Congress and Aides Exempted From 'Obamascare' We The Stuckees!

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I seem to invite responses to my LTE's more than most so I sent the following LTE which the paper may or may not post.

The most recent response came from Tony Center who began his own response "My friend..."  I know Tony and found his response off the mark in many instances and though we know each other I would not say we are friends.

"Frequently my LTE's serve as a burr under the intellectual saddle of liberals and progressives whose ideas and policies, empirically speaking, have proven to fall short of their pronounced goal and thus, produce unintended and negative consequences. I understand the need for government but new is not always improved and even when it is it produces an entire set of issues  that, if not dealt with appropriately, can cause havoc. Change is inevitable but all too often change is sought by indolent  minds who are too stupid to appreciate the beauty of what they already have. More threatening is when change is sought for nefarious reasons and power in order to crush freedom. Consequently, my message is always prevent government from touching too much because lamentably , all too often, what government touches it destroys. Bureaucracies exist to expand their funding and reach and, pyramidaly speaking, numbers are larger at the bottom than top. Government touched education and now is increasingly intruding into health care. I submit government , generally speaking, is better at destruction than improvement. Evidence of this is our military agency. We have the finest but war , by nature, is destructive and wasteful. I daresay, before politicians finish democratizing our military, it will be less effective as education has become since politicians and feel good PC'ers substituted goals of self worth betterment for classics. We currently have a president who is all about change. I would argue, based on five years , he is incompetent, he is divisive,  has led us in the wrong direction and has lied. Of late he would have us believe alleged scandals are phony, as if the tragic and unnecessary death of many serving our nation is a matter unworthy of investigation. As his Sec. Of State said ' What difference does it matter?' For those effected, for those uncaring , for those contemptuous of seeking the truth and with much  to hide these are prophetic and disturbing words.. And then we have the restraints on our freedom of political discourse and intrusions into our privacy. These are the actions of dictators not leaders of a proud Republic. So to those who disagree with me that is your right and prerogative and the fact that you are numerous and vociferous is a welcomed comfort because I am getting under your skin and perhaps forcing you to think and defend your ideas and finding that increasingly difficult you resort to attacking the messenger. At the very least, perhaps, I have served to make the editorial page a bit more stimulating for Barton and Traynor." === Tom Sowell and his busy body politicians.  (See 1 below.) === Poignant! (See 2 below.) === 'OBAMASCARE' RESERVED FOR US MORTALS AND NOT THOSE WE ELECT OR THEIR AIDS!  (SEE 3, 3a and 3b BELOW.) ==== Closing embassies maybe justified, it may be an over -reaction to the failed policies pertaining to Benghazi and the Obama administration's desire to avoid more criticism, it may be evidence of Obama's policy of fecklessness and withdrawal. Whatever the reason, I see in it a precedent that bodes ill and makes little sense because when you telegraph to your enemy your intentions he has the flexibility of selecting another date so to my lame brain it makes little sense but then as Hillary said: "What difference does it make." Closing embassies suggest to me just more evidence Obama's Middle East policies are in shambles. (See 4 below.) === Dick ====================================================================================================== 1)Busybody Politics By Thomas Sowell It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new "solution" to society's "problems." Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns  out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions. San Francisco and New York are both plagued with large "homeless" populations today, largely as a result of previous housing "reforms" that made housing more expensive and severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could be built. The solution? Spend more of the taxpayers' money making homelessness a viable lifestyle for more people. Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among educators is that all sorts of children can be educated in the same classroom. Not just children of different races, but children of different abilities, languages, and values. Isn't it nice to think so? I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with. The result is that many very bright children are bored to the point of becoming behavior problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the range of students who are slower learners. By federal law, even children with severe mental or emotional problems must be "mainstreamed" into classes for other students -- often in disregard of how much this disrupts these classes and sacrifices the education of the other children. Parents who complain about the effect of these "solutions" on their own children's education are made to feel guilty for not being more "understanding" about the problems of handicapped students. Nothing is easier for third party busybodies than being "understanding" and "compassionate" at someone else's expense -- especially if the busybodies have their own children in private schools, as so many public school educators do. Whether in housing, education or innumerable other aspects of life, the key to busybody politics, and its endlessly imposed "solutions," is that third parties pay no price for being wrong. This not only presents opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening, but also to flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other people than these other people know for themselves. Right now, there are people inside and outside of government who are proposing new restrictions on how you may or may not visit the national parks that your taxes support. Among their proposals is doing away with trash cans in these parks, so that visitors have to take their trash out with them. Just how they would enforce this, when millions of people are visiting places like Yosemite or Yellowstone, is something the busybodies need not bother to think through -- much less pay a price, when trash simply accumulates in these parks after trash cans are removed. ObamaCare is perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics. People who have never even run a drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely prescribe what must be done by the entire medical system, from doctors to hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical drugs to health insurance companies. This includes federal laws requiring the turning over of patients' confidential medical records to the federal government, where these records can be looked at by politicians, bureaucrats and whoever can hack into the government's computers. Neither you nor your doctor has a right to keep this information confidential. What could lead anyone to believe that they have either the right or the omniscience to dictate to hundreds of millions of other people? Our educational system may have something to do with that, with their constant promotion of "self-esteem" and especially their emphasis on developing "leaders." Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. The price of their self-indulgence is the sacrifice of our freedom. If we don't defend ourselves against them, who will? ============================================================== 2)

