Changing The Subject

Kevin starts off writing about fake hate crimes and then moves on to a more general discussion of right vs. left, aka good vs. bad.

Williamsonism of the day --

"The difference (between Communism and Socialism) is not entirely trivial. Communism begins with a gun in your face, socialism ends with a gun in your face."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445495/bogus-hate-crimes-trump-conservatives

And KW weighs in on how Obama's politicized corruption of many federal agencies has rendered any investigation of Trumps involvement with the Russians suspect.

"The Obama administration left us with a poison bouquet, a federal government whose investigatory agencies are thoroughly corrupted, politicized, and untrustworthy. We know for a fact that the Internal Revenue Service, acting after demands from Democratic elected officials, targeted conservative-leaning activist groups for investigation and harassment, and that this harassment was outrageous, including demands that religiously oriented organizations disclose the very contents of their prayers. We know that that Internal Revenue Service illegally and maliciously leaked information about the donors of the National Organization for Marriage, in order to facilitate political and financial retaliation against them. We know that evidence, including e-mails, was destroyed to subvert investigation into this criminal conspiracy, and that congressional Democrats went to extraordinary lengths to protect IRS officials from being punished for their wrongdoing. We know that one of the key figures in that case, Lois Lerner, is enjoying a large federal pension rather than a small federal prison cell.

We know that the Department of Justice was wildly politicized during the Obama years, doing Democrats’ bidding on everything from voter-intimidation cases to the Clinton e-mail case. We know that the National Labor Relations Board was used as a political weapon to try to punish Boeing for setting up new production in Republican-leaning South Carolina rather than Democratic-leaning Washington State. We know that the ATF was used to audit a business whose owners were not involved in A, T, or F, but who were involved in election-reform projects, and that the same firm was targeted by OSHA and the IRS. We know that a politicized EPA was involved in such extraordinary shenanigans that its director felt the need to set up a pseudonymous e-mail account in order to hide her activities from ordinary oversight. Even our Democratic friends have concluded that the FBI under the Obama administration was politicized, though they cannot quite seem to make up their minds about the direction or intent of it.

Barack Obama liked to talk about capital-H History, about “making History” and being “on the right side of History.” And though he may not go down as a particularly consequential figure (much of the drama of the Obama years was just that: drama), Obama will be remembered by the historians for a few things: for being the first black man elected president in a country with a complicated, ugly, and brutal history on the issue of race; for attempting to walk away from U.S. commitments in the Middle East only to reinvade Iraq, lose a game of chicken in Syria, misunderstand the nature and the aims of the Arab Spring, and send U.S. forces into nebulously defined conflicts in several African countries; and for being the first president to institute a policy of assassination of U.S. citizens as a matter of national security. But what probably will end up being most consequential about President Obama is the corruption, which was systemic despite his media sycophants’ insipid insistence that his was a presidency without scandal. The corruption of the Obama administration was not of the apple-stealing/intern-bothering Clinton variety, but the much more serious matter of perverting necessary public institutions for political purposes. He oversaw this at the federal level and inspired it at the state level: Consider all those Democratic attorneys general banding together to shake down Exxon and lean on free-market think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or Kamala Harris’s campaign to do to California’s conservative activists what the IRS did to the National Organization for Marriage, demanding donor lists."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445546/donald-trump-russia-investigation

Obama's Scandals

From Matt Walsh at The Blaze --

As far as we know right now, the only real criminals here are the intelligence officials who’ve been leaking classified information from clandestinely recorded telephone conversations to the media in hopes of sabotaging a sitting president. That is a crime, a scandal, and it has the makings of a true constitutional crisis. But the media isn’t interested in running that angle down. They’re only interested in nailing the president for corruption, which is an interest they only just developed.

Look, if Trump is ever guilty of real abuses of power, real corruption, real scandal, I will be the first to call for his head, metaphorically. And I don’t think a Trump scandal is mitigated or made less important or more acceptable by the fact that Obama also had scandals. I’m not going to shout “But Obama!” in order to bail Trump out of whatever trouble he may bring upon himself. Leftists spent eight years shouting “But Bush” for Obama’s sake, and I don’t intend to adopt that strategy. But the fact is that Obama did have scandals — real scandals, terrible scandals, scandalous scandals — and, in the interest of truth, we can’t allow the Left to stand right in front of us and rewrite history on the fly. The truth matters.

