There are many reasons why Barack Obama is unfit to be president, but one of the most basic is, he just isn’t smart enough to handle the job.
It’s not said enough and it’s not part of the national conversation enough. These same clowns laughed at GWB, but when serious stupid enters the White House, they say not a word, in part because they are too stupid to notice themselves. The post comes with a Ramirez cartoon as well but first an older, more famous Obama selfie.
Thousands of innocent people are being murdered around the world, Russia is advancing into Europe, Iran is developing nuclear weapons, ISIS is on a rampage. And this is how Obama deals with the duties of his office.
That this is our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president. No wonder Vladimir Putin and Iranian Mullahs are having a field day at the expense of the West. The leader of the free world is clownish. They realized it years ago; maybe Americans will start getting a clue.
But so it has been for 6 years.
Count me speechless. We have a fool as president.
Is that it? That he is just a simpleton in a clown suit? Until you and others can bring yourself to saying what the reality actually is, that you have a supporter of your deepest enemy as your president, that you have a traitor as the Commander in Chief, you have not even begun to understand what ought to be obvious to anyone.
How’s this for a first para from a mere columnist who wishes to take up Obama’s empty rhetoric about modern Islam and the Christianity of a thousand years ago?
I have written three books and numerous articles about the Crusades, slavery and the Inquisition, so I suppose I am, forgive me, somewhat qualified to discuss them. Not, of course, as expert as President Barack Obama, because he seems to be an authority on pretty much everything.
The columnist is Michael Coren writing in the Toronto Sun, under the heading, Obama dodges tough questions of Islam. His conclusion, in what is anyway a short article, seems to be this:
As I say, I have written entire books about the context and nuance of all this so a column can never satisfy. What Obama was perhaps trying to say was that people use religion to conduct all sorts of evil deeds and in that he is correct. But if he genuinely understood history and religion, he would know that Christ’s actual teachings were seldom the reason for ancient injustices.
The question that must be asked – and Obama and so many like him have neither the courage nor the wit to do so – is whether the same can be said of Islam.
Ahem, ahem. Obama does, of course, know the answer, which is why he does so much to evade the question.
What I appreciate most about this article is that she at no stage criticises Romney himself, other than for not going for the jugular enough. And I could not agree more that the future bifurcated in November 2012, and there is no pulling it back together again now. This is by Jenny Erikson who worked on the Romney campaign:
For months now, people have been asking me if I thought Mitt Romney would make another bid for the presidency in 2016, and my answer has been the same since it was in the aftermath of the 2012 election — not a chance. I saw Mitt and his wife Ann Romney the day after the election, and I knew then and there that Mitt would never run again.
I was on the Mitt Romney for President staff for the last few months of the election. From the Boston headquarters, I saw the inside of the dirty machine of a presidential election, and on the morning of November 7, I saw the exhausting effect it can take on not just the candidate, but his entire family.
The morning after the election was a somber one, especially in Boston, where 90 percent of the voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama (it was impossible to find a bar that Thursday night that wasn’t an Obama victory party). Hungover and depressed, the campaign staff trudged into the main office the next day, not sure what to expect.
Mitt is a classy guy. Seriously, the guy is absolutely one of the best men walking around … but he wasn’t a fantastic candidate. He refused to take the shots he needed to in order to win, and he was too humble to brag about his countless acts of friendship, charity, and good stewardship.
Anyway, about 400 of us gathered in the main room of the main office building, cramming into every space imaginable. I was standing on a desk in a cubicle. Mitt got up and gave his spiel, complimenting the whole team for running a classy campaign. He was proud of the way we did things, and he wanted that known.
He made sure we were all paid through the end of the month, even though I’m positive that we had spent all the campaign coffers. I’d bet those last three weeks of pay came out of his own pockets. It’s typical in elections to not get paid after a loss. You consider yourself lucky if you get paid for the full pay period.
So The Gov (as we referred to him around the office) had us all pat ourselves on the back, as we tried to figure out what exactly we were going to do for jobs, considering the fact that many of us had planned on going to the White House with him.
Then it was Ann’s turn to speak. Now let me say that Ann Romney is one of the classiest, hardest working, supportive, and kind women I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. It takes a tough soul to raise five rowdy boys, and to do it with feminine grace is even more astounding.
But that morning … Ann Romney was obviously upset. She unwound her scarf in the heat from the furnace and handed it to her husband with a playful, “Here — be good for something.” Then she addressed the crowd.
“I really thought we had this,” she lamented. “America got it wrong.” There was more, I know there was more, and she was gracious to all of us and all we had sacrificed to work for Mitt, but there was no denying that she was tired and she was done.
