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I have been plenty wrong on predicting political elections but I do believe Mark Sanford's win suggests there is a volcanic groundswell beneath the surface and it transcends morality because we have dumbed ourselves down when it comes to transgressions by politicians. We have reached such a low opinion  of professionals we are not surprised anymore when they stray off the reservation.

Yes, the economy is showing signs of modest life but why not when the Fed pumps 85 billion/month into it.  Hell is should be roaring but Obama knows how to choke it and then we have yet to feel the real effect of 'Obamascare' - the train wreck even senior members of his own party are ducking and running.

Ah, then comes Syria.  Having avoided touching that hot potato while over 100,000 Syrians have been slaughtered, Obama is now faced with an even harder and more traumatic mess.

Benghazi is a tragic blunder, evidence of incompetence and, more importantly, a complete show of immorality couched in outright lies but it will not have any  significant effect because Americans seem no longer able to connect dots unless the press and media do it for them.  Surely this will not happen because the press and media are too busy circling the wagon and filling us in on various murders and kidnappings that have been occurring with increasing regularity.

The most pitiful excuse offered is that there were  no assets in the area that could have gotten there in time so why try.

Benghazi is no Watergate but it does raise serious doubts about an Administration that promised to be the most open and turns out to be nothing but a boatload of lies and liars.  Furthermore, if the White House cannot find out who knew about Benghazi and failed to tell the president, which I doubt, then it is one dangerous to the nation's welfare because of a level of incompetency that reaches the top.

The 2014 election is a long way off and Obama will not be up for re-election. However, he will do his best to stir the enslaved faithful because any more of a failed  agenda will provide historians a rich brew.

Even the D.C Appeal Court has begun having a field day recently slapping him down for his over reach  - witness the latest rebuke of his arrogant stuffing of the NLRB Board with pro labor thugs.

When Obama's final day in office will have arrived I suspect his golf score will have improved more than the nation's welfare but then he could lie about that as well.

More and more writers are suggesting we are in an irreversible decline.  I attended a luncheon yesterday and the speaker had been an avid supporter of Biden and even he expressed disappointment and actually got the hell out of D.C.  He wrote a book ( "The Pay Off - Why Wall Street Always Wins" by Jeff Connaughton) about how the financial sector of this country has politicians in their hand and how government has totally failed its responsibility of legislative enforcement.

One attendee suggested that maybe the future road down which all  democracies end is they become plutocracies - government controlled by the wealthy. In our case Obama might even destroy the wealthy.

Time will tell, it always does. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Hanson on illegal immigration and who benefits and Syria (See 2 and 2a  below.)
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Dick
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1)The Benghazi Awakening

Hillary Clinton's chief of staff told Greg Hicks not to talk to Congress

Miracles happen, and even the sleepy Washington press corps seems to have paid some attention to Wednesday's House hearing on the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission last September in Benghazi. What they and the public heard is the beginning of a real accounting for a security failure that killed four Americans.

We say "beginning" because the entire story still isn't clear, in particular the roles played by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama before and after the attack. But the hearing led by House Republicans, amid months of media sneering, gave the civil servants who were on duty that September night a chance to give their side of the story.

Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Tripoli, recalled his last conversation with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who told him, "Greg, we're under attack." Mr. Hicks said he knew then that Islamists were behind the assault. In other words, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's public claim at the time that an anti-Islam YouTube video spurred the assault was known inside the government to be false when she and White House spokesman Jay Carney said it.

Mr. Hicks said he briefed Mrs. Clinton that night, yet the father of victim Tyrone Woods says she later told him that the YouTube video maker would be "prosecuted and arrested" as if he were responsible for Benghazi. Stranger still, Mrs. Hicks says Mrs. Clinton's then chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, ordered him not to give solo interviews about the attack to a visiting Congressional delegation. Aficionados of the Clinton Presidency will recall Ms. Mills as one of Bill Clinton's impeachment lawyers.

