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This from a dear and long standing friend and fellow memo reader. He , obviously, is not a happy camper and with justification. Not because of what he says but because events have proven him totally correct
"Dick:
As I watch Yemen continue to fall apart, I am reminded of that nice dinner Sandra and I had with you last September after which, to enhance our digestion, we retired to watch our dear Fuehrer give his speech on ISIL. With the upcoming November elections upon him, and Iraq falling apart, he had to say something. So he said such things as "ISIL is not Islamic" and that we would "degrade and ultimately destroy" ISIS. (I think der Fuehrer only uses ISIL because he likes the thought of someone other than Israel controlling the Levant. It's so neo-colonial.) It didn't save him from the disastrous election, but he was able to dupe enough people with his speech that the Rs only picked up 9 Senate seats.
Anyway, I don't remember much of what he said that night, and I really only recall two things -- a pleasant chance to catch up over dinner, and the indigestion that followed when Obama cited Yemen and Somalia as the success stories in our war against terror: "This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years."
You may recall that I follow Yemen quite closely, had a relative who lived there in the 90s and so on, and came out of my chair when I heard der Fuehrer say that. He must be getting bad advice, I thought, from the Clintonistas or some other nefarious group. How could he have even imagined back then that the tribes stood a chance without some foreign intervention? Al Qaeda even then was using Yemen to stage attacks on Saudi oil fields. Osama used Yemen as training grounds in the 90s, and they have never given up those training grounds. But Obama was calling it a "success"? He was calling Somalia a "successful strategy"?
There are people -- even now -- who think that Obama is the smartest President we've ever had. He may be smart enough to regurgitate the same vicious bile that he learned on the Columbia campus in the 70s, but he's not smart enough to know which strategies work, and which don't. This man's stupidity alone is dangerous, but mixed with arrogance and narcissism, it becomes traitorous.
All the best,
B--"
I replied: "Using the word "Fuehrer was a bit extreme and undercut his cogent observation."
He responded: "I am a student of German history. I lived in Berlin. I am scared out of my wits by the similarities between this man and Hitler. He may not want to burn Jews, or at least not all of them, but his approach to governance and his wresting of absolute power is scary.
All the best,
B--"
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The fragility of China's evolution. (See 1 below.)
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Sen. Ted Cruz is the first Republican of many to toss his hat into the ring.
I predict the liberal press and media will tear into him, claiming:
a) Like Romney, Cruz is stupid even though he graduated from Yale and Harvard. All Republicans are stupid.
b) Like Romney, Cruz is mean spirited because he does not give a fig about those who are on the bottom. Cruz's family fled from Cuba, he put himself through college incurring huge debts because his father could not afford to do so. If he owned a dog he would put him in a cage on top of his car.
c) His fellow Senators believe he is a grand stander and hate him. Obama is loved by fellow Democrats because he works so well with Congress and particularly the Black Caucus who support Al Sharpton and anything/anyone that/who is/are black.
d) Cruz believes in the Constitution . Anyone who thinks our Constitution is relevant in a modern world is out of touch with reality. Just ask Federal judges who constantly rewrite what our Founding Fathers thought made good sense. Also, government by Executive order is far more preferable than allowing "We the people" to decide through, what once was, representative government.
e) Cruz believes a nation that cannot secure its borders could be vulnerable to losing control and thus, threatens our security. America was established so everyone with a grievance could come here and have a better life than those who came here legally and before them. Anyone who thinks otherwise is heartless. Republicans are not only stupid but also heartless.
f) Finally, Cruz believes we should support allies, not disparage their leaders by insulting them and keep our word.
Obama believes the opposite and goes a few steps further. Obama believes we must curry favor with those who say they want to destroy us, turn the other cheek and rely upon their promises so as not to offend their sensibilities.
Obama also refuses to call them bad names and just because they behead innocent people, mostly Christians, it is simply a matter of their unemployed status.
