Just another day in the life of a president who is a walking, breathing disaster
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Victor Davis Hansen and his essay on what happened in Colorado. (See 1 below.)
With respect to the Aurora shooter,I would have been less charitable. I would have made Holmes open the door to his apartment.
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So you think American politics is contentious and confused. (See 2 below.)
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When it comes to America's foreign policy I think of Alice in Wonderland. Most specifically when it comes to our feckless, confused and conflicted efforts in the Middle East, where we always find ourselves leading from behind and trying to play catch up, I am reminded of Carroll's line: ' You must run fast just to stay in the same place.'
Obama is a rear guard player who believes if America maintains a low profile, is un-involved he can ride in on his white horse at the end of the shooting , receive credit for participation and be a player at the table.
As for his Sec. of State, after Hillary leaves office I predict she is going to come out with a line of feminine face products that will be egg based. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Professor David Gelertner does a tap dance on Obama's head. (See 4 below.)
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Spain may be bankrupt but their former rime minister is not bereft of reasoning. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Demons of the Modern Rampage Killer
By Victor Davis Hanson
As of now we know little about what conditions drove, or proved useful to, the Aurora suspect to murder and maim. But given the worldwide incidences of so-called “rampage killings,” the culprit was not the particular gun laws of Colorado. His dark counterparts exist in contemporary Norway, Uganda, Russia, and Latin America. I am sure there is a typology of the multifarious conditions that might prompt such demonic killers—workplace anger, spousal revenge, school-related grudges, religious fanaticism, race or ethnic hatred, political extremism, and abject insanity that offers no exegesis at all.
So far we have hear that guns did it; or that there were unfortunately not any good gunmen in the theater to stop him; or that the mentally ill are not closely enough watched, medicated, or hospitalized; or that we live in a “sick” culture; and on and on.
One unmentioned fact is that rampage killing is not necessarily a modern phenomenon, although firearms as force multipliers facilitate it and up the horrific body count. Killers in the 19th century often shot down innocent bystanders. Yet I think there are some new developments that already have brought hundreds of millions worldwide into the horrifically demonic mind of the suspect James Holmes.
Today every rampage, everywhere, worldwide hits the Internet and cable news, without wider thoughtful context, and yet with great detail of the crime. The graphic story is without valuable analyses, and so offers us little reminder that there are now 7 billion people on the planet—and in a nanosecond we are going to know the name and circumstances of any single one of us who that day goes on a rampage. The net effect is that the Bolivian worries just not about the mass killer in Lima, but the one in Miami or Ukraine as well.
Popular culture—particularly the visual arts of modern movies and TV, or the imagery on the Internet—is far different from even the immediate past, at least
in the sense of blurring reality with fantasy. In the old 1950s Western, the hero shot the villain, who grabbed his chest and fell, as if struck inexplicably by a heart seizure. We were told after Bonnie and Clyde that such stagecraft was “fake”; people should die on screen instead like Clyde Barrow actually did—and we must as adult viewers appreciate the real effects of pulling the trigger.
The opposite ensued! There was far greater chance on Gunsmoke or Bonanza that we had a few seconds to ponder the landscape of the occasional dying victim than amid the dozens who implode on Breaking Bad or Spartacus. How did it happen that by supposedly showing us exactly what a bullet does to flesh, we were thereby exempt from any human accounting— from the sort of explanation of a death that Doc, or Kitty, or Matt Dillon offered, when the latter shot one or two “bad guys” in an hour on Saturday night, or a “good guy” tragically died? Yes, it was phony when the gunslinger slumped over without a drop of blood on his chest; but it would be phonier still to have a smart-ass Marshal Dillon blast away ten in succession, in slow-motion, flesh-exploding detail as if they were mere mannequins all, with no past, no present, no nothing.
Since about 1970, the cinema victim dies in the manner real people die (bloody trauma, the body contorting and in visible pain and shock). But here again is the dilemma—the hyperrealism still blurs reality. In an action-hero movie, a teen-horror film, a shoot-em-up crime show, lots of people perish in the manner in which real people would so die under similarly violent circumstances. But there is less not more shock at the loss of human life.
