Vocal Minority

Liberal Hypocrisy: Obama Lectures Africa's Leaders About Responsibility, Corruption, and Bad Governance

This Washington Times article nearly knocked me off my seat:

Obama to African leaders: Time for ‘responsibility’
By Stephen Dinan | Saturday, July 11, 2009

L’AQUILA, Italy | President Obama on Friday said African countries cannot blame colonialism for problems caused by corruption and their own bad governance as he embarked on his first trip as president to sub-Saharan Africa.

Mr. Obama also announced that he has secured a commitment from major countries to spend $20 billion on food security aid, or $5 billion more than expected from world leaders meeting in Italy this week. But he said rather than simple assistance, this money will be managed “to help people become self-sufficient, provide for their families and lift their standards of living.”

“We do not view this assistance as an end in itself. We believe that the purpose of aid must be to create the conditions where it’s no longer needed,” he said.

The president flew from Italy to Ghana Friday and is scheduled to deliver a speech to that nation’s parliament Saturday, at which time he is expected to lay out developing nations’ roles and responsibilities, and his strong words on ending excuses are likely to be a theme.

He said he delivered that message in Italy at a meeting of major economies and African countries, when some fellow leaders started blaming “colonialism and other policies by wealthier nations.”

Mr. Obama said he told them the parallel between Kenya and South Korea, which 50 years ago had similar-sized economies. Today South Korea’s economy is nearly $1 trillion, while Kenya’s is about $30 billion.

“If you talk to people on the ground in Africa, certainly in Kenya, they will say that part of the issue here is the institutions aren’t working for ordinary people,” he said.

In an interview with AllAfrica.com, released by the White House earlier this week, Mr. Obama sounded an even tougher note.

“I think part of what’s hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we’ve made excuses about corruption or poor governance; that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism,” Mr. Obama said. “I’m not a believer in excuses.

“The fact is we’re in 2009. The West and the United States has not been responsible for what’s happened to Zimbabwe’s economy over the last 15 or 20 years,” he said. “It hasn’t been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we’ve seen elsewhere in Africa. And I think that it’s very important for African leadership to take responsibility and be held accountable.”

Still, he said the world has a responsibility to help African people who are suffering, and that the $20 billion in food aid—of which $3.5 billion has been pledged by the U.S.—will help.

He recounted for reporters a story he had told leaders at a meeting earlier Friday in which he said he has family members in Kenya who live in villages where “hunger is real”—though he stressed his family members do not go hungry.

Aid groups praised the $20 billion figure, but some—including the One campaign, co-founded by rock group U2 singer Bono—said pledges don’t matter until the money comes through. Italy, in particular, has been blasted for being recalcitrant in the past.

“The food initiative looks promising, but what will Italy’s contribution be?” said Bob Geldof, another singer involved with One, who said Italy has delivered on only 3 percent of its commitment to African aid since 2005. “Mr. Berlusconi, you owe the poor a billion euros. Where is it, Mr. Three Percent?”

Mr. Obama said 1 billion people worldwide are hungry, and 100 million have dropped into dire poverty because of the world financial collapse.

Well, I don’t know about those last statistics. But still, suffice it to say, there are a lot of people around the world, especially Africa, living in poverty.

First, kudos to Obama for taking to task the many despotic heads-of-state who keep their nations dangerous and destitute for decades on end. Maybe it actually took a black president to say this to the despotic leaders of Africa. So that in and of itself is a good thing. 

Nevertheless, I find it hard not to view Obama as disingenuous. Isn't the president calling the proverbial kettle, um ... black?  Doesn’t he realize that many of these leaders are left-wing central government ideologues, just as he is, and that they have simply implemented the same  left-wing central government policies that Obama is trying to impose at home? 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Obama is machete-ing refugees in the streets of America. But let’s be clear here: These leader whom Obama is chastising are his brethren, pure and simple.

Too harsh? Case in point: In Obama’s ancestral homeland of Kenya there sits a corrupt Marxist leader Raila Odinga who not only received public support from Obama, but who himself claims to be Obama’s cousin. Although Odinga took office already two years ago, in 2007, the Obama-worshiping mainstream media here in the U.S. was not interested at all in this story. (They were more interested in infesting Wasilla, Alaska snooping for ginned-up ethics scandals to pin on Sarah Palin.) 

See this January, 2008, post from Pam Geller’s Atlas Shrugged blog for a pretty thorough account of the Obama-Odinga relationship. Of all the myriad links therein you will find only one mainstream media citation (NY Times). A much more recent post (October, 2008) is found here at the Logistics Monster blog.

Will Obama ever recognize thay his own Marxist-socialist ideology and the actions stemming from this mindset have kept most of Africa in a third-world prison? Does he find it the least bit hypocritical that he admonishes the leaders of Africa when in some ways all they are guilty of is running their countries based on the same philosophies of him himself, as well as his much-revered father the self-described Marxist Obama Sr.?

What’s more, Obama has yet to put his own money where his mouth is, himself having a half-brother in Nairobi who languishes in poverty and as recently as this January has had run-ins with the law due to drug possession.

But arguably the most contradictory of Obama’s desire to further African prosperity is his demand that developing countries (which, I imagine, given the location of Obama’s speech, are mostly African) adopt global warming climate change energy policies along with the G-8 countries. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon even raised the stakes by suggesting G-8 countries finance poorer nations to “change their carbon-heavy growth patterns and adapt to the effects of global warming. He said the G-8 must do both if developing countries are to cut their own emissions.”

Don’t these megalomaniacal Marxists realize that climate change is the least of Africa’s worries. Most of the continent is still electricity, clean water systems, and even standard plumbing for bathing and going to the bathroom. Millions of Africans a year die from malaria. Even more die from diarrhea—caused by the injection of dirty drinking water. Even in the U.S. climate change is at the bottom of “concern” polls. One would probably be hard-pressed to even find it on the radar among Africans.

Cited by me before on this blog, this article from AllAfrica.com by Ghanan professor and business consultant Kofi Bentil says all one needs to know about Africa and man-made global warming climate change. By sheer eerie coincidence, it was written exactly two years ago—July 11, 2007—in response to Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concerts, which had taken place a couple weeks prior.

… In Africa, we have much more serious things to worry about than climate change. Indeed, if they achieve their objective the concerts will have done harm to the people of Africa.

Britain’s former Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband, recently said that the rest of the world cannot aspire to the UK’s standard of living because: “If the world were to have the same living standards as we have in the UK, then we’d need three planets to support us.” Presumably Mr. Miliband would disagree with Indira Ghandi, who famously said, “Poverty is the greatest polluter.”

Miliband was replaced by Hilary Benn, who as Minister for International Development ran the Department for International Development (DfID). One might have thought that DfID would have supported economic development as a means of escaping from poverty and pollution. But in its Rough Guide to a Better World it advocates “Development by Dung” and claims that “As poor countries develop, it is essential that they do not follow the same failed patterns of energy use.” So it’s dung not diesel for Africa - while India and China soar ahead because they are too big, and nuclear-armed, to stop.

Even if we accept that global warming may have a significant effect on our climate, limiting the use of fossil fuels in Africa would be counterproductive.

Respiratory infections are the leading cause of childhood deaths on my continent, mainly from inhaling the smoke produced by burning wood and dung in our quaint mud huts. Why do we burn these “renewable” but very dirty fuels? Not because we have some desire to save the Earth. No sir! It is because we don’t have access to natural gas or electricity.

The second leading cause of childhood deaths is not malaria or Aids, it is diarrhoea, caused by drinking dirty water. Why is our water dirty? Mainly because we lack cheap, efficient means of pumping and cleaning it. That requires fossil fuels--either directly or to produce electricity.

An underlying cause of many health problems in Africa is malnutrition. This is a consequence both of inefficient farming and poor food distribution. To rectify this situation will mean using cheap and relatively clean fuels, such as gasoline and diesel. (Of course we also need better roads--which can only be built using machines that burn fossil fuels.)

Our already poor and struggling countries are being sucked into a giant movement to save the Earth--with aid money as the carrot and the stick. If we are cajoled into using more expensive “renewable” forms of energy, we will remain uncompetitive and our rates of economic growth will remain low or shrinking.

That would be a tragedy because economic growth has been shown to be the best way to reduce poverty and improve health. Please, Europe and America, spare us! You can cut your own emissions if you want, but don’t tell us what to do. We really have much more serious and urgent threats to deal with. Unfortunately, our beggarly governments are very susceptible to diktats from on high, especially when they are offered aid (which they use to line the coffers of their bank accounts): don’t encourage them! […]

I wonder if Barack Obama will come across Bentil while in Ghana this weekend. And if so, will Obama be convinced that imposing climate change restrictions, which are draconian even for developed nations, will do nothing but consign the developing world to more decades of third-world poverty.

Doubt it.

Quote of the Day (7/10/09) [UPDATED]

"The United States has sometimes fallen short of meeting our responsibilities. Let me be clear, those days are over."

- President Barack Hussein Obama

Aren't you proud we have a president who loves and cherishes his country so much? 

Worst. President. Ever.

