Russian lies, American fecklessness

Reaction to Russian air strikes in Syria:




And for an even more pessimistic outlook, here's Ralph Peters:

Obama's delusional rhetoric on Iran nuke deal

Charles Krauthammer nails it, saying Obama has set a new low with his demonization of Republicans who oppose his deal with Iran on nukes:

Resurgent Jew-hatred

Charles Krauthammer:

Anti-Semitism has returned to Europe. With a vengeance.

... It has become routine. If the kosher-grocery massacre in Paris hadn’t happened in conjunction with Charlie Hebdo, how much worldwide notice would it have received? As little as did the murder of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse. As little as did the terror attack that killed four at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

...  In Berlin, Gaza brought out a mob chanting, “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out and fight alone!” Berlin, mind you.

... European anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, however. It’s a European problem, a stain, a disease of which Europe is congenitally unable to rid itself.

In the comments it's clear that it's not just a European problem.  Canadian Jew-haters came out in force, as usual.  (In America its no doubt the same, plus, the hug-a-Muslim, kick-a-Jew mentality extends to the very top.)

By contrast, the comments behind the e-paper pay-wall harbour no such sentiments. Here are two:

Stephen Boyling:

I say this without reservation - Israel's dilemma is the West's dilemma.  No ifs ands or buts.  There's only one "cure" for anti-Semitism and that would be death.  By any means necessary.  I'm not talking about those confused and crazy nobodies, the "rebels without a cause" that pick the non-thinking obvious - Israel specifically, and Jews generally.  I include union leaders and university professors in that group.  And skinheads.

The enemy is Islam.  The example to be set is Islam.  It's state enablers and financial backers.  Gone.  By any means necessary.  And then maybe I can get on a plane without taking my shoes off.  Or my belt.  Or leaving my trusty pocket knife in a desk drawer.  By any means necessary.  Until that job is done.  Unfortunately, not any time soon.

Alastair Gordon:

It is appropriate to see the term "Jew-hatred" replacing the anodyne "anti-Semitism". How many "progressives" have told me that they cannot be anti-Semitic because, after all, Arabs are Semites too?

Time to call out the Muslim world and their useful idiots - the United Church, Sid Ryan, CUPE, Noam Chomsky, student unions, academics, liberal media, and many on the left for what they really are - Jew-Haters.

Obama's appeasement of Cuba

Krauthammer: "Is there no tyrant or anti-American centre in the world Obama will not appease for nothing in return?"


Marco Rubio: "[Rand Paul] has no idea what he's talking about". What's hurting the Cuban people isn't the embargo, it's the corrupt, incompetent, repressive, radically socialist policies of the Castro dictatorship:

CIA "torture" report - unctuous condescension and hypocritical nonsense

Charles Krauthammer:

The report by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding CIA interrogation essentially accuses the agency under George W. Bush of war criminality.

...It’s a common theme (often echoed by President Obama): Amid panic and disorientation, we lost our moral compass and made awful judgments. ...

... It’s a kind of temporary-insanity defense for the Bush administration. And it is not just unctuous condescension but hypocritical nonsense.

... To make that case, to produce a prosecutorial brief so entirely and relentlessly one-sided, the committee report (written solely by Democrats) excluded any testimony from the people involved and variously accused. None. No interviews, no hearings, no statements. ...

Then there's the media:

Obama's musings on Ukraine - "what you expect from a Miss America contestant"

Charles Krauthammer:

“The United States does not view Europe as a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the Cold War.” - Barack Obama, March 24

'Should'. Lovely sentiment. As lovely as what Obama said five years ago to the United Nations: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.”

That’s the kind of sentiment you expect from a Miss America contestant asked to name her fondest wish, not from the leader of the free world explaining his foreign policy.

The East Europeans know they inhabit the battleground between the West and a Russia that wants to return them to its sphere of influence. Ukrainians see tens of thousands of Russian troops across their border and know they are looking down the barrel of quite a zero-sum game. ...

... Obama’s dismissal of Russia as a regional power makes his own leadership of the one superpower all the more embarrassing. For seven decades since the Japanese surrender, our role under 11 presidents had been as offshore balancer protecting smaller allies from potential regional hegemons.

... Even Ukrainians are expressing regret at having given up their nukes in return for paper guarantees of territorial integrity. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum was ahead of its time — the perfect example of the kind of advanced 21st-century thinking so cherished by our president. ...

