Funny in a not-so-funny sort of way. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Obama is out to kill Hillary’s run for president, and will have her in jail before he will let her take the nomination.
Funny in a not-so-funny sort of way. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Obama is out to kill Hillary’s run for president, and will have her in jail before he will let her take the nomination.
Whatever you may think of the crash in the Chinese economy, who are suffering from the after effects of their Keynesian stimulus – ghost cities anyone? – what I really find interesting about these headlines from Drudge is the comment from Donald Trump. The American system lacks a leader of the opposition; now it has one, of sorts. If Trump comments, it’s news. It has nothing to do with Obama and American politics, but that’s because it is hard really to see Trump as opposed to what Obama is doing anywhere outside of immigration, and even then it’s not all that certain.
CHINA MOVES SPOOK STOCKS…
Roils Markets Second Day as Yuan Cut by 1.6%…
EXPORTERS REELING…
RISKS CLASH WITH USA…
DOW ‘DEATH CROSS’…
TRUMP: Currency devaluation will devastate…
No one else is news. How do any of the established Republican candidates get a look in? He is leading the opposition, but just who or what he is opposed to is still to be determined.
You really do have to wonder about political reporting. This is a brief story on Glenn Beck’s reaction to Donald Trump:
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck called Donald Trump a “son of a bitch,” and panned his performance in Thursday night’s GOP presidential debate.
On his Friday broadcast, Beck argued that the GOP front-runner was a “big loser” in the first showdown between Republican candidates.He is the most arrogant candidate next to the candidate called Barack Obama,” he said. “I mean, there’s nobody I’ve seen more arrogant than him.
“This guy will be Barack Obama times 10 with enemy lists,” Beck added of Trump’s unpopularity with other Republicans. “[He is] really dangerous.”
Beck admitted that Trump’s inclusion produced entertaining political theater, calling it the “best presidential debate” he has ever seen.
“I could watch this as sports [if] my country wasn’t dying,” Beck quipped.
Trump instantly drew boos on Thursday evening by refusing to rule out a 2016 Oval Office bid as an independent.
My guess is that Glenn wasn’t being lighthearted.
I’ve been paying close attention to Donald Trump since we happened to see his speech in Las Vegas that took him to the top of the polls. But politics is not about having a set of opinions. It is about working with other people to achieve collective ends. The business with Megyn Kelly is the finish of him so far as I am concerned, and I am unlikely to be alone on this.
It’s not just the disgust he creates. It’s his lack of proportion. It’s his attitude to the views of those who disagree with him that is so disturbing. He has never run for or held political office. He has only run businesses, which is precisely the wrong kind of experience for anyone in politics. A business is an organisation that does work by command and control. There are decision makers and those who put those decisions into effect. That is not the way a free society works.
Obama has much in common with Trump and has turned out to be the worst president in American history. My way or the highway, with the result that everything of any significance he has become involved with has turned out a disaster. Trump would be no worse, but he would be no better.
A presidential system is the worst form of democracy you can have. The last few years have shown how flawed a system it can be. We can only hope for a better outcome after 2017.
I was already convinced the UK should leave the EU. If all this is true, it is crazy for the UK to stay in.
How many different issues there are. The Democrats overload the system with more outrage than could ever have been imagined and then let the media ignore every bit of it. Let’s just go to three.
First is ISIS. Anyone not sickened by the Islamic State is morally dead themselves. From Mark Steyn:
The self-absorbed hedonism of modern western life necessarily requires desensitization. Bloomberg reports an ISIS “sex slave” price list acquired in Iraq by UN official Zainab Bangura: A woman over 40 will set you back a mere 41 bucks, but if you prefer a girl aged nine or under – and who doesn’t? – the price rises to $165. As Laura Rosen Cohen points out, this is the real “war on women”. But nobody cares – because to care, seriously, either about an infanticide-industrial complex or nine-year-old sex-slaves in an American protectorate, would ask something of us. And to ask something – anything – more than a supportive hashtag is too much.
