John Podhoretz on his radical agenda
By JOHN PODHORETZ, NY POST, Oct. 28, 2012
LINK

Let us now praise Barack Obama. For if he loses on Nov. 6, he will lose for the same reason he would have won — because of his very real, very substantial, and very consequential achievements.

Mitt Romney has based his bid to replace the president on the very simple argument that Obama is a failure — the economy is mired in the doldrums, fewer Americans are working today than in 2009, and job growth has lagged. Obama, Romney says, doesn’t know how to fix what is broken, but Romney does.

It’s a powerful argument, and it may win Romney the presidency, but it’s actually beside the point. If you look at Obama’s presidency not as a denizen of Twitter, focused on the minute-by-minute, but rather with a historian’s eye, you can see it wasn’t about those things at all.

Obama’s presidency hasn’t been dedicated to achieving economic growth in the short term, or about creating jobs.

Those would have been desirable for political reasons, of course. But he was after bigger game. His presidency has been about something larger and grander — and far more disturbing to those who don’t share his implicit sense of what America ought to be.

In his first 16 months as president, from his inauguration through the signing into law of ObamaCare, Obama arguably altered the trajectory of the United States in a manner that neither Mitt Romney (should he become president) or the president who succeeds Obama after his second term concludes in 2017 will find easy to redirect — if he or she even wishes to.

In the first place, there was Obama’s liberation from certain practical limits that would have stymied a less ambitious new leader.

By the time Obama came into office, Washington had already agreed over a period of a few weeks to a $700 billion government infusion into the world banking system. Nothing of the sort had ever been done before, and it was done spit spot with very little national debate.

That TARP program utterly changed the terms of the Washington debate about the economic crisis and the nature of the government’s role, especially since its colossal size barely slowed its rapid adoption into law. The voices raised against it were basically dismissed as being on the fringe. The system needed an expression of confidence and an explosion of liquidity.

When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight — though whether the insight was conscious or not I don’t know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model. Because it got through Congress with so little controversy and was signed into law by a Republican president, TARP gave this new Democratic president who spoke forthrightly about his liberalism and his belief in the curative powers of government serious running room.

First up was the stimulus package, which Obama signed into law on Feb. 17, 2009. For some on the left, it has become axiomatic that the reason the Obama stimulus didn’t work is that it was too small — the hole was too deep and it needed twice as many dollars to fill it to do the trick.

It’s impossible to argue about the validity of such a counterhistory, but here’s the thing: The Obama stimulus was originally priced out at $860 billion, making it the largest single piece of domestic spending legislation ever conceived by a country mile.

Remember that it passed without a single Republican vote in the House and only a handful in the Senate. Any resistance to growing it in size came from within Obama’s own party.

Economically, the stimulus was a disappointment, which is why the left can only sigh as it looks back and wishes it had been larger. Politically, it was worse than a disappointment, as its hurried passage was the key element to the resuscitation of the Republican Party — leading to the rise of the Tea Party and eventually to the crushing defeat of Democrats in the midterm elections of 2010.

But for a president who believes in Big Government and expanding its role in American life, the stimulus was a piece of conceptual genius. It built on TARP to create a potential new universe for government spending. It was suddenly thinkable that the federal government could create a single piece of legislation that could increase discretionary federal spending by 12% — because it just had.

With that achievement under its belt, the Obama administration then turned to the crisis in the automobile industry. Having just gotten the federal government to write an $860 billion check, the decision to seek a mere $63 billion to bail out a single industry seemed like small beer — especially since George W. Bush had written the first check for $17 billion just before Obama took office.

For the first time in American history, the federal government was using the federal treasury to buy stock in private companies and become their dominant stockholders. Thus was another potential model for future big-government action created. Socialist governments nationalize industries by seizing them. Obama’s innovation was to have government simply buy directly into an industry and control it through the sheer size of its investment, while leaving its management structure private.

The innovation was a one-off — so far. But the idea that the auto bailout was such a great success (even with General Motors still largely owned by the federal government) will surely harden in the minds of liberal economists and political scientists. And they will turn to it as a model in the future when an industry they favor or a company they love is in danger of going belly up.

The achievements of the stimulus and the auto bailout were both crucial to the crowning glory of Obama’s first term — ObamaCare.