This is why Ted Cruz will make a terrible president. He is far too conservative for a nation that believes it can continue to in-debt it's children's future.
===
J Street is an organization, mostly comprised of 'Jewish Jerks,' who are opposed to AIPAC's non-partisan accomplishments of furthering the strong relationship between America and Israel.
J Street members are mostly young radical hot heads whose youthful fervor leads them to be destructive and they have become useful handmaidens for Obama. They are becoming the equivalent of Hitler's Youth Group.
Maybe my friend was right in is observations above! (See 2 below.)
Orwell and POGO were right - the enemy is Obama! (See 2a below.)
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Sowell writes about O'Reilley's simple question. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
By Rodger Baker andJohn Minnich
Last week, China's anti-corruption campaign took a significant turn, though a largely overlooked one. The Supreme People's Court released a statement accusing former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, the highest-ranked official thus far implicated in China's ongoing anti-corruption campaign, of having "trampled the law, damaged unity within the Communist Party, and conducted non-organizational political activities." In Chinese bureaucratic speak, this was only a few steps shy of confirming earlier rumors that Zhou and his former political ally and one-time rising star from Chongqing, Bo Xilai, had plotted a coup to pre-empt or repeal the ascension of Chinese President and Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. Thus, the court's statement marks a radical departure from the hitherto depoliticized official language of the anti-corruption campaign.
Of course, it has long been clear that the Xi administration's anti-corruption campaign is far more than just a fight against graft — it is also a political purge designed to tighten the new leadership's control over Party, government and military apparatuses. But up to now, official language on the anti-corruption campaign has been couched in terms of fighting graft and abuse of power "for personal gain." So far as we are aware, very few if any official statements have alluded to "political activities" by suspects — and certainly none concerning high-profile figures like Zhou, whose position at the top of the country's energy industry and domestic security apparatus made him one of the most powerful Chinese politicians of the 2000s. Whatever the court's precise intent, that it chose language even hinting at a coup by Bo and Zhou is extraordinary.
If we accept that the use of a phrase like "non-organizational political activities" is significant, then we have to ask what the decision to use that phrase at this time may signify. To our minds, two possible interpretations stand out. First, it could mark a nascent shift in the way Chinese authorities frame the anti-corruption campaign and imply that going forward the campaign will become more overtly political. Second, it could signal that Xi and his allies, confident of having fully eliminated any threat posed by Zhou and his associates, are acknowledging an end to one phase of the anti-corruption campaign — the elimination of competing factions — and are now embarking on the further consolidation of authority and control over the far reaches of the bureaucracy.
If the former interpretation is correct, the anti-corruption campaign is about to get more brutal and potentially more destabilizing, as it moves from a relatively focused purge and general cleansing of the Party to a full-on assault against those who have the strength to challenge Xi's nascent authoritarianism. According to the latter hypothesis, with the would-be challengers routed and acknowledged as anti-Party plotters, and with political power firmly centralized under Xi and his allies, China's leaders can now put politics aside and move on to the more difficult and important task of building a government ready to manage the profound social and political disruptions that will almost certainly accompany China's economic slowdown.
Xi's Strategy
In either case, the anti-corruption campaign and political centralization are not occurring in a vacuum. The campaign may be the highest profile of Xi's initiatives thus far, but it alone is clearly not sufficient to deal with China's myriad problems. The question, then, is what to expect next.
Two recent developments in particular frame our understanding of the trajectory of China under Xi and his strategy for ushering China and the Communist Party safely through the difficult years ahead. First is the Party's renewed emphasis following the Fourth Plenary Session in October on establishing effective rule of law. Second is the announcement in February that going forward, the anti-corruption campaign would center on 26 of the country's largest state-owned enterprises, with a focus on resource, construction, heavy industrial and telecommunications businesses. This announcement came one month prior to renewed government pledges to merge and consolidate the state sector. It also stands out as the first time the government has pre-emptively and publicly named potential future targets – thus, in theory, giving them fair warning. As one official put it, the government plans to "hang the sword of Damocles" over the state-owned sector's head.
