Andy Mc Carthy - 2 Reasons Why BO Must be Defeated

2 Reasons Why Obama Must Be Defeated

Posted By Andrew C. McCarthy On November 5, 2012 @ 11:03 am In Uncategorized | 66 Comments

I don’t pretend to be without a strong preference in tomorrow’s election. I am voting for Mitt Romney and, without apology, I urge everyone to do the same. Nevertheless, trying to be as objective as I can after a week of living Sandy’s aftermath, two things – by themselves, even without the many others well catalogued in this IBD editorial – should disqualify Barack Obama from serving as president, much less from being reelected.

The first is the Benghazi attack. We now know not only that the president was aware that Americans were targets of a lethal, coordinated terrorist attack while it was underway; Catherine Herridge – who, along with Jennifer Griffin and their Fox News colleagues, continues to do extraordinary work covering a story the Obamedia is desperate to bury – has reported that just a few weeks before the fatal jihadist operation that killed four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the ambassador directly cabled the office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to warn that the consulate in Benghazi could not withstand a “coordinated attack” by terrorists. Such an attack was foreseeable in flashing neon given the prior attacks on the consulate, the prior attack on British diplomats nearby, the cable’s report of jihadist training activity in Benghazi (including by al-Qaeda and its local franchise, Ansar al-Sharia), the previous requests by U.S. personnel for enhanced security measures, and everything that was already known at the time of Obama’s ill-conceived, unprovoked war against Qaddafi about Benghazi’s being Libya’s Jihad-Central.

President Obama and his administration recklessly erected a diplomatic installation in a place too dangerous to have one even if there had been U.S. military security. It contracted out what passed for security to Libyans incapable of providing it — and, almost certainly, disinclined to provide it. It had mega-notice that jihadist terror attacks were not only in the offing but had recently occurred, and that September 11 was a day that screamed out for heightened protective measures. The commander-in-chief was aware of the attack as it was occurring – indeed, hours before it ended – had military assets a short distance away and capable of suppressing the enemy, yet failed to take actions that could easily have saved American lives.

Despite all this, the president and his administration outrageously blamed the attack on an obscure video that had nothing to do with what happened. They went so dishonorably far as to cite the video in the presence of the coffins of Americans killed in Benghazi. Not content with that, they launched a mendacious, vindictive prosecution against a man said to be responsible for the video – a man whose only apparent “crime” was to exercise his First Amendment rights in a manner disapproved of by our Islam-pandering president. And for want of a better explanation (gross incompetence doesn’t come close), all this was done in the service of a political agenda to portray Obama’s disastrous Libya policy as a success, the “Arab Spring” as an Obama-driven triumph of democracy rather than an Obama-enabled ascendancy of Islamic supremacism, and Obama counterterrorism as a bin Laden-slaying victory rather than an al-Qaeda surging failure.

What happened in Benghazi – the lead-up, the catastrophe of September 11, and the ongoing cover-up – is no longer just a debacle. It is an impeachable offense. Putting Americans in peril and grossly failing to take action to protect Americans under siege – in fact, under siege by an enemy with whom we were and are at war – is the most shocking form of dereliction of duty. Serially lying to the American people about the cause of the attack – in fact, covering up the fact that it was a coordinated terrorist attack in order to conceal the fact that the administration had been warned about the possibility and wages of a coordinated terrorist attack – is an inexcusable betrayal of the president’s oath of office. Benghazi makes Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal look like child’s play. Obama has shunned the highest responsibilities of his office, which are the security of Americans from hostile foreign threats and honesty in dealing with the citizens he serves. He should be removed. The voters can do it tomorrow, but it cannot be done fast enough.

Second, the storm that strafed the East Coast days before the election ought to remind every American to ask: What happened to the $800 billion-plus in stimulus funds? (And I’d note that, at Cato, Thomas Firey puts it at more like $2.5 trillion – and itemizes.) I do not subscribe to the Keynesian conceit that a dollar of government spending results in a dollar-plus of positive economic activity in the private sector, but if you’re going to do it, the constitutional concept of “general welfare” demands no less than that taxpayer money be spent only in a manner that benefits all Americans. (As I’ve argued before, I believe it may only be spent for the purposes enumerated in Article I, but put that aside for now.) Where are the improvements in our infrastructure? Where are the billions that could have been spent on improvements that might have left a region less paralyzed by a weather-related disaster?

