It’s Wednesday, August 21st, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!
Leading of the top of today’s order, as CBS News reports…
And what, inquiring minds want to know, did NBC and ABC have to say on the subject of this latest Benghazi bombshell? Not a thing; but they did have time, notes Jim Geraghty, to announce the arrival of yet another mouth taxpayers will be forced to feed:
Egypt Burns, the NSA Is Out of Control, the Economy Stinks… Hey, Look, a Puppy!
The Obamas have a new puppy. This changes everything.
Though it’s been almost twelve months since four Americans were slaughtered and violated at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi:
– Nary a terrorist has been apprehended, let alone taken out;
– Not a single soul, anywhere in government has been pink-slipped or prosecuted;
– No one’s offered even the barest hint of an explanation regarding the whereabouts of the Commander-in-Chief during eight critical hours of the attack;
– And all this despite the utter inability of anyone in the Administration to explain how a fabricated fairy tale about spontaneous demonstrations resulting grade-Z short film no one few if any in the Muslim World had seen came to be peddled as fact for 2-1/2 weeks…despite everyone who’s anyone knowing it to be a patent prevarication.
So, to borrow a phrase from the woman who braved sniper fire in Bosnia, what difference…
…does it make now? Plenty!
Particularly if it keeps this lying sack of cellulite from ever again darkening the door to the Oval Office…unless she’s mopping the floor.
By the way, we don’t know what disgusts us more; Hillary’s abject unfamiliarity with the truth, or Republicans’ inability…or unwillingness…to expose her as the liar she most certainly is.
Since we’re on the subject of prevaricating Progressives, Commentary Magazine‘s Jonathan Tobin relates what he terms…
Obama on Egypt: The Clueless Presidency
There’s some soul searching going on in the Obama administration as it ponders how they got sidelined in Egypt as the situation there got out of control in a spiral of violence. As the New York Times details in a post-mortem of U.S. policy, the administration went all out to persuade the military that had overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood to compromise and allow the Islamists to rejoin the government. Among other efforts to cajole them or to threaten aid cutoffs, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made 17 often-lengthy phone calls to Egyptian General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi trying to get him to make nice with the Brotherhood. They even sent two Republican senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—to continue the pressure in person in Cairo. And they’re baffled as to why they were ignored as Sisi ordered police and troops to clear out the Brotherhood’s armed camps in Cairo this week.
The easy answer to their questions is that unlike Sisi and the military, President Obama and his foreign policy-team continue to fail to understand that the conflict in Egypt is a zero-sum game. The choice there is between the military and the Brotherhood and the transformation of a key Arab country into an Islamist stronghold. This failure to comprehend the nature of the conflict has led inevitably to paralysis. This spectacle of American impotence is worrisome no matter what you think the U.S. should do about Egypt. But it’s not unrelated to the administration’s other foreign-policy failures that are piling up in the Middle East. Having failed to act decisively to try to avoid a far bigger bloodbath in Syria, and content to waste years on futile diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear threat while devoting disproportionate effort on reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks that have little chance to succeed, it’s obvious that Egypt isn’t the only venue where Obama has demonstrated his cluelessness. As Sisi prepares to decide whether to enact a ban on the Brotherhood that might bring the confrontation in Egypt to a head, it’s important to understand that Obama’s failure in Egypt is not unrelated to his problems elsewhere. The common thread is a refusal to abandon its preconceptions and to look at facts rather than fiction inspired by ideology.
In Egypt, Obama’s main problem is his lack of understanding of the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood poses to both the non-Islamist majority in that country as well as to the region. Having bought into the myth that the Brotherhood’s rise in the aftermath of the fall of the Mubarak regime was an expression of democratic sentiment, it refused to see that if it was allowed to take power it would quickly move to destroy any opposition. The U.S. pressured the military to let Mohamed Morsi take office and then continued to urge them to stand aside as he proceeded to demonstrate that the Brotherhood had little interest in democracy. Even as 14 million people took to the streets to demand that Morsi step down, the president continued to preach restraint and then stood by in puzzlement when the military realized that this was probably their last chance to save their country. Even now, the administration seems stuck in the same mythical “Arab Spring” mindset that is predicated on the idea that a totalitarian movement like the Brotherhood is compatible with liberal democracy. Since they don’t understand what led to the events of the last week, how can we expect the Obama team to put forward a coherent position on what happened and what may unfold in the days to come?
