|
Donald Trump probably provided as good a one-two punch as will emerge against Barack Obama’s half-hearted Oval Office address to the country Sunday. Mr. Trump asked, “Is that all there is?” and concluded, “We need a new president-FAST.”
At the top of the Obama short list, of course, was a demand for new gun control measures. The Obama goal will be to tag gun control into a war resolution package for an all-or-nothing vote.
And Obama now, belatedly, wants Congress to authorize him to use force against ISIS. Where has he been with this authorization request?
 Rather than spending a minute pouring over Obama’s watered down remarks, Americans would be better off reading Robert Spencer’s The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS. Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In his new book, Spencer tells readers, “The Obama administration is committed as a matter of policy not to discuss Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism, or to acknowledge that there is an ideology of violence and supremacism within Islam. It cannot confront jihadists even on Twitter.
|
| >> read more |
|
In a 23 May 2013 speech, President Obama told listeners at National Defense University that Americans should move past the post-9/11 war footing. He then went on to compare the Islamist terror threat to “many forms of violent extremism in our history.” As the WSJ notes, “Few speeches in presidential history have been repudiated so quickly by events.”
President Obama entered the White House believing that the “war on terror” was a misguided overreaction driven by political fear, and his government even stopped using the term. Seven years later Mr. Obama is presiding over a global jihadist revival that now threatens the American homeland more than at any time since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Every instinct of this Administration, starting with the President, has been to minimize the terror risk on U.S. soil—perhaps because it contradicts Mr. Obama’s political belief that all we have to fear is fear of terrorism itself.
Read more from the WSJ here.
Here’s Obama’s full speech:
|
| >> read more |
| Both Marine Le Pen and her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen soared to surprisingly easy first-round victories.
Read more from The Local here:
One is a pragmatist: a 47-year-old lawyer by training who has steered France’s far-right National Front (FN) from pariah status to mainstream.
The other is an ideologue: her 25-year-old niece, a Roman Catholic traditionalist whose easy smile and blonde hair belie a stance on abortion, homosexuality and Islam that critics say is dangerous or sectarian.
On Sunday, Marine Le Pen and Marion Marechal-Le Pen — respectively the daughter and grand-daughter of the FN’s firebrand founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen — established themselves as major players in France’s political landscape.
The first round of regional elections placed the FN on track to break the grip of Socialists and conservatives, cementing the party’s grassroots’ rise across the country.
In the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a rustbelt bastion of the Socialists who rule at national level, opinion-poll estimates gave Le Pen more than 40 percent of the first-round vote.
Victory in the second round on December 13 would give her a springboard for her bid to be president in 2017.
Marechal-Le Pen, meanwhile, also scored above 40 percent in the early estimates for the vast Provence-Alpes-Cote-d’Azur (PACA) region in the south, placing her on course for a landmark win next Sunday.
|
| >> read more |
|
 Senator Ben Sasse recently visited San Bernardino and spoke on the terrorist shootings:
We are not at war with terrorism, which is just a tactic. We are not at war with some empty sociological label called extremism. We are not even just at war with ISIS; though we’re obviously at war with ISIS, but there will be other enemies that will lift the black flag of death in the future even after ISIS has been routed in Syria and Iraq. This is not about workplace violence. This is not about global warming or gun shows. This is not about income inequality. This is not about kids from broken homes as tragic as that is. This is not about anything that we have done wrong. This is about who we are. This is about the nature of freedom so who are we, we’re people who unite around the Constitution, we’re people who come together around a First Amendment and we together, 320 million of us, believe in the freedom of religion, in the freedom of speech, and the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press . . .
. . . We are most certainly though at war with militant Islam; we are at war with violent Islam; we are at war with jihadi Islam. We are not at war with all Muslims; we are not at war with Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan who want the American dream for their kids. But we are at war with those who believe that they will kill in the name of religion. President Obama said tonight he’s worried about a backlash against American Muslims. I am too, and you know what, the best way to combat that is? With the truth. By being clear about who we are and what we stand for and by being clear about those who would try to kill us because we believe in freedom.
President Obama opined Sunday night, “So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home.”
Oops, writes NRO’s Jim. Geraghty. Not so fast, Mr. President. A high level source reported late Sunday night that investigators are pursuing several lines of inquiry that tie Farook and Malik to the Middle East, “including the possibility that the two’s deadly rampage had been financed from overseas.”
We felt from early on these two couldn’t have done this alone,” the source said of the shooting in which the husband and wife killed 14 people at a county office building and injured 21 others. The source also said that the amount of evidence pointing in the direction of the Middle East had forced the Obama administration to “do an about-face” about the nature of Wednesday’s attack over the previous 24 hours.
Furthermore, as Jim Geraghty points out, there sure was a lot of ammo, firepower and pipe-bomb material lying around for a household getting by on Farook’s county employee’s salary of about $55,000 annually.
