Remember Benghazi? Remember Hillary?
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Lloyd Marcus is black and he understand the difference between Conservatism and Liberalism and which is better for society and his race.
The biggest myth of all is that Conservatives are heartless .
I submit, along with many black editorialists and analysts, such as Sowell, Marcus, Star, and West to name a few, the facts are otherwise.
Because of past amoral acts on the part of white citizens against blacks we have allowed bleeding doo gooders and liberal hemophiliacs to bludgeon contemporary society into feelings of guilt, when, in fact, their policies have dumbed down an entire segment of our nation and re-enslaved them.
This is the greatest sin, this is the greatest tragedy we have perpetrated upon all citizens and more prophetically upon our black citizens. Liberal policies have helped to break up the black family, disconnect them from the conservative message of their churches, deny them a solid education. These policies have substituted entitlement for self worth and Conservatives are blamed for being heartless?
I do not know when black citizens will wake up to the tragedy imposed upon them. Maybe they are so devoid of reasoning, so dependent and cowred they are incapable of breaking their entitlement bonds but I am unabashedly proud of what Conservatism's principles offer. It is these principles of being a nation of law, being a free people worthy of hard and honest effort, being responsible and being willing to help others achieve through solid education that work and made America great and allowed for miraculous change. (See 1 below.)
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Sowell and Krauthammer on who shut the government down! (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Will the West ever learn? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Lessons in Liberal Projection: Conservatism Is 'Mean'?
By Lloyd Marcus
Is liberals' claim that conservatism is mean correct? After reading this article, you tell me.
In the early sixties, two school bus-loads of us black kids from Pumphery, Maryland were bused to nearby Brooklyn Park Junior/Senior High School. I felt like a speck of pepper in a salt shaker.
Every month, the best seven paintings from all the art classes were displayed in the school lobby. Numerous times, a painting of mine made the cut.
The selection process perfectly illustrated conservatism, as it was based solely on merit. Had today's liberalism been in power at that time, paintings would have been selected based on race, gender, and fairness.
Liberals would argue it unfair that only talented students experience the pride of having their paintings exhibited in the lobby. Their do-gooder attempt to make everyone feel special would ultimately make no one feel special. Anyone who opposed exhibiting every student's painting would be branded a hater, racist, or sexist.
Having my paintings regularly numbered among the best made me aware of my gift. Liberalism would have robbed me of that knowledge which ultimately lead to a career as a graphic designer and art director. That would have been a mean thing to do to a child.
Foolishly, liberalism attempts to make life fair, insuring equal outcomes via government controls. However, life is not fair. Humans make choices which produce various results. One can never truly experience the thrill of victory without the agony of defeat.
Rightly, California parents are outraged over a ruling by liberals to punish/fine youth football teams that score too many points. The message: a team can be good, but not too good.
Liberalism is entrenched in the Democratic Party, whose higher-ups offer do-gooder government-intrusive policies and programs that ultimately injure those whom Democrats claim to champion. Typically, liberal/Democrat policies and programs are ill-conceived, emotion-driven, and void of reality.
For example: decades of liberals/Democrats lowering standards and morals have destroyed the black family. Now we see over 70% fatherless households, with epidemic high school dropouts.
Blacks are aborting themselves out of existence.
Then there is the liberals' irrational obsession with gun control, also known as disarming the good guys (law-abiding citizens). Bad guys -- that is, criminals -- do not obey gun laws. Stats confirm that where gun laws abound, crime does the same.
For the life of me, I do not understand why so-called feminist groups support banning guns. If my wife is attacked, I want her packing -- not armed with a whistle or a spray.
Years ago, liberals/Democrats sought to legitimize Ebonics (African-American Vernacular English) as a language. The Oakland, CA school board proposed higher pay for teaches proficient in Ebonics and funding for teachers to learn it. Sadly, I am not describing a Saturday Night Live skit.
Would you feel secure hearing the pilot of your flight saying something like, "Yo, whassup dogs, we be chillin' ta-day at 30,000 feets"?
Standard operating procedure for liberals/Democrats is to brand any responsible reduction in government spending hateful, cruel, and extreme.
Another "mean" component of liberalism is the belief that it is morally just for government to confiscate the fruits of one man's labors to give to another. This philosophy has nurtured disability and food stamp fraud; both have gone through the roof under Obama. And yet, conservatives'/Republicans' attempts to slightly rein in food stamp spending is called a heartless attack on the poor.
Adding $6 trillion to the national debt since taking office, America's most liberal/progressive president has us on an insane, irresponsible, non-sustainable path.
Strong conservative reinforcements are severely needed in D.C., which is why we at Conservative Campaign Committee have been pounding the drums for months for Steve Lonegan for U.S. Senate in New Jersey. Lonegan will not be intimidated and will fight Obama's job-killing regulations.
