Community Organizer Better Suited @ Shoveling Feces?

Sent to me by another 'dumb' friend that also does not get it. Ain't it great to be unloved, dumb and among the unwashed, 'overweight,' gun toting, bible thumping majority of Conservative Americans who are too stupid to appreciate the pleasures of Far left Liberalism? We only know who and what is wrecking our nation!

How could someone like Hanson, with a doctorate degree, write such insightful trash? He too must be blind to the the logic of Liberalism.

As for Carter, I suspect he got his stomach infection after reading his own nonsense. Most everything he writes is enough to turn one's stomach. (See 1 below.)
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A meaty article but Democrats are either too frightened or stupid to understand the enormity of rage and disgust among us unwashed.

Come November, after the tornado has spoken, Pelosi and her shrinking majority might try, during the interim lame duck session, to ram more poisonous legislation down the nation's throat like carding union members etc.

If she does, Democrats will simply put one more nail in their coffin.

Then the question will be whether Republicans can govern like sensible pall bearers or go back to their mistaken ways and revive the dying Far Left.(See 2 below.)
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Perhaps our great community organizer president would be better suited had he run for mayor of San Fran.

He seems more adept at shoveling feces than running the nation. (See 3 below.)
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Imminent attack in Europe? (See 4 below.)
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Did anyone ever doubt it? Mitchell remains hopeful! (See 5 and 5a below.)
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Democrats like Napoleon might be ready to meet their Waterloo. (See 6 below.)
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Caroline Glick believes the Stuxnet worm may make Iran squirm but they will eventually overcome it and thus, has not changed the strategic vulnerabilities that Israel faces: "The first is Israel’s geographic minuteness, which attracts invaders. The second vulnerability is Israel’s political weakness both at home and abroad, which make it impossible to fight long wars." See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)Clinging to Arrogance
By Victor Davis Hanson


The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn't be enough in America because "I need a majority."

For some reason, Democrats have chosen to follow the disastrous model of Stevenson and not that of feisty man-of-the-people Missourian Harry Truman -- though the former nearly wrecked the party and the latter got elected.

Former President Jimmy Carter likewise seems to feel that he's still too smart for us. Carter, who turns 86 on Friday, is hitting the news shows to explain why he remains America's "superior" ex-president -- and why more than 30 years ago he was so successful yet so underappreciated as our chief executive.

Most Americans instead remember a very different President Carter who finished his single term with 18 percent inflation, 18 percent interest rates, 11 percent unemployment, long gas lines, and a world in chaos from hostage-taking in Teheran and Soviet communist aggression in Afghanistan and Central America.

Now, John Kerry -- who failed to win the presidency in 2004 and recently tried to avoid state sales taxes on his new $7 million yacht -- is voicing similar frustrations about Americans' inability to fathom what their betters are trying to do for them. He is furious that an unsophisticated electorate might not return congressional Democratic majorities in 2010. Kerry laments that, "We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on." Instead it falls for "a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what's happening."

In 2006, Kerry warned students that if they did poorly in school, they could "get stuck in Iraq." He apparently had forgotten that soldiers volunteer for military service, and are overwhelmingly high school graduates.

In the 2008 campaign, Michelle Obama at one point said of her husband's burden, "Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics."

That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

During the recent Ground Zero mosque controversy, Obama returned to that Carter-Kerry-Obama sort of condescension. When asked about the overwhelming opposition to the mosque, the president felt again that the unthinking hoi polloi had given into their unfounded fears: "I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society."

The president often clears his throat with "Let me be perfectly clear" and "Make no mistake about it" -- as if we, his schoolchildren, have to be warned to pay attention to the all-knowing teacher at the front of the class.

Disappointed progressive pundits also resonate this angst over having to deal with childlike Americans. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently psychoanalyzed the falling support for the president by claiming that "The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats."

Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" lamented that uninformed voters were easily tricked into voting against their "real" economic interests.
When America votes for a liberal candidate, it is redeemed by the left as intelligent -- and derided as dense when it does not. We were told not to worry that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did not pay all his income taxes since we were lucky to have someone so well educated and experienced in high finance.

Note that few Democratic candidates are running on the health-care bill they passed, promising at the time that it would be appreciated by a suspicious American public. More federal borrowing and amnesty are still pushed under the euphemisms "stimulus" and "comprehensive immigration reform." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the tea party movement was merely a synthetic Astroturf movement. Professors and preachers may like such sermonizing, but for politicians it's a lousy way to get elected. Again, compare the relative fates of the patronizing Adlai Stevenson and the plain-speaking Harry Truman.