Sunday morning, Representative Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) disclosed that a congressional investigation recently found that at least 72 people working at the Department of Homeland Security also “were on the terrorist watch list.”
Sunday evening from the Oval Office, President Obama made another pitch for barring anyone on the no-fly list or terror watch list from purchasing firearms while ignoring any objections, whether it’s the lack of due process or judicial review. But you know who wasn’t on the no-fly list, writes Mr. Geraghty. “The San Bernardino shooters. Nor was the Fort Hood shooter. Nor the Boston bombers. Nor the Chattanooga shooter. In other words, no perpetrator of any major attack on American soil was on the no-fly list.” Read more from Mr. Geraghty here.
|
| >> read more |
|
 I will never forget the first time I saw the movie Star Wars
as a kid. It was in New Bedford, MA and I remember telling my mom after the show how I needed to see it again. I was hooked. It was such a powerful movie for me. Now, the latest installment, The Force Awakens, hits theaters late night December 17th. The Star Wars series has also been such a huge part of our kids’ movie experience growing up that Becky and I can’t wait to see it with them. Disney has done a wonderful job in keeping the story under wraps and also in building up the excitement to its opening night. J.J. Abrams talks about directing The Force Awakens here:
I cannot say enough about what George was able to do with that first movie, let alone the next ones. Forget how incredible it looked, forget the technology, forget the humor of it, the heart, the romance, the adventure—all the amazing moments that made us love it. Think about what he was able to stir up, the questions he was able to ask—exactly the right questions—the idea that he was able to create a world that clearly went so far beyond the boundaries of what we were seeing and hearing. This, to me, is one of the greatest things about Star Wars. Working on this new movie has been as much about trying to set up elements of what is beyond what you’re seeing as it has been about telling a story that will be satisfying in and of itself. But it can’t feel like a cop-out—like we’re just setting things up and not resolving them.
|
| >> read more |
|
 Former CIA bin Laden unit chief Dr. Michael Scheuer spent two decades working on how to keep Americans safe. Scheuer knows a little about national security.
Here Mike tells readers, “Because of the national government’s consistent and long-since-proven disinterest in defending the republic, its borders, or its citizens, Americans today would be best advised to immediately “buy guns, buy guns, and buy more guns” — and especially automatic weapons.” Read more from Mike here and here.
|
| >> read more |
|
 In The American Conservative, Daniel Larison slams Rubio’s lackluster campaign strategy.
The weakness of Rubio’s campaign organization is one of several reasons why he isn’t likely to do all that well once the voting begins. It is understandable that he hasn’t been able to build an organization in the early states because of his relatively low fundraising, but that itself shows how limited his support has been so far. The odd thing is that Rubio’s lack of a ground game seems to be a deliberate gamble that it isn’t necessary:
On the campaign trail, Marco Rubio is calling for a “new American century.” He’s also running a different type of campaign, one that eschews spending on policy staffers, field operations, and other traditional aspects of a winning bid in favor of television advertising and digital outreach [bold mine-DL].
One could say that this is making a virtue out of necessity, but it is really just evidence of poor campaign strategy. Favoring “digital outreach” over field operations sounds a lot like the ill-fated Howard Dean campaign. Dean received lots of attention in the months leading up to Iowa because of the enthusiasm that he was generating among progressive activists, especially among the nascent “netroots,” but when it came to organization and getting people to show up for him at the caucuses his campaign evidently hadn’t done the necessary work. Dean’s campaign failed to live up to the hype, and Rubio’s seems set up to do the same. One important difference between Dean and Rubio at this point is that there were some real reasons to think Dean was his party’s front-runner, and there aren’t any reasons to believe the same of Rubio.
The Rubio campaign seems to think that because Santorum and Huckabee prevailed in the last two Iowa contests that they don’t need to have much of a presence to be competitive, but that ignores how much time and effort those two put in wooing supporters in the state. It also ignores that Santorum and Huckabee were able to rely on supporters in the state’s churches to do a lot of their organizing for them because they were actively seeking support from social and religious conservatives in a way that Rubio isn’t. Rubio simply isn’t making the same effort:
Rubio, by contrast, has rarely left the Des Moines area for campaign events, and Republicans have taken to joking that he is running for mayor of Ankeny, the Des Moines suburb where his state headquarters is located.
That neglect of most of the state seems unlikely to deliver Rubio a win or even a good result in February. It is possible that his organization is poor enough in these early states that he could end up finishing behind candidates that he and everyone else have already written off.
What do you think of Rubio’s stump performance here? Let me know on my Facebook page.
|
| >> read more |
|
The former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, recently outlined a strategy for beating Islamic State that could actually work. He proposed targeting the infrastructure and production facilities that provide IS with the material and financing it takes to prosecute a full scale war. It appears as though the United Kingdom will now execute a strategy very similar to that outlined by Scheuer. reports here:
British airstrikes in Syria will target the infrastructure that supports Islamic State militants, including oil wellheads, ammunition stores and supply routes running to Iraq, U.K. Defense Minister Michael Fallon said.
