Statecraft as Malpractice; The president’s “red line” is meaningless, and the world will take note.

I heard a statement somewhere about a man whose mouth wrote checks his brain couldn't cash. Don't know why I thought about that. Just did.

Rich Lowry  "This possibility is noted by friend and foe alike. Surely the Iranians will be even more likely to discount the president’s Churchillian statements of resolve in stopping their nuclear program. Surely the Israelis, who just bombed Iranian missiles in Syria making their way into Lebanon, will be even more likely to believe in no red line except their own. Our other allies around the world, who depend on security guarantees that, at the end of the day, are based only on our word, will wonder, too."

The Benghazi Talking Points; And how they were changed to obscure the truth

Stephen F.Hayes  "But according to two officials with knowledge of the process, Mike Morrell, deputy director of the CIA, made broad changes to the draft afterwards. Morrell cut all or parts of four paragraphs of the six-paragraph talking points—148 of its 248 words (see Version 2 above). Gone were the reference to “Islamic extremists,” the reminders of agency warnings about al Qaeda in Libya, the reference to “jihadists” in Cairo, the mention of possible surveillance of the facility in Benghazi, and the report of five previous attacks on foreign interests.
"What remained—and would be included in the final version of the talking points—was mostly boilerplate about ongoing investigations and working with the Libyan government, together with bland language suggesting that the “violent demonstrations”—no longer “attacks”—were spontaneous responses to protests in Egypt and may have included generic “extremists” (see Version 3 above)."

 Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

The man behind the Benghazi cover-up?  "CIA career officials clearly and repeatedly identified Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-linked Islamic terrorists as the culprits behind the murder of four Americans.

"Of course, this would cause embarrassment for the Obama team, especially in the few weeks before the election. They had been boasting for years that Al Qaeda had been decimated, the "tide of war" was receding; they had been on a mission to whitewash the prospect of Islamic terrorism as a threat to America (see Lauri Regan's superb column."

 

Two by Caroline Glick: Time to confront Obama/ Dershowitz and tragedy

Caroline Glick  "Due to American pressure on Israel not to act, and due to the White House's rejection of clearcut reports about Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium, Iran has crossed the threshold. Iran will be a nuclear power unless its uranium enrichment installations and other nuclear sites are destroyed or crippled. Now.

 

"True, the Americans set a different red line for Iran than Israel. They say they will not allow Iran to assemble a nuclear bomb. But to believe that the US has the capacity and the will to prevent Iran from climbing the top rung on the nuclear ladder is to believe in the tooth fairy - (see, for instance, North Korea)."

Also by Ms. Glick: Dershowitz and tragedy  "Over the past generation, we have been inundated by disinformation from an unlimited number of seemingly credible organizations whose aim is to discredit any development related to Israel that does not advance the positions of the Left. And due to the ubiquity of this disinformation, among wider and wider circles today the belief has taken hold that there is something fundamentally illegitimate about non-leftist Israelis and non-leftist supporters of Israel."

Rush Limbaugh: Don’t blame me for WABC’s declining ad sales (UPDATED)

Read more: NYDailyNews.com  "The roots of this simmering dispute go back to February, 2012, when Limbaugh called law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” after she pressed D.C. lawmakers to mandate insurance coverage of birth control.

"Media Matters and other progressive groups called for advertisers to drop Limbaugh’s show — and several hundred, including Sears, Geico, John Deere, Netflix, Capitol One and the New York Lottery, did, the group said.
"Limbaugh has said the departees were replaced, and a source close to the show said revenue was “very minimally impacted in the short term.”
....
"Talk radio has suffered from a serious ad slump since the recession began in 2008. But WABC has opened a substantial lead in recent years over its primary news/talk rival in New York, WOR. In the latest Arbitron ratings, WABC averaged 2.8% of the audience to 1.2% for WOR.
....
"If Limbaugh leaves Cumulus, which now carries him on 40 stations in 36 markets, the source at his show confirms he would be looking for other stations in those markets."

