Category Archives: Politics – international

Not a word can you believe

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The fantastical will to lie at every moment is a pathology beyond comprehension to the normal mind. Obama denies ever knowing his uncle in Boston, denies he ever stayed with him when he was a student. Roger Simon discusses this improbability and takes it further. Who is this man, the President of the United States?

Around Obama there is an unprecedented silence, almost a media omertà. So much remains unknown about this man, although we do know, through the debate surrounding David Maraniss’s failed and tentative biography, that the president lied about his personal history on multiple occasions in his autobiography Dreams from My Father.

He, of course, lies when the truth will cause him harm, but he also lies when it should make no difference. Now he admits he lied about living with his uncle, although no one in the media describes it quite like that:

The White House said Thursday that President Barack Obama briefly lived with an uncle who faced deportation from the United States, correcting its previous statements that the president had never met Onyango Obama.

The 69-year-old, Kenyan-born half-brother of Obama’s estranged father was granted permission this week to stay in the U.S. after ignoring a deportation order two decades ago. The uncle is also known as Omar Obama.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said that when the case first arose, officials looked for records of a meeting but never directly asked the president.

A wilderness of mirrors.

Conrad Black on American Betrayal

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Conrad Black accuses Andy McCarthy of creating schisms on the right in endorsing Diana West’s American Betrayal. This is his article from National Review:

This is not a return to Diana West’s book. However, Andy McCarthy, a man for whom I have very great respect and whom I like very much, has written a review of it in The New Criterion that, because of its revisionist presentation of a number of historical events, is among the most discouraging political documents I have read in many years. Mr. McCarthy, a former prosecutor and distinguished and perceptive writer of the sensible Right, has frequently inspired me by his writing, and when I met him, at a difficult time in my own former travails, by his conversation also. I confidently turned to his review of Ms. West’s America Betrayed, which readers of this column will find it hard to forget after the robust knockabout the book received here and in her reply to me. The rigor of the review and its application to the book are matters I will address in a letter to The New Criterion, which the editor of that publication graciously invited, as I am mentioned, quite unexceptionably, in the review.

What seriously depresses me are three positions taken in the review. First is Andy McCarthy’s view that the scandalous, cowardly refusal of the mainstream elite of American culture and politics to recognize that America’s Islamist enemies are enemies can be traced to Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government in World War II. It is a fact that alarms and disgusts all of us in this debate, including Ms. West and her more vocal (than I am) critics, but I do not agree about the source of the problem. Second is Andy’s qualified accommodation, as worthy of reasonable consideration, of the claims by Ms. West that Lend-Lease was at least in significant part a mistaken reinforcement of Stalinist totalitarianism to the ultimate detriment of the West; that the Normandy invasion served Stalin’s purposes and enhanced his penetration of Western Europe; that Franklin D. Roosevelt was more or less ambivalent about the comparative virtues of Stalinist Communism and Western democracy (though he acknowledges that FDR disapproved of the barbarism of Stalin’s rule); that the Yalta agreement “gave” Stalin half of Europe; and that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were so significantly influenced in a pro-Soviet direction by Soviet agents and such arch-sympathizers that the distinction between an agent and a sympathizer was academic in the United States. And third, I am distressed by Andy McCarthy’s partial defense of Joseph R. McCarthy and his conclusion that the smear of McCarthy enabled Communism and anti-American reflexes to flourish in the United States through all the intervening years and are responsible for the inadequate general response to the Islamist threat that, I repeat, all the participants in this very heated and prolonged exchange revile in almost equally emphatic strictures.