In stark contrast, Obama took over $800 billion from us and shoveled it to his base, his cronies, the illusion of “green energy,” and state and municipal governments nearly as poorly run as the federal Leviathan. He has robbed Americans of millions of jobs, present growth, and future prosperity. This is larceny on an unprecedented scale, and we have nothing to show for it but mountainous, exploding debt – debt that will crush our children and their children … if we get that far. It is a profound betrayal of the intergenerational bond that is the foundation of our society.

These two things alone, Benghazi and a death-spiral of spending under the camouflage of “stimulus,” are more than reason enough to deny President Obama a second term. He must be defeated – and then we must, rather than resting, turn to the important task of minimizing the damage he can done before President Romney is sworn-in eleven weeks from now.
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Image courtesy shutterstock / millerium arkay

Benghazi

Sophocles in Benghazi

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On November 5, 2012 @ 12:00 am In Uncategorized | 99 Comments

What separated the great Athenian tragedian Sophocles from dozens of his contemporaries — now mere names attached to fragments and quotations — were his unmatched characters, an Ajax, Antigone, or Oedipus whose proverbially fatal flaws ultimately led to their own self-destruction.

The Libyan plot is Sophoclean to the core: the heroism of outnumbered Americans who chose to confront a deadly enemy, and were killed and wounded in the defense of their endangered comrades — while the world’s greatest military hesitated to use its power against a ragtag militia to save them.  Bureaucrats ignored not only pleas for beefed-up security before the attack, but also more requests that followed during the assault for reinforcement. A concocted story about a culpable obscure video gave opportunity for the administration to brag about their cosmopolitan multiculturalism as they damned the unhinged filmmaker and, in doing so, systemically lied about the real terrorist culprits of the killings.

The strange thing about Libya is not so much who lied, but rather the question of whether anyone has yet told the whole truth. When American diplomatic personnel are murdered abroad, an administration usually is vehement in blaming likely suspects; I cannot remember a single incident, however, when our government ignored those most likely responsible to focus on others least likely to be culpable. Once the election is over, and reporters no longer feel any remorse about hurting the reelection chances of Barack Obama, perhaps some of their usual incentives to crack open a cover-up will reassert themselves.

In Sophoclean terms, hubris (arrogance) — often due to a character flaw (amartia) — leads to atê (excess and self-destructive recklessness) that in turn earns nemesis (divine retribution).  In that tragic sense, an overweening Obama must have known that — despite the Drone killings — al-Qaeda was far from impotent. And it was not wise, as Obama once himself warned, to high-five the bin Laden raid and leak to the world the details — knowing as he did that bin Laden’s death was not his trophy alone (or indeed a trophy at all) — but better left an unspoken collective effort of military bravery and the dividend of the often derided Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols that Obama had both damned and then embraced. Ironically (another good Greek word), it was probably not so much an obscure video, but the constant chest-thumping about the grisly end of Osama that infuriated the al-Qaeda affiliates. Nothing, after all, is quite so dangerous as talking loudly while carrying a small stick.

Meanwhile, Obama would continue to bask in the removal of Gaddafi, but shirk the hard, dirty work of securing the postbellum tribal landscape. Chaos on the ground in Libya logically ensued — and yet was ignored, as the intervention had to be frozen in amber as an ideal operation. That narrative was again ironic, given that Obama had been among the most vocal in pointing out the vast abyss from

George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” to the Iraq insurgency.

Because Obama now cannot explain how his staff and subordinates watched a real-time video and did not react ^[1] as most Americans would have responded, he is saddled with a long, drawn-out tragic dilemma — knowing that the predetermined end will prove bad and so avoiding it brings only temporary relief. Americans can deal with stormed embassies and lost ambassadors — but not their commander in chief of the world’s most deadly military watching real-time videos of the carnage before going to bed to prep for a campaign stop in Las Vegas (a city Obama himself once preached should be avoided ^[2]). Either an administration discloses or does not disclose — but why, the public will ask, leak the covert details of the cyber-war against Iran, the Osama mission, and the Predator hit protocols, but not inform the public how our own were murdered? All that is hubris and simply asks too much of the public.

