Susan Rice – praag.org

All the president’s women (well, almost)

Barack Obama’s liberal utopians, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, lied the country into bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who had done nothing to the U.S.

The polls and the pundits are cut up about a breach or two in the White House’s formidably protected perimeter. The People should not be. Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Thomas Jefferson, a real prince among men, traveled on horseback and wore plain clothes. Not only was he unguarded, his house in Washington was open to all-comers. Anyone who wrote to Jefferson received a reply in the great man’s hand. He paid for postage out of pocket. Never again will a Jefferson occupy the People’s House. But occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite.

In any event, the latest security breach at the White House – there have been many under departing Secret Service Director Julia Pierson – saw 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez rush across the lawn and into the first family’s residence, where the trespasser was “confronted by a female Secret Service agent, whom he [naturally] overpowered.” No wonder Pierson and the press have circled the wagons. The same lady officer, or another with a similar skill set, had also failed to lock the front door. Disarmed, too, was an alarm meant to alert officers to intruders.

All in all, officers on-duty stood down, and an off-duty officer manned up. (The canine unit, sick of eating Michelle Obama’s carrots, was busy digging for bones.) Gonzales could have bounded up the stairs to the first family’s living quarters had the off-duty officer not tackled him. He must be male. Were he a woman, or something in-between, he’d be up for a medal of honor.

It’s always good to see gender set-asides and affirmative action – in particular, the delusion that women are just as qualified as men to be soldiers, security guards, firefighters and cops – hurt those who inflict it on non-believers.

As for Pierson, like other ciphers in skirts (or pantsuits) promoted by this administration, she is something else – but nothing like stumblebum Marie Harf, the sibilant spokeswoman at the State Department.

Watching Miley Cyrus’s hootchy hoopla is less offensive than enduring a press conference with Ms. Barf, where reasonably intelligent, veteran newsmen attempt to engage this schoolmarmish, tartish young woman in reasoned repartee. Marie Barf is intellectually inconsequential, to put it kindly. Only the other day did she claim, most memorably – and from the safety of her perch – that the outsourcing, in Benghazi, of the safety of American diplomats to the enemy, a local Muslim militia, is justified because it is part of the protocol. The militia hired to protect the compound was late to the scene, possibly complicit in the carnage.

Another exhibit is Lois Lerner. She “is toxic,” conceded Politico, before segueing into a puff piece about this corrupt kleptocrat. The central conceit of the Politico exposé, “Lerner Breaks Silence,” is that she’s a “complicated figure.” The characterization doesn’t jibe with the main character’s actions and demeanor. Lerner is, in fact, consistently one-dimensional. An example: The Treasury inspector general determined that Lerner’s IRS division used “inappropriate criteria … to identify tax-exempt applications for review,” and that certain organizations applying for tax-exempt status, singled out for their “policy positions,” were harassed for “significant amounts of information.” Translated from bureaucratese, Lerner used a vast, oppressive apparatus – the Internal Revenue Service – to hound right-leaning nonprofits, threaten their mission and menace their donors.

In particular, this bloodhound instructed her elite Unit (Determinations U) to BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for tea-party or 9/12 patriots. The IG made his recommendations. Lerner fobbed him off. The Office of Audit grumbled that it does not believe the “alternative corrective action” proposed by the Lerner division “fully addresses” the problems: “We do not consider the concerns in this report to be resolved.” Befitting the flat, uncomplicated, venal personality she is, Lerner showed no commitment to correct her agency’s ways. Post resignation, lippy Lerner remains unrepentant. “I am not sorry for anything I did,” she declared breezily to Politico.

Signally unsuccessful as head of the General Services Administration was Martha Johnson. (Like IRS top officials, she, too, was in-and-out of the White House.) On YouTube, taxpayers watched Johnson’s jolly bureaucrats having a whale of a time at their expense. Chins, butts and guts wiggling obscenely, the grotesque GSA training conferees stayed in lavish spa resort casinos, as detailed in a damning Office-of-Inspector-General report.

In selecting resorts in which to party, our corpulent public servants conducted “dry runs” and “scouting trips” to destinations like the Ritz-Carlton. Also underwritten by taxpayers were assorted team-building exercises, a bicycle-building project, for one. The OIG lists corrupt contracting practices, a miscellany of employee misconduct, including excessive and impermissible expenditure on luxury suites at Nevada’s M Resort, on 1,000 sushi rolls at $7 apiece and on “$6,325 on commemorative coins ‘rewarding’ all conference participants.”

These are but some of the president’s women – not even the heavy hitters. Barack Obama’s liberal utopians, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, lied the country into bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who had done nothing to the U.S.

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The Paltrow of politics (minus looks & ethics)

Hillary Rodham Clinton has done some “conscious uncoupling” from reality. The term was disgorged by a celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow, to announce a separation from her spouse. In the same breath, the actress bemoaned her gilded, glamorous life, and offended America’s military sacred cow by comparing the cyber-attacks she endures to the experience of war.

