THE FOUNDATION
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” —Thomas Paine, American Crisis, No. 1, 1776
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
As we have already noted here and here, Barack Obama wants you to believe that the horrific murders in Charleston last week happened because his gun control agenda has been thwarted. In a new interview — part of a comedian’s somehow appropriately titled podcast “WTF With Marc Maron” — Obama blamed the NRA. “Unfortunately, the grip of the NRA on Congress is extremely strong,” he said. “I don’t foresee any legislative action being taken by this Congress.” Fortunately, the Second Amendment, which the NRA defends, still holds sway with enough members of Congress to stop Obama’s agenda. Of course, he trotted out his usual trope about how he concedes “we have to be respectful” of the traditions of “hunting and sportsmanship around firearms,” neither of which have much to do with our rights. But his most worrisome statement was on the standards for background checks, which the Charleston murderer passed. Obama wants those background checks to be even tougher to pass. How tough? Obama asked, “The question is just, is there a way of accommodating that legitimate set of [hunting and sporting] traditions with some common-sense stuff that prevents a 21-year-old who’s angry about something — or confused about something, or is racist, or is deranged — from going into a gun store, and suddenly he’s packing and can do enormous harm?” So now the standard is whether someone is merely angry, confused or racist? Who gets to decide that? If it’s Obama, no Republican would ever be permitted to purchase a gun.
As Dylann Roof sat in the basement of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Wednesday evening, he almost didn’t go through with his plot. The church members were “so nice to him,” NBC News reports. But Roof was bent on carrying out his “mission.” In murdering nine people in cold blood, leaving one woman alive, he hoped to ignite a race war. It’s the sum of white supremacist philosophy: Sooner or later the races will descend into violence, and Roof wanted to be the spark. But instead of revenge, Roof was met with something else. In an unusual testimony during a bond hearing, the daughter of Ethel Lance, one of the victims, told Roof, “I forgive you. You took something really precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul. It hurts me, it hurts a lot of people but God forgive you and I forgive you.” One by one, the representatives of the victims came forward, forgiving Roof, asking him to give his life to Christ. On Sunday, Roof’s plans vaporized as white Christians prayed with black Christians and churches vowed to build relationships with one another. Truth and love transcend racial lines.
The Environmental Protection Agency is heating up. In late May the EPA took additional controlover America’s waterways. Last week it announced plans to regulate aircraft. This week it expanded its reach even further by slapping regulations on larger vehicles. “The Obama administration on Friday proposed tough new standards to reduce pollution from carbon-emitting trucks and vans, the latest move by President Barack Obama to address global warming,” the Associated Press reports. “The new rules … are designed to slash carbon dioxide emissions by 24 percent over the next 12 years while reducing oil consumption by up to 1.8 billion barrels over the lifetime of the vehicles sold under the rule. … The proposed standards would cover model years 2021-2027 and apply to semi-trucks, large pickup trucks and vans, and all types and sizes of buses and work trucks, officials said.” As if this latest power grab isn’t bad enough, the EPA is about to finalize its long-anticipated Clean Power Plan regulating carbon emissions from coal-fired plants. The sad irony is that it’s all being justified by junk science. More…
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Nate Jackson
Managing Editor
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
By Nate Jackson
This just in from Barack Obama’s never-ending victory lap in the Long War: The State Department issued a notable report Friday indicating that terrorism is on the upswing around the world. Not only that, but Iran has a big hand in it. Clearly, Obama’s boasting in his own successful policies has been, to put it charitably, misplaced.
According to the State Department’s report, terror attacks spiked 35% between 2013 and 2014, while deaths from those attacks rose by a staggering 81%. State called the 2014 attacks “exceptionally lethal,” as 20 of them resulted in more than 100 deaths. Twenty-four Americans were among the nearly 33,000 victims of almost 13,500 attacks.
A major facet of the increase in attacks is that the Islamic State — previously known as the “JV team” — has, according to The Guardian, crippled al-Qaida from within while succeeding in procuring what State’s report called an “unprecedented seizure” of territory in Iraq and Syria. The report found, “The prominence of the threat once posed by core al Qaeda diminished in 2014. … AQ leadership also appeared to lose momentum as the self-styled leader of a global movement in the face of ISIL’s rapid expansion and proclamation of a Caliphate.”
