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Dennis Prager on peace in the Middle East
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Category Archives: Politics – international
“A low blow”
I am more astonished by the interviewee than that they cut him off. He must either be so famous that they must always go back to him or he doesn’t care if he never gets asked back again. But unbelievable.
Principles to the left are values held by the right that can be exploited
This video which stars Ted Cruz’s daughters has led to this cartoon in the despicable racist Washington Post. Those are Cruz’s daughters you see, in case you missed the point.
There are no principles on the left, only what they think will succeed. As pointed out by others, it is unimaginable that a similar cartoon of Obama and his daughters would ever have appeared anywhere. The left wouldn’t do it because they would not wish to ridicule their candidate, but neither would the right since it would offend their principles. Principles to the left are values held by the right that can be exploited. They themselves have none at all.
The notion that children of politicians are off limits is one that applies to the children of politicians on the left. This is discussed in this article which deals with attacks on children of Republicans who are most certainly not off limits. There are no principles on the left, just tactics.
TED CRUZ REPLIES: Hillary ought to be a no-account opponent but the cartoon’s point will be lost on anyone who doesn’t already get it.
Rush to judgment
This is Rush Limbaugh explaining why He is Amazed by How Few Understand Obama and the Movement He’s Mobilized. There is nothing well meaning or altruistic about the left. Their views are overwhelmingly parasitic and harmful. I can hardly recall a single instance when some policy of the left actually led to an improvement in our economic or social relations – think Stalin in the 1930s or Venezuela today. The left has invariably focused on genuine problems but almost no solution proposed by a government of the left has ever succeeded. If you know what the left is up to, you never wish them success. Which brings me to the start of what Rush had said:
You remember back on January 16th, 2009, a few days before Obama was to be inaugurated, I mentioned on this program the Wall Street Journal had asked me (along with a lot of other people) to write 400 words on my hopes for the administration, the first African-American president, Barack Hussein O. And I told you what I told them, ’cause I wrote back and I said, “I don’t need 400 words; all I need is four words: ‘I hope he fails.'”
Obama has sadly not failed. He has achieved many of the destructive aims that he had from the start. To wish that a far-left President fails is not to wish that America fails. It is to wish that the President does not achieve what he has set out to achieve. He goes on:
I thought after two years of an intense campaign that the people on our side, the people opposing Obama had learned what I had learned about Obama, had learned how truly radical he was.
And not just in the Alinsky mold, and not just in the Reverend Wright mold, but I mean literally radical, radical. The most radical leftist Democrat ever elected to the White House and maybe by a long shot. And I was under the impression that people on our side understood the danger, the real danger to the country.
The focus of the post is on Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, which is about how D’Souza had thought that Obama was merely a left-liberal until he ended up being railroaded into jail by Obama for a non-crime that no one had ever previously been jailed for. Limbaugh is astonished, and I am as well, that someone who has paid such close attention to Obama and what he has said and clearly stands for, didn’t get it.
Up until now, Dinesh D’Souza admits that he thought all this time that Obama was just a liberal, a Democrat, another in a long line of Democrats.
And that the liberalism of Obama was just an intellectual exercise against which we must debate. There was nothing inherently destructive about Obama. He was just a liberal, and it was an intellectual challenge for us on the right to go up against Obama and to see if we could win the argument in the arena of ideas. I was stunned. I have to tell you, I was stunned that it took being put in jail for Dinesh D’Souza to admit that he didn’t know what Obama and the modern day Democrat Party was really all about.
The thing is that I have the same problem as Rush. I was introduced to someone right at the start of the Obama era because he was also, I was told, against Obama. So I spoke to him in the way that I might when I am with someone who is on the same side of the fence as I am. And to my shock – and I have seen him many times since but will not talk politics with him such an idiot he is – he began to defend Obama since I was going way too far. I do always say that you have to have been on the left to understand really how evil these people are, unprincipled and with no aim other than the accumulation of personal power. Not the cannon fodder, of course, their foot-soldiers and deluded supporters, but a very high proportion of those who get to the top. So let me finally bring you to Rush’s conclusion:
This is the first time in our country’s history that such a leftist radical has been elected and has proceeded unopposed for seven years in erasing the origins of this country, under the guise of fixing it, under the guise of fixing the never-ending racism and bigotry and racism and homophobic, all these other things that in Obama’s world define this country. I think it’s one of the things that explains this budget deal. I think it explains a lot. The Republican Party is not pushing back, not wanting to disagree. If they do recognize what I recognize, it must have been pretty daunting to say so and stand up and fight against it, which maybe they don’t want to do, I guess.
