http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/iraq-joins-iran%e2%80%99s-axis/print/ Back in 2004 King Abdullah of Jordan, a moderate Sunni, warned that the empowerment of Iraq’s Shiite majority in the Iraq War would mean creating a Shiite crescent—a belligerent, extremist continuum stretching all the way from Iran to Hizbullah-dominated Lebanon. Eight years later, U.S. attempts to create a pluralist Iraqi democracy have instead yielded […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/15-billion-bin-ladens Amidst the graffiti on the wall outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, one of the rioters scrawled “1.5 Billion Bin Ladens.” Last time I heard, the last thing bin Laden saw was a member of Seal Team Six just before he took a bullet to the head. That is the way a nation that […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-ghost-of-bertold-brecht-and-the-balkanization-of-america?f=puball Would it not be simpler if the government dissolved the people and elected another? Bertold Brecht (1898-1956), German playwright Bertold Brecht’s name is now largely lost to history, but the idea expressed in the succinct question above remains as potent today as when he uttered it. Brecht, a self-made Marxist who was once investigated […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/disastrous-foreign-policy-reflects-a-disastrous-presidency The “unexpected” nature of the pandemic of chaos throughout the Middle East is really no different than any of the other unanticipated problems now confronting the Obama Administration. Certainly, the $831 billion dollar “stimulus” of early 2009 should have had the nation’s economy humming by now, with Main Street thriving on account of all […]
The Post-American Middle East http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444620104578006173214696856.html?mod=opinion_newsreel#articleTabs%3Darticle Another day, another installment in what President Obama likes to call the “receding” tide of war. On Wednesday, John Kerry threatened to cut U.S. aid to Baghdad unless the Iraqi government blocks overflights of Iranian planes suspected of ferrying military supplies to Damascus. But Baghdad isn’t budging. Welcome to the […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578005880751641560.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop We can’t declare a unilateral end to our troubles, or avert our gaze from the disorder that afflicts the societies of the Greater Middle East. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment—a U.S. Embassy and its staff seized and held hostage for 444 days, America’s enemies taking stock of its weakness, its allies running […]
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/09/20/dinesh-dsouza-is-right/ There is a school of thought, ably represented by First Things editor R.R. Reno, that blames the leftward drift in American higher education for Barack Obama’s resentment of the United States, rather than his Third World upbringing. The estimable Dr. Reno, who is a friend and former colleague, called D’Souza’s film 2016 “misguided” in […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-12-step-guide-for-the-recovering-obama-voter/
“My name is Craig K., and I’m an Obamaholic.” That’s the confession with which Craig Karpel opens The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter [1]. It’s meant, of course, to be an aid not just to addicted individuals but also to a society that’s taken a wrong turn and gone off the rails.
And, analogously to the addicted individual, the first requirement is accurately targeting the blame: “the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault — it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.” And that includes “those of us who didn’t vote for him, because we didn’t persuade enough other people not to.”
In other words, this book offers itself as a curative to a whole country that has “hit bottom,” as Karpel puts it, as the national debt reaches staggering levels, the numbers of those unemployed and living off the dole continue to burgeon, and the world scene descends into a Hobbesian nightmare as Iran strides unimpeded toward nukes and Islamists take the helm in Egypt and a raft of other countries.
What brought things to such a pass? What enabled Americans to enable “a man with no administrative experience to run the largest organization on earth”? Why was Obama elected without “carefully examining [his] background, character, career, and plans,” while ignoring the fact that he lacked any record of significant achievements?
In the framework of his 12 Steps, modeled loosely on those of AA, Karpel looks for the answers.
For one thing, “we became hooked on a political cult that…presented a politician as a messianic figure.” It’s the left, says Karpel, that’s truly “faith-based,” attributing “providential potency to government.” Government under the left’s dispensation, with the “philosopher-king” Obama at the helm, became a “primitive idolatrous pagan church in which, as the ancient Egyptian fertility god Osiris was superstitiously believed to have the power to make grain grow, the president of the United States is superstitiously believed to have the power to make initial unemployment claims shrink” — along with other miracles, while taking steps reflecting European-style statist fantasies instead of experience and prudence.
In electing Obama, America also fell for charisma “instead of valuing only character.” Whereas Bush 43 “offended sophisticates by acknowledging a supreme being rather than pretending to be one,” Obama dissed American exceptionalism while projecting himself as what was truly exceptional, “the appointed person…at the appointed time.” And, taken in by his charismatic mien, people fell for it.
Good old elitism was another Siren luring the ship off course, “the belief that those with certain credentials” — such as Obama’s Harvard background — “constitute an elite whose members have a right to rule.” This while ignoring the fact (except that slice of voters who are far to the left and welcomed it) that ’60s and ’70s radicals have turned the universities into left-wing hothouses — a milieu well manifested in Obama’s quixotic “stimulus” attempt, Solyndra debacle, and appointment of 42 elite “czars” (an example of what Karpel calls “crony anticapitalism”)
And, perhaps most perniciously since it sows social discord, Obama, says Karpel, got Americans addicted to blaming others. “[N]ever before,” Karpel writes, “has there been a president whose central discourse is about blame.” As the U.S. economy continues to tank, Obama goes on blaming his predecessor, George W. Bush, for the woes. But it’s not only that. On pages 52-56 of this e-pamphlet, Karpel has compiled an impressive list of Obama’s malicious attributions of blame to others, ranging from ATMs to auto manufacturers, from Standard & Poor’s to “stupid” police in Cambridge, Massachusetts (for arresting his friend Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). And the habit is catching, as Obama turns Americans against each other and cultivates group antagonisms.
