The Obama legacy – international division

There is nothing, either domestic or international, that has not been made worse by the Obama presidency. This is from The New York Post that deals with the international side: A world aflame: Obama aides debunk the boss’s happy talk. There is much more than this, but this is quite good enough:

“Violent extremists are operationally active in about 40 countries. Seven countries are experiencing a collapse of central government authority, 14 others face regime-threatening or violent instability or both, another 59 countries face a significant risk of instability through 2016,” Clapper said.

“There are now more Sunni violent extremist groups, members and safe havens than at any time in history.”

That’s quite an achievement. We can talk about the domestic stuff some other time.

Feeling the Bern

bern and trump

REVOLUTION!
*SANDERS 60% CLINTON 39%
*TRUMP 35% KASICH 16% CRUZ 12%

Which comes with this additional detail:

Clinton Horror Deja Vu…
NH Brings Rumors of Campaign Implosion…
Biden ruling nothing out…
She lost every demo except 65+…
DICK MORRIS: Falling Apart…
B Team Deployed to Smear…
MOOK SPOOKED: ‘VICTORY’ MEMO…
Backer Urges Campaign: Keep Steinem and Albright Away!
Photo shows American flags crumpled up on HQ floor…
RESULTS: DEM REPUBLICAN…
LIVE: MAP…

It really is gruesome. Neither side has a solid grounding in common sense and sound economics. But half of America would now vote Socialist, on the Democrat side whether Hillary or Sanders it makes hardly a difference.

In 2008 I used to say Anyone But Clinton so I learned a tragic lesson. Now it’s Anyone But Any of the Ones who are Running. Just remember, democracy is the worst system except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.

Hillary – the worst imaginable successor to Obama

That there has been more controversy around Donald Trump than around Hillary Clinton is further evidence, if more were needed, of the deeply corrupt nature of the media, and the American media in particular. Hillary should go to jail. She illegally used a personal server for her correspondence as Secretary of State because in this way nothing she wrote could be subpoenaed by the American Congress. Instead, every email she sent could be read by governments around the world. Just think of this:

The ex-CIA official said there is “zero ambiguity — none” about the impropriety of SAP-level intelligence being housed on an unsecure private email server. Faddis added that the very existence of that information on her server means that highly classified information must have been moved off of a “completely separate channel” under a process that is “specifically forbidden.” If you had done this while working at the CIA, Hemmer asked, what would’ve happened to you? Faddis’ response: “My career’s over, I lose my clearance, I lose my job, and then I go to prison, probably for a very long time.” Faddis explained that the “consequences are enormous” when information at this level of secrecy is made vulnerable to foreign penetration. “The reason this stuff is in this channel is because it’s going to do incredible damage to US national security if it gets out in the open. That’s why we protect it this way.” When Hemmer inquired whether Hillary’s conduct could have cost lives, Faddis didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. Without question,” he asserted.

That she protected her husband from harassment charges and highly plausible accusations of rape in order to protect Bill’s presidency and her own political prospects is known to everyone without it becoming the impediment to ought to be. But to go even beyond the personal disgust everyone ought to have in seeing her in public, here is a story from The Oz yesterday reprinted from The Times that ought to disqualify her if we have even an ounce of self-preservation left in our collective veins: Sex scandal dogs Hillary’s ‘surrogate daughter’ Huma Abedin. A big Hillary problem, it seems, in the movie that is being released on Huma’s marriage to former Congressman, Anthony Weiner, who became notorious for exposing himself on the internet. Weiner is a Jew, so the following ought to be more than of passing interest, which comes as a throw-away in paragraph 22:

Abedin’s mother is Pakistani; her late father was Indian. She was born in Michigan but when Abedin was two her family moved to Saudi Arabia, where her father establish­ed a think tank, the Instit­ute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Some alleged the family had connections to figures inside­ the Muslim Brotherhood, which has fuelled conspiracy theor­ies.

They certainly have “alleged” these connections and with good reason. Here’s just one example: Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties which are a good deal more significant, you would think, than her marriage ties. It is the absence of controversy about her background that needs to be accounted for. From the story, which appeared in National Review:

Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) — an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than . . . Sheikh Qaradawi [“the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief sharia jurist”], in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It’s not that Abedin is a close friend and confidant, but that she is Hillary’s closest political advisor that should make you think about what is going on in the US. Possibly the most interesting thing about the times in which we live is that everything is known but nothing seems to matter. The media is the fourth estate, more powerful than whatever might be classified as numbers two and three. What makes Donald Trump so important is that he is able to say things the media would murder anyone else for saying and remain viable. Anyone who thinks of Hillary as anything other than near enough the worst imaginable successor to Obama really has nothing to add to a conversation about the politics of the United States.

AND IN NEWS JUST TO HAND: Former House Oversight chairman: ‘FBI director would like to indict Clinton and Abedin’.

California Congressman Darrell Issa, who previously led an investigation into Benghazi as former chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says the FBI “would like to indict both Huma [Abedin] and Hillary Clinton” for conducting sensitive government business on an unsecure, private email server.

