This post by Scott Johnson at Powerline is a good summary of the Iran deal, and it has some excellent links.
See also this by Thomas Sowell. I think the last line of the piece is too understated; the phrase “not his top priority” should be “something he is determined to undermine.”
[ADDENDUM: And this by Allahpundit is the clearest piece I’ve read so far on the “anywhere, anytime” inspections controversy.]
Commenter “FOAF” writes:
Neo, I have always known how intensely you dislike Obama. If anything you despise him even more than I do and that’s saying a *lot*. But you seem to be according some kind of regard for his abilities that some of us do not feel is warranted.
One thing that has always maddened me about Obama apart from the obvious points of his ideology and personality/character is that he had almost no substantive accomplishments in his life prior to his election as POTUS. Yes he was a “community organizer” but what did he actually do as such? Nearly everyone here equally loathes the real community organizer Saul Alinsky. But regardless of that, the things Alinsky did entailed some degree of planning and organization – activities that are notably lacking in Obama’s pre-POTUS resume. And I suspect that even now his attempts at these are pretty desultory.
First of all, I think it is very dangerous to underestimate your opposition. It does no good whatsoever, and is one of the many reasons Obama has succeeded: his opponents have continually underestimated him in terms of what he can accomplish and how far he is willing to go to accomplish it.
I don’t think I overestimate him, either; I think he has many accomplishments, they’re just not the ones people usually look for in a president. I certainly don’t admire most of these things, nor do I think him an intellectual genius or even a giant. I think he’s smart, cunning, and determined, and charming when he wants to be, as well as unprincipled, which can be a pretty powerful combination under the right circumstances.
I don’t mean to say he’s done this alone; not by a longshot. He’s had help, advice, mentors, and supporters, as well as a public primed by the media (both MSM and entertainment), the press, and academia. But he is also an expert at three things in particular: presenting himself as whatever people want him to be, campaigning, and getting and keeping power and pushing for more of it. Those may not be laudable things, but they are important things in the world, and he is excellent at all three. What’s more, his planning and acumen do go back a long way.
No, he doesn’t have many of the conventional accomplishments that historically have qualified a person for the presidency prior to running. He had some credentials in the world, though: Harvard Law, guest lecturer at a prestigious university, community organizer, state legislator, US senator, and had his name on two books as their author. But he has not been a governor, or a US senator for very long, nor has he executive experience of any magnitude. And he certainly wasn’t a general, like Eisenhower or Grant. Obama had other “qualifications,” however.
Obama has long reminded me of the Godfather figure in the eponymous movie, especially in his rise. No, I don’t mean Obama is a murderer or even particularly crooked compared to the general run of politicians. But way back before Obama was elected, when I was first learning about him, I read up on his past and got a cold, cold chill. I’ve written about these things before, of course: remember the Alice Palmer incident, which occurred right at the very start of Obama’s political career? Or Blair Hull and Jack Ryan? (If you don’t recall, please read the links to refresh your memory).
These were not accidents. Although Obama probably did not work alone—he always had help—he was cunning, ruthless, smart, manipulative, charming when he needed to be and nasty when that was required. He amassed power and status, and mowed anyone down who was in a position to stop him.
Except for Bobby Rush. Taking him on was Obama’s one mistake. But he learned from it and never made a similar mistake again, or really any mistake of any consequence (and if you think things like mispronouncing “corpsman” are of consequence to anyone inclined to vote for him, I think you’re wrong).
During the 2008 presidential campaign, many people on the right were paying so much attention to Obama’s leftist confederates and acquaintances—Ayers, Reverend Wright, Frank Marshall Davis—that they had less energy for what Obama himself had actually done—his astounding rise, and who he had crushed along the way, and how.
Take the matter of Emil Jones. If you want to learn a lot about the sort of operator Obama was back in his early political days in Chicago, you’d do well to read this, which also goes into the way that Emil Jones greased the skids for Obama by handing him legislation on a silver platter, and how angry Obama got when anyone suggested he hadn’t accomplished this on his own. And that article I just linked was written by an Obama admirer; I can only imagine what detractors would have written. This information was in the public domain prior to the 2008 election; wonder why so few people have heard of this stuff?