As November 6 looms and the race appears close, Karpel hopes this book will make a difference. He suggests setting up house meetings of Obama Voters Anonymous to “work” its 12 Steps, creating Facebook events, and disseminating the link by Twitter and email. It sounds worth trying; as an American Israeli with an added Middle Eastern perspective on the harm this president has wrought, I hope these ideas catch. There are, of course, those who will vote for Obama no matter what. Polls, though, continue to show considerable ranks of the undecided, people who could potentially be reached by this book’s friendly, empathic approach.
But even if you’ve never dreamed of voting for Obama and aren’t the organizing type, this short, addictive book is one you shouldn’t miss. Distinguished by lean, pungent prose laced with wit, it’s a deeply insightful compendium of where things stand after four years of disastrous executive bungling, and offers a path out of the mess before it’s too late.
Introduction: The Obama you don’t know
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama#.UFsQT41lQ18#LPFWLP_S
Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.
Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end…
Chapter I: A childhood of privilege, not hardship
First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that “Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions.”
It is…
Chapter II: The myth of the ‘rock-star professor’
Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama’s 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, “Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with…
Chapter III: The 1997 speech that launched Obama
Few doubt that Barack Obama’s stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted him into the national limelight.
But another, less-heralded Obama address –…
Chapter IV: For the slumlord’s defense, Barack Obama, Esq.
Writing in his 1995 autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama said he became “a civil rights lawyer” because “to lend meaning to a community’s suffering and take part in its healing — that…
Chapter V: Obama’s toughest critics on the Left
Barack Obama’s carefully constructed image as a civil rights lawyer who wanted to heal the black community was greeted with skepticism by some Chicago activists.
“I never drank the…
Chapter VI: The poor people Obama left behind
Four years after Barack Obama’s historic election as president, little seems to have changed for the African-American communities on Chicago’s South Side.
The lack of change — or the…
Chapter VII: The myth of Obama as state Senate reformer
Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Prairie State Blue, a liberal blog, attributed his victory to the fact that Illinois’ deeply entrenched government corruption had…
Chapter VIII: Obama’s state pension scheme
State Sen. Barack Obama and members of an Illinois lobbying group representing politically connected minority-owned businesses launched a campaign in 2000 to pressure state pension funds to help…
Chapter IX: The Arab-American network behind Obama
President Obama’s controversial relationships with radical figures like Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi have been well-publicized in recent years.
Prior to his academic…
Chapter X: Obama brings Chicago politics to Washington
Chicago has been called the home of “gangster government.” How bad is it?
Consider the following facts about the city from which President Obama rose through the ranks of American public…
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5057/features/at-last-zion/
Nearly 15 years ago in the Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer wrote that “the end of Israel means the end of the Jewish people.” His reasons are perhaps even more relevant in today’s atmosphere of nuclear threat than they were when the article was first published. The essay is reprinted here by permission of the author. —The Editors
THIS IS A WONDERFUL COLUMN BUT IN THOSE 15 YEARS MR. KRAUTHAMMER HAS TRIPPED UP QUITE OFTEN IN FAILING TO SEE THE FAITH DRIVEN JIHAD AGAINST ISRAEL, CALLING GEERT WILDERS A “FASCIST” AND JUMPING UP AND DOWN ON THE ARAB “SPRING”BOARD…..RSK
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I. A SMALL NATION
Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as “one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear, and it knows it.”
The United States is not a small nation. Neither is Japan. Or France. These nations may suffer defeats. They may even be occupied. But they cannot disappear. Kundera’s Czechoslovakia could—and once did. Prewar Czechoslovakia is the paradigmatic small nation: a liberal democracy created in the ashes of war by a world determined to let little nations live free; threatened by the covetousness and sheer mass of a rising neighbor; compromised fatally by a West grown weary “of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”; left truncated and defenseless, succumbing finally to conquest. When Hitler entered Prague in March 1939, he declared, “Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist.”
Israel too is a small country. This is not to say that extinction is its fate. Only that it can be.
Moreover, in its vulnerability to extinction, Israel is not just any small country. It is the only small country—the only period, period—whose neighbors publicly declare its very existence an affront to law, morality, and religion and make its extinction an explicit, paramount national goal. Nor is the goal merely declarative. Iran, Libya, and Iraq conduct foreign policies designed for the killing of Israelis and the destruction of their state. They choose their allies (Hamas, Hezbollah) and develop their weapons (suicide bombs, poison gas, anthrax, nuclear missiles) accordingly. Countries as far away as Malaysia will not allow a representative of Israel on their soil nor even permit the showing of Schindler’s List lest it engender sympathy for Zion.
