kenlacrosse

SYRIA FALLOUT: EVEN THE FRENCH ARE BEGINNING TO SOUND ALMOST NOSTALGIC FOR GEORGE W. BUSH. Google Translate version here.

Michael Yon, quoting British MP Adam Holloway:

Outrage is not a strategy. I thought military action always had to have a purpose behind it – so what is the endstate here? Hit, and then hope?

I am not sure in what way even limited strikes help the people living in my constituency: how does this further Britain’s or America’s national security?

The strategy is a cover for President Obama’s lie that there was ever any kind of “red line” in Syria. The endstate is a weak and confused man made to appear strong and confident. But nobody important — Assad, Iran, al Qaeda, China, Russia, our allies — will believe it.

Nor will the American people.

John Reed in today’s Financial Times:

Atem lo levad (“You are not alone”), the US president intoned in American-accented Hebrew, channelling the same spirit of solidarity that John F. Kennedy invoked when he declared “Ich bin ein Berliner” in blockaded West Berlin in 1963.

Israelis are now recalling Mr Obama’s speech ruefully after his decision to refer any military action against Syria to Congress. Asked afterwards about how the decision made them feel, many offered up this word: “alone”.

Their worry is not that Israel is being left alone to cope with Syria, whose war Israel’s government and most of its people want no direct part in.

The fear – and it is a big one – is about the message America’s perceived wavering on Syria sends to its bigger and much more powerful ally: Iran.

If you draw a red line, you had better mean it. Israel would not be afraid today — and Iran emboldened — if President Prevaricator had just kept his big trap shut. Instead, the two most likely outcomes facing us are:

•Obama suffers what amounts to a no-confidence vote as Congress denies him the authority he says he already has, but he would like them to give him even more of.

•Obama gets his authority and fires some missiles at Syria to no practical effect, at which point Emperor New Clothes declares victors, or escalates the conflict even more fruitlessly.

There are other options, most even worse and some slightly better. But these strike me as the most likely.

CRONY REGULATORYISM: DC Fights Uber, Hurts Consumers and the Environment.

You may have heard of Uber, the innovative taxi startup that’s faced legislative roadblocks in city after city as entrenched interests in bed with local politicians dig in their heels. . . .

It’s almost comical at this point—we say ‘almost’, because Uber may be shutting down its latest offerings due to the DC Taxicab Commission’s onerous rules. Needless to say, VM’s staffers in DC have used Uber on several occasions, and we all are quite fond of the service. We certainly hope that DC’s authorities see the light of day on this and come to some accommodation with the company. Protecting a moribund cartel like DC’s cabbies from honest competition serves no one’s interests in the long term.

Politicians are people who use power to help one group at the expense of others. Public interest seldom plays much of a role.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Long-Term Jobless Left Out of the Recovery: Despite Improving Economy, Prospects Are Bleak for Millions of Unemployed.

No sooner had Russia announced the sailing of the SSV-201 intelligence ship Priazovye from Sevastopol towards the Eastern Med “on Sunday evening” than Israel claimed “it carried out a ‘joint’ US missile launch in the Mediterranean, having earlier claimed ignorance.”

Israel’s Missile Defense Organization and the US Missile Defense Agency officials conducted the flight test. The main contractor for the integration and development of the Sparrow is Rafael and the main contractor of the Arrow Weapon System is MLM of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) in conjunction with Boeing,”

The flight of the Sparrow became a world mystery object for a few hours last night until it’s provenance was acknowledged by Israel and the United States.  The alleged “missile” — the Rafael Sparrow — is a target designed to simulate the trajectories of ballistic missiles Israel might face in an actual war.

Black Sparrow simulates unitary short-range theater Ballistic Missiles such as the SCUD-B. It has performed very successfully in a series of fly-out and interception test missions where various trajectories and re-entry maneuvers, were carried out.

Blue and Silver Sparrow simulates unitary and separable medium to long-range theaters such as SCUD-C/D, Shihab and others. Both targets use the same RV, incorporating a redundant Autonomous Flight Termination System and a 3-axis Attitude Control System. Blue Sparrow performed flawlessly in all its missions so far.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the test was scheduled to finish before the Priazovye could arrive on the scene and pick up telemetry and data. The ship, a Vishnya-class elint ship, reports to the Russian brass.