When Alien, Predator, or Terminator slice up or rip apart dozens, life just goes on. Bodies fly all over the screen and we are onto the next scene. Wondering about who actually was the 11th poor soul who had his heart ripped out by the Terminator is far less interesting than watching the latter utter some banality. The same is true of everything from Die Hard to 300—lots of real-life, graphic killing, but almost no pause and bewilderment over the staggering loss of life or the consequences of Target 12 or Victim G leaving life at 12 or 56. Killing is so easy not just because of robotic arms, RPGs, and computer simulations, but also because there are almost no emotional consequences from the carnage—a fact easily appreciated by the viewer, the more so if young or unhinged or both. The killer usually smiles or at least shows no emotion; the victims are reduced to “them,” anonymous souls who serve as mere numbers in a body count. Will Kane’s victims, in contrast, were known—evil, but still not anonymous and not mere sets for the sheriff’s gunplay.
For the diseased mind that is saturated with such modern imagery, there is fascination aplenty with the drama of killing, but no commensurate lesson gleaned from its sheer horror—at least in human terms of the devastation that such carnage does to humans, both nearby and in the larger community. In the awful mind of the rampage killer, he always must be the center of attention in the manner of his homicidal fantasy counterpart, his victims of no more account than are those decapitated, dismembered, or shot apart by Freddy Krueger or Arnold Schwarzenegger. How odd that we rush to the emergency room for a cut finger in the kitchen—stitches, tetanus shot, pain killer, bandages, a doctor’s reassurance—only to matter-of-factly watch horrific wounds on television that night with no thought that a .38 slug to the shoulder entails something more than our split forefinger.
And there is a further wrinkle to these hyper-realistic cinematic rampages. The killer, be he an evil “Joker,” the horrific Alien, or a hit man in a mafia movie, has a certain edgy personality, even a sick sort of intriguing persona—at least in the sense that his evil is sometimes “cool” in a way that his plodding victims, who simply got in his way, are not. In the abstract, we sympathize with the good, who became his targets; but in the concrete, the film focuses more often on the killer’s emotions, his language, his swagger.
The Joker spits, he puns, he acts disengaged and “cool,” while his victims scream and panic; we want to know why he acts so, and are supposed to be fixated on his strange clothes, face, and patois, never on the series of Joe Blows that are incinerated by him. Is it any wonder we know all about the orange hair of the suspected killer, but very little about the hair colors of any of the poor victims?
Will this distortion of reality change? I doubt it, but I sense a great public hunger for the wounded victim, the near corpse, the dying to suddenly rise up and announce “I am a human being and I count,” as he either dies with a second of nobility or ends the rampage killer. One of the attractions of the violent film Dirty Harry was the utter disdain Clint Eastwood held for the perverted killer (“he likes it”), as he sought to remind society that in comparison with his victims, the killer’s feelings mattered little.
Yes, you say that the teary scene of the death of Boromir in Lord of the Rings or a Kirk Douglas burning on the departing Viking ship was hokey. But I prefer them to the new normal of cinematic death as irrelevant—an indifference that ripples through society at large.
In the Dark Knight, when Batman chooses not to run over the Joker when he can, we are supposedly offered a number of valuable messages—the caped hero has not quite descended into the jungle of the vigilante; the rule of law and due process are upheld; saving the Joker ensures Batman is not the Joker; and even perhaps the misunderstood crime fighter senses a sick affinity with the similarly outcast crime perpetrator. But lost among the director’s messages is the simple fact that had Batman splattered the psychopathic mass murderer, dozens still alive in the remaining minutes of the film would not have been slaughtered. Or was that the director’s message—that Batman’s inflated sense of justice, his inability to terminate evil, ensures that evil will terminate others good but weaker than he?
All of which brings us to our third symptom of the modern age that makes the contemporary rampage killer somehow different. If the suspect is charged and found guilty, I have zero confidence that he will be hanged. I have a great deal of confidence that over the next five years, his awful presence will pop up on a news broadcast. We can execute bin Laden and high-five it; we can incinerate over 2,000 suspected terrorists by video-controlled Predators, and have the president brag about it in warning away suitors from his daughters at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner— but we cannot do the same for someone who was tried, convicted, and sentenced for horrifically destroying people.
