RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/11/27/rice-bombs-in-meeting-with-senators/?print=1

As PJM’s Bridget Johnson reports, President Obama’s dice-rolling attempt to clear the path for Susan Rice to succeed Hillary Clinton appears to have bombed. Ms. Rice, the president’s ambassador to the UN, called for a meeting with three of her most vocal Republican critics — Senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC) and Kelly Ayotte (NH). The senators obliged her this morning and, evidently, came away from the meeting more troubled than ever.

The problem ought to be obvious: Rice cannot possibly have a good explanation for the preposterous story she was dispatched by the president to tell the country on the Sunday shows after the Benghazi atrocity in which Islamist terrorists killed four Americans.

The administration’s problem is reminiscent of the shoddy defense lawyer who is so taken in by his own spin that he can’t understand why others see right through it — a problem that the president’s adoring media exacerbates by not challenging him. We have our disagreements here at Ordered Liberty with Senators McCain and Graham, but neither they nor Sen. Ayotte are babes in the Washington woods, particularly on matters of national security and intelligence. Unless they were just dying to be won over by Ms. Rice (thankfully, they were not), they knew exactly what questions to ask — questions for which there are no good answers.

The administration’s line, parroted by everyone from Obama on down, is that Rice’s abysmal performance on the Sunday show came about because she, automaton-like, merely relayed what the intelligence community told her. This has always been absurd on its face and is especially unbecoming for an official who is asking to be promoted to even greater responsibilities.

The intelligence community, particularly the CIA, knew that the Benghazi operation was a terrorist attack while it was happening. The White House, including the president, no doubt, was also aware of the fact that a terrorist attack was underway. The State Department, of which Rice is a high ranking official, is not an outlier — it is actually part of the intelligence community, with a division called the “Bureau of Intelligence and Research” that is an intelligence agency and has access to all intel relevant to U.S. foreign policy. The players here were not in the dark, and if they had been they had the means to be brought up to speed quickly.

There is no sugar-coating this: the administration lied to to country about what happened. The massacre was a foreseeable result of Obama’s policy of empowering Islamists. Moreover, the massacre cut against the Obama campaign narrative that killing bin Laden had effectively destroyed al-Qaeda. The Mohammed movie was blamed in order to divert attention from those facts as the administration played out the clock until election day. Rice, an ambitious Obama loyalist, was sent out to convey the misleading version of events and dutifully complied.

Straightforward.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-politicians-war-on-science/?print=1 As Paula Bolyard noted [1] the other day, the “gotcha” game by the Democratic operatives with bylines to poison Republican candidates’ chances started early, with a loaded question to Marco Rubio: To read some of the reactions to Senator Marco Rubio’s comments on the age of the earth, you’d think that he’d proposed rounding […]

‘The Killing Has to Stop’ A Visit to the Home of Former Hostage Gilad Shalit By Dieter Bednarz

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/former-hostage-gilad-shalit-and-his-father-on-israel-conflict-with-gaza-a-869381-druck.html

PURE EVIDENCE HERE OF HOW A HOSTAGE AND HIS FAMILY THEN IDENTIFY WITH THE GOALS OF THE TERRORIST CAPTORS….AND TO HINK HOW MANY TERRORISTS WERE SET FREE IN ORDER TO GAIN THE RELEASE FO GILAD SHALIT…..RSK

Gilad Shalit, who spent more than five years in the hands of Hamas kidnappers, harbors no thoughts of revenge toward the Islamist group. And his father, who is beginning a political career, says that Israel needs to negotiate.

The hero of Gaza, as they called him, must be a late sleeper. The sun has already been shining for hours over the Mediterranean, shimmering in the distance, but still there is no movement on the second floor of the house in Galilee, where the shutters haven’t been opened yet. “Gilad, we have company,” Noam Shalit, 57, calls up to the second floor.

