Hope you have a meaningful Memorial Day!
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Constantly having to hear Hillary lie about lying.
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Frankly, I do not understand why Israel remains in the U.N.
America remains because throwing good money after bad is something Congress has proven, time and again, they are expert at. (See 1 below.)
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I have a good friend and fellow memo reader who claims to be objective politically speaking but he always sends me articles from The New York Times and Washington Post which are generally critical of Conservative thinking, always bash Israel and yet, he claims he is not prejudiced. He challenged me to post the following. (See 2 below.)
He continues to defend Hillarious and ignores everything written about her corrupt and lying ways.
He refuses to believe there is a schism in the ranks of the Demwits and always points to the conflicts among the Repubs and he constantly attacks Netanyahu and blames him for expanding Jerusalem, never giving into the Abbas and swallows the unbalanced attacks on Israel emanating from most media circles but asserts he loves Israelis.
So I am presenting a Prager rebuttal and then one from the one and only - Maureen Dowd. (See 2a and 2b below.)
And
A few more I have thrown in for good measure in order to create a little balance and different perspective. (See 2c, 2d, 2e and 2f below.)
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Before Obama leaves office will he shove a knife in the back he swore he was committed to protecting - Israel's? And will those blind Liberal Jews, who have aligned themselves with the Democrat Party, continue to drink their brand of Kool Aid now that this Party has basically walked away from their support of Israel?
Bernie already has but he never committed he had Israel's back as did Obama.
Bernie may have been born Jewish but he is even a more pathetic one than Chuck Schumer. (See 3 below.)
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Rotting from the head? You decide. (See 4 below.)
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Obama's favorability ratings are over 50% because he is constantly protected by the press. I heard recently, though I have only my belief, no proof, that Republicans and Democrats both constitute about 60% of the voters and are mostly evenly balanced around 30 or 32 % each. Obviously Hispanics, blacks and women favor Democrats and what is left of our shrinking white male population and assorted other Americans favor Republicans.
Yet 80% of the nation's 800 largest newspapers endorsed Obama for president.
Obama has been a contumacious failure because he has been divisive, has attacked our allies, has wrecked our military, spread tragedy throughout the Middle East, burdened our economy with crippling debt, worsened race relations and acted in a manner that is either unconstitutional or skates the parameters of such. Yet, when judged by his purposeful goal of accomplishing all that he has he has been an masterful success.
He will go down as one of the worst presidents in history if judged by his oath to protect and defend but a masterful success if judged by his goal of destroying America because of its arrogance and past prejudicial history. You decide. I already did some 7 years ago. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)Israeli Ambassador Says UN 'Completely Disconnected From Reality' After
Resolution Singling Out Israel as World's Sole Violator of Global Health Rights
Author: Lea Speyer
A recent United Nations resolution singling out Israel as the world's only
violator of global health rights reveals how the international body is
"completely disconnected from reality," Israel's ambassador to the UN told
The Algemeiner on Thursday.
Danny Danon was referring to a resolution - co-sponsored by the Arab Group
and the Palestinian delegation - accusing Israel of violating the "mental,
physical and environmental health" of the Palestinians. The motion, which
received support from France, Germany, the UK and various other EU states,
was passed during the World Health Organization's (WHO) annual assembly on
Wednesday. The US and Canadian delegations both voiced their strong
objections to the resolution.
According to the Geneva-based watchdog group UN Watch, no resolutions were
passed against any other country. The assembly did not address other major
health crises, such as the bombing of hospitals in Syria by pro-regime and
Russian warplanes, or the Saudi-led bombing and blockade in Yemen, which is
denying millions access to food and water.
Various Arab countries also used the WHO assembly to lob further accusations
at Israel. Iran claimed that Gaza is under "an inhumane blockade," while
Egypt alleged that Israel shows a "disregard for basic human rights."
Pakistan charged Israel with carrying out a "wave of terror against the
Palestinian civilian population."
The Syrian delegation, UN Watch said, submitted a report "laced with
antisemitic conspiracy tropes," which claimed that Israel continues "to
experiment on Syrian and Arab prisoners with medicines and drugs and to
inject them with pathogenic viruses." Israel's humanitarian medical
treatment of injured Syrians, the delegation asserted, is done in order that
the Jewish state "can resume [its] subversive terrorist activities directed
against the country's peaceful citizens and its infrastructure."
Danon slammed the UN and WHO for continuing to undermine and delegitimize
Israel. "Instead of compiling a professional and objective report, the WHO
is being used by those whose only interest is to harm the state of Israel.
They are doing so even when this means that they are creating an alternative
reality and disseminating vicious lies," he said. "We will continue to stand
up to the incitement spread by anti-Israel entities who are using
international institutions to besmirch Israel's good name."
The UN ambassador is not the only Israeli leader to come out against the WHO
declaration. On Thursday, Knesset Member Yair Lapid called the vote a
"modern manifestation of antisemitism" in a letter to WHO Director-General
Dr. Margaret Chan. The letter, which was posted on Facebook, also stated,
"The World Health Organization has become the latest United Nations
affiliated body, after the United Nations Human Rights Council and UNESCO,
to allow itself to be used by those who seek to alienate the state of Israel
through a campaign of delegitimization."
