It’s Wednesday, January 4th, 2016…but before we begin, a couple quick factoids concerning the United Nations which underscore not only the perfidy of The Obamao’s sell-out of the only democracy in the Middle East, but which highlights the true nature of this hopelessly-corrupt, kleptocratic charade. First, consider the…
Second, meet the inmates running the asylum:
Saudi ArabiaExpertise in human rights: Death sentences for apostasy and adultery; corporal punishment including flogging and amputation; judiciary controlled by regime; beheading more peoeple than ever before; arbitrary arrests of dissenters and minorities; no freedom of speech; jails blogger Raif Badawi.
VenezuelaExpertise in human rights: Widespread arbitrary detention; imprisonment of opposition leaders; intimidation of journalists; torture; policies causing mass hunger and health catastrophe.
ChinaExpertise in human rights: Denial of freedom of speech, religion, and association; extrajudicial killings; repression of civil society; discrimination against Tibetans and other minorities.
CubaExpertise in human rights: Systematic violation of freedom of speech, assembly, press; elections are neither free nor fair; threats and violence against dissidents.
IraqExpertise in human rights: Pro-government militias commit widespread human rights abuses, including assassinations, enforced disappearances, property destruction.
QatarExpertise in human rights: Inhuman conditions for 1.4 million migrant workers; women denied basic rights to equality, denied right to be elected to legislative council; finances ISIS and Hamas.
BurundiExpertise in human rights: Police killings of peaceful protesters; government forces commit summary executions, targeted assassinations, enforced disappearances; arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence; genocide warning.
BangladeshExpertise in human rights: Extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, killing of secular bloggers by Islamist groups, restrictions on online speech and the press, early and forced marriage, gender-based violence, abysmal working conditions and labor rights.
United Arab EmiratesExpertise in human rights:No political parties, no option to change government; restrictions on freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association; arrests without charge, incommunicado detentions, lengthy pretrial detentions; police and prison guard brutality; violence against women; anti-gay discrimination; mistreatment and sexual abuse of foreign domestic servants and other migrant workers.
Sorta like B. Hussein calling Conservatives racists…
…after willingly attending Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years.
“…The president is correct that the largest issue in the election was the Obama legacy: the 125 percent increase in federal debt while the national work force shrank by 10 percent, the shameful Iran nuclear and sanctions giveaway,the shambles of the “red line” and other flip-flops and miscues all over foreign policy, the haughty disparagement of large sections of the electorate (in which he was almost outdone by Mrs. Clinton),the immigration policy of proudly admitting to the U.S. whomever might be seized by the ambition to enter, and the slavish adherence to the most alarmist versions of the faddish climate apocalypse, whatever the cost in American jobs and the current-account deficit, and without waiting for evidence adequate to justify radical measures.The president has had a whim of iron, informed by bygone reflexively socialistic pieties, and while he has not been popular and the majority has thought throughout his administration that the fundamental direction of the country was mistaken, about half the people either like him as a public personality or are afraid, because he is not white, to admit that they don’t.
He may be, as he often seems, a charming man, but when he has gone and the issue of race is not much involved in assessing his performance, he will be seen to have failed as president, as did, though for somewhat different reasons, and not without some successes, his predecessor, George W. Bush. That is their shared legacy: failure, for four terms. There has never been such a sequence in the country’s history. Which is why, for the first time in the country’s history, a person who has never held a public office or senior military command took over one of the main parties by winning the primaries and went on to win the election: an unprecedented solution to an unprecedentedly prolonged period of presidential failure.
…It is also of a piece with the entire foreign-policy career of Secretary of State John Kerry. He entered public life whitewashing the odious and murderous regime of North Vietnam, even as he made false claims to being a war hero, and he exits with his 78-minute pastiche of lies and defamations of Israel at the State Department last week. “Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic,” he said; he must be mad. How anyone can contemplate the horrifying fact that George W. Bush, inept as he largely was (though not in fighting terrorism), almost lost to Al Gore and then to John Kerry, and can reflect on the practical and moral disaster of the Obama Gong Show, and can still be seriously nervous about a Trump presidency escapes my comprehension. In less than three weeks the United States will take off and disarm the self-destructive devices it has been swaddled in for many years. Only a person burdened by a pessimism not of this world(Or a complete detachment from reality.)could think the State of the Union is about to deteriorate from where President Obama leaves it.“
Which again begs the question we’ve posed since The Dear Misleader initially announced for President: is he hopelessly inept…
…or deliberately destructive?!?
In a related item courtesy of Jeff Foutch, Breibart presents…
“President Obama and his mouthpieces have embarked on a bizarre scheme to hypnotize America into forgetting the many scandals of his presidency.They seem to think that intoning “this administration hasn’t had a scandal”overandover againwill make history disappear.It’s the lamest Jedi Mind Trick ever, and is being pushed on people who know Star Wars is just a movie.