As heir to a political dynasty founded by a powerful man, Hillary has received millions of dollars to write books. Over the years, she and husband Bill Clinton have made hundreds of millions from both book deals and speaking engagements. Yet in a recent ABC interview, the former “First Housewife” complained about emerging from the White House not only “dead broke, but in debt”: “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to … piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”

Another reality Hillary has worked to deconstruct is Benghazi. Hillary dare not admit that, by leveling Libya, Americans invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted at the U.S. mission in Benghazi had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any U.S. provocation, real or imagined, to expel those who “came, saw, and conquered.” Still less is the former secretary of state willing to cop to having left the post undefended. This scribe has long subscribed to the view that, at bottom, the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom had imagined she would run the Benghazi compound like a community center. How better to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, was a smashing success?

In a fit of “estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids,” Hillary and two sisters in the Obama administration—“humanitarian hawks” Samantha Power, then a member of the president’s National Security Council, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then Ambassador to the United Nations—launched a “war of the womb” that left Libya in shambles.

All along, our globetrotting hegemon evinced little respect for regional powers and their right to handle their own affairs, in-house, so to speak. On behalf of the African Union, South African President Jacob Zuma had brokered a deal with Libya. By the Telegraph’s telling, the AU had “outlined a political solution to end the fighting in Libya based on an immediate end to attacks on civilians and a ceasefire which would be monitored by a credible international organization. The ceasefire would lead to a transitional period and culminate in elections.” Col. Muammar Gadhafi agreed. Judging from what befell Libya, Hillary and her harridans would have none of it. They refused to give peace a chance. War it was. The rest is history, as is Libya.

Who can forget Hillary Clinton’s blood-curdling cackle, “We came, we saw, he died!”, when tidings arrived of the actions of her thugs of choice in that country? Backed by American drones and French fighter jets above, the Libyan rebels to whom the U.S. had taken a shine intercepted Col. Gadhafi as he fled his hometown of Sirte, dragged him from his vehicle, and lynched him then and there. Hillary’s ululations were a perfect complement to the rebels’ harangues of “Allahu Akbar.”

The focus of Hillary’s next blood-inspired hoedown was to be Syria. She had wanted to arm rebel forces there. Obama objected. Or so she tells readers of her latest, I-did-it-my-way memoire. A story broken by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), almost 2 years back, implicated Hillary’s Syrian soul-mates in the massacre of over 90 Alawi and Shia villagers, “predominantly women and children.” “Rebel atrocities,” relayed National Review’s foreign correspondent, were “being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities.” As president, count on Hillary to devise a creative casus belli for the “humanitarian” invasion she hankers for in Syria. For if she has learned anything from Benghazi, it is not that America ought to divest from democratizing the word, but that our country needs more Green-Zone fortresses everywhere.

Whether this strong-as-a-horse politician was concussed or cowering, in the waning days of 2012, we will never know. Mrs. Clinton was scheduled to testify in December “before the House of Representatives and Senate foreign affairs committees on a report on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.” She was a no-show.

But on CNN, love is in the air. Viewers have expressed a belief that Hillary would restore the country to the Clinton years of peace and prosperity. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, as well as a Sudanese pharmaceutical company that turned out to be the main manufacturer of medicines and vaccinations in Sudan. And he strafed the Serbs in 1999. Stateside, Bill butchered 76 men, women and children in Texas. Alas, so long as Hillary steers clear of another Waco, and confines her murderous sprees to killing far-away people from high above—few boots on the ground—her countrymen will consider her a peacemaker.

While prosperity during the Clinton years was due less to Clinton-economics than to Reaganomics and a Republican Congress not yet completely comatose—in fairness, Bill does grasp something about prosperity. “This is good work,” he famously said about Mitt Romney’s much-maligned work at Bain Capital. Hillary, conversely, has no economic acumen. “There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries,” she grumbled at the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2012. According to economist George Reisman’s cogent analysis—and contra Mrs. Clinton’s crushing ignorance—“a highly productive and provident 1 percent provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent.” As for Obama’s putsch for a North-Korean style health care: Instead of aborting it, Hillary will guarantee that Obamacare reaches full-term gestation.

Another wily fox called Bill (O’Reilly) has defended Mrs. Clinton’s riches as capitalism’s reward for hard work. Not quite. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others. Although she has pudding for brains, Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, has made a living in the honest, productive, non-predatory and salutary ways of the free market. Paltrow’s affluence, unlike Hillary’s, is a reward for assets she peddles to people who choose to purchase them.

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Rice leaves UN with final blast over Syrian ‘disgrace’

US ambassador Susan Rice left the United Nations on Tuesday slamming the Security Council’s failure to act over the worsening Syria conflict as a “moral and strategic disgrace.”

But while Rice criticized Russia and China for their veto of resolutions on the Syria war, she said it was not inevitable that relations with Russia would continue to sour.

Rice, who moves to become President Barack Obama’s national security advisor, said: “The repeated failure of the Security Council to unify on the crucial issue of Syria I think is a stain on this body and something that I will forever regret.”