UPDATE:Talk radio turmoil  "While liberal media enjoy the spectacle of intramural conflict in the talk radio biz, this appears to be nothing more than a hardball negotiation tactic, with both sides keeping their options open. Fans of Rush and of talk radio need not worry."

The feckless elimination of America's stabilizing influence in the world.

Someone said "so we can't be the world's cop, but what if there is a world criminal?"

By Elliott Abrams;  Of Presidents and Bluffing  "Today's New York Times carries a story about the President's "red line" on the Syrian use of chemical weapons: how that line appeared and how it disappeared.

"There are many aspects to this story, but most appear in these brief paragraphs:

Mr. Obama’s advisers also raised legal issues. “How can we attack another country unless it’s in self-defense and with no Security Council resolution?” another official said, referring to United Nations authorization. “If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

But they concluded that drawing a firm line might deter Mr. Assad. In addition to secret messages relayed through Russia, Iran and other governments, they decided that the president would publicly address the matter.

"First, the humanitarian issue: "If he drops sarin on his own people, what's that got to do with us?” said one adviser about the possibility of such an atrocity. How soon they forget. According to the Times that line was uttered last August, not quite four months after Mr. Obama established his "Atrocities Prevention Board." In a speech on April 23, 2012 he said this at the Holocaust Museum:

And finally, "never again" is a challenge to nations.  It’s a bitter truth -- too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of innocents on a massive scale.  And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save.  Read more...

 

By William Kristol;   Pathetic   "The Obama administration’s Syria policy is bad enough, and this State Department press release from this morning is just pathetic:"....

"If the government of the United States is unwilling to do anything but present to the world the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or justice unwilling to use the sword, surely it would be better to say nothing. If the Obama administration is, as Churchill put it in November 1936, "decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent," then it should have the decency to keep silent rather than engage in such pitiable and contemptible posturing."

Also by Mr. Kristol; Losing the Game   "We’re unfortunately approaching a state where “our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared.” That would be disastrous for us, and for the world. An American president has no more important job than to check, and then reverse, the momentum toward such an outcome." 
That will not be said about Israel. See this next post:

Report: Israel Strikes Syria; 'At Least Some...Take Red Lines Seriously'
"Israeli warplanes struck areas in and around the Syrian capital Sunday, setting off a series of explosions as they targeted a shipment of highly accurate, Iranian-made guided missiles believed to be on their way to Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, officials and activists said."..
" "If fired from southern Lebanon they can reach Tel Aviv and even (the southern city of) Beersheba." He said the rockets are much five times more accurate than the scud missiles that Hezbollah has fired in the past. "It is a game changer because they are a threat to Israel's infrastructure and military installations," he said."
US Peace activists are painting posters as we speak.

BENGHAZI: Names of ‘whistle-blower’ witnesses revealed

Fox News  via Drudge: "Appearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will be three career State Department officials: Gregory N. Hicks, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya at the time of the Benghazi terrorist attacks; Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for Operations in the agency’s Counterterrorism Bureau; and Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer who was the regional security officer in Libya, the top security officer in the country in the months leading up to the attacks."
....
" "For me the Taliban is on the inside of the [State Department] building," Nordstrom testified, angry over inadequate staffing at a time when the threat environment in Benghazi was deteriorating,"...

 

The Benghazi Talking Points And how they were changed to obscure the truth

Stephen F. Hayes  "Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom."

Before joining The Weekly Standard, Hayes was a senior writer for National Journal's Hotline. He also served for six years as Director of the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University. His work has appeared in the New York Post, the Washington Times, Salon, National Review, and Reason. He has been a commentator on CNN, The McLaughlin Group, the Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, and C-SPAN.

