Obama Soon To Visit Saudi Arabia For Another Ring Kiss? If Truth Be Told!

Obama and Kerry selling Israel down the Jordan? (See 1 below.)

Meanwhile, as Iran and the U.S. draw closer, has  the CIA upgraded Saudi Arabia's military capability?

Obama is soon to visit Saudi Arabia for another ring kiss?  (See 1a below.)

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Hanson on a beat up Republican Party. (See 2 below.)

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Even though Joe Curl is writing for another paper, his question asking what happened to the "Gray Lady" is appropriate.  A once proud newspaper has faded into the bias trap, it has lost its sense of responsibility and objectivity. (See 3 below.)

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O"reilley tackles an evasive Obama. 

I was unable to print the beginning part of the story. (See 4 below.)

What is evident though, is Obama and Kerry have not put pressure on Israel, Obama has not lied about health care, the IRS and NSA do not exist, Benghazi and Swift and Furious never took place and Obama is totally blameless for everything that has happened on his watch in The Middle East the domestic economy and his tenure in The White House. 

If truth be told, it is all because of FOX TV and their reporting of facts! (See 4a below.)
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Dick

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1)  Selling Out Israel: The Obama-Kerry Plan

By Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison

Israel is being urged to give up major portions of the West Bank of the Jordan River to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).  That outfit is now known in Western media as the Palestinian Authority (PA), but it comprises the major terrorist group Fatah.  That's the Arabic word for conquest.  And conquest of all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been the goal of the PLO since its inception.  Its founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel.  And its logo shows a map of the region with no Israel indicated.

The goals of Fatah could not be clearer.  And yet, successive U.S. administrations have heeded the siren song of peace in our time in a futile attempt to persuade a terrorist group to mend its ways.  It's as if our own State Department thinks a tiger can be turned into a tabby cat if only we feed it enough American cream.  U.S. taxpayers have been forced to spoon out billions in aid to the PLO since 1989 -- with no discernible move toward freedom or democracy by this rejectionist group.  (A "rejectionist" is one who rejects any role in the Mideast for the Jewish state.)

Now, the Obama administration is fully engaged in applying pressure to the Israelis to give in and give way.  President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are committed to a so-called "two-state solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  (This is a conflict, by the way, that has been raging since at least the 1920s, when Arab riots against Jewish settlers in what was then called the Palestine Mandate, supervised by Great Britain, claimed hundreds of lives.)

At issue today is an emerging Obama-Kerry technical fix that would presumably use drones and electronic sensors to monitor Israel's border security. Thus, this administration will pledge to "have Israel's back."

Other countries have relied on such guarantees in the past.  In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson promised French Premier Georges Clemenceau U.S. military intervention if Germany -- defeated in World War I -- ever arose to threaten exhausted France again.  The French Guaranty Treaty, signed by Wilson and Britain's Prime Minister David Lloyd George, pledged the Western democracies to defend France if Germany ever violated the 35-mile de-militarized zone in the Rhineland.  Wilson cared little or nothing about the French Guaranty Treaty, instead concentrating all his energies on the Versailles Treaty, which established his beloved League of Nations.  When Wilson refused any compromise -- even compromises that France and Britain fully backed -- the Senate rejected that treaty.  The French Guaranty Treaty was a casualty of the Executive-Legislative clash over the Versailles Treaty.

Seventeen years later, in 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered Nazi troops into the Rhineland, and Britain and France did nothing.  Within four short years, Nazi troops were marching down the Champs-Elysées in Paris.  France lost her independence trusting the word of a discredited U.S. administration.

Sixty years later, in the 1970s, South Vietnam was pressured by the Nixon administration into signing peace accords in Paris with the Communist regime in North Vietnam.  President Nixon hailed the peace agreement, under which the U.S. would guarantee South Vietnam's independence and freedom.  Nixon never abandoned South Vietnam, but when he faced mounting demands for his resignation over the Watergate scandal, he lost any clout he had on Capitol Hill.  Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) and Rep. Don Fraser (DFL-Minn.) led a successful push in Congress to repudiate Nixon and cut off all aid to South Vietnam.  That unfortunate nation soon fell under the tank tracks of a North Vietnamese invasion.  Communists laughed at U.S. weakness as they overran Saigon in April 1975.  They consigned millions of South Vietnamese to enslavement and thousands to death.

