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Hillary’s Libya: The Second Time as Farce

June 4, 2016

Hillary’s Libya: The Second Time as Farce, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, June 3, 2016

(Please see also, The Benghazi Cover Up. — DM)

Amidst the welter of commentary on Hillary Clinton’s June 2 foreign policy speech in which she allegedly eviscerated Donald Trump as the most unreliable leader since Caligula (projection?), I couldn’t avoid thinking of Karl Marx’s oft-quoted line from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”

I’m no Marxist, but there’s no question the bearded Prussian inadvertently was accurately describing not Trump’s erratic remarks but Hillary Clinton’s actual outrageous actions regarding Libya when writing, in 1852, of Louis-Napoleon’s coup of the previous year.

What Hillary instigated in that North African country, with the obvious acquiescence of Barack Obama, is the most absurd American foreign policy blunder of my lifetime from which the damaging fallout (thousands of drowning refugees in recent weeks, a possible ISIS takeover of that now essentially lawless country, replete with beheadings of Christians, etc.) is just beginning.  Only our complaisant media could conclude anything but the obvious — that the perpetrator of such a disaster should be totally disqualified as president of the United States.

But let’s go back to 2002 or so during the ramp-up to the Iraq War to see how Hillary’s Libya became the “second time as farce,” both tragedy and farce, in this case. Back then Mrs. Clinton — unlike Donald Trump, who waffled — was among the clear majority of American decision-makers of both political parties who favored the war.  Many criticize that position now, but in those days immediately post-9/11 it made considerable sense.  Something had to be done about the Middle East, which was stuck in that other middle (the Middle Ages or earlier ) when it came to social development and even a semblance of modernity. Those benighted lands were now bringing their unremitting primitivism, violently, to our shores.  (Unfortunately, they still are.)

Forget the existence or not of weapons of mass destruction, dominating most everyone’s hearts and minds at that time was the hope that we could — with minimal force if possible — overthrow the execrable Saddam, bring modern democracy to Iraq and — who knows — by example to other countries in the region.

It was a burst of idealism. Remember the slogan “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”? Even the New York Times approved of it. Much as it saddens me to admit because I went eagerly along, we were all dead wrong. We hadn’t reckoned on that cocktail of tribalism and Islamic ideologies, Sunni and Shiite, that makes those cultures so intransigent and resistant to change.  And we weren’t ready to “go to the mattress,” killing hundreds of thousands as we had in Germany and Japan, to overcome that resistance. And even if we had, who knows if it would have worked with those backward lands?  It’s no easy thing.

But that didn’t stop Hillary Clinton from trying it again a few years later, in Libya, against Muammar Gaddafi, an admittedly crazy despot but one who had agreed to abjure nuclear weapons because of Iraq.  (Ironically, Gaddafi was the only serious victory from the whole thing.) Acting partly under the advice of the sniveling sycophant Sidney Blumenthal (paying attention to Blumenthal should disqualify anyone from anything), Hillary decided to push for a second go-round of a failed policy before the first failure had even come close to resolution.  Talk about the second time as farce. Result?  As Colin Powell said, you break it, you own it.

Hillary Clinton broke Libya.

So this is the person who is now telling us that Donald Trump is dangerous. Well, it makes sense, because this is the same person who told the parents of the Benghazi victims at their children’s funeral that their sons died because of the response to some amateur YouTube video nobody watched and not from an organized terror attack by an al Qaeda affiliate — in other words, an absolutely immoral liar.

Whether Trump would be a great leader on the international stage is impossible to say because it always is before that person is in that leadership position.  That’s the inconvenient truth of foreign policy, which, with notable exceptions, is more often about situational reactions than about planning in the great, ahem, laboratories of the State Department.

We do know, however, how Hillary Clinton would perform. We have already seen it.  And not just in the emails or the opera bouffe of the Russian reset or the backing of Islamists like Erdogan and Morsi or the horrifying mess of Syria or the even more horrifying, non-existent Iran deal, but, most of all, in Libya.  That was her baby.

h/t: Hugh Hewitt

Categories: Benghazi, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Iraq war, Libya
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How Hilary’s foreign policy ‘succeeded’ for Iran

June 4, 2016

How Hilary’s foreign policy ‘succeeded’ for Iran, DEBKAfile, June 4, 2016

6Hardline Ayatolla Ahmad Janati

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, declared Thursday June 2 in a major foreign policy address: ‘We are now safer than we were before this agreement (the International-Iran nuclear deal).”

