We think Senator Ted Cruz would be the best GOP candidate for the 2016 presidential election. We like what he says, what he stands for. He is strong, brilliant, confident – and right. And he has the presence, the personality, the manner a president should have. In fact we like everything about him – except of course his religiousness, but that doesn’t seem to be having any adverse effect on his political thinking. Here he is making his principles plain in an interview with Genevieve Wood of The Foundry (part of the Heritage network).  The principles he states are ours too.

We know that not all our regular readers agree with our opinion of Senator Cruz.

We hope those who do not agree will tell us why.

“Conscience does make cowards of us all,”

– says Hamlet.

Is it conscience – deriving from the wrong belief that Britain was bad for the nations it ruled under its imperium until the middle of the twentieth century – that has transformed the British bulldog into a pussycat?

Probably.

These days British officials are so afraid of being called nasty names, they would rather destroy themselves and their country than risk provoking some name-calling by their enemies. (As a result their friends have cause to call them such names as cowards, fools, pussycats.) 

British authorities enforcing political correctness have allowed Muslim paedophile gangs to sexually abuse children with impunity for more than two decades, according to a comprehensive new study that examines the harrowing epidemic of child grooming in towns and cities across Britain.

The meticulously documented report, entitled, Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery, shows how officials in England and Wales were aware of rampant child grooming — the process by which sexual predators befriend and build trust with children in order to prepare them for abuse — by Muslim gangs since at least 1988.

Rather than taking steps to protect British children, however, police, social workers, teachers, neighbors, politicians and the media deliberately downplayed the severity of the crimes perpetrated by the grooming gangs in order to avoid being accused of “Islamophobia” or racism.

The conspiracy of silence was not broken until November 2010, when it was leaked that police in Derbyshire had carried out an undercover investigation — dubbed Operation Retriever — and arrested 13 members of a Muslim gang for grooming up to 100 underage girls for sex.

So there are still strong Britons who know right from wrong. Something happened in Derbyshire, among the police, that could restore an iota of national pride.

Some journalists on the Times were inspired (perhaps) by the Derbyshire police to do their job of reporting what was happening in their country.

Shortly thereafter, the Times of London published the results of a groundbreaking investigation into the sexual exploitation and internal trafficking of girls in the Midlands and the north of England. In January 2011, the newspaper reported that in 17 court cases since 1997 in which groups of men were prosecuted for grooming 11 to 16 year old girls, 3 of the 56 men found guilty were Asian, 50 of them Muslim, and three were white.

In September 2012, the Times published another exposé that revealed the hidden truth about the sale and extensive use of British children for sex.

The article showed that organized groups of Muslim men were able to groom, pimp and traffic girls across the country with virtual impunity. Although offenders were identified to police, they were not prosecuted. A child welfare expert interviewed by the newspaper said the government’s reluctance to tackle such street grooming networks represented “the biggest child protection scandal of our time.”

So Soeren Kern reports and comments at Gatestone. We are quoting him, and his quotations, at length.

He goes on:

But the latest study — which avoids sensational details and confines itself to exposing where officialdom has failed — demonstrates that even the coverage in the Times has understated the scale of the problem:

There is far more to this story than has come out so far. The population are already outraged by what they have learned in the last year or two, but know only a fraction of the scandal … This massive over-representation of Muslim men in this crime spree has been borne out by the prosecutions of the last three to four years, but it is clear that it must have been known long ago and should have been made public.

Because the predators were Muslims, the agencies responsible for child-protection have almost entirely failed in their job to protect vulnerable children. From a fear of being called ‘racist,’ police forces across the country have buried the evidence.

On the rare occasion when the phenomenon [of child grooming] would be discussed in more than the briefest details, political activists and the authorities would come together to stop the public from knowing more. Political correctness would be used to make sure that people did not speak about this phenomenon, enabling the perpetrators free rein to sexually abuse schoolgirls for decades.Yes, decades. We know that in an age where parents are not allowed to smack their children, this sounds unbelievable.