For months to come after his trial there will be a “new” revelation in the case—an interview, a testimonial from a former friend, a novel twist about the evidence. The net effect is that we will know more about the killer and his crime, and each day ever less about his victims.
Tonight, I wish to know nothing about him other than the information necessary to try, convict, and punish him—and any data that might provide some sort of deterrence in preventing another such rampage.
In comparison to those he killed and maimed, and the legions of their relatives and friends, he is nothing. We the sophisticated with university degrees are supposed to know better: that hanging such a nightmarish criminal when convicted is both barbaric on our part and offers no statistical evidence that it will deter future such killers.
Perhaps. But society needs to be affirmed with a certainty that it has the clear sense of evil and good to try, convict, and punish the killer. Hanging Saddam or Eichmann, for all the controversies over their trials, at least offered some finality: they were evil and now are no more—and now we don’t worry whether Saddam was unloved, or the circumstances of Eichmann’s childhood.
In other words, I don’t care a whit whether the Aurora killer was a loner. I don’t care if he was unhappy or if he was on medication. Millions share such pathologies without killing a mouse. I don’t even know whether giving him swift justice will deter the next mass shooter. Yes, give the suspect expert legal counsel; call in all the psychiatrists imaginable; sequester the jury; ensure the judge is a pillar of jurisprudence; but if he is found guilty, I would prefer the gallows and quickly so, to remind us that we live in a civilization that prefers to remember the victims and to remember nothing at all of their killer.
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2))Israel's Knesset Scorecard: Who's on First
Mofaz joined coalition, then quit and now faces mutiny. You can't tell apart the politicians without a scorecard. Arutz Sheva provides it.
By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Binyamin Netanyahu: chairman of the Likud party and a chess player who managed to win a draw with chess master Natan Sharansky.
Part of his childhood was spent in the United States, and his fluent English frustrates Israeli and foreign mainstream media who hate him because his communication skills are better than theirs.
Shaul Mofaz: chairman of the Kadima party, which he joined the day after he said he would never leave the Likud. He ousted Tzipi Livni as party chair and inherited a party crippled by lack of leadership, internal dissension and a trail of corruption.
A successful former IDF Chief of Staff and arguably a less-than-successful politician, he is trying to turn the hareidi-religious draft issue into a one-issue campaign to topple Netanyahu. So far, his efforts have resulted in a fractured party, which was on the verge of a split-up Monday morning. A total mutiny was averted, but he told four Knesset Members to get lost.
Avigdor Lieberman: chairman of the Yisrael Beytenu party and a Russian immigrant who once worked as a bouncer in a bar. He was named by Voice of Israel government radio political analyst Hanan Kristal as one of Israel’s savviest politicians.
Lieberman has matter-of-factly said he will be Prime Minister one day. He might succeed unless police, who have been harassing him for 12 years, manage to convince government prosecutors to indict him for anything from breach of trust to bribery, or at least a traffic violation.
His ministers’ success in running their offices and minding their own business, unlike other undisciplined party Cabinet officers who have something to say about everything, has given Yisrael Beytenu a strong reputation among the public. It also has aroused jealousy in mainstream media people, who hate Lieberman because he says what he thinks, which is usually not in accord with the media’s center-left agenda.
Shelly Yechimovich: chairman of the Labor party and a former television and radio journalist. She is considered one of the hardest-working Knesset Members and is relatively honest intellectually. Yechimovich last year agreed to be interviewed by Arutz Sheva but only on questions concerning women’s rights and labor issues and not on the status of Judea and Samaria. Although she opposes Jewish outpost communities, she has been above politics in statements that express understanding of residents in Judea and Samaria.
Lately, buoyed by poll results showing her party within striking distance of the Likud, she has begun to take herself too seriously and really believes she can become the next Prime Minister. Her former employer, Voice of Israel, interviews her favorably on radio news broadcasts at least once a week.
Eli Yishai: Chairman of the Shas Sephardi religious party, which for years has been an enigma on the Israel political scene, and has managed to be part of a left-wing Labor coalition government and a nationalist Likud government. It has strongly supported a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria but also backed former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin during the age of Oslo Accords. Funding for yeshivas and social programs for low-incomes families, which are among its supporters, are the main planks of its platform.
