They want so badly to believe in The Dream

You've probably seen the lefty posters on social media to the effect that America just rebuked a president that had ushered in umpteen months of private-sector job growth, a steadily climbing stock market and unemployment brought down to six percent.  A little surreal, isn't it?  What is the purpose of putting them on the newsfeed?  Emotional catharsis?  The hope that readers will say, "Boy, yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way, I sure made a mistake yesterday?"

Maybe it's a balm, a hoped-for narcotic effect to blot out the actual reality:

Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election: 

“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”

That reality killed the Democrats. If there’s one economist’s term of art the average person learned in the Obama era, it is“labor force participation rate.” It’s not good. 

For decades after World War II, the U.S. economy had an annual average growth rate of 3.3%. Here are the growth rates for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):

2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%

You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats. The economy was a spent political force for them.

Consider the Freedom-Hater definition of good economic news: Those is desperate straits got a little leg up, enough to keep the lights on and the car payment made, and it was made possible by government tinkering with the free market:  minimum wage hikes, stimulus spending, food stamps.  In short, those most frantically clamoring for a raft in the stormy sea got one paid for with play-like money.

Therefore, according to the FHers, everybody ought to feel good about the country's direction and keep the current regime in power.

Reality works a little differently from this scenario.  Human beings need a basis for believing that opportunity is there for them.  Human beings want to contribute meaningfully to the world and thereby prosper.  The thin gruel of the state doesn't cut it.  Americans, in particular, want to spread their wings and see what they can do with their brief sojourns on this plane of existence.  And they saw none.

It is yet another realm in which we can see the chasm between the leftist vision and reality.  The leftist vision - people are pleased with the pace and nature of economic recovery, climate change is real and dictates drastic changes to our way of life, gender identity is fluid, jihadists can be charmed into halting their war against all infidels - had just come to the point whee it was so out of sync with the lay of the land in front of everyone's nose that the cognitive dissonance was too much to bear.

The little trickle of remaining pro-Most-Equal-Comrade propaganda one sees on social media evokes a kind of pity, does it not?  The vanquished Freedom-Haters can't let go of The Dream.  Way too much invested in it.  So they continue to trumpet the MEC's glories, knowing in their delusional minds that somehow, sometime, everyone will get it and turn from the grievous mistake - basing their actions on reality - and once again ask to be herded into the pen.

They are going to wait such a long time.  Meanwhile, the rest of us have a lot of work to do, un-transforming post-America.

The end of gender politics

There are so many great victory stories involving women: Mia Love, Joni Ernst, Elise Stefanik.

For my money, though, the real nail in the coffin of the "war on women" meme is this little development from southern California:

For Fluke to lose in a conservative or swing district would have cemented her trailblazing image. To lose in the liberal haven of West L.A. is a harsh verdict.

Even more than the Coakley defeat or certainly the Abortion Barbie defeat, this is delicious.

Remember my post from a few days ago about the question of who gets to decide authentic blackness? We're seeing the parallel debate concerning gender get answered this week.

When women en masse did not heed the pronouncements of the mid-century wave of feminists, such as Robin Morgan, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem that marriage was an oppressive institution, the next wave of gals, such as Andrea Dworkin, took it a step further and deemed all heterosexual relationships to be rape.

As is always the case when there's a radical level to a social movement, there was also a parallel "mainstream" level, as evidenced by the "empowerment"-type theme one began to see in traditional women's magazines, where articles on martial arts or navigating a high-powered career path were juxtaposed with ads for shiny-hair products or products for making one's eyes more lovely.  These magazines have, for the past few decades, had a decidedly left-of-center editorial bent, championing all manner of hooey such as sustainable energy, alarm over a supposed bullying epidemic, and, of course, the tension between organized Christian faith and extra-familial sexual behavior.

That's where Sandra came in.

I think Rush Limbaugh is great and always have, but I knew instantly he'd committed one of the worst errors of his career when he called Fluke a "slut."  That was not the angle on which to point out what a hollow figure she was.  The point about Fluke was that she wanted government to make a Catholic institution subsidize contraception - a product that one can get for under ten dollars a month at the Walmart pharmacy.  She was the confluence of the statist dependency mindset and the push to weaken the institution of marriage (by mainstreaming sexual behavior outside it) - and a hypocrite to boot, given her "powerful woman" schtick.  That's what Rush should have stuck with.

But, as with so much in our culture, there wasn't much to her prominence beyond some media hoopla.

