The Scalise problem and his somewhat or seemingly tenuous ties to racists points again to the biggest problem for Republicans being media bias, not perceptions of diversity, not changing demographics etc - although those two things remain problematic - and I should say I'm not quite sure why Scalise has not done the smart and honorable thing and stepped down as whip. 

But that aside, forget Obama reaching out to a truly awful person like Al Sharpton - that probably isn't but certainly could be nothing more than a cynical political calculation - but simply look at Obama's long-term relationship with a person with the extreme ideological proclivities of Jeremiah Wright and how without media bias throwing smokescreens across the quite worrying implications of that relationship there's no way he could've become president - certainly a Republican with similar baggage wouldn't even have bothered to run given the shit storm the media would've sent his way. 

In short media bias inflates sometimes in absurdly untruthful ways conservative flaws while covering up or simply dismissing those of liberals - and if Republicans cannot figure out a way to mitigate this problem or find a way to navigate around it convincingly then national elections will continue to be hard things for them to win. 

With hyperbolic incitement and dishonest propaganda from the racial grievance industry of America now having resulted in the killing of two cops in New York it's helpful to keep in mind why this problem is not going to go away quickly - and simply put that's because liberals need the racist narrative as the grievance industry spins it in order to not only win elections but to legitimize their ideological givens - they can't have the conversation about problems afflicting the black community in America be about the dysfunction of that community being the result of Liberal policies and therefore they need it to be about racism whether that's true or not - thus the racial grievance industry and the galling influence wielded by despicable charlatans like Sharpton etc. etc. - and as long as the media is going to support and endorse this nonsense it's going to stay with us for quite a long time. 

The interesting question for me is how long will Latinos and Asians continue to support this nonsense by voting liberal? Latinos I don't know, they have some conflicted interests here - but Asians? My guess is the Asian community is not impressed. The sad irony that underscores my point here is that the two cops killed were not white, they were a Latino and an Asian - some gut wrenching symbolism there. 

Obama's comments on the Sony hack were pretty weak and insubstantial and incoherent and misguided, no? And this from a guy who manages to be all those things just about every time he steps in front of a microphone, so to stand out in this regard seems to be of significance. 

What on earth was he talking about when he said Sony should have come to him before deciding to pull the film when in fact the National security apparatus should've been on top of this thing from the very beginning? And why the hell did he feel it right to accuse Sony of having made a mistake by pulling the film when clearly they didn't appear to have any options? Was he trying to scapegoat them, trying to make excuses for his own lack of action?

As I've said cyber attacks by one nation upon another are fascinating because there are no set guidelines and no history to define what an appropriate response should be - and this confusion is further complicated when dealing with a leader like Obama, a man who clearly disdains the use of American power and is much more comfortable in the role of American apologist and our great giver of progressively fluffy speeches.

Update: reports today of North Korean internet going down - ahh... that sounds more like the first line of a joke than a serious response by us - I suppose this could be the U.S. sending a cyber shell across the bow of NK but I doubt it - at least I hope not since it would be a wholly insufficient response and misguided I think. I'm not at all sure that a cyber response from us would be a good idea at all - us trying to set a deterrence precedent here I think is full of all kinds of problems - and I'm not sure it's a good idea for us to reveal what our capabilities are - and finally what amounts to a proportional response when you're talking about a bankrupt country like North Korea? There may be some value to a cyber warning shot but I think the punishment should be of a more traditional nature. 

Do I have a problem with Obama without any input from congress undoing a longstanding Cuba policy for no apparently good reason? I think so. Is it going to help the Cuban people and lead to more freedoms for them? Seems unlikely - in fact this may guarantee that another generation of socialist pricks is motivated to keep the abuse in place after the Castros soon depart. Obama claims he is now well sutuated to influence that next generation because his largesse has bought good will which strikes one as remarkably naive - reality seems to be rather you've surrendered your main leverage for bringing about such change and in doing so generated optics that say to all our enemies out there that under Obama American will remain weak, pliable, ingratiating and apologetic. 

In short  Obama's rationale for this gesture doesn't make much sense - unless of course the whole point of it is to keep the socialist loving base happy and related to that but of more significance possibly pave the way for getting rid of Gitmo - and my guess is, since the move is hard to justify otherwise, that's exactly what's going on here.

People who defend the action by saying the embargo etc. hasn't worked are missing the point - a statement has been made regarding what kind of regimes America will tolerate at its borders, if you back away from that statement without getting anything in return that is a capitulation that sends a message that is quite different. Yes Nixon went to China but we got something strategically in return that was valuable - yes we normalized relations with another questionable regime in Vietnam but again strategically we get something out of them - what does Obama's capitulation get us strategically? Nothing good or worth the bad optics that I can see. The only person's interests served by this action seem to be Obama's and his progressive acolytes - but then again I guess we should not be surprised by this. 

The successful cyber attack on Sony resulting in the scuttling of the reviled movie raises curious point Ive remarked on before: when is a cyber attack damaging and egregious enough to represent a legitimate act of war? Not saying the Sony case is that but it does show just how much harm can be done by a motivated enemy - yet there are no established guidelines out there indicating when an act crosses line separating criminal behavior from warlike behavior - and that lack of clarity can definitely lead to problems of encouraging the enemy because the victim is unsure of how to respond. 

Notice how the liberal media portrays Obama's 'executive' actions as being against wishes of a political opposition (read racists) and not the will of the people or at least the desires of the people. Polls show and the last election proved that the man's ideas and policies are simply not popular and yet liberals continue to act as if they have a mandate. I wonder if media bias which has served liberal interests for so long is now coming back to haunt them - ie they've tricked themselves into believing that since  the New York Times et al have no problem with Obama's progressive agenda being wielded with executive abuse that the American people are fine with it too. The latest example of this is now his move on Cuba which I'm guessing most voters will not look upon kindly even though most lack the wherewithal to realistically grasp foreign policy questions - but hell, even the lefty Washington Post has panned the move by Obama which may prove a watershed moment in the way the media portrays Dear Leader. 

I see Erdogan has arrested some more of the ever dwindling 'opposition' media - you really start to understand why Obama was such a big fan of this guy. And again I ask: why is Turkey still a member of NATO or at the very least why is no one in NATO saying something about what is going on there? Erdogan does not believe in the values that underwrite Western civilization, he does not respect or care for the fundamental principles that make up the Western tradition and therefore how on earth can you expect him to serve the interests of the West?

Torture against American values? Institutionalized torture, sure. Torture or forms of interrogation that seem excessively harsh - well obviously not depending on circumstances. What

would be against American values is being denied the right to ask the question in the first place. But when it comes to actions called forth under duress that seem to push the boundaries of what's right,  America has clearly gone there repeatedly, as have all great powers, democracies or not. This is not to equivocate or make excuses - it's to state an obvious reality of power: preserving it under challenging circumstances will often require actions that may prove hard to justify once circumstances return to 'normal'. This will be especially true if one is stuck trying to placate the hurt feelings of liberals whose delusions are not easily assuaged. 

Ann Compton's story about Obama and his sycophants launching into profanity laced tirades against the press behind closed doors because they weren't being quite fawning enough in their reviews of him is quite funny - this man very simply would have no political career and could never have become president of United States without the willing participation of a biased media and I'd say this invective is a reflection of that: like a true dictator he expects total devotion and so anything that looks even slightly disloyal enrages. Some are saying this was just a deliberate tactic to try and intimidate the press into a an even more subservient state as his presidency started to go bad - no doubt but I'd say it also sounds like the rantings of a spoiled child who expects to get everything he wants and cannot endure the insult of being disappointed. 

What does the Rolling Stone rape story debacle tell us about liberalism as the far left practices it? The same thing that the unfounded cries of racism regarding the Ferguson grand jury decision told us and the selling of Obamacare through lies told us and the Benghazi cover-up told us and what the entire Obama presidency and the media's open endorsement of it has been telling us - namely that liberals don't care about facts or reality or objective analysis or even open debate - all they care about is the narrative they want to perpetuate and if it's not actually true or even rationally defensible or just logically coherent in the most basic of ways according to, ya know, facts they don't really give a shit about that. When people who think like this ascend to a power that cannot be effectively challenged and contained and pushed back against by moderating forces that's when you end up with Stalinism and fascism and Maoism and Islamism and people lined up against a wall and shot for not believing what they've been told to believe or for being a threat to the sanctity of the preferred ideology. 

Not to suggest America is about to turn into a Stalinist state, but the tendency towards oligarchic fascism underpinning much of the liberal agenda and thinking is pretty evident. For the kind of closed liberal mindset that produced the Rolling Stone story quite possibly the most awful thing in the world is the white heterosexual male who has not been saved by the grace of progressivism and repudiated  his privileged status - that was the narrative that needed to be told and if the facts sort of got in the way well who cares because every good zealot knows truth is what you want it to be. 