Or how about this, which was also written before the 2008 election and, although something of a puff piece, still contains some clues to Obama’s rise and how he engineered it with Jones’ help and his own cold-blooded ambition. After the Democrats finally won control of the Illinois state legislature after years in the wilderness of Republican domination, Obama went to the newly-minted Majority Leader Emil Jones (whom he had carefully cultivated even before he was elevated to that position) with a proposition:
…[Obama] went to see Jones with a big idea. By that point the two men had known each other for the better part of 20 years, but theirs had not always been an easy relationship. They had first met in the mid-1980s, when Obama, as a community organizer on the far South Side, had seen Jones as an “old ward heeler”…
Jones, a chain-smoking, gravelly voiced, unvarnished throwback to the era of the old Daley machine, was wary of Obama, a freshly minted agitator from Columbia University. Obama and other community activists “were in-your-face types [said Jones to the reporter]. I happened to see them out there one day. And I told them, I said, “˜You don’t gotta be outside. Come on in the office.”
A friendship was born. A decade later, after returning to Chicago with a law degree and the mantle of first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama won his own state-senate seat, taking the place of an incumbent [Alice Palmer] who had decided to run for Congress, placed a distant third in the Democratic primary, changed her mind, and – with Jones’s help – tried to run for her old seat after all. Obama’s team, in a move as bold as it was adroit, challenged her nominating petitions and managed to keep her name off the ballot.
Let’s pause for a minute to understand what was happening. Obama had met Jones before he even went to Harvard Law, and at first Jones and Obama were mutually distrustful but then struck up a friendship. But during Obama’s first run for office years later, Obama pulled a really nasty but very effective power move on Jones’ favored candidate, Alice Palmer, and won. This (as I read in more detail in another article that unfortunately I can’t seem to locate right now) really impressed Jones and made him realize that Obama was no soft law school prof but one of the more hardened and ruthless pols around, even though he was just beginning in the trade. The Alice Palmer gambit was what I call Obama’s Godfather move, and Jones understood that he was in the presence of a man with certain gifts: the ability to look like a nice guy and yet who had no reluctance to mow people down, even former friends and mentors, when he needed to do so to get ahead.
To continue:
Obama arrived in Springfield and told Jones, then the minority leader, that he wanted to “work hard.” He promptly became Jones’s point person on a number of tricky issues, including ethics reform. Now, with Jones elevated to the senate presidency, Obama was approaching him with a cold-eyed proposal.
“After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later,” Jones recalled, relishing the tale. “And he said to me, he said, ”˜You’re the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er.” Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: “And I told Barack, ‘You think I got a lot of pow-er now?,’ and he said, ‘˜Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er.’ And I said, ‘˜What kind of pow-er do I have?’ He said, ‘You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!’ Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. “I said to Barack, I said, ‘˜That sounds good!’ I said, ‘˜I haven’t even thought of that.’ I said, ”’Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?,’ and he said, ”˜Yeah. Me.’”
Jones let the words hang for a moment, and then went on. “The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, ”’Let me think about this.’” Obama knew that Jones’s support could single-handedly freeze the discretion of other powerful politicians in the state, and put endorsements of possible rivals on ice. “We met a little later that day, and I said, ”’That sounds good. Let’s go for it.’”
Jones gave legislation to Obama that other people had worked on for years, and that (as this article I linked previously made clear) frustrated and angered a lot of legislators who had done the actual work on the bills and had to watch as Obama got the glory instead of them. Obama, the freshman, knew exactly how to work Jones, who’d been doing this for years, and Jones knew a fellow master manipulator of power when he saw one.
Todd Purdum, author of this Vanity Fair piece, is an admirer of Obama. But he noticed something important about how Obama got to the top, and how his ability to hide his ruthless nature (Purdum calls it Obama’s “toughness”) behind a mild facade helped him get there and get there fast:
The rare talent is to wear ambition lightly, and to allow toughness to be taken for granted. Obama’s life and career suggest he has that talent – or at least that gift. He long ago decided that he had a chance to make something extraordinary of himself. With a calculating consistency that may not always have been apparent to others, or even sometimes to himself, he set out to do just that. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a schoolteacher in Hawaii, says simply, “He’s a very cool customer.”
