America - From Lion To Chicken Hearted! Future Faces ! Other Commentary!

Dagny, Blake and Stella at Hanukkah!  If these are the faces of the future we might be able to live down Obama, ISIS, Global Warming and the PC'ers!.
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Sowell on Obama's speech. (See 1 below.)

and

Why an Islamaphobia debate matters. (See 1a below.)

and

How did we become a fearful nation?  What caused us to go from lion to chicken hearted? (See 1b below.)
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I have been here.  These were bright hard working young men who were enjoying a fabulous success but the government shut them down because they did not meet a stupid and strangling regulation.

Their operation was in the neighborhood our son is re-developing.  Just another instance where government bureaucracies destroy entrepreneurship (See 2 Below.)
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Talk about something ironical.  The drug that has cured Carter was developed in Israel, the nation that Carter would just as soon be wiped off the face of the earth because they are, in his limpid eyes, an apartheid nation.
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The SIRC's 2017 President Day Speaker speaks out about Iran's nuclear weapon program. (See 3 below.)
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Waste not, want not, unless it is a favored classmate.  (See 4 below.)
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It's just the same old story - terror in London is reported as gory but in Jerusalem it is mere stabbing.  (See 5 below.)
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America's three biggest mistakes according to Pamela and we will pay for them for many  more decades. (See 6 below.)
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Golf humor:

Four married guys go golfing. While playing the 4th hole, the following conversation takes place:

1st Guy: “You have no idea what I had to do to be able to come out golfing this weekend. I had to promise my wife that I would paint every room in the house next weekend.”

2nd Guy: “That’s nothing. I had to promise my wife I would build a new deck for the pool.”

3rd Guy: “Man, you both have it easy! I had to promise my wife I would remodel the kitchen for her.”

They continued to play the hole when they realized that the 4th guy hadn’t said anything. So they asked him, “You haven’t said anything about what you had to do to be able to come golfing this weekend. What’s the deal?”

4th Guy: “I just set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. and when it went off, I shut off the alarm, gave the wife a nudge, and said, ‘Golf course or intercourse?’

And she said, 'Wear your sweater.’”

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Dick
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1) The President's Speech
By Thomas Sowell

When the President of the United States asks the television networks to set aside time for him to broadcast a speech from the Oval Office, we can usually expect that he has something new to say. But President Obama's speech Sunday night was just a rehash of what he has been saying all along, trying to justify policies that have repeatedly turned out disastrously for America and our allies.

This was not a speech about how the Obama administration is going to do anything differently in the future. It was a speech about how Obama's policies were right all along. Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt.

The president struck a familiar chord when he emphasized that we shouldn't blame all Muslims for the actions of a few. How many people have you heard blaming all Muslims?

Even if 90 percent of all Muslims are fine people, and we admit 10,000 refugees from the Middle East, does that mean that we need not be concerned about adding a thousand potential terrorists -- even after we have seen in San Bernardino what just two terrorists can do?

The first responsibility of any government is to protect the people already in the country. Even in this age of an entitlement mentality, no one in a foreign country is entitled to be in America if the American people don't want them here.

Obama's talk about how we should not make religious distinctions might make sense if we were talking about handing out entitlements. But we are talking about distinguishing between different populations posing different levels of danger to the American people.

When it comes to matters of life and death, that is no time for the kind of glib, politically correct rhetoric that Barack Obama specializes in.

Obama may think of himself as a citizen of the world, but he was elected President of the United States, not head of a world government, and that does not authorize him to gamble the lives of Americans for the benefit of people in other countries.

The illusion that you can take in large numbers of people from a fundamentally different culture, without jeopardizing your own culture -- and everything that depends on it -- should have been dispelled by many counterproductive social consequences in Europe, even aside from the fatal dangers of terrorists.

Most refugees in the Middle East can be helped in the Middle East, and many Americans would undoubtedly be willing to financially help Muslim countries like Jordan or Egypt to care for these refugees in societies more compatible with their beliefs and values.