A short while before her speech, the State Department, published its yearly report on world terror, and determined, as in past years, that Iran remains “the leading state sponsor of terrorism, on account of its support for designated terrorist groups and proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.”

Three days earlier, on May 31, scientists at the Institute for Science and International Security, published an extensive analysis of the second report of the IAEA in Vienna, whose job it is to monitor the Iranian nuclear program and establish whether Tehran’s is complying with its commitments.

Their report is titled: IAEA’s Second JCPOA Report: Key Information Still Missing.

The American scientists found oversights in the international watchdog’s report, suggesting collaboration between the Obama administration and the IAEA to conceal Iranian violations.

The scientists offered some examples of these omissions:

Data is lacking on the number of centrifuges, including advanced models, operating in Natanz enrichment facilities as well as the Fordo underground plant. There is no information on what happened to the 20 percent-enriched uranium still remaining in Iran.

Another example is the lack of information on the Iran’s heavy water which is provisionally stored in Oman. Who does it belong to and who oversees it?

These are just a few examples of the blanks in the promised oversight over Iran’s nuclear program, not to mention Iran’s banned ballistic missile program which is geared to design missiles able to reach the US.

The Obama administration had based his detente with Tehran, capped by the nuclear deal, on producing a breakthrough in US-Iran relations. It was intended to strengthen the moderate, reformist and liberal political elements in Iran. ButDEBKAfile sources and Iranian experts report that the exact opposite happened, as is evident in two important elections held in Iran in the past two weeks.

In the elections to the Assembly of Experts, the body which chooses Iran’s top leader, the 91-year-old Ayatollah Ahmad Janati was elected. He is one of the most extreme hardliners in Iran.

A few days later, Ali Larijani was re-elected as Speaker of the Iranian Parliament. Larijani is close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He won by a land slide over the reformist candidate put forward by President Hassan Rouhani.

Five months ago, when the first results of the Iranian elections to the Majlis and to the Assembly of Experts came in, there were cries of joys in the Obama administration. US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Jawad Zarif proclaimed it at the time a victory for the moderates.

Where did these ‘moderates’ disappear in the interim and how did they become supporters of the extremists?

On Friday, June 3, less than 24 hours after Clinton’s foreign policy speech, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei celebrated his victory over American policy saying: Iran has many small and big enemies, but foremost among them are America and Britain. “Any cooperation with the US,” he stressed, “is an act against Iran’s independence.”

Categories: Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, IAEA, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran - secret deal, Iran and terror, Iran centrifuges, Iran nuke inspections, Iran scam, Iran's heavy water, Iranian "moderates", Iranian hardliners, Iranian proxies, Iranian reformers
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The Benghazi Cover Up

June 3, 2016

The Benghazi Cover Up, Front Page Magazine, June 3, 2016

Hill and Barry

Editor’s note: The following video was produced by journalist Lee Stranahan and exposes the coordinated campaign between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the media to conceal the truth about the Benghazi terrorist attack until after the 2012 presidential election. The video sequence is featured in Stranahan’s film “The Caliphate.”

 

Categories: 2016 elections, Al Nursa Front, Al Qaeda, Benghazi, Democrats, Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Islamic immigration, Media, Obama -Benghazi, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama's America
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FLASHBACK — Bill Kristol’s Candidate: It’s ‘Important to Say’ White Working Class Communities ‘Deserve to Die’

June 1, 2016

FLASHBACK — Bill Kristol’s Candidate: It’s ‘Important to Say’ White Working Class Communities ‘Deserve to Die’, Breitbart, Julia Hahn, June 1, 2016

Bill-Kristol-and-David-French-AP-Photos-640x480

According to new reports, The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol wants fellow professional Republican and National Review staff writer, David French, to run an independent presidential campaign.

The prospect of a French run has received some support via Twitter from professional Republicans who oppose the candidate selected by the voters. However, French’s prior controversial writings could alienate a core constituency of the American electorate— namely, white working-class voters.

While Donald Trump has called on the GOP to become a “worker’s party”— a development Sen. Jeff Sessions called for two years ago, ironically, in the pages of the National Review— French has defended the idea that white working-class communities “deserve to die.”

Specifically, French wrote a piece in support of Kevin D. Williamson, who had said:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

French described Williamson’s piece as “excellent” and said that Williamson’s words were “fundamentally true and important to say.”

