Iran's Ayatollah sees America as the bad guy and we need to be destroyed.
From his warped view I understand where he is coming from. (See 1a below.)
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Even The Washington Post slams Obama. What has happened in the print world? (See 2 below.)
Has lying become acceptable? (See 2a below.)
Another week another scandal. In part is big government to blame? If so, why do Liberals want bigger government? (See 2b below.)
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Yesterday, Obama made a speech at West Point and set up two false straw men foreign policy concepts - withdrawal or war are the only choices Obama sees.
Since Obama has no workable foreign policy he suggested two theories no one in their right mind advocates and then opportunistically proceeded to reject them.
He did note he embraces American exceptionalism because he has been battered for his previous rejection of same.
The real choice is not between withdrawal or war but leadership and the ability to execute an effective policy that is appropriate to the challenge. Obama has been unable to accomplish this because he is basically an incompetent standing in shoes too big for his feet which are, all too often, in his mouth.
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The latest round of nuclear talks between the West and Iran ended earlier this month without the progress toward an agreement that many had anticipated. Though the United States and its allies seem eager to sign a deal that will put a fig leaf of non-proliferation on an Iranian nuclear program that they are content to leave in place, Tehran has picked up on Washington’s zeal for a deal and is doing what its negotiators have done best for over a decade: stalling. With the international sanctions regime already starting to take on water after last November’s interim agreement that loosened the economic restrictions on Iran, the Islamist regime knows it is in a far stronger position than its Western counterparts.
But rather than reacting to this dismal situation by rethinking his approach, President Obama seems determined to double down on his determination to get a deal. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, the president is revisiting the tactic he used last year to revive the moribund P5+1 talks with Iran. Rather than continuing to work with his European partners, it appears the U.S. will once again leave the multilateral negotiations and conduct bilateral talks. The assumption is that on their own, American diplomats will be able to entice the Iranians to sign on the dotted line with concessions that even the French and the British wouldn’t consider. If true, this illustrates that what the president started last year with the interim deal is a process that has one goal and one goal alone: getting a deal with Iran no matter what the price.
The Iranians’ strong negotiating position stems directly from the interim agreement that was brought about as the result of secret U.S.-Iran talks. It is difficult to imagine an international community that was reluctantly dragged into enacting sanctions in the first place, raising the pressure on Iran if no deal is reached. Nor does anyone seriously imagine President Obama ordering the use of force if the talks continue to be stalemated. As a result, there is very little reason for the ayatollahs to think they have much to worry about in the talks.
Having already won the West’s acceptance of its “right” to enrich uranium, ending the Iranian nuclear program, as President Obama pledged during his reelection campaign, is off the table. The Iranians are now only negotiating about how long it would take them to “break out” from a deal and race to a bomb. At this point the only objective of the Western negotiators appears to be to lengthen that period from a few weeks to a few months, but even this victory has not lessened Iran’s determination to drag out the talks even further.
That is why the possibility of more secret talks is such a dangerous development. Though the current multilateral negotiations have created a negotiating track that has given the Iranians much of what they wanted in the talks, the open nature of these monthly talk fests make it difficult for the Americans to sweeten the pot even further for the Iranians. Since Tehran has already openly mocked requests to include their ballistic weapons program in the talks and continue to make it hard for the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their facilities, including their military research sites, transparency would appear to favor at least the pretense that the purpose of the negotiations is to actually stop the Iranians from getting a bomb. But secret talks offer the possibility that Obama can go even further than his partners, who have at times balked at the open desire of Washington for an end to the confrontation with Iran at almost any price.
Iran went into this process hoping that it could achieve by Western consent what it appeared it was well on its way to achieving in spite of the push for sanctions: American approval for a nuclear program that could easily be converted to military use. If, as theJournal reported today, Iran’s weapons research scientists are still hard at work at getting closer to a bomb, the margin of error for the U.S. in this process is very small. Having conceded that Iran could amass enough nuclear fuel for a bomb, it will be harder still to craft a deal that could prevent it from taking that next inevitable state to a weapon.
The Obama administration proved last fall that it could sell even a weak deal with Iran to the American public and brand skeptics as potential warmongers. It may be thinking that it can do the same with an even flimsier agreement negotiated in similar secrecy this year. If so, Obama may think he may have gotten himself off the hook for his many promises to stop the Iranians from getting a weapon. But such drives for appeasement that contain within them the seeds of future conflict rarely end well for the appeasers.