Following the vote, the WHO assigned a special delegation to investigate
"the health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory" and "the
occupied Syrian Golan," the results of which will be revealed at next year's
meeting. A series of reports on alleged Israeli crimes, including "the
impact of prolonged occupation and human rights violations on mental,
physical and environmental health" in "the occupied Palestinian territory,"
were also commissioned.
One hundred and seven countries voted in favor of the resolution. The US,
Canada, Israel, Australia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Micronesia and Papua New
Guinea voted against it. There were eight abstentions and 58 not in
attendance.
http://www.algemeiner.com/
ng-out-israel-as-worlds-sole-
connected-from-reality/#
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2)Why ‘Hillary Is Even Worse’ Doesn’t Cut It
by CHARLES MURRAY
I am part of the tiny fraction of the population that deals professionally in public policy from the right. In influence, we are all over the map, from talk-show hosts with audiences of millions (Limbaugh, Hannity) to politicians who directly shape policy (Ryan, McConnell) to academics who write technical papers read exclusively by their peers. We have been dubbed the “Republican Establishment” during this campaign season — bemusing to those like me who have trivial influence and are not even Republicans — but I’ll use Establishmentarians as a convenient label for who we are. This note is addressed to my fellow Establishmentarians, from the Hannities and Ryans to my fellow ink-stained wretches.
Barring a startling turn of events, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. There are good reasons to question his fitness to occupy the presidency, because of both his policy positions and for reasons of character. The standard response among the Establishmentarians who have announced they will vote for Trump is that “Hillary is even worse.” That’s acceptable for people whose only obligation is to cast a vote. Having to choose the lesser of two evils is common in American voting booths. But that shouldn’t be good enough for Establishmentarians.
If we’re going to presume to lecture others about public policy and good governance — as all of us have made a career of doing in one way or another — we need to put our views about Donald Trump on the table now, before the nomination and election. That’s especially true of the False Priests and the Closet #NeverTrumpers — labels that I owe to Jonah Goldberg.
The False Priests are the columnists, media pundits, public intellectuals, and politicians who have presented themselves as principled conservatives or libertarians but now have announced they will vote for a man who, by multiple measures, represents the opposite of the beliefs they have been espousing throughout their careers. We’ve already heard you say “Hillary is even worse.” Tell us, please, without using the words “Hillary Clinton” even once, your assessment of Donald Trump, using as a template your published or broadcast positions about right policy and requisite character for a president of the United States. Put yourself on the record: Are you voting for a man whom your principles require you to despise, or have you modified your principles? In what ways were you wrong before? We require explanation beyond “Hillary is even worse.”
RELATED: Trump or Clinton — A Hobson’s Choice?
The Closet #NeverTrumpers are drawn from the Establishmentarians who can easily avoid publicly revealing their views of Trump. They include policy analysts like me who don’t have a history of writing about current politics, political strategists, senior Hill staffers, and potential appointees to high office in a Trump administration. Many of them now privately tell people like Jonah and me that they agree with us, the #NeverTrumpers, 100 percent. Great. But I suspect that many of these private opinions will get deep-sixed if Trump is elected. That’s not acceptable. You shouldn’t be able to cozy up to the new administration without having previously acknowledged your real opinion of the man you will then be willing to work for. We need to put our views about Donald Trump on the table now, before the nomination and election.
We Establishmentarians, therefore, should all go on the record about our view of Donald Trump. That includes me. I have done so in 140-character tweets, but it’s time to elaborate. Apart from that, I have a specific need to go on the record: While I am already on record with my sympathy for the grievances that energize many of Trump’s supporters, I am thinking about writing a book that is even more explicitly sympathetic with those grievances. I want to forestall any suspicion — especially if Trump is elected — that writing in sympathy with some of the content of Trumpism indicates any form of sucking up to Trump the man.
Here goes: In my view, Donald Trump is unfit to be president in ways that apply to no other candidate of the two major political parties throughout American history.
Let me begin by acknowledging that in some respects, it’s the same-old, same-old. Greedy and venal candidates? Trump and Clinton are both bad. But LBJ was just as bad. Narcissistic candidates? Trump’s narcissism is complicated by his transparent insecurity. But I actually find Barack Obama’s serenely untroubled narcissism to be creepier. Candidates with deplorable marital morals? Trump, yes, but Bill Clinton was at least Trump’s equal, and JFK set a bar for reckless personal behavior that neither can hope to match.
RELATED: No, Trump Isn’t Actually Better than Hillary
Candidates who lie? This is a little more complicated. Yes, many candidates for president have lied. Hillary Clinton has — with stupefying ineptitude — told and continues to tell whoppers. But Trump takes first prize for sheer bulk, averaging one factual untruth every five minutes, according to a systematic fact-check of over four and a half hours of stump speeches and press conferences.
