http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/insecure-obama-insecure-world/ The United States has had good presidents and bad, but it has never had a leader who came to a debate on national security with so much insecurity. It was a small petty man who sat on the other side of the screen, alternately smirking and scowling, grinding his teeth and launching attack after […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/331125/first-aid-living-bing-west A U.S. ambassador is missing and his diplomatic team is desperately fighting off terrorist attacks. Our commander-in-chief and his national-security team in Washington are listening to the phone calls from the Americans under attack and watching real-time video from a drone circling overhead. Yet the U.S. military sends no aid. Why? On September 11, […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/331305/tortoise-ties-hares-concerned-stanley-kurtz
During the first half of the debate, Romney was playing for a tie while Obama was playing for a win. That made a certain sense. As commander-in-chief, Obama has an inherent advantage on foreign policy. So long as Romney stands toe-to-toe and achieves a rough equality with a sitting president on foreign policy, he gains credibility and keeps his momentum in this race. Even so, there was a danger at first that Obama’s attacks and his generally strong posture would give him a win. (I mean “posture,” in part, literally. Some might not have liked Obama’s forward stare and general demeanor, but I thought it was effective.)
Partway through the debate, however, Romney started pushing for the win. His pivot to the economy might have seemed like evasion, but Obama followed him into domestic policy because he saw the risk of not answering the challenge. This put Romney on familiar ground and you could see his confidence grow.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/331318
Dan Senor, a senior Romney adviser, says President Barack Obama’s criticism of Mitt Romney’s Israel trip was “pathetic.”Romney has been to Israel four times, Senor said tonight when speaking to reporters. Obama, he pointed out, has never been there as president. Obama’s posturing on Israel was thus a “cheap shot,” Senor said, and “sort of pathetic.”
“President Obama, as president, has been to over 40 countries. He hasn’t been to Israel,” Senor said. “He can talk all he wants about how significant his trip was as senator. But for presidents, geography is policy.”
In 2009, “[Obama] deliberately chose not to go to Israel,” Senor said. “On that outreach to the Arab world, he could have hopped on a 30- or 40-minute plane ride and made it clear that he stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.”
Senor, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations, advised Romney during debate prep, and has been a top aide to Paul Ryan on the campaign trail.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/habibi-a-moroccan-poet-sings-to-his-love/
Habibi: The Diwan of Alim Maghrebi [1] is a new book of poems by Canadian poet-essayist and frequent PJ Media contributor David Solway. It belongs to his acclaimed series of “translations” of imaginary foreign poets. In this case the ostensible poet, Alim Maghrebi, is a Moroccan who, as Solway tells us in his ostensible introduction, belongs to the (actually existing) school of “new Arab poetry” — “a poetic alloy…of ancestral themes and preoccupations modulated in the language of the street, the newspaper, movies, technology and the Internet.”
Moreover, the introduction tells us, Maghrebi alludes pervasively to the (historical) Meccan poet Umar ibn Abi Rabi’a (644-721), “who was famed for his lyrics lamenting the melancholy transience of love….” Habibi is, indeed, an extended paean and plaint to Maghrebi’s habibi (loved one)—a nameless young Moroccan woman who consumes his days with passions, exaltations, fears, and mortifications.
Habibi is also, simply, a delight from start to finish. Readers who may be chary of today’s often demanding poetry will find this book to be written in a simple and direct, yet poignant and musical language that rises and falls with Maghrebi’s mercurial responses to his fickle, often evasive lover.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/331341/cold-steel-mark-steyn
I doubt President Obama’s tossing of the Bayonet Lobby under the bus will prove to be the critical issue with undecided swing voters in Ohio, but, just for the record, bayonets have played a role in both our recent wars. Afghanistan:
The 24-year-old officer [Lt. James Adamson], a member of the 5th battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, revealed that he shouted “have some of this” before shooting dead a gunman who had just emerged from a maize field.
Seconds later and out of ammunition, the lieutenant leapt over a river bank and killed a second insurgent machine-gunner with a single thrust of his bayonet in the man’s chest…
“I either wasted vital seconds changing the magazine on my rifle or went over the top and did it more quickly with the bayonet.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/a_most_pathetic_debate_1.html The best word I can come up with to describe the final presidential debate is “pathetic.” No matter who wins, we’ve had it. What you just witnessed was the bipartisan abdication of American global leadership. Obama certainly “won” on style and personal attacks — insofar as such things actually matter. Romney gave his worst […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578073201446436838.html?mod=opinion_newsreel Mitt Romney needed to pass the usual tests for Republican presidential candidates in his debate Monday night with President Obama. There was the Ford test (alternatively known as the Palin/Cain/Perry test): Would Mr. Romney say something so obviously misinformed, so manifestly silly, so revealingly ignorant as to disqualify him from serious consideration as a […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203406404578073260317607692.html?mod=opinion_newsreel About 45 minutes into Monday night’s Presidential debate on foreign policy, we found ourselves asking which of the two men on stage in Boca Raton was the incumbent and which was the challenger. President Obama kept attacking Mitt Romney for various things he had said or claimed he had said, while the Republican mostly […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203630604578072662029501782.html?mod=opinion_newsreel Gen. Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, is chairman of the Institute for the Study of War. With Afghanistan the forgotten war this election season, many Americans might be wondering why we have 68,000 U.S. troops there at all. Sure, the Obama administration says they’ll be out “on schedule” […]