Real, powerful women are going to Washington the first week in January, women who understand that there are two human natures - male and female - and that real personal power comes from using one's brains and conviction (and ability to shoot a gun) within that framework.

Memo to the Freedom-Haters: Men and women are different, and each can be powerful in ways consistent with what we know from human history about unchanging reality.  Get over it.

Well done, America!

You know the numbers: largest House majority since WWII, control of the Senate, abundant victory at the state and local level.

As I said yesterday in my post comparing the pre-election outlooks of Erick Erickson and Kurt Schlichter, I think the overall energization factor and the zeal among the fresh faces for the chance to implement del conservative policy is going to make the big-money Pub establishment rethink some assumptions.

Here in my small city, I'm immensely gratified that a ballot initiative which proposed a 5 percent property tax increase to pay for government pre-K went down.  All the cool people - execs of the big corporations, the coalition-builders, the administrative-class types - had gone for it.  The local paper endorsed it.  You saw yard signs for it all over town.  I really wasn't getting my hopes up.  But the real populace of this town understands the free market (there are plenty of private pre-K programs in the area), the importance of family in the first five years of life, and the unique nature of that type of economic exchange called taxation (it's coercive), and gave the idea a thumbs-down.

Illinois got a Pub governor!  That makes a solid red swath through Kansas (actually, probably Colorado) Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.  (Would like to find out more about why Pennsylvania ousted an incumbent Pub.)  Pub governors in Massachusetts and Maryland!

Now, here's LITD's memo to all the newly elected: We're looking for boldness.  We're looking for explicitly conservative alternatives to everything that's been imposed on us.  Resist calls to "work with" Freedom Haters like you would a glass of cyanide.  Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome has no place on our journey back to being the United States of America.

The Most Equal Comrade, our Constitution-Shredder-in-Chief - today's edition

Josh Earnest sounds the clarion that the fundamental transformation will continue apace:

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, President Obama “will continue to act aggressively” to use his executive authority, including on immigration reform.

“He is bound and determined to do everything that he can, using his power in the executive branch, to make progress on behalf of middle class families in this country,” Earnest said. “The president, regardless of the outcome of the election, will continue to act aggressively to use his executive authority to help middle class families.”

According to Earnest, utilizing his executive privilege on immigration reform is the best way Obama can “help middle class families.”

“The best example of something like this would be on immigration reform,” Earnest said.

“Republicans have not demonstrated, at this point, any willingness to consider the bipartisan proposal that passed through the Senate. The president has indicated that before the end of the year that he is prepared to use his executive authority to try to fix those elements of the immigration system that he can fix using his executive authority.”

Earnest said that no matter what happens over the last two years of Obama’s presidency, the president will use executive action to “benefit middle class families.”

The voice of the enemy.

The regime's Israel-hatred: more overt by the day

Consider these utterances:

On Monday, United States Solicitor General Donald Verrilli claimed that “[t]he question of the status of Jerusalem is the most vexing and volatile and difficult diplomatic issue that this nation has faced for decades.”

Addressing the Supreme Court, Verrilli argued on behalf of the Obama administration that a 2002 law permitting Americans born in the city to list Israel as their birthplace on U.S. passports is unconstitutional according the Wall St. Journal.

Curiously, Verrilli ranked the issue of the status of Jerusalem as higher in difficulty than the United States' failed attempt to prevent North Korea from attaining a nuclear weapon or the US's ongoing negotiations with the Iranian regime in an attempt to keep Iran from going nuclear as well. Verrilli also ranked the issue of Jerusalem ahead of the United States' diplomatic failure in Syria during the civil war and minimal reaction when Russia began occupying Crimea in Ukraine. 

You know, actually, you can see the motivation behind the regime's overall prioritization of issues.  Consider the pronouncements of Secretary Global-Test, Secretary Hagel, and the Most Equal Comrade himself on the subject of "climate change."   It's obvious to any non-brainwashed human being anywhere that the way they've equated it with the kinds of issues (other than Jerusalem, of course) that Verilli enumerates here is of a pattern with Verilli's juxtaposition.

It's a not-all-that-implied threat.  Crushing Israel and hobbling post-America's energy security - excuse me, "achieving Middle East peace" and "moving into an age of clean energy" - are matters of such urgency that all Constitutional considerations, or geostrategic considerations, must be jettisoned, because we clearly need to do anything we need to do to address them.

