CONRAD BLACK: IRAN DEAL NOT THAT BAD (HUH???DUMB AND DUMBER)

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/365022/print

Despite its obvious weaknesses, and undaunted by the usual hyperbole of the Obama administration and its bearers, beaters, and apologists, led by John (“unbelievably small”) Kerry, I think the Geneva agreement over the Iranian nuclear program is progress. Habitual readers will recall that I had effectively given up on this administration doing anything except, to conflate phrases of FDR and Mao Tse-tung, “stand idly by with folded arms” while the ayatollahs seeded the topography of Iran with launchers loaded with nuclear-tipped missiles. Of course, this would have led to similar arms in the hands of the Saudis, Egyptians, and Turks, which, with Iran, Pakistan, and Israel, would have made the Middle East a dense forest of nuclear missiles aimed heavenwards on their launchers, but angled at each other. At that point, a nuclear exchange would be practically inevitable, even if it were initiated by one of the Muslim countries in the region tacitly allowing a terrorist group to deliver a suitcase bomb in a container ship and then unctuously claiming not to have known anything about it (much as Mullah Omar, then the ruler of Afghanistan, did after the 9/11 attacks). The failed state is the refuge of the enemies of civilized, or even just powerful, countries, as it affords the world’s most odious people the excuse of claiming no direct responsibility for the outrages launched from such places, e.g., terrorism in Sudan or piracy in Somalia.

ELIANA JOHNSON:Behind 60 Minutes’s Bungled Benghazi Report Lara Logan’s Botched Exposé is the Tip of the Iceberg.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/364929/print It’s not often that 60 Minutes, the high church of television journalism for over four decades, becomes late-night comedy fodder. But that’s what happened earlier this month when Saturday Night Live’s cold open featured 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan (Kate McKinnon) giving a sympathetic hearing to disgraced Toronto mayor Rob Ford (Bobby Moynihan). “I’m […]

JONAH GOLDBERG: Hail to the Panderer-in-Chief Obama Plays the Role of Disinterested Pragmatist, But He’s a Frustrated Ideologue in Real Life.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364937/hail-panderer-chief-jonah-goldberg ‘I’m not a particularly ideological person,” President Obama told an audience of donors in Seattle over the weekend. He added (in Reuters’s words) that “pragmatism was necessary to advance the values that were important to him.” This is an old refrain of Obama’s. As he said in his first inaugural, “The question we ask […]

JOHN WOHLSTETTER: IRAN-SECRETS AND BETRAYAL

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-secrets-and-betrayal?f=puball Telltale clues to identify ally betrayal…..Here’s how to tell: 1.  Conduct secret negotiations with your ally’s mortal enemy, based upon wrongly presumed common interests & hence goals, including back-channel talks going back five years, even one found to be conducting one or another form of war on you & your ally, on a matter […]

HERBERT LONDON: PARANOID STYLE REVISITED

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/paranoid-style-revisited?f=puball Alan Wolfe, the professor of political science at Boston College, has written a reprise of Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 book Paranoid Style In American Politics for the October 25th edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Hofstadter in the 1950’s attempted to explain the inner workings of the political mind, i.e., the conservative mind. For […]

MARK SHERMAN: THE SUPREMES TO REVISIT OBAMACARE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/breaking-news-supreme-court-to-take-another-crack-at-obamacare The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to referee another dispute over President Barack Obama’s health care law, whether businesses can use religious objections to escape a requirement to cover birth control for employees. The justices said they will take up an issue that has divided the lower courts in the face of roughly 40 lawsuits […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD:ENVIRONMENTALISM IS THE NEW RACISM

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/environmentalism-is-the-new-racism/print/ At the heart of all the left’s political agendas is wealth redistribution. That is as true of the Global Warming eco-scam as it is of anything else. The left knows that idealism is a puny force compared to the power of profit. It may employ the slogans of idealism, recruiting college students to wave […]

OBAMA’S MUNICH: BRUCE THORNTON

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/obamas-munich/print/ The interim agreement negotiated by the Security Council and Germany with Iran is a serious advance toward what Winston Churchill called the Munich agreement: “a total and unmitigated defeat” and a “disaster of the first magnitude.” Nothing in the agreement guarantees that Iran will fulfill its promises, or that inspectors will be allowed access to all […]

America as the Protector of Putin, Assad, and Khamenei By Shoshana Bryen

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/america_as_the_protector_of_putin_assad_and_khamenei.html When protests broke out in Syria in late 2011, Russia hoped for a short, nasty war as a matter of Russian national interest — just enough to put the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted Sunnis in their place.  Violence from its own Sunni Muslim population has plagued Russia for decades.  Saudi Arabia took over the defeated nationalist […]

GIVING THANKS IN THE LAND OF THE FREE: MYRON MAGNET

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304655104579165800736157752?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

In the fall of 1621, some 50 of the Puritans who had left the Old World in search of religious freedom sat down in their tiny thatched hamlet of Plymouth with their Wampanoag neighbors to feast on turkey, venison, corn and cod. They also gave thanks for surviving their first terrible New England winter, whose cold and privation had carried off half their community.

Continual waves of pilgrims fleeing religious persecution would follow them across the sea. Their sense of providential escape from foreign oppression stayed vividly alive in the American memory, and ultimately helped guide the Founding Fathers to make a revolution and fashion a new kind of government.