Ron James

Melanie Phillips on the “deserving” (according to Joe Biden) Arabs:

…Biden … said:

“the Palestinians deserve a ‘viable’ independent state with contiguous territory.”

Why? What have they done to deserve it? In what other conflict in the history of the planet have people who have waged a war of annihilation for eight decades and continue to do so been considered to ‘deserve’ anything, let alone an ‘independent’ existence the sole purpose of which is a military beach-head to finish the job and which would slice its victim in half?

To put it another way, why does Joe Biden think that Israel ‘deserves’ to surrender?

And why, once again, is a final solution being imposed by America upon democratic and beseiged Israel, while the administration of which Biden is such an ornament refuses to take any effective measures against the genocidal Iranian regime which is already responsible for countless American deaths and of which Israel is the present and potentially future victim, and which threatens the safety of the western world against which it has long declared war?

Charles Krauthammer demystifies the seemingly contradictory poll results for Obamacare:

…in his summation [at the recent “health care summit], Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.

Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed – say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry’s feeling about the current Democratic health care bills…

Mark Steyn sees us trying to catch up with the Greeks in the race over the cliff:

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe…

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less-profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out, anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick Americans with their defense tab. And, in America, Obama, Pelosi and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

Watching the coverage of the “health care summit,” I thought for a moment that Barry had caught the opposition being as “disingenuous” as he customarily is. But a Wall Street Journal editorial reveals that the disingenuousness, it turns out, was all Barry’s:

…The morning was dominated by an argument over whether ObamaCare would lower insurance costs, and the exchange was telling. Republicans, led by Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, rightly said that premiums would increase, while the President disagreed. “This is an example of where we’ve got to get our facts straight,” he said, in keeping with his strategy of depicting any disagreement as factually challenged or politically motivated.

One fact is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that premiums in the individual market would jump by 10% to 13% in 2016 because the government will mandate that consumers buy richer benefits than they otherwise would. Mr. Obama eventually conceded that point but said these mandates are simple consumer protections. “Yes, I am paying 10% to 13% more because instead of buying an apple, I’m getting an orange,” Mr. Obama said. “We want competition, we just want some minimum standards.”

Well, yes, politicians always claim their standards are the minimum. Despite vastly different consumer health needs and preferences, the core of ObamaCare is the brute-force regulatory standardization of benefits and how they should be paid for, so that government can afford to subsidize health care for all…

Mark Steyn on the “diversity” disease:

…You’ll recall the cringe-making response to the [Fort Hood] massacre by the embarrassing General Casey, the Army’s chief of staff:

“What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

The fact that a grown man not employed by a U.S. educational institution or media outlet used the word “diversity” in a non-parodic sense should be deeply disturbing. “Diversity” is not a virtue; it’s morally neutral: A group of five white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women is non-diverse; a group of four white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women plus Sudan’s leading clitorectomy practitioner is more diverse but not necessarily the better for it. For 30 years we have watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while we deluded ourselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact was always absurd. When the chief of staff of the United States Army has got the disease, you’re in big (and probably terminal) trouble.

George Will gets it right on the “government is broken” nonsense espoused by the likes of Evan Bayh and the leftish media:

…Well, it’s hard to take a lecture on bipartisanship from a man [Evan Bayh] who voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, the confirmation of Justice Alito, the confirmation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Far from being a rebel against his Party’s lockstep movement, Mr. Bayh voted for the Detroit bailout, for the stimulus, for the public option in the healthcare bill. I don’t know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda. No one when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security said, “Oh, that’s terrible - the government’s broken."…

Actually this is the way the U.S. government is supposed to work. It’s supposed to be hard to enact radical change.

Melanie Reid, writing in the Times of London, can’t wait for Mossad the Movie:

…It is an unfashionable thing to say, but I have a considerable admiration for the Israeli way of doing things. They want something, they get it. They perceive someone as their deadly enemy, they kill them. They get hit, they hit back. They don’t waste time explaining or justifying or agonising; nor do they allow their detractors to enter their country and then afford them generous welfare payments. They just act. No messing. No scruples. Not even a shrug and a denial, just a rather magnificent refusal to debate anything.

This absolutism, based on their history, carries its own moral weight; one that is rather electrifying in a Western world grown flabby with niceties. Clearly, the Israelis could defend their policies if they wanted to, but they quite simply can’t be bothered. It’s a waste of breath. One admires them for that, too…

Maybe, as the West becomes increasingly gentle and polite, and pays those monthly direct debits to Amnesty International, we need the Israelis to remind us that the world is not made according to our template…

Robin Shepherd weighs in.

Ann Coulter unloads some well-deserved malice on the wacky crew at MSNBC:

…it was curious that after months of warnings from the Bush administration in 2007 that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program, a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was leaked, concluding that Iran had ceased its nuclear weapons program years earlier.