What in the record of President Obama's administration should give the Israelis confidence that he will truly "have their back"?  As Moshe Ya'alon, a leading Israeli defense spokesman in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, noted, "[s]ensors and drones are no substitute for the physical presence of Israel Defense Force soldiers.  The Jordan Valley is vital to the security of Israel, and we cannot assent to third parties being there in our stead."

President Obama's habit of grand pronouncements -- followed up by less than grand actions -- is catching up with him.  He announced with great fanfare the closure of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.  He flaunted his now-famous Executive Order-signing pen and affixed his left-handed signature.  It would be closed in just one year.  That closure would be accomplished by presidential order by January 2010.  Gitmo remains open.

Last summer, President Obama announced to the world that any use of chemical weapons by Syria's embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, constituted a "red line" that would demand U.S. action.  But when reports stated that Assad had used such weapons -- and when the Obama administration loudly endorsed those reports -- no action was forthcoming.  Today, the administration blames Assad's forces for "foot-dragging" on its agreements to dismantle chemical weapons.  Barely 1% of these have been destroyed.

Is the Obama administration, like those of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon, a discredited administration that cannot keep its pledges even if it wants to?  That is not clear.  President Obama was rather handily re-elected in 2012, even after taking a "shellacking" in the 2010 mid-term elections.  Whether the voters will be paying strict attention to the Obama-Kerry attempts to arm-twist Israelis is also not clear.

Israelis have long memories.  Back in 1967, they trusted to U.N. observers to "have their back" -- literally their back door -- with a peacekeeping force in the Sinai desert.  Egypt's dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered those peacekeepers out of the Sinai and proceeded to blockade Israel's only port on the critical Gulf of Aqaba.  That act of war precipitated the Six-Day War of June 1967.

Israel has learned that when the fate of the Jewish people is at stake -- as it is now, with Iran racing toward nuclear weapons -- the Israelis cannot "outsource" their vital security.  The U.S. should not be trying to force Israel to make dangerous concessions to the PLO -- or any others among their homicidal neighbors.

Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison are senior fellows at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.

1a)  As the West and Iran have moved closer to a nuclear accommodation, signs are emerging that Saudi Arabia is ready to give the world a peek at a new missile strike force of its own --- which has been upgraded with Washington's careful connivance

CIA Helped Saudis in Secret Chinese Missile Deal

By Jeff Stein

Saudi Arabia has long been a backroom player in the Middle East's nuclear game of thrones, apparently content to bankroll the ambitions of Pakistan and Iraq (under Saddam Hussein) to counter the rise of its mortal enemy, Iran.

But as the West and Iran have moved closer to a nuclear accommodation, signs are emerging that the monarchy is ready to give the world a peek at a new missile strike force of its own - which has been upgraded with Washington's careful connivance.

According to a well-placed intelligence source, Saudi Arabia bought ballistic missiles from China in 2007 in a hitherto unreported deal that won Washington's quiet approval on the condition that CIA technical experts could verify they were not designed to carry nuclear warheads.

The solid-fueled, medium-range DF-21 East Wind missiles are an improvement over the DF-3s the Saudis clandestinely acquired from China in 1988, experts say, although they differ on how much of an upgrade they were.

The newer missiles, known as CSS-5s in NATO parlance, have a shorter range but greater accuracy, making them more useful against "high-value targets in Tehran, like presidential palaces or supreme-leader palaces," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, tells Newsweek. They can also be fired much more quickly.

The poor accuracy of the old DF-3s rendered them impotent during the first Gulf War as a counterstrike to Saddam Hussein's Scuds, according to Desert Warrior, a 1996 memoir by Saudi Prince Khaled bin Sultan, then-commander of the Riyadh's Air Defense Forces. King Fahd declined to fling them at Iraq because the likely result would have been mass civilian casualties, and "the coalition's air campaign being waged against Iraq was sufficient retaliation," Khaled wrote.

When that war ended, the Saudis went looking for something better. In China, they likely found it. But unlike in 1988, when they royally annoyed Washington with their secret acquisition of DF-3s, this time they decided to play nice. And the CIA was their assigned playmate.

CIA and Saudi air force officers hammered out the 

ways and means for acquiring the new Chinese missiles during a series of secretive meetings at the spy agency's Langley, Va., headquarters and over dinners at restaurants in northern Virginia during the spring and summer of 2007, a well-informed source tells Newsweek. The arrangements were so sensitive that then-deputy CIA director Stephen Kappes ordered the CIA's logistical costs, estimated at $600,000 to $700,000 buried under a vague "ops support" heading in internal budget documents - prompting loud complaints from the head of the agency's support staff.

