One of Theirs Doesn’t Pan Out

Jennifer Rubin, CommentaryMagazine.com

 

Maureen Dowd is a woman scorned, it seems. Candidate Dreamy has become Captain Obvious. She hisses:

 

“We must do better,” Captain Obvious said Thursday at the White House, “in keeping dangerous people off airplanes while still facilitating air travel.”

 

And like many a conservative pundit, she’s had quite enough of the “President Cool” routine and of the insistence “on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding.”

 

And Obama’s background has proved, if anything, to be a hindrance. Obama’s oversight of the Harvard Law Review didn’t prepare him for the Oval Office. To the contrary, his preference for government by seminar made for an excruciating war-planning process. His cool persona doesn’t instill confidence in voters. It frightens them that their president is disengaged (emotionally and otherwise).

 

Dowd and her colleagues complain now — but he was their kind of guy. Perhaps we shouldn’t put in the White House someone better suited to edit a liberal publication. Read article.

Keith Riler, American Thinker.com

 

Barack Obama's health care plan ensures spiraling costs and will convert health insurance companies into cost-plus health reimbursement utilities, or else bankrupt them completely. Health insurance as we know it (think home/auto/life) will no longer exist. The president's plan also provides for taxpayer-funded abortion, making abortion even cheaper and increasing its frequency. 

 

Obama and Reid have produced a bill that turns this insurance concept on its head by i) preventing underwriting based on medical risk and ii) requiring citizens (and employers) to purchase insurance or pay a fee. This combination guarantees an adverse selection problem whereby healthy people will pay the cheaper fee until sick and in need of insurance, whereupon they will enroll for non-deniable insurance. Risk pools will become sick pools, and insurance will become a pass-through vehicle for the cost of sick policyholders. Read article.

 

Nonie Darwish, FaithFreedom.org

 

Islam is in trouble at the heart of its birthplace, Saudi Arabia, and consequently in other Muslim countries. Muslim leaders and media are desperately trying to regain control both internally and externally. Muslims are starting to openly and defiantly question; while the international image of Islam is being tarnished daily with every act of terror, hate speech and calls for jihad from the pulpits of mosques. The traditional open calls for violence and jihad Islam got away with for centuries is now under scrutiny especially after 9/11. Islam is now under the microscope. That is the quagmire of Muslims today. How can they continue teaching their basic religious jihad education but still save face and Islam’s reputation in a culture where image and honor is everything.

 

The West is not fully aware of what is happening in the Muslim world today where taboo topics are being discussed by brave Muslim reformists and former Muslims. There are ground braking Arabic TV and Internet shows aired inside homes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, etc, discussing what ordinary Muslims were never allowed to heard before. The brilliant Rachid Hmami, a Former Muslim turned Christian and originally from Morocco, has a show, Suaal Garii ‘Daring Question,’ that is making shock waves across the Middle East. Another equally effective show, is that of the brave Coptic priest, Father Zakareya Botros, who was imprisoned in Egypt for proselytizing to Muslims. Father Botros’s show is a huge success in exposing tyranny, contradictions and weaknesses in Islam. Muslims who call in, are often in shocked by what they hear for the first time about their own religion, yet another proof that Muslim establishment intentionally spreads misinformation and ignorance of basic Muslim doctrines to Muslims. Many Muslims, even from Saudi Arabia, call in to renounce Islam.

 

Unprecedented defiance is happening in the heart of the Muslim world. Read article.

 

David B. Rivkin Jr. & Lee A. Casey, NRO.com

 

Writing in the New York Times, Michael Kinsley defends treating Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the al-Qaeda operative who recently tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit) as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant. He argues that, since any line to be drawn between waging war and engaging the criminal-justice system is going to be arbitrary, the U.S. border is as good a line as any. That is, al-Qaeda terrorists captured abroad are enemy combatants while those captured at home are criminal defendants, entitled to all the rights provided by our Constitution and statutes.

 

The problem is that the lines between law enforcement and war are not arbitrary (but rather well defined by law and tradition) and that choosing the U.S. border as a nice, bright line is not driven by military strategy, logic, or law. There is nothing sacred about American territory. Indeed, at least two major wars — the Revolutionary War and Civil War — and numerous military conflicts with Indian tribes were prosecuted on American soil. This war can be (and has been) fought here as well as in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Yemen. In fact, the United States is the enemy’s favored battleground, because this is where al-Qaeda’s most desired targets — American civilians — are most heavily concentrated. This is why the victims of 9/11 died in New York, Washington, and the fields of Pennsylvania, rather than at American facilities and installations abroad.