The history of millions of European immigrants who came here in centuries past was fundamentally different from what is happening in our own times.

First of all, those immigrants were stopped at Ellis Island to be checked medically and otherwise, and were allowed to get off that island to go ashore only after they had met whatever legal standards there were. Otherwise, they were sent back where they came from.

More fundamentally, people came here to assimilate into the American society they found, not to become isolated enclaves of aggrieved foreigners, demanding that Americans adjust to their languages, their values and their ways of life.

Like so much that President Obama says, his talk of "stronger screening" of people coming into the United States is sheer fantasy, when even his own intelligence officials and law enforcement officials say that we have no adequate data on which to base a meaningful screening of Syrian refugees.

When Obama spoke of the danger of our being "drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria," that was yet another fantasy, that wars are optional.

When terrorists are at war with us, we cannot simply declare that war to be over, whenever it is politically convenient, as Obama did when he withdrew American troops from Iraq, against the advice of his own generals. That is what led to the rise of ISIS.

Our only real choice is between destroying ISIS over there or waiting for them to come over here and start killing Americans. As in other cases, Obama has made a choice that reflects politics and rhetoric, rather than reality.

1a)

Why an Islamophobia Debate Matters

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN 

In his speech to the nation last night on terrorism, the only subjects about which the president seemed to muster much passion was his support for more gun control and his opposition to any targeting of Muslims. The reaction to these comments has been mixed. Republican presidential candidates said that Obama was using the issue to distract the public from his failures in the war against ISIS. Yet the very act of questioning the president’s seemingly anodyne defense of a minority group is being treated in some quarters as proof in and of itself of bias.

Like the recent debate about welcoming Syrian refugees, the question of discrimination against American Muslims is being set up by liberals as not merely a question of right and wrong but of how best to counter ISIS’s claims that a clash of civilizations is taking place as well as how to undermine the terror group’s recruiting effort. Yet as much as the entire discussion seems like either an intellectual dead end or a trap for conservatives, the effort to transform fears about terrorism into a debate about Islamophobia is actually one worth discussing. Far from merely a diversion, the push to change the narrative about Paris and San Bernardino from one of Islamist hate to victimization of Muslims is key to understanding everything that is wrong with the administration’s failure to address the threat from ISIS.

The president’s point is that anything that might alienate Muslims either abroad or at home is a gift to ISIS. The president argued after the Paris attacks that what happened there couldn’t happen here because — in contrast to the experience in Europe — of America’s acceptance of religious minorities. But now he takes the position that an overreaction to San Bernardino will provide ISIS with ammunition and allow it to argue that the West really is at war against all Muslims. That’s a pitch that will presumably help persuade more people to join their cause.

Moreover, even before San Bernardino, much of the mainstream media took it as a given that the debate about Syrian refugees proved a backlash against Muslims was under way. Americans were being judged as guilty until proven innocent of the charge of Islamophobia with the stakes in the battle being nothing less than the defense of basic American values.

It needs to be stated that bias against any faith is wrong and very much in opposition to American values. But the problem here is, as Marco Rubio aptly pointed out yesterday, that there is no evidence of widespread discrimination against Muslims. Indeed, even if we were only to focus on Donald Trump’s comments about monitoring mosques or profiling, it’s clear that what is being discussed even by someone who is less than precise in his rhetoric or his focus, are efforts to monitor Islamists fomenting terror, not an attempt to make Muslims second-class citizens. Trump is being accused of wanting to give Muslims the same blatantly illegal and unjust treatment Franklin Roosevelt meted out to Japanese-Americans during World War II. But nobody, not even Trump (who outrageously suggested today banning Muslim immigration of any kind) or Ben Carson (who has crossed the line of decency with some unconstitutional suggestions), is suggesting anything even remotely comparable.

