October 22, 2012 Just a Few Days Before the Election, the Cluelesspresident Tweeted This;

August 12, 2014

October 22, 2012 just a few days before the election, the cluelesspresident tweeted this;

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

Scott Johnson of Power Line asked a friend how it is the president looks so smart yet is so ignorant. Here is part of the answer.

... I think with Obama it starts with ignorance which in his formative years became a required doctrine of the intelligentsia when it came to understanding the way the world works in matters of international security; to be considered politically correct you had to spurn and despise such painfully developed concepts and practices as the balance of power, the necessity of using strength and diplomacy in tandem, etc.

This was allied with a personal drive for High Moralism, the felt need to build a castle around yourself behind a moat of 12-foot thick walls from behind which you could shoot moral arrows at everyone else to demonstrate your superiority and quickly destroy any emerging criticism of yourself. So from this position of invincible ignorance allied with moral perfection and then allied with power, you could become able to cross a line in history to reach a new world shaped by your conviction of your perfected sensibility.

This would mean, 1.) taking the US out of its despicable role of world leadership, which has been immoral and has caused almost all the world’s problems over at least the past century, and 2.) “Transforming” American into a country moral enough to be worthy of you, a kind of big Belgium. As the wicked of the world have refused to fall into line behind this vision, it has made the president increasingly sour and feeling put upon. ...

CharlesKrauthammer writes on amnesty as impeachment bait.

President Obama is impatient. Congress won’t act on immigration, he says, and therefore he will. The White House is coy as to exactly what the president will do. But the leaks point to an executive order essentially legalizing an enormous new class of illegal immigrants, perhaps up to 5 million people.

One doesn’t usually respond to rumors. But this is an idea so bad and so persistently peddled by the White House that it has already been preemptively criticized by such unusual suspects as (liberal) constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, concerned about yet another usurpation of legislative power by the “uber presidency,” and The Post editorial page, which warned that such a move would “tear up the Constitution.”

If this is just a trial balloon, the time to shoot it down is now. The administration claims such an executive order would simply be a corrective to GOP inaction on the current immigration crisis — 57,000 unaccompanied minors, plus tens of thousands of families, crashing through and overwhelming the southern border.

This rationale is a fraud. ...

WSJ Article on the tunnels built by Hamas and the failure of Israel to totallyunderstand what was being prepared for them. We have some good pictures of the tunnels; one of which is amusing.

Israel's early failure to detect the vast Hamas tunnel network that its forces destroyed in Gaza is triggering a wave of recriminations within the country's security and political establishment.

As Israel and the Palestinians agreed to a fresh cease-fire in Gaza that started at midnight there, efforts already were under way in Israel to address the latest challenge to the country's security. Just as Israel built a separation wall to stem a wave of suicide bombings and developed the Iron Dome air-defense system to blunt rocket attacks, it is already casting for deterrents to address the newest Palestinian threat.

Questions over why the tunnel threat was underestimated, and why investment in technology that could detect more of the passages was neglected, are becoming hotly debated in Israel. So is the question of how Hamas was able to obtain the thousands of tons of cement and other materials to build the tunnels.

Meir Sheetrit, a former member of parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, said there was a troubling lack of knowledge about the tunnel building. "I don't think our intelligence knew how many tunnels were dug, the location of the tunnels or how many of them were planned for assault," Mr. Sheetrit said.

"We don't have the technology to detect the tunnels from afar currently. That means we have to rely on information coming from somebody who knows where the tunnel actually is," he added. "Of course, it's not easy for Israel to get human intelligence in Gaza."

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesman, rebuffed suggestions of any intelligence lapse, saying the military has known about Hamas's "strategic project" to build tunnels for years.

"We knew the vastness of the project, and we knew the specific points on the ground to a great extent," he said.

The underground network was painstakingly constructed by throngs of Palestinian workers, who used sophisticated machinery and thousands of tons of cement in a massive multiyear underground construction project into Israeli territory, according to current and former Israeli and U.S. officials. ...

American Thinker posts on the children killed digging the Hamas tunnels.

