From Redstate:

You are probably not surprised to find that Poland and the Czech Republic are not the only loyal and faithful American allies getting screwed by the Obama Administration these days. The ongoing drama in Honduras is an outrage and a disgrace, but not because the Hondurans have done anything wrong. It’s because the Obama administration is actively intervening on behalf of a thug would-be dictator whom the Hondurans properly and legally drove from power.

Shame on you, Barack.

Follow closely, because this is an extremely important and telling example of the kind of foreign policy we are getting from Barack Obama. Let’s review what’s been going on in Honduras this year, and how the Obama administration has come down completely on the side of tyrants, cheaters, and marxists They’ve done it deliberately, and in keeping with their overall global policy of rejecting freedom and snuggling up to the thugs and bandits of the world [remember Iranian protesters after the fraud election? remember soldiers shooting them? remember Obama’s reaction?]…

Honduras is one of the most impoverished countries in central America, but it has been and remains a democratic republic in a region currently overshadowed by several evil dictators who are intent on spreading the evils of drug-money fueled marxism and tyranny to the entire region: Fidel & Raul Castro of Cuba, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and most of all, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. [A cynic like me might add Daniel Ortega in neighboring Nicaragua to the list, as he’s lobbying to change their constitution to allow him to run for president again.]

Morales, Correa, and Chavez were ALL elected in free elections, then seized power by one means or another, and turned republics into their personal tin-pot dictatorships. In the crisis currently underway, Zelaya tried to do the same thing…

Read the rest of it here.

The Blog (of the Weekly Standard) brings us this piece of dumbfounding news:

In a little noticed interview with the Daily Beast (presumably little noticed because serious people don’t read the Daily Beast), Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Barack Obama do more than just refuse to support an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites — the American president must give the order to shoot down Israeli aircraft as they cross Iraqi airspace:

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

The reference here is to the USS Liberty which was fired on by Israel during the Six Days’ War in June 1967. It was a friendly fire error. (See Michael Oren’s article on the incident here.) Brzezinski is implying that Israel attacked the ship deliberately, and that the US should avenge it. To him, Israel is America’s enemy and not Iran.

Contrary to Brezinski’s half-hearted disclaimer that no one wishes for such an outcome, there are plenty on the left who would delight in a pitched battle between the United States and Israel. Democrats in Congress routinely support resolutions affirming Israel’s right to take whatever steps it deems necessary to assure its own national defense. And Obama has at least paid lip service to the concept. But hostility to Israel among the rank and file is very real on the left — and among “realists.”

So conjure the image — the Obama administration sending U.S. aircraft up to protect Iran’s airspace and it’s nuclear installations from an attack by a democracy that is one of America’s closest allies. Unfortunately, this may not be so hard to imagine in Israel, where the number of people who believe Obama is pro-Israel is at just 4 percent — and falling. And given Obama’s (literally) submissive posture to the Saudis, his indulgence of the Iranians, and his simultaneously hard-line approach to Israel, it seems even some of Obama’s supporters can savor the possibility of a “reverse Liberty.”

Zbignew Brzezinski , who was National Security Adviser (1977-1981) to that 0ther anti-Semite Jimmy Carter, is now influential again as adviser to Obama.

Two articles in Investor’s Business Daily (find them here and here) describe the perils we are faced with from nuclear aggressors now that our defenses are being weakened.

First, this:

The Associated Press reports that ElBaradei’s self-styled nuclear “watchdog,” the IAEA, has concluded that Iran’s Islamofascist regime can now design and produce a nuclear bomb, according to an unpublished section of its analysis of Iran.

The IAEA also believes Tehran has “probably tested” a key component for an implosion-based nuclear warhead, and has been developing a missile chamber to carry such a warhead…

Why should all this be in a “secret” section of an IAEA report? U.S., British, French and German intelligence all report that Tehran has been at work on an atomic warhead. The only need for secrecy is to shield this defective, incompetent agency from embarrassment.

Earlier this month, diplomats gave ElBaradei a standing ovation at his going-away party…

It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that ElBaradei, who has held his “nuclear watchdog” position for well over a decade, is actually one of the most dangerous men in the world today.

He has gone out of his way to play down the genocidal threat that terror-sponsoring states in general, and Iran in particular, constitute. And he has emphatically insisted that the free world negotiate with the gang of fanatic mullahs and their henchmen who run that country. Remember: They’re the same ones who’ve vowed to wipe Israel off the map, and who also seek a world without the U.S.

