Is there no one inside the White House loyal enough to the USA to stop or expose Obama’s secret dealing with its enemies – dealings that strengthen them and weaken us?

This is from Front Page, by Majid Rafizadeh:

I have long pointed out that Barack Obama’s administration, and particularly president Obama himself, has been more than likely clandestinely communicating and working with the Islamic Republic of Iran much longer than just before the current nuclear talks, and even long before President Hassan Rouhani came to the United States to attend the UN General Assembly.

Several national and international outlets have just released more details and reports on this issue.

The crucial point … is that while the American people were told by the Obama administration (an image projected by President Obama) that this September’s “historic” telephone call between President Obama and President Rouhani was the first diplomatic outreach to achieve agreement on nuclear issues, the recent revelations indicate otherwise.

These secrets talks, surreptitious letters, leading to confidential and classified negotiations between Obama and the Islamist leaders of Iran, were initiated long before the current nuclear talks, right after the current president of Iran was elected to office.

According to several outlets, including the [Democratic supporting] Daily Beast … the White House— under the leadership of President Obama— started lifting and easing its sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran right after President Hassan Rouhani took office.

According to The Daily Beast, Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a group that works closely with Congress and the White House regarding Iranian matters, stated that for “five months, since Rouhani’s election, the United States has offered Iran two major forms of sanctions relief.” In addition, Dubowitz pointed out that Iran has been selling oil illegally on the black market, leading to a large profitable amount of illegal revenues for Iran.

This also explains why President Obama has tried to oppose any sort of sanctions, policy recommendations, and legislation presented by the overwhelming majority of congressional representatives.

While it took several American administrations, the international community, the United Nations, and European countries to identify illicit institutions and actors in Iran who have abused the international financial sector, the Obama administration is quietly reversing these processes.

The Obama administration’s policy of quietly lessening financial pressure on Iran has significantly emboldened the position of Iranian Islamists in the international arena.

According to Dubowitz, two types of relief and special offers have been given to Iran by the Obama administration.

Firstly, the Obama administration has significantly decreased issuing designations of sanctions violators in comparison to any previous administrations. This is occurring at a time when Iran has been more rapidly working on its nuclear program and increasing its centrifuges, according to the latest report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran has also increased the number of engineers working at a new plutonium plant, and according to many nuclear experts, Iran will reach the breakaway capacity of developing bomb-grade nuclear weapons within the first six months of next year.

The latest assessment is that it could be done in a matter of weeks, not months.

These secrets concessions have significantly assisted the new president of Iran … [and]  President Obama has … assured the Iranian Islamist leaders that they have the green light to receive further relief down the road. …

In addition, Iranian lawmakers have previously pointed out that President Obama has sent secret letters to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. While the Obama administration denies [this], Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed that Tehran did receive the secret letter to the Supreme Leader.

Furthermore, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out, US Secretary of State John Kerry is currently pushing for an agreement with Iran on its nuclear program which will ease sanction on Iran without even asking Tehran to slow down its nuclear activities.

The secrecy of the Obama administration’s work with the Islamist leaders of Iran is bringing, and will continue to bring, further severe repercussions for American national interest, which will just intensify as these clandestine communications networks continue to occur. …

Finally, and more fundamentally, this move has worked to embolden the Islamists’ position, weakening and damaging the American image.

Obama loves Islam. Obviously. But why the choice now of (Shi’a) Iran? His first choice – it seemed – was (Sunni) Saudi Arabia, to whose King he bowed deeply when they met.

We put our little grey skeptical cells to work on these particulars:

Obama has made a close friend of the (Sunni) Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan. Erdogan has befriended Iran, and has turned his country’s former friendship with Israel into enmity. Has Erdogan acted as a go-between for Obama in his wooing of Iran?

Iran is working to become a nuclear-armed power. What it wants to do with its nuclear arms – Iranian leaders have announced – is wipe Israel off the map; whereas the Saudis dread a nuclear armed Iran and seem to have become, on this issue, tacit allies of Israel. Is there a reason in that for Obama to turn away from the Saudis and towards the Iranians? Yes.

So Obama – who has been bullying the Israeli prime minister for the last five years – is positively against the survival of Israel?

We think that is a logical conclusion. But an appalling one.

What others, if any, might there be?

Today,

America honors her heroes in recognizing Veterans Day, including our brave SEALs.

Mark Baisley spells out what “SEALs” stand for – their name and their cause:

That virtuous moniker is actually an acronym for Sea, Air, And Land, indicating that these guys cover every quarter and every dimension. Members of the United States Navy SEALs are a special kind of human, incredibly smart athletes with unthinkable endurance and unimaginable tolerance for pain. The greatest attribute of a SEAL is devotion.

But in a brand new book, a tragic truth is revealed about the Obama Administration’s unrequited devotion from our most selfless of heroes. Aaron Carson Vaughn is honored by his heartbroken dad in Betrayed, The Shocking True Story of Extortion 17 as told by a Navy SEAL’s Father. The book chronicles the events that led to the death of Aaron Carson Vaughn and was authored by Billy Vaughn, with co-authors Monica Morrill and Cari Blake.

Aaron Carson Vaughn “once wrote a note of assurance to his concerned parents about his chain of command saying, ‘They won’t let me die‘. But they did.

The book details the events of August 6, 2011 in Afghanistan surrounding the shooting down of an American Chinook helicopter that held the evocative name of “Extortion 17″.

A high-value Al-Qaeda leader was pinned down in a village by U.S. Army Rangers. Three hours into the intense ground engagement, Extortion 17 was tasked to carry seventeen SEALs into the battle with the onerous task of capturing the Al-Qaeda leader alive.

The Chinook was operated by a crew of five from the National Guard and carried an additional 22 Navy personnel in support of the elite SEAL team. One Afghan interpreter was also on board and, just before taking off, seven Afghan commandos were curiously assigned to the final flight of Extortion 17.

As the Chinook approached its destination, the enemy could be seen running into a building with a tower that gave them an advantageous shooting position. The two Apache escort helicopters had all the visibility and firepower to resolve the battle before Extortion 17 delivered the SEAL team. But the Apaches were denied permission to attack.

Under the Obama Administration’s new rules of engagement, no strike could be made on that building without assurance that no civilians were inside. The enemy knows these rules, which is why they run into buildings where civilians may be located.

Just as in Gaza, where Hamas terrorists do the same. And PLO fighters in Lebanon used to place their guns on the roofs of schools and hospitals, and use UNRWA schools as arsenals. Such is the honor of the Muslim warrior.