The source said that the ship would not be a formal part of the group of warships from the Russian Navy currently in the region and would be reporting directly to the general staff in Moscow.

A source in the general staff had told Interfax last week that Russia wanted to receive the maximum information about the possible military action in the interests of Russian state security.

“We intend … to thoroughly analyze the tactics of the protagonists in a possible conflict,” a general staff source told the news agency.

That last sentence is curiously anachronistic. The strike on Syria, which the Western news media built up to have taken place last weekend, would have been started or even completed before the Priazovye sailed from Sevastopol. The Russians must have been aware beforehand that Obama would cancel the weekend strike for its departure date to make any sense in that regard.

Similarly, the Sparrow’s test timing is itself curious. The Sparrow — if that is what it was — is a defensive test target designed to simulate incoming Iranian and Syrian missiles. Logically these exercises would have been scheduled before any planned punitive raid on Syria.  And — assuming the attack was really ‘on’ for last weekend, the test was unlikely to have been slotted for its immediate aftermath, when operations may still have been ongoing and tensions at a fever pitch.

Taken together these events are suggestive of a larger background that has not been fully explored in the media. The planned attack on Syria could not have been solely about Assad’s use of chemical weapons any more than the attack on the Libya consulate was about a video produced in LA. It was a prelude to or part of something else. Just what is not at this point clear. If so, then the collapse of Obama’s plan as exemplified by its rejection in the British House of Commons implies a far greater strategic setback than the public is being told.

Really? Are they smoking something?  Or is the whole thing a cover for something else?

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

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AXIS OF INEPTITUDE: My USA Today column on the Obama/Hillary/Kerry foreign policy debacle.

Via Ed Driscoll, via Small Dead Animals.

A BARACK DIVIDED AGAINST HIMSELF CANNOT STAND: Victor Davis Hanson: Obama Indicts Obama.

One of the problems that Barack Obama has in mounting an attack against the Assad regime is that the gambit violates every argument Barack Obama used against the Bush administration to establish his own anti-war candidacy.

The hypocrisy is so stunning that it infuriates his critics and stuns his supporters.

Deriding the Iraq war was Obama’s signature selling point. He used it to great effect against both Hillary Clinton (who voted for the war) in the Democratic primaries and John McCain in the general election. For the last five years, disparagement of “Iraq” and “Bush” has seemed to intrude into almost every sentence the president utters.

And now? His sudden pro-war stance makes a number of hypocritical assumptions.

Why yes, yes it does.

President Obama’s surprising decision to seek congressional authorization to attack Syria has caused considerable concern in Israel, according to David Horovitz, founding editor of the Times of Israel. Horovitz says the Israeli political and military leadership “is now fearful that, in the end, domestic politics or global diplomacy will ultimately lead the US to hold its fire altogether.” Moreover:

It is worried at the ever-deeper perception of Obama’s America in the Middle East as weak, hesitant and confused — most especially in the view of the region’s most radical forces, notably including Bashar Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran. And it is profoundly concerned that the president has set a precedent, in seeking an authorization from Congress that he had no legal requirement to seek — and that Congress was not loudly demanding — that may complicate, delay or even rule out credible action to thwart a challenge that dwarfs Assad’s chemical weapons capability: Iran’s drive to nuclear weapons.

Let’s break this down.

If Congress does not authorize President Obama to attack Syria (possible) and in that event, Obama backs down (very possible), the U.S. will, indeed, be viewed by Assad, Hezbollah, Iran, and just about everyone else as weak, hesitant and confused. This outcome may be fine — perhaps even optimal — as far as left-wing Democrats are concerned. But it shouldn’t sit well with Republican legislators. They should keep this in mind when they vote on the question Obama has put to them.

If Congress authorizes the use of military force and Obama launches a campaign that significantly degrades the military assets of the Assad regime, then Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran will begin to take the U.S. more seriously, whatever they say publicly. In this scenario, Obama’s decision to go to Congress will, if anything, make the U.S. appear all the more resolved to confront the Middle East bad guys, at least when we can do so at a relatively low cost. Right now, I don’t think that’s the perception.

