Saturday, June 1, 2013

Walking and Will The Dems Tell Hillary to Take a Hike?

The Importance Of Walking:

Walking can add minutes to your Life.
This enables you at 85 years old
to spend an additional 5 months in a Nursing
Home at $4,000 per month.

My Grandpa started walking
five miles a day when he was 60.
Now he's 97 years old
and we have no idea where the hell he is.

The only reason I would take up walking
is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

I have to walk early in the morning,
before my brain figures out what I'm doing.

I do have flabby thighs,
but fortunately my stomach covers them.

If you are going to try Cross Country Skiing,
start with a Small Country.

We all get heavier as we get Older,
because there's a lot more information in our heads.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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Kim highlights Obama's double problems with the press and media and liberals.
I suspect, unless more questionable activities are unearthed, Obama will escape any severe political fall out. Yes, the public now seems to see an emperor without clothes and the 2014 vote tally could be skewed towards Republicans , but Obama's silver tongue, his ethnicity  and the fact that most Americans do not realize the threat his incompetence and programs will cause our nation will save his wretched soul. (See 1 below.)

Noonan also weighs in.  (See 1a below.)
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Our dreamy Sec. of State suggests Israel should bank on Jordan's Monarchy will last. (See 2 below.)
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Berkeley and Islamophobia are linked.  (See 3 below.)
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Koffler speculates on why Dems might reject Hilary in 2016. (See 4 below.)

I have mixed feeling about Hillary running.  On the one hand I fear the press, media and rabid women would go overboard in helping elect a female. A Hillary presidency would prove an unmitigated disaster and would continue eight years of domestic rancor.
On the other hand it would be nice to see her run and lose so we can finally rid ourselves of her political presence. 
But then Chelsea is waiting  in the wings!
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Krauthammer hammers!  (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)A Double-Trouble Scandal for Obama

The Justice Department scandal has outraged two of the president's most reliable allies: the press and liberal activists.

By Kim Strassel


The verdict is still out on how much political damage the current trio of scandals will inflict on the Obama White House. For now, the one that might hurt most is the one the public cares about least.
A new Quinnipiac poll shows President Obama's job approval falling to 45%, but the survey also ranks the public's focus on today's Washington controversies. Nearly 45% of voters said the IRS scandal is most important, followed by 24% who picked Benghazi. A mere 15% thought the Justice Department's seizure of press records was a big deal.
No surprise. The IRS is an agency that touches nearly every American, and both the IRS and Benghazi scandals revolve around the sort of big, breathless questions—Did the White House lie? Was the administration targeting enemies?—that rivet public attention. Most Americans don't much care what happens to the press, and if anything wouldn't mind seeing it get some grief.
What this verdict misses, however, is two important realities. The first is that—unlike the IRS and Benghazi scandals—the facts of the DOJ's press intrusions are clear and uncontested. We know Justice has seized records of reporters, that Attorney General Eric Holder himself signed onto a warrant that suggested a journalist was a "co-conspirator" in a national-security leak. We also know that government has violated its own guidelines on probing journalists.
So this is a scandal that can't be ignored or dismissed as a Republican witch hunt. Moreover, it is a scandal that has, for once, outraged two groups that Mr. Obama deeply depends on for his political success: the press and liberal activists.
For years, much of the Washington press corps has served as this White House's front-line defense. As recently as a month ago, the press was still playing no-see-um with Benghazi.
Yet since the AP story broke, the Beltway media have been doing a passable impression of a credible Fourth Estate. White House press secretary Jay Carney's daily briefings now resemble "Survivor" episodes, with journalists firing off questions, rejecting answers, and even rolling their eyes at responses. The White House's evasiveness on the press scandal has suddenly got the press corps wondering what else this administration isn't being straight on.
It has even led to the extraordinary sight of major media outlets this week banding together to boycott meetings planned by Eric Holder to discuss Justice's press investigations. The organizations balked because the meetings would be off the record. Since the press is not known for resisting the spin of anonymous Obama officials, this reaction is progress.
Will it last? That may depend on how many more revelations about press intrusions come to light. But the notable thing is that Mr. Obama has lost the media's loyalty at this critical moment of his presidency, as other scandals over the IRS and Benghazi continue to swirl.
Then there are the White House's left-wing allies. Justice's press mess is particularly toxic in this regard, since it riles up liberals regarding both press freedom and transparency, while reigniting their long-simmering fury over Mr. Obama's national security policies.
As the Nation's editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel explained on ABC's "This Week," the only "real" scandal is "that this administration picked the baton from Bush and failing to uphold what it promised, has had the worst record on press freedom." She moved on to indict the White House on the Patriot Act and wiretapping. Bloomberg columnist Al Hunt admitted it was "true" that "Obama is no better than Richard Nixon." Liberal radio host Bill Press tweeted: "What 'breach of national security' are we talking about re the AP story? It's BS and Holder should be fired."
Congressional Democrats have shown little appetite for defending the White House on the press issue. The risk to the administration is that Democrats begin to sense it is in their political interest (given the outcry from the left) to actively join in the criticism. Mr. Holder has survived past controversies because they were viewed as Republican attacks. Can he withstand a bipartisan barrage?
The White House's success in last year's election hinged in part on its liberal activists, who played a big role in getting the base out to vote. That's the model Mr. Obama and his Organizing for America political-support group are betting on for the 2014 midterms, too. So you can bet the White House is concerned about the fury coming from these allies now.
That's why, of all the scandals, the White House is pouring the most effort into damage control on Justice. The administration has revived its media-shield legislation. It has been summoning the press to the White House for sweet-talking sessions with the president. The president's speech last week at the National Defense University was a convenient platform for Mr. Obama to reassure liberals he was restarting his drive to close Guantanamo and addressing their concerns on drone strikes.