Donald Trump is unfit to be president in ways that apply to no other candidate of the two major political parties throughout American history.
But it’s worse than that. It’s not that Trump makes strategic decisions about what useful untruths he will tell on any given day — it looks as if he just makes up stuff as he goes along. Many of his off-the-cuff fictions are substantively unimportant: He says Rex Ryan won championships when he coached the New York Jets, when he didn’t. No one would care — if it were a one-shot mistake. But it happens repeatedly. Then it gets a little more important, as when he says Paul Ryan called to congratulate him after his victory in the New York primary, announcing a significant political event that in fact did not happen. Then the fictions touch on facts about policy. No, Wisconsin does not have an effective unemployment rate of 20 percent, nor does the federal government impose Common Core standards on the states — to take just two examples plucked at random from among his continual misrepresentations of reality. That he deals so heedlessly in those misrepresentations makes it impossible for an opponent to conduct an authentic policy debate with him.
It’s one thing when a candidate knowingly deceives the public on a few specific topics. Hillary Clinton has knowingly tried to deceive the public about her flip-flop on gay marriage and her misuse of her e-mail server. That’s bad. It should be condemned. This aspect of her character should affect one’s deliberations about whether to vote for her. It’s another thing entirely when a candidate blithely rejects Pat Moynihan’s (attributed) dictum, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.”
RELATED: After Eight Years of Obama, America Needs Someone Better than Trump or Clinton
Trump’s indifference to facts is an example of why he is unfit for the presidency — not dispositive in itself, but part of a pattern. That pattern is why “Hillary is even worse” misses the point. P. J. O’Rourke recently announced that he is voting for Clinton. “She’s wrong about absolutely everything,” O’Rourke said. “But she’s wrong within normal parameters!” Similarly, I am saying that Clinton may be unfit to be president, but she’s unfit within normal parameters.
Donald Trump is unfit outside normal parameters. Defending that statement would take a lot of space. I refer you instead to some brilliant essays with which I agree. Ross Douthat has made the conservative case for Trump’s unfitness on grounds of both ideology and character. Andrew Sullivan has written a scarily convincing brief for Trump as a potential “extinction-level” threat to American democracy. But for conveying the essence of why I think Trump is unfit outside normal parameters, I cannot write anything nearly as concise and expressive as David Brooks wrote a few months ago.
Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. . . . He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.
Since Brooks wrote those words, Trump has become the presumptive Republican nominee, and he now does have advisors. He has had ten additional weeks to demonstrate his capacity to learn; to show that he is taking national policy more seriously than buying a sofa; to persuade us that underneath the showman exterior is presidential seriousness. My view is that he has not and cannot. What you see is what you get.
RELATED: Sorry, I Still Won’t Ever Vote for Trump
I am told that it is unfair to speak in such harsh terms of a person I don’t know personally: Look how nice his kids seem to be. Look at all his friends who say that he’s really a pleasant fellow in private. Sorry. I don’t need any secondary sources. Donald Trump makes the case for David Brooks’s assessment in every public appearance. When a man deliberately inflames the antagonism of one American ethnic group toward another, takes pleasure in labeling people “losers,” and openly promises to use the powers of the presidency to punish people who get in his way, there is nothing that person can do or say in private that should alter my opinion of whether he is fit to be the president of the United States.
I know that I am unlikely to persuade any of my fellow Establishmentarians to change their minds. But I cannot end without urging you to resist that sin to which people with high IQs (which most of you have) are unusually prone: Using your intellectual powers to convince yourself of something despite the evidence plainly before you. Just watch and listen to the man. Don’t concoct elaborate rationalizations. Just watch and listen.
And contemplate this fact about history: We have had presidents whose competence once in office was better than we could have anticipated. Truman, for example. We have had presidents whose characters were subsequently revealed to be worse than they had seemed during the campaign. Kennedy, for example. We have never had a president whose character proved to be more admirable once he was in office than it had appeared during the campaign. What you see on your television screen every day from Donald Trump the candidate is the best that you can expect from Donald Trump the president. “Hillary is even worse” doesn’t cut it.
— Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435805/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-why-hillary-is-even-worse-doesnt-cut-it
2a)
A Response to My Conservative #NeverTrump Friends
When you differ from people you admire, you have to question yourself. After all, what is the purpose of admiring people if they aren't capable of influencing you?
So, I have had to challenge my position -- stated since the outset of the Republican presidential debates -- that if Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, I will vote for him over Hillary Clinton, or any Democrat for that matter.
I devoted many hours of radio and many columns to criticizing Trump. His virtually assured nomination has therefore caused me grief as an American, a Republican and a conservative. That his character defects, gaps in knowledge on some important issues, and lack of identifiably conservative principles came to mean little to so many Republican voters is quite troubling. (Though, I might add, it is even more troubling that virtually all Democrats ignore the even worse character of Hillary Clinton, as well as the idiotic socialist ideas of Sen. Bernie Sanders.)#NeverTrump conservatives, such as (in alphabetical order) Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro, Bret Stephens and George Will are not merely people I admire -- they are friends and colleagues. Goldberg, Stephens and Will have made multiple videos for Prager University, which receive millions of views. Shapiro and I have spent Shabbat together. I have had the privilege of writing for Kristol's The Weekly Standard and having him on my show many times. And I have enthusiastically promoted their books. These individuals are special to me not only as thinkers, but as people.
