RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ruth-king/high-noon-for-america-the-coming-showdown/

Reprinted From Family Security Matters.

To order High Noon For America, The Coming Showdown, click here.

While the nation was focused on the economy, Jamie Glazov, to his great credit, gathered a stellar group of intellectuals to conduct a series of roundtable discussions on the Middle East and Arab/Muslim extremism; Russia’s renewed aggressiveness; America’s possible military decline; the unending search for moderation in Islam; energy independence; and breaking away from the leftist cult and dogma.

Dr. Glazov, who holds a Ph.D. in History with specialties in U.S., Russian, and Canadian foreign policy, is editor of Frontpage.com where these symposiums appeared. They are now compiled in his new book, “High Noon for America: The Coming Showdown.” As harbingers of our present national crisis, they are essential reading.

How timely and ironic that the first chapter is titled “The Mismanaged War Against Libya” (March 2011) and deals with our response to the uprising against Qaddafi. Lt. General Miahil Pacepa was the highest official to defect from the Soviet Union. Here are his prescient words:

“All we know for certain about the “freedom fighters” opposing Gaddafi is that they fight with Kalashnikov in hand, and that Kalashnikovs have no history of promoting freedom…A recent article in Le Monde goes a step further, revealing that these “brave Libyan freedom fighters” are dominated by jihadists espousing the same complaints of “Westoxification” accompanied by the Jew-hatred and broader infidel-hatred that permeates the Arab world.”

For good measure Robert Spencer reminds us:

“But he (Obama) didn’t explain how acting forcibly to remove Gaddafi would indeed be in America’s best interests….It is unlikely that he will be succeeded by Thomas Jefferson. The fact that Gaddafi is a reprehensible human being and no friend of the United States does not automatically turn his opponents into Thomas Paine.”

In the chapter “The Shadow of the KGB” (February 2011), Glazov assembles a group of Soviet dissidents including Vladimir Bukovsky, Pavel Stroilov, Lt. General Ion Pacepa, with intellectuals and academics to discuss Russia’s renewed aggressiveness and nuclear buildup.

Glazov is a splendid moderator whose own background in the Soviet Union gives him a unique window into current policies. He begins the discussion by reminding the reader that the United States ostensibly uprooted evil Soviet ideology in 1991, and Russia is seen as a friend and discounted as an adversary although much of its ideology and government are still controlled former KGB officers and their acolytes. Not quite a “reset” as some would have it.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/insecure-obama-insecure-world/ The United States has had good presidents and bad, but it has never had a leader who came to a debate on national security with so much insecurity. It was a small petty man who sat on the other side of the screen, alternately smirking and scowling, grinding his teeth and launching attack after […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/331125/first-aid-living-bing-west A U.S. ambassador is missing and his diplomatic team is desperately fighting off terrorist attacks. Our commander-in-chief and his national-security team in Washington are listening to the phone calls from the Americans under attack and watching real-time video from a drone circling overhead. Yet the U.S. military sends no aid. Why? On September 11, […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/331305/tortoise-ties-hares-concerned-stanley-kurtz

During the first half of the debate, Romney was playing for a tie while Obama was playing for a win. That made a certain sense. As commander-in-chief, Obama has an inherent advantage on foreign policy. So long as Romney stands toe-to-toe and achieves a rough equality with a sitting president on foreign policy, he gains credibility and keeps his momentum in this race. Even so, there was a danger at first that Obama’s attacks and his generally strong posture would give him a win. (I mean “posture,” in part, literally. Some might not have liked Obama’s forward stare and general demeanor, but I thought it was effective.)

Partway through the debate, however, Romney started pushing for the win. His pivot to the economy might have seemed like evasion, but Obama followed him into domestic policy because he saw the risk of not answering the challenge. This put Romney on familiar ground and you could see his confidence grow.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/331318

Dan Senor, a senior Romney adviser, says President Barack Obama’s criticism of Mitt Romney’s Israel trip was “pathetic.”Romney has been to Israel four times, Senor said tonight when speaking to reporters. Obama, he pointed out, has never been there as president. Obama’s posturing on Israel was thus a “cheap shot,” Senor said, and “sort of pathetic.”

“President Obama, as president, has been to over 40 countries. He hasn’t been to Israel,” Senor said. “He can talk all he wants about how significant his trip was as senator. But for presidents, geography is policy.”

In 2009, “[Obama] deliberately chose not to go to Israel,” Senor said. “On that outreach to the Arab world, he could have hopped on a 30- or 40-minute plane ride and made it clear that he stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.”

Senor, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations, advised Romney during debate prep, and has been a top aide to Paul Ryan on the campaign trail.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/habibi-a-moroccan-poet-sings-to-his-love/

Habibi: The Diwan of Alim Maghrebi [1] is a new book of poems by Canadian poet-essayist and frequent PJ Media contributor David Solway. It belongs to his acclaimed series of “translations” of imaginary foreign poets. In this case the ostensible poet, Alim Maghrebi, is a Moroccan who, as Solway tells us in his ostensible introduction, belongs to the (actually existing) school of “new Arab poetry” — “a poetic alloy…of ancestral themes and preoccupations modulated in the language of the street, the newspaper, movies, technology and the Internet.”

Moreover, the introduction tells us, Maghrebi alludes pervasively to the (historical) Meccan poet Umar ibn Abi Rabi’a (644-721), “who was famed for his lyrics lamenting the melancholy transience of love….” Habibi is, indeed, an extended paean and plaint to Maghrebi’s habibi (loved one)—a nameless young Moroccan woman who consumes his days with passions, exaltations, fears, and mortifications.

Habibi is also, simply, a delight from start to finish. Readers who may be chary of today’s often demanding poetry will find this book to be written in a simple and direct, yet poignant and musical language that rises and falls with Maghrebi’s mercurial responses to his fickle, often evasive lover.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/331341/cold-steel-mark-steyn
I doubt President Obama’s tossing of the Bayonet Lobby under the bus will prove to be the critical issue with undecided swing voters in Ohio, but, just for the record, bayonets have played a role in both our recent wars. Afghanistan:

The 24-year-old officer [Lt. James Adamson], a member of the 5th battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, revealed that he shouted “have some of this” before shooting dead a gunman who had just emerged from a maize field.
Seconds later and out of ammunition, the lieutenant leapt over a river bank and killed a second insurgent machine-gunner with a single thrust of his bayonet in the man’s chest…
“I either wasted vital seconds changing the magazine on my rifle or went over the top and did it more quickly with the bayonet.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/a_most_pathetic_debate_1.html The best word I can come up with to describe the final presidential debate is “pathetic.” No matter who wins, we’ve had it. What you just witnessed was the bipartisan abdication of American global leadership. Obama certainly “won” on style and personal attacks — insofar as such things actually matter. Romney gave his worst […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578073201446436838.html?mod=opinion_newsreel Mitt Romney needed to pass the usual tests for Republican presidential candidates in his debate Monday night with President Obama. There was the Ford test (alternatively known as the Palin/Cain/Perry test): Would Mr. Romney say something so obviously misinformed, so manifestly silly, so revealingly ignorant as to disqualify him from serious consideration as a […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203406404578073260317607692.html?mod=opinion_newsreel About 45 minutes into Monday night’s Presidential debate on foreign policy, we found ourselves asking which of the two men on stage in Boca Raton was the incumbent and which was the challenger. President Obama kept attacking Mitt Romney for various things he had said or claimed he had said, while the Republican mostly […]