Republicans outside of the administration went ballistic over the suspicious timing and content of the Iran-Is-Peachy report. Even The New York Times, of all places, ran a column by two outside experts on Iran’s nuclear programs that ridiculed the NIE’s conclusion.

Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and Valerie Lincy of Iranwatch.org cited Iran’s operation of 3,000 gas centrifuges at its plant at Natanz, as well as a heavy-water reactor being built at Arak, neither of which had any peaceful energy purpose. (If only there were something plentiful in Iran that could be used for energy!)

Weirdly, our intelligence agencies missed those nuclear operations. They were too busy reading an article in the Tehran Tattler, “Iran Now Loves Israel.”

Ahmadinejad was ecstatic, calling the NIE report “a declaration of the Iranian people’s victory against the great powers.”

The only people more triumphant than Ahmadinejad about the absurd conclusion of our vaunted “intelligence” agencies were liberals.

…Naturally, the most hysterical response came from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. After donning his mother’s housecoat, undergarments and fuzzy slippers, Keith brandished the NIE report, night after night, demanding that Bush apologize to the Iranians.

“Having accused Iran of doing something it had stopped doing more than four years ago,” Olbermann thundered, “instead of apologizing or giving a diplomatic response of any kind, this president of the United States chuckled.”

Olbermann ferociously defended innocent-as-a-lamb Mahmoud from aspersions cast by the Bush administration, asking: “Could Mr. Bush make it any more of a mess … in response to Iran’s anger at being in some respects, at least, either overrated or smeared, his response officially chuckling, how is that going to help anything?”

Bush had “smeared” Iran!

Olbermann’s Ed McMahon, the ever-obliging Howard Fineman of Newsweek, agreed, saying that the leaked intelligence showed that Bush “has zero credibility.”

Olbermann’s even creepier sidekick, androgynous Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe, also agreed, saying American credibility “has suffered another serious blow.”

Poor Iran!

Olbermann’s most macho guest, Rachel Maddow, demanded to know – with delightful originality – “what the president knew and when he knew it.” This was on account of Bush’s having disparaged the good name of a messianic, Holocaust-denying nutcase, despite the existence of a cheery report on Iran produced by our useless intelligence agencies…

You want to see and hear something nauseating? Watch this from something called AfriSynergy.

A little after 3 minutes, the odious Jew-hatred begins.

According to the Times of London, Israel is “waging a covert war across the Middle East":

Israel is waging a covert assassination campaign across the Middle East in an effort to stop its key enemies co-ordinating their activities.

Israeli agents have been targeting meetings between members of Hamas and the leadership of the militant Hezbollah group, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

They are also suspected of recent killings in Dubai, Damascus and Beirut. While Israel’s Mossad spy agency has been suspected of staging assassinations across the world since the 1970s, it does not officially acknowledge or admit its activities.

The current spate of killings began in December when a “tourist bus” carrying Iranian officials and Hamas members exploded outside Damascus. The official report by Syria claimed that a tyre had exploded but photographs surfaced showing the charred remains of the vehicle — prompting speculation that a much larger explosion had taken place.

Several weeks later a meeting between members of Hamas, which controls Gaza, and their counterparts from Hezbollah in its southern Beirut stronghold in Lebanon was also attacked, resulting in several deaths.

Hamas had sought to cover up the incidents because it was embarrassed, a senior Palestinian official in Ramallah told The Times…

A novel way to play the race card. Now, calling Barry a “professor” is racist:

…[Harvard law professor Charles] Ogletree, founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says he sees the “professor” label as a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race. Calling Obama “the professor” walks dangerously close to labeling him “uppity,” a term with racial overtones that has surfaced in the political arena before, Ogletree said…

“The idea is that he’s not one of us,” Ogletree says of the professor label. “He has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists – those were buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as an African American who was out of place.”

Thomas L. Haskell, a professor emeritus of history at Rice University, agrees that racial bias may be implicit in the attack on Obama’s professorial past.

“For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual,” Haskell says. “But what does that mean to John Q. Public? I don’t know. John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially because this particular intellectual is a black.”

Again, an idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.

Here is brilliant Barry wowing the audience once again:

…Let’s start with an excerpt of the President speaking today at the National Prayer Breakfast, cut number nine:

B[arry] H[ussein] O[bama]: One such translator was American of Haitian descent, representative of the extraordinary work that our men and women in uniform do all around the world. Navy Corpseman Christian Bouchard, and lying on a gurney aboard the USNS Comfort, a woman asked Christopher where do you come from? What country? After my operation, she said I will pray for that country. And in Creole, Corpseman [sic] Bouchard responded in Tanzini.

HH: All right, stop for a second. Mark Steyn, I’m glad he’s recognizing the corpsman, but he can’t pronounce corpsman. And not only that, it makes me think he never, ever rehearses anything.