However, in the final analysis, I do not find their arguments compelling.
Take the "conscience" argument that one can sleep with a clear conscience by not voting for Trump. I don't find it compelling because it means that your conscience is clear after making it possible for Clinton or any other Democrat to win.
In fact, the "conscience" argument is so weak that Goldberg -- to his credit -- published a column two days ago titled "Sorry, I Still Won't Ever Vote for Trump." He wrote, "If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I'd probably vote for none other than Donald Trump."
Shouldn't all Americans vote as if their vote were the deciding vote? Including those whose votes "don't count" because they live in states that are so left-wing they would still vote Democrat if Vladimir Lenin headed the Democratic ticket?
The choice this November is tragic. As it often happens in life, this choice is between bad and worse, not bad and good.
But America has made that choice before. When forced to choose between bad and worse, we supported Joseph Stalin against Adolf Hitler, and we supported right-wing authoritarians against Communist totalitarians.
It seems to me that the #NeverTrump conservatives want to remain morally pure. I understand that temptation. I am tempted, too. But if you wish to vanquish the bad, it is not possible -- at least not on this side of the afterlife -- to remain pure.
The most moving interview of my 33 years in radio was with Irene Opdyke, a Polish Catholic woman. Opdyke became the mistress of a married Nazi officer in order to save the lives of 12 Jews. She hid them in the cellar of the officer's house in Warsaw. There were some Christians who called my show to say that Opdyke's actions were wrong, that she had in fact sinned because she knowingly committed a mortal sin. In their view, she compromised Catholic/Christian doctrine.In my view -- and, I believe, the view of most Catholics and other Christians -- she brought glory to her God and her faith. Why? Because circumstances almost always determine what is moral, even for religious people like myself who believe in moral absolutes. That's why the act of dropping atom bombs on Japan was moral. The circumstances (ending a war that would otherwise continue taking millions of lives) made moral what under other circumstances would be immoral.
In the 2016 presidential race, I am not interested in moral purity. I am interested in defeating the left and its party, the Democratic Party. The notion (expressed by virtually every #NeverTrump advocate) that we can live with another four years of a Democratic president is, forgive me, mind-boggling. To that end, with at least one, and probably multiple, additional leftists on the Supreme Court, a Republican presidential victory in 2020 would mean little. All the left needs is the judicial branch, especially the Supreme Court. Left-wing judges pass so many left-wing laws that they render those who control Congress, and even the White House, almost irrelevant.
Here, then, are nine reasons (there are more) why a conservative should prefer a Trump presidency to a Democrat presidency:
Prevent a left-wing Supreme Court.
Increase the defense budget.
Repeal, or at least modify, the Dodd-Frank act.
Prevent Washington, D.C. from becoming a state and giving the Democrats another two permanent senators.
Repeal Obamacare.
Curtail illegal immigration, a goal that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with xenophobia or nativism (just look at Western Europe).
Reduce job-killing regulations on large and small businesses.
Lower the corporate income tax and bring back hundreds of billions of offshore dollars to the United States.
Continue fracking, which the left, in its science-rejecting hysteria, opposes.
For these reasons, I, unlike my friends, could not live with my conscience if I voted to help the America-destroying left win the presidency in any way.
I just don't understand how anyone who understands the threat the left and the Democrats pose on America will refuse to vote for the only person who can stop them.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM
2b) Weakend at BERNIES
Maureen Dowd
WASHINGTON — HILLARY CLINTON is the Democratic nominee.
Really.
Just ask her.
She should have been able to finally savor shattering that “highest, hardest glass ceiling” — the one she gloried in putting 18 million cracks in last time around — when she attends her convention in Philadelphia in July.
Instead, she is reduced to stomping her feet on CNN, asserting her dominance in a contest that has left her looking anything but dominant. Once more attempting to shake off the old socialist dude hammering her with a sickle, Clinton insisted to Chris Cuomo on Thursday: “I will be the nominee for my party, Chris. That is already done, in effect. There is no way that I won’t be.”
It’s a vexing time for the Clintons. As Bill told a crowd in Fargo, N.D., on Friday, it’s been an “interesting” year: “That’s the most neutral word I can think of.”
After all, why should Bernie Sanders get to be the Democratic nominee when he isn’t even a Democrat? And how is Donald Trump going to be the Republican nominee when he considers being a Republican merely a starting bid?
It must be hard for Hillary to look at all the pictures of young women swooning over Bernie as though he were Bieber.
She assumed that the fix was in, that she and the D.N.C. had arranged for the coronation that she felt she was robbed of in the tulip craze of 2008.
