THE LATE EZER WEIZMAN, WAR HERO AND PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL DID THAT FOR JIMMY CARTER WHO WENT ON TO LOSE IN A LANDSLIDE…..RSK http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/peres-obama-is-a-great-president-security-ties-are-the-best-we-ve-ever-had-1.416030 Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday said that U.S. President Barack Obama is “a great president and a great friend of Israel,” and that security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203753704577255322862397942.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Nobody could believe North Korea’s luck when its soccer squad scored a goal off mighty Brazil at their 2010 World Cup match-up in South Africa. So we’ll forgive Kim Jong Eun if he feels like the diplomatic equivalent of Robinhood for the point he just won against the Obama Administration.
On Wednesday, North Korea announced that it would stop enriching uranium, suspend its nuclear tests and allow U.N. nuclear inspectors to inspect its nuclear facilities (or at least those it chooses to declare).
“Christmas and Christianity,” Dec. 24, 2004:
“Those who are alarmed by the extent of religious belief in this country have roused themselves to make the so-called wall of separation between church and state both higher and firmer. . . . They would be well advised to let matters alone. We have been a free country even though “In God We Trust” is printed on our dollar bills, even though sessions of Congress begin with a prayer, and even though chaplains paid for by our tax dollars are part of our military forces. Our freedom does not depend on eliminating these acknowledgments of the power of religion; it relies instead on the fact that for many generations we have embraced a secular government operating in a religious culture.That embrace will be weakened, not strengthened, by silly attacks on religiosity, stimulating the spiritual to question the seriousness of people who profess a concern for civil liberties.”
Editor’s note: James Q. Wilson, who died Friday at age 80, was one of America’s most consequential political scientists and a frequent Journal contributor. An editorial appears nearby, and here are some excerpts from his Journal writing over the years:
“A Life in the Public Interest,” Sept. 21, 2009:
The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many of the writers [for The Public Interest], myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter’s presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/292496/it-s-pity-somebody-has-win-andrew-c-mccarthy
It’s a pity that they can’t both lose. But if they have to savage someone, better each other than us.
We have no national interest in overthrowing Assad.
Asked about the Iran-Iraq war that stretched for eight ghastly years after breaking out in 1980, Henry Kissinger is said to have quipped, “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
The pity is that we have lost that exquisite wisdom concerning our national interest, despite a two-decade road to hell paved by good intentions — at least compassionate intentions — from Kosovo to Kandahar. If that isn’t clear enough from the latest killings of American soldiers stuck like sitting ducks between the Afghan Taliban and other Afghan Islamists, all doubt is removed by Elliott Abrams, the longtime Republican foreign-policy solon who served as a top National Security Council official during the heady days of the Bush “Freedom Agenda.” “Can there be a group anywhere in the world today more disappointed in United States foreign policy than those fighting the Syrian regime?” Abrams, a distinguished public servant whom I admire, asked this week in a post on the Corner.
Yeah: How about the American people?
Our entanglement in Afghanistan is now reduced to pleading with Taliban decapitators to come to the negotiating table while the Afghan forces our soldiers train and the Afghan civilians our soldiers protect kill our men and women — and while officials of the government we prop up echo their clerics’ exhortations to violent jihad until our infidel forces vacate the country.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/292510/die-die-foreigners-mark-steyn
Say what you like about Afghans, but they’re admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn’t put it any plainer:
“Die, die, foreigners!”
And foreigners do die. USAF Lieutenant Colonel John Loftis, 44, and Army Major Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a “secure room” that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan “intelligence officer.” Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/03/02/obama_likens_himself_to_gandhi_and_nelson_mandela.html
GEEZ…NEXT HE’LL SOLVE THE MIDDLE EAST BY PARTING THE RED SEA…..RSK
Obama Likens Himself To Gandhi And Nelson Mandela
“The civil rights movement was hard. Winning the vote for women was hard. Making sure that workers had some basic protections was hard,” President Obama said at a fundraiser while talking about how difficult it is to bring about “change” in politics.
“Around the world, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term. It takes more than a single president. It takes more than a single individual,” Obama said.
“What it takes is ordinary citizens who keep believe, who are committed to fighting and pushing and inching this country closer and closer to our highest ideals. And I said in 2008, ‘that I am not a perfect man and I will not be a perfect president.’ But I promised you, but I promised you, I promised you back then that I would always tell you what I believe. I would always tell you where I stood,” he also said at a fundraiser in NYC.
Holder Wants Race Preferences and Benefits . . . Forever URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/03/02/eric-holder-wants-race-preferences-and-benefits-forever/ Eric Holder has gone all-in supporting race-based hiring preferences and race-based benefits. Given that the majority of Americans despise this rot, surely the presidential candidates will pounce. In a little noticed interview at the “World Leaders Forum,” Holder makes statements that […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ RECYCLING THE PROPAGANDA Moreover, Syrian Christians have until now been overwhelmingly supportive of the regime, fearing that if the regime collapses, then Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood would rise to power and focus on marginalizing the Christians. The scenarios in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Morocco have not been encouraging. While the older […]
A LONG TALE…. ARIEH O’SULLIVAN
The first time I met Arieh O’Sullivan was in the predawn darkness of a winter morning in Jerusalem in 1997, when he came to pick me up in a jeep emblazoned with the Confederate flag on its spare tire.I was just starting out as a journalist and working as a cub reporter at The Jerusalem Post, and O’Sullivan, a veteran of The Associated Press, was the Post’s seasoned military correspondent. I thought O’Sullivan had one of the coolest jobs in the world, and it turned out that this diminutive Jew with an Irish name and a Southern accent was a pretty cool guy, too……READ IT ALL
CHRIS CHRISTIE AUDITIONS FOR HOLDER’S JOB
Gov. Chris Christie tonight laid into the New York Police Department for spying on New Jersey Muslims, saying he doesn’t know if the actions were “born out of arrogance, or out of paranoia, or out of both.”
At a briefing Thursday, the governor wouldn’t weigh in on whether he thought civil rights were violated, saying that wasn’t his job and that he would leave that to any agencies investigating the NYPD’s intelligence operations.
“My view, politicians shouldn’t be involved in that. Leave it to law enforcement,” Christie said. “If there were any violations of law by the NYPD, I am sure the attorney general will take whatever steps he deems appropriate.” READ IT ALL
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203986604577257321601811092.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The Man Vladimir Putin Fears Most
Alexei Navalny, the rising star of Russia’s opposition, on his political strategy and why the latest czar is ‘trapped’ by power.
The outcome is a foregone conclusion. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia’s paramount ruler since 2000, will reclaim his old job as president in Sunday’s elections. The drama comes in the aftermath.
Anticorruption blogger and activist Alexei Navalny will be in the middle of it—as he has been over the past three months of Russia’s unexpected political awakening. By the tens of thousands, Russians shed their fear and apathy to protest December’s fraud-ridden parliamentary elections and Mr. Putin’s hold on power. From a crowded stage of opposition figures, Mr. Navalny has emerged as the charismatic and fresh face of the movement.
The next phase will test him and the opposition. The series of large demonstrations after December exposed the shallowness of support for Mr. Putin in the large cities and public frustration with the political stagnation and lack of accountability in Russia. Yet the rallies forced no notable government concessions. Though weakened, Mr. Putin gets a new term and possibly energy to reverse his slide or to crack down.
