DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS PART ONE
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GOING FOR BROKE
According to Hillary Clinton’s long-delayed Benghazigate testimony, the State Department just did not have enough money to provide security for a mission in one of the most dangerous places in the world.It did however have 16 million dollars to spend on 2,500 kindle book readers at the drastically inflated price of $6,600 per device.It had $79,000 to spend on Obama’s books and $20,000 on a portrait of Obama. The US Embassy had $150,000 to spend on a book about the ambassador’s residence. There was $4.5 for art in embassies, but no money for Benghazi security.
THE WAR IS OVER, WE LOST
Mullah Baradar’s capture by the CIA in coordination with the ISI was really the only serious victory won against the Taliban in recent years.While Baradar is often referred to as second-in-command of the Taliban, with Mullah Omar’s whereabouts and aliveness still uncertain, he was in practice the leader of the Taliban.Now Pakistan plans to release all Taliban prisoners, including Baradar.
GUNNING FOR AMERICA
Under Socialism, you don’t have to pass a law, you just have to use your economic control to make the companies enforce the law.
Growing government control over banks and investment companies, directly and indirectly, allows those institutions to be used to target firearms manufacturers.
Cerberus was bullied into dropping the Freedom Group which includes Remington and Bushmaster. Now Rahm Emanuel is demanding that TD Bank and Bank of America end their lines of credit to firearms manufacturers unless they come out in support of Obama’s war on the Bill of Rights.
The Party that claims to be upset at corporate influence over politics is trying to forcibly create a corporate lobby in favor of abrogating the Bill of Rights by exploiting their leverage over banks and the leverage of banks over private companies.
Obama Inc Trying to Use Banks to Destroy Gun Manufacturers
NOTHING TO SAY
I considered writing an article after the disastrous results in Israel’s election, but I really have nothing to say about it. Covering Israeli politics is like picking through the trash. Your hands get dirty and all you have for your efforts are trash.Nobody really wins in Israeli politics, except the left, which keeps retaining its fading grip on power through every dirty trick in the book from fake third parties to paid voter fraud. Once again the fake third party strategy paid off, and considering the above-average voter turnout, the voter fraud was no doubt very extensive.Mostly though the right self-destructed, as it has in the past, with Netanyahu continuing his program of staying in power by sabotaging the right and flirting with the left. The election boiled down to people on the right denouncing each other in attack ads in increasingly petty ways and the left profited. What could have been a national turning point, instead means more of the same.
The verminous Deri is back in a big way, back from prison and taking Shas back into left-wing politics. Surreal articles describe a center-right coalition with Haredi parties. In practice such coalitions are common, but defining the Haredi parties as being to the right is wishful thinking.While Iran develops its nuclear program and the Palestinian situation worsens, we can look forward to more years of screaming fights between the Haredi-Dati Leumi-Secularists. A fight that Netanyahu has bizarrely chosen to enlist in. We can also look forward the endless social justice debates as the Tel Aviv parties continue to hijack national politics for their own petty pseudo-Euro antics.
And that’s why I have nothing to say about it. Israel’s politics aren’t in the worst place that they could be, but they’re still in the trash. Lapid’s fake party, like the preceding ones, will fall apart. There will be more accusations of corruption, more police investigations and more media employees of tycoons going on about the influence of tycoons on politics. And so it goes…If there was ever a wrong time for a culture war, it’s now. The fall of the Second Temple shows how that went last time around. But history is a cycle. It’s a wheel. It goes to the same places it came from.
DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?
Despondent after George W. Bush won re-election, a small group of billionaire Democrats met in San Francisco in December 2004 to reflect on John Kerry’s failure to capture the White House. George Soros, Progressive Insurance Chairman Peter B. Lewis, and S&L tycoons Herb and Marion Sandler were angry and depressed.They felt they had been taken—seduced by the siren song of pollsters and the mainstream media who had assured them that the capture of the executive mansion was theirs. But despite giving millions of dollars to liberal candidates and 527 political committees, the donors came away with nothing. At about the same time, another group of wealthy Democratic donors was meeting at a hotel in Washington, D.C., feeling the same way. “The U.S. didn’t enter World War II until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,” political consultant Erica Payne told the meeting. “We just had our Pearl Harbor.”
