That said, I am told by someone who just returned from Israel, the kidnapping of the three young Israelis has unified the entire country and even the deeply religious, who would not feel that way were an Israeli soldier captured, are on board.
Contrast what Israel is doing versus what Obama is doing to get a lone Marine returned from Mexico - nada!
What a totally impotent pussy cat president but at least he plays golf with 'Tiger' Woods!" who obviously has proven he has big balls.
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Revisionist history, like bad science, is always the rage among the "chosen intelligentsia!
But when confronted by facts, as historian Davis Hanson has presented in the article below , liberals and other simple minded souls cannot accept them. To do so undercuts the ground out from under their hatred of GW and would obliterate complaints Obama uses against his favorite 'pinata."
I know facts are hard to swallow and more so when they expose convenient bias! (See 1 below.)
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Our local paper (Savannah Morning News), in their Lead Editorial today, understands the essentiality of the Separation of Power concept, joining with the WSJ's Editorial of today, as well. (See 2, 2 and 2b below.)
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I get e mails from every source imaginable but when I got one asking me to gloat over Paul Begala's support of Michelle Nunn, I responded that it made me barf!
Paul Begala is a hatchet man of the worst order He would not know the truth if it hit him square in the face. He is the worst of the Liberal's brand of apologist!
I know candidates cannot always deny support offered to them because they need votes and broad appeal but they should draw some limits. Once again, though Michelle Nunn may be a lovely person, a vote for her is a vote for Harry Reid and he, along with Obama, are a menace to our Constitutional form of government and thus, our freedom.
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This from a friend and fellow memo reader:
" Tuesday we went to a special movie preview that was shown only in 2 theaters in America, one here in Alpharetta and one in Houston Texas. The movie was "AMERICA".
"AMERICA" was produced by Dinesh D'Souza one of the most prominent intellectual national political voices in America. It is to be shown across the country in the next few days. Dinesh and the films producers were there in person to intro and speak to the audience directly after the showing. It was fabulous!
The movie documented our country's founding, historical development, values and virtually every aspect of what we have been and why we are what we are. The details were superb and something I've never seen as well put together. It is and will be an eye opener to every American and should be, particularly to the Americans unaware of what made us the nation we are and the decline we're going through right now.
Hollywood and the mainstream media would never come close to telling what D'Souza has produced. And, the decline in our schools for the past 50 years of teaching our history bodes sadly for where we are headed. It's film every American must see."
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The Courts may save us yet from our dictator president. (See 3 below.)
Even this dog gets it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
and more unpleasant facts! (See 3 a below.)
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Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Revisionist History Prevails on Iraq Invasion
By Victor Davis Hanson
So who lost Iraq?
The blame game mostly fingers incompetent Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007-08 surge?
Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein.
One can blame almost anyone, but one must not invent facts to support an argument.
Do we remember that Bill Clinton signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 that supported regime change in Iraq? He gave an eloquent speech on the dangers of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
In 2002, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein by force. Senators such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Harry Reid offered moving arguments on the Senate floor why we should depose Saddam in a post-9/11 climate.
Democratic stalwarts such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Nancy Pelosi lectured us about the dangers of Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. They drew on the same classified domestic and foreign intelligence reports that had led Bush to call for Saddam's forcible removal.
The Bush administration, like members of Congress, underestimated the costs of the war and erred in focusing almost exclusively on Saddam's supposed stockpiles of weapons. But otherwise, the war was legally authorized on 23 writs. Most of them had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and were unaffected by the later mysterious absence of such weapons -- which is all the more mysterious given that troves of WMD have turned up in nearby Syria and more recently in Iraqi bunkers overrun by Islamic militants.
Legally, the U.S. went to war against Saddam because he had done things such as commit genocide against the Kurds, Shiites and the Marsh Arabs, and attacked four of his neighbors. He had tried to arrange the assassination of a former U.S. president, George H.W. Bush. He had paid bounties for suicide bombers on the West Bank and was harboring the worst of global terrorists. Saddam also offered refuge to at least one of the architects of the first World Trade Center Bombing in 1993, and violated U.N.-authorized no-fly zones.
A number of prominent columnists, right and left -- from George Will, David Brooks and William F. Buckley to Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius and Thomas Friedman -- supported Saddam's forcible removal. When his statue fell in 2003, most polls showed that over 70 percent of Americans agreed with the war.
What changed public opinion and caused radical about-faces among the war's most ardent supporters were the subsequent postwar violence and insurgency between 2004 and 2007, and the concurrent domestic elections and rising antiwar movement. Thousands of American troops were killed or wounded in mostly failed efforts to stem the Sunni-Shiite savagery.
