http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/tributes-to-totalitarians Anyone who remembers his American history courses in grade and high school – when American history was still being taught, because very little of it is today – will also remember all the glowing, adulatory accounts in standard textbooks of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. One encountered nary a disparaging […]
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/10/a-conservative-defense-agenda
“If the economy doesn’t recover, all talk of a defense recovery go out the door. We have to insist on a realistic defense budget tied to policies that will restore economic growth.”
The first duty of the sovereign, therefore, that of defending the society from the violence and injustice of other independent societies, grows gradually more and more expensive, as the society advances in civilization.
—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
THE GROWING COST OF DEFENSE that Adam Smith foresaw 236 years ago now poses a familiar challenge for American conservatives. The“guns versus butter” debate goes back at least to the Lyndon Johnson era. But then our economy was strong, and our enemy—the Soviet Union—was visible, personified by its odious leaders, and a clear threat.
But now our economy is weak, made so by President Obama’s hyper-expansion of government and debt. It has apparently lost its ability to grow, and without growth there cannot be recovery or prosperity. President Obama’s military build-down has already imposed massive cuts on the Pentagon’s budget, resulting in a significant reduction in our current and future military capabilities. The fiscal realities—with which Congress refuses to deal—make more cuts inevitable.
Our economic weakness comes at a time when the world is highly unstable and when most of our allies refuse to spend what is necessary to provide for our mutual defense. And defense is more expensive than ever, because many of the threats we face are cheap for our adversaries to mount but enormously expensive for us to counter. A state can buy an effective cyberwar capability for very little, but the price to defend against it is enormous. It costs a lot less to launch an ICBM than it does to intercept one before it can deliver its warhead.
Combined with the wrongheaded diplomacy of the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Obama’s military build-down has made us poorer in our ability to defend ourselves and affect world events than we have been at any time since before the Cold War.
We are abandoning our role as a superpower, and we are already unable to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, affect the postwar future of Afghanistan, or even stabilize the most minor of potential conflicts, such as the revived British-Argentinian dispute over the Falkland Islands.
Conservatives thus face two existential questions: First, do we want to resume a global role? Second, what kind of military, intelligence, and diplomatic policies must we undertake to ensure our national defense over the next decade?
GOP leaders such as vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan and former Virginia Governor James Gilmore (now head of the Free Congress Foundation) have already charted paths to economic recovery. Some combination of their proposals—and those of a President Romney—will be pursued if President Obama is defeated in November. If Obama is reelected, economic growth will be postponed indefinitely and the pressure on our national security spending will only increase.
Superpower or Not?
A SUPERPOWER IS A NATION that has the ability not only to protect its homeland but also to defend its interests and allies globally. As former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told me:
The world is looking for some certainty in security, and the U.S. has been the pillar that the world could count on for pretty much all of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st century. If we give that up, the question is, what takes our place? Is it going to be the United Nations? Is it going to be some other alliances? I don’t know about this ‘indispensable nation’ notion, but I do know how important the United States has been to world security and stability for a long time.
Myers hit the nail on the head. If the United States shrinks to a regional power, nothing—no nation, no international body such as the United Nations or NATO—will fill our shoes.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) Told me that our leadership isn’t looking out for America’s national security as it should. “We’re already heading in the direction of not being a superpower,” he said. “And our allies and friends have seen that. Our enemies have seen that.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/obama_campaign_open_door_to_china_mEQG5tC5tRZdbDbiTHGBcL Suppose you are sitting in the Chinese politburo in Beijing. Would you rather President Obama or Mitt Romney, who’s just declared that the era of American weakness abroad is over, win on Nov. 6? Well, you can do something about it. Feel free to get out your credit card, pull up Obama’s fund-raising Web […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/10/10/as-morsi-promotes-hamas-obama-promotes-morsi/?print=1 In Cairo last week, Hamas’s chief, Khaled Mashal, gave a fiery speech calling for violent jihad against Israel. With approving nods from his hosts — aides to Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader whom Egyptians elected their president — Mashal exclaimed, “Resistance [ACM- “resistance” is the Islamist euphemism for “terrorism”], not negotiation, is the […]
CAREFUL ABOUT CHOOSING ALLIES.
