"At evening time, behold, there is terror! Before morning, they are no more" Isaiah 17:14
Language Translation
From on high, the Screaming Eagles soar,
The shroud of oppression,
By talons sharp, soon be tore,
The torch of Lady Liberty, lights the way,
Her Sky Soldiers will save the day..!
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” —Patrick Henry
ERIE, Pa. Former President George W. Bush fired a salvo at President Obama on Wednesday, asserting his administration's interrogation policies were within the law, declaring the private sector not government will fix the economy and rejecting the nationalization of health care.
I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in, the former president said to applause from members of a local business group. You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money. Repeatedly in his hourlong speech and question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush said he would not directly criticize the new president, who has moved to take over financial institutions and several large corporations. Several times, however, he took direct aim at Obama policies as he defended his own during eight years in office.
Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States, he said to huge cheers. Mr. Bush weighed in on some of the most pressing issues of the day: the election in Iran, the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and his administration's interrogation policies of terrorists held there and elsewhere. The former president has not commented on Mr. Obama's decision to ban enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, which the current president has called off course and based on fear.
The way I decided to address the problem was twofold: One, use every technique and tool within the law to bring terrorists to justice before they strike again, he said, adding that the country needs to stay on offense, not defense. On Guantanamo, which while in office Mr. Bush said he wanted to close, the former president was diplomatic.
I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor, he said. I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind.
The Obama administration has started to clear out some of the more than 200 detainees at the facility.
Repeating a mantra from his presidency, he called the current war against terrorism an ideological conflict, asserting that in the long term, the United States needs to press freedom and democracy in corners across the world. Mr. Bush did not directly address Mr. Obama's response to the election in Iran, which some critics have called tepid, but he did make clear that the outcome is very much in dispute. For a fifth straight day, as the Obama administration walks a tightrope by issuing little criticism, protesters gathered in Tehran to demand a new election.
Clearly, there's a level of frustration on the Iranian streets, Mr. Bush said. It looks like it's not a very fair election. Mr. Bush returned again and again to the economy, and sought to defend his own actions after the financial meltdown in the waning days of his second term. Mr. Obama repeatedly has said he inherited that mess.
I am told, 'If you do not move strongly, Mr. President, you will be a president overseeing a depression that will ultimately be greater than the Great Depression,' Mr. Bush said. I firmly believe it was necessary to put money in our banks to make sure our financial system did not collapse. I did not want there to be bread lines, to be a great depression.
He said his administration sought to address the housing bubble before the system broke down. We tried to reform mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but couldn't get it through the vested interests on Capitol Hill. Still, Mr. Bush was optimistic, pressing, as he did as president, free trade, open markets and the free enterprise system. We'll come out of this better than before, he said to more applause.
But he was less than convinced about Mr. Obama's move to overhaul the health care system.
There are a lot of ways to remedy the situation without nationalizing health care, Mr. Bush said. I worry about encouraging the government to replace the private sector when it comes to providing insurance for health care. Asked by the evening emcee at the 104th annual Manufacturer and Business Association meeting if he finds the new president's policies socialist, Mr. Bush started then stopped.
I hear a lot of those words, but it depends on.. he said, breaking off. He later offered a more diplomatic assessment: We'll see.
Wednesday's speech to hundreds of high-paying association members premium tables at the city's convention center went for $1,500 was just the second post-presidency speech by Mr. Bush on U.S. soil (his two major speeches were both in Canada). He was loose and relaxed, his nose a bright red from nearly a week in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he joined his family in celebration of his father's 85th birthday. Mr. Bush told some of his new set stories: How just a month after leaving office he was picking up his dog Barney's poop off a manicured lawn in his Dallas neighborhood; how he's experienced his first red light in 14 years (he served six years as Texas governor before being elected president).
His Secret Service detail, however, was not relaxed: This was the first event in which audience members did not have to pass through metal detectors. Outside, a tiny group of protesters and supporters about 10 people on each side faced off on opposite curbs. One man held a sign that said, President Bush, thank you for saving all the babies. On the other side: Arrest Bush.
But the former president got a big cheer when he walked out on stage even bigger than Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State coach who was also on hand for the event. The former president noted that America has a funny political system: You're it, then you're not it instantly.
He lamented the politics of personal destruction that he said is rampant in Washington, noting, though, that it has always been thus. Recalling how a treasury secretary and a vice president once fought a duel, he joked: At least when my vice president shot somebody, it was an accident.
During a question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush recounted tough decisions he made in office. Still steely, the former president said he left Washington with the same moral resolve. When I look in the mirror, I say, 'He did not sell his soul for short-term politics.' Asked about the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when he first learned of the terrorist attacks while in a classroom full of children in Florida, Mr. Bush said he simply found an inner resolve.
