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Click here: Video: The Italian Carpool Lane | Hell in a Handbasket
I am not clever enough to come up with them, just dumb enough to post them.
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Rand Paul enters the fray and will bring a libertarian perspective who, when confronted by reality, has altered some of his thinking. That said, he is intelligent and is worth listening to, but remains a long shot to get the nomination much less be elected.
Paul is not mainstream because mainstream Republicans have become more like traditional, not Obama like, Democrats.
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Barry's real father? You decide. (See 1 below.)
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Will Obama stop after leaving The White House or will he continue to seek becoming president of the world? (See 2 below.)
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Who needs or wants facts when false and/or salacious narratives make the story more interesting and sells better.
I have maintained for years, when corporations gained control of our, previously independent, newspapers the decline in veracity would begin as solid news took a backseat to theater.. (See 3 below.)
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Our genius bone-headed foreign policy president admonishes Gov.Walker to bone up. Is Obama referring to the bone stuck in his own throat from his own failures?
Obama was being oh so "Obama" because he always tells others what they are missing when, in fact, he is the one who is lacking in credibility. It is a marvelous technique which Obama used to convinced voters how smart he was until they learned he was actually an empty suit.
Hell, Obama did not even know how many states formed our union when he became president. The arrogance and hypocrisy of the man knows no boundaries.
The far left hate and fear Walker because he crushed them and their fuzzy ideas and policies.
If truth be told the term liberal is an oxymoron when you observe how liberals act, how liberals talk and what liberals think. They hate being challenged, they hate it when their biases are revealed, they are basically intolerant of those who have a different viewpoint and liberals believe what they say is, by definition, factual, simply because they say it!. Liberals believe their very words are synonymous with pearls of wisdom. Worst of all, most liberals are humorless, incapable of laughing at themselves and acknowledging empirical evidence revealing the failed logic of their ideas. (See 4 below.)
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This was the opening sentence in 1 below and can apply to Hillary as well:
"Barack Obama’s campaigns for national office have always centered on who he was, not what he’d done.
But who was he?"
Hillary has accomplished nothing and. thus, must run on her husband's coat tails so her focus has to be on who she is, not what she has done. The American voter was dumb enough to elect Obama twice and might still be dumb enough to vote for 'what difference does it make' Hillary. Never underestimate the stupidity of voters! I voted for Carter the first time!
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Obama and his continuing disingenuous comments defending his Iranian proposals. (See 5 below.)The article by Shultz and Kissinger is a must read. Thoughtful , informative and the thinking and warnings of two pros. Obama will probably not listen because he is the expert know it all bone head who is running the show! (See 5a below.)
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Who's Your Daddy? Another Look at Joel Gilbert's Dreams from My Real Father
Barack Obama’s campaigns for national office have always centered on who he was, not what he’d done.
But who was he?
Professional journalists didn’t want to know, and didn’t want voters to know.
In Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, in a world where everything is incombustible, the job of firemen is to burn books. Captain Beatty, the fire chief in Bradbury’s dystopia, became the role model for journalists in 2008. Their job was not only not to investigate the Hope-and-Changer, but to turn their flamethrowers on those who were attempting to do so.
The internet is still fireproof, and so citizen journalists kept unraveling the layers of deception surrounding the multicultural paragon. There were among them, of course, the “wingnuts” and “whackjobs” of leftist demonology. But there were many serious researchers, some with Ph.D.s, some uncredentialed.
In 2012, Joel Gilbert released a film that fleshed out (pun intended) a theory that had long circulated online, and had been tentatively suggested in at least one book, Jack Cashill’s Obama Deconstructed. Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist journalist and poet who had mentored young Barry Soetero in Hawaii, was in fact, Gilbert claimed, the boy’s real father. Dreams from My Real Father tells the story from the point of view of Barack Obama, with a narrator fessing up to what really transpired. The film sold well, got nearly 900 reviews on Amazon, and was distributed gratis to some four million voters.
Gilbert’s premise seems plausible in part because of his clever use of images. Looking at something -- say, the Beirut airport in a 1950s photo -- has a slightly mesmerizing effect, and viewers are inclined to believe that, yes, maybe the Dunhams were there, even without Stan, Ann, and Madelyn being in the picture. Gilbert is adroit at digging up interesting file footage.
But unfortunately, his thesis doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
What follows draws in part on the research of Loren Collins, an Atlanta attorney and conflict mediator, and author of Bullspotting. Quotes not from Obama-Ayers’ Dreams from My Father (the author is referred to henceforth as “Obama”), if not otherwise identified, come from Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman.
Gilbert’s is tale of two men. Ann’s father Stanley Dunham plays nearly as important a role as Frank Davis.
Stanley Dunham
The story Gilbert tells hinges on “Gramps.” He was not a furniture salesman, as everyone claims, but, according a Gilbert, a CIA agent. Stanley signed on after originally serving in Air Force intelligence. Initially sent to Beirut, he was transferred to Seattle to monitor communists at Boeing, then on to Hawaii, where he was responsible for recruiting visiting African exchange students. His first protégé was Barack Obama, Sr. As part of Stan’s job, he was to infiltrate leftist groups, and he wound up meeting Frank Marshall Davis and inviting the genial Stalinist to his home.
This was not a good move, as the propagandist-poet-pornographer seduced his rebellious daughter. When Ann became pregnant, Frank refused to divorce his wife and suggested that a marriage be arranged between his young lover and a willing black man. This seemed like a good idea to Stan, and it occurred to him that he knew just the guy. Barack Sr. agreed, on the condition that he not be listed as the father on the baby’s birth certificate, and thus have no financial liability for the future bi-racial reconciler. Ten years later, when Punahou, the exclusive private school in Honolulu, made a fuss about giving Barry a full affirmative action scholarship -- and not having a birth certificate identifying the father -- Stan paid for Barack Sr. to return to Hawaii, meet his “son” for the first and last time, and verify that he was the dad. The Kenyan was more than happy to take an all-expenses-paid month-long vacation in Hawaii.