French went on to dismiss the struggles white working class Americans endure.

“Citizens of the world’s most prosperous nation, they face challenges — of course — but no true calamities,” French wrote.

While French suggests that the decline of America’s middle class and manufacturing power is no true calamity, others could argue that the greater a nation or culture, the more sorrowful it is to witness its decline — much the same way that history would mourn the destruction of the Palace of Versailles more than the totaling of Justin Bieber’s car.

French insists that the devastation of the working-class’ livelihoods is unrelated to failed federal policies such as mass immigration:

[I] have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

French, instead, suggests that the decimation of these communities is due to the laziness of the American worker:

Millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. My church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement. And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs.

Mr. French’s blame-the-victim approach is notable for two reasons. First, it presents a novel view of human sociology in which people can lose their cultural pride, their means of economic survival, their sense of identity, their self-worth, and even suffer direct discrimination with no corresponding fallout. Second, it underscores one of the unique aspects of professional Republicanism. While professional Democrats advocate for the use of government power on behalf of their base, professional Republicans like Mr. French seem to argue that their own base deserves what’s coming and, as penance, should be left defenseless.

When readers responded with outrage to French’s piece, French doubled down in a post entitled “The Great White Working-Class Debate: Just Because I’m ‘Nasty’ Doesn’t Mean I’m Wrong.”

In recent decades, these white working class communities — and their inhabitants — have been economically devastated and are quite literally dying off. A study by Princeton economists revealed that white, middle-aged working-class Americans without a college degree are experiencing a rapid rise in morbidity. The report found that the rise in their death rates was tied to, what The New York Times described as the “pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures.”

“Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” one of the Princeton economists told The New York Times.

Even French’s boss, Rich Lowry, in his own column about the mortality rates of the white working-class, hinted that a kind of loss of social pride might be the cause. “The white working class is dying from the effects of a long-running alienation from the mainstream of American life,” Lowry wrote. In his piece, Lowry seems to perhaps be hinting at what Pat Buchanan described more starkly:

A lost generation is growing up all around us. In the popular culture of the ’40s and ’50s, white men were role models. They were the detectives and cops who ran down gangsters and the heroes who won World War II. … They were doctors, journalists, lawyers, architects and clergy. … They were the Founding Fathers. … What has changed in our culture? Everything. The world has been turned upside-down for white children. In our schools the history books have been rewritten and old heroes blotted out, as their statues are taken down and their flags are put away.

Ironically, while French has said that his “life’s work” has been “building a conservative movement that represents our nation’s best hope for the greatness Trump claims to crave,” French’s candidacy could help install Hillary Clinton as President and put her in a position to end forever the chances of the conservative movement’s electoral success.

As National Review’s Rich Lowry seemed to suggest more than a decade ago, large-scale Latin American immigration will be “suicide” for the Republican Party. As National Review warned two decades ago, “The Republican hour is rapidly drawing to a close … being drowned — as a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act.”

Today, the U.S. foreign-born population is already at an all-time high of 42.4 million. Every three years, the U.S. adds another city of Los Angeles made up entirely of foreign-born immigrants. Yet Clinton has publicly released on her website a plan to dissolve the nation’s borders within her first 100 days in office.

Similarly, while French claims to be concerned about the rapid pace of Muslim immigration, his candidacy could help install a president who is openly campaigning on expanding Muslim migration. Based on the minimum numbers she has put forward thus far, Clinton would import 730,000 permanent migrants from the Muslim world during her first term alone.

Yet admittedly, French is not opposed to all aspects of a Clinton presidency. As French has previously said, “On trade, Clinton will almost certainly be superior to Trump”— noting that Clinton “would probably maintain the trade-policy status quo, and while that status quo creates winners and losers — as any status quo would — free trade has long been an overall positive for American families.”

The Republican electorate, however, seems to disagree. While many candidates in the GOP primary championed French’s views of ideological “free trade,” those candidates were resoundingly rejected by voters.

Categories: 2016 elections, Conservatives, Democracy, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Hypocrisy, Illegal immigration, Immigration, Never Trumpers, Republican principles, Republicans
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Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious

May 30, 2016

Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious, Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz, May 30, 2016

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Reprinted from Breitbart.