The report shows that even documents that supposedly address the problem of child grooming have gone out of their way to avoid discussing why some “ethnic groups” are massively over-represented as perpetrators—the study calculates that Muslims are 154 times more likely to be perpetrators of these crimes than non-Muslims—while the schoolgirl victims are overwhelmingly of a different ethnic group.

The perpetrators have been overwhelmingly men from Muslim communities, and the victims have been overwhelmingly girls from non-Muslim communities (Sikhs, Christians and Atheists). Yet the professionals never deemed it important to declare this, or even denied the pattern existed.

Atheists ? With a capital A? Atheist girl prostitutes? Intellectual, thinking girl prostitutes? We appreciate the article, but we suggest that Soeren Kern is wrong here and simply means “non-religious”.

Now comes a quoted piece of uproariously stupid, cowardly, official claptrap à la mode:

Despite government agencies in Rotherham knowing about (and privately discussing) the Muslim grooming gangs from 1996, a 2010 document by Rotherham Safeguarding Children Board stated that “great care will be taken in drafting … this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham’s qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided”. 

Rotherham’s “qualities of diversity”! Of which it is proud. “Diversity”: the euphemisim for “not being racist”.

Full translation: “We Rotherhamites don’t look down on people just because they’re child sex-slavers and pimps and criminals – not anyway if they’re Muslim – because we want to prove that we don’t think of ourselves as superior. We’re sorry that we used to think of ourselves like that. But now, to achieve your forgiveness, O Muslims, watch us  sacrifice our values, our law, our pride, and  grovel in the dirt before you like good Socialists (and Christians).”

One of the defining features of child grooming is the ethnic/cultural homogeneity of the gang members, and the refusal of other members of their community to speak out about them or to condemn their behavior. According to the report, the gangs are often made up of brothers and members of their extended family, many from Pakistan, who take part in the grooming and/or rape of the schoolgirls.

The report states that grooming gangs target young girls, aged between 11 and 16, because the gang members want virgins and girls who are free of sexual diseases. “Most of the men buying sex with the girls have Muslim wives and they don’t want to risk infection,” the report states. “The younger you look, the more saleable you are.”

The schoolgirls they target are overwhelmingly non-Muslim, while the gangs are overwhelmingly Muslim. The girls are often lured into the clutches of the gang using a young Muslim man who befriends/seduces the girl. None of this is accidental; here we are not talking about cross-cultural romantic relationships. What is so unusual about this disparity in ethnicity, is that most Muslims in Britain have little or no interaction with the indigenous population.

Yes, well – isn’t that how multiculturalism is supposed to work?

The scale of the problem is truly horrifying. According to Parents against Child Sexual Exploitation (PACE), a national charity focused on working with the victims of child grooming and their families, at least 10,000 British children are in the clutches of the gangs at any one time, and at least 1,000 new girls are being groomed by gangs each year.

But this is “just the tip of the iceberg,” according to a document published by the House of Commons, which estimates that at least 20,000 British children are at risk of sexual exploitation by grooming gangs.

Meanwhile, prosecutions are few and far between. …

Finally, the authors of the report examine the links between Islamic culture and doctrine and the crime of child grooming. They note:

The notion that Islam could be the basis for this criminality is always ruled out of the question, with no investigation of Islamic theology, the history of Islam, or the rulings of Sharia law.

The authors then provide a thorough examination of Islamic sacred texts, and conclude, inter alia, that: Muslim men are taught in  mosques that women are little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority; Islam instructs Muslim men that they can have sex with their slaves, are permitted legally and morally to rape them, and may turn a slave girl into a prostitute; and Islam looks down on non-Muslims.

At the same time, British judges are increasingly using Islamic Sharia law to justify light sentences for Muslims who rape underage girls:

As late as May 2013, the media were reporting that a Muslim man in Nottingham who had raped an underage girl, was spared a prison term after the judge heard that the naïve 18-year-old attended an Islamic faith school where he was taught that women are worthless. Rashid told psychologists he had no idea that having sex with a willing 13-year-old was against the law; besides, his education had taught him to believe that “women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground”.

