Cherokee Nation & More

All Fall Down

      Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On May 6, 2012  

The temple of postmodern liberalism was rocked these last few weeks, as a number of supporting columns and buttresses simply crashed, leaving the entire edifice wobbling.

Fake but Accurate Identities?

The trivial Elizabeth Warren “high cheekbones” fraud ^[1] nonetheless offered a draw-back-the-curtain look into the gears and levers of our national race industry. The real story is not that the multimillionaire liberal (and one-percenter) Warren fabricated a Cherokee identity for over a decade (to the delight of her quota-thirsty universities), but rather the notion that if a pink blond at Harvard can get away with faking a career-enhancing minority identity, then anyone, anywhere, can—or rather often has.

Give Ward Churchill his due: he worked at it—unlike Warren, who junked her supposed great, great, great grandparent once she got tenure and being “Indian” was a drag at Cambridge cocktail parties. At least, like the proverbial chameleon on the leaf, Churchill tried to alter his appearance with buckskin, beads, and braids to find an edge his otherwise mediocre talents and white male status would not supply. In contrast, Warren simply by fiat claimed high cheekbones—no beads, no trips to the reservation, no buckskin, no Churchillian effort. Note the connivance of Harvard, which hand-in-glove used Warren’s pseudo-identity to pad its “diversity” goals, which enable a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty to, well, not feel too guilty about remaining a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty.
Anyone who has taught in a university has come across the “Cherokee” con, especially given the Oklahoma diaspora in California. By the time I retired from CSU, I was exhausted with “1/16th” Cherokee students, who claimed success with their gambits. This was a world of Provost Liz Smith-Lopezes, José Beckers, Simba Bavuals, and all the other attempts to traffic in victimized identities.

Still, Warren, as no other recent examples, reminds us of the bald fakery in America these days. “Van” Jones was not born Van Jones. Louis (note the Jehmu Greene ^[2] bowtie) Farrakhan was not born Farrakhan (yet just try to be a cool black racist as the Caribbean Louie Wolcott, aka Calypso Gene). In his twenties, Barry Dunham Obama went from Barry (a not very useful preppie suburbanite-sounding name) to Barack Obama. In the La La lands of academia, high journalism, and big government (though not in the landscaping business, farming, or short-order cookery), we sometimes wear identities in America as we do clothes, a different outfit as the occasion demands, given that our present-day Jim Crow racialists are busy figuring out to what degree pigment, ethnic ancestry, nomenclature, or assumed identity “counts.”

Cross the border and you in theory can go from an impoverished Mexican national that lived a wretched material existence thanks to grandees in Mexico City to a “minority” with vicarious claims against the American system who is suddenly eligible for oppression-based, affirmative action recompense. But if your family came from Egypt in 1950, you apparently qualify for very little reparations, even if you are darker than the recent Jalisco arrival. Yet again, score 1600 on the SAT and achieve a 4.5 GPA in high school, and if both Asian and wanting to go to Berkeley or Stanford, well then, who cares about the Japanese interment, the Chinese coolie labor of the 1850s, or the exclusionary acts of the 1920s? Too many Asians doing too well is not diversity at all, so we go into the reverse quota mode of exclusion. Warren reminded us that we will soon need DNA badges to certify the exploding ethnic, racial, and gender claims against society. And just as there are too few young these days to support the retiring Baby Boom generation on Social Security, so too we have too few oppressors left to pay out subsidies and recompense for the growing legion of Warren-like victims.

Isn’t It the Economy, Stupid?

We have had 38 months of 8% plus unemployment. We are setting records in the numbers of Americans not working and the percentage of the adult population not employed. GDP growth was a pathetic 1.7%. The borrowing hit $5 trillion under Obama, who between golf outings and campaign hit-ups of wealthy people, adds $1 trillion plus each year in more debt. To question how to pay it back is to pollute the air or abandon the children. In 2005, Paul Krugman was writing why Bush’s spending was going to crash the economy; in 2012, Paul Krugman is writing why Obama’s far greater deficit spending, on top of Bush’s debts, is not going to crash the economy, given that we need to borrow far more than our paltry $3 or $4 billion a day.

In 2004, the media’s “jobless recovery” was the description of George W. Bush’s 5.4% unemployment rate. “It’s the economy, stupid” referred to George H.W. Bush’s 1992 annual 3.3-4% GDP growth rate. “Unpatriotic” was W’s $4 trillion in borrowing in eight years, not $5 trillion in three. If Obama right now had 5.4% unemployment, 3.4% economic growth, and a budget deficit of about $400 billion, what would the media call it—a job-full recovery, “it’s not the economy, smarty,” or patriotic borrowing?
Those with capital—slurred as one-percenters, fat cats, and corporate jet owners unless hit up for Obama campaign donations—are not hiring or buying. Maybe they think oncoming Obamacare will smash them. Maybe they see on the Obama horizon rampant inflation, debt cancellation, or higher taxes as planned liberal remedies for our endless borrowing. Maybe these shrugging Atlases see that fossil fuel energy is not pursued on federal lands, but needless new regulations are implemented.

Whatever the reason, they hesitate—only sorta buying here, kinda hiring there. And the result of millions of these collective hesitancies is an ossified Europeanized economy, run by technocrats without private sector experience and exempt from the sacrifice they demand of others, as they desperately try to borrow and grow the government to ensure a permanent lease on power through the creation of a vast angry dependent constituency. Not near-zero interest rates, not nearly a trillion dollars in “stimulus,” not four years of chronic deficits, not “quantitative easing,” not any classical priming seems able to shock the unwilling and hesitant back into action.

And Then There Is Our Survival

For about three years I have been monotonously suggesting that we were once again in a 1977-1979 Carteresque era, as Obama systematically trashed his predecessor’s policies, denounced “exceptionalism” and “unilateralism,” gave soaring narcissistic sermons on his/our new morality abroad, redefined both allies and enemies as morally equivalent neutrals, and generally suggested that if you were a China, Russia, Middle East, or Latin America, you had justifiable grievances against the pre-Obama U.S., at least during the era when the president was just “three years old.” Last time we did this, after three years of Carter’s sermonizing, calculating nations in 1979-1980 saw that it was time to get up from the table and cash in their chips. So we saw Russia in Afghanistan, China in Vietnam, Iranians in the U.S. embassy, communist insurgencies in Latin America, and radical Islam on the rise, culminating in the annus terribilis 1980. I’m afraid 2012 may be our 1980. For the Carter Doctrine will we get a Johnny-come-lately “Obama Doctrine”?

A “reset” Russia now threatens unilaterally to preempt and take out proposed U.S. anti-missile sites in Eastern Europe (Poland and the Czech Republic should enjoy that, even though it is mere bluster). The Chen case ^[3] reminds of China’s growing contempt for the indebted U.S. (They did not get the message that a community organizer and Chicago part-time lecturer is a postnational, postracial healer.) The Arab Spring is turning into an Islamist Winter. What the media forgot to tell us about the spike-the-ball presidential trip to Afghanistan is the president’s promise to end Predator drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan—the liberal favorite tool of foreign policy (no prisoners in Guantanamo, no tribunals, no trials, no media videos of the explosions, no reports of the kids and granny blown up along with the suspect, little dollar costs, no U.S. lives endangered, no downside really other than we sometimes are not quite sure whom we blew up below).

The more we praised and emulated the EU, the more it unraveled and the more its leaders distrust the “lead from behind” America (Obama never quite got it that, when Europeans trashed us for leading and being capitalist, the whining was a psychological mechanism for being happy that someone other than themselves was still leading and somewhere outside Europe was still capitalist). Or alternatively, just as Obama is our Nemesis, so too he is Europe’s: be careful what you pine away for.

If I were a state or clique up to no good, and if I thought Obama might not be reelected, in my final window of opportunity, perhaps around September, I might flex my muscles in the former Soviet republics, send another missile over Japan or South Korea, cruise into Taiwanese waters, put some Argentine Marines on the “Malvinas,” seek readjustment in Cyprus and the Aegean, send some rockets into Tel Aviv, dispatch some suicide bombers from Gaza, and let off more missiles from Iran. Not just to make a statement, or to gain more “please don’t” concessions, but because it was my pleasure to do it—if only for the hell of it.

Ministry of Truth

Around January 2009, deficits became “stimulus.” “Jobless recovery” vanished from the vocabulary. Guantanamo, renditions, and preventative detention virtually ended. And Obama’s successful surge paved the way out of Iraq. Predator assassinations of hundreds of suspected terrorists and anyone nearby when the explosives went off were liberal improvements over waterboarding three confessed terrorists.