Determined to bring the Democratic Party back from the political wilderness, Soros and the others decided they needed a long-term strategy to regain power. Former Clinton official Rob Stein urged them to copy conservatives who had spent four decades investing in ideas and institutions with staying power.We just had our Pearl Harbor too. And we need that long-term strategy before it’s too late.
NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
When Mitt Romney brought up Mali in the presidential debate, the reference was met with sneers from the left and bewilderment from the media. “Despite Romney Claims, Mali is No Afghanistan, Expert Says,” is how US News and World Report headlined the rebuttal. Three months later, it’s become increasingly clear that not only is Mali turning into Afghanistan, but North Africa is sliding down the same muddy slope.
The only thing that Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy had learned from the wars fought in Afghanistan and Iraq was to avoid the public turning on them by minimizing their casualty footprint. By avoiding troops on the ground, the trio thought that they had dodged all the problems that Bush and Blair had with Iraq. It never occurred to them that the reason Bush and Blair opted for occupation and reconstruction was to try and tamp down the resulting chaos. Despite their best efforts, their own people are coming back in body bags from Libya and Mali. And the killing has only begun.
.from my article, “North Africa Is the New Afghanistan”
JOHN KERRY: RADICAL CAREERIST
The Anti-War movement was moving into high gear even as the Vietnam War was fading away. Americans troops were leaving Vietnam in large numbers and the last American offensive in Vietnam had begun the year before. But for the Anti-War movement, the actual war was only a pretext for undermining their country and promoting themselves.
Few men fit that description better than John Forbes Kerry who had not needed a weatherman to know which way the winds of political fortune were blowing. Vietnam Veterans Against the War became the platform for an aspiring Congressman seeking to remake his image. Despite its name VVAW was as bent on attacking the men fighting the war, as the war itself. Its publicity stunts, such as Operation RAW or Kerry’s own Senate testimony, were calculated to cast returning veterans as war criminals and murderers.
Toward the end of 1971, VVAW was balanced on the edge of its own irrelevance. The publicity stunts had brought it fame and undermined America’s position in negotiating a departure from Vietnam, but the departure was still underway. Rather than speeding it up, Kerry and VVAW had slowed it down to make the most of their moment in the sun, but once the public and VVAW’s membership realized that the war really was ending, so would their popularity.
While some in the VVAW were career radicals, Kerry was a radical careerist. Leftist politics were his way up the ladder, but he never let them get in the way of his own career.
… from “John Kerry: Unfit for Duty.”
IT’S NOT ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE, SOMETIMES IT’S YELLOW
“We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews,” Mr. Morsi declared. Egyptian children “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue,” he said. “The hatred must go on for Allah and as a form of worshiping him.”
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday defended the Obama administration’s gift of four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt despite Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi’s newly-surfaced comments.
“President Morsi has issued two statements,” Kerry said, “to clarify those comments… But not everything, and this is always the complication in dealings with the international sector, not everything lends itself to a simple clarity, black white, this that, every time.”
Nuance. It worked for Chamberlain. It will work for Kerry who will have to navigate the difficult task of being neither black or white, but yellow.
IT’S NOT ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE, SOMETIMES IT GLOWS GREEN IN THE DARK
“We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States,” North Korea’s National Defense Commission said in a statement released by the official news service.
“Settling accounts with the U.S. needs to be done with force, not with words,” it said.
This comes not long after another one of Kerry’s great diplomatic breakthroughs with North Korea.
A prominent U.S. senator met Friday with North Korea’s nuclear envoy who promised to live up to commitments made in an agreement last week with the United States.
Democrat Sen. John Kerry said that the North Korean also made a “profound statement” about wanting a different relationship and not wanting to fight with the United States.
“They said that they will live by the agreement that they made last week, that we can count on that,” Kerry, who chairs the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, told reporters.
We can count on it. We can. Yes we can.
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