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I thought it might be useful to review Obama's successes and achievements in the field of foreign diplomacy.
This was written as a possible article in a future SIRC's newsletter. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Allen West posted this on Facebook:
"From Allen West............
Yippee, the Confederate battle flag has now been removed from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol.
And, just like that, it solves the problem of black-on-black crime and killings.
Now we’ll see the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the black community drop from 75%.
There will be better educational opportunities and schools in South Carolina’s black communities and all across America.
The black unemployment rate will drop —especially the almost 40% black teenage unemployment rate.
We’ll now see an economic entrepreneurial boon in the inner cities because the Confederate battle flag’s been lowered.
And there’ll be no more gangs of blacks beating on whites — as we saw in Ohio recently.
Yep, the liberal progressive media shouted "squirrel" and an entire nation went a running.
All the yelling and shouting by the crowds was evidence of those who lack grace, respect and dignity.
Former South Carolina Gamecocks football coach Lou Holtz remarked that when you get to the end zone, you should act like you’ve been there before.
So what does the lowering of the Confederate battle flag have to do with the killing of little seven-year-old Amari Brown in Chicago — anyone know when his funeral is?
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Let's hear it for the Italians! Http://player.vimeo.com/video/
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Economic themes have a musical connection according to Arthur Brooks and the notes of Capitalism are the sweetest of all but, he argues, Conservatives do not know how to capture the best sounds. (See 2 below.)
I am a Capitalist, have been ever since my days at Wharton. I had them reinforced after reading Rand ,Hayek and Friedman and observing the failures brought about by Socialism, Communism and most other economic policies and spending 50 years involved in the stock market..
That is not to say Capitalism is the answer to all economic or societal problems but the free market does the best job of allocating capital and resources, has proven to provide the lowest costs, accomplishes the most on a cost benefit basis and has created more wealth among more people than any other system.
When Capitalism fails it is usually because of human greed and government intrusions which skew the free market and thus, prevent it from working efficiently. As government has grown and intruded more and more failed efforts become the norm and anti-Capitalists seize upon these as proof Capitalism does not work. When you bend the screw driver don't expect normal results.
It is only logical that when government dams up the natural flow of capital it will find devious and un-natural routes but it will continue to flow and mostly in mis-allocated directions.
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Dick
1)-
From the day Obama became president he was hell bent on implementing a foreign policy which would radically change the way America was viewed and which would incorporate his confused thinking that leading from strength was at cross purposes with what he deemed was the best approach, ie. lead from weakness.. The way for America to regain the respect he believed it had lost, blah blah blah.
Obama began to undo past American Diplomatic initiatives with his speech in Cairo where he apologized for American power, intrusion and arrogance. He also began a long policy of blaming everything under the sun on G.W. and anyone else who happened to be around.
Second, he began to attack Israel, our most trusted and Democratic ally in the region because he bought into the Muslim claim/myth that as long as the Palestinian-Israeli issue remained an intransigent one, nothing positive could occur in dealing with Arabs and Muslims in the region.
Third, his confused family background and associations with Communists, Socialists and assorted radical thinkers, writers and clergy infused his thinking that America and its strength were a threat to world peace and weakness would gain us respect and with renewed respect we would not be feared and would, thereby, gain greater influence.
To accomplish these empirically unsupported goals he set about to weaken our nation financially, militarily and to 'piss' off a host of allies, beginning with the return of Churchill's bust to The British Embassy.
I make no claim as a foreign policy expert, nor writer of note. These are simply my own views and you may take them for what they are and draw your own conclusions. But it is my belief Obama has set our nation back eons, increased the prospect of world disarray and with his vast use of buckets of red paint would also have failed as a painter.
After making his apology speech in Cairo, returning Churchill's bust and picking his notorious fight with Netanyahu, Obama continued his misbegotten tour in the Middle East bowing to Muslim Royalty and making a general fool of himself. All the while this was happening, Putin was taking size of our midget of a president and was preparing to rebuild his empire. (In testimony recently, the incoming Chief of Staff of the Military identified Russia as presenting the greatest threat on the same day we were announcing the draw down of 40,000 combat troops.)
Once again, Obama thought he could break bread with Putin and sent Hillaroius to reset our diplomatic button. Putin' laughed and shortly thereafter invaded Ukraine and subsequently Russian backed renegades shot down a commercial airplane. Before this, Putin annexed by force a warm Crimean port - something Russia has sought for all of its history.
Even before this, Obama withdrew our missiles from Eastern Europe further sending a message of weakness and discouraging our NATO allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia. By now Putin had taken off his shirt, rode a horse bareback and was salivating. Our own painter president was playing golf and vacationing displaying his skinny legs..