6 BOYS AND 13 HANDS

Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC with the eighth grade class from Clinton, WI where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation's capitol, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall's trip was especially memorable. 

On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history -- that of the six brave soldiers raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, during WW II 

Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed towards the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked, 'Where are you guys from?' 

I told him that we were from Wisconsin. 'Hey, I'm a cheese head, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story.' 

(It was James Bradley who just happened to be in Washington, DC to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, DC but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.) 

When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. (Here are his words that night.) 

'My name is James Bradley and I'm from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I wrote a book called 'Flags of Our Fathers'. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me. 

'Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team.. They were off to play another type of game. A game called 'War.' But it didn't turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don't say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old - and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home never even would talk to their families about it. 

(He pointed to the statue) 'You see this next guy? That's Rene Gagnon fromNew Hampshire. If you took Rene's helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph...a photograph of his girlfriend Rene put that in there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys. Not old men.

'The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the 'old man' because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn't say, 'Let's go kill some Japanese' or 'Let's die for our country' He knew he was talking to little boys. Instead he would say, 'You do what I say, and I'll get you home to your mothers.' 

'The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Ira Hayes was one of them who lived to walk off Iwo Jima. He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him, 'You're a hero' He told reporters, 'How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?'

So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died dead drunk, face down, drowned in a very shallow puddle, at the age of 32 (ten years after this picture was taken). 

'The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky. A fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me, 'Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn't get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.' Yes, he was a fun-lovin' hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother's farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away. 

'The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, Wisconsin, where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite's producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say 'No, I'm sorry, sir, my dad's not here. He is in Canada fishing.
No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don't know when he is coming back.' My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually, he was sitting there right at the table eating his Campbell's soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn't want to talk to the press. 

'You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn't see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, 'cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a combat caregiver. On Iwo Jima he probably held over 200 boys as they died. And when boys died on Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain. 

'When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, 'I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.' 

'So that's the story about six nice young boys.. Three died on Iwo Jima , and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.' 

Suddenly, the monument wasn't just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless. 

We need to remember that God created this vast and glorious world for us to live in, freely, but also at great sacrifice 

Let us never forget from the Revolutionary War to the current War on Terrorism and all the wars in-between that sacrifice was made for our freedom...please pray for our troops.

Remember to pray praises for this great country of ours and also ...please pray for our troops still in murderous places around the world. 

STOP and thank God for being alive and being free due to someone else's sacrifice. 

God Bless You and God Bless America. 

REMINDER: Everyday that you can wake up free, it's going to be a great day. 

One thing I learned while on tour with my 8th grade students in DC that is not mentioned here is . . that if you look at the statue very closely and count the number of 'hands' raising the flag, there are 13. When the man who made the statue was asked why there were 13, he simply said the 13th hand was the hand of God. 

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3) Dear Frank,

Moments before shuttering Capitol Hill for a month-long recess, Congress exempted 11,000 members and staff from ObamaCare. News of Friday's last-minute deal making is especially frustrating since part of ObamaCare's original sell to the American people was that lawmakers and aides had to use the plan.

According to The Wall Street Journal, both parties went ballistic when they learned staff would incur dramatically higher healthcare costs. "Democrats in particular, begged for help," and President Obama lept into action telling them in a closed-door meeting that "he would personally moonlight as H.R. manager and resolve the issue."

He did ... for Congress.

"A behind-closed-doors deal announced after Congress is safely away from the crime scene. This is exactly why America rightly hates Washington," charged Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) in a press release posted on his official website. "Obamacare's a train wreck, even for Congress. So it gets fixed ... FOR CONGRESS ONLY" (emphasis in original).

Vitter is right. All Americans should be extended the same "resolution" that Congress is getting.