After Stevens and an aide were killed at the mission, the militias turned on the CIA annex nearby. On the advice of the military attaché in Tripoli, Mr. Hicks said he asked for U.S. fighter planes to fly over the complex in an attempt to scare the attackers away. Libyans had seen U.S. air power during the NATO military intervention in 2011 and might have fled. But Mr. Hicks was told no planes were available. Early the next morning, two Americans died in a mortar attack on the CIA compound.

The Pentagon says no F-16s were on call that night, but why not? Why weren't contingency plans in place? The State Department's supposedly independent review panel said in December that "there simply was not enough time for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference." The review blamed lower level officials for the security failure and didn't even bother to interview Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Hicks says he was "effectively demoted" after Benghazi from "deputy chief of mission to desk officer."

Mr. Hicks also revealed that four special forces soldiers at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli were ordered by U.S. African command not to join a State team headed to Benghazi. The soldiers were the remaining parts of a 16-member security team that had been pulled from Tripoli the previous month. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey recently told another House panel that the African command stopped no one from aiding those besieged in Benghazi. That contradicts Mr. Hicks's account.

Mark Thompson, deputy coordinator for operations at State, added that he recommended the Administration call on the Foreign Emergency Support Team, which the government calls its "only interagency, on-call, short notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents world-wide." It wasn't on the "menu of options," he was told.

The immediate press spin on Wednesday's hearing is that there was no "smoking gun" proof of a cover-up, as if that is the only reason to find out what happened. It's clear enough already that senior Administration officials knew in September they had a politically potent debacle on their hands and did their best to delay and obfuscate any accounting. All of this warrants further investigation, and such oversight is part of Congress's job.

1a)Benghazi Truths vs. Washington Politics

Wednesday's hearing turned a light on a previously unnoticed player in the story: Hillary Clinton's chief of staff

BY ELIOT ABRAMS

'I was stunned. My jaw dropped," said Gregory Hicks at Wednesday's House hearing on the Benghazi terror attack last fall and its aftermath. Mr. Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Libya under Ambassador Chris Stevens, was referring to the now-famous TV appearances by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

Ms. Rice, blanketing the Sunday talk shows the weekend after the murderous assault on the American consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, spoke of spontaneous protests and linked them to a video insulting Islam. But Mr. Hicks said "there was no report from the U.S. Mission in Libya regarding a demonstration," and there were no protests. "The YouTube video was a nonevent in Libya," he added. In the last telephone call that Mr. Hicks received from Stevens, the ambassador said "we're under attack" and then the cell connection dropped.

The hearing deepened the mystery of how Ms. Rice came to say such things. It added a new political wrinkle in the person of Cheryl Mills, whose role was previously unnoticed. Mr. Hicks testified that when a Republican member of the committee, Jason Chaffetz, visited Libya to investigate what had happened, he was instructed that no State Department officer was ever to be alone with the congressman—and that a lawyer was to attend every meeting he had.

When the lawyer was excluded from one meeting with intelligence officers because he lacked the security clearances, Mr. Hicks received a furious call from Ms. Mills, who was then chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We can be confident that Ms. Mills, who represented Bill Clinton in his impeachment hearings and who was counsel to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008, was not calling to guarantee due process. She was calling to protect Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Hicks also told the committee that when he asked the acting assistant secretary for the Near East, Beth Jones, why Ms. Rice had spoken about protests and the video, he was curtly told to drop that line of questioning.

Enlarge Image

European Pressphoto Agency

Gregory Hicks

Mrs. Clinton's role in this matter remains obscure, in part because the State Department's Accountability Review Board did not interview her, amazingly enough. The review board protected all of the department's higher-ups and blamed career officials down the ladder. The board is now itself under investigation by State's inspector general, and Wednesday's testimony revealed the sore feelings of career officers about the review board's conduct.

It is now widely known that the "annex" in Tripoli was a CIA location, but the whole story of Benghazi makes little sense unless the CIA role in the affair can be clarified. There were very few security officers at the consulate, and this seems like a huge error by the State Department. But is this because the whole Benghazi set-up was mostly a CIA operation?

