Chorus Line Forms To The Left!

Karabell writes no where to go but up because money must find a home and with interest rates low and likely to remain low equities, for the time being, is where to be. (See 1 below.)
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When you kick your friends they often turn around and bite you. When you do so in public they might even bite harder.

Obama hugs our adversaries, kicks our friends and seems not to learn anything . (See 2 below.)
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Now that terrorists know we are not going to do much if they attack us they will quit being terrorists or am I missing something?

Certainly Putin is taking advantage of Obama the basket ball president with a lay up.(See 3, 3 and 3b below.)
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Sever Plocker explains what Obama told Netanyahu: 'put up or shut up because I am linking a Palestinian State with preventing Iran from going nuclear.'

It is Plocker who does not get it because he fails to understand Iran will go nuclear regardless of Obama's soothing words so Obama's pledge is meaningless.

Obama is no miracle worker thus, guaranteeing Israel, Iran will not go nuclear is a hard pill to swallow. Obama has not lifted a finger against Putin helping Chavez going nuclear in our own backyard and constantly bows to our enemies, chastises our alleged friends and then expects to be believed?

Obama's foreign policy seems driven by his own Muslim tinged animus towards Netanyahu which is reinforced by that of many in our State Department and others advising Obama.

From now we will also be nice towards those who behead. Its change to PC rhetoric time like in the movie: "Springtime for Hitler." The chorus line forms to the left. (See 4,4a and 4b below.)
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Pipes writes about when Begin stood up to Washington. That was then this is now.

Netanyahu is no Begin. Karzai seems more like Begin. (See 5 below.)
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John Podhoretz weighs in on the purpose of political combat. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)Dow 11000 Is Only the Beginning:Companies go where the global growth is, and with leaner inventories and more efficient work forces, they can make profits even when national economies sputter
By ZACHARY KARABELL

So we're almost there. The Dow is flirting with 11000 for the first time since October 2008—after falling to a low of 6500 in March last year. Now seems an appropriate time to ask whether the dramatic recovery of stocks is sustainable and to speculate about what comes next.

As always, bulls and bears have their argument, with bulls pointing to a recovery in confidence, stabilizing economic data in the U.S., surging corporate profits, modest valuations, and strong trends in the world at large. Bears fret about the threat of inflation eroding profits, banks with toxic loans still weighing down their balance sheets, high unemployment, easy money lulling the world into a false sense of complacency, and mounting debts on government ledgers.

Much of this argument may be irrelevant to the markets, which look primed to go up, not in a straight line, but up just the same.

Over the past decade, the fate of publicly traded companies, which tend to be larger and more global in scale, has detached from the fate of national economies. U.S. businesses rely on the domestic market for a shrinking portion of their revenue and profits, and many—including household names like Microsoft, Intel and Caterpillar—make far more overseas than they do at home.

These global companies, whether European or American, increasingly look to China for future income—the recent imbroglio over Google notwithstanding. And throughout the crisis most of them have been registering impressive gains in productivity and efficiency. How? The old fashioned way: by firing droves of workers and making better use of technology to trim inventories and utilize resources.

The dramatic sell-off in global equities between September 2008 and March 2009 was caused by panic; by the fact that as credit markets froze, equity markets were the only source of reliable liquidity. If you were faced with someone calling in your loan, for instance, you couldn't refinance but you could sell stocks at the click of a button and have your money in the morning.

The panic also stemmed from the cratering of financial companies' income, which made the entire market look suspect. Profits did plunge for several quarters throughout almost every industry and every country but began to recover far more rapidly than most expected.

Today, there is increasingly bullish sentiment among investors, or so surveys tell us. But even so, the Dow is only up 6% year to date, while global and emerging markets—where growth is humming—have done worse. U.S. mutual funds have seen inflows into bond funds and outflows from domestic equity; investors have withdrawn $2.6 billion more than they put in, which means that the "average" investor isn't acting at all bullish. Money-market funds, which are yielding basically nothing, still have $3 trillion, though outflows have been picking up.

What's more, U.S. corporate balance sheets are as flush with cash as they've ever been, in the neighborhood of $2 trillion. Conservative and cautious, companies haven't been quick to spend that stash. They haven't been buying back stock (which would be good for the market); they haven't been undertaking aggressive spending (good for other businesses); they haven't boosted dividends; and they haven't been hiring.

But those trillions will be spent, on mergers, acquisitions and capital spending. With trillions on the sidelines, there is fuel to move markets higher.

Then there is the global growth story, which is revolving around China but includes Brazil, Canada, Australia and many parts of East Asia. There is also strong positive momentum developing in India, and cash is once again piling up in the sovereign wealth funds of the oil states of the Middle East. That growth is generating cash, which is looking for return. The China Investment Corporation recently released a list of its holdings, which showed that it had begun to invest—albeit very quietly—in U.S. stocks ranging from Apple to Coca-Cola. That is a harbinger.

In short, much of our economic data doesn't matter to the prospects for the market. Corporate profits themselves bear more relation to an increasingly complex and interlinked global system than they do any national economy. Companies go where the growth is, and with leaner inventories than the world has ever known and sparser work forces, they can make profits even when national economies sputter.


There's a final reason to believe that the markets are headed higher. With interest rates so relatively low, even a modest increase in rates (which we've seen in recent days) isn't enough to make bonds an attractive investment for institutional and individual investors needing returns. Pension plans, 401(k) plans, mutual-fund managers and financial planners have all seen steep losses, and they all need outsized returns to meet expectations. Bonds simply don't offer that prospect. Only equities do.

None of the reasons why markets are likely to move up depend on a strong U.S. economy or robust growth in Europe. The jarring contrast between how companies and the overall economy are faring may yet produce a populist backlash, especially if unemployment lingers at 10%. But for now, there is little standing in the way of markets, and much to propel them forward.

Mr. Karabell is president of River Twice Research and the author, most recently, of "Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy" (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
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2) The Karzai Fiasco:Echoes of Vietnam in a spat that only helps the Taliban

President Obama isn't faring too well at converting enemies to friends, but he does seem to have a talent for turning friends into enemies. The latest spectacle is the all-too-public and counterproductive war of words between the White House and our putative ally, Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The only winner so far in this spat is the Taliban.

The Obama Administration seems to have had it out for Mr. Karzai from the day it took office, amid multiple reports based on obvious U.S. leaks that Vice President Joe Biden or some other official had told the Afghan leader to shape up. The tension escalated after Mr. Karzai's tainted but ultimately recognized re-election victory last year, and it reached the name-calling stage late last month when President Obama met Mr. Karzai on a trip to Kabul and the White House let the world know that the American had lectured the Afghan about his governing obligations.

