… from bitter experience, warns against the Democrats’ socialist policies:

These extracts are from an article by Ryan Mauro at Front Page:

The House of Representatives began its hearings on Wednesday regarding the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The picture painted by sworn testimonies is one of extreme negligence and incompetence on the part of the Obama administration in protecting our fellow citizens in the field. The Obama administration is also under fire for its embarrassing insistence that the tragedy wasn’t a pre-planned terrorist attack until a mound of evidence forced it to reverse course, long after the truth became obvious. 

The need for strong security at U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya was more than apparent. The country was in a state of civil war a year ago, and violent incidents are common. The central government lacks authoritative control, and militias, including ones of jihadist orientation, are all over the war-torn country. Al-Qaeda-type terrorists are known to be organized in Libya. Ambassador Stevens himself feared that he was on an Al-Qaeda hit list. Special precautions on the anniversary of 9/11 should have been a common-sense measure. 

The House heard the story of Eric Nordstrom, whose job it was to oversee security for American diplomats in Libya. In both March and July, Nordstrom urged the State Department to maintain security in Benghazi because current forces were “overwhelmed and could not guarantee our protection.” He didn’t hear back. Nordstrom says he was told by a senior State Department official that he shouldn’t request reinforcements again because “there would be too much political cost.”

“Too much political cost” for the Obama administration to maintain security for the US legation in Banghazi? What might that “political cost” be? One can only suppose that Obama and his incompetent Secretary of State didn’t want to show any sign that the US recognized such a thing as Arab Islamic terrorism.

But there is such a thing. And trying to substitute wishes for reality is a formula for disaster.

Lt. Col. Andy Wood has a similar story. He led a 16-man Site Security Team in Tripoli from February 12 to August 14. He was told, “You’ve got to do with less.” He says that Stevens wanted his team to stay through August and the U.S. embassy was worried when they left.

Wood further testified that “diplomatic security remained weak” and “The RSO [regional security officer] struggled to obtain additional personnel there, but was never able to attain the numbers he felt comfortable with.” The State Department says the RSO never made a request for more forces and that Wood’s team was replaced with one of equal capability.

We think Andy Wood is telling the truth. We think the State Department is so used to lying that it can’t stop.

There was a steady stream of warnings about the situation on the ground. The consulate was actually attacked twice before with an explosive creating a hole in the gate “big enough for forty men to go through” on June 6. One memo documented 230 security incidents and said there was a “HIGH” risk of U.S. personnel coming under attack. On August 27, the State Department issued a travel advisory cautioning against trips to Libya. Stevens told a retired senior military official not to come.

A travel advisory against trips to Libya? So someone in the State Department possessed some common sense. (A pro-American mole perhaps?) But a little common sense wasn’t enough to spread realism through the whole castle dedicated to lies. So what was anticipated, but not guarded against, happened:

On September 11, 2012, only five U.S. agents and four militiamen were protecting the consulate. The attackers broke through the perimeter in just 15 minutes. Back-up forces could not arrive in time to foil the attack and save Stevens and his colleagues.

Did the terrible death of the ambassador and three of his staff shock Obama and Hillary Clinton into a realization that their policy is lethal? D0 they care if it is?

Apparently not. The substituting of make-believe for facts continues apace, quickens, heats up. Their instincts command: “LIE again. SAY it wasn’t Arab Islamic Terrorism. SAY it was America’s fault because someone in America had produced an an-Islam video that they’d aired over in Egypt to rouse a protest on the same day the massacre was carried out in Libya. LIE, LIE, AND LIE AGAIN.”    

The inability of the U.S. government to convey basic facts to the American public in the aftermath is also unsettling….

“Inability?”  No – refusal! “Unsettling”? No – outrageous! Much as we appreciate Ryan Mauro’s article, we think he is understating the moral case at this point.

But we hope he is right when he predicts:

The Obama administration is in serious trouble if it is discovered that the [Libyan] militia hired to protect the consulate included conspirators in the attack. It is reported that an electronic intercept show the militia’s leader asked his men to stand down in advance of the attack. He is a member of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood and one of his commanders is the brother of Brotherhood cleric Ali Al-Salabi. Who made the decision to hire an Islamist militia to guard an American facility?

So now we know. So determined were Obama and Hillary Clinton to pursue their fantasy that the enemy of the US is it’s friend and ally, that they actually hired Muslim Brotherhood militants to guard the US legation! 

