American leadership.
Tonight is the eve of Yom Kippur and all I can say is God help America!
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Uncle Vladimir is on a roll. (See 1a and 1b below.)
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Love conquers bigotry? (See 2 below.)
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Keeping the lights on and the Greens appeased. Can it be accomplished? What capitalism has wrought environmentalists would take away? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Uncle Vladimir
By David Stokes
Vladimir Putin is currently cashing in on an ill-advised promise made when two presidents thought no one was listening. You may recall President Obama’s whispered assurance, back in March of 2012, to then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev: “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
We are now witnessing that promised flexibility. America’s foreign policy is becoming a caricature—international affairs according to Gumby.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is a mix of Joseph Stalin and Lavrenty Beria---an experienced strongman and savvy intelligence officer. He is hardly someone to be impressed by “flexibility.” Vladimir is all about power and the expansion of Russian influence on the world. He also enjoys it when America looks bad. It makes him smile—sort of.
A while back, I read Michael Dobbs’ account of what happened when the “Big Three”—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—met at Yalta to carve up what was left of Europe. The book is called, Six Months in 1945: From World War to Cold War. I heartily recommend it to anyone wondering if history repeats itself, or at least rhymes.
Dobbs gives a wonderfully detailed account of a weak president being bested by a determined Soviet dictator. FDR gave territory and history away to a ruthless tyrant. A war that started, in part, with a Soviet invasion of Poland, ended with Soviet dominance of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe.
Now with Vladimir Putin inserting himself in a grand way into the current Syria crisis, not to mention joining the editorial staff of the New York Times, the voice of Yogi Berra can be heard crying in the wilderness: “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
We must learn from history’s clock. It was dangerous and wrong to trust the Russians back then, and it is dangerous and wrong to trust them now.
In May of 1945, George Kennan was an American diplomat living and working in Moscow. Most Cold War buffs know very well of Kennan’s memo writing skills. His February 1946 “long telegram” is considered to be one of the seminal documents of the Cold War. In it, he described the Soviet Union’s “neurotic view of world affairs” and the “instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” not to mention their, “secretiveness and conspiracy.”
But ten months earlier, Kennan wrote a memo that was largely overlooked at the time due to his relatively insignificant role as “nothing more than a highly competent clerk.” It is, in fact, that memo Mr. Obama and team should revisit right now. In language similar to what he would use in 1946, he bluntly acknowledged that Joseph Stalin knew just what buttons to push to get the United States to do his bidding. The Russians were already manipulating reality and events and had been all along. Kennan wrote: “They observe with gratification that in this way a great people can be led, like an ever-hopeful suitor, to perform one act of ingratiation after the other without ever reaching the goal which would satisfy its ardor and allay its generosity.”
Franklin Roosevelt gave the store away to Mr. Stalin and company at Yalta. His inexperienced successor, Mr. Truman, didn’t do much better at Potsdam. But of course, they were dealing with a Soviet dictator and we are dealing with Vladimir Putin. Putin is nothing like Stalin, right?
Actually, Mr. Putin has more in common with the pock-faced “man of steel”—referred to at times by Roosevelt and later Truman as “Uncle Joe”—than most people care to notice. He is driven by power and is one dangerous dude. The decision to portray him in sinister terms in my novel, Camelot’s Cousin, was not just a fictional tool, but rooted in scary reality. There are good guys and bad guys in the world. And then there are dumb guys who can’t tell the difference. They may be the most dangerous of all.
As President Obama looks for solutions in Syria and the Middle East by dancing with Vladimir Putin, he is looking for love in all the wrong places.
Sixty-eight years ago, it took a glorified clerk and a recently-booted-out-of-office politician to remind the world that Russia could not be trusted. Kennan wrote his telegrams. And Winston Churchill gave a speech about “the sinews of peace” and that ominous “Iron Curtain.”
In many ways, the key to the present crisis and future success is a good long look at the past.
1a)Western strike force for Syria disperses. Syrian launches offensive near Israeli border
Russian President Vladimir Putin, while engaged in active cooperation with President Barack Obama over Syria, was not averse to going over his head to push his agenda with “the American people” in an article he published in The New York Times Thursday, Sept. 12.
He continues to protest against all the evidence that the calamitous chemical attack of Aug. 21, east of Damascus, was perpetrated by Syrian rebels, not the Syrian army.