Under the protection of Obama rules, the enemy set up on the tower of the building and shot down Extortion 17 using three rocket-propelled grenades. The Chinook fell to the ground in a tremendous explosion, killing all 30 people on board.

The parents of those SEAL Team members who died were gathered for a briefing and were given hundreds of pages of information from the investigation of the event. Betrayed includes many pages of that original material; material that raised enough unsettling questions that Billy Vaughn wrote a book.

One question asked at the briefing was why, even in the minutes following the shoot-down of Extortion 17, America’s massive firepower was withheld.

Three-star Admiral Robert Harward explained to the parents that a drone strike wasn’t used because, “we need to win their hearts and minds”. 

Can a three-star admiral actually believe in such a goal? Did he manage to say it with a straight face?

What the Commander-in-Chief was really after becomes terribly clear only with the knowledge that he put Afghans in command of American troops who were in Afghanistan to defeat Afghans:  

Evidently, this policy of social politeness on the battlefront motivated the Obama Administration to relegate authority over American troops under Afghan command one year before the Extortion 17 crash, the greatest loss of U.S. military SEALs in a single incident.

Social politeness? It may look like that. But a commander-in-chief who puts his troops under enemy command is not just being socially polite. He is not trying to “win hearts and minds” like a missionary. He is helping the enemy to win. He is making sure that the enemy will win. 

All knowledge, forethought, and mission planning for American troops within that country are under the joint oversight of the Operational Coordination Group, a command of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

And win the enemy did:

While George W. Bush was in office, we were treated to a steady drumbeat of casualty reports. But the silence of American media over the past five years has covered up the fact that far more of our troops have been killed and injured under the Obama Administration’s rules of engagement.

It could not have been otherwise. That’s what those rules of engagement were designed to do.

During the seven years of war in the Bush Administration, 630 Americans died in Afghanistan and 2,638 were wounded in action. During the first four years of the Obama Administration, 1,544 Americans have died in Afghanistan and 15,036 have been wounded in action.

Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He has invited Muslim Brotherhood members into his administration as advisers and consultants. He is letting Muslim-theocratic Iran become nuclear-armed. He has had all critical references to Islam purged from army training materials. He withdrew all American forces from Iraq so letting Iran become a force of influence in that land whose soil is soaked with American blood. And his crippling rules of engagement have allowed the Taliban back into power in Afghanistan.

But today he will be seen honoring American veterans, in the posture of mourning for the heroic dead:

The Antagonists

(Picture via PowerLine)

At last Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu seems fully to have grasped that President Barack Obama is his enemy.

We quote from DebkaFile (not always an entirely reliable source, but this report is in broad agreement with many others, only more detailed):

The interim nuclear accord negotiated directly between Washington and Tehran was already secretly in the bag before the two-day talks between Iran and the Six World powers took place in Geneva Thursday and Friday. The plan was for a ceremonial signing to take place Friday, Nov. 8, after US Secretary of State John Kerry flew in from Jerusalem and the Iranian Foreign Minister confirmed “the general outline of an agreement.”

Half a dozen foreign ministers from across the globe flew into Geneva to add their signatures to the interim accord.

But the signing did not take place and the event dragged on into Saturday, Nov. 9.

France refused to sign.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius remarked: “There is an initial draft that we do not accept … I have no certainty that we can finish up.” He also referred to the concerns of Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East. …

The US president’s phone conversation with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (“This is a very, very bad deal!”) early Saturday was a lot more heated. It took place after a three-day visit by John Kerry, which DEBKAfile’s sources reported Wednesday hardly touched on the Palestinian question: Most of the time he was on the phone to the US delegation in Geneva, the White House and the Iranian Foreign Minister.

From those conversations, Netanyahu learned to his dismay that the version of the accord he had received from Kerry in the first of their three conversations differed substantially from the outline prepared for signing in Geneva – especially in the key clause of sanctions relief.

Considerable relief – chiefly the release of Iranian funds frozen in in the West* – was being offered by Obama before the Iranians have done a thing to halt its nuclear program. He is prepared – even eager – to throw away the West’s most potent negotiating advantage, the very sanction that brought Iran to negotiate. We think this is one of the strongest indications that Obama positively wants Iran to become a nuclear-armed power.

This discovery precipitated the most furious row Friday ever heard by any US or Israeli official between an Israeli leader and an American official.

Netanyahu angrily confronted Kerry with the charge that the Obama administration had deceived Israel every step of the way by letting Iran continue to clandestinely develop the prohibited military elements of its nuclear program, including the underground enrichment plan in Fordo; the heavy water plant for plutonium production in construction in Arak; uranium enrichment up to 20 percent purity; and now, the last straw, sanctions.

As usual, Obama lied.

While Obama and Kerry have admitted only to lifting “a few minor reversible sanctions” and “modest’ sanctions relief as part of the deal, Israel discovered a far more generous package of concessions was on offer. The Europeans would lead the way in easing sanctions to allow Washington to show clean hands – especially to Congress.

By Friday, the Iranians understood that the Obama administration was so hell-bent on signing the first ever international accord on their nuclear program, that they could afford without much risk to up the price for their signature and extort more last-minute concessions.

So will Israel now take action against Iran?

The Times of Israel conjectures: “Agitated Netanyahu wonders if he left it too late” – to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power by bombing its nuclear facilities.

It goes on:

The prime minister’s very public horror at the deal taking shape in Geneva reflects his concern that he is failing in what he sees as his central mission. …

Thwarting Iran’s nuclear weapons drive has been the central mission of Netanyahu’s prime ministership. And he has been deeply worried these past few months — since the election of Hassan Rouhani in June gave Iran a smiling new public face, and since US President Barack Obama’s public volte face on a punitive strike against Syria’s President Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons against two months later — that the West was going to cut a lousy deal with Tehran that would leave at least part of the Islamic Republic’s enrichment capabilities intact.

Evidently unimpressed by Obama’s reassurance to him at the White House in late September that the United States would be negotiating “clear-eyed” with Iran, the prime minister headed straight to the United Nations General Assembly in New York to declare that, even if everybody else was fooled by the Rouhani charm offensive, and was ready to take Iran’s “we don’t want the bomb” claims at face value, Israel would “stand alone” against the Iranians’ bid for nuclear weapons.