You can read more here, but this time in the English tabloid press: ISIS executes 19 girls for refusing to have sex with fighters as UN envoy reveals how sex slaves are ‘peddled like barrels of petrol’. The price list for women is presented as well. What is it about ISIS you don’t know that would want you not to see something done?
Second, the revelations about the American abortion industry. The actual issue Steyn was discussing in his post above was the Planned Parenthood sale of baby parts that has been captured on video. Perhaps our civilisation does not deserve to survive:
The fifth in an apparent series of twelve Planned Parenthood undercover videos shows Melissa Farrell, director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, discussing how to manipulate the abortion procedure in order to ensure the “fetus” is delivered “intact” and thus able to be cannibalized for body parts. As Ms Farrell puts it, if a client “has a specific need for a certain portion of the products of conception and we bake that into our contract, and our protocol, that we follow this. So we deviate from our standard in order to do that.”
No newspaper or media outlet you know has covered this in anything other than a perfunctory way, assuming they have covered it at all. How morally sick do you have to be not to find this depraved to the fullest extent of its meaning.
Third, there is the manoeuvering by Obama and Kerry to remove every possible sanction on Iran developing nuclear weapons. This is not a deal. This is the action of someone who is, for all intents and purposes, an Iranian operative elected President of the United States. The only crafting involved was to structure the process so that it could be approved by first the Iranians, then by the UN and finally by the American Senate. This is not calculation on behalf of the United States. This is calculation on how the sell out can be sold. Even the Iranians don’t quite appreciate the traitorous nature of the American President, as witness this:
Obama’s remarks about the deal are meant for domestic consumption and aimed at soothing fears among Republican and Jewish critics, [Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad Ali] Asudi claimed.
The common denominator is the American media who do as best it can not to discuss any of it. Unless you watch Fox or read right-side blogs – easily avoided if your aim is not to know, or even find out what there is to know that you prefer not to – you are virtually unaware of any of it. Even if you had seen any of it, nowhere will you have come across the slightest outrage in the media. It is a moral sickness that infects the entire left side of the political spectrum. If you still can vote for these people – if you still see Obama in a positive way – it is a moral sickness you share with far too many others who prefer to see themselves as moral giants when they are instead the worst of the worst.
It is essential to mark the passing of one of the great historians and enemies of totalitarians of all varieties. Robert Conquest passed away on August 3 at aged 98. I think it is even possible that I read every one of his books [UPDATE: I just went to look at what he’d written – I got nowhere near it]. This is from The Telegraph in London picked up at Powerline:
Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist. His career illustrated also what the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, another former communist, meant when he said to the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti that “the final battle” of the 20th century would have to be fought between the two sides they represented.
An ardent Bolshevik as a young man, Conquest became a bitter foe of Soviet “Socialism”. He had first visited Russia in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great experiment. It was a half century before he returned in 1989, having spent his life between chronicling the horrors the country had endured, and emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”. “He was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn,” said Timothy Garton Ash.
The most dedicated anti-socialists are former socialists, which I have seen often. Of what he wrote, I have found his Three Laws of Politics amongst the greatest insights you are likely to find anywhere:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
But if you want his best quote of them all, it is his suggested title for the reprint of his The Great Terror after the Berlin Wall had fallen and his estimates of death by gulag had turned out to be too small: “How About”, he said, “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?”. When dealing with the left, there are many instances when you feel like saying it, but no one has ever had the right to those words more than he did.
“It is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”
Milton Friedman
The AP story is obliviously written by an American who still thinks European countries are run by royalty. Nevertheless, he gets the point well enough to see the future everywhere in countries that, amongst other things, have been invaded by non-productive sponges and drones. We are back to a modern version of the ancient Marxist maxim: those who do not work, do not eat.
King Willem-Alexander delivered a message to the Dutch people from the government in a nationally televised address: the welfare state of the 20th century is gone.
