Tag Archives: Obama

Iran – what is the Obama end game?

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Michael Ledeen poses the question:

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.

Obama and Iran

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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 and the Israeli election

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Obama has only one enemy in the world, American’s closest ally in the Middle East. From Drudge today:

BIBI BE BAD…
White House ratchets up criticism of Netanyahu…
Inside HQ of ex-Obama staffers’ campaign…
Iran Targets Netanyahu Children for Assassination…

In case you are not keeping up with the latest from the White House, this is where we are:

A U.S. State Department-funded group is financing an Israeli campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has hired former Obama aides to help with its grassroots organizing efforts.

U.S.-based activist group OneVoice International has partnered with V15, an “independent grassroots movement” in Israel that is actively opposing Netanyahu’s party in the upcoming elections, Ha’aretz reported on Monday. Former national field director for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign Jeremy Bird is also reportedly involved in the effort.

He would probably send in the troops if he thought he could. We are dealing with such insanity that it is hard to understand why this remains so low key. Is this now how things are. The stories that the CIA brought on the dismissal back in 1975 is a story that won’t go away, but that, at least, was supposed to have been clandestine. This is right out in the open, and as public as you could wish.

MORE ALONG THE SAME LINES: From Victor Davis Hanson: Can Israel Survive?

The Jewish state has always depended on three unspoken assumptions for its tenuous existence.

First, a democratic, nuclear Israel can deter larger enemies. In the Cold War, Soviet-backed Arab enemies understood that Israel’s nuclear arsenal prevented them from destroying Tel Aviv.

Second, the Western traditions of Israel — free-market capitalism, democracy, human rights — ensured a dynamic economy, high-tech weapons, innovative industry, and stable government. In other words, 8 million Israelis could count on a greater gross domestic product, less internal violence, and more innovation than, say, nearby Egypt, a mess with ten times more people than Israel and nearly 50 times more land.

Third, Israel counted on Western moral support from America and Europe, as well as military support from the United States.

Israel’s stronger allies have often come to the defense of its democratic principles and pointed out that the world applies an unfair standard to Israel, largely out of envy of its success, anti-Semitism, fear of terrorism, and fondness of oil exporters.

Why, for example, does the United Nations focus so much attention on Palestinians who fled Israel nearly 70 years ago but ignore Muslims who were forced out of India, or Jews who were ethnically cleansed from the cities of the Middle East? Why doesn’t the world worry that Nicosia is a more divided city than Jerusalem, or that Turkey occupies northern Cyprus, or that China occupies Tibet?

Unfortunately, two of these three traditional pillars of Israeli security have eroded.

When the United States arbitrarily lifted tough sanctions against Iran and became a de facto partner with the Iranian theocracy in fighting the Islamic State, it almost ensured that Iran will get a nuclear bomb. Iran has claimed that it wishes to destroy Israel, as if its own apocalyptic sense of self makes it immune from classical nuclear deterrence.

Obama is not expected to meet with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will address Congress in March. An anonymous member of the Obama administration was quoted as calling Netanyahu, a combat veteran, a “coward” and describing him with a related expletive. Another nameless administration official recently said Netanyahu “spat in our face” by accepting the congressional invitation without Obama’s approval and so will pay “a price” — personal animus that the administration has not directed even against the leaders of a hostile Iran.

Obama won’t meet with Netanyahu, and yet the president had plenty of time to hold an adolescent bull session with a would-be Internet comedian decked out in Day-Glo makeup who achieved her fame by filming herself eating breakfast cereal in a bathtub full of milk.

Jews have been attacked and bullied on the streets of some of the major cities of France and Sweden by radical Muslims whose anti-Semitism goes unchecked by their terrified hosts. Jewish leaders in France openly advise that Jews in that country immigrate to Israel.

A prosecutor in Argentina who had investigated the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 — an attack widely believed to have been backed by Iran — was recently found dead under mysterious circumstances.

Turkey, a country whose prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was praised by Obama as one of his closest friends among world leaders, has turned openly non-secular and is vehemently anti-Israel.

Until there is a change of popular attitudes in Europe or a different president in the United States, Israel is on its own to deal with an Iran that has already hinted it would use a nuclear weapon to eliminate the “Zionist entity,” with the radical Islamic madness raging on its borders, and with the global harassment of Jews.