Then we come to Vice President Joe Biden, who serially bragged about the president’s bold decision to go after bin Laden. He clearly lied in his debate with Paul Ryan when he asserted that ^[3] “we weren’t told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more security again” — given all the contradicting evidence of direct appeals from the consulate and ambassador. Yet Biden sadly has became a sort of comedic court jester rather than a tragic figure. As a candidate, he made racial slurs ^[4] about the president and crudely joked about immigrants from India ^[5] — and thought FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929. ^[6]

Then as vice president, Biden has accused his opponents of wanting to reinstate the shackles of slavery, is chronically confused about what state he is in at any given time, and blurts out weird things ^[7] that suggest mental confusion. So ironically, of all the characters of the Libyan tragedy, Biden by his very buffoonery is alone exempt from criticism: we expect him not to tell the truth about the consulate, because he cannot distinguish the truth about almost anything. He is a jester, an entertainer, not a serious person from whom we expect veracity.  “That’s just old Joe being old Joe” means that Biden can say almost anything untrue about Libya and no one cares.

That Joe “put y’all back in chains” Biden is vice president should itself be tragic, but so far it has proved more a comic farce.

For Secretary of State Clinton, her awkward tenure at State was nearing a suitable end — at least from the point of view of her reviving her dormant political agenda. Whether the president won or lost in 2012 would have no bearing on her 2016 presidential ambitions.

Whether she left nobly or under a cloud most certainly would. Despite the downside of her job — outflanked by regional czars, her political independence forfeited, and her spouse’s vast income curtailed — for four years Hillary had kept in the news and largely navigated the Obama labyrinth on a safe course for 2016.

Perhaps no longer. For still largely unknown reasons, she or her staff ignored repeated, clear, and detailed prior warnings that the consulate and embassy were vulnerable — and largely defenseless against just the sort of attacks that would kill the ambassador. To the degree we have versions of some of the ambassador’s cables, the warnings all read hauntingly prescient. After the attack commenced, the State Department froze and went into a figurative fetal position — either assuming the CIA would protect the consulate, or that the
Obama successful Libyan narrative should not be endangered by a full-scale Black Hawk Down intervention. Or it was fed by vain hopes that someone, somehow would make it all just go away. “Twisting — slowly twisting in the wind” ^[8] was John Ehrlichman’s Watergate sick parlance to describe the cruel Nixon administration treatment of former FBI head Patrick Gray, but it also describes well enough Hillary’s next 90 days or so on the job. She is in a tragic dilemma: she wants to leave the Obama mess but cannot as long as she suspects that only her continued presence on the job wards off administration efforts to make her a fall person.

Susan Rice and James Clapper are minor, insignificant figures, but ones who both tested nemesis one too many times. The former helped dream up the Libyan intervention, along with Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton (would that Hillary could now take back that crude boast, “We came, we saw, Gaddafi died” ^[9]). Rice was eager that her previous behind-the-scenes labors should receive due credit on the eve of the exit of Secretary Clinton. She got her chance with Libya, played it to the full, and sadly made a fool of herself. She could have fairly summed up what the administration did not know, and done so perhaps once or twice on television. But perhaps her hubris drove her to spin an elaborate scenario of protestors mad over an uncouth video — and not once, but emphatically five times on a single Sunday. If an investigation follows, she will probably identify those who provided her with such narratives that simply could not be true, and were known to be untrue at the time.

James Clapper, in terms of Washington rules, had gotten away with quite a lot. He was a Bush appointee promoted by the new administration, after making the necessary adjustments that such a transformation requires. He seemed strangely clueless on television when told of a foiled London terrorist operation. He almost alone claimed that Gaddafi would not fall. He even more singularly assured us that the Muslim Brotherhood was secular. And he somehow trumped all of that by promulgating the Muslim anger over a video narrative — despite a drone video sending back real-time film of a terrorist attack. How he had so far avoided nemesis is a mystery, but it is no mystery that he will no longer.

David Petraeus is in a classically tragic role — the sole character who combined sterling intelligence and military expertise that would seem to have been critical in responding to just this sort of terrorist assault.  At first report, the only uplifting element of the entire debacle seems to have been incomplete reports of some CIA and private contractor help sent to the consulate, and then a tardy CIA posse dispatched to the annex. But those facts are lost amid rumors and leaks that the intelligence community is also culpable (why would a private contractor have to disobey CIA orders in order to attempt to save an ambassador?) — both in not predicting the danger (or not listening to those who did) and in not addressing the attack at the embassy properly, and in not publicly providing answers to public concern.

