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Hilarious: A Famous Athlete Converts To Judaism (BILLY CRYSTAL ON THE TONIGHT SHOW)
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It would be nice to believe the Progressive movement has been dealt a mortal blow by Obama but I would not count on it. Something for nothing is a powerful weapon and the concept is not likely to die easily. (See 1 below.)
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Oprah has peaked, she has lost her luster because she does not get it!
She is treading in water the depth of which she doe not know and is destined to sink even further if she continues down her stream of ignorance and bias. (See 2 below.)
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Obama's lust to do a deal with Iran reveals much about him but more importantly, I believe, it puts a nail in America's credibility coffin which will last far into the future. Credibility, like cheese and/or wine, takes years to build, years to age. Obama, in less than 5 years, has called American credibility into question, if not totally destroyed what presidents before him took well over 70 years to build.
Tomorrow you have an opportunity to attend this meeting on Iran and Its Nuclear Ambitions:
The Savannah Jewish Federation Community Relations Committee in partnership with the JEA's Jewish Journeys series, will host a free, community event featuring
Bob Feferman from United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI)
Tuesday, November 19th at 7pm
Jewish Educational Alliance
Mr. Feferman's presentation, "Preventing a Nuclear-Armed Iran," will focus on these questions:
- How close is Iran to getting the bomb?
- Why should Americans be concerned about Iran's race to nuclear weapons?
- What can people do to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran?
With the appearance on the world stage of Hassan Rouhani, Iran's new president, concerns about Iran's nuclear intentions are heightened. Rouhani professes that Iran is interested only in nuclear energy, but Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called him "a wolf in sheep's clothing."
The entire community is invited to attend this talk on one of the most important issues facing the Middle East and the rest of the world.
Meanwhile do not rule out what I have been psting for months - Israel and Saudis, starnge bed fellows, may be planning something our of mutual necessity. (See 3 below.)
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Are enough Democrats nervous enough to try and overturn Obamacare? (See 4 below.)
Dick
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1) Might the Establishment Turn Against Obama?
By Daren Jonescu
A disturbing trend among American conservatives is the increasing sense of optimism about President Obama's slow fade in mainstream perceptions, and its ramifications for the future of American leftism. Does Obama's decline entail the undoing of the movement he represents? Progressivism's history reveals another option, which is that the movement will, in the name of saving itself, reject Obama.
Progressives are rigid in their ideology, to be sure, but this rigidity does not extend to their support for leaders. For it follows from the inhumane core of progressivism itself that all men -- even "historic" ones -- are expendable in the name of the cause, namely history's march into totalitarianism.
It is true that Obama has begun to get some bad, or at least unworshipful, press, and that this is both causing and reflecting a drop in his general popularity. It is naïve, however, to assume that it betokens a breach of the establishment's ideological firewall.
Apologists for Stalin's Russia were reluctant to admit that their hero was a bloodthirsty tyrant. However, when the state-controlled press and a complicit Western intelligentsia were unable to suppress the truth any longer, even those apologists turned on him -- not because he no longer represented their views, but because he no longer served their interests. Subsequently, this process of blaming all the regime's evils on one leader as a way of purifying the next became an essential mechanism of Soviet oppression. It is not hard to see how democratic politics may be corrupted into the perfection of such a mechanism. Thus, a similar fate could befall Obama, if American progressives find that their shiny hood ornament has become a rusty eyesore.
For more than six years, the American political establishment has provided cover for Obama -- and that is the entire establishment, from the hard leftists of the Democrat wing to the hard careerists of the Republican wing. Was Obama elected president because he was the first mixed-race nominee? Or was he elected because his status as the first mixed-race nominee was effectively isolated as the only unique fact about him that the mainstream voting population was permitted to notice or address?