The Arabic paper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reported on October 7 that the militia had complained about being inadequately prepared for an attack. One of the consulate’s Libyan guards claims that he was informed on August 28 about a possible forthcoming attack on the facility. He says he was told on September 9 that there was intelligence about an attack timed for an anniversary …

Another guard says that on the morning of September 11, the consulate sent a request for additional security and then canceled it.

Who canceled it? Why?

The State Department has responded with unacceptable excuses. It claims that it never believed that the attack was the spontaneous work of outraged protesters. Yet, White House spokesman Jay Carney incredulously said on September 14, “These protests were in reaction to a video that had spread to the region. We have no information to suggest it was a pre-planned attack.” U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice said on September 16, “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.” …

Lie, lie, and lie again. 

The Libyans were loudly telling us that it was a well-planned terrorist attack. …

But the State Department went on denying it.

And even now will admit no fault:

The State Department is holding to the line that the security at the consulate was adequate based on what was known. The attack was “unprecedented” and therefore, it could not have been reasonably anticipated. This is yet another disingenuous and unacceptable excuse from the Obama administration. Al-Qaeda has carried out similar attacks with fighters on facilities many times before. Everyone knew Al-Qaeda was in the country and had sympathetic militias available in the region. Ambassador Stevens himself felt inadequately protected from the jihadist threat howling at his door.

In the Benghazi fiasco, a wealth of warnings were available for anyone with eyes to see. Yet on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on the U.S. in recent history, our consulate in the backyard of our enemies was left pitifully fortified. Threats were not taken seriously, and four Americans were left to the wolves.

To Arab Islamic terrorists pursuing the jihad that is being persistently waged against us, and that Obama and his cohorts refuse to recognize –  and so aid and abet.

One important question not yet asked  – or not loudly enough for the public to learn the answer:

Why was Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 when an attack was most to be expected, rather than in the better (if not well) guarded embassy in Tripoli?

Here’s a CBS report that gives us quite a nice warm feeling to start with:

One-fifth of American adults have no religious affiliation, and this number is increasing rapidly.

The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a fast pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15 percent to just under 20 percent of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6 percent of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14 percent).

This large and growing group of Americans is less religious than the public at large on many conventional measures, including frequency of attendance at religious services and the degree of importance they attach to religion in their lives.

But then it becomes rather chilling:

But the survey may be affected by a differing view of the words “religion” and “spiritual.”

A new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, conducted jointly with the PBS television program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, finds that many of the country’s 46 million unaffiliated adults are religious or spiritual in some way.

Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68 percent). More than half say they often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58 percent) …

How is that “religious or spiritual”? We are deeply connected with nature and the earth.

… while more than a third classify themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious” (37 percent), …

We never can understand what they mean by “spiritual” if not simply mental or emotional.

… and one-in-five (21 percent) say they pray every day.  …

… The mildly lunatic.

The lower the age group, the less likely people are to be affiliated.

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans – sometimes called the rise of the “nones” – is largely driven by generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones.

As new generations have always replaced older generations, it cannot by itself explain anything. The question is, why is a rising generation now  less religious, or at least less “affiliated”?

A third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation (32 percent), compared with just one-in-ten who are 65 and older (9 percent). And young adults today are much more likely to be unaffiliated than previous generations were at a similar stage in their lives.

In addition, this report contains capsule summaries of some leading theories put forward by scholars in an attempt to explain the root causes of the rise of the “nones.” These theories run the gamut from a backlash against the entanglement of religion and politics to a global relationship between economic development and secularization.

To interpret “a global relationship between economic development and secularization”: As people rise from poverty, they tend to become better informed (or even educated) and less superstitious.

But that doesn’t apply to the many Americans who have remained religious despite prosperity and education. Why are their children leaving the churches and even becoming happily godless?

Our explanation: Religion has had its day. It has been dying out since the Enlightenment. The pace of its dying out has been quickening ever since Darwin destroyed the notion of a creator god. If the West can defeat Islam, the long religious period of history could be over.

Humanity waking from a nightmare!

We took this  extract from an article by Abdulateef al-Mulhim in the Saudi Arabian paper Arab News: 

The question now is who is the real enemy of the Arab world?

The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people.

These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars. …

He describes the atrocities. They provide a true and dreadful picture of the Arab world.

Then he goes on to relate some history, far more accurate than the usual Arab accounts of the same events:

On May 14, 1948 the state of Israel was declared. And just one day after that, on May 15, 1948 the Arabs declared war on Israel to get back Palestine. The war ended on March 10, 1949. It lasted for nine months, three weeks and two days. The Arabs lost the war and called this war Nakbah (catastrophic war). The Arabs gained nothing and thousands of Palestinians became refugees.

