Foreign developments and our 2016 election

During the four months or so that I was neglecting this blog, the foreign developments have been a great thing for the political Right. Both David Cameron in the United Kingdom and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel won big victories, much greater than the polls predicted. It is to be wondered whether this is a portent for the 2016 election in this country. Certainly, I would like to see that.

Right now, polls show Hillary Clinton winning against many Republican opponents — not all the Republican prospects in all the polls, but generally in most polls that I have seen. But of course, November 2016 is a year and a half away. And a lot can change in that time. Yet what if the polls are as far off as they were in the UK ad Israel? Hillary might be losing even now!

All in all, there is hope for 2016.

Last night's debate

Last night, in Boca Raton, Florida, President Obama and Governor Romney had the last of the series of three debates. And while a CNN poll seems to have given the edge to the President in the debate, it was close, 48-40 (and in fact, on the question “Who did the debate make you more likely to vote for?” it favored Romney, 25-24, with half the people saying “neither”), and looking at such commentators as Charles Krauthammer and Erick Erickson, it would seem that who won depends on who you support; most people seem to have given the edge to whoever they wanted to win in the first place. There were also commentators like Toby Harnden of the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, who said that “Obama may have won the Boca debate battle but he knows he is losing the election war to Romney.”

Indeed, all of the pro-Romney commentators remarked that Romney looked more like a president and Obama like a challenger. Erickson wrote:

The whole time during the last Presidential debate, Mitt Romney looked like the incumbent and Barack Obama looked like a challenger trying to keep it together. More specifically, Barack Obama, when he made eye contact, looked like he was seeing and invisible hand writing “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin” on the wall behind Bob Schieffer. This was a man who knows the gig is almost up.

Throughout the debate, Mitt Romney smiled, agreed, and avoided fights. Barack Obama did everything he could to get into fights. That’s not what incumbents in a comfortable lead do.

And Harnden wrote:

If you had been on an extended vacation for the past four years, you would have been forgiven for watching this debate and thinking you were viewing a President Mitt Romney being challenged by a pretender called Barack Obama.

I looked at the transcript, and sometimes President Obama looked absolutely silly. He said things like:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

Gee. As if Governor Romney never heard of aircraft carriers and nuclear subs. But he said this in response to a statement by Romney:

[O]ur Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at under 285. We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me.

I'm sure that the admirals who “said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission” allowed for the existence of aircraft carriers and nuclear subs — and so President Obama's comments are pretty laughable.

When Bob Schieffer asked about Iran, President Obama responded:

[A]s long as I’m president of the United States Iran will not get a nuclear weapon. I made that clear when I came into office.…[A] nuclear Iran is a threat to our national security, and it is a threat to Israel’s national security. We cannot afford to have a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region of the world.

Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. And for them to be able to provide nuclear technology to non-state actors, that’s unacceptable. And they have said that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.

Brave words, for someone who has done so little to deter Iran. It has gotten so bad that Prime Minister Netanyahu had pleaded at the UN for help in dealing with the Iranian threat to his country's existence, and yet the President refused even to meet with him when the two were both in New York. Obama says what we want to hear, but his actions show he is unwilling to take any steps to defuse the Iranian threat.

And Romney's point was well taken when he said:

You look at the record of the last four years and say is Iran closer to a bomb? Yes. Is the Middle East in tumult? Yes. Is — is Al Qaeda on the run, on its heels? No. Is — are Israel and the Palestinians closer to reaching a peace agreement?

No, they haven’t had talks in two years. We have not seen the progress we need to have, and I’m convinced that with strong leadership and an effort to build a strategy based upon helping these nations reject extremism, we can see the kind of peace and prosperity the world demands.

Because the record of the past nearly 4 years is the real issue in this election. As I said, it looks to me that who won depends on who you were supporting in the first place. To me, Romney had the stronger case. But all along, to me, Romney seems to be making sense, and Obama nonsense. So I admit I'm very far from being impartial in judging this debate.

A good statement of the situation, which I'm happy to spread

Ben Stein wrote an article for The American Spectator dated September 17, which says a lot worth thinking about. First, he describes the events of recent days:

Let's start with a few facts.

A man made a cheesy movie about the being that Muslims call the Prophet Mohammed. That man has a criminal record and seems to be a marginal character, at best.

But that man is an American. He is operating in America. He has the full protection of the Constitution, including freedom of expression. So he is supposed to be allowed to say whatever he likes barring libel of living persons and exposure of state secrets. The man made the movie some months ago and nothing happened about it.

Now, Muslim radicals have gotten their marching orders from al Qaeda or whomever. They are rioting all over the Muslim world. As we all know, a super well-armed group of them murdered the U.S. Ambassador to Libya a few days ago, using that old movie as an excuse.

So, here we have it in a nutshell: murdering innocent people is a crime as we view it in this country. Making a movie is not a crime. We start with that.

