A U. S. Navy destroyer stops four Mexicans in a row boat rowing
towards California.
The Captain gets on the loud- hailer and shouts, "Ahoy, small
craft. Where are you headed?"
One of the Mexicans puts down his oar, stands up, and shouts,
"We are invading the United States of America! To reclaim the territory
taken by the USA during the 1800's."
The entire crew of the destroyer doubled over in laughter.
When the captain is finally able to catch his breath, he gets
back on the loud-hailer and asks, "Just the four of you?"
The same Mexican stands up again and shouts, "No, we're the last
four. The other 15 million are already there!"
Can Iran be stopped? (See 1 below.)---
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Is this mean spirited and nit picking or does it have some merit? You decide!
Time to Sequester Air Force One Vacation Flights
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Bill Cosby explains why he is tired. (See 2 below.)
And Pimco's Bill Gross is tired of Bernanke's viewpoint and explanations. (See 2a below.)
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An ego big enough to trip over can also lead to scandals. (Photos referred to in the article not included.) (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Obama's closet friend in the Middle East, Turkey's Erdogan, stiffs him at the last minute as Erdogan fears Russian retaliation. Russia's whose clout continues to rise in that region. (See 4 below.)
Putin has sized up Obama and found him pint size. (See 4a below.)
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Like Archie, Obama perfected the word stifle! (See 5 below.)
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1)Can Iran be stopped?
The West should intervene in Syria for many reasons. One is to stem the rise of Persian power
IN 2009 Iran was on the verge of electing a reformer as president. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, subverted the vote and crushed the ensuing protests. Last week the same desire for change handed a landslide victory to Hassan Rohani—and Mr Khamenei hailed it as a triumph.
When a country has seen as much repression as Iran, outsiders hoping for a better future for the place instinctively want to celebrate along with all those ordinary Iranians who took to the streets. The smiling Mr Rohani’s public pronouncements encourage optimism, for he sounds like a different sort of president from the comedy-villain, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who precedes him. Yet even if his election bodes well for Iranians, it does not necessarily hold equal promise for the rest of the world. Iran’s regional assertiveness and its nuclear capacity mean that it is a more dangerous place than it ever was before.
The case for Qompromise
Given the country’s obvious weaknesses, that sounds implausible. Inflation is running at over 30%, and the economy shrinking. Inequality is growing, with 40% of Iranians thought to be living below the poverty line. Sanctions restricted May’s oil exports to just 700,000 barrels a day, a third of what they used to be; as a result there are shortages of basic goods and growing unemployment caused by factory closures.
Yet the Persian lion has not lost its claws, nor has the theocracy suddenly become a democracy. Mr Rohani was indeed the most reformist of the candidates on offer at the election, but in much the way that Churchill was more of a teetotaller than George Brown. The 64-year-old cleric has been a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic from its inception. For years he headed the national security council (see article). He is constrained by a system that deemed just eight people fit to stand in the recent election and rejected 678 others (including a former president). The president’s power is limited by Iran’s other institutions, many of which are in conservative hands.
While Iran’s politics have probably changed less than Mr Rohani’s election suggests, the balance of power between Iran and the rest of the world has been shifting in Iran’s favour for two reasons. First, thanks to heavy investment in nuclear capacity by the mullahs, and despite attempts by the West and Israel to delay or sabotage the nuclear programme, Iran will soon be able to produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium in a matter of weeks (see briefing). Iran has installed more than 9,000 new centrifuges in less than two years, more than doubling its enrichment capability. It is a short step from the 20% enriched uranium that the country’s facilities are already producing at an increasing rate to conversion into the fissile material needed for an implosion device. Although Western intelligence agencies think Iran is still at least a year away from being able to construct such a weapon, some experts believe that it could do so within a few months if it chose to—and that the time it would take is shrinking.
This makes a nonsense of Western policy on Iran. Round after round of negotiations to try to persuade Iran not to get a bomb have been backed up by the implicit threat that armed force would be used if talks failed. But now it looks as though Iran will soon be in a position to build a weapon swiftly and surreptitiously. Should the West decide to use force, Iran could amass a small arsenal by the time support for a military strike was rallied.
Against that background, a friendlier president becomes a trap as well as an opportunity. He may offer the chance of building better relations through engagement and the gradual lifting of sanctions. But Iran could take advantage of this inevitably slow process to build a weapon.