Everyone just laughed when Sanders, a cranky loner from Vermont with a nondescript Senate record, decided to challenge Queen Hillary. Clinton and her aides intoned — wink, wink — that it would be healthy to have a primary fight with Sanders and Martin O’Malley.
But Bernie became the surprise belle of his side’s revolutionary ball. And now he has gotten a taste of it and he
likes it and he won’t let it go. He’s bedeviling the daylight out of Hillary.
Hillary and her allies are spinning a narrative that Bernie is less loyal to the Democratic cause than she was with Obama. And Trump does delight in quoting Bernie’s contention that Hillary lacks the judgment to be president. On Friday, when he accepted the endorsement of the N.R.A. at its convention, Trump mischievously urged Sanders to run as a third-party candidate and said he would love to have a debate with both Hillary and Bernie onstage.
Hillary says Sanders needs to “do his part” to unify the party, as she did in 2008. But even on the day of the last primaries in that race, when she was the one who was mathematically eliminated unless the superdelegates turned, she came onstage to Terry McAuliffe heralding her as “the next president of the United States.” She then touted having more votes than any primary candidate in history as her fans cheered “Yes, she will!” and “Denver!”
Seeing Trump’s soaring negatives, Sanders thinks, if he could just get past Hillary, he could actually be president.
The Bernie bro violence — chair throwing, sexist name-calling and feral threats — at the Nevada state party convention last weekend was denounced as “a scary situation” by his Senate colleague Barbara Boxer.
Sanders condemned the violence while stoking the outrage, urging the Democratic Party to “open the doors, let the people in.” He flashed a bit of Trump, so sure in his belief that the system is rigged that he fed off the nasty energy.
Boxer had to call Sanders several times before he called back. She and other Democratic Senate women are fed up with his crusade, feeling enough is enough.
I’ve talked to several former Clinton and Obama White House aides who don’t enjoy checking in with the joyless Clinton campaign in Brooklyn. “It’s the Bataan Death March,” one says.
Hopeful acceptance of Hillary has shifted to amazed disbelief that she can’t put away Bernie. Given dynasty fatigue and Hillary’s age, many Democrats assumed that their front-runner would come out of the gate with a vision for the future that gave her campaign a fresh hue, instead of white papers tinkering around the edges. She should have been far over her husband’s bridge to the 21st century and way down the highway by now.
Instead, her big new idea is to put Bill in charge of the economy again (hopefully, with less Wall Street deregulation). Again with the two for the price of one. And please don’t deny us the pleasure of seeing Bill choose the china patterns.
Hillary’s Bataan Death March is making Republicans reconsider their own suicide mission with Trump. More are looking at Clinton’s inability to get the flashing lights going like her husband, and thinking: Huh, maybe we’re not dead here. Maybe Teflon Don could pull this off.
The 2016 race is transcendentally bizarre. We have two near-nominees with the highest unfavorables at this point in the race of any in modern history. We seem to have a majority of voters in both parties who are driven by the desire to vote against the other candidate, rather than for their own.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz tries to herd young women to Hillary by raising the specter of Roe v. Wade being overturned. And former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Trump’s obsession with “10s” and D-cups would “come back to haunt him’’ and give Democrats wins because “there are probably more ugly women in America than attractive women.”
Hillary can’t generate excitement on her own so she is relying on fear of Trump to get her into the White House. And Trump is relying on fear of everything to get him into the White House.
So voters are stuck in the muck of the negative: What are you most afraid of?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-miscarriage-of-justice-department-1463953209
2c)
Former Senior US Official: White House Launched ‘Venomous Whisper Campaign’ Against Netanyahu to Sell Iran Nuclear Deal
Michael Doran said the White House launched a public smear campaign against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of its strategy to garner support for the Iran nuclear deal. Photo: Video Screenshot.
As part of the Obama administration’s strategy to sell the Iran nuclear deal, the White House launched a smear campaign against one of the deal’s biggest critics, Israel’s prime minister, a former policy official told Congress on Tuesday.
According to the congressional testimony of Michael Doran — Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior director in the National Security Council (NSC) in the administration of President George W. Bush — the White House initiated a “whisper campaign” against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cast him “as the villain of the Middle East peace process, an arch-nationalist with unseemly ties to the Republican party who refuses to make the necessary compromises to bring about an historic reconciliation with the Palestinians,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Doran’s testimony came in response to a controversial New York Times Magazine profile on White House national security advisor Ben Rhodes, who gloated about how he was able to deceive the public to garner support for last July’s nuclear agreement. Rhodes admitted to creating an “echo chamber” among susceptible journalists, policy experts and officials to spin the White House’s narrative.
According to Doran, the Obama administration engaged in a strategy of “deception” in order to create a “detente” with Iran. Had the White House been open and honest about the true nature of the agreement, there would have been significant public backlash, Doran said.
In Doran’s estimation, Rhodes’s behavior is part of a greater problem: the growing size and power of the NSC. “Rhodes’s war room is not an isolated problem, it is symptomatic of an NSC that, according to all three of Obama’s former secretaries of defense, has grown imperial in both size and ethos. In order to protect our system of checks and balances, Congress must take action to school the White House in a healthy respect for republican values.”