First, consider the price tag: $930 billion (a phony number, the true one more likely double that, but through trickery that’s how it was “scored”). A piece of legislation as unpopular and controversial as his health-care takeover would surely have collapsed simply due to that number had it not been preceded by the stimulus. But we were in a new world, a new spending world, for Washington as a result of Obama’s action.

Second, consider the fact that it represented an unprecedented government intervention into the private sector — which was surely made more palatable and thinkable by the auto bailout the year before.

It’s safe to say that these three massive legislative and political achievements — the stimulus, the auto bailout and ObamaCare — are what will mark the president’s tenure. For the left, they didn’t go far enough. For people on the right, like me, they provide a glimpse into a new American political arrangement between the private economy, the public sector and the taxpayer that is nothing less than terrifying.

Obama has been a very consequential president — or at least he was until the midterm elections made his continuing innovations impossible by giving Republicans a check against his untrammeled use of government.

In so doing, they may have made his reelection possible, because had he gotten a few more unpopular bills stuffed down the throats of the American people, he couldn’t have been elected dog catcher a week from Tuesday.

But give the man his due. He wanted to change America. He has. Changing America back, or moving beyond the horrors he has inflicted on America, is going to be very difficult.

Michael Tanner on the cost of ObamaCare
By MICHAEL TANNER, October 27, 2012
LINK
Health-care reform is generally considered the signature accomplishment of President Obama’s first term. Certainly, it is representative of the president’s approach to government: a costly new entitlement funded by higher taxes and more debt. It will result in higher insurance premiums, fewer jobs, and sets the stage for the possible future rationing of care.

The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that ObamaCare will cost more than $1.76 trillion by 2022. And that may actually underestimate the real cost. Other estimates suggest that ObamaCare could end up costing as much as $2.7 trillion over the next 10 years and add as much as $823 billion to our growing national debt.

Moreover, at a time of slow economic growth and high unemployment, ObamaCare imposes more than $569 billion in new or increased taxes, the vast majority of which will fall on businesses. Many of those taxes, especially those on hospitals, insurers and medical-device manufacturers, will ultimately be passed along to consumers through higher health-care costs. But other taxes, in particular new taxes on investment income, are likely to reduce economic and job growth.

And this does not even begin to account for the law’s mandate that employers must provide workers with insurance. While some businesses may respond to the law’s employer mandate by choosing to pay the penalty and dumping their workers into public programs, many others will be forced to offset increased costs by reducing wages, benefits, or employment.

Individuals will also end up paying more. Already, ObamaCare has increased insurance premiums by 2%-4%. And the government’s own actuaries project that, in the future, premiums will rise by 7.9% per year, roughly twice as fast as they would have without ObamaCare.

Most troubling of all, ObamaCare is likely to reduce the quality of health care for millions of Americans. It will make it more difficult to see the doctor of your choice, and the government’s actuaries suggest that it could force many hospitals to close.

If this is the president’s signature achievement, it makes for a pretty devastating indictment of Obama’s first term.

— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute

Amir Taheri on how he lost the Middle East
By AMIR TAHERI, October 27, 2012
LINK

For almost a century the Middle East has been a fault-line threatening international peace and stability. With the debris of successive empires strewn around it, this theater of big power rivalries has produced many of the convulsions the world has witnessed since World War II.

The United States developed an interest in the region in the 1940s as President Roosevelt began thinking about the post-war international order. Since then, under American leadership, a political architecture was shaped guaranteeing the region’s stability.

For six decades, under administrations from both parties, American power acted as the pole that kept the tent up. Over the past four years, however, President Barack Obama has pulled that pole away, allowing the tent to sag and, in parts, fold.

The American abdication under Obama has led to a transition from a problematic status quo to an uncertain future. It has also created a vacuum that various opportunist powers are trying to fill.

Under Obama, Russia has gained a veto over aspects of American foreign policy, ranging from the building of a missile shield in Central Europe to halting Iran’s nuclear program, to humanitarian intervention in Syria. After two decades of virtual absence from the Middle East, Russia is trying to regain at least some of the influence that the Soviet Empire once enjoyed.