Of course, Petraeus also must have known when he selflessly took the job that he was descending from Olympus to assume control of a bureau infamous for tarnishing the reputations of almost all who had tried to harness it — an agency whose failures surface in the media, but whose successes usually remain classified, and whose director during scandal and catastrophe is usually the first to be blamed and last to be exonerated. In a fair world, perhaps Petraeus, not Martin Dempsey, should have been chairman of the Joint Chiefs, given his salvation of Iraq. Instead, he was dispatched to a difficult mission in Afghanistan and asked to restore calm, but without a desperate George W. Bush as his commander in chief, willing to wage all to reclaim a nearly lost war. From what little we know so far, Petraeus was not necessarily culpable for providing too little security or sending too little help when the consulate was attacked, but from deliberate leaks a narrative seems to be emerging that he should be held culpable for something. Yet in a larger sense, we know that principled people who go to work for this administration often do not end up well — and so wonder to what degree Petraeus himself is in a position to concede that dilemma, and the consequences to come when the final act of the tragedy of Libya will be at last fully aired.

BO Bungles Afghanistan

President Obama Fumbled Afghanistan
By Michael Yon
President Obama ascended to the power through audacity, oration, and artful manipulation.  In the United States and numerous Asian countries, I saw peoples’ eyes glaze with unconditional trust in a man who is unfit for office.
After the last election, I happened to be home from the wars, and in Washington DC for meetings.  President-elect Obama’s inauguration was nearby, and so I attended on that freezing morning.  Some of my detractors said, “Look at that, Yon’s joined forces with Obama.”  It was an historical event worth seeing. The new president would, after all, be the decider in the wars to which I would soon return.
Many inauguration spectators appeared to be in a trance.  Some hated President George Bush. Others talked about revenge for historical injustices.  For some it was about money for nothing, while for others it was about a sincere desire for hope and change from a vaguely defined status quo.  All were searching for something better or more.
Patriotism was noticeably thin at the inauguration.  Yes, there were thousands of American flags, though team spirit would be more evident at a college football game. The flags were waving in a breeze laced with the stench of entitlement.  It was not a God Bless America day. It was a God Bless Me day.
And there he was.  Our new President. I determined to support him until he proved unworthy.  Almost four years later, many people have snapped out of the trance, and that includes many non-Americans here in Asia.  Obama’s magic wand has been broken over the knee of reality.
I cannot speak about the economy, education or healthcare, but I can speak about Afghanistan.  Obama cannot be faulted that Afghanistan is stone-aged, or that our military strategy was wrecked when he took office.  It was.  The bus was in a ditch. Obama showed up with a wrecker, promising to yank it out.  Today the wrecker is in the ditch atop the bus.
President Obama did fire General McChrystal and send General Petraeus to Afghanistan, which was smart.  But now Director Petraeus is at the CIA, and not where we most need him, which is in the military.  President Obama’s mishandling of the war has left many of us disillusioned.
Our leaders have repeatedly seen national news outlets indict the inadequacy of our MEDEVAC systems in Afghanistan.  It can be said, “Yes, but it was done this way during the last administration.”  True.  And this administration promised hope and change.
Despite sustained national coverage of the MEDEVAC issue and direct appeals to the White House and Obama’s chosen Secretary of Defense, our helicopters still fly over Islamic Afghanistan wearing Red Crosses, which signals that the helicopters are unarmed, has caused unforgivable delays removing wounded troops from the battlefield.
Afghanistan: In October 2001, we destroyed Mullah Omar’s mosque in Sangesar Village, down in Kandahar Province.  His second of three wives, Guljana, was from this village.  His family lived there.  This tiny mosque literally was the birthplace of the Taliban.
Under President Obama, ten years later in 2011, US troops renovated Mullah Omar’s mosque in Sangesar.  First we bombed it in 2001.  Then we fixed it in 2011.  This remains one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.
Perhaps we forgot that Mullah Omar gave Osama bin Laden sanctuary, and bin Laden then attacked America.
The symbolic appeasement represented by refurbishing the mosque is enormous. The place is in the middle of fields of poppy.  Renovating this mosque in Sangesar is like building a dual monument to al Qaeda, and drug cartels.
We are not in this together.  Sangesar is an enemy village.  Our troops still die there.
In 2012, Mullah Omar praised the murders of Coalition forces.  General John Allen, the US commander at the time, called it “an unmistakable message of death.”  Mullah Omar was so busy directing the faithful to murder our troops that he forgot to express gratitude for the revenue stream from opium, and for the renovated mosque demonstrating his potency.
This year, the casualties continue.   In March, at Sangesar, three Afghan insiders turned their guns on Americans, killing Staff Sergeant Jordan Bear from Denver, and Specialist Payton Jones from Marble Falls, Texas.  Another Soldier was wounded.  That is the payment we can expect for appeasing Islamic-narco-terrorists.
I was in the general area last year, and in previous years, and it was mostly about combat.  Our young troops are something to be proud of, and if you saw them in action you would be amazed at their courage and professionalism.  The mess we shoved them into is a national shame. We provided about half the troops required for the stated strategy, then began pulling them out against a domestic political deadline that has nothing to do with the war.  The surge has been a complete waste of effort.
America saw both President Obama and Governor Romney endorse our Afghanistan strategy during their last debate, where ISAF forces train the Afghan Army and Police as a prelude to our disengagement in 2014. This is a broken strategy, with Afghans murdering so many of their trainers.
At least 30% of Afghan trainees must be replaced annually due to desertions and endemic corruption. Training Afghans to replace Coalition forces is not working. As we draw down, the enemy will be able to focus on fewer troops. Hollow Afghan units will collapse, and corrupt Afghan politicians will finally abscond to Dubai.  We should cut our losses and remove the bulk of our force.
Although Obama needs to go home, this is no guarantee that Romney will do better. If Romney is elected, he will need a bigger wrecker.  He is guaranteed the same honest chance that Obama received.  Nothing less, nothing more.