When young Barack was sent back to Hawaii, Ann instructed her dad to introduce him to Frank Marshall Davis, his real father. The two developed a close relationship, especially after Barry, rummaging around in the attic, discovered his birth certificate and confronted his mother.
This portrait of Stanley Dunham doesn’t come close to meeting the sniff test.
The evidence for Stan being a “Company Man” (the title of Gilbert’s “Chapter 2”) consists of the following:
1. A transcript from Berkeley showing the Stan took French for a year.
2. A family picture that shows Ann, who looks about 9 or 10 years old, in a jumper with letters that appear to be “NDJ” on the left strap. Gilbert identifies this as the school uniform of College de Notre Dame de Jamhour in Beirut.
Some obvious problems:
The transcript is flashed on the screen quickly and viewers may not have a chance to see that the aspiring spook got Cs in both of his French classes. Stan was not a stellar student in his other classes either. Apart from a B in Journalism and an A in his second semester of English, all his other grades were Cs and Ds. As Obama puts it in Dreams with typical pretentiousness, at Berkeley “the classroom couldn’t contain his ambition.” According to relatives, Madelyn wrote his term papers while Stan “sprawled on the couch reading murder mysteries.”
Plagiarism runs in the family. Eventually Madelyn “pulled the plug on Berkeley.” “’What can you do if your wife won’t support you to get an education?’” Stan whined more than once after the couple returned to Kansas.
The CIA in the late ’40s and ’50 was recruiting the best and the brightest from Ivy League colleges. (John Updike once wrote an amusing story about a brainy Harvard classmate who was signed on.) The CIA would have had zero interest in Stanley Dunham, who had earlier dropped out of high school not, as Obama tells it, because he punched the principal in the nose, but because, according to his brother, “he was not doing well academically.” “His crude, ham-fisted manners” (as Obama describes them) would probably not have impressed interviewers.
Gilbert’s claim about the stints in Air Force intelligence depend entirely on the alleged proximity of bases to places the Dunhams lived. In fact, they never lived in any of the towns that are home to the three bases in Oklahoma, the seven bases in Texas, or McConnell, the one base in Kansas.
As for the Lebanon sojourn, Gilbert offers no other evidence beside the jumper with NDJ. Stan and Madelyn’s siblings would surely have noticed the Dunhams’ long absence. They’d have been told he was working under whatever cover had been assigned him. Nor did the Dunhams ever live anywhere near McLean, Virginia, where Stan might have received a little training, along with some remedial French.
Apparently, Gramps never mastered the parley-vous, and so was dispatched to Seattle. But though there were and are turf wars between the CIA and FBI, monitoring communists at Boeing would obviously have been the FBI’s beat. Madelyn had spent the war years happily working in a Boeing plant in Wichita, and this may have been the inspiration for the move to Seattle.
The assignment to Hawaii to mentor visiting Africans was not very cost-effective for the agency, since there was only one student the year the Dunhams relocated, Barack Sr., who arrived later in the summer of 1960.
Dreams from My Real Father lingers over a photo that Gilbert claims shows Gramps welcoming Barack Sr. at Hickam Air Force base when he arrived in Hawaii. In fact the picture, from CBS News, is of a party given for the Kenyan to celebrate his graduation from U. of Hawaii.
With time on his hands, Stan was assigned by the CIA to poach once again on the FBI’s territory, according to Gilbert. This is how he made the acquaintance of Frank Marshall Davis. In fact, Gramps most likely met the Communist through contacts at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, where Barry attended Sunday school. “You get five religions in one,” Stan exulted about Unitarianism. In Honolulu, you also got atheism. The Church boasts that its attic was at one time used by Madelyn Murray O’Hair as a “sanctuary.”
The NDJ emblem remains a mystery. There was no private school with those initials anywhere the Dunhams lived, and they didn’t have the money to send Ann to one anyway. It could have been picked up at a yard sale. In any case, in the absence of any other evidence, it’s a wobbly peg on which to hang the CIA tale.
On top of everything, Stan seems awfully obtuse for a CIA agent. As Gilbert tells it, it takes awhile for it to dawn on him that his career would be in jeopardy if his daughter were to marry the leading Communist on the Islands -- though we’ve already been told Frank has declined the honor. It’s Frank, too, who comes up with the idea of finding a black guy who’ll agree to a sham marriage with Ann. Then, when little Barry Soetero is sent back to Hawaii, Ann has to remind her dad who Frank is, as if he’d have forgotten after ten years who had knocked up his daughter. She then requests that he introduce the boy to his real father, not something he’d be happy to do, one would think, under the circumstances. A not-so-dim granddad might also have persuaded Punahou that Barry did indeed have an African or African-American father, despite a missing birth certificate (which didn’t trouble far more important people than the Punahou admissions officer), and that, after one look at Barry, it would not be necessary to see Barack Sr. in the flesh.
Frank Marshall Davis
The evidence for Davis’ paternity rests mostly on two sets of photos. The first is of Davis himself. Gilbert deftly juxtaposes them to photos of Obama, positioning the faces of each at the same angle and with the same expression. There is a resemblance. Collins claims that Gilbert could have picked any African-American. But while it’s no doubt true for Obama’s broad nose, there are other physical similarities that are striking, including the age spots that now dot the President’s face. Once again, though, Gilbert reveals his indifference to evidence. He claims the two men share the same height, 6’ 2”, and build. But Obama is 6’ 1”, not 6’ 2.” If Gilbert couldn’t be bothered to do a .027-second Google search on the President, I’m not sure I trust him on Davis’s height. (Weirdly, the filmmaker also claims that Obama, a guy obsessed with his blackness and wanting to ingratiate himself to the African-American community in Chicago, at some point got a nose job, à la Michael Jackson.)
So the physical similarities are intriguing but hardly conclusive. In other photos of Davis, there’s not much resemblance. And as Collins points out, Mark Obama Ndesanjo, the son of Barack Sr. and a white woman, Ruth Baker (and clearly someone who made his way in the world without the benefit of Affirmative Action), looks a lot more like the President than does another Mark, the son of Frank and his second wife Helen Canfield Davis, a white Chicago socialite eighteen years Frank’s junior. The individual the President most closely resembles is Stan the Company Man, whose English, Irish, Swiss, and French genes dominated Obama’s African DNA.
