There will be no postings until Monday December 14th,2015
For good and for ill, fighting from the air has been perhaps the defining aspect of America’s warmaking. We invented “precision” daylight bombing against Germany in WWII. We pioneered firebombing and nuclear bombing against Japan in that same conflict. We developed laser-guided munitions for use against high-priority targets while fighting North Vietnam, and even more precise GPS-guided munitions for our 21st century wars.
We build the best bombers, the best fighters, and the smartest bombs. We invented stealth so that “America, f*** yeah!” you won’t even see us coming.
Our pilots are perhaps the best trained in the world, and even if our Air Force has become too small for today’s needs, it’s still the biggest and by far the most powerful in the world.
And don’t even get me started on drones. Big drones give Air Force colonels capabilities once reserved to jillion-dollar spy satellites, and tiny drones turn a muddy-boot Army grunt into an aerial reconnaissance asset. Even cooler, a president sorting through “assassination cards” in the Oval Office can have his order relayed to a drone pilot in Nevada who gives a command via satellite to an armed drone over Syria — and then a few seconds later a Hellfire missile sends a jihadi commander to Paradise.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nebraska-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=must_read
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/05/30/nebraska-congressional-elections-2014/
Ben Sasse (R) Challenger
FP: Nick Adams, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Adams: Thank you, Jamie, great to be with you.
FP: Congratulations on your new book. Let’s begin with this question: Why does an Australian care what happens in America?
Adams: Jamie, what’s good for America is good for the world. A weak America is a weak world. A strong America is a strong world. That’s not a theory. That’s reality. We can see it happening right now. Cast your eye over the world: Islamists are openly working to establish a Caliphate. There is a catastrophic humanitarian disaster. Russia is attempting to re-establish the Soviet empire. China is aggressively expanding in the South China Sea. There are vast refugee flows. This is no coincidence. Frankly, this is what the world looks like when American influence is in decline. We are all paying a heavy price for the Obama administration’s politically correct decisions. Western intellectuals have long believed that America is not a force for good in the world, and should take a backseat in world affairs. They now have egg on their face.
FP: Tell us about your new book and why people should read it.
Adams: Let me put it this way: if you love America, and you hate political correctness, then you need to read this book. It’s as simple as that. Nothing is more anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-truth, and anti-reality than political correctness. It is a noose around America’s neck, growing tighter each day. From identity politics and secularism to the all-powerful welfare state and the war against national identity, every problem in America today is either rooted in, or compounded by political correctness. It is destroying America, and if it destroys America, it destroys Western civilization. So, we have to crush it, and only America can.
There have been many books written about Benghazi, but not every book led to a personal attack from the White House. And yet that’s what happened with “Architects of Disaster”, the book by former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra indicting Obama and Hillary for the Libyan disaster.
In “Architects of Disaster”, Hoekstra lays out the case against the intervention in Libya, a war that still remains nameless and hardly discussed despite the post-war murders of five Americans in that country. Beginning with the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, he traces back the roots of that disaster to Obama and Hillary’s intervention in Libya which ended up empowering Islamic terrorists.
As Hoekstra states, the cause of that atrocity was rooted in the administration’s belief that “Jihadists can be both trusted and managed.” And as Hoekstra, currently a Shillman Senior Fellow with the Investigative Project on Terrorism, points out that, “in spite of all that has happened… the Obama administration has continued this policy to the present day.” And appears ready to continue it forever.
Despite that beginning, “Architects of Disaster” is less of a look at Benghazi and instead represents a wider examination of what really happened in Libya. Benghazi was one of the symptoms that Obama and Hillary’s war had gone badly wrong. But it was neither the beginning nor the end of what was taking place in Libya. It was a bloody moment that made Americans rethink a war that they had opposed, but had otherwise never really paid much attention to.
You may see this as Islamist audacity – even, dare we say, chutzpah. Actually, it is business as usual.
In San Bernardino, heartbroken families are preparing to bury the 14 innocent people murdered last week by Islamic jihadists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. They are tending to another 21 wounded by the married terrorists. Meanwhile the Los Angeles chapter of CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) is pressing child custody authorities in California to comply with Islamic law – sharia – in the placement of the six-month-old infant the terrorist couple left behind.
They may not be saying that that is what they are doing, but that is what they are doing.
In the long term, CAIR-LA is pushing to have the child placed with Farook’s sister, Saira Khan. This is going on, mind you, even as FBI Director James Comey told a Senate committee today that the Islamic supremacist couple had been discussing jihad and martyrdom for the last two years (i.e., beginning before Malik immigrated to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia in 2014). Farook may even have plotted a terrorist attack in 2012.
