Thursday, December 5, 2013
From: Gary L. Bauer
Barack Bows To Beijing
When China recently attempted to assert control over the Senkaku Islands, claimed by Japan, by arbitrarily extending an air defense zone over the islands, America’s initial response was the correct one: We sent two B-52s flying through the air space.
But today Foreign Policy reports that signals from leading officials at the White House and the Pentagon indicate that Obama is once again backing down.
Vice President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met for more than five hours yesterday. In all that time, Foreign Policy writes, “Privately, Biden did not call for the air defense identification zone to be rolled back…”
In addition to Biden’s passivity, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told reporters, “It’s not that the ADIZ itself is new or unique. Our biggest concern is how it was done so unilaterally and so immediately without any consultation…”
In other words, we really don’t object to China claiming the islands, we just would prefer that Beijing ask nicely next time.
Arguing over some uninhabited islands may seem trivial, but it’s significant, because China has other territorial ambitions and the United States is treaty-bound to defend our ally Japan. As the Wall Street Journal wrote:
- “China is a rising authoritarian power, and the lesson of history is that peace is imperiled when established powers don’t check such a nation’s expansionist behavior soon enough. China could be the Kaiser’s Germany of this century if the world doesn’t show from the start that its militarism will be resisted.”
This is part of a developing theme. Obama has alienated Israel. Our relationship with Saudi Arabia has gone sour. Great Britain, once a nation America could always count on, refused to follow Obama’s lead on Syria. Now Obama appears to be throwing Japan to the wolves.
And for all his focus on Iran, what does Obama have to show for it? While Obama has reached out and written letters to the ayatollah, the Islamic Republic was expanding its nuclear program by 400%. As former Reagan Defense official K.T. McFarland put it, Iran is spinning more centrifuges today than there are Starbucks stores in the United States.
The damage done to our budget over the last five years is terrible. But that can be fixed. The deficit of trust that has developed with our allies will be much harder to repair.
Millennials Would Recall Obama
As we reported yesterday, young Americans who were so critical to Obama’s electoral success have turned on him. A new Havard poll found that just 41% of Millennials approve of Barack Obama’s job performance and only 39% approve of Obamacare. But there’s more.
If they had the option, 52% of voters under 25 years of age said they would vote to recall Barack Obama. That figure includes 19% of self-identified Democrats and 51% of independents.
Back To His Old Tricks
Attempting to pivot once again to the economy, Obama delivered a speech attacking income inequality yesterday. But not once did he ever address the major cause: Education and family formation.
If a teenage boy or girl drops out of high school and starts having children out of wedlock, they are statistically far more likely to be a low-income “family unit” with most of their “income” coming from the taxpayers.
But if the same teenage boy or girl goes on to college or a trade school and achieves a professional degree or skill, they will have an income many times greater than that of the high school dropout, especially if they marry a working spouse. That is not the fault of the free market or democratic capitalism.
I won’t waste a lot of space here countering every piece of demagoguery in the speech, except Obama’s sudden desire to quote the pope, who recently made some remarks that have been interpreted by big media to be critical of capitalism.
Obama has gone out of his way to attack the values of the Catholic Church through Obamacare’s mandates. He has totally rejected the church’s teachings on the sanctity of life. And he is the first president in history to support a radical redefinition of marriage, leading to a radical assault on the family itself.
Yet anytime someone tries to counter Obama’s extremism by citing these teachings or other religious values, they are attacked by the intolerant left and told religious-based views have no place in secular society. But when it suits his socialist economic agenda, Obama suddenly quotes the pontiff.
Butterflies Or Babies?
The radicals in San Francisco have never discovered an abortion that they would ban. Just ask Nancy Pelosi about her position on late-term abortion.
Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but many might ask whether liberals in the city by the bay have a heart at all. As it turns out, they do. But not for innocent unborn children.
Instead, city officials in San Francisco are scrambling to figure out how they can protect butterflies. Specifically, the bureaucrats on the San Francisco Commission on the Environment want to ban the release of butterflies at weddings and other events.
Why? According to a commission resolution — and I’m not making this up — “Many San Franciscans believe that butterflies are animals to be respected and valued as part of the city’s natural heritage and should not be used as decorations or for entertainment.”
Jeffrey Glassberg, the president of the North American Butterfly Association, told FoxNews, “[They are] taking these living organisms and treating them as nothing but party favors.”
I’ll make you a deal, Mr. Glassberg: I’ll start taking the plight of butterflies more seriously when San Francisco stops treating innocent babies as the equivalent of Styrofoam cups to be discarded on a whim.
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