WarSclerotic

Obama Lies to Nation About Halting Iran’s Nuke Program

via Obama Lies to Nation About Halting Iran’s Nuke Program | Washington Free Beacon.

President Barack Obama was less than forthcoming with the nation Tuesday when he said that “for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of [Iran’s] nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.”

These claims are not supported by any of the facts on the ground in Iran.

Iran, in fact, has bolstered the most controversial aspects of its nuclear infrastructure, while at the same time dragging out negotiations with Western nations. Meanwhile, key economic sanctions on Tehran have been rolled back, allowing the Islamic Republic’s economy to rebound.

Contrary to Obama’s claim that the program is “halted,” Iran has actually made significant progress in all areas of its nuclear weapons infrastructure.

This includes building new nuclear reactors, which give Tehran an alternate plutonium path to a nuke, enriching uranium, and continuing critical work on ballistic missiles.

The below chart, provided by The Israel Project, outlines precisely how Iran has continued to make great progress on the nuclear front.

The President’s Address of Lies

January 21, 2015

by Daniel Greenfield

via The President’s Address of Lies | FrontPage Magazine.

 
Obama’s previous State of the Union address claimed last year would be a “breakthrough year.” In this year’s State of the Union address he announced that he would turn the page.

Turning the page on last year’s grandiose and dishonest claims is what Obama does with each new address. Each year terrorism has been permanently defeated and the economy has recovered; Al Qaeda is on the run, unemployed dentists from Poughkeepsie are learning to install solar panels and illegal aliens from Los Angeles are teaching sex ed to kindergarteners.

And then next year he comes out to announce once again that the country has recovered from the crisis that he had already announced that it had recovered from last year.

And everyone applauds.

What exactly is Obama turning the page on? Two lost wars and the lowest employed population since 1977… under his predecessor Jimmy Carter?

When everything on the last page looks so bad, then it’s time to turn the page, offer up a minor variation on the same promises about infrastructure, income inequality and education, before going back to a busy schedule of playing golf, visiting foreign countries on pseudo-vacations and ruling unilaterally without regard for the other two branches of government that don’t control the military.

There are the false claims of victory in the War on Terror. Obama claims credit for the withdrawal from Afghanistan without accepting responsibility for the defeat. There is no mention of Yemen and Libya, which showed up in his 2013 address, now that both countries have been overrun by terrorists.

Turning the page means not having to read any bad news.

Having dragged the United States into two new wars, one in Libya and one in Syria, Obama sneeringly denounces Republicans and more serious Democrats who want to drag the country “into costly conflicts that strain our military and set back our standing.” By that he means imposing new sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program, instead of letting a terrorist state have a nuclear bomb.

In fact it’s Obama, not Republicans, who brought the United States into a proxy war with Iran in Syria while at the same time allowing it to go nuclear in the single greatest act of strategic insanity in history.

Instead Obama urges that we use “all elements of our power to defeat new threats and protect our planet.” Like inviting James Taylor to play in Paris. The terrorists must have been terrified.

Obama is already claiming credit for beating ISIS, even though ISIS has actually doubled the land it controls since his airstrikes began. But that just means ISIS won’t be mentioned in the 2016 address.

The page will once again have been turned.

Obama also claims to have beaten Putin. There’s only one minor problem with that. In the real world, Russia still controls Crimea. While in the unreal world, Obama controls CNN.

After years of pitting Americans against each other and after overtly endorsing the racist #BlackLivesMatter protests which culminated in the murder of two police officers and the racist harassment of gay bars and random white people eating brunch, Obama warns against allowing “ourselves to be sorted into factions and turned against one another.”

That is followed by equally false and misleading claims of an economic recovery. While Obama claims to have created jobs for Americans, in fact net job growth went to immigrants in mostly low-wage jobs. And the vast majority of the new jobs were part-time jobs.

Workers need to get two or three of those jobs that Obama is touting just to make ends meet.

