grab” of Viet Cong tax collectors and cadres who were terrorizing the villagers, and especially the raids along the coast on Russian-built installations – were conducted by the South Vietnamese. Which is laughable as they had no such capabilities at the time.  So, much of the story is still technically classified and he had a Commander’s pension to protect and a sick wife to care for. Also, a liberal administration could always decide to give him up to the Vietnamese communists as there is no statute of limitations on at least one of the true parts of the story.</p>
<p>More than half the story is true.  And the stuff you think is most likely to be made up, probably isn&#8217;t.</p>
<p><b>MT</b>: There’s quite a bit of detail in the novel that lends a real authenticity and immediacy to the characters and their Vietnam backdrop. It feels like it was drawn from personal experience, but you’re obviously too young. How did you go about researching that detail and creating that authenticity?</p>
<p><b>DF</b>: When I go back and read this now, I realize that no amount of research could have gotten me this level of detail. But in this case, it was easy. I just had to listen. My friend was an amazing guy. The first time I met him, he was in his 60s, but climbing out of the small lake he lived on having done a lap! When his wife took ill, he quit smoking in one day, after having been a smoker since age 12. He used to say that SEAL training was as much about stubbornness and mental toughness as physical skill. I think he was being somewhat modest about his skill set, but I could see that in him.</p>
<p>He was a born storyteller, even though he never really got to tell his stories. Both he and his wife hinted to me that for a time in the late 60s he was “officially” out of the Navy, though his service jacket fills in those blanks. I never got to hear that story, even though he related this classified one to me. I can only imagine.</p>
<p><b>MT</b>: In the book, you tell quite a different story of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which led to the escalation of American troops in Vietnam. Some of the conspiracy types on the left have a sort of a “truther” movement that this was trumped up and our ships were never fired on by the Communists. You say this isn’t true, but you also challenge the official story. Tell us about that.</p>
<p><b>DF:</b> Sure, and this is key to why I think the book is important. The American position is still that, like the <i>Maine </i>or the <i>Lusitania</i>, the North’s (really lame) attack on the <i>Maddox </i>and <i>Turner Joy</i> was completely unprovoked, that the ships were in international waters on patrol and minding their own business. And as far as our ships were concerned, that was true. But the Communists were convinced that our destroyers were providing support for the SEALs in their missions north. But our ships had no idea what was going on. It’s still a secret, though not a well-kept one.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m no Edgar Snowden here. All of our enemies knew what was going on, and it’s fairly widely known in the special forces community. Elliot Abrams even made a reference to it in his book about his persecution by special prosecutors in the Iran-Contra affair. However, our official position diplomatically is still that the North started hostilities. Well of course they did. The South didn’t have a guerrilla army of terrorists trying to turn villages in the North. They didn&#8217;t have an army on the border, poised to invade should the situation allow. But we still maintain that they were the aggressors in the Tonkin Gulf. Well, that’s debatable, but I don’t think Obama should go over there and apologize or anything.</p>
<p>I think this is the first time that the details of what was going on that night along the coast have been put into print.</p>
<p><b>MT</b>: Do you believe our escalation of the war was a good idea? Should we have remained purely in counter-insurgency mode?</p>
<p><b>DF</b>: In hindsight, we probably should have, or leaned very heavily on that strategy. If you look at the counter-insurgency effort in Vietnam it was incredibly successful. By 1973 when we began our withdrawal, the Viet Cong were finished. They were decimated to the point of nonexistence. (I&#8217;m pretty sure that’s the story my friend never got to tell me.)</p>
<p>There are a few reasons why it’s very understandable that we did not stay small, however, besides the cliché that generals always fight the last war. The North did have a regular army and did indeed make appearances on the battlefield. After the experience of the massive Communist invasion in Korea, it was not unreasonable to suppose the same thing could happen in Vietnam.</p>
<p>Second, our Special Forces were still in their infancy. The Army had been at it for some time, though they were basically formed to set up their own guerrilla armies behind enemy lines should the Soviets invade Europe. But turning that mission around was not a big stretch. The SEALs were (and still are) a far more aggressive strike force. But there had been about two SEAL classes graduated when this story takes place.</p>
<p>I don’t think it could have been completely small-unit, but the war was not suited to Big Army, which still doesn&#8217;t do great in such conflicts. Vietnam was more like Afghanistan and less like Iraq in that way. In hindsight, probably Marines should have been the biggest force on the ground with a massive expansion in Special Forces, supported by the air. Kind of like what Bing West says in <i>The Wrong War</i> that we should have done in Afghanistan.</p>
<p><b>MT</b>: David, the book is a real page-turner and has revelations about a controversial topic. Why did you go the self-publishing route instead of pursuing a major publisher?</p>
<p><b>DF</b>: Well, thank you. They say this is the wave of the future in publishing. My friend Robert Ferrigno, whose great “Assassins” trilogy, about life in America after a future civil war and nuclear terrorist incident leads to Sharia law, were bestsellers, still went with on-demand online publishing with his next thriller, <i>The Girl Who Cried Wolf</i>.</p>
<p>However, I did go the old-fashioned route of looking for a publisher for a while. I actually went through several rewrites with an editor at a major publisher who was well known for launching the careers of a few huge novelists who write military fiction. As you know, editors don&#8217;t take that kind of time with authors they don&#8217;t intend to publish. Suddenly though, interest was just withdrawn. I don&#8217;t want to say anything I don’t know to be true, but I was very suspicious about the 180 degree turnaround, as this publisher did have close ties to the military. But I can&#8217;t say anything for sure.</p>
<p>So it’s my job to get the word out with people like you and see how it goes. It’s pure free enterprise.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Kerry Gives $16 Million to Vietnam to Fight Global Warming</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/kerry-gives-16-million-to-vietnam-to-fight-global-warming/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kerry-gives-16-million-to-vietnam-to-fight-global-warming</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/kerry-gives-16-million-to-vietnam-to-fight-global-warming/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 15 Dec 2013 23:25:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213253</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Now let's cut military pensions so we can keep giving money to Vietnam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/1971_john_kerry_ap710422022.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-213254" alt="Kerry" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/1971_john_kerry_ap710422022-450x298.jpg" width="450" height="298" /></a></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a step up. At least Kerry is no longer helping Vietnam fight America. And unlike Jane Fonda, <a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/12/kerry-awards-vietnam-with-16-million-to-fight-global-warming/">Hanoi John is giving actual money</a>. Sure it&#8217;s not his money, but it&#8217;s the V.C. thought that counts.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Decades ago on these very waters, I was one of many who witnessed the difficult period in our shared history,” Kerry told a group of young professionals gathered near a dock at the riverfront village of Kien Vang.</p>
<p>“Today on these waters I am bearing witness to how far our two nations have come together and we are talking about the future and that’s the way it ought to be,” he said.</p>
<p>That future, especially for the water-dependent economy of the millions who live in the Mekong Delta, is in jeopardy, he said.</p>
<p>Kerry pledged $17 million to a program that will help the region’s rice producers, shrimp and crab farmers and fisherman adapt to potential changes caused by higher sea levels that bring salt water into the delicate ecosystem.</p></blockquote>
<p>Good work John. Now let&#8217;s cut military pensions and health care so we can afford to keep on funding the war against Global Warming in &#8216;Nam.</p>
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		<title>Colonel George &#8216;Bud&#8217; Day, R.I.P.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/peter-collier/colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/peter-collier/colonel-george-bud-day-r-i-p/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jul 2013 04:59:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Collier]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bud Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colonel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[POW]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Farewell to an American warrior and patriot -- for whom uncommon valor was a common virtue.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bud-Day.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-198638" alt="Bud-Day" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Bud-Day-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a>America is a poorer place today, a place whose reservoir of valor and determination has been depleted, because George “Bud” Day passed away over the weekend at the age of 88.  He was a synecdoche for heroism, a military man’s military man.  At Medal of Honor get-togethers, his fellow recipients, all of whom had accomplished legendary feats of bravery of their own, would pay special attention when Bud Day appeared.</p>
<p>Bud was at war on behalf of America most of his life and never called a truce even as age and infirmity slowed him down.  He was a 17-year-old high school junior in Sioux City, Iowa when he dropped out to join the Marines in 1942.  He spent nearly three years in the Pacific as a member of a 130 mm gun battery, then came home to get his diploma, attend college and get a law degree.  He passed the bar in 1949, but felt that the weak, piping time of peace would be a brief interlude.  He joined the Iowa Air National Guard and after pilot training was called to active duty during the Korean War as a fighter jock.  After two tours, he decided to become a “lifer” in the Air Force.</p>
<p>In the spring of 1967, Day, by then  just a year away from retirement,  decided to volunteer for a tour in Vietnam.  In June, he became commander of an all-volunteer fighter wing operating out of the Phu Cat Air Base.  He and his men were flying F-100 Super Sabres as part of a top secret program to act as Forward Air Controllers for U.S. fighter bombers operating over North Vietnam, selecting targets and calling in air strikes on them.</p>
<p>On August 26, Day, who now had 65 missions, was directing a flight of F-105s striking an enemy surface-to-air missile site near the DMZ in North Vietnam.   His plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, destroying its hydraulics and sending it into a death spiral.  As he ejected, he smashed into the fuselage, breaking his arm in three places and injuring his back.  North Vietnamese militiamen below watched his parachute bloom and were waiting for him when he landed.  They marched him to a camouflaged underground shelter and began a violent interrogation. When Day refused to answer their questions, his captors staged a mock execution, then hung him from a rafter by his feet.  After several hours, the North Vietnamese, believing him to be so badly hurt that he wouldn’t try to escape, let Day down and tied him up with a loosely knotted rope.</p>
<p>Four days later, as a pair of distracted teenaged soldiers stood guard, Day managed to untie himself and escape.  He headed south at the beginning of one of the most remarkable episodes of resistance and survival of the Vietnam war.</p>
<p>On his second night on the run, Day, feverish from his wounds, was dozing in thick undergrowth when a renegade bomb or rocket landed nearby.  The concussion left him bleeding from his ears and sinuses and lanced one leg with  shrapnel.  Day collected himself and continued to hobble south, eating berries and frogs he trapped while successfully evading the enemy patrols on his trail.</p>
<p>Sometime between the twelfth and fifteenth day after his escape &#8212; by then Day had lost track of time &#8212; he heard helicopters and stumbled toward the sound.  It was U.S. choppers evacuating a Marine unit and he limped toward the landing zone.  But the helicopters left before he got close enough to get their attention.  The next morning, still heading south, the delirious Day was spotted by an enemy patrol.  He tried to hide in the jungle, but was shot in the hand and leg.  He was recaptured within a mile or so of the U.S. Marine firebase at Con Thien.</p>
<p>Taken back to the camp from which he had escaped, he was subjected to starvation, staged execution and torture; his right arm was rebroken.  He was held in an archipelago of camps as he was moved north, finally reaching the “Hanoi Hilton.”</p>
<p>When he arrived at the prison, his untreated wounds were infected, and he was suffering from malnutrition and unable to perform even the most rudimentary task for himself.  The fingers on both hands had curled into fists; he regained some motion by peeling them back, flattening them against the wall of his cell and leaning into them with all his weight. His cellmate was John McCain, who himself had recently been nursed through his own physical nightmare. McCain, who would routinely refer to Day as “the bravest man I ever knew,” put together a homemade split to help heal Day’s damaged arm.</p>
<p>Over the next five years, Day earned his reputation as one of the Hanoi Hilton’s hard men by offering maximum resistance 24 hours a day for all the days of his imprisonment.  Subjected to unremitting torture, he gave his captors only false information.  He provided leadership to the other POWs by his example and by his words, helping create the patriotic elan that would see them through their captivity and immunize them against anti-American despair when they came home.  On one well-remembered occasion in 1971, when rifle wielding guards burst into the cell where some of the prisoners were holding a forbidden religious service, Day moved closer to stare into the muzzles of the guns and began to sing The Star Spangled Banner.  The other men, including James Stockdale, ranking U.S. officer in the prison, joined him.  They always credited him with sharpening their own will to resist and to survive.</p>
<p>Bud Day was released on March 14, 1973.  Three years later President Gerald Ford presented him with the Medal of Honor.  By then he was one of America’s most highly decorated servicemen.</p>
<p>His service to his country and its military men never stopped.  Working as an attorney after his retirement from the Air Force, he filed a class action suit against the U.S. in 1996 on behalf of retired servicemen who were stripped of medical benefits at age 65 and instructed to apply for Medicare.  It was a fight he ultimately won.</p>
<p>In 2004 Bud Day returned more explicitly to the battle when he joined others in Swift Vets and POWs for Truth in attacking John Kerry’s slander of the military in his unrelenting campaign for public office after Vietnam and for his dishonesty in characterizing the war.  And in the years that followed, Day continued to warn about Islamic extremism and against the efforts to disarm the U.S. in the fight against the jihad whose sole objective, he said, was to “make America kneel.”</p>
