From Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

The White House feigns ignorance about the objections to Freeman and says, via Robert Gibbs, ”I think people can be reasonably assured of where the president is on this and how he’ll be actively engaged in seeking Middle East peace.”

Well we aren’t assured of where he is because he placed someone in a high-level security role who, as Tapper points out, defended the Chinese crackdown on Tienanmen Square protesters and had a longstanding financial arrangement with the House of Saud. Throw in the fact that Freeman suggested that the U.S. bears responsibility for 9-11 and you can understand why people have questions about the president’s idea of credibility,

But aside from what Obama intends to do or not, Freeman’s appointment raises an issue that much of the press corps used to obsess over: the politicization of our intelligence agencies. The financial conflict of interest regarding Saudi Arabia is only one aspect. But more importantly, it is hard to believe that the president is going to get impartial, unpoliticized advice from Freeman. Is the man who published Mearsheimer and Walt’s screed on the “Israel Lobby” and who assessed responsibility for 9-11 as “exist[ing] in both directions” really the source of reliable judgment on national security matters? Or is he a propagandist for a particular viewpoint?

Gibbs can try a Scott McClellan “I have no clue what you mean” dodge for one presser, but I doubt the administration can successfully keep this up. For starters, there is a letter signed by nine congressmen, including the House Minority Leader John Boehner, asking the Inspector General to investigate Freeman’s financial ties to the Saudis. So if the president or Rahm Emanuel are asked directly, can they credibly deny knowledge of the controversy? The effort to appear clueless seems to be a strategy of limited utility.

‘Chas’ Freeman appointed chairman of the National intelligence Committee! The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and the Communist government of China surely can’t believe their luck! 

The appointment is so obviously bad for the United States that the question presents itself: in whose interests is Obama governing his country? Has he any idea of the harm he is doing to it? If he has, why does he do it? 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refuses to raise ‘human rights’ issues in her talks with the oppressive Communist Chinese government.  Exercising what she calls ‘smart power’, she smiles and smiles, while dissidents are confined.

There is, however, no indication that her visit to China is having the least effect on any of its foreign policies.   

From Canada Free Press:

The Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a group comprising some of China’s most determined activists, said the authorities had told dissidents that they would not be allowed to move freely during Mrs Clinton’s visit.

They were either placed under increased surveillance or locked in their homes and barred from receiving visitors.

Some activists were reported to have been detained by police at guesthouses outside Beijing.

Many of those who have been targeted by the Chinese authorities signed the Charter 08 petition in December. The petition, which was issued on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, called for political reform, freedom of expression and democracy in China.

It was signed by 303 intellectuals and activists, including Yu Jie, a blacklisted writer who was visited by plainclothes police on Friday.

"They said I was to receive heightened monitoring throughout Clinton’s visit, but it would end once she left," said Mr Yu.

As an expansionist Russia flexes its muscles, Hezbollah has strengthened its position with an important ally. Debka:

A Hezbollah mission, which arrived in Moscow Tuesday, Oct. 28, was taken around Russian state of the art anti-tank missile factories, including KBP in the town of Tula southwest of Moscow, DEBKAfile’s exclusive military sources report. The Lebanese visitors were treated to a live fire demonstration of various types of missile. They then ordered 3,000 missiles of different types and returned home Saturday, Nov. 1. (full report here)

Debka also reports that Tehran is footing the bill. These new Russian weapons, combined with Syria’s ground-to-air missiles, means Israel will find the balance of military power dangerously altered. Hezbollah also used Chinese C-130 anti-ship missiles to great effect during the 2006 war. Russia and China have been the most terrifying obstacles to the UN security council’s attempt to deal with Iran.

In Communist China, children were urged to work on their parents and grandparents to make them conform to Mao’s will in the The Cultural Revolution. Likewise children in Russia and its satellites during the Soviet nightmare were directed to instruct their elders, and to betray them if they did not conform. The same was done to turn children into instruments of the state and against their families in Nazi Germany. Now it begins in the United States of America!  This from Little Green Footballs:

The Obama campaign’s attempted use of children to influence their parents is absolutely open and blatant. Why doesn’t this outrage people? This is political cynicism of an amazing degree.

Barack Obama | Change We Need | The Talk.

Do’s & Don’ts

Do share your personal reasons for voting for Barack Obama;

Do have confidence — your opinion matters to people who care about you;

Do read up on Barack’s positions on the issues you know matter to them;

Do find a good time when both you and they will be open to a conversation;

Do talk to them in person if you live nearby, or on the phone if you don’t;

Do ask your friends to talk to their parents and grandparents as well;

Don’t worry about knowing everything about policy positions before you have this conversation;

Don’t feel defensive. Stay calm, cool and collected;

Don’t wait until the last minute — it might take a few conversations for you to convince them, so start as early as possible;

Don’t catch them at a bad time — make sure you have their attention and enough time to have a conversation.

Unbelievable. And it gets worse.

