H/t Power Line
H/t Joop
The Trickle-Down Erosion of Honesty in Obama’s White House, Breitbart, James Zumwalt, August 12, 2016
The Associated Press
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) conducts fraud prevention training for U.S. businesses. Training focus is both internal and external—preventing fraud against the business as well as fraud by company employees against others.
An important standard taught is the tone set for ethical integrity leadership:
An organization’s leadership creates the tone at the top – an ethical (or unethical) atmosphere in the workplace. Management’s tone has a trickle-down effect on employees. If top managers uphold ethics and integrity so will employees. But if upper management appears unconcerned with ethics and focuses solely on the bottom line, employees will be more prone to commit fraud and feel that ethical conduct isn’t a priority. In short, employees will follow the examples of their bosses.
Obviously, the larger an organization, the more difficult to hold all within it accountable to this standard. However, when numerous examples of a lapse in an organization’s ethical conduct exist, the tone set at the top comes into question.
Next week, a five-month long investigative report will be released finding U.S. Central Command intelligence ISIS and al-Qaeda threat assessments were intentionally downplayed. While offering no definitive evidence President Barack Obama ordered it, determining whether he did or not creates a need to look at the tone set for truth-telling.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered more ethics training for its attorneys based on a judge’s findings he was misled by DOJ lawyers in a high-profile lawsuit initiated by 26 states opposed to Obama’s immigration policies.
Apologizing for any confusion, DOJ lawyers deny making intentional misstatements. But their soft-pedaling contrasts significantly with the judge’s finding, “The misconduct in this case was intentional, serious and material.”
A recent Hillary Clinton email release suggests DOJ may also have blocked a Clinton Foundation probe.
For those believing it unfair to pin transgressions of one wayward federal agency as an indictment of the president under whom it serves, let us turn to Obama’s executive branch staff—where he held the most direct influence.
Ben Rhodes is Obama’s foreign policy guru. He is credited with setting the tone for the Iran nuclear deal both via his interactions with the press and Congress. Throughout the process, he maintained a low profile.
However, with the deal concluded, it has been difficult for Rhodes to contain his successful deception of the media and Congress. In a New York Times interview, he boasted about doing exactly that. And, anyone who knows Rhodes, knows he and Obama enjoy a mind-meld mentality.
For Obama defenders still believing DOJ misconduct and one self-admitted lying foreign policy guru do not an unethical president make, we continue.
Concerning the Iran nuclear deal, Secretary of State John Kerry attempted to deceive Congress there were no side deals. We now know there were at least three.
As reported by the Associated Press, under one side deal, restrictions imposed by the known agreement “will ease in slightly more than a decade” rather than the 15 years originally claimed, thus reducing “the time Tehran would need to build a bomb to six months from the present estimates of one year.”
An aspect of the Iran deal making more recent headlines is the $400 million cash payment to Iran—sold to Congress at the time as a release of “Iranian” funds. Disclosures now suggest the fund release was actually a devious way for Obama to pay a ransom for Americans the mullahs held hostage. Senior DOJ officials objecting to the payment were overruled by Kerry. Obama continues to deny it was ransom money despite evidence strongly suggesting Tehran viewed it as such.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, also denying it was ransom, claims, “We don’t pay for hostages. We don’t negotiate for hostages, absolutely not. We’re a nation of laws…” Yet, the White House, admits some of the money paid Iran could go to fund terrorism—a clear violation of U.S. laws.
Tehran even boasts about Obama’s efforts to deceive Americans on the nuclear deal. The Iranians were told not to discuss their missile tests, conducting them in secret so as not to draw attention to a flawed deal.
Evidence has also come to light that the U.S. State Department manipulated data given to Congress, downplaying anti-Israel bias charges against the UN Human Rights Council.
But, enough about State Department lies. Let us now turn to other federal agencies.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed this month the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had inappropriately targeted tea party and other conservative groups seeking non-profit status. As IRS targeting became an issue, it tried blaming it on “rogue agents.” However, internal documents reveal the tone was set at the agency’s top level.
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper also suffered effects of the tone. In June 2013, he apologized to the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman for lying during a hearing. He had responded “No,” when asked specifically if NSA was spying on Americans. Only after Edward Snowden leaked classified documents revealing secretive U.S. government programs monitoring hundreds of millions of Americans did Clapper’s lie come to light.
The tone from the top includes misrepresenting facts tied to our national security and Muslim immigration.
The Senate Judiciary Committee determined in June 2016 the number of refugees arrested for terror in the U.S. was more than three times higher than what State Department reported.