And that belief of his was enough to get him an acquittal? There was a time when ignorance of the law was no excuse for breaking it, and British law declared that raping a child was a crime. But sharia sees it differently, and tolerance requires the descendants of imperialists to concede superiority to Third World ideas conceived in the dark ages.

The report is emphatic in blaming the doctrine of multiculturalism for Britain’s lack of resolve in confronting the grooming gangs:

Multiculturalism is a fundamentally incoherent doctrine, invented to conceal the serious conflicts which have arisen when peoples from vastly different cultures, with different values, are forced to live together. Political correctness and the doctrine of multiculturalism meant that the professionals whose job it was to help the vulnerable were consciously commanding that these diverse cultural values could not be discussed. Multiculturalism came about in order to deny that there is any significance to cultures having different values and to conceal that there will be conflict when these incompatible values come together. Political correctness is the means by which such denial is enforced.

Those who propound and defend multiculturalism say that people from different cultural backgrounds have different values, and that we must all accept these values as being of equal validity. But when it comes to examining what those different values are, multiculturalists suddenly lose interest in the details of these differences and lose interest in the consequences that follow from these different values. …

Islamic society is a totalitarian society, all other values are to be subordinated to Islamic values. But if anyone in Britain dares to criticize Islam, they will be denounced and told they live in a multicultural society, and must accept these totalitarian values.

Finally the report, written by brave, sensible Britons, reminds the cowards that the Muslim population of Britain is doubling with each generation.

All too soon the non-Muslims will be the minority and lose the power their democratic system allows them – and of which the undemocratic Muslims will take full advantage – to make and enforce their own laws.

Other European countries should take note of that reminder too.

To adapt an expression that probably began with Muslims: The camel’s nose of sharia is in the tent. And your rulers let it get there rather than risk being called “intolerant”, “racist”  “imperialist”, “colonialist”, “Islamophobic”.

If that’s what contemporary European civilization has become, it will be no great loss when the Muslims destroy it. Only it will be replaced by something far worse – the barbarism of Islam.

Congress could prevent Obama from giving “an international body” control of the Internet as he plans to do.

(Why has he the power to do this anyway?)

L. Gordon Crovitz writes at the Wall Street Journal:

Authoritarian governments led by Russia and China long ago found ways to block access to the Internet for their citizens.

Under the new Obama plan, these regimes could also block access to the Internet for Americans. 

There is recent precedent: Authoritarian governments tried to block new Internet top-level domains beyond the familiar .com and .org and .net. Saudi Arabia sought to veto the addition of .gay as being “offensive”. It also tried to block .bible, .islam and .wine. Under US control, the Saudis were denied their wishes. With some new post-US system of governance, will .gay websites be removed from the Internet?

The plan announced on March 14 would have the US give up control of the “root zone file” of the Internet and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.  This root of the Internet stores all the names and addresses for websites world-wide, while ICANN controls Web addresses and domains. The US has used this control to ensure that websites operate without political interference from any country and that anyone can start a website, organize on Facebook … or post on Twitter … without asking permission.

It’s easy to imagine a new Internet oversight body operating like the United Nations, with repressive governments taking turns silencing critics. China could get its wish to remove FreeTibet.org from the Internet as an affront to its sovereignty. Russia could force Twitter to remove posts by Ukrainian-Americans criticizing Vladimir Putin. …

Contacted by this columnist last week, a spokesman for the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration said the agency reviewed this legal issue and concluded the administration can act without Congress but refused to share a copy of the legal analysis. Congress should ask for a copy and do its own analysis.

Congress also could tell the Commerce Department not to carry out its plan.

In 2012, both the Senate and House passed a unanimous resolution to keep the Internet “free from government control”. That happened as the Obama administration was being outfoxed by Russia and China, which hijacked the UN’s International Telecommunication Union to legitimize control over the Internet in their countries. Protecting the Internet may be the most bipartisan issue in Congress.

Will Congress act? Is it still alive?