But hasn’t Obama also demonstrated that he won’t use force to stop Iran’s nuclear program without going to Congress? And won’t Congress be much less inclined to launch an attack on Iran than on Syria?

The answer to the second question may well be yes. But, as a logical matter, the answer to the first question is no, not necessarily. The premise (whether valid or not) of Obama’s decision to go to Congress over Syria is that the resulting delay won’t adversely affect our ability to strike because time is not of the essence in this case. And even before he decided to go to Congress, it was clear that Obama didn’t regard stealth as essential.

In the case of Iran, Obama could authorize a strike without seeking congressional approval on the theory going to Congress would be inconsistent with the need for rapidity and secrecy, as it surely would be in that instance.

As a practical matter, though, it’s nearly certain that Obama won’t attack Iran either with or without the approval of Congress. If Obama’s handling of the Syria business has helped drive this reality home to Israel’s political and military leadership, then it has that, at least, to recommend it.

Conservatives and libertarians can rejoice, if they wish, at the spectacle of Barack Obama proving once again — and perhaps more definitively than ever — that he is the worst president of the modern era, through his utter mishandling of the Syrian situation.

But they ought to wipe the smirks off their faces, because here’s the bitter truth: The GOP bench — the right-wing or even center right-wing presidents in waiting — isn’t a helluva lot better. Not enough, anyway.

At no time in our history, at least in my increasingly long lifetime, has there been such a dearth of key political leadership in our country on both sides of the ideological divide — and at a moment when the world seems about to explode.

Much as they have a great deal to recommend domestically, I’m sorry but Ted Cruz and Rand Paul — the leading “conservatarian” lights of the Senate — do not seem prepared to deal with Syria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, North Korea, and, of course, Russia and China.

It is not enough to roll up the libertarian gangplanks and let the insane of the world blow each other up. That policy rarely works. It certainly didn’t in the 1930s. The insane of the world have a way of coming back to bite you. They’re doing their best at this very moment.

This is a sad Labor Day. America needs serious leadership and it doesn’t have it. Say what you want about this country, about its mistakes and its flaws, but a Pax Americana has prevailed since World War II. And that Pax has been a great positive for humanity. The Obama era seems to be ending it.

And the leadership pool does not look capable of recovering it. No Reagans are in the offing.

On the Democratic side we have the addle-brained Biden and the dishonest, selfish Hillary.

On the Republican side… who?

No one of real stature.

BUZZFEED ON THE INTERNET’S REACTION TO OBAMA’S BOMB-SYRIA PLAN: The memes are running 10-1 against, Mr. President.

They left out this one:

Did you ever think you’d live to see this happen — and on Labor Day?

RON BAILEY: Watched Cops Are Polite Cops: How requiring police to wear video cameras will protect your constitutional rights.

Who will watch the watchers? What if all watchers were required to wear a video camera that would record their every interaction with citizens? In her ruling in a recent civil suit challenging the New York City police department’s notorious stop-and-frisk rousting of residents, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Federal District Court in Manhattan imposed an experiment in which the police in the city’s precincts with the highest reported rates of stop-and-frisk activity would be required to wear video cameras for one year.

This is a really good idea. Earlier this year, a 12-month study by Cambridge University researchers revealed that when the city of Rialto, California, required its cops to wear cameras, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percent and the use of force by officers dropped by almost 60 percent. Watched cops are polite cops.

Jay Stanley, a policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), calls police-worn video cameras “a win/win for both the public and the police.” Win/win because video recordings help shield officers from false accusations of abuse as well as protecting the public against police misconduct. The small cameras like the AXON Flex from Taser International attach to an officer’s sunglasses, hat, or uniform.

In order to make sure that both the public and police realize the greatest benefits from body-worn video cameras, a number of policies need to be implemented.

Read the whole thing. And I agree. Citizens may have a due process right to record the police, but there’s no reason to rely on that.

And now France will reconsider the Syria operation. Reuters reports:  “France will not launch an assault on Syria alone and will wait for U.S. Congress to decide on whether to punish President Bashar al-Assad’s government for a gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said.” In fact, the French president himself was under pressure to consult with parliament before deciding.

