RUTHFULLY YOURS

Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/if-he-believes-it-it-must-be-so_783721.html

On the eve of the Netanyahu visit to Washington, President Obama gave a lengthy interview to Jeffrey Goldberg that shows a chief executive who has learned next to nothing about the world in his five years in office.

First, kudos to Goldberg: he pressed Obama repeatedly, challenging vague formulations and seeking clarity. Goldberg pushed Obama hard, especially on Iran and Syria.

Obama isn’t good off the cuff, especially when challenged; he is far better with a prepared speech. And what emerged is an awful portrait of the president and his conception of the world.

Take Syria. Here’s what Obama said:

“I think those who believe that two years ago, or three years ago, there was some swift resolution to this thing had we acted more forcefully, fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the conflict in Syria and the conditions on the ground there. … Over the last two years I have pushed our teams to find out what are the best options in a bad situation. … But I’ve looked at a whole lot of game plans, a whole lot of war plans, a whole bunch of scenarios, and nobody has been able to persuade me that us taking large-scale military action even absent boots on the ground, would actually solve the problem. And those who make that claim do so without a lot of very specific information.”

Who are these people who have inadequate information, misunderstand the conflict in Syria, and think there is much more the United States could have done? They include both of Obama’s secretaries of state, Clinton and Kerry, his former defense secretary Leon Panetta, and his former CIA director David Petraeus—all of whom wanted much more U.S. support for the Syrian rebels. And perhaps more to the point, take the case of Fred Hof.

Hof has been working on Syria and the broader Middle East since the 1970s, first as a career Army officer and then for the State Department. He was given the rank of ambassador and the title of “special adviser” on Syria by Obama in 2012. Hof has left the government and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, where he writes regularly about Syria at the Council’s web site. He knows far more about Syria than Mr. Obama and saw the same intelligence Mr. Obama did (in fact, he no doubt read a lot more of it). And what he writes is filled with growing anguish and anger about Obama’s failure to act in the face of mass murder by the criminal regime in Damascus. But to Obama, any such criticism “fundamentally misunderstands…conditions on the ground there,” which of course only Obama really understands.

Obama’s “arguments” about Syria in the Goldberg interview are insulting to his former (and, in Kerry’s case, current) top advisers, whose advice he rejected, and misleading about their advice. He describes a situation where ignorant critics seek “large scale military action,” which is akin to the administration’s claim that those who want sanctions on Iran are “warmongers.” But that is a false description, for what was recommended time after time was serious help to the rebels, and a one-time strike (“incredibly small,” said Kerry, not “large scale”) at chemical weapons assets. So we have the president deriding those who disagreed with him—who include his top aides and top experts—and refusing, even now, to understand that his policy of passivity in Syria has produced nearly the worst of all possible worlds: 150,000 dead, 6 million homeless, and a menacing gathering of perhaps 25,000 jihadists at the heart of the Middle East.

http://politicalmavens.com/

After learning that the attic space at Gracie Mansion had once been occupied by Mayor Koch’s chef, Chirlane McCray, First Lady of New York City responded to the question of how the de Blasio’s might use it: “I can tell you with confidence, there will not be a servant living there.” Let’s overlook the slap in the face to Mitchell London, the chef who rightfully never viewed himself as a servant. Let’s focus instead on why Ms. McCray chose that word instead of staff and let’s object to the hypocrisy implied in her statement. It’s clear that our First Lady has not seen “The Butler” in which Oprah lashes out at her son for disparaging his father’s ’servile’ position and reminds him that not only was the butler a man of dignity and integrity but he had also paid for everything that the son had ever gotten and enjoyed. Perhaps Ms. McCray has forgotten how many New Yorkers perform cleaning or child care work in homes, offices or hotels; how many of them are people of color; how many of them earn very respectable wages – sometimes considerably more than Wellesley graduates. Rather than showing respect for people who are willing to work hard to earn a living, the First Lady dismissively refers to them as servants, a rank marginally higher than slaves.

In America we don’t use the word servant – we euphemize with housekeeper, butler, chef, cook, nanny, babysitter, personal assistant, steward, chambermaid. Ms. McCray knows all this and she also knows by now how sizeable a staff it takes to clean and maintain her new residence. She will not be doing any of that work herself – she has chosen to work in her husband’s administration and has a personal assistant who will receive a salary of $175,000 on the public payroll. The First Lady will not be cooking for or organizing the various functions which she and her husband will host – she will be the recipient of all of that, supplied by public funding. In fact, if we added up all the expenses related to Mr. and Mrs. de Blasio’s new lifestyle, you can be sure that it would more than cover the budget of at least one of the three charter schools which the mayor has closed. I challenge Chirlane McCray to ask those mostly black and Hispanic parents what their preference for spending their tax dollars would be – keeping Gracie Mansion clean and well-oiled or re-opening their children’s best hope for a decent educaation.

http://acdemocracy.org/obama-putin-kool-aid/#sthash.2rfrlpb3.dpbs

Media coverage regarding America’s response to Putin’s takeover of Crimea demonstrates the success of the Obama administration’s propaganda maxim blaming successive American administrations for atrocities at home and abroad. Some of our pundits apparently have drunk what might be called the Obama Kool-Aid, i.e., apologies for the United States’ mostly fabricated evil past, as have been offered since the beginning of the first Obama administration.