Communist childhood mentors? Don't go there. Boasting in print about his university penchant for Marxism and his heavy drug use? Well, all students are "idealists" and "party-goers." Explicit statements declaring fully socialized medicine his long-term goal? Surely he's learned now that Washington is about compromise. Long personal, professional, and political association with Bill Ayers -- terrorist, avowed communist revolutionary, advocate of Marxist re-education camps, and education "reformer"? But he says Ayers was just a guy from his neighborhood, and his word should be good enough for us. Refusing to release his school records? So what? -- the man has a Harvard law degree. Spending years in the church of a radical anti-American preacher? How dare anyone question a man's relationship with his God? Communist Party endorsement and campaign support? Well, people are free to support whomever they want -- that's no reflection on the candidate himself. Criticizing the U.S. Constitution's focus on "negative liberties," and its failure to address what government "must do on your behalf" to bring about "economic" and "redistributive" justice? That's just abstract theoretical discussion, proving that Obama is a thinker. "Fundamental transformation" and "spread the wealth around"? Oh, come on, you know what he meant -- just more optimism and a fairer tax code.
All of the above concerns were raised in dark corners during Obama's 2008 primary and general election campaigns. And all of those corresponding rebuttals were offered, with almost perfect unanimity, by the mainstream voices of both major parties.
On the Republican side, George Will criticized the McCain campaign's tepid October jabs at Obama's past associations as "angry" and off-topic, and accused the campaign of trying to suggest "less that Obama has bad ideas than that Obama is a bad person." (Heaven forbid!) David Brooks famously announced his ability to channel the secret language of Obama's pants, which told him their wearer would be a good president. Peggy Noonanpretended objective aloofness in observing that this was "a new liberal moment." The Republican leading lights persuaded themselves that Obama was one of them -- an educated man with a mellifluous voice. And in these days of the coma of reason, having fancy diplomas and the timbre of sobriety is what passes for intelligence and statesmanship.
(I note in passing that education and mature rationality do indeed tend to promote a detached, unexcitable tone of voice. A similar tone, however, is typical of people whose passionate peaks have been shaved off by years of drug use or other excesses; of amoral men whose goals and methods necessitate the gradual flattening of the feelings; and of indolent pseudo-intellectuals practiced at papering over their incompetence with haughty blather.)
Meanwhile, the bulk of the media, dominated by progressive executives and editors, along with their useful idiots the journalism majors, made protecting progressivism's new poster child and mocking or ignoring anyone who dared to challenge him their primary mission.
The 2012 election was more complicated. The establishment conservative voices, after four years of the disaster they had helped to precipitate, and having actively undermined all of Mitt Romney's GOP primary opponents, were less inclined to concede points to Obama directly, for obvious credibility reasons. Instead, they consistently damned their candidate with faint praise, an approach for which Romney -- the self-described "progressive" Republican whose major policy achievement was the prototype for ObamaCare -- was tailor-made.
The leftist media majority, meanwhile, followed the Democratic Party's talking points right down the line, as they were hired to do. And the doomsday clock for American liberty that is ObamaCare was carefully concealed through the obvious and simplistic tactic of delaying much of the law's implementation until after Obama's re-election. (With the "legitimate" press being a propaganda wing of the government, a simplistic tactic takes on the air and effect of brilliant strategy.)
Then there was Benghazi. It was obvious within a week of the attack, to anyone inquisitive enough to read non-American news sources, that the Obama administration had knowingly allowed an ambassador and three other Americans to die during a lengthy, planned terrorist attack, and then concocted and disseminated self-protective lies no less carefully planned than the attack itself. The obviousness of the administration's inhumanity and mendacity was only heightened as the weeks dragged on, and the White House continued to dig itself deeper into what ought to have been its grave, with further lies, smugness, and blunt refusals to answer natural questions such as "Where was Obama during the seven and a half hours of the attack, and what was he doing while the victims were sending urgent and repeated pleas for help?"