UPDATE:

Liberal Media Bias: AP's Coverage of Obama's Now-Broken Tax Promises

When running for president, Barack Obama made many promises to the American people. Some of these promises he has made good on. For instance, he promised he’d close Club G’tmo and make those poor innocent terrorists love us. Sure enough, terrorists are beginning to be released and might even get constitutional protections originally intended to be afforded to American citizens.

Candidate Obama also promised he’d “restore America’s moral standing,” which was supposedly spoiled by George W. Bush (and, well, basically any president before O himself). Sure enough, in the past six months in office apologizing to the world for how much America sucks. Granted, the world’s vision of us has not improved much just ask the Iranian mullahs and Osama bin Laden: they all have declared that Obama is no different than Bush), but he’s at least kept his promise.

Yet another promise made by Obama during the campaign was to reduce nuclear weaponry, focusing on and starting with our own. (Indeed, just this week we learn from the NY Times of all places that as a college student radical in the early 80’s Obama dreamed not only of a nuclear free United States but a military-free one as well. Surprise!) Within the past six months he has kept promise, starting from demonstrating complete eunuch-like capitulation in the face of the fast-growing nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. And of course, just this past week Obama was in Russia negotiating a nuclear arms-reduction deal, which was apparently music to the ears of Putin and Medvedev.

But not all promises made by Obama were able—or should I say not intended—to be kept, namely the promise to not increase taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and couples making less than $250,000. The McCain campaign and other Republicans, not to mention economics keeping a tally of the programs Obama was promising and the tax dollars it would cost, called this promise a load of bull. But no fear, Obama team, several reporters from the Associated Press printed a number of “Fact Check” articles, in which Obama’s critics’ claims were dismissed as lies, myths, and exaggerations.

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly to anyone opposing Obama, his promise has already been broken, and AP has the nerve to act surprised. James Taranto at WSJ’s Opinion Journal writes about it today in detail:

Fact Check: Cardinals to Win Super Bowl
What if the AP covered sports the way it covers politics?
By JAMES TARANTO

If President Obama has his way, you will soon have to submit to government rationing of medical care and drive a tiny car. But at least your taxes won’t go up if you make under $250,000 a year, right?

Oh, you poor naive soul. The Associated Press delivers the bad news in a dispatch by Stephen Ohlemacher titled “PROMISES, PROMISES: Obama’s Tax Pledge Unrealistic”:

Obama made a firm tax pledge during the presidential campaign, repeating it numerous times in the weeks and months leading up to Election Day: no tax increases for individuals making less than $200,000 a year or couples making less than $250,000.

“Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,” Obama told a crowd in Dover, N.H., last year.

But less than a month after taking office, Obama signed an expansion of child health care financed by 62-cent tax increase on each pack of cigarettes.

Obama also signed an anti-smoking bill in June that grants authority to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco. To pay for the new program, a fee is being imposed on the industry—and presumably passed on to consumers—estimated to generate more than $5 billion over the next decade.

While not directly increasing taxes, a House-passed version of Obama’s plan to reduce greenhouse gases blamed for causing global warming would similarly increase American families’ home energy bills by $175 a year on average, according to the Congressional Budget Office. [Because this is not a direct tax increase, but merely a policy causing an increase in your bills, my Obama-worshiping liberal friends would probably circle the wagons and excuse this.]

Obama hasn’t offered a detailed plan to fix health care, though his aides are working with lawmakers as they craft proposals. Obama included only a down payment for health care reform in the budget proposal he unveiled this spring.

He proposed limiting itemized tax deductions for individuals making more than $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000. The plan, which faces stiff opposition in Congress, would limit deductions for mortgage insurance, state and local taxes and charitable contributions, raising about $270 billion over the next decade.

Obama also proposed a series of business tax increases and accounting changes that would raise an additional $30 billion.

If only someone had warned us back when Obama was running for president! Well, actually, John McCain and the Republicans did issue such warnings—but the AP, in a series of “fact check” articles, declared that the warnings were false and implied that they were lies.

On Sept. 2, the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn filed a dispatch from the GOP convention titled “Fact Check: Checking the GOP’s Speakers”:

FORMER SEN. FRED THOMPSON, R-TENN.: “Now our opponents tell you not to worry about their tax increases. They tell you they are not going to tax your family. No, they’re just going to tax ‘businesses’! So unless you buy something from a ‘business,’ like groceries or clothes or gasoline, or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small ‘business,’ don’t worry, it’s not going to affect you.”

THE FACTS: Obama would raise income taxes on the wealthiest and their capital gains and dividends taxes. He would raise payroll taxes on wealthiest by applying it to the portion of income over $250,000 and he would also raise corporate taxes. Only small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise. Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families. The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually.

An Oct. 27 offering from the AP’s Beth Fouhy was headlined “FACT CHECK: McCain Persists in Exaggerations”:

McCain also accuses Obama of aiming to raise taxes on small businesses, which he says would cause them to cut jobs. He has recently fleshed out that point by invoking “Joe the Plumber,” who told Obama on a campaign stop in Ohio that he wants to buy the plumbing business where he works, but is afraid Obama’s tax plan would make that impossible.

In fact, Obama would raise taxes on small businesses making more than $250,000, but only about two percent of small businesses in the country fall into that category. And Obama is also proposing targeted tax relief for small businesses, such as a tax credit for offering health care to employees and elimination of capital gains taxes on startup businesses.

And on Nov. 3, 2008, the AP’s Calvin Woodward summed things up disapprovingly: “Altogether, facts took a beating in the campaign. … When a non-licensed plumber who owes back taxes and would get a tax cut under Obama is held out by McCain as a stand-in for average working people who should vote Republican, you know truth-telling took a back seat to myth-making.”

In truth, facts took a beating in the AP’s campaign coverage because the wire service, in embracing an opinionated style of reporting it calls “accountability journalism,” mired itself in epistemological confusion.

The statements that Thompson, McCain and Joe the Plumber made, and that the AP claimed to refute, were not factual claims at all. They were predictions. We now have sufficient facts, as reported by Ohlemacher above, to conclude that those predictions were accurate. But an accurate prediction (“the Steelers will win the Super Bowl”) is quite different from an accurate statement of fact (“the Steelers won the Super Bowl”). If you don’t grasp the distinction, try going to Vegas and placing a bet on the Steelers to win Super Bowl XLIII.

So the AP repeatedly made a cognitive error in treating as-yet-untested predictions as if they were statements of fact. Even more ludicrous, however, is the basis on which the AP concluded that the GOP statements were false. It treated Obama’s campaign promise as if it were not only a statement of fact but an incontrovertible one.

A promise is a statement of intent, not a fact. Sometimes people are unable to do what they intend because of circumstances beyond their control. Giving Obama the benefit of the doubt—assuming that he sincerely intended not to raise taxes on people making under $250,000, and that circumstances made it impossible to do otherwise—it’s as if the AP had done a pre-Super Bowl “fact check” along these lines:

CLAIM: The Pittsburgh Steelers are favored to win.

THE FACTS: Arizona Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt has made clear that “our guys are ready to play” and that they intend to be victorious.

But the AP’s campaign coverage was worse than this. Politicians sometimes make promises in bad faith—surely more often than American pro sports teams throw games. By treating Obama’s campaign pledge as if it were an established fact, the AP displayed either a staggering naiveté or an appalling pro-Obama partisanship.

I think Taranto hits the nail on the head: Obama’s promises—what he would do if elected—was treated as fact—what will actually happen. Whether the writers for AP were deliberately or unwittingly blurring the distinction between the two or not, it’s too late. Obama’s been elected, and like his opponents in the McCain campaign and elsewhere said, all our taxes are going to be going up.

And that’s a fact!

Guess I'm a Liberal Too. Are You?

Philadelphia writer Michael Tremoglie, who runs the newly-launched Tremoglie’s Tea Time blog, makes a startling revelation:

Who Woulda Thunkit? I’m Really a Liberal

I just realized I am a liberal.

This revelation came to me after reviewing the issues a certain liberal candidate for office outlined. On every issue she listed I found I was in concurrence.

I think you too will come to the same conclusion. Here is the list of the issues:

Pro-choice?

You bet! I completely concur. I think people should have the choice to send their kids to parochial or private schools just like many public school teachers, Democratic Party politicians, feminists, and New York Times’ journalists do. [I agree. I’m also pro-choice with regard to whether I can defend myself with a firearm and pro-choice about what doctors I can choose.]

Anti-death penalty?

Absolutely! Once again total concord. I don't think a baby in its ninth month should be executed.

Civil unions?

Sure thing! I think all unions should be civil. There would probably be less divorces if they were. Besides less divorces means less welfare programs.

Gun control?

Indubitably! I know one definitely needs to control the gun when shooting an intruder.

Redefine families?

You got it, dude. The only time northeastern liberal newspapers use the word family is to describe the mob.

Eliminating prayer in schools?

Forgettabout it. If kids studied like they should they wouldn't have to pray before exams. [Also, schools should be reprimanded if they coerce their students to figuratively pray to Gaia by indoctrinating them with man-made global warming climate change drivel]

Separation of church and state?

