Monday, November 20, 2017

Be Grateful. HST - A Giant! More On Trump and His Iran Strategy. Too Many Jams and Burnt Toast.


Is there something that can make someone both happy and good? Is there a single character trait that, if more people had it, would make the world a much better place? Yes, and in this week’s video, Dennis Prager reveals what that one character trait is.
And:

Why keeping friendships comes in handy and why Truman was of the people.

HST had a good heart. He was not a community organizer.  He was, however, one of the greatest presidents to date.

http://aipac.hubs.vidyard.com/ watch/0jZmnE_0O5QEtDoW8b9dOw
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After attending a lecture on Iran yesterday I thought this follow up might prove interesting. (See 1 below.)

Trump, as I have said many times, has a full plate of messes left  and/or created by GW and Obama and other presidents who chose to kick the can down the field.

If Trump does the same or cannot resolve some of the more knotty issues the problems will only get worse and ignoring them makes them more dangerous.

I am not suggesting war is better than/preferable to peace but reality always trumps denial.  Sooner or later, N Korea and Iran must be brought to their knees.  Yesterday's speaker said sanctions were crippling Iran and then Obama lifted them and even sent Iran pallets of cash, $1 1/2 billion to be exact.  Why did he and Kerry do this? Were they naive or was Obama desirous of allowing Iran to dominate the region?

We have been told Obama was brilliant and a constitutional authority to boot.  He knew enough about the Constitution to break it, to avoid it and he certainly proved he was not brilliant but actually feckless if you judge him by his actions and policies.

He lost billions in favoring start-ups that went bankrupt, he took over companies and banks and ignored rights of bond holders, he pitted whites and blacks against each other and you know the rest.

Putin played Obama for the patsy he was and now Russia has a foothold in The Middle East that every president before him was able to prevent.

Obama said he wanted to transform America.  In that regard he was successful. After 8 years of his presidency I was unable to recognize my nation nor comfortable with the direction in which it was headed..

Furthermore, Obama was an habitual liar. (See 2 and 2a below.)

Having said all that I actually hope the Demwits bring Impeachment Charges against Trump because it would boomerang.  It is about time they got real but that may be asking too much.

Also, threatening to replace a buffoon (Sen. No Franken Sense) with a rattle snake ( Keith Ellison)  is one way of making sure Franken is given a pass.  
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When the New York Times says you have been in too many jams and they conclude you are now  toast perhaps the end is actually near. (See 3 below.)
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Clever. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)

Trump’s Iran Strategy Needs Much Improvement

To counter Tehran’s influence, start with Iraq and Syria—not the nuclear deal.

By  Kenneth M. Pollack and  Bilal Y. Saab
That’s why the Iran policy the Trump administration rolled out last month is important. It’s an effort to forge a comprehensive strategy. Its smartest aspect is that it recognizes that merely curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions won’t end its aggressive behavior across the region. But there are good and bad ways to push back against Iran, and the administration so far seems focused on the bad. Syria and Iraq are the places to execute an Iran strategy effectively—not Yemen or Lebanon, and certainly not over the nuclear deal.
Iran has gone all-in on Syria, and while it is winning, it is also badly overexposed. It cannot afford to let the Assad regime sink, risking the demise of Hezbollah and the dissolution of Tehran’s hard-won position in the northern Levant.

