Crying 'ceasefire' in a crowded military theater: On walking with Kerry
By Rabbi Dov Fischer
The Government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done well to avoid being cowed into a poorly conceived ceasefire in the midst of its defensive struggle to stop Hamas from raining rockets and terror indiscriminately on the people of Israel. It has been encouraging, even inspiring, to read and hear the loud and angry responses throughout Israel — condemnatory across the board, from right to left — denouncing each of the respectively ludicrous ceasefire proposals that have been floated by John Kerry, United States Secretary of State, partly on his own and partly in consultation with two of the world's most notorious generators of Israel-hate: Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and the leadership of Qatar.
Erdogan only recently accused Israel, as he often does, of barbarism worse than Hitler, and Qatar underwrites terrorism and murder all over the world, perhaps more than does any other financial center including Iran. Indeed, political commentator Charles Krauthammer has described Qatar as being more a bank for terrorism than an actual polity.
It may seem beyond belief that a well-spoken American Secretary of State would be so oblivious to the facts on the diplomatic ground that he would continue crying "ceasefire!" in the crowded Middle Eastern military theater, even after Hamas unilaterally has violated so many of them already, most tragically the latest "72-hour ceasefire" of last Friday that they violated within 90 minutes, murdering three Israeli soldiers including Hadar Goldin, whose gorgeous smile broke all our hearts this past weekend. Most Israelis do not know John Kerry as well as we Americans do. If one picture is worth a thousand words, then this video of John Kerry testifying in Congress against his own American countrymen is worth an encyclopedia.
In his 1971 testimony, he focused on his memories of being in Vietnam during the war effort, amid the most barbaric of people — American soldiers:
"They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. . . .
We found most [Vietnamese] people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American. . . . We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We sawAmerica lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum."
To understand John Kerry circa 2014, one need only replace "Viet Cong" with "Hamas," "Vietnamese" people with "Palestinians," and "Americans" with "Israelis." Like watching the movie "Groundhog Day," we are witnessing John Kerry experiencing his chance, forty years later, to relive his youthful days of Vietnam self-righteousness, to conclude his unfinished business, to see indigenous "Third World" victims of "Western imperialism" finally vindicated.
And, yet, as Israelis rightfully throw up their hands in disbelief and frustration over the Secretary of State who "married up" to become enriched with money but who continues otherwise without a clue, there is good reason for Israel's defenders to hope that he will not — because he cannot — mess things up for Israel, if only Israel stands strong.
Thus, Israel must understand who Kerry is, where he stands in America outside the liberal redoubt of his Massachusetts base, and to understand that, beyond Kerry's dramatic limitations, the Obama Administration itself now is limited and partly incapacitated in ways that few American governments have been since America's emergence as a world power a century ago.
First, the American people had a chance to elect John Kerry to be our President a few years ago in 2004. He only had to defeat a somewhat unsteady George W. Bush, who was seeking a second term. Kerry came into the three Presidential debates with the reputation of being a world-class debater, a star from Harvard, facing a man from Texas whom the liberal media depicted as a bumbling fool.
Indeed, Kerry won the first debate, as Bush entered completely unprepared. And then the American people got to know Kerry. The more they learned about him, the more they shrugged and decided that Bush was not such a bad guy after all.
By the time the election arrived, Bush did not seem so stupid any more. Because, in two consecutive debates, Bush ran circles around the Ivy League Kerry. So Kerry has presented himself to the American people, who took his measure and found him wanting. He was rejected. He is Secretary of State today only because he was an early supporter of Barack Obama for President, at a time when others backed Hillary Clinton or Kerry's former running mate, John Edwards. Obama owed Kerry a favor. And, perhaps unwittingly, Obama did Israel a favor, too.
Despite their antipathies towards Israel, Obama and Kerry ironically are proving to be an utterly unexpected blessing for Israel. Through their extraordinary mishandling of the challenges and opportunities raised by Israel's current effort to weaken Hamas, they inadvertently have exasperated Arab Moslem countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, virtually driving them to ally quietly with Israel, as never before.
