Political Lies - Obama"s Role in All of This!

Lying to win is the cornerstone of too many political campaigns. Like fishermen who rise early in the morning return late in the evening and smell of alcohol the truth is not always in them and so it is with far too many politicians seeking office.

Specific to Obama all politicians who want to run for president start by disavowing they will - not anything new there. As for his commitment not to raise public money, that too was not believable considering the fact that he deemed himself an underdog and felt he needed more financial leverage.

What I find more disturbing is his unwillingness to reveal facts about himself, his policies and his clever but untruthful attacks on his opponent. McCain has pretty much stuck to the truth during this campaign to his credit. (See 1 below.)

Neither is there anything new about outside influences trying to shape our elections. (See 2 below.)

Caroline Glick writes that McCain is distancing himself from GW and the Republican Party's selection of McCain gave Obama an opening and he proceeded to mis-define, mis-characterize GW's record as president. GW is not without blame for his own failures because his own policies and initiatives were an incoherent blend of inner conflicts within the administration. As always Glick poses some interesting thoughts and engages in fascinating analysis. (See 4 below.)

In the 30's the world went to sleep and allowed Hitler to come into power. Much the same is happening and once again the world will eventually face a similar problem but this time one with nuclear capability. (See 5 below.)

Tom Sowell is the male equivalent of Caroline Glick. Many years ago Ted Turner was tagged "Mouth of The South." Sowell now places the "Mouth" tag on Obama. (See 6 below.)

Donald Luskin makes the case that I have regarding inflation. The problem with Luskin's argument is that in fighting deflation, an essential first must, the Fed and Treasury have laid the foundation for inflation. (See 7 below.)

Sent to my son-in-law. A brief tongue in cheek analysis of the distinction between Democrats and Republicans. You decide. (See 8 below.)

From a fellow memo reader, graduate of West Point and friend who dis-believes our nation is so desperate it will elect Obama. He refers to a recent article in Commentary Magazine, by Jennifer Rubin which I read, posing a lot of unanswered questions. (See 10 below.)

Have a great week and vote.

Dick

1) Obama's campaign built on lies
By Richard Baehr

There have been many lies by Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign that he has tried to mask by shifting his recollections over time. These include the extent of his relationship with Bill Ayers, what he heard Reverend Wright say during his near 20 year membership in Trinity Church, and his relationship with the vote fraud enterprise, otherwise known as ACORN. Barack Obama has made history and then "remade" it -- and he has done so numerous times.

But two lies in particular have been especially consequential: Obama's pledge not to run for President in 2008, and his commitment to participate in federal financing for his general election campaign, with its consequent spending limits. The news this past Sunday that Obama raised $150 million for his campaign in September shows the significance of the second lie.

The First Big Lie: Running For the Presidency

When Obama was elected a US Senator in 2004 he pledged to the voters of Illinois that he would not run for President in 2008. This is what Obama said on that subject in 2004:

"Look, I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years."

Obama gave a similar response to a question from a reporter that he dismissed as "silly": "Guys, I'm a state senator. I was elected yesterday. I have never set foot in the U.S. Senate. I've never worked in Washington. And the notion that somehow I'm immediately going to start running for higher office, it just doesn't make sense."


This lie has not been given much currency in the media. There have been plenty of other politicians who have promised not to run for higher office and then decided otherwise. The same holds true for some elected officials who pledged to observe a term limit on their years in Congress or the Senate, but later decided "the people still needed them".

Barack Obama, since he first ran for office in 1996, has followed a pattern: he always looked-up for the next elected job to seek. One colleague from his Illinois State Senate days in Illinois said he saw "the positions he held as stepping stones to other things"

After election to the State Senate in 1996, Obama ran (and lost) a race for Congress in 2000 against incumbent Bobby Rush. In 2002, Obama began his run for the open US Senate seat in Illinois to be contested in 2004. In 2006, he began his run for President. In fact, for more than half of the time since he has held public office, Obama has been AWOL from the job to which he has been elected, instead campaigning for higher office. There must have been a "calling" which he heard. Or perhaps it is merely unbridled personal ambition.

It should have been no surprise when Obama broke his pledge to the voters of Illinois and ran for President. If Obama is elected, it will be a new experience for him to actually have to do the job for which he was elected, with no higher office available, at least in the temporal realm. Of course, he could begin his re-election campaign ( and the fundraising for it), on Inauguration Day. It is hard to imagine, after all, that there may be a day soon with no Obama ads on TV or radio.

One safe bet is that the same media which has been enthralled with Obama's candidacy will cover for him and serve as free public relations agents during his Presidency. When problems arise, the media will continue to blame George Bush for having created "intractable problems." With a Democrat-controlled Congress with big majorities in both the Senate and House backstopping a Democratic President, this excuse may wear thin with voters.