But current polls suggest that these clueless and unappreciative Americans apparently believe that an elite education does not ensure their officials can balance a budget, pay their own taxes or speak candidly.

What an outrageous "How dare they!" thought.


Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
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2)The Twister of 2010 America's political landscape will never be the same.
By PEGGY NOONAN


On a recent trip to Omaha, Neb., I found a note prominently displayed in my hotel room warning of the possibility of "extreme weather" including "tornadic activity." The clunky euphemism was no doubt meant to soften or obscure what they were obliged to communicate: There may be a tornado, look out.

That's what's going on nationally. Tornadoes are tearing up the political landscape.

Everyone talks about the tensions between the Republican establishment, such as it is, and the tea-party-leaning parts of its base. But are you looking at what's happening with the Democrats?

Tensions between President Obama and his supporters tore into the open this week as never before, signifying a real and developing fracturing of his party. Mr. Obama, in an interview in Rolling Stone, aimed fire at those abandoning him: "It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election." The Democratic base "sitting on their hands complaining" is "just irresponsible. . . . We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard—that's what I said during the campaign. . . . But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."

At first I thought this was another example of the president's now-habitual political ineptness, his off-key-ness. You don't diss people into voting for you, you can't lecture them into love. The response from the left was fierce, unapologetic—and accusatory. Mr. Obama had let them down, he'd taken half measures. "Stop living in that bubble," shot back an activist on cable. But Jane Hamsher of the leftist blog Firedoglake saw method, not madness. She described the president's remarks as "hippie punching" and laid them to cynical strategy: "It's about setting up a narrative for who will take the blame for a disastrous election." She said Mr. Obama's comments themselves could "depress turnout."

Take the blame? Disastrous? Setting up a narrative?

This isn't the language of disagreement, the classic to-and-fro between a restive base and politicians who make compromises. This is the language of estrangement. It is the language of alienation.

There is a war beginning in the Democratic Party, and the president has lost control of his base.

The Democratic leadership in the House appears to have lost another kind of control, fleeing Washington without passing a federal budget or extending even part of the Bush-era tax cuts, which are due to expire on Jan. 1. Democrats hold a solid majority in the House. They have a hitherto-powerful speaker. And the decision to adjourn passed by only a single vote—that of Nancy Pelosi, who saw 39 Democrats join the Republicans in dissenting.

The Democratic Party right now is showing signs of coming apart under the pressure of the election and two years of an unpopular presidency. But it's not a split in two, with the left versus the establishment. It's more like a splintering, with left-leaning activists distancing themselves from the party's politicians, and moderate politicians distancing themselves from Mr. Obama.

And part of what's driving it is what is driving the evolution of the Republican Party. The Internet changed everything. Everyone has facts now, knows who voted how and why. New thought leaders spring up and lead in new directions. Total transparency leads to party fracturing. Information dings unity. We are in new territory.

Another tornado: The president's influential counselor, David Axelrod, attempted this week to insinuate into the election what Democrats used to deride as "wedge issues." In an interview he said abortion will "certainly be an issue," for Democrats. It will be raised "across the country."

This suggests a certain desperation. Whatever stand you take on the social issues, you have to be blind to think they will make a big difference this year. The issue this year is the size, role, weight and demands of government, and the public sense that its members selfishly look to their own needs and not those of the country. A GOP congressman told me this week that he very much disagrees with the characterization of tea party and Republican voters as enraged or livid. They are scared, he said. He has never, in two decades in politics, heard so many people tell him they are "scared," frightened for their own futures and for the future of their country.

No one will get revved in the way Mr. Axelrod hopes who isn't already a reliable Democratic vote. His raising of a wedge issue speaks not only of a certain cynicism but of what appears to be an endemic White House cluelessness.

Yet another tornado: The Democrats have begun what Grover Norquist predicted a month ago. They saved their money for the end of the campaign and have begun running negative ads. They are not speaking in support of their own votes on health care and other issues. They are avoiding the subject of their own votes on health care and other issues. They are focusing instead on accusations of personal scandal. Both parties have done this in the past, to their mutual shame. But this year, with some exceptions and for obvious reasons, it appears to be largely a Democratic game. At this point in history, with America teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, negative advertising is even more destructive, more actually wicked, than it was in the past.

