Category Archives: Barack Obama

Hands-Off Syria

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Neoconservatism

It’s not often that I agree with Barack Obama, but his hands-off Syria policy, if it is to be believed, is, I’m sorry to say, the right one. It is unlikely, unfortunately, that the US is uninvolved in some covert operation in Syria. One “international affairs and defense analyst” told RT that “since 2012, if not earlier, weapons have been supplied to the rebels … a covert supply of weapons, of course – through Turkey and with the assistance of Saudi, Qatari and Turkish intelligence services.”

As for Israel’s strafing of Syria, what triggered this Israeli strike? The “crisis in 2006 was triggered by cross-border raids on Israel by Hamas in Gaza and by Hezbollah in Lebanon.” Journalist and Middle East expert Ali Rizk is searching for provocation (as we libertarians ought to):

Has there been any military action, has Israel been attacked by any side, whether it be Hezbollah or Syria? Has Israel been attacked by any side whatsoever? Israel has not been attacked.
So we hear this talk about game-changing weapons. But that doesn’t give the right or justification for such escalation…I have to emphasize, the clear message if anyone had any doubts I think now it has become clear: Israel wants Bashar Assad to fall. That is Israel’s choice. Netanyahu himself has said time and again: “Syria is the linchpin between Iran and Hezbollah.”

BBC News’ Jonathan Marcus thinks he’s found justification. Neoconservatives will concur. “According to US intelligence sources,” he reports, “the target of the first of these latest Israeli attacks [inside Syria] which took place overnight on Thursday was a shipment of ground-to-ground missiles at a warehouse at Damascus airport.”

…these latest air strikes underscore Israel’s equal worry about sophisticated conventional weapons being passed to Hezbollah. This includes sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles, anti-shipping missiles, or accurate long-range ground-to-ground missiles. Such concerns are longstanding. … The missiles, which had been shipped from Iran, according to the sources, were Fateh-110s – a mobile, highly accurate solid-fuelled missiles with the capability of hitting Israel’s main population centres, like Tel Aviv, from southern Lebanon.
…What’s not clear, American officials admit, is exactly who the missiles were intended for – the Syrian army or Hezbollah. But the airport warehouse is said to have been under the control of personnel from Hezbollah and Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force.

Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America

Barack Obama, Constitution, Feminism, Founding Fathers, Gender, GUNS, History, Homosexuality, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Sex, Terrorism

“Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Whereas American media has shed mostly darkness on the “apparently” mysterious motivation behind the ruthless, savage, April 15 attack on the Boston Marathon—a Chechen leader offered some valuable insights about these homegrown terrorists:

[The] Tsarnaevs … were raised in the United States, and their attitudes and beliefs were formed there. It is necessary to seek the roots of this evil in America.

The man makes a profound point. Here, and not in Chechnya, did the Tsarnaevs receive a liberal, lax, progressive education, emphasizing the wicked ways of the West and the righteousness of its “victims.” It is here in America that these invertebrates matured into aggrieved ignoramuses.

“If we Americans cannot even agree on what is right and wrong and moral and immoral, how do we stay together in one national family?,” prodded Patrick J. Buchanan, in a recent column.

“A common faith and moral code once held this country together. But if we no longer stand on the same moral ground, after we have made a conscious decision to become the most racially, ethnically, culturally diverse people on earth, what in the world holds us together?

The Constitution, the Bill of Rights? How can they, when we bitterly disagree on what they say?”

As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam discovered, reluctantly, diversity in fact immiserates. The greater the diversity in a county or country, the more distrustful and depressed are its inhabitants.

America’s practically pornographic rituals of public grief—what are they if not a neurotic symptom of this disconnect? A diverse and distrusting people, lacking in a shared national DNA, are thrust together by the crisis of the day. In the absence of any core value over which to unite, we Americans meet on the only common ground we share: the graveyard. We come together to bury or remember our dead. We unite to grieve over tragedy and misfortune that have befallen us for no other reason than that we exist in the same space in time. ….”

Read the complete column. “Reflections On The Boston Bombers & Boyhood In America” is now on WND.

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UPDATED: Boston (And America) Betrayed (Blaming Russia)

Barack Obama, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Islam, Military, Nationhood, Political Correctness, Republicans, Russia, Terrorism, The State

“Boston (And America) Betrayed,” now on WND, is the current column. Here’s an excerpt:

“What if anything did the unspeakably wicked, premeditated, Islam-inspired bombing of the Boston Marathon, on April 15, teach us?

Nothing much at all, other than that we’re immune to learning.

Sh-t happens, the country’s self-anointed cognoscenti keep instructing America. Don’t rush to conclusions.

If you’re media, milk Boston for all its worth. If you’re an ordinary American with a pulse, follow your leaders. Or their lick-spittles in the theatre of the absurd that is television news.