The good war in Afghanistan turned bad, and the bad one in Iraq turned good. The Obama “surge” brought peace to Iraq. We were told that we could not just sit by and watch Libyan thugs kill the innocent, but could do just that in oil-scant Syria. Obtaining UN and Arab League approval to go to war without the U.S. Congress was “leading from behind.”

Those who made over $200,000 never paid their “fair share,” but could—and not by paying more in taxes, but by buying a $40,000 a person ticket to an Obama fundraiser. Golf was no longer an aristocratic indulgence, but fresh-air, healthy downtime for an overworked president. Mangling words and abject ignorance—whether “corpse-man” or Maldives/Malvinas—were evident only to nit-picking partisans. A downright mean country redeemed itself with free jet service to Costa del Sol, Aspen, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard.
Yes, after January 2009, Al Gore lives in a tiny green home. “Two Americas” John Edwards did not really build a 30,000 square foot mansion, with a 4,000 square foot “John’s Lounge.” “Punish our enemies” was the new civility.

What Does It All Mean?

In short, liberalism does not work, contrary as it is to human nature. I wish I could just say that about every thirty years or so, forgetful Americans take an allergy shot of it, suffer the reaction, and then get another three decades of Carter/Obama immunity. But instead statist redistribution and intrusion are an insidious process, no longer specific just to Democrats, but bound up in the growing affluence and leisure of the West—both serving its various needs of alleviating guilt to the masses, subsidizing half the nation, and providing much envied power and lucre to a highly educated and technocratic elite who have little talent for acquiring either in the private sector. That it is not sustainable does not mean that it will not cause havoc as it totters and collapses. Look at Russia and Eastern Europe circa 1989, or the present-day EU, or Greece proper, or California or Illinois today.

All Fall Down

All Fall Down

                

        On May 6, 2012 s

The temple of postmodern liberalism was rocked these last few weeks, as a number of supporting columns and buttresses simply crashed, leaving the entire edifice wobbling.

Fake but Accurate Identities?

The trivial Elizabeth Warren “high cheekbones” fraud ^[1] nonetheless offered a draw-back-the-curtain look into the gears and levers of our national race industry. The real story is not that the multimillionaire liberal (and one-percenter) Warren fabricated a Cherokee identity for over a decade (to the delight of her quota-thirsty universities), but rather the notion that if a pink blond at Harvard can get away with faking a career-enhancing minority identity, then anyone, anywhere, can—or rather often has.

Give Ward Churchill his due: he worked at it—unlike Warren, who junked her supposed great, great, great grandparent once she got tenure and being “Indian” was a drag at Cambridge cocktail parties. At least, like the proverbial chameleon on the leaf, Churchill tried to alter his appearance with buckskin, beads, and braids to find an edge his otherwise mediocre talents and white male status would not supply. In contrast, Warren simply by fiat claimed high cheekbones—no beads, no trips to the reservation, no buckskin, no Churchillian effort. Note the connivance of Harvard, which hand-in-glove used Warren’s pseudo-identity to pad its “diversity” goals, which enable a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty to, well, not feel too guilty about remaining a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty.

Anyone who has taught in a university has come across the “Cherokee” con, especially given the Oklahoma diaspora in California. By the time I retired from CSU, I was exhausted with “1/16th” Cherokee students, who claimed success with their gambits. This was a world of Provost Liz Smith-Lopezes, José Beckers, Simba Bavuals, and all the other attempts to traffic in victimized identities.

Still, Warren, as no other recent examples, reminds us of the bald fakery in America these days. “Van” Jones was not born Van Jones. Louis (note the Jehmu Greene ^[2] bowtie) Farrakhan was not born Farrakhan (yet just try to be a cool black racist as the Caribbean Louie Wolcott, aka Calypso Gene). In his twenties, Barry Dunham Obama went from Barry (a not very useful preppie suburbanite-sounding name) to Barack Obama. In the La La lands of academia, high journalism, and big government (though not in the landscaping business, farming, or short-order cookery), we sometimes wear identities in America as we do clothes, a different outfit as the occasion demands, given that our present-day Jim Crow racialists are busy figuring out to what degree pigment, ethnic ancestry, nomenclature, or assumed identity “counts.”

Cross the border and you in theory can go from an impoverished Mexican national that lived a wretched material existence thanks to grandees in Mexico City to a “minority” with vicarious claims against the American system who is suddenly eligible for oppression-based, affirmative action recompense. But if your family came from Egypt in 1950, you apparently qualify for very little reparations, even if you are darker than the recent Jalisco arrival. Yet again, score 1600 on the SAT and achieve a 4.5 GPA in high school, and if both Asian and wanting to go to Berkeley or Stanford, well then, who cares about the Japanese interment, the Chinese coolie labor of the 1850s, or the exclusionary acts of the 1920s? Too many Asians doing too well is not diversity at all, so we go into the reverse quota mode of exclusion. Warren reminded us that we will soon need DNA badges to certify the exploding ethnic, racial, and gender claims against society. And just as there are too few young these days to support the retiring Baby Boom generation on Social Security, so too we have too few oppressors left to pay out subsidies and recompense for the growing legion of Warren-like victims.

Isn’t It the Economy, Stupid?

We have had 38 months of 8% plus unemployment. We are setting records in the numbers of Americans not working and the percentage of the adult population not employed. GDP growth was a pathetic 1.7%. The borrowing hit $5 trillion under Obama, who between golf outings and campaign hit-ups of wealthy people, adds $1 trillion plus each year in more debt. To question how to pay it back is to pollute the air or abandon the children. In 2005, Paul Krugman was writing why Bush’s spending was going to crash the economy; in 2012, Paul Krugman is writing why Obama’s far greater deficit spending, on top of Bush’s debts, is not going to crash the economy, given that we need to borrow far more than our paltry $3 or $4 billion a day.

In 2004, the media’s “jobless recovery” was the description of George W. Bush’s 5.4% unemployment rate. “It’s the economy, stupid” referred to George H.W. Bush’s 1992 annual 3.3-4% GDP growth rate. “Unpatriotic” was W’s $4 trillion in borrowing in eight years, not $5 trillion in three. If Obama right now had 5.4% unemployment, 3.4% economic growth, and a budget deficit of about $400 billion, what would the media call it—a job-full recovery, “it’s not the economy, smarty,” or patriotic borrowing?

Those with capital—slurred as one-percenters, fat cats, and corporate jet owners unless hit up for Obama campaign donations—are not hiring or buying. Maybe they think oncoming Obamacare will smash them. Maybe they see on the Obama horizon rampant inflation, debt cancellation, or higher taxes as planned liberal remedies for our endless borrowing. Maybe these shrugging Atlases see that fossil fuel energy is not pursued on federal lands, but needless new regulations are implemented.

Whatever the reason, they hesitate—only sorta buying here, kinda hiring there. And the result of millions of these collective hesitancies is an ossified Europeanized economy, run by technocrats without private sector experience and exempt from the sacrifice they demand of others, as they desperately try to borrow and grow the government to ensure a permanent lease on power through the creation of a vast angry dependent constituency. Not near-zero interest rates, not nearly a trillion dollars in “stimulus,” not four years of chronic deficits, not “quantitative easing,” not any classical priming seems able to shock the unwilling and hesitant back into action.

And Then There Is Our Survival

For about three years I have been monotonously suggesting that we were once again in a 1977-1979 Carteresque era, as Obama systematically trashed his predecessor’s policies, denounced “exceptionalism” and “unilateralism,” gave soaring narcissistic sermons on his/our new morality abroad, redefined both allies and enemies as morally equivalent neutrals, and generally suggested that if you were a China, Russia, Middle East, or Latin America, you had justifiable grievances against the pre-Obama U.S., at least during the era when the president was just “three years old.” Last time we did this, after three years of Carter’s sermonizing, calculating nations in 1979-1980 saw that it was time to get up from the table and cash in their chips. So we saw Russia in Afghanistan, China in Vietnam, Iranians in the U.S. embassy, communist insurgencies in Latin America, and radical Islam on the rise, culminating in the annus terribilis 1980. I’m afraid 2012 may be our 1980. For the Carter Doctrine will we get a Johnny-come-lately “Obama Doctrine”?

A “reset” Russia now threatens unilaterally to preempt and take out proposed U.S. anti-missile sites in Eastern Europe (Poland and the Czech Republic should enjoy that, even though it is mere bluster). The Chen case ^[3] reminds of China’s growing contempt for the indebted U.S. (They did not get the message that a community organizer and Chicago part-time lecturer is a postnational, postracial healer.) The Arab Spring is turning into an Islamist Winter. What the media forgot to tell us about the spike-the-ball presidential trip to Afghanistan is the president’s promise to end Predator drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan—the liberal favorite tool of foreign policy (no prisoners in Guantanamo, no tribunals, no trials, no media videos of the explosions, no reports of the kids and granny blown up along with the suspect, little dollar costs, no U.S. lives endangered, no downside really other than we sometimes are not quite sure whom we blew up below).