Obama also pledged to reduce our nuclear weapons and proceeded to negotiate with Iran so they could eventually become a nuclear threat. Iran came to the bargaining table because of imposed sanctions which were wrecking their economy and when Iranians protested, Obama did nothing to encourage and/or support them. Throughout the negotiations, which have gone beyond three meaningless deadlines, Obama has unilaterally given in to every demand of the Ayatollah and/or impotently negotiated lifting one restriction after the other receiving nothing in return.
(http://www.theonion.com/
(http://www.theonion.com/
And do not forget Benghazi. During the campaign Hillarious made a point about a 3 O'clock telephone call and asked voters whether they wanted Obama to answer or her. The night of Benghazi, Hillarious bought into the Obama lie that the loss of our building and four Americans was caused by renegades and some film they allegedly found objectionable.
Hillarious has been obfuscating, hiding and ducking since Benghazi but it appears she did not answer the phone, but was more interested in using her unprotected cell phone while talking to her mother about becoming a grandma or something to that effect and then destroyed the calls because she holds herself as being above the law and persists in thinking of herself as royalty along with her be-knighted, on again off again, Lothario of a husband Subsequently, she told us 'what difference does it matter' when asked what she thought about the events of that night.
Now, I do not claim anything I have written is in sequential form because we know, while some of these events were happening, other clear screw-ups were occurring, like Libya being over run by Islamist terrorists, Obama was busy giving up on keeping troops in Iraq. This withdrawal allowed a new radical force to emerge - ISIS. When asked about all this rising Islamic radicalism and be-headings, including an American reporter, Obama could not bring himself to see what others were seeing and mumbled something about these workplace incidents were caused by those who were jobless and had no hope of making $15/hour. I do not understand how work place incidents are caused by those who are jobless but I digress.
Now let's do a little re-cap. We have lost influence in the Middle East which is in flames. Russia has been allowed to rebuild some of its lost empire by simply invading a neighbor, Iran is going to become a nuclear nation and we are reducing our military. Oh, and N Korea is building its own nuclear arsenal after "Ole " Bill asked them not to and they agreed, and now are preparing a delivery system capable of sending them to San "Sanctuary City" Francisco which houses illegals and sends them back and forth but that is really a domestic issue since Mexico now controls what happens on our borders.
So let's see what our response has been to all of these diplomatic "victories."
Well Israel was attacked by Hamas rockets and when they responded Obama threatened to change some of the arrangements we have with Israel in terms of supplying them with defensive technology jointly invented and which we manufacture. Obama continued to tell Netanyahu to quit expanding those damn settlements and did everything he could to undercut his re-election victory. Netanyahu survived and, before doing so, came here and spoke before Congress and that further infuriated Obama because he does not like being challenged since he was the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize given for doing nothing.
ISIS, or ISIL, continued to expand, enroll more fighters and kill every one who disagrees with them including a slew of Coptic Christians who remain defenseless against this onslaught but the U.N. at least concluded Israel over reacted to the Hamas attacks. Oh, by the way, the Kurds are willing to fight and are effective so we refuse to arm them.
Last week apparently the Chinese stole a bunch of secrets and information pertaining to our government employees and ISIS is using the internet and social engineering to enlist lone wolves so they can attack us at leisure. Probably some are also moving through our porous borders but at least FOX was able to rescue a Marine who was arrested for carrying some guns into Mexico. Meanwhile Sec. Kerry was too busy skiing to get our State Department to retrieve this American captive or any of the others who are reposing in Iranian jails.
Incidentally, we must not forget that China is really aggravating their Asian friends by turning above water coral into islands on which they are building military bases in order to threaten our shrinking Pacific Fleet and in order to protect their expanding oil exploration on disputed areas..
Now let's spend a few sentences on Cuba. Obama decided, since he wants to close Guantanamo and Congress is upset, he would make nice with the Castro Brothers and then theycan demand we return this base and he would then be able to bend to their wishes. For bailing Cuba out of its economic morass, like Iran, Obama said we would let the Castro Boys off the hook so they could receive money from American visitors and investors which they could use to further enrich themselves and so they can maintain their force of thugs in order to suppress and kill those naive Cubans who believe they have some right to be free.