Additionally, concerning criminal aliens in general, it was determined the number reported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as released in 2014 who then went on to commit additional crimes was under-reported to the House Judiciary Committee by almost 90 percent. This led Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte to say Obama was creating “a sanctuary for tens of thousands of criminal aliens.”
The Secret Service also fell victim to Obama’s unethical tone, releasing a congressman’s personnel file in retribution for his disclosures about agent misconduct.
Obama’s unethical leadership has had a trickle-down effect. While 42 years ago such leadership caught up to a U.S. president, it appears Obama, inexplicably, will be spared a similar fate.
Netanyahu rejects Obama’s assertion that Israel now supports Iran accord PM says Israel’s position on nuke deal unchanged; Defense Ministry compares it to Munich Agreement with the Nazis
By Raphael Ahren and Eric Cortellessa
August 5, 2016, 7:41 pm
Source: Netanyahu rejects Obama’s assertion that Israel now supports Iran accord | The Times of Israel

US President Barack Obama, right, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, November 9, 2015. AFP/ SAUL LOEB)
Israel on Friday firmly rejected US President Barack Obama’s claim that its officials now support last year’s nuclear deal with Iran. Far from accepting Obama’s assertion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s stance had not changed, while the Israeli Defense Ministry compared the accord to the Munich Agreement signed by the European powers with Nazi Germany in 1938.
Obama said Thursday that Israeli defense officials are now behind the deal signed by world powers and Iran, and that they recognize the efficacy of the accord. The “Israeli military and security community … acknowledges this has been a game changer,” Obama said. “The country that was most opposed to the deal.”
What mattered most now, Netanyahu went on, however, was to ensure that supporters and opponents of the deal alike work together for three goals: “Keep Iran’s feet to the fire to ensure that it doesn’t violate the deal; confront Iran’s regional aggression; and dismantle Iran’s global terror network.”
Netanyahu said he “looks forward to translating those goals into a common policy, and to further strengthening the alliance between Israel and the United States, with President Obama, and with the next US administration.”
A top minister close to Netanyahu, meanwhile, directly contradicted Obama’s assertion that Israel now backs the accord. “I don’t know to which Israelis he (Obama) spoke recently. But I can promise you that the position of the prime minister, the defense minister and of most senior officials in the defense establishment has not changed,” Tzachi Hanegbi told The Times of Israel.
“The opposite is the case. The time that has elapsed since the deal was signed proved all our worries that, regrettably, we were justified before the deal was made,” said Hanegbi, a minister who works in the Prime Minister’s Office and who until recently chaired the Knesset’s powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
The Defense Ministry used more emotive language to contradict Obama.
“The Israeli defense establishment believes that agreements have value only if they are based on the existing reality, but they have no value if the facts on the ground are the complete opposite of those the deal is based upon,” the Ministry said in a statement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) attends a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee alongside the committee’s chairman, MK Tzach Hanegbi, on Monday, October 26, 2015 (Knesset spokesman)
When the deal was signed last summer between Iran and world powers, Yisrael Beytenu party leader and current Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman compared it to the 1938 Munich Agreement, calling the deal with Tehran “total capitulation to unrestrained terrorism and violence in the international arena.”
The Defense Ministry employed similar language in Friday’s rejection of Obama’s claim.
“The Munich Agreement didn’t prevent the Second World War and the Holocaust precisely because its basis, according to which Nazi Germany could be a partner for some sort of agreement, was flawed, and because the leaders of the world then ignored the explicit statements of [Adolf] Hitler and the rest of Nazi Germany’s leaders,” the ministry said.
“These things are also true about Iran, which also clearly states openly that its aim is to destroy the state of Israel,” it said, pointing to a recent State Department report that determined that Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorism worldwide.
The Defense Ministry further said the deal reached “only damages the uncompromising struggle we must make against terrorist states like Iran.”
US President Barack Obama speaks to the media in Arlington, Virginia, on August 4, 2016. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images/AFP)
Some high-level former and current Israeli defense figures have spoken out in sometimes conditional defense of the nuclear deal. Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot said warily in January that it could present “opportunities” in the future but also raised concerns at the “challenges” it poses. But lawmakers from the ruling coalition have continued to criticize the agreement, citing continued ballistic missile tests banned under an attendant UN agreement, and pointing to Tehran’s continued anti-Israel rhetoric and support for terror groups.
Netanyahu remains openly critical of the agreement, which he says paves Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the weekly cabinet meeting in the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on July 31, 2016. (Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool/Flash90)
The nuclear agreement “removes the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program based on dates certain, rather than on changes in Iran’s aggressive behavior, including its support for terrorism around the world,” a senior Israeli official told The Times of Israel two weeks ago. “The deal doesn’t solve the Iranian nuclear problem, but rather delays and intensifies it.”