That could explain as well why the annex was permitted there, though it did not meet minimal State Department security standards. It may explain why State had a presence in dangerous Benghazi at all—as a cover for the intelligence presence. This may not be fodder for an open hearing, but unless we understand the interplay between State and the CIA, we will not have the full story.

The three witnesses—Mr. Hicks and two other State Department officers who work on counterterrorism and security, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom—came across as civil servants of whom Americans can be proud. Mr. Hicks's account of the night of the attack and following morning, and the desperate efforts to save the Americans in Benghazi, were gripping.

The hearing room was silent as he told the tale, for the most part without emotion. He named the Americans on his team who had risked their lives to try and rescue Stevens, and others who had performed so well in the intense crisis that gripped the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. At 3 a.m. he gave the order to abandon the embassy building because there were Twitter feeds saying an attack was coming, and he told stories like that of the embassy nurse who started "smashing computer hard drives with an ax" to protect classified information.

The hearing also showed the chasm between the culture of career civil servants ready to risk their lives and the vicious political culture of Washington. No doubt politics motivated some of the Republicans, but due to the nature of the hearing they were cast as investigators. Most Democrats appeared far more dedicated to defending Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration than to finding out exactly what happened, and any criticism of Ms. Rice was rebutted. After all, Chris Stevens is gone but 2016 is just around the corner.

The three witnesses seemed to be visitors from a different reality—different from Rep. Carolyn Maloney and her outrage that anyone could criticize the great Secretary Clinton, or from Cheryl Mills and the anger she expressed at Mr. Hicks for allowing a congressman to escape the presence of the lawyer she had sent.

The Accountability Review Board was also part of that Washington culture, protecting the top levels of the State Department—the secretary and the deputy and under secretaries—and laying blame (and punishment) on the career people below them. This hearing did not ascertain where the buck should stop, but it was a step forward in getting the facts. And it was a reminder that in Washington we should not permit people with political motives to blight the careers of civil servants and blame them for failures of management and policy at the top.

Mr. Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, handled Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2009.

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2)Illegal Immigration: Who Benefits?

Why does the well-off California suburbanite stand shoulder to shoulder with La Raza?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Why are over 11 million foreign nationals residing illegally in the United States? If we can answer that question, then we can fathom the purpose of “comprehensive immigration reform,” and understand why special-interest groups mostly favor what the majority of Americans oppose. Illegal immigration goes on because, in the Roman sense, it serves the interest (cui bono?) of tens of millions of people. In practical terms, “comprehensive immigration reform” is a way not to end the present chaos but to legitimize it.

Let us count the concerned beneficiaries.

1) Mexico. Someday Mexico, a nation rich in natural resources, may achieve rough parity with the other North American economies and develop truly consensual and transparent government. Someday the declining birth rate in Mexico may make Mexico City husband its suddenly precious manpower. Someday the Rio Grande may become as abstract as the border between the U.S. and Canada.

That someday, however, is not now. At present, Mexico views the United States as a safety valve for potential social unrest, seeing it in much the same way as Easterners once envisioned the American West — a place that the impoverished but audacious might flee to rather than agitate against vast inequality at home.

No one knows how many billions of dollars illegal aliens annually send back to Mexico and other Latin American countries, but the figure may exceed $30 billion — a source of foreign exchange as valuable as oil exports or tourism. That Mexico’s own citizens residing in the United States often live in poverty in order to budget for their weekly remittances, or that U.S. taxpayers subsidize such beneficence through entitlements, is of little, if any, concern to Mexico City.

Finally, the export of millions of Mexican nationals gives Mexico City political leverage with the United States, whether exercised through the ubiquity of Mexican consulates here, the constant sermonizing about the plight of the dispossessed, or the surreal lawsuits against particular American states. For real reform to succeed, Mexico would have to resign itself to far fewer remittances, potentially greater social unrest, landmark social reform at home, and less traction with the American government. For those reasons alone, it will bitterly oppose real, rather than the present Potemkin, reform.