Rhodes himself was also called to testify before Congress but was blocked by the White House, which invoked executive privilege. In a letter sent to the committee, the White House said “the appearance of a senior presidential adviser before Congress threatens the independence and autonomy of the President.”
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, took to
Twitter on Monday to criticize the White House’s decision after being informed that Rhodes wouldn’t be testifying. “[Rhodes] Talks to reporters and his ‘echo chamber’ but not Congress,” he tweeted. “Disappointing but typical.”
On Sunday, Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, denied allegations that the administration lied to the public and manipulated the media to sell the nuclear deal. “There was nothing hidden. There was no effort to – or reality of misleading,” she said during an interview on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS.
“There is nothing that Ben or the president or I or anybody who was involved in explaining the Iran deal to the American public said that wasn’t factually correct,” she said. “The notion that there was any ball to hide or spin to put on it, I think, is really misguided.”
2d)
J-Street was paid by Obama administration to promote Iran deal
By Ari Soffer
Liberal Jewish group received $576,000 to advocate for Iran nuclear deal, belying its 'pro-Israel' pretensions.
President Barack Obama
Reuters
J-Street received more than half a million dollars to advocate for the Obama administration's controversial nuclear deal with Iran, it has been revealed.
The liberal Jewish group, which bills itself as "pro-Israel and pro-peace" but which critics say takes solely anti-Israel stances, was paid the money by the White House's main surrogate organization for selling the deal.
The Ploughshares Fund was named in an explosive New York Times profile of Obama aid Ben Rhodes, in which the President's chief spin doctor listed the central groups responsible for creating an "echo chamber" in order to promote the deal, even when the White House's official line didn't jibe with the facts.
According to Associated Press, the group's 2015 annual report details several organizations which received substantial funds to peddle the official White House line on the nuclear deal. Among them was National Public Radio (NPR), which received a $100,000 grant to promote "national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran's nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and U.S. policy toward nuclear security."
Other grantees included: The Arms Control Association ($282,500); the Brookings Institution ($225,000); and the Atlantic Council ($182,500), who "received money for Iran-related analysis, briefings and media outreach, and non-Iran nuclear work," according to AP.
The National Iranian American Council received more than $281,000, while Princeton University received a $70,000 grant to support former Iranian ambassador and nuclear spokesman Seyed Hossein Mousavian's "analysis, publications and policymaker engagement on the range of elements involved with the negotiated settlement of Iran's nuclear program."
But the largest recipient of Obama administration funding was J-Street, a group which has been closely cultivated by the current White House and is viewed by many as its mouthpiece in the American Jewish community.
According to The Ploughshares Fund's annual report, J-Street was paid $576,500 to advocate for the deal - something it did ferociously, in spite of the opposition from the majority of the pro-Israel community in the US.
J-Street's dogged support for the Iran deal came despite the fact that the vast majority of Israelis, including those on the left with whom J-Street claims to align, were strongly opposed - a fact seized upon by the group's
critics as proof it consistently acts against the State of Israel's interests.
2e)
Why Bernie Won’t Play Ball
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3)
3)
Why the Palestinians Can't Dance in Obama's Own Words
by Jonathan Rosenblum
Jerusalem Post, Yated Ne'eman
Jerusalem Post, Yated Ne'eman
The Obama administration, according to numerous news reports, is ramping up for a final push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in its final months in office. An extremely critical report on Israeli settlement activities prepared by the United States, in conjunction with the Quartet, is said to be in the works. And the U.S. is even rumored to be contemplating tabling a U.N. Security Council resolution outlining a final status agreement.
Why the obsession with Israel? Like the administration's major current domestic initiative – pushing males who self-identify as females into every girls school bathroom and locker room in America – the energy expended on Israel-Palestinian peace talks is inversely proportional to the importance of the issue.
In Jeffrey Goldberg's near book length treatment of President Obama's foreign policy thinking, in the March issue of The Atlantic, much space is devoted to the president's self-congratulation for having resisted the temptation to intervene in Syria, even as 450,000 people have died, four million have been displaced from their homes, and Europe has been flooded with hundreds of thousands of refugees it cannot absorb and who threaten its entire social structure.
Chief among the president's explanations for his refusal to act is the conviction that there was little the United States could do to make the situation better. Why, then, does he expect to succeed brokering the Palestinian-Israel peace that has eluded his last six predecessors?
Another question. Near the very end of Goldberg's "The Obama Doctrine," he outlines the main planks of Obama's thinking about the Middle East. The first is that the glut of oil renders the Middle East no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were still of surpassing importance, there is little the United States can do to make it a better place given the deformities of the region.
Obama himself describes one of the central (albeit little noticed) messages of his 2009 Cairo speech as one to the Muslim world: "Let's all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East's problems is Israel."
So, again, if the Middle East is no longer important, and the Palestinian-Israel conflict has close to nothing to do with the terrorist threat emanating from the region or the slaughter taking place within, why is the United States embarking on a fool's mission?
