Obama’s next move on the border and deportations

The New Neo Posted on by

For quite some time now we’ve been waiting for Obama’s other shoe to drop regarding amnesty. He’s been warning of us a big announcement, which most people (including me) have speculated will be to end the possibility of deportation for millions of illegal immigrants who are now still at least theoretically subject to it. Nothing has disabused me of the notion that this is his plan.

So what’s keeping him, besides his other pressing engagements (i.e. golf and fund-raising)? He is probably trying to figure out the approach least likely to raise legal challenges.

Obama is nothing if not audacious, but recent SCOTUS decisions (in particular, I would think NLRB v. Noel Canning, the case in which SCOTUS curbed one of his overreaches by a vote of 9-0) have made him a little more careful not to tread too heavily on the toes of even the liberal justices. And mock Boehner’s lawsuit if you will, but it signaled to Obama that the Republicans aren’t completely incapable of mounting some sort of energy, however pallid, for a legal challenge.

Meanwhile, it’s not as though many deportations are actually occurring at present. Au contraire:

“We release all detainees under 14 years of age without taking any biometric identification, including no fingerprints,” the Border Patrol agent explained to Stockman. “We are prevented by law from taking fingerprints or other biometric information on these kids.”

The Border Patrol supervisor could not identify for Stockman the law in question.

“Then how do you know who these children under 14 years old are?” Stockman asked. “How do you know if you are releasing these kids to people who are truly family members in the United States or to pedophiles or other criminals posing as family members?”

“We only know who these children are by what they tell us,” the Border Patrol supervisor admitted. “Truthfully, we don’t really have any idea who they might be or where they came from other than what we can observe from questioning them. You’re right. If they give us false information, we have no way to know it or to follow it up without biometrics.”

Stockman asked what information the Border Patrol has on the people in the United States who claim to be relatives.

“That’s not what our department handles,” the Border Patrol supervisor again admitted.

Rep. Stockman maintains that Obama wants to be impeached prior to the 2014 election, in order to gain sympathy and rally his base. I think Obama knows that any such impeachment prior to November 2014 would fail to win conviction in the Senate, so he’d be safe. But I don’t think he really wants an impeachment—he’d be very happy with the mere threat of one, so he wouldn’t have to waste time and energy defending against it but could claim the mantle of pitiful victim of the racist Republicans nonetheless. On the issue of amnesty, he’s far more frightened (although not frightened enough) of a Court challenge at this point, which could put him in the position of being in open defiance of even the liberal justices and some in his own party.

But why is Obama so keen on officially giving amnesty to the illegal arrivals? They already have de facto amnesty as long as he’s president; why do they need it de jure? Even with de jure amnesty, they almost certainly would not be able to vote yet by 2014 or even 2016, except illegally, which they already could do now just as well (or with just as much difficulty). They will almost certainly be working in the US under the table even without de jure amnesty, much as they do now, too. So what’s the point of raising a fuss and alerting even some of the low-information-voters as to what is going on by officially giving them amnesty? After all, isn’t it logical to think that a subsequent president could take it back by executive order, too, as long as it’s not been codified into law by Congress, and as long as the illegal immigrants granted amnesty haven’t yet become citizens?

The reason might be to throw a bunch of very public and visible fish to the so-called “immigration activists” on the left whom Obama needs in to get energized for the 2014 election. In addition, it might facilitate the granting of benefits to the arrivals, if Congress refuses to appropriate special funds.

Still another reason, I suppose, would be to thumb his nose at all of us and cause Republicans and conservatives—and really, anyone who considers this a sovereign nation with borders—to stomp their feet in impotent rage.

Obama and the Christians of Iraq

The New Neo Posted on by

The Christians of Iraq in the areas controlled by ISIS are being persecuted and either killed or driven from places they’ve occupied since the dawn of Christianity. Not that Obama could stop it at this point (although he probably could have nipped ISIS in the bud when it started to take strength), but as far as I can discern he has not even spoken out against it.

I guess those Christians don’t look like his imaginary sons, or something like that. Or perhaps he’s simply checked out of his job, as so many have suggested.