The Second Big Lie: Accepting Federal Funding For the General Election

The more consequential lie of the 2008 Obama campaign, and the one that may determine the outcome of the election, was Obama's promise to accept federal funds for the general election if his opponent did. It was a given that John McCain, the co-author of campaign finance reform legislation with liberal Democrat Russ Feingold, was going to observe the federal spending limit of $84 million that accompanied the funds. Obama, on the other hand, never had any intention of limiting his spending to that amount.

The contest for the Democratic nomination showed Obama's fundraising prowess; in several months he raised more than $50 million in that month alone. In September, Obama raised more than $150 million, a stunning amount, bringing his total fundraising for the year to $605 million. Obama has raised almost twice as much money in September as McCain received for his entire general election campaign.

Since federal financing of Presidential elections began in 1976, no candidate had ever opted out of the system before Barack Obama. Obama's excuse for doing so was, to put it gently, pretty lame. In reality, the rationale he provided for his action, was a lie. Obama argued that he feared an infusion of special interest group money paying for attack ads against him. Hence, Obama needed to be armed for battle, and $84 million in federal campaign money for the general election, was not enough.

This was hogwash. Ads by independent groups and so-called 527s this cycle have heavily favored Democrats, just as they did in 2004. Obama was advantaged on that front. Obama opted out because he knew it would pay off -- that he could raise much more than $84 million, and that he then could bury McCain by ratios of 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 in spending on ads and organizers down the stretch. That is exactly what is now occurring and a major reason why Obama has opened up leads in the key battleground states.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have been unconcerned about Obama's backtracking and dishonesty on his pledge to participate in federal financing of the general election campaign. For a day or two, some journalists and pundits made it sound like Obama had let them down. But shortly thereafter, the move was viewed as smart, strategic, and necessary -- the obvious thing to do when winning is everything. And of course, the coverage of this campaign by the national media (including late night "comedians") has shown that they believe Obama's winning is everything. Why should the media expect Obama to behave any differently than they have in their own reporting? They have delivered the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising for Obama with puff piece reporting on his campaign, and far less favorable coverage of the McCain campaign.

For the McCain Palin team, it really must seem like they are facing a campaign with all the money in the world. For all practical purposes, they are. And if you think Barack Obama would have had it any other way, then you don't understand Barack Obama. Do you think when Obama met with his advisors to discuss how to sell his breaking a pledge to participate in federal financing of the general election, that anyone said: "But Senator, you would be breaking your word"?

2) Al Qaeda and the Election
By Raymond Ibrahim

Is al Qaeda trying to influence the American presidential election?

Former counter-terrorism coordinator Richard Clarke recently suggested that al Qaeda may be trying to do so. After describing al Qaeda's recent attacks in the Middle East (Yemen, Pakistan), Clarke stated that these strikes may have been primarily geared at aggrandizing al-Qaeda's capabilities via the media.

He then concluded that "Even more likely is the possibility that al Qaeda would hope the ["media-amplified"] attack would benefit John McCain. Opinion polls, which, as noted above, al Qaeda reads closely, suggest that an attack would help McCain. Polls in Europe and the Middle East also suggest an overwhelming popular support there for Barack Obama. Al Qaeda would not like it if there were a popular American president again."

Clarke does not, however, explain why it is that al-Qaeda eschews a "popular president"or what that even means. Nor does he explain why al-Qaeda would want McCain, of the two candidates, the one who has been more forthright about associating Islamic ideology with al-Qaeda.

Moreover, the recent attacks in Yemen and Pakistan reveal very little: Islamist organizations have been attacking "apostate" governments from the beginning, well before 9/11; there is no reason to tie these events to American elections and certainly not see them as benefiting McCain.

That said, there is plenty of evidence that al-Qaeda has long been interested in influencing the outcome of American elections. Their primary method is propaganda -- those many chastising al-Jazeera communiqués by Osama bin Laden and his Second Ayman Zawahiri that have become mainstays over the years. The most obvious example is when a long bin Laden video surfaced days before the 2004 presidential election (Bush and Kerry).

Then, bin Laden repeatedly portrayed Bush as a war-mongering racist (Bin Laden once even managed to sneak in a remark about the treatment of the American natives at the hands of the white man, and Malcolm X-quoting Zawahiri the treatment of his "black brothers" in America). Bin Laden further depicted Bush Sr as a wanna-be "monarch," who established his sons on "thrones," and was responsible for "the mass slaughter of [Muslim] children."

Bush Jr was portrayed as being "blinded by the black-gold [oil]," which he killed "millions of children in Iraq" for. Bin Laden even managed to mock Bush for the now infamous anecdote -- thanks to Michael Moore -- concerning the president reading a goat-story to children when the strikes of 9/11 commenced.

