Our Vacuous* Foreign Policy; Our enemies have a strategic vision for a global conflict, but we don’t.

 

No bro hug?

Andrew C. McCarthy   ... "Syria, we are told, disintegrated because President Obama’s abdication created a leadership void — “the vacuum” — that al-Qaeda rushed in to fill. The “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” the story goes, were poised to fulfill America’s top priority, undermining Iran, by overthrowing the Shiite regime the mullahs control in Damascus. But the president failed to back “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” who threw in their lot with al-Qaeda — strictly, we are to believe, owing to Obama’s default, not to the ideological harmony of the “rebels” with the jihadists.

"Cross Syria’s eastern border, though, and the vacuum abruptly warps. Now, far from undermining Iran, America’s top priority somehow becomes propping up an Iran-backed Shiite state. Obama’s abdication is thus said to be the failure to “consolidate the gains of the Iraq War” by keeping about 20,000 U.S. troops in place to fend off Sunni “rebels,” who — I know you’ll find this hard to believe — have yet again thrown in their lot with al-Qaeda.

"In fact, it turns out that if the same “rebel” gravitates from Syria to Iraq, he’s no longer even a “rebel” anymore; he’s a “terrorist.' ”...

*Vacuous   1. without contents; empty: the vacuous air.

2. lacking in ideas or intelligence: a vacuous mind. 

3. expressing or characterized by a lack of ideas or intelligence; inane; stupid: a vacuous book. 

4. purposeless; idle: a vacuous way of life.

 

Any time you see definitions included in a post, you will know I had to look up the meaning myself.

The #Iraq War Comments @TheDemocrats Would Like You To Forget

American Glob  "Here’s an important yet inconvenient history lesson.
"Do you think Bush just charged into Iraq with no bipartisan support? If you do, you’re wrong. In fact, that description is more fitting for the way Obama and Democrats handled ObamaCare, but I digress.
"Let’s take a walk down memory lane with Democrats on Iraq, courtesy of Instapundit…"  

Scenes From D-Day, Then and Now

The Atlantic Monthly via Robert Hope, former Marine at my duty post in Hawthorne, NV back in 1958. Thanks, Bob, and Semper Fi.

The body of a dead German soldier lies in the main square of Place Du Marche after the town was taken by U.S. troops who landed at nearby Omaha Beach in Trevieres, France, June 15, 1944. Click to view the same location on August 23, 2013.

 

(Posted on June 5th, 2014) "Tomorrow, June 6, 2014, will be the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Allied invasion of Europe in World War II. Seven decades ago, the largest amphibious invasion in history took place, changing the course of the war. Nearly 200,000 Allied troops boarded 7,000 ships and more than 3,000 aircraft and headed toward Normandy. Some 156,000 troops landed on the French beaches, 24,000 by air and the rest by sea, where they met stiff resistance from well-defended German positions across 50 miles of French coastline. Two photographers recently traveled to France, seeking to rephotograph images captured back then. Getty photographer Peter Macdiarmid and Reuters photographer Chris Helgren gathered archive pictures from the 1944 invasion, tracked down the locations, and photographed them as they appear today. Starting with photo number two, all the images are interactive -- click on them to see a transition from 'then' to 'now', and see the difference 70 years can make. [21 photo pairs] "

 A crashed U.S. fighter plane on the waterfront some time after Canadian forces came ashore on a Juno Beach D-Day landing zone in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, France, in June 1944. Click to view the same location on August 23, 2013 

Plus this: 

"Here's a Normandy Beach landing photo they don't show you in textbooks. Brave women of the Red Cross arriving in 1944 to help the injured troops." 

Do Something

Teachers At Texas School Have Come Up With A Brilliant Way To Protect Their Students From Shootings

This comes via the Independent Journal Review :

Longview News-Journal, Longview, TX   "The Union Grove ISD board in January enacted a policy to allow select, licensed and trained teachers and administrators to possess a firearm on campus. Community members wholeheartedly supported the move.