The other development that threatens the West’s interests is happening around Iran. Despite its economic troubles, the Iranian state is a powerful beast compared with its neighbours, and is keen to assert itself abroad. The Iraqi government is now its ally. It has sway over chunks of Lebanon through Hizbullah, the Shia party-cum-militia it finances. And it has sent Hizbullah into Syria, where its fighters have joined Iranian advisers, money and special forces to help turn the tide of the war in Bashar Assad’s favour. Ostensibly the reason why Barack Obama agreed last week to arm the rebels in Syria (see article) was Mr Assad’s use of chemical weapons; but many believe that the greater reason was his reluctance to see Mr Assad hold on to power as a client of Iran’s.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst
This analysis may be too gloomy. It is possible that Mr Rohani’s arrival heralds a more pragmatic and less aggressive position. The new president used to serve as Iran’s main nuclear negotiator, and during his campaign made clear the link between Iran’s economic weakness and the nuclear sanctions, and called for better relations with the West. The West should reciprocate, making it clear that it has no intention of impeding Iran’s peaceful development. At the same time, it should continue to push for progress on the nuclear negotiations.
But it must do so warily. Any deal offered to Iran should include restraints draconian enough, and inspection intrusive enough, to prevent it from building a weapon surreptitiously, otherwise it would be worse than not doing a deal at all. And such a deal would very likely be unacceptable to Iran.
The growing risk of a nuclear Iran is one reason why the West should intervene decisively in Syria not just by arming the rebels, but also by establishing a no-fly zone. That would deprive Mr Assad of his most effective weapon—bombs dropped from planes—and allow the rebels to establish military bases inside Syria. This newspaper has argued many times for doing so on humanitarian grounds; but Iran’s growing clout is another reason to intervene, for it is not in the West’s interest that a state that sponsors terrorism and rejects Israel’s right to exist should become the regional hegemon.
The West still has the economic and military clout to influence events in the region, and an interest in doing so. When Persian power is on the rise, it is not the time to back away from the Middle East.
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2)
2a) Bill Gross – co-CEO of PIMCO and manager of the world's largest bond fund – is a longtime skeptic of Bernanke and his policies. And he believes Bernanke's views of the economy are simply wrong. He told Bloomberg:
2)
2a) Bill Gross – co-CEO of PIMCO and manager of the world's largest bond fund – is a longtime skeptic of Bernanke and his policies. And he believes Bernanke's views of the economy are simply wrong. He told Bloomberg:
IRS. FBI. NSA... Under Obama they consistently exceed their previously understood legal powers. Yes, there was technical consent by the secret FISA court for massive NSA spying. In times of national threat the FISA court is a pushover; just imagine if they said "No" and we had another 9/11/01. So they drove a dagger into the U.S. Constitution rather than stand for principle, the way Chief Justice John Roberts helped damage the Constitution by voting for ObamaCare, and the Burger Court shafted the Constitution and ruined millions of young lives with unrestricted abortion.
Perhaps the most damaging Leftist assault ever was reverse discrimination to make up for white racial sins going back to the slave trade that ended in 1865; that racialist revenge narrative still drives reverse discrimination, forty years after the start of "affirmative" action. It will never end, as long as there is a penny to be made on racial blackmail.
The equal protection clause is gone. Every time the left imagines another victim group, that gaping wound in constitutional protections grows larger and larger -- first on behalf of American blacks, then for all "people of color," then women and gays, and now, illegal immigrants. Reverse racial discrimination has empowered an unelected political class growing fat and thuggish on a new spoils system. With ObamaCare, racial spoils may capsize our elected ship of state, leaving only an EU-type corruptocracy.
