It’s not for me to say whether it is Door No 1, his own sense of infallibility (a mental disorder) or a Door No 2, a learned-in-childhood refusal to never ever admit he’d made an error in judgment, but Barack Obama has been substantively, factually and provably wrong on two key issues that he says are important to his policy pursuits and the national interests. Both stand to fail because he will refuse to retreat. On the first, it is a Door #1, Door #2. option. But on the second, I think Obama is wedded to a position he cannot abandon, despite the alliance of facts against him.
Immigration– Now, while the media, including Fox, has been all over the map trying to turn a few simple paragraphs about a Texas federal court ruling into a week-long melodrama, pending the next ruling by a higher court, the real story has been buried. This Texas federal injunction simply halts DHS from moving forward on its scheduled plan to begin processing 5 million illegals until the trial is held. That could take a year, and while at least one other court (PA) has already ruled Obama acted unconstitutionally with his executive action in the first place, (a separate legal issue) the 26 plaintiffs in this case in Texas also alleged his executive action and planned acts by the DHS also violated a basic tenet of the Administrative Procedures Act by not providing for public notice of the rules change and providing a legislated time for public comment, a process even the EPA still has to follow.
A first year law school mistake, the real story then is that for all the high-and-mighty Obama Administration assertions and gymnastics disguising Obama’s prior 22 shades of gray about the unconstitutionality of what he eventually did, his action may now fail over a drafting failure…unintended loose ends.
Obama can appeal (I assume he already has…if he thinks there is a way he can win easily) but others have hinted he may just ignore the judge’s order. Bad idea, for that could bring about a nullification crisis (as I just wrote about a few days ago) in which 26 states would be perfectly within their rights to deny DHS the ability to implement the plan in their states. (And look for other states to join in.) A real constitutional crisis could ensue, not to mention impeachment being back on the table in the Congress.
Or, Obama can choose wisely, and rescind his executive action, then pass the entire immigration issue over to the Congress, where it belonged in the first, then let them send him a clean bill. In fact, Obama knows there are a bunch of Republicans in both chambers who are itching to give Obama everything he wants…only via this constitutional route. All he has to do is give up the imperial power he has seized.
But what is the likelihood of this happening? Not very. So, in the end, what will be the compelling reason that Obama will choose the wrong path toward getting this immigration plan back on track, risking it all in the process? Door No 1 and Door No 2?
ISIS and that Religion of Peace thingy
Again, in light of growing atrocities by ISIS in the Middle East, including new territory (Libya) we didn’t even know they were encamped, until they beheaded 21 Coptic Christians, Obama’s remarks in defense of Islam have become indefensible…not only in portraying ISIS as a non-religious gang of murdering terrorists, but also in miss-defining Christian history, even Biblical text, as a way to prove his case.
Only this week, Graeme Wood at “The Atlantic” – a generally leftish magazine, posted this article on Islamic history and philosophy which I recommend everyone read simply for context, as it explains why this kind of movement has existed inside Islam since the 12th-13th centuries. Obama says he fears Muslims around the world, or maybe only in Dearborn, (he won’t elaborate) will think America is making war on all Islam when nothing of the sort is the case. Few Muslims believe that, anywhere. But to amplify his argument, Obama stated that the three Saudi students in North Carolina “were killed for their religious faith,” which, while not so, enraged the Saudi government, forgetting I think, that Americans have still killed 2739 fewer Saudis that Saudis have Americans. (Don’t know about you, but I’m still keeping count.) In the process, Obama has refused to acknowledge that any of the Coptic Christians had died for theirs, or the poor Yazidis in Syria, or their children, and hundreds more Christians in Syria. Then, to make matters worse, Obama showed his mastery of history when he spoke wrongly about the Crusades…i.e, who invaded whom first, and who quit and who still hasn’t …Muslim armies attacked Europe from several points, across the Pyrenees (France) in 732, almost 400 years before the First Crusade, occupied the Balkans in the 1300s, (not leaving until 1876), went as far as the walls of Vienna in 1529, all in the name of Islam. Between 632-1924 Islam has spread as far east as India and to the door of France, through Spain, and conquest was its almost sole mode of conversion; by the sword. Since Obama was raised in Indonesia he may not have been aware of this traditional mode of conversion, for I’m told the East Indies were not conquered in this fashion.
