The Middle East solution by Dennis Pragar

Is there anyone in the West who isn't exhausted, fed up, and frustrated with the nearly seventy year old struggle going on between the Jews and Palestinians over a piece of land the size of the state of New Jersey?  Like most people without a dog in this hunt, I have sided with the Israelies over the years and what's more the more I read about the history of the Middle East and it many twists and turns, the more convinced I am that all 180 million of those angry Muslims that surround the 6 million Jews in Israel would do themselves a world of good, materially and spiritually, by putting down their arms and making peace with this tiny country.  Israel would welcome that and bend over backward to help the Palestinians build their own state and teach them how to make it work to the benefit of all the people over there.  In this 5-7minute video, Dennis Pragar provides a clear picture of what the issue is a path to the future success of this region.  Unfortunately this is not likely to happen as long as the Muslim faith remains unreformed to rid it of its decidedly intolerant and militant proclivities.  Go here for the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEzvhvOcWEs&feature=player_embedded

The willing suspension of disbelief

Quinn Hillyer of American Spectator magazine asks the question how anyone, anyone, could vote for Obama after reviewing his record over the past four years.  The answer to that question, of course, is the phenomenon of the willing suspension of disbelief.  It is the only explanation for this incredible record of abject failure:

How can any cogent American citizen possibly even consider voting for Barack Obama now? That's what lots of conservatives and moderates are asking each other, again and again. It's completely baffling, to those who grew up with any sort of sense of what America means and what the American character traditionally has been, that anybody can look at the man's record and want more of the same.

Almost the entirety of the Muslim world is now rioting against an American president who promised that his olive branches to Muslims would secure peace. Like Jimmy Carter, Obama has only shown a weakness that has emboldened the Islamist haters. Meanwhile, our closest ally in the region, Israel, a stable representative democracy led by an American-educated, America-loving prime minister, has repeatedly been insulted, abandoned, and undermined. In short, the United States is in worse position with all sides in the Middle East/northern Africa. We are embarrassed, feckless, wounded... and in four tragic cases, dead.

Allies in Poland and the Czech Republic have been repeatedly let down and sometimes insulted. The "re-set" with Russia earned us only Russian contempt. China and Russia ignore our entreaties around the world, with absolute disdain for our wishes, our olive branches, or Obama's supposedly Nobel-worthy and messianic genius for diplomacy.

Domestically, our debt has increased by 50 percent in just four years, by some $5 trillion, with not a single observable benefit from the spending. Our bond rating already has been downgraded by one agency, and another major agency threatens to downgrade us. Our unemployment rate has never been beneath 8 percent since Obama's first month in office, even though his economic team said his outrageously expensive "stimulus" package would ensure that it would never rise above 8 percent, and indeed that it would drop below 6 percent within four years.

Our politics is more fractured, less civil, than ever -- and as Bob Woodward, of all people, indicates in his new book, this is largely the fault of Obama. He has been the first president in history to push through a major new program without a single vote from the opposing party -- and while refusing to incorporate a single major idea from the other party, while ignoring overwhelming public sentiment to pass it, and while bending the rules in multiple ways to force it through Congress. Meanwhile, on the real business of Congress, his Senate allies have ignored longstanding law by refusing to pass a budget for three years now, while twice rejecting the president's own pitiful budget proposal by unanimous votes.

Obama campaigned with a promise to rein in abuses of executive power, but instead he increasingly rules by executive decrees of dubious constitutionality. Congress won't pass cap-and-trade, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't pass amnesty for illegal immigrants, so he orders it anyway. Congress won't undermine the work requirement in the welfare system, so he guts the work requirements by executive order. And on and on go the abuses.

His Justice Department is flagrantly corrupt and racialist. It told a black majority town in North Carolina that it could not holdnonpartisan elections because voters would fail to elect the black "candidates of choice" if the candidate weren't identified as Democrats. It intervened against the heroic Fire Department of New York to push racial hiring quotas on the department so outrageous that it would force admittance into the fire academy of candidates who missed as many as 70 percent (!!!) of the questions on a simple entrance exam; and, in blocking all applicants expected to be hired under the previous exam, it prohibited a number of black applicants who actually had met standards from being hired. So outrageous was this abuse that even the leftist Village Voice ran a long feature story taking up for the qualified black applicants whose chances for employment were dashed.

And, of course, DoJ ran an idiotic gun-running program on the Mexican border that led to the deaths of two American agents and countless Mexicans while drawing a rebuke from the Mexican ambassador, and then covered up and even lied about its actions. Also, infamously, it dropped already-won cases against New Black Panther thugs for flagrant voter-intimidation outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008 -- dropped the cases, indeed, just in time, meaning four days in advance, for one of those thugs again to serve as an official Democratic Party poll-watcher in municipal elections in 2009.

