Jonathan Spyer, Gloria-Center.org

 

In his letter to Congress announcing the renewal of US sanctions on Syria, President Barack Obama was specific regarding the reasons for his decision.

Syria, the President said, was "supporting terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, and undermining US and international efforts with respect to the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq."

 

 These three accusations are related to verifiable activity currently being undertaken by the Damascus regime. Syria's activity in turn reflects the firmness of the regime's strategic choice to align itself with the regional alliance led by Iran.

 

Syria's actions should be observed well by all those currently promoting the feasibility of a "grand bargain" between Israel and the Arab world. They are evidence of the reality of a Middle East Cold War, in which the fault lines are growing ever clearer.

First, let's recall the details. With regard to supporting terrorism, it is well known that the leaderships of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are domiciled in Damascus. Syria has over the last decade built a close, mutually beneficial strategic relationship with Hizbullah. Damascus also serves as a large care home for various superannuated leftist Palestinian groups. Read article.

 

John P. Hannah

 

Hanging over the meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was one overriding question: Can the president's strategy of diplomatic engagement persuade Iran to cease its efforts to develop nuclear weapons? Unfortunately, history offers little cause for hope -- especially if the United States remains focused on trying to reassure Iran of America's benign intentions. Successful denuclearization of hostile states is most likely to occur as a result of regime change, coercive diplomacy or military action, not U.S. pledges of mutual respect.

 

Consider: South Africa surrendered its nuclear arsenal in 1990 only after the apartheid regime began unraveling. Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine abandoned nuclear weapons after they emerged as independent states in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. In the 1980s, the decisions by Brazil and Argentina to end nuclear weapons programs were linked to their transitions from military dictatorships to liberal democracies.

 

Cases of successful nuclear reversal in the Middle East underscore the importance of coercion. In December 2003, Libya's Moammar Gaddafi accepted an American offer of rapprochement in exchange for giving up his nuclear weapons infrastructure -- after U.S. troops had provided him with the compelling example of deposing and capturing Gaddafi's fellow Arab dictator Saddam Hussein. Read article.

 

Victor Davis Hanson, NRO.com

 

I have a great deal of empathy for President Obama on matters like North Korea and Iran — both lunatic players that I think represent firsts in his own experience. You see, there are no good choices, and he can't simply vote "present" this time. Any decision he makes will be evaluated not necessarily on the basis of its superior logic or the eloquence with which it is presented, but solely on whether it works or not. If it does, he will be praised; if it doesn't, he will be damned, unfairly or not.

 

Soon some wannabe Republican presidential candidate will be barnstorming the country, second-guessing Obama's decision-making, giving him no benefit of the doubt, and adopting simplistic answers as a candidate that he could not possibly embrace as Commander-in-Chief — the one constant being that whatever Obama does, the potential rival, without the responsibilities of office, will argue that it was wrong.

 

Fate, chance, luck, and more will contribute to the outcome of any presidential action — unpredictable, of course, but in the cruel game of assessing presidential decision-making, no grounds for excuse.

 

Moreover, both these problems not only antedated Obama, but antedated Bush as well, yet they cannot be massaged with "reset" button and a "Bush did it," nor by soaring "hope and change" rhetoric. Read article.

 

John Hawkins, Townhall.com

 

Everybody is guilty of being hypocritical sometimes. It’s just part of being human; however, modern liberalism has taken this concept to stunning extremes. The entire liberal belief system, from top to bottom, is a series of logical blind alleys, bottlenecks, and jaw-dropping contradictions.

 

To be a politically active liberal is to a be a person whose life is steeped in hypocrisy from the time he gets up until the time he goes to bed -- and that's despite the fact that many libs take morally abhorrent positions just so they can't be called hypocrites if they ever get caught doing something degenerate.

 

That being said, I will freely acknowledge that every liberal isn't guilty of all the hypocrisies that are on this list and that conservatives can be contradictory, too. Now, let's see if that actually prompts some self-reflection on the Left as opposed to cries of "Here's something conservatives are hypocritical about" and "I don't believe this one." Read article.

 

Patrick J. Buchanan, Human Events.com

 

Dick Cheney is giving the Republican Party a demonstration of how to fight a popular president. Stake out defensible high ground, do not surrender an inch, then go onto the attack.

 

The ground on which Cheney has chosen to stand is the most defensible the Republicans have: homeland security. In seven-and-a-half years after 9-11, not one terrorist attack struck our country.

 

And, unlike Obama's position, Cheney's is 100 percent reality based. He was there. He lived through this. He made the decisions to use the harsher techniques on the worst of the enemy who could yield the greatest intelligence to save American lives.

 

"The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful and the right thing to do." And they "prevented the violent deaths of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innocent people."

 

Having defended every decision he took, Cheney then counterattacked. He charged The New York Times with virtual treason in exposing the program to intercept calls from al-Qaida and mocked its Pulitzer Prize. He accused liberals and Speaker Pelosi of "feigned outrage" and "phony moralizing," asserting they were fully briefed on "the program and the methods." He charged Obama with endangering national security by "triangulating," adopting a policy designed less to secure America than to unite and appease his political coalition. Read article.

