When the Obama Backlash Comes - Barry will stop being such a Happy Camper

When the Obama Backlash Comes

from American Thinker
By Jeff Lukens
April 29, 2009

Public opinion can be very fickle. Barack Obama has ridden a positive wave of opinion all the way to the White House. The public has welcomed him into office in that same spirit of hope in which he ran. Since the inauguration, however, the President is showing he has different plans than the ones he spoke about during the campaign. It should come as no surprise when the public turns on him just as easily as he has turned on them.

The contradictions between Obama's words and actions are many. He opposes big government, and then he vastly expands it. He says he favors bipartisanship, but doesn't practice it. He says he is against earmarks, and then signs the largest pork package in history. And that is just to name a few.

Such inconsistencies are contributing to a lack of confidence in Obama and his economic policies. The budget deficits he proposes are staggering. The trillions of dollars he wants to spend are incomprehensible. There is no evidence that stimulative government spending even works. Obama is apparently racing to remake America in a socialist mold before public sentiment turns against him. One wonders whether his political capital will run out before financial capital of the country runs out.

There is simply no way the government can pay for this level of spending unless it prints money it doesn't have and debases the dollar. His numbers do not add up. Larger deficits are not the solution to a debt crisis.

Not that it is Obama's fault, but throw in Social Security and Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, and we effectively have placed the U.S. government in bankruptcy. Obama addresses this looming crisis only in generalities, but his spending plans bring national bankruptcy closer to reality

Obama's overriding goal seems to government control of more of the society and economy. He claims that by redoing health, education and energy policies he can cure the economy. It is a ruse by which government can control ever more of our daily life.

If he truly wanted the economy to improve, Obama would simply make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Having some certainty about low tax rates would do much to help the economy. But that does not fit with his plans to enact the most radical social change we have ever seen.

Over the past decade, the United States has become ever more dependent on foreign investment in its Treasury Bills, primarily by China and Japan. The willingness of these investors to continue purchasing trillions in U.S. debt has become ever more questionable as they have seen the U.S. economy deteriorate. If they ever walk away, our economy could collapse.

So, where does this all leave Barack Obama?

In the past, excessive taxation and spending policies have caused the economy to contract. High unemployment then followed, and increased government spending caused the budget deficit to soar. The central bank then tried to solve the problem by printing more money leading to higher inflation, punishing family budgets and the dollar.

Usually by this point an alarmed public turns to conservatives to clean up the mess. Think Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Could this pattern portend the end for Barack Obama? Not necessarily. Before conservatives can recover, Obama is hoping to shift the fundamental structure of our economy away from individual self-reliance toward a type of Euro-socialism. We will see which way it plays out.

It's a shame Obama uses his oratory gifts to punish rather than inspire personal achievement. He will likely continue on his merry path until his polls collapse and the public rejects him. The tipping point may be an international incident such as an Arab-Israeli war, Russian aggression, or some other crisis. With the weak domestic economy, and an Obama kumbaya response in a time of emergency, the whole illusion of "change you can believe in" could be laid bare.

By the time the bloom comes off this fanciful presidency, will conservatives have found their voice? Will Obama then reinvent himself with some Bill Clinton-style triangulation plan? Probably not. More likely, he has already shown us his best act and will slowly morph into a finger-pointing demagogue as his polls fade. If anyone else were president and deceptively trying to enact his programs, a full-scale revolt would already be underway.

But for now, Obama is still a curiosity to whom many are willing to give a chance. Political correctness still holds sway, and Tea Parties are about as rebellious as it gets. In due time, the public will judge this man and his policies more clearly, and calls to stop him will grow louder.

Let's hope it's not too late before that happens.
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Israel Reviewing Arm Sales To Turkey - Turkish-Syrian military exercise raises red flags

Turkish-Syrian exercise prompts Israeli review of sophisticated arms sales to Ankara

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
April 27, 2009

Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak commented Monday, April 27, that Turkey's decision to hold three days of military maneuvers with Syria is "disturbing."

And that is not all. The exercise will be accompanied Monday or Tuesday by the signing of a letter of intent between Turkish defense minister Vecdi Gonul and his Syrian counterpart Hassan Turkmani for cooperation in the defense industry.

DEBKAfile's military sources report that the signing and the exercise are major landmarks on the shrinking road of military and trading ties between Turkey and Israel. In 2009, Ankara pared exchanges down to $2.2 billion in 2009 and expanded its trade with Syria to $2.6 billion.

Israel is now in a hurry to slash its military exchanges with Turkey to prevent the leakage of military secrets to an avowed Arab enemy.