The Left has pushed against the Constitution beginning with the Wilson administration and World War I. What's different about Obama is his Leninist grandiosity, combined with amazing oppositional-defiant disorder. In street language that means his f-u attitude. Obama takes pleasure in waving his finger in the air while violating our most precious values. Obama's narcissism and oppositional-defiance therefore control his official actions. The week after Obama's first inauguration, commuters in New York City were shocked when Air Force One buzzed the Statue of Liberty. When the White House was queried nobody took responsibility. But only the President of the United States can override standing orders and FAA safety rules in that symbolic act of giving the middle finger to the whole country, within sight of the ruined Twin Towers. Buzzing Lady Liberty was only one of dozens of acts of symbolic defiance that Obama has indulged in over the years. Psychiatrically these gestures have two features: first, they are unnecessary to achieve any rational goal; and second, they always reveal rage and hatred against "middleclassness," as Jeremiah Wright calls it, the values that normal Americans hold dear. Emotionally Obama's arrogance is based in deep feelings of inferiority, a mental plague that infects much of the left. Oppositionalism is at the very roots of the Left's glorification of revolution. Marx and the other hard Leftists make it very clear that "revolution" means civil war, as bloody as is necessary to alter human nature forever. When in the end human nature prevails, the Left always forgets its failures and discovers new messianic figures, like Obama himself, to forge another great new future. Today the Europeans are genuinely afraid of Obama. If you doubt that, look at these two news photos. The first shows Frau Merkel looking with fear and doubt in her eyes at Obama in Germany this week. Merkel started life as a communist in East Germany, but seems acutely aware of personality cults like Stalin's and Obama's. She fears what she knows. The second photo shows Britain's David Cameron doing that little head bow that politicians do around Obama. Both photos show fear of Obama's arbitrary temper and rage, which is by now understood by governments around the world. It was France's Nikolas Sarkozy who first called Obama "aliene," meaning "estranged from reality."
Merkel's look is particularly revealing, because it was her job this week to protest against Obama's unbounded NSA spying against Germans and other Europeans, who have known Obamas before --- Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and a raft of other control freaks who became enraged when their orders were not followed. Led by our loathsome media, many Americans took the public revelations about Obama's abuses of power with a shrug. The Germans did not, because they still suffer from earlier generations of Obamas.
Oddly enough, after the massive trauma of World War II, inflicted by Germany on Europe and America, there seems to be more sensitivity about massive abuse of power over there than in the USA. Their wounds are fresher than ours. We still imagine it can't happen here. The German press knows better, and therefore went ballistic about the NSA revelations.
The Muslim world has come to the same conclusion. The farcical Arab Spring started after Obama told Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak to leave office, arbitrarily, in the single most blatant act of public imperialism in American history. Obama thereby dislodged the most crucial pillar of Middle East stability in the last forty years: the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty established between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula and in exchange Sadat recognized Israel's right to exist. It was the only genuine peace treaty of the last sixty years, and Obama destroyed it.
The result hasn't harmed Israel so far, even though Obama considers Israel the obstacle to perfect, lasting peace. No. The result has been chaos and starvation in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood. Tens of millions of women who lived in relative freedom are now confined by Shari'ah law. In Syria an estimated 100,000 Arabs have killed each other so far, and last week Syria slipped toward the much-feared regional war between Shiites and Sunnis: Iran, Assad, and Hezbollah against Egypt, Libya, and Al Qaida, all financed by the Gulf Arabs. Russia is backing Iran and Assad, and the U.S. is foolishly backing Al Qaida, who hate us. This is not a foreign policy. It is a jerry-rigged contraption to try to save the day after the Arab Spring destroyed all the unstable Muslim regimes. In 2009, Obama proclaimed his Muslim sympathies from Al Azhar University in Cairo. Today no Muslim believes him anymore. Based on his own messianic authority, Obama has brought nothing but war and suffering to the Middle East. The Iranians hate him as a point of principle. The Saudis fear him as a wild man who has brought Mecca and Medina within easy range of Iranian nuclear weapons. Israel has not been damaged so far, but they don't want a wild man running U.S. policy either. Obama has almost four years to go, unless he becomes UN SecGen, in which case he may be around for another decade to impose his Leninist vision on the world. So far, Obama has made things worse, much worse, both in foreign and domestic policy. Free-market capitalism is a robust system, one that has recovered from massive misgovernment before. Politics is worse today than it has been for decades, because of the rise of the Boomer Left, culminating in Obama the Messiah. Yet precisely because control freaks cannot run our hypercomplex economy, they do not know what is going to happen, and neither do we. Nobody could predict the web, just as nobody could predict the internal combustion engine. Nobody predicted massive shale discoveries that are turning us into a net hydrocarbon exporter in the middle of the greenest administration in history. Nobody can predict the new age of biogenetic engineering. Nobody knows what will happen with ObamaCare, except it will be one unholy quagmire. Wise policymakers understand the limits of their power and end up practicing the rule of "First, Do No Harm." We now have a U.S. president who has turned that upside-down: F First, do some harm. It hasn't worked, and it won't. Obama is a loose cannonball. He has only one guiding principle, the aggrandizement of his own ego. But just one Nobel Peace Prize, just one presidency, can never be enough for his insatiable needs. Obama will always need more.