A tiny democratic beacon in the Middle East should inspire and rally Westerners. Instead, too often, Western nations shrug and assume that Israel is a headache — given that there is more oil and more terrorism on the other side.

Obama is what he is. A leftist anti-Semite who ruins anything he goes near. It is the Jewish “anti-Zionists” I find the most disgusting, and they truly do disgust me.

A dangerous fool in our midst

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It is such a criminal administration that it no longer even tries to hide what it does. The one unforgivable act that Netanyahu achieved was to demonstrate for anyone to see what an ignoramus Obama was about the Middle East. The smoking ash of that confrontation has flamed into a hatred that will not go away under any circumstance. The President seeks to assist the most radical element within Middle Eastern politics, but my guess, and certainly my hope, is that everything will turn out similar to Obama’s undying support for Morsi after the “Arab Spring”. From my perspective, it could not have turned out better.

So now Obama is meddling in the Israeli election. How is this even remotely tolerable?

Haaretz reporter Roi Arad revealed in an article in the Hebrew edition today [January 26] that the foreign funded organization, “One Voice”, is bankrolling the V-2015 campaign to defeat Binyamin Netanyahu’s national camp in the March 2015 Knesset Elections.

One indication of the generous financing is that it has now flown in a team of five American campaign experts (including Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign’s national field director) who will run the campaign out of offices taking up the ground floor of a Tel Aviv office building.

V-2015 is careful not to support a specific party – rather “just not Bibi”. As such, the foreign funds pouring into the campaign are not subject to Israel’s campaign finance laws.

It may be OK according to campaign finance laws, but I suspect the Israeli electorate will have a more clear-eyed view of what’s afoot, and who is, and is not, genuinely interested in their welfare. He is such a dangerous fool that we will be lucky to see the end of him in two years without many more horrors than we have seen already.

You do need friends in this world

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canada israel stampjpeg

Obama, unlike anyone else in his position, is no lame-duck President. The ruin of the West is his deliberate aim and he has two more years to do no end of damage. He cares absolutely nothing about the Democrat Party or the effect his actions will have on Congress. He is a law unto himself, and will not be constrained by any of the normal considerations of party and country.

He would like nothing better as his final legacy of eight years of foreign policy than to see the destruction of Israel. The political calculation that undoubtedly lay behind Netanyahu’s decision to accept the invitation to address the American Congress in March with certainty factored in Obama’s furious response. The story heading is in no way an exaggeration: Obama fuming at Netanyahu invitation to Congress, plans retaliation

“Netanyahu spat in our face. There will be a price.” With these words, an unnamed Obama administration official declared war on Israel’s prime minister in an interview with the left0wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Smarting at being blindsided by the invitation to address a joint session of Congress and advocate a sanctions bill on Iran to kick in if the current round of negotiations fails, Obama is letting his anti-Israel feelings show more openly than ever before.

Haaretz also reports that Obama has been warning Netanyahu for ten days to not lobby Congress on the bipartisan sanctions bill:

U.S. President Barack Obama has demanded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stop encouraging U.S. senators and congressmen to advance new sanctions legislation against Iran.

A senior American official, who asked to remain anonymous due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, said Obama gave Netanyahu this message during a telephone call on Monday, January 12.

There is obviously no principle, only political convenience behind this demand, since Obama stood by as British PM Cameron announced to the world that he was lobbying U.S. senators on the same bill, only in the opposite direction.

That the Israeli cabinet chose to allow Netanyahu to speak to Congress shows how desperate they are. There is a war coming in the Middle East. How Israel will survive in the face of the active hostility of the American administration is the most delicate calculation. I hope they know what they are doing. I hope this is not desperation in the face of every other avenue having been followed. Canada’s friendship with Israel is a blessing, similar to Australia’s. But such friendships are transitory, with the left so fanatically anti-semitic, under the pretext of being anti-Zionist.

“Straight out of Tehran”

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Senate DEMOCRAT Blasts Obama Admin For Iran Talking Points “Straight Out Of Tehran” (January 21, 2015). There is a new world dawning, and it is arriving before January 2017. More on Obama and Iran from John Hinderaker at Powerline, where he concludes:

Barack Obama must love State of the Union speeches: once a year, he can describe the world as he wishes it were, and newspapers will report on it as though he were not delusional.

