Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Friday, July 9, 2010

It's All About My "Cheshire Cat" of a Middle Name and I Reach Out to Islam

Israel just doesn't understand, they hate me for my middle name, not because I have turned my back on the one ally we have in the Near East.

No one gets it better than Claudia Rosett, here-

As part of his public reconciliation with Israel, Obama for the first time in the almost 18 months since he became president just gave an interview to an Israeli TV station (this from the same American president who gave his first interview in office to Al-Arabiya —remember that ?). Speaking Wednesday to Israel’s Channel 2 News, Obama struck a friendly tone.

And yet, as if he can’t quite help himself, out comes this astonishingly crude remark. As reported in the New York Times, he was asked about “the anxiety of many Israelis who feel that he does not have a special bond with Israel.” Obama replied — get ready for it: “Some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion.”

Come again? There are Americans who have wondered about that middle name, less because it is “Hussein” than because it has lived a strange life of its own, fading in and out depending on the audience – disappearing during Obama’s 2008 election campaign, reappearing during his outreach to the “Muslim world,” coming and going as if it mattered in some malleable way to Obama himself. Has he ever considered that public worry about his middle name might have more to do with the slippery nature of its use, and the too often disturbing policies of its owner, than with the name itself?

And for Obama to impute Israeli anxiety to his Cheshire Cat of a middle name is grossly dismissive and insulting to the Israelis. Does he really believe they are such bigots as to judge him — other things equal — by his middle name? Does he have any evidence for that? Or was he drawing on his own stereotype of Israelis? How exactly was he judging them, when he tossed out that remark?

I’ll venture a wild guess that the problem for Israelis is not Obama’s name — first, last, or middle — but his flim-flam fictions and negligence regarding too many hard and dangerous realities in the Middle East. Since becoming commander-in-chief of Israel’s most important ally, America, Obama has repeatedly bypassed or undermined Israel’s very real concerns about self-defense. He has been content to leave Israel in the impossible position of being constrained to wait upon his own feckless policy of apologies and “outreach” toward the “Muslim world,” while Iran races toward nuclear weapons and its leaders trumpet their desire to wipe Israel off the map, in concert with the goals of Iran’s terrorist allies Hamas and Hezbollah — bordering Israel out of Gaza and Lebanon.

Perhaps it’s Obama himself who’s been paying too much attention to his own middle name — betting that by sheer force of personal style, by extending his hand and averting his eyes, he can turn tyrants and terrorists into well-behaved pals. Step-by-step, realities have been interfering with that approach, and to some extent, this has begun moderating Obama’s policies. It’s been a while since he last advertised his abilities to conjure peace out of negotiating with Iran’s mullahs “without preconditions.” On July 1, presented with an overwhelmingly approved bipartisan bill by Congress, he finally gave the OK to enhanced Iran sanctions. And, having snubbed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May, Obama recovered his manners during a meeting this week.

If this is Obama’s public education we are observing, it is an unnerving performance — slow, shaky, half-baked and resting on no discernible set of principles likely to instill confidence in any of America’s allies. It has a lot of Americans feeling pretty nervous too. As long as this is the tenor of Obama’s leadership, it doesn’t matter whether his name is Barack Hussein Obama or Digby Abraham Buckley III. There are life and death matters here in which he has been failing the test as leader of the Free World, and that — not his middle name — is the problem.


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