RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, The Point, at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed “Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died,” outlining the president’s disastrous Afghanistan give-away.

The dialogue also involved an analysis of Obama’s surrender of Iraq, more revelations on the Benghazi betrayal, the scandalous Taliban-Bergdahl swap, and much, much more:

A project is underway to rehabilitate the self-exiled Sixties radical, anti-Semite and “black power” advocate Stokely Carmichael.

The opening salvo in this revisionist project of the Afro-centrist Marxist Left in academia is Stokely: A Life, by Peniel E. Joseph, which was recently published by BasicCivitas Books.

It is more infomercial than biography, calculated to transform its negligible subject into a towering figure of historic importance, and to whitewash the damage he did. Joseph’s central argument is that Carmichael was a “rock star” activist who inspired generations and who singlehandedly changed the course of American history.

Perversely, Joseph calls Carmichael a civil rights leader. If that fairly summarizes Carmichael’s work, he was a civil rights leader only in the bizarre modern sense that racial arsonist like Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader.

It is difficult to imagine an American civil rights leader making common cause with ruthless African dictators but that is what Carmichael did. He changed his name to Kwame Toure to honor two of them. In his self-imposed exile he was a courtier to brutal racist tyrants. He was a friend of Ugandan butcher Idi Amin, and rationalized away the relationship by reminding himself that Amin was anti-American and anti-Zionist. Carmichael even accepted Ugandan citizenship.

He was also a friend of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Libya came closest to accomplishing Carmichael’s vision of a socialist state, according to Joseph.

It is difficult to image an American civil rights leaders going abroad to help hostile powers, but this is what Carmichael did.

Carmichael visited Communist Cuba, giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies abroad. While there he called Abraham Lincoln a racist and helped Cuba’s propaganda effort against the United States. After spending three days with Fidel Castro he told reporters that the conversations he had with him were the “most educational, most interesting, and most enlightening of my public life.”

Carmichael praised the world’s most prolific mass murderer, Mao Zedong, as “a great Chinese leader, the greatest Chinese leader there is.” He palled around with Communist Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and called for the U.S. to be defeated in Vietnam.

When the father of Tyrone Woods finally got a moment with the Secretary of State of the United States, she assured him that justice would be done for his murdered son.

“We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” Hillary Clinton told Charles Woods.

The video that the Secretary of State and past and future presidential candidate was referring to was a YouTube trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims.” The killers of Woods, Stevens, Smith and Doherty could rest easy. No drone ever came for them. The cops instead came for a man who uploaded a YouTube video.

At Andrews Air Force Base, Hillary told the families, “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Even in the presence of the families of the murdered Americans who died because of her, Hillary Clinton was still making lying about Islamic terrorism and apologizing to Muslims into her two major priorities.

Two days earlier, Hillary Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State had told the Libyan ambassador that Ansar Al-Sharia, a group linked to Al Qaeda, was responsible. The morning of the receiving ceremony AFRICOM had sent the State Department a list of suspects, including Al Qaeda members, responsible for the Benghazi attack.

In January, Hillary had blamed “imperfect information.” As she makes her rounds promoting her book, she’s fighting to keep the video lie alive.

In “Hard Choices,” Hillary claims that there were “scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives. It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were.”

Since it’s impossible to disprove a negative, it would be equally inaccurate to state that none of the attackers were influenced by a frustrated passion for Hillary Clinton. Since there’s no way to disprove the possibility that at least one of the attackers was motivated by the video, by love for Hillary or by hallucinations induced by bath salts, it’s inaccurate to state that none of the attackers carried a torch for Hillary, were angry at a YouTube video or were tripping on bath salts.

In the late 1980s the Democratic Party decided that appealing to its donor base required strict adherence to the notion of abortion on demand. Anyone who was pro-life (like Al Gore [1], Jesse Jackson [2], and Harry Reid [3]) either switched sides or was chased out of the party.