Bin Laden concluded by saying that peace and security do not revolve around presidential candidates, but are rather in the hands of the people. But he also knew that the people's will is made manifest in the president they elect. In other words, by mercilessly bashing Bush, his father, and his party, with nary a word about Kerry, he simultaneously implied that, if anyone, only the latter has a chance of ushering in peace and security.

More interestingly, in this same pre-2004 election harangue, bin Laden voiced no complaints or grievances concerning the eight year interval separating the father from the son -- the "Clinton era" -- further fueling the notion that the liberal Clintonesque Democrats, ever celebrating diversity, tolerance, and equality, will set the world to right.

At any rate, it is important to note that bin Laden's pre-2004 election message offered nothing new, simply that long list of endless, ever-morphing grievances, with the usual assertion that if only Americans would vote for someone who ameliorates these grievances -- not another "war monger" -- the war would end.

It should be clear by now (see the AQ documents in The Al Qaeda Reader) that the "grievance-mantra" is simply a smokescreen for a much more existential animus that has little to do with America's temporal actions. In other words, all foreign policy aside, bin Laden has made it perfectly clear that nothing less than submission to Islam, what Islamic law demands, will ever guarantee peace between the West and al-Qaedist radicals. Al-Qaeda has repeatedly stated this in their clandestine writings to Muslims.

Even so, being utterly incapable of understanding theological doctrines and motivations, let alone apparently even appreciating textual evidence, the Left seems to still be convinced that the root problem is foreign policy, and that the solution is appeasement and concessions. Ex-Cia analyst Michael Scheuer, for instance, not only willfully chooses to ignore the blatant evidence contained in The Al Qaeda Reader concerning that organization's ultimate motivations, but he dismisses it, that is, their own words, as a "neo-con" ploy -- perpetrated by yours truly -- while continuing to characterize bin Laden as, at once, Robin Hood, St. Francis of Assisi, and Thomas Jefferson.

Al-Qaeda and Islamists in general know and rely on such unbridled Western liberal guilt. Indeed, it is not implausible to say that, based on history -- from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton -- al-Qaeda has reasoned that it is always best to have a Democrat in office, someone who, while not taking radical Islam seriously, that is, not appreciating its metaphysical components, will try to appease by making "physical" concessions. And above all, someone who will not wage an offensive war against the terrorists, thereby giving al-Qaeda types worldwide that one thing they desperately need: Time. Time to regroup; time for the Western economy to falter ("We will bleed you like we did Russia"); time for Muslim nations to grow stronger, possibly acquiring nukes. Time to resurrect the caliphate.

Based on all this, what can one expect from al-Qaeda in regard to the upcoming presidential elections?

For starters, it must be understood that al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack, followed by their many grievance-filled communiqués -- which have only received more credence by the liberal Left's assent -- have already taken a toll on American society, mostly by making widespread the notion that "more of the same," that is, another Republican WASP president, will only lead to more of the same strife and terrorism. Hence that profound Democrat slogan: "Change."

This may be precisely what al-Qaeda hoped for with the 9/11 strikes -- to convince Americans that Muslims are really angry, and to reinforce this fact with a barrage of indoctrinating communiqués insisting that this anger is entirely related to US foreign policy. Thus the need for "change," the need to break away from Bush and his party, a popular if unconscious position that an increasing number of Americans from across the political divide seem to be taking. And while al-Qaeda may have planted this seed, the Left has run with it.

Enter Barack Hussein Obama, the ultimate representation of change, literally and figuratively: not only is he a liberal Democrat (i.e., "tolerant," "peace-minded," even "enlightened"); he is black (i.e., understands what it means to be a minority, to be the "other"); and his name is Barack Hussein Obama (i.e., as opposed to yet another George or John -- very Christian names -- he has a decidedly Arab/Muslim name that will surely endear Muslims to America). Who better to make peace with the rest of the, especially Muslim, world? Who better to make them like us?

This notion was most recently articulated by Jesse Jackson who "promised ‘fundamental changes' in US foreign policy [if Obama wins], saying America must ‘heal wounds' it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the ‘arrogance of the Bush administration.''' Concluded Jackson: "Barack is determined to repair our relations with the world of Islam and Muslims. Thanks to his background and ecumenical approach, he knows how Muslims feel while remaining committed to his own faith."

Lest anyone assume that al-Qaeda is not sophisticated enough to connive such a feat of reverse psychology to their benefit, the Madrid bombings of 2004 should be recalled: three days before Spain's general elections, explosions in Madrid commuter trains planted by al-Qaeda operatives killed 191 people and injured approximately 1,460.Three days later, Jose Zapatero and his ultra-liberal Socialist party -- which also went on to legitimize gay-marriage in Spain -- won the election. There is good reason to believe that the Socialist party received a big boost in votes precisely because of the Madrid bombings, as many people were convinced the attack came in response to their involvement in Iraq.