Ehud Barak: chairman of his self-proclaimed Independence party after he quit the Labor party. Like Mofaz, he is a former IDF Chief of Staff but has proven to be a much worse politician than soldier. He swept into power after the first government of Binyamin Netanyahu fell in 1999. He enjoyed a commanding majority in his coalition government but blew it after only 18 months.
He offered then-PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat almost everything he wanted, was refused and was left with the Oslo War, otherwise known as the Second Intifada, as his less than crowning achievement. Barak then retired from politics, worked in the private business sector with strong connections in the military-industrial complex, vowed never to return to politics and then did exactly the opposite, narrowly winning the Labor party leadership in 2007.
After Netanyahu was given the nod to form the current government, Barak said he would remain in the Opposition. The next day, he accepted a position as Defense Minister. Last year, he duplicated his failure as party leader when he was Prime Minister in 2000 and split the party to create his own. Polls give him a narrow chance of entering the next Knesset.
Jewish Home: This is the party that succeeded the National Religious Party, which for years has conceded almost every ideological principle in order to maintain the political principle that it can “cause change from within.” Can it really? The jury has been out for years on that question.
Yaakov (Ketzaleh) Katz: Head of the National Union party, which stayed out of the coalition in order to maintain ideological nationalist principles rather than maintain the political principle of being unable to change from within.
His party is comprised of other strongly nationalist MKs who can freely say what they think since they have no political axe to grind within the coalition.
Meretz: This is the left-wing mirror image of the National Union. Its leadership has changed twice in the past thee years. Its strength has decreased slowly over the past several years, reflecting what even mainstream media have termed “intellectual bankruptcy" of the left, which generally demands freedom and tolerance on condition that the same rights do not apply to right-wing elements.
Yehadut HaTorah: The Ashkenazi version of Shas, it has maintained its party strength at 5-6 MKs and champions funds for yeshivas. Keeping true to its ideology, one of its MKs often runs a ministry but only as “deputy” minister in order not to give the impression that it identifies too much with the government. It is more powerful when there is a narrow coalition majority that is dependent on its MKs.
Arab parties: This is a bit of a misnomer because it includes the Hadash party, whose Jewish MK Dov Kheinin is a leader. The other parties have included an MK who fled the country after being indicted for helping Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War. Ahmed Tibi had been the most prominent Arab MK, but his spot has been taken over by firebrand Hanin Zubai, who almost never disappoints journalists with anti-Israeli hate messages. Two weeks ago, she told students in Germany that the Israeli government is fascist.
When Jewish students arrived to counter her statements, she called them fascists, too.
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3)1)Remember Bashar Assad, 'Reformer'?
The dictator's American apologists owe Syria's people an apology.
By Bret Stephens
A reader of last week's column on Hillary Clinton chided me for failing to mention her remark, made as the revolt in Syria was gaining strength last year, that Bashar Assad was "a reformer." The reader makes a fair point, one that helps explain why the administration has been so feckless about confronting the Syrian dictator.
But the real scandal of Mrs. Clinton's remark lies in its broader context.
Here's Mrs. Clinton's fuller quote, from March 27, 2011, answering CBS's Bob Schieffer on why the U.S. was prepared to intervene against Moammar Gadhafi but not against Assad: "There's a different leader in Syria now," she explained. "Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he is a reformer."
That caused some raising of eyebrows. So a few days later Mrs. Clinton clarified: "I referenced the opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration."
Take Joshua Landis, the University of Oklahoma professor who writes the influential Syria Comment blog. In September 2005, Mr. Landis chided the Bush administration for its failure to more closely engage Assad.How could Mrs. Clinton justify administration policy by citing opinions she supposedly refused to endorse? Because she's a genius, obviously. The more relevant point is that she was mouthing the conventional liberal wisdom of the day, which paid more heed to a dictator than to those he repressed. Maybe it's time Assad's apologists apologize to the people of Syria.