Never mind the charters of both Fatah and Hamas.  Never mind the network of tunnels in Gaza that Hamas intends to rebuild.  Never mind the strategic importance of Judea and Samaria to Israel, especially in this age of Syria's failed-state status.  The Great Leveling Project must proceed without obstacles.

The irony is going to come when Israel saves the ass of the rest of the West by taking out Iran's nuclear capability.

Executive-branch overreach gets a long overdue chastising

Eric Holder's fiefdom is forced to cough up a whole lotta Fast & Furious documents:

After years of legal battles between the House Oversight

Committee and Attorney General Eric Holder, 64,280 redacted Operation Fast and Furious documents held under President Obama's assertion of executive privilege since 2012, have been turned over by the Department of Justice after an order from U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson. The Justice Department was originally ordered to turn over a list of documents, better known as a Vaughn Index, with explanations as to why documents fall under executive privilege claims by November 1. 

“When Eric Holder wants to know why he was the first Attorney General held in criminal contempt of Congress, he can read the judge’s order that compelled the production of 64,280 pages that he and President Obama illegitimately and illegally withheld from Congress. Since these pages still do not represent the entire universe of the documents the House of Representatives is seeking related to the Justice Department’s cover-up of the botched gun-walking scandal that contributed to the death of a Border Patrol agent, our court case will continue," Chairman Darrell Issa said in a statement. "I am deeply concerned that some redactions to these documents may still be inappropriate and contrary to the judge’s order in the case. This production is nonetheless a victory for the legislative branch, a victory for transparency, and a victory for efforts to check Executive Branch power. As the production is extensive and may contain sensitive information, our investigative staff will be carefully examining the documents turned over last night.”

There are still more that need to be turned over, but this is a start.

Erick Erickson vs. Kurt Schlichter: Two quite different conservative takes on this election's significance

Writing at Politico, Erickson sounds downright dismissive of any notion that a big Pub victory would signal an opportunity to halt post-America's doom spiral:

The message from Washington’s Republican elite is no longer that government is the problem, but that Democrats in charge of government are the problem. That might work in 2014, but it’s not going to carry the day in the next presidential election. Republicans cannot make the case that government is the problem when they covet the power of controlling it to the extent they do.

This election cycle is only the latest iteration of an old story by which Republican consultants and establishment types have gotten rich and, in doing so, have impoverished the conservative movement—all the while losing important elections that could determine the future of our country. In 2008 the Democrats brought in a fresh face not of Washington as their nominee, while the Republicans reached all the way back to 2000, had a replay of the same old fights, then nominated their own establishment candidate, John McCain, who happened to have been the loser in the 2000 primary struggle. He lost again.

The events of 2012 amounted to a recycling of this story. The GOP refought the 2008 primary cycle with the 2008 loser (Mitt Romney) becoming the 2012 winner. He lost the general election and the consultants again got rich. In November of 2012, housed together on the fifth floor of 66 Canal Center Plaza in Alexandria, Va., nine separate Republican campaign organizations that had collaborated on the Romney loss raked in cash: Crossroads Media, Black Rock Group, WWP Strategies, Restore Our Future, Targeted Victory, DDC Advocacy/Blue Front Strategies, Target Point Consulting, Digital Franking, and Americans for Job Security.

Erickson has a lot of experience as a political strategist, so he speaks knowledgeably about the influence of this opportunistic bunch.

But consider the really cool people who are likely to win tonight: Ben Sasse, Joni Ernst, Mia Love, Scott Walker.  Think about  the great, principled firebrands we already have on the Hill:  Trey Gowdy, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee.

The reason a Pub majority, even if it's far from ideologically pure, matters is that the voices of those who are actual conservatives will be in a better position to call the squishes and Reasonable Gentlemen on any attempt to squelch them.  If out-and-out Freedom-Haters run the place, conservatives' insistence that an "R" designation mean something is a side issue; the real action is on the mind-numbing compromises worked out between the FHers and the squishes.  But if those in the majority do indeed have an "R" after their name, the argument takes center stage.

Kurt Schlichter, writing at Townhall, gets this:

When it’s between a Republican and a Democrat, it’s not choosing the lesser of two evils. At worst, it’s choosing the mediocrity over the evil.

Thad Cochran’s a jerk and the establishment creeps were jerks for supporting him. Vote for Thad.

Pat Roberts is a jerk and the establishment creeps were jerks for supporting him. Vote for Pat.

