RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Stop just hatin’ all the time.” If you haven’t been following the news, you might not know whether this bon mot was uttered by a character on the ABC Family show Pretty Little Liars or by the president of the United States.

Of course, it was the leader of the free world at a Kansas City, Mo., rally last week, imploring congressional Republicans to start cooperating with him. The line struck a characteristically — and tellingly — juvenile and plaintive note.

How many books and articles have been written by conservatives seeking to divine the philosophical beliefs and psychological motivations lurking beneath the president’s smooth exterior?

It’s certainly true that the president is much further left than he’d ever admit, but the deepest truth about Obama is that there is no depth. He’s smart without being wise. He’s glib without being eloquent. He’s a celebrity without being interesting. He’s callow.

It’s a trope on the right to say that Obama has quit, that he’s not interested in the job anymore. It isn’t true. If you are smug and unwilling to bend from your (erroneous) presumptions of how the world works, this is what presidential leadership looks like.

Obama is incapable of the unexpected gesture or surprising departure. He evidently has no conception of the national interest larger than his ideology or immediate political interests. In terms of his sensibility, he’s about what you’d get if you took the average writer for The New Yorker and made him president of the United States.

The notion that Obama might be a grand historical figure was always an illusion, although at the beginning his rousing words lent it some superficial support. Once the magic wore off, it became clear he’s not really an orator. His greatest rhetorical skill turns out to be mockery.

The man who once promised to transcend political divisions is an expert at the stinging partisan jab. What Winston Churchill was to thundering statements of resolve, he is to snotty put-downs.

Now is the time to think about the next Euro-Russian conflict. Europe is steaming toward a new Cold War with Russia and dragging America along in its geopolitical bow wake. The U.S. is also embroiled in Russia’s proxy activities in the Middle East, where we have seen an Arab Spring dwindle into darkness as conflicts expand.

When American leaders talk about the “world community” responding to crises, they mean the United States plus Europe. The E.U. and U.S. together account for half of the global economy, but Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas is the bear in the room.

It’s time for a true Marshall Plan for energy. There have been a variety of aspirational energy ideas co-opting the iconic words “Marshall Plan,” but none rooted in the goal-oriented realpolitik that America used to make such a difference for Europe a half-century ago.

When George C. Marshall announced his European Recovery Program in Harvard Yard in the summer of 1947, he said: “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” The world desperately needs realism again — this time energy realism — for both economic health and political stability.

Every realistic scenario sees the world consuming more, not less, oil and gas in the future. As for alternative energy, even if the hyperbolic goal of supplying all new global demand were met, the world would still consume 40 billion barrels of oil and natural gas annually. In a business-as-usual future, Russia and the Middle East would continue as the dominant suppliers of oil and gas to global markets. But America now has a chance to break that oligopoly.

There has been a lot of talk about using American energy resources as a diplomatic tool — the proverbial “carrot” rather than a “stick” (sanctions). Rhetoric aside, seven key energy numbers underscore just how close we are to a geopolitical game-changer for Europe — and for the U.S. — and what that might mean for the American economy.

In the summer of 2007, then-senator Barack Obama was asked if he was worried that his proposed withdrawal from Iraq would result in ethnic cleansing or even genocide.

He scoffed at the premise.

“By that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” he told the Associated Press. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”

Obama glossed over a crucial distinction. The slaughter in Congo wasn’t caused by our actions. The assumption behind the AP’s question — backed by countless experts — was that a withdrawal from Iraq at the time would almost certainly lead to slaughter. Obama’s remarkable answer was that even if you accepted the premise that leaving would ignite mass slaughter, it would still be right to bug out of Iraq.

Of course, as is his wont, Obama covered all of the rhetorical bases. He acknowledged that leaving prematurely would be bad.

“Nobody is proposing we leave precipitously. There are still going to be U.S. forces in the region that could intercede, with an international force, on an emergency basis,” he insisted. “There’s no doubt there are risks of increased bloodshed in Iraq without a continuing U.S. presence there.”

Then came the patented Obama take-back. “It is my assessment that those risks are even greater if we continue to occupy Iraq and serve as a magnet for not only terrorist activity but also irresponsible behavior by Iraqi factions,” he said.

As grotesque as Obama’s moral argument was, it was unknowable at the time whether his analysis was correct. It’s now pretty clear he was wrong on all counts.

When Obama pulled American troops out of Iraq, they were not serving as a magnet for terrorists; they were acting as a deterrent not only to terrorists but to “irresponsible” Iraqi factions.

‘We could do so much more if Congress would come on and help out a little bit,” President Obama said in Kansas City on July 30. “Stop bein’ mad all the time. Stop just hatin’ all the time.”

Democratic national chairwoman Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D., Fla.) similarly moaned on MSNBC, “The Republicans refuse to do anything.”