BO And Other Has-Beens

Stephens: Barack Obama and Other Has-Beens

Yesterday's man of destiny is today's peddler of spent ideas.

• By BRET STEPHENS

On the eve of the U.S. presidential election four years ago, educated people nearly everywhere understood that China was the country of the future, green was the energy of the future, and Barack Obama was a man of destiny. How quaint it all seems now.
In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism last week in the New York Times, reporter David Barboza identified assets worth $2.7 billion belonging to various members of the family of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, including his 90-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher named Yang Zhiyun.

"The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name," Mr. Barboza reports. "But it happened after her son was elevated to China's ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister."

The Times report would be interesting were it about any leading Chinese official. But Mr. Wen is in a category unto himself, having spent his political career cultivating the image of a kindly old man—"Grandpa Wen"—with a humble background, a common touch, a scientific mind and an uncorrupted soul. In March he was instrumental in firing disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai, another fabulously wealthy servant of the proletariat. The prime minister is supposed to embody the moral fiber of the Communist Party.

Perhaps he does. Perhaps he's even the best of the bunch: In February, Bloomberg reported that "the net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China's National People's Congress . . . rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010." That averages out to more than $1 billion per delegate, and we're not even talking about the senior party leadership.

All this is good to know as a reminder that China, so recently extolled as the very model of technocratic know-how, turns out to be a country heavily populated at the top by rent-seekers and kleptocrats. Should that be surprising? Not if you think that nothing else can come from the lucrative crossroads where politically directed capital and politically connected individuals meet.

This brings us to Al Gore.

Earlier this month the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig reported that the former vice president's wealth is today estimated at $100 million, up from less than $2 million when he left government service on a salary of $181,400. How did he make this kind of money? It wasn't his share of the Nobel Peace Prize. Nor was it the book and movie proceeds from "An Inconvenient Truth."

Instead, as Ms. Leonnig reports, "Fourteen green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of President Obama's historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money."

That's nice work if you can get it—at least if you're on the investment-management end of the deal. But what if you're on the worker-bee end?

The Post story mentions one of the beneficiaries of Mr. Gore's investment acumen, Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls, which won a $299 million award from the federal government in 2009 to make electric-car batteries. Here's how that worked out:

"The company has dramatically scaled back, after executives concluded demand for electric cars was far lower than the administration forecast. The factory outfitted with stimulus funds is nearly idle, and plans to build a second plant have been postponed."

And so to Barack Obama.

When the history of this administration is written, maybe someone will note the dissonance between the president's hip persona and his retro ideology. Here was a man who promised a "transformative" presidency. Yet when transformation came, it amounted to a two-pronged attempt to impose, from one side, a version of European social democracy by way of ObamaCare, and from the other side a version of Chinese state-directed "capitalism" by way of the stimulus.

As a political matter it may have been Mr. Obama's good luck that the bankruptcy of both models became obvious only after he had gotten his way legislatively on both. Yet the president's sagging fortunes have everything to do with his buying into an ideological enthusiasm too late. In a different age, Mr. Obama would have been the guy who went out and bought an Edsel. In this age, Mr. Obama is the guy demanding that you buy an Edsel, too. That car is today called the Volt.

