Posted on 07/03/2014 7:16:02 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed by Hamas. One of those teenagers was also an American citizen.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hamas would pay for kidnapping and killing three innocent teenagers who were hitchhiking home.
US President Barack Hussein Obama, the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, urged restraint.
The world is becoming a dangerous place for Americans. Obama recently traded five top al Qaeda leaders for one American deserter, making American troops, State Department personnel and any other employee of the American government in the Middle East or Afghanistan a target for kidnapping.
Now terrorists know that they can capture and kill American citizens without fear of reprisals. It’s incredible that Obama will not even take action to protect innocent Americans who are killed by terrorist organizations.
It makes you wonder what Obama’s response to the 9/11 attacks would have been. Would he have advised restraint when 3,000 Americans were killed on American soil by terrorists?
He seems determined to free those responsible for the attack, with the notable exception of Osama bin Laden. But insiders report that Obama held off on the attack on Osama’s hideout until there was fear that Osama would flee and the word would leak out that the US knew where he was hiding and did nothing.
Israel is respected and feared in its part of the world because it retaliates against those who attack Israel and its people. The US under Obama is losing all respect, not just in the Middle East but all over the world, because of our president’s refusal to use force against those who attack us.
*****
Obama promised he would not send ground troops into Iraq. He then said that he was sending 275 combat equipped troops to protect the US embassy. He followed that up by saying that he was sending in 300 Special Forces soldiers who would be equipped for combat but would operate as advisors. Now he has added 200 more combat equipped troops to protect American assets.
So Obama has gone from no ground troops to 775 in a week or so. At this rate he will have several thousand ground troops in Iraq by the end of the summer, but he continues to say that he is not sending any ground troops into Iraq. It must be that Obama defines words differently from the rest of the English-speaking world, or perhaps he can’t count.
The problem is going to occur when some of the American troops come under attack. What will Obama do when 10 or 20 American soldiers are on a base that is about to be overrun by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)? Will he let them fight and die alone as he did with the men trying to protect the consulate in Benghazi or will he send help? The very fact that it is a reasonable question to ask raises a host of questions about his leadership.
*****
Obama is touted by his followers as a constitutional scholar. However, that is not really the case as it turns out he doesn’t know that much about the Constitution, or doesn’t think it applies to him.
This is an extremely divided Supreme Court, but it joined together to unanimously rule Obama’s recess appointments as unconstitutional. As it turns out the Supreme Court justices agree that the Senate, not the president, is the authority that determines whether the Senate is in session or not.
Recess appointments can only be made while the Senate is in recess. Obama made appointments to the National Labor Relations Board while the Senate was in session, but was only meeting every third day as is the minimum required when it is in session. Obama for some reason thought that he could make appointments as if the Senate were in recess. Even the wildly liberal appointments Obama has made to the Supreme Court couldn’t back him on this incredible usurpation of power.
The Supreme Court also ruled 5 to 4 in two decisions against Obama. The court ruled that Obamacare cannot force closely held companies to violate the religious beliefs of its owners by providing free birth control and abortion facient drugs for women.
What seems to be lost in that discussion is that no one is saying that women cannot buy any method of birth control they desire. The entire question revolves around whether or not the insurance provided by the company has to provide birth control and abortion facient drugs free to women. It’s incredible that the debate has reached that level, not whether or not a woman should have access to an abortion but whether or not someone who believes that abortion is wrong should be forced to pay for them.
The Supreme Court also ruled in a 5-to-4 decision that people who provide care for the elderly and disabled in their homes cannot be forced to pay union dues. Once again this is such a stretch that it is amazing it is even an issue.
The division in this country reflected on the Supreme Court is startling. While many people believe that no one should be forced to join a union or pay union dues, others believe that even people caring for an elderly or disabled person in their own home should be forced to pay union dues.