Today, there are virtually no pro-life Democrats. And soon, thanks to a major push from Barack Obama to please his Sierra Club and Hollywood donors by saddling the coal industry with strict new regulations, there may be no pro-carbon energy Democrats. In turn, this may create a long-term advantage for Republicans in the Senate similar to their strength in the House of Representatives, which the GOP has held for all but four of the last 20 years.

In the holy Democratic Church of Enlightened Environmentalism, red-state Senate Democrats are becoming Carbon Heretics. They risk excommunication — from a steadily shrinking church. Even if the Democrats are correct in believing that demographics give them a long-term advantage in the presidential sweepstakes, they may find their progressive agenda permanently bottled up in Capitol Hill.

Obama’s proposed new anti-coal EPA regulations [4] and continued dithering on the Keystone Pipeline are costing him support in a large number of states you might call the Energy Belt. Thanks to fracking, traditional fossil fuel-producing states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana have been joined by North Dakota, Colorado and Pennsylvania as major energy producers. “Battle Over Fracking Poses Threat to Colorado Democrats,” [5] read a recent New York Times headline.

Meanwhile, intense support for the Keystone Pipeline and the jobs it would create in Nebraska are making Democratic Senate candidacies there nearly as unlikely as they currently are in Oklahoma and Texas (both of which sent Democrats to the Senate as recently as the 1990s but are now essentially written off by the party).

The potential exists for Democratic Senate candidacies to become increasingly farfetched in ten or more Energy Belt states. Even the most liberal presidents in the future will have difficulty getting anything through Capitol Hill when Democratic energy policy looks increasingly like a writeoff of 20 Senate seats.

On June 7, Marine Le Pen criticized her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen — who founded France’s National Front party [1] in 1972 and headed it until 2011 — for his remarks in a videotaped interview posted on the party’s website about the Tunisian born Jewish singer Patrick Bruel, a vocal opponent of what is often described in France as “the far Right.” Le Pen furiously exclaimed that Bruel would be dealt with “à la prochaine fournée,” [2] or as Canada’s National Post [3] translated Le Pen, “We’ll include him in the next batch.” This is a baker’s expression that usually means momentarily, but can be ominously associated in French with the Nazi crematoriums.

Marine Le Pen asserted that her father’s vile joke was a political mistake, which he should have averted in view of his very lengthy experience. Indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen has repeatedly indulged in similar puns in the past, and been found guilty in court of racist and anti-Semitic vitriol. He was even suspended twice as a member of parliament for such offenses. The younger Le Pen has been eager to distance herself from such attitudes since she took over the party leadership three years ago. However, this is the first time she did so in an explicit way.

Marine Le Pen may feel emboldened by her victory in the Euro-Parliament election last month: the National Front carried 24 out of the 74 seats allotted to France, almost one out of three (albeit only 44% of the registered French voters took part in the election). She is convinced that she has successfully recast FN as a democratic national-populist party, one more in the manner of Charles de Gaulle than of Philippe Pétain. De Gaulle was the head of the French anti-Nazi Resistance and the founder of the Fifth Republic; Petain was the head of the collaborationist Vichy state.

Many observers contend that her criticism was still comparatively mild. A more relevant charge is that she might not be above double entendres with racist and anti-Semitic overtones herself, although in a much more sophisticated way. On March 31, during an interview [4] with anchorman Guillaume Durand at Public Sénat TV, she contended that she was hated by another journalist, Anne-Sophie Lapix, the wife of Publicis chairman Arthur Sadoun. She claimed that the entire Publicis management belonged to an exclusive caste estranged from most French, while her own political mission was to return power to the people. True enough, Marine Le Pen did not actually say that Sadoun and most of Publicis’ managers were Jewish, and her words could be construed to apply to any restricted upper-class group rather than just to a Jewish elite. On the other hand, the Jewish heritage of Publicis, from its founder the late Maurice Bleustein-Blanchet to Maurice Levy, its current CEO, to Sadoun, is an open secret.

The Pace of Obama’s Disasters

Bergdahl one week. Then Ukraine. Now Iraq. What could be next?

