Nostalgic Auction ! Cruz Took The Point and The Expected Flack!
---
Has Obama pulled the curtains down? Time will tell but I would not doubt it.
Meanwhile Krauthammer remains clear eyed! (See 1 and 1a below.)
===
My friend, John Fund, sees the Cruz matter differently than my friend, Kim Strassel, who believes Republicans wasted time shooting at each other rather than aiming their guns at Democrats and continuing to pin the 'Obamascare' tail on their donkey .
I see merit in both views but at least Cruz was wiling to take the point and not shrink back into the bushes along with most of the other Repubican wusses!.(See 2 and 2a below.)
===
This from a Marine friend and true patriot who laments the passing of an era and what it meant to him, and for that matter to me. This week a kid was thrown out of school for shooting his BB gun near his home even though he violated no laws.
We are past the Viet Nam period of disrespect for authority and into the period where anything goes.
We have a president who lies, does not even know how many States are in The Union, and spends your money like it is water on laws that are bad for our nation and our freedoms and takes vacations whose costs are blatant and shameful. He shuts The White House down because of politics and frankly could care less about the damage he is doing to our nation.
That is where we are in our current state of affairs and I do not believe I overstated any facts.
I feel guilty because I have lived through the filet of America and am not sure the future will provide our successors with the same prime choices.(see 3 below.)
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)US appeasement of Iran drowns Israel’s military option against nuclear Iran or chemical Syria Thursday, Sept.26, will go down in Israel’s history as the day it lost its freedom to use force either against the Iranian nuclear threat hanging over its head or Syria’s chemical capacity – at least, so long as Barack Obama is president of the United States. During that time, the Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah axis, backed by active weapons of mass destruction, is safe to grow and do its worst.
Ovations for the disarming strains of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani’s serenade to the West and plaudits for the pragmatism of its Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif flowed out of every window of UN Center in New York this week.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who took part in the highest-level face to face encounter with an Iranian counterpart in more than 30 years, did say that sanctions would not be removed until Tehran produced a transparent and systematic plan for dismantling its nuclear program.
But then, in an interview to CBS TV, he backpedaled. Permission for international inspectors to visit the Fordo underground enrichment facility would suffice for the easing of sanctions starting in three months’ time.
By these words, the US pushed back Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first demand to shutter Fordo and its equipment for enriching uranium to near-weapons grade, which he reiterated at this week’s Israeli cabinet meeting in Jerusalem.
To Tehran, Kerry therefore held out the promise of a short deadline for starting to wind sanctions down - this coming December.
Tehran’s primary objective is therefore within reach, the easing for sanctions without having to rescind any part of its nuclear aspirations - called “nuclear rights” in Iranian parlance.
The foreign ministers of the five permanent Security Council members and Germany, meeting Thursday with Zarif, arranged to resume formal nuclear negotiations next month in Geneva.
In another chamber of the UN building, the Americans were busy climbing all the way down from the military threat Barack Obama briefly brandished against Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons eons ago – on August 31 – before he killed it by passing the decision to the US Congress.
Any suggestion of force against Assad was finally buried at the UN Security Council Thursday, when the United States accepted a formal motion requiring Syria to comply with the international ban on chemical weapons, while yielding to Moscow’s insistence on dropping the penalty for non-compliance incorporated in the original US-British-French draft.
The message relayed to Tehran from both wings of UN headquarters was that it was fully shielded henceforth by a Russian veto and US complaisance against the oft-vaunted “credible military option” waved by Washington. Iran and its close ally, the Syrian ruler Assad, were both now safe from military retribution – from the United States and Israel alike – and could develop or even use their weapons of mass destruction with impunity.
Israel’s Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, who was on the spot, could do little but repeat his government’s demands of Tehran to anyone who would listen, shouted down by the flood of conciliation pouring out for the new Iranian president. There was no escaping the conclusion that the Netanyahu government’s policy – if that is what it could be called - for preventing a nuclear-armed Iran is in tatters.
Iran, instead of facing world pressure to disarm its nuclear program, managed to turn the spotlight on Israel, requiring the world to denuclearize the entire Middle East and force Israel to join the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty.
Given the atmosphere prevailing in the world body these days, it is not surprising that the speech delivered to the assembly by the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was rated moderate – even when he called the establishment of the State of Israel a “historic, unprecedented injustice which has befallen the Palestinian people in al-Nakba of 1948” and demand redress.