Mr. Fallon was headed to Washington to meet his U.S. counterpart, Ash Carter, on Friday, the first time the two men have met since the U.K.’s Royal Air Force joined the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Syria last week.
Mr. Fallon also said the U.K. had responded to U.S. concerns about British defense-spending cuts, but acknowledged it would take time for new military equipment to come into service to fill gaps in capability.
British jets will use precision munitions to target the infrastructure that supports Islamic State, including small oil wellheads that provide revenue for the group, the defense minister said, speaking to a small group of reporters.
“The coalition hasn’t been bombing these infrastructure targets until recently because of this effort to support the ground Kurdish forces. And there are plenty of targets,” Mr. Fallon said.
The U.K. has doubled its strike force to a total of 10 Tornado jets and six Eurofighter Typhoon jets since Parliament approved the expansion of airstrikes against Islamic State to Syria from Iraq, where the Royal Air Force has been bombing for more than a year.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke about the need to cut off Islamic State’s sources of funding with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a call, adding that the U.K.’s first airstrikes in Syria had targeted oil fields.
Within hours of Mr. Cameron winning approval for airstrikes in Syria on Dec. 2, the Royal Air Force began targeting oil infrastructure in eastern Syria. They struck the same Omar oil fields again on Sunday with eight attacks; the government said early reports suggested they were successful. The site is one of the most important to Islamic State’s financial operations, representing “over 10% of their potential income from oil,” the U.K. ministry of defense has said.
|
| >> read more |
|
Pat Buchanan hits the nail in the head telling readers what the Donald is saying:
Trump’s surge this week, in the teeth of universal denunciation, suggests that a large slice of America agrees with his indictment — that our political-media establishment is dumb as a box of rocks and leading us down a path to national suicide.
Trump’s success tells us that the American people really do not celebrate “globalization.” They think our negotiators got snookered out of the most magnificent industrial machine ever built, which once guaranteed our workers the highest standard of living on earth.
They don’t want open borders or mass immigration. They want people here illegally to be sent back, the borders secured, and a moratorium imposed on Muslim immigration until we fix the broken system.
As for the establishment, they are saying pretty much what The Donald is saying. To paraphrase Oliver Cromwell’s speech to the Rump Parliament: You have sat here too long for any good you have done here. In the name of God, go!
|
| >> read more |
|
 Here Daniel Larison excoriates war-dog Senator John McCain over his scolding of Air Force General Paul Selva at a Senate Armed Servces Committee hearing. Larison chastises McCain for his willingness to spend American blood on any and all military engagements, and for risking a broader war with Russia in Syria that could lead to perilous consequences for all.
Dana Milbank reproduces a notable exchange from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Syria:
“We have the military capacity to impose a no-fly zone,” Selva said without hesitation. But he was concerned about the Syrian and Russian reaction. “The potential for miscalculation and loss of American life in the air,” he said, “do not warrant the no-fly zone.”
Sen. John McCain, the panel’s chairman, shook his head. “It is one of the more embarrassing statements I have ever heard from a uniformed military officer,” the Arizona Republican said, “that we are worried about Syria and Russia’s reaction to saving the lives of thousands and thousands of Syrians being barrel-bombed and massacred.”
McCain is the one who should be embarrassed by this exchange, but it doesn’t surprise me that he wasn’t. There is no military option so reckless or dangerous that McCain wouldn’t support it, and it is fortunate that our military leaders are not quite so cavalier about risking American lives and possibly provoking major wars. Thinking through how potential adversaries might react to a course of action is the responsible and sane thing for anyone in the government to do whether he is a military officer or a civilian. Gen. Selva is doing what he ought to be doing under the circumstances, and McCain ought to be ashamed for upbraiding him for offering a sober reckoning of the potential costs and benefits of his preferred policy. In this case, it is also absolutely right to be cautious when talking about an aggressive measure that puts the U.S. on a collision course with another nuclear-armed state. McCain’s characteristic disregard for the consequences of military action is what Milbank should be condemning here rather than faulting Pentagon officials for being responsible.
It also needs to be emphasized here that starting a war with the Syrian government and risking war with Russia wouldn’t guarantee the protection of any civilians in Syria. Not only would a “no-fly zone” fail to offer any protection for civilians from ground attacks from the regime or ISIS, but it would risk escalating the war to the detriment of civilians in all parts of Syria. If a “no-fly zone” were to trigger a wider war, the consequences could be even more severe for all parties to the conflict. As hawks typically do, McCain dismisses the possibility that an aggressive policy might backfire or cost more than it gains the U.S. He is the one ignoring the perils and pitfalls of deeper intervention, and it is simply deplorable.
FLASHBACK VIDEO:
|
| >> read more |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
