President Wuss!

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I am bemused watching Obama - President Wuss - warn Ukraine Separatists and Putin they must allow transparency and stop tampering with evidence.

I doubt Obama has demanded this of Lois Lerner.

What a continuing two faced fraud Obama remains and now he sends Kerry to demand Israel engage in a cease fire because he is tired of and outraged by seeing civilian Palestinian casualties:

"Obama: U.S. has ‘serious concerns’ over Palestinian death toll in Gaza"

WOW - Russia is going to be further isolated and Israel punished for protecting its citizens - blah - blah - blah!

Obama continues to demonstrate he is  no match for Putin except in one aspect - they both are liars! (See 1 and 1a below.)

Will Netanyahu prove to be Prime Minister Wuss?  (See 1b below.)
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Hamas continues to glorify death of their own.  (See 2 below.)
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Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Obama’s Tranquility

by Victor Davis Hanson

Barack Obama’s team recently took credit for improving the “tranquility of the global community,” and the president made it clear just what a calm place the world has become during his tenure.

But this summer Obama’s tranquil world has descended into medieval barbarism in a way scarcely seen in decades. In Gaza, Hamas is banking its missile arsenal in mosques, schools and private homes; even Hitler did not do that with his V2s. Hamas terrorists resort to trying to wire up animals to serve as suicide bombers. Aztec-style, they seek to capture Israeli soldiers to  torture or trade — a sort of updated version of parading captive soldiers up the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan.

Hamas cannot build a hotel, but instead applies its premodern cunning to tunneling and killing in ever more insidious ways. Yet it proves incompetent in doing what it wishes to do best — kill Jewish civilians. Its efforts to kill Jews while getting killed in the process earn it sympathy from the morally obtuse of the contemporary world who would have applauded Hitler in 1945 as an underdog who suffered greatly as he was overwhelmed by the Allies that he once tried to destroy.

In Paris, just seventy years after the Holocaust, sympathetic rioters hit the streets to cheer on Hamas’s efforts to kill more Jews with their crude versions of Vergeltungswaffen. The passive French solution apparently is once again to encourage Jews to leave the country, given the growing number of new Nazis in their midst. Whether Hamas or Putin, the European response is always the same: why cannot they just go away to bother to some Jews or Americans, and leave us alone?

Russian operatives, role-playing as Ukrainian separatists, shot down a civilian airliner, then tried to doctor the debris field, then let the bodies decay, and now are looting the wallets of the dead. You cannot get much less tranquil than that.

In Iraq, ISIS, not content with the usual Middle East savagery, resorts to warring on religious  icons, as if torture and murder of the living do not offer enough outlet for their barbarity. They blow up mosques, shatter tombs, and deface graveyards, in their eagerness to restore the 7^th century. All that seems more Dark Age than merely medieval.

Iran just missed our “deadline” that was supposed to result in fewer centrifuges in exchange for suspending the sanctions. No sane person now believes that the Iranians will stop nuclear enrichment, or will not get a bomb, or will not threaten to use it when they get one. What will Secretary Kerry do, now that the currency of “red lines,” “deadlines” and “step-over lines” has been all used up?


1a)   Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy is failure

Yes, we know, the crazy House. But we were promised hope and change on big issues. We got no vision and less action

Obama's Ineffective and Gutless Presidency

By THOMAS FRANK
I was a 20-year-old college dropout with no more than $100 in the bank the day my son was born in 1994.  I’d been in the Coast Guard just over six months. Joining the service was my solution to a lot of problems, not the least of which was being married to a pregnant, 19-year-old fellow dropout.  We were poor, and my overwhelming response to poverty was a profound shame that drove me into the arms of the people least willing to help — conservatives.

Just before our first baby arrived, my wife and I walked into the social services office near the base where I was stationed in rural North Carolina. “You qualify for WIC and food stamps,” the middle-aged woman said.  I don’t know whether she disapproved of us or if all social services workers in the South oozed an understated unpleasantness.  We took the Women, Infants, Children vouchers for free peanut butter, cheese and baby formula and got into the food stamp line.

Looking around, I saw no other young servicemen.  Coming from the white working class, I’d always been taught that food stamps were for the “others” — failures, drug addicts or immigrants, maybe — not for real Americans like me.  I could not bear the stigma, so we walked out before our number was called.

Even though we didn’t take the food stamps, we lived in the warm embrace of the federal government with subsidized housing and utilities, courtesy of Uncle Sam.  Yet I blamed all of my considerable problems on the government, the only institution that was actively working to alleviate my suffering. I railed against government spending (i.e., raising my own salary).  At the same time, the earned income tax credit was the only way I could balance my budget at the end of the year.

