Aaron Klein: Cold War 2012? Russia, China playing games in Middle East [Audio]

Obama’s Sinister “Religion”—Racist Marxism Under a Faux Biblical Veneer

By Kelly OConnell | June 10, 2012 | Canada Free Press

As we ready ourselves for the inevitable onslaught against Romney’s religion, we need to educate ourselves on Obama’s own beliefs, which are the most unusual of any candidate. Even taking Barack at his word, that he is a “Christian”, his beliefs are highly atypical of biblical Christianity. Barack, as an acolyte of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s ideology, is really a follower of James Cone’s own racist and Marxist Black Liberation Theology. This is the subject of today’s essay.

I. Jeremiah Wright’s Church & Rev James Cone’s “Christianity”

Barack Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago Trinity United church for more than two decades. Given the length of time, we must assume that Barack shared the core beliefs of that congregation. But what were Wright’s core beliefs? These are just a subset of Reverend James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology. This connection is explained by Charles C. Johnson of the American Spectator:

Change—and Some Hope

By Victor Davis Hanson | May 12, 2012 | PJ Media

Rays of Sun Amid the Storm

The Rasmussen Tracking Poll recently had Romney up 50 to 42 over Obama. At this early juncture, such polls mean nothing—except as diagnostic indices of why perhaps both candidates go up and down in popularity.

So why has Barack Obama plunged in the polls these last few days?

The Republican slugfest is over. The media cannot headline any longer the daily conservative suicide. Barack Obama’s job report came out at 8.1% unemployment—but, more importantly, with information that a smaller percentage of adult Americans are working than ever before, and fewer in absolute numbers than nearly four years ago when Obama took office.

So someone must be asking, “What then was the lost $5 trillion for?” Note, in this regard, the 5.4% unemployment rate that won George Bush the slur of a “jobless recovery” in 2004.

There was some pushback to Obama’s spiking the football on the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.

The Obama-Romney Doggy Wars

By Victor Davis Hanson | May 15, 2012 | National Review

John McCain fought Obama with one hand tied behind his back. Not Romney.

Victor Davis Hanson

Last week the Washington Post ran a piece on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s high-school years, in which he supposedly was cruel to a shy, perhaps gay fellow student. The piece, mirabile dictu, appeared in the middle of the Biden-Obama reversal on gay marriage. Errors were spotted almost as soon as it was published, and the essay was summarily denounced as nonfactual by the family of the supposed victim of Romney’s supposed half-century-old callousness.

Of more interest was the reaction to the story. Aside from Romney’s gracious acknowledgment that he might have done something in his teens that he was not proud of (although he could not remember the Post’s hazing incident), and aside from the errors of fact pointed out in the Post story, apparent Romney supporters hit back hard — and in equally trivial fashion. If Romney was an insensitive preppie, well then, so was Obama — and for the matter, we had the punkish young Joe Biden. Almost immediately, all over the Internet, Obama’s own voice was heard reading from Dreams from My Father about his ancient drug use while in prep school, and about earlier unkind treatment of a middle-school girl chum. If high school is fair game in these doggy wars, then why not seventh and eighth grade?

For a year, we had heard from the liberal media the old tale of Seamus the dog, as a sort of Aesop’s fable warning about Mitt Romney’s innate cruelty. You see, on a family vacation, Romney in purportedly callous fashion put the family dog, Seamus, into a custom carrier on top of the family car. Forget about America borrowing $5 trillion in three years; worry instead about a dog on a car roof three decades ago.But after yet another serial telling, suddenly the Romney supporters fought back: If Romney had confessed to putting the dog out like a masthead to the winds, Obama in his memoirs confessed to eating dogs! In short order, the Internet was flooded with Photoshopped images of cynophagia — as Obama munched on dachshund sandwiches and terrier burgers. I guess the point was that Americans would prefer putting Spot on top of the car to eating him.

