DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WEEK THAT WAS
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
DENIAL IS CONFIRMATION
Politicians often seem to deny that one quality about them that everyone knows is true. Obama’s “I Am Not a Dictator” deserves to join “I Am Not a Crook” in the annals of political denials.
Obama is finding a dozen different ways to say that he doesn’t wield absolute power. “I am not a dictator”. “I can’t mind-meld Congress into making a deal.” “Even though I have been doing anything I want with respect to everything else, when it comes to the sequester I can’t take control of it, even though the Senate has offered me that opportunity.”
I am not a dictator, except when I want to be.
CHOPPING THE BRANCHES WILL NOT CHOP DOWN THE TREE
Terrorism can never be defeated by fighting terrorists. Combine massive wealth in some parts of the Middle East with staggering poverty in other parts and the supply of mercenaries is nearly endless. Syrian Jihadists are being paid $150 a month by Qatar; a good salary for an unskilled laborer in a region where life is cheap and every family has plenty of surplus sons and mouths to feed. A barrel of oil can buy the services of a killer for a month and Qatar pumps out millions of barrels a day.
Terrorism is cheap for the sponsors, profitable for the participants and hideously expensive for the targets. A soldier in a First World nation can cost six figures. For that same amount, a backward oil tyranny can field a hundred men. When those hundred men kill a soldier, then his nation will be heartbroken and question the costs of war. When those hundred men die, their mothers will ceremonially wail and cry out for more martyrs to avenge them. And the terror will go on.
Islam makes the process easier. Like Palestinian nationalism, it is a war machine whose ideas lubricate the recruitment, rampages and replenishment of fresh cannon fodder for the wars of the old rich men of the region.
from my article this week, Terrorism Without End
AGENDA IS EVERYTHING, PROCESS IS NOTHING
Obama understands that the ability to set the agenda is what counts. He does not view the battle as procedural and cares very little for process even when it is enshrined in the Constitution. As a former community organizer, he understands that it is the power to set the agenda in the mind of the public that counts and that once that is done, legal procedures become a formality that can be swept aside. So long as he can determine what the urgent task that needs doing now is, all else becomes irrelevant.
The Republican Congress of 1994 understood that setting the public agenda mattered more than anything else. They were eventually outmaneuvered by Clinton, but only at the cost of making their agenda his. Our Republican Congress is determined to pull off the opposite maneuver; adopting Obama’s agenda and then trying to claim credit for it. Not only are their odds of getting centrist credit for amnesty or higher taxes utterly hopeless, but wanting credit for either one is not a brilliant political maneuver; it’s a symptom of political decline.
Can Obama be stopped? He can, but it requires taking control of the public agenda.
from my other article this week, Can Obama Be Stopped?
YOUR NATIONAL PARK IS PROBABLY JUST LIKE DJANGO
Mickey Fearn was named the National Park Service Deputy Director for Communications and Community Assistance because the Park Service decided that it needed to reach out to minorities who weren’t visiting national parks often enough. Or as the NPS tactfully put it, the “revised title for the deputy position emphasizes a new focus on specific outreach and communications to groups currently underrepresented in parks.”
How a group can be underrepresented in parks is unclear. Parks are big spaces full of trees, waterfalls and bears. Bears might be underrepresented in parks because they live there. People can be underrepresented in the park service, but not in parks.
And then he visited Canada…
Mickey Fearn says the reasons run deeper than money and geography.
Here is one unexpected reason: The wilderness evokes some grisly images from American history — black slaves being hanged and lynched by their masters.
“African American people feel safe in cities and less safe in nature,” says Fearn, who is black. “Preserving wild places is a white concept, going back to Rome.”
National Park Service Deputy Director Claims Black People Don’t Like National Parks Because of Slavery
DYING ON THE TREADMILL
For Romney, as for John McCain before him, running for president is just something you do, win or lose — and if you lose, you can always go home to your beachside mansion in La Jolla or your sinecure Senate seat in Arizona. No harm, no foul.
Not for Democrats: They never stop, they never quit, they never sleep. Just think: The Clintons alone have been with us since 1992 and show absolutely no sign that they’ll disappear any time soon; why, Hillary 2016 is just getting rolling! Term-limited though he may be, Barack Obama still has his campaign organization operating full-time.
WE ARE ALL KULAKS NOW
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – has issued a new report called Our Nutrient World
People in the rich world should become “demitarians” – eating half as much meat as usual, while stopping short of giving it up
The UN scientists said people in poor countries should be allowed to increase their consumption of animal protein, which billions of people are lacking. But if that is so as not to cause environmental harm, the move to meat in the developing world must be balanced with a reduction in the amount consumed in developed countries.
In the foreword to this report, Achim Steiner, the head of UNEP, says that “swift and collective action” is necessary
UN Proposes “Food Redistribution” from US and Europe through “Swift and Collective Action”
WILL THE LAST EU MEMBER TURN OUT THE LIGHTS?
The Italian election has shown once again that the European Union is unworkable. Germany might prefer that Italy be governed by unelected IMF technocrats like Mario Monti, but that way lies open tyranny.
Given a choice in democratic elections, the Greeks, the French and now the Italians, have voted for extremist and populist parties promising them that the debts will never have to come due. And that’s only human nature. The problem isn’t with the citizenry who have been told that they can have the good life without having to work hard for it. It’s with the entire structure of the European Union which promised paradise for all.
The Greeks and the Italians have been all too willing to believe that they aren’t responsible for the economic mess, but that it can all be attributed to a conspiracy of banks. It’s the same cheap Paultard-OWS sentiment gone mainstream in bankrupt countries. And while the banks are not free from guilt, the banking infrastructure runs on top of the political infrastructure of the European Union.
Italian Election Proves European Union is Doomed
THE ISLAMIC INSTITUTE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS IS NOW IN SESSION
Ayatollah Ruhollah Qarehi, head of the Imam Mahdi seminary in Tehran, said: “The genocide of the Muslims in Myanmar is ostensibly being carried out by the Buddhists, but we are certain that Judaism and Global Zionism are [behind] the massacre and the genocide against the Muslims…”
“The tenets of Buddhism are derived from Judaism. The Buddhists are a tool [in the hands] of the Jews, and ‘Buddhism’ is a name behind which [hides] the hand of Judaism and Global Zionism.”
“But, since the Jew knows that he is an [object of] derision throughout the world, he hides behind a pseudonym like ‘Buddhism.’ Lecturers at seminaries and universities, as well as the media, must [speak up] in various languages and in eloquent terms… and explain to the people and to our dear youth that behind [the term] ‘Buddhism’ there [hides] the Jew.”
The Jews are apparently the greatest hide and seek players in all of human history.
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