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Joe Biden, Barack Obama and the politics of personal destruction

by Mojambo ( 194 Comments › )
Filed under Elections 2012, Joe Biden at October 12th, 2012 - 8:00 am

I agree with her assessment that Ryan was being deferential to a elder man who frankly did not deserve it. The thread I put up yesterday by Daniel Henninger was eerily appropriate for what was about to come last night.

by Caroline Glick

Thursday the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger published a column called “Obama and the L-word.” In it he described with disgust and dismay the way the Obama administration has been playing fast and loose with the term “liar” to describe Mitt Romney since Romney trounced Obama in last week’s presidential debate.

Henninger noted that the use of the term, cheapens and coarsens the political discourse in the US in a manner that is unprecedented in US politics. He also noted , rightly that this is not part of the American political tradition. It is of a piece with the propaganda of totalitarian regimes.

As he explained:

The Obama campaign’s resurrection of “liar” as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it. The idea was never to elevate political debate but to debauch it.

The purpose of calling someone a liar then was not merely to refute their ideas or arguments. It was to nullify them, to eliminate them from participation in politics. That’s what is so unsettling about a David Axelrod or David Plouffe following accusations of dishonesty and lies with “whether that person should sit in the Oval Office.” And that is followed by President Obama himself feeding the new line in stump speeches without himself ever using the L-word.

This Obama campaign is saying, “We don’t want to compete with Mitt Romney. We want to obliterate him.”

Henninger ended his column by wondering how the Obama campaign’ post-presidential debate employment of this tactic against Romney would impact Biden’s debate performance.

And last night we got the answer. Throughout the debate, Biden treated Rep. Paul Ryan with contempt. He never responded to any of Ryan’s reasoned, substantive criticisms of Obama’s policies. He simply called him a liar, repeatedly. With no justification. He sneered. He guffawed. And he maligned Ryan for 90 minutes.

I watched the debate on Fox News. I suppose the commentators hadn’t read Henninger’s article. They were all expressing shock at Biden’s nastiness. They didn’t seem to recognize that it is part of the Obama campaign’s strategy.

Another aspect of this that both Henninger and the Fox commentators were too gentle to mention outright – although Henninger nearly did is that the politics of personal destruction is based on projection. The side doing it is accusing their opponents of doing precisely what they are doing. In last night’s debate, Biden lied, flat out lied, repeatedly. He lied about what the military thinks of the sequestration policy of gutting military budgets. He lied about what the intelligence community said about the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. He lied about how Medicare is impacted by Obamacare.

[…….]

A word about those lies. At least in the case of the Benghazi lie, Biden’s actions show how lies are part and parcel of how the Obama administration does its business on a daily basis.

The only basis for the claim that US intelligence said the attack wasn’t a terror attack but was a response to that stupid, irrelevant anti-Islam film on YouTube was a statement by James Clapper, Obama’s appointed Director of National Intelligence.

It must be said, Clapper is not a credible source.

Clapper has abused his office repeatedly to politicize intelligence and facts in order to serve the appeasement-of-Islamic-terrorists agenda of the president he serves.

[…….]

In his words, “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam. They have pursued social ends, betterment of the political order in Egypt, etc.”

This was a complete lie and anyone with even a modicum of awareness about the Brotherhood – even without the benefit of classified information – knows that it is a lie. He should have been fired for saying such nonsense because it isn’t just wrong, it is dangerous, as we see today with the Muslim Brotherhood in charge in Egypt.

But this is par for the course for Obama appointees. And it shows the depths to which its officials will sink in order to push the President’s agenda.

Lies are not a simply campaigning tactic or strategy. They are the heart of how this administration does business.

Steven Hayes on Fox made the important point that in the space of just a couple of minutes Biden said US intelligence misled the administration on Libya and could be totally trusted to get Iran’s nuclear capabilities just right.

[………]

I was dismayed that Ryan didn’t just come out and attack Biden for doing what he was doing. But he was in a tight spot. Martha Raddatz, the moderator was there playing interference for Biden the whole time. Every time Ryan started making a point, she’d interrupt him and change the subject.