Why would Obama tell us differently, and by way of justification even say that Americans had justified slavery on the words of Jesus Christ before the Civil War? Wrong. To Obama, slavery was justified on some obscure references in Genesis, via the sons of Cain and the sons of Ham, Noah’s son. I think there are still five people in the Possum Creek Separate Baptist Church in southwest Virginia who still adhere to this belief, but have not heard a white man who had recently bathed say this since 1952. I think Obama got his Christian teachings at that same sort of church (Jeremiah Wright?) though, for he clearly has never read the Old or New Testament of the religion he claims to profess, for not even through Wikipedia could he have become so confused. He can’t even claim to be a Wikipedia-intellectual on matters of Christianity.
So in this case, it is sheer, unadulterated stupidity to try to sell an idea that is so easily refuted. Yet, he tries. So again, why? Stupidity defended by narcissism? A sense of his own infallibility? I just can’t believe Door No 2 is an option here, for his lying (not mistakes) are intentional, and directed at some as yet unknown agenda, with some as yet unrevealed alliance with some element of Islam.
It is not enough to say that Obama is pro-Islam (versus pro-American) but that he has chosen sides among the competing religious and tribal factions in Islam. But which one?
Right now I lean toward that faction being the Muslim Brotherhood. For one, his door is always (still) open at the White House to their emissaries. Second, the Arab Spring of 2011, which again most of you don’t know was in part designed by the US State Department (Hillary, and possibly Samantha Power), and was largely designed to provide a platform for the Muslim Brotherhood to seize power and establish Islamist states across North Africa, as far as Jordan. (Note: this was also the first use of social media in Arab affairs, as Facebook and Google were co-partners in this project.). The type of new state to arise from this Arab Spring was to have the touch and feel of the type Obama himself would like to head, authoritarianism with well creased trousers.
But the Spring fell apart. The Tunisians for instance showed up in masse to vote overwhelmingly against establishing a religious state. In Egypt, the authoritarian regime of Mubarak fell, and the people voted for the new constitution, which ushered in the Brotherhood who instantly tried to change it, heavy-handedly, which caused the military to step in, which cause the American media to lose interest. But the Egyptians put them all in jail anyway, and recently issued 56 death penalties. The MB has been banned, once again, from all politics, as had happened several times before, since Anwar Sadat. (It was the Brotherhood who assassinated Sadat in 1981 for signing a peace treaty with Israeli.)
But in Egypt the Brotherhood established a model for going foward, for there, they let the marauding masses do all the heavy lifting, then sent in the “moderate-Islamist” suits with creased pants-legs to restore order and run the government. The Brotherhood apparently has suits aplenty as they now run the government in Turkey…despite a Turkish population that is secular, doesn’t like them, and is resistant to their efforts to re-Islamicize the country. But ISIS is precisely the sort of military-Islamic organization who can gain real territory, but seemingly have no on-the-ground skills to administer any town, or make any trains run on time. Our media conveniently forgets that the Brotherhood had been at war with Syria and the Assad family for over 40 years, and the “civil war” aspects of that war that involved true freedom fighters largely a mirage. It was only for Obama to recruit a couple of dupes such as Sens McCain and Graham to legitimize what was always a hoax, and pledge a war with Syria which would have been designed to bring the Brotherhood to power. I can’t say why Obama didn’t intervene militarily in Syria after he drew that red line in 2012 but I believe it was in consideration of Turkey, who would like very much for ISIS to clear the Kurdish portions of Syria and Iraq for them before we clear the field for the Brotherhood to take over a land without any real political personality, under the hegemony of the Turks.
Right now, the Brotherhood in Turkey, more than any other Islamist group, can foresee a reestablishment of the caliphate that was once called the Ottoman Empire, centered in Istanbul and stretching to Libya.
Looking for a common thread between Obama’s open lies about history and Islam, I think that thread runs through the Muslim Brotherhood and their nicely pressed suits.
