Instapundit » Search Results » President Ash Carter

CRAZY BARRY’S IS HAVING A HALF-OFF SALE! “Bank of America gets half off its Justice Dept. settlement…by giving millions of dollars to liberal groups approved by the Obama administration:”

The bank has wiped about $194 million off its record $16.6 billion 2014 mortgage settlement by donating to nonprofits and legal groups. Thanks to little-known provisions in the settlement, the bank only had to make $84 million in donations to do that.

The bank wasn’t exploiting any loophole. It’s a key part of the deal the Justice Department offered to get it to settle in the first place. For every dollar the bank has given the nonprofits — none of which were victims of fraud themselves — it has claimed at least two dollars off the settlement. The deal ensured the Obama administration that a certain part of the settlement funds would go to friendly liberal groups, bypassing the normal congressional appropriations.

Among the groups receiving the money were Hispanic civil rights group the National Council of La Raza ($1.5 million), the National Urban League ($1.1 million) and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America ($750,000).

* * * * * * * *

“This is nothing short of a shakedown and another example of how the Obama administration is rigging the system to benefit their political allies. Instead of directing settlements directly to victims or returning the money to the U.S. Treasury, President Obama set up a slush fund for community organizers and other liberal activists. This is outrageous,” said Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., chairman of the Financial Services Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

It’s quite a racket – the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the Clinton administration massively expanding Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act, forcing banks to give high-risk loans to those who had no business owning a home, in a textbook example of Reynolds’ Law run amok. Now in its wreckage, Bank of America is shaken down for billions by the same party that created the CRIA. And of course, no one in the MSM will ask Hillary about her husband’s involvement in the debacle – instead, as this NewsBusters headline today notes, “NY Mag Writer Begs Media to ‘Stop Bugging Hillary Clinton!’”

As Michael Walsh would say, “think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party,” and you won’t go far wrong. Not to mention how all of the above is another marker on the road to “The Coming Middle-Class Anarchy,” if sufficient voters begin to realize how corrupt Beltway elites have rigged the system to benefit themselves and their cronies.

JV RELEASES NEW SNUFF FILM: As Battle for Fallujah Heats Up, ISIS Shows Grisly Executions of Civilians.

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: “For News Outlets Squeezed From the Middle, It’s Bend or Bust,” the New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg notes, in a piece built around the recent Buzzfeed stunt of streaming an exploding watermelon live, generating millions of views in what was basically a glorified 1980s-era Late Night with David Letterman segment. Rutenberg goes on to quote a downhearted freelance journalist who responds “the watermelon … is us,” and Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei who portentously adds, “journalists are killing journalism…[by] stubbornly clinging to the old ways.” That’s defined, Rutenberg writes, “as producing 50 competing but nearly identical stories about a presidential candidate’s latest speech, or 700-word updates on the transportation budget negotiations.”

But note the donkey in the room. At the start of his piece, Rutenberg writes:

Earlier this month, a couple of inventive young go-getters at Buzzfeed tied enough rubber bands around the center of a watermelon to make it explode. Nearly a million people watched the giant berry burst on Facebook Live. It racked up more than 10 million views in the days that followed.

Traditional journalists everywhere saw themselves as the seeds, flying out of the frame. How do we compete with that? And if that’s the future of news and information, what’s next for our democracy? President Kardashian?

Dude — if you’re wondering why, as AP recently noted, the vast majority of Americans don’t trust the MSM, it’s because President Kardashian is in the White House right now. And the Times, the Post, and the Politico and Buzzfeed (self-admitted Journolist member Ben Smith joined Buzzfeed as editor-in-chief in 2011) went all-in to both put him there and prop him up in 2012. So yes, journalists are killing journalism by stubbornly clinging to the old ways — the old ways of being Democrat operatives with bylines. They could change, but that would mean reporting White House scandals, instead of trying to whitewash them away. Until then, don’t be surprised if the public has caught on to the game.

TRUMP AND THE KKK: Jonah Goldberg offers the best explanation for Trump’s footsie-ing with David Duke on Sunday. As Jonah writes, “the issue for me really isn’t whether Trump is a Klan-loving racist. I never thought that (and you can fall far short of that standard and still not have admirable views on various issues), but that isn’t really what matters in this context:”

Again, the best defense of Trump is that he hates these PC gotcha games by the press. I think that’s plausible and probably explains some of it.