Here’s a short list of the many scandals Team Obama thinks it can make America forget…“
Which is one of the reasons we believe Barry has been so intent on controlling the internet.
Moving on, B. Hussein I is just one reason George Will is bidding…
Good Riddance, 2016
Saying goodbye to an awful year
Viewing 2016 in retrospect — doing so is unpleasant, but less so than was living through it — the year resembles a china shop after a visit from an especially maladroit bull. Because a law says, “The state of California may not sell or display the Battle Flag of the Confederacy . . . or any similar image,” a painting of the 1864 Siege of Atlanta was banned from display at the Fresno County fair. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services churned out a 25-page policy statement about “the systematic inclusion of families in activities and programs that promote children’s development, learning, and wellness.” That is, government should provide, as an act of grace — systematic grace — a role for parents in raising their children.
Let freedom ring, in the nooks and crannies of the administrative state: One day a year — Lemonade Day — children in Austin, Texas, can sell the stuff without spending $460 on various fees, licenses, and permits. Twelve-year olds in a Tampa middle school, learning about “how much privilege” they have, were asked if they were “Cisgendered,” “Transgendered,” or “Genderqueer.” Two years after Emma was the most common name given to baby American girls, the trend was toward supposedly gender-neutral baby names (e.g., Lincoln, Max, Arlo) lest the child feel enslaved to stereotypes. A New Jersey mother says a police officer interrogated her nine-year-old son after he was suspected of a racial slur when he talked about brownies, the baked good. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission pondered whether a worker committed racial harassment by wearing a cap emblazoned with the Gadsden flag (depicting a coiled rattlesnake, with the words “Don’t Tread on Me”). A University of Iowa professor complained that the Hawkeyes’ mascot, Herky, a fierce bird, is “conveying an invitation to aggressivity and even violence” that is discordant with the “all accepting, nondiscriminatory messages we are trying to convey.”
As President’s Day approached, San Diego advised city workers to use “bias-free language” by avoiding the phrase “Founding Fathers.” A National Park Service employee giving guided tours of Independence Hall in Philadelphia told tourists that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were produced by “class elites who were just out to protect their privileged status.”The employee praised herself for her “bravery.” The NBA, which plays preseason games in China, home of forced abortions and organ harvests, moved its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte because of North Carolina’s law stipulating that transgender individuals should use bathrooms appropriate to their physiology.
At Washington’s refurbished Watergate Hotel, the message on room-key cards reads “No Need to Break In.” The New York Times reported the downside of humanity’s mastery of fire: “Figuring out how to make fire was no doubt an evolutionary boon to our ancestors. But it may have led to our smoking habit.” Facing a budget shortfall in 2010, New York’s legislature raised the cigarette tax $1.60 to $4.35 per pack, expecting, illogically, that it would discourage smoking and raise $290 million annually. By 2016, cigarette revenues had fallen 25 percent and smuggled cigarettes held 58 percent of the New York market. (And led to the death of Eric “I Can’t Breathe” Garner.)
By 2016, six years after the president’s (fat-assed) wife agitated for federal guidelines limiting sodium, sugar, fats, and calories in school lunches, 1.4 million students had exited the National School Lunch Program, and students had a robust black market in salt and sugar. A tweet with the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama said, “The first lady can have a personal chef, but I can’t have two packets of ketchup?” After Connecticut imposed its fifth tax increase since 2011, General Electric moved its headquarters from there to Boston. CKE Restaurants includes the Carl’s Jr. chain, which was founded in California and ignited the fast-food industry. CKE announced that it was moving its headquarters from California (highest income-tax rate: 13 percent) to Tennessee (highest income-tax rate: zero).
Congress considered bills to prevent the IRS from hiring or retaining people delinquent in their tax payments. Unions in New York and California lobbied for exemption from the $15 minimum wage they had lobbied for. It was splendidly appropriate that when Cuba buried the architect of its ramshackle socialism, the vehicle carrying Castro’s ashes broke down and had to be pushed by soldiers. “Thou swell, thou witty, thou sweet, thou grand” were not lyrics that many Americans sang about either presidential candidate, but one of them had to win, so as you steel yourself for 2017, remember H. L. Mencken’s timeless wisdom: A martini is “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.”
Next up, also writing at NRO, Andrew McCarthy wonders…
“…After eight infuriating years, I am beyond trying to fathom whether his intentional gibberish masks some misguided but well-meaning strategy, some dogma to which he is hopelessly beholden, or something more sinister. The imperative now is to address the mess he is leaving behind, not unwind how and why he came to make it.
…Even after all the mass-murder attacks we have endured over the last few decades, and for all their claptrap about respecting Islam as “one of the world’s great religions,” transnational progressives cannot bring themselves to accept that something as passé as religious doctrine could dictate 21st-century conflicts. So, they tell themselves, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is simply about territorial boundaries and refugee rights. It could be settled if Israel, which they reckon would never have been established but for a regrettable bout of post-Holocaust remorse, would just make a few concessions regarding land it was never ceded in the first place (conveniently overlooking that East Jerusalem and the West Bank are disputed territories, and were not “Palestinian” when Israel took them in the 1967 war of Arab aggression).