I felt my own poverty was a moral failure.  To support my feelings of inadequacy, every move I made only pushed me deeper into poverty.  I bought a car and got screwed on the financing.  The credit I could get, I overused and was overpriced to start with.  My wife couldn’t get or keep a job, and we could not afford reliable day care in any case.  I was naive, broke and uneducated but still felt entitled to a middle-class existence.

If you had taken WIC and the EITC away from me, my son would still have eaten, but my life would have been much more miserable.  Without government help, I would have had to borrow money from my family more often.  I borrowed money from my parents less than a handful of times, but I remember every single instance with a burning shame.  To ask for money was to admit defeat, to be a de facto loser.

The Age of the Zombie Consensus, however poetic it sounds, will probably not recommend itself as a catchphrase to the shapers of the Obama legacy. They will probably be looking for a label that is slightly more heroic: the Triumph of Faith over Cynicism, or something like that. Maybe they will borrow a phrase from one of the 2012 campaign books, “The Center Holds,” and describe the Obama presidency as a time when cool, corporate reason prevailed over inflamed public opinion. Barack Obama will be presented as a kind of second FDR: the man who saved the system from itself. That perhaps the system didn’t deserve saving will be left to some less-well-funded museum.

Another prediction that I can make safely is that the Obama Presidential Library will violate one of the cardinal rules of presidential museums: It will have to be pretty massively partisan. As I noted last week, presidential libraries usually play down partisan conflict in order to make the past seem like a place of national togetherness and the president himself like a man of broadly recognized leadership, but in order for Obama’s presidential library to deliver the usual reassuring message about himself, it will have to stand convention on its head. As president, Obama has been reluctant to take the reinvigorated right too seriously. But as legacy-maker, I predict that he will work to make them seem even crazier and more unstoppable than they actually are.

Why? Because all presidential museums are exercises in getting their subject off the hook, and for Obama loyalists looking back at his years in office, the need for blame evasion will be acute. Why, the visitors to his library will wonder, did the president do so little about rising inequality, the subject on which he gave so many rousing speeches? Why did he do nothing, or next to nothing, about the crazy high price of a college education, the Great Good Thing that he has said, time and again, determines our personal as well as national success? Why didn’t he propose a proper healthcare program instead of the confusing jumble we got? Why not a proper stimulus package? Why didn’t he break up the banks? Or the agribusiness giants, for that matter?

Well, duh, his museum will answer: he couldn’t do any of those things because of the crazy right-wingers running wild in the land. He couldn’t reason with them—their brains don’t work like ours! He couldn’t defeat them at the polls—they’d gerrymandered so many states that they couldn’t be dislodged! What can a high-minded man of principle do when confronted with such a vast span of bigotry and close-mindedness? The answer toward which the Obama museum will steer the visitor is: Nothing.

In point of fact, there were plenty of things Obama’s Democrats could have done that might have put the right out of business once and for all—for example, by responding more aggressively to the Great Recession or by pounding relentlessly on the theme of middle-class economic distress. Acknowledging this possibility, however, has always been difficult for consensus-minded Democrats, and I suspect that in the official recounting of the Obama era, this troublesome possibility will disappear entirely. Instead, the terrifying Right-Wing Other will be cast in bronze at twice life-size, and made the excuse for the Administration’s every last failure of nerve, imagination and foresight. Demonizing the right will also allow the Obama legacy team to present his two electoral victories as ends in themselves, since they kept the White House out of the monster’s grasp—heroic triumphs that were truly worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. (Which will be dusted off and prominently displayed.)

But bipartisanship as an ideal must also be kept sacred, of course. And so, after visitors to the Obama Library have passed through the Gallery of Drones and the Big Data Command Center, they will be ushered into a maze-like exhibit designed to represent the president’s long, lonely, and ultimately fruitless search for consensus. The Labyrinth of the Grand Bargain, it might be called, and it will teach how the president bravely put the fundamental achievements of his party—Social Security and Medicare—on the bargaining table in exchange for higher taxes and a smaller deficit. This will be described not as a sellout of liberal principle but as a sacred quest for the Holy Grail of Washington: a bipartisan coming-together on “entitlement reform,” which every responsible D.C. professional knows to be the correct way forward.

How will all the legacy-shapers of the future regard the Obama movement, the political prairie fire of six years ago that transformed the Senator from Illinois into a folk hero even before he was elected? What will the Obama library have to say about the people who recognized correctly that it was time for “Change” and who showed up at his routine campaign appearances in 2008 by the hundreds of thousands?