The very day after winning the elections, Zapatero promised to withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq, saying, "The war [in Iraq] has been a disaster [and] the occupation continues to be a disaster. It has only generated violence." One month later the last of Spain's troops left Iraq. Bin laden must have been delighted, evinced by the fact that he often indicated this Spanish response as a step in the right direction. More telling is the fact that the first question Jamal Zougam (one of the arrested suspects of the Madrid bombings) asked upon arriving at the Courthouse on 15 March 2004: "Who won the election?' He must've been pleased to know that the terrorist attack achieved the desired result.

Yet while bin Laden's 2004 "political campaigning" worked in Spain, it failed in the US. (After all, Kerry -- not to mention Obama's running mates -- were all white.) Will al-Qaeda try again to influence this year's elections? It may well have reasoned that it's not necessary; the leftist media has already done the job.

Bottom line: without 9/11, the meteoric rise of Senator Obama would have been inconceivable. In this sense, then, Osama paved the way for Obama.

3) Running against Bush
By Caroline B. Glick


In recent months, conservative commentators have devoted countless commentaries to the American media's open bias in favor of Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barak Obama. Although there is no question that their criticism is accurate, it is wrong to root that bias merely in the media's leftist sympathies.

The American media's pro-Obama bias is also the consequence of their misrepresentation of outgoing President George W. Bush's record in office. And that misrepresentation too cannot be ascribed merely to the leftist sympathies of the media. For the media are not the source of that misrepresentation. Bush himself is the source of that misrepresentation.

Bush's record in office is the key issue in the campaign. The outgoing President's abysmal approval ratings in his last two years in power caused both parties to recognize that to win the election, their candidate had to distinguish himself as much as possible from the current occupant of the Oval Office.

In selecting Senator John McCain as their party's nominee, the Republicans adopted this approach. Throughout his long career in Congress, McCain has served as the consummate party outsider. Yet, in his own way, and now to his detriment, he has also been loyal. And so until recently he avoided attacking Bush outright preferring instead to ignore him.

But by ignoring the President, McCain gave Obama full freedom to define Bush's presidency in the manner that best advanced his electoral prospects. And Obama's success in defining Bush has enabled the Democratic nominee to set the terms of debate on the central issue of the campaign: how America finds itself in the situation it now finds itself, and what policies should be adopted to improve its situation.

Obama has successfully cast Bush's presidency as a repeat of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Obama has portrayed Bush's foreign policy as a reenactment of Reagan's muscular, pro-American foreign policy which was based on Reagan's belief in American exceptionalism and his willingness to disregard what America's enemies and its erstwhile allies thought of America's actions. Obama has also portrayed Bush's economic policies as a reenactment of Reagan's policies of free market capitalism characterized by deregulation and tax cuts.

Obama has claimed that European and Muslim estrangement from the US; the increased strength of the insurgency in Afghanistan' Russian aggression; the resilience of the insurgency in Iraq; Iran's unimpeded drive towards nuclear weapons, and every other major US foreign policy problem are the consequences of Bush's embrace of Reagan's foreign policy approach. Obama claims that the financial crisis too, is a consequence of Bush's Reaganesque tax cuts and his general embrace of supply-side economics and the conservative preference for limited government.

By so defining Bush's record in office, Obama has been able to make a case for his own policies, which are diametrically opposed to those he ascribes to Bush.

There is only one problem with Obama's description of Bush's record in office. It is utterly false.

During his first term in office, Bush's foreign policy was raft with internal contradictions and intellectual confusion. Books have been written about the two competing factions in Bush's inner circle. Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld championed a Reaganesque model of statecraft. And opposing them, Secretary of State Colin Powell pushed for a UN-centered, European-style foreign policy more similar to the one adopted by Bush's father.

Throughout his first term, Bush refused to side with one or the other of the factions. Instead he tried to simultaneously implement two mutually exclusive foreign policies. His indecisiveness rendered his foreign policy intellectually incoherent and doomed much that he did to failure. Bush's speechwriters were evidently more sympathetic to the Cheney-Rumsfeld view and so many of his speeches during his first term echoed Reagan's soaring rhetoric. But on the ground, Bush's policies adhered much more closely to Powell's program.

This intellectual disarray was perhaps nowhere more evident than in Bush's refusal to define the enemy in the war. The men who attacked the US on September 11, 2001 were more than simply terrorists. They had a plan and a cause: They were Muslim jihadists. And they were not the ideological fringe of the Islamic world. Their beliefs are propagated by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and are advanced in the most prestigious academies in the Islamic world.