But, denouncing the Klan should be easy. You shouldn’t have to think about it. And you certainly shouldn’t let you’re fear of being called “politically correct” get in the way. That’s beyond asinine. If you want to turn the tables on the interviewer and note that the Klan used to be the militant wing of the Democratic party, go for it. The one thing you shouldn’t do is sound like you’re reluctant to condemn the Klan(!) or that you’re dog-whistling that you don’t really mean it when you do.

Yet when you watch the Tapper interview, it becomes clear what is really going on: He think condemning the Klan will hurt him with conservatives or southerners or both. He needed aides to tell him, “Mr. Trump, sir, it’s okay to disassociate yourself with the KKK.” And so he took to Twitter to clean up the mess he created.

In other words, the issue isn’t that conservative opponents of Trump think he’s a Klan supporting racist, it’s that Trump thinks many of his conservative supporters are. And that’s just one reason I don’t want this guy speaking for me.

Read the whole thing.

Before and after Mitt Romney was shlonged in the 2012 presidential election, Jonah liked to write that Romney speaks conservatism as a second language. Trump does too, only he’s able to disguise it better because of his pushback against PC and because of his decidedly non-patrician tone. The fact that Manhattan limousine leftists such as Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, who coined the infamous “short-fingered vulgarian” leitmotif while editing New York’s ur-’80s Spy magazine to describe Trump, have long despised the man as a classic nouveau riche wannabe obviously helps to burnish his conservative street cred. (Most people instinctively know they’d have a lot more fun hanging out with Al Czervik than Judge Elihu Smails.) As I’ve mentioned before, this is very much akin to another former New York Democrat who decided to turn his megaphone towards an eager right-leaning audience, Morton Downey Jr. But Trump’s tone-deafness towards conservatism also explains the clanger last night: “Donald Trump Praises Planned Parenthood Again, Attacks ‘So-Called Conservatives’ Who Disagree.”

Expect a lot more of this between now and August and/or November.

And if Trump wins the White House? As Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal recently noted, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spectacular-celebrity fueled race to Sacramento, followed by five or so years of inertia because the legendary Hollywood tough guy was terrified of running afoul of the state’s entrenched socialist special interests (unlike Wisconsin’s milquetoast appearing Scott Walker) may be a sneak preview to what’s to come.

See also: Ventura, Jesse.

UPDATE: Heh, indeed.™

FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY CHUCK HAGEL ACCUSES OBAMA WHITE HOUSE OF TRYING ‘TO DESTROY ME’ AFTER HE WAS FORCED OUT OF OFFICE: Gee, there’s a shock – considering Obama’s entire career as president is built around his fighting midwestern Republicans far more tenaciously than ISIS or al Qaeda. And Hagel should have known that when he got in bed with Obama’s administration in the first place.

But as Ed Morrissey writes, Hagel’s accusation isn’t an isolated one; it highlights a much larger pattern for Barry:

So far, he has had four Secretaries of Defense — Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Hagel, and the current SecDef, Ash Carter. All three who have departed Obama’s administration have leveled serious criticisms of the way in which security and military issues have been handled. Hagel’s allegations are the most serious of them all, but fits the pattern suggested by the memoirs of his predecessors.

Hagel sealed his fate when he refused to go along with the White House’s desire to empty Guantanamo Bay. He blocked transfers based on threat assessments from within the Department of Defense, and that angered the White House. In the end, Hagel — who didn’t have a lot of credibility for this position in the first place — found himself isolated and outmatched politically.

Perhaps not for much longer, though. Hagel will certainly produce his own memoirs soon enough, and those may prove even more intriguing than Gates’ or Panetta’s.

No matter what happens in next year’s election, the memoirs to emerge after this staggeringly incompetent administration is over will be loads of fun for political junkies to consume.

MARK STEYN: The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates:

Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight’s events as “an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share”.

But that’s not true, is it? He’s right that it’s an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world – an attack on one portion of “humanity” by those who claim to speak for another portion of “humanity”. And these are not “universal values” but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta “universal” when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those “universal values” are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.

