http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444799904578050954175915378.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_ A contemptuous Joe Biden showed up in Kentucky on Thursday, and spent 90 minutes talking over Paul Ryan, talking over moderator Martha Raddatz, and at times, remarkably, even talking over himself. This is what counts as a “win” for the Obama campaign at this stage in the 2012 campaign. The judgment of the late-night […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2265/Benghazi-Burns-and-Petraeus-Goes-to-Princeton.aspx Two weeks ago, I wondered whether CIA Director Petraeus was politicizing the intelligence after a source told Fox News on September 27 that three days after the Benghazi assault, Petraeus briefed the House Intelligence Committee that “Benghazi was an out-of-control demonstration prompted by the YouTube video. According to the source, this was `shocking’ to […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443749204578051073494711456.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop The Veep’s strategy: Show contempt for your opponent. So now we know what Team Obama’s comeback plan was following last week’s defeat in the Presidential debate. Unleash Joe Biden to interrupt, filibuster, snarl, smirk and otherwise show contempt for Paul Ryan. The carnival act contributed to the least illuminating presidential or vice presidential debate […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/decency_vs_depravity.html#ixzz2954iDpwg
You have to hand it to Barack Obama — no matter what your other opinions of him. It is a downright marvel how he has managed to cram his hundredweight of hubris into the little two-ounce drawstring snuff pouch which is his otherwise unremarkable mind. How else to explain the stunning subterfuge he tried to pull on us — and on the whole world — in the last few weeks? Blaming American laws and freedoms for permitting a citizen nobody to make a movie which Obama falsely maintained stampeded an Arab-mob-that-wasn’t, to cover for his failure to protect his own envoy and three other good men from sanguinary and unspeakable torture-mutilation-murder by a pack of assassin rape-butchers? Thence flying off the next day in splendor to Oz, to blithely extort mountains more lucre from his cultic worshippers?
Richard III had nothing on this moral cripple.
A man willing to do and say these things will do and say anything at all. How likely does it now seem that the bin Laden saga happened as he told it?
Granted, there is nothing unique about the rise of rapacious misfits who gravitate to government, slavering for ever more power. They’ve appeared throughout history, often getting very far before they’re stopped. Yet even the dour and humorless defenders of the honor of the prophet were not roused to mass “demonstrations” by the farcically inept “movie” of which Obama and his harridan secretary made so much. But it gives daunting pause to think that the American people should be complacent any longer about this recrudescence in its midst. Perhaps our historical moment of character and courage is sadly past. We’ll know very soon. The choice is between decency and depravity. This election is about nothing less.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/bidens_strategy_be_a_jerk.html
Is there a human being on this Earth more obnoxious than Joe Biden? It appears that the following was his strategy in the vice-presidential debate:
“Okay, I’ll smile wide like a used-car salesman, shake my head, and laugh while Paul Ryan is talking. This will give all watching the idea that everything he says is nonsense. The only other option is to actually support my side with real ideas, sound reasoning, and appeals to virtue. I can’t do that!
“The other thing I need to do is make myself look assertive, like a real alpha male, by interrupting my opponent continuously. Hey, then if TOTUS and I lose the election anyway, I may still be able to take a leaf out of Bob Dole’s book and do commercials for male enhancement — of course, in my case it would be testosterone booster.”
You know, as is so often the case in these debates, the arguments in the VP contest were a bit policy-wonkish. So most viewers probably couldn’t know exactly what was true and what wasn’t. Given this, will the electorate’s judgment as to who won come down to likeability? If so, I can’t imagine that undecided voters wouldn’t have found Biden disrespectful and his personality thoroughly unappealing.
If Barack Obama’s problem in Denver was bad altitude, Biden’s was bad attitude. So while we’ll have to see what polls tell us, I myself just had the strongest urge to wipe his obnoxious smile off his face with a scouring pad and harsh detergent.
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/10/11/america-wont-survive-another-four-years-of-obama/
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The America of 2012 is not the America of 2008. If Barack Obama wins this election, the America of 2016 will resemble the beaten and bankrupt countries of Western Europe more than it will the America we grew up in. This isn’t Chicken Little speaking. Take a hard look at the trends, and then drop everything else you had in mind for the next four weeks, and make sure everyone you know votes for Romney-Ryan. We have one last chance to save the republic.
1) Dependency on government handouts: As Dick Morris points out in his latest book Here Come the Black Helicopters!, 20% of Americans received some kind of means-tested government check in 2008, when George W. Bush left office. Now 32% of Americans get some kind of means-tested support — food stamps, disability, welfare, and so forth. That’s a third of the country. Transfer payments are now fully one-fifth of personal income, as I observed in an essay last year. Obama’s arbitrary and perhaps illegal changes in welfare work requirements create a cycle of dependency, as the Romney campaign has warned. They also create a built-in majority for the welfare state. Morris observes that the shift to dependency gives the Democrats a majority on paper. The only question now is turnout. Give this another four years, and the number of Americans who have a stake in economic growth will be a minority of the population.
2) Religious commitment: The Pew Institute’s bombshell survey released this week showed that the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion rose from 15% in 2007 to almost 20% in 2011, and that the unaffiliated are much likelier to vote Democratic (63% of unaffiliated lean Democratic vs. 48% of all registered voters).