By claiming that the enemy in the war is generic "terror" rather than a worldview embraced by millions of people throughout the Islamic world, Bush made it impossible for his advisors to develop a coherent strategy for war. He also denied the American people the tools necessary for understanding either the meaning of the struggle or the necessity of fighting it. He deprived the public the basic intellectual framework for understanding for instance why he decided to imprison terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Bush's two-headed foreign policy made it difficult for the public to recognize that the war being waged against the US and its allies in Iraq is not simply an Iraqi struggle, but a battlefield in a regional war fueled by neighboring regimes. His intellectual confusion blinded him to the fact that his democracy agenda was harmed, not advanced by holding popular elections in which jihadists - whose views and aspirations are inimical to the notion of human freedom - were permitted to participate.

In Bush's second term in office, and particularly since the Republican defeat in the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush abandoned the intellectual incoherence of his first term in favor of a full embrace of Powell's policy preferences now championed by his successor Condoleezza Rice. Throughout his entire first term in office, and due to his refusal to adjudicate between two contradictory foreign policy visions, Bush failed to adopt any policy towards Iran. After the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush embraced the Powell-Rice policy of European style appeasement. This has been demonstrated most recently by his stated plan to open a US embassy in Teheran.

Bush's wholesale adoption of the Powell-Rice appeasement policy is also reflected in his policies towards North Korea and the Palestinians. And this week, according to statements by White House officials, he stands ready to apply it towards the Taliban with whom he is considering opening ties.

In Bush's last two years in office, the only surviving remnant of the Cheney-Rumseld Reaganesque foreign policy has been Bush's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. And in spite of its military success, the fact that this policy is contradicted by the President's policy everywhere else casts doubt on the durability of America's victories on the ground.

Bush's acceptance of the Powell-Rice foreign policy doctrine has not been widely recognized. In large part this has been due to Bush's own refusal to tell the public that he has in fact embraced appeasement. Moreover, Bush's reluctance to come clean with the public has been exacerbated by the media's denial of the change.

Whether due to blindness fed by an underlying hostility towards the President, or to ignorance of the significance of Bush's policies, the media have failed to report that Bush's policies today are a repudiation of the ideals and policies Bush gave voice to in his speeches during his first term. Those effectively repudiated speeches were the embodiment of Reagan's foreign policy doctrine.

The same pattern has been followed in popular characterizations of Bush's economic policies. Aside from his tax cuts in his first term - tax cuts that include a "sunset" provision rendering them temporary measures rather than enduring tax reforms - Bush's economic policies during his two terms have been anything but Reaganesque. Bush has vastly increased the size of the federal government. And he has introduced massive new regulation into the US economy.

Emblematic of Bush's eschewal of Reagan's legacy on both foreign policy and economic levels is his newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The establishment of this new position - and the large bureaucracy supporting it - was how Bush chose to contend with US intelligence agencies' failure to foresee and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

But like most failures in governance, the failure to anticipate, uncover and prevent those attacks was not due to an absence bureaucracy. Rather, the failure stemmed from the ideologically-driven unwillingness of the directors of the FBI and the CIA to recognize the threat of al Qaida and focus their efforts on tracking and capturing al Qaida members and sympathizers. The proper response to that failure would have been to fire the heads of those agencies and replace them with people who understood the nature of the threat and were capable of contending with it.

Instead Bush decided to increase the size of the government, add a new layer of bureaucracy to the failed intelligence community and staff it with people of the same mind as those who had failed to anticipate, expose and prevent the September 11 attacks. Not surprisingly, the newly appointed, ideologically uniform bureaucrats continued to underestimate the threats of jihadists or pay attention to any new significant trends in other areas.

It was this failed bureaucratic groupthink that produced the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear weapons program last year. That report, with its demonstrably false assertion that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, scuttled all of Bush's efforts to use economic sanctions to dissuade Iran from building nuclear bombs and pulled the rug out from under any plan to take military action against Iran's nuclear installations in the event of the sanctions' failure.

So too, led by officials of limited intellectual curiosity and blinding ideological cowardice now sitting atop a new bureaucracy, US intelligence agencies failed to anticipate or prevent Russia's invasion of Georgia.

Bush's establishment of the behemoth Department of Homeland Security was yet another attempt to solve a personnel problem by creating yet another department. And just as the National Intelligence Directorate has failed to solve the problems it was created to contend with, so the Department of Homeland Security has simply continued the same failed immigration policies and domestic intelligence policies that caused the INS and the FBI to fail to identify and arrest the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In short then, both in foreign and domestic affairs, Bush's record is completely at odds with Reagan's record in office. Indeed, his policies have been far more similar to those that Obama - who runs as the anti-Reagan -- promises to advance than those that Reagan adopted.