Ezra Levant reminded us recently of how, during a debate, Obama ridiculed Mitt Romney for stating that Russia was a great geopolitical threat, saying mockingly: "... the 1980's are now calling asking for their [cold war] policy back".  Ezra's excellent, updated reply on Mitt's behalf: "Hey Obama, Neville Chamberlain and Jimmy Carter called - they want their 1930's appeasement policy back".

Charles Krauthammer tries to educate Jon Stewart

Fat chance:

Obama's banana-republic

Obama: "Reject Voices That Warn About Government Tyranny"


Sure, so he can more easily get away with using the IRS to punish his political enemies:

Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

... [Frank] VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney.  In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

... Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.

... according to Mr. Obama, he is "outraged" and "angry" that the IRS looked into the very groups and individuals that he spent years claiming were shady, undemocratic, even lawbreaking. After all, he expects the IRS to "operate with absolute integrity." Even when he does not. ...

Mark Steyn:

... Most of those who’ve caught the eye of the IRS share nothing in common with [Mr. VanderSloot] other than his political preferences. They’re nobodies — ordinary American citizens guilty of no crime except that of disagreeing with the ruling party. ... Is that banana-republic enough for you yet?

Krauthammer to Hannity: It could be a ‘fatal problem’ for Obama

"Don't compare apples to terrorists"

Kathy Shaidle commenting on Charles Krauthammer's comparison of present day German Nazism with Islam.

Gulf disaster - “Whose Blowout Is It, Anyway?”

Charles Krauthammer:

Here’s my question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?

Many reasons, but this one goes unmentioned: Environmental chic has driven us out there. As production from the shallower Gulf of Mexico wells declines, we go deep (1,000 feet and more) and ultra deep (5,000 feet and more), in part because environmentalists have succeeded in rendering the Pacific and nearly all the Atlantic coast off-limits to oil production. (President Obama's tentative, selective opening of some Atlantic and offshore Alaska sites is now dead.) And of course, in the safest of all places, on land, weve had a 30-year ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

So we go deep, ultra deep -- to such a technological frontier that no precedent exists for the April 20 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

Not that the environmentalists are the only ones to blame. Not by far. But it is odd that they’ve escaped any mention at all.

Meanwhile Obama points a finger:

... Obama didn't help much with his finger-pointing Rose Garden speech in which he denounced finger-pointing, then proceeded to blame everyone but himself. Even the grace note of admitting some federal responsibility turned sour when he reflexively added that these problems have been going on for a decade or more -- translation: Bush did it ...

Obama’s capitulation on missile defence

Charles Krauthammer:

... What just happened ... is that the United States unilaterally abrogated the security agreement with two close East European allies [Poland and the Czech Republic] — so close that they had troops in Iraq and Afghanistan that supported us — at the behest and because of the pressure of the Russians.

... Now, number one is the timing. Apart from the merits of all this, the idea that we should renounce, on the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland, a security agreement that we had with Poland [because] of Russian objections is scandalously, indescribably amateurish.

Now, on the merits. If there is a secret agreement between us and the Russians ... in return for our capitulation on this issue… The problem is there is not a shred of evidence of a deal. And if not, what this is is a capitulation to Russia....

And imagine if the Poles and Czechs are upset about this, how the feeling is in Ukraine and Georgia. The Russians announced earlier in the week that if a Georgian ship is found in Abkhazian waters, which was a province of Georgia, it will be seized. So it has annexed part of Georgia and it has escalated the war of words on Ukraine.

Belmont Club:

... Eastern Europe has been Finlandized. But the withdrawals have not been reciprocal so far. Even as the US was exiting Russia’s former "near abroad",
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez continued to approach the Russians for nuclear power and weapons assistance....
　
... Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was to meet Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev on Friday after Russia risked Washington’s wrath by offering the fierce US foe help developing nuclear energy.

... Putin made the nuclear offer after Russia this week delayed talks with the United States and other powers on fears Iran is developing nuclear weapons, concerns critics say have been exacerbated by civilian nuclear technology provided by Moscow....

This view from Europe seems just a little over-optimistic given Russia’s belligerent attitude. But the contribution from the American in the comments seems about right.

Appeasing hostile adversaries and throwing friends under the bus? Wasn’t that Neville Chamberlain’s "strategy"?