I realized that we were in crisis, and the first thing I do in any crisis is calm. If you're president, and all of a sudden the whole world is watching you, and you get up and do something precipitously, frighten children, storm out, that kind of movement will cascade through a society, he said.
In answer to a question about what he learned as president, Mr. Bush smiled broadly. There's so much stuff coming at you, he said to laughter. But turning serious, he said, perhaps to his successor: You don't know what's going to come when you're president. You just have to be ready for it.
Reading David Horowitz’s chapter on “The Path to 9-11,” in his book, Party of Defeat, it is blood-chilling to read the text and, while doing so, substitute the name Barack Hussein Obama for the names of our last two Democrat presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and to substitute Islamic jihad for the Communist threat.
For starters, begin in March 1975 when Tony Lake, who later served as Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor, published a column in the Washington Post, arguing for a suspension of aid to the anti-Communist regime in Cambodia.
It was boilerplate liberal foreign policy, reminiscent of the Truman Administration’s suspension of aid to Chiang Kai-shek in 1946, effectively ceding China to Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists, and the Kennedy Administration’s withdrawal of aid from the pro-western leaders of Laos, effectively turning the southern panhandle of that country over to the North Vietnamese, creating a sanctuary for Communist guerilla forces and making possible the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Although Gerald Ford was still in the White House in 1975, the Democrat-controlled Congress cut off aid to Cambodia and the regime fell. The Communist Khmer Rouge then proceeded to slaughter as many as four million Cambodians… men, women, and children. This followed the slaughter of millions of South Vietnamese after Democrats in Congress and the anti-war left, led by John Kerry, forced the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam two years earlier.
According to Horowitz, liberals and Democrats of that era minimized the threat of Communism and viewed Marxist aggression as “understandable”… much like Barack Obama and Democrats of today see the actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and North Korea as “understandable.”
As Gerald Ford left office and Jimmy Carter moved into the Oval Office, he and his advisors sought to create doubt in the minds of the American people about our role as a major world power. As Horowitz describes it, “The new self-doubts Carter hoped to create replaced the confidence that had inspired America… in two world wars. They translated into policies that cut back America’s military defenses, hamstrung America’s intelligence agencies, and weakened the nation’s resolve. All of these pathologies… invited assaults from America’s enemies, including the gathering forces of Islamic jihad.”
Horowitz continues, “To this Democratic Party radicalism, Carter brought an element of personal naiveté and moralizing condescension… Like others on the Left, he believed criminals could be reformed and America’s enemies could be induced towards pacifist agendas. The Communist leaders were rational people who would respond to ‘positive inducements,’ if we only shed our ‘inordinate fear of Communism…’ ” (Is this beginning to sound familiar?)
Then, having disposed of pro-western governments in China, South Vietnam, and Cambodia, liberals and Democrats turned their sights on the Middle East and the Shah of Iran. As Horowitz tells us, “… at the same time Carter was undermining the Shah, his CIA director, Stansfield Turner, was taking an axe to intelligence assets that might otherwise have identified the threat (that Iran posed). Turner cut 820 human-intelligence positions from the agency, forcing it to rely on foreign intelligence sources for analysis.” It was a strategic error from which the CIA could not easily recover… and has not to this day.
Carter’s ambassador to Iran compared the Ayatollah Khomeini to Mahatma Gandhi, while his U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, referred to Khomeini as a “20th century saint.” This in spite of the fact that, in the first year of their rule, the “progressive” mullahs executed more people than had been executed in the entire thirty-seven years of the Shah’s rule.
Finally, on November 4, 1979, a mob of Islamic revolutionaries attacked the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage and holding them for 444 days. They were not released until January 20, 1981, the day that Ronald Reagan became the 40th President of the United States. Clearly, the Islamic revolutionaries knew they could not toy with Reagan and a Republican administration as they had with Carter and the Democrats.
Bill Clinton came to power on January 20 1993. Horowitz tells us that, “Like Carter, Clinton wasted no time in telegraphing America’s vulnerabilities to our adversaries.” A series of major attacks began barely a month into Clinton’s first term with an attack on the World Trade Center in New York… an attack that was intended to kill a quarter of a million people. The Clinton Administration treated it as an isolated criminal act.
Months later, with just three hundred U.S. troops remaining in Somalia, Clinton changed their mission from protecting international food supplies to one of “nation building.” On October 3, 1993, while attempting to capture several of Islamic warlord Mohammed Aideed’s top aides, American troops were ambushed and two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. Eighteen Americans were killed in the firefight and one soldier’s mutilated body was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
In an interview with ABC News, Osama bin Laden said the Mogadishu defeat and subsequent pullout showed that Americans “can run in 24 hours.” He said later, “When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat, and your dead with you.”