The unanimity on this last point underlines the source of my concern. A relatively united Right, which included Diana West and other participants in this discussion, exercised a great influence in assisting President Reagan and his followers and collaborators in mobilizing opinion to support his arms buildup, his development of anti-missile defenses, his stiffening of the backbone of the Western alliance, and the consensus he helped create for a rollback of the Soviet intrusions in Central America, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the imposition of martial law in Poland. That unity of the influential Right was vitally important to the course corrections that lifted the United States and the West out of the inanities and shabby compromises of the Carter era, and led the world to the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international Communism, and to the triumph of democracy and market economics in most of the world. The New Criterion itself played an important and distinguished role in the intellectual phase of that struggle. Diana West, Andy McCarthy, and most of those who have supported and opposed Ms. West in this controversy all played their parts, and there is credit for all of them in the result: the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the nation-state.

A schism as profound as this controversy has now become will splinter the Right and render it incapable of united action, and perpetuate the precise condition that Andy decries and mistakenly lays at the door of Soviet wartime infiltration, both directly and through sympathizers. The process of fragmenting the Right, in this now notorious instance, began with Ms. West’s frequently, though not entirely, outrageous book, but for a writer of the stature of Andy McCarthy to take the positions mentioned above, and for The New Criterion to lend the exposition of those opinions the mantle of its earned prestige, is, and to say the least, very worrisome.

OK, I give up. Where’s the schism? Who is more in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, Conrad Black or Diana West? Reagan was demonised on the left as much as McCarthy ever was. For a variety of reasons it was not made to stick, but it wasn’t for want of trying. If I am not prepared to sell out one of the most relentless fighters on behalf of freedom I do not think of myself as anything other than acting in step with the values of a free world. No one in politics gets it right every time. No one can see the future perfectly. No one has absolutely pure and unblemished motives in everything they do. But if we are to walk away from McCarthy and his aims who then should be the person in the 1950s we should look to as the example of how these issues could be fought out? No one’s name comes to mind because no one else seemed willing to take these issues on and was capable of highlighting them in the same way.

If some of us over here prefer to honour McCarthy rather than revile him, so what? I can work perfectly well with people of a similar persuasion to myself who hold different views about McCarthy’s approach to dealing with our deadliest enemies. If it’s tactics and strategy you are worried about, then say so and this can be discussed. But it looks like a different agenda in play, one that is hard to fathom but seems to suggest that McCarthy was actually wrong in what he said, not in what he did. Since every single person he named in the 1950s has since that time been demonstrated to be an actual communist, communist sympathiser and useful idiot, nothing of what he did strikes me as wrongheaded and against my interests.

McCarthy’s only piece of bad luck was to have arrived on the scene at the same time as television. He seems strange to us today in those grainy black and white takes, but these are the takes made by his enemies in the media. We have our own battles today against a different kind of tyranny. I only wish we had a McCarthy right now who could show the same kind of leadership today that he did then.

Harvey Klehr on Joe McCarthy

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This is from an article by Harvey Klehr on FrontPageMag with the title, “Setting the Record on Joe McCarthy Straight”.

But if McCarthy was right about some of the large issues, he was wildly wrong on virtually all of the details.

There is no indication that he had even a hint of the Venona decryptions, so he did not base his accusations on the information in them. Indeed, virtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up in Venona. He did identify a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is little evidence that those he fingered were among the unidentified spies of Venona.

Many of his claims were wildly inaccurate; his charges filled with errors of fact, misjudgments of organizations and innuendoes disguised as evidence.

He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.

The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue, whose wild charges actually made the fight against Communist subversion more difficult.

Like Gresham’s Law, McCarthy’s allegations marginalized the accurate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cover of being one of his victims and even persuade well-meaning but naïve people that the whole anti-communist cause was based on inaccuracies and hysteria.

So who else was carrying the anti-communist cause at the time? Where are these wild inaccuracies? Just yesterday I was reading a book co-authored by Klehr* and I opened it at random onto a section dealing with Owen Lattimore who is treated as a possible Soviet agent but over whom judgment must be suspended. But see Blacklisted by History Chapter 29 and elsewhere. Seventy years later Klehr (and Haynes) can’t make up their minds. McCarthy was there, then, right on the spot, trying as best he could surrounded by enemies out to destroy his reputation. There may be a strategic sense in attacking McCarthy today although I barely see it and don’t accept it. But if Lattimore in their minds is a 50-50 or less, then who can really be a certainty unless they confess in open court? But let’s take this one para from the above quotation to see what we find:

He failed to recognize or understand the differences among genuine liberals, fellow-traveling liberals, Communist dupes, Communists and spies — distinctions that were important to make.