But this weekend, his concern has been elevated to new heights. … Friday night’s Israeli TV news programs suggested that the prime minister feels he has been misled by the Obama administration, and that the offer put on the table to the Iranians in Geneva — which would allow them to continue to enrich uranium to 3.5% and thus, in Israel’s assessment, to establish themselves as a “breakout” state capable of racing to the bomb at a time of their choosing — is far more dangerous than anything he had anticipated. As he declared Friday in [a]  highly agitated Ben Gurion Airport appearance, Iran, under the deal on the table, “gets everything that it wanted at this stage and pays nothing.”

Ensconcing himself as the prime public face of international opposition to the deal taking shape in Geneva, Netanyahu openly acknowledged that he had pleaded with Kerry “not to rush to sign, to wait, to reconsider, to get a good deal… This is a bad deal, a very, very bad deal. It’s the deal of a century for Iran; it’s a very dangerous and bad deal for peace and the international community.”

Underpinning the prime minister’s undisguised horror at the direction of the Geneva talks was his worry that he has mishandled the crisis. Nobody could credibly assert that Netanyahu has failed to sound the international alarm. He has been warning the world relentlessly about Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, and his constant highlighting of the danger played a central role in pushing the international community into the sanctions that finally brought Tehran to the negotiating table.

What the prime minister is likely asking himself this weekend, however, is whether he should have moved from warnings to action — whether the moment for his threatened resort to force has already come and gone.

Persistent reports have suggested that Netanyahu did want to intervene militarily in the past, most particularly in the summer of 2012, and that he was deterred by opposition from the United States and from Israel’s own security chiefs, past and present. Others close to him, however, insist that had Netanyahu truly believed that it was a case of now or never for a military strike, he would have ordered one. “If he had thought that military action was crucial at the time, he would have acted,” Tzachi Hanegbi, the Likud MK, and former minister for nuclear affairs, who is closer than most others in the party to the prime minister, told this writer just a few days ago.

Hanegbi added that Netanyahu “most likely decided not to [resort to force in the past] because there are great advantages to waiting until Israel comes as close as possible to the limits of its tolerance. Because when that point is reached, we can use all of the previous restraint as a very powerful tool for strengthening the legitimacy of our actions.”

For Netanyahu now, though, the question [is] whether he has waited too long. As he made crystal clear in that UN address, he is certain that “Iran is developing nuclear weapons” and he believes that ”when a radical regime with global ambitions gets awesome power, sooner or later its appetite for aggression knows no bounds.”

He vowed in that speech that Israel would “not allow” Tehran to get the bomb. But now the entire international community is publicly lined up in search of an accord with the ostensibly newly moderate Iran. If a deal — however “bad” and “dangerous” — is being done by diplomats led by the United States, can Israel seriously contemplate defying the world and taking on Iran militarily?

The French refusal to sign the outline of agreement must have somewhat mitigated Israel’s fear of being up against “the entire international community” if it decides to take action.

But Israel should have destroyed as much as it could of Iran’s nuclear installations in 2012. Now it might really be too late. Netanyahu was misled, and he made the wrong judgment, so both anger and self-reproach are appropriate.

If France wants to seize an opportunity it has created for itself to take the lead on this most important international issue (and France has long resented US hegemony, so it might), it will encourage Israel to take the only action that can really stop Iran carrying out its evil designs – raining destruction on the Iranian factories of death.

* From today’s Debkafile: Western sources with access to the closed-door deliberations held in Geneva from Thursday to Saturday reveal that for the sake of a deal, Washington was ready to offer Iran a sanctions relief package worth nearly $20bn, to save the Iranian economy from bankruptcy. Secretary of State John Kerry told Iran’s foreign minister the US was ready to advance at once $3 billion of the estimated $50 billion of Iranian assets frozen in Western banks, and also end restrictions on Iranian’s gold, petrochemical and car industries. This would have netted the Iranian treasury another $16.5 billion. Zarif asked the package to also include restoring SWIFT foreign transfer services to Iranian banks. Both Washington and Tehran counted on a deal being clinched at the Geneva conference. Following its disappointing outcome, the Iranian regime is gripped with rising concern that the country’s further plunge into economic crisis may touch off violent protests and street demonstrations that could spill over into a popular uprising.

What Muslims are doing to Christians is atrocious. The Muslims must tell themselves to stop it.

The hole in the political theory of libertarians is foreign policy. One of them is trying to fill it in. Senator Rand Paul has been speaking up for the Christians persecuted in Muslim lands, especially those in Syria. He’s still for non-intervention. But he’s showing that he’s not unconcerned about what’s going on out there in the dim and irrelevant Rest Of The World. He rightly analyses that what’s going on is – nasty. And he has advice for how that Muslim-on-Christian persecution problem should be fixed.

Cliff May reports and comments at Townhall:

Last month, at the Values Voter Summit, a gathering of conservative activists from around the country, Senator Rand Paul gave a speech [you can hear it all on this YouTube video] on what he called “a worldwide war on Christians by a fanatical element of Islam”.

The senator was careful [as almost all Western politicians always are] not to paint all Muslims with the brush of fanaticism. He stressed that only a minority of Muslims read Islamic scripture as mandating an armed struggle against Christians and other “unbelievers.”

How does he know that? If it were the case, it would mean that only a minority of Muslims read the Koran. Or that the majority of those that read it don’t take in what it says.

But because the global Muslim population is so large — more than 1.5 billion — even a relatively small percentage translates into tens of millions of jihad supporters.

Paul cited a few of the atrocities not making the evening news: a priest shot in the head in Zanzibar; churches bombed in Kenya; the beheading of three girls on their way to a Christian school in Indonesia; converts to Christianity murdered in Cameroon; churches burned and worshipers killed in Egypt; a pastor in Iran tortured and ordered to renounce his faith. …

All true. And he did not mention Nigeria, where thousands of Christians have been killed by a Muslim terrorist group calling itself Boko Haram (“book-learning is forbidden”), and where the random slaughter is on-going.* It is one of the few places where the Obama administration had something to say about the Muslim-on-Christian violence: it warned the Nigerian government, when it attempted to take military action against the Boko Haram terrorists, that it must not “violate their human rights”.

Syrian Christians, more properly called Syriacs, are widely believed to be pro-Assad. But that’s not quite accurate. A recent newsletter of the European Syriac Union states proudly that they were among those asking Assad for “their rights.” As a consequence, they have been seen as “the enemies” of the regime that continues to “attack, arrest, torture and imprison Syriac people.”