Aside from that I felt the age disparity worked in Biden’s favor because Ryan was clearly trying to be deferential to his elder who clearly did not deserve any deference from him. Ryan was playing by the old rule book, treating his opponent with respect. Biden was playing by the Obama rulebook and treated his opponent with contempt as a means of destroying him personally.

Commentators all say that Ryan held his own. And that’s true and good for him, as far as that goes. But that isn’t the point.

The point is that Romney has been warned, by Biden and the campaign. He needs to stay on offense. And that doesn’t just mean to defend his positions or call Obama on the failure of his policies. It means to confront Obama on what he is doing in his campaign and refuse to pretend that this is business as usual.

The ugliness we saw last night is just a foretaste of what will come in the next three week and Romney better be ready. Because if he isn’t, the ugliness he will need to deal with in the next three weeks will be nothing in comparison to the ugliness that will become America in a second Obama administration.

Read the rest – Biden, Obama and the politics of personal destruction

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Elections 2012, Joe Biden | 194 Comments »

These perilous times

by Mojambo ( 108 Comments › )
Filed under Gaza, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Palestinians at October 8th, 2012 - 9:00 am

A very interesting article about the Left’s assault on free speech, religious freedom, and their increasingly fascistic tactics. They cannot win the battle of ideas but they do not hesitate to strong arm any one who stands in their way. Now is not the time for people such as John McCain but for those who as Winston Churchill once said after the Munich sell out “take our stand for liberty as in olden times“.

by Caroline Glick

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s legal term in office expired nearly four years ago. But his supporters don’t care. In Israel, Washington and throughout the world, Abbas’s supporters extol the authoritarian leader as a great moderate. In 2002, desperately searching for a face for the Palestinians that wasn’t Yasser Arafat’s face, the Left pushed Abbas out from behind Arafat’s shadow. Abbas, who served as Arafat’s deputy for 39 years, was upheld as a great moderate and placed in the invented position of Palestinian prime minister.

The fact that Abbas was an inveterate Jew-hater who spent four decades in the senior leadership of a terrorist organization and whose doctoral dissertation was a long denial of the Holocaust, was brushed aside.

His leftist supporters don’t care that he says Israel has no right to exist. They are untroubled by his 2008 rejection of then-prime minister Ehud Olmert’s unprecedentedly generous offer of peace and Palestinian statehood. They don’t mind that Abbas has refused to negotiate peace with Israel for the past four years. They don’t care that he has signed two unity government deals with Hamas or that he seeks to gain sovereignty for a Palestinian state through the UN and so establish a Palestinian state in a formal state of war with Israel.

[……..]

As a consequence, most Israelis greeted Abbas’s speech at the UN General Assembly last week with indifference. In that speech, Abbas made clear – yet again – that he remains Arafat’s loyal deputy. The majority of Abbas’s speech involved a litany of libels against Israel, which he accused of everything from terrorism to apartheid, colonialism, racism, murder, theft, etc., etc., etc.

Then he moved on to his demands. In addition to reinstating his demand that Israel agree to every Palestinian demand as a precondition for negotiations, Abbas demanded that Israel release all Palestinian terrorists from its prisons.

[…….]

But who cares? Abbas certainly doesn’t. And neither do his supporters. Their support for Abbas has nothing to do with what he says or does. It has to do with who they are and what they want. Abbas is their prop, not their partner.

Abbas’s Israeli supporters are the core of far-leftists who brought us the phony peace process with the PLO. Two thousand dead Israelis later, and with no peace in sight, their camp is much smaller today than it was in 1993. But it is still dedicated. And it is overpopulated by members of the media.

TIPPING HIS hat to this group, this week Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced in a media interview that he thinks that Israel should unilaterally withdraw from much of Judea and Samaria.

[…….]

We left Gaza and see the consequences of that unilateral withdrawal every day as southern Israel is bombarded with missiles and rockets. We left and Gaza was transformed into a hub for global jihad, increasingly indistinguishable from Sinai. The very notion that our defense chief could suggest adopting an identical strategy for Judea and Samaria is both obscene and frightening.