Aside from technical personnel, among the few CIA officials let in on the deal were the agency's then-number three, Associate Deputy Director Michael Morrell, a longtime Asia hand; John Kringen, then-head of the agency's intelligence directorate; and the CIA's Riyadh station chief, whoNewsweek is not identifying because he remains undercover. Two analysts subsequently traveled to Saudi Arabia, inspected the crates and returned satisfied that the missiles were not designed to carry nukes, says the source, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing the still-secret deal.

The CIA declined to comment, as did current and former White House officials. The Chinese and Saudi embassies in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Reports that the Saudis have upgraded their missile fleet, however, are not new. Former CIA analyst Jonathan Scherck, for example, who managed intelligence reports on Saudi Arabia as a contractor from 2005 to 2007, claimed in Patriot Lost, an unauthorized 2010 book, that China began supplying a "turnkey nuclear ballistic missile system" to the kingdom with the covert approval of the George W. Bush administration, "no later than December 2003."

Lewis discounts Scherck's "nuclear" claim, which Scherck says he based on reports he saw from CIA spies and technical collection systems.

Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA and White House National Security Council expert on the Middle East, also dismisses Scherck's nuclear scenario, as well as recent claims by the BBC and Timemagazine - citing a former head of Israeli military intelligence - that the Saudis had placed Pakistani nuclear warheads "on order."

"Nonsense and disinformation," he told Newsweek.

But Lewis says that other small but important details in Patriot Lost checked out. "One can raise a number of questions about the logic in Scherck's book - particularly when he starts imagining Pakistani warheads on those Chinese missiles or accusing Bush administration officials of various crimes," Lewis explains, "but when Scherck sticks to the details about monitoring foreign missile shipments and deployments, he's believable."

An engineer on a U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser before joining the CIA, Scherck was fired in 2008 for pursuing details out of channels at the National Geospatial Agency, the satellite imagery service helmed by James Clapper when he began to dig into the missile mystery. Clapper is now director of National Intelligence. Then the Justice Department pounced on Scherck, seizing the modest revenues from his self-published book and prohibiting him from writing or talking further about the matter. Now 39, Scherck works as a night manager of a hotel in Southern California while he works on a screenplay.

Meanwhile, the Saudis have been acting like they want people to take notice of their previously furtive missile program.

"Over the past few years, Saudi Arabia has started talking a lot about its Strategic Missile Force," Lewis writes in the draft of an upcoming piece for Foreign Policy that he showed Newsweek. "And, in the course of doing so, Riyadh seems to be hinting that it has bought at least two new types of ballistic missiles."

"For example," Lewis writes, "in 2010, Khaled - by then deputy defense minister - cut the ribbon on a new headquarters building in Riyadh for the Strategic Missile Force. They released a number of images of the building, both inside and out. Moreover, since about 2007, the Saudi press has covered graduation ceremonies from the Strategic Missile Force school in Wadi ad-Dawasir - especially if the commencement speaker is a person of importance.

"The process of recruiting Saudis has also resulted in fair amount of information appearing in print, right down to the pay schedule," he added. "For a while, the Strategic Missile Force even had a website, although it is no longer active."

The most intriguing photo to appear so far, showed "Khaled's replacement - the recently removed deputy minister of defense Prince Fahd - visiting the Strategic Missile Force headquarters in Riyadh," Lewis writes. Instead of gifting him with the usual "solid-gold falcon in a glass case... the stuff dreams are made of," Lewis cracks, officials are shown posing with a glass-enclosed case of three missile models.

"The missile on the far left is, obviously, a DF-3 of the sort that Saudi Arabia purchased from China in the late 1980s," Lewis writes. "But the other two? They could any one of Chinese or Pakistani missiles. All the missiles Lewis mentions are nuclear-capable.

Again, the unprecedented missiles-and-pony show could be a deception. In any case, the Saudis are banging the drums around their missile bases - without any apparent notice here, Lewis says, probably because it's all in Arabic.

The local Saudi press has been covering blood drives and disaster relief efforts by personnel at known missile bases, Lewis tells Newsweek. And while officials have been secretive about another missile base, he's discovered that "people on Arabic bulletin boards have big mouths.