Absolutely!!! As it is right now, religious institutions – especially parochial and other religious schools - are subsidizing public school districts across the country. If all those students in religious schools were sent to public school, every school district in the United States would have to triple their taxes to pay for the influx. Parents of students who go to private religious and parochial schools are subsidizing school districts and therefore are paying an indirect tax. This is unconstitutional!

Freedom of dissent?

Right on! Conservative students and faculty should be allowed to express their beliefs.

Affirmative action?

No doubt about it. The ACLU, NOW, and the Sierra Club should hire black executive directors immediately. The ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC news anchors, as well as the Managing Editors of the New York Times, Washington Post and Vanity Fair should be replaced by blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and women.

No limits for lawsuits?

You know it. I think lawyers should be sued every time they file one of those frivolous lawsuits.

Rehabilitation for criminals?

Unquestionably! I think judges who place dangerous criminals on probation should be sent to a prison facility to be rehabilitated.

Equal Rights for Women?

Undeniably, women should have to prove that they should be awarded custody of kids in divorce cases just like men do.

More social programs?

Certainly! The greatest social program a nation can provide for its citizens is to keep them safe and free.

It is amazing that all this time I was a liberal and did not know it. Realizing what we have in common, I want to invite my fellow liberals to join me and work together to make this country truly a place where everyone can thrive and be free.

To this great list I’d like to add:

Fairness Doctrine? 

Absolutely! Newsrooms and commentary shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN are hosted by way too many Democrat-voting leftists (according to available statistics). We need FCC-imposed hirings of conservative commentators now! And if a Democrat president is going to usurp an entire network channel to sell the American people on a program, that channel better damn well provide the same airtime to the exact second of the Republican opposition.

Fairer tax system?

You bet your stimulus-package-sized bippy! The tax system is rigged too unfairly to favor the poor. Currently the top 1% pay 39% of the tax burden, but earn only 19% of the income. This is not fair. The top 50% of Americans pay 97%, leaving only 3% for the remaining 50%! John Edwards was right about there being two Americas: the Taxed and the Taxed-Nots. Make everybody pay taxes! Stop rigging the system to favor the poor!

Fairness in elections?

Exactly. Stop election fraud! Demand photo IDs for every eligible American citizen. That is the only fair and effective way to determine legitimacy. Get dead people and (in states where applicable) felons immediately off the registration rolls. Repeal same-day registration. And get ACORN the hell out of the election racket. Stop voter intimidation: Reinstate charges against the Black Panthers who were videotaped blocking a polling place in Philadelphia. End voter disenfranchisement: Make sure our troops overseas get their votes counted, even if, by no fault of their own, their ballots arrive State-side late.

Scenes from a Free Honduras Rally

Well, actually just one scene ... A Facebook friend posted this shot from a Free Honduras rally. Translation for you gringos is underneath.

Translation: "Honduras is an example for the world. We don't have oil or dollars but we have balls."

Right on, right on, right on! Let freedom reign!

Around the Web in 80 Minutes (7/9/09): M. Crowley, P. Ferrara, J. Perazzo

First, my girl Monica responds to Veep Biden’s genius statement about having misread how bad the economy was, leaving us to wonder who’s stupider, the economic-catastrophe-mongers or the American people?

Boy, Do They Think We’re Stupid
By Monica Crowley

On this weekend’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous,” Vice President Joe Biden said: “We misread how bad the economy was.”

He and Obama “misread” how bad the economy was?!

Pardon me, but weren’t they elected on the basis of their self-touted ability to manage the economy back to relative health? Didn’t they slam into Senator John McCain as inept on economic issues, as a man incapable of reading the economy and crafting appropriate policies to bring it back? Didn’t The Bama position himself as the Only One who could fix it? Didn’t he promise to deliver results, such as keeping unemployment to 8% if he were elected and his policies implemented?

And how.

And yet, here we are, at 9.5% unemployment and rising, home foreclosures at record levels and climbing, and multiple industries—including those which have received hundreds of billions of dollars in federal bailout money, from banks to the auto industry—in collapse and/or in bankrupcy.

The trillions of dollars The Bama and his socialist posse have already spent have accomplished absolutely nothing. In fact, all of this government intervention has made things worse.

The Biden says they “misread” how bad the economy was? You “misread” how many calories are in a Snickers bar. You don’t “misread” how bad the economy is, ESPECIALLY when you have spent almost an entire year telling us what a “catastrophe” the economy is, what an epic “crisis” we are in, and how it’s “the worst economic crisis than the Great Depression.”

From all of that apocalyptic rhetoric, it sure SEEMED like Team Bama read the economy just right. Unless, of course, they were trying to sow panic in order to get their massive spending plans through. But they wouldn’t do such a thing, would they??

Now The Biden says all of that over-the-top crisis rhetoric wasn’t ENOUGH. That the economy was WORSE even than that. Which means, of course, they are going to try to spend TRILLIONS MORE on payouts to their Democratic constituencies, disguised as additional “stimulus” spending.

They really think we’re buying this elaborate tap dance of lies and corruption. But then again, if it’s not stopped through our outrage and our own community organizing, then they have every reason to continue thinking it.

Next, Peter Ferrara at the American Spectator argues:

The Bush Doctrine Is Still Working
By Peter Ferrara on 7.8.09

A central theme of President Bush’s administration was to promote democracy in the Middle East. He argued that establishing a full fledged democracy in Iraq in the heart of the Middle East would have transforming effects throughout the Muslim World. Even though the promotion of human rights and democracy had been a central theme of liberal foreign policy for decades, the Left ridiculed Bush’s policy as hopelessly naïve. Even some on the right echoed this criticism.

But recent trends throughout the Middle East show that this policy is now producing a growing, very powerful effect in countering Islamic extremism and terrorism, just as Bush originally envisioned. The most recent example of this is the elections in Lebanon, where the pro-Western coalition in power there was reelected last month with a slightly increased majority over the Islamic extremist Hezbollah coalition, despite Iranian funding estimated in the billions for Hezbollah.

When the pro-Western coalition was first elected in Lebanon in 2005, it soon chased the Syrian army out of the country, ending the occupation started over 20 years ago during the Lebanese civil war. That was a huge victory for America and the West for which Bush received no credit. […]

Absent democracy, the roughly 10% of the public in Middle Eastern, Islamic countries willing to shoot their way into power in the name of Allah seems dominant. Actual elections reveal them to be fringe, extremist groups, greatly diminishing their power in favor of reasonable, secular leaders. As a result, the Bush doctrine of advancing democracy and human rights is now increasingly successful in combating terrorism and Islamic extremism.

Now we are seeing these same results in Iran. Where did the people of Iran get the idea that they were entitled to an honest election? They haven’t had an honest election there in over 50 years. Maybe it comes from watching their Shiite brothers voting in honest, free elections in neighboring Iraq. And maybe it comes as well from watching the same in neighboring Afghanistan, which had formerly been seen as hopelessly backward for centuries.

Iran’s recent sham election fiasco is the biggest victory of all for America and the West, again courtesy of the Bush doctrine of promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East. All of a sudden, the Islamic theocracy in Iran has been discredited and exposed as illegitimate. Now that the ruling mullahs have had to turn to shooting their own people in the streets to stay in power, it is only a matter of time until their theocracy falls, and the popular will regains power. That result will be enormously beneficial for America, because Iran’s theocratic regime is the central power in the Middle East supporting and spreading Islamic radicalism, terrorism, and continued war against Israel and the West. Once Iran’s theocracy falls, and is replaced by a secular government, peace between Israel and the Palestinians will be possible and increasingly likely over time.

In this environment, the right policy for America would be to do what it can to promote regime change in Iran. Organizing an international gas embargo would greatly undermine the security forces by creating a shortage of fuel for their vehicles, as Iran has minimal refinery capacity and must import virtually all of its refined gasoline. International sanctions and isolation for the theocratic regime would also help. Covert financial and even military aid to the rebels may be desirable as well

But President Obama is committed to the opposite course. He is committed to still negotiating with the mullah dictators to get a deal to stop Iran’s nuclear program. There is zero chance any such negotiations will succeed. The mullahs have already said they are not interested in the materialist incentives of aid and trade packages, or concerned about the materialist harm of sanctions. They are committed to their extremist religious views, which call for wiping Israel off the face of the earth, as they have put it (Holocaust 2.0). President Bush actually carried on diplomatic negotiations with Iran for years regarding its nuclear weapons program through a European coalition and in other forums, and all this did was enable the Iranians to buy time to develop their nuclear weapons.

All Obama’s negotiations will achieve is provide legitimacy to the mullah dictators as the real government of Iran, which will delay their fall for years. This reveals the fundamental weakness of Obama’s foreign policy. It is weak on the traditional liberal theme of democracy and human rights. Obama’s foreign policy is more like Nixon’sRealpolitik in its willingness to negotiate and deal with reigning dictators, from Iran to Russia to China to Venezuela, and around the world.