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Washington could take advantage of this by ramping up covert assistance to Syrian rebels to try to bleed Damascus and its Iranian backer over time, the way the U.S. supported the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets in the 1980s. But that runs directly contrary to President Trump’s purported desire to wash his hands of Syria after ISIS is evicted.
In Iraq, Tehran’s dominance is far from complete. There are still many Iraqis, including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who don’t want to live under Iran’s shadow. Helping them would mean a major U.S. investment after the defeat of ISIS, including a large residual military force and significant economic assistance to empower champions of political reconciliation.
Here as well, the administration seems interested only in leaving behind a relatively small force and not in any further economic aid. Sitting on the sidelines and blaming the Kurds when the Iranians help orchestrate an assault on Kirkuk doesn’t help either. It convinces Iraqi political leaders that Iran can and will act, while Washington won’t.
As for the other squares on the Middle Eastern chessboard, none are as strategically valuable or potentially vulnerable for Iran as Iraq and Syria. Not Yemen or Bahrain, where Iran cannot be hurt, or Lebanon, where pushback will upend the country’s extremely delicate balance.
Where the president clearly wants to push back on Iran is over the nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But that is the worst place to do it, because the vast majority of the international community is committed to the JCPOA, and trying to renegotiate it is likely to unravel a useful, if highly imperfect, agreement. A better approach would use the leverage gained from pushing back on Iran’s regional expansion to negotiate a follow-on deal extending the JCPOA’s more stringent restrictions beyond the current 10- to 15-year window.
Officially, the administration has been mum on how it will execute its strategy to push back on Iran. In private conversations, U.S. officials admit they can’t fill in those gaps yet because the administration can’t agree on how to handle key Iran-related issues. Until they can, the strategy is just an aspiration. If they fill it in with the wrong answers, it will be a disaster. And if they don’t fill it in at all, our partners in the region will do so on their own, and the result will be more crises and eventual escalation to even worse.
Mr. Pollack is a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Saab is director of the Defense and Security Program at the Middle East Institute.
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2)New York Times Reporter: Obama Administration Misled on al Qaeda



The new bin Laden documents make clear that there wasintelligence politicization during the 2012 campaign.

By JENNA LIFHITS
The Weekly Standard





A top foreign correspondent at the New York Times said Friday that the Obama administration deliberately downplayed al Qaeda’s strength in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.

“The overall narrative that I think was being pushed to the press, and if you look back at the editorials that were done when that trove came out, was an image of bin Laden isolated, he had lost control of this group,” Rukmini Callimachi said during an event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, referring to the 17 hand-picked documents released by the Obama administration in May of 2012.

Her remarks triggered the following question from Kim Dozier, a former top correspondent for the Associated Press and CBS, and current executive editor of the Cipher Brief: “Do you think that was something that was kept from the public’s view because it revealed that there had to be reams of communication going back and forth, which means U.S. intelligence, Western intelligence, was missing this?”

“Think back to when bin Laden was killed. It was 2011, it was right before a major campaign season. I don’t want to underplay the role that the killing of Osama bin Laden had,” said Callimachi. “But I think that that was theorized into something much bigger.”

“The head of the organization has been killed, and now—these are literally quotes that I would get: the organization has been ‘decimated,’ the organization is in ‘disarray,’ the organization is ‘on the run,’” she continued. “At the same time that we were preparing to pull out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, I think that it was important to portray this as a problem that no longer existed.”

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The Trump administration released roughly 470,000 files in November that were captured in the Abbottabad raid. Only a few hundred were released under the Obama administration, despite one official’s description of the haul as enough to fill a “small college library.”

When Callimachi was covering West Africa in 2011, Obama administration officials and others told her that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which had just taken over the northern half of Mali, “was actually not really connected to al Qaeda.”

“The narrative I would get is that . . . it had opportunistically taken the al Qaeda name in order to have prestige and scare people, and that in fact those people were just criminals,” she said.

In 2013, after AQIM had been cleared out of the area, Callimachi began sorting through thousands of files that had been left in the city of Timbuktu. She discovered evidence that “central” al Qaeda commanders were actually “micromanag[ing]” the Malians who the Obama administration had said had no ties to al Qaeda.

“Suddenly, my worldview, which had been informed by officials . . . started to fall apart,” she said. “Suddenly, I was seeing that this group that I was told really had no ties, with no connection . . . was in fact being micromanaged by al Qaeda central.”

Callimachi said that the recently released documents from the bin Laden raid underscore the reality of the relationship between al Qaeda and its affiliates.

“In fact, the new trove that has now come out confirms very much what I was seeing in Mali, which is not just real connective tissue, but connective tissue to the point of [these affiliates] being micromanaged from Afghanistan and Pakistan,” she said. “Very minor personnel decisions are being decided by the group thousands of miles away.”