“I think the FBI director would like to indict both Huma and Hillary as we speak,” the Republican heavyweight told the Washington Examiner Thursday, during a debate watch-party at Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s New Hampshire campaign headquarters.

“I think he’s in a position where he’s being forced to triple-time make a case of what would otherwise be, what they call, a slam dunk,” Issa said, referring to FBI Director James Comey, who previously told the Senate Judiciary Committee he would conduct a “competent,” “honest” and “independent” probe into Clinton’s handling of classified information during her tenure as secretary of state.

The Bills are overdue

clinton cosby

cosby he said she said

The picture on the left is more than just a bringing together of two Americans last really famous in the 1990s. Both have had credible accusations of abuse of women levelled against them – and that is to put it very mildly – but both have, up until now, been protected by a refusal within the media to attack anyone on the left no matter how great the scandal might have been. The barriers against protecting Cosby are falling and might well have completely vanished. The same is not true for Bill Clinton, and this is all the more so since the credible evidence is also that Hillary perfectly well understood Bill’s character and did what she could to allow him to become president and understands it still, but again remains silent so that she can become president. The media is already a pathological institution. But with the similarities between Bill 1 and Bill 2 so obvious, there will come a time when Hillary will have to answer for what had been done with her obvious compliance.

This is Ann Coulter discussing Bill Clinton and his association with Jeffery Epstein last January. Elites forming a circle of the wagons is the one constant that may be depended on for a Democrat sex scandal.

 

 

Christmas in Australia

IMG_1941

Part of what I love about Australia is that we are the least PC country in the English speaking world. The picture is of Flinders Street Station in the middle of Melbourne and the same words are found all over our trams and buses. In the idiot parts of the Anglosphere there is a “War on Christmas” where such public displays of our Christian heritage are virtually impossible to imagine. Discussed here by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit who quotes Jonah Goldberg.

The war on Christmas represents a special kind of passive-aggressive jackassery because the aggressors deny they have declared a war. They simply take offense at Christmas cheer. They cancel Christmas pageants. They leave baby Jesus in a cardboard box in the church basement, but see nothing wrong with celebrating the Winter Solstice as if that’s a more rational thing to do. And then, when people complain about this undeclared war on Christmas, the aggressors mock and ridicule them for paranoia and hyperbole.

Much of what drives the left is their war on our Christian heritage and values. These latter-day Voltaires think they are free thinkers, standing up for truth and rationality when they are in reality our most deadly enemies since they have been willing to make common cause with Marxists and Islamists who also war against Christianity. Australia remains relatively unaffected by this, at least for now, but is far from unaffected. The hatred for Tony Abbott, for example, was in no small part driven by a widespread disdain on the left for his Christian beliefs.

Sanitising the past

This is the sub-title which explains more closely than the actual title what the article is about: How and why Hollywood distorts history by filming it with a leftist lens. History in a post-modern world is what you want it to be, not an actual account of what happened. The featured distortion of the article is the film Bridge of Spies of which we find:

Bridge of Spies is typical Hollywood myth-making in that it is false on two levels. The lesser level is that of incident, of juicing the details to make a more riveting tale and to create a role more attractive for Hanks, who is so wary of playing any characteristic other than likeable, principled, and trustworthy that he is gradually becoming a sort of Madame Tussaud’s wax figure of himself. So: Donovan’s house wasn’t attacked by gunfire, he didn’t witness East Germans getting gunned down at the Berlin Wall, didn’t get mugged for his overcoat by a gang of East German youths, wasn’t harassed by the East German police, and didn’t have to overcome the hostility of the CIA up to and including the moments at the Glienicke Bridge where Donovan secured the release of both the downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and a young American economics graduate student named Frederic Pryor, who was being held by East Berlin police. In the film, the CIA is so uninterested in Pryor’s release that the agency effectively works at cross-purposes to Donovan, who insists that both men must be freed. “That was the biggest error,” Pryor said this fall. “It didn’t happen like it did in the movie at all.”

Nor did Pryor dramatically get caught in East Berlin while momentarily venturing from West to East to help a woman at the exact moment when the cement and barbed wire of the Wall were hastily being thrown across that section of Berlin. Pryor didn’t even know until last summer that a movie that dramatized events in his life was in the works (Bridge of Spies had already been filmed by then). He hadn’t been allowed to see, much less comment on, the script.

The higher level of its distortion is to create some kind of moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. What caught my eye particularly was this, which reminded me of our Malcolm.

The Constitution is “what makes us Americans. It’s all that makes us Americans,” Donovan declares. A nice thought, but that still doesn’t obligate Donovan to work for a Soviet agent any more than it obligates any individual lawyer to defend, say, Dylann Roof. If anything, the question of which clients to accept is an issue for ethicists of the Bar, but “I’m defending a spy because the Bar Association asked me to” isn’t quite so resonant a declaration as one that invokes the Constitution.