Speaking of dominate, the second set of photos is mostly of black-lingerie-clad and leather-booted models. It was Gilbert who unearthed the dominatrixes. In the original trio of photos, first posted by “The Astute Bloggers” in October 2008, the woman appears without any BDSM apparel. She’s wearing nothing but high heels and a pair of ball earrings, and glances coyly back at the photographer. The model looks something like Ann Dunham. There are Christmas presents on the floor, and Gilbert dates the photos to December 1960.
The filmmaker followed up by doing two things:
1) Recognizing that the sequence of numbers and letters at the bottom of one of the photos came from a filing system used by pornographic magazines, Gilbert searched for other shots of the same woman.
2) He flew to Hawaii to inspect Frank Marshall Davis’s former home in an attempt to verify that this was indeed the setting for the photographs.
Unfortunately, both efforts yielded results that were, to say the least, not encouraging. But undeterred, Gilbert soldiered on with his thesis.
1) Gilbert claimed to have located seven issues of porno mags that featured Ann Dunham. On the website promoting the video, obamasrealfather.com, one page shows covers of the issues.
Doggedly, Collins hunted these down (not so difficult with Exotique, which were republished in a three-volume set). In none of the issues displayed on the website is there a photo of the Ann look-alike. And all but one, Collins discovered, were from the 1950s. Exotique in fact ceased publication in 1959. But then in another issue of this soft-core S&M mag, #23, he found one of the photos Gilbert claims to have been of Ann, the image displayed on the page linked above. Unfortunately, #23 came out in 1958, when Ann was fifteen and two years before the Dunhams moved to Hawaii. The woman, Gilbert claims, is the same as the model in the original three “Ann” photos, though she looks a little more menacing in black opera gloves and calf-high leather boots.
Without delving further into the photo question, it’s obvious Gilbert was passing off as photos of Ann pictures of a woman who could not have been her.
After Collins’ articles appeared, Gilbert added the current caption to the shot of the fetish mag covers, which notes that Davis’s photos were published in “men’s magazines throughout the 1960s.” His parenthetical note below this, that the publication dates “in the 1998 Exotique retrospective collection are inconsistent with original magazines dates,” is true only in so far as the German publisher printed incorrect dates for the magazine’s lifespan on the title page -- 1951 to 1957. Exotique was actually published between 1955 and 1959.
Readers willing to pay 2 pounds (just under $3) can verify for themselves the date of issue 23 at this site.
2. Based on the setting for the photo shoots, Gilbert quixotically attempted to demonstrate that this was, indeed, Davis’s living room.
He located a photo of an interview with Davis that took place on a couch in 1948, and claims in the film that this is the identical couch that the model is sitting on twelve years later. This would have been the dominatrix in Exotique, as the three original “Anns” were posed on and in front of a chair. Unfortunately, even in the low-resolution photos, it’s clear that these are two different sofas: the one in the 1948 picture has separate cushions, while the one from Exotique has raised seams. In interviews, Gilbert also inexplicably makes claims about the windows -- that they floor to ceiling “Tudor” windows -- that are clearly not borne out by the photos he shows.
Once in Hawaii, Gilbert, claiming to be doing a documentary on Davis’s poetry for the History Channel, was admitted to Davis’s former home, and took photos and measurements -- which made the owner suspicious. The results, at best, were inconclusive, because Gilbert did not include any of this evidence in the film. In interviews, however, he made dubious claims about discovering in a shed “plywood sheets” of the same floorboard in the photos. As Collins points out, plywood comes in sheets, boards in boards, so even this far-fetched claim doesn’t make sense.
In the end, the only evidence presented in Dreams from My Real Father that the model was photographed in Davis’ home consists of a) the photo of the couch, which shows no such thing; b) a close-up of the woman’s shoes followed by a very quick close-up of the shoes Helen Davis is wearing in a photo. Again, there’s no match. And c) a close-up of the jazz albums on the floor behind the model. Davis was a jazz aficionado. But then so were millions of other Americans.
Equally dismaying is Gilbert’s use of Davis’s semi-autobiographical pornographic novel Sex Rebel, Black, published under the pseudonym Bob Greene. The filmmaker quotes several sentences from the book, and displays them on the screen, to suggest that the narrator had a sexual relationship with Ann, thinly disguised as “Anne.”
Anne came up many times the next several weeks. She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners. I think we did her a favour, although the pleasure was mutual. I’m not one to go in for Lolitas. Usually I'd rather not bed a babe under 20. But there are exceptions. I didn't want to disappoint the trusting child.
Collins hunted down a copy of the book (there only three in public libraries in the U.S., according to Worldcat) and discovered that the sentences, which are made to appear as one paragraph in Dreams from my Real Father, are pulled from separate pages. The reason was obvious: “Anne” is in fact a thirteen-year-old Jamaican girl and the affair takes place in Chicago in the late 1930s. No way is this a veiled reference to Ann Dunham.
Joel Gilbert, like Bill Ayers, is something of a post-structuralist hoaxer, whether or not he’s read Derrida, Barthes, Foucault and Co. His Atomic Jihad is a straightforward look at the threat posed by a nuclear Iran. But two other movies, originally released as documentaries and described as such in interviews, were later repackaged as “mockumentary spoofs.” These are Paul McCartney is Really Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison (2010) and Elvis Found Alive(2012). Collins provides a detailed account of Gilbert’s disingenuousness.
If nothing else, Gilbert’s walking back his original claims about the two films indicates a certain insouciance about data and evidence.
In interviews, Gilbert repeatedly doubled down on his deceptions. At one point he claimed on Peter Boyle’s radio show that the handwriting (consisting of numbers and letters) at the bottom of the fetish photos matches Davis’s exactly, according to anonymous “handwriting experts.” He also claimed, even more improbably, that he had in his possession photos of Davis and Dunham together, but he didn’t want to show them in the film because they were too racy.
