If James Dean had lived.

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Medved making sense.

The Truth About Christian Zionists | Foreign Policy

The Truth About Christian Zionists | Foreign Policy

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Obama's Growing Trust Problem

This is a dangerous place to be as president, even worse as a young, inexperienced, rather unaccomplished president, sort of like mmmmmm........George W. Bush?

George Will, with great clarity:

Mitch McConnell, the taciturn Kentuckian who leads Senate Republicans, usually resembles Samuel Beckett's character Watt, who "had never smiled, but thought he knew how it was done." Last week, however, careful observers detected a trace of a hint of a shadow of a smile. Congressional Democrats were still at daggers drawn with one another, and the president's rhetoric was becoming CPR for the Republican Party.

On the 233rd day of his presidency, Barack Obama grabbed the country's lapels for the 263rd time—that was, as of last Wednesday, the count of his speeches, press conferences, town halls, interviews, and other public remarks. His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.

Whole piece is right on.

Beethoven's 5th in graphic form

Way cool

jch

and he did it on purpose

Israeli pilot, son of astronaut, killed.

Asaf Ramon

Human Reich Watch

Military analyst for HRW seems well suited for the job

The next anti-Israel "report" by these guys is going to be laughed out of the room.

Indyk (and Pollack) move up

Foreign Policy/The Cable

Martin Indyk moves up at Brookings
Mon, 09/14/2009

The Brookings Institution announced Friday that former Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk (at right with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) will become vice president and director of foreign studies, taking over for Carlos Pasqual, who was recently appointed as President Obama's ambassador to Mexico.
Indyk was the founding director of Brookings's Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which will now be headed up by senior fellow and former CIA intelligence analyst Kenneth Pollack. Indyk has worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and also headed up its related think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was a top negotiator in the Camp David talks. Brookings also announced that Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon will become director of research.

Protests build, but build what?

Washington Post on the Capital protests

I'm a Republican, despise big government, loathe this spending frenzy, and truly believe that the Dem leadership is more interested in buying votes and creating dependent constituencies than fixing any problem. So I am with a lot of this in spirit. But the extremism leaves me cold and fearful of the future of the party. Rush and Beck and Hannity and Coulter - all are occasionally brilliant. Are they helpful? Are they statesmen?

What does the Iranian media say about Israel?

New report here:

Israel in Iran Media

Bin Laden Notes Obama Weakness

 I have said this for a long time. There is not a single country in the Middle East remotely afraid of what President Obama might do. This is bad for Obama no matter what his agenda is. Our enemies need to be afraid of what we can do. 

Obama "powerless" to Al-Qaeda

It is, however, much worse than simply the above. There is currently no country afraid of what Obama might do, except for Israel, our one democratic ally in the region. This DOES actually matter, even to the glee club of Israel hate on the Left, even if they don't get it.

Snowe Falling

 That didn't take long.

Snowe Urges Obama to Drop Public Option

Surreal Gaza

From VDH:

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On December 31, 2008 @ 11:07 pm| 52 Comments

The World Reacts

I spent today reading accounts of Gaza—NY Times, AP, Reuters, etc. There are no terrorists, just militants. Not much about past rocket attacks on Israel–most everything on the crowded conditions of Gaza. Iranian aid is rarely elaborated on; stories about quiet Arab support for defanging Hamas are likewise rare; common is the buzz about protests in Europe. In reaction, I jotted down the following random thoughts.

Gaza as Monte Carlo, perhaps Hong Kong, or is it to be Switzerland of the Mediterranean?

Gaza is a sort of lab experiment in the Middle East. Recall for a minute: the Israelis withdrew en masse, a so-called “retreat” that reverberated all over the Middle East. The West supported free and open elections that gave Hamas their legitimacy, such as it was. Gaza is strategically placed on the Mediterranean with a prime shoreline. It borders Egypt the traditional center of the Arab world. Hundreds of millions of dollars of Middle-East oil money, and Western relief donations have poured into the tiny state. Israeli clearly wants no more of it, and would love to let Gaza alone to be Dubai.

The result?