The left and the press have always been with Mr. Obama when it really mattered, and that may well remain the case. The particular significance of Justice's press scandal is that it has deprived Mr. Obama of support at a time when he is vulnerable on so much else. Who knows what will come of that?
1a)

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason. But nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service. Elite opinion in the press and in Washington doesn't fully understand this. Part of the reason is that it's not their ox being gored, it's those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.
Those who aren't deeply distressed about the IRS suffer from a reluctance or inability to make distinctions, and a lack of civic imagination.
An inability to make distinctions: "It's always been like this." "Presidents are always siccing the IRS on their enemies." There's truth in that. We've all heard the stories of the president who picked up the phone and said, "Look into this guy," Richard Nixon most showily. He got clobbered for it. It was one of the articles of impeachmen
It wasn't a one-off. It wasn't a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.
It is considered a bit of a faux pas to point this out, but what we are talking about in part is a Democratic president, a largely Democratic professional administrative class in Washington, and an IRS whose workers belong to a union whose political action committee gave roughly 95% of its political contributions last year to Democrats. Tim Carney had a remarkable piece in the Washington Examiner this week in which he looked for campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. "In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown." An IRS employee said in an email to Mr. Carney, "Do you think people willing to sacrifice lucrative private sector careers to work in tax administration . . . are genuinely going to support the party directed by Grover Norquist?" Mr. Carney noted that one of his IRS correspondents had an interesting detail on his social media profile. He belongs to a Facebook FB +5.01%group called "Target the Shutdown at the Tea Party States." It advised the president, during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight: "For instance, shut down air traffic control at airports in Norfolk, Tampa, Nashville."
Wow. I guess that was target practice.
There has got to be some way to break through this, to create new rules for the road in a situation like this.