Of course, it’s not impossible that Frank Marshall Davis was Obama’s father, but not on the evidence Gilbert -- or anyone else -- has so far presented.
The claim is central to the movie. This is unfortunate, because later “chapters” take a close look at other sinister figures who influenced Obama, as Davis indisputably did. Drawing on two books that are invaluable for understanding the Confidence Man, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief and Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama, Gilbert documents Obama’s debts to both Tom and Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and (literally) Tony Rezko, and describes his fatal attraction to hard left dogma, so carefully kept under wraps during the 2008 campaign. Gilbert explores this in greater depth than did Dinesh D’Souza’s much slicker Obama’s America: 2016. (If Dinesh had subsidized straw voters for the Dems instead of the GOP, he’d now be Ambassador to Belgium instead of a convicted felon.) Obama’s America, which focuses on Obama’s anti-colonial legacy from his absent father, and includes jaunts to Indonesia and Kenya, was nonetheless a compelling documentary, and it’s not D’Souza’s fault that Mitt Romney lost.
***
Dreams from My Real Father is, first and foremost, an attempt to explain the birth certificate conundrum. Why would a candidate proclaiming the need for “transparency” so resolutely, and at such great expense, resist a simple appeal to release his birth certificate? Why, when he finally posted a PDF of the long form online in 2011, did it raise the suspicions of experts who had not entered the debate previously and had no axes to grind? For those who want a trip down memory lane, some of the best articles at American Thinker by skeptics are here, here, and here.
Parts 2 and 3 of a 4-part presentation by Lord Monckton provide an entertaining summary of the case that the document the White House released was a forgery.
Nonetheless, the idea that Obama was born in Kenya was implausible from the start. Why would middle-class white American parents permit their eighteen-year-old daughter to travel to a backward country in East Africa to give birth? The grad student on a fellowship who had complained about the high cost of living in Hawaii didn’t have the wherewithal to finance a trip even if he’d wanted to. And with a wife and children in Nairobi, he’d have no reason to want to.
Despite being wrong about Frank Davis, Joel Gilbert may have been on to something about the birth certificate. The date and place were correct, but what was problematic was possibly the space above “father’s name.” This may have been either left blank or contained the words “father unknown,” as Gilbert claims. Or Ann may have signed with her maiden name.
For Gilbert, no father is identified on the birth certificate because this was part of the deal with Barack Sr. He would marry Ann, he agreed, but his name would not go on the certificate so that he would have no legal obligations to the baby.
But was there even a marriage?
As Obama concedes in Dreams:
In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I’ve never quite had the courage to explore. There’s no record of a real wedding, a cake, a ring, a giving away of the bride. No families were in attendance; it’s not even clear that people back in Kansas were fully informed. Just a small civil ceremony, a justice of the peace. The whole thing seems so fragile in retrospect, so haphazard.
He later describes himself coming across, of all things, his birth certificate, along with vaccination papers and an article from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Wouldn’t his parents’ marriage license have been among these papers? This is certainly something Ann would have wanted to hang onto.
What Obama has to say about the clipping is of interest:
It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him. No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents
Obama is, as usual, being evasive. There were actually two articles about Barack Sr. The longer one, with a picture, was in the Honolulu Advertiser. It was clearly a human-interest story. What could have been more heart-warming than a paragraph on the African student’s lovely American wife and one-year-old son, who would rejoin him in Cambridge or Kenya?
Psychologists and detectives are familiar with the phenomenon of someone confessing in copious detail to a smaller crime or embarrassing moment in order to cover up a larger one. Was it the birth certificate rather than the article that disturbed Obama?
Did the couple agree to the Maui charade merely to deceive Stan and Madelyn, and never go through with the marriage? Did Ann have a change of heart on Maui after she learned Barack Sr. had a wife and children back in Kenya? Did he tell her about Kezia and the kids in the expectation that this is exactly what would happen?
The couple never lived together, and Barack Sr. certainly didn’t act as if he were married. In April 1961, the U. of Hawaii Foreign Student Advisor, Mrs. McCabe, was concerned enough about his behavior to call the INS to warn about the Kenyan’s “playboy ways.” She told the officer that he “has been running around with several girls since he arrived here last summer.” When McCabe questioned Barack Sr. about this, he assured her he was divorced from Kezia Obama: all a husband needed to do was tell the wife they were divorced “and that constitutes a legal divorce.” McCabe was clearly unaware that the twenty-five-year-old lothario had married again three months earlier, and that this quaint Islamic custom could not have been resorted to a second time, as his new wife was not a Muslim.
Neil Abercrombie, who would go on to become Governor of Hawaii, was a buddy of Barack Sr.’s at U. of Hawaii, and visited his friend in Nairobi in 1968. Abercrombie had stayed in touch with Ann and Barry and was shocked when Obama never once asked about his wife and son.
Nonetheless, there’s is one document, and apparently only one document, that suggests that the Kenyan and Kansan did marry -- apart from the divorce papers filed in March 1964. This is an entry in “Marriage Index 1960-1965” issued by Hawaii’s Department of Health. The couples are listed as “bride” and “groom” and it’s hard to imagine where the information would have come from if not from the state’s marriage registry.
It was unearthed by Nick Chase, and it was he who suggested that Ann signed the birth certificate with her maiden name. Why would she do this?
Throughout her life, Ann was headstrong and impulsive. A few years earlier, she drove with a friend from Seattle to San Francisco on the spur of the moment. Stan had to fly down to collect her. By August 1961 she had already made plans to return with her infant son to U. of Washington. When Jeremiah Wright landed Obama in hot water during the 2008 campaign and refused a $150,000 bribe to stay mum, the candidate visited him to plead in person. “You know what your problem is?” he asked the Rev. “You have to tell the truth.” This is little scary, given the “truths” Wright shouted to his congregation from the pulpit, but it is no less true of Ann Dunham.
Ann was a feisty feminist avant la lettre, and she may in the end have rejected the squalid bargain she’d made with her parents, and bravely declared on the birth certificate that the baby was hers and hers alone.