The Honduras Fiasco

Indeed, while Obama did not want to “meddle” in Iran for fear of offending the mullahs, whom he intends to sweet talk out of their nuclear weapons, he was quick to meddle in Honduras as soon as the people acted to defend their democracy from a rogue president, Manuel Zelaya, allied with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Despite what you have heard from the Democrat party-controlled press, there has been no military coup in Honduras. It is still ruled today by a civilian government, not the military, and free elections are still scheduled for November for a new president and government. […]

Obama’s Nuclear Disarmament

Even worse for America, however, is President Obama’s American nuclear disarmament policy, which he is pursuing this week in Russia through a nuclear deal with the Putin dictatorship. In his foreign policy speech in Prague earlier this year, Obama called for worldwide nuclear disarmament, suggesting that American nuclear weapons are no more acceptable than Iranian nukes, and that the rest of the world would agree to give up its nuclear weapons if America would give up its own. This is an extreme left policy.

North Korea responded soon thereafter with nuclear tests and the firing of new missiles. While Obama responded with bluff and bluster about real consequences, nothing much happened. Meanwhile, Obama’s budget, passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress, substantially cuts funding for missile defense. When Japan suggested North Korea would fire missiles at Hawaii on the Fourth of July, the Obama Administration rushed available missile defense assets to the islands. But the action seemed hollow given Obama’s long range funding plans for missile defense.

Now President Obama has agreed with the Russians to complete a deal that would cut U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals by another third, reducing America’s nuclear warheads down to 1500. It is not clear how we can be sure that Russia will comply with its side of the bargain.

But this arms control initiative reveals how badly Obama’s thinking is frozen deeply in the past, analogously to his unreconstructed Keynesian economic policies from the 1930s. We no longer live in a bipolar world, with America and Russia the only relevant nuclear superpowers. China is now a more powerful threat than Russia with its own nuclear arsenal, and India, Pakistan, North Korea, and soon apparently Iran also pose nuclear dangers. A nuclear deal with Russia alone is not remotely adequate to protect America, even if we could be sure of Russian compliance. Indeed, if we don’t successfully counter North Korea and Iran, and President Obama does not seem to be up to that, nuclear proliferation will spread to Japan, South Korea, and throughout the Middle East. In the face of these threats, cutting our own nuclear arsenal down to 1500 warheads, or even less as Obama ultimately advocates, may leave America vulnerable, particularly to attacks aimed at taking out our nuclear arsenal. Joining that policy with cutting missile defense and halting further development of Reagan’s SDI initiative reflects a blinkered commitment to hopeless left-wing ideology and could not be more reckless and risky for America’s national defense. […]

While Bush’s foreign policy doctrine of promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East is still working to produce huge victories for America and the West, Obama’s foreign policy doctrine of negotiating deals with the world’s dictators, combined with his flower power nuclear disarmament philosophy, may be the gravest threat America faces today.

Finally, at Front Page Mag’s Newsreal blog, John Perazzo has some critical words for Al Sharpton, who delivered an abominable race-baiting eulogy at Michael Jackson’s funeral yesterday and then continued his bloviating later that evening on Larry King Live:

Al Sharpton: A Lifelong Racist Eulogizes Michael Jackson

The late Michael Jackson, Al Sharpton told CNN’s Larry King last night, “expanded,” on “a cultural level,” the work that “[Martin Luther] King and Jackie Robinson and others had done” to elevate the status of blacks in American society. “Michael made people comfortable with each other,” said Sharpton, asserting that, thanks in part to the pop icon’s influence, Americans at large eventually “grew up to be able to be more comfortable making political and other moves that they may not have made without that cultural comfort.”

Sharpton’s remarks to King were an extension of the eulogy he had delivered earlier yesterday at the L.A. Staples Center, where he proclaimed that Jackson had “broke[n] down the color curtain” and “brought blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos together” – thereby setting the stage for the day when Americans would be “comfortable” enough “to vote for a person of color to be the President of the United States.”

Yes, Al Sharpton chose to turn his eulogy for Michael Jackson into a monologue about race. No surprise there. For Sharpton, everything, however grand or trivial, is ultimately about race.

He is, after all, the same Al Sharpton who, in the late Eighties, knowingly abetted a 15-year-old black girl in falsely charging that a mysterious gang of white racists had abducted and gang-raped her; according to ex-Sharpton aide Perry McKinnon, Sharpton did this specifically for the purpose of cultivating an atmosphere of racial division that could help him advance what he called his “movement.”

Yes, we are talking about the same Al Sharpton who, a few years after that, helped foment some of the ugliest anti-Semitic riots in living memory when he falsely depicted a Brooklyn, New York car accident (which had killed a 7-year old black child) as a racially tinged homicide perpetrated by a Hasidic Jew.

He is the same Al Sharpton who orchestrated a grotesque 1995 boycott against a Jewish-owned clothing shop in Harlem, New York, where a throng of black picketers — under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton – shrieked, entirely without cause, that a cabal of “greedy Jew bastards” and white “crackers” had been mistreating them. This crusade, too, ended badly, when one of the protesters eventually shot four whites in the clothing shop and then set the building on fire — killing seven people.

And who could forget the skillful manner in which Sharpton has repeatedly turned handsome profits by using threats of racially charged boycotts and negative-publicity campaigns to shake down a host of corporate CEOs eager to avoid controversy.

Indeed, he is the same Al Sharpton who once lavished an audience of students and professors at New Jersey’s Kean College with references to “crackers” and “Greek homos” who, from a historical perspective, were still “in the caves [of Europe] while we [black Africans] was building empires” and developing “philosophy and astrology and mathematics.”

By inviting this vile bigot to speak at yesterday’s memorial service, Michael Jackson’s family demonstrated that for whatever gifts and talents they may possess, good judgment is not among them.

The same can be said of Larry King, who, in tortured syntax, concluded his interview with Sharpton by fawning: “There wasn’t anyone there [at the memorial service] today who could not say that you were anything but brilliant.”

Liberal Fascism: Climate Cops Coming to Britain. Ready to Be Next?

Ready for EnviroCops?

This is the question asked by Ed Morrissey at Hoit Air, who informs us of a London Times article about such a development:

Whether the British public is ready or not, here come the EnviroCops. The Times of London reports that simply selling carbon credits hasn’t been enough to keep companies from potentially violating carbon-emissions limits. Now they will send green-jacketed police to monitor their operations. […]

Of course, the British authorities do not have a Fourth Amendment to limit them, but even this may be a bit much for Brits to swallow. Green-jacketed inspectors can descend on any business at any time and demand access to facilities. They can look up utility bills without even informing the business. Not for nothing did George Orwell set 1984 in Great Britain. 

How long after we pass cap-and-trade will the US see the arrival of green-jacketed EnviroCops? Probably more quickly than the British did. The entire point of cap-and-trade is to punish those who dare release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and slapping an artificial-shortage system on an almost unmeasurable process will guarantee fraud as well as genuine lack of capability for compliance. Fines will accrue even more revenue to the federal government. The big question is whether Congress will bother adhering to our Fourth Amendment, or simply stick with the British invasion-of-privacy plan for better “efficiency”.

As “jellytoast,” who blogs at Libertas, says: Green is the New Brown (Shirt)!

Never in their fevered little imaginations could all those liberals/Democrats scared of the supposed fascist police state Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft were creating dream up this. For all such folks who have no clue what “fascism” is, this is fascism.

First they came for the SUV drivers …

As I type this, I’m listening to the podcast of yesterday’s Mark Levin Show, during which he just said: “‘Gee, I flipped the switch and the light doesn’t go on …’ Welcome to liberalism!”

Indeed. No doubt this idea will be coming to America soon. 

Welcome to the future, suckers.

Profiles in Liberal Ignorance, Hate, and Intolerance: Maureen Dowd

Over the weekend, the New York Times’ resident spinster penned her obligatory nya-nya-nya-nya-nya piece on Sarah Palin’s decision to leave office in Alaska.

Suffice it to say, Maureen Dowd’s editorial is rife with cheap shots, double standards, flat out politically-motivated lies, and other things to keep Dowd’s psychiatric team busy for weeks. In other words, the article reveals more about Dowd than it does about Palin. It’s a shame that such a pretty woman can be so ugly on the inside.

OK, let’s pick this piece apart, paragraph by detestable paragraph:

Now, Sarah’s Folly
By MAUREEN DOWD

Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

In the very second paragraph Miss Dowd starts with the left jabs. According to Miss Dowd and a lot of other supposedly well-grounded intellectual liberals, conservatives are all “crazy” or “nutty.”

And calling a woman Sarah Palin “Caribou Barbie” proves not only that women can make sexist remarks against other women, but that Miss Maureen is rather jealous of her. Exhibit A: her book, aptly titled “Are Men Necessary?” Sarah Palin’s very existence proves to Miss Maureen that they are, as is the family of loving children that this bitter woman will likely never get the opportunity to enjoy. Living with the philosophy of abortion-über-alles-all-men-suck feminism makes for an empty existence, don’t it?

Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).

How telling she seems to leave out a certain semen-stained dress courtesy of certain president who couldn’t keep his monster in his pants in the Oval Office and a subsequent obstruction of justice charge that resulted in the temporary loss of said president’s law license.

