Questions raised by inconsistent treatment of Fox News host Jeanine Pirro
 

http://dailytorch.com/2019/03/questi...ep-ilhan-omar/

03.21.2019

Questions raised by inconsistent treatment of Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar

By Richard McCarty

Compare and contrast the swift treatment of Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Last week, Pirro questioned if Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s hijab signifies that she supports Islamic Sharia law and asserted that Sharia law is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution. Denunciations were swift; and Pirro, the daughter of Lebanese Christian immigrants, was taken off the air by Fox News.

For those unfamiliar with Omar’s problematic statements, she once tweeted that “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Making matters worse, she defended that tweet earlier this year. In response to a tweet criticizing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for threatening punishment for the anti-Israel comments of Omar and another Democrat, Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.” When people sought an explanation of her tweet, she replied, “AIPAC!” which is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Unsurprisingly, there was bipartisan outrage over these tweets, and Omar was forced to “unequivocally apologize” for what she later acknowledged was an anti-Semitic “trope.”

Most recently, Omar suggested that those who support Israel have an allegiance to that country. Unsurprisingly, a broad spectrum of people has condemned Omar’s statements while vocal anti-Semite David Duke has praised her as “the most important Member of the US Congress!”

Also last week, Rabbi Aryeh Spero, of the National Conference of Jewish Affairs, led a group of Israel supporters to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to protest the Democrat House majority’s mild response to Omar’s anti-Semitic comments. The protesters wanted action taken against Omar and were unhappy with the watered-down resolution the House eventually passed condemning various forms of hate. Of course, Pelosi was too busy to speak with them.

While at Pelosi’s office, the pro-Israel protesters delivered a letter addressed to the Speaker that stated: “You had a chance to stop anti-Semitism dead in its tracks. You did not. You had a chance to shut down the burgeoning anti-Jewish and anti-Israel attitudes seeping into America’s House of Representatives. But, you didn’t. You allowed anti-Semitism and toxic attitudes towards Israel as a nation to stand in the House. We expect more from a Speaker. You failed… You had a chance make a righteous historic decision, but instead you chose appeasement and politics, you decided in favor of what you feel will best serve your Party’s political ambitions. Bottom Line: Omar should be censured and, beyond that, removed from the powerful and influential House Foreign Affairs Committee…”

In his remarks, Rabbi Spero asserted that Pelosi and Democrats are willing to condemn anti-Semitism from the right, but not the left. This has caused him to conclude that they are not actually opposed to anti-Semitism; it is just a means to attack political opponents. Spero also noted that Omar had accused Israel supporters of dual loyalty but the protesters had not questioned her loyalty to the United States in spite of the fact that he is certain she supports Islamic states.

Rabia Kazan, of the Middle Eastern Women’s Coalition, read a letter from the father of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish journalist who was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan. Although Judea Pearl is a lifelong Democrat, he urged Pelosi to find Omar unfit to serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Nearly a week has gone by, and Pirro is still suspended from Fox News while Omar still serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Why is it acceptable for an ultraliberal like Omar to insinuate that Israel supporters have divided loyalties, but unacceptable for a conservative like Pirro to question Omar’s loyalty to the Constitution? Why did Fox suspend Pirro – instead of following the House Democrats’ example and issuing a vague statement opposing hate or religious bigotry? Or better yet, why not give Pirro an opportunity to hold a panel on her show on the issue? Why is a television show host being held to a higher standard than a Member of Congress?

Richard McCarty is the director of research at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

Unfortunately for Americans, Jews & Israelis, and basically INFIDELS worldwide, this latest pandering or caving-into Muslim Supremacists or Muslim Enemies (As Sworn to Allah) pretty-much proves what I've been saying for years.

Such being that the U.S. Congress in general has a Very Bad Case of The Stupids,...especially when dealing with Fanatical Enemies and American Officials Quite Suspect of Intent posing as Concerned Liberals.

But then,...maybe I'm just wrong about that stupidity bit?