It is across the West. I am part of the worst generation, that sensationally ignorant stupid New-Left hippy group-think idiocracy that has created the political world we now inhabit. If you think a centuries long Dark Age could not possibly lie before us, you really haven’t done your sums.
Trump v Clinton head to head
So far as any reports I have seen, Trump has not replied to Obama in spite of the opening Obama provided by criticising Trump. I find that inexplicable, but I am not going to go around telling him how to run a campaign, since he seems quite capable of doing things on his own. Where Trump did go head to head is here: Presidential Front-Runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Face Off. And the issue is this:
The crossfire between the two leading presidential candidates intensified Monday, as Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign stood by her claim that Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s rhetoric is being used as propaganda by terrorist groups, though there is no evidence Islamic State has put him in videos.
Mrs. Clinton said in Saturday’s Democratic debate that Mr. Trump “is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter,” and that he was being used in videos. Mr. Trump angrily denied the former secretary of state’s charge and demanded an apology from her. The Clinton campaign refused to provide one, pointing to comments from several counterterrorism experts and social media posts by terror groups to support the claims.
That she didn’t have evidence for what she said is the way of the world, not that the American media will ever mention it. But Gateway Pundit has a posting on Somebody Tell Hillary… ISIS Recruitment Video Featured Bill Clinton the “Fornicator” (VIDEO). It also shows John Kerry and Obama himself. The video has quite some production values, and is interesting as an artefact of our own times. It obviously will only repel, and I hope frighten the likes of us. So on the narrow issue of who can be used as part of an ISIL recruitment drive, Hillary is lying again. But the wider and more important issue is that only you and I will even know of such videos that expose Hillary as dangerously and badly informed. This is part of the sickening nature of the modern political process, where to find out the kinds of things you might wish everyone to know requires you to move beyond mainstream sources of news and make the effort yourself to see what’s going on, assuming it is now even possible to find out what is going on.
And as an afterthought, there is this to consider as well: Obama, Clinton may be setting up Trump to win Republican nomination because they think he would be the easiest one among the Republicans to beat.
President Obama and Hillary Clinton have intensified attacks on Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, accusing him of manipulating voters’ “fear and ignorance” and using anti-Muslim rhetoric that helps recruit Islamic State terrorists — jabs that appear to be energizing his supporters and strengthening his campaign.
But campaign strategists say the attacks are not aimed at knocking down Mr. Trump. Instead, the smears are part of a calculated ploy by Democrats who want to help him win because they are convinced the billionaire businessman will lose in the general election.
That Hillary might be president makes you wonder how this is even possible in a country of 300-million-plus people: Bush-Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Clinton?
Obama attacks Trump to help Hillary so they say
This is the story Obama, Clinton may be setting up Trump to win Republican nomination and who knows if it’s true. Here is the heart of it:
In a head-to-head matchup, the RealClearPolitics average of national polls show Mrs. Clinton beating Mr. Trump by an average of 6 percentage points, significantly higher than other Republicans such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who trail Mrs. Clinton by 1.5 percentage points and 2.5 percentage points, respectively. All the other Republican contenders fare better in matchups with Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump in the average of national polls.
It’s a theory and a strategy. Personally, I think if Trump wins the nomination he will win the election in a walk.
And now the heavyweight division
Republicans have been very reluctant to attack Obama for the whole of the past seven years. Whether it is the courtesies of the American system or Obama has the photos I don’t know. But now we shall see since he has moved to attack Donald Trump himself. This is from the NYT and featured at Drudge: Obama Accuses Trump of Exploiting Working-Class Fears.
President Obama said in a radio interview airing on Monday that Donald J. Trump, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, is exploiting the resentment and anxieties of working-class men to boost his campaign. Mr. Obama also argued that some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African-American to hold the White House.
That Obama reached for the race-card is disgusting and despicable but par for the course. Since nothing anyone in any leading position has said has referred to the President’s racial background – half white, half black – that he grabs for it in every controversy he is part of has degraded the American political system since it allows him to ignore the substantive parts of any criticism. But lets get to this business about resentment and anxieties, which are not just held by men, and not just held by members of the working class. Let us go on to what he had to say:
“If you are referring to specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc. — which unfortunately is pretty far out there, and gets some traction in certain pockets of the Republican Party, and that have been articulated by some of their elected officials — what I’d say there is that that’s probably pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” Mr. Obama told Steve Inskeep, an NPR correspondent. “In some ways, I may represent change that worries them.”
