Obama will never be ready to be president. He is not the man for the job. 

Power Line shares and substantiates this opinion:

McCain has strongly and unequivocally come out in support of our ally Georgia, while placing the onus for the war squarely where it belongs, on Russia. In this, he has aligned himself with our most loyal European allies. Obama, on the other hand, issued the sort of vapid statement that would ingratiate him with the State Department while not requiring any distraction from his Hawaii vacation. An interesting point, by the way: McCain is supposed to be the old guy, but Obama is the one who needs a vacation.

Here is the latest from the McCain campaign:

This afternoon I spoke, for the second time since the crisis began, with Georgian President Saakashvili. It is clear the situation is dire. Russian aggression against Georgia continues, with attacks occurring far beyond the Georgian region of South Ossetia. As casualties continue to mount, the international community must do all it can to avert further escalations. Tensions and hostilities between Georgians and Ossetians are in no way justification for Russian troops crossing an internationally recognized border. I again call on the Government of Russia to immediately and unconditionally withdraw its forces from the territory of Georgia.

Given this threat to Euro-Atlantic security, I am pleased to see the United States, the European Union, and NATO acting together by sending a delegation to the region, in an effort to broker a cease fire. This is an important first step.

The United Nations has been prevented from taking any meaningful action by Russian objections. In view of this, I welcome the statements of democratic nations defending the sovereignty of Georgia and condemning Russian actions.

I strongly support the declaration issued by the Presidents of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and their commitment that ‘aggression against a small country in Europe will not be passed over in silence or with meaningless statements equating the victims with the victimizers.’

 

I doubt that the Europeans were thinking of Obama when they wrote this, but who knows? Maybe they had seen this "meaningless statement equating the victims with the victimizers" from the Obama campaign:

It’s both sides’ fault — both have been somewhat provocative with each other.

McCain’s statement continues:

I share their regret that NATO’s decision to withhold from Georgia a Membership Action Plan may have been viewed as a green light for aggression in the region. As they propose, a new international peacekeeping force should be created, in light of – as they observe – the ‘obvious bankruptcy of Russian "peacekeeping operations" in its immediate neighborhood.’ In addition, Finnish Foreign Minister Stubb, the Chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has said there can be no return to the status quo in South Ossetia and that Russia cannot serve as a mediator in the South Ossetian conflict. Each of these leaders represents a country that has undergone what Georgia is now experiencing.

That last is a key point, but one that is no doubt lost on Obama and his advisers. It is often said that Obama is not ready to be President, but I don’t think this is exactly right. It seems pretty obvious that Obama, given his temperament, his self-regard, his blithe ignorance of history and of the material conditions of life on this planet, will never be ready to be President. He is not unready: he is unsuited for, and inadequate to, the office.

Western interference in Yugoslavia in order to ‘protect’ Kosovo was always a bad idea.

It was unjustified in that no Western interests were involved; it was bad as a precedent;  bad in its immediate results, spreading war throughout the region; and it continues to be bad in its longer-term effects.

This is from an article in the Telegraph today:

Two key events well beyond Georgia’s borders have triggered Russia’s fury. The first was Kosovo’s declaration of independence in February and the new country’s subsequent recognition by many Western states. This brought a public warning from Moscow that Kosovo’s move to independence could set a precedent for Georgia’s two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The second was Nato’s pledge at the Bucharest summit in April that membership of the Atlantic Alliance for both Georgia and Ukraine was not a matter of "if" but "when", although in deference to Russian objections, no timetable for entry was granted. This provoked Vladimir Putin, then still Russia’s president, to promise more support for Georgia’s breakaway regions.

Now Russia has invaded Georgia. Russia is at fault, as John McCain made instantly clear. Barack Obama put out a statement implying moral equivalence between the invading Great Power and the small independency.

 John Hawkins rightly stresses (in Townhall) that Obama –

has never served in the military, in the House, or as a governor. He has never run a business, was just elected to the Senate in 2004, and has had exactly one hard-fought political victory in his entire career (against Hillary Clinton). So, who would be more qualified to be President: Obama or, let’s say, a guy who served a couple of tours in the military, got out, started his own successful small business, and has served a couple of terms on his local city council? I have few doubts that the city councilman would be far more in touch with the real world and more competent to lead the country than someone who was so haughty and dare I say, messianic that he proclaimed,

 

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

 

This guy has never run a business, run a state, or served in the military, but he’s going to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet? There are people locked away in rubber rooms, drooling on the floor and talking to tiny pink elves, who are less delusional than Obama.

……And that is ultimately the problem with having a President who combines limited experience with towering arrogance. Putting Barack Obama in charge of the United States would be like making a cocky high school class President the new CEO of Wal-Mart. Not only would he not know what to do, he wouldn’t know what not to do, or even that he doesn’t know the difference.

 David Limbaugh writes of Obama in Townhall:

On defense and foreign policy, he very well might dismantle our nuclear weapons in this increasingly nuclear age and would abandon missile defense programs. He would precipitously withdraw our troops from Iraq, thereby jeopardizing its stability and our victory there and inviting the very terrorist enemy he says he would hunt down to reenter and thrive again. He would adopt policies concerning Afghanistan wholly inconsistent with everything he claims to stand for – and against – in Iraq. He would greatly increase our role there and disincentivize participation of our allies in flagrant contradiction to his criticisms of President Bush’s "unilateralism" in Iraq. But he would not add enough troops to simulate Gen. Petraeus’ successful surge strategy in Iraq – only enough to risk entangling us in a Sovietlike quagmire that Democrats claim to oppose, except when they are in control of the executive branch. And he would transform stingy America into a safety net for the entire world with his Global Poverty Act.