This hall of horrors, which, as I noted before the 2012 election, makes Watergate look like cheating at tiddlywinks, was completely trivialized by the "respectable" American media prior to the election. The United States re-elected an administration guilty of fresh sins worthy of the later cantos of Dante's Inferno without most of the voting public even being apprised of the fact. They were not apprised because the press was following the direction of the sinners themselves, whose unofficial position, subsequently expressed so eloquently by their invisible point man on Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was "What difference -- at this point -- does it make?"
Hillary Clinton -- ay, there's the rub. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: modern progressivism's farcical revival of Stalin and Trotsky.
What happened when the progressive intelligentsia's romance with post-revolutionary Russia ran up against the inescapable truth of Stalinism in practice? The intelligentsia turned at last -- not against Soviet communism or its "ideals," which remained the ideals of the intellectual class, but against Stalin. He was, they decided, a traitor to the workers' cause. Their self-rehabilitation as "anti-Soviet" was embodied in their moral support of Trotsky. "Trotskyite" became almost the academic equivalent of "freedom fighter." Stalin, not the Leninist idea, was the enemy. Stalinism, not Marxist progressivism, was the evil destroying Eastern and Central Europe.
It became semi-official doctrine, fed to generations of young people through Western universities, and then down to the public schools, that Marxism is a great ideal, but that it has not been attempted purely in practice, because it was corrupted by Stalin's unscrupulous expulsion of the noble Trotsky. Hence Orwell's Animal Farm, which depicts Trotsky as the idealistic "Snowball"; hence the phony Dewey Commission (yes, that Dewey, the radical socialist re-education theorist consistently whitewashed today as "anti-communist"), which provided Trotsky an official stamp of Western exoneration, while dumping one of its own members (Carleton Beals) for having had the gall to ask Trotsky an awkward question; hence the string of progressives up to the present day who continue to wax nonsensical about how different the Soviet experiment might have been had Trotsky triumphed over the usurper Stalin. (Kudos, on this point, to campus cool killer extraordinaire, Che Guevara, who had the integrity -- if that is the right word for it -- to remain steadfast in support of Stalin, rejecting the cynical self-cleansing of Western intellectuals in favor of standing firm on communist principle.)
Back to the present, where the American news media have tried to obscure the most important facts of Benghazi from day one -- not the facts on the ground in Libya, but the facts on the sofa in the White House and the State Department. But those facts, as is clear from the lengths to which people have gone to hide them, are so grave that in a faint, intimate echo of the Ukrainian famine, they have continued to find their way out in spite of the mainstream media's best Walter Duranty impersonation. It is unlikely that even the whole truth would cause a political earthquake; the American majority has, it sadly seems, been insulated against all moral shock by generations of public education, moronic popular entertainment, and a carefully cultivated mass cynicism that responds to all outrages with a shrug and a chorus of "They all do it."
There is, however, the possibility that Benghazi started a chain reaction of revelations of dishonor and untrustworthiness that will strike at least a substantial fraction of the morally tranquilized as ugly enough to warrant "throwing the bums out." Progressives must grapple with the fact that the lack of underlying principle they have inculcated in much of the public cuts both ways: the unreasoned feeling that it is "time for a change" is a relative sentiment, and may do to one party what it does to another. (That's why having the leadership of both parties in the "establishment" camp is so important.)
As the effects of ObamaCare's implementation are felt directly by enough Americans to overcome the propaganda; as the awareness gradually flowers in people's minds that their government not only has the capacity to track and warehouse all their personal communications and financial data, but has actually been doing so for years; and as the administration's authoritarian lurches (e.g., EPA) and reprisals (e.g., IRS) become increasingly unmasked and vile -- thanks to the determined resistance of the establishment's nemesis, principled constitutionalists -- it is quite likely that the Obama presidency will be judged a liability to the cause.
When enough of the truth of this corruption and destruction has broken through the artificial haze of "politics as usual" to become a problem for the 2016 Democrat presidential nominee, what will the official propagandists do?