The accord, which began its formal implementation in January, will expire in 15 years.
Obama also said Thursday that those who had been most critical of the deal should make mea culpas and admit they were wrong.
“What I’m interested in is if there’s some news to be made, why not have some of these folks who were predicting disaster come out and say, ‘This thing actually worked.’ Now that would be a shock,” he said.
“That would be impressive. If some of these folks who said the sky is falling suddenly said, ‘You know what? We were wrong and we are glad that Iran no longer has the capacity to break out in the short term and develop a nuclear weapon.’ But that wasn’t going to happen.”
Obama Speaks of What He Knows, Being ‘Unfit to Be President’, Rasmussen, Charles Hurt, August 3, 2016
(Please see also, Carr: Hey, Obama! It takes one to know one. — DM)
Donald Trump is “woefully unprepared,” President Obama said Tuesday. “Unfit to be president.”
Well, at least this is one area where the president is a bona fide, qualified expert.
If ever there was a man who entered the White House woefully unprepared and unfit to be president, it was Mr. Obama.
Sure, he hummed a good tune about unifying the country, ushering America into a new “post-racial” era. And he spoke of calming the seas and easing global violence and sprinkling peace between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Middle East and around the world.
Lord, if we could just have 2008 back again. Those were the good old days.
Back before cops were targeted for assassination on the street. Before every police action became viewed first and foremost through the lens of radical racialism. Before the leader of the free world saw it as his duty to routinely insert himself into police matters from Baltimore to Cambridge to Ferguson, Missouri, to Sanford, Florida.
Those were the days before the president denounced people as xenophobes and racists for wanting to enforce the nation’s duly enacted immigration laws. Before tens of thousands of haggard families, children and slaves came rumbling through Mexico on “death trains,” drawn by the president’s illegal invitation. Back in the good old days, before 2008, everyone — including Mr. Obama and Hillary Clinton — all agreed on building a fence to secure our southern border.
And those were the days before America’s first half-Muslim president traveled the world to apologize for American exceptionalism. Before he traveled to Cairo and told Muslims that “it is part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” Still looking for that one in the Constitution.
Before 2008, civilized Americans had never heard of people being burned alive in cages. Drowned in cages. We were not familiar with the practice of throwing gay people off of rooftops for religious purposes. Priests were not beheaded on their own altar.
Yet it is this same president who has presided over all of this these past eight years who has the gall to declare Donald Trump “unprepared” and “unqualified” to be president.
“I said so last week,” he responded when a reporter asked if Mr. Trump is unqualified. “And he keeps on proving it.”
“The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia means that he’s woefully unprepared to do this job.”
Some gall.
And then on top of that, the president gives us his hand-picked successor, who is the one person in all of America who could possibly rival him for the blame of so many of our woes around the world today.
For 25 years, Mrs. Clinton has been part of the problem around here. For the first four years of Mr. Obama’s presidency, she helped craft his disastrous foreign policy.
Indeed, if Mrs. Clinton is what Mr. Obama considers “qualified” and “fit” for the presidency, we probably should settle for “unqualified” and “unfit.”
Obama Only Bombs Libya When the Muslim Brotherhood Lets Him, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, August 2, 2016
Obama is rather belatedly bombing ISIS in Libya after having essentially turned over Libya to Jihadists. That particular course of action cost the lives of four Americans in Benghazi.
Why can Obama bomb Libya now but not to save the Americans who were under siege in Benghazi? The answer is simple and ugly.
In Washington, the Pentagon said the raids were launched in response to a request from the unity government.
“At the request of the Libyan Government of National Accord, the United States military conducted precision air strikes against ISIL targets in Sirte, Libya, to support GNA-affiliated forces seeking to defeat ISIL in its primary stronghold in Libya,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said, using another name for IS.
The GNA is significantly Muslim Brotherhood influenced. Obama refused to provide aid until the GNA, which incorporates Islamists, came into being.
A third deputy is Abdessalam Kajman who aligned with the Justice and Construction Party of which the Muslim Brotherhood is the largest component while Musa al-Kuni represents southern Libya.
Whether it was going after Gaddafi or ISIS, Obama needs to be on the right side of his political Islamists first. And he isn’t about to bomb them merely to save American lives.
The Marketing of the Democratic Candidate, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, August 1, 2016
The Democrats’ convention ended after striving mightily to persuade most of America that Hillary Clinton is somehow more human, likable, caring, and accomplished than the public record of her scandals and behavior would suggest. Unfortunately for the Dems, not Bill, not Obama, not Hillary herself can transform Hillary. There is no political alchemy that can turn that base metal into gold.