Was it only 10 months ago that President Obama capitulated on Syria? And eight months ago that we learned he had no idea the U.S. eavesdropped on Angela Merkel ? And seven months ago that his administration struck its disastrous interim nuclear deal with Tehran? And four months ago that Chuck Hagel announced that the United States Army would be cut to numbers not seen since the 1930s? And three months ago that Russia seized Crimea? And two months ago that John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian peace effort sputtered into the void? And last month that Mr. Obama announced a timetable for total withdrawal from Afghanistan—a strategy whose predictable effects can now be seen in Iraq?

Even the Bergdahl deal of yesterweek is starting to feel like ancient history. Like geese, Americans are being forced to swallow foreign-policy fiascoes at a rate faster than we can possibly chew, much less digest.

Consider the liver.

On Thursday, Russian tanks rolled across the border into eastern Ukraine. On Saturday, Russian separatists downed a Ukrainian transport jet, murdering 49 people. On Monday, Moscow stopped delivering gas to Kiev. All this is part of the Kremlin’s ongoing stealth invasion and subjugation of its neighbor. And all of this barely made the news. John Kerry phoned Moscow to express his “strong concern.” Concern, mind you, not condemnation.

If the president of the United States had any thoughts on the subject, he kept them to himself. His weekly radio address was devoted to wishing America’s dads a happy Father’s Day.

Also last week, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria seized Mosul. Then ISIS took Tikrit. Then it was Tal Afar. Mass executions of Shiites in each place. The administration is taking its time deciding what, if any, aid it will provide the government in Baghdad. But it is exploring the possibility of using Iraq’s distress as an opportunity to open avenues of cooperation with Tehran.

So because the administration has a theological objection to using military force in Iraq to prevent it from being overrun by al Qaeda or dissolving into potentially genocidal civil war, it will now work with Tehran, a designated state sponsor of terrorism for 30 years and a regime that continues to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Bashar Assad in Syria, to help “stabilize” Iraq. At least the White House has ruled out military cooperation with Iran. But give it time.

Here, then, is the cravenness that now passes for cleverness in this administration: Make friends with a terrorist regime to deal with a terrorist organization. Deliver Iraq’s Arab Shiites into the hands of their Persian coreligionists, who will waste no time turning southern Iraq into a satrapy modeled on present-day Lebanon.

Deal brusquely with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki —who, for all his manifest shortcomings as a leader nonetheless wishes to be our ally—and obsequiously with an Iranian regime that spent the better part of the last decade killing American soldiers. Further alienate panicky allies in Riyadh and Jerusalem for the sake of ingratiating ourselves with the mullahs.

The “liberal” democrat incumbents in many states are twisting themselves into pretzels defining “energy independence” but very few have any fracking courage. The most they will do is approve the Keystone Pipeline but only with EPA provisions that virtually doom the project. In New York Governor Andre Cuomo whose latest pretense is of being a tax conservative will not approve fracking which would save the economy of the state….rsk
Fracking Fracas in Loveland Democrats in Colorado are battling over whether to regulate fracking through local-ballot measures.

Loveland, Colo., has been best known nationally for its romantic name; each February, more than 100,000 letter-writers send notes through the city to their sweethearts. Loveland relies on volunteers to hand-stamp the mail with a love poem and forward the letters on to their intended valentines.

But next week, Loveland might well be the site of an epic break-up between Colorado’s environmentalist liberals and its Democratic establishment. The city’s 70,000 residents will vote on a highly divisive fracking moratorium, becoming the latest in a series of Front Range communities to weigh restrictions on this technique for extracting underground natural gas and oil.

Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based independent political activist, calls Colorado “ground zero for a great hydrocarbon battle in the country.” The Loveland vote, he says, will test whether environmentalists can gain by pursuing strategic local-level restrictions against fracking. But these local votes, paired with proposed state-level ballot-initiative efforts, have created a major fault line among Colorado Democrats.