2) Business. Employers in the restaurant and hospitality industries, and in meat-packing, agribusiness, construction, and landscaping, find Mexican nationals wonderful workers. They are. The lack of legality, English, and a high-school diploma are not drawbacks for the physically demanding jobs in these fields, but in a tragically paradoxical way become advantages — turning what would otherwise be entry-level or temporary employment into a multi-year ordeal. The employer reaps the benefit of industrious young and healthy workers, and the greater society picks up the eventual tab for the aging and injured and for dependents in terms of health-care, education, and law-enforcement costs.

In an economy of long-standing 7-plus percent unemployment, employers could surely find American workers, but not, by and large, workers as industrious as Mexican nationals, and not as low-paid, since the assorted costs of the Mexican workers’ achieving nominal parity with American citizens are borne by the society at large. Do not expect business to favor any reform that changes the advantageous status quo.

To be fair to employers, if our society wishes to close the border, then it must be prepared to pay higher prices for some commodities, at least in the short term, on the theory that, in terms of social stability and economic justice, training and employing American citizens might in the long run be less expensive than permitting the influx of illegal aliens to continue. Bottom line: Expect employers to resent bitterly true immigration reform that would halt the influx of cheap labor. In every “grand bargain,” there will be a Republican shilling for big business.

3) The elite. Inexpensive foreign “household help” — gardeners, nannies, housekeepers, cooks — is now a fixture among the wealthy and upper-middle classes of the American Southwest, which are emulating the values and lifestyle of the 19th-century aristocracy. For many American suburban elites, illegal immigration is largely seen in personal terms as a patron-client relationship with particular immigrants. The Atherton or Newport investment banker or computer engineer sees himself as a concerned noble offering needed employment to an equally noble client — as a sort of American version of the patrón who assumes social obligations in addition to paying wages. In psychological terms, the member of the blue-state elite envisions himself not as an exploiter of cheap labor, but rather more as a benefactor of the greater social good. That the Burlingame software executive would never hire an unemployed African-American youth to cut his lawn, given his preference for a Mexican landscaper, is somehow seen as liberal.

Anecdotes (e.g., “I give all my extra clothes to Herlinda”; “We bought a used car for José”), not statistics, guide these people’s thinking. In the elite mind, there is no contradiction between hiring Roberto to build a redwood fence in the backyard and ensuring that one’s own kids go to private schools to avoid joining Roberto’s kids in the neighborhood school in nearby Redwood City. Roberto is a wonderful handyman, but his children are not the sort of chums that Stanford-bound offspring should associate with or be forced to slow down with in an English class. Crass nativists and racists live in places like southern Arizona and Bakersfield; liberal apartheid progressives, eager to ensure social justice, hire illegal aliens in places like Atherton to help the proverbial people. They use their ample income and capital to ensure a social apartness that avoids the realities that those without their disposable income deal with in a quite different fashion. Expect a suburban elite to oppose any true reform that would imperil their own psychological penance and clear material benefits.

4) La Raza. The presence of 11 million illegal aliens — largely from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the majority non-English-speaking and without high-school educations — warps all civic statistics about the upward mobility of Latinos. Translated, that means a third-generation American of partial Mexican ancestry, with a Latinate last name but not speaking Spanish, qualifies as a minority for purposes of hiring and admissions. The apparent theory is that his cohort has not achieved statistical parity with the majority, ostensibly because of ongoing but rectifiable discrimination, rather than because of the continuing influx of newcomers from impoverished Oaxaca.

Why would ethnic elites in journalism, politics, academia, and public employment wish to alter the present advantageous non-system? Illegal immigration has turned much of the American Southwest into a blue political haven. What the La Raza elite fears is a collective ethnic trajectory analogous to the Italian-American experience, where Latinate tribal identification becomes incidental rather than essential to one’s character, and where politics are predicated on issues rather than a quid-pro-quo patron-client bargain. Is there a La Razza that clamors for more immigration from bankrupt Sicily or seeks affirmative action for Italians tarred by slurs of affinity with La Cosa Nostra? Does any other identity group adopt the nomenclature “The Race”?

