Jack’s Newswatch

There’s a joke about a man who tells a psychiatrist, “Everybody hates me,” to which the psychiatrist responds, “That’s ridiculous - everyone doesn’t know you, yet.” Which brings me to Barack Obama: one of the best-informed people in the American security establishment told me the other day that the president is a “Manchurian Candidate”.

That can’t be true - Manchuria isn’t in the business of brainwashing prospective presidential candidates any more. There’s no one left to betray America to. Obama is creating a strategic void in which no major power will dominate, and every minor power must fend for itself. The outcome is incalculably hard to analyze and terrifying to consider.

Obama doesn’t want to betray the United States; he only wants to empower America’s enemies. Forcing Israel to abandon its strategic buffer (the so-called settlements) was supposed to placate Iran, so that Iran would help America stabilize Iraq, where its influence looms large over the Shi’ite majority.

America also sought Iran’s help in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan. In Obama’s imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition - empowered by Washington’s turn against Israel - would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi’ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama’s face.

[More]

Updates:

4:01 pm EDT, July 1st, 2009 — Simon: Iran, Honduras - Is Obama “objectively pro-fascist”?

4:03 pm EDT, July 1st, 2009 — Volokh: “Objectively Pro-Fascist”

6:05 pm EDT, July 1st, 2009 — Obama detractors “Stunned”

The political battle over the fate of the detainees at Gunatanamo Bay just got more contentious.

The Obama administration is considering an executive order to indefinitely imprison a small number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, a move that would be in line with Bush administration policy but already has drawn scorn from civil liberties groups.

“This is not change — this is more of the same,” Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in response to reports that surfaced Friday of the possible executive order. “If President Obama issues an executive order authorizing indefinite detention, he’ll be repeating the same mistakes of George Bush, and his policies will be destined to fail as were his predecessor’s.”

He added, “Throwing people into prison without charge, conviction or providing them with a trial is about as un-American as you can get.”

But former top Bush adviser Karl Rove said the news should be welcomed.

“We are, after all, in a war — not an overseas contingency operations as some in the administration have suggested is the new title for it,” he told FOX News. “And in a war, you take the people you sweep up on the battlefield and you hold them until the war is over or until they no longer represent a threat.”

The White House is weighing the move out of concern that Congress might otherwise stymie its plans to quickly close the naval prison in Cuba.

[More]

TEHRAN — President Barack Obama on Friday praised the bravery of Iranians who protested against a disputed election in the face of “outrageous” violence, while a hardline Iranian cleric called for the execution of leading “rioters”.

Iran’s top legislative body, which had said it found no major violations in the presidential election which set off the worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, said 10% of ballot boxes would be recounted.

Authorities have rejected a call for annulment of the vote by reformist former prime minister Mirhossein Mousavi who led mass protests after he was declared a distant second behindPresident Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the poll two weeks ago.

Mr. Obama, whose administration along with major powers is locked in a row with Iran over its nuclear programme, said hopes for U.S. dialogue with Iran would be affected by the post-election crackdown.

“There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks,” Mr. Obama told a White House news conference, adding: “We don’t yet know how any potential dialogue will have been affected until we see what has happened inside of Iran.”

Iranian authorities have used a combination of warnings, arrests and the threat of police action to drive mass rallies off Tehran’s street since Saturday with smaller gatherings dispersed with tear gas and baton charges.

[More]

Among his many promises upon taking office, President Obama’s goal of cutting the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term is perhaps his loftiest. 

Yet with each spending proposal Obama rolls out, the deficit grows astronomically and the American people are growing more concerned.

The president’s health care reform plan alone would more than double the already enormous 2009 deficit which is estimated at $1.8 trillion. But Obama is adamant that his plan must be “deficit neutral.”

“Like energy, this is legislation that must and will be paid for. It will not add to our deficits over the next decade. We will find the money through savings and efficiencies within the health care system,” he said on Tuesday.