The same trump had earlier happened with the “war against women.” Team Obama saw an opening with Rush Limbaugh’s crude “slut” putdown of Sandra Fluke — for which he later apologized — and attempted to inflate the slur as something emblematic of right-wing misogyny. But again it was not to be.

Limbaugh apologized; Limbaugh did not give money to the Romney campaign and indeed opposed his nomination in the primaries; and Limbaugh’s slur at least could be printed in family newspapers — in contrast to liberal Bill Maher’s. The latter’s profanity-laced and misogynistic sick rants against conservative women could not be quoted without dashes and asterisks. He never apologized. And he gave the Obama campaign $1 million in contributions. The desperate comeback of Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen that Ann Romney — a cancer and MS survivor and mother of five — had “never worked” (a point the odious Maher seconded) only made things worse, before this chapter of the doggy war was apparently called off by those who started it.

There have been more of these tit-for-tit, na-na na-na na-na doggy wars — with charges ranging from patrimonial polygamy to prep-school privilege — but you get the picture. So what can we learn from them, aside from the obvious fact that Barack Obama prefers not to talk about 40 months of 8 percent–plus unemployment, 1.7 percent GDP growth, $5 trillion in new debt, $4-a-gallon gas, and Obamacare?

Team Obama usually starts the exchange, either to distract from dismal economic news, or in zeal to portray Romney as aristocratic and out of touch — but without careful thinking about what the inevitable Romney rebuttal might look like.

The Romney people apparently will not run a repeat of McCain’s 2008 campaign, in which the candidate put such petty retaliation off limits. There will be no sanctimonious putdowns from Romney about dredging up Obama’s dog-eating past, in the manner in which McCain lectured his supporters about the inappropriateness of emphasizing the tripartite name Barack Hussein Obama — although Obama himself did, and would go on to focus on his middle name as proof of his multicultural resonance abroad. Just as Bill Clinton’s war room swore not to do a rerun of Mike Dukakis’s punching-bag 1988 campaign, so Romney apparently has determined not to repeat the McCain one-hand-tied-behind-the-back model.

In other words, each time we hear of an irrelevant hit on Romney, we will probably hear of something equally irrelevant — and worse — about Obama, in a way we never would have in 2008. Petty? A distraction from the failing economy? Of course, but the Romney people apparently believe that they must and will achieve deterrence by replying in kind and to such a degree that Team Obama will soon cease playing such a childish game of taunts.

Read the full article here.

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It Was the Power, Stupid!

By Victor Davis Hanson | April 22, 2012 | PJ Media

I. Power—Always Was and Always Will Be

In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without utility.

But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished, or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.

II. The Year 4

We are in the year four of our lord, when darkness was made light, the seas gently receded, and the planet cooled. In the space of 24 hours in January 2009 the world was turned upside down: massive deficits were no longer “unpatriotic”; 5% (heck, even 9%) unemployment was no longer to be seen as a “jobless recovery”; $4 plus gasoline no longer would become “intolerable.” Filibusters suddenly became ossified obstructionism. Recess appointments were now quite legitimate; lecturing the media about the myth of objective fairness was salutary. Pay-for-play time with the president was consulting; attacking the “unelected” courts was progressive. Voter fraud was not thugs eyeing polling monitors with clubs, but officials asking voters to present a picture ID—and mentioning any of these inconsistencies or writing about the Trostkyzation of American life was either racism or Palinism.

Around March 2008, the Ministry of Truth had issued new edicts about campaign financing, big Wall Street money, and the supposedly pernicious role of contributions: all bad if Bush trumped Kerry, all now good if Obama trumped McCain. So when Obama became the first candidate in the history of the law to renounce public campaign financing in order to shake down $1 billion, there was silence. The Left never really worried about Big Money, but only if more Big Money went to conservatives than to themselves. (Consider the current shameless money grubbing of Jon Corzine to raise cash for Obama after Corzine’s looting of thousands of individuals’ lifetime investments, or the shrillness over Mitt Romney’s supposed mansion in La Jolla juxtaposed to the prior silence about the Kerry mansions, the multiple Gore residences, or “John’s room,” as in the huge and crass Edwards estate.) What was interesting about Hilary Rosen was not her stupid thoughts on Ann Romney, but her cursus honorum that led to hired-gun riches by parlaying political contacts into commerce.