Not only is Obama a lousy painter but he cannot play poker. He simply folds his cards and loses one pot after the other. I guess he did not learn anything when he smoked it
Lest not forget about those poor souls in Syria. Many of them have fled to Jordan and the surrounding Arab nations where they are not welcome any more than were the hapless Palestinians who fled after agreeing to stand aside as Israel was invaded shortly after becoming a U.N. sanctioned nation. First, Obama said he would arm those fighting Assad. He did not. Then he warned Assad not to gas his people. He even drew painted lines in the desert sand. Assad gassed and Obama did nothing. Then Obama said he would help Iran overthrow Assad. This he is doing with restricted air support but Assad remains in power killing and still, on occasion, gasses his people.
Now I know I have left out a few assorted matters like sending an Ambassador to Canada who made remarks that immediately ticked them off, has fired or caused to retire untold numbers of senior military officers who are willing to stand up to him so he can continue to receive advice from pliant, pathetic, obsequious military minds who are a disgrace and, for a bonus, let's not forget the fact that Obama is re-equipping and training Iranians in their fight against ISIS . His pathetic effort has not been going too well because their last engagement found them fleeing and leaving millions of dollars of equipment which ISIS is now using. If truth be known, Iran is now in control of Iraq, but that is G.W's fault for attacking Saddam in the first place.
Every few months, Obama does send a few more Americans over to increase our training efforts in order to give the appearance he is interested in embarrassing and degrading ISIS the Islamic JV Team against which he does not want to appear too aggressive for fear of being accused of being a whackamoler!
Finally, let me mention Obama appears entirely comfortable with America remaining dependent upon foreign energy sources from unstable nations who, eventually, could come under the control of ISSIS if current trends are any indication. The fact that we have sufficient energy to become independent is a fact but even though Obama swore to defend and protect our nation he apparently owes a higher allegiance to Greens and Muslim Kings, who are dependent upon our oil dollars for their survival.
Even this story has a happy ending. Obama will be gone in less than 18 months.
However, if Hillarious wins we can restart the clock because America's demise will most surely continue.
1a)"...allowing Iran to equip itself with sophisticated missiles and weaponry that might have a higher chance to penetrate American defenses, that is unconscionable. Let Obama be a neighborhood organizer for the world after his term ends; while he is in the White House his chief job is to protect Americans lives, livelihood, and security."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Will Obama Endanger Navy for Sake of Deal?
By Michael Rubin
Secretary of State John Kerry announced that international negotiators would likely miss their political deadline to conclude a nuclear agreement by midnight in Washington, DC. With Kerry and his team having collapsed on almost every red line they previously laid out — allowing Iran more centrifuges than Pakistan had when it developed its nuclear arsenal; allowing Iran to keep its fortified, underground plant at Fordo; compromising on anytime, anywhere inspections; allowing Iran a plutonium path; and forcing Iran to come clean on its previous work on the military dimensions of a nuclear program—what is now holding up the agreement is reportedly Iran’s demand that sanctions on its ballistic missile program and arms exports be lifted.In order to defend itself against charges that it was not doing enough to address other Iranian bad behavior — its holding of four American hostages, its support for terrorism, its support for Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime, its gross violations of human rights — numerous Obama administration officials have repeatedly explained that they were limiting the talks with Iran to just the nuclear portfolio. That Iran is now holding the deal hostage in order to advance its ballistic missile program and ensure its ability to export weapons shows that Tehran is not approaching the deal from the same baseline. For Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani, national interest is paramount; for President Obama, philosophy is.Given both President Obama’s quest for a legacy and Kerry’s previous poor negotiating prowess, it is hard to believe that they will hold firm if the only thing preventing their deal with Iran was the extent to which Iran could develop ballistic missile technology (or satellite launchers, as the Iranian press often calls them) or export weaponry to their groups and proxies in what they increasingly refer to in Persian as the “Axis of Resistance,” which comprises Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.Let us hope that Kerry and his team do hold firm, though. Over recent weeks, Bahraini authorities have intercepted an Iranian weapons shipment meant to take the low-grade protest campaigns by the Bahraini Shi‘ite opposition and Saudi Shi‘ites to a new level. During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, Hezbollah crippled an Israeli ship with an Iranian-made C-802 missile. Hezbollah has since bragged both about restocking and upgrading its missile arsenal and about developing an underwater sabotage capability. The Houthis in Yemen, meanwhile, have not only allowed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to transform them into an Iranian proxy, but they have also seized territory along the southeastern Yemeni coast, thereby endangering shipping through the Bab al-Mandab. In addition, the windfall the Obama administration is prepared to allow Tehran will enable Iran to go on a veritable shopping spree with not only Russia and China, but also perhaps even North Korea, France, and Germany.Who will be most vulnerable to this Iranian military build-up? Well, certainly ordinary Syrian citizens who are already suffering between the twin evils of the Assad regime and the Islamic State. But also the U.S. Navy. Khamenei has repeatedly demanded that U.S. forces leave the Persian Gulf, international waters be damned. And contrary to left-wing political activist turned Washington Post correspondent Ishaan Tharoor, the Iranian regime does subscribe to a notion of “Iranzamin” or “Greater Iran” based on the Persian Empire’s historical legacy. This will put Iran and the U.S. Navy on a collision course. That might be inevitable, but allowing Iran to equip itself with sophisticated missiles and weaponry that might have a higher chance to penetrate American defenses, that is unconscionable. Let Obama be a neighborhood organizer for the world after his term ends; while he is in the White House his chief job is to protect Americans lives, livelihood, and security.