Ankara is furthermore defaulting on payments for military purchases and other contracts. It has piled up a debt of several million dollars to Israel's military and air industries, in payment for a $5 billion deal to build a Mark 3 Chariot plant in Turkey. Production of 1,000 Israeli tanks, to have been Turkey's main theater tank, should have begun in early 2009.

Construction is now halted.

Israel will also discontinue sales of its world-class unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and sharply reduce its military ties with Turkey which go back to the 1960s.

DEBKAfile's military sources report that Ankara deliberately played up the scale of the joint exercise, in which Turkish and Syrian border units rather than substantial military forces are involved. Its disclosure was a strong statement of the Erdogan government's policy of trading its extensive strategic relations with Israel for ties with Syria.

Our sources stress that this trend began to emerge three years ago, although the Sharon and Olmert governments did their best to keep it out of sight. DEBKAfile's Ankara sources report that the indirect Israel-Syrian peace talks brokered by Turkey last year were used by prime minister Ehud Olmert to conceal this setback in Israel's foreign relations.

Furthermore, Israel's defense and foreign ministries as well as top IDF ranks held on to the conviction that the installment of a pro-Islamic government in Ankara would not detract from the long-held ties of cooperation and trust between Turkey and Israel.

DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report they misread the signals. The Turkish armed forces is no long the body it once was. The generals of today are in harmony with Recip Tayyep Erdogan's decision to turn Turkey's back on Israel.
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If Conservatives Left The Military, There Would Be No Military Left - Liberals Do Not Fight For This Country

Political Extremism Infiltrates the Pentagon
New Defense Department advisor Rosa Brooks is about as far to the left as one can go.

from Pajamas Media
April 24, 2009
by Ryan Mauro

Every once in a while something happens so shocking, so inconceivable, that it threatens to remove the last bastions of confidence I have in the federal government. The appointment of Rosa Brooks, the radical left-wing Los Angeles Times columnist, as an advisor to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michelle Fluornoy is one of those moments. And by advisor, I don’t mean someone who talks on an informal basis — I mean a full-time advisor so committed to helping formulate policy that she had to leave her position as a fire-breathing partisan columnist.

It’s frighteningly unclear what caused Brooks to receive the appointment. She’s the author of a book about civil liberties during wartime, is a law professor, and is the director of Georgetown University Law Center’s Human Rights Institute. But why was Brooks, out of the thousands of legal experts in the country, chosen to become a high-level advisor? What made her so attractive? It can’t be her admittedly impressive resume, as there surely are other equally prestigious advisors available in this country of 300 million people.

Brooks could only have been chosen for the opinions she’s voiced, so it’s fair to ask what positions she has that made her catch the eye of Fluornoy and whoever else recommended her.

Was it her attitude towards the previous administration, which she described as “local authoritarians”? On more than one occasion, she’s questioned the sanity of President Bush, hardly the tone of respect President Obama sought to bring to today’s “broken politics.” In her piece titled “Straightjacket Bush,” Brooks says that the president and vice president should “be treated like psychotics who need treatment.”

Even more alarming are her stances on important national security issues. She opposed the surge, which she says “someday the history books will have harsh words” for. She also charges the Bush administration with exaggerating the threat from al-Qaeda. “At the time, most experts say, this description of al-Qaeda simply wasn’t true. It was little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky,” she writes.

Brooks clearly does not see the horrid event as the culmination of a failed approach to a gathering threat, but an occurrence based on chance. Now, “al-Qaeda has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001,” she says, owing it to the neocon administration’s warped reality.

The Israeli offensive in Gaza against Hamas also drew ire from Brooks. “The assault in Gaza has more to do with internal politics than its national security,” she writes, apparently thinking that having neighboring territory controlled by a terrorist group that openly states its desire to destroy Israel isn’t worthy of a military offensive. She opines that a military campaign won’t bring about peace because Hamas will inevitably rearm and such actions create extremism which foments the conflict. If this logic is true, then the U.S. might as well leave Afghanistan and stop any attacks on terrorist targets overseas.

Brooks is also a member of the paranoid opposition — the type of political activist who so dislikes their rivals that they become convinced they are capable of all kinds of evil, reduced to an almost subhuman cornucopia of insanity and deceit. She sounded the alarm that the Bush administration was on the war path with Iran, willing to believe intelligence that incriminated their next target and showcase it to the media to make their case. She cast doubt upon the administration’s claims that the Iranians were helping arm the insurgents, giving the mullahs a benefit of the doubt she would never give the administration.

With Brooks’ appointment, this sentiment has gone from simply foolish and disrespectful to dangerous, as her hyper-partisanship has caused her to assume that one must be mentally ill in order to agree with President Bush’s positions. That sort of arrogance and narrow-mindedness, assuming your opponents’ disagreements can only be attributable to a disorder, is exactly the opposite of the type of minds we need at the Department of Defense.