In 1996, Muslim terrorists killed 19 U.S. airmen housed in the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Bill Clinton called for a federal investigation and sent FBI agents to Saudi Arabia. Weeks later, Osama bin Laden told sympathetic journalist Robert Fisk that the bombing was “the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States,” a fact that is now denied by Barack Obama and his radical left appeasers. Horowitz continues, “There was a war, but only one side was fighting.”
FBI Director Louis Freeh complained that Clinton Administration officials were “lukewarm” about investigating the Khobar Towers bombing because it was suspected that Iran was behind the attack and Clinton was “eager to engage Iranian moderates”… apparently the same Iranian “moderates” that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now anxious to break bread with.
In September 1996, when Saddam Hussein moved troops north to attack Iraqi Kurds, a serious violation of the truce that ended the first Gulf War, an American air attack was scheduled. And while the planes were armed and ready to fly, the attack required a final go-ahead from the president. However, Clinton was attending the PGA President’s Cup golf tournament that day, and although his national security advisor called him three times, he refused to take any of the calls. Saddam Hussein was not worried about reprisals from Bill Clinton.
In the summer of 1998, while Clinton was deeply distracted by the Lewinsky affair, Osama bin Laden blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and injuring thousands. In response, Clinton fired Cruise missiles at a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and at bin Laden’s hideouts in Afghanistan. However, before the missiles were launched, and in a spirit of fair play, Clinton first informed the Pakistanis, through whose airspace the missiles would travel. Someone in Islamabad informed bin Laden and he escaped unharmed.
Mercifully, the American people defeated Al Gore in 2000 and Republicans regained control of American foreign policy and the U.S. military. But now an even more pliant Democratic team is in the White House and in less than five months in office they have accumulated more foreign policy blunders than the Bush Administration was responsible for in eight years.
Obama has verbally attacked his own country while on foreign soil… something no other president has ever done. He has insulted our most important western ally, Great Britain; he has angered the Germans and the French; he has severely alienated Israel, our most important ally in the Middle East; he has shown obeisance to the Saudis by publicly bowing to the Saudi king; he has tacitly accepted public rebuke from the most dangerous dictators in the western hemisphere; and he has given aid and comfort to our avowed enemies by declassifying and publishing some of our most sensitive national secrets.
On Thursday, May 21, 2009, former vice president Dick Cheney gave Obama the most public spanking any president has ever received. In a clear, concise, to-the-point speech following a rambling Castro-like speech by Obama… a speech in which he rebuked the Bush Administration some 24 times… the lines could not have been more clearly drawn. Aside from providing a clear and concise review of our national security dilemma, Cheney’s speech was a stark reminder of what it was like when we actually had grownups in charge of our foreign and domestic affairs.
Some may see the many missteps of the Obama Administration as “rookie jitters,” but it’s a dangerous world we live in and it becomes clearer every day that Obama simply is not up to the task. It all looks very much like history repeating itself.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 34% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-four percent (34%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of 0. That’s the highest level of strong disapproval and the lowest overall rating yet record
“Any world order that elevates one nation over another will inevitably fail.”
- Barack Hussein Obama, Cairo, June 5, 2009
A nation is elevated by itself. If no nation is allowed to elevate itself, then there are in fact no sovereign nations. There is in fact, only a one-world nation, under a one-world government.
“Our progress must be shared.” Good old fashioned Marxism, plain and simple.
The president, who left the room to applause from an audience carefully chosen to reflect diverse perspectives, invoked the “Holy Koran” twice, and the “Holy Bible” only once.
Obama got a standing early ovation when he declared: “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
…conservative former U.S. Ambassador to United Nations John Bolton said he considered that one of several “flawed premises” upon which the speech was built, noting America’s longstanding alliance with Saudi Arabia as sign that it’s not all tension between the U.S. and Arab allies.
“This is another Obama blame America first moment,” Bolton said.
Bolton also criticized Obama for what he called “a very hard line against Israeli settlements.”
“When you criticize your strongest ally in an environment like that, it is intended to send a message to that ally,” he said.
Liz Cheney, a former State Department official and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said it was a “well-delivered speech” and that Obama’s personal story “sends a message about America being a land of opportunity.”
But after hearing Obama discuss the long and troubled history of U.S-Iranian relations, she said, “I was troubled by the extent to which I heard moral relativism. I heard the president talk about Iran as though we’ve done some bad things to Iran and they’ve done some bad things to us but now we just need to get together here to go forward — rather than acknowledging the fact that Iran is the world’s largest terrorist-sponsoring state.”
Obama, who talked little about his own connections to Islam on the campaign trail, invoked what he called his “own experience” as he delivered on a campaign promise to make a major address on Muslim soil early in his presidency.
“I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims,” he said. “As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.”