"Turns out, if you're a Saudi assigned to a launch unit," he says, "the most natural thing in the world is to announce on a bulletin board, 'Hi, I work for the Saudi missile force, and I've been assigned to this place, and where can I get an apartment?' And people openly talk about their deployments in a way that Saudi officials would freak if they realized it."

Maybe. But you can't scare people if nobody knows what you got. Maybe the Saudis are suddenly trying to get attention. They've faced the deterrence dilemma before.

In late 1988, Khaled recalled in his memoir, he worried that nobody had detected the deployment of the secretly acquired Chinese DF-3s. What good was having them if nobody was afraid of them? He suggested leaking their existence, "as the object of acquiring the weapon would not have been achieved" unless the world (read: Iranians and Israelis) knew about it. "As it happened," he wrote inDesert Warrior, "we had no need to do so, because the Americans broke the news first." And they were in a king's rage about it.

But what about the 2007 Chinese missile deal Newsweek was told about? No one seems to have noticed that, either.

But they may now.

Important note: Those DF-21s - or whatever they are - don't dramatically tilt the Middle East map in the Saudis' favor.

"Even if it is the case that Saudi Arabia received DF-21 missiles, unless they also received nuclear warheads for the missiles, it has little meaning for the regional military balance," Pollack toldNewsweek.

"Saudi Arabia has had Chinese ballistic missiles since the 1980s, and the DF-21 has a shorter range than the CSS-2s they originally bought. A conventional warhead on the DF-21 would be too small to cause the kind of damage that would have a strategic impact. Even if the Chinese had sold Saudis the mod-4 warhead for the DF-21 - which theoretically can cripple an aircraft carrier - the Saudis lack the sensor technology to find an aircraft carrier, except when one is docked at Port Jebel Ali in the UAE, Saudi Arabia's close ally."

Lewis agrees - with caveats. When you're talking nukes and missiles, you always have to factor in the weird stuff, like Kissinger whispering to Hanoi that Nixon was bonkers over Vietnam and would slap the armageddon button if pushed too far - the so-called "madman theory."

"It has its advantages, it definitely has its advantages," Lewis says of the new Saudi missiles deal, if only because some of those missiles could have been modified to carry nuclear warheads after CIA technicians left. "But I don't know if I were an Iranian I would feel fundamentally different about the DF 21s than I did about the DF-3.... "

He adds, "Maybe there's a whole gut, or visceral, thing, where they" - the Iranians - "say, 'Hey, these guys spent a lot of money, they're serious.' So maybe it just conveys the Saudis' will in a way that is unsettling, in a way that the fine old missile system wasn't.

"It's a weird thing. It has its own, strange logic. So yeah, it makes a difference. But it's not a difference-maker."

Newsweek Contributing Editor Jeff Stein writes the SpyTalk column from Washington.

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2)-  A Beat-up, Exhausted, and Terrified Republican Establishment
By Victor Davis Hanson


On almost every contemporary issue there is a populist, middle-class argument to be made against elite liberalism. Yet the Republican class in charge seems ossified in its inability to make a counter-argument for the middle class. Never has the liberal agenda been so vulnerable, a logical development when bad ideas have had five years to prove themselves as very bad ideas. When Obama is all done he will have taken high presidential popularity ratings, a supermajority in the Senate, and a large margin in the House and lost them all — if only the Republicans can make an adequate case that they represent the middle class, the Democrats only the very wealthy and the very dependent.

Illegal Immigration

We know the entry of 11 million illegal aliens depresses the wages of the poor and entry-level working class. Illegal immigration overwhelms state services, and that too hurts citizens most in need of help. The lower-middle classes do not have low-paid nannies, gardeners, and house-keepers. We know the illegal influx pleases La Raza activists, most of them second- and third-generation elites in government, politics, journalism and education, who without illegal immigration would not have much of a moral or legal justification for the continuance of affirmative action and identity politics, given that statistically Latinos would soon follow the pattern of other assimilated groups. (For example, is there affirmative action for Armenian immigrants? An Italian Razza movement? Punjabi Studies?)

We also know that cheap labor in the shadows benefits corporate business, eager for low-wage laborers.  So how hard is it for a Republican simply to say, “I oppose illegal immigration because (1) it is illegal. It undermines the sanctity of the law and discriminates against the law-abiding waiting in line to enter the U.S. legally. (2) It benefits corporate grandees at the expense of working people. (3) It is driven by self-serving elites of the ethnic-grievance industry to enhance their own advantage, rather than to help poor folks struggling to find decent wages and schools. Illegal immigration, in short, is the most illiberal issue of our time.