1a) Iran Supreme Leader Vows to Destroy America, Says Promoting Negotiation is Treason
Author:
Joshua Levitt
A photo posted on Khameni's Twitter account. Photo: Twitter.
In a speech to parliament, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday vowed to destroy the U.S., which he held responsible for distorting the world’s values and starting indiscriminate wars.
According to semi-official news agency Fars, Khamenei said,“Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist. … This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws on human mind, body and thought. … This requires a difficult and lengthy struggle and need for great strides.”
He said, “Today’s world is full of thieves and plunderers of human honor, dignity and morality who are equipped with knowledge, wealth and power, and under the pretense of humanity easily commit crimes and betray human ideals and start wars in different parts of the world.”
On the question of Iran’s negotiations with world powers aimed at checking the development of its nuclear program, the Ayatollah said, “Those [Iranians] who want to promote negotiation and surrender to the oppressors and blame the Islamic Republic as a warmonger in reality commit treason.”
“The reason for continuation of this battle is not the warmongering of the Islamic Republic. Logic and reason command that for Iran, in order to pass through a region full of pirates, needs to arm itself and must have the capability to defend itself,” he said. “The accelerated scientific advancement of the last 12 years cannot stop under any circumstances.
The Ayatollah’s address to parliament was flagged by “Reza Kahlili,” the pseudonym of a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards who now serves on the U.S. Task Force on National and Homeland Security and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, writing inThe Daily Caller.
The Ayatollah’s speech came after the fourth round of talks in Geneva ended without an agreement, and with Iran presenting its red lines, “including the expansion of research and development for its nuclear program, the need of the country to continue enrichment, and the fact that the country’s ballistic missile program — despite U.N. sanctions — is not up for negotiation,” Kahlili wrote.
“The Obama administration had hoped that with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif showing an eagerness to solve the nuclear issue and address the West’s concerns, there would be a possibility for a negotiated solution. An interim agreement penned last November in Geneva was touted as an ‘historic nuclear deal,’” Kahlili said.
“At the same time, IAEA officials met again with their Iranian counterparts last week in Tehran to discuss information on the work on detonators and needed collaboration by the regime to clear outstanding issues on its nuclear program as part of seven transparency steps Iran had agreed to fulfill by May 15, which has yet to take place,” Kahlili said.
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2)THE WASHINGTON POST
President Obama continues his retreat from Afghanistan
By Editorial Board,
YOU CAN’T fault President Obama for inconsistency. After winning election in 2008, he reduced the U.S. military presence in Iraq to zero. After helping to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011, he made sure no U.S. forces would remain. He has steadfastly stayed aloof, except rhetorically, from the conflict in Syria. And on Tuesday he promised to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.
The Afghan decision would be understandable had Mr. Obama’s previous choices proved out. But what’s remarkable is that the results also have been consistent — consistently bad. Iraq has slid into something close to civil war, with al-Qaeda retaking territory that U.S. Marines once died to liberate. In Syria, al-Qaeda has carved out safe zones that senior U.S. officials warn will be used as staging grounds for attacks against Europe and the United States. Libya is falling apart, with Islamists, secularists, military and other factions battling for control.
We hope Afghanistan can avoid that fate. But the last time the United States cut and ran from there, after the Soviet Union withdrew, the result was the Taliban takeover, al-Qaeda’s safe havens and, eventually, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after which everyone said, well, we won’t make that mistake again.
Mr. Obama said Tuesday that, assuming Afghanistan’s new president signs a basing agreement, the United States will keep 9,800 troops in the country next year for training and counterterrorism. This is fewer than ideal but better than the immediate “zero option” favored by some of his aides, and it will pave the way for allies to participate, too. But Mr. Obama also said the U.S. presence will shrink by half in 2015 and to zero by the time he leaves office.
For years the United States promised to be a partner to a democratic Afghanistan, to help ensure that girls can keep going to school and to lock in the gains that have been won at such a high price by U.S. and other NATO troops. Mr. Obama’s implicit message Tuesday was: “Not so much.” If al-Qaeda can wait out the United States, it may get another chance. If Afghans have thrown their lot in with the Americans, they will be left on their own.