Hamas with its serial rocket attacks on Israel interprets all of the above not as an opportunity for prosperity, but as a stage one for the great accomplishment of its generation—the absolute destruction of the Jewish state. Its agenda is clear and unambiguous, and apparently shared by millions of elites in the West itself, without whose support Hamas could not exist. The common theme of Western press coverage is the misery of Gaza, never the misery of Gaza as a product of the garrison-state mentality of Hamas’s radical Islamic vows to wage perennial war against Israel.

The Enablers

Hamas counts on the fact that its own losses will be characterized as a “holocaust” and appear comparable in the Western media to something like Darfur or the slaughtering in Zimbabwe, or the usual carnage that we wake up to on the news. Take away Western press attention from Gaza, and Hamas is just another violent, illiberal regime that impoverishes its own people while seeking victim status in the West.

Is that too harsh? I don’t think so. Again, if it were to call a one-year truce with Israel, seek normal relations with Egypt, and swear off Iranian-Hezbollah terrorist aid while it sought to rebuild infrastructure, ensure security, and recruit foreign capital, then there would be no more world attention, and its cadres of hooded youth would lack the pizzazz of “militants.”

Jenin Redux

Meanwhile, we suffer through the Jenin reinvention of the rules of war: (1) proportionality: Hamas is allowed to keep trying to kill as many Jews as it can to “balance” those lost to far more lethal Israeli countermeasures. Rule I. War is a tit-for-tat game, where fairness is defined as killing no more than you lose.

(2) Civilians and warriors: there is no such difference. Hamas’s terrorists who shoot rockets against Israeli families burrow into their own civilian infrastructure. They are tragic innocents to the world when they are killed and heroes to their own if can they kill innocents Jews through their barrages. Rule II. The age of uniforms and battle lines is over, replaced by the civilian shield as the best mechanism of defense against Western mastery of traditional arms.

(3) War that is lost on the battlefield can be won through the international media. The Palestinians have counted on six truths in the international arena (a. the world remains largely anti-Semitic; b. the world appreciates the strategic calculus that Arabs are numerous with oil; and Israel is tiny without it; c. Westerners fear Islamic terrorists, not the IDF; d. The West is prone to self-loathing, and romanticizes any who best capture the mantel of victimhood; the Palestinians have brilliantly reinvented themselves by claiming a status akin to women, gays, Hispanics, and blacks—fellow victims of rich while male Westerners; e. Any culture abroad whose hospitals Westerners would not like to be operated in are idealized; any who emulate Western technological supremacy are shunned. Rule III: Just copy any group that sets up shop on an American campus free speech area, and the resulting sympathy is worth a division.

Incremental Victory

The Hamas way of thinking is that it has constantly redefined losses to such an extent that 300+ killed are now dubbed a “Holocaust.” Meanwhile the frequency and range of its rocketry are expanded and embedded into the “normalcy” of the Middle East. Hamas seeks to establish the principle that it can daily wear away the psyche of Israelis while carefully constraining Israeli responses. What a Westerner would call an Israeli “victory” (e.g., terrible destruction of Hamas infrastructure with far greater casualties inflicted than suffered), Hamas and others would call “progress” in a century-long war (e.g., the world now accepts that showering Israeli with rockets is not an act of war, and not deserving of serious retaliation).

A final note: some of the most vicious anti-Israeli sentiment comes from Europe, especially countries like Spain and Greece. Yet I remember Morocco and Spain nearly shooting at each other in 2002 in a dispute over an uninhabited rock in the Mediterranean, and Greece goes ballistic every time Turkey customarily overflies Aegean airspace. Israel alone is not supposed to respond to rocket barrages; our conclusions can only be that the world deems it an illegitimate state worthy of destruction, and will allow its enemies to keep trying until they succeed (Why else would a British television station invite Ahmadinejad to answer the Queen’s Christmas address—a thug who promised the destruction of Israel, is seeking the means to do it, and whose terrorists recently kidnapped British sailors?)

Meanwhile we await “Gaza, Gaza”—the anguished documentary movie as hundreds of filmakers have no doubt already descended to offer us by spring a must see movie on every American university campus.

Post-mortem...

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

-- Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.





Conservatives will be studying this election for years and maybe decades, and there will be opinions anew each day. But my coming from the Heartland of America, my experience working in the American Jewish community, and with Israelis, and with some of the most patriotic Americans anywhere, has taught me some great ideals and some great vocabulary.