The public rebuke was a major loss of face for Mr. Karzai, who later returned fire at the U.S., reportedly even saying at a private meeting that if the Americans kept it up, he might join the Taliban. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs kept up the schoolyard taunts yesterday by suggesting that Mr. Obama might not meet with Mr. Karzai as scheduled in Washington on May 12.

"We certainly would evaluate whatever continued or further remarks President Karzai makes, as to whether it is constructive to have that meeting," said Mr. Gibbs, in a show of disdain he typically reserves for House Republicans.

The kindest word for all of this is fiasco. American troops are risking their lives to implement a counterinsurgency strategy that requires winning popular support in Afghanistan, and the main message from America's Commander in Chief to the Afghan people is that their government can't be trusted. That ought to make it easier to win hearts and minds.

Mr. Karzai has been disappointing as a nation-builder, has tolerated corrupt officials and family members, and can be arrogant and crudely nationalistic. Presumably, however, Mr. Obama was well aware of these defects last year when he recognized the Afghan election results and then committed 20,000 more U.S. troops to the theater.

You go to war with the allies you have, and it's contrary to any diplomatic principle to believe that continuing public humiliation will make Mr. Karzai more likely to cooperate. On the evidence of the last week, such treatment has only given the Afghan leader more incentive to make a show of his political independence from the Americans.

All the more so given that Mr. Karzai has already heard Mr. Obama promise that U.S. troops will begin leaving Afghanistan as early as July 2011. This shouting spectacle will also embolden the Taliban, who after being run out of Marjah have every reason to tell the citizens of Kandahar that even the Americans don't like the Afghan government and are short-timers in any case.

This treatment of an ally eerily echoes the way the Kennedy Administration treated Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. On JFK's orders, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refused to meet with Diem, and when U.S. officials got word of a coup against Diem they let it be known they would not interfere. Diem was executed, and South Vietnam never again had a stable government.

By contrast, President George W. Bush decided to support and work closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during the 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq. The Maliki government was sectarian and sometimes incompetent, and some of its officials were no doubt corrupt, but Mr. Bush understood that the larger goal was to defeat al Qaeda and to stabilize the country. From FDR to Reagan, Presidents of both parties have had to tolerate allied leaders of varying talents and unsavory qualities in the wartime pursuit of more important foreign-policy goals.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. public chastisement of Israel's government, the larger concern over the Karzai episode is what it reveals about Mr. Obama's diplomatic frame of mind. With adversaries, he is willing to show inordinate patience, to the point of muffling his objections when opposition blood ran in the streets of Tehran. With allies, on the other hand, the President is unforgiving and insists they follow his lead or face his public wrath. The result will be that our foes fear us less, and that we have fewer friends.
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3)Obama's Nuclear Poser Review
By Pamela Geller

Barack Obama announced Monday what the New York Times called a "new strategy": his Nuclear Posture Review. He is narrowing the conditions under which the U.S. would use nuclear weapons. For the first time since the U.S. became a nuclear power, the president of the United States has explicitly vowed that we will not use nukes even against countries that use chemical or biological weapons against us, or take us down with a massive cyber-attack -- as long as those states are obeying the provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.


He also overruled his own Secretary of Defense and said that no new nuclear weapons would be developed. Our aging, rusting arsenal is enough.


The New York Times lapdog reporting on this was pure Walter Duranty:

He dodged when asked whether he shared Israel's view that a "nuclear capable" Iran was as dangerous as one that actually possessed weapons.


"I'm not going to parse that right now," he said, sitting in his office as children played on the South Lawn of the White House at a daylong Easter egg roll. But he cited the example of North Korea, whose nuclear capabilities were unclear until it conducted a test in 2006, which it followed with a second shortly after Mr. Obama took office.


Obama is effectively saying to our enemies, bring it on, we won't fight ya -- leaving us naked and vulnerable like a virgin slipped a Rohypnol on her first date with a Chicagoland gangsta.


Obama is removing nuclear defense at a time when Iran's devout mullahcracy is building its nuclear arsenal with the objective of establishing a global Islamic state. And what would Obama do about Iran's nukes? He came out for a U.N. resolution on sanctions -- one "that has bite," in other words, one that will somehow be different from all the sanctions that are already in place. But he warned that it probably wouldn't work: "We're not naïve that any single set of sanctions automatically is going to change Iranian behavior...there's no light switch in this process."


I am actually embarrassed for my nation.


Obama is leaving America flailing in the hostile wind. Was there ever a more frightful time in American history than the age of Obama? Yes, there were very dangerous periods (the Civil War, World War I, World War II), but during those times of great crisis, the steward of this nation was always a patriot, a freedom-lover -- an American. As I explain in my forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (Simon & Schuster), Obama, in contrast, is a socialist internationalist who clearly despises this country and the whole idea of America, the first moral nation built on the principle of freedom itself in human history.


He himself said it in April 2009. During a visit to London for a summit of the Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G-20), a reporter asked Obama: "[C]ould I ask you whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of 'American exceptionalism' that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy?"


Obama offered no avowal of American uniqueness. Instead, he equated American exceptionalism with the national pride that a citizen of any nation could feel: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."


In other words, America is nothing special. Just another country. Dick Cheney summed it up: "There's never been a nation like the United States of America in world history, and yet when you have a president who goes around and bows to his hosts and then proceeds to apologize profusely for the United States, I find that deeply disturbing. That says to me this is a guy who doesn't fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in."


Of course, Obama knows what buttons to push. He assured us: "I'm going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure." And now his cover in this subversive new suicide pact is his desire to make the world into a "nuclear free zone."


Who does he think he's kidding? What despot will ever freely and willingly give up his power? What evil dictator has ever surrendered that which made him strong? This policy is going to destroy us.


The hustler in the White House is setting us up. This isn't a new strategy. This is surrender. He is making America into the laughingstock of the civilized world and the bullseye of the Axis of Evil.

Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster).

3a)Russia Moving Fast Before 'Arms Control' with U.S.
By Jane Jamison

The New York Times says that President Obama's nuclear arms reduction agreement, to be signed within a few days, will significantly alter U.S. defense policy to "substantially narrow the conditions under which nuclear weapons could be used, even in self-defense."


Is anyone in the Obama administration paying any attention to Vladimir Putin?


The Russian prime minister has just returned from his first-ever trip to Venezuela, with bear hugs for dictator-"presidente" Hugo Chávez.


Russia and Venezuela signed no fewer than 31 agreements in twelve hours. Russia has already sold Chávez $4 billion in military armaments, and now he has signed on for at least $5 billion more.


The relationship between Moscow and Caracas has strengthened in recent years, with Venezuela buying military equipments worth $4 billion from Russia, including Sukhoi jet fighters, helicopters, tanks and assault rifles, since 2005.

