Thursday, August 28, 2014

Obama fails History 101



By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, August 28, 2014

President Obama doesn't know much about history.

In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.

He also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the "right side of history." He also chastises others for being on the "wrong side of history" -- as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.

When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead, Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would end up "on the right side of history." Iranian reformers may indeed end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.

Obama often parrots Martin Luther King Jr.'s phrase about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But King used that metaphor as an incentive to act, not as reassurance that matters will follow an inevitably positive course.

Another of Obama's historical refrains is his frequent sermon about behavior that doesn't belong in the 21st century. At various times he has lectured that the barbarous aggression of Vladimir Putin or ISIS has no place in our century and will "ultimately fail" -- as if we are all now sophisticates of an age that has at last transcended retrograde brutality and savagery.

In Obama's hazy sense of the end of history, things always must get better in the manner that updated models of iPhones and iPads are glitzier than the last. In fact, history is morally cyclical. Even technological progress is ethically neutral. It is a way either to bring more good things to more people or to facilitate evil all that much more quickly and effectively.

In the viciously modern 20th century -- when more lives may have been lost to war than in all prior centuries combined -- some 6 million Jews were put to death through high technology in a way well beyond the savagery of Attila the Hun or Tamerlane. Beheading in the Islamic world is as common in the 21st century as it was in the eighth century -- and as it will probably be in the 22nd. The carnage of the Somme and Dresden trumped anything that the Greeks, Romans, Franks, Turks or Venetians could have imagined.

What explains Obama's confusion?

A lack of knowledge of basic history explains a lot. Obama or his speechwriters have often seemed confused about the liberation of Auschwitz, "Polish death camps" the political history of Texas, or the linguistic relationship between Austria and Germany. Obama reassured us during the Bowe Bergdahl affair that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt all similarly got American prisoners back when their wars ended -- except that none of them were in office when the Revolutionary War, Civil War or World War II officially ended.

Contrary to Obama's assertion, President Rutherford B. Hayes never dismissed the potential of the telephone. Obama once praised the city of Cordoba as part of a proud Islamic tradition of tolerance during the brutal Spanish Inquisition -- forgetting that by the beginning of the Inquisition an almost exclusively Christian Cordoba had few Muslims left.

A Pollyannaish belief in historical predetermination seems to substitute for action. If Obama believes that evil should be absent in the 21st century, or that the arc of the moral universe must always bend toward justice, or that being on the wrong side of history has consequences, then he may think inanimate forces can take care of things as we need merely watch.

In truth, history is messier. Unfortunately, only force will stop seventh-century monsters like ISIS from killing thousands more innocents. Obama may think that reminding Putin that he is now in the 21st century will so embarrass the dictator that he will back off from Ukraine. But the brutish Putin may think that not being labeled a 21st-century civilized sophisticate is a compliment.

In 1935, French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval warned Josef Stalin that the Pope would admonish him to go easy on Catholics -- as if such moral lectures worked in the supposedly civilized 20th century. Stalin quickly disabused Laval of that naiveté. "The Pope?" Stalin asked, "How many divisions has he got?"

There is little evidence that human nature has changed over the centuries, despite massive government efforts to make us think and act nicer. What drives Putin, Boko Haram or ISIS are the same age-old passions, fears and sense of honor that over the centuries also moved Genghis Khan, the Sudanese Mahdists and the Barbary pirates.

Obama's naive belief in predetermined history -- especially when his facts are often wrong -- is a poor substitute for concrete moral action.

The King's Critics Lose Their Heads



By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Not since the execution of Charles I has so much vitriol been hurled at a monarch who was deemed to have erred. This week, having announced that it intends to buy Canadian donut giant Tim Hortons — then to escape America’s punitive tax regime for the more welcoming Ontario — the fast-food chain Burger King has been excommunicated from polite society, being transmuted overnight from a beloved staple of the American highway into a flame-broiled Benedict Arnold. “Consumers,” Senator Sherrod Brown advised on Monday, “should turn to Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers or White Castle sliders,” for Burger King’s courtiers have “abandoned their country.”