An Investor’s Business Daily editorial lists some of Obama’s far left appointees, and asks: “Does he have any friends who aren’t crackpots?”

But the question that arises from the list is: Has Obama any friends – has he ever had any friends – who aren’t communists?

America is a country of 320 million people, most of them holding to traditional values. Yet President Obama keeps mining the fringes for his hires. Does he have any friends who aren’t crackpots?

Seriously. The president keeps saying he champions the middle class and its values. But his choices of people to help him run the country are the most extreme in U.S. history, and his second-term nominations are more radical than the first.

No sooner had even some Senate Democrats joined Republicans in voting down a cop killer-coddler for civil rights chief, Debo Adegbile, than Obama sent up a 2nd Amendment-basher for U.S. Surgeon General. Dr. Vivek Murthy advocates doctors asking patients if they keep guns in the home, a shocking invasion of privacy.

Murthy may also have a rocky path ahead of him, but other extreme-left nominees are getting confirmed.

Last year, Obama tapped former Congressional Black Caucus chief Mel Watt as, of all things, head of the federal agency regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together underwrite 90% of all new-home loans. Republicans blocked his confirmation. But thanks to Democrats invoking the “nuclear option” and ending the filibuster, one of the most radical lawmakers in Congress is now effectively running America’s mortgage industry.

Meanwhile, radical racialist Tom Perez runs the Labor Department, where he’s threatening to sue employers who don’t hire minority felons, just like he sued bankers who didn’t make prime loans to un-creditworthy minority borrowers when he was civil rights chief.

You have to be a Kremlinologist to keep track of all the communist-sympathizing cronies orbiting this White House.

Obama’s previous appointees include:

• Valerie Jarrett, his closest White House adviser, whose father-in-law worked closely with Obama mentor and Communist Party leader Frank Marshall Davis in a number of front groups during the Cold War.

• David Axelrod, Obama’s political aide, whose mother worked for a communist organ in New York and whose mentor was Soviet agent David Canter.

• Van Jones, an admitted communist hired by Jarrett as Obama’s green jobs czar.

• Anita Dunn, former White House communications director and Obama’s 2012 foreign policy debate coach, who listed communist dictator and mass murderer Mao Zedong as one of her two favorite philosophers whom “I turn to most” when questions arise.

The other was Mother Teresa. The message: Torture, kill, pray.

• Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulatory czar who wrote a socialist “bill of rights” and who advocates redistributing wealth through climate-change policy.

• Samantha Power, ambassador to the United Nations, a 9/11 apologist who advised the president to follow a “doctrine of mea culpa” and literally bow down to foreign leaders as atonement for America’s “sins.”

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, former State Department policy chief, who advised the president to apologize for the War on Terror.

• Rashad Hussein, Obama’s Mideast envoy, who once defended a convicted terrorist (then got caught lying about it), and drafted the president’s Cairo speech apologizing for the War on Terror.

• Rose Gottemoeller, Obama’s Soviet-sympathizing chief nuclear arms negotiator, who thinks America is a global “bully” and must unilaterally disarm for the sake of world peace.

• John Trasvina, assistant HUD secretary for fair housing who once headed the radical Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, whose co-founder made racist statements about whites.

• Cecilia Munoz, head of White House domestic policy who used to work for La Raza, the militant Latino group that advocates illegal immigrant rights.

• Erica Groshen, Bureau of Labor Statistics chief who sends her children to Camp Kinderland, aka “Commie Camp,” a communist-founded institution where kids during the Cold War sang Soviet anthems.

• John Holdren, Obama’s science czar, who’s advised surrendering U.S. sovereignty to a “Planetary Regime” that will redistribute the West’s wealth to underdeveloped countries and who once advocated “adding a sterilant to drinking water” to control population.

• Harold Koh, former State Department general counsel who believes in “trans-nationalism” and sees nothing wrong with Shariah law in U.S. courts.

• Tony West, associate attorney general who oversees Gitmo policy, even though he defended al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists including John Walker Lindh, who pleaded guilty to aiding the enemy and fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

So what? In Washington, personnel are policy. These people make the rules we have to live by, from health care to home loans to homeland security.