3)
Playing the Music of Capitalism
The leader of Washington’s hottest think tank says that to become a majority again, conservatives need to reassert the moral case for free markets.
PHOTO: KEN FALLIN
Before he was president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks played the French horn. Not on the side. For a living.
It’s not the standard route to the top job at a Beltway think tank. Then again, not much about Mr. Brooks is standard. From dropping out of college to go to Spain to play for the Barcelona City Orchestra, to earning his B.A. degree via correspondence courses from Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey, his life makes for an eclectic résumé.
Today he boasts a Ph.D. from the RAND Graduate School and enjoys an honored spot in the capital’s intellectual firmament. But the horn still defines how he sees the world.
“The French horn is the harmonic backbone of the orchestra,” Mr. Brooks says. “The physics are tricky. It’s as long as a tuba but with a mouthpiece as small as a trumpet’s. This gives the French horn its characteristic mellow sound but also makes it easy to miss notes. The metaphors here form themselves.”
Indeed they do. Not least because think tanks have distinct personalities in addition to their politics.
The libertarian Cato Institute, for example, looks as though it had been designed by Howard Roark, the hero architect of Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead.” The Liberty Bell on the Heritage Foundation logo evokes a classic conservatism rooted in the American founding. The clean modernist lines of the Brookings Institution suggest its faith in good, rational government.
In Mr. Brooks’s hands, AEI has become an orchestra. Sure, it is sometimes labeled “neocon” (almost always deployed as a pejorative) because of the home it provides for former George W. Bush administration officials such as John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz, not to mention scholars such as Fred Kagan who write on military matters. These people are all vital to AEI, but they are only part of a larger ensemble.
“Our side has all the right policies,” Mr. Brooks says. “But without the music, the public hears just numbers and we have no resonance.”
He is speaking over lunch in his corner office overlooking 17th and M streets in northwest Washington, D.C. The office isn’t standard-issue, either.
The walls are bereft of the signed photos and tributes from presidents, senators and other pooh-bahs that are de riguer for the capital’s movers and shakers. The largest piece in the room is a poster featuring José Tomás, Spain’s greatest bullfighter. Mr. Brooks once saw him in the ring. “A true master artist,” he says.
The other poster is from the Soviet Union circa 1964. It features two workers. One is a drunk scratching his head as he looks at the one-ruble note in his hand. The other is a hale-and-hearty type proudly looking at the 10 rubles he has earned. The caption: “Work more, earn more.”
“It was part of a public-information campaign to raise productivity by paying people more,” Mr. Brooks says. It’s the sort of irony he loves, a confirmation of basic market wisdom—courtesy of communist propaganda.
In some ways, the Soviet poster serves the great AEI mission that began with its founding in New York in 1938: to cultivate “a greater public knowledge and understanding of the social and economic advantages accruing to the American people through the maintenance of the system of free, competitive enterprise.”
While the mission remains unchanged, Mr. Brooks believes his obligation goes far beyond the production of academic tomes. These have their place, but if the champions of free markets hope to sell the message to those who aren’t already sold, he says they need to speak to the heart as much as to the head.
It’s what he means by “the music.” It begins by emphasizing that those who benefit most from freer markets are the have-nots: those without inherited wealth, prestigious credentials, social or class advantages—in other words, people whose only hope for a better life is a social order that will reward their hard work and enterprise.
Certainly that has been borne out by the world’s experience. In 1938 it might not have been clear that capitalism was the key to human flourishing. But no longer.
When he was a child, Mr. Brooks notes, one of four people lived on less than a dollar a day. Today, though we still have far to go, the advance of trade and a globalized economy has shrunk that figure to one of 20.
The liberation of hundreds of millions from desperate poverty ranks among the greatest success stories in history. But it’s a story that remains largely untold and mostly unheralded. In his new book, “The Conservative Heart,” Mr. Brooks puts it this way: “Capitalism has saved a couple of billion people and we have treated this miracle like a state secret.”