M[ark] S[teyn]: No, I think that’s true. I mean, I think corpseman is the new zombie superhero, isn’t he, coming out in the big James Cameron movie. That’s what corpseman is. But this guy, I think you’re right. He wings everything. And that’s why he spends so much time speaking to so little good. I mean, this is, apart from the fact that it’s kind of revealing culturally in a broad sense, it typifies the Obama method. I said about that appearance of his with Martha Coakley a couple of days before the Massachusetts election, I said he went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in, which is what he did. He went to the trouble of going all the way to Massachusetts, but then he had nothing to say when he got there. It’s the same thing in Copenhagen with his pathetic Olympics pitch. And I think it does come to this thing where he just says fire up the teleprompter, and I’ll come in and wing it…

Here’s the video. He actually says “corpseman” twice! Do you think we’ll see a book of Barry malapropisms? Don’t hold your breath.

Jennifer Rubin on the now obvious debt of gratitude we owe the previous administration (Bush and Cheney) for establishing Guantanamo and military trials for terrorists:

…Until the public could see the alternative to Bush policies played out before their eyes, they did not fully appreciate just how rational were the choices made by those charged with keeping the country safe in the months and years following 9/11. It is all the more remarkable that the Bush team got it right on the big calls, considering that, unlike the Obami, they did not have any recent experience to guide them. They relied on common sense, on historical precedent, and on the conviction that the highest priorities were to protect the public and deny any advantage to our enemy, not curry favor with international opinion. They have been vindicated in that judgment by none other than the moral preeners who ran for office on the specious argument that the Bush team had betrayed American values and actually made us less safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. It has taken a mere year for two thirds of the public to agree.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done serious if not fatal damage to Barry’s effort to suck up to the international left by trying 9/11 mastermind KSM in lower Manhattan:

The Obama administration on Wednesday lost its most prominent backer of the plan to try the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks in Lower Manhattan when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the trial should not be held in New York City.

The mayor’s reversal was a political blow to the White House’s efforts to resolve a landmark terror case a few blocks from where Al Qaeda hijackers rammed planes into the World Trade Center, a trial that the president saw as an important demonstration of American justice.

Mr. Bloomberg said that a more secure location, like a military base, would be less disruptive and less costly. His remarks echoed growing opposition from Wall Street executives, the real estate industry and neighborhood groups, who have questioned the burdens that such a trial would bring to a heavily trafficked area of the city.

Also:

…Congressional Republicans are threatening a financial maneuver to block the trials from being held in New York and are certain to seize on the mayor’s remarks. On Tuesday, six senators wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and urged him to abandon the idea.

The letter, signed by Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut; John McCain, Republican of Arizona; Blanche L. Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas; Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine; Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia; and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, read, in part, “You will be providing them one of the most visible platforms in the world to exalt their past acts and to rally others in support of further terrorism.”…

“Financial maneuver” in timesspeak means withhold funding. Looks like Barry (and Eric) will have to stiff the loony left on this one as well.

Michael Barone on the poor “boobs” who voted for Scott Brown:

… Members of “the educated class” may have heard of Edmund Burke, but they take the very un-Burkean view that those with elite educations can readily rearrange society to comport with their pet abstract theories. These often secular Americans have a quasi-religious faith in government’s ability to, in Barack Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber, “spread the wealth around” and to recalibrate the energy sector to protect against climate dangers they are absolutely sure are impending.

Ordinary Americans, even in Massachusetts, may not have heard of Edmund Burke, but they share his skepticism that self-appointed experts can reengineer institutions in accordance with abstract theories…

In other words, as Orwell wrote: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them. No ordinary person would.”

And the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick on Barry’s foreign policy:

…Given the congressional backlash to the Massachusetts election, it is possible that Obama will be compelled to put aside his domestic initiatives, or at least to repackage them. US presidents have only a limited capacity to unilaterally implement massive changes on the domestic front. Congressional support is required for most major endeavors. Today, it seems likely that many Democratic lawmakers will refuse to fall on their swords for Obama. So his health care initiative, like his environmental and immigration agendas, may well be buried in committee.

On the other hand, the US Constitution gives the president a much freer hand in foreign affairs. And here we are likely to see a full-court presidential press to force through his radical agenda on everything from nuclear weapons to counterterrorism to appeasement of the Islamic world. Given the prominence Obama has already given to his anti-Israel posture, it can be assumed that Israel will be the focus of even more intense pressure from the White House in the months and years to come…

I watched Meet the Press this morning where I heard liberals opine that the Massachusetts election (and the almost certain demise of Obamacare) was due to a failure to communicate the wisdom and logic of the Democratic program. In other words, Obamacare is wise and logical, but the poor shlubs out there aren’t smart enough to get it, so we have to explain it better.

My view is that if Jesus Christ himself had decided to devote his Sermon on the Mount to explaining Obamacare, Christianity would have remained a tiny cult confined to university faculties.