I say it again: The truth matters.

The truth matters. It matters now just as it mattered for the past eight years. So when Dan Rather claims that Trump may already be guilty of the biggest political scandal in his lifetime, and the New York Times insists that Obama had a scandal free White House, and USA Today along with many other outlets echo that absolutely ridiculous assertion, it behooves those of us who value the truth to calmly respond: UM, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT?

I don’t know what the future holds. Perhaps Trump will indeed eventually own the biggest political scandal in modern history, but in order to achieve that feat, he’s got a lot of work to do. He’s not there yet. Not anywhere close.

Despite what our news media says as it awakens from a coma, Flynn’s conversation with a Russian ambassador is not a bigger scandal than Obama targeting his political opponents with the IRS.

It’s not bigger than Obama’s ATF shipping guns to Mexican drug cartels.

It’s not bigger than Obama sending millions to Iran and then lying about it.

It’s not bigger than Obama’s DOJ spying on journalists.

It’s not bigger than the Obama Administration orchestrating a series of violent coups in the Middle East, funneling weapons to terrorist groups, then leaving an ambassador to die in Benghazi, and then lying about it.

It’s not bigger than Obama’s State Department, headed by a woman who conducted government business on an illegal private server, selling our foreign policy to the highest bidder.

And it’s not bigger, in my view, than Obama’s NSA conducting mass surveillance without a warrant, or Obama assassinating American citizens without a trial, or the DOJ conducting ideologically charged witch hunts against police departments across the country while Obama used his bully pulpit to push false narratives in order to foment racial chaos and division.

Trump may well seize upon the precedent set by Obama and repeat some of these same atrocities. If that happens, we’ll finally see what it looks like when the media actually reports on the types of stories listed above. We’ll also be treated to the spectacle of leftists denouncing Trump’s abuses of, say, the IRS or the DOJ, while insisting that his abuses in these areas are so totally different from Obama’s identical abuses because, well, because, you see, because of various reasons and so forth.

But as they continue with these double standards, we should remember the truth. It won’t excuse whatever Trump may do, but it matters nonetheless. The truth matters. Even if it doesn’t matter at all to the media or the Left.

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/matt-walsh-if-you-just-started-caring-about-political-scandals-again-youre-a-brazen-hypocrite/

To be sure, there are many more scandals Walsh left out. A few I can think of off the top of my head --

The thousands of veterans who died as a result of Obama's incompetent management of the VA.

The release by Obama's EPA of millions of gallons of toxic waste into the Animas River in the southwestern U.S. onto land owned by the Navajo Nation. 

The failure to act when Obama's EPA learned of the lead problem in Flint, Michigan's water supply.

AG Eric Holder lying to Congress about signing the order to surveil journalist James Rosen. Holder was cited for contempt of Congress but was not punished for his perjury and he kept his job of course.

Obama caught on an open mic conspiring with the Russian Foreign Minister to deceive the American electorate prior to the 2012 election.

"If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period."

Life Is Good

America The Great by Kevin The Great

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444620/american-politics-wealth-prosperity-liberty-texas-california-doomsayers-tom-wolfe

And the rest of the world's not too bad either --

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443374/2016-best-year-ever

The Redical In The White House

He leaves today. Not soon enough.

Charles Krauthammer --

"Commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, one of the great traitors of our time, is finger-in-the-eye willfulness. Obama took 28 years off the sentence of a soldier who stole and then released through WikiLeaks almost half a million military reports plus another quarter-million State Department documents.

The cables were embarrassing; the military secrets were almost certainly deadly. They jeopardized the lives not just of American soldiers on two active fronts — Iraq and Afghanistan — but of locals who were, at great peril, secretly aiding and abetting us. After Manning’s documents release, the Taliban “went on a killing spree” (according to intelligence sources quoted by Fox News) of those who fit the description of individuals working with the United States.

Moreover, we will be involved in many shadowy conflicts throughout the world. Locals will have to choose between us and our enemies. Would you choose a side that is so forgiving of a leaker who betrays her country — and you?

Even the word “leaker” is misleading. Leak makes it sound like a piece of information a whistleblower gives Woodward and Bernstein to expose misdeeds in high office. This was nothing of the sort. It was the indiscriminate dumping of a mountain of national-security secrets certain to bring harm to American troops, allies, and interests.