And the conservatives who lost to them in the primaries – if you haven’t done it already, get out there and demand your ticked-off supporters vote for the jerk who screwed you. It isn’t about your hurt feelings. It’s about our country.

He then reminds us of the moral dimension of this contest:

We need to bring it home for the GOP – not because its candidates are perfect but because its candidates are not actively evil. Yeah, I suppose there are some nice Democrat candidates out there. Some of them can maybe muster up a few positive comments about free enterprise and free speech, at least in theory. A few probably even like dogs better than cats, like real Americans.

But they have thrown in their lot with a crowd that seeks to destroy our sacred Constitution. The Democrats voted en masse to effectively repeal the First Amendment. Think about that – these people literally think it’s A-OK to outlaw books. They want to stop you from practicing your religion except in the manner and to the extent they choose. They want you disarmed and helpless. Oh, and if you happen to care whether Israel gets wiped off the map or not, perhaps you ought to put the party in power that didn’t boo the mention of the Jewish State at its last convention. 

See how it sharpens the perspective when you remember that this is a struggle against evil?

And so, while we're looking at it on a spiritual level, let's remember that it comes down to faith - in one's principles, convictions, most deeply held values.  We have seen, most notably in the person of Dutch, that Americans find those principles, when articulated and championed by a truly charismatic figure, electrifying.  And that can beat the money of double-chinned old country club guys any time.

The election eve post

As is usually the case at this hour in an election cycle, interesting stray bits of information are blowing like November leaves onto the radar screen.  Ted Cruz says he'll only support McConnell as Senate Majority Leader to the extent that McConnell behaves as a conservative.  MSNBC talking heads are not happy with Tom Harkin's don't-be-fooled-by-Ernst's-attractiveness remark, as well as the Des Moines Register poll giving her a 7-point lead over Braley.  There's the general discussion about whether it's a bellwether or an outlier, given the new Quinnipiac poll showing the race tied. There's yet another sparsely attended stump appearance by the Most Equal Comrade, this time in Pennsylvania.  There's a southern-state campaign ad trotting out an unprecedentedly vile Hail Mary, equating the GOP to the Klan.

I'm a bit nervous - always am - but I feel pretty good.  Polls and early-voting data haven't looked this good for years.

What a message like this at a site like this ought to stress - and I'd like to find a condensed way to say it in a Facebook post - is that post-America's situation is dire, and the only possible way to turn that around is vote a straight Republican ticket tomorrow.

How to effectively state it and avoid sounding cliched is the challenge.  Pundits warning of the very real chance of Western civilization's doom are not in short supply.  Chances are, if you're reading this, you're reading similar expressions elsewhere.

But any of us pundits who are sincere are thinking of ways to hit you between the eyes.  We're way past the point of talking about a "choice between two fundamentally different visions for this country."  We're talking about having been ruled by a cabal for the last six years which is an enemy of the United States, every bit as much as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iran or North Korea.

 The "two fundamentally different visions" scenario was applicable when the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly and John Dewey were convincing way too many Americans that the executive branch needed more power because modern American life was too complex for the structural confines of the Constitution.  It was applicable in the days of FDR and Frances Perkins and Rexford Tugwell, and the establishment of huge bureaucracies in the name of addressing the national emergency of the Depression.  It was applicable when Johnson and his minions in Congress created Medicare and food stamps and Head Start.  It was applicable some ten years later, when the radicals had come back into the fold and combined their support with that of the older Democrat constituencies to give us the Carter years.

But the current situation is an exponential leap beyond any of that.  Take some time frame - a week, a month - and go back and read the posts here within it and remind yourself of the numerous fronts on which the pro-tyranny-and-decline crowd have imposed ruin on our culture, our economy, and our security.  The headlong rush to accommodate an Iranian nuclear arsenal.  The poisoning of our alliance with Israel.  The complete uselessness of our token efforts to stop ISIS and al-Qaeda.  The rampant skyrocketing of health-insurance premiums, and of doctors leaving the field of medicine.  The $17 trillion debt.  One in five citizens on food stamps.  The use of a fantasy - "climate change" - to hobble the nation's energy security and ruin the coal and oil industries.  The wholesale distortion of basic differences between male and female essences, with the aim of destroying the family structure as humankind has known it all over the world for thousands of years.  The ruin of all of our art forms.

We have an array of external enemies, and we have one enemy among us.  There is a chance - and it is only a chance - of defeating it by peaceful, political means.  It requires you.

