I am always fascinated when an Obamaite is sent forth to get their idol off the hook and they suggest he was out of the loop and thus had no knowledge. Either he is the most incompetent of presidents for not understanding anything, the laziest for finding the work of the office beneath him or he is just contemptuous of the office and the people he was sworn to serve. (See 1 below.)
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Then there is Capt. Ed Freeman! (See 2 below.)
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Is Kerry's Obama's back stabbing knife? (See 3 below.)
Big nations and their leaders often push small nations around because they can out of hubris but then realize the error of their ways too late.
My father knew Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and he used to call the latter Robert Nofacts! In their time they were syndicated columnists with quite a following and allegedly Novak was Jewish but he never let that get in is way of bashing the State,(See 3a below.)
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Dick
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By Derek Hunter
When President Obama stepped in front of the cameras Thursday to magically waive a wand and arbitrarily change his signature accomplishment, he couldn’t help but lie to the American people…again. But lying about the accomplishments of his administration isn’t a compulsion; it’s a requirement.
Looking back on the last five years, what has the Obama administration accomplished? Anything? Put your partisanship aside and be honest – can you name any?
His trillion-dollar stimulus was such a failure that progressives had to invent a new, unverifiable measure to claim victory –and the pathetic “it stopped things from getting worse” defense was the absolute best his team of spin-doctors could muster.
The economy has not recovered. The unemployment rate has decreased only because people have given up the hope to find work and no longer count. We’re on the verge of acquiring as much debt under this president as under all previous presidents combined. And the Middle East is in shambles. The only growth we’ve seen is in a stock market propped up by the Federal Reserve’s printing presses, taxpayer subsidized “green” company bankruptcies, disability and food stamp rolls and the bottom lines of Canadian web design firms.
Obamacare was the only real hope the president had left. After months of scandals exposing him as either disconnected from his own administration or callous and vindictive, the president put all his chips on the Oct. 1 launch of healthcare.gov. The idea that the American people, who had just re-elected him, would turn on him and his baby was the furthest thing from his mind.
When they did he was ill-prepared to deal with that reality.
The failures of the website were far from his biggest problem. The website is but the portal to a failed concept, and its unveiling – luckily for the president – was drowned out in the news by the government shutdown. But after 16 days, the clouds cleared and the lousy website’s problems would give way to the failed concept taking center stage.
The failed concept is that the government can create a structure in which the private sector can function and flourish. The reality is the government can’t even build the most expensive website ever constructed and make it work.
When the concept started causing people to lose the health insurance they voluntarily purchased, Democrats were relieved to be talking about the failed website because it could be fixed. When the numbers of people losing their health insurance climbed into the hundreds of thousands, that aspect of the problem no longer could be ignored.
When the media switched from website crashes to human stories of people being harmed by the government, even cheerleaders of the law started putting down their pom-poms.
Had the president and scores of congressional Democrats avoided specifics and promised only that lives would be made better by the law, the media would have granted a pass, as usual. But they went out of their way. Period. More than three-dozen times in the case of the president alone. Period. To ensure us that if we liked our plan, we would be able to keep it, no matter what. Period.
Partisans and their friends in the media could not explain this away. The big lie was exposed. The game was up.
President Obama tried to fall back on his personal charm and talk his way out of it. Acting like a person summoning memories of what humility was like from stories heard long ago, he offered something resembling as close to an apology he has in him. The “I’m sorry you didn’t understand what I was saying was the opposite of what I was actually saying, so it’s really your fault” line went over like a brick. But it was all he had.
It was so ineffective that it, and the damage the law was doing to people, left former President Bill Clinton no choice but to attempt to distance and differentiate himself, and more importantly his wife, from this law and this president. Having the first prominent Democrat call for a change to the law be named Clinton without it being Hillary, to still give the illusion of loyalty, was important for their future plans.
When one rat starts to leave a ship, the rest follow…
The chorus rose to the point of legislation being introduced, not only by Republicans but by Democrats as well. Action was coming, one way or another.
Never one to worry much about Constitutional constraints, the president pre-empted his detractors and pretended the law that was set in stone only six weeks earlier was made of clay and he changed it.
When asked about his repeated promise he said, “With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan you can keep it, I think -- you know, and I've said in interviews -- that there is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate.”