During his latest visit to Venezuela, Putin had personally delivered four Russian Mi-17 helicopters President Chavez, the last of a batch of 38 military helicopters the South American country purchased from Russia in 2006.


Besides weapons, Venezuela wants nuclear power ("just for domestic purposes," of course). Sadly, due to NASA budget cuts under Obama, it appears that Venezuela may have astronauts before America does in the future. Russia needs oil, and Putin came back with a $20-billion contract to partner with Venezuela in the Orinoco belt. Vladimir and Hugo. It's all good.


We are not going to build the atomic bomb but we will develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. We have to prepare for the post-petroleum era," Chavez said on Thursday.


While Putin was in Venezuela, China was taking delivery of weapons from Russia on Friday.


Russia has delivered 15 batteries of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to China, Interfax news agency reported, under a contract analysts said could be worth as much as $2.25 billion.


China is a major buyer of Russian weapons, and the two countries say they are trying to forge a strategic partnership, though senior Russian officials are privately concerned about an increasingly assertive China.


Russia has been conducting quite a business by selling the same S-300 "Favorit" ("the world's most powerful and efficient air defense system") to many countries hostile to the U.S. and Israel: Syria, India, Algeria, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. Russia is also well underway with even more advanced versions, the S-400 and S-500 series, the latter of which can repel attacks in space. The systems began marketing on YouTube videos and news releases dated in late February of this year.


A nagging concern is the fact that Russia signed a deal in 2005 to deliver anti-aircraft, anti-missile S-300s to Iran...with delivery originally set for 2009. It is not clear if they ever were delivered. Why don't we know?


Obviously, this has presented a huge security concern to Israel.

The S-300 is considered to be one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world, and its capabilities allow it to intercept aircraft flying 30,000 meters up, from 150 kilometers away.


Netanyahu's government began stepping up its pressure on Putin not to go forward with the arms deliveries to Iran last summer. While Russia was taking meetings with the Israelis, Putin also said that his country's economic crisis makes the lucrative armaments business very attractive.


A Russian ship, which may have been delivering S-300s to Iran last August, mysteriously "disappeared" between Finland and Algeria. It is believed that the ship was destroyed by the Israeli Mossad security service, which was acting on a tip. There is speculation that the arms deal was brokered with Iran by rogue Russian military "black marketeers" rather than with the Russian government.


Heritage Foundation's Dr. Ariel Cohen warned last year that the shipments to Iran must be thwarted:


Although the sale of the S-300 to Iran is not prohibited, such a deal would be a game changer in the Middle East. Tehran could threaten U.S. and allied troops' aerial assets in Afghanistan and Iraq if Iran were to deploy the system along its borders. Furthermore, it would boost the defense of Iran's Bushehr reactor, which Russia has built. Finally, Tehran could also use S-300s to protect its Natanz uranium enrichment plant, Arak heavy water plant, and other components of its sprawling nuclear and missile complex.


A nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to the region as Iran uses its nuclear arsenal to foster its hegemony in the Persian Gulf and beyond and would likely trigger a regional nuclear arms race. Israel, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would not sit idly while Tehran is building its nuclear arsenal.


In mid-February this year, after another eyeball-to-eyeball session with Putin in Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that there was an agreement to hold off on the S-300 deliveries to Iran...for now.


The Russians, however say that the delay is due only to "technical difficulties." It wasn't made clear when those "difficulties" might be cleared up and the shipments might proceed.


It may not make a whit of difference. While Obama and Secretary of State Clinton dither over sanctions and partnering countries, Iran sneers at the lack of foreign policy fortitude and races to a finish line of its own making.


It appears that while Vladimir Putin is allowing himself "official deniability" of any deal to directly arm Iran, the technology has nonetheless somehow made its way to Tehran. Just a few days ago, Free Republic's sources quoted Iranian military officials who say they have developed their own "indigenous" versions of the S-300.


Investor's Business Daily now calls Secretary of State Clinton the "Bull in the China Shop Diplomat." She seems overly preoccupied with micro-managing Israel's apartment-building plans and picking fights with Canada over abortion health care policy, while ignoring such elephants in the room as Iran building nuclear weapons and Russia arming America's enemies.


The Wall Street Journal opines that "Obama Seems Unserious about a Nuclear Iran." If the Obama administration has accepted the inevitability of nuclear weapons in the hands of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, why would it cringe at Iran also being militarily able to demolish the Israeli fighter jets which come to destroy the nukes?


Take it a step further, and what assurance does Israel have at all anymore that the United States of Barack Obama will defend her if the worst comes from Iran?


Former Mayor of New York Ed Koch, a Democrat and a Jew who supported Barack Obama's campaign, recently wrote an editorial in an Israeli newspaper, saying "The Trust is Gone."


Humpty Dumpty has been broken and the absolute trust needed between allies is no longer there. How sad it is for the supporters of Israel who put their trust in President Obama.


Vladmir Putin has already proven once to Israel that he cannot be trusted. Kim Zigfeld wrote in American Thinker of Russia's criss-cross hypocrisies of human rights violations, terrorism, and military aggression, while selling weapons of mass destruction to every enemy of this country.


In the meantime, Iran's nuclear negotiator has just come back from a meeting on "energy" with China. China still refuses to join the U.S. in sanctions against Iran.


While Russians and Iranians are taking intercontinental flights cementing deals with our enemies, President Obama is rolling Easter eggs and playing baseball. Still feeling a headwind from passage of the health care bill, no doubt.


Obama is scheduled April 8 to sign a treaty with Russian president Medvedev to reduce nuclear weapons of the two countries "by 30 percent."


Barack Obama presented his tepidly-received nuclear disarmament plan exactly one year ago today in Prague. It would appear, confirming our worst fears, that the only place in the "world with no nuclear weapons" will be the United States if we stay on the bobble-headed foreign policy course of Barack Obama.


Jane Jamison is publisher of the conservative news/commentary blog UNCOVERAGE.net.


3b)Nuclear Dreams and Nightmares
Obama's new and old policy on The Bomb.
By Fred Kaplan

The Pentagon released its Nuclear Posture Review today, and those seeking clarity from the major newspapers must have come away more confused than ever.

The New York Times, in a front-page preview of the report headlined "Obama to Limit Scenarios to Use Nuclear Weapon," called the president's new strategy "a sharp shift from those of his predecessors."

Yet the Wall Street Journal, titling its story "U.S. Keeps First-Strike Strategy," shrugged off the report as "a status-quo document" that makes "only modest changes."

Both stories exaggerate. The actual 49-page report is neither dramatic nor ho-hum. In a formal statement this morning, President Barack Obama said it takes "specific and concrete steps" that "reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national-security strategy."

That's the most that can be said for it, but that's hardly trivial.