Hillary says the US needs to empathize with its enemies - yes if only FDR had done a better job of feeling Hitler's pain we just might have won that war... oh wait. She calls this 'smart power' which I take it it is her version of Obama's 'don't do dumb things' which as far as I can tell means do nothing but dumb things but call those dumb things nuanced and maybe no one will notice.

Of course it is a fundamental rule of war and diplomacy that you must know your enemy and understand what they're thinking and why they're thinking it - but the connotations of empathy are to feel what another is feeling in order to better sympathize with them - that is a vastly different thing then the cold calculation of understanding.

Since she said this thing during a written speech I have to believe it was not a blunder and was done deliberately, the language is deliberate - worried that the progressive base is going to torpedo her campaign again as it searches for an Obama clone? Sorry, Cankles,  but you're going to have to join Code Pink if you want to out lefty Elizabeth Warren. 

With liberals now it seems willing with Obama's blessing to declare rhetorical war on white America as if Jim Crow were still alive and all the problems afficting the black community were the result of racist oppression with the pointy end of this oppressive spear apparently being the police forces of American cities - I have a solution: stop policing black neighborhoods. If liberals truly believe that the police forces of America's inner cities are the storm troopers of a new effort to keep the black man down then what they're  really arguing for is a withdrawal of those evil white forces from black communities - implied in what Mayor DiBlasio said yesterday is that very notion - so let it be done. 

All joking aside (and I'm not really joking) a semblance of this withdrawal will be the practical effect of liberals deciding that by far the greatest problem facing the country right now is white on black racism and that the leading edge of this plague are cops. 

So let it be done - and then we can all stand back and watch the fun that ensues. 

Rand Paul says regarding Obama's executive action on amnesty that he can't defend the indefensible - in other words he can't simply ignore logic and reality and the reasonable objective norms of common sense - ahhh... yes he can, he's built a political career on doing precisely that because if the press and media are not going to challenge your lies and gibberish then lies and gibberish become pretty effective political tools - and with no election left to fight he's doubly free to sling bullshit wherever he pleases.

All Obama needs is for the media to protect him just enough so that his approval rating hangs around 40% and then he can move forward as if he has some kind of legitimate mandate - he starts slipping to 35 or 30% approval rating then not even his friends in the media can save his credibility and Democrats in Congress will start to harbor grave concerns about how much irreparable damage the guy is doing to the party. But I tend not to believe his approval rating will sink that low especially with the media running cover for him - Romney said the number was 47% but I'm guessing that probably overstated things a bit, but certainly roughly 40% of the electorate doesn't care about facts and is gonna believe Obama no matter how full of shit what he says is and are gonna continue to support him. I mean look at the poll numbers regarding the Ferguson grand jury decision - more than 40% of people thought it was wrong - you either have to be an idiot or unmoved by facts and reality to think that - and so it is that Obama believes he can get away with whatever his ideological arrogance desires to attempt. 

People keep asking can racial problems in America ever go away - the answer is the

perception of a problem is not going away at least not easily - but that's  not because of entrenched racism, it's because liberals need the perception of the evil white overlord to persist in order to win elections and push their extremist agenda along - liberals need people of color to be poor and poorly educated and they need lefty whites to feel guilty about it so that the two can remain an easily manipulated voting bloc serving the progressive agenda - and as long as the mainstream media through silence and willful ignorance continues to endorse if not openly support this behavior it's never going away.

Which makes me think when it comes to the political process there's not a lot separating an extremist group like Hamas and the Obama presidency or the liberal elite in general - both feed off the poor and ignorant by stoking grievances that they know the left wing media and press are going to endorse and validate regardless of truth and reality because in Hamas' case the lefty media hates Israel and in America's case the lefty media hates conservatives or capitalism or white people in general or the colonial history of the West or democracy or God and guns and pick up trucks or the military or whatever  the hell it is liberals just simply cannot abide, which often seems to be anything that does not comport with the way they believe the world should be. 

Liberals are fundamentally and by nature, at least in their modern incarnation, not realists, not skeptics, not empiricists - they're idealists and quite naïve and delusional and vain and intolerant ones at that. 

Let's put aside the reams of idiotic words and thoughts being spouted by the left regarding Ferguson that have nothing at all to do with justice and everything to do with pushing forward an extremist liberal agenda - and let's put aside the flagrant and wholly dispiriting reality that demagogues like Al Sharpton do much much much more harm to the black community than they do good and that so long as the liberal elite need African-Americans to forever be an underemployed and under educated underclass dependent on big government and 'legitimately' blaming all their misfortunes on a brand of racism that disappeared more than a generation ago then their fortunes in America will continue to wallow in dysfunction and decay - let's put all that annoying nonsense aside and ask a more pragmatic and possibly more important question: how are the other two significant minority groups in America viewing this race baiting circus?

As for latinos there's certainly no love lost between them and blacks and so they may conceivably be turned off by the whole farce and therefore potentially be turned off by the liberal silliness  that props it up - on the other hand the way that the populist politics of racial grievance can bury the truth and distort debate and bring the giddy media clamoring to your side can also serve the interests of Latinos - so i'd be interested what the polls say but you could see some ambivalence there which in and of itself would be a curious development. 

The really fascinating group to watch as regards reaction to this farce is Asians. Little remarked upon but of significant importance is the fact that in 2014 the GOP won the Asian vote after losing it badly in 2012 - if this trend continues the key to stopping America from becoming the liberal autocracy Obama is so diligently trying to turn it in to could be the Asian vote.

Many have wondered why Asians seem so reluctant to vote republican given that their cultural predilections and sympathies lean right - this is especially true when it comes to issues of law and order - so it's certainly possible the race mongering circus playing out in Ferguson that seems intent on demonizing a cop for doing his job while treating a thug as some sort of hero may be causing Asians to a significant degree to question whether they've been backing the wrong party. 

If 2014 was the beginning of a new trend with Asian voters sure would be a good time to nominate someone like Nikki Haley - with one stroke you neutralize Hillary's only selling point and make a strong appeal to a voting bloc that could be key to the GOP's long term fortunes. 

With Obama now looking for his fourth SECDEF in six years, his foreign-policy in tatters and the Oval Office's relationship with the Pentagon and the military in general obviously let's say

troubled people are wondering what is causing this malaise and coming to the conclusion it's groupthink taking control of Obama and his inner circle and leading to the spoilage of good ideas and coherent strategic thought.

How is this new? The liberal elite is defined by its contempt for other people's ideas and anyone who does not share in their ostensibly enlightened view of things - they're idealists and therefore by nature, given the flimsy assumptions that hold their ideological pretensions together, must guard against open debate and the opinions of skeptics. These people are all about groupthink. 

No clear thinking unbiased person should be shocked at all by what we're seeing here. Obama came into into office with the clear intention of emasculating American power and shrinking its strategic footprint - his arrogance, seconded by the grotesque delusions of the liberal elite, told him that the vacuum left behind would be filled by his Progressive brilliance and the world would be led by him into a new and oh so pretty direction. (What would've been of note is if such a detached from reality view of things had not brought Obama into conflict with the reality-based community of the military. It was a virtual guarantee that the US military would come to dislike and distrust this commander-in-chief - and I'm guessing the distrust began when he ignored the advice of his generals and decided to apply an arbitrary endpoint to his phony 'surge' in Afghanistan)

Again, anyone who bought into the utter nonsense spouted by this man should be utterly ashamed of themselves. There is absolutely nothing surprising about how awful a president this guy is. 

I've been saying for a while now that Turkey can no longer be considered a reliable member of NATO and a trusted ally of the West given Erdogan's arch Islamist sentiments and therefore its continuing membership in the Western alliance should be deeply questioned and the sale of the F 35 to them should be suspended or at least brought under review - and yet we hear absolutely nothing from the leaders of the West.

Two recent events should absolutely bring an end to that silence and if they do not then one will only be able to conclude that political correctness by Western leaders is judged as a more important thing than strategic coherence. Erdogan has openly declared in a speech that the West is the enemy of Islam and went so far as to say that the people of the west enjoy watching Muslims die - there's no way to rationalize rhetoric like that in defense of Turkey's  continuing membership in a Western alliance - but damning as those words are there's something worse: Israeli intelligence has uncovered material support by Turkey for Palestinian terror by allowing Hamas to set up a 'command' infrastructure in Turkey - this is completely unacceptable and should be condemned at the highest level.

And yet we hear nothing except of course from Israel which is rightly outraged. Only a fool at this point would expect leadership on an issue like this from Obama and so it will be up to the Republican controlled Congress to raise the appropriate concern - if they don't one is really going to have to wonder just how detached from coherent strategic thought the West overall is.