Obama-Gates: racial paranoia and profiling

White cop, Sgt Crowley, arrests black Harvard prof (and Obama pal), Henry Louis Gates, Obama sticks both feet in mouth.

By now this is old news but here’s some interesting commentary on the subject:

An LAPD police officer:

... let us examine the issue of racial profiling as it pertains — or doesn’t — to Mr. Gates’s arrest. As I wrote on Wednesday, the suggestion that Gates was "profiled" is ludicrous. Gates was not simply driving or walking along and into the awareness of some racist cop looking to exert authority over him.

... if Crowley’s account is accurate, it was Gates who profiled him, imputing racial animus as the reason for the sergeant’s presence on the front porch.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Somehow the president in the last few hours, in his now characteristic stereotyping, has managed to insult the nation's police with his "stupidly" comment, the nation's surgeons with his reference to greedy tonsil-cutting, and the nation's elderly with his aspirin quip — all reminiscent of the "typical white person" castoff, Pennsylvania clingers speech, and the Special Olympics one-liner. Given his propensity to apologize abroad for the purported sins of other earlier Americans, can we expect some "I'm sorry"s for his own clumsy generalizations?

Charles Krauthammer:

He should have said, "I am a friend of Gates, and therefore I'm inclined to believe his story. But since there's no way I can know what actually happened, I'll decline a comment."
... Instead, he developed the Gates' narrative of racism, and I think in a situation in which it was at least, as of now, entirely unwarranted.

Heather MacDonald :

... whereas Gates’s rantings about police bias might ultimately be dismissed as standard ivory-tower posturing, Obama has now put the presidential imprimatur on a set of untruths that will only fuel disrespect for the law and impede the police in their efforts to protect inner-city residents from crime.

Hope and change in Obama’s "post-racial America".

Update: Mark Steyn:

... The photograph of the arrest shows a bullet-headed black cop – Sgt. Leon Lashley, I believe – standing in front of the porch while behind him a handcuffed Gates yells accusations of racism. This is the pitiful state the Bull Connors of the 21st century are reduced to, forced to take along a squad recruited from the nearest Benetton ad when they go out to whup some uppity Negro boy.

As professor Gates jeered at the officers, "You don't know who you're messin' with." Did Sgt. Crowley have to arrest him? Probably not. Did he allow himself to be provoked by an obnoxious buffoon? Maybe. I dunno. I wasn't there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African American. A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling. The boundless elasticity of such endemic racism suggests that the "post-racial America" will be living with blowhard grievance-mongers like professor Gates unto the end of time.

Obama in Cairo

[via Hot Air]

David Frum does a good analysis too.

Update:

Mark Steyn: "Obama's message of weakness"

And via Blazing Cat Fur: The radical left's postmodern reaction

North Korea's nukes

Charles Krauthammer:

The game is over. We have had 15 years of negotiations under three administrations, the Clinton, Bush, and now Obama. Not just are they a failure, but they are a humiliation.

I think it's time to recognize that it's over. North Korea is a nuclear power. It's not going to be stopped. The only issue is what do we actually do?

I would say forget about U.N. resolutions. Forget about the six- party talks, and forget about even bilateral negotiations. What we need is action.

Action number one, a nuclear Japan. Japan is a country that is directly threatened. I think we ought to have intensive negotiations with the Japanese to encourage them to declare themselves a nuclear power.

The only way in which we're going to have any progress in the area is if we reshuffle the interest of the parties here. A nuclear in Japan will send a message to China, especially, to recalculate its interests.

Up until now, it had zero interest in curbing its client. It is a thorn in our side. It is an ally in the area. It is a threat to South Korea. It supports its hegemony in the region.

A nuclear Japan will reshuffle the deck on its recalculations. It may send a message which would encourage China to change its policy.

Otherwise, nothing happens.

Obama nominates foolish Latina woman

Jonah Goldberg comments on Obama’s latest first pick for the Supreme Court:

From the self-parody file:

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life." -Judge Sonia Sotomayor, in her Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law in 2001

A foolish, sexist, racist judge - just what’s needed in Obama’s post-racial America.

Update [via]:


See also more Goldberg, Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer.

And scaramouche [via].

The Obama three-step

Charles Krauthammer:

... the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

... Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list: "The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e., slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e., the surge) -- and now Guantanamo."

... Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds: rendition -- turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets -- claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus -- to detainees in Afghanistan's Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

... The Bush policies in the war on terror won't have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.