<p>A warrior and a patriot, Bud Day has now joined John Stockdale, his comrade in defiance at the Hanoi Hilton, and Alvin York, Jimmy Doolittle, Audie Murphy, and all the others, fallen now, who also wore the Medal of Honor and for whom, as Admiral Chester Nimitz said, uncommon valor was a common virtue.</p>
<p><strong>Among Peter Collier’s works <i>is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Medal-Honor-Portraits-Valor-beyond/dp/1579652409">Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty </a></i>(Workman Publishers) where he writes about Bud Day and other Medal recipients.</strong></p>
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		<title>Vietnamese-Americans Protest Obama&#8217;s Meeting with Communist Dictator</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/vietnamese-americans-protest-obamas-meeting-with-communist-dictator/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=vietnamese-americans-protest-obamas-meeting-with-communist-dictator</link>
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		<pubDate>Sat, 27 Jul 2013 00:04:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198373</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“I am here in solidarity with democracy activists who are imprisoned right now in Vietnam,” said protester Hoang Tu Duy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/original.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-198374" alt="original" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/original-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>At <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-ho-chi-mihn-was-inspired-by-the-united-states-constitution/">his chummy meeting with </a>Vietnamese Communist leader Truong Tan Sang, Obama said, &#8220;we agreed that one of the great sources of strength between our two countries is the Vietnamese American population that is here but obviously has continued strong ties to Vietnam.&#8221;</p>
<p>That&#8217;s like saying that the Cuban-American community is a great source of strength between America and Castro&#8217;s Cuba.</p>
<p>While Obama delivered this howler with a straight face, outside Vietnamese-Americans, many of whom had come as refugees to the United States, <a href="http://www.voanews.com/content/protests-greet-vietnamese-president-at-white-house/1710313.html">protested the shameful betrayal</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>“I am here in solidarity with democracy activists who are imprisoned right now in Vietnam,” said protester Hoang Tu Duy. “Six years ago, I was here, at the protest against then-Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet. We in the Vietnamese community here in the States, and elsewhere, we do not accept the Vietnamese Communist regime, and anywhere there is a Vietnamese communist leader, we will be present to protest.”</p>
<p>“Human rights [are] a human basic need,” said Pham van Dam of Boston. “We Vietnamese are human beings, and demand that human rights be respected. [Our Vietnam today, especially] the communist leaders in Vietnam do not respect freedom and democratic rights of the people, that is why we are here to protest by joining the gathering today, to voice our concerns. We are standing in front of the White House right now, with about a thousand of our compatriots from everywhere. We come here not to have fun, but to voice our unity. We are all looking in the same direction.”</p>
<p>In addition to the petition, there were letters from the families of prisoners of conscience inside Vietnam &#8212; including bloggers, lawyers and Catholic activists &#8212; urging an end to human rights violations there.</p></blockquote>
<p>What do they think Vietnam is, Burma? If Muslims aren&#8217;t claiming to be the victims, then Barack Hussein Obama flat out doesn&#8217;t care.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/34C85359-3D30-4AAF-8D38-FC898B90B05E_mw1024_n_s.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-198378" alt="34C85359-3D30-4AAF-8D38-FC898B90B05E_mw1024_n_s" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/34C85359-3D30-4AAF-8D38-FC898B90B05E_mw1024_n_s-450x320.jpg" width="450" height="320" /></a></p>
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		<title>The Human-Hating Roots of the Green Movement</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-human-hating-roots-of-the-green-movement/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-human-hating-roots-of-the-green-movement</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:35:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[earth day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Environmentalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaylord Nelson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Green]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vladimir Lenin]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Behind the environmentalist facade lies a totalitarian agenda that is already being enacted. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Denis-Hayes.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-186860" alt="Denis Hayes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Denis-Hayes.jpg" width="215" height="185" /></a>Monday was the 43rd celebration of Earth Day, an event hailed as an effort to promote responsible stewardship of the environment. Fittingly, it is also the <a href="http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/54649">birthdate</a> of Communist Party creator Vladimir Lenin, a reality that the radical environmentalists responsible for the creation of Earth Day dismiss as a mere coincidence. Yet there is little question that under the guise of &#8220;saving the planet,&#8221; the earth-firster crowd would be more than willing to impose the same kind of totalitarian control over the masses envisioned by Lenin.</p>
<p>Like communism, the radical environmentalism that forms the heart of Earth Day celebrations is all about collectivism. In a 2007 <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/economic-development-bulletin/environmentalism-other-challenges-current-era">column</a> for the Cato Institute, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus called environmentalism one of the main dangers to freedom in the 21st century. &#8220;Environmentalism only pretends to deal with environmental protection,&#8221; writes Klaus. &#8220;Behind their people- and nature-friendly terminology, the adherents of environmentalism make ambitious attempts to radically reorganize and change the world, human society, our behavior, and our values.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Earth Day concept was <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2011/04/22/earth-day-denigrates-capitalismand-humans/">developed</a> by then-Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), Congress’s foremost environmentalist. Nelson also helped to develop college &#8220;sit-ins,&#8221; where professors surreptitiously abandoned their curriculums to lecture students on the evils of imperialist America and the virtues of communism, a misunderstood system of governance that merely need better implementation to succeed.</p>
<p>Nelson’s efforts were facilitated by Denis Hayes. Hayes was a student at Stanford University, where he was elected student body president and became a high-profile anti-Vietnam War activist who once helped lead a student siege of a campus weapons-research laboratory.</p>
<p>Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich was the third man behind the Earth Day cult. Ehrlich&#8217;s claim to fame was <i>The Population Bomb,</i> a book that predicted societal disintegration, and <a href="http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_population_bomb_has_it_been_defused/2042/">hundreds of millions of deaths</a> from famine&#8211;by the 1980s&#8211;due to the &#8220;cancer&#8221; of human population growth. In 1969 Nelson and Ehrlich decided that a nation enthralled by the ethos of Woodstock was ready for a nationwide teach-in on environmentalism. Hayes was brought in to coordinate and implement the operation. The trio decided that the first Earth Day would be held on April 22, 1970&#8211;the centennial celebration of Lenin&#8217;s birthday.</p>
<p>The philosophical alignment between Lenin, who issued a decree known as “On Land,&#8221; declaring all natural resources the exclusive property of the state, and environmentalists, who believe that private enterprise and private property are impediments to saving the planet, are unmistakeable. To a large extent, those radical impulses have been realized in the United States. The federal government <a href="http://reason.org/news/show/western-land-federal-devolution">owns</a> nearly 30 percent of all the land in the country, including five states where it <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/23/us/western-land-owned-by-the-federal-government.html?_r=1&amp;">owns</a> more than half. Much of it <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/8/endangered-species-acts-hidden-costs/">remains</a> federalized via the Endangered Species Act, which allows government to cordon off property from development if an endangered species is living on it. Furthermore, until the Supreme Court <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2012/03/21/supreme-court-rules-epa-orders-are-subject-to-judicial-review/">stopped</a> the EPA last year, that agency was using the Clean Water Act to mandate what private property owners could or could not do with their own property, while preventing those owners from seeking recourse in the courts. “In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable,” said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the court’s decision.</p>
<p>The EPA was <a href="http://www.epa.gov/earthday/history.htm">created</a> by Congress eight months after the first Earth Day celebration.</p>
<p>Another major player promoting Earth Day is the Earth Day Network (EDN), founded in 1994 by the organizers of the first Earth Day celebration. The most insidious <a href="http://www.earthday.org/about-earth-day-network">plank</a> of EDN&#8217;s &#8220;core programs&#8221; is its &#8220;Greening Schools and Promoting Environmental Education&#8221; agenda. EDN provides educators with a variety of games, interactive quizzes and other aids, that enable them to teach kids from kindergarten through twelfth grade how to be the best &#8220;green&#8221; citizens they can be. Much of EDN’s emphasis is centered on making kids feel guilty about the size of their &#8220;ecological footprint&#8221; in comparison to children from other nations. &#8220;If everyone lived like you,&#8221; EDN tells children, &#8220;we would need [X-number of] planets&#8221; to sustain the lives of all the earth&#8217;s people.&#8221; EDN’s message is subtle but clear: capitalism is unjust and, as a result, America is using more than its &#8220;fair share&#8221; of the world&#8217;s resources.</p>
<p>Hayes, who sits on EDN&#8217;s Board of Directors, makes this plain. “Under communism prices were not allowed to reflect economic reality,&#8221; Hayes contends. &#8220;Under capitalism, prices don’t reflect ecological reality. In the long run, the capitalist flaw&#8211;if uncorrected&#8211;may prove to be the more catastrophic. …&#8221; Moreover, Hayes makes no bones about the fact that he <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/reference/profiles/prohayes.asp">considers</a> human population growth to be the &#8220;most worrisome&#8221; environmental problem. &#8220;If everyone currently in the world aspires to consume at the same level as, say, the average Swede does, the human population <i>already</i> exceeds the planet&#8217;s carrying capacity,&#8221; writes Hayes.</p>
<p>Ira Einhorn who hosted the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970, made his own personal <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42711922/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/earth-day-co-founder-killed-composted-girlfriend/#.UXWKcIIjH1y">contribution</a> to population reduction. Seven years after the event, police raided his apartment and found the remains of his girlfriend, after one of his neighbors complained about a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid leaking into the ceiling directly below Einhorn&#8217;s closet. After 23 years on the run, he was extradited from France, convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence.</p>
<p>Another major player in the radical environmentalist movement is a Canadian named Maurice Strong. After starting his career in the oil business in the 1950s, Strong cultivated contacts in the Canadian government. By 1966, he became head of the Canadian International Development Agency. His success there impressed UN Secretary General U Thant, who asked him to organize the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, better known as the first &#8220;Earth Summit.&#8221; The <a href="http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=97&amp;ArticleID=1503">&#8220;Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment&#8221;</a> created there offered a number of socialist/Marxist ideas, including the transfer of wealth from developed countries to under-developed ones, the need for population control, and &#8220;extensive cooperation among nations and action by international organizations in the common interest,&#8221; aka world governance. It offered 26 principles to advance this agenda.</p>
<p>In 1992, another Earth Summit was held in Rio, out of which the &#8220;Rio Declaration on Environment and Development&#8221; emerged. Another <a href="http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21/rio-dec.htm">27 principles</a>, similar to the pie-in-the-sky, wealth transferring eco-socialist/Marxist agenda that emerged 20 years earlier, was added to the mix. That summit was also led by Strong.</p>
<p>One world government is the primary impetus behind a UN project known as Agenda 21&#8211;<a href="http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/48898">originated</a> by Maurice Strong. In 1993, the UN explained its mission. &#8220;Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of all people…Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.” 178 countries have currently adopted Agenda 21. Strong himself, who currently resides in the People&#8217;s Republic of China, expressed his personal view on what must happen for Agenda 21 to succeed. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn&#8217;t it our responsibility to bring that about?&#8221; he asked.</p>
<p>There is little question that such people will try. That is why the term &#8220;climate change,&#8221; which replaced &#8220;global warming&#8221; when a <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/09/climate-change-skeptics-seize-on-reports-showing-temperatures-leveling/">decade</a> of steady temperatures threatened the credibility of the environmentalists&#8217; &#8220;irrefutable data&#8221;&#8211;along with the movement itself&#8211;has itself been replaced by the newest catchword, &#8220;sustainability.&#8221; The United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development held in June 2012 issued a report that <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/rio-20/item/12008-the-real-agenda-behind-un-%E2%80%9Csustainability%E2%80%9D-unmasked">reiterated</a> the totalitarian ambitions of both Earth Summits and the Agenda 21 project. “Working Towards a Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy: A United Nations System-wide Perspective,” detailed the trillions of dollars that must be spent moving the entire world towards a &#8220;green&#8221; economy, where every aspect of human behavior would be regulated by a top-down, command-and-control bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Havel foresaw exactly such a development. &#8220;There is no doubt that it is our duty to rationally protect nature for future generations,&#8221; he writes. &#8220;The followers of the environmentalist ideology, however, keep presenting us with various catastrophic scenarios with the intention of persuading us to implement their ideas. That is not only unfair but also extremely dangerous.”</p>
<p>That is a far more elegant way of describing how those who celebrate Earth Day envision implementing their agenda. Less elegant, but far more familiar, is the phrase that both communists and radical environmentalists thoroughly embrace, as in, &#8220;by any means necessary.&#8221;</p>