Negative advertising tears everything down. It contributes to the cynicism of the populace, especially the young. It undermines the faith in government Democrats are always asking us to have, by undermining respect for those who govern, or who seek to. It wears everyone down. And in the long term, though this can never be quantified, it keeps from electoral politics untold numbers of citizens who could bring their gifts and guts to helping solve our problems. I will never forget the visionary real-world entrepreneur who sighed, when I once urged him to enter politics, "I've lived an imperfect life. They'd kill me."


But let's go to what is traditionally the only way journalists and political professionals judge such ads: Do they work? In the past they have. But here's a hunch: This year they will not be so effective.

The primary reason is the severity of the moment. But another is that negative ads worked so well in the past. For a generation, the American people have been told their politicians are lowlifes. You know what they now think of them? They think they're lowlifes! People don't really expect high character from their political figures anymore. "Congressman Smith cheated on his wife." That's her problem. Cut my taxes.

Good practical advice on all this comes from Indiana's Gov. Mitch Daniels, who met this week in New York with conservative activists, journalists and historians. Our country is in real peril, he said, we have a short time to do big things to get it right. Republicans "need to campaign to govern, not merely to win." If Democrats are "the worst, the most malevolent" in their campaigning, "don't match 'em, let 'em." Be better. Be serious about the issues at a serious time.

What appears to be coming is a Republican rout. The main reason is the growing connection between public desire on various issues and Republican stands on those issues. But another is what is happening among Democrats—the rise of a spirit of destruction, and the increasing fact of fractured unity.
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3)San Franciscans Try to Take Back Their Streets
Even the liberal mayor is backing an initiative that would make public spaces safe again from the homeless industry and young thuggish vagrants
By HEATHER MACDONALD


Stroll down Haight Street these days, and chances are you'll be accosted by aggressive young vagrants. "Can you spare some change?" asks Cory, a slender dark-haired young man from Ventura, Calif. "Dude, do you have any food?" His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth "traveler," as the Haight Street gutter punks call themselves, stares dully into space.

Asked why people should give them money, Cory replies: "They got a dollar and I don't." Why don't you work? "We do work," retorts Eeyore. "I carry around this heavy backpack. We wake up at 7 a.m. and work all day. It's hard work." She's referring to begging and boozing. Asked if they're embarrassed to be begging, Cory says: "I'm not begging, I'm just asking for money."

Such strapping young hobos see themselves as on a "mission," though they're hard-pressed to define it. In fact, they are defined by an oversized sense of entitlement.

Of all the destinations on the West Coast "traveler" circuit, the Haight carries a particular attraction to these panhandlers, thanks to the 1960s Summer of Love. Over the last several years, however, the vagrant population has grown more territorial and violent. "I don't care if they ask for change," says Arthur Evans, a self-described former hippie who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years. "It's okay if they loiter and make a bit of noise. But I don't feel safe walking down the Haight at night any more."

In July, two pit bulls bred by the residents of an encampment in nearby Golden Gate Park tore into pedestrians, biting a 71-year-old woman to the bone and wounding her two companions. Last October, one of three punks sitting on a blanket with dogs spat on a 14-month-old baby when its mother rejected their demand for change. These days vagrants carry knives and Mace; people who ask them to move risk getting jumped. Merchants trying to clean up feces and urine left by drunken youth are sometimes harassed and attacked.

By late 2009, community frustration with the aggressive behavior led the police captain in the Haight district to propose a "sit-lie" ordinance to ban sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Police would first ask someone blocking a sidewalk to move along, warning him he was violating the law. Only if he refused could they cite him.

The city's politically potent homeless advocates instantly mobilized against the proposed ordinance, as they have in every battle over public space in San Francisco over the last two decades. The real problem in the Haight, advocates claimed, is inadequate government housing and stingy welfare spending. Rather than "criminalizing poverty," the city needs to spend more money on social services and housing subsidies, they say. But the gutter punks are not looking for housing and have no intention of settling down in San Francisco or anywhere else. They are in the Haight to party, en route to their next way station.

The charge that San Francisco has been stiffing social-welfare spending in favor of what homeless advocates sneer at as the "sacred cows" of police and fire protection is absurd. In fiscal year 2009, the city spent $175 million on homelessness—that's $26,865 on each of the city's 6,514 "homeless" persons, the majority of whom are housed in city-subsidized lodgings. Its police budget was $442 million, or $52 per San Franciscan. The gargantuan outlay for the homeless has done little to dent the vagrancy problem.

Seventy-one percent of voters backed the sit-lie ordinance in a poll conducted by David Binder Research in February, compared to 24% who opposed it. Nevertheless, San Francisco's left-wing Board of Supervisors (the equivalent of a city council) voted it down, eight to three, in June. The law's supporters, who include Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief George Gascón, have put the law on the November ballot as a voter initiative.