And these radical political appointees hire other radicals at the bureaucratic levels, where they’ll become entrenched as career federal employees.

In 2008, before Obama was nominated, we warned about his radical associations, including his ties to Davis — a hardened communist with a thick FBI file — at his Honolulu home. His defenders wrote off this Marxist indoctrination as youthful experimentation.

When we pointed out Obama spent 20 years in the pews of an America-bashing preacher, his apologists argued he was merely attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church to burnish his urban bona fides.

When we noted Obama launched his political career in the living room of an unrepentant communist terrorist, his defenders argued Bill Ayers had blossomed into a respected professor, that his days of cheering on the Vietcong and bombing the Pentagon were behind him.

We were told the parade of anti-American subversives Obama came in contact with throughout his life amounted to ancient history. But now we have this roster of radical appointments, a current record that’s harder to explain away and which raises the indefeasible question of whether they’re a reflection of himself.

Only there can be no question about it. He and they are birds of a feather.

The enemy has gained the commanding heights of power.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) excoriates President Obama’s power overreach, and Democratic Congressmen who applaud him for it.

This is from Townhall, by Guy Benson:

The White House is arguing that the Constitution’s sacred separation of powers prevents Congress from seeking a legal remedy to reign in the president’s abuse of the constitutional separation of powers. This president has repeatedly and unilaterally altered, delayed and abandoned elements of the so-called “Affordable” Care Act, which was enacted by Congress and signed into law by Obama in 2010.

As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley has warned, the Obama administration’s sundry executive power grabs have been pervasive, impacting issues as far afield as immigration and presidential war powers. Here’s Gowdy upbraiding his Democratic colleagues for standing and cheering Obama’s State of the Union promise to bypass the people’s branch in pursuit of his ideological agenda.

The Cold War is not over. Russia is winning it the only way it could, by America choosing to lose it.

From this Investor’s Business Daily editorial we get a clear understanding of how drastically and easily Obama and his clique are sabotaging the United States.

As Russia test-fires new, updated ICBMs on the heels of its Ukraine invasion, Obama’s top arms negotiator is busy downsizing and mothballing America’s nuclear arsenal and destroying our deterrent.

Thanks to Undersecretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, a left-wing peacenik and old Soviet apologist, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is inching dangerously closer to first-strike capability.

Gottemoeller, a longtime anti-nuke activist, is the architect of the disastrously one-sided 2010 U.S.-Russia New Start deal that slashes America’s nuclear arsenal from 5,000 deployable warheads to just 1,550.

One-sided is right. Ms Gottemoeller is only anti-nuke when the nukes are in the arsenal of the US. She loves them when they are in the hands of KGB officer Putin.

In a major concession to Moscow, the deal also limits our development of missile defense interceptors.

The administration won’t even certify to Congress that Russia is complying with its end of the deal (the requirement was removed from the last budget deal). That’s because it’s not. And while we’re gutting our nukes, Russia is upgrading its arsenal.

Moscow’s nuclear modernization program includes new warheads and delivery systems, both missiles and bombers. Yet, “We are not developing new nuclear weapons or pursuing new nuclear missions,” Gottemoeller recently clucked.

Worse, the administration has agreed not to even test our aging nukes for reliability. Gottemoeller is pushing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as a top priority.

Despite her overtures — or perhaps because of them —

Perhaps? Precisely because of them!

Moscow has toughened its posture toward the U.S. and is no longer interested in arms control talks.

No matter, Gottemoeller is fine with disarming America unilaterally, if necessary.

She proposes cutting our strategic warheads to as low as 300. Next, she wants to cut tactical or battlefield nukes, both deployed and non-deployed, even though Russia has a massive 10-to-1 advantage in such weapons. She even wants to ban fuel production.

How can she do that without a treaty? Easy. Obama can make an executive agreement, bypassing the difficult Senate ratification process.