A man like that can do without the usual “accomplishments” ordinarily deemed necessary to reach the presidency.
[NOTE: By the way, according to Purdum, Emil Jones has the Godfather theme as his cell phone ring. And the introduction to this interview with Emil Jones mentions that Obama calls Jones his “political godfather.” Funny how that comparison keeps popping up.]
Commenter “physicsguy” writes:
The Dems have moved so far left, and now regard party loyalty far above the basic concerns of the country. It’s even penetrated down to the local level (at least in CT), where party loyalty and adherence to the leftist ideology trumps all other concerns in their political decision making. The rigid party discipline that the Dems seem to impose and is accepted, is really astonishing to me. While the GOP is more like the Dems of 40 years ago, they do differ in the level of party adherence and discipline.
Where are the Scoop Jackson’s and JFK’s? They don’t seem to exist anymore.
As physicsguy himself observes, the Democratic Party has moved to the Left. Not that there weren’t always leftists in the party (even secret Communists), but as more leftists took on the Gramscian march through education, media, and the press with great success, more of the public was primed to accept and actually applaud a leftward drift.
The example of what happened to Joe Lieberman—going from VP nominee to outcast in just a few short years—was both emblematic of that switch and a warning to anyone who would dare consider remaining (like Joe had been) a Scoop Jackson-like figure within the party. Don’t ever underestimate the power of power as well as personal ambition to intimidate and change minds in a hurry. Lieberman’s fate was a message telling all who were listening (and all were listening) that this sort of behavior would no longer be tolerated, and if you wanted a political future in the Democratic Party you’d better toe the line.
But there’s more to it than that. I have noticed that Republicans and especially conservatives are far more concerned with means (as opposed to mere ends) than liberals and leftists are. Leftists in particular consider that rules were made to be used to advantage if possible, but bent or evaded or redefined or broken if not. The real point is the end point, the point of it all (in addition to self-aggrandizement and power itself, of course).
For conservatives and even quite a few middling Republicans, means are, if not as important as ends, at least very important, because it is through adherence to those rules that we preserve liberty (especially when we’re not the party in power, as has happened more often than not since the 1930s). Now, there are most definitely Republicans who are mostly into self-promotion and money, and are corrupt in various ways; no doubt about that. But there are also a higher number of people than in the Democratic Party who respect procedure and process as being very very important, and who feel that law and the Constitution are not infinitely elastic things that they can reinterpret in order to achieve certain results.
How does this tie in with party loyalty? If you have a pool of people—in this case, Democrats—who largely believe that rules and the Constitution are not as important as results (and that they are smarter than the opposition as well as morally superior) then presenting a united front in order to get to certain end goals is both important and easy to justify. It helps, too, if you have an example right in front of you of someone who didn’t follow that path and was ostracized and ultimately stripped of power.
If you have a pool of people—in this case, Republicans—at least many of whom believe that rules and the Constitution are more important even than a particular result here and there, then presenting a united front is of little importance, and sticking to principle (or what they see as principle) is more so. And so among Republicans you will always have some who refuse to follow the leader. These people won’t always be principled, not by a longshot. Some will follow the money or some other expediency. But you are likely to have others whose motives for bucking the party are more pure. And the entire thing makes for a much less cohesive party.
Another show I sometimes watch, especially late at night while at my computer, is “Forensic Files.”
Each episode is short, only a half-hour. But it’s amazing the tales they manage to tell in just 30 minutes, minus quite a few minutes for the frequent ads. The episodes are all pretty fascinating, although they’re usually depressing because they tell how many murderous people there are in the world—including a fair number of conscienceless psychopaths who seem to have no trouble whatsoever killing spouses or girlfriends of boyfriends, for money or for trivialities, and then acting as though nothing whatsoever has happened.
