“Conservatives were justifiably worried that America’s decline was reaching a point of no return,” writes David Horowitz. After the recent election, many breathed a sign of relief, but as the author ofBig Agendasees it, “one battle is over, but there are many more to come.” To prevail, the combatants must want to win, but that has not always been the case with Republicans.
In 2012 Mitt Romney possessed strategic intelligence on his opponent yet failed to deploy it and duly lost the election. In 2016,Romney blasted fellow Republican Donald Trump as “a phony, a fraud,”a charge Clinton gleefully used in attack ads. Veterans of the Bush White House announced that they would vote for Clinton. In the six years they controlled both houses of Congress, Republicans failed to investigate into the Clinton Foundation.
Horowitz wonders what Republicans failed to understand about the perils of the nation, and “the destructive agendas of the left that threaten its future.” Here the author draws from his vast experience on the left.
The progressive movement operates on “almost religious convictions,” which is why members move in lockstep, and demonize anyone outside their ranks. The movement divides society into “oppressor” groups such as whites, males, Christians and heterosexuals and victim or “oppressed” groups such as “people of color” and the LGBT squads. For Horowitz this is “the old Marxist wine in new bottles.”
Security at the State Department’s Benghazi compound was so dire that another contractor was brought in to clean up the mess just two weeks before the 2012 terror attack – and was later pressured to keep quiet by government bureaucrats under then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to two from the American security company
More on this: ARTICLE AND VIDEO – TUCKER CARLSON AND KATHERINE HERRIDGE
Voter Fraud a Myth? That’s Not What New York Investigators Found
Only one fake voter was refused a ballot. The clerk was the mother of the felon he was impersonating.
By
LARRY LEVY
Mr. Levy is vice chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association.
PresidentTrump’s promise to investigate voter fraud has drawn predictable responses from Democrats and the media, who insist there is no such thing and have been fighting for years to prevent any inquiry into the matter. But an investigation in Mr. Trump’s hometown shows that the problem is real.
In 2013 the New York City Department of Investigation—the storied law-enforcement arm of city government, which houses and manages all the city’s inspectors general and investigators—decided to test the system. City investigators posed as 63 ineligible individuals still on the city voter rolls. Each ineligible voter had died, moved out of the jurisdiction, or been convicted of a felony at least two years earlier.
The investigators didn’t go to great lengths to hide their attempted fraudulent votes. In five instances investigators in their 20s or 30s posed as voters age 82 to 94. In some cases the investigators were of different ethnic backgrounds from the voters they were impersonating. Yet each was given a ballot and allowed to cast a vote without question.
In other instances the investigators informed the poll worker that they had moved but didn’t have time to get to their new home on Election Day; all but one was allowed to vote. Only one investigator was flat-out rejected. He had the misfortune of trying to vote at a polling place where the clerk was the mother of the ineligible felon he was impersonating.
After six years, Americans still don’t know Barack Obama
By Monica CrowleyMonica Crowley is online opinion editor at The Washington Times.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Does Barack Obama love America?
At this point, who really cares?
Half of America isn’t paying much attention to him, and the other half is thinking about who might succeed him in 2016.
And yet, thanks to a recent comment by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the question shows it still has political legs.
The problem is that it misses the real point.
The issue raised by Mr. Giuliani’s comment is not whether or to what extent Mr. Obama loves his country. It is also not about Mr. Obama’s patriotism or lack thereof.
The real point is as true as it is frightening: Six years into Mr. Obama’s presidency, the man is still a stranger.
That’s what Mr. Giuliani was really getting at when he said, “I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America . He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”
With one pointed barb, Mr. Giuliani reminded us that even well into the middle of Mr. Obama’s second term, we still know so little about him.
Starting with his first major speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the mainstream media fell head over heels for him. When he announced a run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2007, that same media became John Cusack’s character in “Say Anything,” hoisting a boombox of love toward his window. And once he became president, they all but declared that they wanted to have his baby.
As a result of their stalkerish obsession, the media never vetted Mr. Obama. While they have made sport of rummaging through Republican candidates’ garbage, college records and past romantic relationships, they refused to do even rudimentary investigative work into Mr. Obama’s background, education, family, friends and professional associates. Digging into Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s college years is called “vetting.” Digging into Mr. Obama’s college years is called “racism.”
They still refuse to do it. His college and law school records remain sealed, his “career” as a community organizer remains murky, his family background and early childhood in Indonesia remain murkier, and details about his ideological education from Communists such as Frank Marshall Davis and radicals such as Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remain largely unexplored.