This notion of a “do-nothing Congress” is yet another Democrat fabrication. In fact, America has a Republican Do-Lots House and a Democratic Do-Little Senate.

Since January 2013, according to its Republican Conference, the Do-Lots House has adopted 347 bills that await votes in the Do-Little Senate. These include serious initiatives to reinvigorate the economy, reduce taxes, speed energy production, slice red tape, expand school choice, extend the flexibility of workers’ hours, enhance federal accountability, and more.

Source: House Republican Conference Flickr File — August 5, 2014.

During the 113th Congress, the Do-Lots House passed 511 bills; the Do-Little Senate, 232. The House has taken 480 roll-call (non-voice) votes; the Senate, 256. Obama has signed 108 House-originated bills but only 37 Senate-born laws. The House has authorized seven appropriations bills and 215 spending amendments; the Senate, zero of each.

Obama ungratefully forgets the Do Lots House’s favors from early this year. Republican leaders annoyed grassroots conservatives by adopting the sequester-ending Murray–Ryan budget, eliminating the debt ceiling, and passing a $956 billion farm bill. The over-generous Do-Lots House handed Obama these elegantly wrapped gifts in return for . . . nothing. Orphaned in the process was Arkansas representative Tim Griffin and Florida senator Marco Rubio’s game-changing Republican amendment. It would have derailed the imminent, multibillion-dollar Obamacare bailout of health insurers’ program-induced financial losses.

Another classic from the “promise of hashtag” crowd.

During today’s State Department press briefing, deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf addressed the unfolding crisis in Iraq.

That crisis has many sources, but its chief source is ISIL. ISIL has taken hold of a large swath of northern Iraq and is killing anyone and everyone who gets in their way, or who refuses to bow to their take on Islam. Currently ISIL has about 40,000 men, women and children holed up on top of a mountain, starving them to death.

A reporter asked if there is a “confrontation to stop” ISIL’s spread.

Harf: “It’s not just a humanitarian crisis. I mean, that’s certainly a key piece of particularly what we’ve seen over the last 48 hours, certainly. But there’s a huge security challenge – if you talk about the Mosul dam, if you talk about other places. ISIL is a threat not just because they kill innocent civilians because of their religion, but because they’re a huge security threat to the stability of certain parts of Iraq. And that’s why throughout this conflict you have seen us continue to ramp up our support and continue to look very urgently at other things we could do to help fight this threat, because at the end of the day we can help the Iraqis, but the Iraqis also have to stand up, they have to pull themselves together, with our help, because this is a threat that certainly they but no one else in the region wants to see grow any more.”

Pull themselves together…

Here are some names to think about: Libya. Iran. Gaza. Syria. Ukraine. Russia.

What do you think about when you ponder those places?

I think about what a disaster Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been. Obama came to office promising to hit the “reset button” with respect to Russia and now he is Putin’s fool. Libya, poor Libya: Obama went in and removed the world’s only transvestite dictator [1], and now what? Gadaffi was a comic if malevolent madman, but he was, at the end, a U.S. ally. Barack Obama has trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies. So he engineered Gaddafi’s ouster. What then? The outrage of Benghazi and, now, chaos in Libya [2]. Good going, Barack.

Everyone is waiting for Iran to acquire the nuclear weapons Obama campaigned to prevent. While waiting for that feature presentation, we have another preview in a country I didn’t mention: Iraq. Whatever you think about our invasion in Iraq under George Bush, at least he left the country with a recognizable form of government under the watchful eye of the U.S. military.

Obama withdrew our forces and, as could have been predicted, the country promptly fell prey to those Muslim fanatics that Obama went to Cairo [3] to court shortly after he was elected.

When Obama left Iraq, he assured the world that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq [4].” Yes, he really said that.

How are things looking in Iraq now? Yesterday, the New York Times reported [5] that Muslim fanatics (my word: the Times preferred “rebels”) captured the country’s largest dam. ISIS, Iraq’s lovable Islamic thugs, have captured the country’s largest Christian town [6]and are busy exterminating Christians. “Even Ghengis Khan didn’t do this [7],” said one observer.

“If you want to understand the world,” my great professor of Arabic at Columbia told me, “you need only remember this:

“The British want to be respected;
The French want to be admired;
The Russians want to be feared;
And the Americans want to be liked.”

It was one of many things — Arab literature and Arabic composition and style (al-inshaa wa-al–usloob) — given me by Professor Pierre Cachia, a wise and worldly man who tells jokes in English, French and Arabic, all perfectly grammatical.

If I told my professor’s joke to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, there is a chance he might smile or give me a quick and rueful “da, konyeshno” — “yes, of course.”

If I got to tell President Barack Obama my joke at a Democratic fundraiser or on the golf course, he might respond with a smidgen of recognition, because the joke nicely sums up Putin’s world view and Obama’s “flexible” approach to world affairs.

