The Three-Headed Hydra of the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson

Trump has inherited a matrix of problems that primarily stem from Iran, Russia, and ISIS.

"The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration’s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle East.

"What makes the Middle East monster deadly is the interplay between the Iranian terrorist regime and its surrogates Hezbollah and the Assad regime; Russian president Vladimir Putin’s deployment of bombers into Syria and Iraq after a 40-year Russian hiatus in the region; and the medieval beheaders of the Islamic State.

"Add into the brew anti-Americanism, genocide, millions of refugees, global terrorism, and nuclear weapons.

"ISIS is simultaneously at war against the Assad regime, Iran and Iranian surrogates such Hezbollah, and Russian expeditionary forces. ISIS also seeks to energize terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.

"Stranger still, ISIS almost surely is receiving stealth support from Sunni nations in the Middle East, some of them ostensibly American allies.

"This matrix gets even crazier.

"The authors of reset policy during the Obama administration are now furious at President Trump for even talking about what they tried for years: reaching out to Putin. Yet in the Middle East, Russia is doing us a favor by attacking ISIS, even as it does no favors in saving the genocidal Assad regime that has murdered tens of thousands of innocents — along with lots of ISIS terrorists as well." . . . 

The Silence of the Lambs Congress

Ann Coulter  "Let's compare what President Trump has accomplished since the inauguration (with that enormous crowd!) with what congressional Republicans have done. 
   
"In the past three weeks, Trump has: staffed the White House, sent a dozen Cabinet nominees to the Senate, browbeat Boeing into cutting its price on a government contract, harangued American CEOs into keeping their plants in the United States, imposed a terrorist travel ban, met with foreign leaders and nominated a Supreme Court justice, among many other things.

"(And still our hero finds time to torment the media with his tweets!)

What have congressional Republicans been doing? Scrapbooking?

"More than 90 percent of congressional Republicans kept their jobs after the 2016 election, so you can cross "staffing an entire branch of government" off the list. Only the Senate confirms nominees, which they've been doing at a snail's pace, so they've got loads of free time -- and the House has no excuse at all.

"Where's the Obamacare repeal? Where are the hearings featuring middle-class Americans with no health insurance because it was made illegal by Obamacare?

"The House passed six Obamacare repeals when Obama was president and there was no chance of them being signed into law. Back then, Republicans were full of vim and vigor! But the moment Trump became president, the repeals came to a screeching halt." . . .

Can't Hillary be capable of looking deep inside to see herself as so many Americans saw her?

Lena Dunham says not to blame her for Hillary's loss   Language advisory. . . . "It's amazing. I'm like, "Why don't we check in with Russia, you guys?" I think it tends to come more from the right wing, although I'm not sure. Now it's so hard to know what's coming from where, because stories get published on Breitbart and two days later they're in Newsweek and you're like, "What the f--k is happening right now?" No one is more studied in the art of the right wing planting a story and liberals eating each other alive over it than I am. I see it every single day, but I'm not gonna stand there screaming about it, 'cause that makes you a bad sport. And also it's boring and I'm not interested in it. But do people want me to go, "I don't think I'm really good for this. I'm gonna bow out"? I wouldn't see any use for celebrity if I wasn't fighting rabidly for what I thought was right." . . ."I'm like. . . "?

This pre-inauguration article calls HRC like she is  . . . "Well, Donald Trump had one thing in his favor: he ran against one of the most unpopular and despised presidential candidates in American history, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Combine the electorate’s Clinton antipathy with a risky but targeted strategy to flip the Rust Belt and it’s not so hard to understand why Donald Trump, a man with no experience in government, will be sitting in the oval office come late January." . . .

 'Well, allow me to retort. Hillary Clinton lost the election because she was a terrible candidate. Nobody likes or trusts her (yes, elections actually are popularity contests) and her neoliberal domestic policies and neoconservative foreign policies turned people off because they are genuinely bad. Clinton represented the establishment in a change election, something she was happy to do. She even openly courted Republicans hoping her “temperament” talking point would make partisan Republicans vote for one of the most hated Democrats in history. It didn’t work.

Liberal activists want no part of a Chelsea Clinton candidacy

Legal Insurrection

"While the media obsesses over the Trump White House day after day, they are largely neglecting to report that a battle is still raging for the soul of the Democratic Party.

"Chelsea Clinton is gearing up for her turn at bat, but the progressive wing of the party isn’t interested.

"The Washington Times reports:

‘Never Chelsea’ movement grows among liberal activists 

They weren’t ready for Hillary, and now they’re definitely not ready for her daughter, Chelsea Clinton.   . . .  

. . . If the candidates running for chair of the DNC are any indication, the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing is about to assume control of the party. The establishment wing however, isn’t going away quietly.