But with Congress safely tucked away in their districts, the countdown continues for the "less fortunate" Americans who, on October 1, start enrolling in ObamaCare.

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Congress's ObamaCare Exemption

The President intervenes to give Members and staff a break.

To adapt H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the cynicism and self-dealing of the American political class. Witness their ad-libbed decision, at the 11th hour and on the basis of no legal authority, to create a special exemption for themselves from the ObamaCare health coverage that everybody else is mandated to buy.

The Affordable Care Act requires Members of Congress and their staffs to participate in its insurance exchanges, in order to gain first-hand experience with what they're about to impose on their constituents. Harry Truman enrolled as the first Medicare beneficiary in 1965, and why shouldn't the Members live under the same laws they pass for the rest of the country?

That was the idea when Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley proposed the original good-enough-for-thee, good-enough-for-me amendment in 2009, and the Finance Committee unanimously adopted his rule. Declared Chairman Max Baucus, "I'm very gratified that you have so much confidence in our program that you're going to be able to purchase the new program yourself and I'm confident too that the system will work very well."

Harry Reid revised the Grassley amendment when he rammed through his infamous ObamaCare bill that no one had read for a vote on Christmas eve. But he neglected to include language about what would happen to the premium contributions that the government makes for its employees. Whether it was intentional or not, the fairest reading of the statute as written is that if Democrats thought somebody earning $174,000 didn't deserve an exchange subsidy, then this person doesn't get a subsidy merely because he happens to work in Congress.

But the statute means that about 11,000 Members and Congressional staff will lose the generous coverage they now have as part of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). Instead they will get the lower-quality, low-choice "Medicaid Plus" of the exchanges. The Members—annual salary: $174,000—and their better paid aides also wouldn't qualify for ObamaCare subsidies. That means they could be exposed to thousands of dollars a year in out-of-pocket insurance costs.

The result was a full wig out on Capitol Hill, with Members of both parties fretting about "brain drain" as staff face higher health-care costs. Democrats in particular begged the White House for help, claiming the Reid language was merely an unintentional mistake. President Obama told Democrats in a closed-door meeting last week that he would personally moonlight as HR manager and resolve the issue.

And now the White House is suspending the law to create a double standard. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that runs federal benefits will release regulatory details this week, but leaks to the press suggest that Congress will receive extra payments based on the FEHBP defined-contribution formula, which covers about 75% of the cost of the average insurance plan. For 2013, that's about $4,900 for individuals and $10,000 for families.

How OPM will pull this off is worth watching. Is OPM simply going to cut checks, akin to "cashing out" fringe benefits and increasing wages? Or will OPM cover 75% of the cost of the ObamaCare plan the worker chooses—which could well be costlier than what the feds now contribute via current FEHBP plans? In any case the carve-out for Congress creates a two-tier exchange system, one for the great unwashed and another for the politically connected.

This latest White House night at the improv is also illegal. OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in congressional pay in return for less overall compensation. Those things require appropriations bills passed by Congress and signed by the President.

But the White House rejected a legislative fix because Republicans might insist on other changes, and Mr. Obama feared that Democrats would go along because they're looking out for number one. So the White House is once again rewriting the law unilaterally, much as it did by suspending ObamaCare's employer mandate for a year. For this White House, the law it wrote is a mere suggestion.

The lesson for Americans is that Democrats who passed ObamaCare didn't even understand what they were doing to themselves, much less to everyone else. But you can bet Democrats will never extend to ordinary Americans the same fixes that they are now claiming for themselves. The real class divide in President Obama's America is between the political class and everyone else.

3a)

 A  Country Founded by Geniuses but Run by Idiots

By Jeff Foxworthy:

If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but not for entering and ...remaining in the country illegally — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If you have to get your parents’ permission to go on a field trip or to take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If you MUST show your identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor, or check out a library book and rent a video, but not to vote for who runs the government — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If the government wants to prevent stable, law-abiding citizens from owning gun magazines that hold more than ten rounds, but gives twenty F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If, in the nation’s largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but not one 24-ounce soda, because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make you fat — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If an 80-year-old woman or a three-year-old girl who is confined to a wheelchair can be strip-searched by the TSA at the airport, but a woman in a burka or a hijab is only subject to having her neck and head searched — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If a seven-year-old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his teacher is “cute,” but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government regulation and intrusion, while not working is rewarded with Food Stamps, WIC checks, Medicaid benefits, subsidized housing, and free cell phones — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If the government’s plan for getting people back to work is to provide incentives for not working, by granting 99 weeks of unemployment checks, without any requirement to prove that gainful employment was diligently sought, but couldn’t be found — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If you pay your mortgage faithfully, denying yourself the newest big-screen TV, while your neighbor buys iPhones, time shares, a wall-sized do-it-all plasma screen TV and new cars, and the government forgives his debt when he defaults on his mortgage — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

If being stripped of your Constitutional right to defend yourself makes you more “safe” according to the government — you might live in a nation that was founded by geniuses but is run by idiots.