Those countries have seen that unchecked Islamist terror now threatens stable Moslem regimes, as ISIS rages throughout eastern Syria and western Iraq, while the Moslem Brotherhood nearly transformed Egypt even as Al Qaeda has made inroads in the Sinai. They know that they are next, and they are compelled to place hope in Israel, of all things, because they have determined that Obama and Kerry will not be freedom's buffers from Hamas.
Obama is the weakest President America has had since the lackluster trio of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan allowed the United States to slide into Civil War. He is weak and vain, incompetent, utterly out of his league on the world stage or even in his own American backyard.
Similarly, Kerry's own lacunae become apparent to bothIsrael and Mahmoud Abbas when he utterly mishandled the "peace talks" that he tried to impose on both sides a few months ago.
Israel and Mahmoud Abbas both faced Kerry's deadlines and implied threats, all bit their lips as they waited to see what would happen upon blamed for failing to make a deal on Kerry's timetable, and they all saw that nothing happened.
Just as Syria learned that Obama does not enforce ultimata and "red lines," and just as Vladimir Putin has taken Obama's and Kerry's measure, first in Crimea and now in eastern Ukraine, so have the Israelis and Mahmoud Abbas figured out who Kerry is.
More than that, it is important for every Israeli to understand what really is on Obama's and Kerry's plate today, in between Kerry's efforts to cry "ceasefire!" in a crowded military theater.
Although it may seem to Netanyahu and his cabinet that nothing is more important to Obama and Kerry than imposing a ceasefire, the actual situation as it now stands sees Obama plagued with an unprecedented boatload of profound problems all over the place, most of much higher priority than whether Israel will cease defending against Hamas. Consider just a smattering:
1. Crimea - Ukraine - Russia. Putin has seized Crimea from right under Obama's nose, and he rightly guessed that Obama and Kerry would not know how to stop him or force a reversal. Obama came back and lectured, saying that Putin is "on the wrong side of history." Putin somehow recovered from the insult and next supplied Ukrainian separatists with the kinds of weapons that recently took down Malaysian Flight MH17.
Still on the wrong side of history. Now Putin not only is supplying separatists with weapons to fight a civil war, but he has launched a Cruise missile, violating a sacrosanct treaty that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had signed in 1987 at the height of the Cold War. That now is on Obama's plate. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
2. ISIL/ISIS is shaping a modern-day Islamist Caliphate out of northeastern Syria and western Iraq. They now are driving Kurds out of northern Iraq, have seized financial institutions giving them $2 billion in assets, and even claim control of the Mosul Dam, which gives them new fighting leverage. The Syria of past decades no longer exists. While Al Qaeda is now crucifying Christians , ISIL has driven Christians out of Mosul where they had lived for nearly two thousand years. Nouri al-Maliki is struggling to hold Iraq together, and Obama wants a replacement for Maliki to save what is left, to bring in Sunnis and to hold Baghdad.
When Obama became President, George Bush had left a long-term apparatus in place to secure gains in Iraq, and Obama abandoned those achievements when he failed to reach a comparatively common status-of-forces agreement with Maliki.
Now all of Iraq may fall — either to ISIS/ISIL, or it might become an extension of Shiite Iran, as Lebanon often has been an extension of Assad Syria. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
3. Libya is going into partial civil war, and Benghazi is in insurrection. Although he and his Administration dishonestly claimed originally that the American ambassador to Libya had been murdered on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi because of a cheaply made short homemade clip on Youtube, Obama in fact presided over a security disaster that saw Al Qaeda regroup in Libya and wreak murderous chaos against America by design on the eleventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center bombing. Obama proudly "led from behind," and we therefore left no long-term apparatus in place to secure the gains in Libya from disappearing in a vacuum when Kaddafi fell. Obama and Kerry now need to deal with that — immediately.
4. Iran is building nuclear weapons that not only will threaten Israel but also will have capabilities of endangering all of Europe and eventually the United States. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
5. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children presently are being smuggled into America by drug dealers and cartels from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The problem erupted into a frenzy when Obama started advancing the argument that, although illegal immigration cannot be countenanced, the children of adult lawbreakers should not be punished.