"Union Grove ISD, a 2A school district with 761 students in rural Upshur County, was the second district in Texas to enact such a policy. The first was Harrold ISD in 2007.

“ 'The worst thing we can do is nothing,” Union Grove school board Vice President Rusty Dyar told the News-Journal in January." ...

Hat tip to John A Diefenbach at Conservatives Network

Abdication has a price

Charles Krauthammer  "Yes, it is true that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq when George W. Bush took office. But it is equally true that there was essentially no al-Qaeda in Iraq remaining when Barack Obama took office.

 

"Which makes Bush responsible for the terrible costs incurred to defeat the 2003-09 jihadist war engendered by his invasion. We can debate forever whether those costs were worth it, but what is not debatable is Obama’s responsibility for the return of the Islamist insurgency that had been routed by the time he became president.

 

"By 2009, al-Qaeda in Iraq had not just been decimated but humiliated by the U.S. surge and the Anbar Awakening. Here were aggrieved Sunnis, having ferociously fought the Americans who had overthrown 80 years of Sunni hegemony, now reversing allegiance and joining the infidel invader in crushing, indeed extirpating from Iraq, their fellow Sunnis of al-Qaeda." ...
...
"Which is what made [Obama's] failure to do so in Iraq so disastrous. His excuse was his inability to get immunity for U.S. soldiers. Nonsense. Bush had worked out a compromise in his 2008 SOFA, as we have done with allies everywhere. The real problem was Obama’s determination to “end the war.” He had three years to negotiate a deal and didn’t even begin talks until a few months before the deadline period."    Emphasis added, TD

My opinion is that Obama wanted to please an idiot electorate. A nation gets the leaders it deserves and he was what his shallow, unaware voters inflicted upon this world. TD

Reprise:

http://netrightdaily.com/2014/06/cartoon-drain/

New Map Shows ‘Most Liberal and Most Conservative Towns’ in Each State — or Use This Online Tool to Find Ones That Most Closely Reflect Your Values

The Blaze   "New data from Clarity Campaign Labs purports to identify the “most liberal and most conservative towns” and cities in each U.S. state. Business Insider then used the data from the political data analytics company to create this nifty graphic:"

 

...

... "The tool, released on Tuesday, uses “seven identifiers” to determine each user’s political ideology:

• I identify with the Democrats more so than the Republicans.
• Abortion should be legal and accessible to all women.
• I attend religious services regularly.
• Climate change is an immediate concern that must be addressed.
• There should be more restrictions on purchasing and carrying guns.
• The government should reduce the deficit primarily by raising taxes rather than cutting services.
• I prefer urban areas.

Full Article.
Hat tip to Jeff Hayden; Plano, TX 

"OBAMA INC’s AGENTS FOR SHARIAH:CRIMINALIZING CRITICISM OF ISLAM VIA THE ISTANBUL PROCESS!ITS TENTACLED LINKAGE FROM BENGHAZIGATE’s VIDEO SUBTERFUGE,TO OBAMACARE & MORE"

Adina Kutnicki

Secretary Clinton addresses the “Istanbul Process” for Combating Intolerance and Discrimination

Based on Religion or Belief, Washington, DC

"UNDER the guise of “tolerance”, the truly intolerant and dangerous, Islamists and leftists, are joining hands. They are actual force multipliers, but against liberty! It is under their Orwellian, taqiyya-laden umbrella (via CAIR, the Brotherhood’s American propaganda arm) that the made up out-of-whole-cloth term, Islamophobia, comes into sharp relief."
...
... "yes, Muslims are the truly injured/aggrieved party" ...

Hat tip to Conservative Bloggers on Facebook

"Climate Change" at the VA: The sick and halt wait but the solar panels don’t

Washington Times   "The administrators at the Veterans Administration have apparently been busy while old soldiers waited to see a doctor, after all. Serving those who served is not necessarily a priority, but saving the planet is Job 1. Solar panels and windmills can be more important than the touch of a healing hand.