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate–an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”

“Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier a Never Trump diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. . . . He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right.Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a leftwing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

Obama’s most consequential domestic legislation is the Affordable Care Act, which he had no part in writing. It was the work of leftwing think tanks and the congressional Democrats. So it will be with Trump, which is why all the blather about his vagueness or impracticality on policy issues is beside the point. Will he build a wall the length of the Mexican border? Probably not. But will he secure the border? Probably so.  Will a Democrat – whether Hillary, Bernie or Joe Biden, secure our borders and stop the flow of illegals, criminals and terrorists? Certainly not. In addition to their decades long war for amnesties and open boarders, Democrats are responsible for the more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that openly defy federal law and provide safe havens for those same illegals, criminals and terrorists.

Open borders, Sanctuary Cities, importing unvetted Muslim refugees from the Middle East are but the tip of the iceberg in assessing the threat that the Democratic Party and its candidate (whoever it is) pose to America’s national security. For twenty-three years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Democratic Party has been the party of appeasement and retreat in the holy war that fanatical Muslims have declared on us. The first bombing of the World Trade Center misfired but still killed 6 people and wounded 1,000 others. Clinton never visited the site while his administration insisted on treating it as a criminal act by individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts, an attitude that would culminate in Barack Obama’s refusal to recognize that we were in a war at all, and certainly not one with fanatical Muslims. To a man and woman the Democratic Party’s elected officials continue to participate in and support this denial.

Following the first World Trade Center bombing, there were three more devastating attacks on American assets by al-Qaeda’s barbarians during the Clinton administration, with no response and no change of mind towards the nature of the threat. There were also massive security breaches, including the theft by Communist China of America’s nuclear arsenal and the publishing of all our hitherto classified data from America’s nuclear weapons tests. Clinton’s leftist Secretary of Energy published the reports for the world to see, as she put it, “to end the bomb-building culture.

Following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration focused on Afghanistan, which had provided al-Qaeda with a base to attack us, and Iraq, which had violated 16 Security Council resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce, which Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had repeatedly violated and prevent him from reviving the massive chemical and nuclear weapons programs we had destroyed. In 1998 Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, a further violation of the Gulf War truce and a clear sign of his determination to revive his weapons programs. Embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton fired 451 cruise missiles into Iraq, a pointless response that was correctly seen by critics at the time as an attempt to deflect attention from his appearance before the grand jury looking into his personal disorders.

The Bush administration put 200,000 troops on Iraq’s borders, which prompted Saddam Hussein to re-admit the inspectors, but then to throw obstacles in their path. Bush went before the UN and secured a 17th Security Council resolution, unanimously passed, in the form of an ultimatum to Saddam to destroy any weapons of mass destruction he possessed and provide proof that he had done so. Bush also went to Congress and got an authorization for the use of force from Senate but not House Democrats. The ultimatum date came and went, and to prevent the word of the United States and the commitment of 200,000 troops from meaning nothing, Bush proceeded to invade Iraq. But before he did so he gave Saddam the option to quit the country in which case the invasion would be called off. A simpler measure would have been to assassinate Saddam, since he was the Iraq problem. But thanks to a law passed by the post-Watergate Democrats the CIA is prevented from assassinating foreign leaders, which made the invasion necessary.

Within three months of the invasion, with American troops still in harms’ way. The Democrats who had authorized the use of force and spoken in favor of the removal of Saddam turned against the war and began a five-year campaign to sabotage it. The Democrats reversal – and betrayal of our men and women in arms – was triggered by a presidential primary in which a leftwing candidate, Howard Dean, was running away with the Democratic nomination. This betrayal prevented us from pursuing Saddam’s generals and chemical weapons into Syria, and bringing Assad to heel. Bush managed to rescue the war effort and defeat al-Qaeda on the battlefield through the “surge” that Democrats opposed. But then Obama took charge and implemented, the Democrats’ America-is- guilty platform of appeasement and retreat, creating a power vacuum in Iraq and Syria that ISIS quickly filled. At the same time, the Democrats have systematically taken down our military which is now at its lowest levels since World War II.

This is the issue that defines the coming election. A party in denial about the Muslim holy war against America and its allies, whose basic instinct is to weaken America’s defenses and enable her enemies, is opposed by a party that wants to rebuild America’s strength, secure our borders and put the safety of our people first.

The Kristol attack on the Republican Party and its candidate Donald Trump, is an attack on all Americans, and needs to be seen in that light.