Is conservatism mean? Absolutely not.
Conservatism is Dr. Ben Carson's mom banning TV in her home and forcing her troubled, angry black child to read books -- a tough parenting decision rooted in love. She ordered Ben to write book reports, which she had to pretend to read because she was illiterate. Now Dr. Ben Carson is a retired American neurosurgeon.
Liberals/Democrats reinforce the anger of black youths such as young Ben, convincing them that they are victims of racist white America -- thus giving black youths an excuse to fail.
Conservatism means treating Americans equally without special concessions for race or gender. It offers individuals dignity and self-respect by teaching them to catch their own fish. It offers freedom and independence.
Utopia for liberals/Democrats is having all Americans totally dependent on government for their sustenance, standing in long lines for rations from the Government Free Fish Exchange.
Conservatism vs. liberalism. Which one is ultimately harmful and mean? You decide.
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2)Who Shut Down the Government?
By Thomas Sowell
Even when it comes to something as basic, and apparently as simple and straightforward, as the question of who shut down the federal government, there are diametrically opposite answers, depending on whether you talk to Democrats or to Republicans.
There is really nothing complicated about the facts. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going -- except for ObamaCare.
This is not a matter of opinion. You can check the Congressional Record.
As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
Whether ObamaCare is good, bad or indifferent is a matter of opinion. But it is a matter of fact that members of the House of Representatives have a right to make spending decisions based on their opinion.
ObamaCare is indeed "the law of the land," as its supporters keep saying, and the Supreme Court has upheld its Constitutionality.
But the whole point of having a division of powers within the federal government is that each branch can decide independently what it wants to do or not do, regardless of what the other branches do, when exercising the powers specifically granted to that branch by the Constitution.
The hundreds of thousands of government workers who have been laid off are not idle because the House of Representatives did not vote enough money to pay their salaries or the other expenses of their agencies -- unless they are in an agency that would administer ObamaCare.
Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who -- if anybody -- "wants to shut down the government." But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to. The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare.
The Senate chose not to vote to authorize that money to be spent, because it did not include money for ObamaCare. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that he wants a "clean" bill from the House of Representatives, and some in the media keep repeating the word "clean" like a mantra. But what is unclean about not giving Harry Reid everything he wants?
If Senator Reid and President Obama refuse to accept the money required to run the government, because it leaves out the money they want to run ObamaCare, that is their right. But that is also their responsibility.
You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you want. And it is a fraud to blame them when you refuse to use the money they did vote, even when it is ample to pay for everything else in the government.
When Barack Obama keeps claiming that it is some new outrage for those who control the money to try to change government policy by granting or withholding money, that is simply a bald-faced lie. You can check the history of other examples of "legislation by appropriation" as it used to be called.
Whether legislation by appropriation is a good idea or a bad idea is a matter of opinion. But whether it is both legal and not unprecedented is a matter of fact.
Perhaps the biggest of the big lies is that the government will not be able to pay what it owes on the national debt, creating a danger of default. Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt.
Even if the debt ceiling is not lifted, that only means that government is not allowed to run up new debt. But that does not mean that it is unable to pay the interest on existing debt.
None of this is rocket science. But unless the Republicans get their side of the story out -- and articulation has never been their strong suit -- the lies will win. More important, the whole country will lose.
2a)Who shut down Yellowstone?
By Charles Kraithammer
The Obamacare/shutdown battle has spawned myriad myths. The most egregious concern the substance of the fight, the identity of the perpetrators and the origins of the current eruption.
President Obama indignantly insists thatGOP attempts to abolish or amend Obamacare are unseemly because it is “settled” law, having passed both houses of Congress, obtained his signature and passed muster with the Supreme Court.
Yes, settledness makes for a strong argument — except from a president whose administration has unilaterally changed Obamacare five times after its passage, including, most brazenly, a year-long suspension of the employer mandate.
Article I of the Constitution grants the legislative power entirely to Congress. Under what constitutional principle has Obama unilaterally amended the law? Yet when the House of Representatives undertakes a constitutionally correct, i.e., legislative, procedure for suspending the other mandate— the individual mandate — this is portrayed as some extra-constitutional sabotage of the rule of law. Why is tying that amendment to a generalized spending bill an outrage, while unilateral amendment by the executive (with a Valerie Jarrett blog item for spin) is perfectly fine?
(2) Perpetrators
The mainstream media have been fairly unanimous in blaming the government shutdown on the GOP. Accordingly, House Republicans presented three bills to restore funding to national parks, veterans and the District of Columbia government. Democrats voted down all three. (For procedural reasons, the measures required a two-thirds majority.)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won’t even consider these refunding measures. And the White House has promised a presidential veto.
The reason is obvious: to prolong the pain and thus add to the political advantage gained from a shutdown blamed on the GOP. They are confident the media will do a “GOP makes little Johnny weep at the closed gates of Yellowstone, film at 11” despite Republicans having just offered legislation to open them.