For its part, Turkey, acting as an opportunist power under its neo-Ottoman leadership, is trying to cast itself as the leader of a new Middle East dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood behind a political facade. Four years ago, Turkey was the region’s only nation that had no problems with its neighbors.

Today, it has problems with almost all of them. Because it is a member of NATO, Turkey could drag the alliance into uncertain waters in the service of its own ill-defined ambitions.

Meanwhile, Iran is gripped by unprecedented fear and hubris — fear that it might be the next target for regime change and hubris about exporting its anti-West ideology of hate to the rest of the region. As in Russia’s case, Iran is both encouraged and frightened by the American retreat. It is encouraged because it sees new opportunities to project power in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and Iraq. But it is also frightened because it might end up facing a new bloc of Arab-Sunni powers determined to push it back into its Shi’ite box.

Obama’s worldview was shaped by two factors.

The first was his desire to be the opposite of what he thought George W Bush was. He saw his predecessor as a “my way or the highway” cowboy who had dictated to others and hit them on the head when they got out of line. The first half of the Obama presidency was spent on an apology tour of the region during which he blamed the US for much of the region’s troubles and spun the cobweb of new contradictions.

For example, in 2009 when Iranians rose against their despot, Obama refused to back them because that would have looked like endorsing Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” Hatred for Bush also led Obama into backing Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemeni despots until the 11th hour. Even then, he preferred an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood rather than democratic oppositions that Bush had tried to help, albeit with little success.

Not being Bush was also a motive in Obama’s decision to downgrade ties with Iraq which, thanks to American blood and treasure, has emerged as a beacon of light in a dark region.

Having established that he was not Bush, he still had to show who he was. The answer was the second factor in his policy: an exaggerated belief in the potency of his own political sex appeal.

Obama thinks that things would happen simply by wanting them to.

He promised to create a Palestinian state in one year, appointing Sen. George Mitchell as special envoy. But then he forgot about Mitchell — who found out that he had been taken for a ride and resigned.

Wishful thinking also shaped Obama’s policy, or simulacrum of policy, vis-a-vis Iran. He stretched his “hand of friendship” to President Ahmadinejad and was roundly rebuffed.

Foreign policy is the ultimate preserve of the president. Thus the political persona of the president, in fact his character, plays a crucial role in determining foreign policy success or failure. A prisoner of fantasies about the world and his own prowess, Obama has proved incapable of developing a realistic policy capable of dealing with a complex and dangerous region. In the process he has sown the seeds of storms that he or his successors might face, at a high cost to the United States.

John Bolton on that Nobel Peace Prize
By JOHN BOLTON, October 27, 2012
LINK

Misjudging Obama’s future by giving him the Peace Prize has proven embarrassing to the Nobel committee. Obama’s failures, tragically exemplified by the murderous September 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, will be his presidency’s real foreign-policy legacy.

Withdrawing American strength from global hot spots, slashing defense budgets and debilitating reductions in US military capabilities, and Obama’s unwillingness to defend American interests and values, will not leave a more peaceful world but a more insecure one.

That’s why Obama and the Nobel Committee are wrong. Both believe that American strength is provocative and unsettling to international peace and security, but in fact the exact opposite is true. American weakness is provocative and unsettling, and we have a very weak president indeed.

— John Bolton is former US ambassador to the United Nations

Noonan: When Americans Saw the Real Obama
Why the Denver debate changed everything.
By PEGGY NOONAN, Wall Street Journal
LINK

We all say Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. But it's all still Denver, Denver, and the mystery that maybe isn't a mystery at all.

If Cincinnati and Lake County go for Mitt Romney on Nov. 6 it will be because of what happened in Denver on Oct. 3. If Barack Obama barely scrapes through, if there's a bloody and prolonged recount, it too will be because of Denver.

Nothing echoes out like that debate. It was the moment that allowed Mr. Romney to break through, that allowed dismay with the incumbent to coalesce, that allowed voters to consider the alternative. What the debate did to the president is what the Yankees' 0-4 series against the Tigers did at least momentarily, to the team's relationship with their city. "Dear Yankees, We don't date losers. Signed, New Yorkers" read the Post's headline.

America doesn't date losers either.