*****
Is it possible that Obama is as dumb as he appears to be? He issued an executive order that children who were illegally in this country would not be deported. Then, reportedly, was shocked when thousands of children crossed the border because they understood that children would not be deported.
It’s not exactly what he said, but then these children don’t speak English either, and it seems a reasonable assumption that if the president says that children in the US won’t be deported that if you get inside the US you won’t be deported. Obama expected an uneducated population that speaks Spanish to understand the nuance of his decision. He was wrong.
If anyone should know that for the rest of the world to get in US and get on the government dole is a huge draw, it is Obama, because several of his relatives from Africa have come to the US to live on the government dole. For people in most of the developing world a chance to get free housing, food, clothes and even free cell phones and medical care is a huge lifestyle improvement. In Kenya, where his relatives are from, there are no such programs.
Of course, it’s quite a bit more difficult to get to the US from Kenya than it is from Central America.
Obama doesn’t seem to realize that for parents struggling to feed their children, the opportunity to send them to America where they will be taken care of for life seems like a no-brainer.
Now Obama is saying, don’t send your children. But what he is not saying is they will be put on the next bus home. The children are still being cared for, and still receiving passes (permisos) to go meet with their families.
The pass is good for 90 days, and during that 90-day period the new immigrant is supposed to check in with immigration authorities. The chance of that actually happening is somewhere between nil and none, but Obama either is so dense that he doesn’t realize it or he doesn’t care.
If Obama is not so out of touch that he doesn’t realize what a boon federal government handouts are to most people in the world, then he is a very calculating, evil man because he is using children to try and get his way with Congress.
*****
Sen. John McCain, the man who is largely responsible for Obama being in the White House, was in Mississippi campaigning for Sen. Thad Cochran before the runoff primary.
Cochrane won that race the old-fashioned way – by lying, cheating and bribing.
Cochrane is about as poor a senator as you can imagine. He seems to be solely interested in getting himself reelected. He never met a pork barrel he didn’t want to take home, but why take home one when you can take home two? You can’t cut spending as the Republicans claim they want to do and spend billions in the home states of every senator just because they are senators.
McCain is only slightly different. McCain would probably get out and campaign for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy if he were still alive. McCain appears to have no political beliefs, but he is a member in good standing of the Senate and appears to put his friends in the Senate first, America second and everything else in the world third.
Cochrane won the primary, not by appealing to Republicans; he had already lost that race. Instead Cochrane appealed to black Democrats. Mississippi has open primaries, which are as dumb an idea as any in politics.
Mississippi has open primaries, which means that a voter, regardless of registration, can vote in the primary for either party. However, you can’t switch primaries in mid-election.
Cochrane’s opponent, Chris McDaniel, is now trying to look at voter roles and determine if a sufficient number of those black Democrats who voted in the runoff election for Cochrane also voted in the Democratic primary.
The only people who were eligible to vote in the Republican runoff were people who voted in the Republican primary or didn’t vote in the primary. Democrats who voted in the Democratic primary were not eligible to vote in the Republican runoff election.
Some counties have reportedly refused to allow people from the McDaniel campaign to go over the voter books to determine how many voters had voted in the Democratic primary and the Republican runoff. If McDaniel can find enough irregularities then he can force a second runoff. But if he is not allowed access to the voter books, he can’t prove his case.
A Republican who will appeal to Democrats to win a runoff is the kind of Republican that McCain thinks the Republican Party needs in the Senate.
McCain wanted to have his Senate buddy Joe Lieberman, who as you may remember was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, run as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. Although Lieberman is a lifelong liberal, what mattered to McCain is that Lieberman was his pal in the Senate.
They don’t call the Republican Party the Stupid Party without reason. McCain eventually picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate and then tried to shut her up during the campaign because she actually made meaningful statements, and probably because she was drawing bigger crowds than he was.