For years, armies of political consultants, publicists, and marketing geniuses have not been able to make people like Hillary. We’re on at least the fifth version of Hillary, and all the oxymoronic advice like “act naturally” or “be likable” has not been effective. She’s still inauthentic and unlikable, and 56% of voters disapprove of her. She’s like New Coke or Betamax, a bad product no amount of advertising could sell in the real world of market accountability. Yet the mainstream media have labored like Trojans on this project, downplaying her crimes and failures, believing her lies, and rationalizing her faults.
We had a representative example recently in Scott Pelley’s interview with Hillary on 60 Minutes. After she whined and whined about the invidious “Hillary Standard” –– the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy version 2.0––Pelley gently asked in therapeutic Oprah tones, “Why do you put yourself through it?” In other words, he accepted the ridiculous premise that her negative image is the consequence not of her actions, but of “Unfounded, inaccurate, mean-spirited attacks with no basis in truth, reality,” as she put it. A real journalist would have challenged her by asking about the long catalogue of financial improprieties from the Whitewater scandal to the Clinton Foundation, or the self-serving lies from “landing under sniper fire” in Bosnia to telling the grieving parents of the four Americans murdered in Benghazi that an obscure Internet video was responsible. But skilled courtiers know that royalty can’t stand too much reality.
This year’s Democratic Convention speakers didn’t do much better, when they could be heard above the Berniacs’ booing and jeering. Their catalogue of lies about Hillary’s résumé––her alleged achievements on Middle East peace, “climate change,” getting Iran to negotiate over its nuclear weapons program––smacks of desperation, given how many light-years from the truth they are. The Middle East has descended into a Darwinian jungle in which ISIS, Russia, and Iran are the alpha predators. Even if Anthropogenic Global Warming is true, all the much touted international agreements from Kyoto to Paris have done and will do nothing to cool the planet. As for Iran, it takes remarkable shamelessness to tout this disaster, given the mounting evidence that the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism has been serially cheating and is likely to obtain nuclear armaments within a couple of decades.
Bill Clinton, the fading Big Dog of the party, gave a tedious convention speech that spent a lot of time trying to “humanize” Hillary by talking about their courtship and marriage and other random acts of compassion and caring. Apart from the preposterous premise that they have had a happy and loving marriage (see Crisis of Character), humanizing Hillary is a fruitless task. She obviously lacks her husband’s political brilliance and powers of empathy. Of course, his empathy is phony, but like Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, Bill is a real phony. He believes all this crap he believes. Hillary has been in the public eye for 25 years, and in all that time she has consistently appeared mean, entitled, insincere, vindictive, petty, elitist, money-grubbing, and insatiable for power.
Then came the big gun, Barack Obama, who in between mentioning himself 119 times said the following with a straight face: “I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman––not me, not Bill, nobody––more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.” And just what are those qualifications? In her eight years in the Senate, the only successful legislation she sponsored was renaming a courthouse for Thurgood Marshall. Eleven other bills were passed in the Senate, most of them small beer. Four of them proposed renaming post offices, one proposed to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Purple Heart, and another the 275th anniversary of the American Revolution. The rest weren’t much better, and none were passed by the House.
How about her tenure as Secretary of State? Let’s see, there’s the groveling “reset” with Russia, which for all its appeasement of Putin failed miserably. There’s the ill-conceived overthrow of Muamar Ghaddafi, which left Libya a playground for ISIS and other jihadist outfits, and swamped the region with weaponry looted from Ghaddafi’s arsenals. There’s the debacle of Benghazi, when repeated requests for security by the consular outpost were ignored, four Americans were left to die, and Hillary responded with blatant lies and political spin about the cause of the terror attack. Don’t forget the private server, through which classified material was passed and likely ended up being read by hackers. And the biggest failure was already mentioned, the deal with Iran that will spark nuclear proliferation in a region already riven with violence and disorder.
Obama was correct about one thing, though––she is more qualified than he was in 2008, an embarrassingly low bar. But more qualified than George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln? Only if you define “qualified” as possession of a résumé filled with the occupation of government offices she never used to accomplish anything meaningful.
Finally came the Grande Dame herself to tell us that only she can fix the problems that Obama says don’t exist in the sunny uplands of America, and that only she can be an agent of change who will govern exactly like Obama.