Energy

Fracking and horizontal drilling help the middle class. Stopping them on federal lands or banning Keystone makes the lower classes pay for the pipe dreams of the upper class. The Berkeley Sierra Club professor doesn’t worry whether he can find a job welding on a pipeline. He does not drive along the Westside 50 miles to work and so cares little about the price of gas for his third-hand pick-up. It is about 70 degrees year round in Menlo Park, so it is easy to jack power bills up to subsidize wind and solar, when you don’t need to survive 105 degree temperatures in Bakersfield. Discouraging energy development is a pastime of the rich, who have the money to shield themselves from the consequences of their advocacy, and do not associate with the less well-off, who always seem to suffer from elite pipe dreams. Why not headquarter the Sierra Club in Bakersfield, where the cost of electricity is real for real people? Cannot a Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union simply say, “Mr. President, you are shamelessly taking credit for gas and oil production that you did all in your power to thwart. The middle class is enjoying a temporary cut in gas prices, despite, not because of, you.”

Gun Control

How hard it is for Republicans to say to liberals, “I accuse! The wealthy have their security details, most of them armed. The underclass has access to illegal weaponry as the armed crime sprees in a Detroit or Chicago attest. Why then go after the middle class, who neither outsource their security nor break the law? Before we issue sweeping edicts aimed at the law-abiding, let us disarm all the security guards of Hollywood and Washington, D.C., and put away for good the criminals who use illegal firearms to hurt the innocent.”

The Federal Reserve

Barack Obama’s Wall Street is booming, not because of a superb business cycle, but because there is no interest on capital anywhere else to be found. The rich profit from their more sophisticated knowledge of stocks, the poor from debt relief. The middle?

What good is it to them that they played by all the rules and saved money — if only to receive no interest on any of their passbook accounts? The self-employed man who was not a pensioned employee in the public sector, who does not chat with his stock broker each week, and who is not eligible for mortgage-debt relief, student-debt relief for his children, credit-card relief, or any federal relief of any sort is a veritable fool. He socked away each month a few hundred dollars in his savings — but in an era when having cash in the bank means that inflation eats it away faster than minimal interest can preserve it.

Young People

Obamacare is a gift to the old and affluent, who use subsidized health care from the young and poor. It is the greatest tax on the youthful cohort in the history of the republic at a time when student debt already exceeds $1 trillion. How liberal is that? Or for that matter, how liberal were colleges to up their annual tuition rates higher than inflation, assured that their own pyramidal cultures (compare the disparities in salaries of the part-timer and full professor for the same class) were subsidized by federally guaranteed (and mostly high-interest) loans? How many rants on race and gender are necessary to win exemption from the exploitation in the classroom next door?

“Fairness” 

We talk about fairness. Do men and women make the same on the president’s own staff? Why does Kobe Bryant make so much and some of his gifted colleagues make so little in comparison? Does Johnny Depp really need $40 million a year when the Hollywood sound tech cannot afford a cottage in South Central L.A.? Did not the Malibu grandees hear their president say that they did not build their film careers, and at some point long ago had made enough money? Could not the gardeners or nannies of Santa Monica at least be unionized? Is there a chapter of ACORN at Google? Can graduate-school TAs get the SEIU interested in their plight? At some point cannot a conservative make the case that liberalism, as preached by its elites, is a psychological mechanism to shield wealthy progressives from the ramifications of their own ideology? Do Apple executives not outsource? Does Facebook not offshore? What is so liberal about Mark Zuckerberg besmirching his opponents as nativists, as he tries to access as much cheap labor as he can, at a time when the Other in Silicon Valley — from his gardeners to computer programmers — could not afford to rent a cot in his tool shed? Cannot a Republican ask Obama at least to forgo Martha’s Vineyard next summer or the next zillionaire golfing outing if he wants to rant about the perks of the 1%?