If McCain had set out to make Obama president, he could not have helped Obama more. He ran a campaign that seemed designed to make someone with no relevant experience and about whom the American people still know practically nothing appear to be a better candidate for president than a former Vietnam War prisoner of war with a long political career including 20 years in the Senate and four in the House.
*****
When I read about the thousands of children and families streaming into the US across the border with Mexico, I am reminded of a quote from a friend of mine, the late Dr. Bill Hodges.
Hodges ran a Baptist mission hospital in Limbe, Haiti, for over 37 years and was considered to be an authority on Haiti.
When National Geographic featured Haiti in an issue, the magazine sent the writer to stay with Dr. Hodges for several weeks to learn about the country. The television news show 60 Minutes once sent a crew to interview Hodges about the situation in Haiti. Hodges didn’t provide the politically correct answers that were expected of a missionary and the interview never aired.
So it made sense that during a Haitian refugee crisis in the 1980s, Hodges was interviewed by a reporter for a story on the underlying cause of the crisis. Hodges was asked, if the borders were opened to Haitians, how many he thought would flee Haiti and come to the United States. Hodges answer was, “All of them.” He said that a few would hang back seeing if they could make some money on the ones who had departed, but if the US opened its doors to Haiti there would be a mass migration.
And why not? Anyone who has visited Haiti has seen the poverty. Children with huge bellies and orange hair – both symptoms of kwashiorkor – are not uncommon. In the US the poor get food, shelter, free health care, education, travel expenses and even cell phones, all courtesy of the government. In Haiti the poor eke out a meager existence, then die of a disease that a well-nourished person would survive, or starve to death.
Obama is learning the hard way that if the US opens its border to illegal immigrants maybe not all of Central American will move to Texas, but millions will. Just by opening the border to children Obama has created a migration of epic proportions. The US has already detained over 52,000 children, and that doesn’t count the ones who have slipped through and have not ended up in the hands of the Border Patrol. That is compared to the 4,000 children that the Border Patrol picked up in all of 2011.
It has been reported time and time again that the Border Patrol doesn’t have time to patrol the border anymore because the officers are dealing with thousands of children. And when they do go out on patrol children and families turn themselves in because they know they will be taken care of and receive permission to travel in the US for 90 days, at which time they are supposed to report to immigration authorities wherever they happen to be. A few families will do just that, but the statistics are that 95 percent will not.
Obama’s solution to this overwhelming problem is to send Vice President Joe Biden to Guatemala to ask people not to send their children to the US.
If planeloads of children were being sent back to in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras every day by federal authorities, the plea by Biden might have some meaning. But instead the families in Central America are receiving communications from their children that they have their passes and are being shipped all over the country at federal government expense.
The idea is just to get past the border because everyone knows that once you get past the border, no one is looking for you and no one is going to send you home. Instead you get a free ticket to travel anywhere in the US you want to go and a permiso saying that you are free to travel without being stopped by authorities.
So Biden says please don’t send your children to the US, but what the Obama administration is doing is saying much louder that the doors are open.
The prediction was that about 90,000 children would cross the border this year, but halfway through the year over 52,000 have been picked up and the flow is not diminishing; it is growing. It may hit 90,000 by the end of the summer and a better estimate at this point might be 150,000 this year. Once again those are just the ones who are picked up or who have turned themselves into the authorities. There is no count on the ones who have eluded the Border Patrol and traveled to some destination in the US on their own.
If none of those 52,000 are sent back home, and there doesn’t appear to be any attempt to do that, the US can expect to have a real flood of children illegally crossing the border on its hands.
*****
Just in case anyone wonders, during all the crises that we have had this year, Obama has found the time to play golf 22 times. Since we are only 26 weeks into the year that means he has played golf just about every weekend possible.
Of course, with Air Force One at his disposal, the weather doesn’t have to be good in Washington, DC, for him to play. He has also played golf during his vacations in Hawaii, Florida and California this year.