Valls made the comments on Sunday to Europe 1 radio as pressure mounted in France for President Francois Hollande to put the question of intervention to a parliamentary vote.

Also on Sunday, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he would meet with the heads of the two houses of parliament and the opposition on Monday to discuss Syria before a scheduled parliamentary debate on Syria on Wednesday.

But while the pressure to create consensus before acting builds, an article in the Wall Street Journal emphasized that Obama sought only his own counsel before deciding to grant Congress a role. It was almost as if he was granting Congress some of his personal authority as an act of generosity. “After a 45-minute walk Friday night, President Barack Obama made a fateful decision that none of his top national security advisers saw coming: To seek congressional authorization before taking military action in Syria.”

Until Friday night, Mr. Obama’s national-security team was focused on only consulting Congress, rather than seeking a vote on an authorization to use force. Mr. Obama’s team concluded that Mr. Obama had the legal authority to act without congressional authorization and was proceeding on that basis.

During his daily wrap-up meeting with Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Mr. Obama and Mr. McDonough went on a 45-minute walk around the White House grounds.

During the walk, Mr. Obama told Mr. McDonough his thinking—that consulting with Congress wasn’t enough—lawmakers should have to go on the record one way or the other. …

The change in Mr. Obama’s thinking confounded White House insiders. Some raised concerns about the decision. They asked what would happen if Congress refused to authorize using force, a senior administration official said.

‘What happens’ in the light of the latest developments is that France may not go at all in that event. Although the ambiguous wording of the Reuters article does not settle whether France will absolutely require US Congressional approval before joining the operation or whether it will join an action authorized solely by executive authority, a prospect that arose when Fox News earlier reported that “one senior State Department official … told Fox News that the president’s goal to take military action will indeed be carried out, regardless of whether Congress votes to approve the use of force” it now seems inconceivable that Paris will openly take sides in a Constitutional dispute.  The French president is himself being reined in.

Whether Obama admits it or not, his leash has been pulled taut. He must get Congressional approval or it’s off. One problem the President will face is that he can no longer fob off the legislator’s questions. They will ask for names, dates, documents. They may even ask about Benghazi. Asking for permission will be a very uncomfortable experience for the man who was formerly above everything.

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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SMART DIPLOMACY: McCain says Syria’s Assad ‘euphoric,’ Iranians ‘happy.’

A comprehensive disaster like the Obama administration can’t be summed up in one statistic, but the one that comes closest is labor force participation. The combined effect of many misguided policies–Obamacare, ballooning spending, massive debt, tax increases, subsidizing of inefficient energy, anti-growth regulation, encouragement of food stamp fraud, and many more–has been to drive many millions of Americans out of the labor force. Express Employment Professionals has produced a white paper that illuminates this human tragedy:

The labor force participation rate is currently at a level not seen since the 1970s – 63.4 percent.

While the unemployment rate has steadily decreased from its high of 10.0 percent in October of 2009 to 7.4 percent in July of 2013, the percentage of Americans in the labor force has not risen. It has fallen about 2.7 percentage points since the onset of the latest recession.

This is a tragedy in the making, and its impact on the country has been underestimated. When Americans quit looking for work because they conclude not working beats working, America faces a significant problem.

This chart shows labor force participation from 2007 through 2013. Note that what has mostly driven Americans out of the labor force is not the recession that ended in 2009, but rather the Obama policies that followed:

President Obama’s policies have devastated all age groups, but the most heartbreaking impact is on the young:

Gallup reports that, “The lack of new hiring over the past several years…seems to have disproportionately reduced younger Americans’ ability to obtain full-time jobs.”

According to Gallup’s “Payroll to Population” measure, fewer Millennials were working full time in June of 2013 than in June of 2012, 2011, or 2010.

A recent 2012 Pew Research Center study found that 36 percent of the nation’s Millennials were still living with their parents.

Millions of older Americans have responded to the lack of job opportunities under Obamanomics by becoming “disabled.” Based on disability statistics, you would think that Americans have suddenly gotten sickly, or perhaps that we have been fighting a war:

A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco also attributes the drop in [labor force participation] in part to the “increased use of some social benefit programs, notably disability insurance.”