Disarmament activists had hoped for more. But, like the single-payer advocates in the health care debate, they were fooling themselves if they expected it.

The big issue—a matter of suspense in arms-control circles—was whether the document would declare that deterring a nuclear attack is the "sole" purpose of nuclear weapons or merely their "primary" purpose.

If it was the "sole" purpose, that would mean the president was declaring that the United States would never use or threaten to use nuclear weapons except in response to a nuclear attack on U.S. or allied territory. It would signal a "no-first-use" policy.

If it was merely the "primary" purpose, that would mean the United States might use nukes in other circumstances, for instance in response to a chemical or biological attack or to a large-scale conventional invasion of an ally. We would, in other words, reserve the right to fire nuclear weapons first—as we have been doing, and declaring, since the atomic age began.

Obama's strategy carves out a novel, and very intriguing, chunk of middle ground. It rejects "no-first-use," noting that the United States is "not prepared at the present time to adopt a universal policy that deterring nuclear attack is the sole purpose of nuclear weapons."

However, it does declare that the United States will not fire nuclear weapons first at any country that has signed, and is in compliance with, the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The distinction may seem semantic, but in fact it's substantial. Throughout the Cold War and in the two decades since, presidents have always maintained a strategic ambiguity about when and whether they might use nuclear weapons. The commonly invoked phrase has been that "all options are on the table," sometimes with eyebrows raised while saying "all."

Obama is now saying that in conflicts with countries that don't have nuclear weapons and aren't cheating on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, all options are not on the table. We don't need to brandish, much less use, our nukes. We can launch sufficiently devastating attacks with conventional weapons and defend ourselves against whatever those countries might throw against us.

This declaration has three tangible effects. First, the nuclear war-planners at U.S. Strategic Command are, in effect, ordered to stop looking for targets in treaty-compliant countries—and to stop listing "requirements" for more nuclear weapons to hit those targets.

Second, it provides another incentive for countries—even unfriendly countries—not to develop nuclear weapons (if they believe the U.S. declaration, anyway).

Third, it further isolates those countries that are in violation of the NPT—which is to say, Iran and North Korea.

"The United States wishes to stress," the document adds, that it will consider using nuclear weapons only "in extreme circumstances" and that it will seek to create the conditions for a no-first-use policy in the future (though it's vague on just what those conditions might be). Perhaps with this in mind, the authors write that deterring nuclear attack is the "fundamental" purpose of nuclear weapons—a somewhat firmer variation on "primary" but stopping well short of "sole."

In a telephone conference with columnists this afternoon, Jim Miller, the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, said that officials discussed all the options in interagency meetings but that a strict no-first-use policy was rejected early on. He also emphasized that President Obama made the ultimate decision on the matter.

First, he said, officials agreed that there were strategic reasons for preserving the first-use option under some circumstances against some potential foes. Second, Robert Einhorn, undersecretary of state for nuclear security, added, in the same phone conference, that several allies in Asia and Europe—who were consulted throughout the drafting process—said that they would find a no-first-use policy "very unsettling." The Cold War concept of the "nuclear umbrella"—in which the United States guarantees an ally's security by threatening to use nuclear weapons in its defense—is still alive.

And yet Obama's narrowing of this umbrella does mark a departure from past policy. In the last Nuclear Posture Review, released in 2002 by President George W. Bush, the umbrella was widened. The Bush document (which was classified, though portions were leaked) declared, "Nuclear weapons … provide credible military options to deter a wide range of threats. … Greater flexibility is needed with respect to nuclear forces and planning than was the case during the Cold War. … Nuclear-attack options that vary in scale, scope and purpose will complement other military capabilities." (Italics added.)

Several officials in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon were trying to integrate nukes into the arsenal as a legitimate and broadly useful weapon of warfare. They didn't quite succeed. Their proposals to build earth-penetrating nuclear warheads and very-small-yield battlefield nuclear weapons never got off the drawing boards or were roundly rejected by Congress.

One thing Obama's review does is to reject the very concept—in effect, to rip up the drawings.

The report signals a few new policies about the U.S. nuclear arsenal. First, it says that the 450 Minuteman 3 ICBMs, most of which are fitted with three nuclear warheads apiece, will be modified to carry no more than one warhead. This will greatly reduce—it should eliminate—any fear in the Kremlin that the United States might be planning a disarming first-strike against Russia. This could do much to build trust and stabilize relations.

Second, it says the United States will not build any new nuclear warheads, period. The existing arsenal will be maintained through "life-extension" programs, facilitated by fairly big increases in the weapons laboratories' budgets. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had been pushing for the new "reliable replacement warhead"; this is one case where Obama seems to have sided against him.

Third (though many will see this as moving in the opposite direction), the report solidifies what appears to be Obama's commitment to developing and deploying missile defenses. His "phased" approach is more limited than Bush's goals were, but still, this is a program of which he was once extremely skeptical.

On face value, the Nuclear Posture Review presents a forward-looking but hardly radical agenda. Whether it endures as just that, or as the first step toward Obama's long-term vision of a world without nuclear weapons, will depend in part on what happens in the next few months and years.

The final section of the report lays out the goals of future reductions beyond those of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which Obama and Russian president Dmitri Medvedev will sign this week in Prague. The goals include sharper reductions not only in long-range missiles but also in tactical, short-range weapons and in spare warheads currently stored in warehouses. Russia has more of the former; the United States has more of the latter. Reducing both will require revisions in military planning, reassessments of national-security interests, and much more intrusive inspection procedures to verify that the cuts have actually been made.

This next step is where the negotiations could get very complicated, extremely testy, and, if they succeed, truly radical.

Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com . His 1983 book about the nuclear strategists, The Wizards of Armageddon, is still in print.
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4)Netanyahu gets it
By Sever Plocker


After patiently listening to his guest’s scholarly lecture, Obama said the following words to Netanyahu: I feel for you, the Israelis, and therefore I recommend that we set a binding timetable for resolving the conflict between you and the Palestinians. I’m determined to end it no later than a year before my first term in office ends. More than 40 years have passed since you occupied the territories and there is no reason to delay or waste more time: Everyone knows what the final-status agreement will look like. You do too. Bill Clinton outlined it in detail. George W. Bush endorsed it. As a black president with Muslims roots, I can get more benefits for you out of the Arabs than my two predecessors.



I therefore expect you, Mr. Prime Minister of Israel, to show guts, draw courage, and lead your state to peace in 2011. The settlement construction freeze is needed only as a start. Meanwhile, I will make the following pledge to you: As long as I am America’s president, Iran will not possess military nuclear capabilities. This I swear. God bless you, Mr. Netanyahu; God bless the people of Israel.