When Lyndon Johnson was president, some of his staff began to think of him as “a sick man,” as Bill Moyers told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Moyers and his fellow Johnson aide Dick Goodwin even began reading up on mental illness — Bill on manic depression and Dick on paranoia.

And so it was, Todd Purdum learned, as he traveled Alaska reporting on Palin for Vanity Fair [Ah yes, Vanity Fair is such an authoritative source for sound political commentary. No wonder the supposedly enlightened liberati^TM continue not to get it - ETR], that the governor’s erratic and egoistic behavior has been a source of concern for people there.

“Several told me, independently of one another,” Purdum writes, “that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’ — and thought it fit her perfectly.”

Erratic and egoistic behavior? Sarah Palin? Sorry, no. It does, however, perfectly describe the current president, whose litany of indescretions and displays of self-aggrandizement never faze Maureen Dowd.

I wonder if Miss Maureen ever accused Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John and Teresa Heinz Kerry, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton of ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’. Because it’s these people who are textbook cases in narcissism, not Sarah Palin.

Finally, it’s quite rich when conservatives like Dick Cheney are accused of paranoia. Because I can’t think of a better example of unhinged paranoia than a “Bush-stole-the-2000-election-Halliburton-Bush-stole-the-2004-election-Halliburton-Bush-lied-people-died-Halliburton-9/11-was-an-inside-job-Halliburton-Bush-invaded-Iraq-to-enrich-his-oil-buddies-Halliburton-Bush-is-spying-on-me-using-the-Patriot-Act-Halliburton-Halliburton-Halliburton-Halliburton” liberal/Democrat.

And to handily make this point is Dowd herself, bubbling.

What looked like a secret wedding turned out to be a public unraveling as the G.O.P. implosion continued: Sarah wanted everyone to know that she’s not having fun and people are being mean to her and she doesn’t feel like finishing her first term as governor.

She can hunt wolves from the air and field-dress a moose, but she fears being a lame duck? Some brickbats over her ethics and diva turns as John McCain’s running mate, and that dewy skin turns awfully thin.

Maybe there’s another red Naughty Monkey high heel to drop — there’s often a hidden twist in Sarah’s country-music melodramas. Or is this a reckless high-speed escape from small-pond Alaska, where her popularity is dropping, to the big time Below? […]

Ummm, newsflash, Miss Dowd: According to this Washington Post article Palin has a 54% approval rate with Alaskans, indeed a steep drop from the 80’s she enjoyed a year ago. But your hero Barack Obama’s approval ratings are also dropping: from 65% on January 21 (with 30% disapproving) to 53% on July 2 (with 46% disapproving). This, Sweet Cheeks, is what we call a statistical tie.

After girlish burbling about how “progressing our state” and serving Alaska “is the greatest honor that I could imagine,” and raving about how much she loves her job, she abruptly announced that she was making the ultimate sacrifice: dumping the state on her lieutenant. […]

“Girlish burbling”? Again, more sexist statements by someone who’d be castigating Rush Limbaugh had he used the same words about, say, Hillary Clinton or, dare I say, Dowd herself.

“We need those who will respect our Constitution,” said Palin, who swore on the Bible to uphold the Constitution. She said she can’t fulfill that silly old oath of office in the usual way because she’s not “wired to operate under the same old politics as usual.”

Ya know, I, like many conservatives, are very wary about Palin’s decision to leave the governership mid-term. But did Miss Maureen criticize Hillary Clinton for leaving New York “in a lurch” when she left her Senatorial perch for greener pastures? Of course not.

If Palin has in fact relinquished her post with the intention of running for higher office, that’s much more honorable than letting your seat gather dust while still collecting your paycheck, as did Barack Obama, John Kerry, and John Edwards. Suffice it to say that we need not even search the NY Times rchives to find Dowd’s criticism of them. The double standards in Miss Dowd’s hit piece are just so embarrassingly blatant.

Naturally, she dragged the troops in, [Yes, Miss Maureen, almost as naturally as you drag in Halliburton] saying that her trip to see wounded soldiers overseas “fortified” her decision to give up because “they don’t give up.”

She refuses to succumb to the “politics of personal destruction.” It’s no fun unless she’s the one aiming those poison darts, as she did when she accused Barack Obama of associating “with terrorists who targeted their own country.”

Umm, that wasn’t a poison dart, because was true. Barack Obama did pal around with terrorists who did target their own country. More frighteningly, Obama has expressed before and during his presidency to pal around with a hell of a lot more. It is in fact Maureen who is the dart thrower in this situation.

OK, enough of this abomination. (We get the point. In the NY Times’ defense, they do present a “conservative” alternative to Dowd with this editorial by Ross Douthat.)

Now here’s Breitbart’s retort. In short, he charges Dowd, as well as Katie Couric and Tina Fey, with a detrimental elitism and snobbery with which female liberals in the media and Hollywood have viewed Sarah Palin from the start:

July 6, 2009
New York Times Barbie strikes again

What a shock that Maureen Dowd devoted her New York Times column Sunday to attack Sarah Palin. It did not so much criticize Alaska’s governor for prematurely stepping down from her official duties as to finish off what sister snipers Katie Couric and Tina Fey began last fall.

The assassination of Sarah Palin—by media.

For those who didn’t pay attention, Mrs. Palin’s unexpected stratospheric rise as a national political figure threatened the media’s preordained presidency of Barack Obama.

In light of how the Obama machine took down Hillary Clinton, which unsettled many feminists who believed 2008 was their time, many who saw sexism at play—the destruction of an ascendant Republican female icon was an urgent imperative for the Democratic Party.

In conjunction with the laws of political correctness as perfected by the Democratic Media Complex, it would take prominent women to take down an unlikely and unexpected conservative feminist symbol that threatened to steal away Mrs. Clinton’s votes from the Chosen One.

While the vanquished then-senator from New York conspicuously removed herself from this task—going so far as praising Sen. John McCain’s running mate as “a very composed and effective debater”—a trio of media partisans, each with a unique skill set, rose to the task of tearing down Sarah Palin.

Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey—Obama’s Angels (featuring Joy Behar in the role of “Bosley”)—used a potent mix of mockery, snobbery and vitriol to undermine Mrs. Palin’s feminist bona fides.

They are what my wife calls “pad throwers,” an allusion to the shower room scene in the Stephen King film “Carrie,” in which the popular girls throw sanitary napkins and tampons at the film’s namesake.

Simply put, they are bullies. And female bullies—“Mean Girls” as Miss Fey’s film calls them—are the cruelest kind.

Primarily motivated by a desire to keep abortion “safe, legal and rare,” female liberals in the media have carte blanche to do and say anything.

But since Mrs. Palin, a mother of five including a boy who was known to have Down syndrome before he was born, is a potent symbol of the pro-life movement, she is considered an enemy of the sisterhood.

Miss Dowd’s attempted takedown of Mrs. Palin is less skillful surgery than it is name calling using fun noun and adjective pairings. Think “Mad Libs.” And, that’s exactly what Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey are. Once the ladies did their job, liberal men like Jon Stewart and David Letterman had the cover to join the hate campaign.

While Mrs. Palin is at ease with her gender, as well as her place in the workplace and at home, Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey convey a base insecurity in their feminine skin. Their rage is fueled by liberalism’s false feminist dogma and they take it out on a woman who chose not to join their angry sorority.

The governor of Alaska’s compelling narrative—athlete, beauty queen, wife, mother, hunter, successful politician—shows adherents of narrow leftist dogma that, perhaps, women really can have it all. Most importantly: freedom of thought.

In calling Alaska’s governor “Caribou Barbie,” Miss Dowd used beauty as a weapon to diminish Mrs. Palin’s achievements. A man would be reprimanded for this, but Miss Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize-winning pad thrower and is licensed for such vindictive pettiness.

“Caribou,” of course, is a stab at Mrs. Palin’s backwater, Red State ways, attacks on which an Upper Westside liberal snob can never get enough. Miss Dowd goes on to ridicule “Sarah’s country-music melodramas.” This is her barely veiled attempt to call Mrs. Palin “white trash.” And this has been the loathsome subtext of all media criticism of the Palins. They even went after their children. Mercilessly.

And Mrs. Palin during the Letterman saga finally cried, “Enough!”

Exposed in the relentless Palin attacks is not just political bias, but unmitigated class bias. The American mainstream media in its current free-fall is begging for more comeuppance when it continues to berate the values and lifestyles of the folks in flyover country who in simpler times used to be considered valued customers.

While “empathy” and “tolerance” may be liberalism’s highest values, Miss Dowd offers her conservative victims none. They are caricatured, demeaned and dehumanized. They are to be mocked and ridiculed to the point where the other students point and laugh. The MoDo template is so simple and repetitive it could be written into a software program.

Perhaps resigning from her first term in office may hurt Mrs. Palin’s attempts to run for higher office. Even I, a Palin supporter, now have qualms about her seeking higher office. But politics is not the most important way to influence our country, and reinforce conservatism’s relevancy in the current global disorder. Media is.