Ann spent her entire adult life supporting Mitt and his ambitions, even through breast cancer and MS. She raised his five sons, played First Lady of Massachusetts, and made it through two presidential primaries and a general election.
And the way Mitt looked at her as she held it together the best she could to talk to the staff, with admiration, love, and respect, told me everything I needed to know about a future run. It would never happen. He loves her too much, appreciates her too much, and could never bring himself to put her through the blood, sweat, and tears of another election.
So while I think Mitt Romney would’ve made a spectacular president, there’s no doubt that 2016 is going to be a rough one for candidates on both sides of the aisle … and the 2012 Republican nominee is content to watch from the sidelines, with the love of his life right there next to him.
I anyway think it is too late for Romney. He was perfect for 2012, but the US is smashed and it will require a different kind of temperament to fix things from here. I’m not sure it can be done, not just because Obama was president, but because Obama was electable. There is no obvious way back now, the way there still was then.
AND HERE IS ANN COULTER HOPING THAT HE WILL: Her title is, Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough. If you understand the title, it really is brilliant. This part, though, is about Romney.
The only Republican who has ever opposed the media and big campaign donors on immigration was Mitt Romney. You know, the guy we just kicked to the curb. On immigration, the elites speak with one voice: The donors want cheap labor, and the media hate Republicans who push ideas that are wildly popular with voters.
As governor of Massachusetts, Romney repeatedly vetoed bills giving illegal aliens in-state tuition. He also vetoed a bill to extend health coverage to illegal aliens. And he made clear he would veto any bill allowing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens, so those never made it to his desk.
While Jeb was one of the first governors to demand driver’s licenses for illegals, Romney was one of the first governors to strike a special agreement with federal immigration officials allowing Massachusetts state troopers to arrest illegal aliens.
But with the cheap-labor plutocrats up in arms during the 2012 presidential campaign over Romney’s suggestion that their serfs “self-deport,” all the Republican lickspittles rushed to denounce his untoward remark. Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker — all of them lined up to take Sheldon Adelson’s loyalty oath, swearing that, as far as they were concerned, illegal aliens should be treated as honored guests.
There are still a few of us around who wish he could be President, but it’s not going to happen, not least because of the preferences of our elites, who are never troubled by the trouble they cause everyone else.
Here is the conclusion of an article by Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s Iran strategy which is near enough to my own. Yet once again he won’t say what he obviously thinks, that Obama is an agent for the Iranians and hopes to see them succeed and the West lose. His entire article is as good a short summary as you will find, but this is how it ends. He is explaining how things look from Obama’s perspective:
The Middle East is not a mess, but a place in a needed stage of transition as it frees itself from Western domination and a new order slowly emerges. To the degree that we need a large military, it is preferable to envision it as an executive agency for enacting social change without the clumsy impediment of Congress, especially in terms of race, women’s issues, and gender preferences. It can do the best work for stability abroad by shrinking itself. Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder and always a relative concept that Westerners pathologically insist is absolute. As far as the world abroad goes, China is a more authentic enterprise than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which are the products of U.S. Cold War nation-building in our own image, not of indigenous revolutionary self-creation. U.S. Cold War culpability — in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, South America, Cuba — is a burden that must be addressed through various means. The rules of nuclear proliferation are a Western construct. Israel is an abnormality, a Western outpost of capitalism and privilege where it has never really belonged, an irritant that should be treated like any other country as much as politically possible. Latin American grass-roots socialism is not Stalinism, but rather an extension of what Obama is trying to do at home.
I think the world now seems a chaotic place only if you assume that the Obama administration wished to be like its predecessors.
It is a largely politically ignorant constituency fed by a media actively hostile to America’s traditional interests. This is the coming of a dark age.
Obama entered the White House with the intention of forging an alliance with our most dangerous enemy in the Middle East. That fact has to be the baseline of any serious analysis of our government’s policies.
Which takes us straightaway to the great unanswered question: Why does the president want this alliance?
And his answer, after having watched Obama deal with this issue for six years:
I don’t know.
Well, that’s just great! But you don’t need to know why he is doing something, only that he is. Since there is no longer any doubt about what he is trying to do, my question is, why is no one trying to stop him? My answer to this is the same as his was to the question he asked above:
I don’t know.
As to why he is behaving as he is, I have do have an answer. It is because he hates America. From Thomas Sowell just the other day:
In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”
And as much as he hates his own country, as would be expected of any associate of Bill Ayers, he hates Israel even more. Why that is so hard to understand after the past six years I really truly don’t know.