The comments in what he called “the timeless city of Cairo” are by far the most extensive he has made about his Muslim roots. Obama added another personal note as he insisted on greater religious freedom throughout the world: “I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. That is the spirit we need today.”
Conservative critics seized on a passage in which he said: “Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.”
However, Obama spoke bluntly of some of the “sources of tension” between the cultures, including head scarves and the role of women, but did not include the word “terrorism” or its variants.
Turning briefly to specifics, he said: “We will expand exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America, while encouraging more Americans to study in Muslim communities. And we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America; invest in on-line learning for teachers and children around the world; and create a new online network, so a teenager in Kansas can communicate instantly with a teenager in Cairo.”
It's pretty bad when even the Russian's are laughing at us !
Saturday, May 30, 2009
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. yours truly,
True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s enemies have gotten together to promote a few sacred causes: to bring Israel to its knees, to force a Pax Americana on Israel (the “Obama plan”) and to grind the prime minister’s status to dust.
If the media in his own country is trying to grind Netanyahu down, why shouldn’t the American administration - which has mobilized the enthusiastic Israeli media for its own needs - take advantage of the latter’s disparaging attitude to attain its goals? (Although it is repelled by such an attitude. In American culture, with its code of honor and restraint, this type of behavior would not pass.)
They have not managed to bring Netanyahu to his knees, but they have managed to fan a foreign fire of Biblical proportions (”Please, with might,” Gideon Levy begs Barack Obama in a piece on May 17). This fire persuaded whomever it persuaded that an American presidential initiative can be presented, without any preparatory dialogue with the government in power, that is unacceptable to the vast majority of Israeli Jews.
Besides the demand to exert powerful pressure on Israel, the peacemakers demanded that Obama also end the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. These relations, the Israeli patriots explained, are damaging to U.S. interests.
Here, too, their labors bore fruit. The speech on a vision of peace for the Middle East, slated for June 4, will not be given at the White House, not even at a joint session of Congress. Only by delivering the speech in Cairo, intentionally skipping a visit to Jerusalem (and even to Tel Aviv!), will the spirit of peace alight on the lips of the American messiah.
Obama has little knowledge of the history, ideology and psychology of the Arab opposition to the Jewish state’s existence. But he has a strategy: to thaw relations with Islam. It is clear what will be demanded in return.
But those who built his program, which purely by coincidence conforms entirely to the ideas of the extreme left in Israel (whose wheeler-dealers are in close touch with Rahm Emanuel and his ilk), are showing an ambition and arrogance that will leave them cooked.
No Arab leader, political or religious, has yet been found who agrees to give up the right of return, which is a central pillar in the Obama plan. The idea to internationalize the Old City and its governance by the United Nations is a futile idea. Only assimilated Jews - and one can be so in Israel, too - could garner support for this idea from a neophyte president, who has no idea how deep the Jewish bond is to its capital, especially to the area containing its most sacred sites.
Obama has tossed a lot of balls into the air, maybe too many. Even a magician like him cannot catch them all. The last ball, the especially heavy one of the Obama plan, might land on his foot, but also on the feet of everyone in the region, who will pay the price imposed on them by the person who wants (by force) to change the order of things. That will also be the case if he does not set aside his disconnected initiatives and quickly connect to reality in other places in the world, as well as at home.
Today, Jerusalem Day, a state ceremony will be held marking 42 years since the liberation of Israel’s capital. In his speech, Netanyahu can somewhat cool down Obama’s messianic fervor and (politely) make clear to whom - exclusively - Jerusalem belongs. He can pledge that after the Paratroopers liberated the city in 1967, no foreign power will ever again pass through its gates.
I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for
which it stands,
one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
American Crusader
Baghdad Time
"Never try to teach a liberal to think, It wastes your time and annoys the liberal"
Our Father in Heaven, Rock and
Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the first
manifestation of the approach of our redemption. Shield
it with Your loving kindness, envelop it in Your peace,
and bestow Your light and truth upon its leaders,
ministers, and advisors, and grace them with Your good
counsel. Strengthen the hands of those who defend our
holy land, grant them deliverance, and adorn them in a
mantle of victory.
Ordain peace in the land and grant
its inhabitants eternal happiness. Lead them, swiftly and
upright, to Your city Zion and to Jerusalem, the abode of
Your Name, as is written in the Word of Your servant
Moses: “Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the
world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from
there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring
you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you
shall possess it; and He will make you more prosperous
and more numerous than your fathers.”
Draw our hearts together to revere
and venerate Your name and to observe all the precepts of
Your Word, and send us quickly the Messiah son of David,
agent of Your vindication, to redeem those who await Your
deliverance.
Manifest yourself in the splendor
of Your boldness before the eyes of all inhabitants of
Your world, and may everyone endowed with a soul affirm
that the Lord, God of Israel, is king and his dominion is
absolute. Amen forevermore.