Gasoline prices are twice what they were when Obama took office -- and rising again. The housing market remains in the doldrums. Food stamp use is by far at the highest level in history, and poverty is markedly up. Food prices are markedly higher. Small businesses are jettisoning the health-insurance benefits they offered employees until Obamacare made it prohibitively expensive. Doctors are retiring in record numbers rather than face Obamacare's scourges -- and most of the law hasn't yet taken effect. Coming soon are new taxes on medical device manufacturers: Patients will pay more for wheelchairs, prosthetics, insulin pumps, asthma inhalers, pacemakers, and other essential fruits of modern medical technology.

Taxpayers are on the hook for huge losses from the auto bailouts, even as most of GM's new jobs have been created overseas rather than here, and even as auto dealerships across the nation were shut down by administration fiat on political bases rather than on the basis of which ones were profitable. Taxpayers are on the hook for politically inspired "investments" to Obama cronies in failing businesses such as Solyndra. Taxpayers are on the hook for higher electricity prices due to a backdoor cap-and-trade scheme imposed by (illegal) administrative fiat.

Religious liberties, meanwhile, are under repeated and sustained attacked from an administration openly hostile to traditional faith. And the president even refuses to defend in federal court laws duly passed by Congress and signed by former President Clinton.

The parade of abuses, incompetencies, extravagances, and illegalities goes on and on. The record of improvements in any sector of American life is… well, nil. Nothing is better, not a single thing, at home or abroad. And Obama has offered no recognizable plans, no new proposals, no substance at all, for making things better in a second term.

This presidency is a disaster. Reasonable people are gobsmacked at the possibility that it could somehow be allowed to continue its degradations of American society.

Taqiya and the post partisan presidency

When it eventually becomes time to assess this miserably failed presidency, this Roanoke speech by Obama will likely be cited as what he meant by post partisanship and, for that matter, changing the culture of Washington, two of his most blatantly false claims made by him and his supporters in the '08 presidential campaign.  Obama has easily been the single most divisive president since the Civil War unfairly caused that dubious distinction to fall to Abraham Lincoln.  It is almost inconceivable how divisive and even destructive the incumbent president has been to civil comity and discourse in this country since he took office nearly 4 years ago.  But when you think about it, this was all quite predictable and even  inevitable.  Obama is a product of Chicago machine politics,  always the poster child for most corrupt city government in the country.  In addition, many believe Obama is a closet Marxist-socialist politician who, like all fanatics of this ilk, believes the end justifies the means. Islamists also believe that lying, dissembling and otherwise deceiving non-believers in the promotion of "the true faith", is perfectly permissable.   Muslims call this practice Taqiya.*  Christians call it a sin.  Even if Obama is not a Muslim, as some claim, practicing Chicago-style politics and his Marxist-socialist beliefs account for his serial lying since he first entered politics.  Remember Saul Alinsky? The man simply has no qualms about telling untruths.  What's more he knows his followers, both voters and enablers in the media, have no qualms in this regard either.  Under these circumstances the only thing Christians and right thinking secularists can hope for is that enough of the electorate sees through this highly destructive and yes, evil behavior, and votes this man and his administration out of office.  Otherwise this country continues down the path to becoming a banana Republic, say along the lines of Venezuela.


*  TAQIYA -- Lying is allowed, as stated in Islamic doctrine, when a believer (Muslim) is speaking to a non-believer (non-Muslim) for the purpose of achieving his goal, the advancement of Islam. When this convenient tool is utilized by a Muslim in speaking to the non-Muslim, it is especially effective in promoting acceptance of Islam.

The pathology of the liberal media

Of all the stars that lined up right for the election of Obama, none was bigger or brighter than the craven MSM and its irresponsible reporting, or lack thereof.  This post by Scott Johnson of Powerline is but one of countless examples of the liberal media's, aka MSM, failure to perform its basic role as watchdog for the people.  Unarguably had MSM thoroughly vetted Obama's past associations, political and personal, instead of white washing them, it is unlikely he would have fooled as many people as he did.  As it was, the MSM papered over and refused to dig into all the troubling people and events in this weird candidate's past. Voila, we are stuck with a radical and incompetent head of state for at least four years.  In this particular case of malfeasance and abject dereliction of responsibility,  the Minneapolis Star Tribune virtually ignored the obviously illegal establishment of a Muslim religion based private school supported by tax payers.  Were it not for the work of Scott Johnson and the lone conservative investigative reporter, Katherine Kersten, on the staff of the Trib, this important story would never have seen the light of day, and the stealth Muslim invasion of our free society would have continued on its merry way.  If ever there was cause to award a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism, this one is a slam dunk.  Wanna bet  she doesn't even get nominated for one by the uber liberal Pulitzer Committee?