It will be a tricky problem. On the up side, those days before his first term began were undoubtedly Obama’s best ones. Mentioning them, however, will remind the visitor of the next stage in his true believers’ political evolution: Disillusionment. Not because their hero failed to win the Grand Bargain, but because he wanted to get it in the first place—because he seemed to believe that shoring up the D.C. consensus was the rightful object of all political idealism. The movement, in other words, won’t fit easily into the standard legacy narrative. Yet it can’t simply be deleted from the snapshot.

Perhaps there will be an architectural solution for this problem. For example, the Obama museum’s designers could make the exhibit on the movement into a kind of blind alley that physically reminds visitors of the basic doctrine of the Democratic Party’s leadership faction: that liberals have nowhere else to go.

My own preference would be to let that disillusionment run, to let it guide the entire design of the Obama museum. Disillusionment is, after all, a far more representative emotion of our times than Beltway satisfaction over the stability of some imaginary “center.” So why not memorialize it? My suggestion to the designers of the complex: That the Obama Presidential Library be designed as a kind of cenotaph, a mausoleum of hope.

Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include "What's The Matter With Kansas," "Pity the Billionaire" and "One Market Under God." He is the founding editor of The Baffler magazine.

1b)   How far has Netanyahu been provoked?

By Ron Lipsman

President Obama might not be the only leader whose self-imposed red lines are drawn in disappearing ink. Until very recently, some were thinking that Benjamin Netanyahu might be predisposed to the same behavior.

Netanyahu has been arguing for years that Iran – despite protestations to the contrary – is intent on developing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them both near to and far from the Persian homeland. From the Knesset to the halls of the UN to the Oval Office, Netanyahu has preached that the Iranian nuclear quest is a threat to the civilized world, but of course particularly to Israel. He exhorts the world community, and especially the US, to halt the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons capability; and he promises in the most forceful terms that if others will not act, then Israel will.

In a similar vein, Netanyahu has given eloquent speeches excoriating the evil practices of the Gaza-based terrorist organization, Hamas. In the same venues in which he lambasts Iran, Netanyahu passionately describes the murderous designs of Hamas and how the Israelis will thwart those intentions; indeed, how Israel will destroy Hamas if provoked sufficiently.

Well, if more than fifteen hundred rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into almost every Israeli community is not sufficient provocation, then one wonders what is. Moreover, the latest provocation is exactly that – the latest. For more than decade, Hamas has engaged in rocket attacks, kidnappings, assassinations and many other forms of terror directed at the Jewish State. Periodically, Israel administers a harsh, but short, and in many ways restrained, military response. The international community says, "Tsk, tsk" and prevails upon both sides to cease fire. The calm lasts a brief period whereupon Hamas resumes its cross-border aggression, and gradually escalates its terrorist actions. The cycle repeats.

Everyone, absolutely everyone, understands that the only way that Netanyahu can fulfill his promise to silence Hamas is by reconquering Gaza. The Israelis could do so, but at great cost in casualties on both sides. Netanyahu, despite his eloquent assertions that he will do whatever is necessary to silence Hamas, has – until this past week -- seemed unwilling to incur that cost. When Deputy Minister Danny Danon said so publicly, Netanyahu summarily cashiered him. But Danon was merely pointing out what many were thinking.

In fact, as events have unfolded, it is clear that more than just Danon in Netanyahu's cabinet subscribed to the view that the Prime Minister engaged in perhaps too much talk and too little action. Those suspicions have likely been allayed by Israel's entry into Gaza.

And yet, it is still unclear how indelible the ink on Netanyahu's red line vis-à-vis Hamas really is. According to his words, the goal of the Israeli incursion into Gaza is not the destruction of Hamas, but rather the rendering of that terrorist organization's power sufficiently impotent so as to ensure no attacks from Gaza for a "sustained period." I have no doubt that the IDF can achieve that objective. I also have no doubt that if Hamas remains the governing force in Gaza, it will be able to reconstitute the threat it poses to Israel. It might take years instead of months; but if Hamas is not destroyed, it will eventually recover its dangerous potential. The period of the cycle will lengthen, but the cycle will recur.

Netanyahu is an Israeli hero. If one counts only his achievement of almost single-handedly converting Israel's basket-case socialist economy into the free market dynamo it has become, it would suffice to cement his place among the Zionist giants of the last hundred years. His leadership and ability to unify the Israeli people are also testament to his greatness. Finally, his eloquence in describing the fundamental differences between the freedom and rule of law present in western democracies, and the barbaric, tyrannical forces arrayed against the West in the Islamic fundamentalist world, is without equal. His 1986 book Terrorism: How the West Can Win is representative of his masterful arguments.