Now I suppose one could argue that booting the only Muslim entity from NATO would do more harm than good and so the best of the Bad options is to ignore Erdogan's abuses and that amounts to a form of strategic coherence. Okay, maybe - it also amounts to a form of sticking ones head in the sand when it comes to the problem of Islamism not being compatible with Western notions of liberty and personal freedom and the open marketplace of ideas enshrined in our democratic institutions. I get that you often form alliances with people you don't agree with - but you do not form binding alliances with people who see you as the enemy and give open support to the enemies of your strategic partners - that's insane. 

I got to say I know the left-wing is unhinged and it's various activist branches are unhinged and irrational and pretty much addled into a blinded intemperate stupidity by their ideological fixations - but still I'm shocked at how desperate they are to turn what happened in Ferguson, a perfectly justified act of self-defense against a kid who thought it a good idea to go gangster on some cop, into some great cause of social justice - it's almost beyond belief the utter nonsense you hear being spoken by supposedly intelligent people never mind the atrocious and rabid hatred you hear coming from people with no claims to intelligence whatsoever. And there's even protests in London, England? Where are the protests condemning young British Muslims running off to Syria to behead people? It's absolutely absurd what's going on here.

Western civilization will not survive the modern incarnation of liberalism if this is the irrational form it is increasingly going to be taking.

The sad farce in Ferguson demonstrates yet again the wholly dispiriting truth that African-American culture will continue to suffer and wallow in dysfunction just so long as liberals need blacks to forever and always see themselves as victims. The rush to judgment by the liberal elite in this case in order to score shallow and pestilential and ruinous and utterly divisive ideological points was just astounding. It was pretty clear from the beginning that the cop was defending himself against some kid who had just robbed a store and decided to go all gangster on him - you do not fire your gun nine or 10 times in order to execute some innocent youth who's supposedly surrendering with his hands up - you fire your gun that many times because you're in fear for your life! But facts and common sense just don't matter to the liberal elite, they've proven that over and over and over again - all they really care about are their ideological pretensions. 

An interesting question has been raised - if the deal Iran has turned down was in fact a good deal for them if indeed their plan is to develop nuclear weapons, then why did they turn it down, especially with Republicans about to take over Congress?

Well... could be they've taken the full measure of Obama and simply do not see him as a serious threat at all. Could be that Obama has already promised them that he intends to bypass Congress when it comes to the signing of any treaty. Could be that not fearing Obama at all the whole purpose now is to make America look weak and pathetic, an outcome that would bring much pleasure to Russia and China. 

On second thought I'm beginning to think that Obama's immigration ploy indeed was unconstitutional   - the feeling seems to be that the granting of what amounts to a virtual amnesty to so many illegals prevents or makes impossible any individual review of their cases and that that failure or abuse amounts to a de facto rewriting of immigration law and therefore what Obama has done is unconstitutional. I dunno - I ain't no scholar - but it's very hard to believe that something so egregiously dictatorial wouldn't be unconstitutional - that seems to insult common sense. 

Let it be understood that if come Monday nuclear negotiations with Iran are extended once again that will be a clear victory for the theocracy and will be tantamount to the signing of the weak deal (which I still expect will happen) - it will also clearly indicate what I've said all along: that iran holds the strong hand here because the West (by which we primarily mean Obama) is so desperate to avoid its promise to use whatever means necessary to stop the theocracy from becoming a nuclear power - meaning of course the military option. Iran and its co-conspirators Russia and China have always known that Obama had absolutely no intention of embracing the military option and therefore these negotiations have been nothing but a shell game managed by them. Iran has known all along that Obama needed to get a deal much more than they needed to make a deal - they've acted all along as if they're  in the catbird seat and that's because they are snd Obama's words and actions put them there.

(and here we go word just in that deadline has indeed been put off until next year - Obama is simply looking for a phony deal that he can sell as viable even though it isn't just so he can crawl out of this mess and hand it off to the next president - and Iran won't even give him that which tells you all you need to know about what they think of Obama - since no one believes for a second that Obama will use force the only thing that could possibly save this mess is the reapplication of stringent penalties - but Iran has manipulated Obama and this process as if they believe that will be impossible to do and no doubt Russia and China have assured them behind closed doors that that is the case - which means for all intents and purposes America has now adopted a containment policy re Iran nuke program - now we just wait and see what Israel does)

As to whether Obama's immigration diktat is unconstitutional, from the scholars I tend to rely on I get the feeling it probably is not given precedents governing executive privilege - although the scope of what he's done raises deep concerns and the details as to what rights exactly Obama is conferring on illegals could change the constitutional math - but just choosing not to pursue deportations of a broad swath of illegals does not seem to be unconstitutional regardless of it looking like a damn silly way to run a democracy. 

Is it good for the country? No - hell, I don't even know if it's good for Latinos given that it completely ruins any chance of achieving comprehensive immigration policy reform. 

Typical of just about everything Obama does this is just another cynical political calculation - unless you're going to give liberals everything they want they're not interested in immigration reform - Obama has and has never had any interest in negotiating a compromise deal with Republicans - the status quo of a broken immigration policy and a porus border serve his interests much better because he gets to make disingenuous populist gestures like this which binds Latinos to the left in perpetuity and when the Republicans try to take it away he gets to paint them as racist and unreasonable. 

Obama simply does not care if the move is unpopular in general or even unconstitutional - he doesn't have to win another election - all he cares about is turning Latinos into a solidly liberal voting bloc similar to African-Americans.  Conservatives going on about how he's a hypocrite because he said so many times in the past that doing what he's just done is unconstitutional and now claims it isn't do not realize that the man lies about everything - he didn't believe it was unconstitutional, he doesn't even care if it's unconstitutional, he just had to say that in order to keep the base mollified while winning elections by pretending to be a moderate. I don't understand why conservatives have so much trouble grasping this about the man - he lies - I don't know if he's ever stepped in front of a microphone and said anything that wasn't a complete load of bullshit - he does this because the media lets him get away with it and it would be impossible to push through his left wing agenda without lying - and he does it because for people like Obama if you do not agree with them and share in the refulgent glory of their beliefs then you're an idiot and do not deserve their respect.

Liberals of Obama's ilk truly view democracy as something that is beneath them and therefore come to see it as nothing more than a clumsy means to grant a phony legitimacy to the 'enlightened' autocracy which is the end they seek. Central to this ruinous ambition is the corruption of the media and that is the most fascinating and disturbing thing about the Obama presidency - this corruption has been thoroughly exposed. And so the really important question now becomes not how do you stop Obama per se but rather how do you fix or counteract the corruption that he relies on to do what he does? Conservatives and even moderates need to have an answer to this threat because every Liberal leader who now comes down the road will try to imitate him - and if that means that sometime soon we're going to end up with a president Elizabeth Warren then that's it, it's over, say goodbye to America. 

Finally a conservative commentator who gets Obama and with eyes free of illusion and fond hopes sees perfectly what Dear Leader and his ilk are all about - Cooke simply nails it with this essay.

What's amazing is how many conservatives have failed to fully grasp this reality about the man - Obama is a far left wing ideologue who wants to push the country as far left as possible in hopes that it can never be pulled back and he doesn't care if he has to break the law or abuse the Constitution or tell blatant lies to do it because as far as he's concerned and people like him are concerned if you do not share in their vision of America then by definition there's something wrong with you and therefore they do not have to respect your opinion nor concern themselves with conventions and formalities that do not serve their purpose - this is why the liberal elite can with such cynical self serving ease dismiss democracy as something that is more of an inconvenient hindrance than a virtue.

As Cooke points out, conservatives and even ostensibly unbiased moderates who are arguing that Democrats will rue the day Obama behaved in such a reckless way are failing to grasp two crucial problems - the media wants Obama and people who think like him to win - and the fantasies championed by the welfare state are much better suited to the buying of votes than the hard truths and realities conservatives are offering.

This cynical ideological extremism hiding behind the mask of moderation is also why I tend to disagree with people who look at Obama's disastrous foreign-policy and see it as a manifestation of incompetence - it's not incompetence if it's your goal to turn America into a second rate power, if it's your goal to open the door to the decline of America as a strategic military force to be feared and respected, if it's your goal to rig together a new world order where America is seen as nothing special - if those are your goals then Obama's foreign policy is not about incompetence but rather about a deliberate design.

That being said, let's keep in mind how the best laid plans etc etc - Obama and his liberal elite catamites are no doubt of the opinion that all the advantages fall to their side now and the great  left-wing autocracy waits but a few short steps down the road - but life do have a way of trippin' a person up. In Greek tragedy things usually don't go too well for people like Obama, hubris being the handmaiden of bad stuff and all - unfortunately, things tend not to go too well for anybody else either - and I am afraid that's the true fate lying in wait for us down the road. 