Report: Former Obama officials leaked to take down Flynn because he wanted to expose the Iran deal

Hot Air  "I get the first part of this story, not so much the second. The bit about Obama alumni targeting Flynn? Highly plausible if not likely. Flynn was a harsh Obama critic ever since O fired him from his position as DIA, and Flynn more than anyone else in the administration seemed prepared to guide Trump towards detente with the same Putin regime that had tried to sink Democrats’ chances during the campaign with the DNC and Podesta hackings. Flynn is also famously an Iran hawk, something which the Obama administration was, er, not. Did Team O have the means and motives to take down a man they despised? You betcha."
. . .
"I’m not even sure it qualifies as a “secret” that Obama appointees were trying to take down Flynn. Last night’s WaPo bombshell about the DOJ warning Trump in January about what Flynn said to the Russian ambassador is littered with Obama administration names in the key details. It was Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General who ended up being fired when she wouldn’t enforce Trump’s travel ban, who took the information about the call to the White House. It was James Clapper and John Brennan who reportedly decided that Flynn’s sanctions talk with the ambassador — which was by all accounts ambiguous — was so grave that Trump needed to know, for fear of potential Russian blackmail. It also stands to reason that Obama guys down the chain would be the bureaucrats most invested in protecting the foreign policy status quo of the last eight years from the one guy in the new intelligence hierarchy who most threatened that status quo."

Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers
This spiteful, vindictive man was happy to wall off aged veterans from visiting open-air war memorials and block viewpoints on open highways with the order to make the government shutdown "hurt". Naturally he will try to make his successor in the While House fail.
"The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches." . . .

America's spies anonymously took down Michael Flynn. That is deeply worrying.

. . . Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously." . . .

Trump Needs To Either Shutdown the Pro-Obama Leakers Or He Needs To Resign

RedState  "Color me a more than a little dubious about the motivation for bringing Flynn down. There are enough people hostile to the Iran deal in the NSC that if they wanted to leak the scope of the US surrender to the Mullahs they would have done so by now. Having said that, I have no doubt that Kredo is right in linking Ben Rhodes’s merry platoon of Obama fellatistos to the operation. The leaks on Trump’s calls to foreign leaders can only have come from within the so-called (haha) professional staff of the National Security Council. The “former” intelligence officials quoted by the Washington post were almost certainly Obama hired staffers who lost their jobs on January 20.". . .

Israel's Ambassador Danon interrupted by protesters at Columbia University

Israel's Ambassador Danon interrupted by protesters at Columbia University . . . "Israel's ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, spoke to a crowd of 300 at Columbia University Monday night, hosted by the Columbia University chapter of Students Supporting Israel.  A large anti-Israel crowd outside Lerner Hall protested the event.


"The groups Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Barnard Columbia Socialists, and Columbia Against Trump coordinated the protest on the Facebook page "Racists Not Welcome: Protest the Israeli Ambassador at Columbia."  Reasons given to protest Danon included his desire to "annex the West Bank" and his "abandoning even the pretence [sic] of the 'two-state solution.'"  They also accused Danon of being "a cheerleader for Trump and the Republican fight" and alleged that "from racist walls to repressive border policing, Trump copies Israel."  And that "Danon is the official representative of a state born, like America, through savage ethnic cleansing" and that "his is a state that has besieged and bombed the Palestinian people since its inception.' " 

Wait just a minute!  Just who is the apartheid group here?
"Experts: Over 200 US-approved textbooks teach Palestinians to kill Jews

"The violent curriculum can be found in 240 books – ranging from civics to mathematics – in over 400 UNRWA schools in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, experts say."

. . .

"Indeed, among the myriad of examples presented from the books, one is a math word problem asking students to use variables, including the number of Jews killed during the first and second intifadas.

"Another was the following excerpt from a poem:
Hearing [weapons] clash is pleasant to my ear
And the flow of blood gladdens my soul
As well as a body thrown upon the ground
Skirmished over by the desert predator
By your life! This is the death of men
And whoever asks for a noble death – this is it!”

“ .We have copies of the books and went through them, and what’s happening is very clear."

When the Jews of Israel are at last murdered or driven into the sea, will these leftist students then demonstrate for them? TD

Two Arab Terrorists Confess to Fogel Massacre - without Regret  . . . "The teenage terrorists, who are members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), were assisted by at least six others, four of them from Awad’s family.


"The massacre of the Fogels took place at night on Friday night (Sabbath), March 11. The terrorists climbed over the fence surrounding Itamar, a Samaria community, and entered the Fogel family's home. They stabbed to death Rabbi Ehud (Udi) Fogel, his wife Ruth, 11-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas.

"The terrorists not only expressed no regret for the brutal stabbings of their parents, the baby, and two other young children, but they also said they would have killed two other children, Roi, 8, and Shai, 2  if they had known they were in another room. The sixth child, Tamar, was out of the house at the time of the murders and discovered the shocking scene when she returned home." . . .

Palestinian TV Airs Show Praising Fogel Family Murderer

Washington Is Out to Get Steve Bannon  . . . "Reporters and pundits are also stepping up the effort to portray Bannon as the puppet master in the White House. Last week, MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said, “Legitimate media are getting word that Steve Bannon is the last guy in the room, in the evening especially, and he’s pulling the strings.” Her co-host, Joe Scarborough, agreed that Bannon’s role should be “investigated.”
     "I’m all for figuring out who the powers behind the curtain are in the White House, but we saw precious little interest in that during the Obama administration." . . .