What is most discouraging about this discussion is that it is nothing new. Every since the 9/11 attacks we have been told that Muslims were undergoing some sort of terrible backlash as the result of those crimes. Yet, as Rubio rightly points out, there has never been any statistical proof that Muslims have undergone the kind of hardships that are being alleged. To the contrary, since 2001 FBI hate crime statistics have consistently shown that Muslims suffer far less from religion-based attacks than Jews.

Both the U.S. government and American popular culture have marched in lockstep on the issue as they not only deplore such discrimination but have gone out of their way to avoid treating Islam or Muslims as an enemy even at a time when Islamists have been waging a bloody war on the West. Neither President Obama nor Hillary Clinton will name radical Islam as the motivating factor behind ISIS and al Qaeda terrorism for fear of offending those who believe telling the truth will worsen the conflict or hurt the feelings of innocent Muslims. The real story about anti-Muslim bias is that in spite of atrocities committed abroad and on U.S. soil by those acting in the name of a form of Islam, Americans remained largely immune to the virus of hate.

Throughout the last decade, and most spectacularly during the debate about an ultimately stillborn plan to build a mosque/Muslim community center at the site of one of the buildings destroyed during the attack on the World Trade Center,discussion of this mythical backlash got relentless play in the media. That was partly the result of successful campaigns by groups that are largely sympathetic to Islamist beliefs like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was founded as a political front for an effort to fundraise for Hamas terrorists to promote this cause. But liberal media outlets also embraced this theme. The purpose was a not-so-subtle attempt to change the narrative of the post 9/11 conflict with the terrorists from one of the bloodthirsty Islamists killing innocents in the name of their faith to one in which bigoted Americans targeted innocent Muslims. For a nation sick of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and no longer sure of its way, the argument resonated even if it was rooted in anecdotal evidence that never stood up to scrutiny.

But while both the Paris and the San Bernardino attacks have given American new reasons to worry about the influence of Islamist terror groups, it has also provided fodder by those who are still more interested in changing the narrative of this war. So it is no surprise that a president who has never had any appetite for confronting radical Islam, and whose great foreign policy achievement — the Iran nuclear deal — is predicated on a dubious effort to transform a radical Islamist regime that regards the U.S. as an enemy into the object of a new détente, would prefer to harp on Islamophobia rather than Islamism.

Genuine discrimination, as opposed to sensible monitoring of possible terror sources, would be wrong, as would violence directed against any group. But that’s not what’s happening. What is happening is that, as may have been the case in San Bernardino, those who see suspicious behavior are intimidated from speaking up for fear of being labeled a bigot or an Islamophobe. President Obama’s emphasis on this issue will only heighten such concerns.

To his credit, the president did say that Muslims have an obligation to try and root out terrorists and those who support their ideas in their midst. The vast majority of American Muslims want nothing to do with terrorists and their agenda. But so long as Obama and his cheerleaders in the media are also promoting a false narrative about a mythical backlash, Muslims will continue to let radicals like CAIR — which has always sought to obstruct anti-terror efforts — represent them. As a consequence, they will almost certainly fail to do the necessary soul searching that their community must undergo in the aftermath of these latest attacks. Nor is it true that Islamophobia is increasing ISIS’s recruiting efforts. That is being aided by the general sense in much of the Muslim world that the Islamists are beating a West that is intimidated by the terrorist group’s brutality and boldness.

In that sense, the Islamophobia debate isn’t merely a distraction from the real problems of a nation fighting a half-hearted war against an Islamist foe determined to bring destruction and horror to the West. It’s also an impediment to the work that needs to be done to fight a far more real threat of Islamist ideology inside the Muslim community.

1b) 

Fighting Terror by Self-Reproach

How did we become a country more afraid of causing offense than playing defense?

By Bret Stephens

Nobody who watched Barack Obama’s speech Sunday night outlining his strategy to defeat Islamic State could have come away disappointed by the performance. Disappointment presupposes hope for something better. That ship sailed, and sank, a long time ago.