What a country!

3b) Imposed law replaces checks and balances.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

If we learned anything about Barack Obama in his first term it is that when he starts repeating the same idea over and over, what's on his mind is something else.

The first term's over-and-over subject was "the wealthiest 1%." Past some point, people wondered why he kept beating these half-dead horses. After the election, we knew. It was to propagandize the targeted voting base that would provide his 4% popular-vote margin of victory?very young voters and minorities. They believed. He won.

The second-term over-and-over, elevated in his summer speech tour, is the shafting of the middle class. But the real purpose here isn't the speeches' parboiled proposals. It is what he says the shafting of the middle class is forcing him to do. It is forcing him to "act"?to undertake an unprecedented exercise of presidential power in domestic policy-making. ObamaCare was legislated. In the second term, new law will come from him.

Please don't complain later that you didn't see it coming. As always, Mr. Obama states publicly what his intentions are. He is doing that now. Toward the end of his speech last week in Jacksonville, Fla., he said: "So where I can act on my own, I'm going to act on my own. I won't wait for Congress." (Applause.)

The July 24 speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has at least four references to his intent to act on his own authority, as he interprets it: "That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I'll use it." (Applause.) And: "We're going to do everything we can, wherever we can, with or without Congress."

Every president since George Washington has felt frustration with the American system's impediments to change. This president is done with Congress.

The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama's expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.

The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition.

To create public support for so much unilateral authority, Mr. Obama needs to lessen support for the other two branches of government?Congress and the judiciary. He is doing that.

Mr. Obama and his supporters in the punditocracy are defending this escalation by arguing that Congress is "gridlocked." But don't overstate that low congressional approval rating. This is the one branch that represents the views of all Americans. It's gridlocked because voters are.

Take a closer look at the Galesburg and Jacksonville speeches. Mr. Obama doesn't merely criticize Congress. He mocks it repeatedly. Washington "ignored" problems. It "made things worse." It "manufactures" crises and "phony scandals." He is persuading his audiences to set Congress aside and let him act.

So too the judiciary. During his 2010 State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama denounced the Supreme Court Justices in front of him. The National Labor Relations Board has continued to issue orders despite two federal court rulings forbidding it to do so. Attorney General Eric Holder says he will use a different section of the Voting Rights Act to impose requirements on Southern states that the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Mr. Obama's repeated flouting of the judiciary and its decisions are undermining its institutional authority, as intended.

The three administration nominees enabled by the Senate's filibuster deal?Richard Cordray at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Thomas Perez at the Labor Department and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy?open a vast swath of American life to executive authority on steroids. There won't be enough hours in the day for Mr. Obama to "act on my own."

In a recent Journal op-ed, "Obama Suspends the Law," former federal judge Michael McConnell noted there are few means to stop a president who decides he is not obligated to execute laws as passed by Congress. So there's little reason to doubt we'll see more Obamaesque dismissals of established law, as with ObamaCare's employer mandate. Mr. Obama is pushing in a direction that has the potential for a political crisis.

A principled opposition would speak out. Barack Obama is right that he isn't running again. But the Democratic Party is. Their Republican opponents should force the party's incumbents to defend the president's creeping authoritarianism.

If Democratic Senate incumbents or candidates from Louisiana, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, North Carolina, Montana and Iowa think voters should accede to a new American system in which a president forces laws into place as his prerogative rather than first passing them through Congress, they should be made to say so.

And to be sure, the other purpose of the shafted middle-class tour is to demolish the GOP's standing with independent voters and take back the House in 2014. If that happens?and absent a more public, aggressive Republican voice it may?an unchecked, unbalanced presidential system will finally arrive.

A final quotation on America's system of government: "To ensure that no person or group would amass too much power, the founders established a government in which the powers to create, implement, and adjudicate laws were separated. Each branch of government is balanced by powers in the other two coequal branches." Source: The White House website of President Barack Obama.

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4)Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and regular commentator at Fox news, has said the closing of U.S. embassies in 21 countries is a sign of weakness on the part of the U.S. and suggests capitulation to al-Qaeda.

He may be partly right, but chances are that the closing of the embassies auger something far more ominous.  The shutdowns may be a sign of an increased conflagration in the Middle East and Northern Africa.  We may be looking at the onset of World War III.