Lara Logan is pretty and pretty convincing and useful when she is on record in denouncing this administration’s failures in Afghanistan. Read “Lara Logan’s War Cry”—-The CBS News and ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent stunned a Chicago audience with her interventionist critique of America’s response to the attacks in Libya. James Warren reports.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/09/lara-logan-s-war-cry.html
Really? How come she has never condemned the Afghan insider killings–rooted as the May, 2011 Army Red Team report revealed in “totalitarian Islam”– let alone See No Islam “Counterinsurgency doctrine” (COIN).
READ: http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/27/army-willfully-ignores-islamic-motivations-behind-afghan-killings-of-us-troops/ by Andrew Bostom
She was in fact a big fan of the mental and moral cretin McChrystal, who, as Diana West discovered, even condemned the assassination of bin Laden as a “violation” of Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty. From Andrew Bostom’s forthcoming “Sharia Versus Freedom”, pp. 359-60:
“Diana West brought to my attention a commentary published May 13, 2011, by Pakistani Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, Dr. Mohammad Ali Rai. Dr. Rai recorded comments made by General Stanley McChrystal in May 2011 at Oxford’s International Relations Society, during a discussion of US military intervention in “Af-Pak.”67 Regarding the assassination of Osama bin Laden—the avowed jihadist mastermind of the mass killing of three thousand US noncombatants in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001, as well as a litany of other murderous jihad terrorist actions,68McChrystal opined:
‘To my [Dr. Rai’s] surprise, the general [McChrystal] also brought up the issue of Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty and how that had been violated in the Bin Laden mission. The general even went on to say that the news of Bin Laden’s death was not something that should be celebrated, as there is no happiness and satisfaction in the loss of human life.69’
The preening, pseudomoralistic voice of amoral, postmodern COIN defeatism, in its own words.”
Logan would blithely resign our troops to the same self-destructive modes of operation dictated by See No Islam COIN under which they currently operate. Conservatives had better get their minds around this reality and stop singing her praises as anything other than a momentary way to bash Obama, appropriately, during the election cycle. However, she represents an endorsement of failed policies, not some bold new approach.
http://times247.com/
French police find bomb materials in terror probe
Israel National News
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
News
French police have found bomb-making materials in the probe of an Islamist terror cell suspected of a carrying out a grenade attack on a kosher supermarket. The suspected leader of the cell was shot and killed Saturday when police tried to arrest him in a raid at his home. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28taKKfPx
Obama’s delusional campaign getting loopier
The Washington Times
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Commentary
After getting thoroughly trounced by Mitt Romney on the debate stage, President Obama chose to trash his opponent, call him a liar and accuse him of being some kind of duplicitous, two-faced snake-oil salesman. In the throes of desperate delusion, his campaign got even loopier. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28tadjSXV
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Issa sets sights on Clinton in Libya probe
The Hill
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
News
Issa sets sights on Clinton in Libya probe
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is setting his sights on his biggest political target yet: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Read more…
Pelosi to Biden: Focus on women during debate
The Hill
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Blogs
Pelosi to Biden: Focus on women during debate
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is urging Vice President Biden to focus on women in Thursday’s night’s upcoming debate with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP’s vice-presidential hopeful. Read more…
Election portent: Supporters see Obama burnout
Yahoo
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Commentary
Election portent: Supporters see Obama burnout
Consider, the anguished acknowledgment of Buzz Bissinger that after a childhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and after a lifetime of casting Democratic ballots, he is voting for Mitt Romney after concluding that Obama is “burnt-out.” Read more…
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West: Obama foreign policy ‘utter failure’
Human Events
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Commentary
President Obama has built a foreign policy on trying to appease and make friends with America’s enemies, rather than facing them head on with strength and clear consequences for their actions. The president’s approach has been an utter failure. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28takem4D
Not just this story http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/obamas-ring-there-is-no-god-but-allah/ On the upper section, “There is no god” is written in Arabic letters, from right to left: Lam, Alif, Alif, Lam, Ha. On the lower section is “except god,” written in Arabic letters from right to left: Alif, Lam, Alif, Alif, Lam, Lam, Ha. It is common in Islamic art […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/is-the-election-delaying-nidal-hasans-trial/print/
The legal wrangling continues over Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist and jihadist who at Fort Hood in 2009 killed 13 while yelling “Allahu Akbar!” The issue is supposedly Major Hasan’s beard, which he grew to signify his Islamic faith. The judge, Col. Gregory Gross, says the beard is a disruption and wants to forcible shave Hasan. That has touched off appeals but something else may be driving the delays, such as the presidential election.