Why was the first debate so toxic for the president? Because the one thing he couldn't do if he was going to win the election is let all the pent-up resentment toward him erupt.

Americans had gotten used to him as The President. Whatever his policy choices, whatever general direction he seemed to put in place he was The President, a man who had gotten there through natural gifts and what all politicians need, good fortune.

What he couldn't do was present himself, when everyone was looking, as smaller than you thought. Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself. He couldn't afford to make himself look less impressive than the challenger in terms of command, grasp of facts, size.

But that's what he did.

And in some utterly new way the president was revealed, exposed. All the people whose job it is to surround and explain him, to act as his buffers and protectors—they weren't there. It was him on the stage, alone with a competitor. He didn't have a teleprompter, and so his failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him, something that provides nourishment, the thing he needs to sound good. He is not by any means a stupid man but he has become a boring one; he drones, he is predictable, it's never new. The teleprompter adds substance, or at least safety.

***
A great and assumed question, the one that's still floating out there, is what exactly happened when Mr. Obama did himself in? What led to it?

Was it the catastrophic execution of an arguably sound strategy? Perhaps the idea was to show the president was so unimpressed by his challenger that he could coolly keep him at bay by not engaging.

Maybe Mr. Obama's handlers advised: "The American people aren't impressed by this flip-flopping, outsourcing plutocrat, and you will deepen your bond with the American people, Mr. President, by expressing in your bearing, through your manner and language, how unimpressed you are, too." So he sat back and let Mr. Romney come forward. But Mr. Romney was poised, knowledgeable, presidential. It was a mistake to let that come forward!

Was it the catastrophic execution of a truly bad strategy? Maybe they assumed the election was already pretty much in the bag, don't sweat it, just be your glitteringly brilliant self and let Duncan the Wonder Horse go out there and turn people off. But nothing was in the bag. The sheer number of people who watched—a historic 70 million—suggests a lot of voters were still making up their minds.

Maybe the president himself didn't think he could possibly be beaten because he's so beloved. Presidents are always given good news, to keep their spirits up. The poll numbers he'd been seeing, the get-out-the-vote reports, the extraordinary Internet effort to connect with every lonely person in America, which is a lot of persons—maybe everything he was hearing left him thinking his position was impregnable.

But maybe these questions are all off. Maybe what happened isn't a mystery at all.

That, anyway, is the view expressed this week by a member of the U.S. Senate who served there with Mr Obama and has met with him in the White House. People back home, he said, sometimes wonder what happened with the president in the debate. The senator said, I paraphrase: I sort of have to tell them that it wasn't a miscalculation or a weird moment. I tell them: I know him, and that was him. That guy on the stage, that's the real Obama.

***
Which gets us to Bob Woodward's "The Price of Politics," published last month. The portrait it contains of Mr. Obama—of a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact—hasn't received the attention it deserves. Throughout the book, which is a journalistic history of the president's key economic negotiations with Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama is portrayed as having the appearance and presentation of an academic or intellectual while being strangely clueless in his reading of political situations and dynamics. He is bad at negotiating—in fact doesn't know how. His confidence is consistently greater than his acumen, his arrogance greater than his grasp.

He misread his Republican opponents from day one. If he had been large-spirited and conciliatory he would have effectively undercut them, and kept them from uniting. (If he'd been large-spirited with Mr. Romney, he would have undercut him, too.) Instead he was toughly partisan, he shut them out, and positions hardened. In time Republicans came to think he doesn't really listen, doesn't really hear. So did some Democrats.

Business leaders and mighty CEOs felt patronized: After inviting them to meet with him, the president read from a teleprompter and included the press. They felt like "window dressing." One spoke of Obama's surface polish and essential remoteness. In negotiation he did not cajole, seduce, muscle or win sympathy. He instructed.

He claimed deep understanding of his adversaries and their motives but was often incorrect. He told staffers that John Boehner, one of 11 children of a small-town bar owner, was a "country club Republican." He was often patronizing, which in the old and accomplished is irritating but in the young and inexperienced is infuriating. "Boehner said he hated going down to the White House to listen to what amounted to presidential lectures," Mr. Woodward writes.

Mr. Obama's was a White House that had—and showed—no respect for trying to negotiate with other Republicans. Through it all he was confident—"Eric, don't call my bluff"—because he believed, as did his staff, that his talents would save the day.