And this is the great irony of the campaign season. By failing to accurately represent his policies to the public, Bush invited Obama to misrepresent his record and so wrongly ascribe Bush's failures to policies he never adopted - much less implemented. By failing to correct Obama's misrepresentation of Bush's actual record, McCain has allowed Obama to characterize him as the candidate who would continue the Bush presidency when the fact is that the small government policies and the relatively more robust foreign policy positions that McCain has adopted render him the candidate most unlike the sitting president.

If Obama wins the elections on Tuesday, his victory will find its roots not in media bias, but in Bush's insistent misrepresentation of his record as president.

5) No compromise with Iran: Israel must take stand against evil instead of counting on world to curb Iran threat
By Robert D. Onley


Regardless of who is elected next week in the United States, Israel must adamantly defend herself against Iran – indeed she will have no other choice. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain are likely to adequately step up to protect Israel in the event that Iran officially "goes nuclear" in the very near future. Local responsibilities preclude such adventurism.



While many Israelis hold out hope that Barack Obama will stridently defend their land, holding negotiations with the fanatic leaders of Iran only serves to approve Iran’s reckless, brash foreign policy in recent years. The sheer fact that the UN General Assembly applauded President Ahmadinejad’s vitriolic speech in September should serve as a stark, frightening reminder that Iran’s ultimate goal remains the complete destruction of Israel – and that the world ostensibly agrees.


On the global stage, any leader combining the words “Zionist regime” should be publicly ostracized and disposed of, not congratulated and praised. The world body’s duplicity is horrifying.



There exists a misguided perception globally that Iran is only playing rhetorical games to increase its regional supremacy. Indeed, rhetoric is certainly a significant part of Ahmadinejad’s posturing, but beneath his insidious speeches lays a fundamental apocalyptic vision shared by the Ayatollahs above him. Official Iranian military parades with enormous Shahab-3 missiles painted with the words “Death to Israel” are not merely provocative symbols – they are overt physical manifestations of Iran’s deadly intentions.



Thus, the Islamic nation’s ongoing disregard for the UN sanctioning process should serve as obvious proof that Iranian leaders are not simply playing mind games. Rather, Iran is pushing full-steam ahead on concrete plans to match its present rhetoric with a powerful future capability.


Israel needs unity
Perhaps a more immediate existential threat remains Iran’s obvious arming and intensive strengthening of its proxy army Hizbullah. Advanced missiles and anti-aircraft weaponry are flooding into the south of Lebanon at an alarming rate. The very fact that such "resistance" weapons are entering the state at all should be evidence enough for Israelis to call for immediate international action. Moreover, the botched 2006 war should not dissuade Israelis from undertaking further defensive military incursions.



Hizbullah's supposed missile potential to strike further south into Israel is an even more pressing concern. Add onto this Iran’s possible future ability to equip Hizbullah with a nuclear device, and the need for the absolute removal of Hizbullah from the region is plainly obvious.


What Israel needs now is unity. While this may not emerge from the currently disabled Knesset and its unstable leadership, Israelis cannot falsely place their hope with the future American president, or even more misguidedly, with the United Nations. The world has proven itself to be entirely indifferent to Israel’s plight, given its weak-kneed stance against a possible nuclear Iran.



Israel’s only true hope for security comes from its own forces, its people, and a strong, united voice against the forces of evil that are ever-faster surrounding her. The day when Israel must take its future its own hands has come. It is time for Israel to take a stand against evil.

6) Ego and Mouth
By Thomas Sowell

After the big gamble on sub-prime mortgages that led to the current financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are ego and mouth?

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else.

Anyone who has actually had to take responsibility for consequences by running any kind of enterprise-- whether economic or academic, or even just managing a sports team-- is likely at some point to be chastened by either the setbacks brought on by his own mistakes or by seeing his successes followed by negative consequences that he never anticipated.

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in real world.

The signs of Barack Obama's self-centered immaturity are painfully obvious, though ignored by true believers who have poured their hopes into him, and by the media who just want the symbolism and the ideology that Obama represents.

The triumphal tour of world capitals and photo-op meetings with world leaders by someone who, after all, was still merely a candidate, is just one sign of this self-centered immaturity.

"This is our time!" he proclaimed. And "I will change the world." But ultimately this election is not about him, but about the fate of this nation, at a time of both domestic and international peril, with a major financial crisis still unresolved and a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon.

For someone who has actually accomplished nothing to blithely talk about taking away what has been earned by those who have accomplished something, and give it to whomever he chooses in the name of "spreading the wealth," is the kind of casual arrogance that has led to many economic catastrophes in many countries.

The equally casual ease with which Barack Obama has talked about appointing judges on the basis of their empathies with various segments of the population makes a mockery of the very concept of law.

After this man has wrecked the economy and destroyed constitutional law with his judicial appointments, what can he do for an encore? He can cripple the military and gamble America's future on his ability to sit down with enemy nations and talk them out of causing trouble.