But every now and then a story is extra-interesting, and that’s where the Roy Brown case comes in. It wasn’t just the story of injustice righted, although there’s that. It’s a tale that’s nearly Biblical in its trajectory of a life on a bad path that is redeemed in the unlikeliest of ways by the unlikeliest of people, an uneducated, angry, and aimless man who showed intelligence and grit under extremely trying circumstances. It features a Crime and Punishment-like ending for the real murderer, and wheels of justice that grind, not just slowly, but (as Roy Brown says in the clip): “I don’t know who said ‘the wheels of justice turn slowly,’ but they are flat. And I’m fixin to jack em up, change the tires, and throw a new spare in the trunk.”
And here’s the aftermath:
There doesn’t seem to be a way to embed the audio I’m asking you to listen to, but please go to the link. The important part of the audio starts at minute 17:25 goes to minute 27:12, and another part begins around minute 37:00 and goes to about 48:30. If you only have time to listen to one of those segments, I’d suggest the first one. But I strongly urge you to hear both.
The interview is with Elizabeth Chryst, who is a former elected officer of the U.S. Senate and is an expert on how Congress works in terms of rules and procedures. I had never heard of her before this, but she seems to be a conservative and is speaking on the subject of the Corker-Menendez bill, and why conservatives are dreaming if they think there was ever any chance of blocking the Iran deal as a treaty. That’s not a reality that she likes, and she knows that her fellow conservatives are unhappy to hear it. But she thinks it’s a reality they need to face.
Basically, her point is that ever since the FDR administration the power to accomplish a treaty-like international “deal” by using executive action instead of the official treaty power, and to bypass Congress by so doing, has expanded greatly and become fairly commonplace and approved by courts. As I’ve said elsewhere, most of us never quite realized how much of a gentleman’s agreement our government was until now. That goodwill has been evaporating, and not just with the Obama presidency either. But Obama took the disintegration further for political gain.
So here we are.
Please listen. The Republicans are the villains sometimes, but they are not the villains here.
So why is so much ire being directed at Corker-Menendez? Because people are very very frustrated and angry. I understand their frustration and anger and share it. But—as Chryst says—facts are facts. There are plenty of reasons for ire at Republicans in Congress. But this doesn’t happen to be one of them.
[NOTE: I am pretty certain that a lot of you will disagree. I plan to write a much longer post on this subject some time next week, but right now I’m about to go outside and actually try to have some fun today.]
Ah, it’s just a bunch of blustering hot air, right? He doesn’t mean a word of it, and he’s not in charge anyway (and yes, that’s sarcasm on my part):
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei withheld his verdict on Iran’s nuclear deal on Saturday but in a fiery address vowed enduring opposition to the United States and its Middle East policies, saying Washington sought Iran’s ‘surrender’.
In an speech at a Tehran mosque punctuated by chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, Khamenei said he wanted politicians to examine the agreement to ensure national interests were preserved, as Iran would not allow the disruption of its revolutionary principles or defensive abilities…
Khamenei maintained that the Islamic Republic’s policies in the region would continue to defy the United States, and the nuclear deal was an exceptional instance of dialogue.
“We have repeatedly said we don’t negotiate with the U.S. on regional or international affairs; not even on bilateral issues. There are some exceptions like the nuclear program that we negotiated with the Americans to serve our interests.”
This is as expected, and was telegraphed all along as the negotiations continued. He’s not even paying lip service to anything else.
The Reuters article I linked to has an interesting way of describing Khamenei that caught my attention: “An arch conservative with the last word on high matters of state…”
What is “conservative” about Khamenei? Well, he wants to “conserve” the radical Islamist republic that got established in 1979. And that government, when it was newly formed, harked back to a much earlier time (and a more fundamentalist version of Islam), which to my way of thinking made people like Khamenei “reactionaries” in 1979 rather than conservatives. Of course, Reuters is British, and Brits and Europeans define “conservative” in ways that are different than in the US and which I don’t quite understand, although they tend to be further to the left than our own “conservative.”