Like her boss, Gottemoeller thinks America is a global “bully” and that its nuclear superiority has created a global arms race. She argues the U.S. must show humility by signing nuclear disarmament treaties and become strategically equal with Russia.

Not even equal. Inferior.

… Most Cold War babies grew up hating the Soviet Union. Not “Rosie” Gottemoeller.

She admired the former communist superpower. Her father told her the Soviets were better at science, so she studied Russian and immersed herself in Soviet propaganda. She’s visited Moscow so many times she now considers it her “second home”. 

Second home? If home is where the heart is, Moscow is her first and only home.

Where are you, Joe McCarthy, when we need you?

With her sitting across the negotiating table –

No wonder Moscow is thumbing its nose at arms reduction.

No wonder a Russian general recently threatened to take preemptive military action against U.S. and allied missile defenses in Europe.

No wonder Russian strategic nuclear bombers are flying so close to Alaska and California.

No wonder Putin has no problem marching into Ukraine. He knows nothing will happen.

Even the IBD does not see what is staring it in the face, the fact that its own story makes blindingly obvious. It concludes:

His Soviet-style power play shows just how dangerously naive Obama and his nutty no-nuke advisers are. Gottemoeller’s ambitious plans for further denuclearizing the U.S. will only invite worse military aggression.

He and they are not naive.  No one except a baby or a lunatic could be that naive. They are deliberately giving America to the Russians – to Putin, who wants to restore the Soviet Union and its empire. Why can’t the opposition forces see what’s happening and take every step necessary to stop it?  Is it because they are naive – or lunatic? Or is it because they cannot bring themselves to believe the evidence so plainly set before their own eyes?

Rose Gottemoeller: more lethal than a thousand nukes

There may be something to the claim that all people want to be free. But it is a demonstrable fact that freedom has been under attack, usually successfully, for thousands of years.

So Thomas Sowell writes in a column titled Freedom Is Not Free. He argues that the thuggish Obama regime is implementing a totalitarian agenda. The evidence that individuals are being hounded by government agencies is enormous and mounting. He mentions a few examples.

The Federal Communications Commission’s recent plan to have a “study” of how editorial decisions are made in the media, placing FCC bureaucrats in editorial offices across the country, was one of the boldest assaults on freedom of the press. Fortunately, there was enough backlash to force the FCC to back off.

With all the sweeping powers available to government, displeasing FCC bureaucrats in editorial offices could have brought on armies of “safety” inspectors from OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration], audits from the Internal Revenue Service and many other harassments from many other government agencies.

Such tactics have become especially common in this administration, which has the morals of thugs and the agenda of totalitarians. They may not be consciously aiming at creating a totalitarian state, but shameless use of government power to crush those who get in their way can produce totalitarian end results.

Too kind. We see clear evidence that Obama and his henchmen (and henchwomen) are consciously aiming at totalitarian power.

The prosecution of Dinesh D’Souza for contributing $20,000 to a political candidate, supposedly in violation of the many campaign finance laws, is a classic case of selective prosecution.

Thugs who stationed themselves outside a polling place in Philadelphia to intimidate white voters were given a pass, and others accused of campaign finance violations were charged with misdemeanors, but Dinesh D’Souza has been charged with felonies that carry penalties of years in federal prison.

All of this is over a campaign contribution that is chicken feed, compared to what can be raised inside of an hour at a political fundraising breakfast or lunch.

Could this singling out of D’Souza for prosecution have something to do with the fact that he made a documentary movie with devastating exposures of Barack Obama’s ideologies and policies? That movie, incidentally, is titled “2016: Obama’s America,” and every American should get a copy of it on a DVD. …

It doesn’t matter what rights you have under the Constitution of the United States, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn’t matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials’ power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences.

In other words, the Constitution cannot protect you, if you don’t protect the Constitution with your votes against anyone who violates it. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.

As long as millions of Americans vote on the basis of who gives them free stuff, look for their freedom – and all our freedom – to be eroded away, bit by bit. Our children and grandchildren may yet come to see the Constitution as just some quaint words from the past that people once took seriously. …

Arbitrary power is ugly and vicious, regardless of what pious rhetoric goes with it.