Here is the thing. The politicization of government employees wouldn't have worried a lot of us 40, 30 or even 20 years ago. But since then, as a country, we have become, as individuals, less respectful of political differences and even of each other, as everything—all parts of American life—has become more political, more partisan, more divided and more aggressive.
Because people think the IRS has always, in various past cases, been used as a political tool, they think we'll glide through this scandal too. We'll muddle through, we'll investigate, the IRS will right itself, no biggie.
But when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a "massive administrative state," one built with many protections and much autonomy.
If it is not forced to change, it will not.
Which gets us to the part about imagination. What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights.
Those who think this is just business as usual are ahistorical, and those who think nothing can be done, or nothing serious should be done, are suffering from Cynicism Poisoning.
The House wants to proceed with hearings and an investigation itself, and understandably. One reason is pride. "We are the ones who got the IRS to do the audit," a congressman said the other night. Another is momentum: An independent counsel would take time and take some air out of the story. But Congress is operating within a lot of political swirls. The IRS certainly doesn't seem to fear them—haven't its leaders made that clear in their testimony so far? Congress itself is not highly regarded by the public. Didn't I say that politely?
Some members have been scared into thinking that tough hearings will constitute "overreach." But when you spend all your time fearing overreach, you can forget to reach at all. A defensive crouch isn't a good posture from which to launch a probe. And some members fear that if they pursue and give time to something that is not an economic issue, it will be used against them. But stopping the revenue-gathering arm of the federal government from operating as a hopelessly politicized and aggressive entity is an economic issue. It has to do with basic American faith in, and compliance with, half of the spending/taxing apparatus of the federal government. How could that not be an economic issue?
There will be more hearings next week, and fair enough. But down the road an independent counsel is going to be needed because the House does not have all the prosecutorial powers an independent counsel would—the powers to empanel a grand jury, to more easily grant immunity to potential witnesses, find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, indict.
Another reason to want an independent counsel: There are obviously many good, fair-minded workers in the IRS, people of sterling character. They deserve to be asked about what they were forced to put up with, what they felt they had to bite their tongues about. There may even be a few stories about people who stood up and said: "You know you're targeting Americans because they hold political views you don't like, right? You know that's wrong, right? And I'm not going to do it."
It would be worth an investigation that breaks open the IRS to find that person, and that moment. You have no idea how much better it would make us feel, how inspiring and comforting, too
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2)
Kerry: Israel should assume Jordanian monarchy rules forever

By Dr. Aaron Lerner

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has proposed that Israel stake it's
survival on the current ruling Jordanian monarchy remaining in power in
perpetuity.

Yediot Ahronot correspondent, Alex Fishman, reports in today's edition that
Kerry recently succeeded in convincing the Jordanians to agree to support
his plan to have Jordanian forces participate in some form of shared
security control of the Jordan Valley.

It should be noted that no one with any knowledge of the Middle East today
is able to predict who or what will rule Jordan a year from now – let along
a decade from now.

It should also be noted that John Kerry is not a Martian who landed on Earth
for the first time a few days ago but instead is the U.S. Secretary of State
and lived in this world over the past several years during which time and
again the folly of making plans based on the working assumption that a given
regime would remain in power forever has been demonstrated
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3)Berkeley Profs: 'Islamophobia' Greater Threat Than Islamic Terrorism
by Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene

The false narrative that "Islamophobia" is a growing threat received a boost at the "Fourth Annual International Conference on the Study of Islamophobia: From Theorizing to Systematic Documentation," which took place at the University of California, Berkeley on April 19 and 20, 2013 under the chairmanship of its foremost conceptual proponent, Hatem Bazian. A senior lecturer in UC Berkeley's department of Near Eastern studies, Bazian directs the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP), a program of the school's Center for Race & Gender, and sits on the editorial board for the Islamophobia Studies Journal. The IRDP is heavily invested in promoting the belief that "Islamophobia" is on the rise globally and its annual conferences (click here and here to read about previous years) never fail to ratchet up the hysteria.
The conference opened just as a massive manhunt was launched in Boston for the two Islamic terrorists, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon earlier in the week. Predictable anticipations of a coming "backlash" against Muslims—which never developed—were repeated throughout the event. Ironically, actual violence against Muslims came at the hands of Turks against Syrian refugees after a car bombing killed 52 people in Reyhanli, Turkey on May 11, 2013.
An audience of approximately sixty-five students, many of them women in hijab (head scarf), attended the second day of the conference, eager to learn about the "'Othering' of Islam," the "racialization of Muslims," and the definition of "Islamophobia":
A contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure, which rationalizes the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve 'civilizational rehab' of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise).
In other words, it was a day of mind-numbing jargon delivered by academics bent on creating the very panic and division they claim to decry.

During the "Islamophobia, Law and Public Discourses" panel, Keith Feldman, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, gave a presentation titled, "How (Anti)Terrorism Went Viral." He focused on the likening in public discourse of terrorism to a virus or a disease that's contagious, without boundaries, and to which no country is immune. Feldman's evidence included comments by Newt Gingrich and former George H. W. Bush special assistant Richard N. Haass, and the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (an obsession of conspiracy theorists).

"In addressing the particular question of anti-Muslim racism," Feldman concluded, such language is used to secure "the homeland against a medicalized threat in its capacity to pathologize subject populations"—a claim undermined by the unacknowledged fact that only the word "terrorism," not "Muslim," was used by those he cited to describe this metaphorical infection.