Categories: 2016 elections, Bill Kristol, Democrats, Domestic policy, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, Never Trumpers, Obama, Obama's America, Political establishments, Republican Party, Republican principles, Republicans, Trump Hater's Club
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Newt Gingrich makes general election predictions

May 29, 2016

Newt Gingrich makes general election predictions, Fox News via YouTube, May 29, 2016

Categories: Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton
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Gingrich predicts Trump will transform the electoral map

May 29, 2016

Gingrich predicts Trump will transform the electoral map, Fox News via Youtube, May 27, 2016

Categories: Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich
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Cartoons of the Day

May 27, 2016

H/t Vermont Loon Watch

true

 

votes

H/t Joopklepzeiker

Politicians and diapers

Categories: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Humor, Obama, Politicians
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Anti-Israel Socialists Chosen to Write Official Democratic Party Platform

May 25, 2016

Anti-Israel Socialists Chosen to Write Official Democratic Party Platform, PJ Media, Ron Radosh, May 24, 2016

Israel_-_Boycott_divest_sanction.sized-770x415xt

Bernie Sanders’ goal is to transform the Democratic Party, which is already a European style social-democratic party, into a full-fledged vehicle for socialism.

This is why he is still campaigning.

Even though Sanders knows Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, he is not giving up until the end. He is fighting for one reason: so his socialist supporters get to play a major role in formulating the Democratic Party’s platform for the 2016 general campaign and beyond. Now, with the announcement of those appointed by both Sanders and Clinton to the important platform committee of the Democratic Party, we already can see his influence.

Worried about keeping the support of Bernie’s people after her nomination is wrapped up, Clinton is being forced to tilt further to the left than she would like, making it much harder for her to shift back to the center in the general election campaign. A move to the center is necessary if she is to win the support of centrists, moderates, and independents. However, Bernie’s pressure has successfully gotten her to cave to his demands for a left-wing platform.

Let’s examine some of the five people Bernie Sanders has gotten appointed to the platform committee. What stands out?

First, their well-known animosity to Israel and support of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — and also, yes, of Hamas in Gaza.

Cornel West

The most prominent name among the five is the professor and radical black activist Cornel West. West has toured with Sanders and opened up rallies for him. West is a leading BDS activist.

He has said that the Gaza Strip is “the ‘hood on steroids.” In 2014, he wrote that the crimes of Hamas “pale in the face of the U.S. supported Israeli slaughters of innocent civilians.”

Like Sanders, West has long considered himself a democratic socialist, and has in the past worked with Dissent magazine and the late Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America.

James Zogby

The next prominent person appointed by Sanders to the committee is James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. As co-chair of the Democratic resolution committee, Zogby now has a direct hand in drafting the actual party platform.

In 1996, Zogby’s group sponsored a rally at which protesters held signs saying:

[Israeli Prime Minister Shimon] Peres and Hitler are the Same — The Only Difference is the Name.

In 2011, Zogby said the Palestinians are suffering their own “Holocaust.” Like West, Zogby supports the BDS movement, which he calls “a legitimate and moral response to Israeli policy” and to Israel’s “bullying tactics.”

Zogby told the Washington Post that his aim is to draft a platform that meets the needs of both Palestinians and Israelis, but from his own work it is most clear he is an enemy of the current Israeli government. He is also a fierce critic of the mainstream view about which group in the Middle East is responsible for the failure of peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis over the past few decades.

Keith Ellison

Sanders also picked Rep. Keith Ellison. The only Muslim in Congress, Ellison is a major critic of Israel and will undoubtedly stand with Zogby and West. All three will work — probably successfully — to implement a strong anti-Israel stance in the official Democratic Party platform.

How will Clinton — who has recently attempted to portray herself as opposed to BDS and as a strong supporter of Israel — choose to deal with this?

Will she make a tactical judgment about votes rather than a moral judgment?

On domestic policy, all of the platform committee members will favor leftist economic and political measures. Perhaps the only disagreement will be over backing Hillary’s more modest health care proposals vs. Sanders’ demand for fully state-run socialized medicine.

Clinton’s choices for the platform committee also reflect how she has been pulled towards socialist positions to satisfy Sanders’ supporters.

Wendy Sherman, a former deputy secretary of State, was a lead negotiator in the Iran nuclear talks; recall the Obama administration maneuvered to prevent Congress from voting on the agreement.