The more we praised and emulated the EU, the more it unraveled and the more its leaders distrust the “lead from behind” America (Obama never quite got it that, when Europeans trashed us for leading and being capitalist, the whining was a psychological mechanism for being happy that someone other than themselves was still leading and somewhere outside Europe was still capitalist). Or alternatively, just as Obama is our Nemesis, so too he is Europe’s: be careful what you pine away for.

If I were a state or clique up to no good, and if I thought Obama might not be reelected, in my final window of opportunity, perhaps around September, I might flex my muscles in the former Soviet republics, send another missile over Japan or South Korea, cruise into Taiwanese waters, put some Argentine Marines on the “Malvinas,” seek readjustment in Cyprus and the Aegean, send some rockets into Tel Aviv, dispatch some suicide bombers from Gaza, and let off more missiles from Iran. Not just to make a statement, or to gain more “please don’t” concessions, but because it was my pleasure to do it—if only for the hell of it.

Ministry of Truth

Around January 2009, deficits became “stimulus.” “Jobless recovery” vanished from the vocabulary. Guantanamo, renditions, and preventative detention virtually ended. And Obama’s successful surge paved the way out of Iraq. Predator assassinations of hundreds of suspected terrorists and anyone nearby when the explosives went off were liberal improvements over waterboarding three confessed terrorists.

The good war in Afghanistan turned bad, and the bad one in Iraq turned good. The Obama “surge” brought peace to Iraq. We were told that we could not just sit by and watch Libyan thugs kill the innocent, but could do just that in oil-scant Syria. Obtaining UN and Arab League approval to go to war without the U.S. Congress was “leading from behind.”

Those who made over $200,000 never paid their “fair share,” but could—and not by paying more in taxes, but by buying a $40,000 a person ticket to an Obama fundraiser. Golf was no longer an aristocratic indulgence, but fresh-air, healthy downtime for an overworked president. Mangling words and abject ignorance—whether “corpse-man” or Maldives/Malvinas—were evident only to nit-picking partisans. A downright mean country redeemed itself with free jet service to Costa del Sol, Aspen, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard.
Yes, after January 2009, Al Gore lives in a tiny green home. “Two Americas” John Edwards did not really build a 30,000 square foot mansion, with a 4,000 square foot “John’s Lounge.” “Punish our enemies” was the new civility.

What Does It All Mean?
 
In short, liberalism does not work, contrary as it is to human nature. I wish I could just say that about every thirty years or so, forgetful Americans take an allergy shot of it, suffer the reaction, and then get another three decades of Carter/Obama immunity. But instead statist redistribution and intrusion are an insidious process, no longer specific just to Democrats, but bound up in the growing affluence and leisure of the West—both serving its various needs of alleviating guilt to the masses, subsidizing half the nation, and providing much envied power and lucre to a highly educated and technocratic elite who have little talent for acquiring either in the private sector. That it is not sustainable does not mean that it will not cause havoc as it totters and collapses. Look at Russia and Eastern Europe circa 1989, or the present-day EU, or Greece proper, or California or Illinois today.

Seth Leibson 05-04-2012

Time To Wake Up

May 4, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



A lifetime of welfare dependency. A capitulation to enemies that has come back to haunt us. A human rights fiasco.  An economy with no promise. That is what we see this week from President Barack Obama both in his campaign for re-election and in his policies.



Let’s begin with a lifetime of welfare dependency.  The Obama campaign unveiled a campaign slide show entitled “The Life of Julia” this week.  I guess Barack Obama likes to make composites of women because here is another one, what he and his campaign view as the typical American woman.  Here is how the slide show is introduced:  “Take a look at how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime—and how Mitt Romney would change her story.”  Fine, we go to the first slide—don’t worry, I’ll go no further.  We have baby Julia and the slide says “Under President Obama: Julia is enrolled in a Head Start program to help get her ready for school. Because of steps President Obama has taken to improve programs like this one, Julia joins thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.”  Then, it says “The Romney Ryan budget would cut Head Start,” etcetera, etcetera.



Let’s stop right there.  Why does the Obama campaign begin and suppose we all will gel to, affiliate, and associate with, or be a child in need of Head Start?  Head Start is a Great Society program for disadvantaged children—a several billion dollar program for, well, not-the-average American. At least not now.  So why do we start with this person?  Here’s why, to quote another keen observer of this: The President and his left-wing view of the world think of a woman and think “a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people's money rather than her own initiative or hard work.”  They truly believe living off the government, by the government, and from the government is the best way to live.  And of course a program like Head Start has tens of thousands of government employees, don’t forget that.



But what many don’t know is that Head Start is an abject failure.  Study after study has shown its ineffectiveness and, sometimes even, harm.  Here’s just one, as summarized by the Heritage Foundation: A scientifically rigorous evaluation called the 2010 Head Start Impact Study found the program “ineffective at providing a boost to children while in kindergarten and the first grade,” the years Head Start is geared toward.  Just a little more:



For the four-year-old group, access to the program failed to raise the cognitive abilities of Head Start participants on 41 measures compared to similarly situated children who were not allowed access to Head Start. Specifically, the language skills, literacy, math skills, and school performance of the participating children failed to improve.



Alarmingly, access to Head Start for the three-year-old group actually had a harmful effect on the teacher-assessed math ability of these children once they entered kindergarten. Teachers reported that non-participating children were more prepared in math skills than those children who participated in Head Start. Head Start failed to have an impact on the 40 other measures.



The Heritage analysis concludes if there’s one anti-poverty education program that should be cut, it’s Head Start.  But the left presupposes American women in it.  Why?  Margaret Thatcher put her finger on this kind of thinking, this ideology (a word we will come back to), if you will.  She said this kind of welfare state thinking is the “debilitating concept of the all-powerful state which takes too much from you to do too much for you, constantly substituting the politicians' view of what the people should have for the people's own view of what they want.”



Is Head Start something we should want?  A billions dollar program that doesn’t work but does make a discipline of government dependence and government employment?  According to the Obama team, the answer is yes.



Another headline: “Russia's top military officer has threatened to carry out a pre-emptive strike on U.S.-led NATO missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe if Washington goes ahead with its controversial plan to build a missile shield.”  This is the very shield President Obama is now proposing because he thought dismantling the Missile Defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, which he did, would satisfy the Russians.  That, obviously, was not the case.  President Obama upset and weakened our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic, we now see, for no benefit at all.  And in appeasing the Russians then, by throwing our allies overboard, we showed no strength or resolve to the Russians so they can today feel free to cavalierly threaten pre-emptive strikes against us again—as if this were 1961 all over again.



And, this week, we also have another human rights fiasco.  The New York Times headline today “Dissident’s Plea for Protection From China Deepens Crisis.”  CNN puts it this way:  “Chen case is another human rights issue for Obama.”  Staying with CNN a moment, here is how their story opens:



Iran, Syria and now China. President Barack Obama faces a third front of vulnerability on his administration's record of defending human rights with the muddled situation involving activist Chen Guangcheng.

With his re-election campaign just hitting full stride, Obama hoped to capitalize on foreign policy successes such as last year's raid that killed Osama bin Laden to blunt Republican attacks on the sluggish U.S. economic recovery.



When CNN says you have a muddled situation, a sluggish economy, and points out that you are using the killing of bin Laden as a political ploy, all in two sentences, you have a problem.  CNN could have gone on to add Sudan and so many other places—do people even know that Islamist Northern Sudan is bombing the South of Sudan again?  We’ll leave that for another day so surfeited are we just now with Iran, Syria, Egypt, China, Russia, Venezuela, and other places that have become both more dangerous to us on President Obama’s watch and less solvable due to President Obama’s policies and ideology.



It should actually be no surprise that we have muddled the human rights case of a Chinese dissident and human rights lawyer.  This administration has shown from year one it doesn’t know what human rights abuses are.  It was Obama’s very own Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner who told Chinese officials two years ago during a human rights summit that our two countries both have work to do.  The AP reported that in discussing human rights with China, Posner “raised on his own” Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law as part of our own dark record.  Yes: the very law the Supreme Court, and even its liberals, seem to be in support of.  As Arizona is to illegal immigrants, China is to killing of millions of citizens.  It’s all the same moral plane according to this administration.



