RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’ve just written Faithless Execution, a book positing that there is such a solid legal case of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the president that the time is ripe to build a political case for his impeachment. I have argued, moreover, that the president’s policy of appeasing and empowering Islamic supremacists has been a national-security catastrophe, catalyzing a jihadist resurgence across the Middle East.

It is pretty safe to say I am no fan of Barack Obama’s. But it is just as safe to say that for Beltway Republicans to blame Obama alone for the implosion of Iraq — which is now being overrun by the same Sunni jihadists those Republicans have championed in Syria and Libya — is shameful.

Look, I will stipulate that the president’s signature recklessness is abundantly evident in Iraq. He heedlessly withdrew U.S. forces, making no effort to preserve the security gains they achieved in routing al-Qaeda, even as it became obvious that the withdrawal had evaporated those gains and invited the terror network to return with a vengeance.

Still, it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush. And it was not Obama who turned Iraq into an Islamic-supremacist state seething with anti-American and anti-Semitic hatred. Long before Obama came to power, Iraq was an Islamist country, rife with Sunni and Shiite militants who agreed on little else besides their devotion to sharia and their abhorrence of the West.

In late 2008, several weeks before Obama entered the Oval Office, I wrote here about the status of forces agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration was then entering into with the ingrate Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. Even then, Iraq was pulling ever closer to the terrorist regime in Iran while American troops continued fighting to protect Maliki’s fledgling government from al-Qaeda jihadists — jihadists that the insidious mullahs were also supplying with money, training, and IEDs.

In the SOFA, the Bush administration agreed to strict withdrawal deadlines that invited al-Qaeda to catch its breath, wait out the United States, then resume the jihad as Americans were leaving — the better to make it look to the world like they were chasing us out. All American combat operations were to cease in mid 2009; and, at the end of 2011, all American forces would pull out of Iraq. The 2008 SOFA is the basis for the American withdrawal that Obama so anxiously consummated. It is what promised a resumption of Islam’s eternal, internecine bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites that now has Iraq on the verge of collapse.

To listen to Republicans and those who foolishly repeat their revisionist history, you would think Obama inherited the Iraq so delusionally envisioned by Islamic-democracy-project devotees: a free, pluralistic democracy that would be a reliable counterterrorism ally and a thorn in totalitarian Iran’s side.

SINCE WW2 WE HAVE NOT ENDED ANY WARS WITH VICTORY…NOT KOREA, NOT VIETNAM, NOT IRAQ, NOT AFGHANISTAN…..AND THE LEGACY OF THAT POLICY IS CLEAR IN KOREA WHERE IKE LEFT THE KIM DYNASTY IN THE NORTH IN PLACE AND NOW IN IRAQ…..RSK
What if, after all the blood and treasure expended in the Normandy invasion and expelling the Nazis from France, the United States had simply declared victory and gone home?
Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great leaders of the western alliance against the Nazis, understood that such an outcome was impossible to contemplate because more than territory was at stake in the war.
And in the lead-up to the war and especially once the United States was in the war, Roosevelt educated the American public, and the American military, for a long war against the darkness of Nazi ideology, “There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future–and that freedom is an ebbing tide. But we Americans know that this is not true.”
Roosevelt prepared Americans for a war to preserve our way of life, not to simply reclaim the territory Hitler and his dark legions had conquered.
And contrary to much of today’s conventional wisdom about American public opinion in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, Americans understood what was at stake.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/season-two-of-fear-and-loathing-a-review

I endured eleven episodes of the thirteen-episode Season Two of Orange is the New Black, which debuted June 6th. I can’t watch the rest of the series. The whole series, Seasons One and Two, leave me numb. No. Indifferent. See my first review of the series published last August, “Fear and Loathing are the New Freedoms,” for a synopsis of this naturalistic, rubbish-tossing romp through the garbage bin of contemporary society and culture.

Orange is on its way to becoming a liberal cult classic, when it’s simply drawn-out agitprop for the Left.