By now we are familiar with the cast of Mr. Obama’s mind. He does not make a case; he preaches a moral. He mistakes repetition for persuasion. He does not struggle with the direction, details or trade-offs of policy because he’s figured them all out. His policies never fail; it’s our patience that he finds wanting. He asks not what he can do for his country but what his country can do for him.

And what’s that? It is for us to see what has long been obvious to him, like an exasperated teacher explaining simple concepts to a classroom of morons. Anyone? Anyone?

That’s why nearly everything the president said last night he has said before, and in the same shopworn phrases. His four-point strategy for defeating ISIS is unchanged. His habit of telling us—and our enemies—what he isn’t going to do dates back to the earliest days of his presidency. His belief that terrorism is another gun-control issue draws on the deep wells of liberal true belief. His demand for a symbolic congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force is at least a year old, though as recently as 2013 he was demanding that Congress kill the AUMF altogether. Back then he was busy boasting that al Qaeda was on a path to defeat.

The more grating parts of Mr. Obama’s speech came when he touched on the subject of Islam and Muslims. “We cannot,” he intoned, “turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam.” Terrorism, as he sees it, is to be feared less for the harm it causes than for the overreaction it risks eliciting.

This is the president as master of the pre-emptive self-reproach—the suggestion that Americans are always on the verge of returning to the wickedness whence we came. But since when have we turned against one another, or defined the war on terror as a war on Islam?

Syed Rizwan Farook, a heavily bearded and openly devout Muslim, was a county employee in good standing with his colleagues who didn’t raise an eyebrow until he and his foreign bride opened fire in San Bernardino. The first 48 hours of the investigation amounted to a nationwide flight from the obvious, a heroic exercise in cultural sensitivity and intellectual restraint, as every motive except for jihad was mooted as a potential explanation for mass murder. Had Farook’s wife not sworn allegiance to ISIS moments before the attack, we might still be debating whether an act of Islamist terrorism had really happened.

On Sunday the Italian newspaper La Stampa carried an interview with Farook’s father, also named Syed. “My son said that he shared [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of Islamic State,” the elder Farook told correspondent Paolo Mastrolilli. “He was also obsessed with Israel.”

The father went on to explain that he had tried to reason with his son by saying that Israel would no longer exist in a couple of years and that the Jews would soon be returning to Ukraine, so there was no need to take up arms for jihad. “But he did not listen to me, he was obsessed.”

Now the Farook family professes utter shock at what’s happened. How can they be shocked? How did we become a society in which a son tells his father that he supports ISIS and it fails to register with this ostensibly integrated Muslim family, living the American dream, that perhaps a call to the FBI would be appropriate?

Here’s how we became that society: By pretending that the extreme branch of Islam to which Farook plainly belonged is a protected religion rather than a dangerous ideology. By supposing that it is somehow immoral to harbor graver reservations about 10,000 refugees from Syria or Iraq than, say, New Zealand. By being so afraid to give moral offense that we neglect to play the most elementary form of defense.

If you see something, say something, goes the ubiquitous slogan. But heaven help you if what you see and say turns out to be the wrong something—an alarm clock, for instance, as opposed to a bomb.

This is President Obama’s vision of society, and it is why he delivered this sterile, scolding homily that offered no serious defense against the next jihadist massacre. We have become a country that doesn’t rouse itself to seriousness except when a great many people are murdered. Fourteen deaths apparently isn’t going to move the policy needle, as far as this president is concerned. Will 1,400?

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2)

USDA kills the Crested Duck

By Abby Schachte

“Every day I operate I have an inspector on site,” Beechview's Crested Duck Charcuterie executive chef and owner Kevin Costa explained during our interview. “We were not producing the same thing everyday so he could come and see what we were doing that day and decide how long he was going to stay.”

No matter, said a Washington bureaucrat. And so Costa is planning to close on Jan. 1.