Fourteen million Americans, including roughly 8.5 million former workers receive disability. In 2011, that included 4.6 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 64. These Americans are not included among the “unemployed.”

Fourteen million Americans on disability–that is more than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho and West Virginia, combined: every man, woman and child in 13 states. The exploding ranks of the “disabled” are due to the absence of jobs in Barack Obama’s economy. The human cost of this tragedy is incalculable.

The CEO of Express Employment Professionals, a former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says: “All indicators suggest this shift [out of the labor force] is not sustainable.” That’s putting it mildly. It is inherent in the human condition (the modern version of the human condition, anyway) that those of working age must produce enough to support children and the elderly as well as themselves. But when only 63% of those who are of working age are actually working, they must support not only the young and the old, but more than one-half of another person of working age who isn’t working. That is a recipe for not just economic, but social collapse. It is the most bitter legacy of the Obama years.

CAROL PLATT LIEBAU: Time To End The Special Perks Of Politics.

It’s impossible for our elected representatives to “represent” us properly if they are living a life that’s insulated from many of the onerous laws or regulations they inflict on the rest of us — or, more generally, if they’re a special “protected class.”

Perhaps the apotheosis of this deplorable trend is the fact that, in 20 states, private lobbyists get public pensions. That’s right — through their taxes, citizens of those states are getting the dubious privilege of subsidizing the retirements of employees of private lobbying firms.

It’s time to stop this disgraceful boondoggle, along with all the other cushy little special favors that our elected officials have granted themselves . . . and their friends.

Indeed.

So, thousands of fast-food workers are out on strike against the national burger chains, demanding that their wages be doubled to $15 per hour. But the national chains don’t control employee wages; how much to pay their people is in the hands of local franchise owners,

Therefore, if you are one of the concerned, caring, and vastly indignant activists behind this strike, I’m here to tell you that your social-justice problem has a simple solution. Take out a loan (or put together the money from your like-minded activist friends), buy a franchise from one of the chains, and hire workers at $15 an hour.

There, that was simple, wasn’t it? You’ll make money hand over fist and demonstrate to all those eeevil corporations that they can too pay a “just wage”; they just don’t want to because they’re greedy.

Or…maybe not. If it were that simple, everyone would be doing it. The commercial landscape would be alive with virtuous workers’ collectives paying their members fat wages and thumbing their noses at top-hatted plutocrats. Why doesn’t this happen?

Because in order for you to pay a worker $15 per hour, that worker has to net you more than $15 an hour in revenue. Otherwise your business runs at a loss until it crashes and the job goes away.

But it’s actually worse than that. Employer Social Security “contributions” approximately double the costs per burger-flipper right away; other tax and regulatory burdens push it up further. To sustain $15 an hour in wages, your employees have to pull $35 an hour or more in revenue each.

That kind of revenue per employee is relatively easy to arrange in a profession or a skilled trade, or even at a really chi-chi restaurant. But we’re talking flipping burgers here, which raises two serious problems.

One is that flipping burgers is not neurosurgery. The job procedures are simple and mechanical; adding a lot of value with a human touch is hard. In truth the main reason burger joints have human employees at all (other than maybe one machine-tender) is that people like to have their food handed to them by a human being rather than catching it off the end of a conveyer belt.

The other problem is that price competition in the fast-food industry is brutal. The name of the game is fast and cheap; that means your franchise has to run on a razor thin margin. If you try to charge significantly more over your cost of the basic inputs (meat, potatoes, cooking oil, electricity) than your competitors do, your customers will desert you.

Which is why the workers’ collective scenario fails. Your social-justice intentions won’t change the cost of those inputs one bit; the only way you can generate enough revenue per hour to cover that $35 or more in cost per employee is to raise prices. A lot. At which point your customers will instantly bail out.

Franchise owners aren’t demons. What they can do is constrained by economics. The wages they can pay are effectively bounded above by the amount of revenue each employee can capture, which in turn is bounded by price competition. If that amount is low, the wages will be too, and no amount of political screaming can fix that.