<p>Earth Day was the impetus behind this mushrooming desire for global power, hidden by an environmental facade. Villainous mankind, whose expressions of waywardness have changed over the decades&#8211;from the polluter, to the deforester, to the animal species eliminator, and finally to climate fouler of the entire planet&#8211;must be brought to heel. Toward <i>that </i>end there has been a remarkable consistency. Earth Day remains a celebration of anti-capitalism, anti-humanism, population control and ill-disguised totalitarianism.</p>
<p>Two of Earth Day&#8217;s founders make these assertions clear. Denis Hayes: &#8220;America has a mechanism to deal with things that are not well-served by the market. It’s called government. Government is the way that we assert the fundamental values of the majority, constrained by the rights of the minority. Government is the realm in which we decide what is dispensable and what is&#8211;literally&#8211;priceless.” Paul Ehrlich: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people&#8230;We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer.  The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”</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>Hanoi Jane to Critics of Her Reagan Role: &#8216;Get a Life&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/hanoi-jane-to-critics-of-her-reagan-role-get-a-life/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hanoi-jane-to-critics-of-her-reagan-role-get-a-life</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2013 04:45:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hanoi Jane]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jane Fonda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nancy Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Fonda still in denial over her treason.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/hanoi-jane-to-critics-of-her-reagan-role-get-a-life/jane-fonda-nancy-reagan/" rel="attachment wp-att-185419"><img class=" wp-image-185419 alignleft" title="Jane-Fonda-Nancy-Reagan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Jane-Fonda-Nancy-Reagan-410x350.jpg" alt="" width="287" height="245" /></a>The Hollywood trade magazine <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em> (<em>THR</em>) <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jane-fonda-her-nancy-reagan-435064">reports</a> that conservative opposition is slowly building toward a possible boycott of the movie <em>The Butler</em>, still six months away from appearing in theaters. That’s because lifelong leftist activist <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1326">Jane Fonda</a> is slated to portray Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy in the flick. “I figured it would tweak the right,” shrugs Fonda. “Who cares?”</p>
<p>The drama is the true story of Eugene Allen, White House butler to every president from 1952 to 1986. Jane Fonda – famously photographed straddling a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun in North Vietnam forty years ago – as the wife of patriotic icon Reagan is a choice that hardly seems coincidental; more likely casting “Hanoi Jane” was a direct and purposeful insult to the conservative American audience, whom many Hollywood elites openly despise.</p>
<p><em>THR</em> reporter Paul Bond’s bias in the article itself is blatant – unsurprisingly, since movie biz trade magazines don’t bother to hide their leftist tilt (although <em>THR</em> is a model of neutrality compared to its online competition <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;frm=1&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;ved=0CDQQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thewrap.com%2F&amp;ei=A99lUYOLKebqigKsv4DwCw&amp;usg=AFQjCNH1iCSJDStZIDKNSLyFb9QzEa4iSQ&amp;sig2=01bjCvrYQgi4xrqfQOej5w&amp;bvm=bv.45107431,d.cGE"><em>The Wrap</em></a>). In his examples of “similar dustups” over political films, Bond writes that the right “howled” about the CBS miniseries <em>The Reagans</em>, while the left only “complained” about The History channel’s proposed 2011 miniseries <em>The Kennedys</em>. The left did more than complain about the project, produced by open conservative Joel Surnow; it got the network to abandon the miniseries, although it was later picked up by the Reelz Channel and won a raft of awards including Emmys.</p>
<p>Bond also says the left merely “complained” about supposed “inaccuracies” in the 2006 miniseries <em>The Path to 9/11</em>, which I have written about before and to which I myself contributed. If you want to know just how politely the left “complained” about <em>The Path to 9/11</em>, check out the documentary <a href="http://www.blockingthepath.com/"><em>Blocking The Path to 9/11</em></a>. ABC was initially proud of the project until Clinton-era alumni feared it would blacken his legacy, because it <em>accurately</em> depicted his flaccid response to the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism in the 90s. Then a vicious internet campaign got underway which resulted in death threats to the filmmakers, and a team of Democrat senators including Harry Reid threatened to pull ABC’s license if it aired the miniseries. ABC’s owner is a close friend of the Clintons to this day he refuses to release it on DVD.</p>
<p>As for Fonda, Bond also writes insultingly that the right “can’t get past photos of her cavorting with the enemy during the Vietnam War, no matter how many times she apologizes.” That’s because Fonda <em>has</em> never apologized to America or to the soldiers whose lives she endangered. “I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us,” she <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/21/jane-fonda-%e2%80%9ci-have-never-done-anything-to-hurt-my-country%e2%80%9d/">claimed</a> recently, still in denial.</p>
<p>As an example of how the right “can’t get past” it, Bond and Fonda singled out Navy veteran Larry Reyes, founder of the “<a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Boycott-Hanoi-Jane-Playing-Nancy-Reagan/393518640666420">Boycott Hanoi Jane Playing Nancy Reagan</a>” Facebook page. “The moviemakers are free to choose,” Reyes says “but it seems like it was their way of giving people like me the middle finger.” Exactly right, Mr. Reyes. Fonda’s classy reply to <em>THR</em> regarding Reyes’ Facebook page was, “Get a life. If he creates hoopla, it will cause more people to see the movie.”</p>
<p>Actually, as a Navy veteran, Larry Reyes not only <em>did</em> get a life, but he devoted a portion of it to honorable service to his country. Fonda, by stark contrast, has devoted a significant portion of <em>her</em> life to blame-America-first activism.</p>
<p>In the early ‘70s the privileged Fonda <a href="http://www.ussyorktown.com/yorktown/apology.htm">preached communism to college students</a> and called the Vietnam War “U.S. imperialism” and “white man’s racist aggression.” In the summer of ’72, while the war still raged, the actress traveled to North Vietnam and played the part of their puppet with Oscar-winning commitment. In addition to posing grinning for <a href="http://www.1stcavmedic.com/jane_fonda.htm">pictures</a> with our enemy, she volunteered to carry out <a href="http://www.1stcavmedic.com/jane_fonda.htm">radio propaganda</a> from Hanoi, telling American pilots that they were war criminals and urging the South Vietnamese soldiers to desert. And, arguably most reprehensibly, she met with tortured American POWs in another scripted propaganda performance, lectured them about carrying out genocide against the Vietnamese, and returned to tell the world that these guests of the Hanoi Hilton were being well-treated and they regretted their warmongering.</p>
<p>“When stories about the torture of POWs later surfaced,” <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=345">John Perazzo notes</a>,</p>
<blockquote><p>Fonda called them lies. When the POWs began coming home in 1973, Fonda derided them as “liars, hypocrites, and pawns,” dismissing any charge that they had been brutalized: “Tortured men do not march smartly off planes, salute the flag, and kiss their wives. They are liars. I also want to say that these men are not heroes.”</p></blockquote>
<p>She went on to support the radical <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6149">Code Pink</a> and calls its co-founder <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1628">Jodie Evans</a> a “<a href="http://biggovernment.com/taylorking/2009/11/17/jane-fonda-obama-funder-jodie-evans-met-with-taliban-code-pink-gives-terrorists-direct-line-to-obama/">dear friend</a>.” Evans and Code Pink today are <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/21/code-pink%25e2%2580%2599s-support-of-the-enemy/">serving even more aid and comfort</a>, literally, to our enemies the Taliban, Hamas, and Iran, than even Fonda did to North Vietnam in her day.</p>
<p>On the occasion of receiving a career award at last November’s L.A. Press Club gathering, Fonda <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/conservatives-attack-jane-fonda-sunday-393089">said</a> that she’ll “go to the grave” regretting “sitting on that gun in North Vietnam.” That’s not the same as an apology. What she means is that she regrets doing it because the controversy still hounds her to this day, as it should. She was and is a traitor who did incalculable propaganda damage to this country.</p>
<p>Fonda and Nancy Reagan never met, but according to a friend of Fonda, the former First Lady “was pleased that I was playing her. Which shows how smart she is,” says Fonda. “She’s smarter than all those extreme right-wingers who are angry that I’m playing a woman whose politics are different than mine. Come on, it’s a movie!”</p>
<p>“It’s just a movie” is the defense Hollywood uses when it wants to spread its leftist hate while dismissing its critics as oversensitive. It’s curious how that excuse doesn’t fly when the left works itself into a lather over a movie that dares even hint at support for conservativism, like last year’s <em>Zero Dark Thirty</em>, a movie which suggested that Bush-era waterboarding contributed to locating the elusive bin Laden. Despite having been directed by hardcore leftist Kathryn Bigelow, she and <em>ZD30</em> were publicly shunned by the groupthink Hollywood left.</p>
<p>Fonda claims that she actually had a portion of the script changed because it made Nancy Reagan look too mean – if true, this says less about Fonda’s respect for Nancy than the writer’s mean-spirited bias (<em>The Butler</em>’s<em> </em>writer Danny Strong was also responsible for HBO’s <em>Game Change</em> and its demeaning caricature of Sarah Palin). “I might not have always agreed with Nancy Reagan, but I admire her, and I&#8217;d never try to insert my views when playing her,” says Fonda. We’ll see come October when the film hits theaters.</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>A History Lesson for Oliver Stone on Vietnam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:40:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Schweikart]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oliver Stone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Lyndon Johnson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[untold history]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174314</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The neo-Communist filmmaker doesn't find communist objectives and atrocities worth mentioning. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/a-history-lesson-for-oliver-stone-on-vietnam/wp_yankeepapanew003/" rel="attachment wp-att-174355"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-174355" title="wp_yankeepapanew003" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/wp_yankeepapanew003-450x348.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="209" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the seventh installment of a series of articles Frontpage is running in response to Oliver Stone’s neo-Communist documentary series, “The Untold History of the United States.” Frontpage will be reviewing each episode of the Stone series, exposing the leftist hateful lies about America and setting the record straight. Below is a review of Part 7 of the series.</em></p>
<p>In Episode 7 of Showtime&#8217;s <em>Untold History of the United States</em>, “Johnson, Nixon &amp; Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune,” Oliver Stone continues his concocted fantasy of how American history allegedly was with the brave John F. Kennedy set to pull Americans out of Vietnam. Lest we forget last episode, in truth, it was Mr. Kennedy who began with a mere 600 advisors there, then ramped up the troop total to over 14,000—some estimates put it at 25,000. If this is the Left’s definition of “withdrawal,” it’s easy to see why Shawty Lo has 10 Baby Mamas. But I digress.</p>
<p>Lyndon Johnson, according to Stone, disregarded JFK’s “memo” about withdrawing troops and instead escalated. We shall return in a moment to the timeline of the program—which begins with a litany of American/CIA “plots” to destabilize Latin American governments—but it is critical that a clear understanding of what Johnson <em>did</em> vs. what the Joint Chiefs <em>said to him</em> occurs. In a meeting in 1965 with his JCS, Johnson bluntly asked if the U.S. could win the Vietnam war. The Chiefs responded with a qualified “yes”: <em>if</em> the U.S. put in 500,000 ground troops immediately, <em>if</em> the U.S. mined Haiphong harbor and sealed off Soviet and Chinese aid; and <em>if</em> there was round the clock bombing of the north, the U.S. would win.</p>
<p>Keep in mind these were the requirements in 1965, although as late as 1969 the U.S. never reached 500,000 troops (when at least a million troops would have been needed due to the escalation by the North), and there were dozens of “bombing pauses” and “peace offensives,” all useless to the cause of peace. While the military may have lied about enemy body counts and the course of the war later, in 1965 the brass was crystal clear that this was a <em>war</em>, and a major commitment if America wanted to win.</p>
<p>That brings us to Stone’s other contradiction: while Vietnam was not a “declared” war, without realizing it he makes clear that Congress easily would have declared war had it been requested—the vote was unanimous in the House and only two senators voted “no” on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.</p>
<p>Stone, however, opens the episode on Vietnam with a review of American intervention in Latin America &#8212; again, supposedly a departure from the JFK’s “reform” efforts, as he labels them. Presumably these Kennedy-esque “reforms” would include the assassination of Ngo Dien Diem (an ally) or the multiple Kennedy-initiated assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. One could argue that at least LBJ managed to target our enemies and was effective enough to remove them. Not once during this harangue about U.S. involvement in the southern hemisphere or the Caribbean are Cuban and Soviet efforts to impose totalitarian gulags on their victims taken seriously. Indeed, throughout the program, if there was a counter-demonstration against a so-called “democratic” Communist government, it was always at the instigation of the CIA and American agents. But if there was a “peace protest” at home, it was never because of KGB agents, who were proven to have been incredibly active throughout the U.S. peace movement. (See the <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/venona-soviet-espionage-and-the-american-response-1939-1957/venona.htm">Venona Project</a> for more information.)</p>
<p>Stone accurately notes (with glee, it seems) that there were atrocities committed by American and/or South Vietnamese troops, although he sloppily shows the “napalm girl,” who was badly burned due to a South Vietnamese attack, while narrating about U.S. atrocities. But this is where the entire series becomes a joke: context. Not once are North Vietnamese or Viet Cong atrocities even mentioned, let alone catalogued—the chopping off of villagers’ arms for supporting the Americans, the genocide of the Hmong, the beheading of village elders who opposed Communists, and so on.</p>