The 2007-08 surge engineered by Gen. David Petraeus ended much of the violence. By Obama's second year in office, American fatalities had been reduced to far less than the monthly accident rate in the U.S. military. "An extraordinary achievement" Obama said of the "stable" and "self-reliant" Iraq that he inherited -- and left.
Prior to our invasion, the Kurds were a persecuted people who had been gassed, slaughtered and robbed of all rights by Saddam. In contrast, today a semi-autonomous Kurdistan is a free-market, consensual society of tolerance that, along with Israel, is one of the few humane places in the Middle East.
In 2003, the New York Times estimated that Saddam Hussein had killed perhaps about 1 million of his own people. That translated into about 40,000 deaths for each year he led Iraq.
A Saddam-led Iraq over the last decade would not have been a peaceable place.
We can also imagine that Saddam would not have sat idly by the last decade as Pakistan and North Korea openly sold their nuclear expertise, and as rival Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear enrichment program.
Nor should we forget that the U.S. military decimated al-Qaeda in Iraq. Tens of thousands of foreign terrorists flocked to Anbar Province and there met their deaths. When Obama later declared that al-Qaeda was "on the run," it was largely because it had been nearly obliterated in Iraq.
Launching a costly campaign to remove Saddam may or may not have been a wise move. But it is historically inaccurate to suggest that the Iraq War was cooked up by George W. Bush alone -- or that it did not do enormous damage to al-Qaeda, bring salvation for the Kurds, and by 2009 provide a rare chance for the now-bickering Iraqis to make something out of what Saddam had tried to destroy.
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2) Editorial: Fighting the 'imperial presidency
AMERICANS WHO support the Constitution and rule of law should cheer House Speaker John Boehner’s announcement Wednesday that the House plans on suing President Obama.
2a) Boehner Stands Up
AMERICANS WHO support the Constitution and rule of law should cheer House Speaker John Boehner’s announcement Wednesday that the House plans on suing President Obama.
Ordinarily, such a lawsuit would merit criticism. There are better ways to spend the public’s limited tax dollars than paying lawyers to pursue what some might initially see as a political witch hunt.
But this isn’t an ordinary case. And it’s hardly a witch hunt.
Instead, America must keep its balance of powers in Washington. Liberty can’t be sustained under an imperial presidency.
The president, by his own actions, has failed to carry out the laws passed by Congress — or, he has executed only those parts of laws that he supports. Otherwise, he changes portions of it unilaterally.
Obamacare is the classic example. After ramming it through a divided Congress, the Obama administration decided on its own to delay the employer mandate — basically usurping the role of the legislative branch and writing new law. He also did essentially the same thing with immigration, promising not to deport youths and adults who are in this country illegally, and on laws affecting drug policy, welfare and education.
Congress is designed to be co-equal of the executive and judicial branches. The Founding Fathers were smart that way. This balance of powers has served the country well, protecting it from presidents who would be kings and giving Americans a stable government.
That doesn’t mean some presidents haven’t tried to tip the scales in their direction. President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to pack the U.S. Supreme Court so it would do his bidding. President Nixon claimed executive privilege to hide information that should have been public.
In that department, Mr. Obama has already one-upped Mr. Nixon, who couldn’t account for an 18-minute gap on a tape recording that investigators wanted. Mr. Obama can’t account for two years of emails at the Internal Revenue Service.
In February, noted constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the growing threat of an imperial presidency.
Mr. Turley teaches at George Washington University and agrees with many of Mr. Obama’s political stances. So he’s no Republican plant. But he testified that the president is moving the nation toward a system in which executive power is unchecked by Congress and the courts. He said this would lead to a concentration of power that allows the president to act unilaterally, threatening individual liberties.
Mr. Boehner appears to have listened. He brushed aside the I-word — impeachment — Wednesday. “This is about his (Obama’s) faithfully executing the laws of our country,” he said.
That’s as it should be.
Any lawsuit must be less about practicing partisan politics and more about keeping America’s president — Democrat or Republican — between the constitutional lines.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama has a different idea about who runs things. He doesn’t see Congress as a co-equal branch. He sees it as a third wheel.
He has bragged that he would use his “pen and phone” to bypass Congress, which is alarming. It may be up to the courts to restore constitutional balance and prevent the White House from becoming a castle.
2a) Boehner Stands Up
The House will sue the President for trampling the separation of powers.
All due credit to John Boehner, who told his House colleagues on Wednesday that the institution will sue the executive branch to defend the Constitution's separation of powers. The Speaker is showing more care that the laws be faithfully executed than is President Obama.