Smiling shyly, his son walks down a short flight of stairs into the kitchen, wearing a blue sweatshirt, jeans and sandals. Gilad Shalit, 26, a lanky young man with a soft handshake, is the most famous victim of Hamas since the radical Islamist group began fighting Israel, which it calls the “Zionist entity.” In June 2006, Hamas fighters attacked his army post, which was guarding the border to the Gaza Strip at the time, and kidnapped Shalit. On Oct. 18 of last year, after spending five years as a hostage, Shalit was released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fatal-flaws-in-the-reliance-upon-international-guarantees?f=puball When an earlier Secretary of State before Hillary Clinton, namely Condoleezza Rice, arrived several times in Jerusalem she pressured the then weak and embattled Israeli government of Ehud Olmert into continuing the dreary and one sided exercise of concessions to the Palestinian Arabs. The futile peace process, which has now existed through successive US […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/war-peace-and-wishful-thinking In one Seinfeld episode, Elaine Benes, the irrepressibly liberal camp follower, promiscuous skank, and social climber – and small screen progenitor of Sandra Fluke – remarks with reckless abandon and shameless gaucheness to a Leo Tolstoy scholar: “Although one wonders if War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it was, had […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-warning-to-president-obama-and-ali-khamenei It is worse than appeasement to negotiate a “deal” with the Islamic theocrats in the occupied Iran, because any deal struck with these mullahs is only another ruse for them to further their plans. The UN resolutions are nothing more than pieces of paper good for burning, they can pass them all they want, […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“Limited government deriving from individual freedom is the only thing that lifts democracy above the violence of the mob. The Muslim world never had that and so its experiments with democracy were doomed to be nothing more than a baton being passed from one form of tyranny to another. More tragically, the United States which once had it is losing both the limited government and the individual freedom. And that means that democracy in America is bound to follow the same path as in the Muslim world, where democracy becomes only another way of taking over a country.”

It would be tempting to attribute the disaster spreading across the Middle East to a brief flirtation with democracy snake oil, but for the better part of the last century the political class of the United States could talk of nothing else. Nearly every war was fought was to spread democracy, protect democracy or worship at the altar of democracy.
For much of the 20th Century it was the working assumption of the sort of men who got up to give speeches in crowded halls that it was democracy that made America special. But it is not so much that democracy made America special, as America made democracy special and workable. And that is because democracy only works when government is limited. When government power isn’t limited, then democracy is just tyranny with a popular vote behind it.

In a poignant historical irony, American democracy went into a prolonged decline just as its political class was busy speechifying about the importance of exporting it abroad. Government authority was increasingly centralized and elections began to come down not to ideas, but to divided groups fighting it out in a zero sum struggle for total control of each other’s lives. American democracy has been exported to Iraq. And Iraqi democracy was exported to America.

With unlimited authority vested in the government, we no longer have elections to decide policy, but to determine whether an oppressive social and cultural agenda complete with a loss of civil rights will be forced on the rest of the country. And our last election was as polarized as an Iraqi election and with a similar outcome.

Democracy was never the solution for the Middle East; a region that is properly multicultural in the sense of being a collection of quarreling tribes, religious factions and ethnic groups. And all that democracy accomplished was to give the majority another tool for oppressing the minority. Instead of bloody revolts leading to dictatorships, there were bloody revolts leading to elections which then led to dictatorships. And only a fool or Thomas Friedman would consider the addition of this extra step to be any kind of improvement.

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/11/27/iran-may-be-close-to-a-plutonium-bomb-german-defense-experts-warn/?print=1 Iran might be “on the verge of producing weapon-quality plutonium,” Germany’s daily Die Welt reported Nov. 26. Hans Rühle, a former top official in the German defense ministry and foreign editor Clemens Wergin cite clues pointing to an Iranian crash program to build a plutonium bomb in the just-released International Atomic Energy Agency report […]

Protester Dies: When Is a Dictator Not a Dictator? Never The recent Hamas-Israel confrontation ended abruptly when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last Wednesday, November 21, a ceasefire that essentially put the relatively new, largely unknown Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in the role of peacekeeper for Israel and Gaza. “Egypt’s new government is […]

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/11/27/diagram-suggests-iran-working-on-explosive-more-than-triple-force-hiroshima/ VIENNA – Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press. The diagram was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program to […]