After tomorrow's probable outcome will come the sorting-out among Pubs regarding how fast to move, prioritizing the issues on our plate, and the shaping-up of the ideological spectrum for the next two years.

But the first step is to stop the darkness, halt the ruin.

If we can.

The only chance we have is to give those who hate freedom no quarter.

What an emboldened ISIS does in towns it conquers

While post-America vets "moderate" Syrian forces that then defect to the jihadists, and puts Susan "The Video Caused It" Rice in charge of micromanaging the effort to combat the jihadists, much to the frustration of the military leaders who actually know what the hell they're talking about, ISIS solidifies its caliphate with stomach-turning ruthlessness,

offing those it conquers by the hundreds at at time:

They were taken from their homes, some pulled from their beds, in the middle of the night.
They were fathers, brothers and sons, members of the U.S.-allied Albu Nimr tribe -- the Sunni clan considered among the last holdouts against ISIS in Iraq's western desert.
About 50 members of the tribe were abducted in Hit in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, during the early morning hours on Saturday, Sheikh Nabil Al-Ga'oud, a tribal leader, told CNN.
Their fate is unknown. But Al-Ga'oud and others believe they are likely dead, the latest casualties of ISIS who have killed hundreds of members of the tribe in mass executions in recent days.

and bidding on captured girls at sex-slave auctions:

The Real War on Women—
A video surfaced this week showing ISIS fighters attending a sex slave auction.
The blue and green-eyed Yazidi girls fetched the highest price.

George Bush was wrong about a lot of things - increasing the federal role in education, beginning the subsidization of play-like "energy companies," and expanding Medicare to include prescription drugs come to mind - but his basic foreign policy doctrine, that you can't wait until threats fully develop and directly impact the homeland to address them, is being proved to be a basic truth about the world in the age of jihad.

And we're not heeding it.

The metastasizing jihad cancer in Syria

Disturbing piece by Patrick Poole at PJ Media today on how it's getting harder by the day to find any "vetted moderate" anti-Assad forces in Syria.  They're joining al-Nusra and ISIS, which, by the way, are cooperating tactically on the battlefield and moving toward rapprochement.

The defections and surrenders Poole reports on have also yielded the jihadists lots of GRAD rockets and anti-tank missiles.

I repeat, we're losing this battle in the war against jihad.  The progressive mindset - the notion that there are parties out there in the world's various corners that share with us in the West a desire for a just, stable world, and that we can enlist them to do what only the strongest Western nations have ever done and then set up international bodies to move us all forward to a brighter future where we focus on climate change and fairness for the transgendered - is nearly as dangerous as jihad itself, being, as it is, the other necessary part of the equation for its victory over us.

Interesting timing on this proposal

Do you suppose the Grey Lady would have run, and the Duke poll-sci professor and junior-level student would have penned, this idea if the Freedom-Haters were cruising to big wins tomorrow?

The aggrieved-victim stance is unbecoming of the chief executive of one of the world's largest corporations

Gay Patriot skewers the Apple head over the way he acknowledges his unconventional sexual proclivities:

Apple CEO, Tim Cook, has come out as the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

“Let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me,” he wrote in a column in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Congratulations, Tim! And it’s great to see you acknowledge, along the way, how America has changed and become gay-positive over the last several decades:

The world has changed so much since I was a kid. America is moving toward marriage equality, and the public figures who have bravely come out have helped change perceptions and made our culture more tolerant…
Part of social progress is understanding that a person is not defined only by one’s sexuality, race, or gender.

Although it’s not so great, Tim, that you still couldn’t stop yourself from playing the Gay Victim card like a drama queen:

Being gay has given me…a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with…
…there are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation. There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being gay…

I challenge GP’s readers to post in the comments, any examples of U.S. / State “laws on the books” that positively or specifically authorize “employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation.”

As for the bit about landlords and tenants: It’s also known as freedom of association, Tim. It’s a good thing because *you* get to have it as well; or at least you *should* get to have it (I am aware that the State of California unfortunately denies everyone that freedom).

This is why we're on solid ground when we accuse movement gays of seeking not just "equality" but special privileges.  Those of any orientation who have thought deeply about the nature of freedom get that.

The end product of government "education": persecution of the West's own religious foundation

This is why having government in a position to determine whether Christian or Jewish schools pass muster with regard to "tolerance" at this advanced stage of our civilizational rot is the final nail in the coffin.  