The newly released files, which panelists said represented the “digital life” of Osama bin Laden and his family, include bin Laden’s personal journal, video of his son, Hamza bin Laden, audio reports on al Qaeda in Iraq, and communications about the Pakistani Taliban.

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracy’s Thomas Joscelyn, who along with Bill Roggio has been pushing for the full release of bin Laden documents since 2012, said the administration attached a narrative to those files that al Qaeda was “on the decline” and that “there was no cohesion” among terror groups fighting from West Africa to the Middle East.

“That narrative that came out in 2012, we knew immediately was wrong, totally wrong, and was basically a cherry picked version of what’s going on,” he said.

2a) Time is like a river.  You cannot touch the water twice, because the
flow that has passed will never pass again.  Franklin Graham was
speaking at the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, when he
said America will not come back.  He wrote:
"The American dream ended on November 6th, 2012.  The second term of
Barack Obama has been the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of
the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled
and developed the greatest republic in the history of mankind.
A coalition of blacks, Latinos, feminists, gays, government workers,
union members, environmental extremists, the media, Hollywood,
uninformed young people, the "forever needy," the chronically
unemployed, illegal aliens and other "fellow travelers" have ended
Norman Rockwell's America.
You will never again out-vote these people.  It will take individual
acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get
back the rights we have allowed them to take away.  It will take
zealots, not moderates and shy, not reach-across-the-aisle RINOs to
right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status.
People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will
probably never again be able to legally comment on or concern myself
with the aforementioned coalition which has surrendered our culture,
our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.
The Cocker spaniel is off the front porch, the pit bull is in the back
yard.  The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky's
"Rules for Radicals" and the likes of Chicago shyster David Axelrod
along with international socialist George Soros have been pulling the
strings on their beige puppet and have brought us Act 2 of the New
World Order.
The curtain will come down but the damage has been done, the story has
been told.
Those who come after us will once again have to risk their lives,
their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that
this generation has timidly frittered away due to white guilt and
political correctness.."
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3)