Perhaps the lock of the homeless advocates on San Francisco's politics will finally be broken. It is auspicious that the current push for civil sidewalks is coming from the Haight, long viewed as the epicenter of San Francisco's "progressive" movement. Two other ballot initiatives next month are aimed at reforming the city's bloated pensions and dysfunctional transit union. If these pass, it might signal a sea change in the political culture, especially since the pension reform measure is sponsored by Jeff Adachi, the city's impeccably progressive public defender.

San Francisco's magical topography has allowed it to indulge in antiurban policies for decades. Even as its economic base peeled off under the pressure of high taxes, ignorant regulations and government-inflated housing costs, tourists have kept pumping billions into the city's coffers. The homeless industry could champion policies that preserved street disorder and squalor, confident that the city's Bay and architecture would keep the tourist tax dollars pouring in.

Such self-indulgence is particularly foolish in a recession. But the sit-lie law is about more than business viability, however important such viability is to a city's lifeblood and energy. It is also about the basic rules of a civilized society, which include the idea that public spaces should be shared by the public, not monopolized by the disorderly few.
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4)US: Imminent terror attack anywhere in Europe


US intelligence Saturday night, Oct. 2, as using the term "imminent" for a possible Mumbai-style multiple terrorist attack following a high alert declared this week in four European countries, the UK, Germany, France and Sweden said to be planned in Pakistan.

In the coming hours, the State Department plans to publish an advisory to American travelers to avoid public places in Europe. The terror threat is described as credible but not specific and appears to draw on intercepted phone calls and the interrogation of at least one European witness of dual Pakistani nationality.

According to a US intelligence source, the two audiotapes released by Osama bin Laden in the last 24 hours, calling on Muslim countries to do more to help Pakistan's flood victims may have acted as a coded trigger for an al Qaeda team to go into action.

Osama bin leader has never released two audiotapes in such quick succession; neither has he ever focused his published messages on human disasters such as floods.
The Washington advisory will warn American travelers to avoid using public transport, town centers, tourist sites and shopping malls in European countries. It too is unusual for not specifying endangered countries in Europe - just the continent at large.

The attack on Mumbai in November 2008 broke new ground for al Qaeda in that it was carried out by five teams of gunmen trained in urban guerrilla warfare who landed by sea before heading for separate simultaneous targets, 3 big hotels, the local station and the Jewish Habad center in the Indian port city. At least 174 people, including six Israelis, died in the rampage. London and Paris, where the Eiffel Tower was this week evacuated for the second time, are situated on large rivers and may also therefore be easily accessed by water.
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5)Peace talks 'going nowhere', diplomats say

Netanyahu refused to hold a serious discussion on any of the core issues apart from security, Abbas reportedly told diplomats he met at the UN General Assembly.

By Barak Ravid

The three meetings held so far between Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the current round of peace talks have addressed nothing of substance, diplomatic sources say.


American mediators are still trying to save the talks from collapsing in the crisis following the resumption of construction in settlements.

Netanyahu refused to hold a serious discussion on any of the core issues apart from security, Abbas reportedly told diplomats he met at the UN General Assembly. Israeli and foreign sources say the main problem is that Netanyahu refuses to present fundamental positions or discuss the borders of the Palestinian state.

"I heard nothing from Netanyahu but niceties," Abbas reportedly told foreign diplomats.

U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell presented the talks as very successful, saying they were moving more rapidly than those in Northern Ireland, where he also served as mediator. He said Abbas and Netanyahu were dealing with all the tough issues and not leaving them to the end of the discussions.

But both Israeli and Palestinian sources said Mitchell's statement was "inaccurate" at best. A European diplomat who met the Palestinian negotiating team in New York about a week ago told Haaretz the Palestinians were furious with Mitchell. "He gave a false presentation of progress," the diplomat said a Palestinian official had told him.

Five Israeli and foreign diplomats, who were briefed about the Netanyahu-Abbas meetings by one of the parties or by senior American officials, said prospects for progress in the talks remained gloomy, even if the construction crisis were solved.

The two first meetings, held during the talks' launch in Washington on September 2 and at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit on September 14, mainly dealt with technical matters like the order of the topics to be discussed and the future of the construction freeze in the settlements.

The first meeting dealt with setting a date for the next meeting and with formulating a "conduct code" for the talks, mainly to prevent leaks. They also discussed the construction freeze and what to discuss first - security or borders.