“The council’s inaction on Syria is a moral and strategic disgrace that history will judge harshly,” Rice told reporters after making her farewells to other UN envoys after four and a half years as US ambassador.

Russia and China have three times used their vetoes as permanent members of the Security Council to block western-proposed resolutions that would have increased pressure on President Bashar al-Assad.

Rice stressed that there were no sanctions or threats of force in the proposed resolutions which she called “very mild.”

“Yet we have been paralyzed, and I don’t know how in any circumstance one could ascribe that to a failure of US policy or US leadership, when the vast majority of the council was ready and willing to move ahead.”

Russia and China accused the United States, France and Britain of only seeking regime change in Syria, where the United Nations says more than 93,000 people have been killed in the past 27 months.

Rice said tougher sanctions against Iran and North Korea had been a Security Council success and showed it was possible to work with Russia, which could become a key dossier in her new White House job.

At Rice’s final closed consultations, Russia’s UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin read out a mock council statement which “expressed relief” at Rice’s departure, according to diplomats at the meeting.

Russia is a “complex” relationship, Rice acknowledged to reporters after the good natured farewell from her rival envoy.

“While there are certainly important points of divergence, and there have been points of friction and there undoubtedly will be in the future, I am not prepared to predict that that is inevitable,” she said.

“On issues as important as Iran and North Korea, and many others, we have been able to find common ground and effect outcomes that have been beneficial,” Rice said.

Samantha Power, a White House advisor, has been named as the new UN ambassador and is awaiting Congress confirmation. – AFP

On the war path with Samantha Power

Trust Republicans to give battle over the wrong broad and for the wrong reasons.

Political posturing aside, Susan Rice, whom Barack Obama has appointed to be his national security adviser – despite or perhaps because of her role in developing the administration’s Benghazi fable – is likely less dangerous than Samantha Power, who will be sent to the United Nations in Rice’s place.

Rice, you’ll recall, was shoved out onto the Sunday shows – five days following the Sept. 11 attack on the mission in Libya last year – to tell tall tales about the genesis of that attack, and to saddle the blame for U.S. fatalities there on an anti-Islam filmmaker. (The man still languishes in jail.)

Formerly at the National Security Council, and acting as senior White House security adviser at the time, Power knows a thing or two about the Benghazi pickle. More to the point: In cahoots with Rice and Hillary Clinton – the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom – Power was responsible for Obama’s war on Libya, having “developed” a doctrine every bit as intellectually and morally bankrupt as the Bush Doctrine (which advocated waging war to ostensibly prevent it).

Writing in The Nation, a magazine of the ultra-left, Tom Hayden has illustrated just how dangerous is Power’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. A former California state senator, Hayden is also a ’60s flower-power peacenik, whose progressive pedigree can be traced back to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Jane Fonda.

According to Hayden, Power is an “Irish internationalist”; a “humanitarian hawk” who “see[s] war as an instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” She “advocates American and NATO military intervention in humanitarian crises.” As she sees it, “The United States must … be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers to stop the threat of genocide.”

Hip to Power’s hypocrisy, Hayden points out that “like U2′s Bono, another Irish human rights activist,” she “has been less preoccupied by the human rights abuses inflicted by the British during the 30-year war in the northern part of her own country.” Indeed, like her neoconservative philosophical clones, Power considers herself a redeemer of mankind – but not, mind you, of her own kind.

Power has still to scale the Senate Foreign Relations committee for confirmation. My guess is that the leggy fanatic will clear the hurdle by offering as confirmation quid pro quo a softer stance on, say, Israel. And voila, onward to Syria.

By far the more dangerous of the two Obama Amazons is Samantha Power. Susan Rice, in a sense, has been neutralized by scandal; she’s under scrutiny. And if you’re wondering what a U.S. ambassador at the U.N. could possibly do by way of taking the country to war, think of John Negroponte. He pushed for the Security Council resolution “that President Bush eventually cited in going to war in Iraq.”

If they play rough, Republicans will lap up the ladies’ foreign-policy antics, starting with the senior Republican senator from Arizona. John McCain recently crossed enemy lines to cavort with Syrian rebels, the type of chaps who lunch on enemy lungs. He, Lindsey Graham (another senior Republican senator) and their colleagues can’t wait to supply the noble savages of the world with rations.

The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn’t led by the U.S., or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage).

In all, white progressives like Power derive an erotic rush from swooping down to save The Unknown Other, whether he likes it or not. The coolest place from which to keep this hot thrill going is the global geopolitical scene.

To expect someone like Power to care about her homies first is a lot like expecting Angelina Jolie to adopt a poor white baby (an Afrikaner living in a shantytown , for example). How unglamorous! There’s no chic value in that. In Jolie’s defense, it’s her money. It’s hers to do with as she pleases. In a public servant, however, Power’s proclivities amount to treason.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Edmund Burke certainly thought so. These sellouts of American interests would do well to ponder Burke’s wisdom:

“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.”