If Hillary Clinton is that nominee, they will have no choice. Regarding the Benghazi dereliction of duty and its cover-up, she is swimming as deep in the muck as Obama. The question for progressives will be how to scrub her up into a semblance of cleanliness in time for her "historic" campaign. And the answer, which has no doubt been fully considered, is clear. Clinton must be recast as the pure, idealistic Democrat who found herself at odds with Obama's cynical Chicago machine, and who will sweep in and do efficiently and sensibly all the things her predecessor promised to do, but gradually compromised through his administration's incompetence and "overreach." (Hence her present silence on the ObamaCare disaster.)
In October 2012, I asked whether Benghazi would be Obama's Waterloo. It was not. It may, however, in combination with a growing list of other unconcealable assaults on his country and its citizens, be enough to force the apologists into the delicate surgery of separating the dream of fundamental transformation from the fundamental transformer himself. Then will arise today's Dewey Commission report, from the "Committee for the Defense of Hillary Clinton," also known as the American political and media establishment. We have already had a glimpse of how that committee will operate, judging from the GOP's reaction to Michele Bachmann's questions about Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The old boys club gave Bachmann the full Carleton Beals treatment.
Yes, American progressives will abandon Obama if and when he is perceived as a liability to their cause, just as their ideological kin dropped Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, and other brave "reformers," as contingencies required. The nickname ObamaCare conveniently guarantees that that disaster will not be hung around the any other Democrat's neck, apart from the senators Ted Cruz forced into branding themselves with his well-timed mock filibuster. As for Benghazi -- or, for that matter, Iran, Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other matters related to the State Department -- once the establishment sees the writing on the wall, and gives the press its new marching orders, the lingering stench will be blamed on Obama alone ("the buck stops with the president"), until this mantra, along with Obama's lame duck status, has its intended soporific effect on that majority of the electorate which has long since been rendered permanently drowsy for just such purposes. "Hillary?" the focus groups will ask. "What does she have to do with Obama's mistakes?"
When they write the updated Animal Farm, Hillary Clinton will be Snowball. The Obama diehards in their Che Guevara T-shirts need not worry, however. For there will be a modern epilogue suited to this absurdist age. The turn against Obama will be contingent and temporary, and will in no way hinder his future career as the ultimate celebrity ex-president -- America's Historic First Ever Cool Cokehead Completely Fabricated LGBT Community-Organizing Contraceptive-Dispensing Communist-in-Chief.
If the progressive establishment turns on Obama during the run-up to 2016, you should not be surprised. The cause trumps the man. But wait for the November 2016 New York Times interview in which he laments, Bill Ayers-style, "I regret only that we didn't do enough." And if he and Beyoncé are not standing side by side as presenters at the 2017 MTV Video Awards, I'll eat my hat.
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Multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey, after her surreal $38,000 handbag “racism” encounter in Switzerland, has just weighed in again on race and the presidency, as yet the nth way of hyping her new film: “There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”
Nobody ever says? Has she read a newspaper columnist or turned on MSNBC lately?
Aside from her historical ignorance, Oprah Winfrey has increasingly turned to the race card to explain the president’s plummeting polls. In her race-obsessed world, Syria, Benghazi, the NSA, IRS, AP, and ACA messes do not explain why a reelected president crashes from a recent 60 percent approval rating to less than 40 percent in less than a year.
Instead, in Oprah’s no-win, racialist world, to the degree that Obama is popular, Americans are considered for the time being as not racist; to the degree that he is not, the country suddenly is collectively under suspicion (e.g., “everybody’s thinking it”).
That Obama might be utterly inexperienced in the manner of Jimmy Carter, less than veracious in the manner of the impeached Bill Clinton, or suffering the same second-term blues of Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra or popularity crash of George W. Bush after Katrina simply cannot for Oprah be true of an African-American president, who for some reason must not suffer the same fate and treatment as almost all who have held the highest office. Instead, in this raciallyobsessed world of Oprah, that Obama is faring no different from his predecessors is now the country’s fault. And as remedy, he must be given deference if the country wishes to avoid the latest therapeutic rant from Oprah.