"Assad's regime is certainly no paragon of democracy," Mr. Landis wrote in a New York Times op-ed, "but even its most hard-bitten enemies [within Syria] do not want to see it collapse." Mr. Landis went on to praise Assad for freeing political prisoners,"tolerat[ing] a much greater level of criticism than his father did," and enforcing a degree of religious toleration that "had made Syria one of the safest countries in the region."
Views like these were well in keeping with most media portrayals of Assad. A lengthy and mostly flattering New York Times profile from 2005 portrays Assad and his wife Asma as a progressive duo struggling to drag their unwieldy country into the 21st century—while trying to deal with an inept Bush administration too stupid to engage him or give him latitude for reform.
Also in 2005, a ferocious battle erupted in the U.S. Senate over the confirmation of John Bolton as ambassador to the U.N. A key point of contention: his congressional testimony from late 2003 claiming Damascus had "one of the most advanced Arab state chemical weapons capabilities," and that it might have a covert interest in developing a nuclear bomb. The CIA reportedly went berserk over what it considered Mr. Bolton's undue alarmism, which would later help sink his nomination in the Senate.
What came next was a chorus of congressional sycophancy. In 2007, Nancy Pelosi enthused that "the road to Damascus is a road to peace." On March 16, 2011—the day after the first mass demonstration against the regime—John Kerry said Assad was a man of his word who had been "very generous with me." He added that under Assad "Syria will move; Syria will change as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States." This is the man who might be our next secretary of state.
Maybe it's unfair to score Messrs. Landis, Kerry and the others for not anticipating how Assad would behave in the face of a revolt. Then again, Mr. Landis's 2005 op-ed was published just a few months after former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's spectacular murder in Beirut. Syria's secret nuclear program was exposed by an Israeli bombing in 2007, yet that didn't deter the rush toward engagement that began under Condoleezza Rice. Sen. Kerry was well aware of the military aid Syria was illegally providing Hezbollah, which also seemed to do nothing to dent his enthusiasm for Assad.
Nor was there a shortage of commentators warning of the perils of courting Assad. So why the headlong rush to do so? Maybe because it fit into a wider ideology of engagement that encompassed not only Assad but also Ahmadinejad and Putin. A simpler answer, and probably a truer one, is that it was the opposite of what the neocons wanted to do.
Now we know what the George Costanza-esque "do the opposite" approach to Syria has yielded: A secretary of state inclined to give Assad a pass when the Syrian revolt began; an administration that took months to call for the dictator's ouster; a U.S. that has helped Assad buy time by insisting that only the U.N.—where he is defended by Russia and China—could sanction any kind of action. It's true that the administration has gradually changed its tune. But did 10,000-plus Syrians have to die in order to bury the myth that Assad's apologists had constructed for him?
On Monday, a Syrian government spokesman all but admitted that the regime had stocks of chemical weapons. So John Bolton was right. Maybe when this administration stops thinking of its critics as the enemy, it won't be caught mute and flat-footed when our real enemies show their colors.
3a)
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3a)Israel: Syrian Transfer of WMD to Hezbollah is Act of War
By Jim Meyers
Israel will act “decisively and without hesitation or restraint” if Syria transfers any chemical weapons to the terrorist organization Hezbollah, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman declares.
Liberman also said Syria’s transfer of chemical weapons to Hezbollah would be a “justification for war.”
Speaking at a press conference at the EU-Israel Association Council meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, Liberman said the transfer of some of Syria’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons to anti-Israel Hezbollah would make tensions in the region “a completely different ballgame,” adding that “we hope for the understanding and cooperation of the international community,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
Also on Tuesday, Israeli Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz said that the Jewish state could face a large-scale conflict in the aftermath of an attack against Syria’s chemical weapons.
Gantz told the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the challenge for Israel is to identify the appropriate moment to take action, if needed, to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons and keep them from falling into the hands of terrorist groups like Hezbollah.
He said Syrian military forces are guarding the chemical weapons stockpile “and have even increased security so it will not fall into rogue hands, although this does not mean it will stay that way. We need to take into consideration what will remain after we act and whose hands it will fall into.”
Syria acknowledged for the first time on Monday that it had chemical and biological weapons and said it could use them if foreign countries intervened in the ongoing rebellion there.