Is there anything that demonstrates the posturing emptiness of modern liberalism better than the Democrat's stance on the Keystone pipeline? Stopping it achieves absolute utely nothing other than the throwing away of good jobs, the needless pissing off a valuable ally and with astounding strategic incompetence  pushing it towards China, and of course finally offering up a soapbox from which bloviating progressives can congratulate themselves on being so gosh darn wonderful. That's it. If one believes in the threat of 'climate change' stopping Keystone does absolutely nothing to mitigate that fanciful threat.

Marvel at how nonsensical the rhetoric is - liberals caterwaul about how the pipeline would add to carbon emissions even though all it will do is transfer oil  from Canada to Louisiana that regardless is gonna go somewhere pipeline or not and yet Obama defends his stonewalling of the project by saying there's no evidence it will reduce gas prices for Americans - this makes no sense since if you're worried about carbon emissions the last thing you should be advocating for is lower gas prices that encourage more driving. 

But then of course Obama and his catamites don't need to make sense since the whole point of this charade is to grandstand in appeasement of the ideological pretensions of the eternally  nonsensical, bereft of coherent thought uber left.

It's almost as if under progressive leadership the democracies of the west are in a competition to see who can govern worst. 

With the recent terrorist attack in Jerusalem Obama once again embraces the obfuscating moral relativism of the liberal mind and worldview when it comes to Islamist extremism by condemning the act but wrapping that condemnation in language that makes it seem like both Israelis and Palestinians are at fault. What is it with the progressives of the Western world and Israel? Are they all anti-Semites? Does hatred of Israel become a proxy that allows them to vent their hatred of what they see as the evils of white capitalist imperialism? Does Israel's existence and the Muslim hatred of it become an inconvenient truth that shines an uncomfortable light on just how misguided the liberal worldview is? Or are progressives just naïve idiots blinded to the folly of their beliefs by the arrogance of their delusions?

John Kerry says US not intimidated by ISIS. That the secretary of state feels the need to make such an idiotic statement proves either that the Obama administration is indeed intimidated by ISIS or has no clue whatsoever what to do about the threat - or indicates that absent an actual strategy they believe that the giving of bellicose speeches will suffice. One really can't say it enough: worst president ever. 

The tyranny of the liberal elite

The central assumption animating Obama's whole approach to governing is that the media will allow him to say whatever he wants to say, get away with whatever he desires to get away with and spin whatever narrative he chooses to spin So that he may impose his extreme left wing ideological preferences on the American people regardless of whether or not they like or agree with those preferences. Given this assumption and the enabling facts that the media very clearly is willing to comply with it and the liberal elite is very clearly of the opinion that democracy is a ruse designed to keep the unenlightened under thumb Obama does not need to trouble himself with caring about what Republicans think nor with what people who vote for Republicans think. This is what a liberal autocracy looks like and this is what happens when an ostensibly free media and press in essence give up their right to free speech in order to subvert objective critical analysis and debate by championing the beliefs and causes of a chosen side. 

For some reason people still tend to want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and believe he's being sincere when he says things - things like 'destroying ISIS - Obama has no intention of destroying ISIS - like everything he does, this 'initiative' is nothing more than a political calculation to make it look like he's doing something because given public sentiment and a stubborn reality that does not much care for his progressive delusions doing nothing is no longer an option - his deeply flawed and misguided world view has backed him into a corner that he cannot get out of and unable or unwilling to rethink his beliefs and challenge his preconceptions he's just gonna fake it for a couple of years until he can hand the mess off to the next president - we know this by inference because of everything he's ever said or done regarding the strategic uses of American power but also factually because of his insistence of 'no boots on the ground' which, as with his application of a withdrawal date to his phoney surge in Afghanistan and his refusal to seriously attempt to negotiate a SOFA with Iraq, is Obama's way of telling us this endeavour is all about politics as far as he's concerned and not some coherent strategic endgame - without boots on the ground all you can do is contain ISIS, and possibly not even that.

The problem [amongst many] is the entire officer class knows Obama is full of shit and although the illusion of containment might hold for awhile, and maybe even long enough to get dumped on the next president, it might also start to fall apart quite quickly making it impossible to pretend that no boots on the ground is a viable option - in other words there'd be a serious disconnect between what Obama says he wants to do and what the military can actually accomplish given the limitations Obama will insist on - and at that point, if Obama refuses to acknowledge facts on the ground, you could really start to see a serious conflict brewing between the Joint Chiefs and Dear Leader - but even if Obama acknowledges the unpleasant facts, grunts still know: it's hard to win if the 'boss' doesn't believe in winning - even great teams can be undone by bad coaching.

Something I've always wondered about - well, since the depth of the Islamist threat was so clearly enunciated on 9/11 - something I've wondered about is what would it mean and how problematic could it become if a significant cadre of young black males were swept up into a radical Islamist ideology that went way beyond Nation of Islam hectoring by idiots like Farrakhan and started to look more like something you get from AQ and now ISIS? A noxious nexus like that really would have the potential to set the country on fire, breed chaos. And then I read this about how ISIS is already there - that's disturbing.

Article also raises frightening spectre that hadn't occurred to me but obviously has to others of terrorists instead of strapping fairly easy to detect bombs to their 'martyrs' just sending their boys into Ebola ravished communities in Africa in order to create a 'stockpile' as it were of infected Islamist heroes who can then be smuggled into Mexico and across the border where they can just wander around Dallas for a few days infecting as many people as possible - imagine the chaos and upheaval 20 or 30 of these 'disease bombs' wandering around various American cities could unleash.  That too is quite disturbing - and, again, is there any reason to believe ISIS hasn't already set such a plan in motion?

It's an unpleasant juxtaposition - the threats out there ramping up and the only country that can really do anything about it, America, being led by a guy whose world view is utterly misguided and who clearly doesn't just distrust American power but in private probably scorns the idea of it and therefore is loathe to use it it any strategically coherent way - that's a troubling juxtaposition. 

With all the chaos rocking the Muslim world and drawing us once again towards the sinkhole, this may be the best thing I've read on misguided American policy even though it's nothing more than an intimation of things - it points out the key issue in all this way I see it: US political and intellectual elites do not get Islam in general and Islamism and the dysfunctional cultural dynamics of the Mideast in particular - this ignorance/foolishness has been on display since the first Gulf War,  but has really shown its ugly head recently with regards to rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, failure to understand and accurately predict how the supposed Arab Spring would play out, the pullout of Iraq, the delusion of leading from behind, the phony surge in Afghanistan, sham nuke negotiations with Iran, failure to understand that as long as Hamas is around peace with Israel is an impossibility, and even throw in failure to grasp what Erdogan is up to in Turkey - the essay rightly points out that this is not just about Obama since Bush made many of the same mistakes - still, Obama has taken the stupidity to a whole new level - and the essay also rightly points out something that really worries me: how Obama's awful foreign policy instincts are made much worse by a media that just cannot bring itself to criticise the man in the way he needs to be criticised - as WR Mead astutely put it, Obama's foreign policy is so awful the media has no choice now but to report on the ugly 'dots' but it still is not connecting those dots and without a connecting narrative the American people will never really grasp just how bad Obama is and therefore correcting the mistakes will be harder to do.  

Most disturbing thing about the Ferguson grotesquerie? Realization of how many on the left would apparently not mind much the cop being found guilty of 'murder' regardless of whether or not he actually is - these people seem to have no problem at all with a rush to judgement and almost openly scorn the idea of due process as if it were some rigged shell game serving the interests of white privilege - but on top of that, the realization that for many of these people [and that includes some in the media and possibly Obama and Holder themselves] the racial detached from reason hysteria they're trying to gin up may in fact be about forcing through that very thing: the cop charged with murder regardless of the facts, indeed regardless of the possibility that he may have been entirely justified in his actions - or, alternatively, the willingness of the left to feed this hysteria and come close to fomenting or inciting a race war [and again that possibly includes Holder and Obama] simply in order to drive up turnout in November.

I mean, the few things we do know about this shooting all seem to lean towards supporting the cop's version of things - and if the woman who Dana Loesch interviewed can be trusted there is physical evidence to support or upend his story as well - she said the cop was punched in the face and during a struggle his gun was discharged in his vehicle, so there's gonna be evidence of those two things if that's what happened - indeed, detectives may have already accumulated enough eyewitness accounts and physical evidence to exonerate the cop but are not releasing it for fear of stoking the flames - and yet so many on the left talk as it none of that matters - the left needs blacks to see themselves as victims in order to lend credence to the narratives they want to spin - the truth is of no use to them in this regard which is why they are so comfortable acting as if it's beside the point - I'm surprised no one's dug up yet who the cop voted for in 2012 - if it was Romney then that's it, case closed, he's obviously a racist. 