Transnational progressives see Israel as intransigent, notwithstanding its many attempts to trade land for peace. They rationalize Palestinian terrorism as the product of that intransigence, not of ideology. Thus their smug calculation that branding Israel as an “occupier” of “Palestinian land” in gross “violation of international law” is the nudge Israel needs to settle. This will effectively grant the Palestinians their coveted sovereign state. Thus accommodated, Palestinians will surely moderate and co-exist with Israel — if not in peace, then in the same uneasy state in which Parisians coexist with their banlieues and Berliners with their refugees.
It is not just fantasybut willfully blind idiocy.No one who took a few minutes to understand the ideology of radical Islam would contemplate for a moment a resolution such as the one Obama just choreographed.
Under Islamic law, the Palestinians regard all of the territory — not just East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria but all of Israel — as Muslim territory. Furthermore, they deem the presence of a Jewish-ruled state on that territory as anathema. A Security Council resolution that declares Israeli control of the disputed territory not merely an “obstacle to peace” but illegitimatetells the Islamists that their jihad has succeeded, that non-Muslim powers accede to their sharia-based demands. It can only encourage them to continue their jihad toward their ultimate regional goal of eradicating the Jewish state.After all, Mahmoud Abbas has stated his racist terms: Not a single Israeli will be permitted to reside in the Palestinian state.As Islamists see it (and why shouldn’t they?), Obama’s reaction was not to condemn Abbas; it was to appease Abbas.As Islamists
see it, Allah is rewarding their fidelity to Islamic doctrine; of course they will persevere in it.
We are not merely in a shooting war with jihadists.We are in an ideological war with sharia supremacists.Mass murder is not their sole tactic; they attack at the negotiating table, in the councils of government, in the media, on the campus, in the courtroom — at every political and cultural pressure point. To defeat jihadists, it is necessary to discredit the ideology that catalyzes them. You don’t discredit an ideology by ignoring its existence, denying its power, and accommodating it at every turn.
President Obama never got this. Will President Trump?
In his campaign, Trump made a welcome start by naming the enemy. Now it is time to know the enemy — such that it is clear to the enemy that we understand his objectives and his motivation, and that we will deny him because our own principles require it.
The new president should begin by renouncing Obama’s Palestinian power-play: Revoke any state recognition Obama gives the Palestinians; defund them; clarify the disputed (not occupied) status of the territories; move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; reaffirm the principle that the conflict may only be settled by direct negotiations between the parties; and make clear that the United States will consider the Palestinians pariahs until they acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, stop indoctrinating their children in doctrinal Jew-hatred, and convincingly abandon terrorism.
That would tell radical Islam that America rejects its objectives as well as its tactics, that we will fight its ideology as well as its terrorism. This is not just about restoring our reputation as a dependable ally. Our security depends on it.“
To borrow a phrase from the immortal D0yle Lonnegan in The Sting, Barack Hussein, not only are you a cheat…
So here’s to you, Barry Soetoro…you Islamofascist douche pump:
And in today’s Environmental Moment, writing at The Federalist, John Davidson notes the ignorance of the ill-informed, as the EPA tells Alaskans attempting to survive Winter in sub-zero temperatures to…
“In Jack London’s famous short story, “To Build A Fire,” a man freezes to death because he underestimates the cold in America’s far north and cannot build a proper fire. The unnamed man—a chechaquo, what Alaska natives call newcomers—is accompanied by a wolf-dog that knows the danger of the cold and is wholly indifferent to the fate of the man. “This man did not know cold. Possibly, all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold 107 degrees below freezing point. But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge.”
If only the bureaucrats in Washington DC knew what the wolf-dog knew. But alas, now comes the federal government to tell the inhabitants of Alaska’s interior that, really, they should not be building fires to keep themselves warm during the winter…
…The problem is, there’s no replacement for wood-burning stoves in Alaska’s interior. Heating oil is too expensive for a lot of people, and natural gas isn’t available. So they’ve got to burn something. The average low temperature in Fairbanks in December is 13 degrees below zero. In January, it’s 17 below. During the coldest days of winter, the high temperature averages -2 degrees, and it can get as cold as -60. This is not a place where you play games with the cold. If you don’t keep the fire lit, you die.For people of modest means, and especially for the poor, that means you burn wood in a stove—and you keep that fire lit around the clock…”
Further proof, as if any were really needed, the only poor about which Progressives care are those who can depended upon to vote for whatever candidate’s name is followed by a (D).
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
And in our opinion there’s nowhere on the planet better at committing the crime than The Palm…particularly if Chuck’s tending your table!
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