Freedom is not free.

You have to fight for it or lose it. But is our generation up to fighting for it?

So there may be no truth in the claim that all people want to be free.

Only a minority, it seems, will vote for freedom. Even fewer will fight for it.

What chance is there that such freedom as we still have will not be lost?

Another brilliant Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor’s Business Daily

We are in principle against intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. But we are not for isolationism or pacifism – we regard either philosophy as a formula for national suicide. If other countries become belligerent, build up their armed strength, send their warships towards our shores, establish bases in countries on our borders, and declare their aggressive intentions towards us, the politics of those countries become our business. That is happening now. We are under threat – because Obama is deliberately weakening America. And his reaction to the result is to weaken America even more.

The conditions for major war develop much more easily when the U.S. is too weak. They are developing as we speak. 

To a meaningful extent, the significant increase we’ve seen in unrest around the globe since 2010 has been made possible, and inevitable, by the retraction of American power. Even where we still have power in place, it has become increasingly obvious that we aren’t going to use it. 

We quote from a website interestingly named Liberty Unyielding. The article on the extreme folly of the Obama administration’s moves to weaken America is by Commander Jennifer Dyer, now retired from the US navy. (Her own blog is at Theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com):

The collapse of order in the Arab nations in 2011 was the first significant stage of the process. The perception that the United States would do nothing about a Hezbollah coup in Lebanon was tested in January of that year. The perception proved to be true, and when protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, for causes both natural and manufactured, a set of radical Islamist actors – the “establishment” Muslim Brotherhood, Sunni jihadists, Iran – saw an opportunity. The establishment Muslim Brotherhood has largely won out in Tunisia, but the battle still rages among these radical actors for Egypt, Syria, and now Iraq. Lebanon is being incrementally sucked into the maelstrom as well.

In multiple venues, Russia has watched the U.S. and the West effectively back Islamists in Russia’s “near abroad”: in Turkey (with support for the now struggling Erdogan government); in the Balkans, especially Bosnia and Kosovo; and in Syria. …

There was a time when the implicit determination of the U.S. to enforce the “Pax Americana” order – the post-World War II alignments of the region – held Russia in check. The Russians still derived some security benefit from that order, after all … It appears to me, however, that 2014 will be the year in which it becomes clear that, according to Russians’ perception, they no longer benefit from the old order. If we’re not going to enforce it, Russia will do what she thinks she has to.

In fact, Moscow’s pushback against the plan for Ukraine to affiliate with the EU constitutes just such a blow for perceived Russian interests. It is of supreme importance for Westerners to not misread the recent developments. The EU and the U.S. did back down when Russia pushed hard last fall. The only ones who didn’t back down were the Ukrainian opposition. I predict Vladimir Putin will try to handle the opposition factions cleverly, as much as he can, and avoid a pitched battle with them if possible. He respects what they are willing to do. But he has no reason to respect Brussels or Washington.

And that means he has more latitude, not less, for going after the regional props to the old order, one by one. As always, Russia’s inevitable competition with China is a major driver, along with Russia’s concern about Islamism on her southern border. The whole Great Crossroads – Southwest Asia, Southeast Europe, Northeast Africa, the waterways that snake through the region – is, if not up for grabs, at least in ferment. Look wherever you like: there are almost no nations where there is not a very present menace from radicalism, or where governments and even borders are not gravely imperiled by internal dissent.

Israel is the chief standout for politically sustainable stability and continuity. Romania and Turkey seem likely to at least retain their constitutional order in the foreseeable future, but Turkey’s geopolitical orientation, in particular, is less certain. Greece and Kosovo – even Bosnia – have serious internal problems. Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia all remain in crisis at various levels. Jordan and Saudi Arabia are relatively stable, and the Arab Persian Gulf states relatively so as well. But their neighborhood is going downhill fast. Iran is riding a wave of radical confidence, and the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan.