Damascus has not signed a 1992 international convention that bans the use, production or stockpiling of chemical weapons, but Syrian officials in the past had denied it had any weapons stockpiles.
"Given the escalation of violence in Syria, and the regime's increasing attacks on their people, we remain very concerned about these weapons," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said on Monday.
The Global Security website, which collects published intelligence reports and other data, says the weapons Syria produces include the nerve agents VX, sarin and tabun.
Gantz expressed concern that deteriorating conditions in Syria could threaten the military’s ability to safeguard the chemical weapons supplies, according to the Post.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)David Gelernter: What keeps this failed president above water?
By Jim Meyers
Israel will act “decisively and without hesitation or restraint” if Syria transfers any chemical weapons to the terrorist organization Hezbollah, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman declares.
Liberman also said Syria’s transfer of chemical weapons to Hezbollah would be a “justification for war.”
Speaking at a press conference at the EU-Israel Association Council meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, Liberman said the transfer of some of Syria’s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons to anti-Israel Hezbollah would make tensions in the region “a completely different ballgame,” adding that “we hope for the understanding and cooperation of the international community,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
Also on Tuesday, Israeli Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz said that the Jewish state could face a large-scale conflict in the aftermath of an attack against Syria’s chemical weapons.
Gantz told the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the challenge for Israel is to identify the appropriate moment to take action, if needed, to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons and keep them from falling into the hands of terrorist groups like Hezbollah.
He said Syrian military forces are guarding the chemical weapons stockpile “and have even increased security so it will not fall into rogue hands, although this does not mean it will stay that way. We need to take into consideration what will remain after we act and whose hands it will fall into.”
Syria acknowledged for the first time on Monday that it had chemical and biological weapons and said it could use them if foreign countries intervened in the ongoing rebellion there.
Damascus has not signed a 1992 international convention that bans the use, production or stockpiling of chemical weapons, but Syrian officials in the past had denied it had any weapons stockpiles.
"Given the escalation of violence in Syria, and the regime's increasing attacks on their people, we remain very concerned about these weapons," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said on Monday.
The Global Security website, which collects published intelligence reports and other data, says the weapons Syria produces include the nerve agents VX, sarin and tabun.
Gantz expressed concern that deteriorating conditions in Syria could threaten the military’s ability to safeguard the chemical weapons supplies, according to the Post.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)David Gelernter: What keeps this failed president above water?
David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale and the author, most recently, of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), just published by Encounter Books. Earlier this month he wrote “Why do we live in America-Lite?” for us, briefly summarizing the themes of his new book. We invited him to return with something that expands on the themes of the book. He has graciously responded with the column below, applying the themes of his new book to explore Barack Obama’s apparent political buoyancy:
Surprise is the beginning of wisdom, and President Obama and his campaign so far are deeply surprising. His presidency is a basket case, a failure with a capital F, and yet he is neck-and-neck with Romney. The only comparable failure since World War II was Jimmy Carter’s—and Carter, it’s true, gave Reagan a tough race in 1980. But Carter at least attracted a stiff primary challenge from Edward Kennedy. And voters were scared of Carter’s opponent (the terrifying extremist Ronald Reagan); they might not be inspired by Romney, but they are comfortable with him. Obama’s showing this year is a surprise from many angles.
The utter failure of this president is rank. History’s most expensive plan ever for buying your way out of recession barely propelled the economy uphill, and now, in a squeal and stench of smoking tires, the Obama Special (sweating, straining, roaring, leaking dollars) is slipping back down again. The president’s signature approach to governing is to ram through some wildly-unpopular measure and then take a bow as the audience hoots. He did it with his famous unreform of healthcare, and again with the blocked Keystone pipeline. His attorney general would be a joke if he weren’t so dangerous, but Obama likes him. The president did give up such unpopular ideas as closing Guantanamo, card-check, a criminal trial for KSM in Manhattan à la P.T. Barnum, cap-and-trade–but only because there was no way to push these things through. (Although when Obama can govern by decree instead of by legislation, he is only too happy. Legislation has always struck him as a monumental bore.)