This prompted rejoicing in the liberal camp. Writing in the London Guardian, Sarah Posner argued that
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/russias-constant-interference-in-ukraine
America is in need of allies in Eastern Europe. Two states there are excellent choices for the U.S. to cultivate. One, Poland, is already a fast friend. But the other, Ukraine, is a fairly new friend, and one the U.S. should work harder to cultivate. One thing is sure, Russia is doing her utmost to meddle in the Ukraine and we must be aware of that fact in our dealings in the region.
One of the stumbling blocks to U.S. understanding of the situation in Ukraine is the recent arrest and conviction of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and the success that Russia’s version of the story has achieved here in the U.S. Too many in the west imagine that she was arrested by a Ukraine backsliding into a Soviet-styled police state where all opposition leaders are squelched. This, however, just isn’t the case.
Unfortunately, the U.S. senate recently pushed a resolution threatening sanctions against Ukraine for the arrest proving that the Senate has fallen for the overly simplistic narrative that Tymoshenko was arrested on “politicized” charges.
But the truth is, Tymoshenko was tried on the quite legitimate charges of contempt of court and corruption. Tymoshenko was involved in corruption that was aimed at returning Ukraine to the control of the Russians, or if not Russia’s direct control, at the very least Russia’s heavy influence.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1774/a_storm_of_massive_proportions_is_brewing_in_the_mideast
The region is splitting apart and ready to explode out of its largely artificial boundaries along two major fault lines, ethnic and religious, writes a former senior editor of the Jerusalem Post
“The Arab Spring, which was hailed – wrongly – in the West as signalling the birth of democracy in the Middle East, is more likely to be the prelude to a regional and global convulsion. If so, it is time to prepare for epochal change.”
Europe’s political and media classes are missing the point. Lazy, ignorant or both, they persist in reading from a clapped-out, 30-year-old script – if it was accurate even then – when they declaim on Middle East affairs. As if the “occupation”, the “settlements”, the “tunnel”, the “wall” and other “crisis issues” are the cause of the all world’s ills; as if the birth of Palestine holds the key to tranquillity and peace, perhaps even utopia. Solve the Palestinian problem and you solve the problems of the world. Or at least the region. Wrong then, wrong now, according to a senior Arab political source. “Make no mistake,” he told me earnestly over dinner last week, “We are on the brink of a catastrophe. And it has nothing whatever to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
He added:
“The Palestinians have never been among the top-10 priorities of any Arab government. Arab leaders don’t give a damn about the Palestinians. They have simply used the Palestinian issue to divert attention from their own failures – to cover up their ineptitude, inadequacies and corruption. Their oppressive security measures were never meant to combat ‘Zionist aggression’ but to suppress the anger of their own people. It’s been an exercise in cynicism, pure and simple. And even Western governments swallowed it.”
Now, he says, the Arab world – and the wider Islamic world – is facing reality. It is a reality that has nothing to do with the Arab Spring, democracy, freedom and liberty. Nor does it have anything to do with rage-fuelled violence supposedly incited by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, conspiracy theories about Western imperialism, Jewish influence-peddling, crusader aggression, insulting cartoons or YouTube videos (though such pretexts are often used to justify pre-ordained spasms of violence).
EU Nobel Peace Prize is more farcical than Obama’s The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in what can only be described as a travesty and a complete farce
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1795/eu_nobel_peace_prize_is_more_farcical_than_obama_s
You’d be forgiven for thinking it was April 1st. It’s not. It’s just another one of those sad moments in the decline of Western civilisation.
Today, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to one of the least democratic institutions in the Western world: The European Union.
Mired in decades of waste and hypocrisy that impoverish the world (see the Common Agricultural Policy), the European Union, it is a travesty to award the peace prize to the EU. The award, if one was going to be attributed to a supranational body, should have gone to NATO for saving millions of Libyans from a grizzly end at the whim of Colonel Gaddafi last year.
But instead, in all their Obama-fawning wisdom, the Nobel Committee has this year decided that the EU has turned Europe from a continent of war into a continent of peace. Funny, we thought that honour should have gone to the Allies during the Second World War. This kind of revisionism should of course be objected to across the board, as the Nobel committee’s decision to pre-emptively award Obama the prize in 2009 was. Since the award three years ago, Obama has presided over a grizzly few years in Afghanistan, kept Guatanamo Bay open, invested in drone warfare and ‘extra-judicial’ killings and has also, through his failure to assert a dominant foreign policy, allowed the Middle East to become even more unpredictable for the US and wider world.
The Nobel Peace Prize is continuing to delegitimise itself in this manner, and frankly acting as nothing more than a public relations firm for Left-leaning individuals and institutions. This trend is increasing.
Once noted as a fair and independent arbiter of peace in the world, the Nobel committee has recently awarded the peace prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore (2007) and the Hamas-excusing Jimmy Carter in 2002. The European Union is therefore in good company. As an organisation that hesitated over the Balkans conflict, that fails to recognise Hezbollah as a terrorist entity, and of course with a gross democratic deficit – there is genuinely no cause for it to be awarded such an ‘honour’.But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? The Nobel Peace Prize is no longer an honour. It’s a farce.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3394/alawites-syria Assad and the Alawites cannot give in. They are fighting for their very existence. The only way to end this civil war is to let them have control over their destiny — ether as an autonomous region in Syria or as an independent entity. The Alawites are a small, historically oppressed people, whose political […]