Netanyahu heard this and was stunned. A week before the meeting, he rejected Finance Minister Dr. Yuval Steintiz’s advice not to travel to America, and instead was tempted by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who as always promised a pleasant and friendly conversation with Obama. The aides and advisors prepared Netanyahu for a clash over the issue of Jerusalem construction: He arrived at the White House equipped with good explanations. Yet he was not prepared to hear, from the president, a firm, unequivocal and blatant demand to complete the negotiations (which had not yet started) within a year and a half. He felt the ground is shifting below his feet; his predications and assessments crumbled.



People who spoke with Netanyahu before the elections can attest to his position at the time. Netanyahu viewed himself as a person chosen by history for one mission only: Freeing Israel from the horror of an Iranian nuclear bomb. He did not link the enlistment of US support against Iran to an agreement with the Palestinians. With complete conviction, he argued that the conflict had been resolved in fact, and that the reality which had emerged in the territories is the solution. This is what we have: A Palestinian parliament already exists, as well as Palestinian elections, a Palestinian prime minister, a Palestinian flag, a Palestinian area code, and Palestinian police. They have full autonomy; almost a state.



A focused president

Netanyahu pinned great hopes on advancing the Palestinian economy and reinforcing its institutions; through actions, rather than slogans. The diplomatic process – that is, the shining path that his predecessors took to nowhere – appeared to him as a needless diversion. A sort of ritual. Netanyahu was not excited over its existence, but was willing to take part in it in order to pay lip service. In his view, which was shared by many others, the demographic and political developments – half a million Israelis living beyond the 1967 borders, as well as the Hamas state in Gaza – pre-empted and annulled any thought of a final-status agreement.



The sense of disgust with the “diplomatic process” prompted author and journalist Tom Friedman to urge President Obama to refrain from US involvement in Israeli-Palestinian talks, at least until the sides are prepared for mutual concessions. Up until a month or two ago, it appeared that the Administration in Washington took Friedman’s advice and that Netanyahu’s approach proved itself. Obama conveyed a sense of voluntarily helplessness.



Yet then came the shock, the consternation, and the pressure. Suddenly, the prime minister of Israel found himself facing an American president who is focused on his objective. A president who shakes his finger at the PM and says: Mr. Netanyahu, in order to hit Iran I need an agreement in Palestine. The time for evasive maneuvers has run out. It’s either peace now, sir, or you will pay now.





When Salam Fayyad, the most moderate and pro-American prime minister the Palestinians ever had, and will ever have, declared in Passover that soon his people will celebrate the establishment of their new state, which will be recognized by the world and by Israel with Jerusalem as its capital, it was Barack Obama who spoke from Fayyad’s mouth. Both of them share the same vision.



Now Netanyahu understands. Now he needs to either make a decision, or go home.

4a)New Road Map? New plan to be based on Clinton's proposal.
By Yitzhak Benhorin

Senior administration sources tell Washington Post that US president is considering change of strategy with new proposal based on Clinton plan

US President Barack Obama is "seriously considering" proposing a US peace plan for the Middle East in the fall, the Washington Post reported Wednesday, quoting two senior sources in the American administration.


If this indeed happens, it will be a change from the present approach, which tries to wring concessions from both sides in order to reach "proximity talks", which in turn will lead to direct negotiations. The chances of a new plan being formulated have increased especially in the light of the crisis over building in east Jerusalem, and US understanding that gradual steps are leading nowhere.


The US proposal will be based on former President Bill Clinton's plan, presented at Camp David in the year 2000, with some amendments as necessary to take into account recent changes.


"Everyone knows the basic outlines of a peace deal," said one of the senior officials, while the other added that "90 percent of the map would look the same."


According to the Washington Post report, the fact that Obama was considering a peace plan was revealed during a meeting in the White House on March 24, convened by National Security Advisor Jim Jones with six former national security advisors – a forum that meets once every few months at Jones' request.

'We must do something'

The last meeting was attended by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, who served under Ronald Reagan, Brent Scowcroft, who advised both Gerald Ford and George Bush Sr., Sandy Berger, national security advisor to Bill Clinton, and two senior advisors from the Reagan years, Frank Carlucci and Robert C. McFarlane.

During the meeting, Obama entered the room and asked to hear what the advisors thought about proposing a US peace plan.


Scowcroft, who spoke first, urged the president to present a plan based on past agreements. Brzezinski expressed his support for the idea and described a number of strategic parameters for such a plan. Berger and Powell both expressed their support too.


The timing of presenting a plan in the fall is linked to a solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. While Israel is against any imposed solution, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is trying to separate the issue of Iran from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Obama administration believes that progress in the peace process will facilitate a solution to the Iran threat.


"It's not either Iran or the Middle East peace process," one of the sources said. "You have to do both." He said the Americans want to remove the controversy over settlements in east Jerusalem and find a regional solution between Israel and the Arab states.


"As a global power with global responsibilities, we have to do something," another senior source said. The plan, he added, would "take on the absolute requirements of Israeli security and the requirements of Palestinian sovereignty in a way that makes sense."

4b)Obama bans terms Jihad, Islam


President Barack Obama's advisers will remove religious terms such as "Islamic extremism" from the central document outlining the US national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said.

The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century."

The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document was still being written, and the White House would not discuss it. But rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on US foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.

The revisions are part of a larger effort about which the White House talks openly, one that seeks to change not just how the United States talks to Muslim nations, but also what it talks to them about, from health care and science to business startups and education.

That shift away from terrorism has been building for a year, since Obama went to Cairo, Egypt, and promised a "new beginning" in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. The White House believes the previous administration based that relationship entirely on fighting terror and winning the war of ideas.


"You take a country where the overwhelming majority are not going to become terrorists, and you go in and say, 'We're building you a hospital so you don't become terrorists.' That doesn't make much sense," said National Security Council staffer Pradeep Ramamurthy.

Ramamurthy runs the administration's Global Engagement Directorate, a four-person National Security Council team that Obama launched last May with little fanfare and a vague mission to use diplomacy and outreach "in pursuit of a host of national security objectives." Since then, the division has not only helped change the vocabulary of fighting terror but also has shaped the way the country invests in Muslim businesses, studies global warming, supports scientific research and combats polio.

Before diplomats go abroad, they hear from Ramamurthy or his deputy, Jenny Urizar. When officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration returned from Indonesia, the NSC got a rundown about research opportunities on global warming. Ramamurthy maintains a database of interviews conducted by 50 US embassies worldwide. And business leaders from more than 40 countries head to Washington this month for an "entrepreneurship summit" for Muslim businesses.

"Do you want to think about the US as the nation that fights terrorism or the nation you want to do business with?" Ramamurthy said.

To deliver that message, Obama's speechwriters have taken inspiration from an unlikely source: former President Ronald Reagan. Visiting communist China in 1984, Reagan spoke to Fudan University in Shanghai about education, space exploration and scientific research. He discussed freedom and liberty. He never mentioned communism or democracy.