In calling Khameini and his ilk “conservatives” in this article, I think Reuters’ intent was the intent I’ve seen a lot on the left, which is to tarnish as many bad governments as possible with the “conservative” or “on the right” brush (for example, Nazis, although they had the word “Socialist” in their name). All such governments are more correctly defined as statist however, which puts them squarely in the same territory in which the left resides, if you use the collectivist/individualist or statist/libertarian dimensions favored by many US conservatives when categorizing these things. There is absolutely nothing about someone like Khameini that is libertarian or human rights focused or small government promoting, and there is no question he does not favor the separation of church and state.
Just a conservative at heart, though.
For a long time, people said one of the problems with Obama was that he wasn’t a leader.
But he is. The thing is, those people who said that were thinking about a different sort of leadership than he offers.
Imagine if a deal like the one just negotiated with Iran had been announced as Obama’s goal in 2008. That is, not a vague “I want to negotiate a deal with Iran to stop them from getting nuclear weapons.” That wouldn’t have stirred any controversy. No, I mean one exactly like the one announced the other day, with all its provisions.
What would have been the reactions, before Obama had prepared us for it? Even some Democrats would probably have been shocked, and denounced it (as long as they didn’t know it came from him, that is). It was too extreme, the capitulation too obvious.
Or had Obama announced his intentions to refuse to defend DOMA, which had been passed by Congress in 1996, would as many people have accepted that, back in 2008 when he was first running? Same for his executive amnesty for large groups of illegal immigrants. Or any number of other things Obama has done.
But now? People (I don’t mean leftists, who would have always approved, but what I call “garden-variety liberals”) have gotten used to all these things, and that’s a reflection of his leadership. His is a slowly-boiling-frog sort of leadership. Step by step, he has accustomed Americans to overbearing executive power, to ignoring the law when a president wants to, to undermining America’s strength in the world. He’s done it through charm (a charm completely elusive to me, but apparently it exists and is powerful), through rhetoric, through a series of strawmen, though accusations at the opposition, through audacious challenges, through threats to those who would oppose him even in his party or in the MSM.
Obama is a very, very bold guy, with a very very strong sense of his own power and abilities. He conveys that to people—and to some he is a leader they have no problem following.
…is death.
Time to sacrifice on the sacred alter of equality of outcome for women.
[Hat tip: Artfldgr.]
It may seem like a small thing compared to the other news we’ve been reading in recent days, but to the wrongly accused it’s a big deal. I think that this US District Court ruling could begin to turn the tide of kangaroo campus quasi-courts and make them a bit more afraid of the repercussions of their failure to afford minimal protections to those students accused of sexual misconduct.
From the ruling of the San Diego Superior Court:
In his ruling, Superior Court Judge Joel M. Pressman cited the fact that Doe was prevented from fully confronting his accuser in the trial, as well as insufficient evidence that sexual encounters occurred without Roe’s consent. Pressman also ordered the school to drop its suspension against Doe.
Pressman based his decision on the following: Roe filed the complaint four months after the sexual encounter, alleged there were two cases of sexual activity without her consent and one instance of retaliation. She told a campus investigator that the alleged assault had greatly impacted her, but text messages and testimony showed that she continued to spend time with Doe. She also told the investigator that she was too drunk to give consent before the encounters, but statements from 14 witnesses said otherwise.
These cases are all too common, and it has been way too easy to make false charges stick in the extra-judicial proceedings on college campuses.
It strikes me that Chattanooga shooter Abdulazeez probably got quite a bit of mileage, starting at least in high school and perhaps earlier, from playing the victim card.
Witness his high school photo comment:
My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do? —“Hijabman.”
Note how clever this is. First, it is meant to engender sympathy and outrage on his behalf: Oh, the poor guy, his very name triggers an alert! How bigoted of us; what discriminatory profiling! Next up, we have guilt: My goodness, my name doesn’t trigger anything. How unfair! And lastly, apparently “Hijabman” (the name he signed with in the yearbook) was “a blog created to chronicle [Abdulazeez’s] ‘struggles as a first-generation American Muslim.’”
Such a struggle that it caused him to kill four Marines because he couldn’t take their terrible persecution of him any more.