And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don’t want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live – modern, pluralist, western societies and those “universal values” of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who’s been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.

In his post titled “Le Kobayashi Maru,” Richard Fernandez writes that “The dream of a ‘borderless Europe’ has taken a body blow:”

The dilemma the West now faces is that it cannot survive on basis on the platform which its elites have carefully constructed since WW2. They are being beaten to death with their own lofty statements. They must either continue to uphold the vision of open borders, multiculturalism, declining birthrates, unilateral disarmament and a growing state sector at all costs — in other words continue on the road to suicide — or retreat. As recent events at American campuses have shown, when faced with the choice of saving the Left and saving the actual world the odds are that “the world” goes over the side first.

In attempting to survive on its own terms the Left will tear itself apart. In its agony it will destroy much else. It maybe that Europe will rediscover its culture; possible it will develop the will to defend itself; conceivable it will hold off extreme fascist movements; even plausibly reconstruct its demography. But it cannot do this without an upheaval that will leave nothing unscathed.

The good news is that the West must soon squarely face choices it has been avoiding until now. The bad news is that nothing will escape unscathed.

Radical Islamism’s greatest challenge is it that ruthlessly exposes a fatal flaw which has existed in the ideology of the West for the last 70 years. It is representative of a question that won’t go away. Can it face the facts just as they are and think its way out of a jam? What Samantha Power called the Problem from Hell is really the Kobayashi Maru test of European civilization. Faced with a no-win situation, will the West find a path through?

Based on Europe’s current political leaders and their wannabe cousins in America, I’m not especially optimistic; tomorrow night’s Democratic presidential debate will likely resemble a round-robin reading of Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Malaise speech,” which signaled that Great Society-era liberalism had reached its intellectual cul-de-sac, in much the same way that Clinton-Obama-era “Progressive” has as well.

As Steyn asks, “What’s the happy ending here?” It won’t be coming from Europe’s leaders, and it certainly won’t be coming from America’s president, nor his designated successor.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. ‘Direct Action’ Against the Islamic State.

The comments appear to signal acknowledgment by the Obama administration that its strategy against the Islamic State has had limited success. Last month, General Lloyd Austin, the head of U.S. Central Command, said the $500 million American effort to train 5,400 troops had resulted in some “four or five” fighters still in the field. Carter announced this month the U.S. was looking at other ways to train support the rebels.

Carter’s remarks Tuesday appear to reflect a change in strategy by the Obama administration whose national-security advisers have recommended that U.S. troops be moved closer to the front lines in Iraq and Syria, according to The Washington Post. . . .

On Friday, commenting on an operation in Iraq to rescue dozens of prisoners held by the Islamic State that resulted in the death of an American serviceman, Carter said: “I expect we’ll do more of this sort of thing,” he said, before adding: “It doesn’t represent us entering the combat role.”

U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, and remain there in an advisory role.

No combat, just a few advisors. Where have I heard that before? And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.

In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:

BOB WOODWARD: Bush Didn’t Lie About WMD, And Obama Sure Screwed Up Iraq In 2011.

[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.

Plus:

Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:

Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.

We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.

Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:

As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

Plus, I’m just going to keep running this video of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

Because I expect a lot of revisionist history over the next few months.

Plus: 2008 Flashback: Obama Says Preventing Genocide Not A Reason To Stay In Iraq. He was warned. He didn’t care.

And who can forget this?

FACT: President Obama kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. Romney called the decision to bring our troops home “tragic.”

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 22, 2012

Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.

Plus: Maybe that Iraq withdrawal was a bad thing in hindsight. Obama’s actions, if not his words, suggest that even he may think so.

DAVE KOPEL: 2nd Circuit upholds N.Y. and Conn. arms bans; contradicts Heller and McDonald.

On Monday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld most of the 2013 arms prohibition laws enacted in New York and Connecticut. The circuit issued a joint opinion in two related cases, New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Cuomo, and Connecticut Citizens’ Defense League v. Malloy. The decision was written by Judge José Cabranes, who was appointed a federal district judge by President Carter and elevated to the 2nd Circuit by President Clinton. The opinion was joined by Judges Raymond Lohier (a President Obama appointee) and Christopher Droney (appointed to the district bench by Clinton and to the 2nd Circuit by Obama). . . .