Senator Obama's running mate, Senator Joe Biden, has for years shown the same easy-way-out mindset. Senator Biden has for decades opposed strengthening our military forces. In 1991, Biden urged relying on sanctions to get Saddam Hussein's troops out of Kuwait, instead of military force, despite the demonstrated futility of sanctions as a means of undoing an invasion.

People who think Governor Sarah Palin didn't handle some "gotcha" questions well in a couple of interviews show no interest in how she compares to the Democrats' Vice Presidential candidate, Senator Biden.

Joe Biden is much more of the kind of politician the mainstream media like. Not only is he a liberal's liberal, he answers questions far more glibly than Governor Palin-- grossly inaccurately in many cases, but glibly.

Moreover, this is a long-standing pattern with Biden. When he was running for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination back in 1987, someone in the audience asked him what law school he attended and how well he did.

Flashing his special phony smile, Biden said, "I think I have a much higher IQ than you do." He added, "I went to law school on a full academic scholarship" and "ended up in the top half" of the class.

But Biden did not have a full academic scholarship. Newsweek reported: "He went on a half scholarship based on need. He didn't finish in the 'top half' of his class. He was 76th out of 85."

7) Ahead of the Curve: Inflation, Not Deflation, Is Looming Threat
By Donald Luskin

Here's the dirty little secret of all the rescue operations that have been carried out this month by government financial authorities around the world. They all take money. Lots of money. And that money has to come from somewhere.

So when the U.S. Treasury says it will invest $700 billion to support the banking system, it has to be able to issue $700 billion in Treasury bonds. Someone has to buy those bonds. Someone has to think they're a good investment, at a time when most people don't think anything is a good investment. The Treasury's effort to restore confidence in banks depends on people having confidence in the Treasury.

When the Federal Reserve says it will invest $500 billion in the commercial paper to support the short-term financing market, it has to print the money. People have to think that money's worth something, even though it's been freshly printed for the occasion. For the Fed to restore confidence by making money available, people have to have confidence in money.

These two things are closely related. A Treasury bond is an iron-clad commitment to pay interest every six months, and to pay the face amount at maturity. To pay in the form of money, that is. It's a riskless security, because the government has the power to print the money required to make the payments. But if the money is worthless, then the bonds are worthless.

The way the credit crisis has unfolded over the last two years, it seems that the focus of the trouble has moved from company to company, from security to security, from country to country. One problem gets solved, then another one crops up. Like leaks springing up in a dam, they just can't all get plugged. When all the problems have been solved, there's only one place for the credit crisis to go: to money. If that happens, then it's not just another leak in the dam; it's a dam break.

If people lose confidence in money, then it's all over. Money is all the rescuers have. When the money itself loses value, there's no one to rescue the rescuers.

What is money, anyway? It's a claim-check that can be presented for goods and services. If you're Joe the Plumber, then money is a claim-check on your plumbing services. Someone hands you a $100 bill, you have to give them some plumbing.

So the amount of money in the world must bear some reasonable proportion to the amount of goods and services that it might claim, now and in the reasonably foreseeable future. If there's too little money, then there's not enough to buy all the plumbing services that are being offered, and the price of plumbing has to fall. That's called deflation. When there's too much money, then there aren't enough plumbing services to go around, and the price of plumbing goes up. That's called inflation.

See where I'm going here?

The Treasury is borrowing a ton to support this year's stimulus program, the housing bailout, the Fannie Mae (FNM: 0.93, -0.06, -6.07%) and Freddie Mac (FRE: 1.03, -0.09, -8.03%) bailout, and now the banking bailout. It all totals something like $1.5 trillion. The Fed's balance sheet has simply exploded over just the last eight weeks. It's gone from about $850 billion to about $2 trillion.

There isn't enough plumbing in the entire universe to use all that money. The only possible outcome is inflation.

I understand if you think I'm completely crazy at this point. How can there possibly be any danger of inflation whatsoever when the price of oil has been more than halved in the last three months? How can there possibly be inflation when the whole world is suddenly in a deep recession, and consumers have stopped spending?

How can there possibly be inflation when the spread between regular Treasury bonds and inflation-protected Treasuries, or TIPS, has gone negative? It's true. The yield on a five-year TIPS is actually higher than the yield on a regular bond, which means the market is forecasting deflation, not inflation, for the first time since TIPS started trading a decade ago.

That's certainly how Ben Bernanke sees it. In the Fed's public statement this week when it cut interest rates to 1%, it pretty much said that inflation is dead and buried, with a wooden stake driven through its heart.

What can I say? If you believe all that, I'm delighted that you have such confidence. I'm delighted you're so optimistic. Confidence and optimism are in short supply right now, to be sure.