*****
Perhaps Obama needs a top advisor other than Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, whose experience before coming to Washington to run the country was as a fixer in Chicago – the most corrupt political system in the country. Obama says that he runs all major decisions by Jarrett, making her more powerful than his chief of staff or any other advisor.
If Obama were listening to someone with foreign policy experience rather than experience fixing crooked real estate deals in Chicago, he might not be constantly surprised by world events.
White House advisors say that Obama was caught off guard by the rapid advance of ISIS. How could that be? Speaker of the House John Boehner said that they had seen this coming for months. Maybe Obama needs to borrow some of Boehner’s advisors.
Of course, his national security advisor is Susan Rice, who doesn’t appear to know anything other than what is written down as talking points. A national security advisor who believes that people show up for a spontaneous protest with heavy machine guns and mortars is completely useless. Rice may have thought that ISIS was massing troops in northern Iraq because they were upset about a video on YouTube and told the president not to worry.
Obama was also caught off guard by the overwhelming negative reaction of the American people to trading five top al Qaeda leaders for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who, according to many soldiers who served with him, deserted. Even the Army now admits that he left his post without permission.
Obama was caught off guard by the Russian intervention and annexation of Crimea and the resulting military actions in Eastern Ukraine. Obama just didn’t see it coming.
According to Obama, nobody told him that the National Security Administration was listening in on the calls of foreign heads of state such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And how did Obama find out? Did his top advisors tell him what the US was doing? No. According to Obama, he found out from the news media.
Despite being told about it, Obama didn’t know that Veterans Affairs was having a big problem providing timely medical care to veterans. According to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, the White House learned about the problems from the media.
The scandal in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – where it has been revealed and admitted to that the IRS was targeting conservative groups with special audits and delaying their applications for nonprofit status – was discovered by the Obama administration through the media. This is despite the fact that the head of the IRS visited the White House more than most members of the Cabinet and more than many Cabinet members combined.
Obama didn’t know that there was a huge problem with the website healthcare.gov until the system crashed and burned. This was his signature piece of legislation and is likely the only major piece of legislation that he will be able to get through Congress during his eight years in the White House. Yet according to Obama he was unaware that the software didn’t work. The White House had awarded the contract to a friend of Michelle Obama, so evidently Obama believed there was no reason to check up and make sure that this Canadian company that had been awarded the contract worth more than $300 million was actually capable of doing the job. It’s the way politics is done in Chicago. Contracts are given out to friends and those who can help you; why would anyone suspect that there might be a problem when ordinary protocol was observed?
The Department of Justice subpoenaed records from the Associated Press (AP), which many believe to be a blatant violation of First Amendment rights. Did someone from the Justice Department tell the president, who once taught constitutional law, to get his opinion. No. According to the White House Obama found out about this abuse from reading it in the newspaper, in AP reports no doubt.
In an administration that takes actions that make no sense, one of the dumber moves was to decide to provide guns to Mexican gangs. There was no way to trace where these guns went, but for some reason someone in the Justice Department decided that the problem the Mexican gangs were having was caused by a lack of guns. Obama found out about this program, according to the White House, by reading about it in the newspaper.
To some of his detractors it seems like Obama is always either on the golf course or on vacation. But what appears to be a better representation of what Obama is doing in the White House is nothing. He isn’t keeping up with world events, he isn’t keeping up with what his own government is doing and he isn’t keeping up with what the American people want him to do.
The longer he stays in office the more it appears that Obama is Chauncey Gardiner from Being There by Jerzy Kosinski. If you haven’t read it, at least watch the movie; it is the best example I have seen of where we now find ourselves.
Gibbon tells us that in decline of the Roman empire, the barbarians used "Roman" as a term of contempt meaning cowardly and weak.
The only word that comes to mind is STAGGERING.
Barry’s CHORTLING about the Fast One he’s pulled.
ARRESTED seems a good word.
his transparent hints could not and did not prepare me for THIS GARGANTUAN FIASCO.
this appears to be the coup de gras
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