Saeed Khan, a history professor and lecturer in Near East and Asian studies at Wayne State University, began his lecture, "Islamophobia and Other Anti-Progressive Campaigns in the Midst of Americas Demographic Shift," by alluding to:
[W]hat has transpired over the last several days in Boston and the unfortunate inevitable reaction I think many in the room are expecting will happen vis-a-vis Islamophobia in its various manifestations.
Noting that some estimates put minorities in the majority in the U.S. by 2043, Khan predicted "an age of multiple moral panics because of this demographic shift" among whites and in particular, white Republicans. "I am situating . . . Islamophobia within this meta-panic," he added, before devoting the bulk of his talk to the six "anti-progressive" issues he attributed to various Republican legislators:
Voter ID and voter suppression efforts, immigration 'reform,' those efforts targeting the LGBT community, reproductive and contraceptive rights, collective bargaining rights at work, along with anti-Sharia, anti-mosque initiatives. . . . By some strange coincidence, a single political party is behind all these efforts: the same politicians targeting all groups. Muslim groups are part of a bigger 'Other.'
Khan didn't explain how opposing the implementation of Sharia law in the U.S. dovetails with issues such as gay and women's rights. Instead, he detailed his plans to conduct a "study, hopefully ready in time for the mid-term election season in 2014," which "will be looking at all fifty states and DC, locating Islamophobia within these six groups as targets of a coordinated effort." He left no doubt that this "coordinated effort" would include targeting the Republican legislators in question for defeat.

Jasmin Zine, an associate professor of sociology at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, spoke on "Constructing the 'Enemies Within': Muslim Youth, Islamophobia, and the Racial Politics of Canada's 'Home Grown' War on Terror," as part of the "Islamophobia in the Age of War" panel. Having based her research on interviews with young Canadian Muslims, Zine asked rhetorically how she could guarantee the confidentiality of her subjects under the "politics of empire" in "Canada's war on terror." As she put it:
I am a well known activist, but . . . what if my data can be confiscated, because of a 'person of interest' label? . . . How do we do our research because of this context of Islamophobia?
Lamenting "Canadian images of the home grown," she complained that the "terrible tragedy in Boston has evoked this home grown terrorist . . . before the facts of the case were known." The fact that the perpetrators of the Boston bombing were Islamic terrorists or that a thwarted plot to derail a passenger train traveling from New York to Toronto the following week involved three Islamic terrorists rather undermined her comments.

Noting that her interview subjects had expressed hesitation at playing paintball or "violent video games in public concourse at the university" for fear of looking like terrorists, Zine added, "I call this the Panopticon of self-surveillance; internalizing the gaze." She described how she and her nineteen-year-old son also suffer from this alleged malady:
We go to Muslim youth events. We play a game: Spot the agent. The guy with the beard, the curious white woman—who? We know someone is there watching; we are very aware of it.
Beyond her paranoia and narcissism, Zine seemed unaware that these "hardships" weren't exactly heartrending during a week when a number of Americans were killed and maimed by the very Islamic terrorists she deemed imaginary.

On the same panel, Tamirace Fakhoury, a political science and international relations professor at Lebanese American University in Beirut who was a visiting postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies in 2011, spoke about "Debunking Islamophobia?: the Discourse of Arab and Muslim Student Associations at UC Berkeley." Her presentation explored the level of activism the "non-state actors" and "transnational contesters" in these student associations devote to countering "Islamophobia." Her jargon-filled, stream of consciousness digressions were opaque:
Colonialist and Orientalist perceptions generating counter-narratives; disentangling the Palestinian issue from Islamophobic connotations; recasting as a civil rights narrative . . . Transnational associations recasting discussion of Islamophobia . . . analytical framework, which consists of structural context and the discursive strategies of actions.
In time, Fakhoury shifted course and suddenly stated, "The question here is whether these international associations of students matter." Answering in the affirmative, assuming that "resistance" is their primary goal, she provided a list of helpful suggestions, including improving access to resources and fellowships, checking the ethnicity box on student applications "so that they could separate themselves with other Arabs," and asking for courses that challenge the "Orientalist colonial narrative." She urged students to invite speakers to campus to "show how and why Islamophobia is a policy construct of the United States" and to take advantage of "Berkeley's opportunity structure" to further their "global commitment to morality social justice coalition building."