So when Michelle Obama told an audience on July 10, 2008 that Ann “was very young and very single when she had him,” she may have been confessing what was figuratively true, whatever may have happened on Maui.
If Ann Dunham did sign with her maiden name and/or the husband was listed as “unknown” or the space left blank, this would of course demolish the great multicultural myth that underlay the whole Obama crusade -- the sacred union of the ex-goat-herder from Kenya and the all-American girl from Kansas, he “black as coal,” she “white as milk.”
Why are Gilbert’s peccadillos relevant now?
Because candor is important. Those of us who migrated rightward from the left did so because at some point we became disillusioned with the lies, distortions, and evasions. In my case, these were originally about a pretty trivial issue, the “standard of living debate” among historians of 19th century Britain. The left will continue to hemorrhage support from young people with curiosity, common sense, skepticism, good taste, and a sense of irony -- as long as we tell the truth, and as long as we are careful not to go beyond the evidence.
A few journalists may already be among the disenchanted. Despite his training, fireman Guy Montag, in Farenheit 451, begins secretly to read and collect books. When Captain Beatty comes to arrest him, the renegade fireman turns his flamethrower on the enforcer of political correctness.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2) Obama's UN Ambitions
Why does Obama do dangerous and irrational things? By now half of American voters have pretty much figured him out as a power-hungry and self-serving Chicago pol with strange Muslim sympathies, and damn the U.S. Constitution and the law.
Obama has no American sense of self-restrained power. Just the opposite. Obama has no ethical absolutes, not even if hundreds of women and children in Kenya and Nigeria are stolen from their homes for Boko Haram slave markets. Not even if the CIA ends up smuggling arms to the barbaric Sunni rebels in Syria, thereby making that civil war even worse.
A lot of Obama’s actions make no sense in terms of American politics, where even the Democrats are running away from their messiah of yesteryear. The radical Left, which runs the Democrats today, is now yearning for Liz Warren to be their newest false prophet. She looks younger than Hillary, and the left likes to flatter itself as being the party of the young and good looking.
Obama’s eyes have always been on the biggest prize in the world, the virtual Presidency of the Planet. He has been signaling (the way he always does) to the fantasists of the Left, the people who think world government is the answer. That’s the point of the global warming scam and similar power grabs. It is also why Obama pretends that the UN can guarantee the Iranian nuclear surrender, rather than the U.S. Senate, as required by the Constitution.
This is Tony Blair’s Third Way Socialism, the Marxist ideology that runs the European Union. The key is for the socialist power caste to use the economic efficiencies of capitalism to leverage their own power. That is Obama’s political game, and to make it work he will play footsie with Wall Street, robber barons, and theofascists in Iran.
That is also why Israel’s safety and security had to be sacrificed to the Iranians, along with the safety of Iran’s Arab enemies. The inevitable result is nuclear proliferation, and the Saudis are giving out hints they are getting armed up.
Obama needs those “57 Muslim states” to become UN secretary general, once a Democrat nominates him. He can count on Eurosocialists, and he may be trading away Eastern Europe to Putin to get Russia’s support
Obama is all about self-glorification and power, and even after two terms as president his hunger for more is not abated. He would need a personality replacement to change. The best hypothesis is that he has been using the presidency to collect IOU’s from Muslim nations, and probably from Putin and the rest. Obama didn’t resist China’s gigantic grab of disputed seabed territory from Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. As a quid pro quo, China might support Obama for secretary general. And Obama would get to be King of the World.
Remember Obama’s deep bow campaign? Remember his failure to place promised antimissile defenses in Eastern Europe? Remember his retreat from the Middle East, and his support for the Muslim Brotherhood terror-sponsors?
Islamic fascists want to control the world. So does the radical Left. Obama is a creature of both. To become secretary general, Obama might even officially become a Muslim, a publicity smash that may make him the favorite of those 57 states. Europe is run by socialists who also believe in world conquest -- by peaceful means, of course. As for Putin and China, they will demand a high price -- such as crippling limitations on US energy production, which Obama has already promised China. Putin is advancing in the Arctic for mineral exploitation, and has taken over a major northern base on the Russian border with Norway that was abandoned after the Cold War.
Obama will never let the words “Muslim violence” escape his lips. This seems increasingly bizarre -- but it would fit his ambition to go beyond U.S. president to build up the UN as a superior center of real power. UNocrats and EUrocrats would love it, because they follow an imperialistic Marxist ideology. Islamic extremism actually helps them, which is why Europe’s International Criminal Court just allowed the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist arm, Hamas, to gain recognition in the EU.
The silence of our “Civil Rights” establishment watching Muslim depredations in Africa, exactly like the slave taking their ancestors suffered, is just one straw in the wind. Obama is not bothering to oppose African slave kidnapping by Muslim raiders. That is an amazing fact.
Obama is after something else than promoting the well-being of this country and the world. He is always grandiose, ruthless, abusive, and willing to sacrifice our allies to his own desires.
The likely reason is that Obama does not plan to stop after two presidential terms.
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The verdict’s in on Rolling Stone. According to no less an authority than the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the magazine’s story last year on a University of Virginia gang rape was a “journalistic failure [that] encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.”
But as with many other stories that don’t fit into the right narrative, the media will continue to draw the wrong lessons.
As an AP article noted, “Despite its flaws, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama.”
Despite its flaws? You mean despite the fact that as far as anyone can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth?
Even once the police investigated the claims of the alleged victim, The New York Times reported: “Some saw a more complex picture, saying that the uproar over the story and the steps that the university had taken since in an effort to change its culture had, in the end, raised awareness and probably done the school, and the nation, some good.”
How has the university benefited from the fact that a fraternity has been falsely accused of a horrific crime? And how has the nation benefited from the false but now widespread belief that violent rape, even gang rape, is raging on US campuses?
Wouldn’t it have done more good for people to know that young women are statistically less likely to be attacked on a campus than off one?
