RUTHFULLY YOURS

Continued impotence and incompetence in the (mis)conduct of Israel’s public diplomacy is becoming not only strategic threat to the country but is beginning to imperil Jewish communities abroad.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-The-Fray-Dereliction-of-duty-329723

Today I saw the Israeli [consul] to Canada being interviewed. I cringed. He was trying to explain how Israel could counter the negative propaganda. He not only was clueless, but almost incomprehensible. He said that Israel should ignore negative criticism because that would make the general public seem that Israel is too combative.

When asked by the interviewers why shouldn’t Israel assert its rights, like referring to the San Remo Convention, he demurred and said that would damage Israel’s image. I was aghast at his utter incompetence. This an official representative of Israel. This is who Israel sends to fight the propaganda war.
– Walter44, an exasperated Jerusalem Post talkbacker, October 1.

Sad but true; witnessed similar incompetence in Australia
– Rafi, a dismayed Post talkbacker, responding to exasperated Walter44

What good is having Apache helicopter gunships, or Merkava tanks, to defend your citizens against attack if you can’t even use them because the world thinks you’re always the aggressor?
– Shmuley Boteach, “Why Jews are so bad at PR,” The Jerusalem Post, January 7.

The ongoing debacle of the (mis)conduct of Israeli public diplomacy (PD) is emerging as one of the country’s greatest strategic failures and gravest strategic dangers.

It is not only endangering the nation’s security, it is imperiling the safety of Jewish communities across the globe.

Pervasive and pernicious

It is difficult to understate how pernicious and pervasive the consequences of this inexplicable fiasco of impotence and incompetence are. They permeate all walks of national life, corroding the very fabric that binds the Zionist enterprise together.

While I do not wish to downplay in any way the danger of the Iranian nuclear program, the dangers inherent in Israel’s abysmal PD performance outstrip virtually any of the other threats that confront the Jewish state as a Jewish state.

While the former is more tangibly kinetic, the latter, although admittedly less cataclysmic, is no less lethal. As will be seen a little later, it intensifies the menace emanating from Iran.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/362259/print Charles Krauthammer has come to my rescue. You see, I’ve been on the receiving end of some spirited reaction since asserting in last weekend’s column that what we commonly call the Republican establishment — i.e., not all individual Republicans but GOP leadership — “is more sympathetic to Obama’s case for the welfare state than […]

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php Not even the coolest president ever can conjure up a national medical regime for 300 million people. If you’re looking for an epitaph for the republic (and these days who isn’t?) try this — from August 2010 and TechCrunch’s delirious preview of Healthcare.gov: “We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way,” explained […]

http://bit.ly/1a4LYhO US House Members and Senators are increasingly approached by panicky leaders of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman and Kuwait, who have always considered the US global leadership and unilateral national security action to be their life insurance policy.  These leaders are concerned about the adverse ripple effects of the lowered US global profile […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/….THE GOLDBERG FILE

‘You know, I actually believe my own bull****.”That’s what President Obama once told a reporter. If the man ever uttered a statement that spoke more to his approach to politics, I haven’t heard it.”

Always Running for a Job He Already Has

The only thing Barack Obama knows how to do is be Barack Obama. He thinks that’s his job, like a king whose only real responsibility is to be kingly. The problem is that the one person (who matters, at least) who doesn’t understand this is Barack Obama. As he once said, Obama believes his own bull***t. (

Charlie offers some good examples of Obama’s own Olympian self-regard. For instance:

“I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Though I immediately thought of this bit from New York magazine:

Emanuel’s ad-hocracy, meanwhile, didn’t faze Obama. The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”

Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.

Obviously, Obama always has a healthy ego, in the same way Godzilla had a healthy physique and the sun has a healthy mass. But part of the problem stems from the fact that he cannot see the difference between campaigning and governing. That would be bad enough, if it were not for the fact that Obama seems to think that he ran his campaign. As I noted the other day in the Corner, here’s Obama’s response to the charge that Sarah Palin had more executive experience than he did:

http://www.investigativeproject.org/

THE AMERICAS
GENERAL SECURITY, POLICY

1. Report: Iran may be month from a bomb
Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a nuclear bomb in as little as a month, according to a new estimate by one of the USA’s top nuclear experts.
Oren Dorell, USA TODAY 8:20 a.m. EDT October 25, 2013
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/24/iran-bomb-one-month-away/3181373/
IPT NOTE: The cited report is posted at http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Breakout_Study_24October2013.pdf, and summary at http://www.isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Breakout_Study_Summary_24October2013.pdf
Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a nuclear bomb in as little as a month, according to a new estimate by one of the USA’s top nuclear experts. The new assessment comes as the White House invited Senate staffers to a briefing on negotiations with Iran as it is trying to persuade Congress not to go ahead with a bill to stiffen sanctions against Iran. “Shortening breakout times have implications for any negotiation with Iran,” stated the report by the Institute for Science and International Security. “An essential finding is that they are currently too short and shortening further.” David Albright, president of the institute and a former inspector for the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, said the estimate means that Iran would have to eliminate more than half of its 19,000 centrifuges to extend the time it would take to build a bomb to six months…