Just as the Mullahs in Iran were on the same moral plane as the citizens of Iran when President Obama sent a new year’s message to the leaders and citizens of Iran in the same message, saying our two countries both had the same hopes and dreams—the problem was one country’s rulers shoots people in the streets and the other’s does not, and the dissidents in the first country heard from the leader of the second only support for those who were doing the shooting, totally ignoring (and killing off) their pleas for help.



When you do not understand human rights you do not know how to work for them.  Ideology is what is behind this, it’s an ideology that cares more about diplomacy and negotiations for the sake of diplomacy and negotiations over the actual God-given rights of people and human beings.  It’s what somebody smart once said of the UN:  The UN cares about lines and maps, it doesn’t care about people.  And that’s the same exact ideology that makes a compulsion, a talisman, of government programs whether they work for people, for human beings, or whether they fail them.



It’s an ideology, at center, that puts the state above the person.



And it is that ideology that is the exact opposite of our Founding where the state was to be the servant of the person because the person, the human, was given rights by God and created the state, not the other way around where the state created the person and made the person subservient to it.  Remember the words: “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”



When you understand our Founding and the appropriate human relationship to government, you understand human rights.  When you do not understand our Founding, you cannot understand human rights because the state, in that case, not the person, is the entity of preferred status and your mission is to protect and defend the state, not the individual or the human.



It is this same ideology that is driving our economic stagnation.  Here’s all I need to know about this, because it’s the example that reveals both President Obama’s view of America at the same time it reveals his view about economics.  When he was in France three years ago and asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism he said “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”  Two socialist economies, one a complete basket case based on out-of-control, cradle-to-grave spending where the state takes too much from you in order to do too much for you.  When asked about American greatness, his mind went to a comparison with Greece.



So today, as a result of no reduction in spending and no plan to inspire growth and prosperity, we will get a jobs report whose numbers will not decrease the unemployment rate.  And, thus, we will hear pleas for more spending and even more taxes, and we will hear nothing about how to inspire, energize, and promote small business or private sector growth.



Why is this all of a piece with a blinding ideology?  Bill Bennett likes to quote the philosopher Hanna Arendt as saying there is nothing so blinding as ideology.  He’s right to do so.  Arendt wrote more on this in her book on Totalitarianism, saying “all ideologies contain totalitarian elements.”  Why do they?  She gave several reasons, the most important, she wrote, was “ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new.”



And that is President Obama.  An ideologue who sees states and statism, governments and governmental programs, not humans and not individuals and not humans and individuals who can operate free of the state but must instead be cared for by it.  He was trained in this school of thought, a school of thought that taught America (and thus America’s Founding) was responsible for the ills of the world.  And so a changed or, in his words, “fundamentally transformed” America would (independent of all experience) put us on the path of curing the world.  Thus, no exceptionalism. Thus, more capitulation to, rather than standing up to, tyrants. Thus, more statism and less individualism and free enterprise.  Thus, more welfare. Thus, more government control and less individual rights.



And the result?  We see it all around us, here and abroad.  Even in this week’s headlines.



Lincoln said our Declaration, our Founding, provided a “maxim for free society, which could be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”



A simple question:  Is the government we have now, are the policies we have now, is the President we have now doing this?  Does he understand it? Does he believe it? Or, in his ideological fixation, is his thinking so independent of all experience such that he cannot learn anything new?  The question answers itself.  And we see the answer all around us.

Our New Regressivism

The New Reactionaries

         

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On April 29, 2012

Our New Regressivism

About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly an ideological rather than a political identification, and had included some early twentieth-century Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover ^[1].
But twenty-first century progressivism is not aimed at political reform. There is no new effort at racial unity. There is not much realization that we are in a globalized, rapidly changing, high-tech economy or that race and gender are not as they were fifty years ago. Instead, progressivism has become a reactionary return to the 1960s—or even well before. The new regressivism seeks to resurrect the machine ethos of Mayor Daley, the glory green days of the ^[2]Whole Earth Catalog ^[2], the union era of George Meany, Jimmy Hoffa, and Walter Reuther, the racial polarization of the old Black Panther Party and the old Al Sharpton, and a Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, or Peter Jennings reading to us each evening three slightly different versions ^[3] of the Truth.

The New Old Chicago

Barack Obama is trying to turn back the way of politics to the era of the pre-reform Chicago machine. He was the first presidential candidate to renounce campaign-financing funds since the law was enacted. He opposes any effort to clamp down on voting fraud. Even his compliant media worries ^[4] that the president’s current jetting from one campaign stop to another in the key swing states is a poorly disguised way to politick on the federal government’s dime. Bundlers are, as was the ancient custom, given plum honorific posts abroad. Obama has held twice as many fundraisers as the much reviled George Bush had at a similar point in his administration. Obama supporters now target large Romney givers and post their names with negative bios on websites, as if we are back ^[5] to Nixon’s enemies of the people. Websites sprout up that go after administration critics in Agnew style, but without the latter’s self-caricature. The 2008 criticism about ending the revolving door, lobbyists, and pay-for-play renting out of the Lincoln bedroom was, well…just examine the career of a Peter Orszag. An embarrassed media keeps silent about the new reactionary ethics, apparently on the premise that not to would endanger four more years of the “progressive” agenda. On matters of presidential style, we are likewise retro ^[6], as Obama sets records for playing golf, and in Marie Antoinette style the First Family bounces between Vail, Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard, Vegas, and Costa del Sol, often in separate jets, as if we, the people, receive vicarious joy from catching glimpses of the Obama versions of Camelot. We have Kennedy wannabes without their own Kennedy money.

Earth Day Forever

On matters of energy, Obama has regressed to the Earth Day mindset of the 1970s, when we were reaching “peak” oil, and untried wind and solar were soon to be the new-age remedy for soon-to-be-exhausted fossil fuels. Add up the anti-empirical quotes from Obama himself, Energy Secretary Chu, and Interior Secretary Salazar (inflate your tires, “tune up” your car, look to U.S. algae reserves, let energy prices “skyrocket,” hope gas rises to European levels, don’t open federal lands even if gas reaches $10 a gallon, etc.) and, in reactionary fashion, we are time-machined back to the campus quad of the 1970s. In this  la la world of Van Jones, evil oil companies supposedly connived to stifle green energy and hook us on fossil fuels, inferior energies that have nothing to recommend them. It is as if the revolutions in horizontal drilling, fracking, and discoveries of vast new reserves never occurred, as if Exxon and Chevron dodge taxes in a manner that Google and Amazon never would, as if efficient smaller gas engines, clean gas blends, and pollution devices have not made the American car both clean-burning and economical beyond our imagination forty years ago. The Obamians, frozen in amber, really believe oil is about to run out, “tuned up” internal combustion engines powering underinflated tires pollute as they did in the 1920s, and Teapot Dome U.S. oil companies need to be “crucified” ^[7]—as regional EPA director and Obama appointee Al Armendariz, in fact, boasted. So we borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to subsidize money-losing solar and wind plants, while putting federal lands rich in oil and gas off-limits to companies eager to pay royalties, hire thousands, and supply the U.S. with its own energy—and all for a regressive ideology. Few see that Solyndra really is the new Teapot Dome.

The UAW and the Big Three—Forever

And the economy? We know statism, whether the Soviet and Chinese brand or the softer European socialist sort, did not work. And as the rest of the world flees from state-controlled and command economies ^[8], we in America look back fondly toward them, as if the U.S could be run perpetually in peacetime as it was for four years during World War II ^[9] or that we could have an endless 100 Days of the first three months of FDR. We can make the unionized Postal Service work (as if there is no FedEx, email, or text messaging) like GM or, better yet, turn a doctor’s visit into a brush with the TSA. When the president scoffs at capitalism with “we’ve tried that,” one wonders whether he means “yes, we did and that’s why the U.S. per capita income and per capita GDP are among the highest in the world, and the poor have appurtenances, housing, and ‘stuff’ unmatched by the middle classes in most countries abroad.” In reactionary fashion, we measure poverty only in terms of relative worth, never by an absolute standard, as if Americans do not have access to televisions, hot water, appliances, and cell phones and do not suffer more from obesity than malnutrition. Our new regressive template for the economy dates from about 1950, when our grandfathers in the AFL-CIO and UAW worked in big unionized factories to supply a war-torn world with almost everything, at a time when China, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia had been flattened and Taiwan and South Korea did not exist as manufacturers. Solyndra and the Volt are to be like Ford circa 1946: assembly lines buzzing with endless solar panels and cars, built by 100-new-rules-a-day unions, without much competition, and products all backordered by a war-wearied and materially deprived world.