Green

How liberal was it that a few hundred Bay Area elites went to court over the last few years to divert about 20 million acre-feet of precious irrigation water to flow out to the sea, in vain pursuit of their fantasies about expanding bait fish populations in the delta or in hopes of seeing a salmon jump out of the river by Fresno? Tens of thousands of poor people will lose their jobs this summer, as irrigation water reserves are exhausted and acreage goes out of production. What is more liberal: allowing an out-of-work poor logger of 23 to go into the Sierra to salvage timber from a burned-out Sierra Nevada forest, or to keep him jobless and on the dole in order that the precious lumber rots and breeds precious populations? In the liberal calculus, is Coleoptera more valuable than homo sapiens? Is the distant bark beetle a more cuddly creature than the jobless, tobacco-chewing chain-sawer having a beer at the Lakeshore bar?

Diversity

Yes, let us all hail diversity and insist that it be applied across the board. Cannot California find a senior elected leader other than Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi? How diverse, given California’s trumpeted diversity, are three elderly multimillionaire women, with hyper-capitalist spouses, who live within commuting distance of each other in the Bay Area? Should the United States Postal service base correct its current labor profile by hiring in accordance with ethnic percentages within the population? Should Asians depart from UC Berkeley so more whites, blacks, and Latinos might enroll commensurately with their percentages in the population? Should the NFL have quotas for non-African-Americans, to give others a chance — to paraphrase Kanye West — to have insider contacts to land such lucrative athletic billets? How many Asians are on the L.A. Lakers versus the size of the Asian community in L.A. County? Have the military casualties of the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq been computed to ensure that all groups suffered commensurately? Just when or when do we not insist on proportional representation based on ethnicity? Are the heads of Hollywood studios reflective of the rich diversity of California? And if we are going down the diversity and fairness routes, then surely Al Gore needs a sermon — after he unloaded a failed network to an anti-Semitic, carbon-burning medieval sheikdom, in failed efforts to beat the new capital gains tax that he so strenuously supported. How fair, how egalitarian, how diverse is all that? What is the ethnic profile of Sierra Club membership?

In 2014 Republicans are going to be kamikazeed by very wealthy, highly educated, and relentless operatives in the Boston-New York-Washington, D.C., nexus, with backup from the San Diego to San Francisco bookend coastal corridor. These critics mostly rest at the top of the capitalist heap, and will assail those who are not, on grounds that they are unfair to every hyphenated group in America.

To survive, Republicans must go on the offensive and point out that their accusers never live the lives they advocate for others. Liberal feminists seem to be John Edwards and Bill Clinton. Liberal men of the people are Al Gore, John Kerry, and Jon Corzine. Their populists who deplore outsourcing, offshore accounts, and non-unions are Apple and Facebook grandees who embrace all three. White privilege is not the fate of the West Virginian or West Texan working at Target, but the tiny, inbred old-boy and old-girl world of prep-school to Ivy League to the insider pull of Dad and Mom to land up with a phoned-in job in journalism, politics, finance, entertainment, the arts, and academia on the East and West coasts, followed by pro forma praise of diversity — for others. Open-borders zealots have their children behind the walls of private academies.

Surely there is a populist case to be made — or is the Republican establishment to manage a permanent, sober, and judicious out-party, as it is demagogued to death by the privileged?

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3) What has happened to The New York Times?

By Joseph Curl

The Gray Lady, America’s Paper of Record, where readers turn to find “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” has gone off the deep end.

Last Friday, the paper published a huge story. “Christie Knew About Bridge Lane Closings, Port Authority Official Says,” the headline screamed.

Huge. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, during a two-hour press conference weeks ago, had repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing about lane closures on a bridge leading into New York City, after allegations emerged that the lanes were shut down to punish a mayor who failed to endorse the governor’s re-election bid. Now, The Times said, it turned out “Christie Knew.” Huge.

“The Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings on the George Washington Bridge in the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Friday that the governor knew about the lane closings when they were happening, and that he had the evidence to prove it,” read the lede of the blockbuster story.

The article went on to prove — nothing. No proof whatsoever of the “evidence” (which was highlighted by the weird wording “had the evidence” — does that mean he no longer “has” it?) Still, the claim was shocking. And it directly targeted a sitting U.S. governor, who just happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.

One might expect such a thin story from, say, the National Enquirer, but The New York Times? And one might wonder why the newspaper didn’t ask the very first question nearly anyone else would ask when presented with such a claim: “Uh, OK, you say you have evidence, can we see it?” Then, if said evidence didn’t pan out, it’d be Spike City for the big scoop.

But no, The Times ran with the piece, which made the follow-on media follow on the story throughout the day. But few noticed the way the lede was changed — in less than 20 minutes.