The thread that binds these two seemingly disparate elements together is the problem of political development in the context of rapid social and economic change — that is, how to build flexible and adaptive governing institutions capable of adjusting to meet the emerging needs of an urbanizing and industrializing (in some regions, post-industrializing) society like China's.
Although Chinese society and its economy have undergone profound changes over the course of the past 30 years — China's economy has grown nine-fold since 2000 alone — the country's political structure has changed only incrementally. To be sure, China's government is in many ways stronger and more effective today than it was when Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978. But it retains the same basic form he put in place more than two decades ago. As long as China's economy was growing of its own accord, this model sufficed. Its task was simply to prevent politics — a second Mao — from derailing the economy. But as the anti-corruption campaign and Xi's power consolidation drive signify, the model of consensus-based political decision-making put in place by Deng is breaking down.
The leadership transition from former President and Party General Secretary Hu Jintao to Xi was the first since the late 1970s that was not pre-ordained by Deng. Following the ravages of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the brief reign of the so-called Gang of Four, Deng assumed the mantle of Chinese leadership, reversing many of Mao Zedong's economic policies, but also fundamentally altering the political organization of China. Rather than Mao's revolutionary model, which required perpetual upheaval, Deng proffered an evolutionary model — one that would useconsensus politics to both break down the extreme factionalism of the Mao era and undermine the ability of any single individual to rebuild a clear faction in the face of multiple competing and cooperating interest groups.
To further reinforce stability, Deng selected both Hu and his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, ensuring more than two decades of clearly defined succession plans. During the economic growth of China's nearly three-decade “miracle,” the system of political consensus proved largely effective. The main purpose of government was to provide stability in the Party and the overall economic system, primarily serving a managerial role rather than a truly innovative leadership role. Certainly there were crises during these years, but these were frequently short-lived, and the government response was often one of delay followed by mitigation, rather than the implementation of any significant change in the underlying political, economic or social systems.
But as China neared its 2012-2013 leadership transition, it was clearly entering uncharted waters. Not only did this transition move beyond anything Deng had prepared for, it also occurred at a point where China's Deng-era economic model had clearly run its course. As with many of the Asian economic tigers before it, China's export-oriented and government investment-heavy model had reached a point where growth alone was no longer sufficient to sustain economic activity, and society had evolved faster than the political model. The global economic crisis, along with Europe's sustained sluggishness, only served to reinforce the end of China's easy times, and made it clear to China's leaders that they could no longer postpone what they had been delaying for more than a decade: a restructuring of the economy to one that would better harness internal consumption.
Xi Jinping's actions are symptoms, not causes, of the breakdown of the Deng political and economic model. As we wrote previously, the anti-corruption campaign is one element in a broader evolutionary process driven by the realization that the transition between China's former economic model (based on low-cost exports and investment-led construction) and new economic model (based on domestic consumption, services and high value-added manufacturing) will entail five to 10 years of immense social, economic and political strain. Simply put, the old model, whose legitimacy rested on the promise of ever-rising material prosperity and stability, is no longer viable.
Toward a New Political Order
What China is building in the old model's place appears to be a more centralized and more personalized political order: in essence, a dictatorship under Xi. At the same time, given the trajectory of Chinese social and economic development — the need to stimulate domestic consumption and innovative, high value-added industry — it is also clear that to succeed, this new order will have to differ fundamentally from the kind of dictatorship established under Mao.