Freedom Riding Forever

On matters racial, we are endlessly back in the 1960s with more Bull Connors and Lester Maddoxes, with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson fighting them on Freedom Marches, not a half-century distant from the “I have a dream speech,” in a troubled era where over 90% of African-Americans who die violently at the hands of another are not lynched, but shot by other African-Americans, and where blacks are 30-40 times more likely to commit some sort of violent crime against whites than vice versa. Without more of the Great Society, there is always said to be the threat of another “resurrection” like Watts, not periodic flash mobbing to rip off iPhones and iPads. In the world of Eric Holder, affirmative action is yesterday, today, and tomorrow ^[10], as if we are Old Confederates who measure non-white lineage by a 1/16 drop standard, as if blond Elizabeth Warren, candidate for senator in Massachusetts and one-percenter Harvard professor, really is a “native-American” as she and Harvard claimed for purposes of minority status. In the real world, the problem is not the absence of civil rights, but an absence of courage to discuss the causes of racial disparities in categories beyond income, from rates of illegitimacy to crime. For the new regressives, someone like John Foster Dulles, the old white guy, is still secretary of state, rather than the truth that a white male has not held the office in over fifteen years. We live in a suspended animation world of To Kill a Mockingbird where the Duke Lacrosse players are still guilty ^[11] by the fact of their association with a black stripper, Trayvon Martin is a martyred hero ^[12] (and even if a court proves it is not so, he still will be), and the members of the Black Caucus are given exemptions to utter racist and inflammatory rhetoric, given the burdens they shoulder of a segregated society peopled by George Wallaces and Strom Thurmonds everywhere.

Ivy League on Viagra

For the new regressives, universities are still hallowed centers of liberal instruction. There is no interest why professors have the reputation of used car dealers (with apologies to used car dealers), tuition soars faster than inflation ^[13], for-profit vocational schools siphon off students, and student loans mimic the 2008 housing bubble ^[14]. In the regressive world, Barack Obama knows something about political science and the law, because Columbia and Harvard certified that he does. Indeed, we are all supposed to believe our children are educated because they have a BA certificate and took a cutting-edge Chicano Studies or Film Studies course at institutions who jack up prices faster than the rate of inflation and are subsidized by big government loans—and to question any of that earns the charge of being “anti-intellectual” or denying the children the right “to be all they can be.” We are supposed to make-believe that the overpriced campus of rock-climbing walls and “the poetics of low-riding” is every bit as rigorous as the 1950s Great Books courses at Chicago.

All the President’s Men—Again and Again

The new media is the most regressive of all. It too is back to the days of the early 1960s when it did not report the antics of the Kennedys in worry about endangering the New Frontier. At least the old reactionary press hid government lapses as well as liberal ones—but not the new regressives: for the L.A. Times, releasing photos of American soldiers with gruesome trophies in Afghanistan is necessary candor of the My Lai sort; yet suppressing Obama’s comments at a banquet for Rashid Khalidi is proper censorship for the cause ^[15], as if someone saw Jack Kennedy nude swimming in the White House pool with a co-ed and had to shut up about it ^[16]. Apparently whether Obama was to be elected was for the media a matter of national security, but not so whether the war in Afghanistan was threatened. For the regressive journalist, Guantanamo and renditions were to be everyday news until January 20, 2009.

Retreads

What is scary for the new regressive is present-day and future America. It is changing by the hour and making obsolete all the old big government, big union, big race, big university, and big media liberal assumptions of the past. And as the world leaves behind the progressive and as he turns regressive and bitter, give him some credit: he does not go down without the old fight against Rockefellers everywhere, Shell, the Alabama racists who insist on IDs to vote, union-busting scabs, tabloid journalists who threaten Cronkite-like Truth, and all the other old enemies of the people.

Seth Leibson 04-27-2012

Time To Wake Up

April 27, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



Dwight Lyman Moody put it this way: “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it.”  I’ve always liked that quote, and I think it’s an excellent instruction in how to comport ones’ self on a daily basis—in character, integrity, and in facing adversity.  But I’ve been thinking about that quote all week as I’ve been thinking about our politics, our presidential campaign, and our country.  Because, at the end of the analysis of this administration’s past three and a half years, I’m worried that a contrast in character of the candidates is simply not enough, not in politics, not in the politics we have to contend with today.



And yet, denouncing and arguing hasn’t worked either; at least not the way we’ve been doing it, and not thus far.  The RealClearPolitics average of polls right now has Obama up over Romney, by nearly four points.  That tells me this is a close election.  And everything can get shaken up—Carter was trouncing Reagan at various times throughout 1979 and 1980, too.


But there’s something different going on this time.  In this election, race will be invoked—we already see that.  Religion will be invoked—we already see that.  Economic divisiveness will be invoked—we already see that.  And we can never expect that the mainstream media will give our side a fair shake.  We have a lot of work cut out for ourselves.  Perhaps a lot more than usual.



So I’m thinking it may be time to start turning the language of Barack Obama around, taking it upon ourselves, and appealing to the fundamental decency of our fellow citizens.  President Obama likes to talk about fairness.  A lot.  And so, too, should we.



I’d like to start with some questions on first responsibilities.  The Constitution says we wrote our Constitution—and wrote our nation into existence—to, among other things (and just a few other things at that), “Provide for the common defence” and “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  And so, John Jay, wrote in the Third Federalist Paper: “Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their SAFETY seems to be the first.”  And he defined “SAFETY” this way: “as it respects security for the preservation of peace and tranquility, as well as against dangers from FOREIGN ARMS AND INFLUENCE, as from dangers of the LIKE KIND arising from domestic causes.”



So, a few questions:  Is it fair to the American people, is it fair to our allies, is it fair to our military (and please keep in mind how much both parties like to speak about how much they care about our soldiers) that President Obama has put forth plans to cut our military?  Is it fair that he wants to cut it so much we will only be able to fight in one land war at a time?  Is it fair to our military that he is also cutting the salaries, health care and retirement benefits of our current military?



Is it fair to our allies that he stripped them of Missile Defense, in order to appease Russia?  And has Russia done anything for us in return?  Was it fair to the American people that President Obama signed a treaty with Russia that gave Russia a veto over American missile defenses?



How about other friends:  Was it fair that President Obama bowed to China in refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama—his fellow Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, for goodness sakes?  In fact, let’s quote the Dalai Lama, because he says something else that I’ve always liked and contemplate a lot:  “Our chief purpose in this life is to help other people. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.”  Is that the Obama record?



Let us continue:  Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that President Obama killed off the jobs creating and energy producing XL Pipeline from Canada?  And that his administration is responsible for “canceled leases on federal lands in Utah,” “suspended leases in Montana,” “delayed leases in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast,” according to Investors Business Daily?  Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that his canceling of domestic energy efforts and slow walking of permits has taken place as the price of gasoline has gone up at the same time, from $1.83 a gallon to almost four dollars a gallon?



Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that unemployment has gone up under his presidency and we’ve had the longest streak of over eight percent unemployment since the Great Depression?  But the real unemployment rate, to quote Jim Pethokoukis, isn’t even close to eight percent: if you include “the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work. That unemployment rate, perhaps the truest measure of the labor market’s health, is a sky-high 14.9%.”  Is that fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them?  relic



Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that this administration has increased the national debt five trillion dollars? Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that President Obama has not submitted a budget with less than one trillion dollars in deficit spending even as he promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term?



I’ve not even spoken of what I think will be the twin foreign policy relics of his presidency: Egypt and Iran. Is it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them; was it fair to the Egyptian people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them; was it fair to the Israelis, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them that President Obama assisted in ushering out our ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt only to create a situation where the Muslim Brotherhood would take over that country?  A take over, by the way, that has turned the Sinai into a terror zone and that just this week witnessed the canceling (by Egypt) of natural gas supplies to Israel.



Was it fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that when a radical Islamic nation at war with us for over thirty years and attempting to acquire nuclear weapons had its own revolution in the streets, a revolution poised to topple that nation, this President said we would not meddle—ensuring the safety and sanctity of the radical Islamic regime?  I’m of course speaking of Iran.  Was it fair to the Iranian people, did it help them or did it actually hurt them that President Obama said we would not meddle, even as protestors in the streets were asking “Where’s Obama?”



Now, let us go to the news of this week:  Has it been fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that he not only criticized Arizona for trying to tamp down on illegal immigration with a law that mirrored the federal law but then went on to sue the state and encourage boycotts?  Has it been fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that he allowed the Mexican president—standing by his side—to condemn Arizona?  Has it been fair to the American people, has it helped them or has it actually hurt them, that he has allowed his State Department officials to compare Arizona’s illegal immigration law to the Chinese as being on par with China’s human rights abuses?