GOLDBERG HAS BEEN A FREQUENT MESSENGER over the years for President Obama's contempt for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and he once again makes reference to the "contentious" nature of their relationship. Goldberg describes Obama as a man of "preternatural confidence." The president relates one instance where he felt that Bibi was lecturing in him in a manner that showed he did not share the president's high self-regard. Obama informed him, "I'm the African-American son of a single mother, and I live . . . in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don't understand what you are talking about, but I do."
And Obama professes to believe, according to Goldberg, "Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel's status as a Jewish majority democracy."
Yet Obama's own analysis leads to the conclusion that it is not within Netanyahu's hands to "bring" peace. Nor is it cowardice or political paralysis that prevents him from doing so.
It takes two to tango, and Obama's own words make clear why the Palestinians can't dance. Though the president will never refer publicly to the problem of Islam, lest he fan anti-Muslim sentiments, in Goldberg's telling he is perfectly forthright with other world leaders: There will be no solution to Islamic terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity. For that Muslims themselves will require a vigorous internal discussion. None is on the horizon.
That still unreconciled Islam enjoins "Mohammedans to maintain a permanent state of belligerence with all nonbelievers, collectively encompassed in the dar al-harb,the domain of war," writes Professor Adda Bozeman inThe Future of Law in the Multicultural World. Malaysian Prime Minister told the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 2003, "A few million Jews cannot defeat 1.3 billion Muslims." A Jewish state on any land previously held by Muslims is an intolerable affront.
All around the Middle East Obama sees failed states that quickly become havens for terrorists. He and his allies created one in Libya, which the president now acknowledges as his greatest foreign policy failure. Because of the absence of civil society in the Middle East desperate people quickly revert to a primitive tribalism based on sect, creed, clan and village. ISIL, in the president's view, is but the distillation of every worse impulse along those lines – a small group defining itself by killing all who are not like them
And for precisely the reasons given by Obama, a Palestinian state in the West Bank would quickly degenerate into failed state and terrorist haven. Institutions of civil society remain weak, and clan and tribal identity high. Civil war broke out in Gaza soon after the Israeli withdrawal, and the same would happen in the West Bank. And as a consequence, the West Bank would become a terrorist haven, as has Gaza, where vast vitally-needed resources are still dedicated to waging war on Israel.
Palestinian society fits Obama's description of Arab countries in general: It is characterized by a "violent, extremist ideology or ideologies, turbocharged through social media" – indeed in the Palestinians' case turbocharged by the official media and education system.
In short, Obama's own analysis leads inexorably to the conclusion that peace will not be had with the Palestinians because their goals are not those of Western liberals who view negotiations as primarily over the size of the slice of the pie of the respective parties. Their goals are more grandiose and not really subject to negotiation. They seek not a state – that they could long ago have had – but the end of the alien one next door.
So why does the president ignore the force of his own logic and despise Bibi. I suspect he's just not that enchanted by the idea of a Jewish state. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told Goldberg that Obama wondered aloud why Israel's military superiority must be maintained.
Jon Favreau, the president's former chief speechwriter, recently commented that he, and Ben Rhodes, an Obama speechwriter cum national security advisor, and the president himself view their "entire job" as "restructuring the American narrative." Could part of that narrative be that Israel is the bad guy?
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4)
We Are a Fish, Rotting From the Head
Glenn Reynolds’ current USA Today column addresses the rapid decline of the United States as a high-trust society, something that sociologists have found to be critical for economic development and security:
[T]he CIA’s “accident” was only the latest in a long rash of “accidental” losses of incriminating information in this administration. The IRS — whose Tea Party-targeting scandal is now over 1,100 days old without anyone being charged or sent to jail — seems to have a habit of ”accidentally” destroying hard drives containing potentially incriminating evidence. It has done so in spite of court orders, in spite of Congressional inquiries and in spite of pretty much everyone’s belief that these “accidents” were actually the deliberate, illegal destruction of incriminating evidence to protect the guilty.
The IRS scandal would have sunk a Republican administration, perhaps leading to impeachment. But the Democratic press is in on the joke, and the Obama administration is set to run out the clock in its usual fashion.
Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.
The only way Hillary will be indicted, as she certainly deserves to be, is if the Democrats decide that she can’t beat Donald Trump–an increasingly likely eventuality–and decide to go with someone else.
“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.
Sad but true. Worst of all, perhaps, is the way Barack Obama and his Attorneys General, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, have corrupted the Department of Justice. Time after time, federal judges have found that DOJ lawyers have lied to the courts on behalf to the Obama administration’s political agenda. Paul described the latest instance, and one of the most shocking, here.
Then there is the fact that Barack Obama is a scofflaw. Repeatedly, he has ignored the Constitution and violated federal law, refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, imperiously changing his own Obamacare statute with no legal authority, and so on. Years later, the courts sometimes catch up with him; the administration has lost a number of 9-0 Supreme Court decisions where its lawbreaking was indisputable. But more broadly, the Obama administration’s campaign of lawbreaking and stonewalling has succeeded.