Word reached South America that Obama will not deport children, and the race to the border commenced, with drug cartels inducing desperately poor parents to pay a king's ransom in return for promises to smuggle the little ones into America and away from drug-gang violence in their own countries.
America even has refugee camps forming here. The flood tide has gotten so bad that Governor Rick Perry has called his state's National Guard to guard the Texasborder, while cities around the country are seeing everyday citizens riot against secret Obama efforts to move undocumented children into their towns. The United States Congress has recessed for the summer without solving the mess, and Obama is threatening to act beyond his Constitutional powers as a result.
Meanwhile, the Congress already is suing him in the federal courts for acting dictatorially in a series of matters, in violation of the American Constitution's laws that separate the Executive and Legislative branches of government.
Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
6. All of America, across the political spectrum, recently was shocked to learn that the nation's heroes, past veterans of American military service, who are assured premium quality health care at special hospitals run by the United States Veterans Administration (VA), in fact have been the victims of scandalous VA incompetence, bordering on criminal misconduct.
Dozens of veterans were allowed to die, many needlessly, because they were put on lengthy "waiting lists" to see doctors, so never received medical care in time. Two thousand or more others never even were put on the "waiting lists."
In Phoenix, Arizona alone, the wait to see a doctor was four months, with 1,700 never even wait-listed. The scandal began with Phoenix and now has been revealed to be systemic throughout the country. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
7. The Internal Revenue Service of America (IRS) oversees income-tax collection. Americans have a long-admired national system of voluntary and mostly honestly reporting income and paying taxes every year.
The IRS properly audits suspicious situations, keeping the system honest and the "playing field level" for everyone. It has long been a central principle of American society that the IRS never mixes politics with tax-collecting, and the effort by the Nixon White House to politicize the IRS led to an Article of Impeachment against him:
"He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."
Forty years later, it now emerges that Obama supporters in the IRS targeted lawful anti-Obama political groups for excruciating audits during the months preceding the 2012 Presidential elections that saw Obama reelected.
At the center of the scandal that has shocked much of the country is a woman named Lois Lerner, who was Director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS.
In Congressional hearings, she repeatedly has invoked her right, as an American, to refuse to testify about her role in the scandal — on grounds that her testimony may lead to her incrimination. When Congress demanded that the IRS produce copies of emails from Lerner's computer, the IRS produced documents and did not produce many thousands more, ultimately saying that Lerner's computer had "crashed," and all her emails were lost.
Americans know that, if the IRS demands emails of them during an IRS audit, that excuse will not work. Now, amid all the scandal, new experts within IRS have emerged to testify that her computer hard disk did not crash, just sustained scratches, and thousands of pages still probably could have been produced.
The investigators are wondering whether Lerner contacted and coordinated with people in the Obama White House when targeting his opponents for audits. Yes, Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
8. "Operation Fast and Furious." The Obama Administration concocted a plan to trace weapons sales by and to Mexican drug cartels by introducing 1,400 firearms into Mexico in October 2009, then monitoring their transfers. Thing is, the Obama Administration lost track of the weapons that now were circulating among the drug cartels. Compounding the calamity, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered at the border in December 2011, and two of the "Fast and Furious" firearms were found at the scene of the murder. Obama needs to deal with that — eventually.
9. On March 31, 2014, United States Marine Sergeant Andrew Tahmooressi was driving along the southern border of the United States. He made a wrong turn, accidentally entering Mexico. In his car's trunk were three legally registered guns, a very common phenomenon in the American culture, particularly for a Marine. Four months later, the Mexicans will not release him, have abused him in prison, and Obama for some inexplicable reason cannot get him freed. The story is on the national news every other night, and his mother pleads passionately. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
10. Continued cracks in Obama's much-vaunted "Affordable Care Act," also known as ObamaCare. The majority of Americans hate the law, and it is killing aspects of the American economy and personal household income, as employers reduce hiring full-time 40-hour-weekly workers and instead hire workers for 29 hours a week, because the law does not require employers to pay ObamaCare premiums for workers who work fewer than 30 hours a week. A wide range of lawsuits against the law are moving forward in the courts, and one provision after another has been getting overturned. Obama needs to deal with that — pretty soon.