Obama considered Manning’s 35-year sentence excessive. On the contrary. It was lenient. Manning could have been — and in previous ages, might well have been — hanged for such treason. Now she walks after seven years.

...This is Obama being Obama. He leaves office as he came in: a man of the Left, but possessing the intelligence and discipline to suppress his more radical instincts. As of November 9, 2016, suppression was no longer necessary.

We’ve just gotten a glimpse of his real self. From now on, we shall see much more of it."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444044/barack-obama-exit-reveals-true-colors

Though it wouldn't nearly make up for the Manning commutation, Trump could do a backatcha with a pardon of Clinton / Obama gadfly Dinesh D'Souza.

Media bias and stupidity continue...Mollie Hemmingway gives four examples from just the last few days. --

https://thefederalist.com/2017/01/19/4-recent-examples-show-why-no-one-trusts-media-coverage-of-trump/

And this will never get old. Smug, condescending, arrogant, obtuse, unfunny leftists making fools of themselves. --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahkMA6JPOHU

Anyone seen a spaceship filled with dinosaurs wearing red capes lately?

Scandal

Kevin Williamson shreds the myth of a scandal free Obama administration --

"Not only was the Obama administration marked by scandal of the most serious sort — perverting the machinery of the state for political ends — it was on that front, which is the most important one, the most scandal-scarred administration in modern presidential history.

For your consideration: Under the Obama administration’s watch, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies from the BATF to the NLRB were illegally used to target and harass the president’s political enemies. The IRS targeting scandal was the most high-profile of these, but others are just as worrisome. Federal investigations and congressional oversight were obstructed, and investigators were lied to outright — a serious crime. The administration protected the wrongdoers and saw to it that they retired with generous federal pensions rather than serving federal sentences for their crimes.

...Having an IRS that sorts nonprofits by their political stances in order to facilitate the harassment of political rivals is in real terms far worse than anything Bill Clinton got up to with Monica Lewinsky, and far worse than the shenanigans that Gordon Liddy and the rest of the Nixon henchmen got up to in the Watergate. The BATF harassment of True the Vote and other Obama-administration enemies is the stuff of which banana republics are made. Using the machinery of the state to seek political power and to aggrandize the political power one holds is the most destructive form of political corruption there is. A sane society would prosecute it the way we prosecute murder or armed robbery. It is a scandal and more than that: It is an assault on the foundations of a free society.

The fact that the same people at CNN who were colluding with the Clinton campaign cannot see a scandal in the Obama administration does not mean that no scandal was there.

For the Democrats and their media partisans, scandals — like homelessness and war casualties — are something that happens to other people."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443911/obamas-many-scandals-abuse-government-power-worse-sex-scandals

And KW declines to applaud --

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443868/obama-last-day-clap-out-applause-free-society-stalin-tom-price

Betrayal

Yesterday, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. was ordered by Barack Obama to abstain in the vote for a resolution that condemns Israel for its West Bank settlement policy, thereby ensuring its passage. Power wrote a book on the abdication of responsibility by the U.S. in preventing genocides. Then she proceeded to help her boss abdicate his responsibility in preventing the genocide in Syria. She has now augmented that disgrace with this vote empowering terrorists at the expense of the only democracy in the Middle East and her nation's staunchest ally.

Some Twitter commentary --

Arthur Schwartz -- Barack Obama just spat in the face of Israel & sided with a bunch of terrorists. That's his legacy. He's a worthless piece of garbage.

Kurt Schlichter -- Obama is a fucking disgrace.

Groups who have stood against the Jewish people:
Rome.
The Nazis.
USSR.
The Obama Administration.
All consigned to the ash heap of history.

Michael Goldfarb -- Obama just tore up the rule book on his way out the door. Good…let’s gut the UN and create our own facts on the ground.

Richard Kemp -- A day of infamy in the UN Security Council: Obama stabs Israel in the back, increases likelihood of violence, reduces prospects for peace.

Philip Klein -- Obama cool with Syrian use of chemical weapons and Iran building nukes. But Jewish housing construction MUST BE STOPPED!

Khaled Abu Toameh -- Palestinian Islamic Jihad praises UN resolution, says it will pave way for isolating and boycotting Israel.