And besides, whence comes the sanctity of the “clean CR,” the single bill (continuing resolution) that funds all of government? The Democrats have declared it inviolable — and piecemeal funding, as proposed by the Republicans, unacceptable on principle. On what grounds? After all, the regular appropriations process consists of 12 separate appropriation bills. The insistence on the “clean CR” is just a fancy way to suggest some principle behind the president’s refusal to compromise or even negotiate.
(3) Origins
The most ubiquitous conventional wisdom is that the ultimate cause of these troubles is out-of-control tea party anarchists.
But is this really where the causal chain ends? The tea party was created by Obama’s first-term overreach, most specifically Obamacare. Today’s frantic fight against it is the echoing result of the way it was originally enacted.
From Social Security to civil rights to Medicaid to Medicare, never in the modern history of the country has major social legislation been enacted on a straight party-line vote. Never. In every case, there was significant reaching across the aisle, enhancing the law’s legitimacy and endurance. Yet Obamacare — which revolutionizes one-sixth of the economy, regulates every aspect of medical practice and intimately affects just about every citizen — passed without a single GOP vote.
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3)America and the good psychopaths
By Caroline B. Glick
The West still doesn't -- but must -- fully grasp Obama's thinkinges
In his speech Tuesday before the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tried to get the Americans to stop their collective swooning at the sight of an Iranian president who smiled in their general direction.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the premier warned, "I wish I could believe [President Hassan] Rouhani, but I don't because facts are stubborn things. And the facts are that Iran's savage record flatly contradicts Rouhani's soothing rhetoric."
He might have saved his breath. The Americans didn't weren't interested.
Two days after Netanyahu's speech, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel issued a rejoinder to Netanyahu. Hagel said, "I have never believed that foreign policy is a zero-sum game."
Well, maybe he hasn't. But the Iranians have. And they still do view diplomacy — like all their dealings with their sworn enemies — as a zero sum game.
As a curtain raiser for Rouhani's visit, veteran New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins wrote a long profile of Iran's real strong man for The New Yorker. Qassem Suleimani is the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is the most powerful organ of the Iranian regime, and Suleimani is Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's closest confidante and advisor. Rouhani doesn't hold a candle to Suleimani.
Filkin's profile is detailed, but deeply deceptive. The clear sense he wishes to impart on his readers is that Suleimani is a storied war veteran and a pragmatist. He is an Iranian patriot who cares about his soldiers. He's been willing to cut deals with the Americans in the past when he believed it served Iran's interests. And given Suleimani's record, it is reasonable to assume that Rouhani — who is far more moderate than he -- is in a position to make a deal and will make one.
The problem with Filkin's portrayal of Suleimani as a pragmatist, and a commander who cares about the lives of his soldiers — and so, presumably cares about the lives of Iranians — is that it is belied by the stories Filkins reported in the article.
Filkins describes at length how Suleimani came of age as a Revolutionary Guard division commander during the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, and how that war made him the complicated, but ultimately reasonable, (indeed parts of the profile are downright endearing), pragmatist he is today.
As the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Suleimani commands the Syrian military and the foreign forces from Iran, Hezbollah and Iraq who have been deployed to Syria to keep Bashar al Assad in power.
Filkins quotes an Iraqi politician who claimed that in a conversation with Suleimani last year, the Iranian called the Syrian military "worthless." He then went on to say, "Give me one brigade of the Basij, and I could conquer the whole country."
Filkins notes that it was the Basij that crushed the anti-Islamist Green revolution in Iran in 2009. But for a man whose formative experience was serving as a Revolutionary Guards commander in the Iran-Iraq War, Suleimani's view of the Basij as a war fighting unit owes to what it did in its glory days, in that war, not on the streets of Tehran n 2009.
As Matthias Kuntzel reported in 2006, the Basij was formed by the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq War to serve as cannon fodder. Basij units were made up of boys as young as 12. They were given light doses of military training and heavy doses of indoctrination in which they were brainwashed to reject life and martyr themselves for the revolution.
As these children were being recruited from Iran's poorest villages, Ayatollah Khomeini purchased a half million small plastic keys from Taiwan. They were given to the boys before they were sent to battle and told that they were the keys to paradise. The children were then sent into minefields to die and deployed as human waves in frontal assaults against superior Iraqi forces.
By the end of the war some 100,000 of these young boys became the child sacrifices of the regime.
When we assess Suleimani's longing for a Basij brigade in Syria in its proper historical and strategic context -- that is, in the context of how he and his fellow Revolutionary Guards commanders deployed such brigades in the 1980s, we realize that far from being a pragmatist, Suleimani is a psychopath.
Filkins did not invent his romanticized version of what makes Suleimani tick. It is a view that has been cultivated for years by senior US officials.