But as the years have passed, and Israel under his leadership has failed to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities, doubts have arisen about his resolve. His seeming unwillingness to deliver a fatal blow to Hamas reinforces those doubts. The events of the coming days should resolve the doubts – one way or the other. It is important to resolve them now. For surely, the Iranians are watching carefully and might conclude that Netanyahu has no intention of attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. One supposes that the new "Islamic State" and its mad caliph are also paying attention – not to mention all the other bad apples in Israel's neighborhood.

A century of history has proven that the Arab/Muslim world does not and will not accept the existence of a sovereign Jewish State in the Umma. The Muslim word is willing to use any means, of course including terror, to obliterate Israel. The Israelis understand this. It has compelled them to fight many wars in order to maintain their existence. The sacrifices the Israelis have made in these efforts have been enormous. The Israelis would like, most fervently, to not have to continue making those sacrifices. Alas, harsh (even if eloquent) words and limited military reactions will not dissuade Hamas and its allies from their genocidal intentions. Unfortunately, much more severe action by Israel is required.

Ron Lipsman, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, writes about politics, culture, education, science and sports athttp://ronlipsman.com.

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2)

Hamas TV: Dead Gaza civilians privileged to have died this way "These people [Gaza civilians killed in war] - their time had come, and they were martyred. They have gained [Paradise]...  Don't be disturbed by these images...   He who is Martyred doesn't feel...  His soul has ascended to Allah." [Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), July 20, 2014] by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik Hamas is trying to both justify and console Gaza's population over the many civilian deaths it has caused in the Gaza war. While broadcasting gruesome pictures of dead civilians, including children, a TV host explained that since in Islam a person's time of death is predetermined by Allah, the people who have been killed in the recent fighting have actually "gained": They would have died now anyway, but now they will receive the rewards of Martyrdom - Shahada - in Paradise.       Click to view Warning: Graphic Images    Palestinian Media Watch has documented Hamas' use of civilians as human shields, which has led to a high civilian death toll. Hamas has instructed Gaza civilians to disregard Israel's warnings to evacuate areas before they were bombed, and has decried those who have criticized the high civilian death toll. The glorification of Martyrdom both justifies the Hamas activities that led to these deaths and also may console the population. In addition, this message may persuade civilians to continue endangering their lives by protecting Hamas terrorists and their terror infrastructure with their bodies. Recently, PMW reported on a sermon by the former Palestinian Authority Minister of Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who likewise glorified Martyrdom death as something to which Palestinians should aspire. Click to view The following are the words of the Hamas TV host, referring to the civilians who died in the Gaza war as "having gained," followed by the words of the former Palestinian Authority Minister of Religious Affairs, who explains the ideology of Martyrdom in Islam.        Hamas TV: Dead Gaza civilians gained Paradise: "The enemy has killed us and we are Martyrs" Hamas TV host: "Every soul has its time. These people - their time had come, and they were Martyred (i.e., Gaza civilians killed in war). They have gained [Paradise]. They have nothing in this world, especially in the Gaza Strip. There's no life in the Gaza Strip. What life can we have in the Gaza Strip? Being with Allah is better. Being with Allah is better. What we see is very hard but we won't surrender, Allah willing. The first to say it are the Martyrs' family. The first to say it are the Martyrs' mothers and fathers... Don't be disturbed by these images. He who was killed this way doesn't feel. By Allah, he does not feel. These are not my words, but the words of our beloved Prophet [Muhammad]: He who is Martyred doesn't feel. Only we suffer by these images. By Allah, [the Martyr] doesn't feel. His soul has ascended to Allah. His soul is with the Lord. His soul is inside a green bird. He is with Allah now. He is in Paradise. Only we suffer by these images... In other cities, in other countries, thousands die in earthquakes, floods, plane crashes, in ferry or shipwrecks, in natural or unnatural disasters. Thousands die. Thousands die but we don't know what their fate is with Allah. But we [in Gaza] are Martyrs. The enemy has killed us and we are Martyrs." [Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas), July 20, 2014] PA Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habbash:   "After prophecy and righteousness there is no status Allah has exalted more than Shahada (Martyrdom)... ''And think not of those who have been killed in Allah's way as dead. Nay, they are alive (and) are provided sustenance from their Lord.'  Allah forbade us to consider them [the Shahids (Martyrs)] as dead or to speak of them as being dead... They went smiling to their deaths... The Shahid has merit with Allah, a merit that no one else has... No one - not even the righteous - yearns to return to this world after death. Only Shahids. Why? Because they see the great honor Allah has prepared for them. One of them aspired to return to this world in order to be killed again, in order to die as a Shahid yet again... Allah spoke with one of them (a Shahid), Jabir ibn Abdullah... After all he saw in Paradise, he wanted to return and be killed [again] in order to taste the pain of death a second time. Abdullah said to Him:  'Lord, then tell those who follow us about what we have found.'  Allah Himself is conveying to us the message from the Shahids. The prophets convey  Allah's message and Allah conveys the message of the Shahids. What kindness!  'The Shahid - his sins are forgiven with the first gush of his blood from his wound...  The Shahid advocates on behalf of 70 members of his family, and saves them all from hell. The Shahid lives together with the prophets and the righteous ones.'  When they threatened Yasser Arafat, [he said] 'You threaten me with death?  I yearn to die! I come only to it; I seek only it.'  We will never reach the level of the prophets. We won't. So let us reach the level of the Shahids. I say to you, brothers, as the Prophet [Muhammad] said: 'He who honestly seeks Shahada, Allah will give him the status of the Shahids, even if he dies in his bed.'"  [Official PA TV, Nov. 8, 2013]   PA Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habbash: "We know for certain that as long as we [adhere] to the truth, we will face challenges and be made a target - as individuals and as groups - we know this for certain. Nonetheless, we are also confident in the words of Allah: 'Say, 'Do you await for us except one of the two best things' (Quran, Sura 9:52, translation Sahih International). What do you expect, enemies, cowards (indistinct word), what do they expect will happen to us? 'One of the two best things.'  Brothers, Allah willing, only one of the two best things will happen to us - victory or Martyrdom (Shahada) - and what a good fate this is, what a good level is this - victory or Martyrdom... 'Say, 'Do you await for us except one of the two best things while we await for you that Allah will afflict you with punishment from Himself or at our hands? So wait; indeed we, along with you, are waiting' (Quran, Sura 9:52, translation Sahih International). Await, wait a short while, I swear the signs heralding victory are seen on the horizon. I swear in a God, beside whom there is no other God, that the end of the tyranny and the tyrants is near. This occupation and its growths and creations that wish to spread corruption in our land... We tell them all, the occupation and the occupation's instruments and any who serve the occupation: 'Await for us except one of the two best things' - we, Allah willing, [will be] either Martyrs or victors on our land. [...] Pay attention, it is Allah who says: 'They will not harm you except for [some] annoyance' (Quran, Sura 3:111, translation Sahih International) - it is possible that they will harm you. I say to you, it is possible that they will kill us, it is possible that Allah will sentence us to Martyrdom. It is possible that we will be wounded, it is possible that terrorism will be laid on us - 'They will not harm you except for [some] annoyance' - but in the end, 'and if they fight you, they will show you their backs' and the conclusion - 'then they will not be aided' (Quran, Sura, 3:111, translation, Sahih International). We ask for victory more than we ask for life. We ask for the strengthening of our people in this good and blessed land." [Official PA TV, Dec. 20, 2013]