I like this turn of phrase from Vic Hanson where, regarding the lunacy of Ferguson, the babbling incoherence of extremist leftism that is critical race theory is seen expanding its idiotic reach into the brave new world of critical legal theory - everything in the America of Obama/Holder is now nothing more than a reflection of what they consider right and fair. Who cares if the officer was maybe justified in his actions - hell, why even care about what actually happened - when it comes to what the progressives deem fair, why should the constitution or a persons' rights or truth itself be allowed to get in the way of that? How can justice be anything other than what the left says it is?

It's as if you can't turn anywhere without seeing something that makes you shake your head in despairing wonderment at just how awful the Obama presidency is - I can't wait for the Warren administration, that will be like having front row seats to the fall of Rome.

No comment on the 'race war’ going on in Ferguson? No - you can’t have an intelligent discussion about race in America so long as liberals have a vested interest in blacks forever and always seeing themselves as victims - simple as that - all you can do is sadly stand back and watch the nightmarish farce play out over and over again until the great reckoning finally reaches us somewhere down the road. This is of course not to absurdly contend that blacks haven’t been victimized but rather to state the obvious: any culture that is told and encouraged to believe that any wrong it does or dysfunction it manifests is the fault of someone else is gonna develop some pretty problematic qualities and behavioural aberrations - this is exactly what liberalism has done to African-Americans - and as long as liberals need blacks to see themselves in this way and have the political wherewithal and media backing to make it so nothing is gonna change. Think about it: Asian ‘immigrants' were also treated quite badly by ‘white’ America as the country came of age - not as poorly as blacks but in many ways not that far removed either - a coolie was by and large in all but name a slave - and yet Asians in America flourish and their culture exhibits none of the dysfunction and constant embrace of grievance black culture does - why? Because liberals never adopted Asian Americans as a 'special cause’ and therefore they were spared the enervating ravages of white guilt coming to their ‘rescue'. Asian Americans had no choice but to put the injustice done behind them and move on, adapt - and now there’s no cultural group in America doing better than Asians. Much of this has to do with the fact that for Asians there’s never been a stigma attached to 'acting white’ therefore they were able to adopt those aspects of Western culture imminently worthy of being adopted - Western civilization beginning with Athens and ending with America is the most successful and dynamic culture to ever walk the earth and yet modern liberalism essentially tells blacks to scorn that culture, to demonize it, to treat it as the enemy - that’s pretty god damn stupid.

What’s happening in Ferguson is not about racism - it’s about the dysfunction and enervation the progressive's mindset and worldview give rise to - and as long as this dysfunction serves the liberal sympathies of the media and the electoral fortunes of Democrats and the selfish schemes of charlatan hucksters like Sharpton it’s hard to see this ‘racism’ problem ever going away, at least not quietly - you do get the feeling that waiting somewhere down the road is a rupture to public order that will be quite disturbing.

[for a fuller and much more erudite expression of the point I'm trying to make - that the problem with Ferguson is not racism but liberalism - see this very nice piece by Williamson over at NRO]

Heard Rove speaking on Hugh Hewitt show where he said Obama insists on intelligence reports being delivered in writing rather than coming from specialist briefers - if true that pretty much tells me all I need to know about Obama and why his foreign policy practice is so god awful - what it tells me is that he believes what he believes, he has zero interest in questioning those beliefs and little tolerance of someone else maybe challenging them, and if stubborn facts refuse to comport with those beliefs he doesn't care because as far as he’s concerned he’s smarter than the facts.

This dynamic was clearly on display in recent Gaza action - even if one opposed the Israeli action and could manage to summon up something of a coherent argument as to why, once the extent of the terror tunnels became obvious all opposition to the Israeli action was rendered irrelevant and no longer governed by reality and common sense - not for Obama who continued to resist the logic of it in both word and deed as we now know [the denial of arms shipments] - and this was true of all other lefties out there. Why? Because the tunnels proved Netanyahu et al right - that the Palestinians are not really interested in peace, or rather that the only peace they're really interested in is one that involves Israel’s implied or explicit destruction, which is why until Hamas is done away with and whatever's left over fully acknowledges Israel’s right to exist and Israel’s security needs are subsequently treated with utmost seriousness no agreement is possible - what the Israeli right has been saying for quite awhile is now proven true and Obama and all his lefty pals simply cannot admit to that because such an admission would tear down just about every naive sympathy they cling to.

Think about how illogical or misbegotten the left’s approach to Israel is: in order to isolate it and thereby force it into an agreement no one, left or right, in Israel any longer feels could be trusted, you have to by implication serve the interests and tactics of the Islamist extremists by in effect contributing to the delegitimization of Israel - and once you've done that, why should people committed to the destruction of Israel bother with compromise? The Islamist extremists have created a zero sum game: you're either with Israel or you’re by implication with them - and it’s amazing how many idiots in the West have chosen to be against Israel. Sure, they may not see it quite in those terms, but that in effect is the result you get to by naively believing in a peace that can never happen so long as Palestinians and all Islamists are wedded to preconditions and an ideological intolerance at odds with Israel’s survival.

Can this be true, that Obama halted arms shipments to Israel during assault on Gaza? Just when ya think that Obama's practice of foreign policy along the delusional, bereft of common sense, strategically inept lines of classical far left wingedness can't sink you any further into despair regarding the future of this little thing we call Western Civilization, the man manages to reach into his big bag of stupid to pull out another deformed imp to dance his farce on the world stage.

I guess congress is on vacation but they should really come back for one day to officially censure in some way this act of betrayal against Israel by Obama - you can't allow the stench of this perfidy to linger and add to the anti-Israel sewage currently streaming through the out-house of world opinion.

But actually shouldn't refer to Obama's practice of foreign policy as inept - of course in objective realist terms it most decidedly is - but relative to how the average leftist academic in the US views the world and America's place in it, Obama's foreign policy farce is very much in keeping with that progressively addled mindset and therefore in that sense not inept - utterly delusional, yes, and fraught with oh so many dangers - but in essence not inept. It's the default thinking of this ilk of intellectual to see Israel as the villain [in this role it becomes a proxy for American capitalism and white privilege colonialism in general], the Palestinians as the victims and if we just isolate Israel and back it into a corner they'll be forced to compromise and peace will fall magically from the sky. What makes this point of view so shockingly stupid and detached from reality is that ten years ago Obama could have found people on the left in Israel who agreed with that position - not anymore, left and right in Israel are more or less united in belief that the only peace the Palestinians are interested in is the one that ends with Israel's destruction and therefore the only option is to defeat the extremists in battle and hold down the fort until another American president comes along who actually has a clue when it comes to the Mideast.

[what makes this behaviour by Obama doubly shocking in its stupidity or if you prefer misguided conceits is that all the other players in the region know Israel has it right - not meaning they support Israel of course, although Saudi Arabia and Egypt are definitely on board when it comes to squashing  Hamas - but rather they know that Israel's reading of the situation is accurate and Obama's is way off - and the conclusion they draw is that Obama will not defend traditional American interests in the Mideast - and it's very hard to believe that that perception leads to anything 'good']

[so how do you explain the maladroit reasonings of Obama and his maenads? Ideological arrogance - arrogance is how the ideologue guards against ever having to imagine themselves wrong for the admitting of error about something so fundamental to a left wing ideologues thinking as Israel's culpability would threaten to unravel the entire belief system to which they cling - and consider the arrogance at work here: despite sound empirical evidence that supports Israel's position and against the opinions and perceptions of everyone in the Mideast whose opinions and perceptions we should care about, Obama is declaring he knows better - that's an impressive display of arrogance]

There may be nothing more annoying than pundits and talking heads pointing to public opinion polls in order to justify questionable foreign policy decisions, which many liberals are trying to do by saying Obama's seemingly flawed policies are really just him giving the people what they want. Saying a president needs to curry public support when it comes to policy and that the public's opinion matters are two entirely different things - the former makes sense and is pragmatic, the latter is meaningless and a recipe for disaster. The average voter is completely ignorant when it comes to foreign policy questions - they may have feelings which can vaguely approximate notions regarding foreign policy and those notions can often be more or less accurate -  but overwhelmingly the average voter has close to zero relevant understanding of the intricacies of foreign policy and therefore seeking out or being guided by their opinion would be about as daffy as a CEO asking the car park attendant for business advice or the surgeon asking the orderly how to go about removing a spleen. Support and guidance are two entirely separate things - the wise president will figure out a way to earn the former, but when it comes to the latter he or she is on their own. It may seem somewhat undemocratic, but when it comes to foreign policy the people by and large only get a say after the decisions have been made and results become evident and open to judgement - which is why it's so important for voters to get an accurate sense of how a candidate might act given a crisis and why it's not unreasonable to blame the media more than Obama for his foreign policy malpractice since it's the media that created and nurtured the illusion [or outright lie] of Obama as some brilliant operator whose understanding of just about everything under the sun was beyond reproach - this is why I say the real scandal of Benghazi was the left wing media's complicity in covering it up - the flawed logic and misguided preconceptions under girding Obama's foreign policy thinking were all in essence on display with Libya and Benghazi, and the media conspired with Obama to keep the truth safely hidden away - which is why no one should be surprised by how badly things are going right now.

