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August 2013

HIS SAY: HOW DO YOU SPELL HYPOCRISY?

From my e-pal Dr. John A…..

Why are the leftists who excoriated Bush for acting against Iraq, partly because Saddam had used chemical weapons of mass destruction against his people, now encouraging Obama — or not objecting at least — to doing the same thing in Syria!?

Why did the same people not excoriate Clinton for the earlier launching of massive cruise missile attacks — killing many civilians — against Baghdad for similar reasons?

Are Democrats sacrosanct and Republicans open game?

How does one spell hypocrisy?

RSK: How indeed? And, are honor killings, public stoning and beheading for crimes against Sharia law less morally objectionable? Not to the victims.

The Saudi-Egyptian Connection: The New Version Of The Quadruple Alliance Of 1815 By DICK MORRIS

The Saudi-Egyptian Connection: The New Version Of The Quadruple Alliance Of 1815 Democracy has not worked in the Middle East or in North Africa. It has just led to the installation of Islamist regimes who use the power they acquired in free elections to end democracy, abolish civil and human rights, enslave women, kill Christians […]

Muslim Brotherhood Groups and Their Jewish Friends By Ryan Mauro

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/muslim-brotherhood-groups-and-their-jewish-friends/print/ An organizer of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked rally explicitly acknowledged its “friendship” with both the Brotherhood and “the Jewish Voice for Justice and Peace,” apparently referring the Jewish Voice for Peace. The organization is at the forefront of activism against Israel and the “Islamophobes” that stand against American Islamists, earning the affection of the Brotherhood’s […]

CRIME, RACE AND MEDIA ON THE GLAZOV GANG

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamacares-road-to-nowhere-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood Actor, Dr. Karen Siegemund, Founder of Rage Against the Media and Howard Hyde, author of the new pamphlet, Pull the Plug on Obamacare.

The Freedom Center’s National Development Director, Tiffany Gabbay filled in for host Jamie Glazov, delivering a stellar performance.

The Gang gathered this week to discuss Crime, Race and Media Blindness. The discussion occurred in Part II and shed light on the epidemic of black-on-white crime and our culture’s deafening silence about it.

Part I focused on ObamaCare’s Road To Nowhere and Losing the Middle East.

BRUCE THORNTON: OUR CONTRARY PRESIDENT

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/our-contrare-president-2/ Remember the “contrary” Sioux warrior from Little Big Man? He did everything backwards––said “hello” for “goodbye,” washed in sand instead of water. Our president is the foreign policy contrary. He has gotten backwards every maxim of proven wisdom for dealing with the rest of the world. Teddy Roosevelt counseled, “Speak softly and carry a big […]

WHAT’S WRONG WITH GOING INTO SYRIA? ROBERT SPENCER

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/whats-wrong-with-going-into-syria/print/ American military intervention in Syria is likely to begin this week, and one thing we know amid the general confusion is that the objective is not to oust Bashar Assad: White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday: “I want to make clear that the options that we are considering are not about regime change. […]

HERBERT LONDON: A GLOBAL SURVEY AND US DECLINE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-global-survey-and-us-decline The road to the future has been set by the Obama administration. According to a recent global survey of more than 38,000 people in 39 countries, more people see China as eventually surpassing or already having surpassed the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower, notwithstanding the fact that many more people hold a favorable […]

JONAH GOLDBERG: THE REAL MESSAGE OF MLK- A COLORBLIND SOCIETY

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/356887/print Amid the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, one complaint became almost a refrain: What about economic justice? After all, the official title of the event was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The line “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live […]

RICH LOWRY: THE SAP-OBAMA HAS PERFECTED THE ART OF SPEAKING REPROACHFULLY AND CARRYING LITTLE OR NO STICK

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356814/sap-rich-lowry

President Barack Obama’s most telling act on the international stage may have come in a meeting in early 2012 in Seoul, South Korea, with Russia’s seat-warming president, Dmitri Medvedev.

