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March 2016

Peter Smith Vulgar, Crass, Despised … and Winning

Only time will tell if Donald Trump takes the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, but the fact that he is ahead of the pack surely tells us something: of all the Oval Office hopefuls, he is the only one game enough to address the issues blue-collar Americans rate as most important.
Mitt Romney didn’t mix it with Barrack Obama in 2012. He didn’t have the fortitude to skewer to him on the Benghazi attack and murder of a US ambassador mere weeks before Americans went to the polls. It was an electoral gift to the challenger, courtesy of a dead diplomat and three other slain Americans left to die without help and commemorated with a pack of lies about an irrelevant video. Yet Romney let Obama off the hook.

Where was the Commander in Chief throughout the night and early morning, when those who he had sworn to lead were fighting for their lives and when he was the only one with the authority to order in nearby airpower. Bizarrely, we still don’t know. We can conjecture. He was likely asleep, preparing for a fund-raising event while the killings went on.

What we know with certainty, no conjecture required, is that Romney was too polite (too craven?) to ask tough questions. He was unequivocally a weak reed when it counted and consequently lost an election that was eminently winnable.

The election lost and more than three disastrous years later, a strong candidate, unafraid to ask tough questions, is leading the Republican race. Hello! Here comes Mitt back from oblivion; spineless then, full of spite and spittle now. Apparently he’s afraid his grandchildren will ask him ‘What did you do, grandpa, to stop Trump?’ A more pertinent question to ask of him is what he did to stop Obama. And why he effectively threw in the towel?

It comes to this. The Republican establishment can’t stand someone outside of the political class gaining power. That is why Romney and some other elites have said that they will not vote for Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee. There is them, the political class, right or left. And then there are the outsiders. Part of the outsiders is the great unwashed, otherwise called blue-collar workers. I will come back to them.

White House Working on Renewed Mideast Peace Push The U.S. is discussing plans to revive Middle East talks before Obama leaves office, including possible Security Council resolution, senior U.S. officials say By Carol E. Lee and Rory Jones

LAME DUCK EFFORT TO WEAKEN ISRAEL RSK
The White House is working on plans for reviving long-stalled Middle East negotiations before President Barack Obama leaves office, including a possible United Nations Security Council resolution that would outline steps toward a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, according to senior U.S. officials.

The internal discussions are aimed at offering a blueprint for future Israeli-Palestinian talks in a bid to advance a critical foreign-policy initiative that has made little progress during Mr. Obama’s two terms in the White House, the officials said.

The strongest element on the list of options under consideration would be U.S. support for a Security Council resolution calling on both sides to compromise on key issues, something Israel had opposed and Washington has repeatedly vetoed in the past.

Other initiatives could include a presidential speech and a joint statement from the Middle East Quartet, an international group comprising the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

A senior administration official said no final decisions have been made and that Mr. Obama is considering a range of possibilities. The timing of any new White House move hasn’t been determined, but officials said it would be later this year.

The White House offered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a meeting with Mr. Obama later this month, but Mr. Netanyahu declined, administration officials said Monday.

By wading into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the final months of his presidency, Mr. Obama would be following a path some of his predecessors have taken. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both pushed for an agreement late in their second terms, but neither was able to bridge longtime divisions between the two sides. CONTINUE AT SITE

The subversion of American Evangelicals :Caroline Glick

The largest Evangelical communities remain solidly supportive of Israel, and their size dwarfs that of the rising forces of replacement theology and its concomitant hatred of Israel.

Monday the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’s hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, will run through the week.

Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.

But will this support last? One of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 elections is Evangelical support for businessman Donald Trump. Trump in many ways personifies everything that people who take the Bible seriously are supposed to oppose. He owns casinos. He curses and uses profanity in his public appearances. He has donated to Planned Parenthood and forcefully supported abortions on demand.

Trump has also insisted repeatedly that he will be neutral toward Israel.

Notable & Quotable: Restore Western Civ at Stanford- Students seek a vote on requiring two quarters of study.

From the Stanford Review editorial board’s “The Case for a Western Civilization Requirement at Stanford,” Feb. 21:

National debates erupted over Stanford’s decision to remove Western Culture requirements during the 1980s. We believe the University must reignite a national debate and reinstate a Western Civilization requirement. Therefore, the Stanford Review is petitioning to place an initiative on the undergraduate spring ballot urging the Faculty Senate to instate a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement, replacing Thinking Matters. The initiative text reads:
“In accordance with Stanford’s commitment to educating its students, and in recognition of the unique role Western culture has had in shaping our political, economic, and social institutions, Stanford University should mandate that freshmen complete a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement covering the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.” . . .