Like Reagan in China, Obama in Cairo made only passing references to terrorism. Instead he focused on cooperation. He announced the United States would team up to fight polio with the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a multinational body based in Saudi Arabia. The United States and the OIC had worked together before, but never with that focus.

Polio is endemic in three Muslim countries — Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan — but some Muslim leaders have been suspicious of vaccination efforts, which they believed to be part of a CIA sterilization campaign. Last year, the OIC and religious scholars at the International Islamic Fiqh Academy issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that parents should have their children vaccinated.

"We're probably entering into a whole new level of engagement between the OIC and the polio program because of the stimulus coming from the US government," said Michael Galway, who works on polio eradication for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Centers for Disease Control also began working more closely with local Islamic leaders in northern Nigeria, a network that had been overlooked for years, said John Fitzsimmons, the deputy director of the CDC's immunization division.

Though health officials are reluctant to assign credit to any one action, new polio cases in Nigeria fell from 83 during the first quarter of last year to just one so far this year, Fitzsimmons said.

Public opinion polls also showed consistent improvement in US sentiment within the Muslim world last year, although the viewpoints are still overwhelmingly negative, however.

Obama did not invent Muslim outreach. President George W. Bush gave the White House its first Quran, hosted its first Iftar dinner to celebrate Ramadan, and loudly stated support for Muslim democracies like Turkey.

But the Bush administration struggled with its rhetoric. Muslims criticized him for describing the war against terror as a "crusade" and labeling the invasion of Afghanistan "Operation Infinite Justice" — words that were seen as religious. He regularly identified America's enemy as "Islamic extremists" and "radical jihadists."

Karen Hughes, a Bush confidant who served as his top diplomat to the Muslim world in his second term, urged the White House to stop.

"I did recommend that, in my judgment, it's unfortunate because of the way it's heard. We ought to avoid the language of religion," Hughes said. "Whenever they hear 'Islamic extremism, Islamic jihad, Islamic fundamentalism,' they perceive it as a sort of an attack on their faith. That's the world view Osama bin Laden wants them to have."

Hughes and Juan Zarate, Bush's former deputy national security adviser, said Obama's efforts build on groundwork from Bush's second term, when some of the rhetoric softened. But by then, Zarate said, it was overshadowed by the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and a prolonged Iraq war.

Obama's foreign policy posture is not without political risk. Even as Obama steps up airstrikes on terrorists abroad, he has proven vulnerable to Republican criticism on security issues at home, such as the failed Christmas Day airline bombing and the announced-then-withdrawn plan to prosecute 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.

Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist and former Bush adviser, is skeptical of Obama's engagement effort. It "doesn't appear to have created much in the way of strategic benefit" in the Middle East peace process or in negotiations over Iran's nuclear ambitions, he said.

Obama runs the political risk of seeming to adopt politically correct rhetoric abroad while appearing tone deaf on national security issues at home, Feaver said.

The White House dismisses such criticism. In June, Obama will travel to Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, and is expected to revisit many of the themes of his Cairo speech.

"This is the long-range direction we need to go in," Ramamurthy said.
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5)When Israel Stood Up to Washington
by Daniel Pipes

As U.S.-Israel tensions climb to unfamiliar heights, they recall a prior round of tensions nearly thirty years ago, when Menachem Begin and Ronald Reagan were in charge. In contrast to Binyamin Netanyahu's repeated apologies, Begin adopted a quite different approach.

The sequence of events started with a statement from Syrian dictator Hafiz al-Asad that he would not make peace with Israel "even in a hundred years," Begin responded by making the Golan Heights part of Israel, terminating the military administration that had been governing that territory from the time Israeli forces seized it from Syria in 1967. Legislation to this effect easily passed Israel's parliament on Dec. 14, 1981.


Menachem Begin with Samuel Lewis on a friendlier occasion in May 1977.

This move came, however, just two weeks after the signing of a U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation Agreement, prompting much irritation in Washington. At the initiative of Secretary of State Alexander Haig, the U.S. government suspended that just-signed agreement. One day later, on Dec. 20, Begin summoned Samuel Lewis, the U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv, for a dressing-down.

Yehuda Avner, a former aide to Begin, provides atmospherics and commentary on this episode at "When Washington bridled and Begin fumed." As he retells it, "The prime minister invited Lewis to take a seat, stiffened, sat up, reached for the stack of papers on the table by his side, put them on his lap and [adopted] a face like stone and a voice like steel." Begin began with "a thunderous recitation of the perfidies perpetrated by Syria over the decades." He ended with what he called "a very personal and urgent message" to President Reagan (available at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website).

"Three times during the past six months, the U.S. Government has 'punished' Israel," Begin began. He enumerated those three occasions: the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, the bombing of the PLO headquarters in Beirut, and now the Golan Heights law. Throughout this exposition, according to Avner, Lewis interjected but without success: "Not punishing you, Mr. Prime Minister, merely suspending ...," "Excuse me, Mr. Prime Minister, it was not ...," "Mr. Prime Minister, I must correct you ...," and "This is not a punishment, Mr. Prime Minister, it's merely a suspension until ..."

Fully to vent his anger, Begin drew on a century of Zionism:

What kind of expression is this – "punishing Israel"? Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we youths of fourteen who, if they don't behave properly, are slapped across the fingers? Let me tell you who this government is composed of. It is composed of people whose lives were spent in resistance, in fighting and in suffering. You will not frighten us with "punishments." He who threatens us will find us deaf to his threats. We are only prepared to listen to rational arguments. You have no right to "punish" Israel – and I protest at the very use of this term.

In his most stinging attack on the United States, Begin challenged American moralizing about civilian casualties during the Israeli attack on Beirut:

You have no moral right to preach to us about civilian casualties. We have read the history of World War II and we know what happened to civilians when you took action against an enemy. We have also read the history of the Vietnam war and your phrase "body-count."

Referring to the U.S. decision to suspend the recently signed agreement, Begin announced that "The people of Israel has lived 3,700 years without a memorandum of understanding with America – and it will continue to live for another 3,700." On a more mundane level, he cited Haig having stated on Reagan's behalf that the U.S. government would purchase $200 million worth of Israeli arms and other equipment "Now you say it will not be so. This is therefore a violation of the President's word. Is it customary? Is it proper?"

Recalling the recent fight in the U.S. Senate over the decision to sell AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia, Begin noted that it "was accompanied by an ugly campaign of anti-Semitism." By way of illustration, he mentioned three specifics: the slogans "Begin or Reagan?" and "We should not let the Jews determine the foreign policy of the United States," plus aspersions that senators like Henry Jackson, Edward Kennedy, Robert Packwood, and Rudy Boschwitz "are not loyal citizens."