In a memo to the House, Mr. Boehner detailed the institutional injury Congress is suffering amid Mr. Obama's "aggressive unilateralism," which is as good a description as any of his governing philosophy. When the executive suspends or rewrites laws across health care, drugs, immigration and so much else, elected legislators are stripped of their constitutional role.
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio Associated Press
The Beltway press is portraying Mr. Boehner as merely serving carrion to the tea party vultures, and no doubt he hopes in part to sate the political appetites of the backbench. But we doubt he'd wager the House's reputation, and his own, on a novelty lawsuit that the courts wouldn't hesitate to toss as frivolous. From what we know of the Speaker's deliberations, he's been persuaded on the merits.
We'd prefer that Congress and President resolve their disputes through the normal political rough and tumble. The Constitution anticipates that the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue will be in tension as they balance each other's power. But the major reason to involve the judiciary in this case is Mr. Obama's flagrant contempt for regular political order. For example, he has unilaterally revised, delayed or reinterpreted ObamaCare no fewer than 38 times.
Far from a partisan caper, this implicates the foundation of the U.S. political architecture. The courts generally presume that individual Members of Congress lack the "standing" to make a legal challenge, but Mr. Obama is stealing inherent Article I powers that no party other than Congress can vindicate. Mr. Boehner said he will seek a House vote authorizing the lawsuit and put it under the direction of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group.
Constitutional litigator David Rivkin and Florida International University law professor Elizabeth Foley, who devised the theory that Congress has the institutional standing to sue the President, are thus asking a constitutional question that hasn't been joined at the courts. We first encouraged such a lawsuit in an editorial seven weeks ago.
More than a few judges and Supreme Court Justices seem to be concerned that Mr. Obama's conduct is undermining the rule of law and political accountability. Already this week the Supreme Court whaled the Environmental Protection Agency for defying the plain language of the law in the name of anticarbon policy, and more rebukes may be coming in the next week on recess appointments and ObamaCare's contraception mandate.
This is the President, after all, who last summer proclaimed that "in a normal political environment" he'd ask Congress to fix laws such as ObamaCare, but since the House disagrees with his priorities he'll go ahead and "tweak" statutes himself without legislative consent. Thanks to Mr. Boehner, the courts will get a chance to weigh in on whether Mr. Obama, or his successors, can exercise such imperial powers.
2b)IRS: Shame and Loathing on the Media Trail
A number of smart people, among them Peter Wehner, Mark Halperin and John Hinderaker, have been pointing out the unfortunately predictable silence of the mainstream media regarding the IRS scandal — not to mention the myriad other Obama scandals that we will soon be counting on three, or is it four, hands.
The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times made no mention of the congressional hearings on the missing Lois Lerner emails and putative computer crash; the networks were a virtual silence of the not-so-lambs. (Remember how they obsessed on the Christie/GW Bridge contretemps as if it were the beginning of nuclear war?)
2b)IRS: Shame and Loathing on the Media Trail
By Roger L Simon
A number of smart people, among them Peter Wehner, Mark Halperin and John Hinderaker, have been pointing out the unfortunately predictable silence of the mainstream media regarding the IRS scandal — not to mention the myriad other Obama scandals that we will soon be counting on three, or is it four, hands.
The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times made no mention of the congressional hearings on the missing Lois Lerner emails and putative computer crash; the networks were a virtual silence of the not-so-lambs. (Remember how they obsessed on the Christie/GW Bridge contretemps as if it were the beginning of nuclear war?)
On his Wednesday Talking Points Memo, Bill O’Reilly went so far as to say the media silence, censorship, whatever you want to call it was subverting democracy. That’s an understatement. It was trampling on it.
The conventional explanation for this willful blindness cited by the above mentioned gentlemen is that the media is in the tank for the Democratic Party and, by extension, for Obama. Well, sure. But it is far more than that. Political parties and politicians come and go. The media doesn’t. They may be in the tank for Obama, but much more than that they are in the tank for themselves — a whole lifestyle and world view that has been going on for decades, moral narcissism distilled to its purest essence.
It is that world view and lifestyle that is under threat in the debacle that is the Obama administration. This world view, promulgating supposedly altruistic values, but actually stemming from a profound need to be thought of as good for their beliefs irrespective of results of those beliefs, is in a precarious position as never before. The disintegration of a politician or a political party is bad enough. Far worse is the disintegration of a personality, the disintegration of the self. That is intolerable.