Western civilization, more so than any other, unleashes disruptive technology on the world; and Western history brims with examples of technological revolutions and their effects on warfare, politics, culture, economics, and poverty. Technologists and policymakers working on driverless cars, for example, would surely benefit from knowledge of how transportation innovations impacted urbanization patterns, employment, and culture.

But these future business and government leaders will not have this insight. 59% of Stanford’s Class of 2019 intends to major in engineering. These students will not know the history that society needs them to grasp. Stanford must equip these students with the knowledge necessary to attain “direct usefulness in life,” as our Founding Grant requires.

BRET STEPHENS: THE RETURN OF THE 1930s

Donald Trump’s demagoguery may be a foretaste of what’s to come.

In temperament, he was “bombastic, inconsistent, shallow and vainglorious.” On political questions, “he made up his own reality as he went along.” Physically, the qualities that stood out were “the scowling forehead, the rolling eyes, the pouting mouth.” His “compulsive exhibitionism was part of his cult of machismo.” He spoke “in short, strident sentences.” Journalists mocked his “absurd attitudinizing.”

Remind you of someone?

The description of Benito Mussolini comes from English historian Piers Brendon’s definitive history of the 1930s, “The Dark Valley.” So does this mean that Donald Trump is the second coming of Il Duce, or that yesteryear’s Fascists are today’s Trumpkins? Not exactly. But that doesn’t mean we should be indifferent to the parallels with the last dark age of Western politics.

Among the parallels: The growing belief that democracy is rigged. That charisma matters more than ideas. That strength trumps principles. That coarseness is refreshing, authentic.

Also, that immigrants are plundering the economy. That the world’s agonies are someone else’s problem. That free trade is a game of winners and losers—in which we are the invariable losers. That the rest of the world plays us for suckers. That our current leaders are not who they say they are, or where they say they are from. That they are conspiring against us.

These are perennial attitudes in any democracy, but usually marginal ones. They gained strength in the 1920s and ’30s because the old liberal order had been shattered—first at Gallipoli, Verdun and Caporetto; then with the Bolshevik coup in Russia, hyperinflation in Germany, Black Tuesday in the United States. “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?” wondered T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” in 1922. Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome the same year. CONTINUE AT SITE

Clinton Hacker Extradited to U.S. Jim Swift

Romanian hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel — better known as Guccifer — is being extradited to the United States, say news reports.

The hacker has scored many notable victims in recent years, including Hillary Clinton shadow adviser Sid Blumenthal.

Guccifer once bragged to PANDO that “I used to read [Clinton’s] memos… and then do the gardening.”

As the Daily Caller has previously reported, Guccifer’s hacking has played a role in the Clinton email scandal:

Sidney Blumenthal emailed Hillary Clinton at least two intelligence reports about Libya which were not included in the trove of 296 emails released by the State Department on Friday.

Clinton has claimed that in December she turned over all official government emails she sent or received from her personal account while in office. In turn, the agency has claimed it turned all Clinton emails related to Libya or Benghazi over to the House Select Committee investigating the Benghazi attack.

But a screenshot of Blumenthal’s email inbox, which the Romanian hacker Guccifer published in March 2013, shows two reports about Libya emailed to Clinton which were not released in Friday’s batch.

It’s not known whether Guccifer’s extradition is in any way connected to the investigation into Clinton’s private email server.

Clinton’s Laughable Claim: Petraeus Offense Was Worse By Andrew C. McCarthy

Last week’s Washington Post bombshell, the news that the Justice Department has given immunity from prosecution to the former State Department staffer who maintained Hillary Clinton’s “homebrew” email server, is forcing Mrs. Clinton and her apologists to alter their media strategy.

For months it has been obvious that a serious criminal investigation of the former secretary of State’s reckless mishandling of classified information has been underway. Yet Camp Clinton has maintained that the government is merely engaged in a “security inquiry” that is focused on the physical server itself — not a probe of criminal suspects. This has never made sense. The FBI, which has assigned many agents to the case, is in the criminal investigation business.

Plus, when the now-immunized former staffer, Bryan Pagliano, invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege in refusing to testify before the House Benghazi committee, it signaled that he feared truthful answers would incriminate him.

Now with Pagliano apparently poised to cooperate with the FBI, the claim that Mrs. Clinton is not a criminal suspect is untenable. So Clinton and her supporters are changing tack: instead of implausibly insisting there is no crime to investigate, they argue that there is no crime worth prosecuting.

This narrative was first floated a few months ago. The story goes like this: retired General David Petraeus, the former CIA director, committed a classified information offense that — according to Clintonistas — was far more serious than Mrs. Clinton’s conduct, yet Petraeus was permitted to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count. Ergo, a prosecution of Mrs. Clinton over her comparatively minor misconduct cannot be justified.