And in 1967, the Arabs led by Egypt under the rule of Gamal Abdul Nasser, went to war with Israel and lost more Palestinian land [it was never “Palestinian” land, but never mind that now – JB] and made more Palestinian refugees who are now on the mercy of the countries that host them. The Arabs called this war Naksah (upset). The Arabs never admitted defeat in both wars and the Palestinian cause got more complicated.

And now, with the never ending Arab Spring, the Arab world has no time for the Palestinians refugees or Palestinian cause, because many Arabs are refugees themselves and under constant attacks from their own forces. Syrians are leaving their own country, not because of Israeli planes dropping bombs on them. It is the Syrian Air Force which is dropping the bombs. And now, Iraqi Arab Muslims, most intelligent brains, are leaving Iraq for the east. In Yemen, the world’s saddest human tragedy play is being written by the Yemenis. In Egypt, the people in Sinai are forgotten.

Finally, if many of the Arab states are in such disarray, then what happened to the Arabs’ sworn enemy (Israel)? Israel now has the most advanced research facilities, top universities and advanced infrastructure.

Many Arabs don’t know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than many Arab states and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy more political and social rights than some places in the Arab World. Wasn’t one of the judges who sent a former Israeli president to jail an Israeli-Palestinian?

The Arab Spring showed the world that the Palestinians are happier and in better situation than their Arab brothers who fought to liberate them from the Israelis. Now, it is time to stop the hatred and wars and start to create better living conditions for the future Arab generations.

How many fellow Arabs will he persuade to his point of view? How many quietly share it?

People died, Obama lied. Yes, that happened in Libya last month, when Ambassador Stevens and three other American were murdered by terrorists, having been refused the protection the ambassador had asked the State Department for. And Obama and his henchwomen went on lying and lying about what happened. (You need a bitter sense of Huma to appreciate the appalling story to the full.)

But that is not the story that Thomas Sowell deals with in the article we appreciatively quote from here. He is writing about a speech Obama made in 2007 in which he typically lied. Dr Sowell calls Obama “Phony in Chief“.

When President Barack Obama and others on the left are not busy admonishing the rest of us to be “civil” in our discussions of political issues, they are busy letting loose insults, accusations and smears against those who dare to disagree with them.

Like so many people who have been beaten in a verbal encounter, and who can think of clever things to say the next day, after it is all over, President Obama, after his clear loss in his debate with Mitt Romney, called Governor Romney a “phony.”

Innumerable facts, however, show that it is our Commander in Chief who is Phony in Chief. A classic example was his speech to a predominantly black audience at Hampton University on June 5, 2007. [ See the video below.] That date is important, as we shall see.

In his speech — delivered in a ghetto-style accent that Obama doesn’t use anywhere except when he is addressing a black audience — he charged the federal government with not showing the same concern for the people of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit as they had shown for the people of New York after the 9/11 attacks, or the people of Florida after hurricane Andrew hit.

Departing from his prepared remarks, he mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.

Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York and Florida because the people there were considered to be “part of the American family.” But the people in New Orleans — predominantly black — “they don’t care about as much,” according to Barack Obama.

If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it – rub people’s emotions raw to hype their resentments. And this was Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.

Why is the date of this speech important? Because, less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn’t present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn’t there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.

Unlike Jeremiah Wright’s church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against – repeat, AGAINST – the legislation which included the waiver.

When he gave that demagogic speech, in a feigned accent and style, it was world class chutzpah and a rhetorical triumph. He truly deserves the title Phony in Chief. …

Obama’s true believers may not want to know the truth. But there are millions of other people who have simply projected their own desires for a post-racial America onto Barack Obama. These are the ones who need to be confronted with the truth, before they repeat the mistake they made when they voted four years ago.

This is from Fox News:

A Michigan hybrid battery plant built with $150 million in taxpayer funds is putting workers on furlough before a single battery has been produced. …

Workers at the Compact Power manufacturing facilities in Holland, Mich., run by LG Chem, have been placed on rotating furloughs, working only three weeks per month based on lack of demand for lithium-ion cells.

The facility, which was opened in July 2010 with a groundbreaking attended by Obama, has yet to produce a single battery for the Chevrolet Volt, the troubled electric car from General Motors. The plant’s batteries also were intended to be used in Ford’s electric Focus.