Last night on Jim Lehrer’s show the idiotic old hack Mark Shields said the following:

… I – first of all, all great revolutions are led by aristocrats. That is the reality of history.

So, the idea that [Barry] went to Harvard Law School does not in any way preclude his leading a populist revolution…

Actually the “great revolutions” he’s talking about are always led by intellectuals, not aristocrats, and those intellectuals are usually the kind that philosopher Eric Hoffer described as “two-bit” meaning they “read a book.”

These are the kind of whom Dostoyevsky wrote:

If these great modern professors are given the full and utter possibility of abolishing the old society in order to reconstruct it anew, it will result in such gloom, in such utter chaos, something so gross, so blind and so inhuman that every building will collapse under the curses of humanity, even before they have a chance to finish construction.

Mark Steyn on Barry’s wacky spin:

…"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry, and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts…

Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it…

And Conrad Black:

…this president seems overwhelmingly confident, strangely detached, and, as Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s leading speech-writer, and now one of the leaders of the Obama Buyers’ Remorse Movement, wrote, ‘cold and faux eloquent.’ He is fluent and sonorous, but rather vapid. And now, Maureen Dowd, foxy doyenne of New York Times columnists and pin-up girl of the D.C. Democratic establishment, niece of FDR’s top fixer, former co-leader, with Michelle, Caroline Kennedy and Oprah Winfrey, of the Obama massed, synchronized cheerleaders, has apostacized and reviled the president as a nasty egotist. When A Democratic president has lost Ms. Dowd and the Kennedys’ Senate seat, it is time to return to the drawing boards…

Barry said in an interview with ABC News:

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country — the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” Mr. Obama said. “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Brit Hume deftly analyzes Barry’s preposterous spin:

Floating in the river of commentary on the Massachusetts senate election is the claim that it mostly reflects an anti incumbency mood and that Bay state voters are just as angry at Republicans as Democrats. Well if that’s true they have a peculiar way of showing it. Scott Brown is no watered down greened up Republican-lite. On the economy, he campaigned for across the board tax cuts, the Ronald Reagan kind. And against the current wave of big spending on defense he wants a military quote second to none and no constitutional protection for enemy captives. He’s even asserted waterboarding is not torture. On the environment, he’s skeptical man is warming the planet and he flatly opposes the cap and trade bill being pushed by the president. And of course he’s against the centerpiece of the Obama agenda, the health care reform bill. Those positions you might expect from a Republican running in a conservative state. But Scott Brown ran on them in liberal Massachusetts and won convincingly because tens of thousands of people who normally vote D voted R. President Obama said today that the anger that elected Brown is the same anger that elected him and it goes back eight years. In other words Massachusetts has elected its first Republican senator since the 1970s because it was still mad about the Bush Administration.

More wise observations by Mark Steyn.

Excerpt from Hugh Hewitt radio program:

HH: …Very few people have traveled as far around the globe as Mark. Mark, have you ever seen anything remotely approaching this Haiti thing?

MS: No, because I think Haiti is, certainly in the Western Hemisphere, as near as you can get to an entirely non-functioning state. By the standards of the Caribbean, it’s a failure and a disaster before the earthquake strikes. If an earthquake had happened to strike the Bahamas, or even the Turks And Caicos, it would not have looked like this. And that’s why although earthquakes are indiscriminatory, and the earthquake certainly doesn’t have any preferences to whether Haiti or the Dominican Republic, is either side of the border line, the impact of the earthquake is certainly very different according to what side of the line you’re on.

HH: Mark Steyn, I know, I assume, and I think I’m right about this that you’ll agree with me in rejecting Pat Robertson’s analysis of why this happened. But why is it that Haiti is such a basket case?

MS: Well, for a start, it was a French colony rather than a British colony. I mean, we can make that comparison almost anywhere in the world. I’m a bit of an old school British imperialist, and I know obviously the majority of your listeners for very good historical reasons will have a different view on that, but generally, and it’s a good guide in the world, even in the worst parts of the world, that if you’re trying to do business, it’s easier to do business in Malaysia, say, than Indonesia. And if you’re trying to do business, obviously, you’re better off in Jamaica than Cuba, and you’re certainly better off in Jamaica than in Haiti. And I think what it is, is that no nation was ever really built there. It’s always very moving to me when you go to the British Caribbean, if you go to Barbados or the Bahamas, or wherever, and you go into those little parliaments, which are like little, mini Westminsters, you see the speaker with his wig, and the mace, and hansard, just like in London or Ottawa or Canberra, whatever one feels about imperialism, functioning societies were built there. There has never been a functioning civil society or public infrastructure in Haiti. And so when a natural phenomenon strikes, it’s devastating there, not just by comparison with an earthquake in California, but even by the standards of an earthquake in Iran, for example…