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Obama and America's credibility in the Middle East has evaporated. (See 1 below.)
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Syria is ablaze because of Israel. Egypt is about to implode because of Israel. Iran is developing nuclear weapons because of Israel and the Palestinians hate each other because of Israel. Iraqis still kill each other because of Israel.
However, any man who works as hard as our president, can blame everyone for his own failures and lack of leadership, yet remains in control of the golf cart convinces me we have nothing to worry about.
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Is Priebus going to teach Republicans how to fight back? They do not have to lie like Obama and the Democrats. They simply need to stand up against these lies and offer sound rebuttals and the truth and not shrink away when challenged.
Obama's record of inept leadership and abject failure is evident and mounting and all Republicans need to do is what the press and media have failed to do and, even for feckless Republicans, that should not be too overwhelming. (See 2 below.)
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Off to Arkansas Monday and while in Little Rock might even visit 'Ole' Bill's Library.
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Dick
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1)Hoekstra: Mideast 'Ablaze' While US Has 'Little Credibility' in Region
Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra told Newsmax on Thursday that "we have a Middle East that is ablaze" and that the situation reflects "a diminished U.S. influence" in the region.
"It's chaos, and the U.S. and this administration have very, very little — if any — leverage to help resolve the crisis in Egypt," the Michigan Republican told Newsmax amid news reports that as many as 638 people were killed in the country’s deadliest day since the Arab Spring began in 2011.
"We now have chaos throughout Libya, radical jihadists on the doorstep of getting into Western Europe," Hoekstra said. "That was not possible under [Moammar] Gadhafi.
"You've got a dead American ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, and you've got Egypt ablaze," he added. "You've got total chaos in Syria, and I don't think that's it yet. Who knows what's going to happen in Jordan? Who knows what may happen in Turkey? And you've got chaos in Iraq.
"It's like: 'Wow! What a huge mess we have!' It's been a long time since we've had such little credibility in the Middle East as what we have today," Hoekstra said.
A crackdown by the Egyptian military that began on Wednesday against the mostly Islamic supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi has caused 638 deaths and more than 4,500 injuries throughout Egypt.
President Barack Obama was among the world leaders condemning the bloody crackdown. On Thursday, he canceled joint U.S.-Egyptian military maneuvers.
In Thursday's violence, government buildings were set afire near the pyramids, policemen were gunned down, and scores of Christian churches were attacked. As turmoil engulfed the country, the Interior Ministry authorized the use of deadly force against protesters targeting police and state institutions.
The Muslim Brotherhood, trying to regroup after the assault on their encampments and the arrest of many of their leaders, called for a mass rally on Friday to challenge the government's declaration of a monthlong nationwide state of emergency and a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
The violence marked Egypt's deadliest day since the 2011 popular uprising that toppled autocratic ruler Hosni Mubarak and plunged the country into more than two years of instability.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, Hoekstra served eight terms before leaving office to run unsuccessfully for Michigan governor in 2010. He chaired the Intelligence Committee from 2004 to 2007, and currently serves on the Advisory Board for Lignet.com.
"The actions in Egypt are horrific," Hoekstra told Newsmax. "What appears now is the almost systemic slaughter of Coptic Christians.
"This administration is not speaking out about the slaughter of Christians in Egypt, and this has been going on for almost a year. The Muslim Brotherhood is now blaming Coptic Christians. They're the convenient scapegoat for this.
"The least we should be doing is speaking up for human rights and religious freedom and the protection of the Coptics in Egypt," he added. "There was always some persecution going on, but what's been going on since the brotherhood came into power has been bad.
"They’re running people of the Christian faith out of the country, or they're killing them."
At this point, the bloodshed in Egypt is not about restoring Morsi to power, but it never has been, Hoekstra said.
"It was never about one person. It was never about Mubarak. It was never about Morsi," he said. "This is about the Muslim Brotherhood and the kind of groups and ideology they represent versus the ideology and the kind of governance that people like Mubarak and the Egyptian military represent."
More broadly, however, Hoekstra said the Mideast turmoil reflected a "relatively naïve" foreign policy by the Obama administration.
"They really believed that with a new president and a new administration in Washington that the Middle East and the radical elements would be much more open to discussions with the U.S. and with the moderates in these countries to reach some kind of an accommodation.
"In reality, when the radical jihadists see an opening, they don't see it as an opportunity for accommodation, they see it as an opportunity to push their agenda — and they see weakness.
"We've seen that in Iran," Hoekstra continued. "We see that in Egypt. We've seen that in Libya — and, so what do we have now? All of that makes Israel much more vulnerable.
"You just have a lack of clarity in terms of U.S. message. What is our message?" he asked. "It was about getting rid of Mubarak and having elections. What we found out in Afghanistan and in Iraq is that elections don't give you democracy. Elections don't guarantee stability. They don't guarantee freedom.
"We need to decide what we want and what's important in the Middle East," Hoekstra added. "Is it elections? Is it stability? Security and stability for Israel? We've been all over the map as to what is important to the United States."