Among the strongest evidence that Turnbull is a man of the left in everything he stands for is his role in defending Peter Wright, the MI5 agent who wrote his book Spycatcher outlining everything he could find to discredit and reveal the counter-espionage efforts of the West. Both Wright and Turnbull are heroes of the left because they found against Margaret Thatcher who tried to prevent the book from being published. People tell me that this is what barristers do, they defend their clients whatever their personal views may be. You believe that and you can believe anything. No one who has ever briefed counsel in an important case briefs someone who is not absolutely onside. That is Malcolm’s side. It remains an unmitigated disgrace that he now leads the party of the right in Australia. No one should trust a thing he does.

The media and constitutional government

I am like many in seeing the dangers of a President Donald Trump, but I am also like many others in thinking he is the only cure for what is wrong with the American political system. The rush from constitutional government to government by executive decree has been astonishing. Obama decides what he wants and does everything he can to impose the outcome by executive order. The fear expressed below is that Trump will continue the approach that has been driven by Obama:

Cruz believes our constitutional arrangements are basically sound but that the leadership class that manages those arrangements has got to go. Trump, on the other hand, seems to reject those arrangements altogether – Rich [Lowry’s] “post-constitutional” label, or even “post-republican” (small-r).

Trump’s support comes from people who have given up on our existing “regime,” in the political science sense of the word. The Tea Party’s efflorescence of constitutionalism was, as Rich writes, “a means to stop Obama” – in other words, to stop lawlessness and rule by decree, which is what constitutions are for. But, as Rich continued, constitutionalism “has been found lacking” – Obama, and the Supreme Court, have pursued extra-constitutional (i.e., illegal) tactics and prevailed. Repeatedly. On momentous issues that immediately affect every American.

As I have written before, politics is what you can get away with. In the US, you can get away with whatever the media allows you to. If it does not call a president out in a prolonged and intensive way, there is nothing, it seems, a president cannot do. The only limits are what can actually be done, not what can be attempted. Some things fail because they go so far against the grain of society that no writ will run no matter what a president might wish to do. But for most – such as the wrecking of the medical system in the US, or the effective introduction of open borders – the absence of a watchdog media has permitted every illegal action and inaction to occur.

This will never happen under a Republican president. The media will never give a President Trump the pass. Look at this from CNN where it is fine to attack Trump (R) but not Clinton (D).

If Americans want a constitutional presidency, they need to elect Republicans. It’s as simple as that, although simple it definitely is not.

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.

The media and Mr Trump

As big a problem as anything that now exists for the United States and the West in general is the far-left media who work hand and glove with the politicians of the left to pollute political debate. The genius of Donald Trump is that he is able to transcend the media and get through to the actual population in a way that no one else has previously been able to do.

Trump said it himself, the media are “unbelievably dishonest”. He says things that are so outrageous from the perspective of the left that they made him the formidable presence he is by publishing everything he said on the assumption that telling people what he says will be instantly discrediting. Yet finding out that Katrina Pierson, Donald Trump’s new press secretary, is black Tea Party activist, is quite astonishing and revealing.

Pierson says her alliance with The Donald is “perfect.”

“This is a nontraditional campaign,” the outspoken Republican and Dallas tea party activist said. “I can be a little bit more who I am. That’s what I mean when I say it’s like a perfect fit. [Trump’s] sort of not politically correct. He sort of calls it like he sees it. I’m kind of that way, too,”

Rush Limbaugh discussed all of this yesterday: How Donald Trump Plays the Media. If Trump is unique in what he is doing, non-transferable to anyone else for whatever reason, then it is a serious problem. But in the meantime he is changing the rules of the political process.

You Republicans, you can denounce Trump all day, all week, all month, and the Democrat Party and the media are still gonna say you laid the table for it. You can condemn Trump all you want, but it is not going to buy you any love or respect or admiration from the Drive-By Media and the Democrats. Now, folks, the conventional wisdom is that Trump is scum, that Trump is a reprobate, that Trump is dangerous, that Trump is obscene, Trump’s insane, Trump’s a lunatic, Trump’s dangerous, Trump’s got to go. Why join in with that phrase? Why join that crowd? We never fall in with conventional wisdom here. . . .

Meanwhile, I’ve never said anything like anything Trump says. But despite it all they can’t take him out. They can’t stop covering him. They can’t humiliate him. They can’t embarrass him. They can’t diminish his support. They’re powerless, and this has them in a panic. The media that can make-or-break anybody cannot touch Trump, and every time they try, all they do is make him bigger. They can’t explain this. They are frustrated to no end, and so are both political parties who rely on the media to be the great equalizer in all of this.

Nothing’s working. No matter what Trump says, the media is there, and every member of the media is there. Every network, every camera, every microphone is there. Last Friday night Trump was in Raleigh, North Carolina. Reuters lied. Reuters even tried lying to destroy Trump. They ran a story claiming that Trump’s performance and his appearance were shut down by Black Lives Matter protesters. MSNBC ran with it. . . .

Donald Trump is condemning ISIS. Donald Trump is condemning illegal immigration. Donald Trump is condemning a weak, stupid United States leadership. Over here, everybody else is not. They are condemning Donald Trump. In a political sense, Donald Trump, leading the presidential campaign, is the sole occupier of his position. He has no competition for it. Just in a political sense, that’s pretty brilliant positioning to me. He owns the media. They can’t stop talking about him.

And what’s it costing him?

Zero.