[………]

Barak lost his political base when he left the Labor Party and formed his own Independence faction with other breakaway Labor politicians at the beginning of 2011. He needs Abbas’s Israeli supporters to vote for him if he is to get elected to the next Knesset. Even more crucially, Barak needs Abbas’s supporters in the Israeli media. So to win their support, he opted to run on a platform of expelling Jews from their homes.

Barak’s move doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about him. He remains the political opportunist he has always been. His move is interesting because of what it reveals about the nature of Israel’s Left.

There is no rational way to argue that Israel can gain any advantage by surrendering Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians. If Israel departs, either Abbas will gobble up the territory and demand more, or he will swallow the concession and get swallowed by Hamas, which will demand more – as happened in Gaza.

Either way, Israel loses.

But that doesn’t matter for the Left. The Left continues to support Israeli withdrawals because its members know that the biggest loser of such an action won’t be Israel as a whole. It will be the Israeli Right. And that is all the Left cares about.

[……….]

The Israeli Left is not alone in its belief that its number one priority is to destroy its domestic political opposition. Throughout the Western world, the political Left is increasingly rallying around positions that are in fundamental conflict with their nation’s interests as well as with the specific ideological commitments of the Left, for the sole purpose of gaining and maintaining power.In recent weeks, the Left in the US has exposed its motivations and purpose in profoundly troubling ways. If Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel is the core of the Zionist revolution, freedom of speech is the foundation of America. Without Jewish settlement, there is no Israel. Without freedom of speech, there is no America.

IN RECENT weeks, US President Barack Obama and all of his senior aides and supporters have launched an assault on freedom of speech. They have attacked previously unknown figures because they dared to exercise their freedom of speech to produce an anti-Islamic film and broadcast it on YouTube. The White House pressured Google (which owns YouTube) to take the movie down. Obama’s media supporters have gone along with this shocking assault on bedrock American principles.

The Left’s support for Obama’s bid to repress freedom of speech in relation to the movie was not an isolated incident. Today the enlightened leftists of New York and Washington are apoplectic because a federal judge required New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to post paid advertisements by the Stop the Islamization of America human rights group calling for Americans to support Israel against jihad.

The content of the ads is self-evidently reasonable. They read, “In any war between the savage and the civilized man, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

SIOA’s founder Pamela Geller submitted the ads to the MTA last year in response to a rash of anti- Israel ads calling for the US to end its support for the Jewish state. Those ads were published on New York buses and subways and on public transportation around the US.

[……..]

From The New York Times to radical rabbis to pro- Islamic Christian pastors to The Washington Post, everyone is wringing their hands. In a televised debate with Geller, the anti-Israel evangelical pastor Rev. Jim Wallis condemned the ads, told Geller she was going to get Christians killed, (by what or whom, he never said), and demanded that Geller silence herself. As he put it, “Stop talking.”

It is important to be clear. The American Left doesn’t have a problem with free speech, per se. And they aren’t concerned – as Wallis would have you believe – that calling jihad savagery is going to get people killed, (by not-at-all savage jihadists).

The problem with messages like Geller’s is that talk about jihad distracts people from what the Left wants them to be thinking about.

Like the Israeli Left, the American Left doesn’t want Americans to think about the actual threats to the US emanating from the Islamic world. They want the public to think about what for them is the only real threat to their values and their ability to win and wield power.

That threat doesn’t emanate from the Islamic world where women are treated worse than farm animals, homosexuals are hanged in public squares, Christians are forcibly converted and assaulted, churches are burned to the ground, the annihilation of the Jewish people throughout the world is an ardent desire, and “Death to America” is a political program.

For the American Left, the primary threat to their way of life comes from people who oppose abortions and gay marriage and gun control. It comes from people who oppose unionization of government workers and nationalization of healthcare.

[………]

The reason that Islam is supposed to be immune from criticism is that for American leftists as for Israeli leftists, the only important battle is the one against domestic foes. And just as the abysmal results of leftist policies have left the Israeli Left with no choice but to shoot the messengers, so too the American Left must deal with policy failure by silencing the opposition.

