[Fox] What if the folks who run the Department of Political Justice recently were told that the republic would suffer if Hillary Clinton were indicted for espionage because Donald Trump might succeed Barack Obama in the presidency? What if espionage is the failure to safeguard state secrets and the evidence that Clinton failed to safeguard them is unambiguous and overwhelming?
What if President Obama never really liked his former rival whom he appointed as his secretary of state? What if he had no real interest in seeing her succeed him because he and his wife simply could never trust her?
What if, when Clinton suggested to the president that the U.S. wage a secret undeclared war against Libya, the president went along with it as a no-lose proposition? What if he assumed that if her secret war succeeded he’d get the credit and if her secret war failed she would get the blame?
What if the means of fighting the secret war consisted of employing intelligence assets rather than the U.S. military? What if Clinton concocted that idea because the use of the military requires a public reporting to the entire Congress but the use of intelligence assets requires only a secret reporting to a dozen members of Congress?
Additional 'What if's' follow, any one, or any combination of which are entirely plausible.
[FOXNEWS] The failed coup d’état by elements of The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... ’s military signals more repression and chaos in the Middle East.
We still lack important information on what motivated the attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him... , its timing and how and why it collapsed so quickly. Nonetheless, we confidently predict Turkey will suffer several major domestic consequences, in turn causing significant international ripples.
Most importantly, Erdogan’s relentless pursuit of an increasingly radical Islamicization of Turkey will proceed largely unfettered. And no significant institutional or political opposition inside Turkey now stands athwart his penchant for authoritarianism.
The triumph of Erdogan’s government means he has swept the board clear of any real impediments to implementing his radical policies. Both as prime minister and now as president, Erdogan has focused single-mindedly on an Islamicist attack on Turkey’s secular constitution, and the very foundations of a modern Turkey, rising from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, envisioned by Mustafa Kemal.
Turkey’s military, following the pattern laid down by Kemal (known widely as "Ataturk," meaning "father of the Turks"), was intended to be the guardian of the new, Europe-oriented nation-state he strove to create.
Although it may sound odd to Western ears that the military was to safeguard civil rights, especially freedom of religion, in this new Turkey, Kemal well understood that modern thinking needed time to take root and replace the Byzantine medievalism that had characterized Ottoman rule for centuries.
Sadly, Erdogan’s religious zeal has proven Kemal right. For years, Erdogan has replaced high-ranking, secular military officers with loyal Islamicists in a blatant effort to bend the military away from its secular vocation, toward endorsing or at least accepting a re-established state Islam, harking back to the dear departed Ottoman caliphate.
Erdogan’s success at stuffing the military’s top officer corps with Islamicists and political loyalists likely explains why Turkey’s military wasn’t fully behind the coup attempt. Indeed, as seemed clear even in the revolt’s early hours, it appeared more an act of desperation, a last gasp by the military’s pro-secular elements, rather than a concerted effort by a united military establishment.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/21/2016 00:00 ||
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#1
Can Mr. Bolton + Mustache be the next Secretary of State? Please?
#5
I am deeply concerned about our troops stationed in TU.
The USAF, at the direction of The Pentagon, has engaged and trumpeted social experiments directly offensive to their host country's predominant belief, and, soon to be Government, system. Not smart - Facebook photos can get you in deep "doo-doo."
Hoping (all) our assigned personnel are keeping vigilance that will prove unnecessary.
#11
Any military have insight in to the chances the nukes are actually turned over? Because I personally can't believe such a thing (currently) until it happens.
Posted by: Charles ||
07/21/2016 21:06 Comments ||
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[THEFEDERALIST] As much as I found Trump’s campaign off-putting, a kernel of something within the Trump campaign spoke to me and stirred that long-dormant resentment. For me, it was a revelation and a possible explanation of why Trump won the Republican primaries and why Americans’ opinions of Congress and both political parties are so low.
My resentment, long in remission, came back and crystallized in the following thought: Americans are governed by politicians who see fit to reimagine entire sectors of our economy and, indeed, our lives despite having little, if any, experience in the areas of life they seek to reform wholesale. This means Americans, seeing the failures of government from Obamacare ... aka the Affordable Care Act, an ineptly designed and worse executed piece of legislation designed to bring 17 percent of the U.S. economy under the direct control of the government. The previous iteration, known as Hillarycare, was laughed out of Washington. This stinker was passed on a party-line vote without being read... to the Veterans Affairs, from the Environmental Protection Agency dumping toxic materials into a Colorado river to the Dodd-Frank regulations strangling local community banks, have had just about enough of their credentialed but utterly inexperienced supposed betters reordering their lives and livelihoods.