Obama lies about putting Americans back to work while presiding over an economy in which immigrants have taken low-paying part-time jobs while Americans dropped out of the workforce.

But having just unilaterally and illegally passed amnesty, to take away even more jobs from Americans, Obama warns that bills “refighting past battles on immigration” will be vetoed.

This particular past was very recent, but when you’re turning the page on how you screwed Americans only a few months ago, then it’s suddenly the very distant past.

Somewhere between the Cold War and ObamaCare.

Obama insists on taking credit for an energy revolution that he battled every step of the way and continues to fight with his Keystone veto threat. Instead of admitting that fracking and cheap Saudi oil made the difference, he went on touting his solar and wind boondoggles that have cost a fortune.

The only thing solar power and wind turbines have done (besides killing eagles and providing kickbacks to Democratic donors) was make energy more expensive for middle class and working class families.

With a national debt over 18 trillion dollars, which increased more under him than every president combined, and a nearly 4 trillion dollar budget request, Obama describes the entire ugly mess, from ObamaCare to his frenzied spending spree on failed Green Energy wrecks, as “middle-class economics.” Even a snake oil salesman would have winced at selling ramming up health care costs for the working middle class as “middle-class economics.” “Screw the middle class” economics would be more accurate.

That’s why Obama lost the middle class. It’s why the man who took away the health insurance plans of millions is vowing to veto any effort to bring back middle class health insurance to “protect them” from being able to choose their own doctors.

But turning the page means never having to take responsibility for the things you did or the lies you told.

Every State of the Union address, Obama drags out the same claim about the gender pay gap, which even the liberal media fact checked to death, only for him to resurrect it again next time around.

Obama’s claim that he will lower the cost of community college to zero has already been fact checked to death, but still gets shamelessly put forward. The one thing that we have learned about Obama is that unlike George, he will not only tell a lie, but he will keep on smugly telling it without any trace of shame.

That shamelessness is the sum of Obama’s brilliance.

Having taxed prosthetics for ObamaCare while threatening any effort to remove his tax, he talks up “creating revolutionary prosthetics, so that a veteran who gave his arms for his country can play catch with his kid.”

Aside from making it harder to develop and buy those revolutionary prosthetics, Obama cut health care for veterans and let the VA assign them to oblivion for even routine lifesaving medical exams.

Having destroyed the space program, he speaks of “pushing out into the Solar System not just to visit, but to stay” when even visiting the space station requires relying on faulty Russian Soyuz vehicles.

Never mind “pushing out into the solar system.”

When Scott Kelly, whom he mentions by name, goes for his year-long stay in space, he’ll be traveling in a Soyuz vehicle.

An Obama speech is composed of constant lies. Connoisseurs can distinguish different types of lies.

There are the crazy lies, such as when Obama claims that setting aside his worthless Global Warming pact with China will “endanger the health of our children.” And then there are the shameless lies such as his claim that propping up the Castro dictatorship is “standing up for democratic values.”

Is there anything less democratic than propping up a dictatorship?

Finally there are the genuinely evil lies, such as Obama condemning anti-Semitism and explaining how his commitment to gay rights makes us safer right before he discusses his determination to release some of the world’s most dangerous Islamic terrorists from Guantanamo Bay.

And yet all of Obama’s lies are in their own way evil. We expect politicians to lie, but an Obama speech is more than a few lies. It’s an absence of truth.

Obama not only lies about the economy or the war, he lies about his policies, he lies about his motives, he lies about what he did and what he said, and he goes on lying about what he intends to do. He lies boldly and he lies by omission. He lies gleefully. Even when he calls for bipartisanship and decency, he perverts those impulses by lying about his refusal to compromise or show any decency to Americans.

What Obama has delivered is not an address, but a black hole of lies in which each lie clusters next to a dozen more until it is impossible to see the light.