In its place a “participation society” is emerging, in which people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets, with less help from the national government.
The king traveled past waving fans [!!!] in an ornate horse-drawn carriage to the 13th-century Hall of Knights in The Hague for the monarch’s traditional annual address on the day the government presents its budget for the coming year. It was Willem-Alexander’s first appearance on the national stage since former Queen Beatrix abdicated in April and he ascended to the throne.
“The shift to a ‘participation society’ is especially visible in social security and long-term care,” the king said, reading out to lawmakers a speech written for him by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government.
“The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.”
The cradle-to-grave welfare state will go. Dependence on the government, other than occasionally and in small amounts, will disappear. If you are not self-supporting, no one else will be obliged to provide for you what you cannot earn yourself. We shall see if there is enough support for such measures in Holland in 2015. By 2030, it will be on its way to being universal since the welfare state can no longer be sustained.
I can understand how the Iranian deal is in Iran’s national interests. I can also understand how it is not in the national interests of many of the countries of the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia in particular. But tell me, how is the deal in the interests of the United States (aka the Great Satan)? In what possible way are any of America’s foreign policy aims advanced by this agreement?
If you are an ally of the US, you are now looking elsewhere for protection and safety. No one can or will trust the US as they once did. It will not matter who is elected next or the time after that. The treacherous nature of the US, which can change with every election cycle, and which is often determined by domestic side issues of no real consequence to its strategic concerns, will leave each of its allies looking for alternatives. The possibility of a far-to-the-left ideologue as president would have once been seen as impossible. With Obama and the constituency he has built, it seems to have become almost mandatory.
And while it seems invisible to those who govern the US at the present time, the combination of its economic and open-borders policies will make the US a weaker country well into the foreseeable future. Built on top of that the fetish for green energy. It may still be the strongest military presence, but it will be able to enforce its will to only a limited extent should it even wish to do so.
Thirty years from now we will be living in a world so changed I can only barely begin to sketch it. The only thing I am near enough sure about is that the Pax Americana we have depended on since the fall of the Pax Britannica will have been vastly diminished.
In the meantime, Kerry is off to do the near impossible while leaving out trying to do the absolutely impossible:
The Iran nuclear deal tops Secretary of State John Kerry’s agenda as he meets with foreign ministers from Egypt and Qatar this weekend. Kerry will skip a visit with Israel, the main U.S. ally in the Middle East and a vociferous opponent of the deal. . . .
“People in my region now are relying on God’s will, and consolidating their local capabilities and analysis with everybody else except our oldest and most powerful ally,” Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan wrote in a July 16 op-ed for Lebanon’s Daily Star.
With that, you do not even need to read between the lines. Diplomatic though Saudi Prince Bandar was, he could not have been more clear or more critical.
UPDATE: At least there isn’t completely idiocy across the US, only among Democrats and their leaders:
American voters oppose 57 – 28 percent, with only lukewarm support from Democrats and overwhelming opposition for Republicans and independent voters, the nuclear pact negotiated with Iran, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.
Voters say 58 – 30 percent the nuclear pact will make the world less safe, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds.
Opposing the Iran deal are Republicans 86 – 3 percent and independent voters 55 – 29 percent, while Democrats support it 52 – 32 percent. There is little gender gap as men oppose the deal 59 – 30 percent and women oppose it 56 – 27 percent.
I should just add that 52-32 percent support is not “lukewarm”.
Found at Instapundit: Ruth Wisse in the Wall Street Journal on “Obama’s Racial Blind Spot”. She’s only, of course, being polite in calling it a blind spot.
Barack Obama’s election to the presidency represented to many Americans this country’s final triumph over racism. Reversing the record of slavery and institutionalized discrimination, his victory was hailed as a redemptive moment for America and potentially for humankind. How grotesque that the president should now douse that hope by fueling racism on a global scale.