But I think you're wrong. The U.S. Treasury is borrowing so much money — as are the treasuries of all the major countries — in order to support banking rescue operations, there's just no way that bond yields aren't going to have to go up. When that happens, the Fed and the other central banks of the world will probably decide to buy some of that debt, to keep rates low, so that the world can more easily pull out of recession.

That's called "monetization" of debt. It means that, effectively, instead of borrowing real money, the governments of the world will just print it. That always causes inflation. But the governments will do it, because they believe inflation is dead, so they'll think they can get away with it.

But the fact that they think inflation is dead will bring inflation to life. If you print enough money, you will get inflation. No matter how much the price of oil has fallen.

So what if the oil price drops by 50%? If the governments of the world print enough money, that drop won't last long. Neither will the recent drops in other commodities. That's the way inflation works. It's the way it always works. Governments print too much money. The price of everything goes up. That's inflation.

Now I'm not saying it has to rise to crisis proportions. It will happen slowly. A little bit at a time. We'll have plenty of time to see it, and avoid the worst.

But we'll see it later than we should. We'll see the first signs, and the second, and we'll ignore them. We always do. Then it will get worse, and finally we'll react. Hopefully, that day will come before inflation gets so out of control that we really do have a crisis on our hands.

The best way to play it is with gold. Lately gold has been acting more like lead. It's fallen along with everything else. Cash is king right now.

But gold is the single most inflation-sensitive thing in the world. I think before a year has passed, gold is going to start sensing the inflationary threat I'm talking about. When it goes back to the old highs around $1,000, and then just keeps on going, remember: You heard it here first.

8) Every four years the American citizens are presented with the opportunity to voice their opinions regarding our country's leadership and this always leads to a spirited exchange of ideas from two opposing sides; The Democrats versus the Republicans. But recently this conflict of ideals has spilled out from behind the debate platforms and onto the streets. Tongue in cheek warfare with political signs has always been fair game, but even this staple of party support has escalated in the weeks leading up to our historic 2008 election. Gone are the days where placing your party's sign in front of the other party's sign was enough; sign warfare has escalated into defacement and in some cases, downright theft.

Conclusion: Democrats will invariably try to solve a problem by throwing money at it, whereas Republicans will just as quickly shoot it. If this isn't a perfect example of our country's two-party political system in action, then I don't know what is.

9) Long about Wednesday, we will probably know if our country will be led by a competent and tested patriot or a cipher who makes a good speech but has not give us much in the way of substance to deal with except his notion that we need change. His concept of change seems to be redistribution of national wealth, suppression of freedom of choice in the workplace (viz Card Check), suppression of free speech (viz the Fairness Doctrine), total "freedom" of choice (viz abortion of the unborn, willy-nilly), emasculation of national defense, withdrawal from Iraq come hell or high water, a surge in Afghanistan (BS, thank you), "universal health care (the big O likes the VA system!), and appointment of Supreme Court justices who are empathetic to people Obama identifies as downtrodden, who will rewrite the Constitution to allow for "economic justice." Then, he proposes an armed civilian force supported by a budget equal to that of the Department of Defense "to protect our security." He will be assisted in his efforts by Pelosi, Reid, and Frank, all bona fide nut cases.

We are still at war with the Islamic Jihad. The economy is fragile, at best. Russia under Putin has thrown down the gauntlet. Iran will have a nuclear weapon in about six months. The North Korean genie is once again out of the bottle. And so it goes. Do you think a Federal government dominated by deluded people would have the will and the ability to confront these challenges?

Here is a list of questions posed by Jennifer Rubin this morning on the blog Commentary Magazine Contentions:

When did he realize Bill Ayers was a terrorist and why did he continue the relationship?

Did he agree with Ayers’s educational philosophy?

Did he personally approve grants from the Woods Fund and agree with the agendas of far Left groups (like the Arab American Action Network and ACORN) who received money?

How was it that he remained ignorant for over twenty years of Reverend Wrights’ anti-American and anti-white views ? What about Wright’s philosophy and rhetoric did he find

so brilliant and compelling?

What relationship did he have with Rashid Khalidi and what did he hear and say at that 2003 celebration?

What’s the real definition of “rich”?

Does “fairness” and income inequality trump every other concern in economic policy?

Does he really agree with Big Labor’s commitment to abolishing secret ballot elections and abandoning a bipartisan commitment to free trade?

Will he do what is needed in Iraq to secure the victory?

Does he really intend to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability and, if so, what will he do about it?

Will he hike more taxes, cut spending or borrow more when his advisors tell him we can't afford $4.3 trillion in new spending?

Does he really intend as his first act to sign the Freedom of Choice Act abolishing all abortion regulation including parental notification laws?

Like McCain, I have been a fighter for America my entire adult life. I have confidence in the common sense and decency of the American people. I find an Obama victory inconceivable. McCain should win.