12 Israelis wounded in stabbing attack on Tel Aviv bus – Diplomacy and Defense – Israel News | Haaretz.

Three in serious condition; assailant, West Bank male who entered Israel illegally, was shot in the leg; Hamas official hails ‘bold, heroic act’; Netanyahu blames PA for attack, Lieberman blames Palestinian and Israeli Arab leadership.

The scene of the stabbing attack in Tel Aviv, January 21, 2015. Photo by Moti Milrod

Sophisticated Russian S-400 missiles for Iran under new military pact, S-300s for Egypt, Syria, Hizballah.

The cash-strapped Russians have become less choosy these days about clients for their prized S-300 defensive systems and even more advanced S-400 missiles. They are now ready to sell the former – not just to Iran, but also to Egypt, Syria and the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah.

Iran won this breakthrough with the signing of a new military cooperation pact in Tehran Tuesday, Jan. 20, between Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Iranian counterpart Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqan.

“The two countries have decided to settle the S-300s problem,” the Iranian defense ministry said, while Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, a former ministry official, added: “A step was taken in the direction of cooperation on the economy and arms technology, at least for such defensive systems as the S-300 and S-400. Probably we will deliver them.”

The S-300 has been a bone of contention between Moscow and Tehran since 2007, when Russia contracted to sell Iran the S-300 missile system, for which Tehran paid $800 m, and never delivered because of strong objections by United States and Israel.

Today, both Iran and Russia are under Western sanctions and willing to help each other impede US Middle East interventions. President Obama is leaning hard on Europe to withhold arms and weapons systems from the Russian army, to punish President Vladimir Putin for his actions in Ukraine and his annexation of Crimea.

Until now, the Russians were wary of burning all their bridges to the US administration and sidestepped outright confrontation with Washington by keeping open controlled exit hatches, in case an opening for a fresh start presented itself.

One such hatch served to set Russia and the United States on the same side of the table in the six-power nuclear talks with Iran.

However, as the prospect receded of further let-ups in the frozen relations between Presidents Obama and Putin, Moscow began shutting those exits down.
Five months ago, Moscow signed a huge $3.5 bn arms deal with Egypt, financed by Saudi Arabia. This closed the Egyptian military market to the US munitions industry.
With its cooperation pact of Jan. 20, Russia became the Iranian armed forces’ primary supplier of new and sophisticated weapons systems,up to and including S-400 missiles – in defiance of the arms embargo against the Islamic Republic and US policies at large.

Iran’s Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, in particular, stood up and urged greater cooperation as a means of opposing American ambitions in the region. “Iran and Russia are able to confront the expansionist intervention and greed of the United States through cooperation, synergy and activating strategic potential capacities,” Dehghan said. “As two neighbors, Iran and Russia have common viewpoints toward political, regional and global issues.”
He said that the new agreement includes expanded counter-terrorism cooperation, exchanges of military personnel for training purposes and an understanding for each country’s navy to more frequently use the other’s ports. They already cooperate in supporting Syria’s Bashar Assad.

Most of all, debkafile’s political sources note that the pact with Moscow strengthens Tehran’s hand in the ongoing nuclear talks with the six powers. Iran’s negotiators are better able to stand up to the efforts of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to extract more concessions on its nuclear ambitions, in order to reach a comprehensive accord, after interminable postponements, by the next deadline of June 30, 2015.

The S-300 missile system, which is designed to intercept aircraft and missiles, including cruise missiles, was for years the emblem of the most advanced Russian weaponry, capable in Iranian hands of deterring Israel from attacking their nuclear program.

However, over the years, the Israeli Air Force will have developed and tested methods, whether by aerial or cyber warfare, for beating the S-300, whose workings became increasingly exposed as they were supplied to European countries, notably Greece.

On the quiet, as recently as 2013, Russia let Iran and Syria have components of S-300 batteries as installments in advance of supplies of complete systems.  Last year, Moscow promised to consider future supplies to Hizballah in Lebanon as well.

Russia’s policy evidently envisages Israel’s partial encirclement by batteries of S-300 missile systems from the north and south and both S-300 and S-400 batteries from Iran to the east.