Syrian Christians have appealed to the U.S. government for assistance and … have been turned down. Paul argues: “We must work to ensure our country, our policies, our tax dollars, are on the side of ending this violence rather than encouraging those who perpetrate it.” But he never gets around to saying who or what he has in mind.

What he says instead: “How someone could believe that killing innocent people would further one’s cause is beyond me.” Is that really so hard to fathom? Both the Nazis and the Communists killed innocent people by the millions to further their causes. By now we should understand that totalitarianism is totalitarianism — whether [the ideology] is based on race, class, or religion.

It’s not entirely true that he didn’t say what might be done to discourage violence against Christians: he sensibly said that “not one dollar of US money” should go to any place where they burn the US flag, and no money should go to Pakistan where Christians are being held in jail – at least one of them on death row – for the offense of being Christian.

He also, interestingly enough considering the general pacifism of the libertarian movement, declared that “there are times when it is right to use military action”, for instance “after 9/11”. But he thinks (and we do too) that it would be wrong for the US to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war.

“Radical Islam will end only when Islam begins to police Islam,” Paul adds. Can you imagine Churchill saying Nazism will end only when Germans begin to police themselves? Can you imagine Reagan saying Communism will end only when Russians begin policing themselves?

Paul insists that “Islam needs to remember and recreate the good in their history.” But those waging jihad believe the best in their history was when there was an Islamic empire as extensive as Rome at its zenith, dominating, and often destroying, communities of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and other “infidels”.

The presumption of radical Islam, wrote Bernard Lewis (the world’s leading scholar of the Middle East before that field of study became extensively politicized and compromised), is that “the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule”. 

Western politicians have been reluctant to acknowledge this reality and act on it by developing a strategy aimed at defeating revolutionary Islam in both its Sunni and its Shiite variants. The best President Bush could do was to declare a global War on Terrorism — as if we objected only to the jihadis’ weapon [method, tactic] of choice. President Obama insists we’re fighting “violent extremism,” a term so nebulous as to be meaningless.

Yes, but it enables him to dissolve events like the Boston marathon bombing in the general problem of violent extremism soon to be practiced his administration alleges – by the Tea Party and US army veterans. But while those potential terrorists are named and pre-shamed in DHS reports and military training guides, Islam goes unmentioned. If you were to accuse him of never saying anything against Islamic terrorism, he’ll get members of the press to point out that he has emphatically condemned “violent extremism”.

Senator Paul has yet to improve on these flawed conceptual frameworks. “The ultimate answer must come from Islam itself,” he told his audience. “They will never accept us through force of arms. …

We don’t want them to accept us. We want to be rid of them.

“Somehow, though, they must come to understand that they must police themselves, that they must root out and destroy the sadists and killers who distort and contort religion to justify killing civilians and children.”

So Rand Paul found out nothing about Islam before making this foreign-policy speech!  It is no distortion or contortion of Islam, the killing of civilians and children. It’s what Islam does. It’s what the Koran – a military manual for ruthless conquerors and enslavers – requires Muslims to do. It’s what Islam is all about. He seems to think of “religion” as one big bundle with the golden rule and cheek-turning instructions tucked up inside it.

“Somehow, though, they must come to understand” is neither a policy nor a strategy. Senator Paul is to be commended for speaking out about the plight of Christians in Muslim-dominated lands at a time when so many other voices are silent. But if he would step back from the trees he’d see a deep and dark forest: attacks on Christians are battles in a “War against the West” being waged by the 21st century’s most lethal imperialists. If Paul seriously aspires to be a world leader, he would be well-advised to begin developing a response not based on retreat, passivity, and drift.

Another thing Rand Paul said was, ‘Make no mistake – this is about religion.”  He’s right of course. Ever more human suffering because of religion. (But that was not what he meant.)

The part of his speech with which we thoroughly disagree, and strongly object to, is an extended eulogy (as routine for politicians, when they make any criticism of Islam, as proclaiming that most Muslims are peaceful persons full of goodwill towards the infidel) on a purely mythical Medieval Islam, a beacon of cultural light; caliphates bristling with scientists and mathematicians, steeped in Greek and Latin learning, irreproachably tolerant.** Either he was only repeating this nonsense because he felt the politician’s need to do so, or he has really swallowed all that deceitful Muslim propaganda. He makes the case that as such an Islam existed once, it could exist again. Which would be a persuasive argument, if it were not untrue that it had ever existed at all.

* We have posted a number of articles on the murder of Christians by Boko Haram, the Muslim terrorist group in Nigeria. See for instance: More acts of religion in Nigeria, January 19, 2012; More Christians burnt to death by Muslims, July 11,2012; Another murderous act of religion in Nigeria, May 10, 2013; More Christians slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria, September 30, 2013.

**There is a large body of literature refuting the Muslim claim to an enlightened Islamic Civilization in the Middle Ages. Some of the best articles are:  The Real Islamic ‘Golden Age’ by John O’Neill, who also wrote a book on the subject titled Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Culture; Who Is Really Being Dishonest About Islam? By Robert Spencer; ‘Islamic Civilization’ – The Biggest Lie Known to Man by Ali Hassan. On the intolerance of Islam throughout its rule over Christians and Jews the leading authority is Bat Ye’or. Among her magisterial books on the subject are: The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, 1980; Islam and Dhimmitude, 1984; The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, 1996. This great historian was chiefly responsible for making the word “dhimmi” known to the West.

The government of a democracy too easily grows too big.  It needs to be kept within set limits by having its functions defined. Otherwise government can become not just too encroaching on citizens’ lives, but far too powerful. Government should not be a humanitarian institution. If it becomes a provider to the people, it becomes an authority over them.

It should not be a function of central government to house, feed, educate and medically treat the citizens. To believe that it should is to believe that some citizens must be compelled to support others; that money should be taken from these and given to those, the government acting as the redistribution agency with the power of enforcement.

Adult citizens  should support themselves. Yes, there will always be some who are unable to do so because of  severe physical or mental disability. But the number of  such people who also have nobody – no parent, no child, no sibling  – who can or will support them can only  be a small proportion of a population.

Of course nobody, in a humane society can be abandoned to suffer and die because they have no means of support. The few need to be cared for and protected in institutions. And the institutions should be local – the more local the better.  A reasonable portion of local taxes could fund them, and there would be nothing to stop charities from helping to meet the expense, their coffers filled by those who advocate that government should be a humanitarian institution. The person who tells you  that it should be the government’s business to house, feed, teach and cure everybody, wants to be recognized as a good person. He is not offering a workable theory of government in a free society.