It’s no wonder that questions about Mr. Obama’s very essence are still being kicked around. No one — Mr. Obama first and foremost — has ever answered them. (more…)
“LEADING FROM BEHIND: The Reluctant President: the Advisors Who Decide For Him”
The following C-Span video is a fascinating in-depth conversation with Richard Miniter, award winning investigative journalist and New York Times best selling author of the book, “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President & the Advisors Who Decide For Him”.
Mr. Miniter argues that President Obama has been indecisive and conflicted throughout much of his presidency, and that many of his victories can be credited to behind the scenes advisers. Mr. Miniter discussed the qualities of leadership and the research behind these conclusions with Karlyn Bowman. Cases they focused on included the death of Osama bin Laden, relations with Israel, the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking strategy, health care reform, and raising the federal debt ceiling.
For those of you who live in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, Richard Miniter will be the guest speaker at the next ICON Lecture Series on Tuesday, March 10, 2015 at Extraordinary Ventures at 200 S. Elliott Road, Chapel Hill at 7 p.m. There will also be a book signing and a Q&A after he speaks on How the Media Covers Politics. (see flyer below)
Why haven’t we seen the documents retrieved in the bin Laden raid?
Stephen F. Hayes
September 15, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 01
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The broader collection of documents paints a far more complicated picture of al Qaeda. There are documents laying out al Qaeda’s relationships with terror-sponsoring states, including Iran and Pakistan. There are documents that provide a close look at bin Laden’s careful cultivation of a vast array of increasingly deadly affiliates, including the one we now know as ISIS. Other documents provide a window into the complex and highly secretive system of communications between al Qaeda leaders and operatives plotting attacks. Still others offer a glimpse of relations between bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the others who run the global terror syndicate.
In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, an elite team of 25 American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the walls of a compound just outside the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. CIA analysts had painstakingly tracked a courier to the compound and spent months monitoring the activity inside the walls. They’d concluded, with varying levels of confidence, that the expansive white building at the center of the lot was the hideout of Osama bin Laden.
They were correct. And minutes after the team landed, the search for bin Laden ended with a shot to his head.
The primary objective of Operation Neptune Spear was to capture or kill the leader of al Qaeda. But a handful of those on the ground that night were part of a “Sensitive Site Exploitation” team that had a secondary mission: to gather as much intelligence from the compound as they could.
With bin Laden dead and the building secure, they got to work. Moving quickly—as locals began to gather outside the compound and before the Pakistani military, which had not been notified of the raid in advance, could scramble its response—they shoved armload after armload of bin Laden’s belongings into large canvas bags. The entire operation took less than 40 minutes.
The intelligence trove was immense. At a Pentagon briefing one day after the raid, a senior official described the haul as a “robust collection of materials.” It included 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives, and a dozen cell phones—along with data cards, DVDs, audiotapes, magazines, newspapers, paper files. In an interview on Meet the Press just days after the raid, Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, told David Gregory that the material could fill “a small college library.” A senior military intelligence official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon on May 7 said: “As a result of the raid, we’ve acquired the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”
In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al Qaeda’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in America’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al Qaeda’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligence—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden documents were primary source material, providing unmediated access to the thinking of al Qaeda leaders expressed in their own words.
A comprehensive and systematic examination of those documents could give U.S. intelligence officials—and eventually the American public—a better understanding of al Qaeda’s leadership, its affiliates, its recruitment efforts, its methods of communication; a better understanding, that is, of the enemy America has fought for over a decade now, at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.
Incredibly, such a comprehensive study—a thorough “document exploitation,” in the parlance of the intelligence community—never took place. The Weekly Standard has spoken to more than two dozen individuals with knowledge of the U.S. government’s handling of the bin Laden documents. And on that, there is widespread agreement.
“They haven’t done anything close to a full exploitation,” says Derek Harvey, a former senior intelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and ex-director of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). (more…)
Why are there no good choices? From Crimea to North Korea, from Syria to Egypt, and from Iraq to Afghanistan, America apparently has no good options. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, Russia owns Crimea and all we can do is sanction and disinvite—and wring our hands.
Iran is following North Korea’s nuclear path, but it seems that we can only entreat Iran to sign the same kind of agreement North Korea once signed, undoubtedly with the same result.
Our tough talk about a red line in Syria prompted Vladimir Putin‘s sleight of hand, leaving the chemicals and killings much as they were. We say Bashar Assad must go, but aligning with his al Qaeda-backed opposition is an unacceptable option.
And how can it be that Iraq and Afghanistan each refused to sign the status-of-forces agreement with us—with the very nation that shed the blood of thousands of our bravest for them?
Why, across the world, are America’s hands so tied?
A large part of the answer is our leader’s terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, “a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” (more…)