In this tumultuous region, it’s actually a little funny that Pakistan looks stable and staid compared to Iran, Afghanistan, and neighbors west. We can hope that Islamabad’s perceived need to maintain a symmetrical stance against India will keep Pakistan’s loose federation of intransigents federated, and the nukes under central control. But as we move across South Asia, we near another boiling pot. Thailand – long an American ally and pillar of stability in the region – has been rocked in recent months by national unrest of a kind not seen in Southeast Asia for decades. Islamist radicalism is a growing threat in Indonesia, and an unpacified one in the Philippines, after more than a decade of U.S.-Philippines collaboration in fighting it.

And, of course, China is making real, transformative moves against regional security with her proclamations about air space and maritime rights off her southeast coast.

This disruptive process, like the battles for many of the Arab nations, is already underway. We’re not waiting for something to happen; it’s started.

China assumes, quite correctly, that there will be no effective pushback from the United States. But two other nations with power and means will regard it as intolerable for China to dictate conditions in Southeast Asia: Japan and Russia. The dance of realignment among these nations has implications for everyone in Central Asia and the Far East. The day may be on the horizon sooner than we think when maintaining a divided Korea no longer makes sense to at least one of the major players. The day is already here when Chinese activities in Central Asia are alarming the whole neighborhood, just as Chinese actions are in the South China Sea. …

Russia and Iran are advancing on the US through Central America:

It’s no accident that as radical leftism creeps across Central America (falsely laying claim to a noble “Bolivarian” political mantle), the maritime dispute between Nicaragua and American ally Colombia heats up – and Russia shows up to back Nicaragua and Venezuela – and so does Iran – and unrest turns into shooting and government brutality and violence in Venezuela – and Hezbollah shows up there to openly support the radical, repressive Maduro government.

Now Iran has a naval supply ship headed for Central America, very possibly with a cargo of arms that are not only prohibited by UN sanction, but capable of reaching the United States if launched from a Central American nation or Cuba.

We’re not still waiting for the shocks to start to the old order. They’ve already started. I haven’t surveyed even the half of what there is to talk about …

She looks at the latest defense cuts with dismay and considers what the consequences will be:

This is the world in which the United States plans to reduce our army to its lowest level since before World War II, and eliminate or put in storage much of its capabilities for heavy operations abroad (e.g., getting rid of the A-10 Warthogs, moving Blackhawk helicopters into the National Guard). It’s in this world that DOD proposes to cease operating half of our Navy cruisers, while delaying delivery of the carrier-based F-35 strike-fighter to the Navy and Marine Corps. These cutbacks come on top of cuts already made to training and maintenance expenditures in the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force that will affect unit readiness for years to come. …

Then comes what should be a shocking observation:

By cutting back on defense so drastically, America is deciding, in essence, to “fight fair”: to give whatever opponents emerge more of a chance to kill our soldiers, damage our interests, and drag out conflicts. …

That would be hard to believe of any American leadership – until now. It is ludicrous. Worse, it is lunatic. But Obama has never concealed or disguised his wish to weaken America’s military capacity.

The decision “to further limit our capabilities to use power in politically relevant ways” will result in “even more global unrest: more conflict, more shooting, more blood, more extortion and political thuggery menacing civil life in the world’s poorer and more vulnerable nations”, and that cannot be good for America. The point is that –

These unpleasant trends will spill over into civil life in the wealthier nations soon enough …

As it has, she points out, in Ukraine, Thailand, and Venezuela, “whether directly or through second-order consequences”.

Peace and freedom have to be tended constantly; they are not the natural state of geopolitical indiscipline, but its antithesis. …

We’re extraordinarily unprepared for the world that is shaping up around us. …

[And] a world that doesn’t want quiescent trade conditions, tolerance of dissent, the open flow of ideas, and mutual agreements, peacefully arrived at, will not have them.

That’s the world we are sentencing ourselves, for now, to live in. Perhaps we will learn from the consequences how to think again: about what it takes to guard freedom, and indeed, about what freedom actually is. 

It is Obama who needs to think again, but there is no reason to hope that he will. It could hardly be more obvious that he does not care for freedom.