Fakhoury concluded that students' most significant objective should be to introduce resolutions at various campuses condemning "Islamophobic hate speech," including the assertion that Islam is "inherently dictocratic." She never mentioned the importance of free speech, an apolitical education, or the cultivation of an identity separate from one's ethnicity or religion.

Hatem Bazian concluded the day by examining Twitter activity surrounding the conference. A PowerPoint presentation featured the faces of the scholar of Islam Robert Spencer, blogger and activist Pamela Geller, and television/radio host Glenn Beck. Claiming that Spencer had issued an "Islamophobic tweet," the contents of which he didn't reveal, he warned the audience that, "The Islamophobes are there," before adding jauntily:
I always say thanks. There's no such thing as bad publicity; it's what you do with it, so once again we want to . . . thank them for engaging us in this material.

He then invited conference participants to submit papers for the next issue of the Islamophobia Studies Journal before summing up the hyper-politicized atmosphere of the conference by claiming that, "education is about social justice."

When an audience member who identified herself as being from Cambridge, MA, asked, "What would you do if you were mayor of Boston?," no one on the panel answered. Another audience member finally blurted out, "Stay calm, I'd say," to which Mahan Mirza, the panel's moderator and a teacher at Zaytuna College, Berkeley's "Islamic university" and a cosponsor of the conference, responded: "I would be a radical mayor and advise the populace not to believe mainstream media reports." The awkward silence that followed was broken only when someone asked about the previous talk, at which point the audience exhaled a collective sigh of relief.

The brutal terrorist attack on Boston and the then-growing awareness that the perpetrators were Caucasian Muslims did not fit the artificial "racialized" narrative of an academic enterprise devoted to battling "Islamophobia," demonizing critics, silencing dissent, and politicizing higher education. Ideology and willful blindness to inconvenient facts are poor substitutes for honest examinations and rigorous debate about Islamist terrorism in the U.S. and beyond. As long as America's Middle East studies establishment refuses to admit the obvious, taking them seriously about the most vital issues of our day is a fool's errand.
Berkeley resident Rima Greene co-wrote this article with Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

----4) Why Democrats might reject Hillary Clinton in 2016
By KEITH KOFFLER 
It looks like the Hillary Clinton inevitability bandwagon is up and running again.
Just as in the ramp-up to 2008, Hillary has again scored a victory in the Political Prognosticators’ Primary, vanquishing the prospective Democratic field, in the eyes of the cognoscenti, by pre-spanking her opposition with her imposing résumé.


No doubt she can outwork the opposition and probably raise more money and get more pop stars to pledge their allegiance. She eats determination for breakfast and persistence for lunch.
But what those who tout Clinton as a nigh unstoppable force for the 2016 Democratic nomination fail to realize is that Hillary Clinton is the most overrated politician of her generation.
But diligence, as Barack Obama has taught us, does not guarantee success. Getting results and performing when it counts — as Obama also teaches — are what matters in politics. And results are what Clinton doesn’t get, and probably won’t get in 2016.
Her entrée onto the political stage as her own person seemed auspicious: as first lady in 1993, she seemed destined to shepherd her husband’s health care reform proposal through the Congress and straight to his Oval Office desk. But by 1994, the labyrinthine Big Government plan of more than 1,000 pages had collapsed of its own weight.
Results were, of course, also elusive during her other biggest moment in the political arena, her run for the presidency in 2008. Her supposedly unstoppable procession to the nomination was somehow derailed by a callow young man with a foreign-sounding name who had the annoying habit of making Democratic voters crave hope and change instead of experience and common sense.
The rest of Clinton’s record reads like an excruciatingly long CV that seeks to overwhelm with content but out of which nothing particularly impressive pops out.
She carpetbagged her way into a safe New York Senate seat but did little that was particularly notable during eight years in which she mainly seemed to be nesting on Capitol Hill until she could hatch her presidential campaign.
Though lacking qualifications for the job, she was chosen secretary of state after her failed presidential bid as part of President-elect Obama’s “Keep Your Enemies Closer” strategy — often misinterpreted as a “Team of Rivals” approach — and proceeded to again do little that was remarkable.
She worked hard, of course, traveling incessantly, but there never appeared to be any grand plan or theory of world politics going on inside her head.
She’ll be remembered more for her failures, including a “reset” button with Russia that was mistranslated and then ultimately failed to work, the ascension to power of Muslim fundamentalism in the Middle East, the failure to protect the U.S. mission in Benghazi, and the editing by her aides of the talking points framing the cause of the Benghazi attack. Meanwhile Iran continued on the path toward an atom bomb and tens of thousands died in Syria at the hands of Bashar Assad, whom she had suggested was a “reformer.”
Clinton’s bumbling political touch was on full display during a recent congressional hearing in which she exclaimed, with respect to the cause of the Benghazi attack, “What difference at this point does it make?”
Nevertheless, if Woody Allen is right and 80 percent of life is showing up, Clinton may still have a chance, because she certainly has been showing up. But there are other headwinds that contradict the prevailing notion that the breeze is at her back.