In fact, Oprah has no record of worrying about the level of disrespect shown the office. If she did, she might have said something a few years ago when her president was routinely being compared to a Nazi, and often by her own fellow celebrities, writers, politicians, civil-rights activists, and filmmakers. That she said nothing then, but now says a lot, explains not America’s problem with race, but her own race obsessions, which have blinded her to her own prejudices and hypocrisies.
I don’t recall Oprah objecting when Bush was routinely shouted down. Did she deplore Al Gore calling the Bush team “digital brownshirts”? Or maybe John Glenn invoking the Nazis (“It’s the old Hitler business”) to talk about her president? Nor do I remember her weighing in on Linda Ronstadt’s claim that the Bush administration was “a new bunch of Hitlers.” Harry Belafonte and Julian Bond both routinely labeled their conservative opponents as little more than Nazis or KKK racists. Nor did Oprah note that “there’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs” when Barbra Streisand compared Bush to Hermann Goering. Was she worried when Alfred A. Knopf published a novel about musing how to kill Bush? Or by a prize-winning docudrama film imagining the killing of Bush? What was her reaction a New York play, “I’m Gonna Kill the President,” was produced? Did Oprah once give a similar BBC interview about the office of the president and disrespect shown it in 2004 when a guest columnist in the Guardian, Charles Brooker, wrote: “On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”
What might explain her outrage now about criticism shown Obama, but silence just recently when abject hatred and dreams of violence were voiced against her president? That answer may explain a lot about what Oprah has become.
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For the last week, several colleagues I have been teaching at twoJoshua Fund retreats in the epicenter. One was in Netanyahu for Israeli pastors, ministry leaders, and their wives. The other was in the West Bank for Palestinian Christian leaders and their spouses.
At both events, we scrupulously avoided discussing politics, war, and rumors of war. We simply taught through the Book of James, prayed and worshipped each other, and encouraged the dear brothers and sisters here. Sometimes you just need to stop focusing so much on all the troubles and trials of the world, and just spend time in the Word of God and in fellowship with people who love the Lord. This is where we find such refreshment in troubled times.
That said, the retreats are now over and as I came to Jerusalem, it became clear that war clouds are building again.
· Netanyahu says a bad deal between the West and Iran would make a war more likely.
· Nasrallah (head of Hezbollah) said a bad deal could trigger a major regional war.
· Yaakov Amidror, the recently retired Israeli national security advisor, said today there is "no question" Israel has the capability to use military action to neutralize Iran's nuclear threat and that Netanyahu is prepared to take that action if necessary.
· A growing number of Israeli commentators are saying after so many years and so many discussions and negotiations, time for talk may have run out -- it may be time to launch a preemptive strike (similar to the scenario I write about in Damascus Countdown).
· Now we are hearing credible reports that the Saudis are so fearful of an Iranian nuclear arsenal that: 1) they are preparing to buy nuclear warheads from Pakistan; and 2) the Saudis have been building a secret alliance with Israel to take military action against Iran if diplomacy fails.
These are fascinating developments, and ones that are impossible to independently verify at the moment. But I have to say they have the feel of truth to it, and many here are taking them very seriously.
Please join me in praying for peace. None of us want a war. Let us pray the Lord stops Iran from building nuclear weapons in some other way, and that war won't be necessary. At the same, let us be praying for regional leaders to have the wisdom they need to know how best to proceed in a very dangerous time. James chapter one urges us to pray for wisdom when we need it, and to pray in faith, and the Lord will give us wisdom generously. So pray, too, that the leaders of the region come to know the Lord and see how He alone can give them insight into how to protect their people from the cruel and terrible evil of an apocalyptic, genocidal regime in Tehran actually building nuclear weapons and preparing to use them.