After the second meeting, Mitchell said the parties had discussed seriously and in detail core issues of the final status arrangement. But officials briefed about that meeting said it dealt with an attempt to define the "core issues" rather than presenting positions on them.

The sources said this discussion was strange as at least two Israeli governments had reached an agreement with the Palestinians on this issue.

The sources said the sterile discussion about whether to discuss borders or security first, or both issues simultaneously, continued.

Mitchell described the third meeting, held on September 15 in Jerusalem, as very positive and said it made considerable progress. Here too officials familiar with the talks said the opposite is true.

Abbas presented Netanyahu with all the details of his talks with former prime minister Ehud Olmert and the current Palestinian stands on borders, security, the refugees, Jerusalem and the settlements. Netanyahu refused to comment on the Palestinian positions, especially on the borders, and would only present his position on the security arrangements.

Abbas was "alarmed" to hear at that meeting that Netanyahu was interested in reaching a framework agreement within a year, but in implementing it over a period of at least 20 years, a European diplomat said.

The American brokers were reportedly extremely frustrated after the meeting in Jerusalem and some of them wondered if the talks hadn't in fact gone backward.

A source close to the prime minister confirmed that Netanyahu refused to go into core issues such as the borders in detail. As long as the construction crisis was not over and the talks' continuation was not assured, Netanyahu did not want to present a position that could endanger him politically, the source explained.

5a)Mitchell: Peace still within reach
By Attila Somfalvi

Israel, US' efforts to stop PA from walking out on peace negotiations continue. Palestinians insist only extension of settlement freeze can save talks; Special US envoy says not all is lost

The direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations are practically deadlocked, but Israel and the US are refusing to give up hope, maintaining cautious optimism as to the future of the peace talks instead.


Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Saturday that despite the Palestinian announcement, "the door isn't closed, and efforts continue." Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, alongside the US, are attempting to reach a formula that will keep the talks on track, while Jerusalem sources said some international pressure was already being felt.


Prime minister stresses only way to strike peace between Israel, Palestinians is to 'seriously sit down and negotiate, not walk away.' Defense Minister Barak confident solution to deadlocked negotiations can be found within a week
Full story


The pressure on Israel, they said, is likely to increase in the coming days, should the threat of a breakdown in talks loom over the coming Arab League summit.


Government sources said senior international figures are expected to arrive in Israel soon to personally pressure Netanyahu, but the Prime Minister's Office denied such visits are known to them.


As for the continued freeze, the sources said the Americans would not be suggesting a two-month freeze extension for the sake of time alone. The time, they ventured, may be used to try and work out the issue of borders.


'Peace can be achieved'
Special US envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, who arrived in Cairo on Saturday night, confirmed that both Israel and the Palestinians have asked the US to continue its efforts to overcome obstacles and further negotiations.


"The two parties, Israelis and Palestinians have asked us to continue our discussions with them and with other governments on how best to achieve the objective of the negotiations," Mitchell told the media after meeting with Arab League Secretary General of Amr Moussa.


"Peace in the region and a viable independent (Palestinian) state can be achieved, realistically, through direct negotiations between the parties," he added.

Mitchell arrived in Cairo from Qatar where he met with Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassem Bin Jabr al-Khalifa, and briefed him on the current situation of the peace talks.


Mitchell is set to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Sunday, before heading to Jordan.

Meanwhile, sources at the Palestinian Authority said Saturday that while the Americans will undoubtedly continue their efforts to formulate a solution that would prevent a deadlock in the peace talks, "We have made it clear that settlement construction like the one that went on prior to the freeze will not allow any resumption in talks."

According to a senior Palestinian source, that US is trying to convince the PA that Netanyahu is seriously perusing a peace agreement, "But even so, we expect a series of gestures on his part, and first and foremost the halting settlement construction."

The direct talks have been suspended, added the source, but refused to confirm whether a partial settlement freeze will satisfy the PA at this time. Nevertheless, the Palestinians are being pressure by Arab elements, as well as by the United States, to refrain from abandoning the talks.

Also Saturday, senior Likud figures, who had previously expressed their opposition to continuing the freeze, told Ynet that under certain conditions, and with "significant" US assurances, they would be willing to support a continuation of the freeze for a limited time.