For some time, the power-struggles of the listed nations have been largely characterized as civil wars among various Muslim factions, including the Muslim Brotherhood.  But civil wars are confined within national boundaries.  Once the boundary lines have bled into one another, as is presently the case with Syria, the wars become a generalized struggle, with various factions joining with the likeminded of surrounding nations.  As World Wars I and II demonstrated, when war escapes national boundaries or aggressive entities invade other national boundaries, nations with a vested interest in maintaining or extending their power bases begin to team up with one another according to ideological empathies.  The fighting then spreads as more and more nations get sucked into a black hole of conflict.

As the West has gradually abandoned its former role in the area, the national lines the Allied Powers drew in the Versailles Treaty, which basically carved up the ancient Ottoman Empire, have been under incessant pressure.  The pressure increased exponentially since 1979, when extremist Islamists attacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran, capturing 60 American hostages, whom these Islamists held for 444 days.

The Islamist movement spread from nation to nation, placing the area in constant chaos.  Those nations had been carved into supposedly manageable European-sized entities with the probable hope that each nation would gradually take on democratic form, with the League of Nations as a calm and judicious mentor.  But the creators of the Versailles Treaty were oblivious to the intransigently authoritarian nature of Islamism, as the Middle Eastern and North African countries were at the time relatively subdued.

Now, however, the national boundaries established in 1919 are becoming increasingly meaningless, as the Islamist movement is more about empire-building than nation-building.  The West, with its long tradition of democracy, has never fully grasped the Islamist preference for authoritarianism and empire, and so it has believed that the national lines it drew would encourage the growth of democracy.  What the Islamist impulse for empire means, however, is that war among the Middle East and North African nations is inevitable, as national boundaries mean nothing to those determined to re-establish the equivalent of a caliphate.

All the above is to say that the probable reason for the closure of the U.S. embassies is that the hostilities in the area have reached such proportions that the civil wars afflicting the area are no longer containable in any meaningful way.  Further, al-Qaeda and its ilk, not long ago described by the current U.S. administration as completely defeated, have doubtless metastasized to such a degree that they feel safe to attack Big Satan in its most vulnerable outposts -- outposts that have long been islands of diplomacy that is no longer possible. 

The vanishing of the Western centers of diplomacy in the Middle East and northern Africa may mean that the West has been warned -- perhaps by Israel? -- and finally sees that there is no diplomatic solution possible, regardless of the present posturing of the so-called "peace talks" between Palestinians and Israel.  The "peace talks" probably should be regarded as a complete charade, kept up to the bitter end while the entire area is about to go up in flames as America exits stage left.

Meanwhile, two chief players, Iran and Russia, are in a deadly chess game designed to ensure hegemony in the area -- a hegemony that will almost certainly be successful if Iran already has the nuclear bomb. 

But another chief player may already have signaled the U.S. that she is about to do a pre-emptive strike.  While the world is focused in the utterly useless Middle East "peace talks," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knowing beforehand that the talks will be absolutely fruitless, could have already made the decision to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.  It may be that he has already sent word to President Obama, who, with the Benghazi fires still burning in the minds of the conservative media as well as in the hearts of some congressmen, is now committed to retreat.  The administration does not want a dozen Benghazi-type incidents to occur before the elections of 2014 and 2016.  It would be more politically expedient to close the embassies and warn Americans not to travel rather than to risk protecting either the diplomatic outposts or American citizens.

When embassies are closed, it is usually because war is imminent.  The lines of the Versailles Treaty are dissolving as nations disintegrate and new entities take shape.  What those new lines will look like is anyone's guess, but it could be that Iran allied with Russia will be the biggest power-broker in the Middle East, but not without a dreadful struggle.

The question before Israel is whether or not she will allow Iran the capacity to annihilate her, as Iran's leaders have expressly said they would like to do.  Will Israel passively face another holocaust?

Not likely.

The survivalist mentality that has served Israel so well is probably already kicking in.  Israel has often said, "Never again."  For her, it is indeed now or never.  It may be that the chaos and confusion now gripping the Middle East will afford her the opportune moment to strike as the nations surrounding her fight one another. 

As for the United States, it is anyone's guess as to the role this administration sees for our nation regarding Israel.  There is warrant for suspecting that our president will opt out of any meaningful alliance with Israel, leaving her to face the consequences of a strike alone while he mouths empty words of support. 

Time will tell, of course.

But in the meantime, some reading of the tea leaves is warranted, as the unprecedented closing of our embassies gives us a big clue that ominous events are happening behind the scenes, soon to burst into the open with consequences we can scarcely imagine.

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