Omri Ceren -- Organization statements praising Obama admin screwing Israel at UN:
- jstreetdotorg
- Hamas
- Palestinian Islamic Jihad

neontaster -- Maybe if Israel threw more homosexuals off roofs and funded proxy attacks against American troops then Obama would be more sympathetic.

Yair Rosenberg -- If not for the United Nations, where would we be able to hear Venezuela lecture the Jewish state about upstanding moral conduct?

Katie Pavlich -- Hey Congress, it's far past time to defund the UN.

When Obama leaves office, it will be a good day. So sick of this crap.

Ben Shapiro -- On behalf of Jews who care about Israel, Mr. President, let me just say, GFY.

Sean Davis -- Obama hates Israel as much as he loves ceding control of the Middle East to Iran.

Brad Thor -- From sending the Churchill bust back, to stabbing Israel in the back - it ends as ignominiously as it began...

Victoria Coates -- Today, POTUS, John Kerry and Ambassador Power joined the long line of cowards who stood by and did nothing while a mob attacked the Jews.

Larry Elder -- Mr. Obama, it's not complicated. Palestinians lay down their arms=peace. Israelis do so=genocide. Any questions?

Benjamin Haddad -- Obama could have used his last weeks in office to finally confront Russia over Syria, and the hacking. Instead he chose to go after Israel.

Seth Mandel -- While Israel is helping the Syrians that Ambassador Power has abandoned, she votes with despots against Israel. For shame.

Today explained.
 

A lengthier explanation is provided by Stanley Kurtz in an essay he wrote for National Review five years ago (5/26/2011). Note this prophetic passage --

The continuing influence of Obama’s pro-Palestinian sentiments is the best way to make sense of the president’s recent tilt away from Israel. This is why supporters of Israel should fear Obama’s reelection. In 2013, with his political vulnerability a thing of the past, Obama’s pro-Palestinian sympathies would be released from hibernation, leaving Israel without support from its indispensable American defender.

A truly clarifying piece. Read it all.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/268159/pro-palestinian-chief-stanley-kurtz

Donald Trump -- As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th.

THAT DAY CAN'T ARRIVE SOON ENOUGH.

Added 12/24 -- Fox News Panel (Goldberg, Hemmingway, Lane, Krauthammer) discuss Obama's disgrace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3xLZnfwEMM

Inconsequential Action

An appropriately scathing critique of Barack Obama's Syria policy from Leon Wieseltier of the left leaning think tank Brookings Institution, writing for the Washington Post.

It is a shameful and incontrovertible fact of our history that during the past eight years the values of rescue, assistance, protection, humanitarianism and democracy have been demoted in our foreign policy and in many instances banished altogether. The ruins of the finest traditions of American internationalism, of American leadership in a darkening world, may be found in the ruins of Aleppo.

...It would be incorrect to analyze our delinquency in Syria in the dichotomously simple terms of action and inaction. The administration creatively pioneered a third option, which it pursued not only in Syria but also in Ukraine and elsewhere: Between action and inaction, it chose inconsequential action. There is the Obama doctrine! We backed moderate Syrian rebels, but not as seriously or as generously as the immoderate Syrian rebels were backed. We sent in small numbers of special operators. The CIA ran a few programs. We acted, in sum, only in ways certain not to affect the outcome. We were strategically feckless. I suspect that the president believes that the United States has no moral right to affect an outcome in another country. I suspect that he regards such decisive action as imperialism, or at least as Iraq-like. What this means in practice is that we will not help people who deserve our help. In the spirit of respecting other societies, we will idly gaze at their destruction. How would disrespecting them be worse?

As a direct or indirect consequence of our refusal to respond forcefully to the Syrian crisis, we have beheld secular tyranny, religious tyranny, genocide, chemical warfare, barrel bombs and cluster bombs, the torture and murder of children, the displacement of 11 million people, the destabilization of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, the ascendancy of Iran in the region, the emergence of Russia as a global power, the diminishment of the American position in the world, the refugee crisis in Europe, the resurgence of fascism in Europe and a significant new threat to the security of the United States. It is amazing how much doing nothing can do, especially when it is we who do nothing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/aleppos-fall-is-obamas-failure/2016/12/15/5af72640-c30f-11e6-9a51-cd56ea1c2bb7_story.html?utm_campaign=Jolt%2012/16/2016&utm_medium=email&utm_source=jolt&utm_term=.6ff8c1fa5f61&wpisrc=nl_daily202&wpmm=1