Hasan’s action scored good reviews in some quarters. “Nidal Hassan is a hero,” said the website of Anwar Al-Awlaki, imam at the Dar al-Hijirah mosque Hasan attended. “He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. . . Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done?”
President Obama’s first response to Hasan’s mass murder was brief, low key, and failed to include Islamic terrorism as bearing any responsibility for the deaths. “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing,” the president said. That now amounts to official policy.
After Hasan’s mass murder campaign, the Obama administration’s Department of Defense issued Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood. As Andrew McCarthy noted in Spring Fever, Major Hasan was a “five-alarm jihadist” but the DoD report casts his actions as “workplace violence,” as though Hasan was a fired postal worker seeking payback.
Protecting the Force contains not a single reference to jihad or jihadists and its only mention of “Islamic” is an endnote reference to “Countering Violent Islamic Extremism,” a 2007 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. The word “hate” occurs only once. Given the reality of the Fort Hood mass murder, the praise from al-Alwaki, and Hasan’s attempts to contact al Qaeda, the omissions are truly breathtaking.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/michael-widlanski/obama-americas-hollow-man/
Clint Eastwood’s image of the empty chair in the White House hit home even with the literately conscious magazine The New Yorker whose cover featured Barack Obama’s “empty chair” as the metaphor for the presidential debate.
Movie cowboys are often men of few words and much action. Eastwood knows. Few people are better suited to sum up the essential emptiness and hackneyed hollowness of Barack Obama who cast himself as the sheriff who kills terrorists like Osama Bin Laden when all before him have failed.
The policies of Barack Obama all begin with a lot of words: Recovery Summer, Stimulus, Arab Spring, Re-Start with Russia, Engagement with Iran, ambassador to Syria. But they all end ”not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
That is the phrase of T.S. Eliot whose poem “The Hollow Men” seems to have been written for Obama, although it was composed before Obama was born.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
“Gesture without motion” is President Obama’s trademark in office.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/white-people-what-are-they-good-for/print/
LAMONT IS A POSEUR AND FOOL WHO IS OFTEN FEATURED BY O’REILLY…RSK
White privilege consists of being white. Black privilege consists of denouncing white people in ways that would be considered racist if the shoe were on the other foot.
Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, a man whose website modestly describes him as a “Professor, Author, Speaker, Public Intellectual,” has assembled a list of what he believes are the 15 most overrated white people to prove the point. Any college faculty member who tried assembling a list of the 15 most overrated black people would soon be the target of the most overzealous witch-hunt since Salem.
But if we were assembling a list of overrated black people, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill might just deserve his own place on the notepad. Hill’s bio is the usual intriguing world of African-American academia, complete with essays on social commentary in Hip Hop. Hill writes, so he’s an author. He speaks, so he’s a speaker. And he was once a weekly contributor to the Star Jones talk show, so he’s clearly a public intellectual. Best of all, he’s an affiliated faculty member in African American Studies at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. IRAAS has a logo that features two iguanas mating and offers all the usual navel-gazing courses that exist only to waste tuition money, except they’re African-American navel-gazing courses.
