Posts For: October 9, 2014
Keeping America Safe for the Middle Class
10.09.2014 - 9:54 AM
“If Republicans win, we know who they’ll be fighting for,” President Obama said on Tuesday. “Once again, the interests of billionaires will come before the needs of the middle class.”
“If Republicans win, we know who they’ll be fighting for,” President Obama said on Tuesday. “Once again, the interests of billionaires will come before the needs of the middle class.”
Where did he say it? According to the New York Post, in the hyper-exclusive Conyers Farm area of very upscale Greenwich, Connecticut. Conyers Farm has ten-acre zoning. He was speaking at a fundraiser at the $26-million estate of a man named, believe it or not, Rich Richman. His audience consisted of people who had paid up to $32,400 a head to have dinner with him. He had flown up from New York City, where he had earlier attended a fundraiser hosted by George Soros (net worth $24 billion) and Paul Tudor Jones (net worth $4.3 billion). The flight was in a convoy of four helicopters and they landed at the Greenwich Polo Club. Polo, of course, is the most expensive sport you can play on land. (A polo field measures 300 by 160 yards, bigger than nine football fields.)
So the president was telling a bunch of millionaires and billionaires to pony up in order to prevent the country from being run for the benefit of millionaires and billionaires, the one segment of the American socioeconomic spectrum that has prospered exceedingly during the Obama administration.
And politicians wonder why people don’t like them or trust them.
Obama’s Strategy May Turn the Islamic State into the “Strong Horse”
Those who early on said that President Obama’s strategy to “degrade and defeat” the Islamic State — the words and aims are Mr. Obama’s — was ludicrously insufficient are finding those concerns being borne out.
Those who early on said that President Obama’s strategy to “degrade and defeat” the Islamic State — the words and aims are Mr. Obama’s — was ludicrously insufficient are finding those concerns being borne out.
On the front page of Wednesday’s USA Today is a picture with this caption: “ISIL close to seizing strategic Syrian town: Smoke rises from Kobani, Syria, as seen from the Turkish side of the border. Despite U.S.-led airstrikes, Islamic State militants are still encroaching, indicating President Obama’s no-ground-troops strategy may not be working.”
Reporting on the same event, the New York Times puts things this way:
A Kurdish official in Kobani, Assi Abdullah, said that despite the bombing, Islamic State fighters had managed to enter new areas of the town and move north, closer to the border.
That development, along with what could be seen of the fighting from across the border, suggested that two days of intensive airstrikes had failed to turn back the militants. Kurdish fighters, as well as Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have said that airstrikes alone will not stop the attackers.
These reports should be combined with this one, a Wall Street Journal story that reports, “Islamic State appears to have largely withstood the airstrikes so far and with scant pressure on the ground in Iraq and Syria, the militants have given up little of the territory they captured before the campaign began.”
“The strikes are useless so far,” said Mohammad Hassan, an activist in eastern Syria battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. “Most of the training camps and the bases were empty when the coalition hit them.”
(On Saturday Islamic State fighters seized the Iraqi town of Kubaisa, located in western Anbar province, “its latest conquest in the desert region where it has chalked up a string of victories, a military official and people fleeing the scene said.” This comes two days after the fall of Hit and as the Islamic State sought to consolidate control in towns west of Ramadi.)
What’s happening was easy to predict when the president announced his plan to defeat the Islamic State without “boots on the ground”; it’s now being confirmed by facts on the ground.
Mr. Obama is waging this war in a slapdash fashion. (He is reluctant even to refer to this conflict as a war.) His approach is de minimis, a trifling, “defined mainly by its limitations,” according to the Washington Post. Unless he fundamentally alters his approach, the president has no chance to achieve his stated goal. The result may be the Islamic State, having withstood our strikes, will be seen as the “strong horse” in the Middle East. America, thanks to Mr. Obama, will be seen as the “weak horse.” And we know what that led to last time. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” So said Osama bin Laden shortly after 9/11.
Has Barack Obama learned nothing since then?
October 2014
Articles
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Taking Sides in Ferguson
Noah Rothman -
Obama’s Con Law
David BernsteinHis aggressive pursuit of executive power caps a 40-year leftist assault on the rule of law.
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Shifting Alliances in the Middle East
Ofir HaivryA political order has passed into history, and a handful of coalitions are fighting for the future.
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Britain’s Heart of Darkness
Jonathan Foreman -
John Dean’s Watergate Whitewash
James RosenLate in life, he continues to try to revise Watergate history in his own favor.
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‘Children in Europe Are Europe’s Problem!’
Robert A. SlaytonWhen the United States turned its back on the Jewish youth of Nazi Germany.
Politics & Ideas
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It Was More Than Envy
Daniel Johnson -
With Friends Like These...
Ruthie Blum -
Learning to Hate Zion
Tom Wilson
Culture & Civilization
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The Big Tramp
Frederic Raphael -
Confessions of an Aesthete
Terry Teachout -
At Sea in the Year 100
Fernanda Moore -
The Neocon Moment
Matthew Continetti
John Podhoretz
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When Liberals Feel Silenced
John Podhoretz
Threat Assessment
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When Will the Next War Start?
Jonathan S. Tobin
Letters
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Recognizing Anti-Semitism—and Calling It Out
Our ReadersResponses to Melanie Phillips’s “The Return of Christian Anti-Semitism."
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Yes, Countering Russia Is Necessary
Our Readers -
Israel and International Law
Our ReadersResponses to Eugene Kontorovich’s, “Crimea, International Law, and the West Bank.”