Costa's experience navigating the federal regulations to run his small business are a prime example of why “having a go” at the American Dream has become nearly impossible. It should be a prime concern for any city leaders who want Pittsburgh to thrive.

Costa moved back to his hometown. With help from family and friends, he started his business in 2010. For two years he sold his specialty cured meat at the public market in the Strip District. But he and his business partner, his older brother, always knew they wanted to find a space to sell wholesale. They decided on Beechview, an area of town in need of revitalization, and it worked. As Pittsburgh Magazine put it, his market/restaurant was “a showcase for small-batch, housemade products — sausages, pâtés, prosciuttos and more — served with high-quality accompaniments.”

All the while, Costa was working toward obtaining a license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which was granted in 2013. “Before then, business was steady but my partner (was having) to front (the money) to pay monthly bills,” Costa said.

A USDA license isn't required to operate, he said, but it is necessary “if you want to ship out of state ... and (that) was what enabled us to be financially viable.” And viable they were, contracting with clients across the country, from Brooklyn to Austin, to sell Crested Duck products at high-end food purveyors and markets.

All the time Costa was making his cured meats, he was inspected locally by a team of six different people. Yet, when his federal license came through — “a great day that was short-lived,” he says — he was immediately faced with an extensive and invasive food safety inspection.

For two weeks a bureaucrat from Washington sat in his facility and poured through all his records. The inspector never had dealt with charcuterie before and is legally handcuffed from disclosing what he needs to approve the safety plan (even if he felt like it).

Costa said it was totally different than working with the local USDA inspectors with whom he had developed good relations. When Costa learned the inspector was going to reject his application, he withdrew it. He can reapply anytime within the next two years.

“I'm no martyr,” Costa says. But he is justifiably angry. “My process was approved by six different people (and) I worked with (a) professor at Penn State (who is) an expert on food safety and microbiology,” Costa said.

“I do think I was understaffed and (my) paperwork didn't look the way it should have,” he conceded. But “we struggled to make this work for two years and over two weeks it was all taken down.”

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3) 

Council on Foreign Relations

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program Confirmed

by Elliott Abrams

The nuclear deal with Iran requires that it tell the truth–the whole truth–about its previous efforts to build a nuclear weapon.

As Sen. Mark Kirk said this week,

senior Administration officials repeatedly told the American people that Iran should come clean on all nuclear weapons activities as part of any final deal:

·           “…[W]e have required that Iran come clean on its past actions as part of any comprehensive agreement….”—Then-Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, February 4, 2014

·           “They have to do it.  It will be done.  If there’s going to be a deal; it will be done.”—Secretary of State John Kerry, April 8, 2015

After the Iran nuclear agreement was signed, the Administration reversed itself:

·         An Iranian admission of its past nuclear weapons program is unlikely and is not necessary for purposes of verifying commitments going forward.”—Unclassified Verification Assessment Report for Congress Pursuant to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, July 19, 2015, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal

Why this reversal? We now have some evidence of why: Iran was in fact working on nuclear weapons until at least 2009, and has refused to “come clean.” To have demanded that Iran truly comply with the language of the nuclear deal might have torn the deal

apart, and the Obama administration would not allow that–at any cost. The newest IAEA report on the Iranian program is described in The New York Times:

Iran was actively designing a nuclear weapon until 2009, more recently than the United States and other Western intelligence agencies have publicly acknowledged, according to a final report by the United Nations nuclear inspection agency.

The report, based on partial answers Iran provided after reaching its nuclear accord with the West in July, concluded that Tehran conducted “computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device” before 2004. It then resumed the efforts during President Bush’s second term and continued them into President Obama’s first year in office.

But while the International Atomic Energy Agency detailed a long list of experiments Iran had conducted that were “relevant to a nuclear explosive device,” it found no evidence that the effort succeeded in developing a complete blueprint for a bomb.

In part, that may have been because Iran refused to answer several essential questions, and appeared to have destroyed potential evidence in others.