The Jews have a great word. "Tachles" pronounced "TACH-less."It even sounds like something a Moultrie County farmer would say, and it's meaning is even more so. It means "root" or "meat" and in common parlance today it means "the bottom line." And the tachles about the Republican defeat in 2008 is that in 12 years of Republican rule, the Party managed to jettison virtually every conservative principle that brought them to power in the first place, and deeply offend the core values of the American voters - both R and D - that believed in what Reagan had established.

The groupthink of the Republican leadership, the refusal to address corruption in the ranks, the abandonment of small government, and the complete refusal to reign in government spending, dovetailed into the ideological meltdown we see today.

To a majority of Americans, the Republican brand is now defined by grumpy old white men, protecting elected pedophiles, attacking gays for wanting certified monogamy, launching wars of dubious credibility and mission, and spending money literally faster than it can be printed. Note this fact alone: the national debt will grow by $1.4 trillion in 2008. That's 1400 billion dollars of new debt in one year. There were a lot a reasons for this, and many we can lay at the feet of Dems in Congress, but understand, President Obama would have to be quite socialist indeed to ever surpass such a figure.


So? "This town needs an enema!" as the Joker famously declared. Well, so did the Republican Party, and it got one. I will long remain an ardent admirer of John McCain, and while I became less and less enthusiastic for a President Palin (at this time), her treatment by the media was little short of fevered malicious hate. In truth, she was not ready for that job and would not have been prepared on day one to accept the Presidency if the 72-year-old McCain had passed away. Bu nothing excuses the media for their unhinged bile.

The lesson is first - quality does matter. We need prepared, vetted candidates that are not thrown on to the national stage 70 days out. We had quality Republicans, even female Republicans like Kay Bailey Hutchison that simply would have been better picks for VP. But this first learned lesson is because of the second important lesson:

Republicans, and conservatives of all creeds, need to know, now and forever, we will never, ever get a fair hearing by the press. Just forget it ever happening. Conservative ideas and principles are going to be caricatured and belittled and treated like quaint relics of a by-gone primitive America 95% of the time. You will be attacked. Your opponent will get editorial love letters. This is not because the entire media machine is anti-Republican, (though some of it certainly is) - it is because 95 reporters out of 100 BELIEVE that liberalism is right and good, and good for the country. When a reporter reacts with disbelief that someone could actually believe that small government is good, or base their life decisions on a relationship with Christ, or live according to a three-thousand year old tradition, or honestly believe that abortion is murder, well that is because they literally can't believe it. Religion and conservative traditional thought is on par with worshiping Zeus or Apollo to most graduates of journalism school these days. Conservatives need to remember that every time they step up to give an interview or give a quote - you are talking to someone who doesn't understand you, thinks you are delusional, and likely wants make you look bad, because probably because that is what their editor has asked them to do - "for the good of the country."

Now, why are journalists tilted so hard to the left? Do you ever wonder why someone becomes a journalist? Why they want to be a reporter? Going out and covering the actions of, well, other people?


As a recovering journalist, I will tell you that people who become journalists are almost without exception lazy, pretentious, self-impressed, busy-bodies who have never held real jobs. They are the tattletales of Jr. High and the schemers of High School, and excelled at digging up dirt and and exposing the embarrassments of others, usually to make themselves feel better or look better. The grow-up and want to continue being scheming tattletales and suddenly discover that they can actually get paid to do it. The roughly 5% of journalists who do not fall into this category and are actually out doing to protect the people, etc.? Well, they are exactly that: 5% of all journalists.

Journalist are professional social observers. They observe and write about it. To be paid to do this someone has to want to read what you write or want to promote what you write. Reporters are most often sent to cover stories of calamity and death and destruction. They immediately identify with the victims and write that story with little thought to cause and effect. Why? Because they have a four inch column to fill in a paper and that is what can be crammed in. Reporters do this for years before they get a break and can really go out and do their own investigations. Years of covering victims. Writing the victim's account is all they know and soon all they identify with, and the liberal movement and its philosophy serves this narrative quite well.

Terrorists? Victims of US imperialism. Iraqi insurgents? Victims of US invasion. New Orleans' stubborn citizens? Victims of Bush incompetence. Patriotic soldiers? Victims of Bush's war. Palestinian terrorists? Victims of Israeli aggression. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.