Maybe it's just that the Dems are being their quite typically & deviously shrewd, instead.

After all, if the Democrats and America's Muslim Enemies combine forces against President Trump & America, and/or throw both Trump & America: "Under the bus", just take a wild guess at which party gets to achieve TOTAL DOMINATION & CONTROL over We Americans.

Yeah, that's right. That ONE PARTY PREFERRING (just like Progressive, Communist or Islamic nations) Democrat Party.

WISE UP!!! Don't remain stupidly herd-like suckered-in, by either Dem or Islamic Political Supremacists.

Neil

2020 Democrats don’t only have to face Trump — They must take on the 'Blob'
 

2020 Democrats don’t only have to face Trump — they must say how they’ll take on the ‘Blob’
By: JEFFERSON MORLEY, INDEPENDENT MEDIA INSTITUTE - 22 MAR 2019 AT 10:07 ET
RE: https://www.rawstory.com/2019/03/202...yll-take-blob/

If a Democrat is elected president in November 2020, he or she will have two challenges: one global and one municipal.

The first challenge will be how to run the worldwide $643 billion a year military empire of the United States, which surveils the planet while fighting four undeclared wars. The second challenge is much smaller but still formidable: what to do about “the Blob” in Washington, D.C.

No, this isn’t a science fiction joke. The Blob is the nickname that Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s speechwriter, gave to America’s foreign policymaking elite in a May 2016 interview. According to Rhodes, the Blob included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other supporters of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

More generally, Rhodes was referring the coterie of operatives who have made U.S. foreign policy under every president from Truman to Trump. With his unkind epithet, Rhodes suggested these men and women responsible for the U.S. foreign policy record are a shapeless mass lacking a coherent identity yet somehow ominous.

While Rhodes was reviled inside the Beltway, his coinage has stuck. The Blob is useful shorthand for a recognizable and powerful group: the former officials, analysts, diplomats, writers and military officers who espouse orthodox U.S. foreign policy views.

They are not a secret cabal. They work at think tanks and elite universities and consulting firms. They talk to reporters. They opine on cable TV talk shows. And they rotate in and out of government positions. They range from multilateral liberals to hawkish neoconservatives. While they have had deep differences, they have collectively promoted a broadly consistent set of policies that has defined the United States in the world over the last 30 years.

Right now, they favor a hard line on Russia, intervention in Syria and Venezuela, bolstering NATO, and promoting free-trade agreements. They oppose defense spending cuts, rapid denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and a jobs-driven foreign policy.

At its best, the Blob gave us the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, Cuba normalization, the Millennium Challenge to address global poverty, and the now-abandoned treaty on nuclear weapons in Europe.

At its worst, the Blob gave us proxy wars (leading to failed states) in Central America; expansion of NATO (to the fury of Russia); free-trade agreements (which did little for Americans living inside the East and West Coasts); invasion of Iraq (on false pretenses); the (unsuccessful) occupation of Afghanistan; the implementation of a torture regime (and its removal); the furtive implementation of mass surveillance (since abandoned); the illusory “two-state solution” in Israel/Palestine; and unauthorized wars in Libya, Somalia, Niger, and Yemen, the last with catastrophic human consequences.

What should President Sanders (or Warren or Biden or Buttigieg or Gabbard) do upon taking office on January 21, 2021? Should they follow the Obama strategy of implementing incremental course corrections in the trajectory of current policies? Or force a fundamental change of direction on issues of war and peace?

The answer depends, in large part, on how she or he thinks about the Blob.

The Blob Today

Trump has marginalized the Blob. He has abandoned the orderly policymaking process they revere. He ignores their briefings. He scorns their expertise. He demonizes their concept of a (neo)liberal world order. Instead, he uses the U.S. foreign policy apparatus for his own ends: to feed the family business, withdraw from land wars, collaborate with like-minded autocrats, stimulate arms sales, demonstrate belligerence, and dominate the news cycle.