Set in a minimum security women’s prison in Connecticut, it focuses on the conflicts of the female inmates as well on those of those of the security staff. There are no heroes, nor any heroines in the series. Staff and inmates alike, they are all criminals of one stripe or another. The series is purported to be based on Piper Kerman’s book about her time in such a prison.

The series, both Seasons, boils over with graphic lesbian sex scenes (with a few heterosexual ones thrown in for “diversity’s” sake), graphic violence among the prisoners, conniving, lying, and scheming by everyone, racial tensions between whites, blacks, and Latinos (who have now taken over the kitchen), competition among “queens” of the roost in bringing in contraband things like lipstick, cell phones, dope, and even junk food.

The word “f…k” occurs seven or eight dozen times in the dialogue, the term “c…t” perhaps half as often. Other obscene slang terms are sprinkled throughout for good measure, to make sure viewers understand that they’re not watching Leave it to Beaver, or the old Perry Mason. Or even a James Cagney gangster movie. There’s more “realism” in Jimmy Stewart’s Call Northside 777 than in Orange.

I reached a point where I don’t really care if any of the characters resolve their external or internal conflicts. I could develop as little or no empathy for any of the characters as I could for Jeremiah Wright, Gloria Steinman, or Vladimir Putin. I felt as though I wanted to put every one of them out of their misery. Including the head of the prison, a tall, shapely brunette who is the prison’s administrator and is as corrupt as the rest of the characters. Including one black inmate character, “Crazy Eyes,” who is turned by a black witch, dope racketeer, and manipulator of feeble minds, called “Vee,” from a harmless, mildly amusing whacko into a vicious thug and brainwashed toady who beats up a fellow black inmate on orders from Vee. Vee also sics her black girl thugs on the dethroned ruler of the kitchen, Russian”Red,” whose contraband racket she wants to take over.

The school isn’t being honest about its hostility to Evangelical Christianity.

Bowdoin College is not happy with the New York Times. Earlier this week, the paper ran a front-page story about the way Bowdoin engineered the eviction from its campus of a Christian group that had proved troublesome. The small liberal-arts college was apparently stung by the negative attention from a newspaper it cannot ignore and promptly issued a blanket denial.

The college’s response falls into the category of audacious obfuscation.

The Times cited Bowdoin as an example of the growing conflict on American campuses caused by a new interpretation of the principle of “non-discrimination.” The idea is that it constitutes unacceptable discrimination for religious student groups to require that their leaders affirm certain religious tenets and moral teachings. This new interpretation conflicts with the longstanding principle that colleges respect the religious freedom of their students. Increasingly, the Times reported, colleges are sacrificing religious freedom in the effort to open positions of leadership in religious groups to gay students.

The Times’ lead example was the burden that Bowdoin College put on the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship (BCF), an Evangelical group with about 40 members among the college’s 1,800 students. “After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college,” the Times reported. “Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers.”

In its official reply, Bowdoin asserted that, on the contrary, (1) the college has “no plans to drop . . . recognition” of the BCF, (2) the BCF is “free to sponsor speakers or other presentations that promote their beliefs,” and (3) the group is “free to choose their own student leaders.” The statement declared, “Religious freedom and spirituality are alive and thriving at Bowdoin.”

But Bowdoin is not telling the whole story. My organization, the National Association of Scholars, has been watching the college closely for some time. In April 2013, we published What Does Bowdoin Teach?, a 370-page study, of which I was co-author, on how Bowdoin’s curriculum and student activities shape the intellectual and moral lives of its students. The BCF was featured in 15 pages of the report, and we found a recurring and highly public conflict between the Bowdoin administration and the BCF over the issues of homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

Jonah Goldberg was never among those conservatives (names withheld in order not to humiliate the guilty) who were positively ecstatic about the “Arab Spring”- some even getting into hyperbole and calling it a parallel of the American Revolution. Sharia loving Jeffersons and Madisons….rsk
The Arab Spring is over, and tweeting slogans won’t change the chaos that has followed it.
The Arab Spring is over. Welcome to the Jihadi Spring.