The 2nd Circuit decision exemplifies the pattern in many lower federal courts of defying the Supreme Court’s admonition in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment is not “a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.” The approach of some lower courts seems to be that Heller stands for little beyond its holding that handgun bans are unconstitutional. In Heller, the court chastised lower courts for having “overread” the court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller; the Miller court had upheld the federal tax and registration system for sawed-off shotguns, but many lower courts asserted that Miller had ruled that the Second Amendment is a “collective right” that no individual can assert. Among the lower courts which, according to Heller, placed “erroneous reliance” on an incorrect interpretation of Miller, was the 2nd Circuit, in United States v. Scanio, No. 97–1584, 1998 WL 802060 (2d Cir., 1998).

Today, the trend is opposite, with some courts, including the 2nd Circuit, straining to under-read Heller. It seems that Heller is not a well-liked opinion among some federal judges, and, for some of them, barely a controlling opinion.

This is an unfortunate area for judicial lawlessness; it will not go unnoted, and it will undermine the position of the courts.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Central Asian Officials Say They’re Worried About Taliban’s Spread.

Despite failing to take Kunduz last week, the Taliban is advancing across Afghanistan, seemingly undeterred by U.S.-trained forces. Although a Russian return to Afghanistan seems unlikely, Central Asian officials have been making statements that could eventually justify Kremlin involvement. The Financial Times reports on the words of Kyrgyzstan’s prime minister, who claims his country is fortifying its borders, and Tajikistan’s president, who reportedly has expressed concerns to Putin about the skirmishes along his country’s borders. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the members of which Moscow promises to protect. Russia could use that relationship to justify attacks against the Taliban.
Nor are these the only officials mentioned in the story: Afghanistan’s vice-president Abdul Rashid Dostum went to Russia and Grozny, “where he met Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Mr Kadyrov wrote on his Instagram account that Kabul needed help from Russia — ‘as in Syria’ — to prevent Isis establishing a foothold…”

Just about the last thing the White House needs is Putin sending fighter jets to Afghanistan. Of course, Russia would have a tough time affording another war effort and, for all we know, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are simply complaining about the Taliban as part of a Moscow-coordinated effort to make NATO look bad.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter says NATO is considering adjusting its Afghanistan withdrawal timeline, but the White House has not announced new plans. Ultimately, whether the Taliban truly threatens other countries or not, President Obama’s failure to stabilize Afghanistan gives a nice boost to the America-as-diminished-world-power narrative.

It’s almost like Obama doesn’t mind that.

SEE, I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE POINTING THIS OUT. EVEN IN THE FRIENDLY NEW YORK TIMES, FROM FRIENDLY COLUMNIST ROGER COHEN, WE GET THIS: Obama’s Syrian Nightmare.

Syria will be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency, a debacle of staggering proportions. For more than four years now, the war has festered. A country has been destroyed, four million Syrians are refugees, Islamic State has moved into the vacuum and President Bashar al-Assad still drops barrel bombs whose shrapnel and chlorine rip women and children to shreds.

For a long time, those who fled waited in the neighborhood. They wanted to go home. They filled camps in Turkey and Jordan and Lebanon. When it became clear even to them that “home” no longer existed, nothing could stop them in their desperate flight toward the perceived security of Europe. The refugee crisis is the chronicle of a disaster foretold. . . .

American interventionism can have terrible consequences, as the Iraq war has demonstrated. But American non-interventionism can be equally devastating, as Syria illustrates. Not doing something is no less of a decision than doing it. The pendulum swings endlessly between interventionism and retrenchment because the United States is hard-wired to the notion that it can make the world a better place. Looking inward for long is a non-option for a nation that is also a universal idea. Every major conflict poses the question of how far America should get involved.

President Obama has tried to claw back American overreach after the wars without victory in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Actually, we had won in Iraq until Obama threw it away. And Syria, alas, is not Obama’s only debacle. What’s missing from Cohen’s column? Hillary’s complicity. And Joe Biden’s.

Plus:

Elsewhere, however, he has undersold American power. In Syria and Libya he has washed his hands of conflicts that the United States could not turn its back on. Such negligence comes back to bite America, as its experience in Afghanistan since the 1980s has shown. Nobody loves a vacuum like a jihadi. And nobody likes American wobbliness like Vladimir Putin.