Moreover, ElBaradei has almost certainly suppressed evidence discovered by his agency of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons development — in the name of peace, of course.

It’s like some twisted nightmare — an agency whose supposed purpose is to prevent the spread of the deadliest weapons instead hiding the fact that a terrorist regime is building them. And not only is its director not censured — he gets showered with awards and a grand send-off for presiding over such inexcusable acts.

The bad dream continued with the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland last week being marked by the U.S. scrapping plans for long-range missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, two of our strongest allies in Europe. Instead, we’ll have sea-based sensors and interceptors that can stop only short-range missiles from Iran or Russia.

Unfortunately, it’s no nightmare. Our leaders being asleep to the growing threat of nuclear terror is very much a reality.

Or maybe they don’t want to defend America?

Next, this:

“Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked at a “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran in 2005. “But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved.”

He added that Iran had a strategic “war preparation plan” for what it called “the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”

A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high above America.

This is where the Airborne Laser aircraft program, canceled by this administration, would come in handy.

Or it could be an upgraded Shahab launch, masked as a satellite attempt and flying over where the European defense sites would have been. It would wreak near total devastation on America’s technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure.

The threat is called electromagnetic pulse. Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., calls it the one way we could lose the war on terror. As he notes, a single nuclear warhead, detonated at the right altitude, would interact with the Earth’s atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating to the surface at the speed of light.

Nobody is harmed or killed immediately by the blast. But life in the U.S., the world’s only superpower and largest economy, comes to a screeching halt as a country dependent on 21st-century technology instantaneously regresses almost a century in time.

Millions could die as hospital systems shut down and as rail and air traffic controls collapse. Farmers would be unable to harvest crops, and distributors couldn’t get goods to market. Energy production would cease. Computers and PCs would become large paperweights. Telephones, even cell phones, wouldn’t work.

Retaliation would be futile and meaningless — if it were even possible — since communications with our deployed forces overseas, including ballistic missile submarines, might be cut off. A presidential authorization might be impossible to send, so fried might be our communications infrastructure.

To defend Europe — and American troops stationed there — against the possibility of a missile attack from Iran requires a European third site. We now maintain one ground-based missile site in Fort Greely, Alaska, and a second at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates cite intelligence indicating that Iran’s long-range missile development is going slower than previously thought. So ignore that Iranian Omid satellite. There’s time, they say, and for now our existing Aegis and other defenses should do fine.

But shouldn’t we have our long-range defenses ready before their offense is?

The fact is, we simply have too few Aegis-equipped and SM-3 armed vessels to provide defenses for Japan and Hawaii from the North Korean threat, both long- and short-range. Where are the Aegis ships to patrol the waters between Iran and Europe — or off our own coasts, for that matter? If the administration is planning a massive shipbuilding program, we missed the announcement…

President Reagan’s dream of a layered missile defense defending against, rather than merely avenging, a nuclear attack is being suffocated in the crib.

Now the only option may be for Israel to take out the nuclear facilities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and save us from our folly.

Or we can wait for the day when nuclear-armed missiles are in the hands of a man who wants to wipe Israel off the map as he waits for the arrival of the 12th Imam and the apocalypse.

From The Blog:

If Iran can credibly hold Washington and New York City at risk, we’ll be essentially locked in to a Cold War style deterrence paradigm with Tehran — a country that will have no problem unleashing their proxies against US interests and allies (like the Soviets did) without fear of serious conventional reprisal.

The president has at his disposal two tools to ensure that Iran can never threaten the United States: either an offensive, decapitating, conventional strike on Tehran’s leadership, ballistic missile inventory, and nuclear weapons program, or a defensive missile shield so tight a bottle rocket couldn’t slip through. In a critical juncture in history, where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans can no longer assure our security, Obama has opted for neither.

Why? For the answer, see our two posts below, Promoting American weakness and US security will depend on the kindness of (evil) strangers.

From John Hinderaker at Power Line, we learn about a cause for despair:

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke at a forum in Omsk, Siberia. Pravda reported that her speech “surprised the audience.” No wonder. The Russians in attendance must have wondered how they managed to lose the cold war:

Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world…

The former US Secretary of State surprised the audience with her speech. She particularly said that democracy was not the perfect system. “It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems,” Albright said.

America has been having hard times recently, Albright said. “We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home – they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” Albright said adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York. “My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,” the former head of the US foreign political department said.