In a write-through of the piece, the new lede said: “The former Port Authority official who personally oversaw the lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, central to the scandal now swirling around Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, said on Friday that ‘evidence exists’ the governor knew about the lane closings when they were happening.”

“Evidence exists”? Where? Does anyone “have” it like, say, the reporter writing the story about its existence?

Meanwhile, the headline, once a killer with the declarative “Christie Knew,” also morphed into a watered-down weakling. “Christie Linked to Knowledge of Shut Lanes.” “Linked to Knowledge”? A far cry from “Christie Knew.” And what does it even mean for someone to be “linked to knowledge”? Was President Richard Nixon “linked to knowledge” of the Watergate cover-up?

Don’t look in the article, it’s not there. The story no longer said a Port Authority official “had the evidence.” That was gone. The story simply said that the official claimed “evidence exists.” And the vaunted newspaper didn’t bother to ask him for the evidence? Hmm.

As questions began to emerge about the altered piece and headline, The Times was forced to put out a statement.

“Times metro editor Wendell Jamieson addressed the change in an email to HuffPost’s Michael Calderone: ‘We’ve made probably dozens of changes to the story to make it more precise. That was one of them. I bet there will be dozens more,’” the Huffington Post wrote.

Dozens more? Maybe, just maybe, The Times should work the story for a while until editors and reporters can draft a strong piece before publishing. Just a thought.

For the record, David Wildstein, the Port Authority official who claimed he “had” the evidence, has been publicly asking for immunity since the scandal hit the press. He has even been held in contempt by the New Jersey Legislature for refusing to testify. And the threat of “evidence” makes up just one sentence in a two-page letter from his lawyer. So why would The Times run it?

On Sunday, we got the answer, from none other than Paul Krugman, an op-ed columnist at the paper. “I think Christie was the one guy that really scared them for 2016,” he said of Democrats. “I mean, Christie is in a no-win situation, even if there isn’t any smoking gun.”

A no-win situation, even without evidence. Just a claim of evidence, Mr. Krugman implied, was enough.

So, in the end, The Times ran a thin story with an unsubstantiated claim of “evidence” directly linking Mr. Christie to the lane closures because it didn’t need a “smoking gun” — or any evidence at all. The allegation alone was enough to put the governor in a “no-win situation.”

“Could we have made this more clear? Yes,” The Times reporter who wrote the piece, Kate Zernike, said Sunday on CNN. “Did we make it more clear? Yes.” And all those changes, softening the lede, the headline? “That’s a typical newspaper process,” she said.

No, it’s the typical newspaper process for a rag on Grub Street, where hack writers churn out stories light on facts and heavy on innuendo. Which, in 2014, now includes The New York Times.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times and is now editor of the Drudge Report. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.

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4

Mr. O’Reilly, sitting forward in his chair at the White House, pressed Mr. Obama repeatedly. The president, smiling but seemingly trying to keep his patience, pushed back in kind. At times the two men talked right over each other.

When Mr. O’Reilly asked if the broken promise on keeping health plans was “the biggest mistake of your presidency,” Mr. Obama responded, “Oh, Bill, you’ve got a long list of my mistakes of my presidency.”

When Mr. O’Reilly interrupted an answer to press Mr. Obama on why

 Susan E. Rice, now the president’s national security adviser, first characterized the Benghazi attack as a spontaneous response to an anti-Muslim video, Mr. Obama said, “And I’m trying to explain it to you if you want to listen.”

Mr. O’Reilly went on to say that Mr. Obama’s detractors believe the administration tried to mislead the public about what really happened in Benghazi because it was in the middle of his re-election campaign.

“They believe it because folks like you are telling them,” Mr. Obama responded.

“No, I’m not telling them that,” Mr. O’Reilly protested.

When Mr. O’Reilly asked if the I.R.S. scandal involving tax scrutiny of political groups exposed corruption in the agency, Mr. Obama blamed Fox for spreading what he called incorrect information. “That’s not what happened,” Mr. Obama said. “Folks have, again, had multiple hearings on this. I mean, these kinds of things keep on surfacing in part because you

 and your TV station will promote them.”

Mr. O’Reilly responded that there were “unanswered questions” and 

asked again if there was corruption in the I.R.S.

“There were some boneheaded decisions,” the president said.

“But no mass corruption?” Mr. O’Reilly asked.

“Not even mass corruption — not even a smidgen of corruption,” Mr. 

Obama said.