Even before Director Comey’s testimony, we knew Farook’s mother was living with the couple in what was a bomb factory teeming with ammunition, and that his father was well aware that Farook was an admirer of the Islamic State (ISIS). One might figure, oh I don’t know, maybe CAIR would want to think twice before asking the authorities to place the infant with members of this family.
Baseball has been overtaken by other professional sports in terms of fan interest. The recent World Series — a competitive one, including a New York team from America’s largest media market — had trouble competing for TV viewers against an NFL Sunday night football game. It is therefore not surprising that few people could identify the Major League Baseball player who set the record for most times stealing home in a single season (7), and most times carried off the field in a stretcher in his career (11), not including similar events while playing ball in the Army during World War II.
That player, who enjoyed a season and a half of extraordinary performance until the first of many head-on collisions with an outfield wall short-circuited his career, was Pete Reiser, sometimes known as the original “Pistol Pete.”
In his first full season as a starting outfielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941, Reiser won the National League batting title (.343) while leading the league in doubles, triples, runs scored, number of times hit by a pitcher, and slugging percentage. He was named a starter in the All-Star game, finished second in MVP balloting, and helped the Dodgers make it to the World Series for the first time in 21 years (where of course they lost to the Yankees in the first of five head-to-head defeats at the hands of the “Bronx bombers” during the next 13 seasons). The next season, Reiser was having an even better year, hitting .350, getting voted onto the All-Star team again, and pushing the Dodgers into a 6-game lead over St. Louis in the National League pennant race.
Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on national security. He needs a better strategy for describing and defending his policies to the American people.
With public approval of his anti-ISIS efforts at 33 percent, President Obama took to the airwaves last night to bolster support for his counterterrorism strategy. Judging by the reaction in the national press, the speech fell flat. We shall see what the polls say, but it seems safe at this point to rule out a dramatic surge in the President’s support as a grateful nation responds to his dramatic appeal. A president once compared to Lincoln as an orator and Eisenhower as a strategist by his adoring supporters no longer seems credible or even interesting on the terror threat that many voters now think is the biggest concern facing the nation.
Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on this topic; it is waiting for 2017 and the decisive repudiation of a global strategy that many of the President’s closest advisors and senior aides believe has failed. One thinks of the famous Boston Globe headline about a Jimmy Carter speech, added by a printer as a placeholder that somehow survived to the first morning edition: “More Mush From the Wimp.” Fairly or not, that is what more and more Americans hear when Obama speaks about terror.The political consequences of the perceived failure of Obama’s national security approach are already on display. Secretary Clinton is running against the foreign policy of the man she served for four years
The Romans had a saying, “Experience is the teacher of fools.” On Sunday night Obama addressed the nation about the San Bernardino attacks, and among the usual lefty Democrat talking points about preventing a “backlash” against Muslims and fretting over “assault rifles,” he gently called out the Muslim community.
That [avoiding a “war with Islam”] does not mean denying the fact that an extremist ideology has spread within some Muslim communities. This is a real problem that Muslims must confront, without excuse. Muslim leaders here and around the globe have to continue working with us to decisively and unequivocally reject the hateful ideology that groups like ISIL and al Qaeda promote; to speak out against not just acts of violence, but also those interpretations of Islam that are incompatible with the values of religious tolerance, mutual respect, and human dignity.
Has the overwhelming, graphic experience of jihadist mayhem opened one of the numerous ideological locks closing the president’s mind?
Some commentators thought the words a “big deal,” as the Daily Beast put it. The Washington Post called it “unusual.” But such estimates are convincing only by comparison with Obama’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge any link between the numerous jihadist outfits perpetrating thousands of violent attacks, and the doctrines of Islam. The statement does mark a slight shift away from the usual talk of generic “violent extremists,” and from his willingness to condemn Christianity for the Crusades and Inquisition, while never, ever linking Islam to the 14 centuries of Muslim violence. But it is still light years from the sort of clarity and honesty about Islam we need to demand from Muslims.
In A HISTORY LESSON FOR RICK STEVES Exposing PBS’s biased documentary on the Holy Land.
The author, Joseph Puder, omitted the fact that OF the original British Mandate for Palestine (Israel), 78% of it was given away by Churchill to the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (Jordan). Palestine (Israel) was left with a mere 22% of its promised traditional homeland, where the Jews had lived continuously for over 3,700 years – even after the Romans destroyed their state of Judea in 70 A.D.
Not only was this land grab for Transjordan a violation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (Israel) but it went against the San Remo Conference of 1920, the Treaty of Lausanne and the Treaty of Sevres.
All of this occurred following World War I when the Turkish Ottoman Empire was being divided to create Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan.
Shame on Rick Steves!
Janet Levy,
Los Angeles