This is clearly an attempt to turn the American people and its lawmakers once and for all against US military intervention in Syria in any shape or form.
If Putin succeeds in getting his message across, it would be the second time in a decade that Moscow has worked its will on the American people. The first time, the Russians aimed at discrediting the Bush administration by convincing the world ahead of America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, although he was on record as having gassed 5,000 of his Kurdish citizens to death in 1988.
In his article, Putin went on to say sanctimoniously: “It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as one relying solely on brute force.”
The famously peace-loving Russian leader was lambasting an American president known for his extreme shyness of military action. Putin must be utterly confident that Obama is too far along their joint diplomatic path with Iran on Syria to back out now. He is evidently counting on a military attack being finally off the table and the Assad regime guaranteed safe.
Military sources report the Western military armada built up opposite Syria in the past two weeks was breaking up as the US president’s resolve for military action faded under relentless pressure from Moscow.
The British and French ships headed through the Suez Canal for the Red Sea Wednesday, Sept. 11, and the American vessels pulled back from Syrian shores to waters between Crete and Cyprus.
Obama has therefore caved in on his original intention of keeping the war armada in place - as heat for Assad to comply with the Russian plan for the elimination of his chemical weapons.
Every reputable chemical and military expert has advised the US president that there is no way that Assad’s chemical arsenal can be located and destroyed without importing an army of monitors long term for the job, and this can’t be accomplished while a civil war is raging in the country. Even if it becomes feasible, it will take years.
Meanwhile, the Syrian army is not waiting for diplomacy to run its course and Thursday, resumed offensive operations in the south, targeting Deraa and advancing rapidly towards the Syrian-Jordanian-Israeli border intersection.
The rebels’ morale is in the pits out of a sense of betrayal by the Obama administration and their resistance to the Syrian army’s onslaught is half-hearted at best.
1b)Obama Lets Putin Humiliate America, In Word And Deed
Syria: A murderous enemy of democratic freedom such as Vladimir Putin gets a New York Times platform to lecture Americans. Why not? He just proved he has more international clout than our own president.
Even Obama admirer Joe Klein admits in Time magazine that the president's Syria debacle "weakened the nation's standing in the world" in "one of the more stunning and inexplicable displays of presidential incompetence that I've ever witnessed."
President Obama's Tuesday address to the nation, ridiculed by friend and foe alike, was soon trumped by Russian ruler and ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin's own address to the nation — our nation — in the New York Times. In response, the White House continues trying to have it both ways.
Obama's speech downplayed Putin's role in getting his terrorism-supporting client, Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, to agree to give up chemical weapons.
"In part because of the credible threat of U.S. military action, as well as constructive talks that I had with President Putin, the Russian government has indicated a willingness to join with the international community in pushing Assad to give up his chemical weapons," the president contended.
Putin didn't really close the Assad deal, you see. It was Obama's threat; Obama's diplomatic prowess with his pal Vladimir, with whom he just had to cancel a pointless summit to avoid being tongue-lashed in person, the guy who just gave asylum to leakmeister Edward Snowden; and it's "the international community," not Putin, persuading Assad.
Obama gets the credit. But if the Syria deal falls apart? You guessed it: Putin gets the blame.
Putin "now owns this," an unnamed senior White House official told CNN after the Putin op-ed. "He has fully asserted ownership of it and he needs to deliver." But to a Russia determined to reduce U.S. global power and prestige, "to deliver" may mean not delivering.
There is no pressure on Putin. Disarming Assad's chemical weapons will take months, way beyond the public's attention span. Meanwhile, Assad remains in power as a valuable ally of both anti-American Russia and a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Moscow is already funneling Assad more conventional weapons.
The vulture who rules Russia sits hissing from the perch America's so-called Newspaper of Record provided him. This beneficiary of election fraud, who rubs out opposition journalists and conquers 20% of neighboring Georgia, instructs Americans on "preserving law and order in today's complex and turbulent world."
I
t's debatable who is worse, the New York Times for giving this tyrant a national microphone, or President Obama, whose egotistical blundering gave this enemy of America the prestige to get into its pages.
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2)Mel Gibson’s Daughter Marries a Jewish Man
The daughter of actor and noted anti-Semite Mel Gibson married a devout Jewish man over the weekend.