Why Obama stayed home

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Why did Obama stay home? a number of people have asked. This is John Hinderaker’s answer:

I offer two possible explanations. The first is incompetence. The second is that if it didn’t seriously occur to Obama that he should go, it may simply not have occurred to him to send anyone else.

He also canvasses five other possibilities:

1. Incompetence: This theory should always be on the table when government at any level is involved. And it can explain why Obama didn’t have a top level official appear at the Paris rally.

2. Security: Don’t make me laugh. When Obama wants to do something, he doesn’t let security issues interfere.

3. Terrorism, what terrorism?: The estimable Byron York posits that Obama skipped Paris because he wants to downgrade the issue of terrorism. John finds this theory plausible, and I do too.

4. No sympathy for colonialists: This is a crude summary of an elaborate theory offered by Lee Smith. It’s worth considering, but very speculative. I think Smith may be over-thinking this.

5. He’s too cool: This, in essence, is the theory the White House is now providing.

Others have said that he stayed home to watch the football, which is plausible, although I was able to watch the games easily enough here in Australia. That, too, is not why I think he stayed home.

Here’s my answer. He didn’t go because he supports the other side. He did not want to add even so much as an ounce of support for those who are fighting the Islamists since he wants to see them succeed. I would be happy to entertain some other answer as the real one were it not for the fact that there is not a single position Obama has taken, at any time in his life, that would make me think he is on my side of any important ideological question, and this one least of all.

And having written this, I came across this, by Roger Simon: Is the White House a ‘Sleeper Cell’?. The idea is so obvious, and has been for so long, that I assumed that no one has put two and two together because the conclusions are not just terrible for the politics of it, but is vastly discrediting for the American system of government. Let me go to how Simon ends his article before coming back to the point:

A “sleeper cell” in the White House? It would certainly explain Obama’s not going to France, which was a decision that hurt the USA, hurt the effort against Islamic terror and hurt the president’s already tarnished reputation into the bargain. There are so many other things that the existence of a White House “sleeper cell” would explain that I couldn’t even begin to count them. And as you know, a cell doesn’t have to be violent to be active. There are many ways to do damage.

But who would be a member of this cell? Is it one or all of them? Well that, I am sorry to say, I cannot tell you. I do not have the proper clearance. You are, however, free to guess. Who would stop you?

Simon has clearly come to the same conclusion as I have, but won’t say it. It is just too terrible to have to admit. A Parliamentary system can be subverted, I suppose. But anyone who gets to the top has had to go through the proving ground of the Parliament itself. You must stand your ground on innumerable occasions, being asked questions by people whose interests are to find a flaw in your policies, that being the members of the opposition parties. This is a crucible that simply does not exist in a republican presidential system, and especially one in which the media is as corrupt as that found in the US.

Obama has never had to face serious questioning at any stage of his rise, nor does he now that he has reached the presidency. No one knows who he is, really is, nor has anyone probed him to find out what he truly believes. But you would have to have been born an idiot not to understand exactly what he stood for even before he was elected. Since that time, there has never been an instance that he has stood up to any radical Islamic government. The only time Egypt, for example, caught his interest was after Al-Sisi successful coup. Then, but only then, he was set to punish the Egyptians. Nor did he provide any support of any kind, not even ideological, when the Iranian people tried their own counter-revolution.

This is not a first-time instance, either. The near-as-certain certainty is that the FDR White House was riddled with Stalin’s agents. Not spies who tried to steal secrets, but the actual policy advisers who ran the government. This is the final paragraph of my review of Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character which I titled, with good reason, America, the Big Dumb Ox. This is where the title comes from:

As a result of reading West’s book, I now look on the United States as a big dumb ox, led around by a cabal of its enemies whose intent is to take the beast out to slaughter. It is a very large beast and will not go quietly. But given what you will learn from this book, you will be in some despair in trying to work out what can be done. This is a very troubling book which I nevertheless encourage you to read.