This isn’t talk radio. This is policy formulation. Unless there’s an undisclosed advisor to Fluornoy of an opposite viewpoint, then a partisan enclave where the far left has a monopoly on intellectual discourse has been created in the Pentagon. For the sake of our national security, we must hope that Fluornoy’s admiration for Brooks’ viewpoints is limited to legal matters and hope that the marketplace of ideas hasn’t been banned from the debate on that issue.

Ironically, Brooks has criticized President Bush’s “cooking of the intelligence books.” If the politicizing of national security is of such a concern to Brooks, she should resign immediately.
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Obama is now Politically and Militarily Raping Israel - It Is Undeniable!

The flags of the United States and Israel shouold be flown at half-mast, because we are truly witnessing the death of our relationship with Israel.
Rees

NATO member Turkey and Syria hold first joint military exercise
DEBKAfile Special Report
April 26, 2009

The joint Turkish-Syrian tank and armored infantry exercise backed by air power begins across the Turkish-Syrian border Monday, April 27, and lasts three days.

DEBKAfile's military sources stress that it is the first joint military maneuver any NATO member, including Turkey, has ever carried out with Syria. It appears to have received a nod from the Obama administration and another first: Never before has an important NATO power staged a joint exercise with any Arab army.

Ankara's decision to launch the drill on the day Israeli commemorates its war dead - in league with Iran's leading ally - is a measure of how far Turkey's longstanding strategic pact with the Jewish state has fallen by the wayside of recent changes.

Washington's approval underscores its new policy of boosting the strength of the Syrian army as partner in a strong a three-way military coalition with Turkey and Lebanon.

Ankara made its announcement while US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was on a short visit to Beirut.

It comes only four days after another first US step: Tuesday, April 22, DEBKAfile's exclusive sources reported that the Obama administration had just approved a large Turkish arms sale to the Lebanese army assigning Turkish military instructors to train Lebanese army units (half of whose personnel are Shiites sympathetic to Hizballah.)

Neither of the Obama administration's actions took into account Israel's vital security interests; nor was Jerusalem consulted about the strategic changes on its borders - or even informed.

DEBKAfile reports that both US drastic policy reverses are causing extreme consternation in Israel's top security echelons, which are criticizing the new Netanyahu government for taking too long to respond to the dire security setbacks piling up around its borders. The most troubling development confronting Israel in years is the grouping together of the Turkish, Syrian and Lebanese armies.

According to the statement from Ankara, the joint exercise "aims to boost friendship, cooperation and trust between Turkish and Syrian land forces and to increase the capability of border troops to train and work together."

In recent weeks, too many developments are closing in too fast and too dangerously for Binyamin Netanyahu to put the whole can of worms on hold until he has a chance to figure out his policies and talk to Barack Obama in the coming month. The dynamic on the ground will be in full flight by then. Too late, the Israeli prime minister will find the security situation running out of his control. Turning back the clock will be hopeless and he will find himself fed some unpalatable accomplished facts.
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Israel shocked by Obama's approval of large Turkish arms sale to Lebanon

Obama's Foreign Policy Is A Runaway Train...and as the train speeds off out of sight, you can hear Obama calling out to the Jewish people, "Who's your daddy now!"
Rees

from the DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
April 22, 2009

Turkish commandoes will train Lebanese troops

DEBKAfile quotes senior Israeli military circles as staggered by the discovery that US president Barack Obama had approved a large Turkish arms sale to the Lebanese army, including the services of Turkish military instructors. This was taken as further proof that the US president is deaf to Israel's immediate security concerns. Lebanese president Gen. Michel Suleiman has more than once threatened neighboring Israel. When he signed the arms deal in Ankara Tuesday, April 21, he once again pledged publicly to place the Lebanese army at the disposal of the Shiite terrorist Hizballah in any confrontation with Israel.

If that happened, said one Israeli source, Israel could find itself under attack not just by Hizballah as in the past, but by a Lebanese army, well trained and armed by Turkey. He noted that more than 50 percent of Lebanon's fighting manpower are Shiites loyal to Hizballah.

The conviction is growing in Jerusalem that the US president endorsed the transaction as a means of breaking up the long-standing military pact between Israel and Turkey, because it interferes with his Middle East objectives. Our sources note that neither Washington nor Ankara bothered to inform Israel of the transaction or its scope.

After meeting Turkish president Abdullah Gul, Suleiman at the head of a large Lebanese military delegation signed the contracts for the sale and declared with deep satisfaction: "We reviewed the new [US] policies towards the region in the light of President Obama's recent visit to Turkey."
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Don't Be So Sensitive, Mr. President

photo of Roxana Saberi who continues to be held captive in Iran

Truth comes before reconciliation.