 

Dan Blumenthal and Robert Kagan, Washington Post.com

 

The North Korean launch of its Taeopodong-2 missile and its second nuclear test have laid bare the paucity of President Obama's policy options. They have exposed the futility of the six-party talks and, in particular, the much-hyped myth of China's value as a partner on strategic matters. The Obama administration claims that it wants to break with the policies of its predecessor. This is one area where it ought to.

 

After decades of diplomacy and "probing" Pyongyang's intentions, one thing is clear: Kim Jong Il and his cronies want nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. What will dissuade them? Isolation and more punitive sanctions would make sense if China and Russia would go along. But they haven't, and they won't.

 

We would support military action against North Korean missiles and missile sites, if we had prepared ourselves over the past few years to protect our allies against possible North Korean retaliation. Former defense secretary William J. Perry and current defense undersecretary Ashton B. Carter recommended this course of action in The Post a few years ago. But the supposedly bellicose Bush administration didn't take such action, and the odds of this administration doing so are even smaller. Read article.

 

Terence Jeffrey, CNSNews.com

 

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told a group of reporters at the National Press Club on Thursday that he wants to “coerce people out of their cars.”

 

In Newsweek magazine last week, nationally syndicated columnist George Will published a piece critical of Lahood, entitled, “Ray LaHood, Transformed--Secretary of Behavior Modification.”

 

“He says he has joined a ‘transformational’ administration: ‘I think we can change people's behavior,’” Will reports that LaHood said over lunch.

 

LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Peoria, Ill., has become a champion of using the Department of Transportation and federal transportation spending to get people to take trains, busses, and ride bikes instead of driving cars.

 

At the National Press Club on Thursday he attempted to respond to George Will’s column and to explain his vision for using the power of government to change people’s transportation behavior and to change the nature of American residential communities. Read article.

 

Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post.com

 

President Obama is expected to announce late this week that he will create a "cyber czar," a senior White House official who will have broad authority to develop strategy to protect the nation's government-run and private computer networks, according to people who have been briefed on the plan.

 

The adviser will have the most comprehensive mandate granted to such an official to date and will probably be a member of the National Security Council but will report to the national security adviser as well as the senior White House economic adviser, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations are not final.

 

The announcement will coincide with the long-anticipated release of a 40-page report that evaluates the government's cybersecurity initiatives and policies. The report is intended to outline a "strategic vision" and the range of issues the new adviser must handle, but it will not delve into details, administration officials told reporters last month. Read article.

 

Sultan Knish.Blogspot.com

 

When early in the 20th century Germany faced a variety of complex economic, military and political problems, the Nazi propaganda organ, "Der Sturmer" boiled them down to a simple message, "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck". In a flash, Germany's defeat in WW1, the worldwide economic depression and its political turmoil could all be blamed on the Jews. And of course if the Jews were gone, everything would be alright in Germany again.

 

If we simply removed the tiny state of Israel, 1/80th the size of Iran. Islamic terrorism would go the way of the Dodo, women and religious minorities would have rights and Europe, America and the Muslim world would be able to join hands and sing Kumbaya.

If only it wasn't for Israel.

 

Never mind that much of the actual instability comes from the fact that the map of the Middle East was a clumsy colonial hodgepodge of imaginary states with ancient names, ruled by bandits and warlords, styling themselves Kings and Emirs. Virtually every ruling house in the Middle East that was backed by the England, France or the US... is despised by their own populations.

 

And as in the Pre-WW2 period, too many in the West have bought into the victimology of the sociopathic mass murderers and the idea that conceding a country or two to them, might buy us "peace in our time".

 

Now some 70 years after Munich, Barack Hussein Obama is pressuring Israel to let itself be carved up in order to appease Islamic terrorists, claiming that the solution to the Middle East's problems lie through Israel. 130 years after a liberal politician coined the phrase, "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck", Western liberals are back to reducing a complex series of regional problems to the "Jewish Question." Read article.

 

Byron York, JWR.com

 

Barack Obama is making an enormous mistake on the most important initiative of his presidency. In recent weeks, Obama has stressed that healthcare reform is the essential ingredient for the success of his economic-recovery plan. Yet the president, easily the most gifted White House communicator since Ronald Reagan, has the message all wrong.

 

"Our businesses will not be able to compete, our families will not be able to save or spend, our budgets will remain unsustainable unless we get healthcare costs under control," Obama said in his May 16 radio address. He has said the same thing on many other occasions, almost always stressing the threat of runaway cost. When Obama talks healthcare, it's cost, cost, cost.

 

But that's not what people want to hear — or at least not all they want to hear. Of course, they complain about the expense of medical treatment, but controlling cost is not their top healthcare concern. "Americans will prioritize cost over quality right up until the moment they realize that it's their quality that they are sacrificing," writes the Republican pollster Frank Luntz in "The Language of Healthcare 2009," a brilliant new analysis of the public's healthcare concerns that also serves as a road map for defeating Obamacare.

 

"Americans will prioritize cost over quality right up until the moment they realize that it's their quality that they are sacrificing," writes the Republican pollster Frank Luntz in "The Language of Healthcare 2009," a brilliant new analysis of the public's healthcare concerns that also serves as a road map for defeating Obamacare. Read article.

 

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