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2)Taking Back the GOP Debates
The party has a right to protect its own interests: no more fact-challenged Candy Crowleys.
The summer meetings of national political parties are usually quiet affairs, but this week’s Republican National Committee meeting in Boston is full of controversy about who should moderate and run the 2016 GOP presidential-primary debates. A few RNC members are even talking about ditching conventional journalists as moderators and bringing in Sean Hannity or Mark Levin to do the deed. “I actually think that’s a very good idea,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus told Fox News’s Andrea Tantaros. “I mean, there’s a lot of good people out there that can actually understand the base of the Republican Party, the primary voters.” Another possibility is that new players — ranging from C-SPAN to Telemundo to the Christian Broadcasting Network — might be allowed to sponsor debates.
Priebus himself jump-started the debate earlier this month when he asked NBC and CNN to withdraw their planned multi-part film projects on the life of Hillary Clinton. Priebus said that giving the likely Democratic frontrunner for president such exposure so close to the election called the objectivity of the networks into question and motivated the RNC to reconsider whether these networks should even participate in organizing presidential debates.
2)Taking Back the GOP Debates
The party has a right to protect its own interests: no more fact-challenged Candy Crowleys.
The summer meetings of national political parties are usually quiet affairs, but this week’s Republican National Committee meeting in Boston is full of controversy about who should moderate and run the 2016 GOP presidential-primary debates. A few RNC members are even talking about ditching conventional journalists as moderators and bringing in Sean Hannity or Mark Levin to do the deed. “I actually think that’s a very good idea,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus told Fox News’s Andrea Tantaros. “I mean, there’s a lot of good people out there that can actually understand the base of the Republican Party, the primary voters.” Another possibility is that new players — ranging from C-SPAN to Telemundo to the Christian Broadcasting Network — might be allowed to sponsor debates.
Priebus himself jump-started the debate earlier this month when he asked NBC and CNN to withdraw their planned multi-part film projects on the life of Hillary Clinton. Priebus said that giving the likely Democratic frontrunner for president such exposure so close to the election called the objectivity of the networks into question and motivated the RNC to reconsider whether these networks should even participate in organizing presidential debates.
It’s not controversial to note that presidential debates have long displayed real problems with fairness on the part of moderators and panelists. PBS anchor Jim Lehrer notes in a recent book, Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, that the panelists in one of the 1988 presidential debates between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis pressured CNN moderator Bernard Shaw to withdraw or alter what became his famous question to Dukakis: Would he favor the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered? Now-MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell and ABC’s Ann Compton confirmed to Lehrer that they had put pressure on Shaw, who is still peeved over the incident. “I’ve never confronted any of the three panelists,” Shaw said. “But I was outraged at the time that a journalist would try to talk a fellow journalist out of asking a question. I think you can tell I am still doing a burn over it. I just wouldn’t think of doing that.”
Old-school journalists such as Shaw would no doubt have wondered at the shenanigans of the 2012 campaign. During the final debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, CNN moderator Candy Crowley stepped out of her role and took Obama’s side in a heated moment in the debate, attempting to correct Romney on a factual question about the Benghazi terrorist attack. She later had to admit that Romney had been more right than wrong in his answer.
In the primaries, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked all of the GOP candidates before the New Hampshire primary whether they thought states should ban contraception. At the time, there was no public-policy debate in any state on the issue. He continued to harp on contraception after the candidates addressed the issue. Newt Gingrich, for one, fought back, tellling the former top aide to President Bill Clinton after a question about gay marriage: “I just want to raise a point about the news-media bias. You don’t hear the opposite question asked. Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples, which is exactly what the state has done? . . . The bigotry question goes both ways, and there’s a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. And none of it gets covered by the news media.”
NBC’s Brian Williams also demonstrated how out of touch he was with public opinion during one debate at the Reagan Library, when he asked Governor Rick Perry about the criminals executed in the state of Texas: “Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?” After Perry explained that anyone convicted had by that point exhausted numerous appeals and deserved the “ultimate justice,” many in the audience clapped. Williams then asked Perry to explain the audience reaction. “What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?” It was almost as if Williams, disgusted by the audience reaction, was unaware that Americans have consistently backed the death penalty for murder by a 2-to-1 ratio, with support among Republicans at 80 percent or higher.
None of this is to suggest that Republicans who want to install exclusively conservative commentators as debate moderators and panelists have got it right. Debates will not serve the party well if they become an echo chamber or if the moderators address only hot-button issues that spark the conservative base. But a political party has a right to do its best to project the kind of image it wishes, and if that involves greater “diversity” in debate formats and participants, all the better. Just as the media landscape has offered more choices to consumers with the advent of new players, so too would presidential debates appeal to more viewers if they moved beyond the formats and cast that seem to have been ordained over a half century ago, during the Nixon–Kennedy confrontations. Everything else in the media is changing, so why not the fusty and frozen format of debates?
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