To be fair to Putin, Russia’s desire to be feared did not start with Putin, and it is not just a Russian desire. Other states like being feared, too, and America’s yen for affection did not commence with President Obama, though he embraces it more than any other American leader in history, especially when facing the Middle East.

Once in office, Obama rushed to greet the Islamic countries, reminding everyone he was Barack HUSSEIN Obama, the man whose middle name re-emerged after the election, the man who loved the sound of the Islamic call to prayer and who was proud to tell everyone that he was born to a Muslim father.

In a spate of trips, interviews and policy initiatives, Obama flirted with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, embraced Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, courted Syria’s dictator, and “engaged” Iran’s maniacal ayatollahs. But somehow, it did not work.

In this centennial year of the Great War some things have not been said, or at least I haven’t heard them. Among them:

All the smart people knew the war would never come. The continent to which war came was on such an upward trajectory in terms of prosperity, inventiveness and political culture that it could have become—it arguably already was—a jewel of civilization. And the common man who should have wept at the war’s commencement instead cheered.

John Keegan went into these points in his classic history “The First World War,” published in 1998.

His first sentence is beautiful in its simplicity: “I grew up with men who had fought in the First World War and with women who had waited at home for news of them.” His father and uncles saw combat, his aunt was “one of the army of spinsters” the war produced.

His overall assessment is blunt: “The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.” Leaders who lacked “prudence” and “good will” failed one after another to stop an eminently stoppable train of events that produced a conflagration. That was tragic not only in terms of loss of life, and psychological, physical, emotional and even spiritual injury to survivors, but because the war destroyed a rising, bettering world: “the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent.” It of course also left “a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense” that it guaranteed the world war that would follow 20 years later, which by Keegan’s calculation was five times as destructive of human life. Auschwitz and the other extermination camps “were as much relics of the First as the Second world war.” “They have their antecedents . . . in the fields where the trenches ran.”

The relief agency in Gaza, financed in part by the U.S., has become a patron of Palestinian grievance.

On Wednesday, as a truce held between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon briefed the U.N. General Assembly. “The senseless cycle of suffering” must end, he said, asking: “Do we have to continue like this: build, destroy, and build, and destroy?”

For answers, the secretary-general would do well to look at the U.N.’s own main agency in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, better known as Unrwa. Bankrolled chiefly by the United States and the European Commission, with headquarters split among Gaza, Jerusalem and Amman, Jordan, the agency is one of the U.N.’s most perverse, destructive creations. In Gaza it essentially functions as Hamas’s handmaiden.

During the clashes of recent weeks as Israel sought to stop rocket attacks by Hamas and to destroy the organization’s terror tunnels, Unrwa has loomed large on the public stage—with a pronounced Palestinian tilt. Its commissioner-general, Pierre Krahenbuhl, has publicly condemned Israel, accusing the Israelis of “serious violation of international law.” On Al Jazeera television, the agency’s spokesman, Christopher Gunness, has wept for the Palestinians.

Thirteen members of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) were trapped and in danger of freezing to death when their base, Halley VI, lost power. Power went down on July 30th and is now partially restored. The BAS waited to report the incident until power came back up, however now reports that the incident was so serious that all science activities have been suspended and emergency contingency plans to abandon some of Halley’s eight modules and attempt to shelter in a remaining few have been prepared.
The incident is particularly serious, as the station is likely completely cut off from rescue for months. The incident occurred during the height of the Antarctic winter while southern sea ice is at or near record highs (Marc Morano has details at Climate Depot).
One Survey member, Anthony Lister, managed to send a out a “tweet” when power came back up, reporting that the outage occurred while the station was experiencing record cold temperatures of -55.4° C (-67.72° F). (h/t Rai news)

It is not possible to survive for long at the station without power, placing the 13 members of the expedition in danger of freezing to death, although they remain safe while they can keep the power running.

Halley VI is located on the Brunt Ice Shelf on 150 meter thick ice, just off the coast of Antarctica. Temperature there never climbs above freezing and this time of year the sun never climbs above the horizon.
Halley VI became operational in 2012 and consists of eight modules supported by hydraulic legs on skis. The skis are designed to permit the BAS to periodically reposition the station using bulldozers in the hopes of escaping the fate of past stations which were lost when they became buried under vast accumulations of ice and snow. In the past the station was a major source of reporting on the Antarctic “ozone hole.”
The Halley VI power loss serves as a stark reminder of the incredibly harsh and dangerous cold conditions Antarctic researchers brave. It also can’t help but remind us of Chris Turney’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition which became trapped in rapidly expanding sea ice last December. Drama ensued when both the ice breaker carrying the expedition and the ice breaker initially sent to rescue it both became trapped. A third ice breaker was ultimately able to evacuate the passengers using a helicopter.