11. The mad rush of corporate inversions, as major American corporations link up with small irrelevant European companies in a ruse to avoid inflated American corporate taxes and stifling corporate regulations, now has erupted — seemingly overnight — as the new rage in American markets. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
Miraculously, Hamas could not have selected a more foolish time to start a war with Israel. Israel's elected leadership will benefit by grasping the full dimensions of opportunity that exist right now as Obama's and Kerry's plates fill heavier by the day with so many burning and urgent crises that former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, assessing the situation now submerging Obama and Kerry, says simply that "the world is a mess."
And all of this comes only three months before an American national election when Obama potentially may lose his United States Senate majority to the Republicans, which will finish off his agenda for his remaining two years. Indeed, even if his party somehow saves his Senate majority, the very threat of losing it all compels him now to devote inordinate time to fundraising — specifically right now, just during the heart of the Israel-Hamas war — with no way to focus on everything at once, and circumscribed in his ability to over-do his pressure on Israel at a time when he is compelled to tell millionaire Hollywood Jewish liberals every night, as he vacuums their pockets clean and absorbs their money at fundraising soirees and dinners, that he bleeds for Israel, something they need to hear regardless of whether he is speaking truth or whether they even care. As a forerunner of this bi-partisan support for Israel, the Congress just approvedanother $225 million towards Israel's Iron Dome defense,
Mr. Kerry has picked the wrong time to cry "Ceasefire" in a crowded military theater. With Iran manufacturing trouble, Iraq in flames, Syria splitting like an amoeba, Libya back in chaos, Putin on the march into Ukraine through proxies, Christians being driven from the caliphate, scandals at home regarding IRS harassing political opponents, lost emails, children surging at the border and living in refugee camps, veterans dying at home while waiting for the Government to let them see a doctor, American elections only three months away — and so much more — Hamas miraculously picked the worst possible time for them to start a bloody fight with Israel, and this moment offers Israel the first opportunity since 1967 to fight a just war to a conclusion that can extend until Israel believes it properly and satisfactorily has achieved the goals needed to make this the last war with Hamas.
By Rabbi Dov Fischer
The Government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done well to avoid being cowed into a poorly conceived ceasefire in the midst of its defensive struggle to stop Hamas from raining rockets and terror indiscriminately on the people of Israel. It has been encouraging, even inspiring, to read and hear the loud and angry responses throughout Israel — condemnatory across the board, from right to left — denouncing each of the respectively ludicrous ceasefire proposals that have been floated by John Kerry, United States Secretary of State, partly on his own and partly in consultation with two of the world's most notorious generators of Israel-hate: Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and the leadership of Qatar.
Erdogan only recently accused Israel, as he often does, of barbarism worse than Hitler, and Qatar underwrites terrorism and murder all over the world, perhaps more than does any other financial center including Iran. Indeed, political commentator Charles Krauthammer has described Qatar as being more a bank for terrorism than an actual polity.
It may seem beyond belief that a well-spoken American Secretary of State would be so oblivious to the facts on the diplomatic ground that he would continue crying "ceasefire!" in the crowded Middle Eastern military theater, even after Hamas unilaterally has violated so many of them already, most tragically the latest "72-hour ceasefire" of last Friday that they violated within 90 minutes, murdering three Israeli soldiers including Hadar Goldin, whose gorgeous smile broke all our hearts this past weekend. Most Israelis do not know John Kerry as well as we Americans do. If one picture is worth a thousand words, then this video of John Kerry testifying in Congress against his own American countrymen is worth an encyclopedia.
In his 1971 testimony, he focused on his memories of being in Vietnam during the war effort, amid the most barbaric of people — American soldiers:
"They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. . . .
We found most [Vietnamese] people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American. . . . We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We sawAmerica lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum."
To understand John Kerry circa 2014, one need only replace "Viet Cong" with "Hamas," "Vietnamese" people with "Palestinians," and "Americans" with "Israelis." Like watching the movie "Groundhog Day," we are witnessing John Kerry experiencing his chance, forty years later, to relive his youthful days of Vietnam self-righteousness, to conclude his unfinished business, to see indigenous "Third World" victims of "Western imperialism" finally vindicated.
