http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2045/four_more_years_of_obama_s_middle_east Like most modern American presidents, Obama will likely try to secure his legacy by a bold foreign policy initiative. All the more reason to be concerned ow that America has re-elected Barack Obama, it is time to ask what his second term might usher in for the Middle East, especially Israel. If he is […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2041/abu_qatada_s_victory_incites_extremism_on_both_sides
“And indeed for those who now only give any weight to the rulings of transnational bodies it should be recalled that even the UN has sanctioned Qatada as an associate of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”
The images of Abu Qatada smirking to himself, and indeed perhaps to us, as he was driven from the court ruling that allows him to remain in the UK, should have been enough to rile anyone. Indeed, with the exception of a few fringe human rights groups and ultra-Left commentators it feels as if the entire country is united in its opposition to this man remaining in our land.
And yet he remains here all the same and today is released on bail from Long Lartin Prison.
That this man is a dangerous and hostile figure is hardly in dispute. Described as Osama Bin Laden’s ambassador to Europe and having been implicated in terror cells in Chechnya, Germany, Tunisia as well as in his home country Jordan, and indeed in the 9/11 attacks, his terrorist credentials are quite impeccable.
And indeed for those who now only give any weight to the rulings of transnational bodies it should be recalled that even the UN has sanctioned Qatada as an associate of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Yet, laughably, following the ruling Qatada could stay in Britain, his solicitor, Gareth Peirce, pleaded: “I think the time has come in the world, with the conflicts in the world, for us to talk to each other and understand each other and enter into dialogue, and perhaps nothing is as black and white as it is painted” – A statement of such astonishing moral relativism that one doubts whether even Peirce can really believe a word of it. After all, what’s not black and white about his client having called for the murder of Americans, Christians, and Jews?
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/11/13/petraeus-and-the-failure-of-american-intelligence/
My evaluation of the state of U.S. intelligence after the Petraeus scandal appears this morning at Asia Times Online.
No one rises through the ranks of intelligence services by reporting pertinent facts that politicians don’t want to hear, Edward Luttwak observes. Bad policy produces bad intelligence. If you believe that Hitler is an ally, at least of convenience, as Stalin did in 1941, you will reject as fraudulent hard evidence of an imminent German invasion of Russia. If you believe that the Soviet Union is a prosperous, peace-loving land, as the foreign policy establishment did when Reagan took office, you will ignore evidence of Russian vulnerability and fear-aggression, as did Robert Gates, then head of the CIA’s Soviet section. CIA Director William Casey brought in an alternative team headed by Fortune magazine editor Herbert Meyer to produce an alternative, correct analysis.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-cooling-a-far-more-dangerous-fate/?print=1 A poll conducted on November 5 by Rasmussen Reports found that an all-time high of 68% of “likely U.S. voters” say that global warming is “a serious problem”; 38% of them thought it was “very serious.” Considering the benefits of warming and the fact that even the UK Met office shows that there has […]
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/11/13/the-real-housewives-of-centcom-or-who-should-solve-benghazi/ Now we know why the Pentagon was built with five sides — its architect figured out what our military really wanted for its headquarters was not a conventional office building but a theater-in-the-round set for a French bedroom farce with all the doors ready to slam. I know — not funny. While history and […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/inoffensive_savagery.html When is the word “savage” not racist and offensive? In Tunisian citizen Souhir Stephenson’s “Tunisia, a Sad Year Later,” published last Wednesday in the New York Times, she wrote: “Tourism is dwindling. Who wants to vacation among bands of bearded savages raiding embassies, staking their black pirate flag over universities or burning trucks carrying […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/now_is_the_winter_of_our_discontent.html In Shakespeare’s Richard III, the Duke of Gloucester wins a military campaign, later becoming Richard III and bringing tyranny and calamity to his opponents and to the realm. So, too, the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the USA will likely usher in an irrevocable death blow to America’s love of freedom […]
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/husband-wrote-letter-nytimes-about-wife-having-affair-government-executive_662256.html
Husband Wrote Letter to NYTimes About Wife Having Affair with ‘Government Executive’ Related to the Petraeus affair? Daniel Halper
Here’s a letter to the New York Times Magazine’s “ethicist,” which was published over the summer:
My wife is having an affair with a government executive. His role is to manage a project whose progress is seen worldwide as a demonstration of American leadership. (This might seem hyperbolic, but it is not an exaggeration.) I have met with him on several occasions, and he has been gracious. (I doubt if he is aware of my knowledge.) I have watched the affair intensify over the last year, and I have also benefited from his generosity. He is engaged in work that I am passionate about and is absolutely the right person for the job. I strongly feel that exposing the affair will create a major distraction that would adversely impact the success of an important effort. My issue: Should I acknowledge this affair and finally force closure? Should I suffer in silence for the next year or two for a project I feel must succeed? Should I be “true to my heart” and walk away from the entire miserable situation and put the episode behind me? NAME WITHHELD
There is, as one might imagine, much speculation that this is somehow related to CIA director David Petraeus’s affair with biographer Paula Broadwell. Or it could be completely unrelated.