If one were wondering what it might take to turn those skeptical of national borders into raging nativists, one now has one’s answer: Opt out of Leviathan’s scheme. By wishing to arrange a better deal for itself, petitioners at MoveOn.org charge, “dirty” and “treasonous” Burger King has revealed itself to be sorely lacking in “patriotism.” Channeling PresidentObama, one signatory perniciously suggests that “traitors should be shot!”; another that the federal government ought to summarily remove executives’ passports; yet another that the state might considering punishing the company with vindictive ex post facto legislation. Janet Schott, from Wentzville, Mo., sums up the sensibility: “Count me as one less customer if you cross the border,” she promises. “Do your American duty.”

To inject lofty concepts such as “duty” into a debate such as this is to betray both a political tone-deafness and a chronic lack of understanding as to why governments are instituted among men. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder whom the dissenters imagine to be the hero of this story. Presuming for the sake of argument that the average American taxpayer will receive with horror the news that a private company is attempting to pay as few taxes as it possibly can while staying within the law, the fact remains that Burger King’s antagonists — the IRS, the federal government, President Obama — are all infinitely more unpopular than it is. From the days of Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, the tax collector has been a universally loathed figure within the English-speaking world. (The United States, you will recall, got its start courtesy of a metastasizing tax rebellion.) Certainly, corporations represent less-sympathetic characters than do individuals. Dow Chemical, let’s say, is unlikely to inspire the same reaction as did Sam Adams. But in a fight between an outfit that serves hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, and coffee at a low price, and a government department that forcibly takes your hard-earned property and does its level best to make your life hell each and every April, who’s the bigger bad guy?

At its root, this is a tale of government at its worst — of what happens when the retrenchment of the state comes to be seen as a quirky and a fringe idea rather than as the obvious solution to what ails us. Venom or no venom, it will remain the case that the primary cause of Burger King’s planned exile is the excess of the state, which has, by virtue of a punitive and uncompetitive tax regime, made the United States an unattractive place for global businesses to call their home. In a rational world, that state would respond to the mess that it has created by adjusting the incentives. In this world, alas, it will likely do no such thing. Instead, it will use its influence and its power to bully and, eventually, to coerce — adding legislation to legislation, piling force atop of force, and applying in the economic sphere that favorite injunction of the uncreative general: “push on, boys, for this time the line will break.” President Obama is quick to describe those who are fleeing as “deserters” but slow to explore what might be prompting the desertion. “Sorry,” it seems, has no place in Leviathan’s narrow lexicon. Contrition and regret remain alien concepts. “If we just pass one more law,” our mandarins think, “the contraption will finally work.”

There was a point in American history at which the federal government could realistically expect to crush competition between states and to impose upon the country a set of uniform rules from which nobody could hope to escape. Globalization and technology have brought that era to close, restoring to civil society the sacred right of exit and rendering nation states as competitors in a world market. While Washington remains unyieldingly intrusive, Burger King will be unable to radically reduce its liabilities by moving from California to Tennessee. But it can now find succor outside of America’s borders. The wise response to its having so publicly chosen to do so is not to send the military to the 49th parallel, nor to recruit in anger the collection of simpleton activists that hangs around on MoveOn.org; but to issue a simple and vital inquiry, the better to grasp the contours of the problem: “tell us, if you will, what it was that made you want to leave?”

School Girls Turned into Suicide Bombers



By Joanne Moudy
Thursday, August 28, 2014

When 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped from their dormitory in Chibok on April 14, 2014, many in the western world were outraged and demanded justice. Sadly, although about 70 girls managed to escape the grips of the Boko Haram terrorists, little if anything was done to rescue the remaining victims.

According to accounts, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s first order of business was to contact the Washington DC based public relations firm Levick to shore up his own presidential image. Jonathan did not make an official comment about the travesty until May 4th, nearly three weeks after the kidnapping.

In a video released on May 5, the current leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau claimed that it was his right to take prisoners to use as slaves. He claimed in the video that “Allah instructed me to treat them like infidels and sell them…” which translated means the girls had already been tortured and then sold to members of the Boko Haram.

Another video was released soon afterwards showing of a group of girls of similar age, who appeared to be in good physical condition, reciting verses from the Koran. The video was supposed to portray the prisoners as healthy and happy. However, there were two significant problems with the video; one, the parents of the missing girls didn’t recognize any of the children being shown and two, the abducted girls had been studying Christianity and western education, not the Koran, leading authorities to believe the video was a farce.

Two weeks ago when four school girls set off four separate suicide bombs, there was little doubt that the exploded girls had been among those stolen from the dormitory on that fateful night. That revelation sent the Nigerian population into renewed fears because of the certainty that the abducted girls are being tortured into submission and slavery. It also heightens concerns about general public safety since women and children have not been previously considered suicide bombers and thus can easily maneuver into public places without drawing suspicion.