They saved nothing. Washington became immobilized.

Mr. Woodward's portrait of the president is not precisely new—it has been drawn in other ways in other accounts, and has been a staple of D.C. gossip for three years now—but it is vivid and believable. And there's probably a direct line between that portrait and the Obama seen in the first debate. Maybe that's what made it so indelible, and such an arc-changer.

People saw for the first time an Obama they may have heard about on radio or in a newspaper but had never seen.

They didn't see some odd version of the president. They saw the president.

And they didn't like what they saw, and that would linger.

A version of this article appeared October 27, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When Americans Saw the Real Obama.

Kyle Smith on his lack of a second-term agenda
By? KYLE SMITH, October 27, 2012
LINK

The worst-kept secret in Washington is that President Obama doesn’t have a second-term agenda. But actually that’s not quite true. He has a stated agenda, and it’s to increase partisanship, dial up the volume on the bickering and further divide us on ethnic lines.

But don’t believe me: Believe Team Obama, who in a carefully managed set of leaks orchestrated to accompany Time magazine’s cover story the week of the Democratic convention, said as much. The headline: “Obama Plays Hard Ball.” Aides told the magazine, without apparent irony, that they believed the president had been far too bipartisan in his first term (Republican votes for Obama- Care: zero. Republican votes for the stimulus: three, only one of whom will still be in office in January).

“We won’t make that mistake again,” the president’s top people told Time and other outlets, vowing to be even less deferential to the other side of the aisle.

Obama’s aides understand the Democratic Party will not be retaking the House of Representatives and hence will be unable to pass any liberal legislation. So they told Time their big goal for the next four years would be to propose an amnesty program for illegal aliens. They made it clear that immigration reform would finally come up not because Obama particularly cares about this issue (if he had, he would have pushed it when he had huge majorities in both houses of Congress, or at any other time in the last four years) but because the White House sees this as a wedge issue that will earn lots of media coverage intended to turn Latinos decisively against the Republican Party.

Otherwise, Obama will continue to press for tax hikes (not to close the deficit but just to punish the wealthy), believing that this time John Boehner will have to cave. And he’ll press for . . . not much else.

Even pieces published on NPR have been saying things like, “What would President Obama do with a second term? It’s been a bit of a mystery throughout the campaign.”

A bit.

But now we have the blueprint for the second term, or at least a souvenir photo album masquerading as an agenda called “The New Economic Patriotism: A Plan for Jobs & Middle-Class Security.” (Sorry, lower and upper classes: the president doesn’t care about you.)

Obama had counted on coasting to reelection by spending more money on character assassination than has ever been spent anywhere, ever. But it’s not working, so he was forced to throw together the booklet after the third debate.

Politico reports that a “Democrat close to the campaign” e-mailed, “Had to do it . . . It’s all about earning people’s votes.”

But the pamphlet is literally what Obama is figuratively: a lightweight.

Heavily padded with pictures of the chief executive looking all serious and problem solve-y, the booklet is the sound of a man digging in his heels, demanding that everyone recognize how awesome his first term has been. He keeps hoping failure will magically be transformed into success.

Micro-proposals like the creation of “manufacturing institutes” and more backing for community colleges have all the heft of Bill Clinton’s famous call for more school uniforms. Obama also calls for a temporary tax credit for business hiring that he imagines will create a million new manufacturing jobs, but businesses don’t take on permanent hires based on such fleeting blasts of energy — economic junk food.

In his improbable new incarnation as a lover of fossil fuels, Obama trumpets the oil and gas exploration that his EPA has been vigorously blocking, but he also pushes his “plan” — more like a daydream — for America to derive 80% of all energy from renewable sources by 2035. That’s unthinkable without massive penalties being dealt to the non-renewable side that provides the vast majority of our energy today.

On the big, worrisome issues — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the long-term deficit — Obama proposes nothing, though he continues to claim, preposterously, that he has saved us all $4 trillion in deficit spending in the long run. “Simply not accurate” was the ruling of the Washington Post’s fact checker, who added that “virtually no serious budget analyst agreed” that Obama’s $4 trillion in savings consisted of anything more than accounting gimmicks.