UPDATE: New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren claims this is unrelated to the Petraeus affair:
http://politicalmavens.com/
The Petraeus Affair engages us on many levels, ranging from compromised security and political cover-ups to more fundamental questions of morality, duplicity, honor and human nature. Superficially, tales of adultery are always more fascinating when they are about good looking people in high places, both of which pertain here. It’s too soon to know how much deeper this plot will sink and how many other people may be involved, but as of Tues, Nov 13th, its disclosure is shaping up as the familiar saga of territoriality and competition between an alpha female and her perceived younger threat.
If you were creating a prototype for an ambitious, disciplined and determined go-getter, you would have conjured up Paula Broadwell, the athletic West Point graduate who fixed on David Petraeus as the subject for her PhD thesis, later turning it into a book with a journalist’s assistance. What started as a request for interviews and academic cooperation soon turned into a physical attraction and yada, yada, yada, you know the rest. What we don’t know is whether this began in Afghanistan or when Petraeus was already at the CIA, neither of which matters for the purpose of this essay. At some point during the affair, Ms Broadwell (or does she prefer the honorific Dr. as in Dr. Jill Biden?) became aware of Jill Kelley, another attractive married woman who is billed as a friend of Petraeus and someone active in helping wounded veterans and adorning Tampa society. As in stories we’ve read and seen in newspapers and movies, Alpha Paula regressed to the level of a high school cheerleader, sending nasty e-mails to Alpha Jill, warning her to keep her pom poms off this already claimed, adulterous, married general. Wily Jill, not wishing to descend into a catfight with her older challenger, instead resorted to the tried and true tactic of snitching to the FBI, conveniently contacting an agent who was already trying to win her favor by exposing his pecs and abs online.
To recap: we have one gloriously decorated Alpha male general, married to the scion of an illustrious military family, involved with a 40′ish married mother of two who is also a graduate of West Point and former homecoming queen; friendly with a younger married woman also involved with military men, who may or may not have been flirting with said general under the table or above, who tattles to the spooks about the nasty, sexually explicit e-mail she’s getting from an “anonymous” sender.
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/11/11/missing-the-boat/?singlepage=true
The Smithsonian magazine has an article about seven famous people who might have sailed on the Titanic but who, for some reason or other, missed the boat. They included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, Milton Hershey, J. Pierpoint Morgan, Henry Frick, and Alfred Vanderbilt.
Dreiser had shifted to the Kroonland to save money. Hershey, of candy bar fame, had the money and had actually made a deposit on a ticket, but some business matter detained him and he had to cancel. What seemed like bad luck at the time actually turned out to be good fortune. Had things proved otherwise, the Titanic would have proved an even bigger disaster; our grandfathers might have grown up in a world without Hershey’s bars.
Lefty Gomez once remarked, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” What constituted good or bad might have been obvious on the baseball diamond, but things were less obvious in the more complex arena of everyday life. The Chinese had a story to describe the ambiguity of fortune.
… there lived an old man on the northern frontier of China. One day, his horse disappeared … few months later, his horse came back with another horse that was even better. His neighbors came to congratulate him on his gain. But … the old man … said this “good luck” might turn out to be misfortune in the end. Strangely, he was right again. A few days later, his son fell from the new horse and broke his leg … since his son was lame after that accident, he was not chosen to be a soldier to fight in the following war so that he lived with family safely.
Fortune into misfortune. Misfortune into fortune. The loss of the USS Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea was the down payment on the victory at Midway. In exchange for Lexington‘s loss, the Zuikaku and Shokaku were too mauled to sail with Nagumo on that fatal 4th of June. But you wouldn’t know it as the Lady Lex was going down. The role that event played in the greater scheme of things had yet to be revealed.
Of course, if Nimitz had lost at Midway the Lady Lex’s loss would have been just a loss.
When Mariano Rajoy followed socialist leader José Luis Zapatero to become Spain’s prime minister in 2010, he may have thought he had won the electoral lottery. But what he may actually have done was replace the metaphorical Edward Smith as captain on the Spanish ship of state.
Voters turned to him in hopes of alleviating the pain of Europe’s debt crisis. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mr. Rajoy’s longtime rival, had stepped down as prime minister as the elections approached in the face of widespread resentment over Spain’s economic woes.