Despite Obama making this pledge over and over again in past weeks, a series of recent polls indicate that Americans aren’t convinced:

[More]

Updates:

3:07 pm EDT, June 25th, 2009 — EXCLUSIVE: Bill gives billions to save trees in other nations

3:10 pm EDT, June 25th, 2009  — What the Liberal Media Aren’t Telling You About Obama’s Healthcare Plans

President Obama spoke up Friday on Iran to say, again, that the massive rebellion there “is not something that has to do with the outside world.”

On Saturday, Obama sort of reversed that, by saying that “the universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected,” and “the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.” Except he also sort of reversed his reversal, by illustrating the U.S. role as basically a spectator part, sitting around to bear witness, while Obama assures us that in what Martin Luther King called “the arc of the moral universe,” somewhere out there, justice awaits.

So, to translate Obamaspeak into plain English: The current havoc and terror being inflicted on Iranian demonstrators is, for the U.S., still really nothing to do with us. And don’t worry, in the long-run, it will all work out.

Ummmm…. OK. And in the long-run, said Keynes, we’re all dead. This crisis, with the deaths and beatings and arrests of protesters in Iran, is pretty firmly located right now – in the short-run.    

And if the goal for Obama is a better, safer future, if not for the people of Iran, then at least for the “outside world,” a.k.a. the United States of America, then this rebellion in Iran, with its courageous protesters fighting armed security forces, has plenty to do with us. For an America apparently unwilling to use military force to deter Iran’s regime from its malignant and terror-based ambitions on the global stage, this rebellion is the best chance that has come along in the 30 years since the Islamic revolution to see the Iranian regime collapse. Which could be a genuine game-changer for peace and progress in the Middle East, in a way that no amount of Obama’s speechifying and respect-offering and nuclear-haggling could possibly achieve.

For such a collapse to happen would almost certainly require that Iran’s pervasive and armed security forces flip sides, and go over to the demonstrators. That is far less likely to happen as long as major powers, especially the U.S., are busy offering or showing “respect” — to borrow one of Obama’s favorite words — to the current regime.

For Obama to refer — as he did this week – to Iranian tyrant Ali Khamenei by his own preferred title of “Supreme Leader” is to reinforce the very regime that is the source of the problem. For Obama to say, as he did on Friday and again on Saturday, that “I think ultimately the Iranian people will obtain justice,” is to address a real and immensely important crisis with words out of la-la land.

[More]

By now you’ve probably all marveled at the physical dexterity of the Great Leader and Teacher, BO², as he valiantly swatted down a malevolent fly in the middle of polishing his hagiography with a properly prostrate CNBC/New York Times reporter named John Harwood. It was an amazing feat of athleticism, as befits a second-string player on the Punahou basketball team, and one more example of the mythological status BHO II has achieved in a mere five months. Is there anything he can’t do, except maybe charm Benjamin Netanyahu out of Jerusalem?

Still, I’m a little nervous about this fly stuff because, as any reader of the Brothers Grimm knows, whenever flies show up in the story, trouble is sure to follow. It doesn’t take a Bruno Bettelheim or a Joseph Campbell (not that I’ve ever read either one of them) to see the omen here. First, Sonia Sotomayor breaks her ankle rushing to her Obama-commanded Supreme Court confirmation, and then Hillary Clinton breaks her elbow, probably on Bill’s jaw; the next thing you know, Obama himself will break the stock market, the housing market, the financial system, General Motors, the health-care system, the U.S. military, and the Republican party. Seven with one blow!

You all remember the Valiant Little Tailor, who swatted seven flies at once and went on to parlay that feat into a fearsome reputation as a man-killer. There he was, minding his own business, trying to finish his waffle, when the pesky creatures landed on his jam. Big mistake! PETA or no PETA, down they went. The Little Tailor was so proud of his feat that he fashioned a belt that read, “Yes, we can,” or something like that, and set off into the big wide world to seek his fortune. Along the way he outwitted a couple of giants named John and Joe, cowed the media into submission, captured a unicorn, and got elected president of the United States. And when the people finally figured out he was just a tailor and threatened to unhorse him, he teamed up with John Harwood and Brian Williams and shouted them all down until they went away.