<p>Context aside, Stone perpetuates the same stupid myths in this supposedly “new” and “untold” history. He implies that Vietnam was disproportionately fought by blacks and flatly states that they died in disproportionate numbers. This is absolutely incorrect: blacks comprised 12% of American forces in Vietnam and 12.5% of casualties, which was almost exactly their share of the U.S. population at the time. Indeed, men with a college degree (most of them pilots and the heavy majority of them white) were disproportionately killed. There is the implication, though not specifically stated, that Vietnam was a “draftees’ war,” which again is simply wrong. Contrary to the Stone counterfactual history, two-thirds of Americans who fought in Vietnam were volunteers. When these statistics are connected, it means that in reality the type of person who had the highest likelihood of dying in Vietnam was a white college graduate. An even more astonishing fact is that more Canadians fought in U.S. armed forces in Vietnam than there were Americans who fled to Canada to avoid the draft &#8212; by a factor of three-to-one.</p>
<p>Stone revels in the mass anti-war demonstrations and insists that professors and journalists received CIA money to challenge anti-war views. Of course, to a leftist there can never be an honest disagreement with a leftist policy: it must always come because someone is paid to oppose the Left. Again, we have no mention of the infiltration of campuses by active Soviet sympathizers and devout Communists, which continues to the present.</p>
<p>Throughout, Stone is perfectly willing to believe anything the North Vietnamese say when they are ridiculing or contradicting American claims. But when Gen. Vo Bam later admitted that he was given the task in 1959 of beginning an invasion of the South, somehow the North Vietnamese were not to be believed. Indeed, the testimony by Communist officers is completely relevant and revealing. A 1995 interview with Co. Bui Tin, who served on Ho Chi Minh’s general staff, said, “Gen. [Vo Nguyen] Giap [commander of the North Vietnamese army] believed that guerrilla warfare was important but not sufficient for victory.” Tet, wherein Stone ignores entirely the role of the American media, we now know was a <em>desperation</em> move by the North. Again, Bui Tin:</p>
<blockquote><p>Our senior commander in the South, Gen. Nguyen Chi Thant, knew that we were losing base areas, control of the rural population and that his main forces were being pushed out to the border of South Vietnam . . . .  Tet was designed to influence American public opinion . . . . Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages.</p></blockquote>
<p>Yet when unnamed North Vietnamese leaders said that the United States would use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, well, that must be a statement of truth for Stone because it’s what he wanted to believe.</p>
<p>American “fear of weakness,” according to Stone, resulted in Vietnam. It couldn’t have anything to do with Communist expansion. In the peace settlement, the South “dithered” about allowing elections, but Stone never mentions that the North never had elections at all.</p>
<p>The post-Vietnam material is equally silly. Stone ignores John Dean’s role in overseeing, and possibly ordering, the Watergate burglaries. But surprisingly Stone spends little time on Watergate because of his obsession with foreign intrigue, this time Chile, where the U.S. was blamed for denying Salvador Allende aid. Yet the contradiction of why a socialist paradise would need outside aid in the first place—especially after stealing foreign assets—is never mentioned. Without doubt, many repressive dictatorial regimes in Latin America killed or “disappeared” (one of Stone’s favorite phrases) tens of thousands of people. Again, context: where is the condemnation of the <em>millions</em> killed in communist purges, or the slaughter of hundreds of thousands by African governments that had nothing whatsoever to do with the United States or the CIA? Stone is so paranoid of the CIA that it must have millions of covert agents to achieve what he credits it with accomplishing, yet at the time of the Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in 1979, we could hardly field any agents inside the revolutionary movements.</p>
<p>Continuing through the 1970s and into the 1980s to blame all of America’s woes on Vietnam (this is the “reversal of fortune”), Stone finally drifts into one of the most absurd complaints for a leftist ever: the deficit. He actually laments that Nixon took us off the gold standard (but of course it was Johnson’s Great Society spending, not Vietnam, that destroyed the budgets) and calls a deficit of $258 billion in 1968 “staggering.” FDR and LBJ were pikers in jacking up deficits compared to the current incompetent in the White House, who needs to ponder a trillion-dollar coin as a means to address our shortfalls.</p>
<p>Vietnam did leave a lasting scar, one that was not fully healed until American forces effortlessly kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The nation was divided, but this was in no small measure due to the fact that many passionately understood that America&#8217;s cause against Communism was righteous and necessary. Nixon’s narrow election in 1968, for instance, was only “narrow” because George Wallace, even more committed to defeating the North Vietnamese, siphoned off millions of votes from Nixon. Stone’s series is only “untold” because few have had the temerity to portray Soviet propaganda on cable TV as historical fact. If we are lucky, it will continue to be “untold.”</p>
<p><strong>Related articles on Stone’s series:</strong></p>
<p>1. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-left-wing-agitprop/">Bruce Thornton’s introduction</a> to this Frontpage series.</p>
<p>2. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/neo-communism-out-of-the-closet/">David Horowitz’s analysis</a> of the meaning behind the warm reception of Stone’s Kremlin propaganda.</p>
<p>3. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-untrue-history-stalin-the-great-hero-of-wwii/">Matthew Vadum’s review</a> of Stone’s first episode.</p>
<p>4. Daniel Flynn’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/through-oliver-stones-looking-glass/">Roosevelt, Truman and Wallace</a>,” the second episode.</p>
<p>5. Daniel Greenfield’s <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-atom-bomb-and-the-truth-bomb/">review of “The Bomb,”</a> the third episode.</p>
<p>6. Bruce Thornton’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/oliver-stones-cold-war-melodrama/">The Cold War: 1945-1950</a>,” the 4th episode.</p>
<p>7. Matthew Vadum’s review of “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/oliver-stones-distortion-of-the-eisenhower-era/">The 50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb &amp; The Third World</a>,” the 5th episode.</p>
<p>8. Larry Schweikart&#8217;s review of &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/the-cuban-missile-crisis-world-saved-by-the-soviets-says-oliver-stone/">The Cuban Missile Crisis,</a>&#8221; the 6th episode.</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>Why the Senate Shouldn’t Give John Kerry a Pass</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/why-the-senate-shouldnt-give-john-kerry-a-pass/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-the-senate-shouldnt-give-john-kerry-a-pass</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jan 2013 04:50:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Carter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secretary of state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state department]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Obama's Secretary of State nominee has been on the wrong side of every foreign policy debate since Vietnam. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/why-the-senate-shouldnt-give-john-kerry-a-pass/110201_john_kerry_speech_ap_328/" rel="attachment wp-att-173318"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-173318" title="110201_john_kerry_speech_ap_328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/110201_john_kerry_speech_ap_328.jpg" alt="" width="254" height="194" /></a>In nominating John Kerry for Secretary of State and Chuck Hagel for Defense, Barack Obama has highlighted both men’s combat service in Vietnam. In doing so Obama repeats the common fallacy that combat experience necessarily qualifies someone to make decisions about when, why, and how to conduct a war, decisions that in our political system are reserved for citizens and their representatives whether veterans or not. In fact, though, often those same experiences––whatever they teach about the horrors of combat, or reveal about the bravery and character of those who experience it––can distort someone’s judgment about the larger aims and purposes war serves, leading to dangerous policies.</p>
<p>A dramatic example of how combat experience can distort foreign affairs can be found in England’s disastrous foreign policy after World War I. The gruesome carnage of that conflict obsessed the British in the Twenties and Thirties. Numerous novels and “trench reminiscences” written by veterans, as historian Corelli Barnett writes, “had an immediate relevance to the present and the future. What began as an epitaph ended as a warning. As a warning, the war books seemed to say that war was so terrible and futile that the British ought to keep out of another one at any cost.” The result was the pacifism, reckless disarmament, and misplaced faith in diplomacy to forestall conflict that emboldened Germany and lead to World War II.</p>
<p>Vietnam has often played a similar role in American foreign policy over the last 40 years, as can be seen in Obama’s picks for defense and Secretary of State. Hagel’s more egregious and frequently discussed track record of blunders will no doubt raise more questions and invite more scrutiny during his confirmation hearings. But the Senate’s clubby bonhomie that often sacrifices principle for amity will probably make Kerry a shoo-in. A closer look at his foreign policy record, however, reveals that his Vietnam-shaped vision of American power will ensure he carries out Obama’s program to change America from a global leader to a “partner mindful of his own imperfections,” as candidate Obama wrote in <em>Foreign Affairs</em>, one more comfortable with “leading from behind.”</p>
<p>The politicized history of Vietnam, which many veterans legitimized with their personal wartime experiences, has frequently distorted U.S. foreign policy. The narrative that America had “lost” the war because it was an unjust, neo-colonial interference in a civil war in which we backed the corrupt side, and a mismanaged conflict marked with unprecedented brutality and atrocities against civilians, created a “never again” mentality redolent of many British politicians in the 1920s and 1930s. The “lessons” of Vietnam taught that given our unjust conduct of the war, we should avoid such adventurism by raising the bar so high for American intervention that in effect the U.S would never respond militarily except to a direct attack on the homeland. Instead, multilateral diplomacy, non-lethal sanctions, a focus on human rights, and trusting the U.N. and other multinational institutions became the only legitimate means for protecting our national security and pursuing our interests. As a result, during the 70s when Jimmy Carter endorsed this philosophy, the Soviet Union went on a geopolitical rampage that didn’t end until Ronald Reagan was elected and for a time restored our nerve.</p>
<p>That narrative, of course, was in the main a left-wing fable. The brutality of Vietnam was not exceptionally excessive, the Soviet Union and China were indeed aggressively attacking the West and its allies through proxies in order to extend communism’s reach, and in fact the war was not lost militarily, but thrown away politically. The true lesson of Vietnam is that a conflict won on the field of battle can still be un-won by feckless politicians.</p>
<p>Which brings us to John Kerry, who has pursued and endorsed policies that follow from that erroneous “lesson” of Vietnam. Kerry, of course, notoriously began his public career by slandering his fellow veterans in his April 1971 Senate <a href="https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html">testimony</a>. There he decried the “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He went on to catalogue these crimes in which U.S. soldiers “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”</p>
<p>Kerry then went on to recycle the false left-wing “lesson” of Vietnam: that “there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy.” Rather than a pushback against communist aggression in the defense of freedom, the conflict was “a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence.” He then placed Vietnam in the larger context of the leftist view of the Cold War currently being recycled in Oliver Stones’ Showtime series: the “United States is still reacting in very much the 1945 mood and postwar cold-war period when we reacted to the forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this paranoia about the Russians and how the world was going to be divided up between the super powers.” Thus in Vietnam “right now we are reacting with paranoia to this question of peace and the people taking over the world,” and the “so-called Communist monolith.”</p>
<p>Influenced by this narrative, Kerry’s subsequent foreign policy career in the Senate has been marked in the main by being on the wrong side of just about every issue. He voted against the authorization of force for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, arguing instead for sanctions as Hussein’s troops brutally plundered Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Despite his initial vote authorizing the 2003 war in Iraq, he later called the liberation of Iraqis from a psychopathic mass-murderer the result of “the most inept, reckless, arrogant and ideological foreign policy in modern history.” Like then Senator Obama, he opposed the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, calling it “a tragic mistake” that “won’t end the violence; it won’t provide security; . . . it won’t turn back the clock and avoid the civil war that is already underway; it won’t deter terrorists, who have a completely different agenda; it won’t rein in the militias,” predictions all falsified by the success of the surge. Later in 2007, he voted in favor of a Senate resolution to withdraw all U.S. troops within 90 days. Here too he agreed with Senator Obama, who also opposed the surge, which he called “a mistake” and a “reckless escalation.” In his <em>Foreign Affairs </em>article of the same year, he called the war in Iraq a “civil war” and Vietnam-like “morass.” As for Afghanistan, last June Kerry called that conflict “unsustainable” and prodded Obama to hasten our withdrawal, something the president just announced he intends to do. The result will be a repeat of the failure of Vietnam: hard-won military success will likely be squandered as Iraq falls under the influence of Iran, and Afghanistan once again provides a haven for the jihadist Taliban.</p>
<p>On other issues Kerry’s aversion to military force and preference for diplomatic outreach, symptoms of the “Vietnam syndrome,” have led to foreign policy blunders. He called Bashar al-Assad’s Syria “an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region” and made 6 visits to woo that thug regime even as it was hosting and arming terrorist outfits like Hezbollah, cozying up to Iran, and facilitating the transit of terrorists into Iraq, during one period over 90% of jihadists travelling to Iraq to kill our troops. He’s endorsed the received wisdom on Israel, obsessing over settlements as obstacles to a two-state solution, calling Israel’s defensive fence that has dramatically reduced terrorist attacks a “barrier to peace,” and telling Middle Eastern leaders that Israel should return the Golan Heights to Syria. During the 90s, when al Qaeda launched its series of attacks on U.S. interests that culminated on 9/11, Kerry was supporting massive cuts in the intelligence budgets and pledged to “almost eliminate CIA activity.” When he ran for president in 2004, he called terrorism a “nuisance” like prostitution, and just recently asserted that a dubious global warming is as dangerous as 9/11 or Iran getting nukes.</p>