This perversion of the UN's historic action to create a Jewish state could only go down as moderate in a climate given over wholly under John Kerry’s lead to appeasing the world’s most belligerent nations and forces, so long as they made the right diplomatic noises.
1a)
The real Rouhani
By Charles Krauthammer
The search, now 30 years old, for Iranian “moderates” goes on. Amid the enthusiasm of the latest sighting, it’s worth remembering that the highlight of the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages debacle was the secret trip to Tehran taken by Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s former national security adviser. He brought a key-shaped cake symbolizing the new relations he was opening with the “moderates.”
We know how that ended.
Three decades later, the mirage reappears inthe form of Hassan Rouhani. Strange résumé for a moderate: 35 years of unswervingly loyal service to the Islamic Republic as a close aide to Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Moreover, Rouhani was one of onlysix presidential candidates, another678 having been disqualified by the regimeas ideologically unsound. That puts him in the 99th centile for fealty.
Rouhani is Khamenei’s agent but, with a smile and style, he’s now hailed as the face of Iranian moderation. Why? Because Rouhani wants better relations with the West.
Well, what leader would not want relief from Western sanctions that have sunk Iran’s economy, devalued its currency and caused widespread hardship? The test of moderation is not what you want but what you’re willing to give. After all, sanctions were not slapped on Iran for amusement. It was to enforce multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding a halt to uranium enrichment.
Yet in his lovey-dovey Post op-ed, his U.N. speech and various interviews, Rouhani gives not an inch on uranium enrichment. Indeed, he has repeatedly denied that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons at all. Or ever has. Such a transparent falsehood — what country swimming in oil would sacrifice its economy just to produce nuclear electricity that advanced countries such as Germany are already abandoning? — is hardly the basis for a successful negotiation.
But successful negotiation is not what the mullahs are seeking. They want sanctions relief. And more than anything, they want to buy time.
It takes about 250 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in August that Iran already has 186 kilograms. That leaves the Iranians on the threshold of going nuclear. They are adding3,000 new high-speed centrifuges. They need just a bit more talking, stalling, smiling and stringing along of a gullible West.
Rouhani is the man to do exactly that. As Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005, he boasted in a 2004 speech to the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the [uranium conversion] facility in Isfahan. . . . In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan.”
Such is their contempt for us that they don’t even hide their strategy: Spin the centrifuges while spinning the West.
And when the president of the world’s sole superpower asks for a photo-op handshake with the president of a regime that, in President Obama’s own words, kills and kidnaps and terrorizes Americans, the killer-kidnapper does not even deign to accept the homage.Rouhani rebuffed him.
Who can blame Rouhani? Offer a few pleasant words in an op-ed hailing a new era of non-zero-sum foreign relations, and watch the media and the administration immediately swoon with visions of detente.
Detente is difficult with a regime whose favorite refrain, fed to frenzied mass rallies, is “Death to America.” Detente is difficult with a regime officially committed, as a matter of both national policy and religious duty, to the eradication of a U.N. member state, namely Israel. It doesn’t get more zero-sum than that.
But at least we have to talk, say the enthusiasts. As if we haven’t been talking. For a decade. Strung along in negotiations of every manner — the EU3, the P5+1, then the final, very final, last-chance 2012 negotiations held in Istanbul, Baghdad and Moscow at which the Iranians refused to even consider the nuclear issue, declaring the dossier closed. Plus two more useless rounds this year.
I’m for negotiations. But only if it’s to do something real, not to run out the clock as Iran goes nuclear. The administration says it wants actions, not words. Fine. Demand one simple proof of good faith: Honor the U.N. resolutions. Suspend uranium enrichment and we will talk.
At least that stops the clock. Anything else amounts to being played.
And about the Khamenei agent who charms but declares enrichment an inalienable right, who smiles but refuses to shake the president’s hand. When asked by NBC News whether the Holocaust was a myth, Rouhani replied: “I’m not a historian. I’m a politician.”
Iranian moderation in action.
And, by the way, do you know who was one of the three Iranian “moderates” the cake-bearing McFarlane dealt with at that fateful arms-for-hostage meeting in Tehran 27 years ago? Hassan Rouhani.