Benghazi Impeachment Suddenly Not So Far-Fetched

Cartoon and commentary at the link from Hope n' Change
 

Roger L. Simon at PJ Media: Benghazi Impeachment Suddenly Not So Far-Fetched   "On October 27^th, 2012, only days before the presidential election, I wrote:

If Barack Obama is reelected, will he face impeachment over Benghazi — a yet more unpleasant and far more wrenching result than to lose an election?

It could happen — and in my estimation should happen — the way revelations are playing out over the bloody terror attack that took four American lives and has led to weeks of prevarication and obfuscation.

The scandal thus far has at least tarnished and quite possibly implicated everyone from the CIA director, to the secretaries of State and Defense, to the UN ambassador and, of course, the president himself — with no end in sight, because Obama, normally loath to expose himself and even less so in an election season, refuses to answer questions on the subject.
It’s not the crime, but the cover-up, we learned in an earlier impeachment, only in this case the crime may be just as bad or worse.”

...."Barack Obama is bloody lucky he’s a Democrat, because if he were a Republican, he’d be in deep trouble right now, close to the brink of extinction.  Only his increasingly pathetic loyal media claque can save him.  It will be interesting to see if they do so at the expense of their own reputations.
...."This was before Susan Rice made her dog-and-pony performance on the Sunday shows, asserting it was all caused by a video nobody watched, and long before the oleaginous* Candy Crowley famously covered up for Obama on Benghazi at the presidential foreign-policy debate."

Followed by rioting and burning in major American cities with photos of rioters hauling off expensive luxury items.

*oleaginous:   Adjective;
1.having the nature or qualities of oil.
2. containing oil.
3. producing oil.
4. unctuous; fawning; smarmy .

Obama: The fall

Charles Krauthammer  "It began with the sequester. Obama never believed the Republicans would call his bluff and let it go into effect. They did.

"Taken by surprise, Obama cried wolf, predicting the end of everything we hold dear if the sequester was not stopped. It wasn’t. Nothing happened.
"Highly embarrassed, and determined to indeed make (bad) things happen, the White House refused Republican offers to give it more discretion in making cuts. Bureaucrats were instructed to inflict maximum pain from minimal cuts, as revealed by one memo from the Agriculture Department demanding agency cuts that the public would feel."
....

Krauthammer moves on to the subject of Obama, Benghazi and Boston:
"All this while appearing passive, if not helpless, on the world stage. On Syria, Obama is nervously trying to erase the WMD red line he had so publicly established. On Benghazi, he stonewalled accusations that State Department officials wishing to testify are being blocked.

"He is even taking heat for the Boston bombings. Every day brings another revelation of signals missed beforehand. And his post-bombing pledge to hunt down those responsible was mocked by the scandalous Mirandizing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, gratuitously shutting down information from the one person who knows more than anyone about possible still-existent explosives, associates, trainers, future plans, etc."

 

The Tsarnaevs’ Facilitators; Who inspired the alleged Boston marathon bombers to find meaning in the most violent forms of madness?

Tablet Magazine

An exterior view of the Islamic Society of Boston Mosque on April 26, 2013, in Cambridge, Mass. The mosque was attended by the alleged Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Mosque leaders there have publicly condemned the violence; they held inter-faith prayer service Friday to mourn the victims of the terrorist attacks. (Kayana Szymczak/Getty Images)

"But Tsarnaev’s alleged turn to violent crime is hardly extraordinary—the particular form of crime he chose is worthy of closer and more nuanced attention than the press seems capable of giving it. No one becomes a jihadist terrorist in a vacuum, any more than one finds oneself in a U.S. Army uniform shooting at Taliban fighters in a vacuum; recruits may have all kinds of personal reasons for signing up, but there’s a pre-existing structure that then welcomes and shapes them and directs their actions toward a larger strategic purpose." Hat tip to Edward W. Wagner

As the interviewing of Muslims connected with the Boston bombers should keep in mind the principle of Taqiyya.
Understanding Taqiyya ― Islamic Principle of Lying for the Sake of Allah
"The word "Taqiyya" literally means: "Concealing, precaution, guarding.” It is employed in disguising one's beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies. In practical terms it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking. It is currently employed in fending off and neutralising any criticism of Islam or Muslims."