Let me see. McCarthy is trying to sort out all of this in real time on his own and didn’t quite make all the fine distinctions we still cannot make three generations later. If Klehr is still not willing to point the finger at Lattimore because we cannot be absolutely positively sure, then what was McCarthy supposed to do? He wasn’t writing some useless scholarly tract. He was trying to help save the West from communist tyranny. And it wasn’t the US that was directly endangered but large parts of Asia and Europe. But if the US was going to carry this fight, it had to first know it was in a fight. This kind of refined sorting things out seventy years later is supposedly “right-wing” political writing at its worst. And the thing is, what’s the issue if people like me think back on McCarthy in a positive way?

I could see an argument that says you don’t want to get caught up in any of this since the McCarthy name remains a stick to beat you with. If the argument went that this is one sleeping dog that should be left to lie, then I could acknowledge that there are genuine dangers in bringing McCarthy up. But that does not seem to be the point. The criticisms are about McCarthy, what he did and how he did it that for all I can see could easily be published in the Washington Post.

Well let me use the Deng Zhao Ping ratio of 70% good 30% bad since if that’s good enough for Mao it ought to be more than good enough for Joe McCarthy (how bout 90-10?). In my view, though, looking back but having watched the ways of the Left, the reason McCarthy became as notorious as he did was because he was so effective in what he did. I don’t know exactly what these McCarthyist tactics are supposed to mean, but if it means exposing the existence of evil doers in the State Department, I am all for it.

* John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. 2006. Early Cold War Spies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For the discussion on Owen Lattimore see Chapter 2 on Amerasia.

I think she’s trying to say he’s not very bright

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From Peggy Noonan, and you have to go through the whole 800 words before you come to this:

Commentators like to decry low-information voters—the stupid are picking our leaders. I think the real problem is low-information leaders. They have so little experience of life and have so much faith in magic — in media, in words — that they don’t understand people will get angry at you when you mislead them, and never see you the same way again.

From Instapundit whose entire post reads, “PEGGY NOONAN BEGINNING TO WONDER if Obama’s as smart as he was cracked up to be.” For myself, I don’t think being smart is all that it’s cracked to be either but that’s something else again.

In the meantime, for some further sense of the extent to which the President is a fraud, you should also read Jack Cashill’s latest on How Author Obama Foreshadowed President Obama. If you don’t know this story already, it’s really time you did. And more here.

Horrific in every detail

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This is beyond imagination and horrific in every detail:

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.

Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.

The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown.

The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she claims to have made a full recovery.

The case has developed into an international legal row, with lawyers for the woman describing it as “unprecedented”.

They claim that even if the council had been acting in the woman’s best interests, officials should have consulted her family beforehand and also involved Italian social services, who would be better-placed to look after the child.

Brendan Fleming, the woman’s British lawyer, told The Sunday Telegraph: “I have never heard of anything like this in all my 40 years in the job.

“I can understand if someone is very ill that they may not be able to consent to a medical procedure, but a forced caesarean is unprecedented.

“If there were concerns about the care of this child by an Italian mother, then the better plan would have been for the authorities here to have notified social services in Italy and for the child to have been taken back there.”

The case, reported by Christopher Booker in his column in The Sunday Telegraph, raises fresh questions about the extent of social workers’ powers.

It will be raised in Parliament this week by John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP. He chairs the Public Family Law Reform Coordinating Campaign, which wants reform and greater openness in court proceedings involving family matters.