Across a huge swath of what, up until recently, had been known as Iraq and Syria, a transnational movement of Sunni Islamic extremists has taken control. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has conquered — without much effort — Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, along with most of the province of Nineveh. It’s also taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown. Along the way it has ransacked banks (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars), pillaged weapon stockpiles (including the stuff we left behind for the Iraqi army), and recruited ever more fighters from Iraq, Syria, and abroad.

ISIS started out as an al-Qaeda franchise, but in 2011 it broke off to become an independent dealer of Islamist mayhem. If anything, it is more extreme than al-Qaeda — though that fine distinction probably means little to the Shiites and Christians it slaughters.

Sunday in Pakistan, Taliban militants attacked the airport in Karachi, the country’s busiest and most important travel hub. They followed up with an attack on an airport security-training facility, showing that there was no area of Pakistan it could not threaten. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif came into office seeking an accord with the Taliban. But the Taliban won’t abandon its key objective: a total Islamist state. After the attacks, most observers think Sharif will have little choice but to unleash the army on the insurgents.

On Thursday, buoyed by the international warm bath he received for making a pact with the devil Hamas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned Israel for a “grave escalation of violence.”

Abbas was responding to Wednesday’s joint Israel Air Force and Shin Bet security agency strike on targets in Gaza, following a rocket attack that barely missed a major highway in the southern part of the country. Luckily, the missile landed in an open area, missing its mark, innocent civilians. But the message was as clear as the air raid siren and subsequent explosion: Terrorism pays.

If Israelis are killed, or merely sent running to bomb shelters with children in tow, the mission is a success, particularly if Israel does not retaliate, since rendering the Zionist enemy powerless is a key aim.

But even when Israel does take action, as it did this week, the terrorists also win, through propaganda.

Indeed, residents of Gaza who witnessed the Israeli strike claimed that a man on a motorcycle had been assassinated and three others seriously wounded. This is enough to set the “international community” and Israeli leftists on their hind legs.

Never mind that the biker happened to be Mohammad Awwar, a well-known jihadist who had worked as a Hamas policeman and participated in several rocket launches against Israel. Forget the fact that he had been planning to down an Israeli helicopter. Imagine that he was just a harmless biker.

This is how Abbas would like the “narrative” to play out, of course, which is why his office issued a statement for foreign consumption.

“We hold Israel responsible for this escalation, which we consider an attempt to exacerbate the situation and pull the region into violence,” it read.

As usual, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found himself having to refute the charge. During a meeting on Thursday with the visiting former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, Netanyahu explained that the attack on Gaza was made necessary by Abbas’ failure to curb terrorism in the first place.

Obama Claims Al Qaeda Takeover in Iraq Caused by his Foreign Policy, Proves his Foreign Policy Right

While the White House is focusing on the awesome magic of Obama’s first Tumblr and the meme they’re desperately trying to push, the First Kid had to take some time out to address a serious issue caused by the time he tried to pretend that Iraq was no longer a problem because he decided to ignore it.

At least he hasn’t blamed Al Qaeda’s rampage across Iraq on…

1. Global Warming

2. Income Inequality

…yet. I’m sure that will be the hot talking point on Slate/Salon/Atlantic/New Republic/HuffPo/MSNBC shortly.

Anyway Obama is finally springing into action after years of ignoring Al Qaeda’s rise in Iraq after his botched withdrawal. And he’s considering all options.

Like the option to do nothing. Or roll out a hashtag. Or credit himself for his foresight in claiming that the disaster caused by his policy of pretending Al Qaeda in Iraq no longer existed.

But first his team is trying to figure out how to help. They’re still trying to figure out how to help Ukraine. And they’re still wondering whether they can do anything for Pompei after the volcano went off.

On Monday, two millionaires showed off their latest inequality talking points as Obama used Elizabeth Warren’s student loan bill to bash congressional Republicans.

“If you’re a big oil company, they’ll go to bat for you,” Obama sneered. “If you’re a student, good luck.”