Mr. Obama might still squeak by. He has, in addition to incumbency and a vestige of likability, the benefit of a challenger who only found his stride very late in the campaign. But a second term will mean four years of spent ideas packaged in shopworn rhetoric, to be shoved down the national throat by a president with nothing politically to lose.

Sound appealing?
Write to bstephens@wsj.com

BMB YAB MIDEAST is YOUR's

You Broke Mideast, Mr. President, Now You Own It

 Posted 09/21/2012 06:53 PM ET

 

With the Middle East now more hostile to U.S. interests than ever, the "Arab Spring" has become a major political liability for the president. Try as he may, he can't distance himself from it.
Betraying his frustration with Cairo's Muslim Brotherhood, which egged on U.S. embassy rioters, President Obama said, "I don't think we would consider them an ally, but we don't consider them an enemy."
But in a May 2011 speech at the State Department, Obama essentially took credit for Islamists' rise to power as part of his broader Mideast strategy to help free them from the "repression" of despots, while ending their "suspicion" and "mistrust" of America from the war on terror.
"That's why, two years ago in Cairo," the president expounded, "I began our engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect."
The main beneficiary of his "engagement" was the radical Muslim Brotherhood, which has called for jihad against America and the destruction of Israel. The main loser was steady U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak.
The following timeline reveals how Obama sided, tragically, with the enemy from day one:
2009: Obama travels to Cairo to deliver apologetic speech to Muslims, and infuriates the Mubarak regime by inviting banned Brotherhood leaders to attend. Obama deliberately snubs Mubarak, who was neither present nor mentioned.
He also snubs Israel during the Mideast trip (and still hasn't stepped foot inside the borders of America's closest Mideast ally).

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2009: In the speech, Obama blames Mideast hostility toward Israel and the West on "colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims." He also vows to withdraw U.S. troops from Muslim lands and push for creation of a Palestinian state, proclaiming:

"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. ... It is time for the settlements to stop." Music to the ears of the anti-Semitic Brothers, who applaud wildly.

2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied Islamist — Rashad Hussain — as U.S. envoy to the Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, which works closely with the Brotherhood.

2010: Hussain immediately travels to Egypt to meet with the Brotherhood's grand mufti, and is followed by Obama, who makes another trip to Egypt.

2010: Secretary of State Clinton lifts visa ban on Egyptian-born grandson of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Tariq Ramadan, a suspected terrorist on the U.S. watchlist, is warmly received in Washington.
(Clinton's closest adviser, Huma Mahmood Abedin, happens to have extensive Brotherhood ties in the region.)

2011: The White House fails to back Mubarak in a coup organized by the Brotherhood.

2011: The White House sends intelligence czar James Clapper to Capitol Hill to whitewash the Brotherhood's extremism. Clapper testifies the group is a moderate, "largely secular" organization.

2011: Clinton sends her special coordinator for Middle East transitions, William Taylor, to Cairo to give Brotherhood leaders special training to prepare for the post-Mubarak elections.

2011: In a shocking first, the State Department formalizes ties with Egypt's once-outlawed, terror-tied Brotherhood, letting diplomats deal directly with Brotherhood party officials in Cairo.

April 2012: The administration quietly releases $1.5 billion in military aid to the new Egyptian regime and vows to secure additional billions from the IMF and World Bank. It also taps the Overseas Private Investment Corp., a U.S. agency, to underwrite $2 billion in private investment in Egypt and other Arab Spring states. More, it forgives up to $1 billion in Egyptian debt.

June 2012: Clinton grants visa to banned Egyptian terrorist who joins a delegation of Brotherhood officials from Egypt to meet with Obama's deputy national security adviser to demand the release of the Egyptian Blind Sheik terrorist imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

July 2012: Pledging "a new partnership," Obama invites Egyptian President and Brotherhood hardliner Mohammed Morsi to visit the

White House in September. Morsi is expected to demand Obama free the Blind Sheik, who happens to be a key Brotherhood leader, as well as the hero to the lead 9/11 hijacker and the current al-Qaida kingpin, both Egyptians themselves.

Shockingly, the administration has issued nondenial denials when asked if it has negotiated the release of a convicted terrorist rivaling Osama bin Laden in importance and reverence among al-Qaida followers.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., is investigating what could be the biggest scandal of Obama's presidency. He says federal agents recently approached his staff to complain that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are actually considering Morsi's request to free the Blind Sheik, as Omar Abdel Rahman is known, from a maximum security federal prison in North Carolina.