The Blob fears Trump, for good reasons and bad ones.

This is the Democrats’ dilemma. Trump’s successor cannot run, much less reorient, America’s global empire without a policymaking elite. Yet the existing elite—the Blob—is wedded to the status quo ante Trump, and adamant in defense of its unimpressive-to-awful record since 9/11.

Exhibit A: Robert Kagan, liberal-minded neoconservative, adviser to both George Bush and Hillary Clinton. He is using the platform of the Washington Post to offer an alternative to Trump’s foreign policy. Since Trump has no use for the Blob, Kagan is appealing to Democrats and post-Trump Republicans to return to the foreign policies of the Clinton-Bush-Obama era. He wants America to face the challenge of the populist authoritarianism.

Kagan doesn’t spend much time defending the Blob’s record on Iraq’s non-existent WMD, torture, mass surveillance, election-meddling, Libya, or Yemen. He doesn’t spend any time addressing what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have said about the roots of today’s authoritarianism.

Kagan’s eloquent disquisition on the course of world history ends with the argument that to oppose his policy prescriptions is to oppose democracy itself:

“A broad alliance of strange bedfellows stretching from the far right to self-described ‘realists’ to the progressive left wants the United States to abandon resistance to rising authoritarian power. They would grant Russia and China the spheres of influence they demand in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. They would acquiesce in the world’s new ideological ‘diversity.’ And they would consign the democracies living in the shadow of the authoritarian great powers to their hegemonic control.”

One could describe the same reality by saying the repeated failures of the U.S. foreign policy elite—two unsuccessful trillion-dollar wars, the use of torture and mass surveillance, and near-total indifference to the impact of foreign policy on the U.S. economy have generated widespread opposition to the pretensions of the foreign policy elite. It is a “broad alliance” indeed.

The idea that post-Trump U.S. policymakers will act in defense of democracy is belied by the failures of democracy that have occurred on their watch. Kagan’s rhetoric of democracy is about as convincing as when Hillary Clinton tweeted “America is already great.”

What Is to Be Done?

The position of the three leading Democratic candidates on the Blob are pretty clear.

Joe Biden, who has not yet announced, was among the most dovish of Obama’s advisers, but he seems comfortable with the national security status quo. He might invite Kagan for an interview but not give him a job.

Bernie Sanders, gruff socialist, is an outsider. Along with his foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, he insists on a fundamental change from Blob policies. Sanders wouldn’t return Kagan’s phone calls.

(See David Klion’s “Who Is Matt Duss, and Can He Take On Washington’s ‘Blob’?” on the Nation.)

Elizabeth Warren, impassioned Harvard professor, is a policymaking insider par excellence (she almost single-handedly created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau). She too wants to break with the Blob. Warren would return Kagan’s phone call—and tell him to hold her beer.

In short, Biden would most likely embrace the Blob, Sanders would purge it, and Warren would bend it to her will.

Another Democratic aspirant who has signaled their independence from Blob thinking is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who served two tours in Iraq as a medical specialist. She is an outspoken anti-interventionist, who has flouted liberal sensibilities with her willingness to take meetings with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a brutal dictator. She serves on the board of a foreign policy group funded by the Koch Brothers. She’s a Blob-buster.

Beto O’Rourke, the El Paso congressman, has shown an independent streak. According to Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, O’Rourke “bucked Obama on several important issues, pressuring him to close Guantanamo, supporting legislation to curtail NSA spying, opposing war in Syria and arming the country’s rebels, and demanding Obama get congressional authorization for his continued war on ISIS.” O’Rourke looks like a Blob skeptic.

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, served as naval intelligence officer in Afghanistan, but has not focused on foreign policy or national security issues. He did endorse the suggestion of Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent that all Democratic presidential candidates pledge to abide by the War Powers Act. The oft-ignored 1975 law requires the president to get congressional approval for U.S. military action lasting longer than 90 days. That’s the kind of useful reform the Blob would never propose but could probably live with.