Journalists are today elitist, scheming, know-it-all, attention-craving tattletales because that is what they have been their entire lives. They do not have the courage or the conviction to do what actual courageous people do. They don't have the humility and decency to do what humble and decent Americans do everyday. They are, quite simply, failed human beings. Persons incapable of doing the things other people do and must therefore write about it instead, to get attention, to make themselves feel more important than those they interview, and to hide their overall inability to contribute to society in any meaningful way. They deserve no respect whatsoever.

Now, the problem. All presidents get a press honeymoon of some indefinite length. If you are Republican, it’s about a week. If you are a Democrat it’s about a month. If you are Barak Obama, The One, the New Abraham Lincoln Despite Having No Achievements? Well, folks, we are about to see the most obscene and obsequious pandering worshipful press honeymoon in American history and it could last four years. Every normal thing done by President Obama will be again touted as the First Whatever Ever by a black President and everything he says and does will be hung on with baited breath by a sycophantic press the likes of which has not been seen since Louis XIV.

Any invitation to the White House or the President’s schedule will be so highly sought and treasured that reporters will do and say anything to stay on that list. Obama’s approval ratings will be viewed and reported through the racist lens. If they are high? - he’s The One and transcending race, if they are low? - he’s The One and heartland hicks hate black people.


It's all well and good for conservatives and all Republicans to feel good about America on Inauguration Day, 2009. The GOP can’t get sucked into the old GOP minority model of opposition for the sake of opposition. It is historic and important and says a great deal of good things about America. But make no mistake, if you have paid any attention to the actual policies that a President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Leader Reid, Chairmen Rangel and Schumer and the rest of the liberal phalanx have been advocating over the past two years, we should all realize that on many major issues our country faces this liberal government is preparing to lead our nation in a hard left turn that will in the words of President-elect Obama, “fundamentally transform” America. The Obama State Media will be right there to help.

For conservatives, we can expect to have a barrage of really bad ideas coming down the pike in 2009. We will see the Employee Free Choice Act, that denies employees free choice. We will see the Fairness Doctrine, designed to eliminate and censor dissenting voices in public life. We will see a Freedom of Choice Act legislatively enshrining the right of a mother to murder her child. We will see a massive permanent and unchecked nationalization of health care that will need intense scrutiny. We will see strong efforts on estate tax increases and sales tax increases across the boards. We will see radical and extreme amnesty proposals put forth under the rubric of "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" that will include driver's licenses for illegals and an increasing disregard of border control. We will see capital gains increases, stifling growth on Wall Street. We will see cuts in Defense spending and massive reprogramming of funds for liberal pet projects and pork. We will see a new influx of liberal activist judicial appointments across the federal bench, and we will see their activism rewarded. We will see racial and ethnic preferences forwarded in hiring laws and college campuses. We will see income tax increases to close the massive gap in spending. We will again see bans on oil drilling. We will see international law begin to trump US law, in issues like the global poverty tax and Kyoto treaty.

This is all important, but without question the most dangerous issue confronting American today is that the new Administration will attempt reason and discourse with an irrational and committed enemy. A nuclear Iran, creating a terrified Israel, will lead us to the brink like few things in history, and allow new an imperial Russia, and ferment an imploding Pakistan.

For much of the 111th Congress, the breakdown may allow little more than principled opposition. But this vital. We are now the most important minority in the history of the Republic. Dissent is imperative. Republicans have been colossally incompetent in communicating our ideas, our principles and our well-reasoned positions. We have silent when we should have been outraged; we have been petulant and whiny when we needed to be thoughtful and explain. This election was well-deserved.

We will watch the Obama Presidency with interest, and perhaps even borrow some of his hope. It is not in our interests for him to fail in all his efforts. We will watch and welcome opportunities for genuine betterment of the country. But neither is it in our interests for President Obama to succeed in all of his efforts. We will fight every attempt to encumber our children with more entitlements. We will resist the effort to codify the redistribution of wealth. We will fight every attempt to radicalize the courts. We will stand against every attempt to weaken our military, or compromise with our enemies. We will call censorship by it's name and demand the facts of history stand for themselves. We will fight for all that is right and good in American life, and we will not apologize for thinking it so.

The Palin Paradox

Obama gets it. Do his supporters?