To construct an entire economic system, dependent on government enforcement, round the desperate needs of a small proportion of a population, is an idiotic idea and a formula for ruin.

Instead of impoverishing the most productive and successful citizens by over taxing them, governments should safeguard the free market, which is the only means to a nation’s prosperity. And the more prosperous the nation, the better it can look after that small minority needing charitable care.

Well, there’s nothing new in all that. But it needs to be said over and over again (perhaps in increasingly agonized tones) as liberty slips away from us.

But here is a fresh look at government and its uses of power. A new development in democratic politics. The state as provider and controller – but more: the state as Lover. 

Or at least as abusive partner in an intimate relationship. 

It is the brilliant perception of Daniel Greenfield, who describes the relationship at his Sultan Knish website. We quote:

Love is in the air. There are plush teddy bears in the Capitol Hill gift shop and romantic songs playing on Air Force One. Listening tours are planned and every begging email asking for another five, ten or forty bucks to stop the Republican onslaught is addressed personally to you. To you.

Love makes the world go round, or so singers have crooned for the last hundred years. And what other emotion could it be but that which makes the iron wheels of the state turn.

With everything at stake, voters keep picking the candidates they think love them the most. The exit polls keep showing that voters choose unqualified radicals like Barack Obama or Bill de Blasio because they’re “likable”, “share their values” and “care about them.”

Experience came in dead last in the New York election, both literally in Lhota’s case, and in the exit polls, which showed voters ranking experience somewhere between a dead zebra and a mugger on the C train. 34 percent wanted someone who shared their values. 30 percent wanted change. And an unspecified number of right-wing lunatics wanted experience.

Voting is starting to look a lot like dating. A big chunk of the electorate doesn’t just want someone to manage a government. They want someone who will make them feel special, share their values and love them back.

Government is becoming more personal, even as it’s becoming more impersonal. Newly hatched ducks develop an attachment to their wire mothers. Children neglected by their parents fixate on their nannies. And what of a generation of broken families?

What else is there for all the Julias to do but turn to the man whom Indian chiefs used to call the Great White Father in Washington. And what is there for all the Chads to do but look for love from the bureaucratic wire mother of the Nanny State?0

The great ambition of the social reformers was to replace the unscientific and selfish family with the progressive programs of the state. And their dream has been realized.

Within a few generations of government growth, a nation once noted for its strong nuclear family has replaced it with a cradle-to-grave state that abstractly pats all the Julias and Chads on the head, telling them they can be anything they want and then sending them the bill for its services.

Is it any wonder that Chad and Julia just want a government that loves them and are a bit fuzzy about the differences between a politician, their father and their significant other?

Past generations wanted to be inspired by leaders, but the definitions of inspiration and leadership have changed. In the past it meant urging others to rise to new challenges. Today it means making Chad and Julia feel good about themselves by telling them that they have great potential so that they feel like someone out there understands and cares about them without having to actually do anything. …

The National Debt is bigger than ever and politicians have gotten better than ever at reassuring the people that they care about the national debt, they feel the national debt’s pain, share its values and want it to grow up to be the best national debt that it can be in a country where every national debt has equal opportunities to achieve regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation or national bankruptcy.

Conservatives struggling to convince the rest of the country that Obama is the worst thing since sliced bread that had been left out for three years in the sun face the same problem as anyone trying to convince a friend that the charming sociopath that they’re dating is bad for them. They can assemble an artillery of facts, hurling them one by one, waiting for the BOOM, but only hearing faint thumps, and then resort to frustrated outrages of common sense only to get nowhere.0

After all that, all it takes is a single “I care about you, share your values and promise never to take away your health plan again… period” teleprompter call to convince them that it truly is true love.

And even if the voters who only want to care about a politician who cares about them first eventually realize that they’ve been had, that while Obama was pretending to care about their anger at Wall Street, he was also pretending to care at least as much about the concerns of Wall Street executives, and so on for every one of their values, they’ll just wait for the next charmer to come along.

Those who have been deprived of love will go on looking for it in all the wrong government places. And the Julias and Chads who associate government with love will press every politicians to tell them how the National Debt makes them feel and show them that they really truly care about them. That process will helpfully winnow most decent and competent leaders leaving behind sociopaths, car salesmen, community organizers, con men and anyone who can fake a relationship on a dime.

Emotion is more malleable than reason. And a relationship calls forth the most self-rationalizing emotional states that can exist in the human mind. …

There is no question that most of us are in a relationship with government. It’s a non-consensual relationship and an abusive one, but those are the kind most likely to lead to a bout of Stockholm Syndrome. Hostages fall in love with their hostage-takers, captives fall in love with their captors and Democratic voters fall in love with their elected officials.

With the traditional family in bad shape, romanticizing the even more dysfunctional relationship with the state transforms an abusive relationship into a caring one. …

A sizable portion of the country doesn’t just want someone good or someone who has the right ideas, they want someone to love them, to care about them and to make their relationship with government feel meaningful so that they can believe that it is love, rather than dirty money, favor-trading, vote-swapping, fanatical devotion to 19th century ideologies and humanitarianism that makes the fax machines, the hard drive platters, cars and cabinet meetings of government go round and round.

It seems tragically probable that the Left has won. Socialism – or call it statism, or collectivism – has won. All over the Western world it has won. There are no political parties in Europe or the New World that have any chance of coming to power that are not socialist. Those parties that call themselves conservative are no more likely to dismantle the welfare state that every Western nation has become than are the self-declared collectivist parties.

The Left, we repeat, has won throughout the West. And having allied itself with Islam, it is helping that savage force to replace our civilization and its outposts and defenders throughout the whole world.

It is too late to reverse the accumulating consequences of its victory. Sentiment has defeated Reason by achieving political power and using it to coerce conformity.

For all its claims to be rational, Socialism is the political expression of sentiment: the sentiment of egalitarianism, to appease the base emotion of envy.

In its claims to act in the name of compassion; in its determination to humble the more gifted and more accomplished; in its vision of a High Government as lord, father, judge, director, enforcer, provider, punisher; in its mystical doctrine of an ideal existence somewhere in the hereafter that will justify suffering and sacrifice; in its striving for total control; in all this Socialism closely resembles Christianity. Socialism can fairly be called “secular Christianity”.