But who cares about the facts as long as awareness has been raised? Take the case of Ellen Pao, who filed suit against her former employer, venture capital group Kleiner Perkins, for gender discrimination.
She was seeking millions of dollars in damages to make up for what she claimed was a pattern of women being excluded from important meetings. They weren’t invited on a ski trip with other partners. Women were forced to sit in the back of the room during a meeting.
Two weeks ago, a jury decided her claims were completely without merit. And yet from the media coverage, you’d think Ellen Pao successfully exposed a Silicon Valley rife with discrimination.
Here’s Farjad Manjoo in The New York Times: “The trial has nevertheless accomplished something improbable . . . The case has also come to stand for something bigger than itself. It has blown open a conversation about the status of women in an industry that, for all its talk of transparency and progress, has always been buttoned up about its shortcomings.”
In a Bloomberg article called “Ellen Pao Lost, Women Didn’t,” Katie Benner declared: “The case broke wide open the issue of sexism in a powerful, influential industry.”
Or take the Atlantic, which declared, “Ellen Pao’s claim against top venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins seems to have come up short, but it’s brought heightened attention to gender discrimination in tech.”
Come up short? She lost.
There was no merit to her claims. If Silicon Valley is so filled with sexist pigs acting illegally, perhaps we could find a case where they actually did that.
What Ellen Pao successfully did is what most people who file frivolous lawsuits do: They make it harder for companies to do business. They make it more expensive to cover their behinds.
They push everyone to make sure they never put anything substantive in an email, and hire large numbers of bureaucrats to ensure that another lawsuit isn’t filed. Or if it is, it’s settled out of court.
This is not unlike what happened after the Justice Department released its report on the shooting of Michael Brown last summer.
The only “lesson” that could really be drawn from the DOJ report and the grand jury’s non-indictment was that you shouldn’t knock over convenience stores, but if you do and a police officer catches you, it’s probably not a good idea to resist arrest.
But that was not the lesson that others wanted to emphasize. Which is why the Ferguson police now have to try to change the composition of their staff and ticketing policies — though they have no bearing on the case at hand.
Even The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capeheart, whose article “ ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Was Built on a Lie” offered a kind of mea culpa for rushing to judgment in the case, concluded: “Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger ‘Black Lives Matter.’ ”
Actually, yes, it does diminish the importance because it calls into question whether those were real issues at all.
Maybe we’ve spent too much time around preschool teachers. Maybe we are so used to being infantilized by the media that we hardly notice these rejoinders at the end of every story, assuring us that even if the story was all wrong, the narrative was correct.
Not everything has to be a teachable moment. And if we do need a moral to every story, it would be useful to find one based on the facts.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
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4) Obama: Gov. Scott Walker needs to ‘bone up’ on foreign policy
ByDavid Nakamura
President Obama and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker traded barbs Monday after the president suggested that the likely Republican presidential candidate "bone up on foreign policy."
Obama made the remarks in an interview with NPR published Monday, responding to a question from reporter Steve Inskeep about Walker's vow to undo a nuclear pact with Iran on his first day in the White House.
In defending his administration's tentative framework with Iran over its nuclear program, Obama told NPR that he is confident that it does not need congressional approval. He added that he hopes lawmakers "won't start calling to question the capacity of the executive branch of the United States to enter into agreements with other countries. If that starts being questioned, that's going to be a problem for our friends and that's going to embolden our enemies."
Obama added: "And it would be a foolish approach to take, and, you know, perhaps Mr. Walker, after he's taken some time to bone up on foreign policy, will feel the same way."
Walker, who has been eager to establish his foreign policy chops ahead of a likely bid for the GOP presidential nomination next year, didn't take long to fight back with a string of Twitter messages.
Walker has been overshadowed the past two weeks as a pair of rivals — Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) — announced their candidacies for the Republican nomination. The governor has not impressed many of the party's leaders with his knowledge of international affairs, drawing mockery last month for refusing to talk about foreign policy on a trip to London and then for comparing his experience battling labor protesters to taking on Islamic State terrorists.
Obama has been eager to sell the Iran nuclear framework to a skeptical Congress as his administration seeks to finalize a deal without lawmakers approving additional sanctions on Tehran that could scuttle the talks.
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5) Iranian, US Versions of Nuclear Deal Contradict Each Other
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5) Iranian, US Versions of Nuclear Deal Contradict Each Other
by Ari Yashar
While US President Barack Obama's administration has been so busily celebrating the framework deal sealed last Thursday with Iran over its nuclear program, official Iranian statements in Farsi appear to disprove Obama's claims about what has or hasn't been agreed.
The New York Post outlined on Saturday the different statements about the agreement. Those statements include one by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and EU foreign policy head Federica Mogherini, as well as an official Iranian text, a text in French, and US Secretary of State John Kerry's summary which presents the framework as being a done deal.
The paper notes that Mogherini's statement and the French text are so vague that they are "ultimately meaningless."
Meanwhile the Iranian text is careful to state that nothing has been agreed to by the Islamic regime, and is titled as merely a press statement as opposed to the US text entitled "Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action."
Examining the bodies of the American and Farsi text, the paper found stark differences, including outright contradictions.
For one, while the US version says Iran agreed to various conditions, including reducing the number of centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,500, the Iranian text says Iran "shall be able to" carry out the various conditions. The caveat leaves Iran's reduction of centrifuges, for example, as something it may do but has not committed to.
Likewise uranium enrichment in the covert Fordow reactor is to be halted for 15 years according to the US text, while the Farsi version says Iran "will be able to do" this, if it wants to.
Direct contradictions
But the differences are not just a matter of nuance and semantics; in certain places the texts present complete opposites. The US statement says Iran agreed to not use advanced centrifuges, which are ten times as effective as standard centrifuges.
The Iranian text says "on the basis of solutions found, work on advanced centrifuges shall continue on the basis of a 10-year plan," directly contradicting the American version.
This point is crucial, as experts have anticipated that under the deal Iran can develop its centrifuge technology and reach a point where it can make a three week dash to obtain a nuclear weapon.