... Hamas killed hundreds of children in the construction of its extensive tunnel network, built partly to carry out attacks on children across the Gaza border in Israel. That report--confirmed by Hamas itself--emerged in 2012, not from the Israeli government, but the sympathetic Journal of Palestine Studies, in an article that otherwise celebrated the secret tunnel system as a symbol of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli "siege" of the Gaza Strip. (snip)

Hamas is not only using child labor, but likely child slavery, in building its terror tunnel network. While the world worries obsessively over the child casualties of Israeli attacks on Hamas targets in Gaza, it has ignored Hamas's deliberate killing of hundreds of Palestinian children, over the objections of the local populace.

The knowledge that Hamas used children to dig tunnels for smuggling and terror up to 25 meters below ground changes the moral calculation of the war significantly. Not only does Hamas show extreme indifference to the lives of Palestinian children by using them as human shields, placing rockets in UN schools and the like, but it actively destroys those lives by sending Palestinian children to die underground in 19th century conditions. ...

And now Power Line posts on reports some of the children were executed so the tunnels would remain secret.

Digging tunnels for Hamas and living to tell about it is no sure thing. At least 160 Palestinian children reportedly died while performing the hazardous duty that the tunnel digging for Hamas entails. This number was reported in a pro-Palestinian journalist based on statements by Hamas officials in Gaza.

But surviving the digging was only half the battle. Hamas reportedly executed dozens more diggers in the past few weeks out of fear that they would provide information to Israel about where the tunnels are located.

The executions were reported on an Israeli military blog, based on statements by Palestinians involved in the digging. The Times of Israel could not independently confirm the report. But who can doubt that Hamas, which reportedly spent 40 percent of its budget on the digging and used child labor, would take the most extreme measures to keep the locations secret from Israel?

Humor seems misplaced today, butfor some relief,here's Andy Malcolm with late night.

Conan: Monday was President Obama’s 53rd birthday. His age is now higher than his approval rating.

Meyers: A New York restaurant has created the Rice Burger, which replaces normal burger buns with rice patties. The restaurant also replaces customers with empty chairs.

Fallon: A man in Maryland claims that he found one of President Obama’s custom golf balls in the woods near the golf course where the President played over the weekend. Yep, Obama said he'd been looking for his balls for a while. Then, Democrats said, "Yeah, we know."

Barack Obama;

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

12:21 PM - 22 Oct 2012

Power Line

Obama’s map of misreading: A comment

by Scott Johnson

I asked the person who is perhaps the most worldly wise man I know if he would comment on Obama’s interview with Obama apostle Tom Friedman as related yesterday in the Times article “Obama on the world.” Noting the stupidity of Obama’s comments to Friedman, and Obama’s incessant yammering, I asked my acquaintance what he made of the whole production. He responded with the following comment, which I thought readers might find of interest:

I’ve wondered about this a lot, way before Tom Friedman’s report of this conversation. I’m not sure I’ve figured it out, but I think I’m getting close. Both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. separately and in other contexts said something about “ignorance allied with power” being the worst imaginable combination.

I think with Obama it starts with ignorance which in his formative years became a required doctrine of the intelligentsia when it came to understanding the way the world works in matters of international security; to be considered politically correct you had to spurn and despise such painfully developed concepts and practices as the balance of power, the necessity of using strength and diplomacy in tandem, etc.

At this point he has been forced to do something like take a presidential decision of the kind that all previous presidents have known they would have to take– the “hard decisions” recognized by the president’s hero Reinhold Niebuhr but never recognized by the president. So he has been forced by events to do it. But he didn’t want to do it. And he keeps making it clear that he is determined not to do it in an effective way, to assure our enemies of the many things he will never do, and to sulk about it for the foreseeable future as he relates his unappreciated fate to those who share his feelings, like Tom Friedman.

He then adds a parenthetical postscript: “(this is not unique to the president, it can be seen all through White House personnel and among so many of the younger generations who have never actually had a job or actually done anything connected to the real world)”

Washington Post

Amnesty as impeachment bait

by Charles Krauthammer

President Obama is impatient. Congress won’t act on immigration, he says, and therefore he will. The White House is coy as to exactly what the president will do. But the leaks point to an executive order essentially legalizing an enormous new class of illegal immigrants, perhaps up to 5 million people.