Former US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker spoke at length with Filkins about his indirect dealings with Suleimani through Iranian negotiators who answered to him, and through Iraqi politicians whom he controlled.
Crocker attests that Secretary of State Colin Powell dispatched him to Geneva in the weeks before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to negotiate with the Iranians. Those discussions, which he claims involved the US and Iran trading information about the whereabouts of al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Iran could have led to an historic rapprochement. But, Crocker maintains, hope for such an alliance were dashed in January 2002, when George W. Bush labeled Iran as a member of the "Axis of Evil," in his State of the Union address. Supposedly in a rage, Suleimani pulled the plug on cooperation with the Americans. As Crocker put it, "We were just that close," he said. "One word in one speech changed history."
Crocker told of his attempt to make it up to the wounded Suleimani in the aftermath of the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003. Crocker was in Baghdad at the time setting up the Iraqi Governing Council. He used Iraqi intermediaries to clear all the Shiite candidates with Suleimani. In other words, the US government gave the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards control over the Iraqi government immediately after the US military toppled Saddam's regime.
Far from convincing Suleimani to pursue a rapproachment with the US, Crocker's actions convinced him that the US was weak. And so, shortly after he oversaw the formation of the Governing Council, Suleimani instigated the insurgency whose aim was to eject the US from Iraq and to transform it into an Iranian satrapy.
And yet, despite Suleimani's obvious bad faith, and use of diplomacy to entrap the US into positions that harmed its interests and endangered its personnel, Crocker and other senior US officials continued to believe that he was the man to cut a deal with.
The main take away lesson from Filkins' profile of Suleimani is that US officials — and journalists — like to romanticize the world's most psychopathic, evil men. Dong so helps them to justify and defend their desire to appease, rather than confront — let alone defeat them. For their part, Suleimani and his colleagues are more than willing to play along with the Americans, to the extent that doing so advances their aims of defeating the US.
There were two main reasons that Bush did not want to confront Iran despite its central role in organizing, directing and financing the insurgency in Iraq. First, Bush decided shortly after the US invasion of Iraq that the US would not expand the war to Iran or Syria. Even as both countries' central role in fomenting the insurgency became inarguable, Bush maintained his commitment to fighting what quickly devolved into a proxy war with Iran, on the battlefield of Iran's choosing.
The second reason that Bush failed to confront Iran, and his advisors maintained faith with the delusion that it was worth cutting a deal with the likes of Suleimani was that they preferred the sense of accomplishment a deal brought them to the nasty business of actually admitting the threat Iran posed to American interests — and to American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Expanding on Bush's aversion to fighting Iran, and preference for romanticizing its leaders rather than acknowledging their barbarism, upon entering office Obama embraced a strategy whose sole goal is engagement. For the past five years, the US policy towards Iran is to negotiate. Neither the terms of negotiation nor the content of potential agreements is important. Obama wants to negotiate for the sake of negotiating. And he has taken the UN and the EU with him on this course.
It's possible that Obama believes that these negotiations will transform Iran into a quasi-US ally like the Islamist regime in Turkey. That regime remains a member of NATO despite the fact that it threatens its neighbors with war, it represses its own citizens, and it refuses to support major US initiatives while undermining NATO operations.
Obama will never call Turkey out for its behavior or make Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan pay a price for his bad faith. The myth of the US-Turkish alliance is more important to Obama than the substance of Turkey's relationship with the United States.
A deal with Iran would be horrible for America US and its allies. Whatever else it says it will do, the effect of any US-Iranian agreement would be to commit the US to do nothing to defend its interests or its allies in the Middle East.
While this would be dangerous for the US, it is apparently precisely the end Obama seeks. His address to the UN General Assembly can reasonably be read as a declaration that the US is abandoning its position as world leader. The US is tired of being nitpicked by its allies and its enemies for everything it does, he said. And therefore, he announced, Washington is now limiting its actions in the Middle East to pressuring its one remaining ally Israel, to give up its ability to protect itself from foreign invasion and Palestinian terrorism by surrendering Judea and Samaria, without which it is defenseless.
Like his predecessors in the Bush administration, Obama doesn't care that Iran is evil and that its leaders are fanatical psychopaths. He has romanticized them based on nothing.
Although presented by the media as a new policy of outreach towards Tehran, Obama's current commitment to negotiating with Rouhani is consistent with his policy towards Iran since entering office. Nothing has changed.
From Obama's perspective, US policy is not threatened by Iranian bad faith. It is threatened only by those who refuse to embrace his fantasy world where all deals are good and all negotiations are therefore good.
What this means is that the prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear power does not faze Obama. The only threat he has identified is the one coming from Jerusalem. Israel the party pooper is Obama's greatest foe because it insists on basing its strategic assessments and goals on the nature of things even though this means facing down evil.
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