In 2011, Obama said, “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” At that time, as events have shown, the president had no policy in place to achieve that objective and no will to forge such a policy. His words were of a grave irresponsibility.

In 2013, with France poised to join the United States in military strikes on Syria, Obama walked away at the last minute from upholding his “red line” on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. In so doing, he reinforced Assad, reinforced Putin, declined to change the course of the Syrian war, and diminished America’s word in the world — setbacks of far greater significance than ridding Syria of chemical weapons. This was a mistake.

Like Carter’s weakness with Iran, we will be paying for Obama’s criminal negligence for a long time.

THOUGHTS ON TRUMP, from Roger Kimball:

I don’t think Donald Trump will be the GOP candidate in 2016, and I don’t think he would win if he were. But he has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder. Moreover, he has done it in a way that, though terribly, terribly vulgar, is catapulting Trump to first place in the polls. What does that tell us? That the people are stupid and need to be guided by the suits in Washington? If you believe that, I submit, you are going to be profoundly disappointed come November 2016.

Though does anyone think Trump will be a laissez–faire kind of president if he actually won? To borrow from the Spy magazine gag line on Trump that Roger quoted in his post, wouldn’t President Trump likely be a “short-fingered vulgarian” clone of Michael Bloomberg or Jimmy Carter? Perhaps not in terms of specific policies (such as Bloomberg’s obsession with bike lanes), but in terms of wanting to micromanage everything? Generally, that’s been a recipe for failure in the White House, whether it’s LBJ or Obama personally choosing bombing runs to Carter’s legendary micromanagement of the White House tennis court. It’s only a matter of time before someone like that thinks he knows what’s better for the American people than the people themselves.

AFTER NEARLY 4 YEARS IN HANDS OF IRAN, OBAMA FINALLY SAYS U.S. HOSTAGE’S NAME:

Next month, the family of a Marine veteran will mark the grim milestone of his fourth year held by Iran — barring a miraculous change of heart by a regime that originally sentenced him to death for conspiracy to commit espionage.

Today brought another milestone in the tragic case of Amir Hekmati: President Obama finally, for the first time, said his name in public.

The family had been begging the White House just to say Amir’s name.

Mr. Obama’s two terms really are a case study in how a president can make Jimmy Carter look competent by comparison, aren’t they?

THE WORLD SMELLS WEAKNESS: A confluence of events this week emphasizes that the world–especially its worst characters–smells the pungent aroma of American weakness thanks to President Obama’s purposeful, “leading from behind” philosophy of non-leadership:

Iran is brazenly trying a Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian for espionage, ignoring State Department entreaties to release him. It also has ongoing ties to North Korea, which is providing nuclear weaponry expertise, even as Iran claims to be negotiating the the Obama Administration to halt development of its nuclear weapon program.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is forced to pitch his country’s concerns about the Iran nuclear deal directly to Congress, and our President won’t even meet with him.

President Obama will meet with Arab Gulf leaders, however, in an attempt to pitch them on his Iranian deal. But the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain snub the President and don’t attend. Saudi Arabia sends its own troops in to fight ISIS in Syria.

China is building up strategically located islands in the South China Sea–including construction of a military airstrip–destabilizing the area and warning the U.S. not to fly or sail near them. After Secretary of Defense Ash Carter responded tepidly, a Chinese Colonel said Mr. Carter “wasn’t as tough as I expected.”

To counter Putin’s overt aggression in Crimea, Lithuania and Poland tell Congress they want U.S. military bases to protect them.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter admitted that the US-trained Iraqi military forces have “no will to fight” ISIL–the official excuse for why Ramadi and other major cities in the region are falling. But then again, the Administration doesn’t exhibit a will to fight ISIL either.

The Obama Administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS-supporting Syrian rebels have been disasters.

The question is: What will 18 more months of an Obama Administration mean for U.S. national security?

OBAMA’S NATIONAL SECURITY DREAM TEAM: . . . is more like a nightmare. Scott Johnson over at Powerline catalogs the top Obama security advisors, and reading it, one can’t help but feel like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

It reminds me of a scrawny JV team (with DOD Secretary Ashton Carter as the only promising prospect), which is ironic, considering that President Obama referred to ISIS as an al Qaeda JV.