III. Tongue-tied Presidents

We can play this Orwellian game with almost everything these days. Take presidential cosmopolitanism and the Bush-as-oaf trope. The disdain was not for an inept president, but rather a simple means to destroy an ideological opponent. Why again the cynicism? Because the Left cares little that Barack Obama has no clue where particular islands in the news are and cannot even do political correctness right when he wishes to ingratiate himself to his South American hosts by wanting to trill the “Maldives.” We have a president who can say Talêban, drop the g’s in a black patois, and trill his Spanish words in front of Latin American hosts, but is off 8,000 miles in his geography.

Ditto “corpse-man,” the Austrian language, 57 states, and all the other parochialism and gaffes that remind us not only that it is hard being a president without making gaffes, but that it is especially hard as a conservative president when each gaffe is cited as proof of ignorance.

IV. So What?

What is going on? Two things, really. One, the media believes that the noble ends justify the tawdry means. So if it is a choice between emphasizing the latest Obama embarrassment by digging into the scary Fast and Furious, the “millions of green jobs” Solyndra insider giveaways, the Secret Service decadence, the GSA buffoonery, and the work while getting food stamps con in Washington OR endangering Obamacare and by extension “the children,” or the war to eliminate autism, or the right to breath clean air–well, why would one ever wish to derail all that by weakening a landmark progressive and his enlightened agenda?

Or for you more cynical readers, why would you wish to enervate the present comfortable culture in Washington in which the press and politics are at last one? Or why undermine the first African-American president, who is a constant reminder of our progressive advancement? Or why weaken our only chance some day to have open borders or gay marriage?

Two, the Left has always operated on the theory of medieval penance. We surely must assume that Warren Buffett has never had problems with the ethics of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. or had a company he controls sued by the IRS for back taxes. Why? Because he has confessed his sins, and accepted the faith and paid his tithe to the Church. Ditto a Bill Gates or a rich celebrity like Sean Penn or Oprah. In the relativism of the left, if the one-percenters will simply confess that their class is greedy and needs to pay their fair share—even if they are entirely cynical in the manner of GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and penance is written off as the cost of doing business—then they become exempt from the wages of them/us warfare and the “you want to kill the children” rhetoric.

V. Good and Bad Fat Cats

There is no difference in the way the Koch brothers or Exxon run their empires and the way that  GM, GE, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Google do. But the former are enemies of the people, while the latter are protectors who have have confessed to their bishops and agreed to mouth doctrine and thereby obtained penance to make as much money as they want and to spend it as they damn well please. Suddenly in America after 2009 there are good and bad cable networks, good and bad celebrities, good and bad CEOs, good and bad sports teams (ask Lovie Smith), good and bad states, good and bad everything—not adjudicated on the actual basis of behavior, but rather on whether some are willing to go to reeducation camp, admit their errors, and join the effort to clean the air and feed the kids.

Or do any of you believe there are not Google “corporate jet setters,” or Facebook “fat cats,” or GE executives who didn’t know when it was time not to profit, or Microsoft grandees who ignored the point at which they had made enough money? (For that matter, why could not Barack Obama have made $550,000 last year; had he not reached the point where he didn’t need any more cash?)

Read the full article here.

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Sharpton Should Have Been Shunned Long Ago

By Aaron Goldstein |  April 18, 2012 | American Spectator

We’ll know who to thank if Florida explodes.

Imagine a white preacher from the South.

Let us suppose this white, Southern preacher utters words full of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Mormon and homophobic venom.

