America Is No Longer A Player

Apparently it takes two years to get the measure of a man. Equally apparent is that it takes some Americans even longer.

Last night’s show is one to be bookmarked. It dealt primarily with the foreign policy failures of the Obama administration, especially as pertains to the Middle East. On the eve of the president’s trip to Brazil, we can now look forward to a fresh set of policy embarrassments looming in South America. This is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton continues to distance herself from this administration.

Everything about the discussions last night was pretty much on target. And it is not something that will ever be reported in the NYT and in other liberal mainstream media outlets. Obama is their baby, after all. A mother will always stand up for her child.

But neither Batchelor or Hoenlein (or any of their guests) ever got down to actually pulling the trigger. Triangulation no longer works. Only facts are relevant. By parting ways with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel among others, the U.S. has planted itself firmly in Iran’s twelver camp. This did not just happen because of inattention, ignorance, or character flaws. It is deliberate. Anyone might be relieved to see our president as dupe and bumbler-in chief. It might even be so. In any case, Obama has been the public face of events that have occurred since he has been in office. It is he who must be held to account. No doubt, others much smarter than Obama are pulling his strings.

On the home front it’s the same story. Obama’s presidency has been a disaster anywhere you look.

One hopeful sign (if you can call it that): I see China inching closer to the breach. As I have predicted previously, Israel will survive. Iran will not. Half ‘evil’ will always win out over 100% ‘evil’. America is no longer a player.

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Auras

I wish the president had been more specific. His continual use of the pronoun ‘we’ (was that a mouse in his pocket?) was startling to me. Who exactly was the ‘we’ he was referring to? Was it his team at the White House? Was it his party? Was it the government in general? Or was it, as should have been the case, all of us?

Therein lies the puzzle of the president’s State of the Union speech. Therein lies the answer as to whether he heard the American people speaking out during the midterm election. Therein is the clue we’ve all been waiting for that would give us some indication as to whether or not the president has shifted toward the center.

You would have to have been born yesterday to mark this as a substantive speech. Obama does not come without history, after all. He’s had two full years to weave his magic. Where are we now?

He pretty much glossed over the (self-inflicted) problems of the past two years. Perhaps these did not much matter. These could still be spun as Bush’s fault. Now we are going forward into an era of high-speed bullet trains (did I say ‘bullet’?) and mercury light bulbs, solar shingles and clean energy to boot. We will reach out to South America (after having reached out and touched China and India; Syria, Iran and Hamas). We’re making progress. We’ve adopted Soviet style terminology to explain ourselves. For the moment, at least, we’re sweeping the fires raging in the Middle East under the carpet.

So far so good. It’s the ‘we’ I can’t seem to wrap my brain around. If by it he meant just he, his appointees and supporters, nothing has essentially changed. If he includes Republicans in his schemes, it’s likely that he means to win them over by threatening to use them as a foil. Only if he meant ‘all of us’ (which I doubt), is he now on the right track.

To one capable of seeing auras, a live mouse shines brighter than a dead elephant. How does Obama see us?

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Toy Room

The U.S.-led NATO forces are not going to prevail. Not because they can’t. but because we don’t want them to. There’s s something else afoot. Pakistan is a failed state. Obviously it’s not a failed state to China. Ditto, North Korea.

There are any number of failed states being gathered up in South America, Africa, and in the Middle East. Assange can work both sides of the fence depending on which side you talk to. There’s even someone out there who finds terrorism useful, otherwise it would stop.

We’re being played. India, Israel and a whole slew of other nations don’t know it yet. They still believes the deck isn’t stacked. And this might surprise you: The culprits are not necessarily the culprits we are made to hate. This is simply a diversion. The culprits are inside our own American house.

America is the strongest, most opulent house on the block. Could there be any doubt that America is not in charge of its own affairs?

We’re told that America is in decline. The biggest house on the block never falls on hard times. But, at the same time, it remains free to make additions or alterations if the owners should so decide. The biggest house on the block determines its own changes. The change is toward totalitarianism. Things can be done either by doing or not doing. You don’t roll your mother-in-law off the cliff and into a lake, and then jump into the water and rescue her (though, on second thought, this ploy too has been tried before).

Suffice it to say that change is at hand. Our people already have an inkling of it. They are finding themselves increasingly marginalized. They feel they are being herded through a maze. They are made to argue amongst themselves as to what it all means. They’re not getting the straight story. The (stealth) narrative belongs to Obama, Pelosi, Soros, and Reid. WikiLeaks is only a part of the deception - so is Pakistan, North Korea, China, et al. The toy room is America.