So, when Obama and his retinue of progressive fools say the only thing that can ‘fix’ Iraq is the formation of an ‘inclusive’ western styled democracy isn't he basically contradicting his opposition to the Iraq war and declaring Bush right? Does he think respect for liberty, a free conscience and democracy just springs up magically in Muslim polities when very clearly it does not? If there’s a political path forward in Iraq it’s because Bush invaded and created the opportunity - you can't both damn that invasion and cheer on the benefits of it and remain credible - you cannot claim what Bush did both the cause of the problem and the solution and remain credible - you cannot claim that Iraq would have been better off if Bush had left Saddam alone and at the same time talk as if Muslim polities and Islamism in general are naturally inclined towards ‘inclusiveness’.

Liberals flat out make zero sense when talking about Iraq and the Mideast in general. I’m not gonna defend the mistakes Bush made but there’s a significant difference between saying the invasion was a mistake and saying the occupation was flawed - and if liberals are now gonna maintain that the only thing that can save Iraq is ‘inclusive’ Western styled governance then they are flat out contradicting themselves viz Bush - or declaring their belief that the world is run by magical fairies and wise and kindly left leaning wizards who live in the clouds.

But of course regardless of the hypocritical idiocy of liberals all this talk of ‘inclusiveness’ is pointless - ISIS controls Sunni Iraq and it ain’t giving it up even if Iraqi Sunnis in some general sense can be convinced to trust in Shiite dominated governance again.

So what’s Obama up to with his air strikes? He’s wrapped the op in ‘humanitarian’ terms of course because he does not see American power in strategic terms even though if he had we would never have left Iraq and therefore there'd be no humanitarian crisis - but aside from that, what’s Dear Leader up to, assuming he indeed has a clue of some sort? The air strikes are clearly too limited to be about some overarching strategy of ‘defeating’ ISIS and no sane person would ever imagine Obama agreeing to something like that anyway - so it ain’t that. Could be a holding tactic designed to contain ISIS while the Kurds are armed - but that would mean Obama unilaterally creating an independent and militarized Kurdish state because the amount of military upgrade required here to deal with ISIS is huge - which means arming the Kurds would also require a significant US military presence in this new Kurdish state to train, oversee, help with command and control and force protect - he may surprise, but I really don't see Obama agreeing to something like that - that would be completely out of character for him.

Leaves one with three options: this is just a one off humanitarian effort, which would I think be even too stupid and ill advised for Obama - although can't rule it out; Obama believes that limited air power can contain ISIS and that will be good enough - thoroughly misguided if that’s the case; it is about ‘containment’ but in order to buy time for the rise of ‘inclusive’ governance in Baghdad - as said though even if that is possible, which I highly doubt, it’s too late - ISIS is powerful and committed to its cause and has acquired significant military hardware left behind by the fleeing Iraq army - on top of that they've demonstrated a solid understanding of military tactics in general and as others have pointed out of Maoist insurgency theory specifically - which means they ain't going away quietly and therefore pushing Maliki aside in the name of a greater respect for Western styled ‘inclusiveness’ is pointless even if such a thing is feasible which as said I rather doubt.

Only conclusion I can draw from all this then is that once again Obama is demonstrating that when it comes to foreign policy he is utterly clueless - all of his instincts are wrong, all his sympathies misguided or delusional. Guess we just sit around now and wait for ISIS to take over Baghdad or for Iran to move into southern Iraq and create a new Islamist Shiite state - and if that happens Obama can wave goodbye to any putative nuke deal or rapprochement with Iran he might be dreaming about.

Of all the depressing detritus and flotsam populating the effluvia spilling from the wreck of ideologically driven idiocy that is the Obama presidency his claiming in a peevish snit to a hapless reporter the other day that it wasn't his idea to leave Iraq is potentially the most galling of the sad lot - he explicitly ran on the promise to get out of Iraq, he bragged about having done that once it was done, he put out campaign material in 2012 lauding the brave new war free world his brilliance had created - the brazenly cynical point of covering up Benghazi was to keep this whole ‘I end wars’ illusion/delusion alive - it’s public freaking record for christ sake that he scorned the opinions of military leaders who advised against a complete withdrawal - since running away he has twice rejected pleas from Maliki to come back, the second of which had to do with the baleful rise of ISIS, a rise which the military advised him would require an American presence to stop and advice which he once again ignored - and now he wants to claim it wasn't his idea to get out of Iraq? Somebody please tell me - is this man delusional, so locked in his little liberal echo chamber that he actually believes that everything he says is more or less true regardless of how false it may be? Or is this the behaviour of a person so utterly convinced of the media’s desire to protect him that like some horribly spoiled miscreant child he feels he can do and say whatever the hell he pleases?

[and while we're on this whole indulgent media/Iraq thing - is it true that in Friedman interview Obama claimed that he was surprised about how Libya fell apart and that his biggest regret was not paying enough attention to something resembling a post war plan? Are you fucking kidding me? The man made his career by opposing the Iraq war, a GLARING frickin' example of the problems that ensue when you do not properly plan for the post hostilities phase - and he was surprised by Libya? Everyone who opposed Libya as a foolish, ill conceived, strategically flawed misadventured said that the half in, half out leading from behind model would bring ya nothing but chaos and a failed state - all of us who called Libya stupid pointed at Iraq and said the one clear lesson to be learned from the removal of Saddam was that the post war plan was just as important if not more so than the war plan itself - we all saw the inherent problems associated with 'lead from behind' thinking - and what's more all of us who opposed Libya pointed to the Arab Spring and said Iraq teaches us that the toppling of these regimes does not lead to freedom and democracy flowering in the Muslim world - it leads to trouble, upheaval and extremism returning in a different form. And yet Obama was surprised by Libya? Give me a fucking break. And let me guess - Friedman didn't challenge this absurd statement - I suppose I could go read the interview but I can't stand that lapdog Friedman - but I'll take a wild guess and say he didn't challenge this astoundingly absurd statement from Obama]

Well, looks like maybe Hillary is gonna stand up and be from the sidelines the president America needs at the moment since Obama is clearly incapable, unwilling or completely uninterested in being that president:

overall, she indicated that she considered President Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy to be too cautious. Responding to Obama’s self-described foreign policy doctrine of: “Don't do stupid shit,” Clinton, who served as his top diplomat for four years between 2009 and 2013, said: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don't do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

What she calls 'too cautious' is really just a polite way of saying 'too liberal' which itself is just a polite way of saying 'delusional' but as a liberal guess asking too much of her to say that - still, nice to hear someone on the left speak with at least a hint of common sense that's willing to see the world as the rather ugly thing it actually is - ludicrous as it seems, it's almost as if at this point Obama's foreign policy can be paraphrased as: America retreats, forswears its white privileged arrogance, and the void is filled by reasonable people coming together, talking nicely to each other and everything working out fine. The man is dangerously misguided and worse than that shows no sign of possibly reevaluating his flawed preconceptions. I'm no fan of Hillary, but someone of import on the left needed to stand up and say something.

So what has the Gaza conflict revealed about Obama? What many people uncorrupted by bias have known since before he was president: he's not a pragmatist, not a realist, not a clear thinking moderate, not a conscientious and evenhanded rationalist - he's an ideologue who gets away with pretending to be all the former because of media complicity - his foreign policy is governed not by reasonable analysis but by ideology and that ideology is of the weak kneed, America hating uber left. He has one goal as president: push the country as far left as possible before his term is over regardless of damage that might do and dangers that might give rise to.

The policy approach to the Gaza conflict should have been a no brainer for an American president: the American people supported Israel, the congress supported Israel, both left and right in Israel were firmly behind the steps taken, especially once the dire threat of the tunnels became obvious, virtually all our Arab allies behind the scenes supported the action since they hate Hamas too because of its ties to Iran, Egypt, no friend of the Muslim Brotherhood which Hamas is an offshoot of, openly supported Israel by refusing to accept Hamas' demands for a truce, and finally Hamas is a recognized terrorist outfit without any political legitimacy whose sworn purpose in life is the destruction of Israel and whose tactics of choice are to indiscriminately target Israelis and then when Israel responds throw as many of their own people as possible in front of bombs so as to feed the anti-Semitic idiocy of 'world opinion' - this should have been a no brainer, all the more so because Obama didn't have to act, all he had to do was say the right words - and yet still he got it wrong. That tells you all you need to know about his presidency: he's not driven by common sense or an objective analysis of what's in America's best interests - he's driven by ideology, he's there to serve the interests of the far left [the only faction in the country that didn't side with Israel] and quite frankly I think couldn't care less about those who do not share his vision - and he's gotten away with this because he's an expert manipulator of a media utterly corrupted by bias.