Production of the taxpayer-subsidized Volt has been plagued by work stoppages, and the effect has trickled down to companies and plants that build parts for it – including the batteries.

“Considering the lack of demand for electric vehicles, despite billions of dollars from the Obama administration that were supposed to stimulate it, it’s not surprising what has happened with LG Chem. Just because a ton of money is poured into a product does not mean that people will buy it,” [said] Paul Chesser, an associate fellow with the National Legal and Policy Center.

Or, to put it another way – you can’t buck the market. As Friedrich Hayek says.

The 650,000-square-foot, $300 million facility was slated to produce 15,000 batteries per year, while creating hundreds of new jobs. But to date, only 200 workers are employed at the plant by by the South Korean company. Batteries for the Chevy Volts that have been produced have been made by an LG plant in South Korea.

The factory was partly funded by a $150 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. LG also received sizeable tax breaks from the local government, saving nearly $50 million in property taxes over 15 years and another $2.5 million annually in business taxes. Landing the factory was hailed as a coup when shovels first hit the ground.

“You are leading the way in showing how manufacturing jobs are coming right back here to the United States of America,” Obama told workers at the ground-breaking ceremony. …

Chesser said no amount of government subsidies can counter the practical problems posed by plug-in cars.

“Electric car batteries do not perform much better than they did 100 years ago,” he said. “Research has not conquered the battery storage issue, and therefore the electric transportation ‘stimulus’ did not boost the ‘technology of the future,’ but instead a century-old technology as far as performance and capability goes.”

He added that the LG Chem plant’s problems show that the unpopularity of electric cars despite heavy taxpayer subsidies has had more widespread negative effects than most realize.

“Billions of dollars were put into Volt research, and Ford received $5.9 billion in stimulus loans to retrofit plants to produce [electric vehicles],” Chesser said. “The battery companies like LG Chem that were supposed to service them have no customers to speak of. Their existence was solely based on access to taxpayer money.

“Had it been private investors rather than government bureaucrats making the decision, there either would have been a reality check about the industry, or only those who made individual decisions to invest would have lost their money, not taxpayers.”

Obama picks losers. As Mitt Romney says.

(Hat-tip for the Fox report, our reader and commenter Robert Yarber)

Berkeley … Peace Corps … Democratic Party … Middle East …

Christopher Stevens, US Ambassador to Libya, bien pensant par excellence, walked a sure path of romantic self-deception to an early, cruel, and violent death.

Al Gore blamed “the altitude” of Denver for Obama’s feeble performance in the presidential candidates’ debate with Mitt Romney last week.

(From Wiki: “Denver is nicknamed the Mile-High City because its official elevation is exactly one mile or 5,280 feet (1,609.344 m) above sea level, making it one of the highest major cities in the United States.”)

Inevitable association – the story of Icarus:

Icarus’s father, Daedalus,  engineer and inventor extraordinary, made wings for himself and his son so that they could escape from imprisonment on the island of Crete by flying away from it. He made the wings with wax and feathers, and warned Icarus not to fly too high, “too close to the sun”, because if he did his wings would melt. Icarus did not heed his father’s warning. He flew too high, his wings melted, and he fell into the sea and died.

It was the altitude that killed him. He wasn’t equipped to fly that high.

Same with Obama.

Never thought we’d agree with Al Gore about anything.

Both sides of the civil war in Syria torture children to death.

This is from Front Page, by Frank Crimi:

One of the more loathsome horrors of Syria’s civil war has been the deliberate targeting of Syrian children by both pro-government and rebel forces, barbarity which includes imprisonment, rape, torture, sexual abuse, murder, and use as human shields.

That gruesome reality has been chillingly documented in recently released reports by the United Nations [see that pig flying? – JB] and two British-based humanitarian groups working with Syrian refugees, War Child and Save the Children.

While children in war zones are normally caught in the crossfire between opposing forces, the purposeful targeting of young children, according to the July 2012 War Child report, make the Syrian conflict “disturbingly unique”.

Well, the War Child report is just plain wrong there. Palestinian terrorists have been purposely targeting Israeli children for decades – and killing their own (see our post The sacrifice of children to Allah, August 19, 2011). The Lord’s Army in Africa forces children to cook and eat their parents (see our post The Lord’s Army of child slave cannibals, June 14, 2011). We could make a long list. But the point is not whether what the Syrians are doing is unique, but that they are doing it.

They are –

 … abducting children and imprisoning them in former schools which have been converted into specially designed torture centers.

There the children are –

… beaten, blindfolded, and subjected to stress positions, whipped with heavy electrical cables, and scarred by cigarette burns.