Though the Enlightenment destroyed the power of the Christian Churches, and to a large extent drained Europe of religious belief, Christianity has its revenge. It has crept back through the romantic idealism of Marxism and its daughter, the welfare state, until once again popes and primates – the ideology’s elite – command obedience. The punishments they will inflict on you for not conforming are not now the rack, the wheel, or the stake. (Or not yet.) Rather, they will tax away your wealth. They will actively seek ways to incriminate and imprison you. They will surreptitiously deny you your rights under the law.

In America, agencies of oppression are now most notoriously the IRS, the EPA, the TSA (see here, here, and here.). Among the government departments which have arrogantly assumed dictatorial powers are those of Justice, Health, and Education. We have been told by a source we have no cause to doubt that law-enforcement agencies throughout the country have been instructed by the socialist administration to investigate, humiliate, accuse, and whenever possible condemn and imprison “the Rich”, and – it seems from some cases we know of – to fine them to the limit of the law. Rich or not , you will find that there’s no aspect of your life that the long fingers of despotism cannot or will not probe and re-direct.

For this calamitous system a growing majority, it seems, will cast their votes time and time again. Democracy itself has brought the one country which was founded on the idea of personal liberty to this condition.

The Left has won in America; it  has won in Europe; it has won throughout the West. It prevails in the schools and academies where dissent is discouraged and even penalized. It is enthusiastically supported by the mass media. And those who should oppose it, the Republicans, far from standing for liberty, talk passionately about trivial issues, apparently seeing its mission as a holy crusade to keep people from making their own choices in matters of personal – especially sexual – relations. They would have us all conform to busy-body moral rules laid down by Christians. For in America the old Christianity still holds the minds of millions in thrall. The sacerdotal Christianity of the puritan Right will not be liberty’s champion against the secular Christianity of the tyrannous Left.    

The Left thinks in terms of achieving an ideal society. It has ends and goals. The leftist government steers the nation towards a vague vision. The people must be carried on forever towards it, whether they like it or not, while every effort is made to persuade them that the end, the goal, the destination is a paradise. But history tells us that socialism leads only to impoverishment at best and unmitigated hell at worst.

Governments should not have “ends”. They should only have functions. Or rather, one function: to protect the liberty of the people. Government should serve us, not reign over us. With the only other political party likely to gain power in America too feeble to fight, is there no other force that we can look to for taking up the cause of liberty?

The answer ought to be the libertarian movement. If the libertarian movement were genuinely for liberty above all else, for defeating the Left by upholding the Constitution, shrinking government, keeping the state from interfering in the economy, and defending the nation, there would be hope for a future victory of Reason and Freedom.

But the libertarian movement is not a force bringing hope.

Derek Hunter writes at Townhall on The Problem With Libertarians:

There was a time I called myself a Libertarian. And there was a time I was a Libertarian. I just wanted to get government to leave me alone, to leave people alone and to go all crazy and limit itself to doing only that which is spelled out clearly in the Constitution. That was what a Libertarian was. But it’s not anymore.

The word no longer has any meaning, no definition or parameters, certainly no coherent philosophy to speak of. And there’s no one to blame for that except Libertarians themselves.

So what happened?

By not even loosely defining the parameters of a set of beliefs, Libertarians allowed their brand – as it was – to be hijacked by anyone willing to wear the label. They went from the movement for individual responsibility, small government and free markets to a gaggle of misfits who want pot and prostitution legalized and a total non-interventionist foreign policy. …

We have no objection to pot and prostitution being legalized. Why were they ever illegalized? But we hear libertarians defending child pornography; preaching historical revisionism; pretending liberty can dispense with the rule of law. And we object to all that. As for their non-interventionist foreign policy, they seem to think that we need not stir ourselves in our own defense unless America is invaded militarily by a hostile power. It makes us wonder if such libertarians are at all aware of what’s going on in the outer world. Do they think about what it will mean for us when Iran becomes a nuclear power – which it soon will?  Have they thought what will happen to this country if there is nuclear war anywhere on the globe? We doubt it.

The great Reason magazine is a wonderful publication filled with great articles, solid journalism you won’t find elsewhere … and a voice that does little more than complain.

Reason is great at highlighting abuses by every level of government, stories ignored by other media outlets. But you won’t find much in the way of philosophy or solutions. …

I love the Cato Institute and have a lot of good friends who work there, and they do offer some good solutions. They just refuse to do anything about them. Cato has a deserved reputation for refusing to play nice with anyone else. When was the last legislative “victory” spearheaded or introduced by Cato? …

On election night 2008, I was at a Reason/America’s Future Foundation (another Libertarian group) election night party in a Chinatown bar in DC. The results of the election were a forgone conclusion, so what better way to mark the night than with a few drinks and friends. Hell, the band played as the Titanic sank, so why not imbibe a bit as the nation hit the iceberg?

It’s not like anyone was thrilled to vote for John McCain that day. But as bad as McCain was (and still is), he was better than Barack Obama. At least that’s a conclusion you’d expect anyone who supported liberty to draw.

Yet that night, as each state was declared for Obama, cheers rose from the crowd. When Obama won Ohio, you would’ve thought you were in a bar in Green Bay and the Packers had just won the Super Bowl. High-fives and laughter filled the room.

It wasn’t as though these self-described Libertarians wanted Obama to win. Well, actually, many of them did. But the majority of them wanted McCain to lose. They wanted Republicans to lose. Their victory was to let the country lose, to get that smug sense of self-satisfaction they were feeling. …

Libertarians have devolved from the pro-liberty wing of the right side of the ledger to the annoying kid who, when he doesn’t get 100 percent of what he wants, takes his ball and goes home. The team he agrees with more than half the time loses to the team he barely agrees with at all, and he cheers …

David Horowitz, writing at the National Review, argues for a united front to be formed against the Left; all factions of Republicans, libertarians, conservatives, coming together under the banner of liberty. But he does not expect the idea to win instant favor.

Naturally, the first reaction of conservatives to this advice will be to reject it. Conservatives do not want to behave like leftists, who see politics and government as a means for transforming the world and the people in it. Temperamentally, conservatives are cautious because they know that the problems the world faces are caused by human beings, not by the social institutions that progressives plan to change. …

Fortunately, the objections of conservatives are not an obstacle to getting behind a unifying idea. The conservative cause already has a moral core; it is just not currently a political theme, the way equality is for Democrats and progressives. But it can be made into one.

Conservatism … is about protecting the constitutional system created by the Founders. But the creation of this constitutional arrangement was a revolutionary act. It provided a political framework to maximize individual freedom and allow citizens to exercise their talents and enjoy the best possible lives.