The real reason these media folks cannot face reality is that to do so would mean to see their very persons, everything they have ever stood for, or thought they stood for, or pretended to themselves they stood for, dissolving in a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Obama is beside the point. They don’t even like Obama anymore. Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does. But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it.
So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that?
No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.
The heroes of Watergate are no more, if they ever were. (That was always basically a chimera.) The myth of the crusading investigative reporter is not only dead, it’s decomposed. In the disintegration of the Obama administration, the end of the mainstream media is not collateral damage, it is the core damage.
That is already evident in the response to the IRS scandal. It is metastasizing rapidly despite the near blackout by the MSM. In one recent poll 63 percent of Democrats think the IRS intentionally destroyed the emails. Democrats. How’d they find that out? Not from the New York Times.
Get ready for endless tantrums of many sorts. When moral narcissism of the level we have been experiencing breaks down, anything can happen. The media will do almost anything to preserve their fragile selves. Evasion, distraction and outright lies will be continuous and may reach unprecedented levels.
The mainstream media has been in trouble for years, but their silence about the ills of the Obama administration has finished them off as never before. They will stumble on, but from here on in they will be, as was said of the U.S. during the Vietnam era, a “pitiful, helpless giant.”
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3) Supreme Court Rules Obama Overstepped His Authority
The Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the president's power to fill high-level vacancies with temporary appointments, ruling in favor of Senate Republicans in their partisan clash with President Barack Obama.
The Obama brand was exquisitely well-suited for the moment, and it prevailed. During the president's first term, however, many Americans were disabused of the messianic expectations his campaign had actively fomented. Team Obama anticipated this inevitable back-to-earth transition and worked assiduously -- and at times ruthlessly -- to shore up the president's core coalition of support in advance of 2012. The second Obama campaign's primary strategy was to ensure that this victory firewall would hold. In spite of mediocre ratings and the yoke of Obamacare, it did. But eighteen months into an ineffectual and scandal-plagued second term, more Americans than ever before are looking at the Obama 'Rorschach test' and seeing a failed presidency. Worse still for Obama's party, crucial elements of his coalition appear disillusioned and disengaged ahead of the midterm elections. In mid-June NBC's Chuck Todd examined a spate of polling and delivered an unforgiving verdict: “Essentially the public is saying, ‘Your presidency is over,’" he said. This week, a batch of fresh polling reinforces that sentiment. Gallup, NBC/WSJ, NYT/CBS, Fox News and Reuters are all out with national surveys, none of which measure Obama's job approval rating higher than 41 percent. The president's economic marks have been poor for many months, and the new polls continue to reflect the public's dim view. Especially worrying for the White House is the fact that all of these surveys were conducted prior to this week's hideous headlines about the US economy's substantial Q1 contraction. Public opinion on Obama's signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, remains underwater and isn't budging. And in several of the new data sets, Americans' assessment of his foreign policy performance plumbs new depths, for fairly obvious reasons. Perhaps most galling to Obama's inner circle is Obama's about-face on the president's handling of Iraq -- one of his bread-and-butter issues, on which he's literally never polled poorly. Change:
The situation on the ground in Iraq is horrific, no doubt, and that's driving the poll crash. But what's telling about this NYT/CBS poll is that Obama's policy posture actually fares rather well on every sub-question about Iraq. An overwhelming majority agrees that the war was a mistake, a slimmer majority backs his decision to withdraw all US troops from the country, and a plurality supports his response to the current crisis. And yet, take another look at the above chart. How does one reconcile Amerians' approval of the administration's specific Iraq policies with their starkly negative overall assessment of Obama himself on the issue? Daniel Drezner cites "the difference between policy outputs and policy outcomes," which is of course a major factor. But Obama's toxic brand is also at play here. Americans have lost confidence in his ability to lead, so they're more likely to reflexively give him a thumbs-down on matters of import. Combine his severely wounded political standing with the catastrophic reality in Iraq, and the result is a (-15) approval rating on the Iraq war for our famously (and popularly) anti-Iraq war president. I'll leave you with this graphic illustrating Democrats' very real 2014 enthusiasm problem, which we've been covering for months:
3) Supreme Court Rules Obama Overstepped His Authority
The Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the president's power to fill high-level vacancies with temporary appointments, ruling in favor of Senate Republicans in their partisan clash with President Barack Obama.
The court's first-ever case involving the Constitution's recess appointments clause ended in a unanimous decision holding that Obama's appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012 without Senate confirmation were illegal. Obama invoked the Constitution's provision giving the president the power to make temporary appointments when the Senate is in recess.
Problem is, the court said, the Senate was not actually in a formal recess when Obama acted.