Flynn's Son Condemns 'Disinformation' Campaign Against His Father   . . . "Following Flynn's exit, Democrats are demanding an investigation into his relationship with the Russians."

David Gregory tries to do to Trump what he did often to George W.

Surprise: Obama joins the attack on Trump's presidency . . . "He is actively engaged to oppose the policies of President Trump.  The civility during the inauguration was all for show. 

"There is a political civil war in progress.  The Opposition Party of the Democrats/MSM does not accept Trump as the legitimate president.  It opposes  his Cabinet appointees on party lines and criticizes every move he makes.  Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer has announced that the Democrats will oppose Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch by demanding sixty (60) votes to confirm.

"The Hollywood/Entertainment wing of the Opposition Party viciously attacks Trump as Nazi, as Hitler, at every opportunity. " . . .

Bill Clinton Tries To Wear A Yarmulke At Shimon Peres’ Funeral

Daily Caller   "When you’re an ex-president, paying your respects to a fellow world leader is the right thing to do.

"But something seems to have gone terribly wrong with the positioning of Bill Clinton‘s yarmulke at former Israeli President Shimon Peres‘ funeral.

"Pretty sure this is not how it’s worn.

"If Clinton glances to his left, he can get a sense of the proper perch."

http://www.lucianne.com/

Maxine Waters Falls For Pranksters Posing As Ukrainian PM Seeking Her Support Against Putin And His “Hacking” Of Fictitious Country…

Weasel Zippers

. . . "Two Russian pranksters have called US Congresswoman Maxine Waters posing as the Ukrainian PM seeking reassurances in the wake of Moscow’s most recent “invasions” across the globe and impudent “hacking” of presidential elections in a fictitious country. […]

"The pranksters then proceeded to exploit the seriously lacking geography knowledge of Congresswoman Waters, who had recently claimed that Russia was “advancing in Korea.”

"Speaking about the most recent “development” in Ukraine, the duo claimed that “Putin’s regular army” had “simultaneously occupied” both Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine and Lvov, which is in the West. In addition, the pranksters said that Russia had “invaded Gabon” to support President Ondimba.

"As a final blow, the pranksters claimed that Moscow had “hacked the election system” in a fictitious country of Limpopo, completely reversing the outcome and installing their puppet Ai Bolit as a president. Since the situation there has become even “worse than in the US,” the ousted president of Limpopo was considering fleeing to Ukraine, they said" . . .

Activists Warned Officials About Oroville Dam 12 Years Ago (But Nobody Listened)

The problem with Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway

Zero Hedge

Officials were warned twelve years in advance about potential safety hazards at the Oroville Dam in Butte County, California, which now faces the risk of flooding nearby residential areas as a result of a broken spillway and increased rainfall.

Local outlet Mercury News reports:

“Three environmental groups — the Friends of the River, the Sierra Club and the South Yuba Citizens League — filed a motion with the federal government on Oct. 17, 2005, as part of Oroville Dam’s relicensing process, urging federal officials to require that the dam’s emergency spillway be armored with concrete, rather than remain as an earthen hillside.”

"That never happened. The aging Oroville dam, which exceeded capacity on Sunday, began to overflow and spill over the earthen emergency spillway after the main spillway was severely damaged. These developments prompted flood warnings and a declaration of a state of emergency from Governor Jerry Brown. The spillway is on the verge of collapse, a potential disaster that prompted mass evacuations. Over 188,000 residents have been displaced." . . .

Map of the flood zone.

The stunning destruction at Oroville Dam and the work ahead

A craterlike hole that has surfaced in the middle portion on Oroville Dam’s main spillway, a 3,000-foot structure lined in concrete. (Kelly M. Grow/ California Department of Water Resources via Getty Images)

"When authorities were forced to use Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway, as recent storms caused the adjacent reservoir to swell, they expected to let water flow for at least 32 hours, 58 at the most.

"But after just less than a day, the emergency spillway in California’s gold country was at risk of failing. A craterlike hole had surfaced Sunday. Officials feared the worst: That further erosion would cause the spillway to collapse, clearing the way for a 30-foot-wall of water from the overfull reservoir to engulf surrounding areas." . . .

Busted: 75 Percent Of Illegal Aliens Rounded Up Over The Weekend Had Criminal Records

Matt Vespa

"Over the weekend, immigration enforcement agents rounded up hundreds of illegal aliens from across the country. It was not a Trump initiative—the wheels for these raids were set in motion before he was sworn in—but it was certainly in the spirit of one. Immigration activists noted that the nature of these raids was harsher—whatever that means. The Department of Homeland Security said that 75 percent of those who were rounded up had criminal records (via The Hill):

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said that 75 percent of the people detained last week in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids were “criminal aliens.”

. . . "After eight years of dithering or outright negligence, you can see how this—and many other issues—could give rise to a political outsider, like Trump, to win an election. When a Democrat, like New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, says that illegals wouldn’t be deported if they were caught drunk driving, you see why voters trust Republicans on law and order and national security issues. " . . .