Iranian regime is currently the world’s leading exponent of anti-Jewish racism. . . . Whereas Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich had to plot the “Final Solution” in secrecy, using euphemisms for their intended annihilation of the Jews of Europe, Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweets that Israel “has no cure but to be annihilated.” Iran’s leaders, relishing how small Israel is, call it a “one bomb state,” and until the time arrives to deliver that bomb, they sponsor anti-Israel terrorism through Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militias. . . .
Perhaps Mr. Obama is oblivious to what the scholar Robert Wistrich (who died in May) called “the longest hatred” because it has been so much a part of his world as he moved through life. Muslim Indonesia, where he lived from age 6 to 10, trails only Pakistan and Iran in its hostility to Jews. An animus against Jews and Israel was a hallmark of the Rev.Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago that Mr. Obama attended for two decades. And before he ran for office, Mr. Obama carried the standard of the international left that invented the stigma of Zionism-as-imperialism. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama felt obliged to repudiate his pastor (who had famously cursed America from the pulpit), and muted his far-left credentials. Mr. Obama was voted into office by an electorate enamored of the idea that he would oppose all forms of racism. He has not met that expectation.
Some Jewish critics of Mr. Obama may be tempted to put his derelictions in a line of neglect by other presidents, but there is a difference. Thus one may argue that President Roosevelt should have bombed the approach routes to Auschwitz or allowed the Jewish-refugee ship St. Louis to dock in the U.S. during World War II, but those were at worst sins of omission. In sharpest contrast, President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran is an act of commission. This is the first time the U.S. will have deliberately entered into a pact with a country committed to annihilating another people—a pact that doesn’t even require formal repudiation of the country’s genocidal aims.
To which Elizabeth Price Foley has added:
Exactly. Why most American Jews are standing silently by, like sheeple, in the face of these facts is a utter mystery to me. Why did American Jews not demand, at a minimum, Iran’s repudiation of its genocidal aims against Israel? Admittedly, such a repudiation would not have changed the hearts and minds of the Iranians, but it would have at least forced the Administration to publicly recognize and discuss Iran’s genocidal intentions.
As it stands, however, the genocidal aims of Iran toward Israel have been swept under the rug, not even worthy of discussion, which is exactly what the Obama Administration wanted. The Administration’s failure to even discuss the inhumanity of Iran’s racist/ethnic hatred is both shameful and telling, particularly given that Obama is our first black president whose entire presidency has focused incessantly on issues of race and ethnicity. The Obama Administration’s indifference to Iran’s hatred of Jews will further fan the flames such hatred across the globe.
The only explanation I can fathom for American Jews’ acquiescence to the Iran deal is that most are liberals/progressives first, Jews second. How tragic that this attitude has emerged only one generation removed from the Holocaust.
And if you are looking for a bit more along these same lines, there is Sultan Knish discussing The Useless Jewish Organization. This is from somewhere near the end, but you should read it from the beginning.
If Obama’s nuclear deal is to be defeated, it won’t be done by the establishment insiders. The establishment is invested in its own credibility and its politics. It will make a show of fighting the Iran deal before fundraising off its miserable failure. And the money will go to fund its progressive causes.
The establishment will not stand up to Obama, just like it didn’t stand up to FDR. The real action will come from ad-hoc coalitions, like the one behind the Stop Iran Rally, that throw things together. And it will come from a handful of kids somewhat that do what the adults aren’t doing.
It’s not an answer for me that Israel could damage Iran if it started up. The aim of policy ought to have been never to give Iran even the opportunity, but perhaps that was too hard. It is certainly too hard now that they have stopped trying, for no discernible reason. We are all living on the edge of a volcano. When it will erupt, it seems to me, is now only a matter of time, not whether. On the other hand, in spite of its rhetoric, why should the Iranians risk having their country turned into a nuclear wasteland. Tragically, that kind of calculation is all that stands between Israel and a nuclear war.