King says he has no doubt a deal is in the works. Former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy, who actually prosecuted the sheik nearly two decades ago in New York City, believes Obama has secretly signed off on the deal to appease the Brotherhood, and is waiting until after the election to announce it.

"I think the plan has been to agree to the Blind Sheik's release, but not to announce it or have it become public until after the election," said McCarthy, author of the new book, "Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy." "That is consistent with Obama's pattern of trying to mollify Islamists."

The Brotherhood's sudden rise to power in Egypt and Tunisia — and soon, in a possible domino effect, Yemen and even Syria and Jordan — didn't happen organically. It was orchestrated by a U.S. president sympathetic to its interests over those of Israel and his own country.

American Capitalism GONE (Pravda)

The irony of this article appearing in the English edition of Pravda (Russian on-line newspaper) defies description.  Why can a Russian newspaper print the following yet the American media can't/won't see it?

  
 American Capitalism Gone With A Whimper 
 
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American  descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. 
  
True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
   
Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
  
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas than the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a Burger King burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy".  Pride blind the foolish. 
  
Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power.  Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.
  
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama.  His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive.  His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world.  If this  keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not,  America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe. 
  
These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all.  First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, losses, and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars.  These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison.  Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes.  Should we congratulate them?
  


(This article "snoped" TRUE


These men, of  course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the  very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on  trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another.  They are also usurping the rights, duties, and powers of the American congress (parliament).  Again, congress has put up little more than a whimper to their masters.
  
Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motors) president step down from leadership of his company.   That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self-given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will.  Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.
  
So it should be no surprise that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies.  I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster.  Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, and so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.
  
Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "free man" whimper.
  
So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance, and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses?  Senator Barney Frank, a social pervert basking in his  homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal  norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a  looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his  Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort.  He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.
  
The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left. 

The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest, and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is.  The world will only snicker.
  
 Stanislav Mishin© 1999-2009... PRAVDA.Ru . When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru  should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point

AARP Love Affair with Obamacare

Strassel: The Love Song of AARP and Obama

Newly released emails reveal the 'nonpartisan' group's stealthy White House alliance on health care.

• By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

When Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan address the AARP on Friday, good manners will no doubt keep them from asking this question: How can that lobby claim to speak for American seniors given its partisan role in passing ObamaCare?
Thanks to just-released emails from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, we now know that AARP worked through 2009-10 as an extension of a Democratic White House, toiling daily to pass a health bill that slashes $716 billion from Medicare, strips seniors of choice, and sets the stage for rationing. We know that despite AARP's awareness that its seniors overwhelmingly opposed the bill, the "nonpartisan membership organization" chose to serve the president's agenda.
The 71 pages of emails show an AARP management taking orders from the White House, scripting the president's talking points, working to keep its board "in line," and pledging fealty to "the cause." Seniors deserve to know all this, as AARP seeks to present itself as neutral in this presidential election.

 

The emails overall show an AARP leadership—Policy Chief John Rother, Health Policy Director Nora Super, Executive Vice President
Nancy LeaMond, Senior Vice President David Sloane—that from the start worked to pass ObamaCare, before crucial details pertaining to seniors had been addressed. This crew was in constant contact with Mr. Obama's top aides, in particular Nancy-Ann DeParle and Jim Messina.

As early as July 2009, Mr. Sloane was sending the administration—"as promised"—his "message points" on Medicare. Ms. DeParle assured him "I think you will hear some of your lines tomorrow" in President Obama's speech—which he did. Mr. Rother advised the

White House on its outreach, discouraging Mr. Obama from addressing seniors since "he may not be the most effective messinger [sic] . . . at least to the McCain constituency." Better to manage these folks, he counsels, through the "authoritative voices of doctors and nurses."

AARP had long lambasted cuts in fees to Medicare doctors because reduced payments would mean fewer doctors who accept patients with the insurance. Yet in its campaign for ObamaCare, it argued the money the health law strips from Medicare—by imposing price controls on hospitals—would improve "care." When the organization tried to sell the line to its own people, it didn't go well. Ms. Super told Obama officials in June 2009: "It was actually a heavy lift for us to convince many at AARP that Medicare 'savings' (which they read as cuts) is not bad for beneficiaries." Note the "savings" quote marks.