With the end of illegal immigration, in a generation or two the very word La Raza or Chicano would disappear from the American parlance, buried under the juggernaut of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration. Only the influx of millions of illegal aliens replenishes the unassimilated ethnic pool and thereby ensures through the ensuing disparities that the Latino caucus, the Chicano Studies Department, and the accented name of the evening newsreader do not go the way of Italian-, Armenian-, or Greek-American assimilation.

Under the present win-win scenario, expect the ethnic elite to oppose bitterly any true reform measure that would close the border and someday make “Hispanic” or “Latino” as significant as “German,” “Romanian,” or “Polish” — a rubric of occasional ethnic pride but without any measurable political clout.

5) The Democratic party. If it was true that under the 1986 amnesty, less than half of the concerned foreign nationals chose to become citizens, that would not be the case with an updated version. Much has changed politically in the last 30 years. We can disagree over the reasons why “Latino” has become synonymous with “Democratic,” but not over the political results. The Left cites conservative insensitivity to the plight of the Latin American poor; the Right points to cynical political manipulation that offers assorted entitlements in exchange for ethnic loyalty manifested by second-generation voters and a sense of solidarity that permeates American citizens of Latin American ancestry. No matter — any amnesty this time around would see much greater participation rates to fuel ongoing political momentum.

In any Gang of Eight–style caucus, assume that its Democratic members would not wish to endanger the present political realities that have changed the electoral map of the southwestern United States. In cynical fashion, Democrats will grant concessions on guest workers to pacify Republican grandees fronting for business, in exchange for amnesties that will maintain demographic dividends and their own political futures. As a general rule of thumb, any time a Democratic legislator praises a Republican counterpart for being reasonable and sensitive, we can equate such magnanimity with private guffaws about the naïveté — if not greed — of his opposite number. How ironic that the “Latino” vote is probably not what lost the Republicans the last election — instead, it was the working-class whites who stayed home because they sensed that they were not a part of Mitt Romney’s world, and who mostly oppose blanket amnesties unless they come with ironclad assurances of closed borders.

And what about the American people? The public that feels most immediately the social costs of illegal immigration bitterly resents the cynical non-enforcement of the law. Whereas professors in Maine or Wisconsin may see a liberal civil-rights issue, ranchers along the border or parents whose children are at a school in Tulare see only illiberality: the public bearing the social costs of employers’ greed, and an ethnic lobby practicing a disturbing chauvinism concerned not with illegal immigration per se, but only with illegal immigration from Latin America. (Were 1 million Chinese arriving illegally each year, La Raza would be decrying non-enforcement of the law and unfair competition to American workers.)

In the same manner in which principled skepticism concerning gay marriage became homophobia, support for fracking made one a polluter, doubts about the government’s responsibility to provide wealthy women with free birth control equated with misogyny, or worries over curbing the Second Amendment were synonymous with redneck heartlessness, so too border enforcement is now tantamount to nativism and racism — charges analogous to child molestation for most Americans today.

Solutions? Close the border. Deport illegal aliens who are not working and have been regularly on public assistance, have violated U.S. criminal laws, or have just recently arrived. After that, allow the law-abiding, employed long-term resident to pay a fine and remain on U.S. soil, while learning English and applying for citizenship — from the rear of the line. Aid the transition of American citizens off state support into the labor force; take the moral high ground with Mexico and demand respect for U.S. sovereignty and U.S. laws. Do not be bullied by La Raza, and instead understand the basis of its philological reality. Do not let yourself be demagogued by false charges of nativism and racism. Worry more about unemployed American citizens and stressed taxpayers than about Mexican nationals who are fleeing a nation rich in natural resources and in need of millions of reformers.

All that should be the basis for immigration reform — and thereby will ensure outrage from the special interests that are so heavily vested in the present violation of the law.

2a)Hoping for Change in Syria

By Victor Davis Hanson 

Remember when President Obama used to warn Syria's Bashar al-Assad to stop his mass killing and step down?