There are two very strong philosophies competing in the pro-Obama movement. The best is the philosophy that retains hope and love of country and has come to the very valid viewpoint that Bush has squandered so much of what made American a light and an inspiration. This philosophy attacks the policies of Bush and the Republican Congress, and is what makes Obama appeal to average Americans, and many heartland conservatives. These are true FDR Dems. They are not afraid of government or even big government, but they are extremely tired of ineffective government and deeply offended by corruption. These last two points are why they went to the Dems in ‘06. Not because Dems were proven better, but because Republicans had betrayed their trust eight different ways. Senator Obama has convincingly and effectively addressed many of their concerns and articulated their complaint. He validates their narrative. One may act as if this validation is superficial until we note that Americans responded by looking past a short career to nominate him for President of the United States, and did so over a strong woman candidate from a powerful state.

The second philosophy present in the pro-Obama camp is the liberalist ideologues, a dominant orthodoxy among the American media and the intellectual elite. Viewed as fairly as possible, this group includes all those who honestly believe that liberalism properly understood is coherent political plan for American growth and greater equality for all its citizens, and it also includes to those who are dumbfounded and insulted that conservatives have any role in politics at all. For much of this camp conservatives are dangerous extremists lost in the 1950’s. The truly dark heart of the liberalist camp is, in actual fact, not very fond of America or the American system. Where conservatives see something flawed but worth preserving, liberalists see something broken and worth tearing down to begin anew.

Sarah Palin is, nationally, an unknown quantity. She will pass or fail the test she has chosen to take. McCain staked his political future and his one shot at the Presidency on her ability to win over his party and a plurality of Americans in sixty days. Complaints or critiques about vetting are foremost breathtakingly arrogant. The Pundit Principle is in full bloom these days, somewhat the reverse of the observer effect of Heidelberg's uncertainty principle “that which you observe you also change” the Pundit Principle is “that which we didn’t know about must not have occurred” and often takes self-righteousness to new levels. The bottom line is simply this: McCain and his campaign decided to stake their continued existence on this choice. We all get to watch and see if this faith was misplaced.

But the Palin paradox remains: She is a woman. She is a very accomplished, attractive mother of five. She is courageous and stridently feminine. She is in truth exactly what feminists have long been saying they wanted their daughters to be. The only thing she’s not is pro-choice, and so the liberalist recent knee-jerk move is: she must be destroyed. And boy o’ boy have they read this wrong.

The philosophy of camp two still doesn’t understand how fragile the support of camp one is. Senator Obama clearly does understand the vulnerability, and his campaign has been pitch perfect on this from word one. But from the rage and invective from liberalist bloggers to the piling on by the NYTimes to the latest in-kind contribution from MSNBC, all of these desperate efforts to paint Palin out of the gate as “something-other-than-inspiring and accomplished” (and certainly NOT a real feminist) is far from helping Obama, likely to utterly undo all the hard work of the Obama camp to actually articulate a message of post-partisan politics. Put bluntly: Every single story attacking Palin or her daughter helps McCain. Every. Single. One.

What NOW and other feminist organizations all know but do not admit is that there are a great many strong, independent women out there who are actually quite conflicted about abortion rights and don’t see it as a clear-cut issue for feminism. There are a lot of feminists who made the choice of life and are quite overjoyed by it, and there are many women who chose to have an abortion and were shocked by the trauma. Sarah Palin’s mere presence on the ticket will not pull these women to vote for her. But seeing her attacked every day for supporting her daughter’s choice to have a kid at 17 and get married, seeing her attacked for being a working mother with her kids at the office, seeing her attacked as inexperienced when she is the elected leader of a state and managing a $11.5 billion economy at the age of 44 – these are the things that will drive women to pull that lever for Palin.

Senator Obama has built an impressive campaign of hope and what I am willing to concede is rooted in a sincere desire to restore a lot of disenchanted Americans’ faith in their country. I am also willing to place Senator Obama in the first camp – those liberals who do retain a love of country and want to believe in it. The second camp of his supporters is simply not that interested in simple validation, they want vindication, and are perfectly willing to destroy anyone who might stand in the way of their triumph. We will now watch and see if this fevered irrationality will be allowed to torpedo the most inspiring Democratic campaign in decades, and propel John McCain and Sarah Palin to the White House.