Rift widens on Iranian nuclear deal as Israel, Arabs warn against allowing enrichment
By Joby Warrick, Washington Post Published: October 23 | Updated: Thursday, October 24, 8:53 AM
http://www.investigativeproject.org/ext/11123
Correction: Earlier versions of this article, including the Thursday print edition of The Washington Post, misstated one of the conclusions of an independent analysis released Wednesday. The study calculated that Iran is now capable of producing enough weapon-grade uranium to fuel an atomic bomb in less than six weeks, using the equipment and know-how it already has. The Obama administration on Wednesday acknowledged a widening gulf with key Middle Eastern allies over nuclear talks with Iran, as Israeli and Persian Gulf Arab leaders pressed for drastic cuts to Iran’s atomic infrastructure that Tehran has insisted it will never accept. The differences came into stark relief as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to lecture Secretary of State John F. Kerry at a joint news conference, warning against a “bad deal” that would allow Iran to retain any capability to make enriched uranium. Iran, which last week began a new round of nuclear talks with the United States and five other world powers, says it will never agree to give up its right to make uranium fuel for peaceful nuclear energy…

2. Nuclear officers napped with blast door left open
By Robert Burns-Associated Press Wednesday, October 23, 2013
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/23/nuclear-officers-napped-blast-door-left-open/
WASHINGTON (AP) — Air Force officers entrusted with the launch keys to long-range nuclear missiles have been caught twice this year leaving open a blast door that is intended to help prevent a terrorist or other intruder from entering their underground command post, Air Force officials said. The blast doors are never to be left open if one of the crew members inside is asleep — as was the case in both these instances — out of concern for the trouble an intruder could cause, including the compromising of secret launch codes. Transgressions such as this are rarely revealed publicly. But officials with direct knowledge of Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile operations told The Associated Press that such violations have occurred, undetected, more times than in the cases of the two launch crew commanders and two deputy commanders who were given administrative punishments this year. The blast door violations are another sign of trouble in the handling of the nation’s nuclear arsenal… READ IT ALL

The Balfour Declaration reflected a historical trend that was already underway, but it did not launch the Jewish return to Eretz Israel. This return was a product of the national will of a people which Shaath and his colleagues still refuse to recognize, thereby perpetuating the conflict with Israel to this day. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cnzcVMjwPXU/UmptO8pfkdI/AAAAAAAA8Ig/6LKMl0iZjWo/s1600/The+Balfour+Declaration+-+The+British+recognition+of+a+pre-existing+right.jpgDore Gold.. Last […]

A fiasco for the governmental ages….http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacare-roll-out-bombs Begin with ObamaCare’s latest humiliation statistic: more people have signed up to go to Mars when technology permits, than have signed up at the federal government’s health care website. At a time of record public distrust of government and their leaders, this happens. As for the president’s telemarketing pitch […]

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/10/freedom-vs-compulsion-bramwell-vs_25.html Reading through the 1,092-page Oxford Book of English Prose as a respite from current events (published in 1925, it is little less  than an inch thick, and probably weighs less than two ounces), I came upon an essay by the Tory lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, and was struck by one of his comments. Writing in […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6107
Much ado about Adelson

There is nothing like a few racy quotes from billionaire philanthropist Sheldon Adelson to get the liberal media in a tizzy. With all the carry-on surrounding statements he made on Tuesday evening at Yeshiva University in New York, one would have thought that he had the ear of U.S. President Barack Obama and the power to shape American foreign policy.

This is as laughable as the media frenzy that ensued over the casino magnate’s comments, made in the course of a forum on “Iran, Assimilation and the Threat to Israel and Jewish Survival.”

In the first place, Adelson’s highly publicized backing of Republican contenders to prevent Obama’s election in 2008 and reelection in 2012 failed. His current level of influence on the administration in Washington, then, is nil.

Secondly, the 80-year-old businessman and ideologue — who makes a habit of literally putting his money where his mouth is — has never made a secret of his political positions, however abhorrent they may be to his left-wing detractors. So, none of his public remarks should come as a surprise, least of all when they relate to issues closest to his heart and about which he is happily vocal. Tuesday night’s forum, moderated by “America’s Rabbi” Shmuley Boteach (best-selling author of “Kosher Sex” and other books on marital relations), covered three such topics.

The right-leaning, predominantly Jewish audience came to hear Adelson, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens and Yeshiva University president Richard Joel discuss the pressing matters of the day from a conservative viewpoint. They were not disappointed.