He said: “I have seen a number of cases of abuses of people’s rights in the family courts, but this has to be one of the more extreme.

“It involves the Court of Protection authorising a caesarean section without the person concerned being made aware of what was proposed. I worry about the way these decisions about a person’s mental capacity are being taken without any apparent concern as to the effect on the individual being affected.”

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is an Italian national who come to Britain in July last year to attend a training course with an airline at Stansted Airport in Essex.

She suffered a panic attack, which her relations believe was due to her failure to take regular medication for an existing bipolar condition.

She called the police, who became concerned for her well-being and took her to a hospital, which she then realised was a psychiatric facility.

She has told her lawyers that when she said she wanted to return to her hotel, she was restrained and sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Meanwhile, Essex social services obtained a High Court order in August 2012 for the birth “to be enforced by way of caesarean section”, according to legal documents seen by this newspaper.

The woman, who says she was kept in the dark about the proceedings, says that after five weeks in the ward she was forcibly sedated. When she woke up she was told that the child had been delivered by C-section and taken into care.

In February, the mother, who had gone back to Italy, returned to Britain to request the return of her daughter at a hearing at Chelmsford Crown Court.

Her lawyers say that she had since resumed taking her medication, and that the judge formed a favourable opinion of her. But he ruled that the child should be placed for adoption because of the risk that she might suffer a relapse.

The cause has also been raised before a judge in the High Court in Rome, which has questioned why British care proceedings had been applied to the child of an Italian citizen “habitually resident” in Italy. The Italian judge accepted, though, that the British courts had jurisdiction over the woman, who was deemed to have had no “capacity” to instruct lawyers.

Lawyers for the woman are demanding to know why Essex social services appear not have contacted next of kin in Italy to consult them on the case.

They are also upset that social workers insisted on placing the child in care in Britain, when there had been an offer from a family friend in America to look after her.

An expert on social care proceedings, who asked not to be named because she was not fully acquainted with the details of the case, described it as “highly unusual”.

She said the council would first have to find “that she was basically unfit to make any decision herself” and then shown there was an acute risk to the mother if a natural birth was attempted.

An Essex county council spokesman said the local authority would not comment on ongoing cases involving vulnerable people and children.

Time and ill will

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An earlier take of my own on Obama’s character. Now this, titled The Schizophrenia of Barack Obama, which begins:

Barack Obama is a man with only one core conviction. He has, as the basic foundation of his otherwise disorganized and uncertain belief system, the irrefutable tenet that the United States, because of its European roots, has been the epitome of oppression and arrogance throughout its history. Therefore, he is able to rationalize the need to say or do anything as the transformation of American society and the end of the pre-eminent status of the United States are his sole objectives. He has, thus, adopted a pre-meditated schizophrenic personality wherein he comports himself as an apologist and appeaser on the international stage and a narcissistic autocrat at home.

The autocrats that ran roughshod throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century were determined to aggregate power in a central authority and to achieve an exalted position for their countries. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is determined to denigrate and diminish the stature of his nation as he otherwise emulates the tactics of these despots.

Beyond his one immutable and core tenet, Obama wavers between acceptance of hybrid fascism with its emphasis on crony capitalism and inflexible government dominance of the individual and the economy on the one hand, and on the other post-World War II European-style socialism rather than rigid socialist/Marxist ideology. This may be anathema to the hard core left from whence he came, but little do they understand that Barack Obama is driven by retribution not ideology.

That it is so little recognised that Obama is driven by hatred for the country that made him President is one of the mysteries of the modern world. The left in the US shares the same hatreds – in the media and across the academic world. If you’re so stupid, why are you rich; if I’m so smart, why do you have more money than me? The unfairness because those fellow students who never could work out quadratic equations are now wealthy while all those guys at the top of the honour roll are still driving Fords. And they are going to ruin this civilisation if they can. And they can so they are going to. Time and ill will is all it needs.