In short, everyone is said to be flummoxed about the motive for the murder spree.

And, with exceptions on the Right, America is marching in lockstep. Evil per se doesn’t exist. Those who do evil, must have been brainwashed, been hard done by, or have been afflicted with a mutation on the “moral gene.”

The putative perpetrators of an act that left three dead and many more maimed are the brothers Tsarnaev.

One of these two young Muslim-Americans has already been dispatched. On the lam after the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s descent into hell was hastened, on April 19, during a shoot-out with the Boston police.

You should also know that the two brothers’ path to citizenship and permanent residence here was without obstacles—at least, when compared to my own and that of my spouse.

This is quite understandable, given the priories and preferences established by the US Managerial State.

To no avail did Russian state security twice practically beg the FBI and then the CIA, in 2011, to place Tamerlan Tsarnaev on counterterrorism watch lists. It was pointless. The FBI turned the Russians down (as the Transportation Security Administration intensified its assaults on grandpa and grandma from the prairie).

Correction: By some circuitous route, the National Counterterrorism Center managed to add Tamerlan’s name to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE. But membership in the TIDE fraternity only got Tamerlan an invitation to a bash at the White House.

‘”Unemployment compensation’ for the elder terrorist (who was unable to work on account of vocational training in Dagestan), college aid for junior, cellphones to both courtesy of the feds, attorneys on retainer to field run-ins with the law, housing, hospitalization—you name it, the Tsarnaev brothers got it. …”

The complete column is, “Boston (And America) Betrayed,”Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE (4/26): BLAMING RUSSIA. Did you know that it was not enough for the Russians to have warned our dumb-ass “treason class” of the FBI about Tamerlan Tsarnaev—they were supposed to do the footwork for us?

Yes, this argument is advanced by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). The ponce’s case is essentially the one princess Condoleezza made, framing the intelligence she had as not amenable to “action.”

In other words, because FBI laggards refused to develop the information—the outcome of their treason becomes someone else’s responsibility.

POLITICO:

The FBI did a “very thorough job” of checking out Tamerlan Tsarnaev after being tipped off to his potential extremism, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on Sunday, blaming Russia for failing to provide any further information.

Legal Doublespeak About National Gun Registration

Barack Obama, Constitution, GUNS, Individual Rights, Law

Gun owners must be wondering what in bloody blue blazes the malfunctioning media is talking about when referring to the gun legislation just defeated in the Senate as a background-check bill.

“Don’t we already have those?”, they’d be asking themselves. And they’d be right.

If you’ve purchased a gun from a dealer, and you have a Concealed Pistol License, you’ve undergone a background check. I have. According to the law in my state, the firearms dealer must run you through the NICS—National Instant Criminal Background Check System— for an instant check prior to delivery.

Most states have similar laws.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered a canned performance of righteous indignation, with activists beating on breast behind him over the defeat of the savior bill. A “shameful day for Washington,” raged Obama, who is master of the cliche.

The defeated Manchin-Toomey amendment has been misrepresented by the jokers of the media as no more than “a compromise on a fraction of the comprehensive gun control package the president called for after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.”

However, the extent of the Obama media’s doublespeak becomes clear when the legal implications of Toomey-Manchin are unpacked by Second-Amendment scholar David Kopel.

The “badly miswritten” Toomey-Manchin Amendment was “in fact a major advancement for gun control,” writes Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog written by law professors.

Particularly interesting is what Kopel has discovered with respect to “The provision which claims to outlaw national gun registration.” It “in fact authorizes a national gun registry”:

Let’s start with registration. Here’s the Machin-Toomey text.

(c) Prohibition of National Gun Registry.-Section 923 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
“(m) The Attorney General may not consolidate or centralize the records of the
“(1) acquisition or disposition of firearms, or any portion thereof, maintained by
“(A) a person with a valid, current license under this chapter;
“(B) an unlicensed transferor under section 922(t); or
“(2) possession or ownership of a firearm, maintained by any medical or health insurance entity.”.

The limit on creating a registry applies only to the Attorney General (and thus to entities under his direct control, such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). By a straightforward application of inclusio unius exclusio alterius it is permissible for entities other than the Attorney General to create gun registries, using whatever information they can acquire from their own operations. For example, the Secretary of HHS may consolidate and centralize whatever firearms records are maintained by any medical or health insurance entity. The Secretary of the Army may consolidate and centralize records about personal guns owned by military personnel and their families.
The Attorney General may not create a registry from the records of “a person with a valid, current license under this chapter.” In other words, the AG may not harvest the records of persons who currently hold a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Thus, pursuant to inclusio unius, the AG may centralize and consolidate the records of FFLs who have retired from their business.