This is an extraordinarily insightful article on Obama’s strategic approach to Iran. I wouldn’t have said he had one at all, but Michael Doran has tied all the strands together in a very compelling narrative, Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy. The lead-in quote sets out what is to come:
The president has long been criticized for his lack of strategic vision. But what if a strategy, centered on Iran, has been in place from the start and consistently followed to this day?
And the opening para sets the scene:
President Barack Obama wishes the Islamic Republic of Iran every success. Its leaders, he explained in a recent interview, stand at a crossroads. They can choose to press ahead with their nuclear program, thereby continuing to flout the will of the international community and further isolate their country; or they can accept limitations on their nuclear ambitions and enter an era of harmonious relations with the rest of the world. “They have a path to break through that isolation and they should seize it,” the president urged—because “if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication . . . inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power.”
That’s the aim, to turn Iran into a regional power in the Middle East. Once you see that, quite a bit of everything else falls into place, except how did he become president in the first place. Well written too, so it is easy to read from start to end.
AND NOW THERE’S THIS: The most dangerous man ever to be president. Obama wants to leave his stamp on history as the greatest strategic genius since, I don’t know, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Report: Secret ‘Talks About Talks’ Taking Place Between U.S. and North Korea, also about nuclear weapons. What a buffoon he is, an absolute buffoon.
Obama fails at everything he tries to do. Netanyahu surges in pre-election polls just as he sends his own team of election advisors to Israel to help the opposition.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is enjoying a surge in the latest opinion polls of Israeli voters. The Jerusalem Post reports that its latest poll shows Bibi’s party, the Likud, is leading the race for the first time in weeks. Other polls agree, and show the Likud leading its rival, the Zionist Union, which is a combination of the Labor and Hatnua parties.
The Post attributes Netanyahu’s improved showing to the cross-border conflict with Hezbollah, which attacked Israeli soldiers earlier this week, killing two. The attack was a retaliation, likely orchestrated by Iran, for Israel’s strike on a Hezbollah convoy in the Syrian Golan Heights earlier this month, in which an Iranian brigadier general was also killed.
However, this is also a week in which Netanyahu has been the target of withering criticism from the American and Israeli left over his decision to accept Speaker of the House John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress in March. If that has harmed Netanyahu, it has not prevented him from taking the lead–and it may even have rallied Israeli voters around him.
I am of that unusual middle generation, the post-Holocaust period of Jewish acceptance in the West, which is now being followed by a return to the days of pre-War Europe. My mother’s photo album at home showed a picture of some relative dead upon the sofa, having been murdered during a pogrom in Poland sometime just after World War I. We’re not there yet, but those straws in the wind inside that Kosher butcher shop in Paris are signs of something evil stirring. That is why I find this article so interesting. It comes with the title, The ideological roots of media bias against Israel, but it is not just about Israel. But if you get to its conclusion, and it is a long article, it ends on an upbeat note. And it’s not just about the media, but it does tell you quite a lot about the media that is worth understanding, if you appreciate that the media are a stand-in for the intellectual class, who are a problem all on their own.
The cult’s priesthood can be found among the activists, NGO experts, and ideological journalists who have turned coverage of this conflict into a catalogue of Jewish moral failings, as if Israeli society were different from any other group of people on earth, as if Jews deserve to be mocked for having suffered and failed to be perfect as a result.
Most of my former colleagues in the press corps aren’t full-fledged members of this group. They aren’t true believers. But boycotts of Israel, and only of Israel, which are one of the cult’s most important practices, have significant support in the press, including among editors who were my superiors. Sympathy for Israel’s predicament is highly unpopular in the relevant social circles, and is something to be avoided by anyone wishing to be invited to the right dinner parties, or to be promoted. The cult and its belief system are in control of the narrative, just as the popular kids in a school are those who decide what clothes or music are acceptable. In the social milieu of the reporters, NGO workers, and activists, which is the same social world, these are the correct opinions. This guides the coverage. This explains why the events in Gaza this summer were portrayed not as a complicated war like many others fought in this century, but as a massacre of innocents. And it explains much else.
So prevalent has this kind of thinking become that participating in liberal intellectual life in the West increasingly requires you to subscribe at least outwardly to this dogma, particularly if you’re a Jew and thus suspected of the wrong sympathies. If you’re a Jew from Israel, your participation is increasingly conditional on an abject and public display of self-flagellation. Your participation, indeed, is increasingly unwelcome.
What, exactly, is going on?
Observers of Western history understand that at times of confusion and unhappiness, and of great ideological ferment, negative sentiment tends to coagulate around Jews. Discussions of the great topics of the time often end up as discussions about Jews.