Sarah Palin may best serve her country by entering the media fray. In the pursuit of taking her down, Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey have created the person who burns the liberal media prom down.

Hopefully, when she leaves office Mrs. Palin starts to work on her telekinetic powers.

Can’t say I disagree with any of these comments.

It has become obvious from the start that liberals/Democrats are scared of Sarah Palin. She is the promise of feminism, which they despise. He has everything that liberal women like Maureen Dowd want but can’t have. She has achieved everything on her own terms. And most importantly, she is Barack Obama’s most formidable opponent in 2012.

Sarah Palin isn’t quitting anything, liberals/Democrats. She’s just getting ready for the next battle. And you know it all too well.

As far as the so-called feminists like Dowd, Couric, and Fey, Curt at the Flopping Aces blog writes this:

… [T]here is no way, no how, someone who is a real feminist would throw such insults at a female who is strong, independent, and successful. But the feminist movement has always been a leftist breeding ground, or has been as long as I’ve been alive. It’s not women rights they cherish, but the liberal ideology.

Bingo.

Let round two begin.

Article of Note: Dershowitz Doesn't Get It (M. Phillips)

Melanie Phillips, Rite Jew from Britain, has some harsh words for Alan Dershowitz at today’s Jewish World Review:

Dershowitz doesn’t get it
By Melanie Phillips

Alan Dershowitz is one of the most prolific, high-profile and indefatiguable defenders of Israel and the Jewish people against the tidal wave of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling currently coursing through the west. So a piece by him in the Wall Street Journal giving expression to the rising anxiety being felt about Obama by American Jews naturally arouses great interest.

But just like the majority of American Jews, getting on for 80 per cent of whom voted for Obama, he is a Democrat supporter who is incapable of acknowledging the truth about this President. For most American Jews, the horror of even entertaining the hypothetical possibility that they might ever in a million years have to vote for a Republican is so great they simply cannot see what is staring them in the face — that this Democratic President is lethal for both Israel and the free world. And in this article Dershowitz shows that he too is just as blind.

Acknowledging the anxiety among some American Jews about Obama’s attitude to Israel, Dershowitz concludes uneasily that there isn’t really a problem here because all Obama is doing is putting pressure on Israel over the settlements, which most American Jews don’t support anyway. But this is totally to miss the point. The pressure over the settlements per se is not the reason for the intense concern.

It is instead, first and foremost, the fact that Obama is treating Israel as if it is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Obama thus inverts aggressor and victim, denying Israel’s six-decade long victimisation and airbrushing out Arab aggression. The question remains: why has Obama chosen to pick a fight with Israel while soft-soaping Iran which is threatening it with genocide? The answer is obvious: Israel is to be used to buy off Iran just as Czechoslovakia was used at Munich. Indeed, I would say this is worse even than that, since I suspect that Obama — coming as he does from a radical leftist milieu, with vicious Israel-haters amongst his closest friends — would be doing this to Israel even if Iran was not the problem that it is.

In any event, the double standard is egregious. Obama has torn up his previous understandings with Israel over the settlements while putting no pressure at all on the Palestinians, even though since they are the regional aggressor there can be no peace unless they end their aggression and certainly not until they accept Israel as a Jewish state, which they have said explicitly they will never do. On this, Obama is totally silent. So too is Dershowitz. That’s some omission.

Next, Obama is pressuring Israel to set up a Palestine state — within two years this will exist, swaggers Rahm Emanuel. But everyone knows that as soon as Israel leaves the West Bank, Hamas — or even worse — will take over. The only reason the (also appalling) Abbas is still in Ramallah, enabling Obama to pretend there is a Palestinian interlocutor for peace, is because the Israelis are keeping Hamas at bay. Yet Dershowitz writes:

There is no evidence of any weakening of American support for Israel’s right to defend its children from the kind of rocket attacks candidate Obama commented on during his visit to Sderot.

So what exactly does he think would happen if Israel came out of the West Bank and the Hamas rockets were down the road from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (literally: many in the west have absolutely no idea how tiny Israel is). It’s not a question of Israel’s ‘right to defend its children’. If Obama has his way, Israel would not be able to defend its children or anyone else, because Obama would have removed its defences by putting its enemies in charge of them. It is astounding that Dershowitz can’t see this.

Then there was Obama’s appalling Cairo speech in which he conspicuously refrained from committing himself to defending Zionism and the Jewish people from the attacks and incitement to genocide against them, but committed himself instead to defending their attackers against ‘negative stereotyping’. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.

Worse still, by falsely asserting that the Jewish aspiration for Israel derived from the Holocaust, Obama effectively denied that the Jewish people were in Israel as of right and thus endorsed the core element of the Arab and Muslim propaganda of war and extermination. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.

Obama drew a vile — and telling — equivalence between the Nazi extermination camps and the Palestinian ‘refugee’ camps. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Obama’s statement that the Palestinians ‘have suffered in pursuit of a homeland’ was grossly and historically untrue, and again denied Arab aggression. On this, Dershowitz has nothing to say. Equally vilely, Obama equated genocidal terrorism by the Palestinians with the civil rights movement in America and the resistance against apartheid in South Africa. On all of this, Dershowitz has nothing to say.

Dershowitz also grossly underplays the terrible harm Obama is doing to the security not just of Israel but the world through his reckless appeasement of Iran. In the last few weeks, this has actively undercut the Iranian democrats trying to oust their tyrannical regime, and has actually strengthened that regime. All the evidence suggests ever more strongly that Obama has decided America will ‘live with’ a nuclear Iran, whatever it does to its own people. Which leaves Israel hung out to dry.

But even here, where he is clearly most concerned, Dershowitz scuttles under his comfort blanket — Dennis Ross, who was originally supposed to have been the US special envoy to Iran but was recently announced senior director of the National Security Council and special assistant to the President for the region. It is not at all clear whether this ambiguous development represents a promotion or demotion for Ross. Either way, for Dershowitz to rest his optimism that Obama’s Iran policy will be all right on the night entirely upon the figure of Dennis Ross is pathetic. Ross, a Jew who played Mr Nice to Robert Malley’s Mr Nasty towards Israel in the Camp David debacle under President Clinton, is clearly being used by Obama as a human shield behind which he can bully Israel with impunity. American Jews assume that his proximity to Obama means the President’s intentions towards Israel are benign. Dazzled by this vision of Ross as the guarantor of Obama’s good faith, they thus ignore altogether the terrible import of the actual words coming out of the President’s mouth.

The fact is that many American Jews are so ignorant of the history of the Jewish people, the centrality of Israel in its history and the legality and justice of its position that they probably saw nothing wrong in Obama saying that the Jewish aspiration for Israel came out of the Holocaust because they think this too. Nor do they see the appalling double standard in the bullying of Israel over the settlements and what that tells us about Obama’s attitude towards Israel, because — as Dershowitz himself makes all too plain — they too think in much the same way, that the settlements are the principal obstacle to peace.

Many if not most American Jews have a highly sentimentalized view of Israel. They never go there, are deeply ignorant of its history and current realities, and are infinitely more concerned with their own view of themselves as social liberals, a view reflected back at themselves through voting for a Democrat President.

Whatever else he is, however, Dershowitz is certainly not ignorant. Which makes this lamentable article all the more revealing, and depressing.

Debby Smith, Just Another in a Long List of Democrat Pawns

There she was in front of the camera for all America to see. Stricken with cancer, frightened, helpless, weeping. Then came the hug from the compassionate President Obama. It was one of the most poignant moments of Obama’s health care infomercial broadcast on ABC News.

Who would not have voted to pass Obama’s nationalized health care plan right there at that very moment?

Which was exactly Obama’s plan.

Virtually everyone knows someone suffering with cancer like 53-year-old Debby Smith, and would do almost anything to ease their pain. But Ms. Smith’s unfortunate situation notwithstanding, it was soon found out that she was a Democrat activist who was ostensibly planted by the Obama team in order to garner support for his nationalized health plan. 

As underhanded as it was by the Obama team to use a cancer patient to push a program, this is one of the most frequently used tactic from the Democrat play book.

When it comes to selling a new policy or program on the American people, the Democrats are worse than a used-car dealers. Using only the most recent issues— C(r)ap and Trade bill and nationalized healthcare—as examples, you will find a plethora of tactics perfected by the best of snake-oil salesmen. For instance, they regularly use tactics like suppressing vital information that could thwart their agenda, such as scientific findings that would obliterate any necessity for the C(r)ap and Trade bill (see here and here). In order to sell nationalized health care, Democrats will like clockwork note the statistic that around 45 million Americans lack health care. (See, among others, Larry Elder obliterate the crap out of that lie.)

But probably the most loathsome tactic used by Democrats to impose their liberal-leftist agenda is appealing to our emotional side by using as pawns people who belong to some victimized, oppressed, or otherwise irreproachable class. And that’s what Debby Smith’s role was on ABC News last week. Despite their oft-stated claims that Americans are mean, uncaring, selfish, greedy, and individualistic (which is supposed to be a bad thing according to the collectivists, i.e., the “sacrifice for the common good” types), Democrats regularly bet on the inherently sympathetic and altruistic nature of the American people to get their liberal policies pushed through.