What conservatism is about is freedom, and this is its natural unifying idea.

Individual freedom and ordered liberty made possible by the imposition of limits on government is the idea that unites conservatives and Republicans, and should be their rallying cry. The idea is fundamentally opposed to the “equality” that is the goal of progressives and Democrats. …

The equality proposed by progressives and Democrats is a declaration of war on individual freedom, and therefore on the American constitutional framework. The steady erosion of that freedom is the consequence of progressives’ political successes. This is the war that divides Left and Right. Conservatives must recognize that it is a war, and prosecute it as a war to defend individual freedom. That should be the unifying idea of the conservative cause. …

The very struggle that inspired the Right in the Cold War era — the battle between tyranny and freedom — is once again staring us in the face, but we are reluctant to name it. We have gone almost silent instead. The silence must end. It is time to connect the battle for individual freedom at home and the defense of our free society abroad, and to make them one. That is the way to advance the conservative message and unify the political forces on which the future of our nation depends.

He warns:

If conservatives continue to ignore the fact that their opponents approach politics as a religious war, if they fail to organize their own resistance as a moral cause, they will eventually lose the war and everything that depends on it.

Eventually? We fear “eventually” is now.

Enjoy this official Obama administration video clip made in 2009:

Thomas Sowell talks to Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard about the differences between Liberalism (ie. statism) and Conservatism. (The video dates from 2010.)

Our JL-2 SLBMs have become the fourth type of Chinese nuclear missiles that threaten the continental United States, after our DF-31A, DF-5A and DF-5B ICBM.

This report is from the Washington Times:

Chinese state-run media revealed for the first time [in the last week of October] that Beijing’s nuclear submarines can attack American cities as a means to counterbalance U.S. nuclear deterrence in the Pacific.

On Monday, leading media outlets including China Central TV, the People’s Daily, the Global Times, the PLA Daily, the China Youth Daily and the Guangmin Daily ran identical, top-headlined reports about the “awesomeness” of the People’s Liberation Army navy’s strategic submarine force. …

The article features 30 photos and graphics detailing, among other things, damage projections for Seattle and Los Angeles after being hit by Chinese nuclear warheads and the deadly radiation that would spread all the way to Chicago.

China’s sub fleet is reportedly the world’s second-largest, with about 70 vessels. About 10 are nuclear-powered, and four or more of those are nuclear ballistic submarines capable of launching missiles. …

In the 1980s, China developed its first ballistic missile sub, the Type 092 Xia-class, which has 12 launch tubes for the Julang (Giant Wave)-1 missiles. The JL-1 had a limited range and failed multiple test launches.

In 2010, a new class of missile sub, the Type 094 Jin class, entered the service. It is capable of launching 12 to 16 JL-2 missiles with a range of about 8,700 miles, covering much of the continental U.S. with single or multiple, independently targetable re-entry vehicle warheads.

Chinese calculations for nuclear attacks on the U.S. are chillingly macabre.

“Because the Midwest states of the U.S. are sparsely populated, in order to increase the lethality, [our] nuclear attacks should mainly target the key cities on the West Coast of the United States, such as Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego,” the Global Times said.

“The 12 JL-2 nuclear warheads carried by one single Type 094 SSBN can kill and wound 5 million to 12 million Americans,” the Global Times reported.

China also has developed land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles — notably the DF-31A, which has a range of 7,000 to 7,500 miles.

“If we launch our DF 31A ICBMs over the North Pole, we can easily destroy a whole list of metropolises on the East Coast and the New England region of the U.S., including Annapolis, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Portland, Baltimore and Norfolk, whose population accounts for about one-eighth of America’s total residents,” the Global Times said.

All the state-run press reports stressed the point that the PLA’s missile submarines are now on routine strategic patrol, “which means that China for the first time has acquired the strategic deterrence and second strike capability against the United States.”

Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C., here‘s what’s happening to US defense. (This is our Facebook 0ne-paragraph summary of the original IBD article.)

At least 197 officers have been fired or removed from duty by this president, including no fewer than nine senior commanding generals this year. Two nuclear ICBM force commanders were sacked in one week recently. U.S. Africa Command head Gen. Carter Ham was shown the door by Obama for questioning orders against a rescue mission in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, when our ambassador and three other U.S. personnel were killed by Islamist terrorists. Rear Adm. Chuck Gaouette, a carrier strike group commander, was also relieved of his command for assisting forces ordered into action by Ham. Now retired heroes charge he is emasculating the armed forces. So says Patrick Brady, a retired major general who in one day saved 51 seriously wounded soldiers in Vietnam. When such a man severely criticizes his commander-in-chief, he obviously does not do so lightly. His accusations are grave. “This president will never fight if there is any reason to avoid it,” he says. Also speaking candidly is retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, a veteran of the elite Delta Force who served as deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence under President George W. Bush. He points to the “unprecedented” number of four-star generals relieved of duty over the last three years and warns that the military’s future is at stake since many colonels who would have become generals are also being relieved — or quitting. “Morale is at an unprecedented low,” he says. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely is outraged at Obama firing those “who have given their lives for their country,” while protecting incompetent civilian cronies. The hailstorm of criticism is intensifying for a commander-in-chief who is intent on destroying the armed forces just as he has the nation’s health care system.

Look up! See the  skies filling with pigs on the wing – because: The left-biased media are exploding with disapproval of the president they have long and deeply adored.

CBS finally got round to airing a report on what happened in Benghazi on 9/11/12  that is not flattering to the Obama administration because it shows – without explicitly stating – that Obama and Hillary Clinton lied about the disastrous events of that night of death and defeat. [But see Postscript.]

Obama’s most faithful dog NBC reveals to its audience that Obama lied when he said that people could keep their health insurance under Obamacare.

Four opinion columnists of the left-leaning Washington Post are shocked, shocked at Obama’s display of incompetence, his denial of culpability, his claimed ignorance of what his administration has been doing badly.

Ruth Marcus becomes quite strong in her disapproval, here. Her theme is “the chaotic reality of the Obama administration’s second term”. She writes:

The menu of current problems [that] go to issues of core competency to govern [are]:

Eavesdropping on foreign leaders. The choices here are unflattering. EitherPresident Obama did not know what his spy agencies were up to, in which case he is not fully in control of the reins of power after nearly five years in office, or he knew, in which case he did not think through the obviously inadequate cost-benefit ratio and his aides are misleading the public now. … How could he not know? If he did know, how could he think the information gleaned could possibly be worth the risk of having foreign leaders discover the surveillance? …

Syria. …   the herky-jerky nature of the administration’s approach — drawing a red line, failing to enforce it, trumpeting enforcement, then suddenly shifting to Congress — does not portray the president in a flattering light. This is first-year-of-first-term amateurishness …

Oh yes, health care. The president’s signal domestic policy achievement. Probably the most important legacy of his administration. …  So how could the roll out of the Web site be so bad?