When I see the Obama White House, my attitude is, so what’s new? And what has been the most troubling part in reading West has been the effort made by the “elites” on the conservative side of politics in the US to discredit everything she wrote. The only conclusion vast enough to make sense of it all is the notion of progressive internationalism, whose most important ideal is bound up in the notion of open borders. If Islam, as peaceable as most of its adherents no doubt are, has within it a core of violent primitives, who cannot be contained by the more civilised notions that have been painfully and slowly accumulated in the Judeo-Christian West, then this entire progressive internationalist enterprise is a planetary disaster that will bring on a new Dark Age. But the vision will not disappear, and on we go.

So let me say this straight out. Wherever you are, wherever you are reading this right this minute, you cannot know what political system and religious values will prevail one hundred years from today. You may have your preferences, and you may find it inconceivable that Sharia may dominate the planet. But if the US can elect an Obama in 2008, don’t you tell me what will not happen by the year 2115.

How surprised by this are you?

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obama you let the whole world down

From Drudge:

‘We can live together’…
Netanyahu, Abbas attend Paris mass rally…
Largest in French history…
KISS-OFF: USA represented only by ambassador?
Officials skipped Washington ‘Charlie’ rally, too…
Gunman appears in chilling video, declares loyalty to Islamic State…
WIRE: Both brothers had weapons training in Yemen…
Afghanistan rally hails attackers as ‘heroes’…
FEINSTEIN: Terrorist sleeper cells are in USA…
FBI Assuming Larger Surveillance Role…

MEANWHILE BACK IN AUSTRALIA: This is titled, Our Gutless Surrender, is written by Roger Kimball, is published at PJ Media in the US, but begins:

The Melbourne-based journalist and television commentator Andrew Bolt is celebrated and reviled by all the right (i.e., all the left) people throughout his native land. He’s been threatened, sued, and otherwise harassed by the politically correct establishment that, despite the great Tony Abbott in the prime minister’s seat, holds sway in Oz. Along with the writers associated with Quadrant magazine in Sydney, Bolt is one of only a handful of people who have effectively challenged the sclerotic orthodoxy of establishment opinion on all matter of issues, from the Aborigines and immigration to the virtues of free-market economics to the cesspool of hatred that is the ideology of radical Islam.

It does require a special kind of brave, which unfortunately not everyone has.

The centre cannot hold because the centre no longer exists

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The US is no longer a country, a unified coherent whole, the homeland of a people with a common history and a common purpose. Large parts of its landmass is instead being turned into a campsite, where the campers are given votes so that the productive can keep passing on a significant part of their incomes to the government to bribe the new campers with. Here’s the story: Obama opens fraud-ridden benefits programs to illegal immigrants:

President Obama’s unilateral executive action on immigration will make hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, illegal immigrants eligible for federal transfer payments. That will be done primarily through two widely used programs — the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit, or ACTC.

As it turns out, those two programs are already among the most corrupt and fraud-ridden in the entire federal government. A newly-released report from the inspector general of the Internal Revenue Service confirms that the EITC is plagued by fraud (which was already well known) and also reveals for the first time that the ACTC is even worse.

The two programs, intended for low-income workers, are what is known as refundable tax credits. That means they give workers a tax refund that is larger than their tax liability. So a family with a tax bill of $1,000 might receive an EITC “refund” of $5,000, meaning the family doesn’t write a check to the government but rather receives a check from the government. The ACTC works similarly for low-income workers with children.

Supported by both political parties over the years, the programs were intended to encourage work and strengthen families. Their growth has been extraordinary in recent years — payments increased 40 percent from 2007 to 2012 alone. And now both are beset by staggering levels of fraud. . . .

In fact, the president obscured what is happening by telling the covered illegal immigrants that if “you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to stay. …” In fact, for many of those affected, “willing to pay your fair share of taxes” actually means “willing to accept an assistance check from the government.”

If past practice is any guide, the Obama administration will likely start an aggressive, multilingual campaign to encourage illegal immigrants affected by the president’s action to apply for as many benefits as possible. And if not all of them are actually eligible to receive the taxpayers’ money? Well, no one will be checking that too closely.

You tell me where this ends? That the productive will forever remain content to share their wealth with millions of others who have not contributed a single dollar over and above what they have taken is not a longterm proposition. How and what circumstances will bring it to an end will remain the mystery for now, but I suspect not for long.