Get Ready America

John E. over at Ace of Spades HQ shows us our destiny in 2016:

There is no hope.

MORE: Damn, that was fast!

Muslim Brotherhood Assumes Dictatorship in Egypt, Morsi New Pharoh

They’ve talked about blowing up the Sphinx and the Pyramids, but the Muslim Brotherhood has no problem with ancient Egyptian vernacular, or at least, their form of government. President Mohammed Morsi decreed himself to be above the law and has assumed dictatorial powers…just until a new constitution is written. Yeah, and I’m Buck Rogers.

Anyway, as Ed Morrissey points out, this is all the result of the “smart power” currently on display in the Obama/Clinton/Rice/Abedin Administration. We had a semi-dictator in place in Hosni Mubarak who, while scum in his own right, did keep the Muslim Brotherhood at bay and kept peace with Israel for some 30 years. Yeah, but should America really be cozy with scumbags like Mubarak? Maybe we should “give peace a chance.” So when the natives got restless, Obama threw Mubarak under the bus. The Muslim Brotherhood is misunderstood, you see. After all, Alger Hi…I mean, Huma Abedin can vouch for them, so what the hell?

So let’s look forward to 2013 and see what’s in store:

1. Dictatorship in Egypt
2. Partial dictatorship in Libya
3. Chemical weapons somewhere in Syria while the country fights a bloody civil war
4. Iran with the bomb depending on whose estimates you believe
5. Hamas (i.e. Iran) doing what it wants in Gaza and Israel
6. Susan Rice, Huma Abedin, and John Kerry running our foreign policy

I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to find a silver lining in this. Another point: back in the 1970s, things were pretty bad in the Middle East under the Carter Administration. I was very young then, but I seem to remember a lot (if not most) of the American people pretty pissed off about it. How much of the American public is pissed off about our foreign policy today? Twenty-percent? Maybe 15% soaking wet?

Yeesh.

The Scandal of Our Age

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece over at PJMedia that demands to be read. Here’s a taste:

In the Watergate scandal, no one died, at least that we know of. Richard Nixon tried systematically to subvert institutions. Yet most of his unconstitutional efforts were domestic in nature — and an adversarial press soon went to war against his abuses and won, as Congress held impeachment hearings.

As far as national security went, Nixon’s crimes were in part culpable for destroying the political consensus that he had won in 1972, at a critical time when the Vietnam War to save the south was all but over, and had been acknowledged as such at the Paris Peace Talks. But Watergate and the destruction of Nixon’s foreign policy spurred congressional cutbacks of aid to South Vietnam and eroded all support for the administration’s promised efforts to ensure that North Vietnam kept to its treaty obligations.

          […]

What I call “Securitygate” — the release of the most intricate details about the cyber war against Iran, the revelations about a Yemeni double-agent, disclosures about covert operations in and against Pakistan, intimate details about the Osama bin Laden raid and the trove of information taken from his compound, and the Predator drone assassination list and the president’s methodology in selecting targets — is far more serious than either prior scandal. David Sanger and others claim that all this was sort of in the public domain anyway; well, “sort of” covers a lot of ground. We sort of knew about the cyber war against Iran, but not to the detail that Sanger provides and not through the direct agency of the Obama administration itself.

Here is the crux of the scandal: Obama is formulating a new policy of avoiding overt unpopular engagements, while waging an unprecedented covert war across the world. He’s afraid that the American people do not fully appreciate these once-secret efforts and might in 2012 look only at his mishaps in Afghanistan or his public confusion over Islamic terror. Ergo, feed information to a Sanger or Ignatius so that they can skillfully inform us, albeit with a bit of dramatic “shock” and “surprise,” just how tough, brutal, and deadly Barack Obama really is.

Yet these disclosures will endanger our national security, especially in the case of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. They will probably get people killed or tortured, and they will weaken America’s ability for years to work covertly with allies. Our state-to-state relations will be altered, and perhaps even the techniques and technology of our cyber and special operations wars dispersed into the wrong hands. There is nothing in the recent “exclusive” writings of David Sanger or David Ignatius that was necessary for the American people to know at this stage, unless one thinks that we had a right to the full story of the Doolittle Raid in 1942, or that Americans by July 1944 needed an insider account of the date and planning of D-Day, or that we should have been apprised about what was really going on in New Mexico in 1944.

Not A Happy Clappy Time For MSNBC

Behold! Five minutes of pure awesomeness in video form. Via The Blaze, today on Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski got taken to school, to put it mildly, by Harvard Professor and Newsweek columnist Niall Ferguson over the goings-on in Egypt:

The only question I have is how much longer will this guy be allowed to work at Newsweek, much less Harvard. These kinds of opinions aren’t look on too kindly by those respective institutions.

BTW, isn’t the look on Mika’s face priceless?

There Is No Alternative

Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge web-video series is uncommonly good. This is what The Charlie Rose Show could be if Charlie weren’t such an elitist hack.

This latest interview with writer/journalist/scholar Claire Berlinski is worthy of everyone’s time. She talks about Margaret Thatcher and how the Iron Lady turned Britain around, something that was thought to be an impossible task.

In part 3, Berlinski tackles the inevitable question: Is Sahara Palin comparable to Thatcher? I love Sarah Palin and would sleep just fine if she were president, but I definitely have qualms with her as a political leader. Berlinski explains this beautifully and her concerns apply to anyone running for president in 2012.

There is no alternative getting around it…I’m in love.

Another President, Another Woodward Book

Well, we’re into the second year of Obama and we have our first Bob Woodward book on the administration that will be heavily excerpted but rarely read. Here’s the big “bombshell” they’re floating:

During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, “We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.” 

Is Obama another Nietzsche? Probably not, but it’s certainly a comment that’s not gonna win him any admirers on the patriotic right. While his words are technically true, it’s his mentality that is the problem. Yes, we can survive or “absorb” another attack, but remember, what gets absorbed is people’s lives. We don’t want to get hit with a terrorist attack and lose even one American life to terrorism ever again. While the goal may be unattainable, that’s the goal we want our president to have.

Ultimately, this isn’t the worst thing I’ve heard Obama say…far from it, but it’s another piece of the puzzle that fits perfectly.

American Weakness Set Stage For Flotilla Incident

Bottom line: President Obama’s desire to weaken the United States’ standing in the world is hurting Israel. Her enemies are emboldened. Michael Goodwin at the New York Post puts it best:

Weakness always begets aggression, and, like clockwork, Obama’s repeated signals that he is weakening America’s commitment to Israel are emboldening the Jewish state’s enemies. From Syria to Iran to Lebanon, from Hezbollah to Hamas and the PLO, the wolves smell blood and are trying to gauge whether they can get close enough for the kill.

And whether the United States will stop them. That they even dare hope we won’t reflects the danger of Obama’s demented decisions.

The huge flotilla is the latest example of the open-season mania, with the result that Israel is under international siege — for defending itself. And, not incidentally, for defending an embargo on Gaza that Washington supports.

This whole situation makes me so mad, it’s indescribable. Fortunately, the country seems to be coming around.

America The Weak

The situation in the world for the United States is now getting very scary. North Korea is showing major hostility. Iran is going to have nuclear weapons soon. The American president is doing nothing. Bill Kristol sums it up: (Hat tip: Gateway Pundit)

Smart Power

Via Hot Air:

So far in this administration, we’ve managed to alienate the UK, Israel, and now Canada, while talking nicely towards Iran and North Korea with no results to show for it. That, apparently, is “smart power.”

Haitians: Where’s That American Imperialism We’ve Heard So Much About?

Via Don Surber.