NURIT GREENGER: C.H.I.P. RECEIVES ENDORSEMENT BY TENNESSEE LEGISLATORS

– Nurit Greenger, Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program (C.H.I.P) Founder & President introduced the Program to the Tennessee Legislators in Nashville, Tennessee, causing a wave of great interest and much support.C.H.I.P‘s entire vision began with Whitwell [Tennessee] Middle School Paper Clips Project and the Whitwell Children Holocaust Memorial. This is a project about the discrimination of others, about the Holocaust, the result of the Nazis discrimination of Jews. Whitwell Middle School Paper Clips Project has set the case in point that a change could be made, one young student at the time.
For the past two years C.H.I.P, that has set itself up to the task to take middle school students to Israel and thus start building a generation with the emphasize on the teaching of basic western values of tolerance and indiscriminating behavior, along the values that are captured in the Ten Commandments, has been gathering growing support.
“C.H.I.P, means chipping away at ignorance” stated Mrs. Linda Hooper, the visionary of the Paper Clips Project, who is leading the way for 22 Whitwell Middle School students and 10 chaperones to partake in the C.H.I.P Project this coming May, 2016.
Assisted by Lydia Taylor of Hayovel who initiated the Tennessee legislators’ introduction to C.H.I.P, this past week in February, Ms. Greenger was invited to meet with the several Tennessee legislators: Tennessee General Assembly Senator Janice Bowling, David Alexander-Tennessee State Representative and Randy Boyd Commissioner, Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. The visit has captured the endorsement of C.H.I.P by the legislators.

Renowned scholar of Islam Patrick Sookhdeo provides a good primer into the Islamic State By Andrew Harrod, PhD

Who supports the Islamic State (ISIS) and why do Sunni nations seem to tolerate it?

Patrick Sookhdeo, a Muslim convert to Christianity and scholar of Islamic faith and politics, “suggests a pessimistic prospect; Islamic State is likely to remain a persistent threat, even if it suffers overwhelming defeats.” So reads his recent book Unmasking Islamic State: Revealing Their Motivation, Theology, and End Time Predictions, an insightful primer into the Islamic State (IS) jihadist polity currently ravaging Mesopotamia and beyond.

Islamic State “is the most well organized Sunni jihadi organization in the Middle East and may well have the most sophisticated structure of any terrorist organization currently active,” Sookhdeo writes. Islamic State presents an alliance of convenience between high ranking military officers and officials from Saddam Hussein’s deposed Baathist dictatorship and jihadist organizations that originally fought Iraq’s American-led regime change. The result is a “powerful fusion of Salafi/Jihadi ideology with professional military and counterintelligence strategies and urban warfare tactics, as well as bureaucratic know how needed to run state.”

“With the declaration of the caliphate Islamic State has become the leading jihadi group worldwide, supplanting Al-Qaeda [AQ] as perceived leader of the radical Islamist movements,” assesses Sookhdeo. Kidnapping for extortion, looting of bank gold deposits and other valuables like antiquities, and black market oil sales mean that “Islamic State has become the richest jihadi organization in the world,” worth over $2 billion in some estimates. Having “constructed a viable territorial state,” Islamic State “is constantly opening up new, unexpected fronts and bringing other jihadi groups under its umbrella” globally. The “information strategy now employed by Patrick Sookhdeo, Andrew Harrod, Islamic State, Saudi, ISIS, ISIL makes most of Al-Qaeda’s efforts seem old-fashioned.”

How to force Donald Trump to release his taxes: To figure out what he’s hiding, the press must start playing hardball with the Republican frontrunner by Gabriel Schoenfeld

Donald Trump is a lying liar. His fabrications and confabulations are too numerous to tally. At the same time, his falsehoods do not halt his progress. The press dutifully records them. The public dutifully reads about them and absorbs them. And Trump and his loyal followers march forward to the Republican presidential nomination and possibly the White House.

It need not be this way. Take one of the more important matters in the presidential vetting process: personal tax returns.

In January, just before the Iowa caucuses, Trump suggested to NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the release of his returns was imminent: “We’re working on that now. I have big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time.”Subsequently, Trump told CNN that he couldn’t release his returns because he is being audited, suggesting that perhaps he’d been singled out by the IRS because he is “a strong Christian.”

On yet another occasion, Trump has promised that “I will absolutely give my return, but I’m being audited now for two or three years, so I can’t do it until the audit is finished, obviously.”

On another occasion, he has explained that he can’t release his returns because “four or five years” of them are under audit.