REJECTED: European leaders never thought they’d miss George W. Bush.

Recent headlines chronicling the breakdown in U.S.-Israeli affairs and the personal loathing between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have overshadowed the continuing ructions in Washington’s relations with its traditional allies in Europe.

Josh Rogin at Bloomberg View has reported that Mr. Obama delivered what can only be regarded as an extraordinary slight to Jens Stoltenberg, who became the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization six months ago. Obama is one of the few Western leaders who has not yet met with Stoltenberg and in fact deliberately passed up an opportunity to see him last week when Stoltenberg was in Washington. Rogin noted that the NATO chief was finally able to secure a last-minute meeting with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, but that Stoltenberg requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit but never heard back from the White House.

The upshot is that Obama missed a good opportunity to demonstrate NATO solidarity in the face of Moscow’s on-going depredations against Ukraine. As Rogin concluded, “the message Russian President Vladimir Putin will take away is that the White House-NATO relationship is rocky, and he will be right.” Moreover, given that Stoltenberg is a two-time prime minister of Norway, a meeting would have sent a useful message to Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark that are facing increased Russian provocations (here, here and here).

Mr. Obama’s disinterest in America’s European allies is a long-standing story, however. In September 2009, as part of his “reset” of relations with Moscow, he abruptly shelved plans to deploy ballistic missile defenses in eastern Europe that Poland and the Czech Republic had signed on to at considerable political risk. As a Washington Post assessment notes, administration officials “failed to give a heads-up to the Poles and the Czechs, making it appear like a diplomatic snub at their expense.” Characterizing the U.S. consultation process, a senior national security official in Warsaw lamented that “we heard through the media.”

Obama then skipped out on a November 2009 meeting with European Union leaders at the White House, conspicuously assigning the hosting duties to Vice President Joe Biden. Reports (examples here, here and here) were soon circulating that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy – the latter being the most pro-American leader in Paris in decades – felt they were being ignored.

Well. . . .

European leaders, with few exceptions, quite deliberately undermined Bush and promoted Obama. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

JOEL KOTKIN: America Down, But Not Out:

America, seen either from here or from abroad, doesn’t look so good these days. The country that maintained world peace for decades now “leads by behind,” or not at all. You don’t have to have nostalgia for George W. Bush’s foreign policy to wish for someone in the White House who at least belongs in the same room with the likes of Vladimir Putin. Some wags now suggest that President Barack Obama has exceeded Jimmy Carter in foreign policy incompetence – Carter certainly was more effective in the Middle East.

What about space? Remember, we won the space race but now have to depend on Russian launch vehicles to do much of anything in orbit. President Obama thought we could rely on the Russians to provide us with cheap rides into orbit, but Putin squashed that notion after we objected to his actions in Ukraine. John Kennedy must be turning over in his grave.

And as for our domestic economy, the best you can say is “It could be worse,” particularly if you look at what’s happening in torpid Europe. It’s a sign of our utter lack of confidence that the current administration, and much of the punditry, still thinks we should follow the Continent’s economic and social policies.

Yet, despite all these challenges – and two presidencies the public ranks among the worst in history – it’s far too early to write off the United States. After all, no one else is doing very well.

We’ve had a worldwide epidemic of bad luck.

THAT CLINT EASTWOOD EMPTY CHAIR SKETCH WAS SPOT-ON, WASN’T IT?

This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.

Reflect on that for a moment. The President of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office day after day. The West Wing is stuffed with high power aides. His political appointees sit atop federal bureaucracies, monitoring the work of the career staff around them. The President has told his core team, over and over, that the health care law and the website rollout are his number one domestic priorities.

And with all this, neither he nor, apparently, anyone in his close circle of aides and advisors knew that the website was a disaster. Vapid, blind, idly flapping their lips; they pushed paper, attended meetings and edited memos as the roof came crashing down. It is one thing to fail; it is much, much worse not to see failure coming. There is no way to construe this as anything but a world class flop.

And just one of many from this administration. Like I said, Clint was spot on. And much as I love Walter Russell Mead, I note that he voted for this guy, and blandly assumed that an Ivy League pedigree was some sort of assurance of competence. Not so much. And it’s not as if the signs weren’t there, for those able to see them.