The Arak heavy water nuclear plant is another point of contention, with the US saying Iran has agreed to dismantle the core, while the Iranian text says the exact opposite; the plant will remain, and in fact be "updated and modernized."
Another contradiction is found in US claims that there will be various limitations for different time periods, including a ten year limit on levels of uranium enrichment, a 15 year limit on building new facilities, and a 20 year limit on transparency guidelines.
All other versions, including the Iranian text, Mogherini's Italian text, and the French text, do not give any reference to these figures.
Another difference between the US version and all others is that the US says Iran will take steps to reassure the world community that its nuclear project is not military, a reference to Iran's development of missiles able to carry nuclear warheads.
None of the other versions mention this point.
And the US statements claim Iran will receive sanctions "relief," with talk of phasing, even as Iran says the sanctions will be "immediately terminated," a point which led Zarif to accuse the US of lying last week.
Obama's false claims
The New York Post also pointed out three "outrageous claims" that Obama made when he presented the deal at the White House Rose Garden last Thursday, touting it as being an "historic" agreement.
One such claim was when Obama said that at the time he first took office, Iran had "thousands of centrifuges" which would now be cut to just over 6,000.
However, back in 2008 when Obama was first elected Iran only had 800 centrifuges. Under Obama's two terms - and likely due to his policies vis-a-vis Iran - that figure has rapidly blossomed into the current 19,000.
Obama's second claim was when he said the new framework plan blocks "all of Iran's paths" to developing a nuclear weapon, going on to explain the three "paths."
But in his very statements, he noted that even if the deal is implemented, Iran will still have a breakout capability of building a nuclear bomb in one year. His very statement proves those "blocked paths" would not stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear arsenal.
In a final claim, Obama said the US has only three options: reaching the deal he presented, continuing sanctions which he claimed wouldn't do anything, or getting into "another ground war in the Middle East."
And yet instituting a tougher sanctions regime in the international arena against Iran is an alternative that could force the Islamic regime into agreeing to a better deal, a point that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has raised repeatedly and emphasized in opposing the deal.
5a)
The Iran Deal and Its Consequences
Mixing shrewd diplomacy with defiance of U.N. resolutions, Iran has turned the negotiation on its head.
The announced framework for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program has the potential to generate a seminal national debate. Advocates exult over the nuclear constraints it would impose on Iran. Critics question the verifiability of these constraints and their longer-term impact on regional and world stability. The historic significance of the agreement and indeed its sustainability depend on whether these emotions, valid by themselves, can be reconciled.
Debate regarding technical details of the deal has thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regarding its deeper implications. For 20 years, three presidents of both major parties proclaimed that an Iranian nuclear weapon was contrary to American and global interests—and that they were prepared to use force to prevent it. Yet negotiations that began 12 years ago as an international effort to prevent an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in the first 10 years.
Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of U.N. resolutions, Iran has gradually turned the negotiation on its head. Iran’s centrifuges have multiplied from about 100 at the beginning of the negotiation to almost 20,000 today. The threat of war now constrains the West more than Iran. While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point officially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for 10 years Iran will never be further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be significantly closer.
Inspections and Enforcement
The president deserves respect for the commitment with which he has pursued the objective of reducing nuclear peril, as does Secretary of State John Kerry for the persistence, patience and ingenuity with which he has striven to impose significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program.
Progress has been made on shrinking the size of Iran’s enriched stockpile, confining the enrichment of uranium to one facility, and limiting aspects of the enrichment process. Still, the ultimate significance of the framework will depend on its verifiability and enforceability.
Negotiating the final agreement will be extremely challenging. For one thing, no official text has yet been published. The so-called framework represents a unilateral American interpretation. Some of its clauses have been dismissed by the principal Iranian negotiator as “spin.” A joint EU-Iran statement differs in important respects, especially with regard to the lifting of sanctions and permitted research and development.
Comparable ambiguities apply to the one-year window for a presumed Iranian breakout. Emerging at a relatively late stage in the negotiation, this concept replaced the previous baseline—that Iran might be permitted a technical capacity compatible with a plausible civilian nuclear program. The new approach complicates verification and makes it more political because of the vagueness of the criteria.
Under the new approach, Iran permanently gives up none of its equipment, facilities or fissile product to achieve the proposed constraints. It only places them under temporary restriction and safeguard—amounting in many cases to a seal at the door of a depot or periodic visits by inspectors to declared sites. The physical magnitude of the effort is daunting. Is the International Atomic Energy Agency technically, and in terms of human resources, up to so complex and vast an assignment?
In a large country with multiple facilities and ample experience in nuclear concealment, violations will be inherently difficult to detect. Devising theoretical models of inspection is one thing. Enforcing compliance, week after week, despite competing international crises and domestic distractions, is another. Any report of a violation is likely to prompt debate over its significance—or even calls for new talks with Tehran to explore the issue. The experience of Iran’s work on a heavy-water reactor during the “interim agreement” period—when suspect activity was identified but played down in the interest of a positive negotiating atmosphere—is not encouraging.
Compounding the difficulty is the unlikelihood that breakout will be a clear-cut event. More likely it will occur, if it does, via the gradual accumulation of ambiguous evasions.
When inevitable disagreements arise over the scope and intrusiveness of inspections, on what criteria are we prepared to insist and up to what point? If evidence is imperfect, who bears the burden of proof? What process will be followed to resolve the matter swiftly?
The agreement’s primary enforcement mechanism, the threat of renewed sanctions, emphasizes a broad-based asymmetry, which provides Iran permanent relief from sanctions in exchange for temporary restraints on Iranian conduct. Undertaking the “snap-back” of sanctions is unlikely to be as clear or as automatic as the phrase implies. Iran is in a position to violate the agreement by executive decision. Restoring the most effective sanctions will require coordinated international action. In countries that had reluctantly joined in previous rounds, the demands of public and commercial opinion will militate against automatic or even prompt “snap-back.” If the follow-on process does not unambiguously define the term, an attempt to reimpose sanctions risks primarily isolating America, not Iran.