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2)-IDF shows photos of alleged Hamas rocket sites dug into hospital, mosques

The images were taken from the northeastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaia, which was the scene of heavy fighting in recent days.

Hamas fires rockets from Wafa Hospital in the Gaza neighborhood of Shejaia Photo: IDF SPOKESMAN'S OFFICE

The IDF on Monday released declassified photos showing how Hamas uses hospitals, mosques, and playgrounds as rocket launch sites.

The images were taken from the northeastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaia, which was the scene of heavy fighting in recent days.

Israel's army said it had been targeting militants in the clashes, charging that they had fired rockets from Shejaia and built tunnels and command centers there. The army said it had warned civilians to leave two days earlier.

Sounds of explosions rocked Gaza City through the morning, with residents reporting heavy fighting in Shejaia and the adjacent Zeitoun neighborhood. Locals also said there was heavy shelling in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip.

"It seems we are heading towards a massacre in Beit Hanoun. They drove us out of our houses with their fire. We carried our kids and ran away," said Abu Ahmed, he did not want to give his full name for fear of Israeli reprisals.

The Islamist group Hamas and its allies fired multiple missiles across southern and central Israel, and heavy fighting was reported in the north and east of Gaza.

Non-stop attacks lifted the Palestinian death toll to 496, including almost 100 children, since fighting started on July 8, Gaza health officials said. Israel says 18 of its soldiers have also died along with two civilians.

Despite worldwide calls for a cessation of the worst bout of Palestinian-Israeli violence for more than five years, Israeli ministers ruled out any swift truce.

"This is not the time to talk of a ceasefire," said Gilad Erdan, communications minister and a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's inner security cabinet