Iran disdainfully snubs him, Russia snubs him, Europe ignores him, the Israelis can’t stand him, the world grows more dangerous by the hour. He did indeed take out Osama, and has moved aggressively to kill terrorists. But any other president would be deemed to have turned these victories into defeats by his tone-deaf campaigns afterward to squeeze out maximum political gain–as if he had killed Osama himself, bare-handed. The cost to US intelligence sources or the dignity of the office matters nothing, evidently, as the Obamiacs mash every last drop of juice out of the pulp. In fact this is a man to whom “cost” seems like a foreign concept, a word he has never learned.
He used to seem intelligent and articulate, capable of wit and charm when he felt like trying. But assaulting Romney, he is arrogant and patronizing. Nowadays his smiles are ominous. The grim satisfaction he takes in mocking, goading and heckling Romney calls to mind an Elizabethan bear-baiting.
But even more surprising than his political super-buoyancy is the resurrection of big-government, 1930s-style economic thinking in the Democratic party long after it was taken out with the trash along with Jimmy Carter, and once more (for good measure) after Gingrich smashed Clinton in the ’94 midterms. The failure of central planning and state-managed economies is one of the big themes of the 20th century. But Obama’s handlers have yet to tell him.
His biggest asset is being black. People feel virtuous when they vote for him, or support him, or at least don’t trash him. We all like to feel virtuous. One has the impression that most commentators write off the whole question of his surprising political resilience by assuming, implicitly, that race explains everything.
But it doesn’t. There is more to this story. Obama perfectly fits the personal profile of the Culture Machine that runs so much of the American elite nowadays.
The Machine is run by PORGIs, who are just like Obama: post-religious, globalist, intellectuals or at least intellectualizers (who talk and act like intellectuals even if they don’t quite qualify themselves). And his being black, with an African father, an African name (icing on the cake) and a childhood spent in a Muslim nation (the cherry on top!) makes him beyond perfect–makes him nearly divine. We’re unlikely to hear anyone say so during this campaign as frankly as Evan Thomas of Newsweek did in 2009: reviewing the president’s recent speech in Cairo, Thomas explained to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above—above the world, he’s sort of God.” But we all get the idea.
He is post-religious: he took his family to a church where the religion seemed to be America-hatred. There are no biblical echoes in his speeches, as there have been in the speeches of so many presidents, left and right, and such other American leaders as Martin Luther King. “Pandering to religious nuts” is the way PORGIs analyze such references. Another way to describe them is quintessentially American. We are, after all, a biblical republic. The idea of America– freedom, equality, democracy, and America as the promised land–grew straight out of the Bible. Obama is the first American president to put all that stuff behind him. As for American Zionism, American Exceptionalism, the city on a hill—it is one part of the American creed that Obama simply rejects.
He is the perfect globalist. America is intellectually and spiritually too small for him. He and his colleagues in the PORGIate rise as effortlessly as hot-air balloons to the level of global versus merely national. Obama Obaminates America’s acting alone. He likes to pull into the mix not only our allies but our opponents. Russia must help with Syria. Russia and China must help with Iran. In the globalist worldview, “enemy” is a childish idea and has been eliminated. Venezuela, North Korea, Iran are not criminally dangerous, they are naughty, and must be reasoned with, scolded and eventually welcomed home with a big hug.
You might think that Obama makes a poor intellectual: he doesn’t seem to read; ideas evidently mean nothing to him. But notice that he governs on the basis of theories and not facts. And he graduated from Columbia and Harvard. Case closed.
If conservatives were serious, they would think much harder about the Culture Machine (aka the Establishment) and the ways in which Obama is typical instead of exceptional—typical of a new type of Establishment leader, the new Machine Man. We’re used to old-fashioned political (usually Democratic) machines. But those political machines compare to the modern Culture Machine like a stick of dynamite to an H-bomb. While conservatives worry about debt and taxes and huge problems abroad, the left is busy pulling the whole country out from under them. While conservatives fiddle around on the roof, robbers are rifling the house and stealing the children. Conservatives might consider climbing down and having a look. Obama is only the first of a new breed.