In Israel, leftist appeasement of Palestinian terrorists has led to a horrific death toll and the obvious absence of peace. So the Left must silence those who have the temerity to oppose that failed policy. The Right’s most visible members are the religious Zionists, who are disproportionately situated beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and so the Left must destroy them through expulsions, no matter what the cost to Israel.

In America, the Left’s most conspicuous failure is its claim to promote women’s rights, equality and civil liberties in the culture war, even as it defends the Islamic world’s addiction to female genital mutilation, forced marriages, honor killings and executions of homosexuals for the “crime” of being gay. So the Left must silence critics of jihad and Islamism, and hope no one will notice its hypocrisy.

The upshot of all of this is that the Left must be denied its ability to dominate national discourses. Because Abbas and the pathologically Jew-hating society he leads is a threat to the Jewish state, while religious Zionists are not. And the assaults on American embassies throughout the Islamic world are not due to Internet movies, but to the savagery inherent in jihadist Islam.

In these perilous times we cannot permit ourselves to be led astray by those who insist we are our worst enemies.

Read the rest – The Left’s only enemy

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Gaza, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Palestinians | 108 Comments »

The only way America can appease the Muslim world is for America to cease to be America

by Mojambo ( 115 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Egypt, Free Speech, Hate Speech, Islamists, Israel, Media, Mitt Romney at September 24th, 2012 - 11:30 am

The actions of the Egyptian prosecutor in issuing arrest warrants for American citizens exercising their first amendment rights is as Winston Churchill would have referred to it (as he did after the sellout of Czechoslovakia) as being – [T]his is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time. Who amongst us can say with absolute certitiude that a re-elected Obama would not cave in to the next Egyptian request?

by Caroline Glick

On Tuesday, Egypt’s chief prosecutor issued arrest warrants against eight US citizens.

Their purported crimes relate either to their reported involvement in the production of the Internet movie critical of Islam that has received so much attention over the past 10 days, or to other alleged anti-Islamic activities.

One of the US citizens indicted is a woman who converted from Islam to Christianity.

According to the Associated Press, Egypt’s general prosecution issued a statement announcing that the eight US citizens have been indicted on charges of insulting and publicly attacking Islam, spreading false information, and harming Egyptian national unity.

The statement stipulated that they could face the death penalty if convicted.

The AP write-up of the story quoted Mamdouh Ismail, a Salafi attorney who praised the prosecution’s move. He claimed it would deter others from exercising their right to free expression in regards to Islam. As he put it, the prosecutions will “set a deterrent for them and anyone else who may fall into this.” That is, they will deter others from saying anything critical about Islam.

This desire to intimidate free people into silence on Islam is clearly the goal the heads of the Muslim Brotherhood seek to achieve through their protests of the anti-Islamic movie. This was the message of Muslim Brotherhood chief Yussuf Qaradawi. Three days after the anti-American assaults began on the anniversary of the September 11 jihadist attacks on America, Qaradawi gave a sermon on Qatar television, translated by MEMRI.

Qaradawi struck a moderate tone. He called on his followers to stop rioting against the US. Rather than attack the US, Qaradawi urged his Muslim audience to insist that the US place prohibitions on the free speech rights of American citizens by outlawing criticism of Islam – just as the Europeans have done in recent years in the face of Islamic terror and intimidation.

[…]

Both the actions of the Egyptian prosecution and Qaradawi’s sermon prove incontrovertibly that the two policies the US has adopted since September 11, 2001, to contend with Muslim hatred for the US have failed. The neoconservative policy of supporting the democratization of Muslim societies adopted by President Barack Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush has failed. And the appeasement policy adopted by Obama has also failed.

Bush’s democratization policy claimed that the reason the Muslim world had become a hotbed for anti-Americanism and terror was that the Muslim world was not governed by democratic regimes. Once the peoples of the Muslim world were allowed to be free, and to freely elect their governments, the neoconservatives proclaimed, they would abandon their hatred of America.

As a consequence of this belief, when the anti-regime protests against the authoritarian Mubarak regime began in January 2011, the neoconservatives were outspoken supporters of the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak, despite the fact that he had been the US’s key ally in the Arab world for three decades. They supported the political process that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. They supported the process despite the fact that Qaradawi is the most influential cleric in Egypt. They supported it despite the fact that just days after Mubarak was ousted from power, Qaradawi arrived at Cairo’s Tahrir Square and before an audience of two million followers, he called for the invasion of Israel and the conquest of Jerusalem.