Responding to demands that the Golan Heights law be rescinded, Begin sourced the very concept of rescission to "the days of the Inquisition" and reminded Lewis that

Our forefathers went to the stake rather than "rescind" their faith. We are not going to the stake. Thank God. We have enough strength to defend our independence and to defend our rights. … please be kind enough to inform the secretary of state that the Golan Heights Law will remain valid. There is no force on earth that can bring about its rescission.


Menachem Begin consulting with Yehuda Avner.

The session ended without Lewis responding. As Avner recounts, "Faced with this unyielding barrage, which to the ambassador seemed somewhat hyperbolic and, in part, even paranoid, he saw no point in carrying on, so he took his leave."

Comments: (1) Late 1981 marked the nadir of U.S.-Israel relations during the Reagan administration. In particular, strategic cooperation made headway in subsequent years.

(2) The ministry website calls Begin's blast "an unprecedented move"; to which I add, it was not just unprecedented but also unrepeated.

(3) Begin's sense of destiny, combined with his oratorical grandeur impelled him to respond to current policy differences by invoking 3,700 years of Jewish history, the Inquisition, the Vietnam War, and American antisemitism. In the process, he changed the terms of the argument.

(4) Notwithstanding intense American aggravation with Begin, his blistering attack improved Israeli pride and standing.

(5) Politicians in other countries quite frequently attack the United States. Indeed, Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, did so last week. But his purpose – to convince his countrymen that he is not, in fact, a kept politician – differed fundamentally from Begin's of asserting Israel's dignity.

(6) It is difficult to imagine any other Israeli politician, Binyamin Netanyahu included, who would dare to pull off Begin's verbal assault.

(7) Yet that might be just what Israel needs.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
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6)The Purposes of Political Combat
By John Podhoretz

O my America, how partisan you have become! How difficult you have made it for visionary politicians who want nothing more than to improve you!

You have been paralyzed into stasis by the status quo, which has injected its subtle toxins into your bloodstream by means of radio frequencies between 530 and 1700 kilohertz and a lone television cable-news channel, whose incomprehensible power overruns the combined effect of two others like it; nightly newscasts on three broadcast channels; and the vast majority of newspapers and magazines in the United States. Rallies of surly citizens claiming the mantle of Revolutionary War Bostonians in the spring of 2009 and rude questioners at political gatherings with elected officials home from Washington in the summer of 2009 were harbingers of the inexplicable political reversal that has since been made flesh by electoral defeats in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and polling numbers suggesting a catastrophe in the offing for President Barack Obama’s party come November, when elections for all 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats take place.

How can this be, my America? You had given Obama and the Democrats a nearly free hand; not since 1977 had the political balance in Washington been tilted so completely to the advantage of one of the two parties. Seventy million cast their ballots for Obama, and on that same night, Democrats won a 78-seat majority in the House of Representatives and (after much recounting) the 60 seats in the Senate they needed to enact legislation almost at will. Under such circumstances, partisanship should no longer have had any meaning or held any sway, for, O my America, you asked for change, and you gave the change agents the power they needed to enact change; but after only a few months, the works got all gummed up. It will now require procedural tricks and sleights of hand to effect the very change you sought—and in effecting it, and thereby following your will, Democrats may seal their own fate in this election year. Thus has partisanship worked its ugly dark magic, turning the political system upon itself when the verdict of the electorate in November 2008 should have been final.


_____________


The preceding paragraphs re-present a distillation of liberal thought about the political circumstances of the present moment. The degree of bafflement liberals express at the surprisingly perilous position in which Barack Obama and the Democrats find themselves is understandable; after all, such peril was nearly unimaginable to everyone just a year ago. The results of the 2008 election had been so decisive, the condition of the post-Bush Republican party so parlous, and the double wound to the Right caused by the difficulties of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown so infected that Obama and his party appeared to have an all but free hand.

Indeed, the combined effects of a war gone sour and the capitalist system’s apparent self-immolation seemed to Obama and his team to have brought a decisive end to one ideological era and inaugurated a new period in which the American people were now consciously and explicitly seeking liberal activism from their politicians.

It was by no means an unreasonable presumption. The 2008 election, with its 53-46 margin in favor of Obama, and his victory in the unlikely states of Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana, followed on the 2006 midterms, in which Democrats crushed Republicans and regained control of both chambers for the first time in 12 years. Both elections were cast as, and indeed seemed to be, referenda on the failures of the Right—not just standard political failures, but failures on a grand scale that invalidated the modern conservative governing project.

Those failures were considered moral ones, expressed in the political and personal corruption in which Republican politicians had engaged and around which much of the 2006 elections seemed to revolve. They were seen as economic, with Republicans shouldering the blame for the economic meltdown of 2008. And they were thought managerial, in the decision to go to war partly on the basis of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and then the failure to do what was necessary to win that war. Liberals and leftists were tireless in arguing that these failures were not coincidental but linked, that they shared a common root—the essential heartlessness and soullessness of the Republican party and the conservative movement. And the electorate appeared to respond exactly as they had hoped it would.

It therefore seemed only logical that the thoroughgoing rejection of the Right was pretty much the same thing as an endorsement of the ideas and policies of the anti-Right. After all, liberals had had to concede as much when things had gone against them, hadn’t they? For years following the 1994 congressional election, a common presumption in political circles was that the United States had proved itself to be a “Center-Right nation,” at least as far as the voting public was concerned. Leftist thinkers like Thomas Frank found themselves compelled to devise a theory to explain why Americans chose to vote in ways injurious to their own supposed best interests. “The matter with Kansas,” Frank said in his bestselling 2004 analysis, was that its people had been conditioned to respond to hot-button cultural stimuli on matters like abortion rather than to support redistributionist economic policies designed to improve their own well-being. The same line of argument had been offered a decade earlier about Southern and urban ethnic voters by the reporters Thomas and Mary Edsall in their 1992 book, Chain Reaction—only in that case, the Edsalls said, the stimuli had been primarily racial.

It had further become axiomatic in liberal circles from the 1970s onward that the Right had secured the superior political posture on matters of security, regarding both crime at home and America’s position abroad, by ginning up (knowingly in a state of cynicism, or desperately due to personal neurosis, or innocently as a result of stupidity) a state of peril in relation to supposed threats that were little or no threat at all—Cuba, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union. The terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 came as an almost undisguised blessing for the Right, according to one version of this theory popularized in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11; they became a means of generating new security fears, most especially fear of Iraq, which made possible the engagement in an unnecessary war whose purpose was to rally people ’round the flag and the Republican president—until things went horribly wrong.