Reviews were meh. “There is not anything significantly new here,” said CNN’s Jessica Yellin. That’s a little troubling, because only 4% of Americans think more of the same is the right way to go in a second term. Bernie Madoff has higher approval ratings than that. (62% demand “major changes” from an Obama re-up.)

Obama’s second term “plan” is a nothing sandwich, a blast of hot air, a wet firecracker. It’s empty rhetoric from an empty suit, sitting on an empty chair.

A Case Study In Incompetence
NY Daily News Editorial, October 28, 2012
LINK

Myriad are the failures of the Obama administration, but none is more tragic, or more frightening, or more foreboding of catastrophe than the appalling mishandling of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi.

Details continue to leak, but it’ll be hard to top the bombshell from Fox News at week’s end reporting that repeated urgent requests for military help during the attack were summarily denied — for hours.

In those hours, former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was killed after he chose to disobey an order to “stand down” — and rushed to aid his fellow Americans.

This is not explained by the “fog of war” excuse so lamely offered by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — or the “Monday-morning quarterbacking” whining of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

It’s well established that the Benghazi consulate had been denied adequate security in the days leading up to the attack. But the new report suggests an astonishing lack of competence, or maybe it was cowardice, as a US ambassador and his team were coming under a well-coordinated terrorist attack.

Jennifer Griffin, a veteran Fox News defense correspondent, reported Friday that there were two urgent requests — hours apart — for help during the attack.

Special-ops teams and air cover were readily available, and could’ve been on the scene in less than two hours. (The attack lasted for more than six hours.)

In fact, two surveillance drones were deployed — both capable of relaying real-time visuals of what was happening.

But urgent requests for help were rejected — even when Woods and two others radioed that they had a laser fixed on the terrorists who were firing mortars and called in their coordinates.

Woods and another former SEAL, Glen Doherty, were killed by a mortar shell about six hours after the initial assault began.

“My son . . . responded to the cries for help and voluntarily sacrificed his life to protect the lives of other Americans,” says his father, Charles Woods.

“This has nothing to do with politics,” he added. “This has to do with integrity and honor. My son showed moral courage.”

True enough, surprise attacks happen.

But the failure to respond — leaving an American diplomat and his security team to their fate — defies comprehension.

This, even as e-mails show the State Department and White House Situation Room knew within the first couple of hours that an al Qaeda affiliate was publicly claiming responsibility.

But how could that be?

Hadn’t al Qaeda been defanged by SEAL Team 6 when it took out Osama bin Laden — and didn’t the president have the victory laps to prove it?

Well, apparently not.

So Obama & Co. stuck with the untenable claim that the Benghazi strike wasn’t a terrorist attack at all, but a “spontaneous” mob assault prompted by that anti-Muslim video.

Indeed, says Woods, Clinton vowed to him at a White House meeting that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”

And don’t you just know, the “person . . . that did the video” is in jail, on a very dubious probation-violation charge. (So it seems the administration can follow through on some things when it chooses.)

Equally offensive was the bizarre remark at the same event by a “loud and boisterous” Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly asked Woods, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”

This man is a heartbeat away?

Compare that crudity with Charles Woods’ outraged dignity: “I wish that the leadership in the White House had the same level of moral courage and heroism that my son displayed.”

He wants “the person or persons who made the decision to sacrifice my son’s life to stand up” — and accept responsibility.

Not going to happen.

Not in this administration.

Acknowledging what really happened in Benghazi would mean confessing to hubris, incompetence, amateurism and deceit.

These are, sadly, Obama hallmarks.

So, what does the president have to say for himself?

“Well, we are finding out exactly what happened,” Obama told a reporter Friday.

Forty-seven days late and four lives short, sad to say.

So add cluelessness to the bill of Obama particulars — which goes a long way toward explaining the clouds of acrid smoke hanging over the entire Middle East.

As does nature, statecraft abhors a vacuum. When one develops, adventurers and advantage-takers appear in short order.

Iran continues to build its bomb; Syria burns; Turkey awaits its fate, and Egypt is looking at a Muslim Brotherhood-enforced Sharia state.

Think of it as Benghazi writ large.

Time to evict the deceiving amateurs.