The point is, in the ongoing fairy tale that is Hope and Change, we all love a happy ending: Even though the little tailor gets found out, it doesn’t matter. It’s way too late!

[More]

Notes:

I can’t wait to see what happens when the CIA sends him the bill for the deliberate destruction of their new and improved version of the “fly on the wall“.

WASHINGTON — Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.

And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence. Then, worse. Three days in, the president makes clear his policy: continued “dialogue” with their clerical masters.

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with — which inevitably confers legitimacy upon — leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamanei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of “some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.”

Where to begin? “Supreme Leader”? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts — a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What’s at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime — and the future of the entire Middle East.

[More]

Obama administration grants Miranda rights to detainees in Afghanistan

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.

Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal — read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.

If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today — foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them and they’re reading them their rights — Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

[More]

Obama Versus the Way of the Universe

I wish the President well, but he is butting up against human nature. And that is a fight one cannot win. If one runs up nearly a $2 trillion annual deficit, and then persists in such red-ink to the point of adding another $9 trillion, all to reach an aggregate $20 trillion national debt, there are not too many options. If there were, everyone-both states and individuals-would simply spend, call it stimuli, and then find academics to offer contorted explanations why it was OK and the money need not really have to be paid back. Does Obama think his debt is like buying  a house in a down market with an up market inevitable?–that is, we borrow to the max and then count on our equity to come to bail us out? But houses do not always go up, and we can’t quite sell off the US to capture our speculative profit.

So we all know the old rules, because the universe works according to time-honored precepts: we either must tax all of us (there are not enough of those evil “they” who make between $200-500K or even enough of the noble generous rich who make over $10 million a year and think Obama should increase inheritance taxes so that their children get only $1 billion instead of $2, while the hardware store owner’s kids sell the business) in insidious ways; OR simply cut government expenditures elsewhere to pay the annual interest payments, OR print money and screw the Chinese, European, etc. , debtors, inflating our way out via the late 1970s.

Sorry, there are no other real alternatives.

The only mystery? How the choice of payment is rhetoricized in the hope and change mode.

Deficit Foreign Policy Too

So it is with foreign policy as well. Obama’s make-over will have positive short-term effects, as he reminds the world ad nauseam that he is black, sorta, kinda from a Muslim family, and the son of an African who is more like the world than he like most Americans-and not George Bush and not a thieving capitalist and not a warmongering imperialist and not (fill in the blanks). (My favorite Cairo line was the apology on Gitmo where inmates have laptops and Mediterranean food, spoken to millions whose societies kill and maim tens of thousands in Gulags on a yearly  basis.)

[More]

CAIRO, EGYPT — Seeking to unite Muslims from Indonesia to Morocco to Detroit around common goals of peace and dreams of a brighter future, President Obama Thursday called for a new beginning for the United States and Islamic world.

“We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek a world where extremists no longer threaten our people, and American troops have come home; a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own, and nuclear energy is used for peaceful purposes; a world where governments serve their citizens, and the rights of all Gods children are respected,” he said to an audience of about 3,500 at Cairo University.

“Those are mutual interests. That is the world we seek. But we can only achieve it together.”

Mr. Obama pushed for Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program and said both Israelis and Palestinians must work together for peace.

[More]

Notes:

I’ve added Obama’s full Cairo speech to the sidebar video area because it’s interesting.  When the first part ends the next part will be available.  I’ve also added the link to my “Links” area so that it doesn’t get lost. 

I’ll leave it up for a few days.

More Notes:

It took me a while to find the entire speech and get it up and it isn’t centered but I try (it’s a video problem failing to merge with the template and I can’t fix it from here). 

People should listen to it.  There’s some bullshit but there is also a lot of truth.

It’s the first time I’ve heard it all and it’s well worth the time spent on it. 

Updates:

7:13 pm EDT, June 4th, 2009 — Obama draws questions, praise from Muslims