“The Democratic party is tremendously divided,” Ciruli explains. “That’s the gist of the problem here for the Democrats. Probably the rank and file oppose fracking . . . but the Democratic-party establishment is mostly in favor of it, including the governor, who is strongly in favor of it.”

Since 2012, the towns of Longmont and Lafayette have banned fracking outright, while Boulder, Fort Collins, and Broomfield have all enacted moratoriums. All of these restrictions are facing acrimonious challenges in court from energy companies and from the property owners who collect mineral and land leases.

Saving the Rule of Law
The president’s boundless disdain for the Constitution endangers our republic.

Andrew C. McCarthy prosecuted the Blind Sheik after the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and is a longtime contributor to National Review Online and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. An expert in national security and terrorism, McCarthy is author of the new book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. In an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, he explains his case.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: “American constitutional republicanism has been strong enough to survive over two centuries of self-governance, civil war, world war, terrorism, social upheaval, and periodic economic calamity. But can it survive a Ruler of Law and his trusty pitchforks?” Is it really that bad?

Andrew C. McCarthy: Well, for constitutional republicanism, sure. I am not saying that we are on the cusp of rampant violence and social disorder. I am saying that we are witnessing the death of a republic under the rule of law. When I call the president the ruler of law, I mean that he selectively rather than faithfully executes it. His “pitchforks” — that’s his word, not mine — is the hard left base that he agitates to “direct action,” as he did in his community-organizer days, in order to extort his current targets — whether they are businesses, states, or political opponents — into concessions. A constitutional republic is a nation of laws; we’re becoming subjects of presidential whim.

Lopez: Still, just in case the New York Times and Talking Points Memo have read this far: You are not actually campaigning to impeach President Obama?

McCarthy: No, I am campaigning to make executive lawlessness a major issue in our politics. As I say in Faithless Execution, the best thing for the country would be for the president to reverse course, honor his oath, faithfully execute the laws, and finish his term that way. But if he will not — and things seem to be getting worse rather than better — then there either has to be meaningful push back or we must resign ourselves to being a very different kind of country. I want to create a political environment where the president feels real pressure that incentivizes him to follow the law. Impeachment is the ultimate answer to executive lawlessness, and it has to be a real rather than an illusory remedy if you’re going to rein in rogue behavior. But the real goal is to give the president’s opposition — which has been largely supine for five-and-a-half years — the backbone to use its other major tool, the power of the purse. Impeachment is the last resort … but it has to be a real resort.

Lopez: You do make the legal case, though. How is this useful when you yourself explain that there is not political will for this?

McCarthy: The political case has to be built, and political will has to be cultivated. Convincing people that there are compelling legal grounds for the conclusion that a president has committed impeachable offenses is vital to developing the public will to do something about it.

Lopez: What does it say about the American people that there is not a political will for impeachment despite some of the unprecedented things that are happening? It’s a little bit insane that the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of religious sisters who serve the elderly poor, have to sue the Department of Health and Human Services because of Obamacare’s abortion-drug/contraception mandate, isn’t it? And yet the president was reelected?

McCarthy: I concede in the book that this is the part of the equation on which the jury is still out: us, the public. President Obama is a known quantity and has been a knowable quantity to anyone willing to dig a bit since he first burst on the national scene. He’s doing what you’d expect a movement Leftist to do. The president’s opposition is feckless in many ways, and they don’t fight the way many conservatives would like to see them fight, but let’s not mistake fecklessness for stupidity. When they seem paralyzed to act, it is not just because they lack backbone; it is also because they have surveyed the landscape and concluded there is significant political risk in fighting the president. To be sure, they miscalculate a lot, but I don’t think they are making that up out of whole cloth.

The question is whether a significant majority of the American people still care about individual liberty and having a government that is both limited and bound by the law. That’s why the Sisters have to sue: The administration does not perceive that the public at large cares enough about its own freedom of conscience or the Sisters’ good work to object much. It may be that the country has dramatically changed, that a lot of us don’t mind an intrusive government led by a president who rules by decree. And it may be that many people who do mind have been so beaten down by the relentless expansion of government’s tentacles and the lack of a real opposition to it in Washington that they just feel overwhelmed and powerless.