Chris Cillizza writes skeptically:

“Obama didn’t know” has become a regular refrain for this White House. Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the president was unaware of the red flags that had been raised in regards the launch of Healthcare.gov, and back in May the President himself said knew nothing about the reports of the IRS targeting of conservative groups before he read about it in the media.”

And his column is illustrated with a video clip from a CNN report about Obama’s repeated plea that he “didn’t know”, questioning whether this was “a strategy”. The host’s air of mild surprise, his tone of “only asking”, fig-leafs the message that if Obama really doesn’t know what’s going on in his administration, he should.  

Dana Milbank seems more than a little irritated (writing here at IBD):

For a smart man, President Obama professes to know very little about a great number of things going on in his administration. .. Is it better that he didn’t know about his administration’s missteps — or that he knew about them and didn’t stop them?

Richard Cohen – seeming hurt and even a touch angry (here):

[Obama] has lately so mishandled both domestic and foreign policy … [His Syrian policy is] intellectually incoherent and pathetically inconsistent … The debacle of the Affordable Care Act’s Web [raises]questions about confidence. … An erratic presidency has made the world a bit less safe.

Why were they unable to see what sort of man Obama is until now?

They saw what they wanted to see.

What’s happened that they see him more clearly now? Why did they let him get away with so much? Why are they still not complaining about the lies and cover-up of Benghazi?

Is it too late to undo the harm Obama has done to America?

*

We now know that perhaps 16 million people* will lose their health coverage because of ObamaCare. But David Axelrod sniffs “the overwhelming majority of the population won’t lose their current coverage,” and Anna Eshoo (my congresswoman) assures us that these millions will now be able to purchase “better” insurance (which they don’t want and which doesn’t fit their needs).

Three years of blatant lies from Obama in order to herd the American people, mostly against their will, into an unworkable, financially disastrous system, all in the service of the long-term goal of the Democratic Party: to increase the power, the reach, and the intrusiveness of the federal government, thereby turning free, independent citizens into wards of the state. This is what Obama meant when he proclaimed shortly before his first inauguration that the total transformation of this country will begin in five days. Next on Obama’s agenda is universal pre-school, that is, a year or two more in state-run, generally mediocre schools and a year or two less time with their parents (who may harbor undesirable, reactionary views). And let us not forget the Obama administration’s long-standing policy of not enforcing immigration laws, which means an ongoing rapid transformation of the demographics of this country and a huge increase in the number of people who will vote for welfare state policies.

What is this transformed America that Obama and most Democrats envision? At best, it’s a bloated European-style welfare state similar to the ones that are currently sinking into insolvency, that are unwilling and unable to defend themselves against the enemies within and without, that are becoming more culturally enfeebled with every passing year, and that are locked in a demographic death spiral which ensures their virtual disappearance as a culture in the lifetime of my grandchildren. At worst, it’s a leviathan state which holds the commanding position in every critical aspect of life, both political and economic — something akin to a Soviet Union but perhaps without the gulags, the purge trials, and the sealed borders. This worst case scenario is not so far-fetched when one considers the chief influences in Obama’s life: the Reverend Wright, Frank Marshall Davis (Communist Party member), Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, and Obama’s revered father, a Marxist revolutionary. Steve Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner in physics, once expressed amazement that religious people actually believe that the Bible is literally true. When it comes to irrational belief, is it as difficult to grasp the notion that Obama might very well believe and wish to put into practice the anti-American, anti-capitalist worldview of those he has chosen to associate with throughout his adult life?

One may argue that a single man cannot possibly do irreparable damage to a society in eight short years. Let us hope this is true. But think about it! In two generations, Greece has gone from a nation of sturdy fishermen, farmers, and merchants into a bankrupt society whose citizens riot at the prospect of not being able to retire at the age or 50 with full pensions. Massive government intervention, in particular unearned benefits, has done to the Greeks what it has done to so many blacks in this country; that is, it has reduced them to feckless wards of the state. As Ambassador Daniel Moynihan pointed out, culture is more important than laws, but culture can be changed by changing the laws.

As far back as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville described a new and distinctive culture, one that was totally different from those of Europe. It was a culture characterized by individualism, self-reliance, hard work, suspicion of authority, individual generosity, and the willingness to form local associations to solve social problems. It is what shaped and molded America and is the reason why the United States and not Brazil, Argentina, or Russia is the world’s preeminent power. Obama appears to have nothing but contempt for this culture, as exemplified by his off-hand comment about those people who cling to their guns and religion and his wife’s comment (almost certainly approved by him) on the campaign trail to the effect that for the first time in her life she felt proud of her country. When asked what made America great, Obama cited the passage of Social Security and Medicare – implying that the evolution of 13 weak colonies to the most powerful, the wealthiest, and the most innovative and creative nation in a little over two centuries was nothing compared to social welfare legislation. On another occasion, Obama opined that the Constitution was a flawed document in that it stipulates only negative rights (Congress shall not do this or that) and but does not stipulate positive rights (good jobs, free education, free medical care, free housing, etc.). But by their very nature, it is beyond the power of government to guarantee such “rights”. Government can decree the things it wants done but cannot ensure that these things will be done. If it could, the Soviet Union (which had a magnificent constitution) would have been an earthly paradise but, like all other states that have offered cradle-to-grave fulfillment of human needs, was a giant prison whose citizens were equal in their poverty.

Robert Kantor   TAC Associate    October 30, 2013 

*Footnote:  A Forbes article headlines: Obama officials [predicted] in 2010 that 93 million Americans will be unable to keep their health [insurance] plans under Obamacare.

Postscript 11/13/13: It turns out that the CBS report was based on a false account. This does not alter the fact that an Obama-supporting TV channel was prepared to discuss Benghazi without whitewashing the Obama administration – unless putting out the program was the start of a cunning plan to tell lies, have them exposed, and so make it seem that any adverse criticism of the administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack is likely to be untrue. It’s a possibility, but we think it more probable that CBS was simply deceived, and its willingness to criticize the administration’s handling of that dire event remains the notable point.