Jay Inslee, governor of Washington state, is running a one-issue campaign: climate change, which implies a U.S. foreign policy agenda very different than the Blob consensus. He’s a Blob skeptic.

The foreign policy views of John Delaney, a Maryland congressman and former businessman, flow from his belief in free trade, long a staple of semi-official Washington thinking. He’s Blob-friendly.

The other declared candidates—Sen. Cory Booker, former HUD secretary Julian Castro, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Kamala Harris, Senator Amy Klobuchar and entrepreneur Andrew Yang—have said little about issues of war and peace beyond platitudes. What they have (or have not) said about Venezuela indicates they are Blob-friendly.

Of course, the 2020 campaign has just begun, and voters are notoriously uninterested in foreign policy issues, at least until they become issues of war and peace. The candidates have just begun to face questions about how they would administer the American empire after Trump. And those questions begin with: What do you think of the Blob?

Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

About this article it was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Truly surprised at the Highly Respected (since Quite DIFFERENTLY fair and honestly reporting and discussing both sides of most matters) Fox News Chanel suspending Judge Pirro aside,...one wonders why such a Fine News Network would treat Jeanine so-damn-harshly just for giving an Honest Opinion, and/or exactly how MANY other sensible Americans ALSO BELIEVE?

Besides, what's so: "Unacceptable for a conservative like Pirro to question Omar’s loyalty to the Constitution?" Our Constitution and Sharia Law mix as well together, as oil does with water.

Also,: "Why did Fox suspend Pirro – instead of following the House Democrats’ example and issuing a vague statement opposing hate or religious bigotry?"

Then too, and what most Americans should deem Most Important of all, is: "Why is a television show host being held to a higher standard than a (OATH-TAKING) Member of Congress?"

Whom threatened Whom???

Neil

Marine Commandant: Border deployment, shuffling funds for wall poses 'risk'
 

Marine Corps commandant: Border deployment, shuffling funds for wall poses 'risk'
By: Nicholas Sakelaris 3/22/19
RE: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2019...53272078/?sl=3

Photo link: https://cdnph.upi.com/svc/sv/upi/255...poses-risk.jpg
Gen. Robert B. Neller, USMC, Commandant of The United States Marine Corps, testifies on the Marines United website, during a Senate Armed Services hearing investigating the matter, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on March 14, 2017. A private online group called Marines United, with over 30,000 active and former military service members, mostly Marines, was caught sharing thousands of nude photos of Marine women without their consent.

March 22 (UPI) -- The commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Gen. Robert Neller, warned acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan that deploying Marines to the southern border and reallocating funds to build a border wall poses an "unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency."

Those tasks, which Neller called "unplanned and unbudgeted," forced the Marines to cancel or reduce involvement in several military exercises, the general said. Neller warned Shanahan in recent memos that were obtained by The Los Angeles Times. CNN also reported on the communications.

"The overall impacts of these cancellations and expected cancellations will result in three extremely negative impacts to the joint force," Neller said in the memos. "Marines will not participate in exercises in Indonesia, Scotland, and Mongolia, and will reduce participation in exercises with Australia and the Republic of Korea at a time where we are attempting to double down on strengthening alliances and attracting new partners."

The cost to deploy troops to the border was $130 million in 2018, but the Pentagon has not provided a new cost estimate for 2019.

President Donald Trump called an emergency declaration to reallocate billions of dollars to build the wall on the southern border, bypassing Congress, which refused to fund it. Portions of the money will come from military construction projects. Congress attempted to stop the emergency declaration but Trump issued his first veto last week to sink that resolution.

Neller said this reallocation forced the Marines to delay critical repairs and building projects at bases across the country.

In terms of dollars, relief efforts for Hurricanes Michael and Florence were the costliest, at $3.5 billion, Neller said.

The U.S. Army has also deployed personnel to the southern border and is funding that through its maintenance and operations budget.

Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Horlander said the costs were "not staggering" and that effort was not "hurting our readiness, but it could."