<p>As Kerry’s record of flip-flopping statements shows, much of his behavior can be explained by political opportunism. But his foreign policy vision is one reflecting the so-called “lessons” of Vietnam forged by the left 40 years ago. It is a vision that doubts America’s rightness to be the dominant global power, that distrusts America’s military power, and that privileges multilateral diplomacy and unaccountable multinational coalitions over the will of the American people as expressed through their elected representatives. In short, as America’s chief diplomat Kerry will be a faithful servant of Barack Obama’s foreign policy of American retreat and decline.</p>
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		<title>Why Kerry Remains Unfit for Command</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/why-kerry-remains-unfit-for-command/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-kerry-remains-unfit-for-command</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Dec 2012 05:40:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Swift Boat Veterans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[testimony]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Winter Solider]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=170679</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look back at the ugly truths the Swift Boat Vets brought to light about the senator. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/why-kerry-remains-unfit-for-command/kerry-4/" rel="attachment wp-att-170689"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-170689" title="kerry" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/kerry1.jpg" alt="" width="224" height="170" /></a>It is now official. Last week, President Obama <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/john-kerry-nominated-president-obama-succeed-hillary-clinton/story?id=18036194">nominated</a> John Kerry to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, saying Kerry&#8217;s &#8220;entire life has prepared him for this role.&#8221; He further contended that Kerry&#8217;s service as a Vietnam veteran taught him the &#8220;responsibility to use American power wisely, especially our military power.&#8221; That assessment may come as a shock to the thousands of Vietnam veterans whose reputations Kerry trashed in order to advance his own radical political agenda.</p>
<p>Remarkably, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, unable to attend the nominating ceremony due to her continuing effort to dodge testimony regarding the Benghazi debacle, viewed that trashing as an asset. &#8220;John Kerry has been tested&#8211;in war, in government, and in diplomacy. Time and again, he has proven his mettle,&#8221; said a written statement released by Clinton. &#8220;I remember watching young Lieutenant Kerry&#8217;s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee many years ago and thinking that I had just seen a man of uncommon courage and conscience.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is a particularly callous and stinging statement from Clinton. Many Americans are aware of John Kerry&#8217;s infamous abuse of his fellow soldiers during the &#8220;Winter Soldier Investigations,&#8221; when he <a href="https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html">appeared</a> before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 as a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and made the following statement:</p>
<blockquote><p>They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.</p></blockquote>
<p>Kerry contended that these atrocities were committed &#8220;on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yet there were even more damnable parts of Kerry&#8217;s testimony that have remained largely under the radar. Like every good progressive, Kerry promoted the leftist worldview of a racist America, no better than the enemy we were fighting. &#8220;We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong,&#8221; he stated. Furthermore, Kerry embraced a defeatism proven colossally wrong years later by President Ronald Reagan, claiming, &#8220;We cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.&#8221;</p>
<p>Kerry&#8217;s toxic legacy makes him a perfect choice for the radical Obama administration, as <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/why-i-oppose-john-kerry/">explained</a> by Jerome Corsi, Harvard Ph.D. and co-author with John O&#8217;Neill of the book &#8220;Unfit For Command, Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry”:</p>
<blockquote><p>The young John Kerry who condemned the U.S. military in his infamous 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has much in common with the young Barack Obama who expressed admiration for Franz Fanon and Malcolm X when expressing in the pages of his autobiography his particular form of anti-colonial black rage against the United States of America.</p></blockquote>
<p>Co-author John O&#8217;Neill, the former leader of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that played an instrumental role in thwarting Kerry&#8217;s presidential bid in 2004, and driving progressives crazy in the process, was equally blunt. In an email published as part of a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324001104578161062571306322.html?mod=ITP_opinion_0">column</a> by former editorial board member Seth Lipsky (written before it was clear whether Kerry would be nominated for State or Defense), O&#8217;Neill contended that Kerry &#8220;is well qualified to be the Secretary of Defense&#8230;of Cuba or Venezuela. He [is] certainly an expert on surrender and can run up a white flag with the best of them.&#8221;</p>
<p>Lipsky himself wonders about the hypocrisy of President Obama, who paid lip service to the need to &#8220;correct the narrative of Vietnam,&#8221; noting that thousands of American GIs were held responsible for the &#8220;misdeeds of a few,&#8221; while at the same time nominating the Senator from Massachusetts. &#8220;It is hard to think of anyone who did more to besmirch the name of the GIs who fought in Vietnam than Sen. Kerry,&#8221; says Lipsky, who also reminds us that Kerry testified &#8220;after meeting in Paris with envoys of our communist foe and then echoing in the debate here their calls for an immediate withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam.&#8221;</p>
<p>Most Americans are unaware that Kerry not only besmirched veterans, but our nation&#8217;s methods of conducting war as well. Another <a href="http://old.nationalreview.com/document/kerry200404231047.asp">statement</a> he made during the hearings ought to be brought up during the nomination process, especially when one considers that President Obama has made extensive use of unmanned drones to kill terrorists. &#8220;We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact that this country has been unable to see there is absolutely no difference between ground troops and a helicopter crew, and yet people have accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration,&#8221; Kerry states at the Senate hearing. &#8220;No ground troops are in Laos, so it is all right to kill Laotians by remote control.&#8221; It would be interesting to know if Kerry is against killing terrorists by &#8220;remote control&#8221; per se, or if he is merely indignant that they are not given an equal opportunity to kill our troops in return, due to America&#8217;s technological advantage.</p>
<p>One may further wonder if Kerry knows who the real terrorists are. Despite voting to authorize the use of force in Iraq, based on several <a href="http://www.whosaiditiraq.blogspot.com/">statements</a> that Saddam Hussein was a &#8220;brutal and murderous dictator&#8221; who has &#8220;used weapons of mass destruction,&#8221; Kerry once again <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXaoavV1d4s">took</a> an opportunity to bash American&#8217;s fighting forces on CBS&#8217;s &#8220;Face the Nation&#8221; in 2006. &#8220;And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the&#8211;of&#8211;the historical customs, religious customs,&#8221; he told host Bob Schieffer.</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t Kerry&#8217;s only disparagement of soldiers fighting in Iraq. During his <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15499174/ns/politics/t/uproar-over-kerry-iraq-remarks/">speech</a> at Pasadena City College, Kerry thought he was being humorous. &#8220;You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” he said. His fallback excuse was that he was bashing President Bush, not the troops.</p>
<p>Much of Kerry&#8217;s record would have been suppressed were it not for the efforts of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who brought much of this information to the fore. Their efforts in exposing the Senator have been excoriated by the mainstream media, furious that the Swift Boaters were able to derail Kerry&#8217;s run for the presidency in 2004. It was the Swift Boat Vets who exposed his slandering of American GIs, and largely debunked much of his self-acclaimed heroism. They were so effective, that a 2010 <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/soldiers-with-brain-trauma-denied-purple-hearts-adding-insult-to-injury">investigation</a> by Pro Publica and National Public Radio revealed that soldiers who had sustained concussions in Iraq were denied Purple Hearts because some military doctors didn’t want &#8220;anymore John Kerrys.&#8221; It was the Swift Boaters who charged Kerry with accepting Purple Hearts that were not honestly earned. Part of those charges center around the reality that despite receiving three of them, he never <a href="http://www.redstate.com/2012/09/16/john-kerry-is-an-ignoramus-but-you-knew-that/">spent</a> any time in a hospital.</p>
<p>Yet it is Kerry himself who has sown the seeds for what ought to be his ultimate disqualification for Secretary of State. In an April 18, 1971 appearance on &#8220;Meet the Press,&#8221; Kerry <a href="http://www.aim.org/media-monitor/john-kerrys-war-crimes/">admitted</a> that he committed war crimes in Vietnam. “There are all kinds of atrocities and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed&#8230;All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down.” Kerry added that those who condoned or engaged in such activities were &#8220;war criminals.&#8221;</p>
<p>When confronted with that statement by the late Tim Russert in 2004, Kerry claimed the word &#8220;atrocities&#8221; was &#8220;inappropriate.&#8221; When Russert pressed him on his Winter Soldier testimony, asking if many of Kerry&#8217;s stories had been &#8220;discredited,&#8221; the Senator hedged. “Actually, a lot of them have been documented,” he said. Russert asked, “So you stand by that?” Kerry replied, “A lot of those stories have been documented.” Nonetheless, Kerry has also tried to excuse his past behavior as the work of an &#8220;angry young man.&#8221;</p>
<p>Angry young man or not, how many documented stories constitutes &#8220;a lot,&#8221; versus the percentage of outright lies &#8212; along with Kerry&#8217;s assertion that he was a pawn of a government of &#8220;war criminals&#8221; &#8212; ought to be an integral part of any confirmation hearing. So should the ludicrous claim he made in an <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/04/r_is_for_reckless?page=full">article</a> he wrote for Foreign Policy magazine last September. &#8220;I grew up in a Senate and foreign-policy world where we treated as gospel the notion that&#8211;as Sen. Arthur Vandenberg famously said&#8211;&#8217;politics stops at the water’s edge,&#8217;” Kerry wrote.</p>
<p>That Kerry’s career of politicizing war over the course of <em>decades</em> reveals this to be an utter lie is indisputable. Yet even more troubling, it reveals a level of self-denial so deep, one might be forgiven for wondering how it is possible he is even being <em>considered</em> for Secretary of State, much less a <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2012/12/21/john-kerry-hillary-clinton-secretary-of-state-barack-obama/1775589/">reported</a> shoo-in to get the job. That reality is as much a testament to the nature of something known as &#8220;Senate collegiality&#8221; which, in this case, amounts to confirming a hack willing to undercut American troops whenever it served his purposes, to a position fourth in the line of presidential succession lest the Senate chamber become a hotbed of rancor if Kerry is denied the nomination.</p>
<p>The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who officially <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2012/12/13/will-swift-boat-veterans-reunite-to-protest-a-kerry-nomination/">disbanded</a> as a political organization in 2008, might be up to the task of making the process a bit harder for Kerry and his Senate friends. John O’Neill played it close to the vest when he appeared on Fox News&#8217;s &#8220;Hannity.&#8221; “We will do the best we can, Sean. I was contacted today, I spoke with three people that won the Congressional Medal of Honor, who will do the very best we can,&#8221; he promised. &#8220;We’ve got kids&#8211;heck, I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of kids who have been engaged in combat or in the armed forces. Can you imagine them counting on John Kerry to protect their back?”</p>
<p>Thousands of troops already know the answer to that question. It is up to the Senate to decide whether their sacrifices and their reputations from Vietnam to the present can be kicked to the curb. When the fog of political expediency is penetrated, Kerry&#8217;s fellow senators face a simple choice: they can either demonstrate respect and loyalty for America&#8217;s fighting forces, or one of their own.</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>John Kerry: Assad&#8217;s Man in Washington</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/john-kerry-assads-man-in-washington/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=john-kerry-assads-man-in-washington</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:55:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Assad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[secretary of state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169730</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[After the senator's romance with the butchers of Vietnam came his romance with the butcher of Syria. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/john-kerry-assads-man-in-washington/image6353993/" rel="attachment wp-att-169738"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-169738" title="image6353993" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/image6353993.jpg" alt="" width="254" height="191" /></a>Now that U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice has had her name withdrawn from consideration for Secretary of State, it appears that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is next in line for the job. Sources have <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/12/john-kerry-to-be-nominated-to-be-secretary-of-state-sources-say/">told</a> ABC News that the president has tabbed the Massachusetts senator, but that the official announcement is being delayed by other pending Cabinet decisions, as well as the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.</p>
<p>Whether Kerry should be nominated at all is the question we would be asking if there were any justice in the world. If Rice ostensibly incurred the wrath of Washington insiders for her lack of judgement regarding Benghazi and Rwanda, how is it possible Kerry gets a pass for his own lack of judgment regarding a host of issues, from his enduring support for Syrian butcher Bashar Assad and his belief that climate change is a “national security” issue, to his unthinkable testimony before the U.S. Congress maligning America and Vietnam vets while running interference for the Viet Cong? Kerry, it seems, cannot kick the habit of sidling up to the great killing machines of our time.</p>
<p>Kerry&#8217;s lack of judgment is nothing new. For the last decade, he has been the federal government’s highest-ranking <a href="http://freebeacon.com/an-affair-to-remember/">apologist</a> for Assad. It was Kerry who made numerous efforts to undermine the Bush administration&#8217;s attempt to isolate the Syrian dictator after their courtship of him ended in failure in 2003. Kerry has made repeated visits to Syria, meeting with Assad <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/generous-remember-john-kerrys-praise-of-syrian-dictator-assad/">five times</a> between 2009 and 2011.</p>