Plus:

As more people reflect on the President’s extraordinary press conference, the public sense that the President and his team just aren’t up to the job will inevitably grow. It was a jaw dropping moment of naked self revelation, and the more one reflects on it the more striking it becomes. The President of the United States didn’t know that his major domestic priority wasn’t ready for prime time—and he thinks that sharing this news with us will somehow make it better. It is moments of this kind that give epithets like “Carteresque” their sting.

That’s unfair to Jimmy Carter, whose style ran more toward micromanagement than to obliviousness.

UPDATE: More competence.

ANOTHER UPDATE: National Journal: President Obama and His Gang That (Still) Isn’t Shooting Straight: Incompetence, deception and lack of accountability still hound White House and health reform. “Incompetence, deception and lack of accountability doomed the Obamacare rollout. That’s old news. What’s new? The nagging durability of the White House’s incompetence, deception and lack of accountability.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Moral Decline Of Oprah.

Multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey, after her surreal $38,000 handbag “racism” encounter in Switzerland, has just weighed in again on race and the presidency, as yet the nth way of hyping her new film: “There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”

Nobody ever says? Has she read a newspaper columnist or turned on MSNBC lately?

Aside from her historical ignorance, Oprah Winfrey has increasingly turned to the race card to explain the president’s plummeting polls. In her race-obsessed world, Syria, Benghazi, the NSA, IRS, AP, and ACA messes do not explain why a reelected president crashes from a recent 60 percent approval rating to less than 40 percent in less than a year.

Instead, in Oprah’s no-win, racialist world, to the degree that Obama is popular, Americans are considered for the time being as not racist; to the degree that he is not, the country suddenly is collectively under suspicion (e.g., “everybody’s thinking it”).

That Obama might be utterly inexperienced in the manner of Jimmy Carter, less than veracious in the manner of the impeached Bill Clinton, or suffering the same second-term blues of Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra or popularity crash of George W. Bush after Katrina simply cannot for Oprah be true of an African-American president, who for some reason must not suffer the same fate and treatment as almost all who have held the highest office.

In the words of Tony Katz: “It’s not his race. It’s that he’s awful.” To Oprah, however, it’s all about his race. That’s why she supported him in 2008, and it’s why she’s smearing his opposition now: Racial loyalty trumps all. Her fans figured this out in 2008, of course, which is why she’s a comparative nobody now.

IRS CHIEF COUNSEL INVOLVED IN TARGETING CONTROVERSY:

The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney.

In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review applications that the agency had screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.

Previous accounts from IRS employees had shown that Washington IRS officials were involved in the controversy, but Hull’s comments represent the closest connection to the White House to date.

Read the whole thing.

PER WEHNER: Obama’s Lear-like Rage. “Mr. Obama’s effort at emotional blackmail has failed, and in bitterly lashing out at those who called him out on his demagoguery, he went some distance toward confirming that he is, in fact, a demagogue. Three months into his second term, Mr. Obama is becoming an increasingly bitter and powerless figure. When a man who views himself as a world-historic figure and our Moral Superior commands things to happen and they don’t, it isn’t a pretty sight. See yesterday’s Rose Garden statement for more.”

Meanwhile, a reader emails: “I wonder how all those wringing their hands over the failure of the gun bills would feel…if the nation’s abortion policies were based on the Kermit Gosnell atrocities?”

Yes, the emotional-blackmail thing only goes one way, apparently. But it’s interesting that it was such a colossal failure this time. Putting forward people to promote your cause, and then maintaining that no one is allowed to argue with or criticize them because of their victim status must have looked like a sure winner to the White House, but they overplayed their hand and it backfired.

UPDATE: More backfire. This emotional bullying stuff just doesn’t seem to intimidate people on the right anymore. I guess when you’ve been called a racist every time you disagreed with Obama’s healthcare policy, such things lose their power.

And reader Drew Kelley emails: “Remember how we joked about Obama’s first, and second, terms being – in a best case scenario – another term of Carter? Today, it seems that this term is turning into a reprise of Nixon, but with a President even more bitter.”