Good luck indeed. Warren’s bill cynically piggybacks on a lower interest rate plan from last year that the House passed 392 to 31. The Republicans, who only care about oil companies, unlike Obama who doled out billions in Green Energy loans to the companies of his donors, voted for it almost en masse.

Unlike it, Warren’s bill isn’t really about student loans and isn’t meant to pass. Like her Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, it’s political theater by a lifelong fraud who began her career as a fake Indian, was a fake Republican and is now a fake Socialist. It would be easier to find a garden spot on Mars than a single honest moment in the career of Elizabeth Ann Herring.

Warren’s bill is cynical manufactured outrage trying to link two unconnected things, supposed tax breaks for the rich to student loans, so that her equally corrupt colleagues can hold on to their fiefdom in the Senate by dragging out the overexploited youth vote for the midterm elections.

Elizabeth Warren, a tenured celebrity professor who jumped into politics, and Barack Obama, an untenured law school instructor, who made it big in politics, know exactly why student loan debt is so high and why their measures do nothing to address its real causes.

Harvard Law paid Warren $350,000 to teach a single course. When Scott Brown brought it up during a debate about student loans, she protested. “I want to talk about the issues. Senator Brown wants to launch attacks.”

But Warren’s outrageous compensation is the issue. Harvard pays the adjuncts who teach many of its undergraduate classes an average of $11,037. Elizabeth Warren, who likes comparing the salary of a company’s employees to its CEO’s, isn’t comparing the $429,981 that Harvard paid her before she ran for office to an adjunct’s salary. And unlike a CEO, all Warren did was show up for a little bit and then go back to her real business as a lawyer and government consultant.

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Superstar Josh Brewster and joined by titans Nonie Darwish, author of “The Devil We Don’t Know,” Michael Hausam, a conservative writer and activist, and Karen Siegemund, founder of Rage Against the Media.

The Gang discussed: Obama’s New Bow to the Islamic World, analyzing who the Radical-in-Chief really wants to be admired by the most.

The dialogue occurred within the context of Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap.

Don’t miss it:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-new-bow-to-the-islamic-world-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

It isn’t that the barbarians are at the gate. The barbarians control the gate. I don’t know what else to call a president and attorney general who have opened the U.S. border to literally tens of thousands of “children” – some described as “sexually active” teens, some even suspected of ties to gangs. This not only breaks laws, it breaks trust. Opening the border this way also opens the most outrageous front to date in what increasingly looks like a kind of war aimed at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” And the people’s elected representatives do nothing.

Children are usually just children, but when 130,000 of them are expected to storm the border in the coming year, they more closely resemble an advancing column, a kind of foreign legion of child-mercenaries raised abroad with cynical promises of booty in the form of cradle-to-grave taxpayer charity.

But who will fight “children”? This is the audacity of this latest Obama “crisis”: Trojan horse as “humanitarian crisis.” For the literary set, call it “Camp of the Saintlets,” a twist on the prophetic “Camp of the Saints,” the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail envisioning an apocalyptic “invasion” of Europe by successive boatloads of Third World nationals, which is today old news out of Spain, Italy and other nations.

Of course, there is an undeniable genius to this form of border attack. All “the kids” from the rest of the world (do you really think Central America is the end?) have to do is serve as pitiful proxies of the assault. Once vanquished by pangs of conscience, however false, we’ll support them forever. We’ll have to. Have you taken a look at your local police department’s massive and bristling military hardware lately? Just shut up and watch as this newfangled children’s crusade turns our border, the concept of nationhood itself, into dust. Welcome to Obamaland.

Of course, even the 17-year-old gangbangers among the youngsters aren’t the masterminds or generals. Like American citizens, they are pawns, dupes, lured by promises Washington may indeed extract from Us, the People. “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away,” one Guatemalan mother told a radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. She is right. Come one, come all.

Once they are over the increasingly irrelevant line, Obama officials welcome the invading junior armies, shepherding them straight into an enfolding and enlarging federal safety net from which they may never have to emerge. These are just the newest wards of a brave new state that bears no resemblance to the republic as defined by those antique documents kept under glass in the dim light of the National Archives.