Before the two got up to leave, President Obama asked — in an exchange caught on an open mic — that Moscow cut him some slack. “This is my last election,” Obama explained. “After my election I have more flexibility.” Medvedev promised to “transmit this information to Vladimir,” referring, of course, to the power behind the throne, Vladimir Putin.

When he received the message, Putin must have chortled at the heartbreaking naïveté of it. Here was the leader of the free world pleading for more time to get along with his Russian friends on the basis of an utterly risible assumption of good will. Here was a believer in the policy of “reset” who still didn’t get that the reset was going nowhere. Here was weakness compounded by delusion.

Putin didn’t care about Obama’s flexibility or inflexibility so much as any opportunity to thwart the United States. Obama said that Syrian president Bashar Assad had to go; Putin worked to make sure he stayed. Obama said that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden had to return to the United States; Putin granted him asylum. When a few weeks ago Putin related to a group of Russian students that he had told Snowden to stop doing damage to the United States, the students did the only thing appropriate upon hearing such a patently insincere claim — they laughed out loud.

CURBING MY ENTHUSIASM FOR BARBARA TUCHMAN

MY EAGLE EYED E-PAL SOL S. ON BARBARA TUCHMAN—–“….. to Vietnam wherein she accepts every stupid false cliché of the time. http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Tuchman-s-folly-6466

May 1984

Tuchman’s folly by Paul Johnson

A review of The March of Folly by Barbara W. Tuchman.

In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam,[1] Barbara Tuchman discusses in detail four totally different and widely separated instances in which, she argues, foolish leadership produced disaster: the Trojan acceptance of the Trojan Horse, the handling of Protestantism by the papacy in the early sixteenth century, English policy during the American Revolution, and America’s conduct in Vietnam. These four instances are enveloped in a more general theoretical treatment of the role of folly in history. Thus, there are five areas in which to test the validity of the book. What I propose to do here is to examine only one of them in detail: the Vietnam experience, which (I imagine) provided Mrs. Tuchman with her chief motive in producing this work.

My old tutor A. J. P. Taylor used to say that the only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history. If he believed that literally he would not, I think, have spent a lifetime writing and teaching history, for the object of studying history is not merely to discover what happened but to learn something about the nature of human societies, obviously with a view toward safeguarding or improving our own. To that extent I am with Mrs. Tuchman. Taylor’s real point, however, was the intrinsic difficulty of discovering true lessons and the obvious risks of applying false ones. Thus, Anthony Eden came to grief over Suez in 1956 because he applied a lesson—concerning the dangers of appeasement—wrenched out of its true historical and geographical context. Mankind is on a voyage from an irrecoverable past into an unknown future. All historical situations are unique and unrepeatable; they are usually complex too, and the more closely they are observed, the less easy does it appear to draw thumping great conclusions from them which can be applied elsewhere.

Mrs. Tuchman’s examination of American policy in Vietnam inclines one to endorse Taylor’s scepticism. It follows the conventional, not to say threadbare, lines which the liberal media developed in the 1970s: that American involvement in Vietnam was, ab initio, an error which compounded itself as it increased and was certain to fail all along. She thereby falls into a trap which a historian who seeks to draw lessons from the past should be particularly careful to avoid: to assume that what in the end did happen, had to happen. The inevitability of failure in Vietnam is a bad starting point from which to begin an analysis. It presupposes the same kind of determinism which infests Marxist history and which invalidates it as an objective re-creation of the past. Mrs. Tuchman appears to believe that the Marxist form of nationalism pursued by Ho Chi Minh and his associates was bound to triumph, that it was in some metaphysical sense an irresistible force. This seems to me a dangerous posture for a historian to adopt in general, and especially in this case, since she has considered only half the evidence. We do not know what happened on the other side of the hill, or how close Ho Chi Minh’s enterprise came to failure, as did similar ones in Malaysia and Burma. The sources are simply not available. The Allied expedition to the Dardanelles in 1915 seemed, immediately after it was abandoned, a foredoomed failure, “inevitable”; when the Turkish sources eventually became available, they suggested it might well have succeeded, if persisted in a little longer.