Obama wants to control everything except himself. That has always been a formula for tyranny, and Obama is no exception.
Character is destiny.
3a) It's a Question of Trust
Scandals, scandals, scandals! Get 'em while they're hot!
The stories are out there. The rapidly rising cost projections for ObamaCare far beyond any promises made to get the bill passed, the Fast and Furious gun running debacle, the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi who died without aid or succor, the IRS targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups, the harassment of journalists at AP and James Rosen of FOX News, and the NSA's massive overreach in collecting data on anyone who uses a phone, texts a message, e-mails his girlfriend, asks Mom for a recipe, or surfs the web. And those constant reports that the next major piece of legislation, the so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, has had more flips and flops than a hyperactive chef at IHOP. These stories are all out there, and they're said to have damaged the government by "eroding" the trust of the American people. In each of these examples, the government of the United States has told lies to the citizens who hired it, collectively, to do a job. The job description that government employees were supposed to adhere to, and fulfill, is most commonly called the Constitution of the United States. And those who have actually read the Constitution are fully aware that the government is allowed to do only certain things -- and not a single thing beyond that. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments make perfectly clear that there are defined limits to the authority that we have granted to the government.
Unless my copy of the Constitution has been redacted beyond all measure, lying to us is not one of the powers we granted to our federal government back in 1789. Yet it seems that our government is now (paraphrasing an old advertising line used by General Electric) working on the basis that Lying Is Our Most Important Product.
And yet our esteemed leader, Barack Obama, has had the temerity to actually say:
And to claim that the trust the average citizen had in his government is "eroding" is just another example of the twisting and distortions that the government is constantly trying to peddle. To erode means a slow wearing away of something that was solid, such as water wearing away at our coastlines as waves hit the shore.
The lengthy menu of scandals currently being covered (or ignored, depending on the media outlet) is not really showing anything eroding, unless you want to define a tsunami wiping out your four-year-old's sand castle in 0.01 seconds erosion.
The obvious erosion of trust in government began with the rise of the Tea Parties, the strength of Ron Paul's libertarian message, and the collapse of confidence among both Democrats and Republicans in the members of their own parties in Congress and the Senate. And with each new exposure of corruption, malfeasance, and common garden-variety idiocy, the confidence that Americans have in the people they've hired weakens. In fact, a recent Rasmussen poll indicates that only one in ten Americans has any faith at all in Congress. To be fair, though, Democrats express a slightly higher percentage of support for Congress -- 12%. Even that is nothing to brag about.
So trust is gone among most voters, even those who drank a lot of Kool-Aid. And once trust is gone, no amount of speeches, promises, grandiose plans for having a debate or a national conversation about the "issues," or trying to change the subject is going to change the general feeling that is now even obvious to our president -- we don't trust you!
I was lucky enough to have an older gentleman become a sort of mentor to me when I started working, and he made an observation that has stayed with me for the last forty years. He was commenting on the lack of professionalism and the poor performance of a large group of second-tier managers in an organization when he said, "Remember, first-rate people hire first-rate people. Second-rate people hire third-rate people. The guy in charge here is definitely second-rate, even on a good day." Looking at his selections for staff at all levels, our president will have to do some major shifting of responsibility and accept a lot of resignations to work his way up to that second-rate classification.
The Administration has tried distraction, but honestly, does anyone think that exposing a new scandal is really going to help? The people in the administration have tried to insinuate that they are not really crooks -- just poorly organized. So incompetence is now a defense? A defense for the guy who we were told is the smartest person in the room?
Trust, like respect, is never given. Trust can only be earned. Once that trust is betrayed, it takes a whole lot longer to rebuild after betrayal that it took to build it in the first place. When a people don't trust their government, resistance to government mandates begins to grow. We all know that the government is inefficient, but we used to trust that everyone was paying for that inefficiency equally. When the illusion of equality is pierced, and trust is destroyed, whom do the ordinary people turn to? The answer to that question won't be the government. Not the government that exists today.