There you have it. And Albright was Secretary of State during the relatively moderate Clinton administration. I’m afraid she speaks for most Democratic foreign policy “experts.” Promoting American weakness: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

By the way, since “overcoming the gap between the poor and the rich” is the world’s number one priority, do you suppose Albright waived her speaker’s fee, which is listed coyly as more than $40,000? No, I don’t think so, either.

There is serious trouble ahead among the nations as a result of Obama putting away American power as he creates a weak, poor, socialist state out of what has long been the strongest and most successful country in history.

Mark Steyn comments accurately on Obama’s ever more disastrous foreign policy (read all of what he writes here):

You’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington… The Europeans “negotiate” with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. “This [the breaking of the promise by the US to provide  anti-missile shields to Poland and the Czech Republic] is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. “Finally the Americans have agreed with us.”

There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.

There is no discreetly arranged “Russian concession.” Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest – especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity’s regrettable “disproportion.” The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext – that, aside from a tiny strip of land [on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean], every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

John Perazzo writes at Front Page Magazine (please read it all here):

The Apollo Alliance, which helped craft portions of the $787 billion “stimulus” legislation that the President signed into law in early 2009, exerts a powerful influence on the environmental views and policies of the Obama administration. Specifically, the Alliance had a hand in writing the “clean energy and green-collar jobs provisions” of the bill, for which $86 billion was earmarked. Apollo Alliance’s name gained some notoriety in recent weeks because of its ties to Van Jones, the communist revolutionary who resigned his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” during Labor Day weekend. But there is another highly noteworthy Jones – Jeff Jones (no relation) – who also holds a lofty post with the Apollo Alliance, and who, as such, also has the ear of the President. Remarkably, Jeff, like Van, also has a history as a communist revolutionary – with longstanding, intimate ties to domestic terrorism, no less.

Today Jeff Jones is director of the Apollo Alliance’s New York State chapter… .

In 1965 Jones joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and became active as an anti-war speaker on college campuses. In April 1967 he quit school to become the regional office coordinator of New York City’s SDS chapter, a position he held until December 1968. SDS supported America’s Communist enemies in the Cold War while denouncing the U.S. as a nation rife with bigotry, injustice, greed, and unrestrained militarism – and calling for America’s unilateral disarmament. During his tenure with SDS, Jones became a sworn enemy of the United States government. Believing that America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia was immoral, he sided openly with the North Vietnamese communists. Formally renouncing the conscientious-objector status that had been conferred on him as a result of his Quaker lineage, he began referring to himself and his ideological comrades as “communist revolutionaries.”…

By mid-June of 1969, Jones, along with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, became a leader of SDS’s most militant wing and formed a new radical organization, Weatherman. They issued a Weatherman “manifesto” eschewing nonviolence and calling for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the “mother country”; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the “white” United States on behalf of the non-white Third World…

In March 1970 Jones and his fellow Weathermen adopted a new name, the Weather Underground Organization, taking fake identities and restricting themselves exclusively to covert activities. Also in 1970, Jones and the Weather Underground issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government. The FBI launched a manhunt to track them down.

Jones would elude law-enforcement authorities for more than a decade. He lived for over a year in San Francisco with fellow fugitive and Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, who would later marry the America-hating terrorist Bill Ayers. Dohrn and Ayers, you may recall, would eventually (in the mid-1990s) give Barack Obama his start in politics when they hosted meet-and-greet events for him at their home in Chicago…

Since his capture in an October 1981 police sweep, Jones has found a home in the environmental movement, the place where many former communists have established a platform from which to promote anti-capitalist agendas and portray Western industrialized society as the scourge of the natural world…

After all those years as a communist revolutionary seeking to undermine capitalist America, Jeff Jones has finally found his way back home. Now he can pursue that same objective under the more socially acceptable auspices of the Apollo Alliance, the organization whose board of directors features that other Marxist, Van Jones – the man whom President Obama selected six months ago as his highest-level environmental adviser.

So why is anyone surprised that Obama is ruining the economy, diminishing liberty, and sucking up to despotisms of the Third World?

Today it is officially announced that Obama has broken America’s promise to Poland and the Czech Republic to supply them with anti-missile defense shields – as we said he would two weeks ago (Obama abandons Poland and Czech republic to the enemy, September 3). Why is he doing it? The Russians were furiously against the plan, so that’s one poor reason. But the main and outrageous reason is, of course, that Obama is not interested in defending America or its allies or the free(-ish) world.