Bombarded by these various catalysts, the argument ran, the American people had entered into a period of unreason in which they reacted to averse changes in their lives and communities by embracing symbols of power and authority rather than insisting on concrete and specific political changes that would make their lives better and easier. The most telling statement of this theme came from Barack Obama during his run for the Democratic nomination in early 2008, when he said of rural voters that our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.



These words were revealing not only in the condescension he displayed toward the very people he insisted his campaign was designed to help but also in the way they expressed Obama’s—and, by extension, the specific Left-liberal attitude he both embodies and exemplifies—distrust of and contempt for politics itself.

I am using the word politics to describe the arena of public policy, in which matters involving the direction of the United States are hashed out. Players in the arena range in size and import from the president to an individual voter, from the Senate majority leader to a school-board member in his home state of Nevada, from Charles Krauthammer to a commenter on a blog or a caller to a radio show. The arena is host to conflicts over matters large (weapons systems) and small (the food pyramid), bitterly disputed (abortion) and barely discussed (depreciation schedules), of historical import (war) and entirely evanescent (a la carte cable pricing). But conflicts are what they are, and politics is how they are adjudicated.

The great military strategist Clausewitz once said that “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” but the opposite is true as well. In a stable republic like the United States, in the 145 years since the end of the Civil War, Americans have managed not to war with each other because we have come to accept implicitly that we handle our disagreements in the arena of politics.

And that has led to another implicit acceptance, which is that the system cannot afford to have us arguing, as Henry Kissinger described North Vietnamese negotiating tactics, over the shape of the table. So with very few exceptions, we operate by consensus on the legitimacy of the essential architecture of the government. And because time is finite and there are limits even to the natural human drive to disagree, our politics actually function with a great deal of overall consensus, a consensus driven by the overall stability of the body politic. Among elected politicians, even the pacifistically inclined find it necessary to vote for increases in the defense budget, while those inclined toward libertarianism will support Social Security increases and extensions of unemployment insurance. That may not be their inclination, but they are compelled to it by the logic of a stable political system.

When a stable political system finds itself in imbalance, however, something more complicated and unpredictable begins to happen. Principled differences will tend to crystallize every now and then around one or two events or issues or pieces of proposed legislation. The crystallization almost always occurs when one party or ideological tendency attempts, or is thought by the other party or ideological tendency to be attempting, to extend the bounds of the consensus in such a way that it shifts into something else. Once the conflict crystallizes, all bets are off, and the games in the arena begin.

This is what politics is at its core. Now, elections are the primary vehicle for the conduct of politics, because they are adjudicated at a given time and place and feature a winner and a loser. The methods used to win elections and defeat rivals are always in low odor in a democracy, because they are confrontational and impolite and lack nuance. But those methods work, and so they are used. The odd part is that the people who use them successfully, politicians and their staffs and consultants, often want to limit these methods exclusively to election seasons; they want to believe that there is a time to run for office and a time to govern, and the time for governing ought to function under different rules. According to this way of thinking, “politics” is something low, while governing is something high; you engage in politics because you have to in order to secure the power to engage in governing, which is your sworn and devoted duty.

Thus it was that Barack Obama could invite his 2008 rival, John McCain, to a health-care summit in February 2010 and greet McCain’s criticisms of the president’s health-care bill by saying, “Let me just make this point, John. Because we’re not campaigning anymore. The election is over. We can spend the remainder of the time with our respective talking points going back and forth. We were supposed to be talking about insurance.”

McCain wanted to discuss the particulars of the health-care legislation passed by the House and Senate. The purpose of the health-care event was to create some form of momentum that would help Obama and his vision for health-care reform carry the day. Nonetheless, Obama had determined that the conversation at that point was to be about “insurance.” He was annoyed at McCain’s effort to introduce political considerations into the discussion. Such a thing was lowering, the stuff of campaigning. “The election is over,” said the president. Two weeks later, speaking heatedly before a crowd in Pennsylvania, he insisted that “the time for talk is over.”


Talk is politics. Governing is action.

By saying “the time for talk is over,” Obama was echoing his own words a year earlier about the $787 billion economic-stimulus proposal he was then trying to work through the legislative process: “The time for talk is over, the time for action is now.” At every step of the way in the course of pushing his relentlessly ambitious domestic agenda, Obama has invoked this duality: His opponents want to fight; he wants to do. They are playing politics; he is above politics.

The obvious objection to my argument here is that Obama doesn’t mean this; in belittling his opponents and their propensity to talk, he is playing politics himself, attempting to throw them on the defensive. But the habitual nature of his response, and the response of those who support him, to the populist uprisings against his agenda over the past year suggests he is not the least bit disingenuous.

Obama really does seem to believe that the opposition to his core policies—the creeping nationalization of health care, the effective nationalization of the American automotive industry, the imposition of onerous regulations on energy production, and the expiry of tax cuts that will lead to gigantic effective increases—is not principled. Rather, such opposition deserves to be dismissed as bad faith—the efforts of the status quo, big business, and the politicians in their pockets. Or it is to be explained away as evidence of psychological or spiritual impairment created by the wounds inflicted upon sorry and ignorant souls who are being manipulated by forces beyond their control.

How is it that Obama can fail to see that changes of the magnitude he is seeking would compel those who believe that those changes are dangerous—who honestly believe that they are bad for the country and whose belief is grounded in powerful ideas about how society should be ordered—to marshal their forces to do whatever is in their power to prevent them from taking place? And that it would be wise not to dismiss or belittle the energy and resolve of the opposition, but rather to take their full measure and plan accordingly?

Obama’s failure may reside in his contempt for politics. For the national counter-assault against Obama is a manifestation of democratic politics as they ought to work. A rather vague promise of change during his presidential campaign morphed afterward into an agenda of astonishing size with an astonishing price tag. The passage of a $700 billion bank bailout supported by Obama before the election was followed by his $787 billion stimulus package. No sooner had that $1.5 trillion been committed than the president began advocating cap-and-trade legislation that would cost $800 billion through the election in 2012. And then came health care, with a cost of, at the barest minimum, $900 billion over 10 years, and very likely double that or more.

Americans did not take this grandiose and ruinously destructive plan on faith, nor should they have. A majority of them may have voted for change, but that change was change from something, from George W. Bush primarily, and not necessarily change toward something, toward a wholesale revision of the relation between the state and the economy. In response to Obama’s call for an end to talk and a time for action, an engaged and concerned citizenry used whatever political means were at hand—from spontaneous rallies following a financial consultant’s call on a little-watched cable-TV show for a revival of the Boston Tea Party, to a Senate victory in Massachusetts for a candidate promising to be the 41st vote to block health care.

In using politics to slow down and thwart him, Obama’s rivals are not simply talking. They are acting as citizens in a democratic republic. When challenged by their president, they, too, decided that the time for talk was over and the time for action had begun.
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