I don’t think it’s the latter, though; if he cares about an issue he’ll still rouse himself on it. I don’t think he ever cared a bit about the plight of any Christians vis-a-vis the Muslims who are persecuting them. And IMHO that’s not because he’s a closest Muslim, either. My reading on Obama is that he is not a religious man at all—either Christian nor Muslim—but that his pose of being a Christian was always for political purposes, even way back when he first joined Reverend Wright’s church.

Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf has accused Obama of not speaking up about the plight of the Christians in Iraq:

…[T]his meets the official test of genocide.”

Asked if President Barack Obama has spoken out against this atrocity, Wolf said he has not.

“No, the president hasn’t said anything, the State Department hasn’t said anything,” he lamented. “Frankly, nobody is saying anything.”

Asked what the United States could do about the situation in Mosul, Wolf listed several options.

“There is a lot we can do,” he said. “One, the President of the United States can urge the Kurdish government to continue to guard and protect the Christians.”

“Secondly, we can give some of the foreign aid that we are already giving, give it to a group like Catholic Relief or World Vision or a group like that, to provide relief ”“ water, food, clothing,” he continued. “Thirdly, we can tell the Maliki government to start protecting the Christian sites and the Christian communities. [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-]Maliki flew out ”“ all the Shia were flown out of Mosul ”“ and they left the Christians there to die.”

“And lastly,” Wolf concluded, “every person who is listening should call their congressman and their senator and insist that they insist the White House do something.”

Unfortunately, the White House, freed of its need to stand for election again, could not care less about public pressure on this or on any other topic. You might have better luck contacting your Congressional representatives, depending on who they are.

How to scare a child

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not that hard to do. But still, it’s pretty cute. My husband shaved his mustache off when our son was about three, to similar effect:

I bet she would have been a whole lot more frightened if he’d been able to grow a beard in 30 seconds.

And now for something that is unlikely to scare anybody:

[Hat tip: CDR M at Ace’s.]

About those Gazan tunnels…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it’s even worse than you might think:

Using further eyewitness reports, the article describes how Hamas has integrated the tunnel network into the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, constructing entrances in homes and even mosques. “I have not entered one civilian home that did not have weapons, suicide belts, or booby traps in it,” the source told the Post, stressing the lengths to which the IDF goes to protect innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, regardless.

Much more from Powerline:

Hamas was apparently a few months away from conducting a mass attack on Israeli civilians during the upcoming Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, on September 24. The raid would have been like something out of a movie: hundreds of heavily-armed Hamas fighters would have emerged from over a dozen underground tunnels in the dead of night, jogged 10 minutes to their targets, and then infiltrated a set of lightly-populated and lightly-guarded Israeli communities. Casualties could have reached the thousands, and some of the victims would have been taken back alive as hostages.

The offensive attack tunnels seem to quite literally have been built for this kind of purpose. The IDF recently published a map of how they were dug to spill out on both sides of nearby communities (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtYjL4mCAAAI6c6.png). Israeli soldiers have been reporting that just inside some of the tunnels were storage units filled with tranquilizers, handcuffs, ropes, and so on…

If the reports are confirmed, there are some immediate adjustments that analysts, journalists, and diplomats will all but certainly make:

(1) A ceasefire without at least the destruction of Hamas’s tunnel network would likely becomes a non-starter. It would be militarily untenable ”“ and probably politically impossible ”“ for Israeli leaders to accept anything less.

(2) The inevitable Israeli investigation into pre-conflict failures ”“ and the Israelis always hold these, no matter how well things go ”“ will have to take into account both how so many tunnels got built and why Israeli intelligence failed to crack the tunnel plot earlier. There’s a lot of focus right now on the former, but a lot of the digging and earth moving happened underground. It’s the latter debate, about sigint and humint, that has the potential to cost people careers.

(3) Confirmation of the plot would raise the stakes in the growing controversy over how human rights groups and diplomatic bodies pressured the Israelis into liberalizing restrictions on cement imports. Kilometers and kilometers of reinforced tunnels were being built deep into Israeli territory while Gaza-based offiicals railed against cement shortages

Given all of this, the objections to the Israeli offensive become more and more absurd. Some people will not rest until Israel is no more, and they would like to intimidate Israel into committing suicide.

Obama the Alinskyite, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

[Note: A commenter recently alerted me to this 2009 article by David Horowitz about Obama’s Alinsky roots which described the aims of his presidency. I’d like to give that commenter a hat tip, but I can’t seem to locate who it was.]