Today, months after the terrorist abductions, there is little factual information on the whereabouts of the missing girls, although there is strong speculation that they have been dispersed into makeshift concentration camps spread throughout northeastern Nigeria. Some remote villagers report sightings of the girls being transported into the neighboring countries of Chad and Cameroon.

Another concern is that the abducted girls have been raped and impregnated for the sole purpose of creating more innocent babies, which the Boko Haram will then use as tools to further their terrorist attacks.

Imagine strapping explosives to the chest of your toddler and sending him/her into a crowded market. It’s a scenario that rational human beings can’t even fathom. But maybe it’s time we did, because there isn’t much difference between any of the radical Jihadists factions spread around the globe. From Hamas to al-Qaeda to the Boko Haram to the Muslim Brotherhood, they are connected in most cases by a money trail and definitely in all cases by their unquenchable hatred for any Judeo-Christian culture.

Americans in particular need to be concerned about the advance of this radical Islamic evil because, like it or not, it’s already hit our shores. The Twin Towers, Fort Hood massacre and Boston Marathon, to mention a few, were not isolated events. They were planned and executed by radical Islamic Jihadists, hell bent on destroying our country from within. Shari’a run Islam is not a religion of peace, no matter how often their leaders (and ours) say that it is.

Sadly, the Obama administration would like you to look the other way and move on with your lives. And while America sleeps, the Muslim Brotherhood – through its shrewd government and business associations as well as mega Mosque building – has already successfully brainwashed U.S. citizens into believing the Muslim cry for “diversity.” Don’t you believe it! Their diversity cry is a farce because in fact the very last thing they will accept is anything remotely divergent from their own absolute, Shari’a controlled Islamic world dominance.

Meanwhile, the only U.S. President to have ever bowed to a Saudi king is too busy playing golf to pay much attention to Iraq or Israel, let alone the kidnapped girls in Nigeria.

Are the French Lazy?



Charles Payne
Thursday, August 28, 2014


'They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three hours and work for three. I told the French union workers this to their faces. They told me that's the French way!’



-Maurice Taylor, CEO Titan International

Socialism is a losing policy as it stops economies from growing. It also makes people lazy. The (2013) front cover of Le Point magazine translated to English reads in part, “Are the French Lazy?”

Yesterday, French President François Hollande dissolved his government as the nation continues to fall apart. This is the natural consequence of socialism- running out of other people’s money. How can the people of France ever get their economy to thrive when they work (by far) the least amount of hours of any industrialized nation?

    France 1,479 hours
    US 1,790 hours
    Mexico 2,226 hours

In addition, government spending, as percentage of GDP, is out of control, pushing out private sector funds and resulting in a sense of entitlement.

    France 56.2%
    Germany 44.9%
    US 40.7%

This week, François Hollande came under fire from his finance minister for not spending enough money, rather than engaging in austerity. Yesterday, a new minister was announced, Emmanuel Macron, 36 years-old; not even old enough to remember the last budget surplus of 1974. In 2008, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) ranked France as the fifth largest economy, however, in six years; the country will be on the cusp of slipping out of the top ten based on purchasing power parity.

Richest Nations in 2020  GDP
#1           China     $28.1
#2           USA       $22.6
#3           India      $10.2
#4           Japan    $6.2
#5           Russia   $4.3
#6           Germany             $4.0
#7           Brazil     $3.9
#8           UK          $3.4
#9           France  $3.2
#10         Mexico $2.8

The central tenet of socialism is the paternal state that ostensibly gives away things essential to life in a shared-scenario that limits excessive wealth and somehow creates a fair Utopia. In fact, the more any government gives away stuff, the less people will have the impetus to get those things for themselves. Such is the case in America where the longer someone is on welfare and food stamps, the more they become long-term welfare and food stamps recipients.

 


In France, Hollande’s popularity is down to 17%, and his government is in disarray. I think it is a great way for us to segue into the ills of big government. Also, to understand why America is on the wrong track by focusing on human nature. The real deal is that any discussion regarding having fewer government programs, like welfare, is always clouded by race, and the fear of being called racist. Moreover, we need to get the economy in gear, and there is no way that can happen with so many people waiting for government to meet their needs.