The gradual expiration of the framework agreement, beginning in a decade, will enable Iran to become a significant nuclear, industrial and military power after that time—in the scope and sophistication of its nuclear program and its latent capacity to weaponize at a time of its choosing. Limits on Iran’s research and development have not been publicly disclosed (or perhaps agreed). Therefore Iran will be in a position to bolster its advanced nuclear technology during the period of the agreement and rapidly deploy more advanced centrifuges—of at least five times the capacity of the current model—after the agreement expires or is broken.
The follow-on negotiations must carefully address a number of key issues, including the mechanism for reducing Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium from 10,000 to 300 kilograms, the scale of uranium enrichment after 10 years, and the IAEA’s concerns regarding previous Iranian weapons efforts. The ability to resolve these and similar issues should determine the decision over whether or when the U.S. might still walk away from the negotiations.
The Framework Agreement and Long-Term Deterrence
Even when these issues are resolved, another set of problems emerges because the negotiating process has created its own realities. The interim agreement accepted Iranian enrichment; the new agreement makes it an integral part of the architecture. For the U.S., a decade-long restriction on Iran’s nuclear capacity is a possibly hopeful interlude. For Iran’s neighbors—who perceive their imperatives in terms of millennial rivalries—it is a dangerous prelude to an even more dangerous permanent fact of life. Some of the chief actors in the Middle East are likely to view the U.S. as willing to concede a nuclear military capability to the country they consider their principal threat. Several will insist on at least an equivalent capability. Saudi Arabia has signaled that it will enter the lists; others are likely to follow. In that sense, the implications of the negotiation are irreversible.
If the Middle East is “proliferated” and becomes host to a plethora of nuclear-threshold states, several in mortal rivalry with each other, on what concept of nuclear deterrence or strategic stability will international security be based? Traditional theories of deterrence assumed a series of bilateral equations. Do we now envision an interlocking series of rivalries, with each new nuclear program counterbalancing others in the region?
Previous thinking on nuclear strategy also assumed the existence of stable state actors. Among the original nuclear powers, geographic distances and the relatively large size of programs combined with moral revulsion to make surprise attack all but inconceivable. How will these doctrines translate into a region where sponsorship of nonstate proxies is common, the state structure is under assault, and death on behalf of jihad is a kind of fulfillment?
Some have suggested the U.S. can dissuade Iran’s neighbors from developing individual deterrent capacities by extending an American nuclear umbrella to them. But how will these guarantees be defined? What factors will govern their implementation? Are the guarantees extended against the use of nuclear weapons—or against any military attack, conventional or nuclear? Is it the domination by Iran that we oppose or the method for achieving it? What if nuclear weapons are employed as psychological blackmail? And how will such guarantees be expressed, or reconciled with public opinion and constitutional practices?
Regional Order
For some, the greatest value in an agreement lies in the prospect of an end, or at least a moderation, of Iran’s 3½ decades of militant hostility to the West and established international institutions, and an opportunity to draw Iran into an effort to stabilize the Middle East. Having both served in government during a period of American-Iranian strategic alignment and experienced its benefits for both countries as well as the Middle East, we would greatly welcome such an outcome. Iran is a significant national state with a historic culture, a fierce national identity, and a relatively youthful, educated population; its re-emergence as a partner would be a consequential event.
But partnership in what task? Cooperation is not an exercise in good feeling; it presupposes congruent definitions of stability. There exists no current evidence that Iran and the U.S. are remotely near such an understanding. Even while combating common enemies, such as ISIS, Iran has declined to embrace common objectives. Iran’s representatives (including its Supreme Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order; domestically, some senior Iranians describe nuclear negotiations as a form of jihad by other means.
The final stages of the nuclear talks have coincided with Iran’s intensified efforts to expand and entrench its power in neighboring states. Iranian or Iranian client forces are now the pre-eminent military or political element in multiple Arab countries, operating beyond the control of national authorities. With the recent addition of Yemen as a battlefield, Tehran occupies positions along all of the Middle East’s strategic waterways and encircles archrival Saudi Arabia, an American ally. Unless political restraint is linked to nuclear restraint, an agreement freeing Iran from sanctions risks empowering Iran’s hegemonic efforts.
Some have argued that these concerns are secondary, since the nuclear deal is a way station toward the eventual domestic transformation of Iran. But what gives us the confidence that we will prove more astute at predicting Iran’s domestic course than Vietnam’s, Afghanistan’s, Iraq’s, Syria’s, Egypt’s or Libya’s?
Absent the linkage between nuclear and political restraint, America’s traditional allies will conclude that the U.S. has traded temporary nuclear cooperation for acquiescence to Iranian hegemony. They will increasingly look to create their own nuclear balances and, if necessary, call in other powers to sustain their integrity. Does America still hope to arrest the region’s trends toward sectarian upheaval, state collapse and the disequilibrium of power tilting toward Tehran, or do we now accept this as an irremediable aspect of the regional balance?
Some advocates have suggested that the agreement can serve as a way to dissociate America from Middle East conflicts, culminating in the military retreat from the region initiated by the current administration. As Sunni states gear up to resist a new Shiite empire, the opposite is likely to be the case. The Middle East will not stabilize itself, nor will a balance of power naturally assert itself out of Iranian-Sunni competition. (Even if that were our aim, traditional balance of power theory suggests the need to bolster the weaker side, not the rising or expanding power.) Beyond stability, it is in America’s strategic interest to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war and its catastrophic consequences. Nuclear arms must not be permitted to turn into conventional weapons. The passions of the region allied with weapons of mass destruction may impel deepening American involvement.
If the world is to be spared even worse turmoil, the U.S. must develop a strategic doctrine for the region. Stability requires an active American role. For Iran to be a valuable member of the international community, the prerequisite is that it accepts restraint on its ability to destabilize the Middle East and challenge the broader international order.
Until clarity on an American strategic political concept is reached, the projected nuclear agreement will reinforce, not resolve, the world’s challenges in the region. Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement there—on complex new terms. History will not do our work for us; it helps only those who seek to help themselves.
Messrs. Kissinger and Shultz are former secretaries of state.
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