Obama had argued that the Senate was on an extended holiday break and that the brief sessions it held every three days were a sham that was intended to prevent him from filling seats on the NLRB.
The justices rejected that argument Wednesday.
The issue of recess appointments receded in importance after the Senate's Democratic majority changed the rules to make it harder for Republicans to block confirmation of most Obama appointees.
But the ruling's impact may be keenly felt by the White House next year if Republicans capture control of the Senate in the November election. The potential importance of the ruling lies in the Senate's ability to block the confirmation of judges and the leaders of independent agencies like the NLRB. A federal law gives the president the power to appoint acting heads of Cabinet-level departments to keep the government running.
Still, the outcome was the least significant loss possible for the administration. The justices, by a 5-4 vote, rejected a sweeping lower court ruling against the administration that would have made it virtually impossible for any future president to make recess appointments.
The lower court held that the only recess recognized by the Constitution is the once-a-year break between sessions of Congress. It also said that only vacancies that arise in that recess could be filled. So the high court has left open the possibility that a president, with a compliant Congress, could make recess appointments in the future.
A recess appointment can last no more than two years. Recess appointees who subsequently won Senate confirmation include Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, two current NLRB members and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton is among recess appointees who left office because they could not win a Senate vote.
3a)The 'Obama Brand' in Crisis
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, many critics warned that his thin resume and striking dearth of executive experience rendered him ill-equipped for the job. Most Americans disagreed, hungrily consuming Obama's diligently-cultivated image and message. The electorate was weary of the Bush administration, worn out from years of war, and reeling from an economic crisis. Obama's inexperience was thus transformed into a feature, and a 'fresh start'-minded public was willing, if not eager, to take a chance on someone new. Beltway mainstays like Hillary Clinton and John McCain didn't stand a chance. A 2006 Washingtonian piece placed a finger on the nature of Obama's intoxicating promise:
The Obama brand was exquisitely well-suited for the moment, and it prevailed. During the president's first term, however, many Americans were disabused of the messianic expectations his campaign had actively fomented. Team Obama anticipated this inevitable back-to-earth transition and worked assiduously -- and at times ruthlessly -- to shore up the president's core coalition of support in advance of 2012. The second Obama campaign's primary strategy was to ensure that this victory firewall would hold. In spite of mediocre ratings and the yoke of Obamacare, it did. But eighteen months into an ineffectual and scandal-plagued second term, more Americans than ever before are looking at the Obama 'Rorschach test' and seeing a failed presidency. Worse still for Obama's party, crucial elements of his coalition appear disillusioned and disengaged ahead of the midterm elections. In mid-June NBC's Chuck Todd examined a spate of polling and delivered an unforgiving verdict: “Essentially the public is saying, ‘Your presidency is over,’" he said. This week, a batch of fresh polling reinforces that sentiment. Gallup, NBC/WSJ, NYT/CBS, Fox News and Reuters are all out with national surveys, none of which measure Obama's job approval rating higher than 41 percent. The president's economic marks have been poor for many months, and the new polls continue to reflect the public's dim view. Especially worrying for the White House is the fact that all of these surveys were conducted prior to this week's hideous headlines about the US economy's substantial Q1 contraction. Public opinion on Obama's signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, remains underwater and isn't budging. And in several of the new data sets, Americans' assessment of his foreign policy performance plumbs new depths, for fairly obvious reasons. Perhaps most galling to Obama's inner circle is Obama's about-face on the president's handling of Iraq -- one of his bread-and-butter issues, on which he's literally never polled poorly. Change:
The situation on the ground in Iraq is horrific, no doubt, and that's driving the poll crash. But what's telling about this NYT/CBS poll is that Obama's policy posture actually fares rather well on every sub-question about Iraq. An overwhelming majority agrees that the war was a mistake, a slimmer majority backs his decision to withdraw all US troops from the country, and a plurality supports his response to the current crisis. And yet, take another look at the above chart. How does one reconcile Amerians' approval of the administration's specific Iraq policies with their starkly negative overall assessment of Obama himself on the issue? Daniel Drezner cites "the difference between policy outputs and policy outcomes," which is of course a major factor. But Obama's toxic brand is also at play here. Americans have lost confidence in his ability to lead, so they're more likely to reflexively give him a thumbs-down on matters of import. Combine his severely wounded political standing with the catastrophic reality in Iraq, and the result is a (-15) approval rating on the Iraq war for our famously (and popularly) anti-Iraq war president. I'll leave you with this graphic illustrating Democrats' very real 2014 enthusiasm problem, which we've been covering for months:
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