Although I had certainly read about Obama’s Alinsky roots prior to Obama’s election, and understood in a broad and basic sense what that past of his meant—looking back now on David Horowitz’s 2009 essay on the subject I’m impressed by how deeply Horowitz understood what was going to happen. His essay is still well worth reading, although I wish all of America had read, and understood, it before voting in 2008.

But it’s no accident it—and the facts and predictions in it—was kept hush-hush. The vast majority of the press and Obama’s fellow Democrats were too excited at the prospect of electing America’s first black president, and were either fooled by Obama’s generalities and platitudes, or they were fully on board with the leftist fundamental transformation of America that he contemplated and wanted to keep it a secret from the public as long as possible.

Looking back, these quotes from Hororwitz leapt out at me with particular poignance and clarity. Now that we’ve experienced five and a half years of Obama’s destructive presidency, it’s possible to appreciate even better than before (and most people on this blog were well aware of Obama’s nature even in 2008) how excellent and important the fit is between Obama and Alinsky:

The Alinsky radical has a single principle – to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots. What this amounts to in practice is a political nihilism – a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people” …the goal is power for the political vanguard who get to feel good about themselves in the process.

The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.

Guided by Alinsky principles, post-Communist radicals are not idealists but Machiavellians. Their focus is on means rather than ends, and therefore they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies in the way their admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agenda, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is resources and power.

Unlike the Communists who identified their goal as a Soviet state – and thereby generated opposition to their schemes – Alinsky and his followers organize their power bases without naming the end game, without declaring a specific future they want to achieve – socialism, communism, a dictatorship of the proletariat, or anarchy. Without committing themselves to concrete principles or a specific future, they organize exclusively to build a power base which they can use to destroy the existing society and its economic system. By refusing to commit to principles or to identify their goal, they have been able to organize a coalition of all the elements of the left who were previously divided by disagreements over means and ends.

After Obama became a U.S. Senator, his wife, Michelle, told a reporter, “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.”

Thus Alinsky begins his text by telling readers exactly what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. In his own mind the radical is building his own kingdom, which to him is a kingdom of heaven on earth. Since a kingdom of heaven built by human beings is a fantasy – an impossible dream – the radical’s only real world efforts are those which are aimed at subverting the society he lives in. He is a nihilist…I am constantly asked how radicals could hate America and why they would want to destroy a society that compared to others is tolerant, inclusive and open, and treats all people with a dignity and respect that is the envy of the world. The answer to this question is that radicals are not comparing America to other real world societies. They are comparing America to the heaven on earth – the kingdom of social justice and freedom – they think they are building.

Conservatives think of war as a metaphor when applied to politics. For radicals, the war is real. That is why when partisans of the left go into battle, they set out to destroy their opponents by stigmatizing them as “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes” and “Islamophobes.” It is also why they so often pretend to be what they are not (“liberals” for example) and rarely say what they mean. Deception for them is a military tactic in a war that is designed to eliminate the enemy.

The most basic principle of Alinsky’s advice to radicals is to lie to their opponents and disarm them by pretending to be moderates and liberals.

Alinsky’s advice can be summed up in the following way. Even though you are at war with the system, don’t confront it as an opposing army; join it and undermine it as a fifth column from within. To achieve this infiltration you must work inside the system for the time being. Alinsky spells out exactly what this means: “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.” In other words, it is first necessary to sell the people on change itself, the “audacity of hope,” and “yes we can.” You do this by proposing moderate changes which open the door to your radical agendas

No matter what Alinsky radicals say publicly or how moderate they appear, they are at war. This provides them with a great tactical advantage since other actors in the political arena are not at war.

There is no real parallelism in the war which radicals have declared. One side is fighting with a no-holds- barred, take-no-prisoners battle plan against the system, while the other is trying to enforce its rules of fairness and pluralism. This is the Achilles’ heel of democracies and all radical spears are aimed in its direction.

What makes radical politics a war is the existence of an enemy who must be eliminated. For Alinsky radicals, that enemy is the “Haves,” who “oppress” and rule the “Have-Nots.”

Lenin once said that the purpose of a political argument is not to refute your opponent “but to wipe him from the face of the earth.” The mission of Alinsky radicals is a mission of destruction.