Why commit to the zero option now? An administration official, speaking to reporters on the condition that he not be named, said it’s “necessary for planning purposes . . . for everybody to have predictability.” Given the small number of troops involved, that’s not persuasive. It may be, a year from now, that reducing the troops by half or even withdrawing them all seems a wise and prudent option. But why not examine conditions then and make a decision based on facts? Instead, an administration that faulted its predecessor for being ideological seems to have substituted ideology for reality-based foreign policy.
“Ending wars.” “Nation-building at home.” The “pivot to Asia.” These are popular and attractive slogans, and they make a lot of sense in the abstract. But they don’t necessarily bring peace to a dangerous world, and a president can’t always safely choose which dangers he would rather confront.
2a) Obama and the Truth
Smoking gun emails have been unearthed which prove the Obama administration lied about the Benghazi attacks. This lie was repeated. It was compounded. It was uttered at the United Nations General Assembly.
Without truth there is no justice; and without justice, compassion misses its mark. Hillary Clinton said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” when questioned about Benghazi. She might as well have said, “What difference does the truthmake?” The difference is that an innocent filmmaker would not be unjustly punished for violence he didn’t cause. The families of the dead, and We the People, would know why our own people are dead in Benghazi and who is responsible. We could learn from it and avoid it being repeated. We could remove the individuals in charge so that their poor judgment would not cause further damage. Gandhi said, “Truth never damages a cause that is just.” Imagine, if we punish the innocent and fail to punish the guilty, all because we didn’t know the truth, then our cause is damaged. If we do not act upon the truth, then America’s voice on the public stage shall contain no inspirational moral authority. Our allies will shrink from us. Our enemies will feel all the more justified to destroy us.
2b)
Another week, another scandal.
2a) Obama and the Truth
Smoking gun emails have been unearthed which prove the Obama administration lied about the Benghazi attacks. This lie was repeated. It was compounded. It was uttered at the United Nations General Assembly.
Now the VA scandal has erupted revealing that the actors in the bureaucracy cooked the books…lied…to cover up wait times. This is systemic conspiratorial lying.
The families of Americans who died in Benghazi deserve compassion. The veterans and their families impacted by the Veteran’s Affairs scandal deserve our compassion.
The unseen victim in the rubble is the truth. We have, as a people, forgotten that the first duty is to the truth.
We live in a culture that often denies truth exists and substitutes person for principle. Many have virtually deified Barack Obama. His resonant voice and face-to-heaven posture (as if he was anointed by the divine) sent thrills up people’s legs.
John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” Barack Obama does not transcend principle. He is a false god. The persona he projected, the one many bought, is a myth, one that was persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. The truth, for so many, didn’t matter. By becoming “sort of God” in their eyes, he has had the power to confuse, misdirect, befog, and substitute lies for the truth. His mendacity eludes the light because he is seen as the light. When things have gone wrong, they have blamed the subordinates but never the conceit they created or embraced.
If we were a country where truth truly matters, then Obama’s words and actions would be more carefully measured, tested, checked and double-checked, to reveal the content of his character, to dispel the myths. There are some who have looked for the content but have found it carefully concealed. Peggy Noonananalyzed Obama’s identity:
Does he stand for something? I suppose he stands for many things, but you can't quite narrow it down and sum it up. A problem with his leadership is that there's always the sense that he's not quite telling you his core and motivating beliefs. There are a lot of rounded banalities. There are sentiments and impulses. But he isn't stark, doesn't vividly cut through. There's a sense he's telling people as much as he feels he can within the parameters of political safety, and no more.
Barack Obama was the fill-in-the-blank candidate. He became what people wanted. He reflected back people’s hopes and dreams. He was the change they could believe in. He was something that couldn’t exist. He was a lie. We didn’t know and we didn’t demand the truth of who he was before we empowered him. Is it any surprise then that that what he says is no more truthful than what many thought he was? Peggy Noonan also wrote this:
As for speaking truthfully, well, he speaks, in many venues and sometimes at great length. But rather than persuade the other side, he knocks down a lot of straw men and deploys no affection or regard for those who disagree with him. He says the great signature program of his presidency will do one thing and it turns out to do another. He is evasive about Benghazi and the other scandals. He winds up with polls showing Americans do not see him as a truth teller.
It is an unavoidable conclusion that Barack Obama is symbolic of America’s attitude about truth in this country. He was elected twice. He is symbolic evidence that truth, as a core value, is dying in American culture. Today lies are commonplace; we have developed euphemisms for them. They are called “narratives” and maintaining the lie is called “preserving the narrative.” “Spin” and “spin doctors” are shiny euphemisms that mask ugly deceit and deceivers.