And, yet, as Israelis rightfully throw up their hands in disbelief and frustration over the Secretary of State who "married up" to become enriched with money but who continues otherwise without a clue, there is good reason for Israel's defenders to hope that he will not — because he cannot — mess things up for Israel, if only Israel stands strong.
Thus, Israel must understand who Kerry is, where he stands in America outside the liberal redoubt of his Massachusetts base, and to understand that, beyond Kerry's dramatic limitations, the Obama Administration itself now is limited and partly incapacitated in ways that few American governments have been since America's emergence as a world power a century ago.
First, the American people had a chance to elect John Kerry to be our President a few years ago in 2004. He only had to defeat a somewhat unsteady George W. Bush, who was seeking a second term. Kerry came into the three Presidential debates with the reputation of being a world-class debater, a star from Harvard, facing a man from Texas whom the liberal media depicted as a bumbling fool.
Indeed, Kerry won the first debate, as Bush entered completely unprepared. And then the American people got to know Kerry. The more they learned about him, the more they shrugged and decided that Bush was not such a bad guy after all.
By the time the election arrived, Bush did not seem so stupid any more. Because, in two consecutive debates, Bush ran circles around the Ivy League Kerry. So Kerry has presented himself to the American people, who took his measure and found him wanting. He was rejected. He is Secretary of State today only because he was an early supporter of Barack Obama for President, at a time when others backed Hillary Clinton or Kerry's former running mate, John Edwards. Obama owed Kerry a favor. And, perhaps unwittingly, Obama did Israel a favor, too.
Despite their antipathies towards Israel, Obama and Kerry ironically are proving to be an utterly unexpected blessing for Israel. Through their extraordinary mishandling of the challenges and opportunities raised by Israel's current effort to weaken Hamas, they inadvertently have exasperated Arab Moslem countries like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, virtually driving them to ally quietly with Israel, as never before.
Those countries have seen that unchecked Islamist terror now threatens stable Moslem regimes, as ISIS rages throughout eastern Syria and western Iraq, while the Moslem Brotherhood nearly transformed Egypt even as Al Qaeda has made inroads in the Sinai. They know that they are next, and they are compelled to place hope in Israel, of all things, because they have determined that Obama and Kerry will not be freedom's buffers from Hamas.
Obama is the weakest President America has had since the lackluster trio of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan allowed the United States to slide into Civil War. He is weak and vain, incompetent, utterly out of his league on the world stage or even in his own American backyard.
Similarly, Kerry's own lacunae become apparent to bothIsrael and Mahmoud Abbas when he utterly mishandled the "peace talks" that he tried to impose on both sides a few months ago.
Israel and Mahmoud Abbas both faced Kerry's deadlines and implied threats, all bit their lips as they waited to see what would happen upon blamed for failing to make a deal on Kerry's timetable, and they all saw that nothing happened.
Just as Syria learned that Obama does not enforce ultimata and "red lines," and just as Vladimir Putin has taken Obama's and Kerry's measure, first in Crimea and now in eastern Ukraine, so have the Israelis and Mahmoud Abbas figured out who Kerry is.
More than that, it is important for every Israeli to understand what really is on Obama's and Kerry's plate today, in between Kerry's efforts to cry "ceasefire!" in a crowded military theater.
Although it may seem to Netanyahu and his cabinet that nothing is more important to Obama and Kerry than imposing a ceasefire, the actual situation as it now stands sees Obama plagued with an unprecedented boatload of profound problems all over the place, most of much higher priority than whether Israel will cease defending against Hamas. Consider just a smattering:
1. Crimea - Ukraine - Russia. Putin has seized Crimea from right under Obama's nose, and he rightly guessed that Obama and Kerry would not know how to stop him or force a reversal. Obama came back and lectured, saying that Putin is "on the wrong side of history." Putin somehow recovered from the insult and next supplied Ukrainian separatists with the kinds of weapons that recently took down Malaysian Flight MH17.