A spat has broken out over whether the media demonstrated liberal bias in their coverage of Senator Ted Cruz’s marathon anti-Obamacare speech. Conservatives are contrasting the heckling and slurs leveled against Cruz with the overwhelmingly positive reaction won by his fellow Texan Wendy Davis for her ultimately unsuccessful filibuster of a bill in the Texas state senate restricting abortions performed after 20 weeks.
Liberals who reject the bias charge make two main points. First, they say, the most negative commentary against Cruz came from opinion writers, not news reporters. Second, they add, Davis’s 13-hour physically grueling feat constituted a genuine filibuster while Cruz’s semi-orchestrated effort wasn’t a bona fide attempt to derail Obamacare.
Let’s deal with both arguments in turn. It’s certainly true that opinion writers were the most dismissive of Cruz’s efforts. Josh Gad, writing in USA Today, said he watched TV in disbelief as he saw “a grown man from Texas, who seemingly had passed through sixth grade, standing at a podium in the U.S. Senate, at risk of urinating on himself or worse while reading bedtime stories” in order to protest Obamacare. Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, called Cruz, with whom he went to college at Princeton, an “arrogant jerk.”
But the tone of reporters and news anchors was also clearly dismissive or negative. Most networks focused on Bill Clinton’s latest endorsement of Obamacare. When they covered the Cruz speech at all, they showed few clips of Cruz actually explaining his position, although he did so at length throughout the course of 21 hours. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos called Cruz’s speech “bizarre,” and NBC’s Natalie Morales referred to it as a “long-winded protest.”
By contrast, Stephanopoulos’s ABC show This Week featured Wendy Davis in its “spotlight” segment and interviewed her in the dinner theater where she once worked as a waitress. There was little criticism of the unruly mob of Davis supporters in the gallery who shouted down Texas state legislators. Indeed, most news reports made no mention at all of this crowd, although it’s likely that their disruptive behavior was just as responsible as Davis was for the fact that the bill didn’t make it to the floor for a vote in Austin before the legislative session’s midnight deadline.
The second argument liberals make to defend themselves against the charge of liberal bias in the Cruz–Davis coverage is that Cruz’s 21 hours meant nothing at all. Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine, after comparing Cruz to the late demagogue Joe McCarthy, claimed:
A filibuster has a point, a definable political objective. What Cruz is doing has nothing that concrete. And it is not the case that these are identical because, “symbolically,” they are the political equivalent of caber-tossing. One was a filibuster. The other is a long speech.
The truth is that both speeches were made in large part for the purpose of political theater and had no real chance of changing the legislative outcome. Davis has admitted to fellow legislators that she knew Republican supporters of the abortion restrictions would soon come back and pass the bill in a special session. Cruz admitted in public the high likelihood that he would not achieve his goal of defunding Obamacare.
But both speeches have undoubtedly had political consequences. Davis became an instant liberal celebrity and has signaled she will run for governor of Texas next year, a race she would begin as an underdog but might have some chance of winning.
Cruz has for now become the “it” guy for the conservative base as a result of his speech, probably boosting his presidential ambitions. But he has also helped reshape the entire approach Republicans are taking to Obamacare. House speaker John Boehner is suggesting that Republicans will seek a one-year delay in implementing Obamacare as part of any deal to continue funding the government. The Cruz speech may be partly responsible for rattling Senate majority leader Harry Reid so much that he admitted that Obamacare’s tax on medical devices was “stupid,” even while insisting he’d accept no changes in the law. Cruz’s speech may also have spurred Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to announce that he wants a one-year delay of Obamacare’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance. And Cruz’s criticisms of Obamacare were partially validated Thursday when the White House announced it was postponing enrollment in most of the small-business exchanges, originally scheduled to open on October 1.
The editorial board of the New York Times has dismissed Ted Cruz as “the public face of the aimless and self-destructive Tea Party strategy to stop health-care reform.” In reality, his speech may have reignited intense opposition to a law many conservatives had fatalistically accepted as unstoppable. It’s too soon to know if Cruz’s speech will have a lasting impact, but the over-the-top criticism by some liberals has revealed just how worried they are about both Cruz’s potential and Obamacare’s future. Cruz “is the most talented and fearless Republican politician I’ve seen in the last 30 years,” Democratic strategist James Carville told ABC News in May. “He is going to be something to watch.”
After all, when Ronald Reagan burst into the national consciousness with his televised “Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, liberals were united in their scornful dismissal of him. As I recall, the Gipper bested his critics with the last laugh — many times over.