This is why minimum wages kill jobs. In the U.S. of 2013, the magic threshold is abour $14.50 an hour – if an employee can’t generate that much gain, the job either won’t exist at all or will only exist illegally off the books where taxes and regulation can’t more than double its cost.

But if you’re illiterate, unskilled, or just young, you may not be able to net $14.50 per hour for an employer. In that case you get the shaft. You might be willing to work for less, but the system will “protect” you by keeping you unemployed and desperate.

How this logic applies to other low-wage service jobs – in places like (say) big-box retail stores – is left as an easy exercise.

If you want to tempt fate, organize an expedition to one of the polar regions to call attention to the perils of global warming. The outcome is foreordained:

Severe weather conditions hindered our early progress and now ice chokes the passage ahead.

Our ice router Victor has been very clear in what lies ahead. He writes, “Just to give you the danger of ice situation at the eastern Arctic, Eef Willems of “Tooluka” (NED) pulled out of the game and returning to Greenland. At many Eastern places of NWP locals have not seen this type ice conditions. Residents of Resolute say 20 years have not seen anything like. It’s, ice, ice and more ice. Larsen, Peel, Bellot, Regent and Barrow Strait are all choked. That is the only route to East. Already West Lancaster received -2C temperature expecting -7C on Tuesday with the snow.”

Richard Weber, my teammate to the South Pole in 2009 and without doubt the most accomplished polar skier alive today, is owner and operator of Arctic Watch on Cunningham Inlet at the northern end of Somerset Island. Arctic Watch faces out onto our proposed eastern route. Richard dropped me a note the other day advising: “This has been the coldest season with the most ice since we started Arctic Watch in 2000. Almost no whales. The NWPassage is still blocked with ice. Some of the bays still have not melted!”

…we’d require at least another 50-60 days to make it to Pond Inlet. Throw in the issues of less light, colder temperatures, harsher fall storms and lots of ice blocking the route and our decision is easy.

So the expedition is being abandoned. Did this experience cause any second thoughts on the global warming campaign? Of course not!

Our message remains unaffected though, bringing awareness to the pressing issues of climate change in the arctic.

Right. Some would say the Arctic could use a little climate change, but don’t hold your breath.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Obama has surrendered. NBC reports, “Obama will seek Congressional approval before any military action against Syria”. Strikes would be “effective tomorrow or next week or one month from now,” the President was quoted as saying.

As I wrote upon hearing that the British had pulled out of his ‘limited but decisive’ symbolic gesture: “it’s over. … Now, with Britain out of the operation, Obama faces the prospect of going into Syria almost literally alone, without the UN, NATO, Congress, or even the UK to back him up. Two courses are now open to him. He can climb down as best he can and pretend he’s changed his mind or he can go forward risking a wider war for nothing.”

It just took him that many more hours to realize that Steiner was not coming.

But the crisis has not yet ended. It’s just moved from Syria to Washington. There is now a power vacuum in Washington. For either there’s a new President Obama — one who has learned to share power not only with the other branches, but also with other points of view within America — or a new President in the manner of Gerald Ford after Nixon left. The old omnipotent President Obama, able to make the seas fall, the child of the world uniquely equipped to build bridges everywhere, answerable only to himself, is gone.

As America’s leader the old Obama handed Syria, Russia and Iran and huge victory. Gave it to them on a platter with his vaunting, invincible stupidity. In the process, not only has he shot America in the foot on the world stage but he will have emboldened the Ayatollahs to forge ahead with their nuclear ambitions. He will have encouraged Russia to make a comeback in the region. We will shortly feel these effects in Egypt, Iran and even in Europe.

He has also destroyed himself. It was painful to watch, even to those who had no particular fondness for him. There is always something inexpressibly sad about seeing a great thing die, whether it is a ship, a whale, an enfeebled giant, or a puffed up fantasy. And his “friends”, so obsequious in his salad days, were silently tiptoeing toward the door has he self-destructed. Nile Gardiner at the Telegraph mused over why Hillary Clinton was “remarkably silent on Syria”.