<p>In 2009, days after Barack Obama&#8217;s inauguration, Kerry was <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j929Sp7dmwgsfZyG3wkUK4qtCbLQ">sent</a> to Syria as part of a policy review by an Obama administration looking to establish new relationships with countries the Bush administration considered hostile. Bush had repeatedly accused Syria of willful ignorance regarding the arming of terrorists in Iraq, and supporting terror in general. In 2005, following the assassination of Lebanon&#8217;s former premier Rafiq Hariri, in a car bombing most likely orchestrated by the Assad regime, the United States withdrew its ambassador.</p>
<p>None of it mattered to Kerry. He listened to Bashar Assad advise him that Washington must “move away from a policy based on dictating decisions,” adding that future relations between the countries should be based on a &#8220;proper understanding&#8221; by Washington of Middle East issues and interests. In return, Kerry chose the occasion to bash the former administration. &#8220;Unlike the Bush administration that believed you could simply tell people what to do and walk away and wait for them to do it, we believe you have to engage in a discussion,&#8221; he said. &#8220;So we are going to renew diplomacy but without any illusion, without any naivety, without any misplaced belief that, just by talking, things will automatically happen.&#8221;</p>
<p>A year later, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee <a href="http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2010/04/01/104671.html">ignored</a> his own advice and sat down once again with Assad. &#8220;Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,&#8221; he said in April 2010. &#8220;Both the United States and Syria have a very deep interest&#8230; in having a very frank exchange on any differences [and] agreements that we have about the possibilities of peace in this region,&#8221; he said in the statement. And once again, he called on Syria to stop supplying weapons to Hezbollah.</p>
<p>Seven months later, <a href="http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/11/29/wikileaked_john_kerry_calls_for_israel_to_cede_golan_heights_and_east_jerusalem">disclosures</a> of diplomatic cables by the Wikileaks website revealed that Kerry had been busy undermining Israel as well. He told leaders in Qatar that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria, and that the capital of a Palestinian state should be established in East Jerusalem, as part of the so-called peace process. According to the cable, Kerry did so during separate meetings with Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, and the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa.</p>
<p>Concerning the Golan Heights, the cable noted that &#8220;[Kerry] added that Netanyahu also needs to compromise and work the return of the Golan Heights into a formula for peace.&#8221; As for an East Jerusalem capital for a Palestinian state? &#8220;Any negotiation has its limits, added Senator Kerry, and we know for the Palestinians that control of Al-Aqsa mosque and the establishment of some kind of capital for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not negotiable,&#8221; the cable stated. &#8220;For the Israelis, the Senator continued, Israel&#8217;s character as a Jewish state is not open for negotiation. The non-militarization of an eventual Palestinian state and its borders can nonetheless be resolved through negotiation.&#8221;</p>
<p>By March 2011, as Israel, the United States and France watched the anti-government protests in the Middle East begin to include Syria, France and the U.S. <a href="http://www.jewishjournal.com/world/article/report_us_france_nixed_kerry_visit_to_syria_20110328">nixed</a> another trip by Kerry to Damascus, concerned that it would signal &#8220;Western weakness.&#8221; That decision may have been precipitated by an <a href="http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2011/03/16/senator-john-kerry-on-u.s.-policy-toward-middle-east/9by">appearance</a> Kerry made before a think tank audience twelve days earlier. During his speech, he contended the United States had a crucial role to play in facilitating the &#8220;democratic transitions&#8221; in the Middle East, including Egypt. “The people of Egypt liberated themselves in eighteen days without a single IED or suicide bomb,” Kerry said.</p>
<p>As for Assad, Kerry again could not contain himself. “Well, I personally believe that—I mean, this is my belief, okay? But President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had.” During the same speech he doubled-down on such pie-in-the-sky nonsense, contending that &#8220;Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it.”</p>
<p>Syria has indeed changed. The death toll in the bloody civil war, during which Assad has cut a bloody swath through his own nation using heavy artillery and helicopter gunships in civilian neighborhoods, has <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-23/syria-death-tolls-climbs-past-40-000-mark-activists-say">topped</a> 40,000.</p>
<p>Syria is hardly Kerry&#8217;s only detour. Progressive hearts are a-flutter because the senator is <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/a-secretary-john-kerry-would-elevate-climate-issues-20121215">also</a> a climate change warrior. “No senator since Al Gore knows as much about the science and diplomacy of climate change as Kerry,” said David Goldwyn, an international energy consultant who served as Clinton’s special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs. “He would not only put climate change in the top five issues he raises with every country, but he would probably rethink our entire diplomatic approach to the issue.”</p>
<p>If a speech Kerry gave last August on the floor of the Senate is any indication, climate change may even go to the top of the list as one of the nation&#8217;s chief security threats. “I believe that the situation we face [with climate change] is as dangerous as any of the sort of real crises that we talk about,&#8221; he said. (The word &#8220;real&#8221; is a revealing choice that was apparently lost on both the true-believers and Kerry himself.)</p>
<p>All of the above will undoubtedly be dismissed by Kerry&#8217;s colleagues in the Senate, where an old-boys club mentality trumps hard-nosed thinking&#8211;meaning Kerry is virtually a lock to be confirmed. An equally out-of-touch John McCain <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/congress/mr-secretary-mr-president-sens-kerry-mccain-poke-fun-at-each-others-lofty-ambitions/2012/12/03/c0559fc8-3d7e-11e2-8a5c-473797be602c_story.html">indicated</a> as much, when he responded to an introduction by Kerry at a news conference in early December with the quip, “thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.”</p>
<p>It is disheartening to hear such pronouncements from a man like McCain given Kerry&#8217;s notorious romance with the communist slaughterers of Vietnam and his seditious lies about U.S. forces, which were made famous through his testimony <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/kerry-vietnam-atrocities-state/2012/12/07/id/466887">during</a> the Senate Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971 and his extensive pro-communist activism. In &#8217;71 Kerry appeared before Congress as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/10/investigate_the_winter_soldier.html">told</a> the story of  &#8220;over 150&#8243; Vietnam vets who &#8220;told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war…&#8221;</p>
<p>According to the Winter Solider <a href="http://www.wintersoldier.com/staticpages/index.php?page=Swett_CID">website</a>, Army reports &#8220;newly discovered&#8221; in 2008 discredited those claims. Organizations such as the Swift Boat Veterans infamously rose to oppose Kerry&#8217;s 2004 run for the presidency. Not least among their long list of grievances were Kerry&#8217;s <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,132799,00.html">two meetings</a> with the North Vietnamese, even as American soldiers were still in the field suffering unspeakable cruelty by communist forces.</p>
<p>Yet John Kerry will be nominated and confirmed to replace Hillary Clinton. It doesn&#8217;t matter that he has been colossally wrong about Bashar Assad, more willing to negotiate Israel&#8217;s position in the peace process, a disciple of junk science, or willing to sell out his fellow veterans and country. He is a member in good standing of the ruling class, and his progressive credentials are a perfect match for an administration equally lacking in judgement and integrity. That&#8217;s &#8220;how things work&#8221; in Washington, D.C.</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>Jane Fonda Finally Apologizes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ben-shapiro/jane-fonda-finally-apologizes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jane-fonda-finally-apologizes</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Nov 2012 04:50:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Tell it to the POWs.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ben-shapiro/jane-fonda-finally-apologizes/jane/" rel="attachment wp-att-166270"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-166270" title="jane" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/jane-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="202" /></a>It only took 40 years. But finally, actress-turned-workout-specialist Jane Fonda has apologized for sitting on a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun during her 1972 visit to North Vietnam. Fonda, who used her fame to push her radical leftism during her heyday, traveled to Hanoi in 1972 in solidarity with the Viet Cong. While there, she proceeded to blame the US for supposedly bombing a dike system, and did a series of radio broadcasts stating that US leaders were “war criminals.” Those broadcasts were replayed for American POWs being tortured by the Viet Cong. Later, when POWs spoke about their experiences of torture, Fonda would call them “hypocrites and liars,” stating, “These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed.” She explained that these POWs were “careerists and professional killers.”</p>
<p>Now, four decades removed, sitting in the lap of luxury, Fonda has decided that the pictures on the anti-aircraft gun were a mistake. Not the actual visit – she stands by that. “I did not, have not, and will not say that going to North Vietnam was a mistake,” she said. “I have apologized only for some of the things that I did  there, but I am proud that I went.”</p>
<p>But when it comes to those gun photos, then she wishes she’d done something different: “Sitting on that gun in North Vietnam. I’ll go to my grave with that one.” Of course, as John Nolte of Big Hollywood points out, that’s “a step up from what we learned in Patricia Bosworth’s biography, ‘Jane Fonda,’ where the star reportedly said: ‘My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.”</p>
<p>She’s a deep human being, you see.</p>
<p>Back in July 2011, she spelled out why she regretted the anti-aircraft gun photo:</p>
<blockquote><p>It happened on my last day in Hanoi. I was exhausted and an emotional wreck after the 2-week visit. It was not unusual for Americans who visited North Vietnam to be taken to see Vietnamese military installations and when they did, they were always required to wear a helmet like the kind I was told to wear during the numerous air raids I had experienced. When we arrived at the site of the anti-aircraft installation (somewhere on the outskirts of Hanoi), there was a group of about a dozen young soldiers in uniform who greeted me. There were also many photographers (and perhaps journalists) gathered about, many more than I had seen all in one place in Hanoi. This should have been a red flag ….</p>
<p>Here is my best, honest recollection of what happened: someone (I don’t remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed. I got up, and as I started to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what had just happened hit me. “Oh my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, it never occurs to Fonda that the pain she caused with that photo was a mere sliver of the pain she caused by acting as a propagandist for one of the worst regimes in human history. But that’s because in Hollywood, being such a propagandist merely endears you to elites, as Sean Penn can tell you. Tom Lehrer once mocked NASA for working with former Nazi scientist Wernher Von Braun; “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down,’” Lehrer sang, “‘That&#8217;s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” But in Hollywood, it’s worse than that: you’re feted for siding with the world’s most evil people.</p>
<p>That’s why Hollywood continues to treat the blacklist as one of the worst blots on American history. The truth is somewhat different: the Soviet Union was working with the American Communist Party to infiltrate Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and succeeded in infiltrating the Hollywood unions to a large extent. The Communist Party was interested in the overthrow of the American way of government. Not all of those blacklisted were card-carrying communists; that was the tragedy of McCarthyism. But to sympathize for those who treated Stalin as a hero rather than shunning them as moral reprobates is a move only Hollywood could make. Dalton Trumbo, perhaps the most celebrated member of the Hollywood Ten, bragged to his bosses in the Soviet Union that the Communist Party in Hollywood had helped quash anti-Soviet films like an adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s masterwork <em>Darkness at Noon</em>. Some of the Communist Party’s favorite Hollywood movies included <em>Mission to Moscow </em>(1943), in which Hollywood gave a clean bill of health to the Stalinist show trials. Meanwhile, when it comes to today’s Hollywood blacklist of American conservatives, Hollywood honchos brag that it’s a positive development.</p>
<p>Jane Fonda should rightly have been written off by America’s most powerful institutions four decades ago. Instead, she still kicking – and next, she’s playing Nancy Reagan, whom she brags she’ll prevent from looking “too mean.”</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>Panic of the Progressives</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/panic-of-the-progressives/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=panic-of-the-progressives</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Oct 2012 04:55:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left went into a fit of rage after Obama's debate disaster. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/121004_obama_debate_reu_605.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-147296" title="121004_obama_debate_reu_605" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/121004_obama_debate_reu_605.gif" alt="" width="375" height="240" /></a>“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner said, “it’s not even past.” The progressives’ fury over Obama’s meltdown in last week’s debate, and their desperate efforts to get him reelected by any means possible, have to be understood in the context of the long history of the left’s attempt to impose its ideology on the United States. Though successful at capturing the universities, schools, popular culture, and most churches, the left still lusts for the presidency, where the real power lies to change America in line with their ideology. Yet for the last four decades, the left has seen what appears to be victory slip from its grasp, as their presidential standard-bearer either lost the election or betrayed their ideals once in office.</p>
<p>Start in 1972. The left successfully hijacked the Democratic party and imposed its ideological aims on the party’s platform: creeping socialism, dirigiste economic policy, radical egalitarianism, income redistribution, a balkanizing identity politics, institutionalized assaults on traditional morality and religion, and a foreign policy predicated on the global malignity and oppressive policies of the United States. Unfortunately for the left, America wasn’t ready for such a radical transformation, and George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon by 23 points. Yet within a year, the media-hyped Watergate scandal mortally wounded Nixon, who was replaced by the ineffectual Gerald Ford.</p>