Where does that leave us? First, we see that all the Iranian propaganda about never, ever building a weapon, and about the mysterious “fatwa” barring Iran from having a nuclear weapon, was a pack of lies. They were working on a weapon as recently as 2009. Second, we see that the nuclear deal, however weak its terms, will not in any event be enforced. Read again those words from our top negotiators, Kerry and Sherman. If those demands on Iran have been abandoned, which will be next?

The treatment of the famous PMDs, the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear work, has now been abandoned–and the IAEA apparently was not even allowed to speak with the head of the program, the Iranian official Mohsen Fakrizadeh. The lesson this teaches Iran is that the United States, at least under this administration, has too much invested in the agreement to demand full Iranian compliance with it.

There are other implications, as The Times suggested:

Iran’s refusal to cooperate on central points could set a dangerous precedent as the United Nations agency tries to convince other countries with nuclear technology that they must fully answer queries to determine if they have a secret weapons program.

Quite right. The deal itself is bad enough, but a failure even to enforce it means the likelihood of nuclear proliferation has risen even further.

========================================================4)$678 million Obamacare enrollment website No American companies were even considered

Michelle Obama's Princeton classmate is a top executive at the Canadian company that earned the no-bid contract to build the disastrous Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of '85, is senior vice president at Canadian company CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the so far costing $678 million Obamacare enrollment website atHealthcare.gov.

Townes-Whitley and his Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Toni Townes, Princeton '85, is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa.  George

Schindler, the president of the CGI Federal's Canadian parent CGI Group, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.

Sooooooo...........

Let's see if we can connect the dots here ...

1.) No American companies were even considered for building Obamacare's website;

2.) CGI Federal was chosen by God knows which criteria and hired;

3.) CGI Federal was given a NO BID contract worth $93 million;

4.) A top executive of CGI Federal was a Princeton classmate of Michelle Obama

5.) Previous company's experience was building a gun registry for the Canadian government;

6.) CGI Group was fired by Canadian Government for overruns that cost Canada $100 million

4.) CGI has continued its practice of overruns as the Obamacare enrollment website has gone from $98 million to costing U.S. tax payers $678 million, and it's still going up!

==============================================5) Terror in London But Not Terror in Jerusalem

In recent days London has experienced a similar incident to the many Palestinian stabbing attacks that have taken place against Israelis over the past few months.

An attacker, who was later found to have material linked to Syria and global terror on his cellphone, slashed passersby at a London Underground station while shouting “this is for Syria, my Muslim brothers.”

As far as the UK security forces are concerned, this was an act of terrorism carried out by a radicalized individual. Indeed, the Daily Mail’s Mail Online makes it quite clear in its headline and opening sentence that this is terrorism.

Compare the above, however, with a story published only hours later concerning a terrorist knife attack in Jerusalem.

Note how in both headline and text the word terrorist is in quotations to make it clear that this reference to the Palestinian attacker is somehow up for debate.

By now, it is completely clear that the Jerusalem attack was just the latest in a wave of Palestinian terrorism aimed at both Israeli civilians and soldiers.

For the Mail Online (and others) it appears that there is a different standard at work when it comes to what is terrorism. When British people are on the receiving end it is undoubtedly terrorism. When Israelis are the victims or Palestinians the perpetrators, it is somehow questionable.

Yet one more example of the insidious double standards at work in the media when it comes to coverage of Israel.

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6)

3 Biggest Mistakes America Ever Made...

Exclusive: Pamela Geller warns that nation 'may never recover from  latest catastrophe'

By Pamel Geller

In her 239-year history, America has made three colossal mistakes. These do not, however, overwhelm the fact that the idea of America is wholly unique to mankind.

America was the first moral government based on individual rights and freedom. No other government in the history of mankind was based on such a concept. Man’s value and his inalienable rights were paramount to the Founding Fathers. Extraordinary. Everything noble and magnificent that this great nation achieved was in accord with the principle of individual rights.