SENATE APPROVES FISCAL CLIFF LEGISLATION: “Hours past a self-imposed deadline for action, the Senate passed legislation early New Year’s Day to neutralize a fiscal cliff combination of across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts that kicked in at midnight. The pre-dawn vote was 89-8. . . .Under the deal, taxes would remain steady for the middle class and rise at incomes over $400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for couples — levels higher than President Barack Obama had campaigned for in his successful drive for a second term in office.” Democrats sound kind of disappointed in the size of the tax increases.

UPDATE: Senate Quickly Passes 157-Page Deal on Fiscal Cliff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Over the Fiscal Cliff, Or There And Back Again.

But Jeff Carter isn’t happy.

MORE: Senate passes massive tax cut which raised taxes over $600 billion in middle of night without reading the bill.

Related: Rand Paul on the Fiscal Cliff. “I never considered myself a Rand Paul fan (or enemy), but he seems to be one of the few people making sense right now.”

MORE STILL: Ann Althouse:

Is that a “clear win”? Good lord, whatever happens, the NYT will spin it as a win for Obama. I thought his number was $250,000 for couples, and now, it’s way up at $450,000. That should be called a clear compromise. How hard it must be for the Republicans to compromise, when even clear compromises are declared clear wins for the other side.

I notice that it’s $400K for individuals, but only $450K for married couples. That’s a $350K difference in threshold if you’re living together but not married. Is Obama anti-marriage?

JOHN HINDERAKER ENDORSES MY PROPOSAL. “Today, there are many millions of Americans who can tell one Kardashian sister from another, but have no idea that Barack Obama has compiled the worst presidential record since Jimmy Carter. Seriously: they really don’t know. These are the voters we need to reach, and to reach them we need to go where they live. At TMZ, for example. Or The Frisky.”

A TALE OF TWO CANDIDATES:

[jwplayer mediaid=”156627″]

UPDATE: Related videos at Hugh Hewitt’s Website.

MORE: If Romney goes on to win on Tuesday, the above video will be seen as his equivalent of Ronald Reagan saying to Jimmy Carter — just a few days before his own “unexpected” election — “There you go again.” In both cases, they were a gentle and positive way for the challenger to remind the American public that the president they elected in good faith, based on a groundswell of media-generated frenzy four years prior, under the auspices of “Change” and a new tone, were, underneath it all, mean-spirited, punitive liberals.

SCANDAL: Bombshell: Obama.com Owned by Bundler in Shanghai with Business Ties to Chinese Government.

In an explosive report set to send shockwaves through official Washington, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) released a 108-page GAI investigation into the threat of foreign and fraudulent Internet campaign donations in U.S. federal elections (visit campaignfundingrisks.com to download the full report).

Breitbart News obtained an advance copy of the bombshell report which reveals that the Obama.com website is not owned by the president’s campaign but rather by Obama bundler Robert Roche, a U.S. citizen living in Shanghai, China. Roche is the chairman of a Chinese infomercial company, Acorn International, with ties to state-controlled banks that allow it to “gain revenue through credit card transactions with Chinese banks.”

There’s more.

The unusual Obama.com website redirects traffic directly to a donation page on the Obama campaign’s official website, my.barackobama.com, which does not require donors tob enter their credit card security code (known as the CVV code), thereby increasing the likelihood of foreign or fraudulent donations. The website is managed by a small web development firm, Wicked Global, in Maine. One of Wicked Global’s employees, Greg Dorr, lists on his LinkedIn page his additional employment with Peace Action Maine and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. According to the GAI report, 68 percent of all Internet traffic to Obama.com comes from foreign visitors.

And still more.

In 2011, Mr. Roche obtained one of the most sought-after pieces of real estate in Washington, DC: a seat at the head table for President Obama’s State Dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao. How Roche—a man whose infomercial company hawks fitness equipment, cell phones, and breast enhancement products—landed a seat alongside Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, Sen. John Kerry, former President Jimmy Carter, and Chinese President Hu Jintao remains unclear.

Since 2009, White House Visitor Logs list the name Robert Roche at least 19 times, despite the fact Mr. Roche’s primary residence is in China.

Those of us who remember the dubious-donation scandal of 2008 — largely ignored by the press, of course — won’t be surprised. Will this get more attention now?