“It’s her turn,” is what’s often said about Clinton, but Democratic primary voters don’t care whose turn it is. They have repeatedly swooned for thrilling newcomers instead.First of all, unlike Republicans, Democrats don’t stage a coronation for the last cycle’s runner-up. Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney had all gained credibility with Republicans voters who decided it was their turn after an earlier strong primary loss.

They ditched Edmund Muskie, who’d run as vice president in 1968, for George McGovern in 1972. They ignored a slew of familiar names in 1976 to nominate Jimmy Carter, took Bill Clinton in 1992 over 1976 runner-up Jerry Brown, and of course plucked Barack Obama out of nowhere to make him the candidate in 2008. We may hardly have even heard, at this point, of the person who will best Clinton in 2016.
Or perhaps we have. The exception to the rule for Democrats is former sitting vice presidents, like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore — all of whom were nominated. And now another, Vice President Joe Biden, seems to want the job too.

What’s more, the Benghazi scandal has clearly damaged the credibility of Clinton’s claim to competence. While her name is mentioned daily in connection with the fiasco, Biden has cleverly laid low. After associating himself with seemingly every other aspect of the Obama presidency, Biden seems to have somehow immunized himself from the scandals.

For Hillary Clinton, 2016 may come down to that God-given quality that many great politicians are gifted with: Lousy opponents. But that’s a risky formula for success.

Keith Koffler, who covered the White House as a reporter for CongressDaily and Roll Call, is editor of the blog White House Dossier.


5)
Video: Krauthammer Brings Up The Obama/Clinton 10:00 Phone Call: ‘There’s the Scandal’


On the O’Reilly Factor, tonight, Charles Krauthammer brought up the 10:00 pm phone call between  Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, whose activities on the night of the 9/11 attack in Benghazi have yet to be scrutinized. What did he do for those eight hours? Krauthammer posited that the answer to this question could be the biggest scandal of all.
I think there is a bigger story here that will in time come out. The biggest scandal of all, the biggest question is what was the president doing in those eight hours. He had a routine meeting at five o’clock. He never after during the eight hours when our guys have their lives in danger, he never called the Secretary of Defense, he never calls the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he never called the CIA Director, Who does he call? But five hours in he calls the Secretary of State. And after the phone call she releases a statement essentially about the video and how we denounce any intolerance. It looks as if the only phone call is to construct a cover story at a time when the last two Americans who died were still alive and fighting for their lives. There’s the scandal and that has to be uncovered.”

As you may remember, Clinton said in a statement following the 10:00 pm phone call; “some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”
Frank Gaffney of The Washington Times recently wrote about the Benghazi Scandal’s Female Factor:
Curiously, the truth that has finally begun to emerge has yet to shed light on the involvement of two other women who almost certainly were players before, during and after the Benghazi attacks.
The first is Valerie Jarrett. She is Mr. Obama’s longtime consigliere. Such is her relationship with him and the first lady that she is permitted to involve herself in virtually all portfolios, including the most sensitive foreign affairs and national security ones. That would surely be the case in this instance in light of Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s insightful observation:
“The Obama White House sees every event as a political event . Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.”
To rephrase Sen. Howard Baker famous questions from an earlier congressional investigation of a presidential cover-up called Watergate: What did Ms. Jarrett do, and when did she do it?
I think the chances that Obama consulted his “longtime consigliere” at some point between 5:00 and 10:00 are extremely high.
Representative Jason Chaffetz has been saying that Obama could face impeachment over the Regime’s response to the Benghazi attack.
 “They purposefully and willfully misled the American people, and that’s unacceptable,” Chaffetz told NRO’s Robert Costa. “It’s part of a pattern of deception.”

That’s why that 10:00 phone call is so important.
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