In a ceremony Saturday at the Temple Emmanuel of Beverly Hills, 36-year-old Mary-Catherine Regina Gibson married 42-year-old Ezekiel Sharon, a prominent record producer.
The couple has been secretly engaged for two years and are planning a long honeymoon in the south of France before meeting up with relatives in Israel. Mary-Catherine has reportedly already converted to Judaism.
Mel Gibson was asked about the surprise nuptials during an interview with E! News this morning while promoting his upcoming documentary on how the Rothschild family killed Abraham Lincoln. The acclaimed actor and director said that although he is disappointed in his daughter's decision, he hopes that eventually she will see the error of her ways and get a divorce.
"You know I've got nine kids," Gibson told E! anchor Melana Scantlin. "So I guess it's not surprising that one of them turned out to be a complete f*****g loser. But when I think about all the time and treasure I put into that one: the Catholic school tuition, the monthly private jet to Lourdes, the rosaries made of diamonds ... and then she goes and does something like this?
"I can tell you one thing: that greedy little challah lover is not getting one god damned cent of my money. I've worked too long and too hard for that. Too long and too damn hard. Let's hope this doesn't last."
Mazel Tov Mel
Mel Gibson has faced accusations of antisemitism since a 2006 incident in which he infamously told a police officer that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
Mel's father, Hutton Gibson, for his part is a radical traditionalist Catholic who has flirted with Holocaust denial and promotes various conspiracy theories involving Jewish people.
Although Gibson has never used such language himself, he came perilous close today when asked why he though his daughter had chosen to defy him.
"They're all in on it," he proclaimed. "Emmanuel, Redstone, Eisner, Spielberg, Geffen -- all the big Hollywood Jews got together and arranged this marriage just to try and screw me over. It's not enough they destroyed my career by blacklisting me from good projects, now they're out to destroy my family too.
"I should have seen it coming. It's all so clear now in hindsight. But that's the thing with these guys. They're sneaky. They hit you when and where you least suspect it."
In a statement released though the groom's publicist, the newlyweds responded to Mel's unhinged comments.
"We're sorry to hear that Mary-Catherine's father disapproves of our union, but lucky for him he now has several psychiatrists in the family though his daughter's in-laws. Feel free to stop by any time free of charge."
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3) Environmentalism: The Road To A Primitive Existence With No Energy
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Energy: It seems that Great Britain is struggling to keep the lights on. This shouldn't happen in a developed nation, but it's where the environmental movement is taking us.
In late August, National Geographic reported that Ofgem, Britain's energy industry regulator, has "warned of an impending 'near-crisis' of energy supply, calling the situation 'horrendous' and likening it to being on a roller coaster headed 'downhill — fast.'"
Apparently Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has even said he was working to "keep the lights on" while Ofgem's capacity assessment says "risks to electricity security of supply over the next six winters have increased since our last report in October 2012."
National Geographic says "the main reason for the possible crunch" is "closing a number of aging coal-fired plants — as well as some oil and nuclear ones — to meet European Union environmental laws."
What Britain will be left with after its surrender to the "European Union environmental laws" is a reserve electric power capacity of between 2% and 5% — roughly half of what it is now.
It will lose 20% of its power plants over the next decade, and will have no coal-powered facilities, which provided 39% of the country's electricity just last year.
From there, National Geographic's story gets even uglier. Customers will be paying higher prices, though some will be able to keep their costs down by opting for cheaper "interruptible contracts," meaning their power can be cut off when it's deemed necessary.
It's a poor trade-off that might be acceptable in the third world, but not in Western Europe.
Oddly, officials and providers are betting that a weak economy will keep demand low and blackouts from being widespread. Well, one way to ensure a weak economy is to fabricate high energy costs and spotty service.
The environmental movement is remarkably backward. It prefers to push back man's achievements in return for some vague environmental gain. Today's environmentalists are arguably anti-energy. As others have said, they see energy as a problem, not a solution.
Sure, they like taxpayer-funded energy. But it is too expensive for the market, too undeveloped, too unreliable for practical use, and is harder to produce than the energy we easily get from fossil fuels. We can't run a modern and growing economy on costly experimental energy.
As the loss of power in Britain illustrates, the roads of environmentalism lead to a more primitive existence and lower standard of living. It's not about a cleaner world but a reversal of the gains made by capitalism.
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