Still on the wrong side of history. Now Putin not only is supplying separatists with weapons to fight a civil war, but he has launched a Cruise missile, violating a sacrosanct treaty that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had signed in 1987 at the height of the Cold War. That now is on Obama's plate. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
2. ISIL/ISIS is shaping a modern-day Islamist Caliphate out of northeastern Syria and western Iraq. They now are driving Kurds out of northern Iraq, have seized financial institutions giving them $2 billion in assets, and even claim control of the Mosul Dam, which gives them new fighting leverage. The Syria of past decades no longer exists. While Al Qaeda is now crucifying Christians , ISIL has driven Christians out of Mosul where they had lived for nearly two thousand years. Nouri al-Maliki is struggling to hold Iraq together, and Obama wants a replacement for Maliki to save what is left, to bring in Sunnis and to hold Baghdad.
When Obama became President, George Bush had left a long-term apparatus in place to secure gains in Iraq, and Obama abandoned those achievements when he failed to reach a comparatively common status-of-forces agreement with Maliki.
Now all of Iraq may fall — either to ISIS/ISIL, or it might become an extension of Shiite Iran, as Lebanon often has been an extension of Assad Syria. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
3. Libya is going into partial civil war, and Benghazi is in insurrection. Although he and his Administration dishonestly claimed originally that the American ambassador to Libya had been murdered on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi because of a cheaply made short homemade clip on Youtube, Obama in fact presided over a security disaster that saw Al Qaeda regroup in Libya and wreak murderous chaos against America by design on the eleventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center bombing. Obama proudly "led from behind," and we therefore left no long-term apparatus in place to secure the gains in Libya from disappearing in a vacuum when Kaddafi fell. Obama and Kerry now need to deal with that — immediately.
4. Iran is building nuclear weapons that not only will threaten Israel but also will have capabilities of endangering all of Europe and eventually the United States. Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
5. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children presently are being smuggled into America by drug dealers and cartels from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The problem erupted into a frenzy when Obama started advancing the argument that, although illegal immigration cannot be countenanced, the children of adult lawbreakers should not be punished.
Word reached South America that Obama will not deport children, and the race to the border commenced, with drug cartels inducing desperately poor parents to pay a king's ransom in return for promises to smuggle the little ones into America and away from drug-gang violence in their own countries.
America even has refugee camps forming here. The flood tide has gotten so bad that Governor Rick Perry has called his state's National Guard to guard the Texasborder, while cities around the country are seeing everyday citizens riot against secret Obama efforts to move undocumented children into their towns. The United States Congress has recessed for the summer without solving the mess, and Obama is threatening to act beyond his Constitutional powers as a result.
Meanwhile, the Congress already is suing him in the federal courts for acting dictatorially in a series of matters, in violation of the American Constitution's laws that separate the Executive and Legislative branches of government.
Obama and Kerry need to deal with that — immediately.
6. All of America, across the political spectrum, recently was shocked to learn that the nation's heroes, past veterans of American military service, who are assured premium quality health care at special hospitals run by the United States Veterans Administration (VA), in fact have been the victims of scandalous VA incompetence, bordering on criminal misconduct.
Dozens of veterans were allowed to die, many needlessly, because they were put on lengthy "waiting lists" to see doctors, so never received medical care in time. Two thousand or more others never even were put on the "waiting lists."
In Phoenix, Arizona alone, the wait to see a doctor was four months, with 1,700 never even wait-listed. The scandal began with Phoenix and now has been revealed to be systemic throughout the country. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
7. The Internal Revenue Service of America (IRS) oversees income-tax collection. Americans have a long-admired national system of voluntary and mostly honestly reporting income and paying taxes every year.
The IRS properly audits suspicious situations, keeping the system honest and the "playing field level" for everyone. It has long been a central principle of American society that the IRS never mixes politics with tax-collecting, and the effort by the Nixon White House to politicize the IRS led to an Article of Impeachment against him:
"He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."
Forty years later, it now emerges that Obama supporters in the IRS targeted lawful anti-Obama political groups for excruciating audits during the months preceding the 2012 Presidential elections that saw Obama reelected.
At the center of the scandal that has shocked much of the country is a woman named Lois Lerner, who was Director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS.