The campaign against Zhou and Bo was more than a personality clash, and much more than an issue of basic corruption. It was a battle between competing models for the Party to maintain authority and control during the economic transition — and it was a battle over how the economy would make that transition. On the one hand, Bo — and by implication Zhou, as Bo's patron and ally — seemingly espoused what amounted to a return to the revolutionary politics of the Mao era, in which political legitimacy would rest not with the administrative apparatus, and certainly not within the rule of law, but in the hands of a charismatic leader, presumably Bo himself. On the other hand, if recent pledges to strengthen the rule of law and streamline and improve the functioning of powerful state-owned enterprises are to be taken seriously, then Xi and his allies would appear to be driving toward something else. The Xi camp's vision seems to be a political framework that could draw on elements of Mao's legacy — centralization of political power and nationalism, most saliently — while ultimately preserving the Deng model's promise of evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change.
Let us assume that the politicization of the charges against Zhou is a sign of the Xi camp's victory over the Zhou and Bo camp regarding the political, social and economic model for Chinese reform. If that is the case, the Chinese leadership is, at least publicly, seeking a model that, though under tight central leadership, will try to rest on an autonomous, efficient and high-performing bureaucracy. This model also will almost certainly entail some level of legal protection for private and intellectual property rights — at least those of Chinese citizens — as a means to stimulate domestic consumption and innovation.
Recent Communist Party pronouncements on the importance of strengthening the rule of law, far from empty doublespeak, represent embryonic moves toward this end. The same goes for the anti-corruption campaign, especially in its application to the process of consolidating and streamlining the state sector. Authoritarianism and effective rule of law are not fundamentally incompatible. Neither are dictatorship and efficient administration. History offers several examples of countries that combined strong government and legal protection for things like private property and contracts without also adopting democracy: 19th century Prussia, for example, or 20th and 21st century Singapore. As China's leaders attempt to bolster their own rule of law and bureaucratic reforms, these examples are likely not far from their minds.
But the problem with this comparison is that Prussia, at its peak in 1871, had fewer than 25 million people. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, its population measured only 10 million. Singapore is a city of 5.4 million. The leaders of each country worked for decades, over successive generations, to build high-performing bureaucracies that combined the kind of effective protection of property rights historically necessary to support the transition to advanced industrial economies. The differences between Prussia and Singapore and China are so many and so great as to make comparison virtually impossible. But two key differences — two fundamental constraints on China — stand out: size and time.
Evolutionary Versus Revolutionary Change
Throughout history, China has struggled with a common cyclical problem: To manage a nation as vast as China, the central government that first pulled together the far reaches of the empire needs to build and expand a bureaucracy to manage the complexities and scale of China. Over time, that very bureaucracy steadily usurps power from the center, and parochial interests reign supreme. At times of national crisis, the center tries to reclaim authority and control, only to realize that power has fragmented. The bureaucracy is resistant to change, and the system often breaks down after struggling to reform. Then, a new centralizing power rises from the ashes of the old, and the cycle begins again.
The Communist Party is no stranger to this cycle. Mao followed a revolutionary path, allowing frequent disruptions to keep the bureaucracy from ever fully usurping power from the center. Deng encouraged the bureaucracy, hoping that the economic prosperity it could bring would ultimately allow the center to balance the competing centrifugal forces with a fairly light touch. While Deng's model was a revolutionary shift from the Maoist model, it was predicated on a slow, steady evolutionary change in China and assumed it could somehow avoid the challenges of China's centuries of cycles. The transition from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, and the attendant challenge from Bo Xilai, questioned whether the Deng model was still applicable.
The difference between the Xi model of reform and the vision espoused by Bo was in part in how they would harness support from the population. Both Xi and Bo would need to reallocate capital from the more economically advanced coast and Yangtze River basin. Bo, who had built a cult of personality in Chongqing and blended Chinese nationalism with Party veneration, was apparently going to justify that through revolutionary propaganda, following the Maoist pattern of harnessing the vast masses of economically disenfranchised to force the redistribution of wealth.