There were Mr. Rogers bromides about “we will fix it together” and “it takes a village.” Oprah bumper stickers like “love trumps hate.” Smug references to her years of “public service,” a euphemism for holding offices without really doing anything. Maudlin family history and anecdotes about sick children. A revisionist history of the Obama era that leaves out the inconvenient truths that his tenure has seen the worst recovery from a recession since World War II, and a retreat of America that has left a vacuum filled by our rivals, enemies, and terrorists.
Then came the chum for progressives. Evil corporations and income inequality. Attacks on the same Wall Street that has given her foundation and campaign millions and millions of dollars. “Comprehensive immigration reform,” the code word for amnesty and minting new Democrat voters. Job-killing minimum wage increases. The same “investment in new, good-paying jobs” that Obama spent nearly a trillion dollars on, only to discover that “shovel-ready jobs were not so shovel ready,” as the president laughed. Gun control, though it’s been repeatedly proven to have little impact on crime or terrorism. The threat that “Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes,” even though the top 1% already pay 38% of income taxes, and those making at least $250,000 pay more than half. As for corporations, their tax rate is already one of the highest among advanced economies. And of course, “the precise and strategic application of power” in order to deal with ISIS––which in practice means continuing Obama’s habit of doing the least possible tactically in order to avoid the political blow-back from risky strategic action.
So after a three-day advertisement of her achievements, policy chops, qualifications, compassion, and experience, her speech was a catalogue of sentimental blather and stale progressive clichés, delivered to a crowd as easy to please as drunks at a comedy show.
In the end, after these mendacious speeches, all that’s left to justify a Hillary presidency is the specious argument that nominating a rich, white, Ivy-League-credentialed woman from an affluent family will correct a cosmic injustice akin to slavery, a “milestone in the fight for equity in postwar America,” as the Wall Street Journal wrote. Given the huge gains made by women over the last several decades, it was inevitable that a woman would be nominated for president. But as theJournal continued, women’s “progress has become so widespread that some women voters appear indifferent to another glass ceiling shattered. More women graduate from college than men. They are the main breadwinners in four of 10 U.S. households. They run General Motors, Co., PepsiCo Inc. and IBM Corp.” Nearly half the enrollees in law and medical schools are women, and they are projected to surpass males in a decade. Women are Senators, members of the House, and Cabinet members in historically unprecedented numbers.
Moreover, it would be a more believable ground-breaking achievement if it were a woman whose climb to prominence hadn’t depended on marrying the right man and then publicly sacrificing her feminist dignity when he serially humiliated her with his sordid philandering, a scenario straight out of Mad Men. Perhaps that’s why Donald Trump gets more support than Hillary among white women between the ages of 35 and 64. “I think we have gotten away from the historic nature of this campaign because Hillary Clinton has become an exceptionally polarizing candidate,” admitted Democratic pollster Peter Hart.
Nor can Clinton count on progressive millennials who flocked to Bernie to get excited about her supposed historic achievement. Writing for The Weekly Standard, Alice B. Lloyd surveys an anti-Clinton collection of essays by leftist feminists who see her as a “token” of the rigged establishment rather than a ground-breaker for leftist change. They resent her reliance on “corrupting corporate intervention” and her habit of “favoring the politically and diplomatically expedient ‘imperial feminism.’” According to one contributor, “What we need is not a woman for president; what we need is a movement.” As Lloyd writes, “Progressive feminists say they see right through this manipulative messaging, and aren’t falling for it.”
Many women, in short, don’t buy her “outsider” rhetoric and claims to victim status based merely on the accident of her double x chromosomes. And for all her pandering to Black Lives Matter, Hispanics, and the party’s loony left, Hillary’s choice of a bland, middle-aged, straight white male with a record of political opportunism merely confirms that she is an entrenched insider comfortable with Wall Street and the party establishment. Playing the “woman card” cannot compensate for her personal flaws and slight record of achievement. Perhaps that’s why only a fifth of voters are enthusiastic about the possibility of electing the first woman president.
So what has Hillary got instead of charisma, character, achievements, and even the thrill of first woman president? Voters who favor big government, increased entitlement spending, higher taxes on the “rich,” and continuing American retreat abroad. Voters who belong to public employee unions and are confident Hillary will bail out their states when publicly funded pension plans bankrupt state treasuries. Rent-seekers who benefit from green energy boondoggles based on global warming hysteria. Diversicrats who leverage identity politics into social and political capital. Battalions of economic ignoramuses who think you really can get something for nothing and socialism is cool. Bicoastal elites who compensate for their privilege by espousing federal policies and programs the cost of which they never, ever have to pay.
In other words, all those factions that want their “passions and interests” served rather than the security and interests of the country. The only question is, are there 65 million of them?
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