Glenn asks the right question: if our purported leaders are scofflaws, why should the rest of us be honest?
So why do the rest of us bother to obey the law? And, yes, that’s an increasingly serious question.
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[P]eople may obey the law because they think that being law-abiding is an important part of maintaining a viable society. But that’s the kind of law-abiding behavior that’s at risk when people at the top treat the law with unconcealed contempt.
Being law-abiding for its own sake is a traditional part of bourgeois culture, and our ruling class has lately treated the bourgeoisie with contempt as well. Which raises the risk that this contempt will be returned.
It is being returned, as evidenced by the Trump and Sanders candidacies.
America has been — and, for the moment, remains — a high-trust society. In high-trust societies, people extend trust to strangers and follow rules for the most part even when nobody is watching. In low-trust societies, trust seldom extends beyond close family, and everybody cheats if they can get away with it.
High-trust societies are much nicer places to live than low-trust ones. But a fish rots from the head and the head of our society is looking pretty rotten.
Which is why this year’s election is so important. Barack Obama’s legacy must be repudiated, root and branch.
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5)
How Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy De-Stabilized the World
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier warned Adolf Hitler that if the Third Reich invaded Poland, a European war would follow.
Both leaders insisted that they meant it. But Hitler thought that after getting away with militarizing the Rhineland, annexing Austria, and dismantling Czechoslovakia, the Allied appeasers were once again just bluffing.
England and France declared war two days after Hitler entered Poland.Once hard-won deterrence is lost, it is almost impossible to restore credibility without terrible costs and danger.
Last week, Russian officials warned the Obama administration about the installation of a new anti-ballistic missile system in Romania and talked of a possible nuclear confrontation that would reduce the host country to “smoking ruins” and “neutralize” any American-sponsored missile system.Such apocalyptic rhetoric follows months of Russian bullying of nearby neutral Sweden, harassment of U.S. ships and planes, warnings to NATO nations in Europe, and constant threats to the Baltic states and former Soviet republics.
China just warned the U.S. to keep its ships and planes away from its new artificial island and military base in the Spratly archipelago — plopped down in the middle of the South China Sea to control international sea lanes.
Iranian leaders routinely threaten to close down the key Strait of Hormuz. North Korea and the Islamic State are upping their usual unhinged bombast to new levels — from threatening nuclear strikes on the U.S. homeland to drawing up hit lists of Americans targeted for death.
All the saber-rattling of 2016 is beginning to sound a lot like the boasts and bullying of Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany of the 1930s.
But why so much tough talk — and why now?
After the abject pullout from Iraq in 2011 and the subsequent collapse of the country eroded U.S. credibility, after the fake Syrian red lines, the failed reset with Russia, the Benghazi fiasco, and the slashing of the military, America has lost its old deterrence.
In a recent interview, President Obama claimed that his Syrian flip-flop was one of his prouder moments, and he disparaged some of our allies (presumably Britain and France among them) as unreliable, glory-hogging freeloaders.
Israel has formed an alliance with some of its longtime enemies in the Persian Gulf based on their shared fears of Iran and their mutual distrust of American commitment. Israelis and Saudi Arabians alike are confused about whether the Obama administration naïvely appeased Iran with a nuclear deal or deliberately courted it as a new ally.
Japan and South Korea have hinted about going nuclear, prompted by their growing distrust of decades-old American pledges to protect them from neighborhood bullies such as China, North Korea, and Russia.
In a recent New York Times Magazine interview, deputy national-security adviser and presidential speechwriter Ben Rhodes ridiculed the “Blob” — his derogatory term for the bipartisan Washington, D.C., foreign-policy establishment. He also bragged about deceiving journalists and policy wonks in order to ram through the Iran deal without Senate approval or public support. Rhodes, who wrote Obama’s mythological “Cairo Speech” and also the infamous Benghazi “talking points,” seemed to confirm accusations that this administration has contempt for traditional U.S. foreign policy.
If we know how and when the U.S. lost its ability to deter enemies and protect friends, why is the world suddenly heating up in the last year of Obama’s presidency?
Recent interviews with the president and his advisers might confirm the impression abroad that the global order is, for a rare moment, up for grabs, as a lame-duck administration retreats from America’s role of world leader. And given that there are only eight months left to take advantage of this global void, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and Islamic terrorists are beginning to believe that the U.S. will not do anything to stop their aggressions once they change global realities by force.
South Korea, Estonia, Japan, Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Philippines, and much of Europe all expect provocations — and fear the U.S. might issue more red lines, deadlines, and step-over lines rather than come to their aid.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Aggressors are not sure whether Hillary Clinton, if elected, will govern more like a traditional Democratic president committed to leading the Western alliance. And if Donald Trump were to be elected, no aggressor would know exactly why, when, or how he might strike back at them.Given those uncertainties, it may seem wise in the waning months of 2016 for aggressors to go for broke against the predictable Obama administration before the game is declared over in 2017.For that reason, the next few months may prove the most dangerous since World War II.
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