It’s not funny, it’s fascism

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It is an astounding story but what it means is that those in power in the United States have absolutely no fear of retribution for any of the actions they take. It’s being treated as a curiosity, an odd moment in the life of the nation. But really, what’s funny about this?

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has ‘joked’ publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

Meanwhile, IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, in his testimony to the House Oversight Committee over the agency’s systemic corruption, answers ‘I don’t recall’ no fewer than 80 times. Try giving that answer to Wilkins’ colleagues and see where it gets you. Few persons are fond of their tax collectors, but, from my experience, America is the only developed nation in which the mass of the population is fearful of its revenue agency. This is unbecoming to a supposedly free people.

Of course it’s funny, whimsical even, a laugh riot. What a bunch of clowns those people at the IRS are. We can be so morally superior to such transparent jerks. We can see through them. We can see that they are a totalitarian lot who are squeezing the freedom to criticise the government right out of the system. We can see all that and therefore we can laugh at their totalitarian stupidity.

But this is now the bottom line. If you are an American and say or do anything that comes to their attention that they do not like, they will do you over with the IRS. We’ll see how funny you think it is then. We’ll see how many are then willing to say a word.

The highest quality climate science

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At least they met but why the secrecy. This is by Nigel Lawson in the latest edition of The Spectator:

The long-discussed meeting between a group of climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society on the one side, and me and some colleagues from my think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the other, has now at last taken place. It was held behind closed doors in a committee room at the House of Lords, the secrecy — no press present — at the insistence of the Royal Society Fellows, an insistence I find puzzling given the clear public interest in the issue of climate change in general and climate change policy in particular.

The origins go back almost a year, to a lecture by the president of the Royal Society, the biologist Sir Paul Nurse. In it he chose to launch a gratuitous personal attack on me, making a number of palpably false allegations. I wrote to him, pointing out his errors, and he replied — somewhat changing his tune — conceding that ‘it is quite legitimate for both of us to talk about climate change policy, but before doing so we need to have access to the highest quality climate science. I am not sure you are receiving the best advice, and I would be very happy to put you in contact with distinguished active climate research scientists if you think that would be useful.’

So now the highest quality climate science has been provided but we don’t know what it was or how Nigel Lawson replied. All I do know is that Lawson has not changed his mind. But again, why the secrecy?

Hamlet discusses war in the China Sea

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Any parallels here? I suppose not since we are dealing with the projection of power.

Enter HAMLET, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and others

HAMLET
Good sir, whose powers are these?

CAPTAIN
They are of Norway, sir.

HAMLET
How purposed, sir, I pray you?

CAPTAIN
Against some part of Poland.

HAMLET
Who commands them, sir?

CAPTAIN
The nephews to old Norway, Fortinbras.

HAMLET
Goes it against the main of Poland, sir,
Or for some frontier?

CAPTAIN
Truly to speak, and with no addition,
We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.

HAMLET
Why, then the Polack never will defend it.

CAPTAIN
Yes, it is already garrison’d.

HAMLET
Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.

CAPTAIN
God be wi’ you, sir.

Coke is it

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From The Telegraph in London:

Crack-smoking antics of Rob Ford do not appear to have put off his supporters, poll shows.

And this from The Australian:

Nigella ‘Higella’ Lawson had the taste for cocaine, her ex-husband has told a court.

Illegal narcotics are a curse on our society but they are as deeply embedded as alcohol and are used extensively by our political elites. But it is only conservatives who will be whipsawed into political destruction by even a hint of such impropriety. I am no defender of the use of cocaine but I am not content to let the sanctimonious hypocritical mobs of the left deprive us of some of our potential leaders because of rules they do not abide by themselves. I will be surprised if this revelation about Nigella Lawson ruins her career but it might (she is, after all, the daughter of Nigel Lawson). But if she were an established participant on the right, whatever the facts of the case might be, the certainty would be that her career would be over.

As for the real Rob Ford, or at least for another side, see this.