Ideas to Get the Conversation Started

Approaching your parents about who they are voting for can be intimidating if you’ve never talked about politics with them before. But this campaign has been built by supporters sharing their stories about what inspires them and why they want to see change in this country. Here are some ideas for ways you can talk to your parents about why you support Barack:

Call or ask in person if they saw the debate and what they thought about it.Tell them why you are voting for Obama and why it’s important to you.

Print out for them information on some issues you know are important.

Share Barack’s speech from the Democratic National Convention or Meet Barack, a video about who Barack Obama is, where he comes from, and what his values are.

Email them and tell them why it’s important to you that they vote for Obama.

Think about their perspective. If they are Republican, or are concerned about Barack’s policies, think about where they are coming from and what makes them think the way that they do.

 

It seems likely that the man who wins the presidential race gets the booby-prize. The new president’s task would daunt Hercules.

The difficulty of guiding and protecting America, leading the West, and keeping guard over the whole seething world at this point in human affairs should be too formidable for any man or woman of normal intelligence to think of tackling it.

Either both candidates have a measure of self-confidence in their capabilities amounting to almost lunatic self-delusion, or both are astonishingly blind to what they’d be undertaking.

America is in the grip of an economic crisis that no man and his dogs can save it from. Only time and free economic activity can eventually restore confidence and prosperity. But both candidates propose regulation: one of them full-blown socialism. Their remedies can only make the crisis worse. The winner will be blamed and damned for that, but even if he should decide not to regulate, blame and cursing is what he’ll get.

The world is threatened by the dark regressive force of militant Islam; by proliferating nuclear arms in the hands of evil men; by an aggressive Russia and the rising power of Communist China; and by the slow but steady pre-emptive capitulation of an ignominious Western Europe to all these threats. One candidate seems not to grasp the reality of the dangers, and might even have sympathy with the ideologies behind them. Neither candidate could bring himself to warn Islam, or the evil despots, or Vladimir Putin, or the Chinese potentates, that America is willing to use its military might to force them to change their ways. Without that threat and a manifest resolution to carry it out, nothing will stop them.

While we fall ever deeper into debt with China; while Russian warships cruise the Caribbean and Russian arms and technology strengthen our enemies in South America and the Middle East; while every day Islam advances further until it can overwhelm us; our Don Quixote in the White House will go to war against the weather. Some will praise him for that, no doubt, until real disaster ruins him and them.

In the light of all this, competing for the presidency looks very like competing for the captaincy of the Titanic.

If one of the candidates should suddenly see clearly what he will be confronted by if he wins, he might do everything he can to hand the victory and the burden to the other. Perhaps John McCain is doing just that. It’s the only plausible explanation for his failure to use the potent ammunition he’s got against Barack Obama, to defeat him in the contest for the dreadful job of leading us to shipwreck.

Jillian Becker

October 2008

 Communist tyrannies typically use people as pixels in vast and spectacular displays of perfectly rehearsed co-ordination. The opening ceremony of the Olympic games in Beijing was the latest example. 

Writing chiefly about the Russian invasion of Georgia, George Will comments in Townhall:

What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

This year’s August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world’s preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremony featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

 

 Front Page Magazine reports:

Uighur Islamic separatists killed eight people during a rash of suicide bombings on August 9, in the latest in a series of brazen terrorist attacks inside the communist police state. Terrorists targeted a dozen government offices with home-made explosives, just one day after the Turkistan Islamic Party released a video threatening to attack public transportation during the Games.

Earlier in the week, two Muslims drove a truck into a group of paramilitary police in Xinjiang province, then attacked the officers with knives, throwing explosives into their barracks. Sixteen officers died in the brazen attack. A local Communist Party official reported the two attackers had prepared written statements that declared, “they had to wage ‘holy war.’”

To most Western observers, the very existence of Chinese Muslims comes as a surprise. However,as previously reported in FrontPage, followers of Islam (mostly Sunnis) make up an estimated 1%-2% of China’s population – approximately 30 million people.

The Hui people, numbering around 20 million, practice Islamic dietary laws and other customs, but very rarely engage in jihadist violence. However, the nation’s 8.5 million Uighurs present a challenge to Chinese authorities. Located near the Pakistan and Afghanistan borders, the north-west province of Xinjiang is home to these Turkic Muslims, whose language is closer to Turkish than Chinese, and whose women often wear buhrkas. Many of the area’s tens of thousands of mosques have been financed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Uighurs have never accepted Communist rule. The cycle of sporadic unrest and subsequent crackdowns by Chinese authorities has persisted for decades … 

For the most part, Western media – using the struggles of Tibet as their touchstone – frame the attacks during the Beijing Olympics as part of “a local ethnic conflict” between the Uighurs and China’s culturally and ethnically distinct Han majority.

However, Dr Walid Phares, the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, charges both parties with denial: “As under the Russians in Chechnya it looks like the Communists in China are battling another form of totalitarianism to come: Jihadism.”

One of those conflicts – like the Iran-Iraq war or the Soviet-Afghan war – which has no side worth cheering for.