In contrast to liberals, who in Alinsky’s eyes are constantly tripping over their principles, the rule for radicals is that the ends justify the means. This was true for the Jacobins, for the Communists, for the fascists and now for the post-Communist left. This is not because radicals begin by being unethical people. On the contrary, their passion for a future that is ethically perfect is what drives their political agendas and causes many to mistake them for idealists. But the very nature of this future – a world without poverty, without war, without racism, and without “sexism” – is so desirable, so noble, so perfect in contrast to everything that exists as to justify any and every means to achieve it.

Writes Alinsky: “The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem.” In other words, Alinsky’s radical is not going to worry about the legality or morality of his actions, only their practical effects. If they advance the cause they are justified. “He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.”

The end of Hororwitz’s article is, “What radicals like Saul Alinsky create is not salvation but chaos. And presidential disciples of Alinsky, what will they create?” Even back then it was a rhetorical question; Hororwitz knew the answer, although he did not yet know how successful Obama and his minions would be.

The feeling many Americans now have of having been duped by Obama is completely understandable. They were purposely and consciously duped. We who never bought into Obama in the first place, who regarded him even in 2008 as a leftist con man fooling Americans, don’t feel duped. But we feel horrified at the way it’s played out so far. Obama has run into speed bumps along the way, but how many Americans are still unaware of what they are dealing with except for a vague feeling of unease? And how many think what Obama’s been doing is just peachy keen because they agree about wanting to destroy this country and move it to the far left? There are way too many of both types: the fools and the knaves.

Did the ACA framers mean to limit subsidies to state exchanges?

The New Neo Posted on by

The decision in any appeal of Halbig—and therefore the ultimate fate of Obamacare—may rest on that question.

The left would like to say it was all a huge oversight and more or less an unfortunate and careless typo or drafting error, and that clearly Congress’s intention was to allow the feds to give out subsidies. The right says no way:

The deliberate creation of a separate section to authorize a separate federal entity is not a drafting error. The repeated and deliberate reference to one section but not another is not a drafting error. The refusal to grant equal authority to two programs authorized by two separate sections is not a drafting error. The decision to specifically reference section X but not section Y in a portion of a law that grants spending or tax authority is not a drafting error.

The clear text of the law repeatedly demonstrates that plans purchased via federal exchanges were never meant to be treated the same as plans purchased by state-based exchanges. Despite its assertions, the IRS was never granted the statutory authority to hand out tax credits related to plans purchased via a federal health exchange.

Now a video from 2012 has been unearthed featuring “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber (about whom I’ve written about in depth before). In it Gruber, who should know a thing or two about Obamacare, makes it very very clear that subsidies can come only through the state exchanges. What’s more, he said it on record at least two times, one of them not in response to a question, and explained both times at significant length.

Now, of course, he’s saying dummy me, I can’t even imagine what I was thinking back then. He calls it a “speako”—like a typo, get it? But these were “speakos” that went on for a full minute, in some detail. The most that he could say that would make any sense is that he was mistaken.

It really doesn’t matter, though, whether Gruber was right or wrong. His statements can’t speak for Congress’s intent, although they would constitute a small bit of evidence about it. Intent is deduced from much more than that, but you know what? Statutes are usually considered (at least by non-liberals) to say what they mean unless the mistakes really do involve typos, which the ACA certainly does not (as Sean Davis makes clear).

Here’s the rule:

It might seem a bit odd, but as a general matter, while conservative jurists are likely to look to the intent of the framers for constitutional questions, for statutes the basic process is to look at the plain language of the statute first, either ignoring Congress’ intent entirely, or turning to it only in the case of an ambiguity in the statute.

The language is not the least bit ambiguous here, and it is consistent too. There is really very little wriggle room for interpreting it otherwise. In a more normal world, the courts would simply say to the legislature, “If you didn’t mean what you wrote, go back and fix it so it says what you meant.” Now, of course, that’s not possible, because Obamacare could never be passed again, and everyone knows that. It’s that unpopular.

Counterintuitive: inactivity doesn’t lead to childhood obesity after all?

The New Neo Posted on by

Most of us think we know a lot about what makes people fat. They eat too much and they’re inactive.

Newer evidence about the influence of gut flora indicates the iffiness of the first proposition, at least as a hard and fast rule. Certainly, eating less will cause weight loss. But the fat do not necessarily eat more than the thin, something I’ve noticed (and written about) before among my friends and acquaintances. There is no justice.