I just think he’s a far-left loon, and that pretty well covers the kinds of change he represents. If his standard of concern is whether something might “destroy the United States”, as he says below, I’m not sure short of a nuclear war what he would include. This is truly disturbing:
“This is a serious challenge — ISIS is a virulent, nasty organization [!!!!!] that has gained a foothold in ungoverned spaces effectively in Syria and parts of western Iraq,” Mr. Obama said, referring to attacks the group organized in Paris and apparently inspired in San Bernardino. “But it is also important for us to keep things in perspective, and this is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”
As for destroying the United States, there are other nations along the pathway to the US that might find things have deteriorated to a very considerable extent because of the American President. Think about this, a reminder of where things have gone with Iran:
The Iran deal isn’t merely sub-par diplomacy, it is a scandal. I don’t see how a president who took seriously his duty to preserve American security could have entered into it. There is another scandal, too: a journalistic one. Here, as in so many instances, reporters have covered up for the Obama administration by deliberately failing to report the facts surrounding the Iranian nuclear debacle. It would be interesting to compare the number of minutes that network news broadcasts have devoted, over the last few months, to the fulminations of Donald Trump with the minutes they have devoted to the crumbling of the Iran agreement. Likewise with column inches in our supposedly sophisticated newspapers.
But Obama has now taken on Donald Trump who will or will not react and will or will not reply directly to what has been said. This really is a moment of truth. I don’t know why it has taken so long for such a showdown to have occurred, but the time has now arrived. Is Trump up to it? We are now about to find out.
Soros and the progressive internationalist cause
This is a theme I have dwelt on before, progressive internationalism. Every era comes to an end for some reason. This is the reason for the end of ours. Here we have more of the same urged on by George Soros. The author here seems to see some kind of benevolence in Soros’ actions, but the actual drive is hatred for the open societies by the left.
George Soros, “a prominent international supporter of democratic ideals and causes” is no exception to the rule.
Under the false pretext of “democracy promotion” the notorious magnate created a network of foundations and instigated a series blatant regime changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics after the collapse of the USSR.
“Now his foundations are up to their eyeballs in promoting propaganda serving the US-UK war agenda for destroying stability in Syria as they did in Libya three years ago, creating the current EU refugee crisis,” Engdahl stresses.
It seems that Soros is making every effort to exacerbate the ongoing refugee crisis in the EU: the infamous philanthropist is urging European leaders to accept about one million of refugees annually and at the same time he is encouraging the desperate asylum seekers to flee to Europe.
And it will just go on because Soros is far from the only one with such attitudes and beliefs in positions of power.
The TnT show
Donald Trump is a standard-issue liberal-leaning businessman who, having decided that his best chance for glory lies with the GOP, found a few hot button issues that appeal to conservatives. If you move beyond these issues and get him off-message, he reverts to the liberal notions and cliches that predominate among the rich and famous.
The only difference between how Trump is described and our Malcolm is that he hasn’t even found a single one of those issues, hot button or not, that appeal to conservatives. Whatever he does that is reminiscent of the the conservative side of the ledger is only being done because he has been forced to by the 43 who would be in open rebellion if he tried to dodge the original agreement. But if you want to have some idea of what the PM is like, let me take you to Geoffrey Luck’s review of Malcolm Turnbull’s biography found at Quadrant Online. If you are looking for evidence that Malcolm has always been a man on a mission, go to the link. Here is a bit from the start on how he ended up leading a party of the right without having any principles to match.
Well explained is how despite the temptation of many ALP friends and mentors, Turnbull made the objective decision that in Labor, his wealth would ultimately frustrate his obsessive ambition to become prime minister.
I have no idea what Trump will be like as President but there he will almost surely be, in the same way that I still have no idea what Malcolm will be like as PM although that is what he now already is. But both from the business class, both from the left and both overflowing with confidence in their abilities.
An imagined Donald Trump on Hillary Clinton
More parody. This was picked up at Powerline which is described as this rendering of Donald Trump as re-imagined by Masterpiece Theater. I assume that the words are Trumps even if not the sound. Whether this is the actual transcript being followed, the points made are also extraordinarily accurate, and nothing I have ever heard from an actual Republican in quite such a devastating way.
Law of Markets 