At the same time, rumors spread through the political system about contacts between Likud and Kadima, or between Netanyahu and Kadima Chairperson Tzipi Livni, perhaps in an attempt to create an axis that would enable Livni to join the government if developments lead to the collapse of the current coalition.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6) Dems face day of reckoning
By: Donald T. Critchlow


Americans, in large numbers, cast their ballots in 2008 for a noble dream of post-partisan, post-racial politics. Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since 1994. They picked up 21 seats in the House and eight in the Senate in addition to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

The Democrats were giddy with victory. They had arrived in the Promised Land! This, as their new president declared, was a moment of transformative change.

Convinced of its mandate, the Democratic Congress undertook a legislative agenda that has left the nation as polarized as ever, burdened with budgetary deficits and a national debt that threatens to transform America into a second-class country. Congressional Democrats profoundly misread the 2008 election results and have been left with a reputation as a party of grandiose ideas — with little financial sense or ability to govern sensibly.

The Democrats went shopping without looking at their checkbook balance or caring how to pay for their purchases. Whether the purchases were necessary may be debated — but everyone can agree that a buyer needs to figure out how to pay the bill.

Closer observers might have been more circumspect about the meaning of the 2008 mandate. While sick of the Bush administration, congressional corruption and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and frightened by the financial meltdown on Wall Street, Americans had not turned to the left in 2008. Exit polls showed that 22 percent of voters called themselves liberals; 34 percent described themselves as conservatives; the remaining 44 percent were moderates. These numbers were not that different from every presidential election in the past 20 years. The United States remained a center-right country.

With the sheer power of majority control, Democrats pushed through historic legislation: a massive economic stimulus program, health care reform, financial regulation, a takeover of General Motors and American International Group, and an array of other measures. Such a legislative record should have left them triumphant.

Instead, as the economy limped along with unemployment at nearly 10 percent, Democrats experienced a grass-roots backlash not seen by their party since 1854, when they passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and reopened the slavery question. So severe was the reaction that President Franklin Pierce is still the only sitting elected president to lose his party’s renomination.

As legislative successes multiplied, political polarization intensified. Conservatives accused Democrats of leading the nation to socialism. Democrats countered that their opponents were extremists. They labeled Republicans “the party of no” — though congressional leaders such as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had issued “A Road Map for America’s Future,” in 2007. That plan offered detailed legislative alternatives in health care, Social Security reform and debt reduction, with many proposals scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

Instead of rehashing these ideological debates, let’s look at the Democrats’ crowning achievement: health care reform.


Aware that President Bill Clinton’s health care plan had crashed and burned, congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama crafted a plan to win over the health care industry. They assured physicians that the new plan would reimburse them, just as current private or government plans do. They told hospitals that they would no longer have to overcharge patients to cover the uninsured. Big Pharma would be allowed to charge high prices for patented drugs so the United States could maintain global drug leadership. The key to cost control was to be the public option — which would provide cheap insurance.

But once the public option ran into opposition, out of fear it would lead to nationalized health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) dropped it. With that, the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 became seriously underfunded.

The plan included no effective taxation to support the new health care costs, for fear it would be attacked as a tax-raising proposal. Claims that savings would be achieved by cutting Medicare funding down the road had no political credibility. No one believed that fees on health care equipment and testing could make up the costs. Even tort reform was rejected, so as not to alienate one of the Democratic Party’s largest contributors trial lawyers.

Instead, Democrats accepted a plan that seemed to assume that funding would magically appear. Democrats said the cost was $60 billion per year, but subsequent Medicare actuarial estimates placed the costs at $180 billion per year. Spending on health care in America is expected to rise to 24 percent of gross domestic product from 16 percent — already the world’s highest level of health expenditure, because most industrialized nations pay 9 percent to 12 percent.

The Democratic Congress’s fiscal irresponsibility was apparent in other measures as well. Take the pork-laden stimulus act. Reid’s plan to build a railroad to nowhere in Nevada might win him votes among Vegas’s big contractors and unions, but it is a waste of $8 billion.

Incredibly, Obama’s deficits after less than two years have already exceeded President George W. Bush’s deficits after eight years. To make matters worse, the Democratic Congress, for the first time in modern budget history, will not have passed out of committee any part of the proposed budget by October, when the fiscal year begins.

In the end, Americans are still searching for political leaders willing to confront this impending disaster. Polling in advance of the November elections indicates that voters think Democrats, with their visions of transformative change, are committing fiscal malpractice.

A new kind of transformative change appears to be in the air.

Donald T. Critchlow, who holds the Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History.” He is completing a book about the radicalization of liberalism in the past 50 years.
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7)Column one: The lessons of Stuxnet
By CAROLINE B. GLICK



A war ends when one side permanently breaks its enemy’s ability and will to fight it. This has clearly not happened in Iran.