Muammar Gadhafi's dictatorship had then just collapsed under Western bombing. The murders of Americans in Benghazi and the subsequent postwar tribal mess in Libya were still in the future. In those heady days of 2011, the rage was "lead from behind," the blooming Arab Spring and social-media types calling for democracy in the streets of Cairo.

The Muslim Brotherhood was proclaimed to be largely "secular." Echoing the pseudo-disavowals of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini years earlier, the American-educated Mohamed Morsi insisted that his Islamist movement was not interested in running Egypt.

Now comes a depressing Arab Winter of chaos and growing Islamic authoritarianism. Egypt is a mess, with a wrecked economy and wide scale persecution of Coptic minorities. No one yet knows exactly what actually happened in Benghazi. More than ever, the stubborn Assad clings to power. He calculates that killing 70,000 of his own is far better math than sharing the fate of other deposed Arab dictators such as Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein or Hosni Mubarak.

The result is that Obama's threats of yesterday about Syrian use of weapons of mass destruction are now contextualized and internationalized. We sorta, kinda want the United Nations, our allies or maybe the Arab League first to certify Assad guilty of using weapons of mass destruction. Then we can eventually, at some time in the future, organize a coalition to address the problem.

The president finds himself in a terrible dilemma with Syria -- partly one of his own making, partly also due to the lose-lose nature of the Middle East. Obama rightly understands that to remove repugnant Arab dictators tottering amid insurrection is not difficult, given overwhelming American airpower. But he also realizes that the freewheeling tribal and sectarian mess that follows can be almost as odious as the authoritarian police state that crumbles.

The third alternative -- fostering a postwar democracy, as in Iraq -- requires a multiyear investment in American blood and treasure of the sort that former Sen. and presidential candidate Obama damned as foolhardy. He appreciates how Iraq imploded the second term of the George W. Bush presidency. Without that unpopular war, fierce antiwar critic but otherwise relatively unknown and untried Barack Obama might have never won the Democratic presidential primary.

Obama, better than anyone, also knows the rules of today's political opportunism. Currently, liberal hawks are calling for Syrian intervention on humanitarian grounds. They are echoed by many conservatives seeing intervention as a way of both hurting enemies such as Iran and Hezbollah while helping friends such as Arab reformers and Israel.

Yet put Americans on the ground in Syria, fighting both the Assad regime and al-Qaeda, with rising costs in blood and treasure at a time of near national insolvency, and yesterday's assorted zealots will quickly become today's "I told you so" critics.

Obama must remember the fiery 2002 speeches of then-Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Harry Reid authorizing the Iraq War. He read the once-impassioned pro-war columns of New York Times and Washington Postcolumnists. So he also recalls that all such interventionist zealotry soon turned from "my brilliant three-week victory over Saddam" into "your botched multiyear occupation" once the Iraq insurgency took off, American costs skyrocketed, and national elections loomed.

Without a credible follow-up of using force, Obama's once-soaring warnings have become stale and no longer earn any deterrence. Even a Nobel Peace Prize laureate can only so many times thunder about "red lines" and "game changers."

After serial but inconsequential deadlines to cease their nuclear enrichment, the Iranians now snooze when lectured. Assad bets that the danger of American retaliation for crossing the WMD red line is far less than the danger of losing his rule -- and his life.

North Korea looks at the latest Obama remonstration to act responsibly in the same way most Americans regard his erstwhile promises to close Guantanamo within a year, or to dismantle the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols: mellifluous idealism not necessarily followed by unpleasant implementation.

China increasingly believes that the U.S. president is more interested in reducing our deployable nuclear warheads than in warning aggressive Red Army generals that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are firmly protected under the American nuclear umbrella.

In the end, we are left only with hope for change. Maybe Iran and North Korea will come to their senses and behave. Maybe Assad will finally fall. Maybe the Syrian insurgents will prove to be pro-American democrats after all. And maybe opportunistic senators and journalists will not play politics and one day abandon the very policies that they once urged their president to adopt.

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