This is a familiar pattern. (An all-too familiar pattern!) Obama came into office thinking that he could charm the Iranians into giving up their nuclear ambitions and that American pressure on Israel could magically create peace with the Palestinians. If problems arose elsewhere in the Middle East, he thought they would be easily resolved with bad guys like Bashar Assad conveniently leaving the stage because President Obama said he “must go.” So as we now peruse the Middle East, we see an Iran that thinks it can go on fooling the West with a diplomatic process intended to stall talks until they can build a nuke while the United States invests precious time and energy on muscling Israel into making concessions to a Palestinian Authority that has no interest in ever signing a peace agreement. And Bashar Assad, with the help of his Iranian and Hezbollah allies, remains in power while winning a civil war that Obama could have spiked two years ago with a timely push.
While critics from both the left and right assail Obama’s indecision that–as I noted on Friday–protects neither American interests nor values in Egypt, this is yet another symptom of an administration that remains besotted with the same preconceptions that it brought to Washington in 2009. While he laments his lack of good choices and the fact that America’s ability to influence events is limited, it is the president’s refusal to face facts about the Brotherhood and some of his other blind spots that is most to blame for the fact that he has left American foreign policy hanging in the wind at a decisive moment in history.
This is akin to a man convicted of killing his parents begging for mercy because he’s an orphan. More importantly, we’re far from certain America…and the world…isn’t exactly where Der Obafuhrer wants them to be.
How else can one explain, as these next two related items forwarded by Balls Cotton clearly confirm, the utter ignorance of History repeatedly revealed by what the MSM wants us to believe is brightest, most highly-educated President ever to put his feet up on the Resolute desk? First, Robert Reilly writing at Intercollegiate Review:
“Thirty million people in the streets of Egypt, with the help of the Egyptian military, have saved the United States from the consequences of its disastrous policy of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood since President Barack Obama came to office. Just months after his inauguration in 2009, Mr. Obama appeared in Cairo to address the Muslim world. He ensured that members of the Muslim Brotherhood were seated in the front row of the auditorium at Cairo University. Since the group was still officially banned in Egypt, no one from President Hosni Mubarak’s administration could attend. The message from the seating arrangement was unmistakable: even at the price of snubbing his official host, Mr. Obama recognized the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate player in Egyptian politics. Already, this was clearly interference in the internal affairs of the Egyptian state.
…Unfortunately, the German military did not move against Adolph Hitler when he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Had they done so, Europe and the United States would have been spared a world of woe. Had that happened, would the American government have tried to intervene at the time, insisting on a restoration of Hitler, who had been democratically elected by a plurality of the German people? Would we have insisted that our democratic creed required us to do so? These questions answer themselves. We would have been grateful to the German military for doing so. We should likewise have some appreciation for what the Egyptian military has done to save its country and, by the way, preserve U.S. strategic interests in that area of the Middle East.”
Then there’s this UPI.com‘s Arnaud de Borchgrave:
“The powers that be in the nation’s capital, including the dominant media culture, are suffering from collective geopolitical amnesia. CBS’s Ned Calmer and this reporter (for Newsweek) arrived in Cairo Jan. 25, 1952, acting on a tip picked up in Tunis, that something “big” would soon take place in Cairo.
Next day, Cairo erupted in what became known as “Black Saturday” and the “Big Cairo Fire.” It was huge. Some 300 buildings were torched, including the old Shepherd’s Hotel where we were staying. Martial law was decreed throughout Egypt. Losses to fire included 30 major companies and banks (including Barclays), 310 stores, 117 residential units, 92 bars, 73 coffee shops, 13 hotels, 40 movie theaters, either automobile showrooms, 10 weapons stores and 16 clubs. Casualties were comparatively light — 26 killed and 552 injured.
It was the handiwork of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. The plan was to create maximum chaos as a way of forcing a degenerate King Farouk and a weak coalition government to bow to the “religious saviors.”
…[What’s] More surprising is that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Big Cairo fire circa 1952, didn’t rate a mention in all the background stories about the current Cairo fires — done by the same organization that is now cast as the misunderstood innocents who won an election fair and square only to be deprived of the spoils by a supreme commander, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.“
From where we sit, this latest Egyptian debacle hasn’t deteriorated due to The Obamao’s being doomed to repeat the past as a result of not remembering it; the problem is he never really learned anything in the first place! Sure, he’s educated; but little good the theories of Engels, Marx, Alinsky and Frank Marshall Davis do when you’re a President tasked with actually running a government, rather than a radical trying to overthrow one!
In all seriousness, we’d take odds these two…
…could conduct a more successful foreign policy than this pair…
…of educated idiots.