When the rioting and craziness overseas began, Mr. Obama said nothing about it for many hours. He went to fund-raisers with his Hollywood pals and declined an intelligence briefing on the events (so Fox News reports).

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department apologizes for the movie via the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Many hours later, Mr. Obama says he's sorry the diplomats and security people were murdered. (They "died in attacks," as the NY Times said, as if they had heart attacks instead of being shot.)

At the same time, the tides are moving rapidly towards war in the Middle East, between Israel and Iran. Iran is racing towards getting nuclear weapons. Iran has promised to use these horrific weapons to have a second Holocaust by "...wiping Israel off the map." Naturally, Israel does not want Iran to murder all the Israelis.

Israel is pleading with the USA to help it bomb Iran and slow down Iran's weapons program.

Mr. Obama says he's way too busy to have a meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu about this. He has to be on TV and at fundraisers.

Then, we have the description of Romney's response, and its reception by the White House and the media:

Then comes word from Mitt Romney that Mr. Obama is not acting Presidential. Mr. Obama should have condemned the killings right away, says Mr. Romney. We should not be apologizing to terrorists, says Mr. Romney. And Mr. Obama should be striving night and day to keep peace and security in the Middle East.

That's it. That flips the "panic" switch in the mainstream media. Now, the terrorists who shot our diplomats and security personnel are no longer the issue. It is all Mr. Romney's incompetence. If only he had the temperament of an Obama — to apologize to terrorists instead of condemning them… Romney is a dangerous man.

The media goes berserk, on the attack against Mr. Romney. This is what they have been waiting for. The dogs of MSM warfare are let slip. Nothing else matters except mission number one: destroy Romney.

But, Stein reminds us, this is not the first time the media have shown a disturbing partiality toward the Left and the Democratic Party:

In a way, it's just what the media did to his father when they went crazy because he said he had been brainwashed in Vietnam — which was completely true. In a way, it's exactly like what the media did to Gerald Ford when he praised the Polish people and said they never would be slaves. It is precisely what they did to Richard Nixon when he did a series of trivial wrongs and they burned him at the stake for it, while the war maker and womanizer, JFK, was elevated to sainthood.

Stein continues:

No candidate can beat the combination of 95 percent of the African-American vote and 99 per cent of the MSM vote. So, Obama's in.

But think of what we have lost: I am writing this on Sunday night, September 16, 2012. The Obama administration is still apologizing to the Muslims worldwide, even in Libya even as the President of Libya says the killings there were not spontaneous but were long premeditated and the nutty movie was only a smokescreen. Our government is still saying, "Sorry," to violent mobs because an American citizen exercised his first Amendment rights. Incredibly, Jay Carney, White House spokesman, is spinning a complete fairy tale that the Islamists really like America and Mr. Obama. The murderers are just upset about a movie trailer that came out months ago. How stupid do they think we Americans are? If Mr. Obama really believes, he belongs in a straitjacket. If not, his spokesman is the biggest fantasist of all time.

Look, maybe sweet talk and apologies have a place somewhere. Maybe this should be said in private, between diplomats. But to apologize publicly to killers and arsonists over free speech in America… this isn't done… and of course the first amendment protects people outside the mainstream. Tom Paine, Samuel Adams, John Adams — these were considered nuts by the British. The whole idea is to protect all speech.

And in Barack Obama's America, the man who made the movie is brought in for law enforcement questioning. This really happened just yesterday.

And Mr. Barack Obama will be President for four more years and then quite possibly Mrs. Clinton, arch apologist for American values, for years afterwards.

When republics fall, it's not always slow. It can be like slamming a door.

It is later than any dare think.

This really summarizes the events of the past few days, and the nature of Obama's (and his supporters') responses, about as well as anyone could. I also like the analysis of the media's treatment of past presidents like Ford, Nixon, and JFK, all of which are more accurately described than anything else I've ever seen about them. So I'm happy to have echoed his posting.

Newt has it right in one place, the Middle East

Well, I have to say one thing good anout Newt Gingrich: he has the facts right on the Middle East. A posting by Muriel Kane says:

In an interview with The Jewish Channel released on Friday, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich called the Palestinians an “invented” people and suggested they have no right to a state of their own.

“I believe that the Jewish people have a right to a state,” Gingrich told the interviewer. “Remember, there was no Palestine existing as a state. Part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs … and they had a chance to go many places. And for a variety of political reasons, we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s.”

Reuters points out that Gingrich’s remarks run counter to official United States policy, which does view the Palestinians as a people with the right to a state of their own.

Gingrich, who said his worldview was “pretty close” to that of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also described the Obama administration’s Middle East diplomacy as “out of touch with reality.” He inisted that Obama and his aides “lie to themselves” about the conflict, which he portrayed as one “between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law and a group of terrorists that are firing missiles every day.”

I don't like a lot of what Newt Gingrich has been saying, but on this issue, I agree completely.