By Christopher Hitchens
Monday, April 13, 2009
from Slate.com

President Barack Obama's visit to Europe afforded us an opportunity to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of his style in operation. And, even though he has almost attained the Holy Grail of public relations—in other words, he is practically at that ineffable and serene point where he gets good press for getting good press—there may come a time when even his trans-Atlantic admirers will have to take a second look.

His speech in Strasbourg, France, was much too long, given the youth of the audience and the way in which presidential sonorousness ate into the time that was to be allowed for questions, but its aim of changing the American tone was largely successful. I thought that the best moment was when he focused on the German and French citizens who had perished in the World Trade Center. George W. Bush always spoke as if the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, were an attack on the United States only and drew the corollary in his rhetoric that you are either "with" the United States or with the "terrists" (as he always seemed to think they were called). By underlining the losses suffered by other countries, not only did Obama redress this imbalance, he also gently but firmly reminded Europeans that this was and is their struggle, too.
Related in Slate

One would have liked a bit more of this combination and perhaps very slightly less willingness to make disclaimers about American power. It's absurd to act as if, at NATO and G20 meetings, the United States is just another modest member. In the case of NATO, it is at least "first among equals," or primus inter pares, in that its military strength is greater than that of all the other members of the alliance combined. In the case of the world's economic powers, a disproportionate share of the blame for the current crisis lies with America and so does a comparably vast element of the chance that the decline can be reversed. It is obviously not a moment to strut around impersonating a hyperpower, but that doesn't mean that Madeleine Albright's injunction about the United States being a "necessary" power can be disowned, either.

The limitations of the Obama manner were exposed in his address to the Turkish parliament and his press conference with the Turkish leadership. The president did not take the opportunity to reiterate his principled stand on the Armenian genocide that we are commemorating this month and took refuge in platitudes about healing and negotiation. It's not as if the Turks don't know what he thinks, so it's difficult to see the value of undue reticence. And it's hardly an accident that, in all successful attempts at settling accounts with the past in other nations, the word reconciliation has invariably been preceded by the word truth. The first duty is to stop lying. Only then can any genuine attempt at settlement get under way.

It was also somewhat naive of Obama to deny that the United States is "or ever will be" at war with Islam. Of course, one cannot exactly make war on a faith, most especially a faith that is currently undergoing a civil war within itself, in which Turkey has several times been attacked by Bin Ladenist forces. But twice in the past, jihad has been officially proclaimed from Turkey's capital. It was in the name of the Quran that the piratical Ottoman provinces known as the Barbary States took hundreds of thousands of American and European voyagers into slavery in the 18th century, until Thomas Jefferson dispatched the fleet and the Marines to put down the trade, and it was from Constantinople that the Ottoman military alliance with German imperialism in 1914 was proclaimed as a holy war binding on all good Muslims. In other words, what one really wants is an assurance that Islam is not, nor ever will be, at war (again) with the United States.

That Obama is confused about this, and also slightly weak, is demonstrated by his earlier attempt at quiet diplomacy, or constructive engagement, or whatever we agree to call it, with Iran. He sent a message to "the people and leaders of Iran" on the occasion of Nowruz, or New Year—a day that he may or may not have known is slightly frowned upon by the Islamic authorities, because it involves fire ceremonies and other celebrations that predate the Muslim conquest of Persia. Any offense they might have taken on that score must have been mollified when the president twice referred to the country as "the Islamic Republic of Iran," as in, "The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations."

Does this boilerplate goodwill represent anything true? In order for the great and civilized nation of Persia to take its rightful place in the community of nations, it would have to be able to demonstrate that its leadership was freely chosen by its own people and that it was willing to abide by agreements and undertakings (on nontrifling matters such as nuclear proliferation) that it had solemnly signed. The mullahs rule Iran on the basis of a Khomeini-ite dogma known as the veliyate faqui, which makes them the owners and "guardians" of all the country's citizens. And they have been covertly seeking enriched uranium of the sort not required for a civilian nuclear program, while never ceasing to proclaim the imminent and apocalyptic return of the 12th or "hidden" imam. In other words, in order to claim its "rightful place" in any recognizable community of nations, Iran would in effect have to cease to be an Islamic republic.

Meanwhile, the theocratic regime has several times exerted its power to arrest and imprison Iranian-Americans for "offenses" that would not be crimes in any civilized country. The most recent such outrage is the imprisonment of journalist Roxana Saberi, framed for allegedly buying a bottle of wine. We should hear more from the White House about her case and less about the sensitivities of her jailers. Some differences cannot be split. Many conflicts are real and do not arise from mere cultural misunderstandings. Obama must learn this or be taught it, whichever comes sooner.
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