<p>Then in 1975, the anti-war left was seemingly vindicated by the collapse of South Vietnam in the face of a massive invasion by the North Vietnamese with the support of the Soviets and the Chinese. The truth, of course, was very different. The U.S. had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting the South off from air support and foreign aid. Yet the perception fostered by the sympathetic media was that the left had been right: America had fought an unjust, neo-imperialist war against a nationalist movement supported by a majority of the Vietnamese, a war disguised as resistance to communist aggression. Believing the endemic corruption and tyranny of America had been made manifest both domestically and abroad, the left was sure its chance had come to finish the work started in 1972.</p>
<p>Enter Jimmy Carter in 1976, a one-term governor of Georgia with scant national experience. Yet Carter was the perfect Trojan horse: a Southern evangelical Christian who could appeal to traditional conservative constituencies. Once in office, however, Carter’s presidency was marked equally by incompetence and leftish ideology, his policies predicated on American retreat and weakness. This tone of apology and retreat was obvious in his inaugural speech, where he admitted America’s “recent mistakes,” suggested we should not “dwell on remembered glory,” and sighed that “even our great nations has its recognized limits” and can “simply do our best.”</p>
<p>A few months later, he announced that America was now free of the “inordinate fear of communism,” and so he would put the promotion of human rights at the center of foreign policy, and push for a “freeze on further modernization and production of weapons and a continuing, substantial reduction of strategic nuclear weapons as well.” Hence Carter pursued moralizing internationalism, pushed for disarmament, and emasculated the CIA. A few years later came the famous “malaise” speech, in which Carter gloomily identified “a fundamental threat to American democracy,” what he called “a crisis of confidence . . . that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” And of course, the major causes of this “crisis” were the two American original sins: “the agony of Vietnam” and the dishonoring of the presidency by the “shock of Watergate.”</p>
<p>The consequences of Carter’s foreign policy of self-loathing and retreat quickly became obvious during his presidency, as the Soviet Union and its satellites went on a geopolitical rampage, and cutbacks in U.S. weapons development were met with a Soviet military buildup. Worse yet in the long run, our steady ally in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, was abandoned to the tender mercies of the jihadist Ayatollah Khomeini. Soon followed the storming of our embassy and the taking of American hostages, 52 of whom were held for 444 days. Carter’s groveling outreach to the mullahs in Iran––including a secret letter delivered by leftist former Attorney General Ramsay Clark that yearned for good relations “based upon equality, mutual respect, and friendship”––followed by a poorly planned and half-hearted rescue attempt that killed 8 American soldiers, whose charred remains were gleefully poked with canes by Iranian mullahs, convinced Americans once again that progressive policies damaged America’s security and interests. Nor were they ready to embrace the self-loathing and guilt that underlay those policies.</p>
<p>Thus followed the long, dark night of the progressive soul, Ronald Reagan’s two terms in the White House. Reagan’s success in turning around the economy and bringing down the Soviet Union convinced brighter progressives that the old leftist playbook had to be abandoned. If they wanted the presidency, they had at least to pretend to endorse more centrist policies, particularly when it came to foreign policy. After the interregnum of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, a tanking economy allowed once again a southern governor to come to the rescue. Even better, unlike the dour, self-righteous Jimmy Carter, the “New Democrat” baby-boomer Bill Clinton was “cool,” a draft-dodger, skirt-chaser, dope-smoker, and saxophone player. More important, he was a brilliant politician who could “feel your pain” and connect with voters much more intimately than the self-righteous scold Carter ever could. At the start of his term, Clinton seemed to deliver on the progressive agenda. He started work on creating government-run health care, the progressive Holy Grail, he improved the position of homosexuals in the military, he increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and he expanded entitlements such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. Then came the debacle of the midterm elections, when Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress.</p>
<p>Clinton responded, of course, by his now legendary “triangulation,” tacking to the right. At the start of his second term he announced, “The era of big government is over.” He committed a mortal sin for progressives: he cooperated with Republicans in reforming welfare, striking at the heart of progressive environmental determinism by recognizing the corruption of character that follows absolving individuals of personal responsibility. He signed off on legislation eliminating two provisions of the Glass-Steagall act, which had restricted banks from getting involved in securities, and he lowered the capital gains rate from 28% to 20%. Clinton then crippled the remainder of his presidency with the humiliating scandal created by his juvenile hijinks with a White House intern, becoming only the second president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. Once more, the left had been betrayed by its political great hope.</p>
<p>Yet waiting in the wings was Vice President Al Gore, a progressive true believer and prophet seemingly free of the character flaws that had compromised Clinton’s presidency. But the disputed 2000 election––stolen, progressives rationalized, by George Bush and the Supreme Court’s conservatives––brought to power another Republican, this one even more hateful than Ronald Reagan. Reagan, after all, was from an earlier generation who had missed out on getting his consciousness raised by the progressive take-over of the culture in the 60s. But George Bush was a baby-boomer, a privileged, partying frat-boy who, as the leftist myth has it, found Jesus and conservatism and parlayed his family connections to take control of the White House. But the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and the seeming revival of the anti-war movement, reanimated the old progressive myth from the &#8217;60s, when the left stopped another “unjust” neo-imperialist war. Yet in 2004, the Democrats nominated John Kerry, one of the Senate’s most left-wing members, but an incompetent campaigner full of rich-liberal hauteur and utterly lacking in charisma. Once more, the progressives had to spend four more years in the political wilderness.</p>
<p>Then in 2008 the progressive messiah arrived. A left-wing Dr. Frankenstein could not have created a candidate more perfect than Barack Obama. He was nominally black, “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” as Joe Biden put it, lacking the frightening funk of a Jesse Jackson. He was Columbia and Harvard educated, and endowed with a photogenic family. More important, unlike Kerry or Carter, he possessed a seemingly Clintonesque ability to present political bromides and slogans with a winning smile. Best of all, he was staunchly progressive, his whole adult life before 2008 spent in the belly of the leftist beast: universities and Alinsky-inspired community organizing, with two-years&#8217; worth of service in the U.S. Senate, where he was one of its most liberal members, railing against the 2006 “surge” in Iraq, which he called a “reckless escalation” redolent of Vietnam. Provided with the political Teflon created by white guilt and the yearning for racial and political reconciliation that he exploited in his speeches, and coddled by a protective media, Obama overcame the usually toxic effects of extreme liberalism on presidential candidates.</p>
<p>So the media went all-in for Obama, ignoring or dismissing the troubling details from his past like his grades in college, his incomplete health records, his friendship with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, and his 20 years spent in his self-confessed “spiritual guide” Jeremiah Wright’s racist, anti-American church. Even his betrayal of progressive goals like closing down Guantanamo and quickly ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not damp the progressive ardor. He partially delivered on the leftist Holy Grail of nationalized health care, ramming through Obamacare with sleazy politicking the media studiously ignored. He went on the international “apology” tour, confessing America’s past sins and validating the old leftist indictment of America as a global villain. He dismissed American exceptionalism, and instead extolled the virtues of multi-lateral diplomacy and U.N. internationalism presumably scorned by his trigger-happy cowboy predecessor.  He also proscribed waterboarding, the most effective interrogation technique we had for extracting useful intelligence, but decried as “torture” by the left. He did ramp up drone attacks, another progressive mortal sin, but one ignored by the same media that meticulously documented every one of Bush’s alleged transgressions of international law. But this backsliding, along with other lapses such as maintaining rendition and other Bush-era policies like the Patriot Act, could all be forgiven, acceptable compromises necessary to win their standard-bearer another term, when without the pressure of reelection he could be more “flexible,” as he told the Russians. So when the reelection campaign started, the media shifted from their usual ideological bias to outright partisanship. They ignored or played down anything remotely damaging to Obama, from Joe Biden’s surreal gaffes to the attempt to cover up the disastrous mistakes that led to our ambassador being murdered in Benghazi, thus deflecting attention from Obama’s failed foreign policy.</p>
<p>Then came the debate. Without a friendly chorus to preach to and a cheerleading media to act as a filter, Obama was revealed to be what he had been all along: a mediocre mind, a terrible politician, and an arrogant narcissist who could only smirk and grimace as Mitt Romney took him apart.</p>
<p>At that point, 40 years of progressive frustration and betrayal erupted into hysterical rage. The possibility of Obama’s defeat and yet another repudiation of progressive ideology suddenly became more real. No amount of media spin, from Al Gore’s altitude sickness excuse to Bob Woodward’s made-up foreign policy “crisis,” could cover up the debacle of Obama’s performance. Like children who fear they might not get what they want, the media could only throw a tantrum and attack their messiah for revealing the feet of clay they had so desperately kept hidden.</p>
<p>Now the progressives are panicking. They can’t create a better candidate than Obama has been for smuggling progressive ideology under the guise of soothing centrism. And they can’t stand the thought of yet another competent Republican whose term will illustrate once again the real-world failures of progressive utopianism. What this history of 40 years of dashed hopes and abject failure tells us is that from now until election day, the desperate Dems and their media errand boys will use every dirty trick to defeat Romney and preserve their dream to “fundamentally transform America.”</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>Port Huron at 50: Still Communist After All These Years</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/port-huron-at-50-still-communist-after-all-these-years/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=port-huron-at-50-still-communist-after-all-these-years</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Apr 2012 04:45:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=129039</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An NYU conference celebrates the founding document of the sixties-era radical left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/hayden.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-129040" title="hayden" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/hayden-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a>Before there was <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7694">Occupy Wall Street</a> and Zuccotti Park there was Students for a Democratic Society and Port Huron. When it was written in 1962, the <a href="http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron.html">Port Huron Statement</a> announced the birth of the radical student group <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7496">Students for a Democratic Society</a> (SDS), and with it the launch of what would become the so-called New Left. The manifesto’s legacy has since been sullied by the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/DESTRUCTIVE-GENERATION-Second-Thoughts-About/dp/0684826410">destructive history of SDS</a>, which within a few years splintered into a bevy of revolutionary Marxist and militant organizations – most notoriously the terrorist <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=6808">Weather Underground</a> – that came to embrace the very form of communist totalitarianism the Port Huron Statement professed to reject.</p>
<p>That morally stained history has not prevented SDS veterans, led by the document’s principal author, Tom Hayden, from periodically celebrating the Port Huron Statement as something it never was: a reformist treatise that succeeded in spirit even as it failed to transform America in line with SDS’s radical vision. Hayden has been the leading propagandist of the Port Huron Statement’s supposedly lasting cultural importance, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/port-huron-statement-40">penning</a> and <a href="http://vimeo.com/16326064">delivering</a> near-annual tributes to the document while divulging little about its troubling history. The latest of these commemorative efforts occurred last week at New York University in New York City, which hosted <a href="http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/events/huron_schedule.pdf">a two-day conference on the Port Huron Statement</a> to celebrate its 50-year anniversary and to reflect on its historical impact.</p>
<p>Headlined by Hayden, who delivered the keynote address, the conference was a class reunion of sorts of 60-era radicals. The audience was full of aging activists, their nostalgia for the political currents of the sixties betrayed by their graying ponytails, Che Guevara T-shirts, and well-thumbed copies of <em>The Nation</em>. Several said they had been present when the Port Huron Statement was issued in 1962.</p>
<p>Their goal seemed to be to convince themselves that the Port Huron Statement still mattered. Hayden touched on the point directly in his keynote remarks, when he suggested that the document remained historically relevant. “To understand history, you can’t leave it to the historians,” he said. Instead, Hayden left it to himself, and the resulting account was woefully incomplete. Rather than revisit the past, Hayden preferred to rewrite it.</p>
<p>Hayden stressed that the major contribution of the Port Huron Statement was introducing the world to the notion of “participatory democracy.” Hayden described the term in bland terms to mean a call for greater social and economic participation. But as an honest reading of the Port Huron Statement confirms, “participatory democracy” was never a call for democracy at all, but rather a coded prescription for a radical insurrection against established democratic institutions. Thus, it’s not surprising that all of the movements that have embraced “participatory democracy” – from Mexico’s anarcho-communist Zapatista guerillas, to Nicaragua’s communist Sandinistas, to most recently the street thugs and hooligans of Occupy Wall Street – have been unabashedly radical.</p>
<p>Hayden could not bring himself to be more honest about another aspect of the Port Huron Statement, namely it’s opposition to “anti-communism.” As Hayden told it, SDS came under criticism in the 60s for being insufficiently supportive of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. “We were on trial because our views were not anti-communist enough,” Hayden explained ruefully, to sympathetic agreement from the audience.</p>