Happy new year!!!

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Transfer of Dominance

Like everything else, our administration’s announced suspension of its now obvious policy of forcing Israel into an ever-shrinking box can be seen in one of two ways. Supporters of Israel (and Israel itself) will say that Obama has learned his lesson and realized that the Palestinian side of the conflict has never had it as its goal to make peace, and has no intention of doing so no matter how many concessions Israel might make. The denouncers of Israel (and America) will claim that they have succeeded in forcing Obama out of the game.

Both positions contain an element of truth. The real question that needs be asked is: Why has Obama in effect given up, taken his toys and gone home? And why now?

Wikileaks may have played a part. Revelations so far have pretty much left Israel smelling like a rose. It could just be that our president has seen the writing on the wall. He could be thinking that something is about to happen over there and he wants to make sure he’s as far away from it as possible when it blows. In other words, he’s ducking.

There’s always the possibility of war, of course. Yet, short of outright hostilities, diplomatic efforts - now underway - involving nations beyond White House influence could also unmask Obama’s shameless dereliction of responsibility (and climb-down) with regard to one of America’s heretofore closest allies in the Middle East.

The UN is said to introduce a resolution which will unilaterally declare Palestine a state. It is likely to be overwhelmingly supported by its member nations. The American media will paint this development as a total surprise. The U.S. will abstain from voting, breaking with its previous policy. Instead, China will veto, and the transfer of global dominance will be complete.

Whatever happens will happen. Obama has decided he’ll have no part in it. His lack of leadership will once again be exposed, providing fresh impetus for unaligned nations to rally around a winner.

For further reading, google Caroline Glick’s latest assessment of the situation in today’s Jerusalem Post, particularly as it‘s being played out within our own hemisphere.

http://pkoelliker.blogspot.com/

Winner Takes Nothing

Like it or not, whatever strides the U.S. has made since WWII has had a tremendous impact on the rest of the world. In every way, America has defined the standard of modernity. Every success, every setback, receives huge coverage in the foreign press. Often our political travails influence the policies set by governments around the globe.

It is normal for us - even regarded as inconsequential - when our political parties bad-mouth each other. Republican administrations are regularly attacked by Democrats who have been known to say anything they think they can get away with. We pretty much expect as much: Bush accused of favoring the rich; Bush labeled as war-monger; Bush blamed for Katrina; Bush blamed for the World Trade Center bombing. We take it all in stride, even if The New York Times, standard bearer for the Democrat Party, presents it as truth and then retracts it on page 47 a month later. Then there is ‘global warming’, a clever send-up to label America as excessively wasteful, even to the detriment of the planet. There’s the perennial issue of the poor, the homeless, the hungry (never mentioned during Democrat administrations) and, now, the overtly greedy that are said to deny the rest of the planet its daily bread.

Every bit of such claptrap originates from within our own borders. We can identify it as an effort to score points against the opposing party. Much of it is eventually discredited as pure rhetoric. But once its out there in print or on the net, others pick it up and build their case against America.

A prevalent notion abroad, for instance, is that America is a racist country. In fact, any opposition to Obama’s policies, for whatever reason, is liberally portrayed as racist sentiment against a black president. The fact that we elected a black president in the first place is conveniently forgotten.

You hear it everywhere - in India, in South America, in Africa - that America is a racist nation. They get it from reading the likes of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, whose opinion columns are read widely throughout the world. It is only those who have actually traveled and lived here who know that race is not an issue for ordinary Americans; that England and Russia are far worse when it comes to that.

We’ve been accused often enough to understand it’s just a political ploy. We no longer take it seriously and tend to ignore it completely. It’s simply our own political operatives attempting to score points, points that are then picked up overseas to serve more sinister purposes.

It might have been good if we had nipped our tendency for engaging in some of our more extreme rhetoric in the bud sooner. Democrats, now turned Fabian socialists, in particular have succeeded in turning the domestic propaganda wars into a worldwide crusade. What started as domestic political rhetoric has grown hotter and is now threatening to topple the very foundations of our way of life. They have recruited allies among the ranks of our enemies; and, now, we are finding our nation in peril.

To a large extent, what we are experiencing today has been self-inflicted. The poison wells up from within our own institutions which have been infiltrated (by ourselves) and corrupted. Our present troubles are a consequence of our two-party system being at war rather than cooperating. It’s a repeat of Sherman’s (march to the sea) scorched earth policy. Winner takes nothing.

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