British faith schools are to be forced to teach equality and respect for gay rights or face closure, in a move backed by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan. The orders come following 40 snap inspections of faith schools, including Christian and Jewish schools, in the wake of the Trojan Horse plot in Birmingham in which radical Islamists were found to have infiltrated between four and eight schools to promote hard-line Salafist Islam. 

Reports on the 40 snap inspections are due later this month. Sir Michael Wilshaw, chief inspector of schools, is expected to conclude from the reports that any school not preparing students for life in modern Britain, by which he means embracing alternative lifestyles and other cultures, will be subject to no-notice inspections, downgrades, and even possible closures. 

They will face the same penalties if they are deemed to be in breach of the Equalities Act, which mandates respect for gay and transgender people, and of other religions and races, despite the Act containing an exemption for school curricula.  

His stance has the backing of Morgan, who told the Sunday Times today that it is “crucial” that Jewish and Christian schools “actively promote” British values, including tolerance for other lifestyles and cultures. “These values — democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs — are not new. The requirement to ‘actively promote’ them is designed to reinforce the importance this government attaches to these values,” she said. 

However, Ofsted inspectors have come under fire in recent weeks for being overzealous in their desire to root out any behaviour which doesn’t adhere to their standards, including by asking inappropriate questions during their snap inspections designed to probe whether pupils held tolerant views towards gays and members of other religions. 

“They made us feel threatened about our religion. They asked ‘Do you have friends from other religions?’ They asked this many times until we answered what they wanted us to say,” one year eleven pupil at a Jewish orthodox school has reported. 

So very late in the day.

Turning what ought to be a mission focused on decisive victory into a cluster-you-know-what

The indispensable team of Eli Lake and Josh Rogin at the Daily Beast spell out the rift between the pointy-heads of the junta and those actually trying to stop the ISIS threat:

Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

Making matters worse, military officers and civilian Pentagon leaders tell The Daily Beast, is the ISIS war’s decision-making process, run by National Security Adviser Susan Rice. It’s been manic and obsessed with the tiniest of details. Officials talk of sudden and frequent meetings of the National Security Council and the so-called Principals Committee of top defense, intelligence, and foreign policy officials (an NSC and three PCs in one week this month); a barrage of questions from the NSC to the agencies that create mountains of paperwork for overworked staffers; and NSC insistence on deciding minor issues even at the operational level.

Even a junta member, Chuck Hagel, directly representing the military as he does, is frustrated about it:

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel himself is among the critics of Obama’s strategy in Syria. Hagel wrote a memo last week to Rice warning that Obama’s Syria strategy was unclear about U.S. intentions with respect to Assad, undermining the plan.
Hagel stood by the memo Thursday. “We owe the president and we owe the National Security Council our best thinking on this. And it has to be honest and it has to be direct,” he told reporters.
But the top uniformed military leaders in charge of the operation also are struggling to work around the White House policy constraints and micromanagement, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey; Gen. Lloyd Austin, commander of CENTCOM; and Gen. Michael Nagata, the SOCOM lead official in charge of the Syrian train and equip program, according to multiple officials and people briefed by those generals.

Nagata has been tasked with building a new rebel army from scratch but is not permitted to work with existing brigades, meaning he must find and vet new soldiers, mostly sourcing from Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. What’s more, the size of the program will produce only 5,000 fighters a year after the training begins, most of whom who will serve as “local defense forces” and not go after ISIS, according to two officials briefed on the plan. Of those forces, 500 would be given additional training in “counterterrorism.” That’s a small attack force to face an ISIS military that is estimated to have tens of thousands of fighters.

Dempsey told reporters Thursday that the recruiting and vetting of soldiers for the new Syrian rebel army has not yet begun, although sites for the training camps have been chosen.

Of course, Secretary Global-Test thinks  patty-cake with yet another set of enemies is going to usher in the age of unicorns and rainbows:

Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that there is no military solution to the Syria crisis and said the U.S. is reaching out to Russia and Iran, among others, to seek a new political negotiation. Syrian National Coalition President Hadi al Bahra told The Daily Beast last month that there is no genuine interest in a new political process in the West, which he described as being “in a coma.”

“There have been so many things said on Syria that were not delivered,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Nobody thinks the president really wants to do anything on Syria. Even currently serving officials realize that you cannot bomb your way out of this and you need to have a plan for a political solution, but we don’t have it. There needs to be a fully thought out strategy with a political dimension that involves the opposition. If you don’t do that, you can’t solve this problem.”