It couldn’t have happened without U.S. enablers.

Almost everything we are told about illegal immigration is both a lie and amoral.

Sometime around 1212, mystics in Europe cooked up the idea that kids could part the seas, reach the Holy Land, reclaim Jerusalem, and convert the infidel Muslims. Thousands of children in Northern Europe flocked to the Mediterranean in response to such rumors, but when they reached the shore, the seas would not part, and many of them died as they scattered home in hunger.

We are witnessing a sort of children’s crusade on our own southern border. Thousands of young, poor would-be immigrants — 90,000 this year alone — have swarmed across the border, the logical fruition of the entire cynical approach of the Obama administration toward illegal immigration.

During his first term, President Obama lectured Latino activists (at the same time he was advising them to “punish our enemies” at the polls) that he was not a tyrant and thus lacked the executive power simply to offer amnesty by fiat. Translated, that meant something along the lines of “Keep cool for another year or two until I am reelected, and then the law becomes irrelevant, and we will have more constituents to enhance our political power.” On cue, after the 2012 election, Obama opened the border and started issuing a series of de facto amnesties to various categories of illegal aliens, especially children.

People in Latin America took note of the erosion of U.S. immigration law, as did our friends in Mexico who facilitated their transit. It is not quite clear whether the recent surges of kids and teens are grass-roots phenomena, or in part orchestrated by the Latin American media and governments. The latter seem to think that the clueless U.S. is not much good for anything other than offering a safety valve for what they consider their own excess population and a source of billions of dollars in cash through remittances.

What we can say for sure is that Obama has nullified U.S. immigration law, made it clear that deportations were de facto over, praised the arrival of young illegal aliens, and thereby prompted a surge northward of thousands more kids without their parents. The apparent thinking of the crusading children was that the U.S. border would open, as the Mediterranean once was supposed to have done. Kids would become near-instantaneous citizens. And they would then be anchors for their patient parents, who had sent them ahead with the promise they would all soon be reunited in the north.

America is getting to know candidate Hillary… again. And judging from her recent poll numbers, the more the country is exposed to candidate Hillary, the less it likes what it sees (and hears.)

As Secretary of State, Hillary was certainly very popular. But she wasn’t running for office then and was generally viewed from afar as a non-partisan secretary relaying her boss’s diplomatic memos and international calls. Her favorability hovered in the mid-sixties throughout her service, peaking at 66% just before leaving the office.

It’s not the first time Hillary enjoyed high favorability ratings. Upon entering the unelected roll of First Lady, Bill’s helpmeet had solid numbers approaching 60% by spring of his first year in office (but still far lower than Laura Bush’s 70%+ favorability rating at around the same time in George’s presidency.)

But high approval numbers have not been the norm for the newly made-over former secretary. After being appointed by the 42nd President to chair the Task Force on National Healthcare Reform, the precursor to ObamaCare, and once on the scene promoting nationalized healthcare, Hillary saw her numbers dramatically sink.

By 1996, well after HillaryCare was abandoned, Mrs. Clinton would also have the numerical distinction of 42 — but in her case the 42 represented her favorability percentage, her lowest recorded for a recent First Lady according to Pew Research (unless her 39% Gallup rating is counted when President Clinton first took office and she was a virtual unknown.)

She managed to recover from that low point to achieve a high of 67% approval as she stood in a supportive roll by her cheating husband, just after he was impeached for lying. Yet by fall of 2000 as Bush and the GOP were on the rise for election victory in November and her political campaign for the Senate was in full public view, Hillary fell again back to the 40s in favorability.

There’s little question that the Benghazi horror has had a negative impact on Hillary’s ratings, but even this was only after she stepped into the limelight and testified. In addition to Gallup, a Washington Post / ABC News poll in December of 2012 also found Hillary airborne at 66% approval, three months after Benghazi.