Think about it: how many practicing physicians helped design and implement Obamacare? How many doctors did the B.O. regime consult in imposing its electronic medical records requirements on physicians? Did the B.O. regime take significant input from doctors who worked within the existing system every day and knew a thing or two about how the proposed reforms might affect their industry? Hardly.
Instead, Americans were treated to the sight of ivory tower intellectuals like Jonathan Gruber with their models, charts, and theories about how wonderful Obamacare would be, and to big insurance companies and their lobbyists helping craft the Obamacare legislation. Gruber and the lobbyists never saw a patient in their lives. Never tried to get a Medicare reimbursement. Never had to comply with the onerous electronic medical records requirements.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/21/2016 00:00 ||
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#1
having little, if any, experience in the areas of life they seek to reform wholesale
That's not how I think of American (or Western, including many Israeli) politicians. My images are more "The Island of Doctor Moreau" sorta thing.
#1
The Republican party has been awful at conservatism. It (and the rest of the country) needs chemo. We are getting a vote between cyanide look aid and bloodletting and snake oil.
#7
Somewhere along the line it switched from 'We the People' to 'This is the American Chamber of Commerce' and missed the signal indicating it was leaving voters for donors.
When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.
But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama's remedies proved worse than the original illness.
Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America's strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.
The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.
Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word "terrorism," was airbrushed from the new administration's vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like "overseas contingency operations," "man-caused disaster" and "workplace violence."
In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.
Yet Obama's outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic "violent extremism."
Careerist toadies in government parroted the party-line message and even tried to outdo their politically correct boss.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano focused on returning veterans as terrorist risks. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry said that global warming, not the Islamic State, was the real threat. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the president asked him to make Muslim outreach a top priority for the agency. CIA Director John Brennan said that jihad "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam." Director of National Intelligence James Clapper opined that the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular.
The president often blamed the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for needlessly provoking Islam. Obama said that terrorist dangers were no more deadly than falls in bathtubs. He wrote off the Islamic State as an inept jayvee squad, assuring that they posed no existential threat. He campaigned on the premise that al-Qaida was on the run. Obama pulled all troops out of Iraq, which instantly degenerated into chaos.
Obama kept insisting that guns, not Islamic terrorists, were the real danger -- even as assassins used bombs from Boston to Paris, knives from California to Oklahoma, and, most recently, a truck to run over innocents in Nice, France.
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies got the message and worried more about charges of "Islamophobia" than preempting deadly terrorist attacks. Authorities had either interviewed and then ignored the Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino and Orlando terrorists, or they had blindly ignored their brazen social media threats.
There was never cause for such weak-horse contrition.
Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants -- even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.
Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets and later from the Taliban.
For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil -- even as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil profits for Gulf state monarchies.
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida, were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America's lack of campaign finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.
The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East. Jihadists try to convince the Arab street that returning to religious fundamentalism and exporting jihad will empower Muslims to recapture lost primacy over a decadent and guilty West, just as in the mythical glory days of the caliphate.
In truth, religious intolerance, gender apartheid, illiteracy, autocracy, statism, tribalism and religious fundamentalism all guarantee poverty, economic stagnation and scapegoating. While much of Asia and Latin America progressed through reform, the Middle East blame-gamed its miseries on affluent Western nations and on Israel.
More disturbing, millions of Middle Easterners fled to the safety of Europe and the United States -- but on occasion, only to resist assimilation and show ingratitude once they got there.
In short, the dreamy Obama approach to terrorism has proved a nightmare -- and it is not over yet.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Yes, a given. But I love butcher paper and brain storming exercises. Everyone becomes a participant and all theories are exposed. 
[FOXNEWS] The failed coup d’état by elements of 
[THEFEDERALIST] As much as I found Trump’s campaign off-putting, a kernel of something within the Trump campaign spoke to me and stirred that long-dormant resentment. For me, it was a revelation and a possible explanation of why Trump won the Republican primaries and why Americans’ opinions of Congress and both political parties are so low.
You nailed it ! 