Accordingly, we have no enemies, only disagreements that could be resolved by giving in to our contenders. Thus Russia, Iran, and even al-Qaeda will eventually leave the “nineteenth-century,” “medieval” and “Cold War” past and come around to the administration’s worldview of equally respected and pacific states

One of the earliest of Obama’s apologies came on January 27, 2009, in an interview with Al Arabiya:

“My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that.”

New Yorker editor, David Remnick, who served as the Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, is apparently one of the Kool-Aid drinkers. “The United States also does not have the leverage it wants in historical terms. Invading countries is something the United States knows about from really raw experience. And Russia knows that and asserts that day in and day out on Russian television all the time,” he commented on Monday morning on NBC’s Today show. Remnick, who praised Putin during the Sochi for showcasing Russia on the world stage in pop cultural terms during the Olympics, saw nothing wrong in Putin’s intervention in Ukraine “to assert Russia strength in a country where they have legitimate interests.”

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/are_liberals_less_selfish_than_other_people.html

Liberals claim to be better than other mortals. Liberals, they tell us, are a political anomaly who vote for other people’s benefit, not their own. Democrats see themselves as the generous party, the saviors of the needy, the elderly, the minority underdog against the cruel hand of fate and Republicans.

Liberals are right: there is a difference in caring that shows up along party lines. Conservatives give more, a lot more. They aren’t content with good-hearted wishes, they do good deeds, turning wishes into actions. Conservatives are ten times more personally charitable, even to secular causes. They do far more volunteer work. They even give more blood. Conservatives do more to help the poor, the sick, minorities, the environment. People who want small government give an average of $1600 a year versus a measly $140 given by redistributionists. It’s not because conservatives are richer; the opposite is true.

Liberals rationalize their stingy behavior by saying government welfare is a right. They will tell you that voting for higher taxes (on other people) is morally superior to charity. Really? Out of a $1000 “donated” to the IRS a meager $30 reaches the poor, versus $700 from a private charity. Our neediest citizens would be in tough shape without the $126 billion in church programs, from soup kitchens to adoption centers to shelters to hospitals.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/new-liberal-media-meme-obamas-inaction-makes-him-strong-putins-invasions-make-him-weak/print/ Courtesy of a cursory reading of 1984 and several sharp blows to the head, the media has gathered up the tattered remnants of its dignity and has a new meme out to explain everything. “Strength is weakness, Weakness is strength.” Think Progress, CAP’s little spin factory, deployed the meme, “an act of weakness, not […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/jimmy-carter-to-visit-venezuela/print/

Last week Jimmy Carter fired off letters to Venezuela’s fraudulent President Nicolas Maduro and to Venezuela’s defrauded Presidential candidate Enrique Capriles expressing “grave concern” regarding the political turmoil and bloodshed convulsing their nation. From his pulpit at Emory University’s Carter Center, the former U.S. president calls for “dialogue” among the embattled Venezuelan parties and offers to visit the troubled nation — but not as a formal “mediator.”

The news of Carter’s proposed Venezuela visit was only hours old when alarmed Venezuelan anti-socialists sent out an SOS: “Please, desist from your trip,” reads an open letter from Venezuelan blogger/journalist Daniel Duquenal. “You have absolutely no credibility in Venezuela…You have cursed us enough as it is. I can assure you that half of the country has no respect nor credibility for you and the other half (the Castroites) thinks you are a mere fool that they can use and discard as needed.”

Venezuelan continues as a veritable battleground between hundreds of thousands of protestors and thousands of Cuban-trained government police and national guardsmen. Fifteen protestors have been shot dead, hundreds arrested and thousands injured. “I feel as if this were a war zone,” said one resident of the far-western city of San Cristobal, long known for it’s anti-Chavista activism.

Desperate to cow that area’s rebellious residents Maduro even sent some of his regime’s Russian-built Sukhoi warplanes to buzz (but not yet bomb) the area. “It doesn’t matter if it takes a month, two months, three months. We have to get rid of this government,” said one desperate protestor.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/ben-shapiro-crashes-ucla-divestment-from-israel-hearing-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s special editon of The Glazov Gang was joined by Ben Shapiro, the Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org, Elisha Krauss, Morning Co-Host at KRLA AM 870 The Answer and a staff writer at TruthRevolt.org, and Jeremy Boreing, the Managing Editor of TruthRevolt.org.

The Gang gathered to discuss Jew Hatred and the Art of Political Warfare. The dialogue occurred within the context of Ben’s recent successful appearance at the UCLA Divestment from Israel Hearing, in which he blasted both the student sponsors and those considering the anti-Semitic measure. The panel also discussed How Conservatives Can Best Fight Political War, Pierce Morgan’s Ratings Tanked After Being Eviscerated By Shapiro, UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s Jew-Hatred, and much, much more. Watch the two-part series below:

Part I:

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/it-takes-a-rogue-nation-to-stop-a-rogue-state/

The international community looked into Putin’s eyes and blinked. Multilateralism has failed as badly as it did in the days of the League of Nations, but then again it never actually worked.