The only way he could not have known it was if he didn’t want to know – if his staff was under orders or chose not to tell him. There’s no reason to believe he’d know on his own. He has no real-world experience in business or the private sector in general, but he does have a staff. The motivation for his lie is either willful deceit or willful ignorance. But neither excuses it.
On the website, what he said was telling. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as -- the way it was supposed to.”
The key word is “directly.” Either the president was remarkably incurious about the main consumer aspect of his proudest achievement or he was lied to. If he was lied to, the fact that no one has been fired is a disgrace. If he was incurious…
So, either the president of the United States has surrounded himself with people who deliberately keep him in the dark and/or lie to him, or he is an incompetent man in over his head so far that he’s frozen in ignorance, unable to muster the wherewithal to ask even the most basic questions on major issues. Or else he’s lying.
History will judge, but the present, between now and the end of his term, can’t be allowed to forget.
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2)You're a 19 year old kid.
You're critically wounded and dying in
The jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam .
It's November 11, 1967.
LZ (landing zone) X-ray.
Your unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense from 100 yards away, that your CO (commanding officer) has ordered the MedEvac helicopters to stop coming in.
You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns and you know you're not getting out.
Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again.
As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.
Then - over the machine gun noise - you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter.
You look up to see a Huey coming in. But.. It doesn't seem real because no MedEvac markings are on it.
Captain Ed Freeman is coming in for you.
He's not MedEvac so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway.
Even after the MedEvacs were ordered not to come. He's coming anyway.
And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 3 of you at a time on board.
Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses and safety.
And, he kept coming back!! 13 more times!!
Until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm.
He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day. Some would not have made it without the Captain and his Huey.
Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Air Force, died last Wednesday at the age of 70, in Boise , Idaho
May God Bless and Rest His Soul.
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3)The Kerry Fiasco
By Jerold S. Auerbach
Who could have imagined it? Secretary of State John Kerry is making his predecessor James Baker seem like Israel's best friend. Back in 1990, Baker complained that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was thwarting Bush administration efforts to launch Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations (sound familiar?). He flamboyantly revealed the White House telephone number, instructing the Israeli government: "When you're serious about peace call us." The frustrated secretary, advised to consider how his blatant hostility might play out to American Jewry, memorably responded: "Fuck the Jews, they didn't vote for us anyway."
During the past several weeks, Kerry has repeatedly berated Israel while blithely undermining his own credibility. First, he blamed the Jewish state for stymied negotiations with the Palestinians, now in their fourth month of going nowhere (exactly where they have always gone). Then he dismissed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated warnings that the United States was abandoning its Middle East allies, Arab states and Israel alike, by caving in to Iranian pressure to lift biting financial sanctions that have inhibited its nuclear development. Finally, with the announcement by Israel's Housing minister that settlement construction would soon resume, quickly rescinded by Netanyahu, Kerry went ballistic.
Kerry's fundamentally flawed analytical framework is grounded, as criticism of Israel inevitably is, in the distorted perception that Jewish settlements in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people pose the fundamental obstacle to Middle Eastern peace. "We do not believe the settlements are legitimate," Kerry declared on Israeli television during his recent visit. "We think they are illegitimate. And we believe that the entire peace process would in fact be easier if these settlements were not taking place." They send the message, to Kerry at least, that "perhaps you're not really serious." About any Palestinian obstacles to peace, including their resistance to partition that dates back to 1937, Kerry remained silent.
Astonishingly, Kerry warned on Israeli and Palestinian television that unless Israelis wanted "a third intifada," they must surrender to Palestinian demands. Otherwise, "you may wind up with [Palestinian] leadership that is committed to violence." Palestinian terrorism, after all, is Israel's fault. Only the recent, and promised future, Israeli release of Palestinian murderers from prison, where many were serving multiple life sentences for their horrific crimes, earned Kerry's grudging praise for Netanyahu's "seriousness" -- but not a word of consolation to families of the victims.
When Kerry realized that greener peace pastures might lie elsewhere, he hastily exited the Middle East for Geneva, where he imagined that he could seal a deal of capitulation with Iran over its nuclear program -- thereby heightening Israeli vulnerability. When France pulled the rug out from under Kerry's inclination to imitate Neville Chamberlain at Munich, the secretary of state lost it once again, returning to Washington with yet another stain on his diplomatic c.v. to plead with senators not to toughen sanctions against Iran lest it offend the ayatollahs -- and protect Israel.
