http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/texas-mega-church-leader-partners-with-muslim-brotherhood-front/ On June 9, the Clarion Project reported that the U.S. envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation will be speaking at an Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) regional conference, sharing the stage with at least three Islamists. But there are some other featured guests: ISNA’s interfaith allies, including Pastor Bob Roberts of NorthWood […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-greatest-scandal-of-them-all/print/
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
– attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero.
We have been reading of late of the blizzard of scandals that has buffeted the Obama administration. Every week or so a major storm wracks the political climate in the U.S., so much so that it is hard not to grow somewhat blasé. Whether it’s the odium of the Benghazi betrayal and ensuing cover-up; or the IRS training its sights on conservative and pro-Israeli organizations; or the DOJ seizing the phone records of News sources; or the Attorney General caught lying (or conveniently forgetting) about a subpoena against a FOX News reporter; or NSA snooping on Verizon customers under a court order granted in April, as if replicating thriller novelist Brad Thor’s grisly tale about internal espionage, Black List; or a follow-up spy program code-named PRISM, expanding an operation begun under George W. Bush that was relatively measured, judicially redrawn and discontinued in 2007, but now, in the words of Matthew Vadum; “a warrantless surveillance program on steroids”—the time comes when we expect nothing less of a meretricious administration.
The scandals go back years: the Affordable Health Care Act passed in the middle of the night and encrypted in thousands of pages that nobody seems to have read; a multi-billion dollar stimulus project that didn’t stimulate anything; the defrauding of Chrysler’s secured creditors in favor of the UAW when the auto company went bankrupt; the Fast and Furious gun-running plan yet to be clarified by the Attorney General; the loans and grants to crony Green entrepreneurs who regularly fail to meet their goals and end up in default; the numbing disgrace of a Muslim outreach scheme that has seen known terrorists and dubious Islamic groups and individuals welcomed at the White House and operating to influence policy at the highest levels of government. The net result is always the same: a modest degree of public indignation followed by business as usual. Sarah Palin is on the money when she laments that “Obama supporters…naively and blindly (despite failure after failure and scandal after scandal) continue to give him the benefit of the doubt.” After all, this may be a scandal-prone administration, there have been others, let’s move on.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal titled “The Decline of the Obama Presidency,” Fred Barnes argues that Obama’s second term is coming undone not because of scandals but because of inept decisions made during his first term—his sclerotic partisanship, his alienating of potential allies, his broken promises. For Barnes, the scandals themselves are not the major factor in “the Obama breakdown,” though they “have worsened his plight and made recovery next to impossible.” Even The New York Times editorializes that the Obama administration has “lost all credibility.”
In a most important way, however, we have tended to miss the point. We do not have the leisure of indifference or jaded boredom. Concerned citizens have no choice but to grapple, in the succinct depiction of PJ Media’s Roger Simon, with “the absolute Orwellian madness that is the Obama administration.” The issue is not simply that the U.S. government under the suzerainty of Barack Obama is beset by a concatenation of scandals or has proved itself incompetent. Indeed, pace Barnes, poor decision making may be considered scandalous as well. But the real scandal is Barack Obama himself, a man demonstrably unfit to be president of the United States, who makes the hapless Jimmy Carter and the sleazy Bill Clinton look like choir boys. The scandal is that America is being led by a man about whom we know all too little, who has placed his salient records under seal (including his original birth certificate)—a man who, as Bill Schanefelt writes in in an article titled “President Photoshop” in American Thinker, has “left surprisingly few documented footprints in the sands of time”; who is assiduously liquidating the economy; who is gutting the military while rendering it a politically correct monstrosity; whose foreign policy lies in shambles as he cozies up to dictators and theocrats or sits on the sidelines twiddling his thumbs; and who gives every indication of having managed to evade the responsibilities not only of his position but of genuine adulthood.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/clinton-insider-reveals-obamas-foreign-policy-blunders/ “The Dispensable Nation has two conclusions. One conclusion is that Obama’s foreign policy was terrible. The other conclusion is the one that has to be drawn from Nasr’s version of the Clinton 2.0 vision; that Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy would be even worse.” Early on in his introduction, Vali Nasr gets to the theme […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Creativity is an individual act. The act of building something, whether with hammers, blueprints, words, boards or plans is individualistic. Collectives can build, but not creatively. A mass has no vision because it has no personality. It can follow rules but not dreams. American exceptionalism emerged out of a society which empowered the creative […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/mccain_vs_the_wacko_birds.html
McCAIN, ONCE SO HEROIC, NOW OBVIOUSLY SUFFERS FROM PTS (POST TRAUMATIC STUPIDITY)….RSK
McCain VS The Wacko Birds Richard Butrick
Senator McCain, has called Senator Ted Cruz and his ilk in Congress “wacko birds.” Ted Cruz’s reply?