There’s a new cyber-weapon on the block. And it’s a doozy. Stuxnet, a malicious software, or malware, program was apparently first discovered in June.

Although it has appeared in India, Pakistan and Indonesia, Iran’s industrial complexes – including its nuclear installations – are its main victims.

Stuxnet operates as a computer worm. It is inserted into a computer system through a USB port rather than over the Internet, and is therefore capable of infiltrating networks that are not connected to the Internet.

Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran’s Information Technology Company, told reporters Monday that the malware operated undetected in the country’s computer systems for about a year.

After it enters a network, this super-intelligent program figures out what it has penetrated and then decides whether or not to attack. The sorts of computer systems it enters are those that control critical infrastructures like power plants, refineries and other industrial targets.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security researcher who was among the first people to study Stuxnet, told various media outlets that after Stuxnet recognizes its specific target, it does something no other malware program has ever done. It takes control of the facility’s SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition system) and through it, is able to destroy the facility.

No other malware program has ever managed to move from cyberspace to the real world. And this is what makes Stuxnet so revolutionary. It is not a tool of industrial espionage. It is a weapon of war.

From what researchers have exposed so far, Stuxnet was designed to control computer systems produced by the German engineering giant Siemens. Over the past generation, Siemens engineering tools, including its industrial software, have been the backbone of Iran’s industrial and military infrastructure. Siemens computer software products are widely used in Iranian electricity plants, communication systems and military bases, and in the country’s Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr.

The Iranian government has acknowledged a breach of the computer system at Bushehr. The plant was set to begin operating next month, but Iranian officials announced the opening would be pushed back several months due to the damage wrought by Stuxnet. On Monday, Channel 2 reported that Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility was also infected by Stuxnet.

On Tuesday, Alipour acknowledged that Stuxnet’s discovery has not mitigated its destructive power.

As he put it, “We had anticipated that we could root out the virus within one to two months. But the virus is not stable and since we started the cleanup process, three new versions of it have been spreading.”

While so far no one has either taken responsibility for Stuxnet or been exposed as its developer, experts who have studied the program agree that its sophistication is so vast that it is highly unlikely a group of privately financed hackers developed it. Only a nation-state would have the financial, manpower and other resources necessary to develop and deploy Stuxnet, the experts argue.

Iran has pointed an accusatory finger at the US, Israel and India. So far, most analysts are pointing their fingers at Israel. Israeli officials, like their US counterparts, are remaining silent on the subject.

While news of a debilitating attack on Iran’s nuclear installations is a cause for celebration, at this point, we simply do not know enough about what has happened and what is continuing to happen at Iran’s nuclear installations to make any reasoned evaluation about Stuxnet’s success or failure. Indeed, The New York Times has argued that since Stuxnet worms were found in Siemens software in India, Pakistan and Indonesia as well as Iran, reporting, “The most striking aspect of the fast-spreading malicious computer program... may not have been how sophisticated it was, but rather how sloppy its creators were in letting a specifically aimed attack scatter randomly around the globe.”

ALL THAT we know for certain is that Stuxnet is a weapon and it is currently being used to wage a battle. We don’t know if Israel is involved in the battle or not. And if Israel is a side in the battle, we don’t know if we’re winning or not.

But still, even in our ignorance about the details of this battle, we still know enough to draw a number of lessons from what is happening.

Stuxnet’s first lesson is that it is essential to be a leader rather than a follower in technology development. The first to deploy new technologies on a battlefield has an enormous advantage over his rivals. Indeed, that advantage may be enough to win a war.

But from the first lesson, a second immediately follows. A monopoly in a new weapon system is always fleeting. The US nuclear monopoly at the end of World War II allowed it to defeat Imperial Japan and bring the war to an end in allied victory.

Once the US exposed its nuclear arsenal, however, the Soviet Union’s race to acquire nuclear weapons of its own began. Just four years after the US used its nuclear weapons, it found itself in a nuclear arms race with the Soviets. America’s possession of nuclear weapons did not shield it from the threat of their destructive power.

The risks of proliferation are the flipside to the advantage of deploying new technology. Warning of the new risks presented by Stuxnet, Melissa Hathaway, a former US national cybersecurity coordinator, told the Times, “Proliferation is a real problem, and no country is prepared to deal with it. All of these [computer security] guys are scared to death. We have about 90 days to fix this [new vulnerability] before some hacker begins using it.”