By the way: If you want what we were told was one of the best defenses of Arizona, see the op-ed Bill and I did in 2010 for National Review.  It’s linked here and at BillBennett.com



On the domestic tranquility and common defense front, just one last question:  Is it fair to the American people, will it help them or will it actually hurt them, to take the posture, as was done this week, that the war on terror is over?  Here’s the story from the non-partisan, the exquisitely non-partisan, National Journal: “The Obama administration is taking a new view of Islamist radicalism. The president realizes he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively "moderate" Islamist groups emerging as lead political players out of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.”  Thus, “The war on terror is over,” according to the State Department.



So finally, is it fair to the American people, will it help them or will it actually hurt them, to believe there is no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and call Islamist groups “moderate?”  By the way, the official motto of the Muslim Brotherhood, as we cannot tire of stating: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”  And Hamas—on our State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, the group that trains children in martyrdom in camp, school, and on television—is a self-identified Muslim Brotherhood organization.



Fairness to America and her friends.  Helpful to America and her friends.  Hurtful to American and her friends.  Just what is the straight stick and what, at long last, is the crooked one?  And just what will it mean to ratify this history?  That, perhaps, is the most crucial question of all.

Rumors of War III

Want to Know More About the Militant Islamist Groups Exposed in ‘Rumors of War III’? This Companion Profile Tells You

On Wednesday evening GBTV unveiled the highly anticipated special, “Rumors of War III, Target U.S.” The documentary examined how radical Islamist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, are gaining a foothold in America, be it via the growing threat of Mexican drug cartels or the infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood mouthpieces in the U.S. government. Given that the Obama administration has essentially declared the war on terror over, it seems some have chosen to dismiss the power, reach and actual motivations of these militant groups. In order to understand the threat, however, one must understand who these Islamists really are — their roots, ideology and ultimate stated goals.

The Muslim Brotherhood: “Jihad is our way” 

Founded in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher and staunch Adolf Hitler admirer, Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood is no new-comer to the game of radical Islam. In fact, the Sunni group is considered the oldest and most powerful Islamist organization in the world to date. It is the ideological predecessor of Hamas, Hezbollah and even al Qaeda. Active in at least 70 countries around the world (some estimates claim 100), the Brotherhood’s long-stated purpose is to provide resistance to the secularization and westernization of Islamic nations by promoting the tenets of the Quran and its “legal” framework, Shariah law. Further, its ultimate goal was to be the destruction of non-Islamic states through jihad — or holy war — resulting in the establishment of an Islamic caliphate — one that would eclipse the whole of the western world and beyond.

While sympathizers decry reference to the Brotherhood’s roots as merely overblown scare-tactics leveled by right-wing ”extremists,” their claim that the group is largely secular flies in the face of the entity’s very name: Muslim Brotherhood; and its motto: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad [struggle] is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
Perhaps one of the reasons some believe the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate group and force for good is through the group’s seemingly extensive community service work. A cursory glance at the Brotherhood and one sees the veneer of a socially-conscious organization focused on youth-outreach, school and mosque development, and even the coordination and promotion of sporting events for the betterment of the community. Once the veil is lifted and the group’s historical ideology is examined, however, a more sinister reality emerges.

According to analysis conducted by Discover the Networks and Jewish Virtual Library, in the 1930s, the Brotherhood was mainly an underground, paramilitary organization that amassed weapons and operated “clandestine camps that provided instruction in military and terrorist tactics.” By the mid-1940s the Brotherhood in Egypt boasted roughly 1,500 branches and by 1948 a membership that is estimated to have exceeded 2 million. During that time period, the late, disgraced PLO leader Yasser Arafat fought alongside his Muslim Brethren.

Of the Brotherhood’s dual identity, scholar Martin Kramer stated:

“On one level, they operated openly, as a membership organization of social and political awakening. Banna preached moral revival, and the Muslim Brethren engaged in good works. On another level, however, the Muslim Brethren created a ‘secret apparatus’ that acquired weapons and trained adepts in their use. Some of its guns were deployed against the Zionists in Palestine in 1948, but the Muslim Brethren also resorted to violence in Egypt. They began to enforce their own moral teachings by intimidation, and they initiated attacks against Egypt’s Jews.”

In keeping with its budding penchant for violent opposition, the Brotherhood assassinated then-Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi in 1948, resulting in the group’s exile from Egypt and inevitably, the assassination of its own founder, al-Banna. Those who did not flee were imprisoned by the thousands, but that did not stop the militant Islamist Brotherhood. The remaining members simply disbursed to satellite locations in Transjordan, Palestine and Syria, many of whom participated in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
One of the Brotherhood’s more radical factions was led by writer and ideologue Sayyid Qutb. who Discover the Networks reports advocated armed conflict against non-Islamist states in the Middle East and ultimately, Western infidel nations. DTN describes Qutb this way:

Qutb — whose wordview distinguished sharply between “the Party of Allah and the Party of Satan,” — declared that Egyptian society under the secular Nasser was contrary to authentic Islam. Asserting that the Prophet Mohammad himself would have rejected such a government, Qutb claimed that Muslims had both a right and an obligation to resist it. Qutb’s writings — which challenged the views of mainstream Sunni theologians, who extolled the Islamic tradition of deference to the state and ruler — are now cited by many scholars as some of the first formulations of political Islam.

DTN continues by describing that the lynchpin of Qutb’s “fundamentalist critique” of Egyptian society was his “abiding contempt for the Western, especially the United States, which he regarded as spiritually vacant, decadent, idolatrous and fundamentally hostile to Islamic piety.”

While Qutbs influence was rising, however, the Muslim Brotherhood’s reign of terror almost came to an end in 1954 after one of its members, Abdul Munim Abdul Rauf, attempted to assassinate then-President Nasser. Ironically, the permission the Brotherhood had received to re-enter the country was hence revoked and Nasser put what can only be described as a fatwa on the militant group, burning down its headquarters and arresting approximately 15,000 members — some of whom were executed– notably, Qutb.
In an article for the Middle East Forum scholar Raymond Ibrahim considered what provoked such a violent reaction in Nasser (other than his assassination attempt). He wrote:

“Nasser, a pious Muslim, was most likely intimately, if not instinctively, aware of what the Brotherhood was—and still is: he was aware that it is impossible for Muslim organizations committed to theocratic rule to negotiate or share power, much less be trustworthy allies. In short, Nasser was aware that, once the opportunity presented itself, the Brotherhood would do everything in its power to take over: unlike secular parties concerned with the temporal, it has a divine mandate — a totalitarian vision — to subdue society to Sharia.

That is not where the madness ends. As the decades progressed, the Brotherhood was involved in a series of other “jihads” culminating in the jointly-planned assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat following the success of his Sinai Treaty with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Later, in 2004, one of the Brotherhood’s longtime clerics and Islamic scholars, SheikhYousef Al-Qaradhawi, issued a fatwa — or religious mandate — ordering Muslims abduct and kill U.S. citizens in Iraq.

From Israel’s 1948 War of Independence to the Arab Spring; from paying a role in the assassination of the one Arab leader the world thought would usher in an era of peace and stability in the region, to having a hand in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Muslim Brotherhood has been there in the thick of it all — and in no small way.

As we approach the present-day, after fueling the violent Egyptian Spring that successfully toppled Hosni Mubarak’s Western and Israeli-friendly regime, the organization has attempted to show its “softer side” by taking a place at the country’s political table. The Brotherhood has secured sweeping wins in Egypt’s parliamentary elections and is seeking to claim the presidency itself with candidate, Khairat el-Shater. While he was among a group of candidates recently disqualified from the race, his campaign is appealing for his reinstatement.

Under the presidency, and after decades struggling for the establishment of a theocracy, the Brotherhood promises an Egyptian “renaissance.”

Hamas: “In as much as Jews love life—we love death and martyrdom.”

Founded in 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood progeny is an Islamic terrorist organization whose base of operations is primarily concentrated in the Gaza Strip and some areas of Judea and Samaria (otherwise known as the West Bank). An Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement,” Sunni-comprised Hamas describes itself as “one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood” and is also a proxy of Iran, which frequently supplies the group arms as well as funds its various initiatives. More than this, Hamas is also a social, religious and now, after “democratic elections,“ an ”official” political movement in the region. The organization comprises a legislative and social branch, along with its military outfit, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Hamas’ stated purpose, its sole reason for existence, is to liberate Palestine from its “evil” Zionist occupiers. It is not enough for Hamas that the Palestinians establish their own state alongside Israel, as the terrorist group deems Israel’s very existence an abomination and one that, ultimately, needs to be wiped from the face of the earth. To this end, it has been the primary aggressor against the Jewish State, routinely orchestrating suicide-bombings that target military and civilians alike. It also frequently launches rockets into Israel and has claimed responsibility for hundreds of attacks in the last two decades, particularly after amping up its onslaught in the wake of the Oslo Accords.