<p>But that too was a historical whitewash. Not only did the Port Huron Statement reject liberal anti-communism but it embraced its converse, “anti-anti-communism.” The Soviet Union might have been totalitarian and repressive, the authors’ conceded, but it was wrong to “blame only communism” for the Cold War given that the United States, with it’s “monstrous” military structure, its “corporate economy,” and its “imperialist” foreign policy, was not clearly better – and in any case had “done a great deal to foment” Soviet suppression and aggression.</p>
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		<title>Smearing Our Troops</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/smearing-our-troops/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=smearing-our-troops</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/smearing-our-troops/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:33:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[My Lai]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Bales]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[William Calley]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=126595</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left uses the killing of civilians in Afghanistan to attack the military and U.S.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/20090315_soldiers_in_afghanistan.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-126598" title="20090315_soldiers_in_afghanistan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/20090315_soldiers_in_afghanistan.gif" alt="" width="375" height="257" /></a>Sergeant Robert Bales stands accused of murdering 16 Afghans, including 9 children. Many top American military officials, including Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, have <a href="http://www.npr.org/2012/03/21/149007874/accused-sergeant-heads-down-a-long-legal-road">intimated</a> that even the death penalty &#8220;could be a consideration&#8221; should Bales be found guilty of the crime. On cue, the Left has used this tragic incident as an opportunity to impugn the entire military and the nation, claiming the killing is on par with My Lai and is representative of our servicemen and women generally.</p>
<p>CNN blogger Stephen Prothero exemplified this dementia perfectly in a recent <a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/19/my-take-it-takes-a-nation-to-make-a-massacre/">piece</a> titled &#8220;My Take: It takes a nation to make a massacre&#8221; in which he spells out who is really at fault. &#8220;It takes a country to make a man do these things, and we were his country,&#8221; writes Prothero. &#8220;We U.S. citizens voted for the presidents who sent him into combat and for the Congress that appropriated the money for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.&#8221; If Bales is found guilty? Prothero suggests that &#8220;each of the rest of us should spend a day sitting in front of our local jail. There we should confess to our respective gods &#8216;our sins, known and unknown, things done and left undone&#8217; (as the Book of Common Prayer puts it). Then we should write a letter to the wife and children of Sgt. Bales asking for their forgiveness too.&#8221;</p>
<p>Prothero then reflexively descends into one of the prevailing themes that inevitably emerges when an American soldier is accused war crimes: comparisons to Lieutenant William Calley and the massacre at My Lai that occurred during the Vietnam War. Calley&#8217;s crimes were indeed horrific, but <em>Counterpunch</em> writer Jeff Sparrow <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/21/from-my-lai-to-kandahar/">uses them</a>, along with Neil Shea writing for <em>Democracy Now,</em> not merely to condemn Bales, but soldiers in general, who need &#8220;a protective layer of hatred to perform what [is] asked of them.&#8221; He then takes on America itself, which has ostensibly normalized &#8220;torture against (mostly Muslim) detainees; the construction of secret prisons to detain Muslim prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial; the routinisation of assassinations and other extrajudicial killings of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen; and, most of all, deaths of (by the most conservative reckoning) hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Muslim, in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.&#8221;</p>
<p>His conclusion is that the war against Islamic terror has &#8220;created a new audience who wants to never leave the gun, an audience no longer shocked by atrocity but increasingly prepared to celebrate it.&#8221; Completely missing from Sparrow&#8217;s article, however, is a <em>single word</em> on the far greater &#8212; and continuing &#8212; atrocities committed by the Taliban and other jihadists across the world, which our military has sacrificed enormously to prevent.</p>
<p>Shea himself <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/16/afghan_massacre_sheds_light_on_culture">continues</a> with another trope made popular during the Vietnam war: American soldiers straddle the border between sanity and psychosis. &#8220;I met up with a group of soldiers who were the first I had ever come across who made me feel pretty nervous about what I was going to see while I was with them,&#8221; he writes. &#8220;And I spent a few days with them and came to just really understand that they had gotten to the edge of violence, as we understand it, in Afghanistan, and they seemed ready and capable of doing some pretty bad things. I didn’t actually witness them do anything too terrible, but the way that they talked and the way that they acted toward Afghan civilians and animals and property in the country was sort of stunning to me&#8230;Many of these guys seemed like they had reached the end of their rope in terms of stability and controlling their aggression.&#8221; That&#8217;s a rather remarkable conclusion for a man who &#8220;didn&#8217;t actually witness&#8221; our troops doing anything wrong.</p>
<p>At least Shea was somewhat restrained. Benjamin Busch&#8217;s Daily Beast <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/16/us-soldier-afghan-rampage-tears-at-our-national-soul-says-former-marine.html">article</a> on the issue warns that the murders allegedly committed by Bales allow &#8220;for the possibility that any one of us could go insane at any time, and that every veteran poisoned by their combat experience could be on edge for life.&#8221; He too takes Americans as a whole to task, noting that our &#8220;national disinterest&#8221; in &#8220;distant events&#8221; is unsurprising because &#8220;we are a people known more and more for our selfish distractions than for our awareness.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the <em>New York Times,</em> psychiatrist and retired brigadier general Dr. Stephen Xenakis employs both themes, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/us/sgt-robert-bales-from-small-town-ohio-to-afghanistan.html?_r=2&amp;hp=&amp;pagewanted=all">asserts</a> that Sgt. Bales is &#8220;emblematic&#8221; of bigger problems within the military. “This is equivalent to what My Lai did to reveal all the problems with the conduct of the Vietnam War,” contends Xenakis. “The Army will want to say that soldiers who commit crimes are rogues, that they are individual, isolated cases. But they are not.” The <em>Tucson Sentinel&#8217;s</em> Charles M. Sennott <a href="http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/031712_afghan_bales_analysis/the-lessons-staff-sgt-robert-bales/">echoes</a> those thoughts. &#8220;Overnight, Bales has for many around the world become the face of what is wrong with America’s war in Afghanistan,&#8221; he contends. &#8220;Just as 44 years ago in the ides of March of 1968, the My Lai massacre and Lt. William Calley became synonymous with all that was wrong with the war in Vietnam.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Assault on America’s Prestige</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/obama%e2%80%99s-assault-on-america%e2%80%99s-prestige/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama%25e2%2580%2599s-assault-on-america%25e2%2580%2599s-prestige</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:19:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Carter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mubarak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[What Obama’s “new way forward” has meant for American strength and credibility abroad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/obama_salutes.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122203" title="obama_salutes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/obama_salutes.jpg" alt="" width="392" height="261" /></a></p>
<p>In 1868, a British army led by Sir Robert Napier sailed from India to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to rescue several English and European hostages from the mentally unstable, sadistic King Theodore. Theodore had become enraged a few years earlier because his letter to Queen Victoria asking for military assistance had been ignored, and so he retaliated by taking the hostages. Napier’s expedition required the building of a port, railroad, and road in order for his army of 13,000 soldiers to march to Theodore’s stronghold Magdala, 400 brutal miles from the coast. After the three-month march, the British met Theodore’s army at Magadala and routed it. The hostages were released, and Theodore committed suicide. Then Napier led his army back to the coast and sailed away, surprising many who believed that rescuing the hostages was a pretext for colonial expansion.</p>
<p>The Abyssinian expedition illustrates the British awareness that an empire must defend not just its material interests, but also its prestige. Insults and injuries to its citizens cannot be tolerated, for rivals and enemies will interpret such forbearance as a weakness to be exploited. The expedition was an expensive, massive undertaking, but one necessary in order to warn the Empire’s potential enemies that England would pay any price to defend its honor and interests. Power is not just about material resources, but also the perceptions of others that power will be used, a perception that works as a force multiplier. As Vergil says in the <em>Aeneid</em>, “They have power because they seem to have power.”</p>
<p>History is filled with examples of how costly it is for a nation to allow its prestige to be damaged, thus weakening its power and inviting aggression. By 1938, Hitler had no respect for the English or the French despite their combined military might, given their failure to respond to Germany’s serial violations of the Versailles settlement over the previous two decades. Thus Hitler’s brilliant manipulation of diplomacy in the Czechoslovakia crisis, when England and France, as Churchill would write later, “presented a front of two over-ripe melons crushed together.” Hitler agreed: a year later, he would respond to England and France’s guarantee of Poland’s security by sneering, “I saw them at Munich. They are little worms.”</p>
<p>Likewise the U.S. paid the price for its loss of prestige following the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975. As Jimmy Carter publicly announced a “crisis of confidence,” fretted over America’s “recent mistakes” and “recognized limits,” and cut spending on the military, an emboldened Soviet Union went on a geopolitical rampage throughout the Third World. Equally ominous was the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the embassy hostages, a grievous affront to our prestige met with toothless sanctions, U.N. resolutions, secret negotiations, and the whole repertoire of excuses to substitute talk for action. A byproduct of this blow to U.S. prestige was the creation of an oil-rich jihadist regime in the heart of the Middle East, one that immediately started creating and supporting terrorist groups that for 30 years have murdered Americans. A series of jihadist attacks followed Iran’s victory over the superpower America, from the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, to the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, none of which were met with a punitive response that would have made clear the overwhelming price to be paid for assaulting America’s interests and citizens. So it was no surprise that Osama bin Laden, convinced that America was a “weak horse” with “foundations of straw,” on September 11, 2001 sent his jihadists to attack the very centers of American power and prestige in Washington D.C. and New York.</p>
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		<title>What Does Romney Really Think About Vietnam?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/bruce-thornton/what-does-romney-really-think-about-vietnam-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-does-romney-really-think-about-vietnam-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/bruce-thornton/what-does-romney-really-think-about-vietnam-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:45:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[defeat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intervention]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[khmer rouge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Is the Republican presidential candidate on the wrong side of history?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/helicopter.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-116839" title="helicopter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/helicopter.gif" alt="" width="375" height="246" /></a></p>
<p>Mitt Romney recently said <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/18/romney-iraq-provided-lessons-learned-video/" target="_blank">something</a> on Fox News Sunday that raises questions about his understanding of history and its pertinence for foreign policy. In the course of talking about the war in Iraq and the “lessons learned” from that conflict and its “errors,” Romney responded to a question about an incident from his father’s brief 1967-68 run for the Republican nomination. In August 1967, George Romney told a Detroit radio-television reporter, “Well, you know when I came back from Vietnam [in November 1965], I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the Generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there . . . . And, as a result, I have changed my mind . . . in that particular. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression.”</p>
<p>Little remembered today, Romney’s remark, particularly the careless use of the term “brainwashing,” ended his run for the nomination. The other governors and the journalists who had been on the 1965 trip disavowed Romney’s insulting characterization of the military and diplomatic personnel who had accompanied the governors. Romney was accused of flip-flopping on his earlier comments that the war was “morally right and necessary” and that withdrawal was “unthinkable.” One journalist, noting the amount of time between the trip and Romney’s about-face, wondered why it took so long for Romney to get his brain back from the laundry.  The media pounced on Romney’s clumsy use of the “brainwashing” metaphor: the <em>New York Times</em> headline read, “Romney Asserts He Underwent ‘Brainwashing’ On Vietnam Trip.” In February 1968, faced with polls showing voters in New Hampshire preferring Richard Nixon by a six-to-one margin, Romney dropped out of the race.</p>
<p>When Chris Wallace raised the issue in his Fox News Sunday interview, Romney responded, “Years later when my dad was proven to be right in terms of the errors in Vietnam, my wife asked him, ‘You know, dad, how do you feel about the fact that you’re finally being vindicated in what you said?’ And he said, ‘You know, I never look back. I only look forward.’ He’s quite a guy.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Chris Wallace didn’t ask an important follow-up questions. When Romney said his father “was proven to be right in terms of errors in Vietnam,” what exactly did he mean? Was one of the “errors,” as George Romney had explicitly said, getting involved in Vietnam in the first place “to stop Communist aggression”? And what events exactly does Mitt Romney believe “proved” his father was right? These are critical questions for understanding Romney’s grasp of history and its lessons.</p>
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