Neera Tanden is president of the Center for American Progress — a pro-Clinton think tank that has sought to create dialogue between Israel and the American “progressive” community.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, current head of the Democratic National Committee, was allowed to select four members of the 15-member platform committee. Note that Sanders attacked her for supporting Clinton throughout the primary process, which is perhaps why her selections are also quite revealing.

Wasserman Schultz appointed Maryland’s Rep. Elijah Cummings as the committee’s chairman.

Cummings fiercely defended Obama’s Iran deal, often getting into arguments with Republicans while it was discussed in congressional committees on which he sits.

Cummings does happen to represent a district with a large Jewish population. So he “supports” Israel to the extent one can do so while favoring the Iran deal, and he is involved in a program that sends African American high school students from Baltimore to Israel.

Rep. Howard Berman of California is a legitimate pro-Israel legislator. He supported sanctions against Iran in 2010 when he was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

To balance these two (plus one other pro-Israel member), Wasserman Schultz also appointed the far-left Rep. Barbara Lee of California. Lee stands out as perhaps the only elected representative further to the left than Bernie Sanders.

Lee once was a chief aide to a leftist congressman from Oakland, Ca., Ron Dellums. Lee joined 59 other House members in signing a letter following the 2009 Gaza war that urged the Obama administration to pressure Israel to allow more aid to Gaza. She spoke — along with Ellison —against a resolution condemning the 2009 UN report on the Gaza war. That resolution was supported by the Israeli government and the mainstream of the American pro-Israel community.

Lee, along with Cummings, Ellison, and Rep. Luis Gutierrez — a Clinton appointee to the Committee — have all been endorsed by the political affiliate of the left-wing J Street. That group, as we fully know, has been leading the opposition to sanctions against Iran and has lobbied strenuously amongst the American Jewish community to gain support for the Iran deal.

In April of 2009, journalist Mark Hemingway wrote an article about her appropriately titled “Comrade Barbara.” He revealed Lee to be a supporter of Fidel Castro:

[Lee is] still in the thrall of just about every discredited personality and idea the Left has produced in the last 50 years, and utterly convinced of her own righteousness.

Lee was a good friend of the late thug and leader of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton, who escaped to Cuba for three years to dodge trial on various charges. Of Newton, who murdered opponents and made a living dealing drugs in the ghetto in Oakland, Lee wrote in her biography that “despite his roughness, my mother really liked him.”

Instead of acknowledging that the Panthers had become a full-fledged criminal organization, Lee argued that anything “bad” the Panthers did was the fault of the FBI, which actually carried out the measures which they blamed on the Panthers.

Perhaps the most egregious action Lee took came during Ronald Reagan’s presidency over the island of Grenada. Until the military intervention carried out by Reagan, Grenada was in the hands of a tyrannical Marxist-Leninist regime. It was negotiating for a new extension of an airfield so that the island could be used by Soviet jets in order for the USSR to get a military presence in the Caribbean.

After the collapse of the communist regime, the “Grenada papers” were published. They included correspondence between Lee and the island’s rulers in which she advised them on how to issue reports on the airfield to make it appear that it was not being built for military use.

In one letter, Lee wrote of Rep. Dellums:

[Dellums is] really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn’t want anything to happen to building the Revo[lution] and making it strong.

Hemingway concludes his article with this:

Perhaps the reason Lee has made dozens of trips to Cuba is that outside of her Berkeley congressional district, the oppressive Communist dictatorship is the closest place to home where she can be said to speak for anybody.

Perhaps Wasserman Schultz believes that Lee’s appointment will soften Bernie Sanders’ disdain for her. However, she has given Sanders yet one more ally who will undoubtedly support all of his far-left, socialist suggestions for the forthcoming platform.

Hillary Clinton’s negatives are now slightly below those of Donald Trump. The forthcoming far-left platform might satisfy Bernie Sanders’ deluded young followers, but will assure a further loss of support for the Democrats from centrists and independents.

Categories: 2016 elections, Antisemitism, Bernie Sanders, Democrat party platform, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Israel, Palestinians
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Full Measure Episode 34: May 22, 2016 (P1) — Campaign funding

May 23, 2016

Full Measure Episode 34: May 22, 2016 (P1) — Campaign funding

 

Categories: 2016 elections, Bernie Sanders, Campaign financing, Donald Trump, Establishment, Hillary Clinton
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