Ironically, we are not ignorant of the lies. As seen here, in a Gallup poll, said they do not trust Congress, and only 23% of viewers trust the mainstream media television news, the two institutions upon which we rely on for truth in leadership and information. If telling the truth is not a core, motivating principle for these institutions, then there must have been a decision penetrating their rank and file that it is somehow better to lie. When you decide it is somehow beneficial to lie, you impair your soul. Thomas Jefferson said:
He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.
Later, as truth becomes less important and lies become more important, when the soul becomes tainted, especially the soul of a country…the soul of the state, then so often violence follows. This is perhaps inevitable as the need to preserve the lie inspires ever-greater methods to suppress, rewrite, and recast the truth. Those methods begin with the curtailment of freedom, shift to compulsion, and eventually to violence. Today it is the IRS targeting conservative groups to curtail their financial ability to oppose the Democrats. It is the stonewalling of subpoenas for evidence on Fast and Furious. It is the subtle violence of the VA Scandal, where people die by inaction and the neglect is covered up by falsification because it is better, they thought, to preserve the lie that the VA Administration delivery model works.
It is a frighteningly small step from death by neglect to overt violence.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said:
Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with LYING. Between them there is the closest, the most profound and natural bond: nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence. Whoever has once announced violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose lying as his PRINCIPLE.
2b)
What Obama’s many messes really mean
Dems blame . . . big government?
BY S.E. CUPP
Another week, another scandal.
From Fast and Furious at the ATF to the Pigford fraud at the Department of Agriculture, the IRS’ political targeting to the State Department’s Benghazi mess, the healthcare.gov debacle at HHS to spying at the NSA and the DOJ, President Obama is running out of agencies and departments to defend in his two years left in office.
This White House has either had the worst luck in recent memory or it is responsible for breaches of public trust so vast, it’s no wonder public faith in our government is at a record low.
And now, we must add the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs — one so singularly sad, offensive and disappointing it almost feels wrong to put the callous deaths of at least 40 veterans who served our country in the same category as political tax targeting. Still, in some ways it is more of the pitiful same.
There are hearings that try to coax information out of high-level bureaucrats who never seem to know enough or to tell the entire truth. Desperate finger-pointing, that Republicans must somehow be to blame, from Obama loyalists. And endless delays and stall tactics to slow-walk or withhold key information until the public tires of the exercise.
The truth Democrats don’t want you to know is that these scandals are not about racism or Republicans or obstruction votes or even President Obama.
They are about the collapse of a big-government bureaucracy that consistently lets you down, but which the left depends on to keep your vote.
If there’s anything at all funny about these scandals, it’s that Democrats don’t realize that their efforts to deflect attention away from this inconvenient truth often ends up pointing directly at it.
The problem is never at the top, they insist. The issue at the IRS wasn’t Lois Lerner or anyone else “in charge,” or their top-down directives to monitor political activity, but “low-level bureaucrats” in a Cincinnati office.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wasn’t responsible for the Obamacare website problems; it was Canadian contractor CGI.
Never mind who gave the directive at the NSA to secretly collect metadata from millions of Americans; the real problem there is the rogue private contractor.
And Secretary Eric Shinseki has done a heckuva job at the VA, but the folks underneath him decided — totally on their own — to keep secret waiting lists.
Yes, people at the top should be held responsible when things go wrong. But at the same time, it hardly matters who that is when he or she is sitting on top of a steaming pile of bureaucratic waste.
The oversight of millions of low-level bureaucrats with unnavigable chains-of-command and arcane protocols is the problem.
The outsourcing of sensitive government work to low-level contractors in Canada and elsewhere is the problem.
The sprawling and ever-expanding surveillance state that puts our most personal information in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats is the problem.
And, yes, money is the problem, too, but not in the way Democrats insist. The VA itself reported more than $2 billion in waste and fraud, just in 2012. The inability to manage the money these bloated bureaucracies we already have is the problem.
Big-government bureaucracy is the problem, and Democrats unintentionally tell us that all the time. But don’t take my word for it.
“The point is, we are a big country,” says self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The VA sees six and a half million people a year. Are people going to be treated badly? Are some people going to die because of poor treatment in the VA? Yes, that is a tragedy and we have to get to the root of it.”
Well, I think he just did.
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