If this is just a trial balloon, the time to shoot it down is now. The administration claims such an executive order would simply be a corrective to GOP inaction on the current immigration crisis — 57,000 unaccompanied minors, plus tens of thousands of families, crashing through and overwhelming the southern border.

This rationale is a fraud.

First, the charge that Republicans have done nothing is plainly false. Last week, the House passed legislation that deals reasonably with this immigrant wave. It changes a 2008 sex-trafficking law never intended for (and inadvertently inviting) mass migration — a change the president himself endorsed before caving to his left and flip-flopping. It also provides funds for emergency processing and assistance to the kids who are here.

Second, it’s a total non sequitur. Suspending deportation for millions of long-resident illegal immigrants has nothing to do with the current wave of newly arrived minors. If anything, it would aggravate the problem by sending the message that if you manage to get here illegally, eventually you’ll be legalized.

Third, and most fatal, it is deeply unconstitutional. Don’t believe me. Listen to Obama. He’s repeatedly made the case for years. As in:

“I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books. . . . Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the [immigration] laws on my own. . . . That’s not how our Constitution is written” (July 25, 2011).

“This notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true. . . . There are laws on the books that I have to enforce” (Sept. 28, 2011).

“If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws” (Nov. 25, 2013).

Laws created by Congress, not by executive fiat. That’s what distinguishes a constitutional republic from the banana kind.

Moreover, Obama had control of both houses of Congress during his first two years in office — and did nothing about immigration. So why now?

Because he’s facing a disastrous midterm election. An executive order so sweeping and egregiously lawless would be impeachment bait. It would undoubtedly provoke a constitutional crisis and stir impeachment talk — and perhaps even the beginning of proceedings — thus scrambling the electoral deck. As in 1998, it would likely backfire against the GOP and save Democrats from an otherwise certain sixth-year midterm shellacking.

Such a calculation — amnesty-by-fiat to deliberately court impeachment — is breathtakingly cynical. But clever. After all, there is no danger of impeachment succeeding. There will never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. But talking it up is a political bonanza for Democrats, stirring up an otherwise listless and dispirited base. Last Monday alone the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised more than $1 million from anti-impeachment direct mail.

Apart from the money, impeachment talk energizes Democrats and deflects attention from the real-life issues that are dragging them down — the economy, Obamacare, the failures of Obama’s foreign policy. Everything, in other words, that has sunk Obama to 40 percent approval, the lowest ebb of his presidency.

There’s an awful irony here. Barack Obama entered our national consciousness with an electrifying 2004 speech calling for healing the nation’s divisions and transcending narrow identities of race, region, religion, politics and ideology. Four years later, that promise made him president. Yet today he is prepared to inflict on the nation a destructive, divisive, calculated violation of the constitutional order and national comity — for the narrowest partisan advantage.

For this president in particular, who offered a politics of transcendence, this would constitute a betrayal of the highest order.

According to White House leaks, the executive order will be promulgated by summer’s end. Time enough to reconsider. Don’t do it, Mr. President.

WSJ

Gaza Tunnel Network Fuels Recriminations in Israel

New Three-Day Cease-Fire Is Agreed On

By Asa Fitch in Gaza, Rory Jones in Jerusalem and Adam Entous in Tel Aviv

A Palestinian man looks at what used to be a tunnel leading from the Gaza Strip into Israel.

Israel's early failure to detect the vast Hamas tunnel network that its forces destroyed in Gaza is triggering a wave of recriminations within the country's security and political establishment.

As Israel and the Palestinians agreed to a fresh cease-fire in Gaza that started at midnight there, efforts already were under way in Israel to address the latest challenge to the country's security. Just as Israel built a separation wall to stem a wave of suicide bombings and developed the Iron Dome air-defense system to blunt rocket attacks, it is already casting for deterrents to address the newest Palestinian threat.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesman, rebuffed suggestions of any intelligence lapse, saying the military has known about Hamas's "strategic project" to build tunnels for years.