"The department early on set up an Office of Green Management Programs designed to “help VA facilities nationwide recognize opportunities to green VA, and to reward innovative ‘green’ practices and efforts by individual facilities and staff within the VA.” This sometimes means paying more attention to greening the department and saving the polar ice caps than to health care."... 
...

"At the Phoenix VA Health Care System, where 20 Americans died from incompetence and cover-up, the department spent $20 million putting solar panels on the hospital roofs."  Read more:

IRS Destroyed Hard Drive Lois Lerner Used at Time of Tea Party Targeting

Heritage  "Lois Lerner’s missing emails are likely gone forever because the Internal Revenue Service destroyed the hard drive she used at the time tea party groups were targeted, according to sources on Capitol Hill."

Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Committee On Oversight and Government Reform said:

If the IRS truly got rid of evidence in a way that violated the Federal Records Act and ensured the FBI never got a crack at recovering files from an official claiming a Fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination, this is proof their whole line about ‘losing’ emails in the targeting scandal was just one more attempted deception. Old and useless binders of information are still stored and maintained on federal agency shelves; official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don’t just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention.

denverpost.com 

President Obama's counsellors

http://terrellaftermath.com/

Why People Zone Out on Hillary

We watched the Greta Van Susteren/ Brett Baier interview of Hillary and were fascinated by their interesting and incisive questions. Hillary's answers, however, were, um, well..."nothingburgers", to coin a word.  TD

PJ Media   

 ... "Most people know she’s basically dishonest, a prevaricator.  Even liberals, though they won’t readily admit it, know this.  Who can forget her blaming her husband’s compulsive philandering on the “great, right-wing conspiracy”?  If they only had such power. Or the dim-witted claims of being under fire when she hadn’t been (at least Geraldo makes a show of ducking)  and, more recently, the banshee-cry of “What difference does it make?” concerning the deaths of our people in Benghazi?

 

" The Benghazi lies are actually exponential. (I’m not even going to go back to Whitewater, the miracle quick killing on the stock market, the mysterious Rose Law Firm bill and all the rest.)" ...

...

"So Hillary is a nowhere woman, trying to replace a nowhere man, which is saying something given Obama’s recent poll numbers. And no one wants to pay attention to a nowhere woman who has been a serial liar. It’s stupefying."

 

Cartoon and quote below from hopenchangecartoons

 ...By all accounts, the book is a ponderous doorstop of meaninglessness - which is hardly surprising since even news junkies such as ourselves are hard pressed to come up with a single hard (let alone successful) choice that Hillary made as Secretary of State...

Hillary pilloried

Hillary stumbles in interviews   ... "You are one of a hundred senators tasked with deciding whether the United States goes to war or not. You vote to go to war. And when the war does not go well, you no longer want to be associated with it? Isn’t that the definition of irresponsibility? Isn’t it the adult thing to take responsibility for your actions, especially actions that were debated seriously and heavily documented before, during, and after the decision was made?"...

Mediaite: Fox’s Bret Baier Relentlessly Hammers Hillary Clinton on Benghazi  

Video of the interview

Hillary’s Mush; She speaks at length without saying much  
"One of the first, and perhaps most stinging, critiques of Hillary Clinton’s book tour came from Game Change co-authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, with Halperin lamenting, “I don’t understand writing a book of that length without a message,” and Heilemann calling the book “mush.”

"We shouldn’t expect much more than mush from Hillary Clinton between now and November 2016. If she’s truly pressed for a theme, expect nothing meatier than “It’s time for a woman.” 

Hillary Clinton was 'dead broke' leaving White House despite more than $780,000 in assets 

"Hillary Clinton says she and her husband Bill went from the White House to the poor house.

"In an ABC News interview broadcast Monday, Hillary Clinton defended the speaking fees she and Bill reel in, saying, “We came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt.”

“ 'We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy,” she added." Read more:

 

 Hillary Clinton backpedals on ‘dead broke’ comments  “ 'We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” Clinton said on Monday night. “We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”

"Top Republicans and commentators immediately slammed the remarks as out of touch."