One of these victims was a 15-year-old boy named Khalid, tortured in his old school where his father had once been the principal, who said, “They hung me up from the ceiling by my wrists, with my feet off the ground. Then I was beaten. I was terrified.”

In some instances, captors would bind the children’s hands together so tightly that, according to one victim, “the veins in their wrists would start to bleed. I witnessed so many children dying from this torture”.

For some, the maltreatment inflicted was a form of “sexual torture,” sexual violence levied on both boys and girls, some as young as 12, which included “rape, penetration with objects, sexual groping, prolonged forced nudity, and electroshock and beatings to genitalia”. …

The type of sadistic punishment meted out to the children followed no formal protocol, but rather, according to a child sufferer who was subjected to electric shocks, “depended on what mood these men were in … They showed no sympathy, no mercy”.

This abject cruelty was pointedly expressed in the torture and death of a 6-year-old boy named Alaa, who was slated for torture because his father was an anti-government activist wanted by the Syrian regime. … Over the course of three days, the little boy was tortured, beaten and starved by his captors, with one 16-year-old witness to Alaa’s suffering saying, “I watched him die… He was terrified all the time. …” 

They speak of the terror, but not of the pain. How can one not think of the pain? Of six year old children in pain. Think how they must have cried.

These children are housed like animals as well, inhumanely incarcerated in small, overcrowded rooms, often shared with decomposing bodies. Then, as they await their assigned date with their torturer, they are starved for days on end, with their only drinkable water available from the cell’s toilet. …

Children outside [these]  deadly confines face equally lethal dangers, such as being used for target practice. …

One Syrian woman  … witnessed two armed militia men betting on which of them could shoot an 8-year-old boy playing alone in a street. … The men shot the boy, but their shots didn’t kill him right away. As he lay bleeding, the boy’s mother tried to reach him but was kept back by the men, leaving the boy to die hours later alone in the street outside his home. …

While the Syrian government may treat a child’s life as worthless, it has discovered they possess some practical value … serving as human shields … placing them on the front of government tanks and armored personnel carriers as they advance into an opposition held area.

Pretty pointless really, as the opposition cares no more for children than the government does. Using children as shields can only work against people with moral principles and a conscience.

One Syrian man named Nabil witnessed such a barbarous and cowardly act when he [saw]  two tanks entering his village with “children attached to them, tied up by their hands and feet, and by their torsos,” a sight which made Nabil feel so helpless that all he could do was cry.

Tanks “protected” by the bodies of living children – who will not deter the other side from shooting at the tank or blowing it up.

They must be very religious, the people who do such a thing. 

Of course, none of this … comes as a complete shock given that pro-government forces had signaled their contempt for children early on in the Syrian uprising, disregard expressed in the form of regime snipers deliberately shooting children who were part of street protests.

In fact, so distasteful was the sight of child protesters to the Syrian regime that it would take its vengeance by attacking schools. In one village, pro-regime militia went to a grade school, picked 50 children at random, many of whom were as young as 6-years-old, and proceeded to tear out their fingernails….

While most of the acts of violent child assault and murder have been committed by Syrian security forces and pro-regime militias, such as the dreaded Shabiha militias, the hands of opposition forces are far from clean. … The Free Syrian Army (FSA) forcibly [recruited] children, some as young as 8-years-old, into their ranks. …

Syrian Christian children have been targeted, along with their families, by elements of the FSA and an assortment of armed Islamist and al-Qaeda-linked terror groups as part of a systematic cleansing of Syrian Christians.

Cleansing: derived from the iniquitous phrase “ethnic cleansing”, the word has become a euphemism for mass murder.

That cleansing includes the killing of whole families, the sacking of churches, and the forcible evacuation of Christians from towns and cities, such as the forced Christian exodus of nearly 50,000 people from Homs in which armed Islamists murdered more than 200 Christians, including entire families with young children. …

As Rob Williams, CEO of War Child, has said, “The Syrian conflict must now rank as one of the worst for the depth and scale of abuses against children,” adding that it “will scar Syria for generations”.

If Rob Williams means that a nation with too few children is “scarred”, he may be right. If he means that the parents of the murdered children will be “scarred” he must surely be right. But if he means that Syria’s reputation, as a people, will be scarred, we must say that we very much doubt it. Who will hold the torturing to death of children against the torturing killers? Christians? They forgive. Western opinion generally? There is no precedent to suggest it. So who will remember those children, and refuse to forgive?