Xi, on the other hand, though certainly consolidating power and taking on a more controlling tone, appears to be pursuing a more evolutionary path to reshape China's economic landscape. Rather than Maoist revolutionary ideology, Xi's propaganda machine nearly paints him as an equivalent of a U.S. or European president, a leader best qualified to be trusted to guide the Chinese forward through difficult times. While he is harnessing a type of Chinese nationalism or extreme patriotism, it is intended to keep all of the Chinese agreeing on policies, rather than turning against one another.
The fundamental question, however, is whether China has time for an evolutionary change. Other Asian nations that underwent significant economic and political transformation, from Meiji-era Japan to Park Chung-hee's South Korea, each made more radical and rapid changes — something that may be forced upon China's leaders. But each did so with the attending major social disruption and a heavy hand in domestic security. Major economic overhauls are messy affairs, and China has decades of dead wood to trim from its economy due to the lingering effects of Mao's intentional drive to ensure massive industrial redundancy, as well as to mismanagement and frequent unprofitability among state companies.
Although Singapore and even Prussia may be idealized models for China as countries that were able to transform and retain tight central authority, Lee Kuan Yew and the kaiser never had to manage a population of nearly 1.4 billion people, more than two-thirds of whom have effectively been left behind over three decades of promises that everyone would get rich in the end. As China tries to transition away from low-end manufacturing and economic stimulus driven by government-financed construction, it is the low end of the economic spectrum that will be disproportionally affected. A gradual shift in its economic model would allow China to slowly metabolize these displaced workers, but it is far from certain that China has the time to allow for this slow change, as the rest of the global economy is shifting with or without Chinese consensus.
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2)
J Street Delegation Defaces Hillel International Headquarters
Posted By TheTower.org Staff
A delegation of college students attending J Street’s annual conference held a demonstration this afternoon outside the headquarters of Hillel International, the largest organization devoted to Jewish life on university campuses, to protest the decision by Eric Fingerhut, Hillel International’s CEO and President, to decline attending the conference.
Fingerhut withdrew from participating in the J Street convention because of “concerns regarding [his] participation amongst other speakers who have made highly inflammatory statements against the Jewish state,” as he said in a statement on March 9. Among those controversial figures named by Hillel International include Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator who has compared Israel to ISIS.
More than 1,000 students are attending the conference; around 200 of them attended the protest. The students listened as leaders from J Street U, J Street’s campus arm, spoke on a megaphone about the “massive failure of Jewish communal leadership” that Fingerhut’s declined attendance symbolized. Benjy Cannon, the president of J Street U, alleged that “right-wing donors” are constraining student voices. Cannon has been published in Haaretz and The Forward.
Cannon concluded his speech by demanding that the Hillel International board of directors hold an on-the-record meeting with J Street U representatives to explain their decision not to attend the J Street conference.
Following the conclusion of the speech, students defaced the outside of the Hillel International building with Post-It Notes saying, “Dear Eric, you cancelled on _____,” with a student’s name filling in the blank. Students were then ushered back to the Washington Convention Center by J Street staffers so they could be on time for a speech by Dennis McDonough, the White House Chief of Staff.
As most J Street U students hustled back to the convention, a small delegation from Open Hillel [1], a movement dedicated to pressuring the world’s largest Jewish student organization to no longer be pro-Israel, posed for pictures. As they finished their photo op, they returned to the convention center, as the Post-It Notes began to unstick from the building and float away in the wind.
J Street U’s attempt to protest Hillel to change its policies about Israel-related speakers reflects a philosophy identified by Aiden Pink, assistant editor of The Tower, in The Anti-Zionism of J Street [2], which was published in the June 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine.
When Israel makes the “wrong decision,” American Jews have three choices. The first option is to accept the messiness of geopolitics, and give the people of Israel the benefit of the doubt that their government will find the right path in a tough neighborhood and a world of moral complexity. The second is to grow jaded and disillusioned with Israel, and because Israel is so wrapped up in American Jewish identity, many who do become jaded and disillusioned with Judaism itself.