[hey, the Obamaphiles cry - what do you mean he got it wrong - he supported Israel's right to defend itself! Please, people, enough with the bullshit - if you truly supported Israel's actions you would do so knowing that there's gonna be civilian casualties because that's exactly what Hamas wants to have happen and you'd figure out how you're gonna talk about those casualties without undermining Israel's actions and needs - that's not what Obama did: out one side of his mouth he defended Israel's right to defend itself and out the other he talked about the death toll in a way that undermined Israel's actions and served the interests of Hamas - which tells me Obama did not support this operation but had to pretend he sort of did because the country did - that's the reality here and so just stop with the bullshit. Israel knows this is the case, they know they were betrayed by Obama - and word coming out that Netanyahu in a phone call yesterday with Kerry hung up on him is testament to that and probably a good indication that Israel is more or less done with this administration - and how that impacts the Iran negotiations ought to make for an interesting spectacle]

Spain and Britain to review military sales to Israel - it's getting harder and harder to resist the feeling that the entire Western world is at this point in history governed by fools - this shaming especially rich coming from England who gave us Bomber Harris and his deliberate targeting of civilians in WWII, a strategy that Eisenhower did not agree with. And then you get Obama's America hating gnome Valerie Jarrett throwing in her brilliant insight that Israel's security needs do not justify the killing of civilians - that's some real fancy thinkin' there - aside from Hagel, is there anyone in the Obama administration that has read a single book on military strategy, practice and history? If there is, Obama clearly doesn't listen to them. Was it in Gates' memoir that he mentioned Obama displaying something resembling contempt for the opinions of the military when it came to foreign policy questions? I don't remember - somebody said it - regardless, who doubts that it's true?

It's getting difficult to know what to say anymore - ya just watch this mess with a sense of dread crawling up your back knowing that something bad is coming and the West is too compromised by the musings of fools to do a damn thing about it.

[as a sidebar to this sense of doom - see what irreprehensible bile and hate and irrational, unhinged bellicosity Erdogan is spewing at Israel now - almost as disgusting as the explicit or implied condemnation of Israel by the West is the failure of anyone to criticise Erdogan's extremist ranting - does anyone in NATO have the balls or at least common sense to stand up and censure this man? Why at this point is Turkey even a member of NATO - and why the hell do we still intend on selling them F-35s? Any country or person who speaks about Israel this way absolutely cannot be trusted to protect the interests of America - to quote Casey Stengel with depressing aptness: can't anybody here play this game?]

It would seem that Sam Power used the adjective 'horrifying' to describe an action in Gaza by Israel - and in doing so she has won the war for Hamas. Whether it will be expressed or not, who knows - diplomatic restraint will probably prevail - but I'm guessing across the board in Israel right now there's nothing but outrage and contempt felt for the Obama administration. What the consequences of this will be, hard to say - but one imagines they'll be bad since Power just gave Hamas exactly what it wanted.

Let me try and explain this simply - for Hamas, there's no greater honor for a Muslim than to die for Allah, especially if that death adds to the destruction of Israel - so when Hamas puts its people in the way of bombs what they're doing is using these 'martyrs' to terrorize Western media and governments because the West cares more about these people in secular terms than Hamas does - Hamas is 'terrorizing' its own people, but the real target of that terror is Western media and governments and now Obama - and the purpose of this terror is to provoke these dupes and fools into contributing to the delegitimization of Israel - which is exactly what Power has done - hell, which is exactly what Obama's entire Mideast policy has done since the day he took the oath.

I think I'd have to describe this as shameful behavior - in a capitulation to what amounts to terrorism the Obama administration has betrayed Israel - I don't think I'm being unreasonable putting it in those terms, and I'm pretty sure the vast majority in Israel would agree with me.

We'll see what the consequences of this will be - hard to predict - but I'd say, as bad as Obama's practice of foreign policy has been to this point, it appears to have just taken a turn down a road that is very dark and very dangerous and it's very hard to see any way that this can end well.

[well, may be a tad unreasonable to say won the war for Hamas since losing those tunnels is a pretty big loss and it's hard to imagine how they'll go about reversing that loss - which brings up interesting question: why did Hamas risk exposing these tunnels by continuing the missile barrage till the point Israel had no choice but to invade? That seems like a pretty big tactical blunder - I did speculate before things got hot that Hamas seemed to be gambling that Israel would not go for the big kill - maybe with Egypt shutting down the smuggling tunnels Hamas' finances were so bad they had no choice but to tempt fate - and again, I'd like to know if Abbas knew about these tunnels because if he did that would be revealing]

[and as emphasis to my claim that Obama's response to Gaza amounts to a capitulation to terror, there's these brief thoughts from WR Mead which are not about Gaza per se but relate to the wider problem of which Gaza is a part - Obama is stuck thinking of Muslim extremism as a manifestation of western arrogance and the idiocy of Bush, that's his worldview and he's not gonna re-examine that misguided perception no matter what because to do so would upend every sentiment that undergirds the ideology of the left - Obama had a perfect opportunity with Gaza to move his foreign policy in a more coherent and reality based direction and not only did he not do that, seems to me he's doubled down on his foolishess - and we've got two more years left of this - every bad actor out there who wishes ill on America and what it represents is paying attention to this mess and drawing pretty scary conclusions]

Let’s ask - albeit fraught with problems and complications galore, but was there really any other option available to Israel but to move into Gaza? Well, they could never have left in the first place or, once gone, the residents could have exploited that opportunity in a positive way rather than enabling the rise to power of an Islamist terror group whose stated and practically sole purpose is the utter destruction of Israel - that would have helped.

But things being what they are, was there really any way to avoid what has happened? Seeing as how if Israel had had prior knowledge of how extensive and sophisticated and therefore how absolute a threat the terror tunnels were that that in and of itself would have been just cause for entering Gaza regardless of the thousands of missiles and Hamas’ clear intention to cross a line that Israel could not ignore so as to happily martyr their people for the myopic and dumb as dirt world media - I really don't see how anyone could think Israel had a choice here: the existence of the tunnels makes that clear - I mean of course I see how anti-Semites and those who tend to hate Israel as a proxy for hating America and of course liberals in general who as a rule are quite addled when it comes to these things would be able to convince themselves about the viability of ‘other options’ - but for any objective, rational, clear thinking person determined not to cower before the unpleasant facts it’s pretty hard to see how Israel had any choice but to do what its done.

The only thing that possibly could have convinced Israel to forbear the aggression from Hamas would have been a firm, an unequivocal commitment from Obama regarding both Israel’s security needs and America’s intention to back that commitment up fully, even with action on the ground if need be - and on top of that a crystal clear statement challenging the legitimacy of Hamas as a political entity worthy of respect - but there’s not an American ally left in the world who feels they can trust Obama in such a fundamental way - when it comes to Israel what you get from Obama are gestures and platitudes - read between the lines of his words and actions and what you see is a default liberal hubris that is hostile to Israel and naively indulgent of Islamism - like most of the liberal elite he sees Israel as the main problem in the region and not the dysfunctional extremism of Islamist polities - I mean, Kerry and Obama didn't even raise much of a fuss when Fatah and Hamas announced a unity gov't, with Kerry even saying he could work with such a thing - just read this article on Hamas’ ‘covenant’ to get a good idea why such an egregious betrayal of Israel and common sense in general as that from the Obama administration would cause any sane Israeli not to trust it when it comes to the hardcore facts of Israel’s survival. Netanyahu may have to smile for the cameras and tolerate Obama - but trust him to do what's right when push comes to shove? My guess is he stopped doing that a long time ago.