One need not go too far back in history to see this tactic at work. Looking only at the 2004 presidential campaign we witnessed Democrat candidates John Kerry and John Edwards using a little girl to bash Dick Cheney from the stage of the DNC convention.

And who can forget Cindy Sheehan, the distraught mother mourning the death of her Iraq. She became for Democrats face of anti-Iraq War activism, speaking for “Peace Moms” everywhere and acting as a one-woman Bush-bashing act during the 2004 election season. Of course, eventually Mother Sheehan started getting too big for her britches. Soon she was networking with the world’s most vicious and anti-American thugs like Hugo Chávez and attending anti-war rallies demanding not only that the U.S. get out of Iraq, but also that Israel get out of Palestine. When conservatives/Republicans started pointing out these uncomfortable facts, liberals/Democrats immediately jumped on them, accusing them of being insensitive and mean-spirited.

Another example of anti-“War on Terror” sentiment was the families of 9/11 victims. After all, how can Republicans go after the poor mourning wife of a brave firefighter or the unfortunate stock broker working high up in the WTC’s North Tower? But then suddenly we saw certain families campaigning for John Kerry against George W. Bush, most notably the “Jersey Girls.” That was when Ann Coulter led the charge criticizing these women for using their victim for political as well as financial gain. For this, Coulter was pilloried by the liberal establishment. In fact, when Coulter took these women to task in her just-released book Godless, two Democrat assemblymen from New Jersey called for the banning of the book and a liberal media watchdog group called for her being banned from CNN. (But remember: It’s Republicans who are the fascists.)

Who remembers when Democrats had 12-year-old Ilana Wexler, founder of Kids4Kerry.org, deliver a speech at the 2004 DNC convention in Boston? During this speech she ridiculed Dick Cheney for using profanity (Cheney had just been raked over the coals by the Democrats and liberal media for being recently overheard saying the word “f**k” to a Democrat with whom he was having an argument—a private conversation; ironically, the same Democrats and media were not fazed in the least that John Kerry himself was quoted in Rolling Stone magazine the f-word …). Anyway, those conservatives/Republicans who had the courage to criticize Democrats for this underhanded use of an innocent child, they were vilified. (See, e.g., the unfortunate plight of Dennis Prager.)

Yet another example from the past few years is the Democrats using Michael J. Fox and the late Christopher Reeve to sell embryonic stem-cell research. Rush Limbaugh was in the liberal crosshairs when he accused Fox of either overacting or deliberately staying off his medication for sympathy points. (Fox denied these claims and Rush subsequently apologized.) And right before Reeve’s death, that slithering snake John Edwards promised that if America elected him and his running mate, he would stand up and walk again. Highly effective, but luckily (in 2004 anyway) not effective enough to put a Democrat in the White House.

But now we fast forward to the present. Barack Obama was simply too hard a target for conservatives/Republicans not to confront, and the Democrats knew it. Which is why the first black presidential nominee, the Democrat Party as a whole, and the compliant liberal media would use the race card at every turn during the campaign. Even now, liberal pundits call virtually any criticism of Obama, from Rush Limbaugh “wanting him to fail” to the nationwide Tea Parties, as smoking guns of angry Republicans lashing out because there’s a black man in the White House. Despite all evidence of his past (especially its covered up parts), his ideology, and his relationships, Obama aplogists call his detractors racists as easily as they breathe air.

But now Obama himself has found another victim: the cancer patient. Just last week, when ABC News became President Hope&Change’s personal information outlet, a 53-year-old Debby Smith was called on to plead that Obama’s national health care plan make things better for her. Smith’s tear-filled moment in the national spotlight concluded with a poignant hug from the president, and to be sure many millions of eyes across America were teary as well.

Then we find out Smith was a Democrat activist who the Obama team planted in the town hall meeting. I’m certainly not going to cast judgment Debby Smith; she, like the others above, found themselves in the unique position of having the national stage, courtesy of the Democrat Party, to better their unfortunate situation. True, she’s a responsible adult and was acting willfully, but my beef isn’t with her, it’s with Obama. Because Ms. Smith is an individual with whom all Americans can sympathize, it’s going to take one of those heartless conservatives/Republicans to call out Obama for using this Democrat activist as an emotional pawn to sell his nationalized health care plan.

Meanwhile, pretty soon Ann Coulter will have enough material for a second volume of Guilty.

Sarah Palin Resigns. What the ...?

Returning from Independence Day weekend with family out of state, I was as shocked as anyone to learn of Sarah Palin's announcement that she's resigning the governorship of Alaska at the end of the month.

Having missed two news cycles already on the topic, I won't try to reinvent the wheel. There are enough interesting analyses and commentaries to find on-line. What I will be looking for over the next week, of course, is not necessarily Palin's decision, but reactions from both sides—especially the media. From what I've read so far from the conservative side, the two camps are: (1) Palin's just committed political suicide and (2) Palin has made the right move to position herself for the national spotlight. I'm leaning heavily toward the first option, but with all the details not yet in, I'm willing to believe anything ...

Article of Note: More Jews Becoming Wary of Obama (S. Schwartz)

As a Jewish Republican, I am delighted to post articles like these. Each one of such pieces gives me just a little more hope that my Obama-worshiping Jewish brethren will wake up (See original source for provided links)::

July 05, 2009
‘Them Jews’ of Obama: From Kvell to Kvetch
By Stuart Schwartz

“Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me.”

That’s the complaint of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the anti-Semitic, radical minister who was Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor for two decades. In other words, a nefarious group of people around Obama are forcing the president to behave contrary to his interests and instincts. Such are the Sauron-like powers ascribed to Obama advisors who, having eaten of the fruit of the matzo, now control the president and vast swaths of the nation.

“Them Jews” around Obama have been the object of much attention, especially eliciting the adoration of secular Jewish liberals who comprise roughly half of the American Jewish community of five million. One observer from the Jewish counterpart to Reuters was moved to kvell (Yiddish for “to feel delighted and proud to the point of tears”) during the presidential campaign “am I the only one noticing that Obama and Biden are not so much assembling staff, as gathering a minyan?” A minyan is a quorum required for Jewish public worship.

But pride has turned to alarm as even some liberal American Jews are getting it: the Obama administration, including “them Jews,” is uniquely hostile to Israel. For the first time since its founding, Israel is viewed by a U.S. president as the impediment to peace in the Middle East. And “them Jews” around him are working hard to make sure the anti-Israel views of the president are carried out in policy. Rahm Emanuel, for example, the president’s Jewish chief of staff, has been reported by Richard Baehr to be behind the effort to force Israel to submit to Palestinian demands while the president cultivates Arab despots. And there is ample evidence that Obama, assisted by his minyan, will put more pressure on a Jewish state that is anathema to his radical allies.

As a result, the attitudes of American Jews are changing, however slowly. Kvell has turned to kvetch(the wonderful Yiddish word for whine or complain) as even the Jewish press, which spent the past year vying with Newsweek and mainstream television networks for a place at the Obama altar, realizes the truth of one of those rules around which God centered his scripture: “They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” One prominent Jewish weekly did not need the Weather Channel or Winston Churchill to note the gathering storm at the six month mark of this radical administration,asking frankly “Will U.S. Jews Stand With Israel—Or Obama?”

Reality beckons. “Them Jews”, it turns out, are a collection of individuals afflicted by the overweening pride and ambition of much of inside-the-beltway Washington, but more so. And for whom Judaism is not a description of a special relationship with God, but a tool to leverage in the pursuit of power.

They share a single, irreligious characteristic: a self-centered worldview that focuses upon personal ambition, gain, and the applause of the media and cultural elite. “Them Jews” are not so much a sinister cabal as a motley assortment of garden-variety, leftist politicos. Forget spirituality and the splendid notion of “tzedakah“, the Hebrew word that denotes the doctrine of adherence to moral principles that Jews introduced to civilization. Instead, we have a combination of John Dean and Sammy Glick (What Makes Sammy Run), leavened with the charm of Martha Stewart.

The distinguishing feature of “them Jews” is not their Judaism; rather, it is the successful pursuit of personal power. Power is what motivates David Axelrod, whose manipulative abilities were approvingly described by the New York Times as his “unique West Wing kind of way” (the Grey Lady and Hollywood, a liberal twofer); Rahm Emanuel, who the Times compared to “a different Emanuel” and the United Church of Christ hinted may be “a higher power” (classic liberal, not Jewish or Christian theology: Rahm as Jesus or, perhaps, part of the Trinity with the boss a Newsweek editor declared “sort of God” (and, perhaps, Michelle); and Dennis Ross, an adaptable Middle East policy butterfly flitting from administration to administration, whose latest tome on the Middle East does not recognize anti-Semitism, preferring instead to use the expression “ideological animus,” and referring to the predilection of Arab despots to slaughter Jews as “very troubling” (rather Obama-esque).