Meanwhile, the obfuscation and misdirection continues, as the…
Nestled along the southern shore of Lake Ontario, the town of Greece, N.Y., with its population of 96,095 people and median household income of $53,541, would appear to be everything the town boasts of being in its promotional literature: namely, “a great place to live, work, and play.” It is also a great test case — in what is shaping up as the most important church-state litigation to reach the U.S. Supreme Court in three decades, with the Obama administration taking what is perhaps a surprising stance on the matter.
As far back as 1997, local officials in Greece opened the town’s monthly council meetings with a prayer, usually delivered by a Christian clergyman who responded to the town’s invitation to do so. “Grant these servants of yours the help they need to guide our community wisely,” intoned a priest from the Holy Name of Jesus parish to kick off the meeting of July 21, 2009.
But not all of the opening prayers were so ecumenical. “We celebrate your son, Jesus,” said a pastor from Lakeshore Community Church that December. “We ask all this through Christ, our Lord,” said another pastor, closing his prayer with the ritual “Amen.”
In February 2008, two residents — one Jewish, the other an atheist — sued the town, claiming that the nearly exclusive reservation of the opening prayer for Christian clergy violated the First Amendment’s prohibition on laws respecting an establishment of religion.
“During the nine-year period from the inception of the Town’s prayer practice to the eve of the filing of this lawsuit — a period involving exclusively Christian prayer-givers — over two-thirds of the prayers included Christian language, and no other religious traditions were referenced,” argued Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens in briefs filed with the Supreme Court in April. “The Town’s litigating position — that it would accept volunteers of any faith, whether clergy or otherwise — was undercut by the Town’s failure ever to announce, much less formally enact, an all-comers policy.”
The district court rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, but an appellate court overturned the lower court’s ruling — thus paving the way for the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Enter the Obama administration. Earlier this month, lawyers for the Justice Department, representing the federal government, filed an amicus curiae brief that — to the surprise of some veteran Court watchers — sided with Greece in arguing that the prayers pose no violation of the Constitution. “Neither federal courts nor legislative bodies are well suited to police the content of such prayers, and this Court has consistently disapproved of government interference in dictating the substance of prayers,” argued Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr.
The government brief went on to make a subtler argument, one sure to attract further scrutiny from the administration’s critics. “The court of appeals’ [sic] approach,” wrote Verrilli, “would inevitably require courts to decide questions such as whether references to the ‘Holy Spirit’ are uniquely Christian, whether prayers addressed to ‘Allah’ are uniquely Muslim, and whether references in particular prayers to ‘King of Kings’ are Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.”
Yeah…and if you believe that, we’ve got a grail we’d like to sell you! This meaningless sop to unwary Christians reminds us of the approbation heaped upon John McCain by the MSM prior to his clinching the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Though far more subtle, it flies in the face of everything else the Administration’s ever done or said, and is intended solely to distract, dissuade and…divide.
Next up, what we can only term a logical follow-on to the official sanctioning of criminal trespass:
Illegal Aliens Demand Free Organ Transplants
This insanity is taking place outside a prestigious Chicago-area hospital, according to news reports, but it’s only a matter of time before it spreads nationwide. Dozens of demonstrators and hunger strikers have gathered outside the medical facility chanting through bullhorns and waving large signs to protest the hospital’s policy that patients must be in the U.S. legally to qualify for an organ transplant procedure. One large, yellow sign captured in a newspaper photo says “we are also human!”
We fully appreciate and agree Mexicans, regardless of their immigration status, are in fact human. But if illegal immigrants have a “right” to organ transplants in America, why not Tanzanians…or Nigerians…or any other foreign nationals on the planet?!? It’s called a “National Organ Donor Registry” for a reason; and this is one case where Americans should be first and last…at least as long as there’s a native-born or naturalized citizen suitable for an available organ on the waiting list.
On the Lighter Side…
And in another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, here’s a real shocker:
You’ll recall these are the youths whose ethnicity was inexplicably omitted from initial reports they were bored, so “decided to kill somebody”. The “somebody” was Chris Lane…
…who just happened to be jogging by at the time. After determining Lane deserved death, the three little angels drove up behind him and shot him in the back.
No comments from either the Divider-in-Chief…
…or his Race-Hustling Czars:
Turning now to the Education Section, and this just in from North Texas:
School District Bans Parents From Walking Children Into Buildings
So this is bad policy…
…how?!? Particularly in North Texas!
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another Sign the Apocalypse is Upon Us:
No comment necessary; nor is there any doubt the authoress is a Lib. And for a moment, just for a moment, the writer’s choice of a nom de plume evoked memories of Hillary immediately after learning about the existence of Monica’s blue dress!
Magoo
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