Obama may claim to have “decimated” al-Qaida, but he has done so only by permitting the Islamic State to do it for him. That’s hardly what we’d call a model for success.
Much of the terrorism increase has happened in Iraq, where the Islamic State filled the vacuum left by Obama’s premature withdrawal of American forces. But Syria is also a serious problem, where the report notes that the number of foreign fighters swelling the ranks of the Islamic State “exceeded the rate of foreign fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”
Finally, and perhaps of most concern going forward, is that the State Department acknowledges Iran’s major role in sponsoring the increase in terrorism — all while Secretary of State John Kerry negotiates lucrative sanctions relief as part of a lousy nuclear agreement with that nation.
“ISIL and AQ were far from the only serious threat that confronted the United States and its allies,” according to the report. “Iran continued to sponsor terrorist groups around the world, principally through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF).”
Though Iran is no friend of the Islamic State, its methods don’t differ all that much. “Tehran increased its assistance to Shiite militias fighting in Iraq and continued its long-standing military, intelligence and financial aid to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Syrian President Bashar Assad’s embattled government and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” notes the Associated Press, which added, “While the 388-page [State Department] study said Iran has lived up to interim nuclear deals with world powers thus far, it gave no prediction about how an Iran flush with cash from a final agreement would behave.”
That’s reassuring.
But at least Obama’s worried about it, says White House spokesman Eric Schultz: America’s “grave concern about Iran’s support for terrorism remains unabated. That is all the more reason that we need to make sure they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”
If only Obama’s deal would in fact ensure that.
In short, all of Obama’s assurances that terrorists were defeated, decimated or otherwise diminished by his policies were bunk. His policies have failed, and the world is paying the steep price of his “leadership.”
TODAY AT PATRIOTPOST.US
BEST OF RIGHT OPINION
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OPINION IN BRIEF
John Goodman: “The Republican Party has four factions, Matthew Dowd announced on This Week with George Stephanopoulos a few weeks ago. They are: the libertarians, the evangelicals, the Tea Party and the establishment. Notice that all four factions are defined by ideas. They are defined by how they think the world should be organized. Can you name the four idea factions that make up the Democratic Party? The problem is that the Democratic Party is not a party of ideas. It is a party of special interests and groups who respond to identity politics. When Clinton announced her candidacy, she carefully went down the list of groups she intended to target: women, minorities (read blacks), Hispanics, immigrants, the LGBT community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender), etc. … Then of course there are the economic interests, including working women, minimum wage workers, teachers and members of just about every labor union in the country. In all cases the strategy is the same. Attached to every group there is a single issue or a set of issues that is vote-determining. Members of the group may disagree with the candidate on every other issue. But those disagreements don’t matter. Republicans never campaign this way. If they did, Republican voters wouldn’t vote for them.”
SHORT CUTS
Insight: “Speech delivery counts for little on the world stage unless you have convictions, and, yes, the vision to see beyond the front row seats.” —The Gipper
The BIG Lie: “When I ran in 2008, I in fact did not say I would fix it. I said we could fix it. … If you’re dissatisfied that every few months we have a mass shooting in this country killing innocent people, then I need you to mobilize and organize a constituency that says this is not normal and we are going to change it.” —Barack Obama
Non Compos Mentis, part I: “If Congress had passed some common-sense gun safety reforms after Newtown … we wouldn’t have prevented every act of violence, or even most. We don’t know if it would have prevented what happened in Charleston. No reform can guarantee the elimination of violence. But we might still have some more Americans with us.” —Barack Obama
Non Compos Mentis, part II: “I cannot imagine the horror that could’ve occurred if people [in Charleston] were sitting around with concealed weapons, this thing started and you had a full-scale gunfight. You might not even have three survivors.” —Democrat strategist Bob Shrum
Demo-gogues: “Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say n—r in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination.” —Barack Obama
Village Idiots: “We have to use this most recent tragedy to keep us working on [gun control]. We have to do that. It is insane the number of guns and the ease of getting guns in America.” —Charleston mayor Joe Riley
Late-night humor: “Hillary Clinton signed a note … for a nine-year-old boy, explaining to his teacher that he was missing school to meet her. In exchange, the kid wrote Hillary a note saying his dog ate her emails.” —Jimmy Fallon
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson
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