Obama’s Jews are nothing if not flexible. That’s what happens when your moral compass is set to True Obama. You want them to be for Israel? Dennis Ross assured Florida Jews during the campaign that “preventing Iran from going nuclear is a very high priority” for an Obama White House, that the candidate’s love of Israel was a “commitment of the head and heart.” After the election, however, Ross was a key player in developing a policy that culminated with the announcement of Obama, as head of “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” that he would not oppose Iran’s development of nuclear energy.

Rahm Emmanuel worked his Jewish connections with the kind of single-minded intensity that the Democrat left showed in attacking them. He assured the largest pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that “the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow, and forever.” The passing of forever was marked by the New York Post six months later in “Israel Betrayed: President Obama Is Treating Our Friend Like A Fiend, And Turning Public Opinion Against An Ally”. End of story.

David Axelrod cemented his Jewish credentials by engineering an image of himself as a friend of the underdog. He arranged adoring profiles such as this one by the reliably left Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, which noted that Axelrod “was smitten by John F. Kennedy, then saw his hero reborn” in Obama.

But the real Axelrod was simply another cynic—albeit a talented one—on the political scene. He had no apparent moral qualms, for example, about helping Michelle Obama steer poor patients away from her employer, the University of Chicago Medical Center, which then cornered the market on high-margin private insurance patients. In what has become a classic Axelrod approach, he used a public relations campaign to misrepresent the program to the community, assuring them that inner city residents would have better care by avoiding the best hospital in Chicago. They didn’t—but so what? Axelrod won.

He used the same approach with American Jewish organizations. I’m a Jew, he assured them. The result, as one blogger—self-described as a purveyor of Talmudic analysis and liberal opinions—put it, was to empower “a (real) Jew” who can be trusted—read my lips—with the best interests of the Jewish community. The prestigious Jewish Daily Forward chronicled the joy: “At Jewish Inaugural Gala, Axelrod ‘Kvells’”, while Axelrod reaffirmed ”Obama’s willingness to work closely with Israel upon taking office.”

The election won, however, he did to the American Jewish community and Israel what he did to Chicago inner city residents: turned around and pressured Israel to submit to the demands of Iran, Hamas and other terrorists and thugs in the Middle East. Obama declared Israel to be the chief obstacle to peace and Axelrod, true to form, used his public relations prowess to pressure dissenters in the Jewish community. It was evident, as one Israeli newspaper noted, that Axelrod was behind the clash between the administration and Israel.

So what have we learned? If you are Israel, last names do not matter. Classic American Jewish street creds do not matter. Morality, a dedication to Judeo-Christian traditions, does matter—in other words, “do what is right and good in the Lord’s sight,” as Moses (a hopeless moralist who would have never made it into the Obama inner circle) put it. And strength matters. Israel must stay strong and resist an administration that embraces totalitarian thugs and murderers (who are, as Dennis Ross might put it, “humanitarian-challenged”).

And there is now another Yiddish word for what Israel and its supporters might expect from “them Jews” of Obama: bupkis (rough translation: “goat droppings”—go figure!).

Sensible Liberals: Helen Thomas and Chip Reid

This, in my opinion, is quite a story. A blasting of the Obama administration came from an unlikely source yesterday: Two mainstream and notably liberal White House reporters - Helen Thomas and Chip Reid - turned the tables on the Obama head propagandist Robert Gibbs, charging the administration with fixing the health care town hall meetings, "pre-packaging" questions, and essentially controlling the whole thing.

The video of the confrontation is absolutely delicious:

Why would two notoriously liberal establishment journalists suddenly turn on an administration they've heretofore been cheerleading for? My guess is it's an ego/pride thing. The rigging of the Huffington Post "reporter" by the Obama team must have infuriated professionals like Thomas and Reid. And if there's one thing you don't want to do, it's upset a news media type with a holier-than-thou complex.

No doubt this confrontation makes the Obama administration look very bad. How it will affect them in the long run might be too soon to tell, but I wouldn't skate on thin ice with Helen Thomas. The woman's been a White House fixture since JFK. She even invoked Nixon, saying: “Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control [the media]. They didn’t try. What the hell do they think we are, puppets?They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them." Damn, that's serious! Careful, Obama, your approval numbers are slipping as it is. And you know what they say: Once you've lost "Aunt Helen," you've lost America.

Ways the Left Has Screwed Up My Country Today: Franken Declared Winner in MN

So much for Democrats being conserned about voter fraud … Thanks, ACORN. By now, you all certainly know that the loathsome Al Franken has been declared the victor of the fakakhte Minnesota Senatorial race. The party that calls its opponents mean-spirited, narrow-minded, and playing politics at the expense of the nation now welcomes to the Capitol one of our most hateful, partisan, and obnoxious humans.

My liberal/Democrat Jewish friends are ecstatic—ecstatic. Why, people? Why??? One of them requested a limerick for the occasion (an inside joke; every occasion warrants a limerick with this meshugeh crowd …). So here was my submission:

There once was a Senator Franken
On his victory ACORN was bankin’
He’ll take his Left stand,
Wreck further our land,
In ’10 Dems are in for a spankin’.

Those of you needing a crash course on this debacle can read this American Spectator article by Matthew Vadum.

In the meantime, if anyone needs me, I’ll be in New Zealand …

Liberal Fascism: A Second Scientist Silenced by Global Warming Alarmists

This post is dedicated to certain well-meaning but misguided young lady whose high school education has convinced her, despite all my evidence to the contrary, that polar bears are going extinct and that it’s the fault of man-made global warming climate change. A.R., this one’s for you.

*  *  *  *  *

Question: What’s more frightening than a scientist being suppressed and silenced by power-hungry bureaucrats because his work jeopardizes their whole motivation to enact legislation for fighting man-made global warming climate change?

Answer: Two scientists being suppressed and silenced.

Not even the Soviet premiers and their politburos could have thought this up. Just days ago, EPA researcher Alan Carlin was forbidden by his own agency to publicize a report that would have put a crater-sized hole in the entire man-made global warming climate change theory that undergirds the C(r)ap and Trade Bill being pushed by Congress and the White House.

That's right, kids. The science is sooo settled on man-made global warming climate change that the contradictory scientific work has to be censored. Not addressed, not confronted, not refuted, as real scientists do. It has to be suppressed, censored, covered up by power-hungry politicians who keep telling us the debate is over.

And to think I keep hearing about this Republican war on science ...

The second instance in a week of science suppression comes from the U.K. Telegraph (Doesn’t the U.S. mainstream media to any real journalism anymore???):

Polar bear expert barred by global warmists
Mitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views 'are extremely unhelpful’ , reveals Christopher Booker.
Christopher Booker
Published: 5:20PM BST 27 Jun 2009

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists’ agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.

Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.

So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of “scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice”. But also check out Anthony Watt’s Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year’s recovery from its September 2007 low, this year’s ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.

Is this un-freaking-believable or what?

I’ve heard of Dr. Taylor. In every article and book on global warming climate change that I have read, he has been the go-to guy on polar bears. And now he’s being banned because his scientific findings don’t support the ideological party line.

Another eye-opening article comes from the Artic Sounder, a newspaper that serves the Northwest Arctic and North Slope [h/t The Astute Blogger] :

Polar bear appearances grow on oil fields
Alex DeMarban
June 24, 2009 at 12:04PM AKST

Polar bear encounters on the North Slope oil fields have risen to record levels the last two years, a sign that increasing numbers of the white giants may be prowling on land because the sea ice they prefer is shrinking, scientists said.

Oil field sightings along the southern Beaufort Sea coast jumped to 321 in 2007 and 313 in 2008, said Craig Perham, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Anchorage.

That’s more than double the 15-year average of 138. It’s also a sharp rise from 232, the previous high in 2005. […]

Um, does this sound like polar bears going extinct to you?

Even as far back as May 2007 the polar bear population were known to be fine and flourishing, as seen from this graphic posted at Small Dead Animals [h/t Gateway Pundit]:

(See also this post at the Riehl World View blog pertaining to the famous “polar bears on the ice floe” picture. You can read statements from the actual photographer that the polar bears were not in trouble and that her photo was coopted by Al Gore and other environ-mental-ists for man-made global warming climate change propaganda.)

I am so sick of these power-hungry bureaucrats who are on the verge of passing one of the most destructive bills in U.S. history based

When the EPA and environ-mental-ist fellow travelers (including our own president!) call CO2 a pollutant, they are full of crap.

When Barack Obama declares that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over,” he is full of crap.

When Barack Obama tells us the C(r)ap and Trade bill will benefit the U.S. economy and save jobs, he is full of crap.

When Al Gore says “The science is settled,” he is full of crap.

When the loathsome Henry Waxman (D-CA) says that “the consensus is overwhelming,” he is full of crap.

(While we’re on the topic, Waxman is also full of crap when he calls the opposition to the bill by most Republicans “playing politics” and “rooting against the country and … against the world.” This guy couldn’t support one thing that was trying to be achieved by the Bush administration for the good of the country and/or the world, from tax cuts to the War on Terror. Calling this guy a disgrace would be too kind.)

And when anyone says “The debate is over,” it’s only because they have covered their ears, shut out anybody with evidence contradictory to their own radical ideology, and declared it to be over.