The idea of American exceptionalism – a concept that President Obama not only scorns but has absolutely no understanding of – is synonymous with the concept of individualism. What is American exceptionalism except individual exceptionalism?

Individualism regards every man as an independent being who possesses an unalienable right to live his own life, dream his own dream and be the master of his own destiny; no group, no mob, no special interest has rights other then the individual rights of all of its citizens.

The social system of a nation based on individualism is capitalism. The best description that comes to mind is from “Atlas Shrugged”: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Indeed, this is what made America great.

But there have been these three principal mistakes:

1) Slavery

At the time of the American founding, slavery was common practice. Blacks were sold into slavery by other black tribes. Africans and Muslims sold slaves to European and American slave traders.

But slavery was an assault on the very idea of America. A country based on individual rights could hardly reconcile that with the idea of slavery. Capitalism is the only system incompatible with slavery. Our Founding Fathers knew this, and they fought long and hard with the slave states, but those states were having none of it. During the Constitutional Convention and all of the debates concerning the Constitution, the best men wanted to abolish slavery right away, and, clearly, they should have. The South, however, would not join the Union without slaves. Without the South, the fledging country would not win a war against the British. So they compromised.

In any deal between good and evil, evil profits. Ayn Rand said, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.” And so it did. Slavery led to the catastrophic Civil War. Approximately 650,000 Americans died so slaves would be free, to the great honor of this country (something the haters never mention). That horrible wrong was corrected at an unfathomable cost.

2) Jimmy Carter

Before Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter was easily the most disastrous president this country ever had. Many of the troubles we have today in the Middle East, and the rise of the global jihad, can be attributed to his policies.

Carter began the destabilization of the Middle East and the rollback of secularism there when he betrayed the shah, our great ally in a critical region, and enabled his overthrow at the hands of the bloodthirsty mullahs who established the Islamic Republic of Iran.
That betrayal bore immediate poison fruit with the 1979 hostage crisis, during which Carter dithered impotently and gave to the world an indelible image of American weakness. When the mullahs freed the hostages on Jan. 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president, they showed the world what they thought of both Carter and his successor.
Imagine if we had backed the shah. Hollywood has churned a number of movies and TV series (Amazon has one right now) imagining what the world would have looked like had the Nazis won. Current reality reflects the inversion of this. Imagine if we had backed the shah – what a wonderful turn for the world. Iran would not be the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. There would be no Hezbollah (an Iranian proxy). The U.S. would have had a staunch ally in the Middle East – a powerful alliance.

Carter lasted only one term, but those terrible four years established that America was not a reliable ally, and would abandon those nations who had been our faithful friends (a precedent Barack Obama has followed many times). In unleashing the mullahs, Carter’s presidency set another precedent as well: It established that America would underestimate, misunderstand and downplay the threat from jihadis and pro-Shariah Islamic supremacists – another precedent Obama has faithfully followed and expanded upon.

3) Barack Obama

Nothing has ever happened to the United States that is worse than the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. A committed Marxist collectivist, he has stood throughout his presidency against that very principle of individual rights that made America great. In abandoning our allies and aligning with the Muslim Brotherhood and other sinister groups, he has aligned with the most evil forces of the 21st century and overturned the order of the world. In abandoning and even actively turning against our allies (most notably Israel), he has made the United States of America, for so long the beacon of freedom in the world, into an untrustworthy ally, a nation that cannot be taken at its word.

We will be paying for Obama’s presidency for decades to come. The full dimensions of the damage he has caused – the gutting of the economy, the new polarization of the races, the Iran nuclear deal and more – is likely only to be known once he is out of office. And America may never recover from this catastrophe.

If it does, however, it will be because it recovered respect for the principle of individual rights. As Reagan once said, “With all its flaws, American remains a unique achievement for human dignity on a scale unequaled anywhere in the world.” That is still true. The shining city on the hill can shine again. But at this point, that will take a massive change in our political and media culture.
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