"The future of American journalism depends on the ability to print truth, not opinion."

http://terrellaftermath.com/

Koch brothers versus so-called journalism  "Journalism is no longer an ethical profession. It is not a profession at all. It is nothing but a propaganda machine, cutting and pasting whatever they get their hands on to push an agenda, from the right and especially the left. Real, hardcore, skeptical, fact checking journalists are few and far between. There are no real reporters left in journalism today. There are only agenda driven political hacks and fame seeking wannabes. They besmirch the terms journalist and reporter."

The Times itself sees only evil in all this; Koch brothers want to make your newspaper their megaphone   "Having fallen short of their objective of crushing Democrats and liberalism, they now apparently believe a necessary component in their strategy is ownership of a few major newspapers. It is doubtful they want to merely have a voice on the editorial pages, as has always been a publisher’s prerogative. It is far more likely they hope to create print versions of Fox News."
Aided, of course by the sychophantic, Obamaphilic cartoonist David Horsey:

Liberals Freak Out Over Prospect of Koch Brothers Buying the LA Times
"Remember, the LA Times now, two years later, is warning people -- part-timers -- that they may lose their jobs or their compensation because of Obamacare. You know, that's journalistic malpractice. The people at the LA Times should have known that when Obamacare was being debated. The people that read the LA Times, all 25 or 30 of 'em, should have been told that when this thing was being debated. The LA Times let down the readership." Rush Limbaugh

No longer socially acceptable to be a Christian; good for the Body of Christ, but sad for American society

OUTRAGE! High School Track Team disqualified after making religious gesture to God for winning race
"The team was on the way to the State Championships with this win at the Regional. As a team they reached their goals. They deemed this taunting.

"They should be ASHAMED of themselves! That rule needs to be rescinded!
So this is where everything is now. It’s ok to praise a Gay Basketball Player that doesn’t have a team but disqualify a winning track relay team that gives honor to God? ...."

Jason Collins, Tim Tebow and the culture war ...."But hold on. I can't imagine that these politically-correct executives don't fear the wrath of gay activists and their numerous sympathizers. You see, for them, an avowed Christian like Tim Tebow is someone they enjoy kicking to the curb. Not so for the first openly gay NBA athlete. And heaven forbid that a team takes a pass on Collins because they don't think he can play at a professional level anymore, but then some media outlet reports that an executive with said team had voiced opposition to gay marriage or ate at Chick-fil-A!"

 

I believe Tebow was cut because of his qualifications as a quarterback and not because he is a Christian. To think otherwise is to be no better than all the race-baiters who are such a millstone around the necks of our society.

The issue of this post is America's new perspective of what is considered admirable and what is not. TD

 

Off with Broussard’s head! "Faithful America has launched other petitions related to homosexuality: It has targeted the Boy Scouts of America for its “discrimination” against gays and St. Anthony’s Roman Catholic Church in Oceanside, N.Y., for not allowing an openly gay man continue serving as a church volunteer."

Radicalizing the Military   "Presently, however, they are under threat from within, and one cannot help but notice that our military is being forced, against centuries of American tradition, morals and example, to become a reflection of the left. This appears to be part of the plan to fundamentally transform the United States, and it carries dire consequences for our long-term survival." 

...."Now, the left has targeted religious belief for special attention and examples of overt bigotry within the military have recently come to light. A recent briefing to an Army Reserve unit in Pennsylvania equated Christianity, including Evangelists and Catholics, with terrorist organizations such as Hamas and al Qaeda. The president has also stated that a conscience protection for military chaplains against ceremonies that violate their beliefs is "unnecessary and ill-advised". All must bow to the agenda, you see. It is their god."  Read more.