Hillary is toast: Scandals finally catch up with Clintons 

By Liz Peek


Imagine: even the New York Times’ Ross Douthat now thinks that Bill Clinton should have stepped down over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Douthat’s mea culpa op-ed in this past weekend’s paper, in which he confesses that he and others may have been wrong to dismiss Bill Clinton’s indefensible behavior, will serve as the official political obituary for Clinton, Inc.
Hillary Clinton is done, finished, kaput. Dogged by scandals old and new, out of step politically, her excess baggage has morphed into an entire baggage train, dragging her towards political oblivion. While it is refreshing to consider the landscape unadorned by Clintons, Republicans will miss her. Only Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have contributed as generously to GOP fund-raising efforts in recent years, or so energized voters.
Mrs. Clinton is finally being held to account, at least in the court of public opinion, where it may matter most. As charges of sexual aggression swirl around prominent figures on the left and right, Bill Clinton’s gross and possibly criminal behavior is getting a second look. New York’s junior Senator Kirsten Gillibrand took the revisionism to a whole new level when she told the New York Times that President Clinton should have stepped down when his sexual relationship with 22-year old staffer Monica Lewinsky came to light.
Though Gillibrand later tried to soften the blow by putting her statement in a modern context, the damage was done. Bill Clinton’s affairs and sexual aggression are now fair game, at a time when the country is outraged over such activities. Many have long considered Hillary’s defense of her husband hypocritical in the extreme. Even as she postured as a champion of women’s rights, she tossed Lewinsky, Juanita Broaddrick (who accused Clinton of rape), Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones under the bus.  These women accused Hillary of trying to intimidate them into silence. As recently as last year, Broaddrick broke down in tears as she recounted her 1978 ordeal. It would be hard to muster that emotion if the story were bogus.
It is high time Bill Clinton’s misdeeds and Hillary’s defense of them received bipartisan condemnation. Gillibrand broke that sound barrier. Others have piled on, including Clinton-friendly pundits and apparatchiks like David Rothkopf, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, and Michelle Goldberg. Liberal screed and former staffer at the Center for American Progress Matthew Iglesias wrote on Vox recently, “I think we got it wrong”, saying that defending Mr. Clinton was a mistake.   
Meanwhile, there are increasing calls for a special counsel to investigate accusations that Hillary sold out the country by green-lighting the sale of Uranium One to a Russian state-linked entity, in return for cash donated to the Clinton Foundation and to Bill directly. Mrs. Clinton is in a precarious position here; as she becomes more assertive in blaming her election loss on Moscow’s intervention, she has called for ever-widening scrutiny of all things Russian. This is a risky gambit for Mrs. Clinton; comparisons between actual payments made to Clinton, Inc. and smoky speculation about “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia do not favor the former First Lady.
The Russia probe has also unearthed revelations that Hillary’s campaign shelled out millions of dollars to finance the infamous “Trump dossier,” which fed speculation about the president’s ties to Russia and how Moscow might have influenced the election. In other words, the Clinton team paid for a hit job on Trump that has been widely discredited but that ultimately led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the ever-expanding investigation that Democrats hope will bring down a duly elected president. It is a shocking chain of events, and one that has been extraordinarily damaging to the country.
Nonetheless, Hillary continues to tour the country, claiming with ever-greater vehemence that Russia undermined her campaign and put Donald Trump in the White House. That’s when she’s not blaming misogyny, the media, the DNC, Bernie Sanders, President Obama, James Comey and a host of others whom she considers responsible. Her tour is an embarrassment, not only for its content, but because it is yet another example of the never-ending Clinton lust for cash. She has been selling “VIP” tickets for nearly $1,200; you would think she might treat her loyal supporters to a freebie, after they doled out billions only to see her lose. The good news: plenty of websites are advertising tickets at 50 percent off.
Those steadfast supporters need some good news. Donna Brazile’s revelations that Hillary effected a clandestine takeover of the Democratic National Committee almost a year before the election, and made sure that the supposedly neutral organization pushed the nomination in her direction was salt in the wound.  Aside from the shocking disclosures, Brazile’s break with Clinton, Inc. is a sure sign that Hillary and Bill’s dominance of Democratic politics, nurtured by an incomparable fundraising behemoth, is coming to an end.  
Not that they have yet ceded the floor. Last May Hillary and former DNC Chair Howard Dean launched Onward Together, a PAC established to fund groups dedicated to “encouraging people to organize, get involved and run for office.” Presumably Hillary tapped Dean for credibility in sponsoring the “progressive values” the PAC’s website claims. The Daily Caller has reported that six months in, Onward Together seems mainly intent on fundraising, with scant evidence that its revenues are being distributed to other organizations.  
With the Clintons, it has always been about the money. Onward Together will be a test. If the millions roll in, the Clintons will remain a force to be reckoned with. If not, they will fade into political obscurity. Already, monies flowing into the now-tainted Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation have tumbled – down 42 percent in 2016 on top of a 37 percent drop the year before.
It’s also about the politics. Democrats have moved far to the left of Bill and Hillary. Worse for the Clintons, they are moving on.
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4) From the county where drunk driving is considered a sport, comes this true story.
Recently a routine police patrol parked outside a bar in Austin, Texas.
After last call the officer noticed a man leaving the bar so apparently
intoxicated that he could barely walk.

The man stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes, with the officer
quietly observing.

After what seemed an eternity in which he tried his keys on five different
vehicles, the man managed to find his car and fall into it. He sat there for
a few minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off.

Finally he started the car, switched the wipers on and off--it was a fine,
dry summer night, flicked the blinkers on and off a couple of times, honked
the horn and then switched on the lights... He moved the vehicle forward a
few inches, reversed a little and then remained still for a few more minutes
as some more of the other patrons' vehicles left.
At last, when his was the only car left in the parking lot, he pulled out
and drove slowly down the road.

The police officer, having waited patiently all this time, now started up
his patrol car, put on the flashing lights, promptly pulled the man over and
administered a breathalyzer test.

To his amazement, the breathalyzer indicated no evidence that the man had
consumed any alcohol at all!

Dumbfounded, the officer said, "I'll have to ask you to accompany me to the
police station. This breathalyzer equipment must be broken."

"I doubt it", said the truly proud Texan.  "Tonight I'm the designated
decoy."
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