Hamas’ success at wreaking havoc in the region could not be done alone. In addition to receiving backing from Iran, the Islamist group also receives arms from its Lebanese brothers, Hezbollah, and more disturbing, al Qaeda. In a detailed analysis for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Dr. Harold Brackman explained that Hamas “has held secret summits with Al Qaeda operatives in locales as distant as India, and even sent a select few members to train in bin Laden’s Afghan camps.”

He added that even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed in 2007 that: “It is Hamas that is shielding Al Qaeda, and through its bloody conduct, Hamas has become very close to Al Qaeda [in Gaza].”

The Hamas slogan rings eerily familiar to that of its forebear, the Muslim Brotherhood, stating: ”Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Quran its Constitution, Jihad its path, and death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief.”

Per the terrorist organization’s charter, Hamas asserts that jihad is a “duty binding on every Muslim man and woman” and unequivocally rejects negotiated settlements as a means to coexist with Israel. ”There is no other solution for the Palestinian problem other than jihad. All the initiatives and international conferences are a waste of time and a futile game.”
Discover the Network reviewed the charter and published several of its other tenets. Some include:

• mandates that jihad be directed explicitly against the reviled Jews: “The Nazism of the Jews does not skip women and children, it scares everyone. They make war against people’s livelihood, plunder their moneys and threaten their honor.”
• calls for the fulfillment of the Qur’anic scripture which reads: “The prophet [Mohammad] said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

To put Hamas’ destructive power in perspective, take into account that 680 missiles, rockets and mortars were fired into southern Israel, mostly by Hamas, in 2011 alone. Since its inception, Hamas has also been the primary perpetrator of suicide bombings.

Aside from operating within a vast network of militants spread across the Islamic world, Hamas ensures future success primarily via the dissemination of a steady stream of propaganda and through the indoctrination of Palestinian youth in schools. It has been widely reported the terrorist group has infiltrated the Palestinian education system, which has modelled its textbooks after Mein Kampf and other anti-Semitic works. Watchdog groups like Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI frequently capture footage of Palestinian children chanting such slogans as “death to Israel” and “death to America.”

For good measure, review the following Hamas battle cries as listed in the Simon Wiesenthal report:
“The language of bullets and bombs is the only language that the Jews understand.”
“We tell them [the Israelis]: in as much as you love life—the Muslims love death and martyrdom.”
“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!”
“You [America] will face the mirror of your history for a long time to
come. . . . [With the 9/11 attacks] Allah has answered our prayers.”

Simply put, Hamas is a cult of death. There are no tenets, catch-phrases, songs of patriotism or decrees put forth by the terrorist group that do not contain, in some degree or other, reference to murder and suicide; vitriol and bloodshed. Nary a word of peaceful coexistence can be found. Instead, what is offered in spades, is murder and martyrdom.
What is perhaps most difficult for those who love life — like Americans and Israelis — to comprehend is that it is futile to attempt to appeal to groups such as Hamas, because they are impervious to reason and incapable of properly processing basic human emotion (such as love of child). This is perhaps best illustrated in its collective and continued willingness to sacrifice its children by sending them off to their deaths, strapped with explosives in the “name of Allah.” An entity that comprises people who do not value their own lives, especially those of their children, is not one that can be negotiated with. The West and Israel has no leverage over Hamas, because Hamas has nothing it values enough to fear losing.

Hezbollah: “The party of god”

Not far from Hamas’ base of operations, is the Lebanon-based Hezbollah. Led by Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia terrorist organization’s stated goal is the establishment of an Islamic state encompassing both Lebanon and Israel.
With the help of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and now Syria alongside, Hezbollah was born during Israel’s first war with Lebanon in 1982 and has been a violent opponent of the Jewish State ever since. But Hezbollah’s animus is not reserved solely for Israel. The Islamic group has also been implicated in dozens of major terrorist attacks against the U.S. and other Western targets, including the 1983 suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 service men and women. It was followed by an assault on the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in 1984. Of the brutal attack, The Jewish Virtual Library notes:

The bombing at the Marine barracks in Beirut was the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima (2,500 in one day) of World War II and the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the 243 killed on 31st January 1968 — the first day of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam war. The attack remains the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II.

The militant Islamist organization is also said to have been responsible for the kidnap, torture and murder of U.S. Army colonel William R. Higgins and CIA Station Chief in Beirut, William Buckley, as well as for the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed. The terror group is also responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that left 19 American servicemen dead.


The list, frighteningly continues, but the picture painted thus far rings loud and clear.

In terms of more recent developments, Hezbollah’s operations in the Middle East intensified with the onset of the second Lebanon War, when members of the militant group killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two others stationed in Israeli sovereign territory. In response, Israeli Defense Forces launched a series of strikes intended to remove the Hezbollah threat from its border. What ensued was a near-constant barrage of rocket and mortar fire into Israel. One estimate places the the number of rockets fired into Israel by Hezbollah during the conflict at roughly 4,000.

 

Since the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah operatives have been spotted around the world, most notably in Central and South America, leading national security experts to believe the terrorist group is collaborating with America and Israel-hostile regimes in Cuba and particularly, Venezuela.

According to a report by the American Enterprise Institute, Hezbollah and its enablers in Iran have been “greatly expanding their operations in Latin America to the detriment of inter-American security and US strategic interests.”
AEI continues:

Today, Hezbollah is using the Western Hemisphere as a staging ground, fundraising center, and operational base to wage asymmetric warfare against the United States. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and other anti-American governments in the region have facilitated this expansion by rolling out the welcome mats for Hezbollah and Iran.

It seems Hezbollah is now edging one step closer to American soil, and its intentions should undoubtedly be prompting the U.S. to take pause, and moreover, proper precautions.

Rumors of War III

Rumors of War III discusses the aforementioned Islamic groups and how they are infiltrating American society. Now that you have the background on who, and what, these militant organizations truly stand for, the documentary’s findings will prove all the more riveting.

It's the Power, Stupid!

It Was the Power, Stupid!

         Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On April 22, 2012  

I. Power—Always Was and Always Will Be

In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without utility.

But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished, or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.

II. The Year 4

We are in the year four of our lord, when darkness was made light, the seas gently receded, and the planet cooled. In the space of 24 hours in January 2009 the world was turned upside down: massive deficits were no longer “unpatriotic”; 5% (heck, even 9%) unemployment was no longer to be seen as a “jobless recovery”; $4 plus gasoline no longer would become “intolerable.” ^[1] Filibusters suddenly became ossified obstructionism. Recess appointments were now quite legitimate; lecturing the media about the myth of objective fairness was salutary. Pay-for-play time with the president was consulting; attacking the “unelected” courts was progressive. Voter fraud was not thugs eyeing polling monitors with clubs, but officials asking voters to present a picture ID—and mentioning any of these inconsistencies or writing about the Trostkyzation of American life was either racism or Palinism.

Around March 2008, the Ministry of Truth had issued new edicts about campaign financing, big Wall Street money ^[2], and the supposedly pernicious role of contributions: all bad if Bush trumped Kerry, all now good if Obama trumped McCain. So when Obama became the first candidate in the history of the law to renounce public campaign financing in order to shake down $1 billion, there was silence. The Left never really worried about Big Money, but only if more Big Money went to conservatives than to themselves. (Consider the current shameless money grubbing of Jon Corzine to raise cash for Obama ^[3] after Corzine’s looting of thousands of individuals’ lifetime investments, or the shrillness over Mitt Romney’s supposed mansion in La Jolla juxtaposed to the prior silence about the Kerry mansions, the multiple Gore residences, or “John’s room,” as in the huge and crass Edwards estate.) What was interesting about Hilary Rosen was not her stupid thoughts on Ann Romney, but her cursus honorum that led to hired-gun riches by parlaying political contacts into commerce.

III. Tongue-tied Presidents

We can play this Orwellian game with almost everything these days. Take presidential cosmopolitanism and the Bush-as-oaf trope. The disdain was not for an inept president, but rather a simple means to destroy an ideological opponent. Why again the cynicism? Because the Left cares little that Barack Obama has no clue where particular islands in the news are and cannot even do political correctness right when he wishes to ingratiate himself to his South American hosts by wanting to trill the “Maldives.” ^[4] We have a president who can say Talêban, drop the g’s in a black patois, and trill his Spanish words in front of Latin American hosts, but is off 8,000 miles in his geography.