Actually, even though I asked that question, I understand that part of the increase is to accommodate bona fide refugees from tyranny, and particularly people who sided with and trusted us in Iraq and Afghanistan and are fleeing the current regimes that would kill them for giving us that help. But that’s a very small percentage of the whole (and we’re not even accepting all of them).
As for the rest, I’d really like to know, for example, why terrorist shooter Abdulazeez’s family came here from Kuwait. Were they refugees? Were they highly skilled? How were they vetted? I’d also like to know whether they are citizens now.
One other thought—it was only about two weeks ago that Donald Trump made his famous statement about immigration, the one he’s gotten so much flak for and that I wrote about here. In that brief time we’ve had the shooting of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco, illustrating in graphic and dreadful form the danger of which he was speaking, and now the Chattanooga killings demonstrate the same thing.
You might ask what I’m talking about. For example, although I can’t find the link now, I noticed some leftist in the comments section of another blog mocking Trump after Chattanooga by saying something like this: “Hey Donald, here’s another murder by those terrible Hispanics you demonized, right? While you were busy talking about Mexicans, look what happened!”
But let’s look at Trump’s actual quote from two weeks ago, right after his famous “rapists” comment:
But it’s not just Mexico that’s dumping all of it’s problems in the U.S., Trump continued. “It’s coming from all over South and Latin America and it’s coming probably, probably, from the Middle East. We don’t know.
Indeed. And it’s going to keep coming, if our government has anything to say about it. We don’t seem to be able to monitor immigrants (even legal ones) properly once they’re here, so we need to vet them at time of entry far better than we do, and be very very careful about who we let in, and in what numbers.
The circumstances are as follows, as far as we know up to now:
The attacks, which happened minutes apart, began when a single shooter, identified as 24-year-old Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, drove a silver Ford Mustang convertible to a Lee Highway recruiting center at 10:45 a.m and fired more than a dozen rounds into the building. After his initial barrage, he led responding police officers on a high-speed chase down Amnicola Highway to a second military installation, where he opened fire again and was killed after a gun battle that one witness estimated lasted 20 minutes.
Three victims were rushed to Erlanger’s Trauma Center, including a Chattanooga police officer and two members of the military. One of those patients was discharged from Erlanger this afternoon; the other two are still being treated. Including the victim, the violence claimed five lives, with three more wounded.
Officials have said the shooter died during the attack, though they did not say how he died. During the attack on Amnicola Highway, numerous Chattanooga and Hamilton County officers “actively and enthusiastically” engaged the suspect, said Chattanooga Police Chief Fred Fletcher.
The motive behind the attack, which the FBI said came without warning, is still under investigation. A U.S. official said there was no indication Abdulazeez was on the radar of federal law enforcement before the shootings, according to the Associated Press.
So, I think we can safely say that this is almost certainly a case of Islamic terrorism. How hooked into terror networks Abdulazeez was is unknown; he could be a lone wolf who was merely inspired by their propaganda, or more closely connected. He was born in Kuwait, and no one seems to know whether he was a US citizen or not, although one would think that would be easy enough to determine. He has an engineering degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was on his high school (in Chattanooga) wrestling team, and is said to have been popular with his classmates.
Interesting how well this fits the profile of another US Islamic terrorist born in an Muslim country, on the wrestling team, and popular: that would be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. I wonder whether Abdulazeez was also an affable stoner.
We also know that Abdulazeez was “was a student intern a few years ago at the authority, a federally owned utility that operates power plants and dams across the South.” Interesting. It’s also not surprising that he was an engineering student; for some reason this particular background is very very common among more well-educated jihadis.
It would also be interesting to know how long ago his family came here, and why. An almost laughable (if the topic weren’t so very serious) Onion-esque article on Yahoo features an interview with a high school classmate of Abdulazeez’s who is quoted as saying, “”They were your average Chattanooga family.”
Right.
[NOTE: A related issue is why on earth places like the venue of the shooting still are required to be gun-free zones. You might as well call them “sitting-duck zones.” It’s a topic I wrote about before here.]