WASHINGTON – Slammed by Sen. John McCain as one of his party’s “wacko birds,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is embracing the epithet.
“It is wonderful to be among friends or, as some might say, fellow wacko birds,” Cruz said Wednesday night at Coalitions for America’s Weyrich Awards Dinner, named for the late conservative icon Paul Weyrich.
McCain’s slur seems to have backfired. The epithet “wacko bird” has now become honorific among those in Congress who honor the Constitution — especially the 1st Amendment (free speech) and the 4th Amendment (privacy, unlawful searches and seizures). Leading wacko birds include Cruz, Ron Paul, Mike Lee, and Justin Amash.
Elected over the past three years, Republican Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz have had a meteoric impact in Washington, soaring to grassroots stardom, crashing into the Democratic majority and raining down on the old bulls of the Republican Party.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/two_gop_turncoats.html Last week was an exceptionally ignominious one for Americans who care about the U.S. House of Representatives (granted, an endangered species). Not one but two epic new lows were recorded in that body’s tormented history. First, let’s talk about the dingbat. The area north of the City of Detroit, from the western bank of […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324809804578511213977903512.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
WARREN KOZAK IS AUTHOR OF ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS ON WW2 THAT I EVER READ:
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LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak (Oct 17, 2011)
Fifty years ago, on June 11, 1963, the United States opened a new chapter regarding a pivotal matter—race—that had been a source of contention from the nation’s beginning. At the center of this watershed moment for America were the president, a governor, two 18-year-old college students and one of the leading civil-rights activists of that era. The dramatic 24 hours played out in three separate locales, with repercussions that are still felt half a century later.
The day began in sweltering heat at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, when two black students, James Hood and Vivian Malone, tried to enter Foster Auditorium to register for classes. They couldn’t because the governor of the state, George Wallace, physically blocked the door in a desperate attempt to stoke the dying embers of the segregated South.
Television news cameras were rolling when Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, from the Justice Department, asked Wallace to step aside. He refused. But President Kennedy, foreseeing Wallace’s refusal, had federalized the Alabama National Guard. Gen. Henry Graham, the head of the Alabama Guard, ordered the governor, who was essentially his commander, to move.
Before the governor grudgingly surrendered, he delivered a thinly veiled racist speech for the TV cameras in which he denounced the “unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion . . . by the central government.” The moment established Wallace on the national stage, and he would go on to make four racially charged runs for president.
In Ted Sorensen’s 1965 Kennedy biography, the writer described JFK as mildly and quietly in favor of civil-rights legislation as a senator in the 1950s. But Kennedy’s own views had evolved by the early 1960s, and he became a major force in the struggle. At risk to his political career, he had decided to send a federal civil-rights bill to Congress. Kennedy asked the three TV networks for time on the evening of June 11 to announce it to the nation.
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Governor George Wallace speaks in the doorway of a campus building at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, publicly refusing to allow African-American students entry to the school despite a federal mandate.
The president, who faced re-election the following year, understood that the bill would cost him the Southern states. Since he was elected by the thinnest of margins in 1960, giving up five or six states could mean no second term.
In one of the strongest speeches of his presidency, Kennedy laid out the case for ending all forms of racial segregation in America. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy said. “It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”
Some of his arguments were practical. How could the U.S. promote freedom abroad, the president asked, when millions of its own citizens were by law less than free?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350699/clappers-lie-charles-c-w-cooke By dint of a widespread preference for politeness, human beings tend to trip over themselves to find euphemisms for the word “lying.” The questionable among our public servants are charged with “misleading,” “hedging,” and “evading”; they are accused of disseminating “falsehoods,” and they are presumed guilty of “ambiguity” or of being “slippery” and “smooth.” […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350692/diagnosis-kathryn-jean-lopez Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recently released Women’s Equality Act is a “radical deregulation of abortion in New York,” says Dr. Elissa Sanchez-Speech. A family physician in Rochester, N.Y., she opposes the governor’s push, calling the abortion component to his legislation both “unnecessary for and harmful to women’s health.” Dr. Sanchez-Speech talks about her opposition to […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350673/pick-your-scandal-victor-davis-hanson All can agree that the Obama administration is mired in myriads of scandals, but as yet no one can quite figure out what they all mean and where they will lead. Benghazi differs from all the other scandals — and from both Watergate and Iran-Contra — because in this case administration lapses led to […]