2a)
Defunders Give Democrats a Pass
Picking a fight with fellow Republicans has kept the spotlight off off the party responsible for ObamaCare. By Kim Strassel
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell this week attempted something novel. He talked about (wait for it . . . ) Democrats!
You know, Democrats. Remember them? The folks who forced through ObamaCare on a party-line vote. The party that bears sole responsibility for a law hitting families with layoffs, reduced work hours, soaring insurance premiums and lost health coverage. The crew that is now actively restoring funding to that immensely unpopular law—a vote that ought to prove perilous to red-state senators up for re-election.
As Mr. McConnell said Tuesday on the Senate floor: Majority Leader Harry Reid "can only afford to lose four Democrats if he wants to restore funding for ObamaCare. So, if five Senate Democrats vote against the majority leader, ObamaCare will be defunded . . . The spotlight should be on them."
If only it were. The tragic reality is that this vote isn't shaping up to be all that perilous for the owners of the law. Nobody is even talking about Democrats. Nobody has put an iota of pressure on them for months. Every camera, every microphone has been trained on the GOP.
This has been the defunders' biggest mistake, because it didn't have to be this way. Bear in mind that the idea to "defund" ObamaCare is not new; it featured in last year's election. And it remained a strategic option throughout this spring and early summer, as the GOP debated how best to pressure vulnerable Democrats and get an ObamaCare win.
That debate was derailed when a rump group in the GOP unilaterally decided to impose "defund" as the broader Republican position. Having moved on their own, their only hope of enforcing support was to deliberately make this fight about Republicans—instead of Democrats. So what began last year as one possible strategy for undercutting the health-care law devolved this summer into a minority-imposed (and bogus) litmus test of conservative purity.
This effort has not, for some time now, been about victory. It has become, as RedState's Erick Erickson put it with his usual eloquence, about shining a light on the "cockroaches" in the GOP. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has spent months berating his own side as "appeasers" who care only about "being invited to all the right cocktail parties in town."
Outside conservative groups—Heritage Action, the Senate Conservatives Fund—have raised real cash on this venture, and they've spent most of it attacking House and Senate Republicans. A bare trickle of dollars, if that much, has gone to directing public ObamaCare anger toward Democratic senators such as Arkansas's Mark Pryor, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, Alaska's Mark Begich, or North Carolina's Kay Hagan.
The result is that, while the defunders will get their vote in the Senate, they laid no groundwork—no sustained or coordinated advertising or Web campaign, no public uprising in key states—to pressure Democrats to vote with them. This is an error of embarrassing proportions. Five Democrats isn't a lot, especially in the context of an unpopular law. On Thursday, West Virginia's Joe Manchin—who isn't even up for re-election—became the first Senate Democrat to support delaying the individual mandate for a year. While it isn't "defund," it's a big crack in Democratic unity.
Now imagine if, over the past months, the conservative dollars had been spent flooding the airwaves with ads demanding that Ms. Hagan justify an ObamaCare exemption for big business but not for average families? Or on ads pinning soaring premium-prices on Mr. Pryor? Or if Heritage Action—instead of holding its Defund ObamaCare rallies in Tennessee and Alabama (to target Republicans already opposed to ObamaCare)—had focused its events in Louisiana, inspiring voters to swamp Ms. Landrieu's office with calls? Or in Colorado (Sen. Mark Udall) or New Mexico (Sen. Tom Udall)?
The defund coalition will claim we wouldn't be having a vote if they hadn't dragged their colleagues along in the first place. We'll never know. The defund ringleaders this summer couldn't be bothered with the hard work of calling internal meetings with their colleagues—soliciting input, selling the idea, formulating a strategy, getting people on board.
They instead served notice that this was the plan, and took to the airwaves to berate those who didn't hop-to. The Republican majority that balked didn't do so because it lacked conviction. They balked because this was sprung on them, and they feared the "plan" had no forethought (is this our best leverage?), no strategy (which Democrats do we target?) and no endgame (what's our fallback?). The lack of all that is the real reason Harry Reid will win his vote.
Mr. Cruz on Fox News Sunday this week allowed that maybe, toward the end of this week, if the GOP shaped up, and if he got around to it, "the next step . . . is starting to get red-state Democrats." A bit late for that. The defund coaches, having spent the game directing their players to tackle each other, have looked up in the final seconds to realize that an opposing team is on the field. One that has been scoring all along.
No comments:
Post a Comment