In Congressional hearings, she repeatedly has invoked her right, as an American, to refuse to testify about her role in the scandal — on grounds that her testimony may lead to her incrimination. When Congress demanded that the IRS produce copies of emails from Lerner's computer, the IRS produced documents and did not produce many thousands more, ultimately saying that Lerner's computer had "crashed," and all her emails were lost.
Americans know that, if the IRS demands emails of them during an IRS audit, that excuse will not work. Now, amid all the scandal, new experts within IRS have emerged to testify that her computer hard disk did not crash, just sustained scratches, and thousands of pages still probably could have been produced.
The investigators are wondering whether Lerner contacted and coordinated with people in the Obama White House when targeting his opponents for audits. Yes, Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
8. "Operation Fast and Furious." The Obama Administration concocted a plan to trace weapons sales by and to Mexican drug cartels by introducing 1,400 firearms into Mexico in October 2009, then monitoring their transfers. Thing is, the Obama Administration lost track of the weapons that now were circulating among the drug cartels. Compounding the calamity, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered at the border in December 2011, and two of the "Fast and Furious" firearms were found at the scene of the murder. Obama needs to deal with that — eventually.
9. On March 31, 2014, United States Marine Sergeant Andrew Tahmooressi was driving along the southern border of the United States. He made a wrong turn, accidentally entering Mexico. In his car's trunk were three legally registered guns, a very common phenomenon in the American culture, particularly for a Marine. Four months later, the Mexicans will not release him, have abused him in prison, and Obama for some inexplicable reason cannot get him freed. The story is on the national news every other night, and his mother pleads passionately. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
10. Continued cracks in Obama's much-vaunted "Affordable Care Act," also known as ObamaCare. The majority of Americans hate the law, and it is killing aspects of the American economy and personal household income, as employers reduce hiring full-time 40-hour-weekly workers and instead hire workers for 29 hours a week, because the law does not require employers to pay ObamaCare premiums for workers who work fewer than 30 hours a week. A wide range of lawsuits against the law are moving forward in the courts, and one provision after another has been getting overturned. Obama needs to deal with that — pretty soon.
11. The mad rush of corporate inversions, as major American corporations link up with small irrelevant European companies in a ruse to avoid inflated American corporate taxes and stifling corporate regulations, now has erupted — seemingly overnight — as the new rage in American markets. Obama needs to deal with that — immediately.
Miraculously, Hamas could not have selected a more foolish time to start a war with Israel. Israel's elected leadership will benefit by grasping the full dimensions of opportunity that exist right now as Obama's and Kerry's plates fill heavier by the day with so many burning and urgent crises that former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, assessing the situation now submerging Obama and Kerry, says simply that "the world is a mess."
And all of this comes only three months before an American national election when Obama potentially may lose his United States Senate majority to the Republicans, which will finish off his agenda for his remaining two years. Indeed, even if his party somehow saves his Senate majority, the very threat of losing it all compels him now to devote inordinate time to fundraising — specifically right now, just during the heart of the Israel-Hamas war — with no way to focus on everything at once, and circumscribed in his ability to over-do his pressure on Israel at a time when he is compelled to tell millionaire Hollywood Jewish liberals every night, as he vacuums their pockets clean and absorbs their money at fundraising soirees and dinners, that he bleeds for Israel, something they need to hear regardless of whether he is speaking truth or whether they even care. As a forerunner of this bi-partisan support for Israel, the Congress just approvedanother $225 million towards Israel's Iron Dome defense,
Mr. Kerry has picked the wrong time to cry "Ceasefire" in a crowded military theater. With Iran manufacturing trouble, Iraq in flames, Syria splitting like an amoeba, Libya back in chaos, Putin on the march into Ukraine through proxies, Christians being driven from the caliphate, scandals at home regarding IRS harassing political opponents, lost emails, children surging at the border and living in refugee camps, veterans dying at home while waiting for the Government to let them see a doctor, American elections only three months away — and so much more — Hamas miraculously picked the worst possible time for them to start a bloody fight with Israel, and this moment offers Israel the first opportunity since 1967 to fight a just war to a conclusion that can extend until Israel believes it properly and satisfactorily has achieved the goals needed to make this the last war with Hamas.