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5)How dare the world shun Israel on terrorism
5)How dare the world shun Israel on terrorism
José María Aznar
Forty years after Munich, we are wrong to freeze out the country most affected by atrocities
When we are about to mark the 40th anniversary of the terrorist attacks at the Olympic Village in Munich, in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists, it is a real paradox to see Israel excluded from the first meeting of the Global Counter-terrorism Forum.
This initiative, led by the United States and attended by 29 countries and the European Union, took place last month in an effort to improve the co-ordination of counter-terrorism policies at global level. Why wasn’t Israel invited? The meeting was held in Istanbul and no one wanted to “provoke” the host, the Islamist Government of the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Worse still, in July, the forum organised its first victims-of-terrorism meeting. Not only was Israel excluded, but Israeli victims had no place in its official speeches. When we see deadly terrorist attacks such as the recent one in Bulgaria, targeting tourists simply because they were Israeli, the marginalisation of Israel is totally unacceptable.
As a terrorism victim myself, who was fortunate to survive a car-bomb attack, I cannot understand or justify the marginalisation of other terrorist victims just for political reasons. If we extrapolate Israel’s experience of slaughter to Britain, it would mean that in the past 12 years about 11,000 British citizens would have died and 60,000 would have been injured in terrorist attacks. In the case of the United States, the figures would be 65,000 dead and 300,000 injured. Israel’s ordeal is far from insignificant.
It is even more poignant if one considers Israel’s willingness to face up to terrorism and the practical experience that it has acquired to defeat it. Israel has much to contribute in this area and everyone else has a lot to learn if we really want to defeat the terrorists.
Fiamma Nirenstein, the vice- president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (and a member of the Friends of Israel Initiative) has made a proposal that is as fair as it is attractive — to hold a moment of silence at the London Olympics in memory of the 1972 massacre. Remembering is important, first, because of the victims, but also because many Europeans adopted the wrong attitude towards Palestinian terrorism after the Munich attack. The culprits who were arrested were later quietly released for fear of further attacks. And because of that initial fear the terrorists knew how to take advantage of the situation and to press for more rewards.
I have experienced terrorism at first hand. Many of my friends and some political colleagues have been killed by terrorists whose only merit was to have a hood, a gun or a bomb. Nonetheless, even in the most difficult times, I have always believed that weakness and appeasement are the wrong choices. Terrorism is not a natural phenomenon; it doesn’t happen spontaneously; it’s not something ethereal. It can and must be fought using all the tools provided by the law and democracy — and most importantly, it can be defeated if there is the will to defeat it. Israel has provided ample proof that it possesses that will, since its own existence is at stake.
To marginalise or isolate Israel to avoid irritating Turkey is a big mistake. All of the Middle East, from Morocco to the Gulf, is undergoing profound, although not always peaceful, change, which is yielding very disturbing results. Although the elections in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt are something new and promising for the region, Syria is immersed in civil war and there is a danger that the region’s largest arsenal of chemical weapons will spin out of control and become available to anyone — as happened with Libya’s portable anti-aircraft missiles, which disappeared after the fall of of Colonel Gaddafi. In Egypt, the rise of Islamism threatens economic and political stability. Hezbollah is still in Lebanon, keeping alive its goal of eliminating Israel — just as members of Hamas do in Gaza. Despite sanctions, Iran is moving forward with the development of a nuclear bomb in its effort to become the regional leader and to export its Islamist and revolutionary ideology as widely as possible. There are also other areas in turmoil that directly affect Europe, such as the Sahel region of Africa, south of the Sahara, which is now becoming dominated by al-Qaeda.
Isolation not only renders Israel weaker against its enemies, but also makes all Westerners weaker. And the practitioners of terrorism know all too well how to exploit our differences.
Remembering Munich 40 years on should be a useful reminder of our successes and failures. It should help us to enhance our collective abilities to fight terrorism. Israel is key in this fight. Israel is a part of the West. Israel is not the problem; it is part of the solution. We will become the problem if we continue to cold-shoulder Israel, the country most affected by terrorism and, possibly, the one that knows best how to defeat it.
José María Aznar was Prime Minister of Spain from 1996 to 2004 and is chairman of the Friends of Israel Initiative
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