At ‘the corner’ of the National Review Online, Jay Nordlinger writes:

I thought Barack Obama would be a poor and troublesome president. Did I think he would yuk it up with Hugo Chávez, smirk with Daniel Ortega about the Bay of Pigs, turn his wrath on a Central American country trying to follow its constitution, denounce President Bush abroad, bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, endorse a radical Middle Eastern view of how Israel came into being, knock Western countries that try to protect Muslim girls from unwanted shrouding, invite the Iranian regime to our Fourth of July parties, stay essentially mute in the face of counterrevolution in Iran, squeeze and panic Israel, cold-shoulder the Cuban democrats in order to warm to the Cuban dictatorship, scrap missile defense in Eastern Europe, and refuse to meet with the Dalai Lama [this item doesn’t annoy us as much – JB] — in addition to his attempts to have government eat great portions of American society? No, I did not. You?

Yes, we did. We said so, in generalized prediction. We only don’t understand why the whole country couldn’t see what Obama would set about trying to do: at home, turn America into an impoverished socialist country, and abroad, ally America with its enemies and alienate its friends.

What can be done to cure the sad condition we describe in the post below?

One way is to teach our children history – especially the history of America. Bill Bennett is taking active steps to do this. He writes:

How can we expect the next generation of Americans to protect and defend the country’s legacy if they do not know their own history? Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.” Our country’s very freedom and future hinges on education. How can we ask our children to fight, and perhaps die, for a country they do not know?

America’s love for history has always been self-propelled. Long before the ivory towers of pedagogy there were the log cabins of self-education. Men like Abraham Lincoln were voracious readers, often going to great lengths to get their hands on, and minds around, the classics. Education wasn’t limited to five days a week, seven hours a day and nine months out of the year; it was an on-going process with children often spending their few spare hours of the day reading under candlelight.

Today, our textbooks are more intent on political correctness, dulled-down event reporting and universal appeal. The dramatic and realistic story of America is mostly absent in the study of American history. Text authors, publishers and higher education experts have desiccated the rich drama and conflicts of history and replaced them with dry narratives that read more like recipe books and less like thrilling, page-turning novels.

My goal, along with a group of award-winning teachers, is to reverse this precarious trend and reshape the future of history education in America. Known as Team HOPE (History Opens Eyes), we have begun incorporating “America: The Last Best Hope” and other curriculum materials into a comprehensive and compelling narrative about our country. “Last Best Hope” does not look or read like any other textbook. It is the story of a people inextricably linked by the common threads of freedom and virtue, a story of men and women who rallied a great people behind them throughout the course of our nation’s history. In “Last Best Hope,” history is more than rote memorization or tedious facts; it is drama, romance, comedy, mystery, action, tragedy and triumph. I believe in the “warts and all” version of American history—not “warts, and that’s all.” And because of this, our project has been positively reviewed by scholars from all ideological perspectives.

This revolution we are commencing is not limited to classrooms or textbooks. Remember parents: You are a child’s first and most important teacher and the single-most effective Department of Education. President Ronald Reagan said, “Let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” As our children return to school this fall, let us actively engage and encourage their interest in history—from the dinner tables to the classrooms.

If we are to restore America’s love for its rich and great history, we must begin by telling the truth, not in a prosaic, tiresome fashion, but in a captivating and memorable way. Our story is one of great suffering and great triumph; it is what Abraham Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”

From Power Line:

There has been a surprising amount of controversy over the size of the anti-Obama administration protest in Washington [on September 12]. Liberal media have pegged it in the “tens of thousands” (or even just “thousands”) range, while some have claimed that there were as many as 2 million people there, which seems impossible [why? – JB]. There probably will never be a definitive number, but efforts to lowball the crowd are ridiculous. I have no expertise at estimating crowds, but this one was obviously huge. If you compare it, in very rough terms, to the 50,000 or so it takes to fill a stadium, it appears to be well into six figures.

I have no doubt that Washington Democrats are well aware of how many people turned out, even as their media outlets try to downplay the event. Ultimately, those media efforts will have little effect, just like the media’s silly attempt to portray anti-big government voters as “racists,” etc. The rubber will hit the road in November 2010. If present trends hold, the ruling Democrats will suffer a severe reversal that the media will not be able to avoid reporting, however much they may hate it …

It was certainly big enough to make even the the Obama-besotted editors of the New York Times feel compelled to report it. Amazingly they have done so not unfairly.