AEI aims to change that. “We should be shouting it from the rooftops,” he says. “IfBeethoven were alive today, he would dedicate the ‘Ode to Joy’ to this miracle. In the very first verse of that poem—which inspired Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—we hear, ‘Beggars become Princes’ brothers’! If this is so, it is because of free enterprise.”
Few today would deny the market’s success in literally producing the goods. For some, however, this is a paradox. It’s a paradox because, in this way of thinking, socialism has the higher ideals but fails in practice, while capitalism succeeds in practice even though it is based on greed.
Mr. Brooks believes these critics are limited by materialistic assumptions about wealth and its production. Capitalism, he insists, succeeds not because it is based on greed, but because the freedom to trade and do business with others is in harmony with our God-given nature. So he has no patience for those who fear the moral argument.
“We need to know Adam Smith who wrote ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ as well as we do the Adam Smith who wrote ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ ” he says. “Because when you do, you begin to understand we are hard-wired for freedom by the same Creator who gave us our unalienable rights.”
Donors seem to like what they are hearing. AEI has never lacked for influence, and its scholars have helped staff many a Republican White House. But under Mr. Brooks the organization is experiencing explosive growth.
In the six years since he took over as president, annual donations have nearly doubled, to $40 million today from roughly $22 million in 2009. The endowment is about $90 million. “We don’t accept government money,” he says, “and we’re proud of that.”
There are more people too—225 full-time scholars and staff, up from 145. They range from political economist and demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, public-opinion analystKarlyn Bowman and political scientist Charles Murray to political scientist and journalistNorman Ornstein, Yale Medical School’s Sally Satel and Kevin Hassett, a former senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
But the many additions that AEI has made means it is now busting at the seams. This forced a big decision: Come February, AEI will move out of the office building it has called home since 1971 and into a refurbished historic landmark off DuPont Circle. It’s a former luxury apartment building where Andrew Mellon once lived.
Mellon was the millionaire financier who served as Treasury secretary for three presidents: Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. In this capacity he successfully pushed for large tax cuts that helped usher in a great period of American economic growth.
The compatibility is not lost on Mr. Brooks. Nor is a sense of proportion: “My office,” he notes, “will be Mellon’s former master bath.”
Mr. Brooks’s ready sense of humor seems of a piece with his ideological dedication to happiness—or at least to “the pursuit of happiness,” as Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Brooks has written several books and more than a few op-eds on the subject, and he says social science confirms that happiness comes from faith, family, community and work.
The first three are familiar conservative standbys. But work deserves more attention, he says. And here’s where the purely materialistic assumptions about money and income and status break down, because work itself brings satisfaction.
And guess what? This isn’t true only for Harvard professors, Hollywood stars or Silicon Valley types. He cites a survey showing that those with the least education, the lowest incomes and the least-prestigious jobs report that they wouldn’t quit working even if they suddenly had the money to do so. That reality, he says, should make us think twice before tossing around phrases like “dead-end jobs.”
In the end, the only sour note Mr. Brooks sounds has to do with his worry that the Obama years might lead conservatives to forsake the optimism inherent in the view that we can write a better future for ourselves, our neighbors and our country.
“The central disappointment of the Obama administration is that he campaigned on unity and optimism but governed on division and pessimism,” he says. “We will not flourish if conservatives respond in kind, and make this a contest between dueling pessimisms.”
He doesn’t say so, but he could be talking about Mitt Romney. On paper Mr. Romney had all the credentials to make the case on the campaign trail for how free markets lift people up. But his success was used against him, best reflected in the devastating post-election poll finding that four of five Americans believed the former Massachusetts governor didn’t care “about people like me.”
That’s the kind of thing that politics can do. But it maddens Mr. Brooks that “liberals win moral arguments about the economy with materialistic assumptions about wealth” while “conservatives lose these arguments even though we have moral understanding of wealth.”
It comes down to this: In the capitalist view, poor people aren’t liabilities to be managed by government; they are human beings with untapped potential. Mr. Brooks makes that argument over and over and wherever he can, whether on a panel with President Obama at Georgetown University, a conference with Archbishop of Canterbury in London, or on home ground at AEI with his friend the Dalai Lama.
Across the world—in Greece, China or America—the trust in free markets is being tested. But the French-horn player who sits atop the American Enterprise Institute remains confident that the growth of market freedom will liberate ever more millions from the bondage of poverty and despair.
“We don’t need to write an opera about free enterprise to reach people,” he says. “But it’s not a bad idea.”
Mr. McGurn is a Journal columnist and a member of the editorial board.
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