Even in November 2009, as the ObamaCare debate progressed, Ms. LeaMond worried that the Medicare spin wasn't working against public criticism of the bill. She emailed Mr. Messina and Ms. DeParle that she was "seized" with "concerns about extended coherent, strong messaging by Republicans on the Medicare savings." To pull off the legislation, she mused, "we"—the White House and

AARP—will need a "concerted strategy."

Lobbying for Seniors, or for Obama?

The emails AARP didn't want its members to read.

In August 2009, AARP had already unveiled a national advertising blitz for ObamaCare, to ensure that "every member of Congress knows the 50-plus community wants action to fix what's wrong with healthcare." The group made this claim despite weeks of daily tracking showing its members in revolt against the president's plan.

July 23, 2009: AARP reported to the White House that 1,031 members called in against the proposed health-care changes; 77 called in support. July 28, 2009: 4,174 opposed; 36 in support. July 29, 2009: 2,656 opposed; 23 in support. Mr. Sloane told the White House that AARP lost 1,897 members in a single day "in disagreement over our position on health reform." All the reports to Team Obama were accompanied by AARP's request to keep the information "close," apparently so word didn't leak that seniors hate ObamaCare.

And the ad blitz went on.

Was AARP sending these tracking reports to its outside board of directors—its governing body? Maybe not: AARP staff seemed to view the board as a problem. In June 2009, Ms. Super emailed Obama budget guy Keith Fontenot: The AARP board is meeting, she said, and we "need to get their buy-in on several proposals," including the president's Medicare cuts, which "as you might imagine, they are a bit concerned about." Could he share ideas with her? "It would really help get them on Board."

When Mr. Rother was asked in December 2009 by the White House to attend an event with Mr. Obama, he declined. "I am presenting to my Board on health reform" on the same day, he wrote. "I think you want me to keep my Board in line, so please understand my need to regret."

AARP was, however, on 24-hour alert to do the White House's political bidding. Typical is a March 2010 email exchange about Rep. Larry Kissell, a North Carolina Democrat who remained a "no" vote as ObamaCare neared its endgame. Labor boss Andy Stern emailed Mr. Messina—"Kissel [sic] a Problem"—and advised bringing in the AARP guns. Mr. Messina forwarded the note to Ms. LeaMond, with the word "Help." "On it," she quickly responded. Soon after: Does Mr. Messina want AARP to have its board chairman arrange a meeting, or just call the congressman "right away?" "Both?" Mr. Messina asked. "Will do," she assured him. Rep. Kissell voted no.

In an interview, AARP spokesman Jim Dau and Legislative Policy Director David Certner noted that the lobby was committed to health-care reform long before Mr. Obama's election, that it pushed for policy additions to the bill that were crucial for seniors, and that it did not endorse legislation until AARP's priorities were met. They said that the board was kept informed and that AARP faced similar criticism when it worked with the GOP on a drug benefit in 2003.

"We get criticized, but we never take our eye off the ball when it comes to pursuing things that are good for our members," says Mr. Dau. "We make no apologies for our advocacy."

AARP's ardent efforts on behalf of ObamaCare bear a resemblance to the work of the drug and health industry in 2009—with one significant difference. Those industries' backroom dealing was motivated by financial self-interest. What motivated AARP, given that its membership of 37 million people 50 years old and older was clearly opposed to ObamaCare, since they recognized that it would hurt them? The answer appears to be: pure ideology.

In October 2009, Ms. Super expressed frustration that the Senate might strip more spending from the bill. She declared to colleagues:

"I'm heading up to the House now where at least Democrats are Democrats (sort of)." Ms. Super is now working for Mr. Obama's Health and Human Services Department.

In November 2009, Mr. Rother declined a White House request to have an AARP person take part in a roundtable. "I think we will try to keep a little space between us and the White House," he explained, adding that AARP's "polling" shows the organization is more "influential when we are seen as independent." He wanted "to reinforce that positioning," said the man working daily to pass ObamaCare, since "the larger issue is how to best serve the cause." Mr. Rother has left AARP and now leads the liberal National Coalition on Health Care.

When the health-care reform bill passed the House in March 2010, Ms. LeaMond exuberantly emailed Mr. Messina: "This is the new AARP-WH/Hill—LeaMond/Messina relationship. . . . Seriously, a great victory for you and the President."

But not one for America's seniors, who had looked to AARP to oppose ObamaCare's cuts and rationing. That's worth remembering come the next AARP bulletin to seniors offering its "balanced" view on issues.
Write to kim@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 21, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: 

The Love Song of AARP and Obama.