But as we all know, she isn’t.

This from Power Line:

Opponents of energy development like to claim that it is hopeless to drill for oil, since it would take so long to get it flowing. Barack Obama, for example, recently claimed that if Congress lifts the offshore drilling ban, it will take seven years to get any oil. Obama supported this assertion by misrepresenting a report by the Energy Information Administration. If you read this post, you already know how the Left is misusing that report.

Today the Institute for Energy Research followed up with more information about misuse of that report. I want to focus on this point:

EIA’s analysis assumes that leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. Yet, off the coast of California, some of these resources have already been leased. A report from Wall Street research house Sanford C. Bernstein says that California actually could start producing new oil within one year if the moratoria were lifted. The California oil is under shallow water and already has been explored. Drilling platforms have been in place since before the moratorium.

There are other areas, too, where pumping could begin in months, not years. Obviously full exploitation of our energy resources will take longer. But that is an argument for starting quickly, not an argument for delay. And we can at least begin to get relief from high energy costs quite rapidly.

 Worse even than Obama’s taking money from our enemies – Karen Hughes gave it to them.   

This from Jihad Watch and NewsMax:

Bush aide Karen Hughes gave money to jihadist groups

So says Steve Emerson. "Terrorism Expert: Karen Hughes Gave Money to Bad Guys," by Kenneth R. Timmerman for NewsMax, August 3 (thanks to PRCS):

A longtime adviser and close confidant of President Bush funneled millions of dollars in U.S. government grants to radical Islamist organizations, many of whose leaders have been convicted or indicted in terrorism cases in the United States, respected terrorism expert Steven Emerson told Congress last week.

“When Ms. [Karen] Hughes was appointed as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, she set the tone to continue a disastrous policy of outreach with Islamist partners,” Emerson told the House International Relations Committee.

Among the recipients of the State Department grants actively championed by Hughes was Ahmed Younes, formerly an official with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a group that has “publicly challenged the designation of Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations” and whose leaders “have made extreme statements defending terrorist organizations,” Emerson said.

Another beneficiary of Hughes’ outreach program to American Muslims was Aly Abuzaakouk, the executive director of the American Muslim Council (AMC) and a former director of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIHT).

 

Actually, it’s the IIIT.

The North Virginia-based IIHT “is suspected of being a pivotal cog in the Muslim Brotherhood’s high command in America," according to federal law enforcement records newly released to Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism under the Freedom of Information Act….

The IIIT was named as an allied group in the infamous Muslim Brotherhood memorandum of 1991 that emphasized that the Brothers “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Anyway, read it all.

 

 

 Jim Brown reports on ONENEWSNOW:

 In a Front Page article here, the author argues that in a world of nuclear proliferation it is necessary for the US to maintain its nuclear capability.  But is the US doing so? 

The 63rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima is a time to think realistically about this. 

Like it or not, the truth is that we cannot rid the world of nuclear arms. But we can eliminate ours. And the dirty little secret is that we are well on the way to doing just that – unbeknownst to most Americans who would rightly be appalled at the prospect.

Thanks to 16 years of inattention, purposeful neglect and willful unilateral disarmament measures under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the United States’ nuclear arsenal is steadily obsolescing, becoming evermore problematic to maintain and increasingly losing its deterrent credibility. We alone among nuclear powers – declared and undeclared – are going out of the business by failing properly to preserve, let alone modernize, our aging stockpile.

The 63rd anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima should serve as an opportunity for urgent stock-taking. We can persist in the pretense that our inexorable, solo denuclearization is of no strategic consequence by pretending to rid the world of all nuclear arms.

Or we can recognize reality: A world without effective, safe, reliable and credible U.S. nuclear weapons will not be one in which there will be no more Hiroshimas. It will, instead, be one in which others can continue to inflict such destruction on us. And the contribution our deterrent has made to world peace – to say nothing of the security and freedom of this country and its allies (including post-war Japan) – will be no more.

The self-abasement of the British authorities before the Arabs is now complete and utterly contemptible. It’s hard to say whether they are more stupid in their shortsightedness as to the consequences of such caving-in,  or more wicked in possibly working deliberately to bring about the demise of their nation and all that it used to stand for.  

The Saudis, in their customary immoral fashion, used bribery to gain commercial advantage. It was a clear breach of British law. But the highest court in Britain has let them off.  

Read Melanie Phillips here on how the Law Lords have sacrificed the highest principles of British law to sheer expediency. 

 John Bolton writes in the Wall Street Journal (whole article here):

Iran is pursuing two goals simultaneously, both of which it is comfortably close to achieving. The first – to possess all the capabilities necessary for a deliverable nuclear weapon – is now almost certainly impossible to stop diplomatically. Thus, Iran’s second objective becomes critical: to make the risks of a military strike against its program too high, and to make the likelihood of success in fracturing the program too low. Time favors Iran in achieving these goals. U.S. and European diplomats should consider this while waiting by the telephone for Iran to call.