Once again, the perfidy of Israelis -- like malevolent Jews ever since Shylock -- loomed large for Kerry. "Every time anybody would say anything about 'what would the Israelis say,' according to a Senate aide, they'd get cut off and Kerry would say, 'You have to ignore what they're telling you, stop listening to the Israelis on this." What could they possibly know about their own security needs? Illinois Senator Mark Kirk complained: "It was fairly anti-Israeli. I was supposed to disbelieve everything the Israelis had just told me." Should the Senate Banking Committee decide not to ease sanctions against Iran when they are most effective it would, of course, be Israel's fault.
As Secretary Kerry's diplomatic fiascos multiply, he seems ever more determined to blame Israel for his own incompetence. About the Palestinian Authority's demand for the "right of return" to Israel claimed by millions of descendants of 1948 refugees, he remains silent. He is oblivious to nearly a century of international guarantees, dating from the British Mandate and endorsed by the American government, for the right of Jews to "close settlement" west of the Jordan River. Most ominously, he now seems willing to sell Israel for a mess of Iranian diplomatic pottage.
It is enough to generate longing for the good old days when Secretary of State Baker was riding high in Foggy Bottom.
3a) EISENHOWER REGRETTED HE PUSHED FOR SINAI WITHDRAWAL
Dr. Joseph Lerner Thursday, January 16, 1997Dr. Joseph Lerner - Founder - IMRA - 1921 - 2006
When President Bill Clinton won his second term, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak joined
forces to put out a column urging him to follow the example of President
Dwight Eisenhower to "stand up to Bibi Netanyahu."
"Remember what Eisenhower did to Israel in Sinai!" is embedded in American
middle east policy. For Zionists it is a reminder of the U.S. at its
roughest. For Israel's opponents, it is the optimal standard.
In Israel's 1956 joint military undertaking with Britain and France,
Eisenhower warned Israel of severe consequences were she not to withdraw
from the Gaza Strip and Sinai. All U.S. assistance would end and financial
contributions to Israeli institutions would lose their tax exempt status.
There would be serious U.N. declarations and the U.S.S.R. might intervene.
After only two days of these warnings Israel complied.
Peter Golden in his "authorized biography" of Max M. Fisher "Quiet Diplomat"
(1992) relates that in October 1965 Fisher met with President Eisenhower in
Gettysburg to get agreement to accept the U.J.A. medal for his role in the
liberation of the Nazi concentration camps twenty years earlier. French
General Pierre Keonig leader of the French Resistance and British Field
Marshall Alexander were also to be honored.
Golden reports that toward the end of the visit Eisenhower "wistfully
commented 'You know, Max, looking back at Suez, I regret what I did. I never
should have pressured Israel to evacuate the Sinai'" (all references are to
pages xvii and xvix). Eisenhower's remark astonished Fisher.
Fisher was not the only one who was told of Eisenhower's change of mind.
Nixon told Golden: "Eisenhower...in the 1960s told me -- and I am sure he
told others -- that he thought the action that was taken (at Suez) was one
he regretted. He thought it was a mistake."
Although Fisher knew this for 27 years before publication of his "authorized
biography" he evidently never sought to give it publicity beyond the
biography. It is still essentially unknown. Had Eisenhower's rethought
position been known in 1965, it might well have been helpful to Israel.
After reading the biography, I wrote Fisher asking why he hadn't publicized
this change in Eisenhower's thinking. Unfortunately, he canceled our
scheduled meeting in Jerusalem.
The Gettysburg visit brought a change in Fisher's life aspirations. Golden
relates that Eisenhower "almost as an afterthought" as they started to
depart said: "Max, if I had a Jewish advisor working for me, I doubt I would
have handled the situation the same way. I would not have forced the
Israelis back." Fisher was "struck...with the impact of epiphany. If Fisher
had been unsure of the of the extent of power an unofficial advisor could
wield with a president, he now had his answer, and from an unimpeachable
source: the influence exerted could be decisive. It was exactly the role
Fisher hoped to play."
Author Peter Golden regarded Fisher's 1965 Gettysburg visit with Eisenhower
so crucial that he related it in biography's introduction titled "Eisenhower
and the Revelation of Sinai". Yet, somehow that revelation escaped the
attention it deserved.
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