Let us suppose that the hateful words uttered by this white, Southern preacher incited violence which resulted in the deaths of innocent people.

Let us further suppose that this white, Southern preacher bore false witness and accused a man of raping a girl and that this man successfully sued the white, Southern preacher for slander only to refuse to recompense his victim.

Today, this white preacher from the South would be a despised figure. He would not be welcome in polite society. He would be regarded as a hatemonger with neither credibility nor legitimacy. He would be persona non grata. He would be shunned.

But it is today and Reverend Al Sharpton has uttered words full of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Mormon and homophobic venom. Sharpton’s words have incited violence that resulting in the deaths of innocent people. Sharpton did slander an Assistant District Attorney for committing rape and was successfully sued but got others to pay that debt. And yet if a preacher is black instead of white and is based in Harlem instead of Hattiesburg, that preacher isn’t shunned but rather showered with praise and power. Consider what Jeff Jacoby wrote about Sharpton in the Boston Globe:

If Sharpton were a white skinhead, he would be a political leper, spurned everywhere but the fringe. But far from being spurned, he is shown much deference. Democrats embrace him. Politicians court him. And journalists report on his comings and goings while politely sidestepping his career as a hatemongering racial hustler.

Now consider that Jacoby wrote these words in January 2003.

Nearly a decade later little has changed and in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Sharpton’s power might very arguably be at or near its zenith despite the dubious and incendiary nature of his statements regarding the case.

Here is what Sharpton said during a rally in support of Martin in Sanford, Florida on March 22, 2012:

Read the full article here.

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The Meme War We Must Win

By streiff | April 18, 2012 | RedState

If you think Ann Romney and Seamus the Dog aren’t important you don’t belong in electoral politics.

In the past week the presidential campaign has been hit by two events that many have termed silly. First there was the Hilary Rosen comment denigrating Ann Romney’s decision to stay at home and actually raise her children rather than elect to have a stranger do that. Second was the softer Seamus-on-the-roof story rolled out by the Obama campaign yesterday.

Many, especially our own “smart set”, have criticized the attention these events have attracted as somehow taking away from the high minded policy discussion that is supposedly taking place.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Since Mitt Romney has become the presumptive GOP nominee we’ve seen two broad lines of attack opened against him. The first is “Mitt is an out of touch rich guy.” The second is “Mitt is a Mormon and Mormons are very, very strange.”

The closest they have come to making a policy attack on Romney is criticizing him as a conservative. How this is supposed to hurt him is anyone’s guess as the major knock on Romney during the primary was that he wasn’t conservative.

Both the stories on Ann Romney and Seamus the dog are designed to build a meme portraying Romney as a plutocrat, some sort of latter day (nyuk nyuk) J. P. Morgan. For instance, the recent Paul Begala article in The Daily Beast refers to Romney as Thurston Howell III:

And I mean elite. In Mitt Romney the Republicans have the apotheosis of wealth worship. Romney has amassed a fortune so vast he is expanding his $12 million beachfront mansion and installing an elevator … for his cars. For his cars, people. If you’re insanely rich, you might have an elevator in your mansion. But a lift for your Lexus? Keep in mind he’s running for office, for Pete’s sake. What’s he going to do if he wins? Use orphans as human golf tees?

[…] So far Romney has had a case of Marie Antoinette Syndrome. Every time he tries to connect with a middle- class voter he makes the Grey Poupon guy look like Joe Lunchbucket. He brags about his friends who own NASCAR teams and NFL franchises. He casually makes $10,000 bets. He says the $374,000 he made in speaking fees isn’t a lot of money. When a kid gives him an origami duck made out of a $1 bill, all he has in his pocket to replace it are hundreds.

Romney apologists will say I’m taking this out of context. Baloney—or rather, Wagyu filet mignon. The context is that Romney truly is out of touch [my emphasis] , and middle-class voters may conclude that he is not on their side.

Read the full article here.

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]