One voice in Washington that has been remarkably absent from this week’s Syria debate has been that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton hasn’t said anything at all about President Obama’s plans for military strikes against the dictatorship in Damascus. As someone who dominated the US foreign policy landscape over the past four years, Clinton’s silence on Syria is striking. What explains this?

What explains it is she could see the ship going down, as Gardiner himself concluded. ” Her own handling of the Syria crisis was a spectacular failure, as has been President Obama’s. The last thing she needs in the lead-up to her inevitable White House run is a reminder to Americans of her poor track record as Secretary of State, from the Syrian debacle to the farcical Russian reset. Syria is a liability for Clinton in 2016, and with good reason she is nervous about what happens next.”

The wheels on the bus go round and round …

What happens next? That is indeed the question. If Obama can reinvent himself as the President of the United States of America; if he can throw out all the hacks in his office who have led him to this sorry pass; if he can learn from his mistakes and start to think strategically, then the setback will be merely temporary. He will emerge much more formidable than he is now.

But if he persists then this is merely the first and the smallest of an unending string of defeats. If he continues with the pretense no one now believes he will only succeed in making a fool of himself. But until a new Obama emerges or he heads for the links, the Oval Office is only half tenanted; there’s no one in the White House — and the enemies of America will scent this.

Nobody ever beat arithmetic. Nothing has ever beat reality. The Narrative 0, The Truth 1.

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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HEY, IT’S NOT LIKE SHE WAS SECRETARY OF STATE UNTIL JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO OR ANYTHING: Why a nervous Hillary Clinton is remarkably silent on Syria.

HEY, IT’S NOT LIKE SHE WAS SECRETARY OF STATE OR ANYTHING: Hillary Clinton Stays Quiet On Syria. “While at State, Clinton was more than active on crisis in Syria: She voiced frequent condemnation for President Bashar al-Assad, worked to pledge tens of millions in humanitarian aid to the Syrian people, strengthened sanctions against Assad’s regime, and at times took a harder line on the country’s civil war than the president.”

Well, earlier she called Assad a “reformer.” So it might be a bit awkward.

DOG WHISTLE: Cornel West: MLK 50 Was ‘Coronation of Bonafide House Negro of Obama Plantation…Al Sharpton.’

I want to draw attention to Sohrab Ahmari’s Wall Street Journal weekend interview with Craig Zucker: “What happens when a man takes on the feds.” It is a profoundly disturbing tale of the Age of Obama.

The tale calls to mind (to my mind anyway) the Leninist question: What is to be done? I wish I knew.

EXPLOITATION: The Atlantic: Barely a third of U.S. senators pay their interns — and embarrassingly for Democrats, a party focused on workplace welfare, most of them are Republicans.

UPDATE: Turns out this is not from John Cleese, though it has an Aristotelian authenticity that causes me to leave it up anyway.

This is making the rounds, and should not be missed:

ALERTS TO THREATS
IN 2013 EUROPE

From JOHN CLEESE

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from “Pissed Off” to “Let’s get the Bastards.” They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide.” The only two higher levels in France are “Collaborate” and “Surrender.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ‘s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.

Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout Loudly and Excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.” Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”

The Germans have increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.” They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose.”

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels ..

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Australia, meanwhile, has raised its security level from “No worries” to “She’ll be right, Mate.” Two more escalation levels remain: “Crikey! I think we’ll need to cancel the barbie this weekend!” and “The barbie is cancelled.” So far no situation has ever warranted use of the last final escalation level.

Regards,
John Cleese ,
British writer, actor and tall person

And as a final thought – Greece is collapsing, the Iranians are getting aggressive, and Rome is in disarray. Welcome back to 430 BC.

SMART DIPLOMACY: Flashback: When Hillary Clinton Dubbed Syria’s Bashar Assad a ‘Reformer.’

CHANGE: World Federation of Scientists changes its policy: “Climate change in itself is not a planetary emergency.”

Well, the Democrats had fun this week, with their partisan pep rally on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have Dream Speech,” whose central principles today’s liberals wish to have declared unconstitutional.  Heh.  And I can’t help delight in the spectacle of watching John Kerry have to flush “global test” down the toilet.  What’s that old line: Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.

This sounds about as plausible as most other alternative energy ideas.

And finally. . .