Asked why Douglas Shulman, while I.R.S. commissioner, had visited the White House many times, Mr. Obama said the agency was involved in the implementation of the health care program and new Wall Street regulations. “I do not recall meeting with him in any of these meetings that are pretty routine meetings that we had,” Mr. Obama said.

At other moments, Mr. Obama skirted Mr. O’Reilly’s questions, including one about why he had not fired Kathleen E. Sebelius, the health secretary, for the health care debacle.

“I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable,” Mr. Obama said, offering no examples. “But when we’re in midstream, Bill, we want to make sure that our main focus is how do we make this thing work so that people are able sign up and that’s what we’ve done.”

Mr. O’Reilly, who has interviewed Mr. Obama in the past, including before the 2011 Super Bowl, ended the session on a softer note. “I know you think maybe we haven’t been fair,” he said, “but I think your heart is in the right place.”

Then he asked perhaps the most pressing question of the day: Who would win the Super Bowl?

Mr. Obama ducked.

“These guys are too evenly matched,” he said. “I think it’s going to be 

24-21, but I don’t know who’s going to be 24 and I don’t know who’s going

 to be 21.”


4a)

Obama to O'Reilly: Fox News Reason for My Problems

S

By Greg Richter

President Barack Obama twice blamed Fox News Channel for misinforming the public
 on issues that have bedeviled his presidency in the past year during a pre-Super Bowl interview with the network's Bill O'Reilly.

The two sat down in the White House on Sunday for a live pregame interview that 

started about 4:35 p.m. and aired for about 10 minutes.

O'Reilly first noted that Obama's detractors believe he did not initially say the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three 

other Americans dead was terrorism because it happened in the heat of an election. 

Obama had just weeks earlier said al-Qaida was on the run after U.S. Navy SEALs assassinated its leader, Osama bin Laden.

"That's what they believe," O'Reilly said of Obama's detractors.

"And they believe it because folks like you are telling them that," Obama said in the 

often testy interview.

"No, I'm not telling them that. I'm asking you whether you were told it was a terror attack," O'Reilly countered.

Obama said it was "inaccurate" to say that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told him the attack was terrorism when he first gave him the news. O'Reilly noted that Gen. Carter Ham, head of operations in Libya, has testified he immediately told Panetta the attack

 was terrorism, and not the result of a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Muslim video.

"But it's more than that because of Susan Rice," O'Reilly said, noting that Rice, who was then U.N. ambassador, used the video explanation days later on the Sunday talk shows. 

"Just as an American, I'm just confused," he said.

"Bill, I'm trying to explain it to you if you want to listen," Obama countered.

The president also turned on Fox News when questioned about the IRS scandal, in 

which conservative groups were scrutinized more heavily when seeking tax-exempt 

status.

"These kinds of things keep on surfacing, in part, because you and your TV station will promote them," Obama said.

O'Reilly asked if Obama was saying there was no corruption in the IRS scandal.

"No," Obama said. 

"There was some boneheaded decisions out of a local office," adding that there was

 "not even a smidgen of corruption."

O'Reilly also asked why Obama didn't fire Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over the botched rollout of the Obamacare website in October.

Obama argued that while glitches had been anticipated, no one expected a complete failure of the site. He said everything had been fixed, and the site is now running as it should.

O'Reilly noted that only 8 percent of Americans agree with Obama, and again pressed about firing Sebelius.

"I'm sure that the intent is noble," O'Reilly said, "But I'm a taxpayer, and I'm paying Kathleen Sebelius' salary, and she screwed up. And you're not holding her accountable

."

"Well, I promise you that we hold everybody up and down the line accountable," 

Obama said. "But when we're midstream, Bill, we want to make sure that our main 

focus is, how do we make this think work so that people are able to sign up, and that's what we've done."

O'Reilly asked if Obama considered the biggest mistake of his presidency telling "the nation over and over, if you like your insurance you can keep your insurance?"

"Oh, Bill, you've got a long list of my mistakes in my presidency," Obama said.

But he did admit he regretted that the "grandfather clause" written into the Affordable Care Act didn't cover everyone.

"That's why we changed it," he said.

"You gave your enemies a lot of fodder for it," O'Reilly said. 

The interview was scheduled to continue after the live broadcast. The recorded

 interview is set to air Monday night on "The O'Reilly Factor."  

"I know you think maybe we haven't been fair," O'Reilly noted near the end of the live interview, "but I think your heart is in the right place."

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