 

Nor, in fact, is the line Mr. Kinsley proposes arbitrary; it is ideological. Adopting a war-abroad/law-enforcement-at-home rule is nothing but an exercise in political triangulation. It indulges the Left’s fundamental disdain for the use of military force, while permitting the Obama administration to claim that it actually is trying to protect the American people by taking the fight to the enemy. Read between the lines — or read the lines. Mr. Kinsley contrasts our roles “as a liberal democracy and as a legitimately aggrieved superpower.” Why is it, exactly, that those two things are inconsistent? We are, in fact, a legitimately aggrieved liberal democracy that happens, also, to be a superpower. Read article.

 

Maggie's Notebook.Blogspot.com

 

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission, have ripped the administration for giving Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day underpants bomber, the cover of a civilian trial.

 

Mukasey countered Deputy Security Advisor, John Brennan's suggestion that we can get information from the now-lawyered-up Abdulmutallab by offering him a plea deal:

 

"He certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.

 

Mr Mukasey argues that it was crucial to gain intelligence from him immediately as details about locations, names and other plots is subject to rapid change.

 

Abdulmutallab could have been held and interrogated in military custody under existing US legislation before a decision was taken whether to charge him before a military tribunal or a civilian court, according to Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General under President George W Bush. Read article.

 

Rabbi Aryeh Spiro, American Thinker.com

 

Mr. Obama's first concern seems to protect things Islamic rather than name and fight the Islamism intent on destroying us. This attitude predates his presidency, and it is one of the animating and personal goals of his worldview. Even before becoming senator of Illinois, he tells us in The Audacity of Hope (pp.261) of his earlier decision: "I will stand with them [Muslims] should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." For Barack Obama, the recognition that this is not simply generic "extremism," as he likes to call it, but specific to Islam and carried out by devout young Muslim men borders on the "ugly direction" against which he promised to stand. But by so doing, Mr.Obama is misleading the country and standing in the way of the measures needed to protect the American people and win the war on terror.

 

What we get from the president after each incident is not a tough, impassioned call to wipe out jihadists, but the warning that we "should not rush to judgment" or draw any conclusions regarding Islam or Muslims. The more Islamic terrorism, the more warnings we receive from him not to mischaracterize Islam. But how can the American public be accused of "rushing" to judgment when this has been happening before our eyes for thirty years already? After decades of these incidents -- and they are coming quicker now -- Obama expects us to participate in his cover-up for Islam by immediately agreeing that these attackers are either "alone," or "misfits," or "crazy." They are not crazy, but devoted to a cause; not misfits, but fit into a very large Islamist groupthink; not alone, but part of an ideology, most often coordinated by Islamists and clerics higher up. These are agents of Islamism on the same level as the German agents of Nazism who tried to do damage within our borders during WWII. At least back then, the safety of the home-front was more important to our leaders than protecting "feelings."

 

Until President Obama acknowledges the Islamic context behind these acts of worldwide jihad, we Americans remain at great risk. One cannot vanquish what he does not believe is a culprit. Read article.

Tony Blankley, FrontPageMag.com

 

My old boss Newt Gingrich used to say that he studied history as a practical guide for a working politician and political activist. And it is with that in mind that I offer the foregoing.

 

2010 is going to be a tough year. We are going to have huge struggles over terrorism, war, shockingly large new deficits and public debt policies, crushing tax proposals on energy, income, health care and many other human activities. We have every right to dissent, and to do so vigorously even on such matters as terrorism policy.

 

Contrary to White House and Democratic Party complaints in the last few days, there is nothing partisan or improper about sharply criticizing such administration policy. As a loyal conservative Republican, I nonetheless wrote an entire book in 2005 criticizing Bush’s anti-terrorism policy and operations. As did many other conservative Republicans dissent. At a much, much grander level, Winston Churchill in the 1930s powerfully dissented from a policy of appeasement that Britain’s leaders at the time were convinced were vital to secure the peace. Dissenting with honesty, ferocity and courage is one of Churchill’s lessons to us today.

 

And, whether fighting as an underdog in a political struggle or trying to keep things together as a breadwinner in this second hard economic winter, Churchill’s last words in his last speech in Parliament as prime minister in 1955 are sturdy guides to conduct: “Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair.” Read article.

 

Victor Davis Hanson, Townhall.com

 

1979 was another climactic year. Jimmy Carter's prior years of sermonizing about American bad habits had convinced many of the world's bad actors that it was time to press forward their regional agendas without fear of American reaction.

 

Once theater aggression began, there was little way to stop it. President Carter's whiny "crisis of confidence" speech in which he confessed to a collective American malaise only made things worse.

 

What a year 1979 proved to be! Daniel Ortega's Sandinistas took control of Nicaragua. The Iranian Revolution triggered an oil panic. A global energy crisis followed. Islamic terrorists took American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. About seven weeks later, the Soviet Union's Red Army entered Afghanistan. China earlier in the year had invaded Vietnam.

 

2010 may turn out to be a similar year of destiny. In 2009, the United States gave Iran at least four deadlines to stop its nuclear program. All were ignored. Does an emboldened theocracy believe this now is the year to become nuclear and change the entire strategic makeup of the Middle East? Read article.

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