Then there is the asymmetry of vulnerability to cyberweapons. A cyberweapon like Stuxnet threatens nation-states much more than it threatens a non-state actor that could deploy it in the future. For instance, a cyber-attack of the level of Stuxnet against the likes of Hizbullah or al-Qaida by a state like Israel or the US would cause these groups far less damage than a Hizbullah or al-Qaida cyber-attack of the quality of Stuxnet launched against a developed country like Israel or the US.

In short, like every other major new weapons system introduced since the slingshot, Stuxnet creates new strengths as well as new vulnerabilities for the states that may wield it.

As to the battle raging today in Iran’s nuclear facilities, even if the most optimistic scenario is true, and Stuxnet has crippled Iran’s nuclear installations, we must recognize that while a critical battle was won, the war is far from over.

A war ends when one side permanently breaks its enemy’s ability and will to fight it. This has clearly not happened in Iran.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made it manifestly clear during his visit to the US last week that he is intensifying, not moderating, his offensive stance towards the US, Israel and the rest of the free world. Indeed, as IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Benny Ganz noted last week, “Iran is involved up to its neck in every terrorist activity in the Middle East.”

So even in the rosiest scenario, Israel or some other government has just neutralized one threat – albeit an enormous threat – among a panoply of threats that Iran poses. And we can be absolutely certain that Iran will take whatever steps are necessary to develop new ways to threaten Israel and its other foes as quickly as possible.

What this tells us is that if Stuxnet is an Israeli weapon, while a great achievement, it is not a revolutionary weapon. While the tendency to believe that we have found a silver bullet is great, the fact is that fielding a weapon like Stuxnet does not fundamentally change Israel’s strategic position. And consequently, it should have no impact on Israel’s strategic doctrine.

In all likelihood, assuming that Stuxnet has significantly debilitated Iran’s nuclear installations, this achievement will be a one-off. Just as the Arabs learned the lessons of their defeat in 1967 and implemented those lessons to great effect in the war in 1973, so the Iranians – and the rest of Israel’s enemies – will learn the lessons of Stuxnet.

SO IF we assume that Stuxnet is an Israeli weapon, what does it show us about Israel’s position vis-à-vis its enemies? What Stuxnet shows is that Israel has managed to maintain its technological advantage over its enemies. And this is a great relief. Israel has survived since 1948 despite our enemies’ unmitigated desire to destroy us because we have continuously adapted our tactical advantages to stay one step ahead of them. It is this adaptive capability that has allowed Israel to win a series of one-off battles that have allowed it to survive.

But again, none of these one-off battles were strategic game-changers. None of them have fundamentally changed the strategic realities of the region. This is the case because they have neither impacted our enemies’ strategic aspiration to destroy us, nor have they mitigated Israel’s strategic vulnerabilities. It is the unchanging nature of these vulnerabilities since the dawn of modern Zionism that gives hope to our foes that they may one day win and should therefore keep fighting.

Israel has two basic strategic vulnerabilities.

The first is Israel’s geographic minuteness, which attracts invaders. The second vulnerability is Israel’s political weakness both at home and abroad, which make it impossible to fight long wars.

Attentive to these vulnerabilities, David Ben- Gurion asserted that Israel’s military doctrine is the twofold goal to fight wars on our enemies’ territory and to end them as swiftly and as decisively as possible. This doctrine remains the only realistic option today, even if Stuxnet is in our arsenal.

It is important to point this plain truth out today as the excitement builds about Stuxnet, because Israel’s leaders have a history of mistaking tactical innovation and advantage with strategic transformation. It was our leaders’ failure to properly recognize what happened in 1967 for the momentary tactical advantage it was that led us to near disaster in 1973.

Since 1993, our leaders have consistently mistaken their adoption of the West’s land-forpeace paradigm as a strategic response to Israel’s political vulnerability. The fact that the international assault on Israel’s right to exist has only escalated since Israel embraced the landfor- peace paradigm is proof that our leaders were wrong. Adopting the political narrative of our enemies did not increase Israel’s political fortunes in Europe, the US or the UN.

So, too, our leaders have mistaken Israel’s air superiority for a strategic answer to its geographical vulnerability. The missile campaigns the Palestinians and Lebanese have waged against the home front in the aftermath of Israel’s withdrawals from Gaza and south Lebanon show clearly that air supremacy does not make up for geographic vulnerability. It certainly does not support a view that strategic depth is less important than it once was.

We may never know if Stuxnet was successful or if Stuxnet is Israeli. But what we do know is that we cannot afford to learn the wrong lessons from its achievements.
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