This situation creates a unique opportunity for demagogues to rattle on about how they can cure all our ills if we just "trust" them. Obama himself has tried to sell that idea, and his approval ratings are tanking, but there are always others waiting in the wings.
So the key answer to the question "Whom can we trust?" is a simple, two-word response: no one. Keep that answer in the forefront, and try to convince the rest of your community that blind trust got us into this, but more won't get us out.
Jim Yardley is a retired financial controller for manufacturing firms, a Vietnam veteran, and an independent voter.
4)U.S troop buildup in Jordan after Turkey shuts US-NATO arms corridor to Syrian rebels The US decision to upgrade Syrian rebel weaponry has run into a major setback. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan phoned President Barack Obama in Berlin Wednesday, June 19, to report his sudden decision to shut down the Turkish corridor for the transfer of US and NATO arms to the Syrian rebels.
Against this background, the US President informed Congress Friday, June 22, that 700 combat-equipped American military personnel would remain in Jordan at the end of a joint US-Jordanian training exercise. They would include crews of two Patriot anti-aircraft missile batteries and the logistics, command and communications personnel needed to support those units. The United States is also leaving behind from the war maneuver a squadron of 12 to 24 F-16 fighter jets at Jordan’s request. Some 300 US troops have been in Jordan since last year.
Erdogan’s decision will leave the Syrian rebels fighting in Aleppo virtually high and dry. The fall of Qusayr cut off their supplies of arms from Lebanon. Deliveries through Jordan reach only as far as southern Syria and are almost impossible to move to the north where the rebels and the Hizballah-backed Syrian army are locked in a decisive battle for Aleppo. The Turkish prime minister told Obama he is afraid of Russian retribution if he continues to let US and NATO weapons through to the Syrian rebels. Since the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland last week, Moscow has issued almost daily condemnations of the West for arming “terrorists.”
Rebel spokesmen in Aleppo claimed Friday that they now had weapons which they believe “will change the course of the battle on the ground.”
Military sources are strongly skeptical of their ability - even after the new deliveries - to stand up to the onslaught on their positions in the embattled town by the combined strength of the Syrian army, Hizballah troops and armed Iraqi Shiites. The prevailing intelligence assessment is that they will be crushed in Aleppo as they were in Al Qusayr.
That battle was lost after 16 days of ferocious combat; Aleppo is expected to fall after 40-60 days of great bloodshed.
The arms the rebels received from US, NATO and European sources were purchased on international markets – not only because they were relatively cheap but because they were mostly of Russian manufacture. The rebels are thus equipped with Russian weapons for fighting the Russian arms used by the Syria army. This made Moscow angrier than ever.
Until now, the Erdogan government was fully supportive of the Syrian opposition, permitting them to establish vital command centers and rear bases on Turkish soil and send supplies across the border to fighting units. He has now pulled the rug out from under their cause and given Assad a major leg-up
This about-turn is a strategic earthquake – not just in terms of the Syrian war but also for the United States and, as time goes by, for Israel too.
Ten years ago, Erdogan pulled the same maneuver when he denied US troops passage through Turkey to Iraq for opening a second front against Saddam Hussein.
President Obama reacted by topping up the US deployment in Jordan by 700 combat-equipped troops to 1,000. Patriot missile interceptors and F-16 fighter jets are left behind from their joint war game for as long as the security situation requires. DEBKAfile: The joint US-Jordanian maneuver was in fact abruptly curtailed after two weeks although it was planned to continue for two months until the end of August.
The widening disruptions of the surging Syrian war are on the point of tipping over into Jordan and coming closer than ever to Israel.
4a) America sidelined, barely relevant
The war in Syria, started by locals, is now a regional conflict, the meeting ground of two warring blocs. On one side, the radical Shiite bloc led by Iran, which overflies Iraq to supply Bashar al-Assad and sends Hezbollah to fight for him. Behind them lies Russia, which has stationed ships offshore, provided the regime with tons of weaponry and essentially claimed Syria as a Russian protectorate.
And on the other side are the Sunni Gulf states terrified of Iranian hegemony (territorial and soon nuclear); non-Arab Turkey, now convulsed by an internal uprising; and fragile Jordan, dragged in by geography.