[actually the default liberal thinking on Israel was that conservatives in Israel were the problem and that someone like Livni could make peace - but when it comes to security issues left and right have closed ranks in Israel - most Israelis now believe that the only peace the Palestinians are interested in is one that explicitly or implicitly involves the death of Israel, and with 'world opinion' actively or by implication enabling that sentiment, most Israelis would hold that when it comes to an obscenity like Hamas you only have two choices: fight or surrender - which is why support for this war is huge in Israel. Of course these people understand that the war feeds the anti-Israel narrative - but that only matters if you believe Palestinians are sincerely interested in a peace deal that recognizes Israel's right to exist. This is why I say unequivocal American support for Israel is essential because anything that looks hesitant or reluctant or ambivalent or sophistic ends up rewarding the tactics of Hamas et al and guarantees that eventually Israel will have no choice but to act - because, as said, the only other choice is surrender. Obama has acted all along as if he could use the dubious leverage of 'world opinion' to force Israel into making unwise compromises - I've said all along that that was misguided and would only make a modicum of sense if the Palestinians, and quite frankly the Muslim world in general, were actually serious about defending Israel's right to exist - otherwise you're just backing Israel into a corner from which eventually they'll have no choice but to fight back from]

[a corollary not yet raised by anyone far as I know: did Fatah know about how extensive the Hamas tunnel system was? If so and said nothing to Israel that would make them complicit in terror acts against Israel - you can argue that of course they wouldn't have said anything if they knew - but think about it: if Fatah was actually serious about making peace with Israel, what better way to build trust than to reveal intel on the tunnel system? And on the contrary, if the peace negotiations were nothing but a charade playing off of the gullible idiocy of Kerry in order to drive negative opinions of Israel, what better way to make that clear than to keep hidden such a serious threat?]

Obama's malpractice when it comes to foreign policy has convincingly re-established the belief that liberals, as they have seen, defined and conducted themselves since the days of McGovern and McCarthy, cannot be trusted with national security and the cold blooded demands of promoting and defending America's interests in a hostile and dangerously complex world - the left's completely detached from reality response to Israel's actions in Gaza, actions which were rational and certainly justifiable before the discovery of just how extensive and sophisticated the tunnel system Hamas has constructed was and which are now with that discovery rendered unequivocally necessary - the left's alarming inability to recognize and understand these facts supporting Israel's actions, facts which should be obvious to any clear thinking person with a modest capacity for objective analysis, pretty much confirms with a thunderous exclamation point the idea that liberals cannot be trusted with national security [which is of course not to forgive or ignore the many blunders conservatives have made - but there's a very, very big difference between a driver who gets in an accident because they made a mistake and a driver who gets in accident because they have no clue how to drive].

Now possibly there are some moderate realists on the left out there who see this growing problem and have plans or hopes of redressing the damage done by Obama and the seemingly increasing influence the far left code pinkers have on the way Democrats talk and think about foreign policy - but when you have Hillary, who's supposed to be one of these moderates, one these pragmatic 'hawks', saying that Hamas is firing from schools and hospitals and the like because Gaza is small and therefore their field of operations is limited - jesus, I mean, profoundly idiotic statements like that really don't fill one with optimism that the left is about to rediscover its inner Truman.

This depressing NY Times story about how Europe through weak kneed cowardice and shortsighted thinking that almost overwhelms one with its stupidity has allowed itself to become the chief financier of al Qaeda dovetails nicely I think with much of Europe's and much of the left's in general equally shortsighted take on Gaza - namely, the willingness of these people to appease the terrorists by rewarding their tactics in order to avoid the unpleasantness of what confronting that terror necessarily gives rise to - much easier to just demonize Israel and hope thereby to shame them into an ill-advised truce rather than confront the true threat head on. And just as with the paying of ransoms to al Qaeda's kidnappers the utterly predictable has happened, kidnappings have increased to the point where Europe is now the chief source of capital for terrorists who  would like nothing better than to turn Europe into a pile of ash, what the hell do these morons think is gonna be the consequence of appeasing Hamas who is throwing its own citizens in front of bombs in order to terrorize Obama and the EU into just such an appeasement? It's clear Hamas believes that eventually the redoubtable idiocy of the 'world community' is going to step in and stop Israel - and at that point Hamas wins. Which is why I say, if you're not supporting Israel 100% in this endeavor, you're serving the interests of rabid anti-West terror - you're paying the ransom.

As I was reading the Times story it also occurred to me, and I don't remember it being addressed in the article per se - but it occurred to me that European countries paying these ransoms aren't simply doing so to save their people - they're also doing it to keep Islamist extremism off the front pages - with a growing Muslim problem throughout Europe which is giving rise to reactionary right wing animus all over the place, countries like France really don't wanna see pictures of their citizens being beheaded popping up on TV screens - much simpler to just pay the ransom and pretend everything's fine - this very much in keeping with Obama's attempt to address Islamist extremism by ordering gov't agencies to simply stop talking about it - which may not seem as obviously a bad idea as paying a ransom to these people, but the consequences are pretty much the same - their interests are advanced, ours diminished.   

Well, it would appear that Obama and Kerry have finally figured out their misguided intentions for Gaza will be going no where until they start taking seriously the idea of demilitarizing it - but here now is the whole problem with Obama and his practice of foreign policy: no one trusts him to do what he might say he'll do or do it competently should he actually commit to giving it a try. Friends and enemies have gotten the message: he doesn't believe in the value and uses of American power and therefore has never spent much time thinking about its practice and so like most liberals has no realistic or thoughtful understanding of or appreciation for the concept and no practical and objective sense of what the world might look like absent its effect. Browse the syllabi of America’s liberal universities and you'll find there are many many many more courses on the history of feminism or the semantics of white privilege than there are on the history of war - such is the rose colored glass through which a progressive of Obama’s ilk sees the world.

Our friends and enemies have witnessed the show and drawn their conclusions: Obama is either dangerously naive, hopelessly idealistic or rendered disturbingly incompetent by ideological conceit when it comes to the practice of foreign policy and thus it is our friends have determined he cannot be trusted and our enemies have pondered deeply the question of just how far they can push things with a president such as this sitting in the White House.

One can also imagine that it might not be amiss to believe that both our enemies and friends have wondered about a possibility that many on the right are convinced is true - namely, that Obama is leading a country that he doesn't much like and may indeed hate. The actions he's taken and the general nature of the way he governs does lead one to the speculation that he doesn't much see himself as the president of the whole United States but rather just those who think like him - which one could interpret as being symptomatic of an ideology not interested in the idea of America that has held sway for so long but rather cares only for the America that will be once the quiet progressive coup that Obama has started usurps control - and that America, one let's say that a professor in gender studies at Harvard would finally feel proud to count themselves a member of, would most decidedly not be a thing that our enemies need fear nor our erstwhile friends need vainly to claim a trust in.

"... I wonder, since Obama seems fine with forcing on Israel a ceasefire that would undermine its interests and even in the long view threaten its survival while serving the interests of its enemies by leaving them intact and emboldened to carry on with the tactics of their terrorist ways... I wonder, does that mean Obama would have supported Palmerston's waylaid efforts to end Britain's stance of neutrality during the Civil War by embracing an armistice between the Union and the Confederacy which would have recognized the south as an independent country thereby ensuring the continuance of slavery?... seems like a rather odd position for a black president who likes to think of himself as Lincolnish to find himself in... if such a thing had come to pass, would it be Obama's contention that Lincoln would have been wise to accept peace on terms that would have dissolved the union and guaranteed renewed violence down the road under circumstances much less favorable to the north ...?"   

So let me try and understand this - about 85% of Israelis support the action in Gaza and oppose ending it before military objectives are complete - and both left and right political parties plus media outlets feel the same - so support in Israel for the Gaza action is pretty god damn solid and viewed by a strong majority as absolutely necessary - and yet Obama and Kerry are insisting on telling this country, to whom the US is its most vital, most essential ally and whose support is the only thing standing between the idiocy of 'world opinion' [a phrase which should only ever be used in the pejorative] and Israel's survival, that they're wrong and must stop - which means in essence that Obama is actively legitimizing the entrenched anti-Semitic idiocy of 'world opinion' and much of the tactics and rhetoric of Islamist terror while delegitimizing the rights and fundamental security needs of Israel, one of our key allies.

Wow. What can one say? It's almost impossible to believe that this is really happening - can it be true that they do not see that by encouraging Israel's enemies and with that essentially everything in the world we should be opposed to that that amounts to guaranteeing bad outcomes? That this will not ameliorate divisions and hatreds but embolden and encourage them? Do Kerry and Obama actually think that they can force Israel into what amounts to a virtual surrender and everything is just gonna be fine, peace will fall magically from the sky and Muslim polities will leap to embrace Israel's right to exist? This is insane - I mean if they were insisting on a truce while at the same time asserting without question the need for Gaza to be demilitarize there would be something to that - I'd probably still disagree with it because it'd be hard to trust Obama et al viz demilitarizing Gaza but at least there'd be a sense to it one could get hold of, but that's not what they're doing - and what's worse they're bringing Qatar and Turkey into the talks - I mean Qatar is a key Hamas financier and Erdogan has been saying the most incendiary and outrageous things against Israel the last few weeks, he should be allowed no where near these talks - Egypt should be the only interlocutor since they're the only Muslim country whose security needs align roughly with Israel's: they both want Hamas gone. It's almost unbelievable what's going on here -  calling Obama the worst president the country has ever had doesn't really capture the awfulness of this spectacle.