In recent years some studies have indicated that inactivity among children, something that was long thought to be responsible for increasing levels of childhood obesity, may not be that much of a factor either. Although the news came out four years ago, I don’t think it’s gotten widespread notice, perhaps because it goes so strongly against what seems to be common sense as well as PC thought. I think it highly likely that exercise is good for kids whether it leads to weight loss or not, but apparently it’s not the basic causative problem in obesity:

EarlyBird is based at the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, UK, and has been observing in detail a cohort of city school children for the past 11 years.

A review published in 2009 of all trials using physical activity to reduce childhood obesity showed weight loss amounting to just 90g (3oz) over three years, and the EarlyBird study wanted to know why the trials were so ineffective. So they challenged some popular paradigms.

It is well known that less active children are fatter, but that does not mean — as most people assume it does — that inactivity leads to fatness. It could equally well be the other way round: that obesity leads to inactivity.

And this is the question EarlyBird was uniquely placed to answer. With data collected annually over several years from a large cohort of children, it could ask the question — which comes first? Does the physical activity of the child precede changes in fatness over time, or does the fatness of the child precede changes in physical activity over time?

And the answer, published recently in Archives of Disease in Childhood, was clear. Physical activity had no impact on weight change, but weight clearly led to less activity.

What does cause childhood obesity, which has been increasing dramatically for decades in the entire western world? From reading up on it, I can only conclude that it works something like this: some people have the genes that foster it and always have, but previously it was held in check by the fact that food was neither very plentiful nor varied for the vast majority of the population (there also was more physical activity, but that doesn’t seem to have made as much difference). Now that tasty, abundant, and non-monotonous food has become readily available in the west to even most poor peoplet, everyone is eating pretty much to capacity. Therefore those with the genes for it are going to become fat.

Being fat used to be a sign that a person was prosperous and healthy. No more. In the west, it tends to mean a person is more likely to be poor than rich (Michael Moore excepted). Certain ethnic groups, blacks and Hispanics, are also more susceptible, and their increasing numbers in the population will also lead almost inexorably to higher percentages of obesity.

Want 10 more reasons for increasing rates of obesity that have nothing to do with overeating or inactivity? You’ve got em.

Despite our growing hedonism we’re still a moralistic and somewhat puritanical species. It’s just that the target of our concerns have shifted, and what used to be focused on sexual prohibitions seems to have shifted to health rules, particularly on overeating and exercise. But maybe we’re not such bad folk after all, it’s just our prosperity and our genes.

[NOTE: In an attempt to head off the “just go on a lowcarb/Paleo/Taubes diet” people who seem to come in proselytizing on every thread about weight loss or diet, I refer those interested to this thread (including comments) and this one.]

Moving to the left

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s so rare to see a piece describing a political change from right to left that this one in Politico entitled “Why Am I Moving Left?” caught my eye.

It’s written by Thomas E. Ricks, a 50-something journalist who has spent the last twenty-five years specializing in writing about military matters, and he seems remarkably unreflective for a writer. He’s “puzzled” by not just his drift but by his “late-middle-age politicization,” since prior to this he had been a “detached centrist” who “didn’t participate in elections, because I didn’t want to vote for, or against, the people I covered.”

I can’t see how a person can follow politics and not have an opinion on them, so my guess is that until recently Ricks closely followed events in his field of expertise (the military) but not events in general, because he describes not a conscious effort to refrain from voting despite strong feelings, but a lack of strong opinions about politics at all.

So perhaps he’s just begun to pay attention recently, because he’s decided he doesn’t need to remain aloof anymore. One of the things he doesn’t like is what happened in the Iraq War, and he also thought that our conduct of the war in Afghanistan was “inept.” How that would translate into support for the left (or particularly Obama, who destroyed whatever good we did) I haven’t a clue, since a person would have no reason to believe the left would be better at conducting a war Ricks actually supported, such as Afghanistan. Nor does he explain what was so inept about Afghanistan, under the extremely difficult circumstances that country presented, circumstances that were known and predicted to be exceedingly challenging.