And behind them? No one. It’s the Spanish Civil War except that only one side — the fascists — showed up. The natural ally of what began as a spontaneous, secular, liberationist uprising in Syria was the United States. For two years, it did nothing.
President Obama’s dodge was his chemical-weapons “red line.” In a conflict requiring serious statecraft, Obama chose to practice forensics instead, earnestly agonizing over whether reported poison gas attacks reached the evidentiary standards of “CSI: Miami.”
Obama talked “chain of custody,” while Iran and Russia, hardly believing their luck, reached for regional dominance — the ayatollahs solidifying their “Shiite crescent,” Vladimir Putin seizing the opportunity to dislodge America as regional hegemon, a position the United States achieved four decades ago under Henry Kissinger.
And when finally forced to admit that his red line had been crossed — a “game changer,” Obama had gravely warned — what did he do? Promise the rebels small arms and ammunition.
That’s it? It’s meaningless: The rebels are already receiving small arms from the Gulf states.
Compounding the halfheartedness, Obama transmitted his new “calculus” through his deputy national security adviser. Deputy, mind you. Obama gave 39 (or was it 42?) speeches on health-care reform. How many on the regional war in Syria, in which he has now involved the United States, however uselessly? Zero.
Serious policymaking would dictate that we either do something that will alter the course of the war, or do nothing. Instead, Obama has chosen to do just enough to give the appearance of having done something.
But it gets worse. Despite his commitment to steadfast inaction, Obama has been forced by events to send F-16s, Patriot missiles and a headquarters unit of the 1st Armored Division (indicating preparation for a possible “larger force,” explains The Post) — to Jordan. America’s most reliable Arab ally needs protection. It is threatened not just by a flood of refugees but also by the rise of Iran’s radical Shiite bloc with ambitions far beyond Syria, beyond even Jordan and Lebanon to Yemen, where, it was reported just Wednesday, Iran is arming and training separatists.
Obama has thus been forced back into the very vacuum he created — but at a distinct disadvantage. We are now scrambling to put together some kind of presence in Jordan as a defensive counterweight to the Iran-Hezbollah-Russia bloc.
The tragedy is that we once had a counterweight and Obama threw it away. Obama still thinks the total evacuation of Iraq is a foreign policy triumph. In fact, his inability — unwillingness? — to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement that would have left behind a small but powerful residual force in Iraq is precisely what compels him today to re-create in Jordan a pale facsimile of that regional presence.
Whatever the wisdom of the Iraq war in the first place, when Obama came to office in January 2009 the war was won. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed. Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government had taken down the Sadr Shiite extremists from Basra all the way north to Baghdad. Casualties were at a wartime low; the civil war essentially over.
We had a golden opportunity to reap the rewards of this too-bloody war by establishing a strategic relationship with an Iraq that was still under American sway. Iraqi airspace, for example, was under U.S. control as we prepared to advise and rebuild Iraq’s nonexistent air force.
With our evacuation, however, Iraqi airspace today effectively belongs to Iran — over which it is flying weapons, troops and advisers to turn the tide in Syria. The U.S. air bases, the vast military equipment, the intelligence sources available in Iraq were all abandoned. Gratis. Now we’re trying to hold the line in Jordan.
Obama is learning very late that, for a superpower, inaction is a form of action. You can abdicate, but you really can’t hide. History will find you. It has now found Obama.
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5) Where Was the Tea Party?
By Peggy Noonan
One of the great questions about the 2012 campaign has been “Where was the tea party?” They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the question is: “Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to raise money.”
The economist Stan Veuger, on the American Enterprise Institute‘s blog, takes the question a step further.
The Democrats had been badly shaken by the Republican comeback of 2010. They feared a repeat in 2012 that would lose them the White House.
Might targeting the tea-party groups—diverting them, keeping them from forming and operating—seem a shrewd campaign strategy in the years between 2010 and 2012? Sure. Underhanded and illegal, but potentially effective.
Veuger writes: “It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered—and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been demobilized by the IRS.”
The research paper Veurger and his colleagues have put out notes that, in Veuger’s words, “the Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise.”
More: “The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5-8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”
Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012 victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication. The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped.
Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did. Which is why our editor, James Taranto, calls him “President Asterisk.”
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