In the event, the Egyptian people voted for Qaradawi’s Muslim Brotherhood and for the Salafi party. The distinction between the two parties is that Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood are willing to resort to both violent and nonviolent ways to dominate the world in the name of Islam. The Salafis abjure nonviolence. So while Qaradawi called for the riots to end in order to convince the Americans to criminalize criticism of Islam, his Salafi counterparts called for the murder of everyone involved in producing the anti-Islamic film.

[…]

Ashoush wrote, “Those bastards who did this film are belligerent disbelievers. I issue a fatwa and call on the Muslim youth in America and Europe to do this duty, which is to kill the director, the producer and the actors and everyone who helped and promoted the film.

“So, hurry, hurry, O Muslim youth in America and Europe, and teach those filthy lowly ones a lesson that all the monkeys and pigs in America and Europe will understand. May Allah guide you and grant you success.”

These are the voices of democratic Egypt. The government, which has indicted American citizens on capital charges for exercising their most fundamental right as Americans, is a loyal representative of the sentiments of the Egyptian people who freely elected it. The Salafi preacher is a loyal representative of the segment of the Egyptian people that made the Salafi party the second largest in the Egyptian parliament. Qaradawi’s call for the abolition of freedom of speech in America – as has happened in Europe – and to ban all criticism of Islam is subscribed to by millions and millions of Muslims worldwide who consider him one of the leading Sunni clerics in the world.

Free elections in Egypt have empowered the Egyptian people to use the organs of governance to advance their hatred of America. Their hatred has been empowered, and legitimized, not diminished as the neoconservatives had hoped.

The behavior of the Egyptian government, Qaradawi and the Salafis also makes clear that Obama’s policy of appeasing the Muslim world has failed completely. Whereas Bush believed the source of Muslim hatred was their political oppression at the hands of their regimes, Obama has blamed their rage and hatred on America’s supposed misdeeds.

[…]

There is a difference between appeasing parties that have been harmed by your actions and appeasing parties that wish your destruction. In the 1970s the US appeased the Philippines by transferring sovereignty over the Clark Air Force Base to the Philippine government. America was still America and the US and the Philippines became friends.

To appease a party that hates your way of life, you must change your way of life. The only way America can appease the Muslim world is for America to cease to be America.

Read the rest – Obama’s dangerous consistency

Tags: Caroline Glick
Posted in Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, Egypt, Free Speech, Hate Speech, Islamists, Israel, Media, Mitt Romney | 115 Comments »

The reign of delusion

by Mojambo ( 218 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Hillary Clinton, Islam, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood, September 11, Sharia (Islamic Law), Turkey at September 14th, 2012 - 3:00 pm

Gaddafi, as Miss Glick writes, had been neutered since 2004 and the forces which we backed are responsible for the carnage in Benghazi and the same thing will happen in Damascus after the Assad Crime Family is eventually wiped out. Obama’s foreign policy is even worse (if that is even possible) then his domestic policies. There is no way that the events this week in Egypt and Libya would have happened had Mubarak and Gaddafi still been in charge. By the way, I love her description of ” (Hillary) Clinton, the bewildered stewardess of US foreign policy”, Hillary is starting to make Condi Clueless seem competent.

by Caroline Glick

As he suffocated to death at the US Consulate in Benghazi on the 11th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the US, did US Ambassador Christopher Stevens understand why he and his fellow Americans were being murdered? From what we have learned of this man since he was killed, it is clear that he was extremely courageous. He stole into Benghazi in April 2011 on a cargo ship to serve as chief US liaison officer to the rebel forces fighting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He did the business of the US government in makeshift offices and moved from safe house to safe house under what can only be considered dire conditions of combat.

But did he understand the forces he was unleashing? Stevens arrived in Benghazi at an early phase of US involvement in the rebellion against Gaddafi, a former US foe who had been neutered since 2004. But even then it was clear that the rebels with whom he worked included jihadist fighters associated with al-Qaida. Their significance became obvious when just after the regime fell in November 2011, rebel forces foisted the flag of al-Qaida over the courthouse in Benghazi.