The Sunni jihadist  bloc is on course to join Iran and North Korea as irreversible problems for post-America.

There will come a day when all the distractions on the world  - not accommodating transgendered people in the State Department, not jawboning about "climate change," not opening the southern border to floods of people from everywhere and anywhere -  won't save us from squarely facing the gravest crisis we've enter encountered.

We are ruled by overlords who hate America.  The proof gets more conclusive every day.

 

The Most Equal Comrade's desire for a "peacemaker" legacy is going to get American cities incinerated

Evidence has been mounting all year that the MEC intends to get a piece of paper signed with the world's greatest menace, come hell or high water:

Deputy national-security adviser and MFA in creative writing Ben Rhodes likened an Iranian nuclear deal to Obamacare in a talk to progressive activists last January, according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The remarks, made at a since-discontinued regular meeting of White House personnel and representatives of liberal interest groups, reveal the importance of a rapprochement with Iran to President Obama, who is looking to establish his legacy as his presidency enters its lame-duck phase.

“Bottom line is, this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war,” Rhodes said. “So no small opportunity, it’s a big deal. This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is health care for us, just to put it in context.”

Actually, it's been the agenda all along:

That is why Democrats called Bashar al-Assad a reformer, why Obama remained silent during the 2009 protests over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rigged election, why the State Department doesn’t include human rights or ballistic missiles in the scope of its negotiations with Iran. It is why Obama has resisted overthrowing Assad even after he crossed the red line of chemical-weapons use, why he refers to the “Islamic republic of Iran,” bestowing legitimacy on the revolutionary regime, and why administration officials reject congressional proposals to reinstate sanctions should the negotiations with Iran fail.

These decisions are not made in light of the national-security interests of the United States. They are made to keep alive President Obama’s dream of peace with Iran. And the purpose of these decisions isn’t to mollify American politicians. It’s to satisfy Iranian ones. 

This is the supreme illustration of the chasm between the progressive insistence that human nature is collectively evolving and that sworn enemies can be made into "partners" and the way the world actually works.

Here's how the world actually works:

Iran has stopped answering the UN nuclear watchdog's questions about its suspected past efforts to design nuclear weapons. 
This according to a report on Friday in The New York Times.  
Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA said Friday that Iran failed to provide more information on what Amano termed "possible military dimensions," of its nuclear program. 
According to the Times, Amano said that cooperation had not been forthcoming, despite receiving assurances from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that Iran "would clarify the ambiguity," with regard to documents that appear to show work on nuclear weapons. 
“What is needed now is action,” the Times quoted Amano saying in reference to a list of around a dozen issues that require Iranian clarification.   
An IAEA report issued in early September showed Iran had failed to answer questions by an Aug. 25 deadline about what the UN agency calls the possible military dimensions of the country's nuclear program.  

The IAEA is tasked with checking that Iran is living up to its part of the interim agreement with six world powers reached in November of last year, which was designed to buy time for the current talks on a comprehensive solution of the stand-off that would dispel fears of a new Middle East war. 

Another one of those top-priority moves we expect  of the new Congress we're likely to get:  thwart this madness.  Stop the patty-cake.  Find out how the regime is planning to work around the legislative branch and have a plan for defeating it.

Conquering us from within

My only question is why wasn't every last parent removing his or her kid from this poison:

Parents said they discovered that what their children were learning about Islam was more about the tenets of the faith than the history of the religion, according to KTLA.  One question asked the students to write down teachings from the Koran. 

The father continued, “What I saw written in these bubbles was, ‘The one true God, Allah’ in one of the bubbles. In one of the other bubbles was ‘All people must submit to Allah,’ in another bubble. The I turned the page over and I see the five pillars of Islam.” 

The parents assert that the students should be taught the history behind the religions, whether it is Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or others, but not the tenets of the faith. 

Father: “Can you imagine the outcry all over this country if children were bringing home paperwork that asked them to write down John 3:16, or asked them to write down the 10 Commandments?” 

Mother: “And if it ended with the Declaration of the Faith, Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior? That’s what the equivalent, I mean, part of us, for our son? We’d be happy about that." 

Father: “But some parents may not be.” 

The parents talked to the principal, but the school refused to change the schoolwork, prompting the parents to remove their son from the class. 

I want to know more about the teacher, too - and whoever it was that developed the curriculum.