Ditto “corpse-man ^[5],” the Austrian language, 57 states, and all the other parochialism and gaffes that remind us not only that it is hard being a president without making gaffes, but that it is especially hard as a conservative president when each gaffe is cited as proof of ignorance.

IV. So What?

What is going on? Two things, really. One, the media believes that the noble ends justify the tawdry means. So if it is a choice between emphasizing the latest Obama embarrassment by digging into the scary Fast and Furious ^[6], the “millions of green jobs” Solyndra insider giveaways ^[7], the Secret Service decadence, the GSA buffoonery, and the work while getting food stamps con in Washington OR endangering Obamacare and by extension “the children,” or the war to eliminate autism, or the right to breath clean air–well, why would one ever wish to derail all that by weakening a landmark progressive and his enlightened agenda?

Or for you more cynical readers, why would you wish to enervate the present comfortable culture in Washington in which the press and politics are at last one? Or why undermine the first African-American president, who is a constant reminder of our progressive advancement? Or why weaken our only chance some day to have open borders or gay marriage?

Two, the Left has always operated on the theory of medieval penance. We surely must assume that Warren Buffett has never had problems with the ethics of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. or had a company he controls sued by the IRS for back taxes ^[8]. Why? Because he has confessed his sins, and accepted the faith and paid his tithe to the Church. Ditto a Bill Gates or a rich celebrity like Sean Penn or Oprah. In the relativism of the left, if the one-percenters will simply confess that their class is greedy and needs to pay their fair share—even if they are entirely cynical in the manner of GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and penance is written off as the cost of doing
business—then they become exempt from the wages of them/us warfare and the “you want to kill the children” rhetoric.

V. Good and Bad Fat Cats

There is no difference in the way the Koch brothers or Exxon run their empires and the way that  GM, GE, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Google do. But the former are enemies of the people ^[9], while the latter are protectors who have have confessed to their bishops and agreed to mouth doctrine and thereby obtained penance to make as much money as they want and to spend it as they damn well please. Suddenly in America after 2009 there are good and bad cable networks, good and bad celebrities, good and bad CEOs, good and bad sports teams (ask Lovie Smith), good and bad states, good and bad everything—not adjudicated on the actual basis of behavior, but rather on whether some are willing to go to reeducation camp, admit their errors, and join the effort to clean the air and feed the kids.

Or do any of you believe there are not Google “corporate jet setters,” or Facebook “fat cats,” or GE executives who didn’t know when it was time not to profit, or Microsoft grandees who ignored the point at which they had made enough money? (For that matter, why could not Barack Obama have made $550,000 last year; had he not reached the point where he didn’t need any more cash?)

VI. The War on Science

We are in strange times. When the Right is in power, the press, the academy, the arts, the foundations, the liberal churches, and the zillionaire class all lecture us on greed, scandal, profit-mongering, wars against science, destroying the planet ^[10]—the entire laundry list of exploitive greed. The result is that the Right is careful. Bush walked a tightrope, as his moral concerns about stem cells became killing Christopher Reeve, and No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug program were begrudged as too little big government, too late.
When the Left is in power, all of the above go silent.

There really is a war on science in the way a Steven Chu wasted billions on irrational subsidized schemes that produced no energy, while, along with Ken Salazar, neglecting proven ways to increase oil and gas production on federally controlled lands. The GM-subsidized Volt is de facto a war against science; so is high-speed rail—at least for now. The anti-deficit properties of the Buffett rule are make-believe accounting, and entirely anti-mathematical. There really are anti-constitutional scandals in which people died as in Fast and Furious. There really are Ken Lay-type con artists still around called Jon Corzine. There really are misogynists like Bill Maher that daily declare “war on women.”

VII. Fire With Fire

I have a confession to make that may upset readers. I was neutral in the Republican primaries, but especially interested in one fact: who would take off the gloves and run a “war room” campaign in the fashion of Bill Clinton in 1992 (as opposed to the McCain model of emulating Mike Dukakis in 1988)? Romney did it first and most effectively ^[11].

The result is that when we hear that Rush Limbaugh should be taken off the air for his profane misogyny, almost immediately now there are accounts of Bill Maher’s $1 million gift to Obama ^[12] and his far greater and unapologetic slurs against women. When we hear all those creepy “concerns” about Romney’s great-grandfather as a polygamist in Mexico, suddenly we are reminded that Obama’s father in Kenya was, too. Putting a dog on the car roof is now not quite the same as eating a dog ^[13] and then matter-of-fact reading ^[14] one’s account of it on an audiotape. Trivial? Yes. Distractions from the current economic mess, and beneath us all? Perhaps. All Romney’s doing? Of course not.

But at least 2012 won’t be a default campaign. In other words, to quote Obama, Romney will get in “their faces” and “bring a gun to a knife fight.” McCain more graciously and nobly lost by putting all sorts of concerns off the table. I would expect that should Obama keep harping about Romney’s tax returns, Romney will demand Obama’s transcripts and medical records at last to be released. If Obama’s surrogates keep writing about Mormonism, we will learn of new disclosures about Trinity Church. For every Mormon bishop who said something illiberal in 1976, we will hear of a Father Pfleger or Rev. Meeks trumping that in 2007. And so on.

VIII. Only Power?

Does that mean Obama does not care about ideology? Not necessarily. You can be cynical about trashing fat cats while enjoying Martha’s Vineyard—and still believe in nationalizing health care on principled grounds. A sort of medical TSA is a win-win situation in that we all line up for bypasses and antibiotics in the way the line at the airport snakes back and forth; health officers with epaulettes will take our blood pressure and pop us pills in the way unionized TSA officers so assiduously screen our luggage, five or six to a console. Just as you see a small crowd consult whether granny’s wheelchair is laced with plastic explosives, so too the Obamacare GS-10 examiners will huddle to see whether that appendix of yours really is all that close to rupturing, as you, the paranoid and greedy, suspect.

“Share the wealth” and “fairness for all” are not incompatible with a power-hungry technocratic class, an apparat to oversee all this liberality. As recompense for their noble sacrifice, a complete exemption is granted from the consequences of their own mandates. If Michelle is exhausted from trying to make us eat well, why should she not go to Costa del Sol or R&R or Vegas? If Barack Obama is worn out trying to win for us the Buffett rule, why should he pay 30% on his $760,000 in income? If Tim Geithner is fighting on our behalf to make us pay a “premium” tax for being privileged Americans, why should he have to pay his FICA? If Steven Chu takes the heat for trying to get us $8 a gallon gas in our best interest, why should he have to buy a car ^[15] and drive?

In 2012 we will learn whether there is a year 5 or 2013.

IX. Footnote to Trayvon Martin

The liberal narrative about the case is now destroyed; it had nothing to do with finding out the truth, whether a trigger-happy vigilante murdered Trayvon Martin, or a desperate neighborhood watchman saved his head from being pounded to smithereens by pulling out a gun and shooting his assailant, or something in between. The narrative instead was solely concerned with taking a tragic shooting case and turning it into more fuel for a fossilized civil rights industry (since the case broke, dozens of violent crime cases of blacks against whites and Asians are splashed over the news, enraging readers and escaping liberal commentary). All we know now is that the “narrative”—a preteen shot “like a dog” while eating candy by a white “assassin” who uttered racial epithets and was never even touched by the victim, only to be let go by a wink-and-nod police force—is false.

I think it will be very hard to get a second-degree murder conviction, given the absence of racial malice on the tape (the narrative’s “coons” and NBC’s version ^[16] of Zimmerman on his own volunteering “he’s black” are now inoperative), eyewitness accounts of the fray, and the clear injuries to Zimmerman. Instead, the authorities will hope that by inflating the indictment, by airing the facts, and by making Zimmerman testify, tensions will ease–and so when he is acquitted or a judge throws out the case, or a lesser count is pressed, riots will fizzle.

X. Sacrificial Lambs
This is sort of the criminal version of the Scooter Libby case: after it was learned that Plame was probably not a covert agent, that her status was disclosed to Robert Novak not by Libby but by Richard Armitage, that Colin Powell knew the entire time that his deputy–not Libby–had made the initial disclosure, that there were areas of conflict of interest between Plame and Wilson in his selection for his yellow-cake mission, then Libby was sort of seen as a sacrificial lamb who had to be guilty of something to save the narrative of a fascistic effort to sabotage the Constitution.

Perhaps before the second-degree-murder charge is thrown out, the prosecution can so entangle Zimmerman in testimony that they can recharge him with perjury or conspiracy and then plea bargain him down to a year or two. The case is now not concerned with justice, but with politics, defusing threats of violence, and salvaging the careers of so many who so foolishly rushed to judgment.