Did Stevens understand what this meant? Perhaps he did. But his boss, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, certainly didn’t. Following Tuesday’s attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Clinton said, “Today, many Americans are asking – indeed, I asked myself – how could this happen? How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.”

Clinton, the bewildered stewardess of US foreign policy, then proclaimed with utter certainty that there is nothing to be concerned about. “We must be clear-eyed, even in our grief. This was an attack by a small and savage group – not the people or government of Libya,” she said.

Of course, what she failed to mention was that after the rebels felled Gaddafi’s regime – with US support – they began imposing Islamic law over large swathes of the country.

Clinton was not the only senior US official who didn’t understand why Stevens and three other Americans were murdered or why the US Consulate in Benghazi was reduced to a smoldering ruin.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thinks that the party responsible for the Muslim violence against the US on the anniversary of September 11 is a kook in Florida who enjoys saying nasty things about Islam.

The day after the murderous assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi, and in the face of an ongoing mob assault on the US Embassy in Cairo, and on US embassies in Yemen and Tunis, Dempsey called Pastor Terry Jones in Florida and asked him to withdraw his support for a film that depicts Muhammad in a negative fashion.

Dempsey’s spokesman Col. Dave Lapan told Reuters, “In a brief call, Gen. Dempsey expressed his concerns over the nature of the film, the tensions it will inflame and the violence it will cause. He asked Mr. Jones to consider withdrawing his support for the film.”

Dempsey’s belief that a third-rate riff on Muhammad supported by a marginal figure in Florida is the cause of the terrorist attacks on US embassies is not simply shocking. It is devastating.

[…]

Following the September 11 attacks, the US Congress formed the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and charged it with determining the causes of the assault and recommending a course of action for the government to follow to prevent such attacks from happening again. It took the commission members nearly three years to finish their report. In the end, they claimed that the chief failure enabling the attacks was “one of imagination.”

Unfortunately for the US, the commissioners had things backwards. It wasn’t that imagination failed America before September 11. It was that imagination reigned in America. And it still does.

It’s just that the land of make-believe occupied by the US foreign policy elite has shifted.

Until September 11, 2001, the US foreign policy elite was of the opinion that the chief threat to US national security was the fact that the US was a “hyperpower.”

That is, the chief threat to the US was the US itself. After September 11, the US decided that the main threat to the US was “terror,” against which the US declared war. The perpetrators of terrorism were rarely mentioned, and when they were they were belittled as “marginal forces.”

Those forces, of course are anything but marginal.

The Islamic ideology of jihad is the predominant ideology in the Muslim world today.

The rallying cry of al-Qaida – the shehada – is the cry of Muslim faith. Jihadist Islam is the predominant form of Islam worshiped in mosques throughout the world. And the ideology of jihad is an ideology of war against the non-Islamic world led by the US.

Then-president George W. Bush and his administration imagined a world where the actual enemies of the US were marginal forces in Islam. They then determined – based on nothing – that the masses of the Muslim world from Gaza to Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond were simply Jeffersonian democrats living under the jackboot.

[…]

With President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the imaginary world inhabited by the American foreign policy elite shifted again. Obama and his advisers agree that jihadist Islam is the predominant force in the Muslim world. But in their imaginary world, jihadist Islam is a good thing for America.

Hence, Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan is Obama’s closest confidante in the Middle East despite his transformation of Turkey from a pro- Western secular republic into a pro-Iranian Islamic republic in which secularists are jailed without trial for years on end.

Hence Israel – the first target of jihadist Islam’s bid for global supremacy – is strategic burden rather than an ally to the US.

Hence the US abandoned its most stalwart ally in the Arab world, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and supported the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in the most strategically vital state in the Arab world.

Hence it supported a Libyan rebel force penetrated by al-Qaida.

Hence it is setting the stage for the reinstitution of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

It is impossible to know the thoughts that crossed Stevens’ mind as he lay dying in Benghazi. But what is clear enough is that as long as imagination reigns supreme, freedom will be imperiled.