But rather than hope for the best or wallow in loathing, some American Jews choose a third path, preferring to take actions into their own hands. Citing Hillel the Elder’s famous dictum, “If not now, when?” they want to repair our broken world by repairing Israel, spurring changes in Israeli policy by, for example, pressuring the United States government to pressure Israel by threatening its financial aid, or urging the White House not to veto one-sided, anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Security Council.
The problem with this prescriptive approach, however, is that it forgets another part of Hillel’s saying: “If I am only for myself, what am I?” This group, in its wisdom, believes it knows what is best for Israel, and going beyond mere verbal criticism, actively works to mold Israel in its own image for its own emotional benefit. It is in this group that J Street finds itself.
2a) The Orwellian Obama Presidency
Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory.
The humiliating denouement to America’s involvement in Yemen came over the weekend, when U.S. Special Forces were forced to evacuate a base from which they had operated against the local branch of al Qaeda. This is the same branch that claimed responsibility for the January attack on Charlie Hebdo and has long been considered to pose the most direct threat to Europe and the United States.
So who should Barack Obama be declaring war on in the Middle East other than the state of Israel?
There is an upside-down quality to this president’s world view. His administration is now on better terms with Iran—whose Houthi proxies, with the slogan “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam,” just deposed Yemen’s legitimate president—than it is with Israel. He claims we are winning the war against Islamic State even as the group continues to extend its reach into Libya, Yemen and Nigeria.
He treats Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.
He was prepared to embrace a Muslim Brother as president of Egypt but maintains an arm’s-length relationship with his popular pro-American successor. He has no problem keeping company with Al Sharpton and tagging an American police department as comprehensively racist but is nothing if not adamant that the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” must on no account ever be conjoined. The deeper that Russian forces advance into Ukraine, the more they violate cease-fires, the weaker the Kiev government becomes, the more insistent he is that his response to Russia is working.
To adapt George Orwell’s motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory.
The current victim of Mr. Obama’s moral inversions is the recently re-elected Israeli prime minister. Normally a sweeping democratic mandate reflects legitimacy, but not for Mr. Obama. Now we are treated to the astonishing spectacle in which Benjamin Netanyahu has become persona non grata for his comments doubting the current feasibility of a two-state solution. This, while his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas is in the 11th year of his four-year term, without a murmur of protest from the White House.
It is true that Mr. Netanyahu made an ugly election-day remark about Israeli-Arab voters “coming out in droves to the polls,” thereby putting “the right-wing government in danger.” For this he has apologized, in person, to leaders of the Israeli-Arab community.
That’s more than can be said for Mr. Abbas, who last year threatened Israel with a global religious war if Jews were allowed to pray in the Temple Mount’s Al Aqsa mosque. “We will not allow our holy places to be contaminated,” the Palestinian Authority president said. The Obama administration insists that Mr. Abbas is “the best interlocutor Israel is ever going to have.”
Maybe that’s true, but if so it only underscores the point Mr. Netanyahu was making in the first place—and for which Mr. Obama now threatens a fundamental reassessment of U.S. relations with Israel. In 2014 Mr. Abbas agreed to a power-sharing agreement with Hamas, a deal breaker for any Israeli interested in peace. In 2010 he used the expiration of a 10-month Israeli settlement freeze as an excuse to abandon bilateral peace efforts. In 2008 he walked away from a statehood offer from then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In 2000 he was with Yasser Arafat at Camp David when the Palestinians turned down a deal from Israel’s Ehud Barak.
And so on. For continuously rejecting good-faith Israeli offers, Mr. Abbas may be about to get his wish: a U.S. vote for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. For tiring of constant Palestinian bad faith—and noting the fact—Israel will now be treated to pariah-nation status by Mr. Obama.
***
Here is my advice to the Israeli government, along with every other country being treated disdainfully by this crass administration: Repay contempt with contempt. Mr. Obama plays to classic bully type. He is abusive and surly only toward those he feels are either too weak, or too polite, to hit back.