I’m not going to bother to fisk Ricks’ entire article. But if you go down the list of things Ricks says were what turned him to the left, you’ll find that most of them are emotional reactions where calling on the left to remedy things doesn’t seem to demonstrate much logic at all. Ricks doesn’t like the NSA spying, income inequality, bailouts, gun massacres. So: Democrats? Did they oppose the NSA data collection or the bailouts to a greater degree than Republicans did, and do they have solutions for gun massacres or income inequality that aren’t worse than the diseases? Ricks doesn’t even try to argue why he thinks they do.

I have no idea how typical Ricks is of any recent phenomenon. I’ve not seen any surveys on how political change has been going during the Obama administration, but I find it very hard to believe he’s not in a tiny minority, and that any change that has occurred has been in the other direction, particularly among millennials.

[ADDENDUM: Just now I looked up Ricks’ Wiki entry, and after reading it I am of the opinion he’s very much a liberal, and has been for a long time.]

Obama and the border: what side is he on?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why is Ed Rogers so mild and tentative here?:

Nothing suggests the president wants to own, control or take charge of securing our border. He only met with Texas Gov. Rick Perry when he was shamed into doing so and he is not relaying any tough messages or talking about potential penalties for the countries that are exporting their citizens to the United States. Even the $3.7 billion he wants Congress to appropriate for the crisis is mostly geared toward accommodating the inflow of illegal immigrants, not stopping it. And that request has not been accompanied by any serious effort to lobby for its passage.

With all this, it is fair to ask: Whose side is the president really on? Does he support the beleaguered U.S. law enforcement officials who are trying to guard our border? Does he empathize with the American communities who are forced to deal with the influx of those who are willfully breaking the law?

It is revealing that after meeting in early July with immigration activists who oppose any efforts to return the illegal immigrants to their home country, the president went so far as to reassure the group that, “in another life, I’d be on the other side of the table.” It is not hard to believe the president has a bias on the side of the foreigners. It isn’t a leap or unfair to believe that emotionally and ideologically, the president’s sympathies are with the goals of the immigration activists ”” but since, as president, he has this bothersome responsibility of enforcing U.S. laws and protecting the U.S. border, he must, for the time being, avoid formally joining their ranks.

Rogers has long been an Obama critic. But still, contrast the polite caution of his accusations in this piece with the sort of thing you used to read every day about President Bush from the liberal press. And yet there really is no question that Obama not only is uninterested in securing the border but is actively undermining and even sabotaging border security for what he sees as political gain.

Granted, it’s a serious charge. There aren’t too many things presidents are required to do, and one of them is to maintain and defend our territorial integrity. Obama not only refuses to do that, he is neither subtle nor hidden about it; on the contrary, he is open in his contempt for the entire situation.

Obama has reached a new stage in his presidential life. It was nearly four years ago (November of 2010) that I made the prediction that Obama could be re-elected in 2012:

And then, and then””voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?

In Obama’s case, not answering to the electorate doesn’t just mean advocating unpopular things, or spending his time on golf and fund-raising, or refusing to even make an appearance at the border despite being begged, although those activities or omissions are all included. It means endangering the country and putting its populace at risk. It means winking at the arrival of criminals from south of the border. It means dismantling the armed forces. It means releasing five Taliban leaders in exchange for one traitor. It means refusing to stop the rise of ISIS when it was possible to do so, allowing Islamist terrorists around the world to regroup and get much stronger.

And somehow it means that even many of those pundits who oppose and criticize Obama are afraid to tell it straight. I assume that’s because they fear they’ll sound as though they’ve gone off the deep end, or will be accused of that old perennial, racism. But it’s Obama who’s gone off the deep end—and this country is poised to follow him right over the brink.

[NOTE: In the comments section to the Rogers article, I found this interesting remark by someone who calls himself “brianc2221.” I can’t find a way to link it, so I’ll just quote it:

Some on the far right have long claimed Obama’s goal was to destroy the country. I never believed them UNTIL NOW.

I’m not sure how widespread that sentiment is, but I hope “very.”]

The undeserving poor

The New Neo Posted on by

The phenomenon was mocked in “My Fair Lady” but its origins predated that, in “Pygmalion,” Shaw’s play from which “My Fair Lady” and this speech of Alfred Doolittle’s was taken. Isn’t it interesting that, despite writing this, Shaw was a Fabian Socialist?

Here’s how the undeserving Doolittle ends up:

Be careful what you wish for, “That’s the tragedy of it, Eliza.”