In the late 1800s, for example, French society was riven by the clash between the old France of the church and army, and the new France of liberalism and the rule of law. The French were preoccupied with the question of who is French, and who is not. They were smarting from their military humiliation by the Prussians. All of this sentiment erupted around the figure of a Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, accused of betraying France as a spy for Germany. His accusers knew he was innocent, but that didn’t matter; he was a symbol of everything they wanted to condemn.
To give another example: Germans in the 1920s and 1930s were preoccupied with their humiliation in the Great War. This became a discussion of Jewish traitors who had stabbed Germany in the back. Germans were preoccupied as well with the woes of their economy – this became a discussion of Jewish wealth, and Jewish bankers.
In the years of the rise of communism and the Cold War, communists concerned with their ideological opponents talked about Jewish capitalists and cosmopolitans, or Jewish doctors plotting against the state. At the very same time, in capitalist societies threatened by communism, people condemned Jewish Bolsheviks.
This is the face of this recurring obsession. As the journalist Charles Maurras wrote, approvingly, in 1911: ‘Everything seems impossible, or frighteningly difficult, without the providential arrival of anti-Semitism, through which all things fall into place and are simplified.’
The West today is preoccupied with a feeling of guilt about the use of power. That’s why the Jews, in their state, are now held up in the press and elsewhere as the prime example of the abuse of power. That’s why for so many the global villain, as portrayed in newspapers and on TV, is none other than the Jewish soldier, or the Jewish settler. This is not because the Jewish settler or soldier is responsible for more harm than anyone else on earth – no sane person would make that claim. It is rather because these are the heirs to the Jewish banker or Jewish commissar of the past. It is because when moral failure raises its head in the Western imagination, the head tends to wear a skullcap.
One would expect the growing scale and complexity of the conflict in the Middle East over the past decade to have eclipsed the fixation on Israel in the eyes of the press and other observers. Israel is, after all, a sideshow: The death toll in Syria in less than four years far exceeds the toll in the Israel-Arab conflict in a century. The annual death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is a morning in Iraq.
And yet it is precisely in these years that the obsession has grown worse.
This makes little sense, unless we understand that people aren’t fixated on Israel despite everything else going on – but rather because of everything else going on. As Maurras wrote, when you use the Jew as the symbol of what is wrong, ‘all things fall into place and are simplified.’
The last few decades have brought the West into conflict with the Islamic world. Terrorists have attacked New York, Washington, London, Madrid, and now Paris. America and Britain caused the unravelling of Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead there. Afghanistan was occupied and thousands of Western soldiers killed, along with countless civilians – but the Taliban are alive and well, undeterred. Gaddafi was removed, and Libya is no better off. All of this is confusing and discouraging. It causes people to search for answers and explanations, and these are hard to come by. It is in this context that the ‘Cult of the Occupation’ has caught on. The idea is that the problems in the Middle East have something to do with Jewish arrogance and perfidy, that the sins of one’s own country can be projected upon the Western world’s old blank screen. This is the idea increasingly reflected on campuses, in labour unions, and in the media fixation on Israel. It’s a projection, one whose chief instrument is the press.
Jews understand this very well, or at least some do. But if you wish to be a self-identifying Jew, this is now a reality you face. Two other reminders, both on video. First this, which took place in New York City’s Council Chamber.
And then this, which is what it is. You can watch it here if you want.
As to the picture at the start of this post, it is from The Return of Anti-Semitism by Jonathan Sacks in The Wall Street Journal on 30 January. The caption runs, “two Jews, kneeling at right, about to be put to death by the sword as revenge for the death of Jesus, who looks on at top left. Manuscript illumination, c1250, from a French Bible”. But as the story makes all too clear, that is not much of an illustration of the issue as the twenty-first century begins. This is closer to it:
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, an Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yaqub, speaking in January 2009 on Al Rahma, a popular religious TV station in Egypt, made the contours of the new hate impeccably clear: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth…You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.”
And then there is the President of the United States, for whom most American Jews have voted for and would no doubt do so again if given the chance. This article from the latest Commentary is titled, America’s Anti-Israeli President, but anti-Israeli is again a synecdoche. Here are the concluding paras:
Mr. Obama wouldn’t be the first world leader to have an irrational animus against Israel. He’s not even the first American president to have an irrational animus against Israel. (See: Jimmy Carter.) But it is fair to say, I think, that no American president has been this consistently hostile to Israel while in office or shown such palpable anger and scorn for it and for Israel’s leader.
Perhaps given President Obama’s history–including his intimate, 20-year relationship with the anti-Semitic minister Jeremiah Wright–this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.
Sinister and very disturbing, but what is to be done? No answers really come to mind.
Law of Markets 