The international order that everyone pretends is a real force in world affairs is really the United States and a few partners doing all the work and letting the diplomats and bureaucrats of the world pretend that they matter. Without America, the United Nations would be just as useless as the League of Nations. With America, the United Nations is only a deterrent when the United States puts its foot down and the rest of the world doesn’t get in the way.

It has become fashionable to denounce the United States as a rogue state. A military intervention, even with the backing of its Western allies, but outside the framework of the organizations of the international order, was deemed unilateralism and cowboy diplomacy.

And then Obama rode in on a three-speed bike and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to doing nothing.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/03/agitprop-oscar/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=7255a09d90-2014_3_4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-7255a09d90-41165129
Two new films explore the complexity of Israeli-Arab and Palestinian identity. One is propaganda, the other much more artful. Which do you think got the Oscar nod?
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ rules for Best Foreign Language Film provide that each “country” makes a single submission. This year there were 76 submissions—a record. An Academy committee reduced them to a nine-film shortlist, and a second committee chose five nominees, from four countries and one non-country: Belgium (The Broken Circle Breakdown), Cambodia (The Missing Picture), Denmark (The Hunt), Italy (The Great Beauty), and “Palestine” (Omar). The rules also require that a film be first released in the country submitting it. In the past year, Omar has been released in Europe and the United States, but not in “Palestine.”

The Academy bent its rules in the case of Omar, but the nomination presents issues even more important than the rule violations. This essay examines why Omar is characterized as a “Palestinian” film, and what it shows about whether “Palestine”—if it ever actually becomes a country—can live side by side in peace and security with Israel. It also takes a look at a second new film, Bethlehem, which is nearly identical in plot, quality, and in the questions it raises, and whose exceptional artistic merit makes the specific choice of Omar all the more unfathomable.
The synopsis of Omar by Adopt Films, the movie’s U.S. film distributor, is as follows:
Omar is accustomed to dodging surveillance bullets to cross the separation wall to visit his secret love Nadia. But occupied Palestine knows neither simple love nor clear-cut war. On the other side of the wall, the sensitive young baker Omar becomes a freedom fighter who must face painful choices about life and manhood. When Omar is captured after a deadly act of resistance, he falls into a cat-and-mouse game with the military police. Suspicion and betrayal jeopardize his longtime trust with accomplices and childhood friends Amjad and Tarek, Nadia’s militant brother. Omar’s feelings quickly become as torn apart as the Palestinian landscape. But it’s soon evident that everything he does is for his love of Nadia.

In evaluating Omar as a Palestinian film, consider these facts: The film’s screenwriter and director is Israeli. The actor playing the lead role was born in Israel and attended Tel Aviv University before moving to New York. The actress playing the beautiful Nadia is a 16-year-old born in Israel. The actor playing the key role of Omar’s friend Amjad is another 16-year-old born in Israel. Most of the movie was made in Israel (six of the eight weeks of filming). Moreover, Israel allowed the filmmaker to shoot wherever he wanted—he says “we managed to get permission for all of the places, even the wall,” which functions as a virtual character in the movie (featured prominently in the film’s poster, symbolically holding the young lovers apart).

The very existence of this film is a tribute to Israel—a country where a movie about “occupied Palestine” (a.k.a. the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria), and the “separation wall” (a.k.a. the “security barrier” that in most places is not a wall but a fence) can be made freely, not only without governmental opposition, but with explicit governmental permission.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/372365/toward-what-ukraine-kevin-d-williamson

Call them — us — paleos, isolationists, libertarians, non-interventionists, peaceniks, or what you will, a broad coalition touching left, right, and center precipitated out of the cloud of regrets and recrimination floating around the Iraq War specifically and the Bush foreign-policy legacy generally. The Left and the Buchananite Right reiterated their favorite conspiracy theories (respectively, war for oil and corporate profits and war for Jewish interests), but there was a realignment in less feverish quarters, too, as many on the post-Bush right recoiled from the final cost/benefit analysis of the so-called democracy project. The new non-interventionists might not have been entirely sure what we wanted, but we knew what we didn’t want more of, and that was the sort of foreign policy that has come to be fairly or unfairly synonymous with neoconservatism. Are we anti-neocons? Maybe, though that would imply a more adversarial position than is always the case. Perhaps we are only chastened post-neocons.

The Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in prelude to effective annexation — and let us not pretend that it is something less than that — has presented us with the first great foreign-policy test of the post-neocon era. We are not handling it convincingly.

Senator Rand Paul, the most prominent of the anti-neocons and someone I admire greatly, was typical in his tepid, incoherent response to the Russian invasion. He wrote that we should “make it abundantly clear to Russia that we expect them to honor the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum,” and explained to the Russians, as though they had not considered the question, that “economic incentives align against Russian military involvement in Ukraine.” He hinted in the vaguest possible way about economic retaliation through the World Trade Organization.