The Saudis figured that out in 2013, after Mr. Obama failed to honor his promises on Syria; they turned down a seat on the Security Council, spoke openly about acquiring nuclear weapons from Pakistan and tanked the price of oil, mainly as a weapon against Iran. Now Mr. Obama is nothing if not solicitous of the Saudi highnesses.
The Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance. On the Iranian nuclear deal, they may have to go rogue: Let’s hope their warnings have not been mere bluffs. Israel survived its first 19 years without meaningful U.S. patronage. For now, all it has to do is get through the next 22, admittedly long, months.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3) A Simple Question
By Thomas Sowell
It is amazing how a simple question can cause a complex lie to collapse like a house of cards. The simple question was asked by Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel, and it was addressed to two Democrats. He asked what has Hillary Clinton ever accomplished.
The two Democrats immediately sidestepped the question and started reciting their talking points in favor of Hillary. But O'Reilly kept coming back to the fact that nothing they were talking about was an accomplishment.
For someone who has spent her entire adult life in politics, including being a Senator and then a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has nothing to show for all those years -- no significant legislation of hers that she got passed in the Senate, and only an unbroken series of international setbacks for the United States during her time as Secretary of State.
Before Barack Obama entered the White House and appointed Mrs. Clinton Secretary of State, Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq had notified their higher ups, stationed in Pakistan, that their cause was lost in Iraq and that there was no point sending more men there.
Hosni Mubarak was in charge in Egypt. He posed no threat to American or Western interests in the Middle East or to Christians within Egypt or to Israel. But the Obama administration threw its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over and began terrorizing Christians in Egypt and promoting hostility to Israel.
In Libya next door, the Qaddafi regime had already given up its weapons of mass destruction, after they saw what happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But President Obama's foreign policy, carried out by Secretary of State Clinton, got Qaddafi removed, after which Libya became a terrorist haven where an American ambassador was killed, for the first time in decades.
The rationale for getting rid of Middle East leaders who posed no threat to American interests was that they were undemocratic and their people were restless. But there are no democracies in the Middle East, except for Israel. Moreover, the people were restless in Iran and Syria, and the Obama-Clinton foreign policy did nothing to support those who were trying to overthrow these regimes.
It would be only fair to balance this picture with foreign policy triumphs of the Obama-Clinton team. But there are none. Not in the Middle East, not in Europe, where the Russians have invaded the Crimea, and not in Asia, where both China and North Korea are building up threatening military forces, while the Obama administration has been cutting back on American military forces.
Hillary Clinton became an iconic figure by feeding the media and the left the kind of rhetoric they love. Barack Obama did the same and became president. Neither had any concrete accomplishments besides rhetoric beforehand, and both have had the opposite of accomplishments after taking office.
They have something else in common. They attract the votes of those people who vote for demographic symbolism -- "the first black president" to be followed by "the first woman president" -- and neither to be criticized, lest you be denounced for racism or sexism.
It is staggering that there are sane adults who can vote for someone to be President of the United States as if they are in school, just voting for "most popular boy" or "most popular girl" -- or, worse yet, voting for someone who will give them free stuff.
Whoever holds that office makes decisions involving the life and death of Americans and -- especially if Iran gets a nuclear arsenal -- the life and death of this nation. It took just two nuclear bombs -- neither of them as powerful as those available today -- to get a very tough nation like Japan to surrender.
Anyone familiar with World War II battles in the Pacific knows that it was not unusual for 90 percent of the Japanese troops defending Iwo Jima or other islands to fight to the death, even after it was clear that American troops had them beaten.
When people like that surrender after two nuclear bombs, do not imagine that today's soft Americans -- led by the likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton -- will fight on after New York and Chicago have been reduced to radioactive ashes.
Meanwhile, ISIS and other terrorists are giving us a free demonstration of what surrender would mean. But perhaps we can kick the can down the road, and leave that as a legacy to our children and grandchildren, along with the national debt.
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