With regards to a secret Saudi-Israeli alliance, here is what is being reported so far.
· The Mossad is working with Saudi officials on contingency plans for a potential attack on Iran in the event that Tehran's nuclear program is not sufficiently curbed in the deal that may be concluded between Iran and world powers in Geneva this week, The Sunday Times reported.
· Both Jerusalem and Riyadh have expressed displeasure at the deal being formulated between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers that they see as doing little to stop Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapon.
· According to the Times, Riyadh has already given its consent for Israel to use Saudi airspace for a potential attack on Iran.
· The paper quoted a diplomatic source as saying the Saudis were willing to assist an Israeli attack by cooperating on the use of drones, rescue helicopters and tanker planes.
· “Once the Geneva agreement is signed, the military option will be back on the table. The Saudis are furious and are willing to give Israel all the help it needs,” the Times quoted the source as saying.
· Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said in an interview with French daily Le Figaro on Saturday that there is a “meeting of the minds” between Israel and the “leading states in the Arab world” on the Iran issue – “one of the few cases in memory, if not the first case in modern times.
· “We all think that Iran should not be allowed to have the capacities to make nuclear weapons,” he said. “We all think that a tougher stance should be taken by the international community. We all believe that if Iran were to have nuclear weapons, this could lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, making the Middle East a nuclear tinderbox.”
· Saying that an Iran with nuclear arms would be the most dangerous development for the world since the mid-20th century, and stressing that the “stakes are amazing,” Netanyahu urged the world’s leaders to pay attention “when Israel and the Arabs see eye-to-eye.”
· “We live here,” he said. “We know something about this region. We know a great deal about Iran and its plans. It’s worthwhile to pay attention to what we say.”
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4)
Are Nervous Democrats Starting to Eye Obamacare Repeal?
By Guy Benson
On one end of the spectrum you have down-with-the-ship partisans, who continue to beat their chests about running on Obamacare in 2014. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has doubled down on this theme, and Nancy Pelosi is on board, too. Stand tall, or whatever:
Then you've got the David Plouffes of the world, who are reduced to adorable wish-casting disguised as "analysis:"
Sure, Dave. Whatever you say. Finally, there are the teeth-grinding, sweat-drenched Democrats who are casting their gaze ahead to next fall with increasing alarm. Almost 40 members of Pelosi's caucus cut the White House loose by voting for the "Keep Your Plan" Act last week, and numerous Senate Democrats have stated on the record that the president's alleged Obamacare "fix" is insufficient. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza suggests that the coming Democratic circular firing squad may not be avoidable. Taking the internecine divisions a step further, National Journal correspondent Josh Kraushaar wonders if more Democrats might start flirting with the "R" word:
I wouldn't hold my breath for rank-and-file Democrats to fully abandon the president, but many will no doubt keep him at arm's length. Who wants to be associated with a much-ridiculed failure, and an administration being pilloried by mainstream media analysts as incompetent, deceptive and allergic to accountability? Who wants to be tethered to a president who's dangerously insulated from reality? The problem for Democrats are their series of votes to pass, fund and sustain Obamacare. Also -- pace Plouffe -- Republicans will run as if Obama and his signature law are sitting atop the Democratic ticket. The thoughts keeping Democrats awake at night are the prospect of endless internal bickering, and stubbornly sticky poll numbers:
And the Obamacare debacle could very well grow worse. Also complicating the Left's messaging are conflicting and shifting explanations of their lies. President Obama claimed that there was no lie, then attempted to re-write his infamous promise, then half-assedly 'apologized' for it. Skittish Democrats like Mary Landrieu and Jeff Merkley are insisting they had no idea that millions of Americans would lose their coverage because of Obamacare, while others breezilyadmit that everyone knew. How is it possible that Landrieu was totally in the dark, while the truth was blatantly obvious to her Senate sisters? (Hint: It's not). Will Mary Landrieu and company take '100 percent' responsibility for their feigned ignorance?
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