The audacity of Obama’s lying

Brazenness is key. If you’re going to lie, don’t be shy

Roger Kimball

 

Former President Barack Obama campaigns for Democrats ahead of the 2018 midterms

Roger Kimball

What makes a good liar? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think, partly because it’s a harder and more complex thing to accomplish than you might think.

Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not have a satisfactory answer to the question. Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the sport, I admire from afar expert practitioners. And I was reminded just a few days ago that we have in our midst a grand master of mendacity. In his speech in Milwaukee on Friday, Barack Obama demonstrated once again his effortless, masterly deployment of deceit.

Again, I do not say that we groundlings have been vouchsafed all the inner workings of the mechanism. But one thing is clear from Obama’s performance: brazenness is key. If you are going to lie, don’t be shy. Capitalise on the public’s inherent goodwill — and its poor memory.

Another useful gambit: accuse others, preferably in violent terms, of precisely that of which you are yourself guilty.

Watch this: ‘What we have not seen before in our public life is politicians just blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly, lying. Just making stuff up.’ Nice!

As in, ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’?

‘Nobody In My Administration Got Indicted,’ said the Big O, but consider Eric ‘kick ’em when they’re down’ Holder, the only Attorney General in history to have been held in contempt of Congress. Consider also Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official whose shameless ‘I take the Fifth’ performance before Congress was its own humiliating indictment. Or consider Hillary Clinton herself, whose list of possible felonies would have kept the the DOJ busy for years were it not for her best buddy, the disgraced James Comey, another Obama apparatchik who should be lawyering up.

The irony attending Obama’s charge — ‘In Washington they have racked up enough indictments to field a football team’ — revolves around the fact that most of the criminal referrals and shadowy behaviour concern people who worked for him, as the names Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Glenn Simpson (just for starters) suggest. Those indicted on team Trump were either set up — Mike Flynn, George Papadopoulos — or were charged with wrong doing about matters having nothing to do with the President: Paul Manafort is the most obvious example.

Brazenness. A habit of accusing others of that of which you are yourself (which I suppose comes under the category of brazenness). The truly accomplished and successful liar needs something else, something that if can influence but not sully control: I mean the cooperation of the Zeitgeist, which potency in our time means the cooperation of the media. Obama accuses Trump of lying. The media lines up to declaim it from the rooftops. He berates Trump for his incivility, his tone, his incitements. But haven’t the media poisoned the atmosphere with their nonstop attacks on the President? He is unfit for office; is ‘literally Hitler’; he, the father of a Jewish convert and grandfather of Jewish children, is an ‘anti-Semite’; he is ‘racist,’ ‘xenophobic,’ ‘Islamophobic.’ And yet it is somehow Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, not the media, that is coarse and rude and mendacious.

How does that work? As I say, I cannot claim to understand the alchemy of this process. I merely call attention to its wondrous and seemingly magical operation.

https://spectator.us/audacity-obamas-lying/

BLAMING SCHOOLS FOR THE “ACHIEVEMENT GAP” IS FOOLISH AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN EDUCATION, RACE

On Election Day, voters in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, will choose among six candidates for the school board running in three contested two-person elections. A seventh candidate is running unopposed after her challenger dropped out of the race.

Montgomery County is Maryland’s largest school district. Its operating budget exceeds $2.5 billion a year.

The Washington Post has presented profiles of the seven candidates based on their written answers to questions. One of the questions called on the candidates to identify the “greatest problem facing the school system.”

Five of the seven candidates identified “the achievement gap affecting students of color” or some variation on the same theme. Is this really the school system’s greatest problem?

There was a substantial achievement gap when I was a student in Montgomery County public schools. Some students were extraordinarily high achievers. Others achieved very little that was positive.

I don’t recall anyone saying that this gap was a problem with the school system. I think we assumed that, to the extent the gap didn’t flow from variations in abilities that help one succeed in school, the problem resided in the students and/or their parents.

In those days, the vast majority of students in the county were White. That has changed dramatically. At our 50th high school reunion, we learned that only 7 percent of the student body at our alma mater are White.

But the change in racial composition, and the fact that White students as a group are higher achievers than Blacks and Hispanics, shouldn’t change the analysis. Why assume that it’s the school system’s fault if Black students as a group achieve less than White students? Why not place the blame for poor achievement where it has always been placed — on the students and/or their parents?

Are Black students in a given class instructed differently than Whites in the same class? Do they take more difficult exams? Is student placement determined by race instead of demonstrated aptitude?

The answer to these questions surely is “no.” It’s true that Black students are disciplined more frequently than Whites, but that’s the result of behavior, not race.

The same analysis applies to Hispanic students, assuming that schools make reasonable efforts to offset any language barrier. I’m not aware of any evidence that in Montgomery County they don’t.

I suspect that blaming the school system for the collective inability of certain racial and ethnic groups to achieve depresses minority student achievement. Only to the extent that the school system mindlessly blames itself does it bear some responsibility for the problem.

So what is the biggest problem facing the Montgomery County school system? I don’t know. I’m tempted to say it’s that all students, regardless of race and ethnicity, are subjected to the victimization mindset exhibited by five of the seven school board candidates. I suspect this mindset pervades large chunks of the curriculum and makes most students dumber.

What did the other two candidates say? The candidate who’s running unopposed, Brenda Wolf a retired civil rights attorney and the only Black candidate, said: “Prioritizing use of limited resources.”

That’s a conventional, all purpose answer, and it’s encouraging to see a former civil rights lawyer not citing “the achievement gap.” However, it seems odd to talk about limited resources as the district’s biggest problem when the education budget exceeds $2.5 billion.

The other candidate, Patricia O’Neill, a liberal from my neck of the woods who has served on the school board forever, said: “Aging and overcrowded schools.” That’s a sensible answer. I might vote for her this time.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/10/blaming-schools-for-the-achievement-gap-is-foolish.php

The Left’s Response To The Mass Shooting Of Jews Is An Act Of Bad Faith

The Left’s Response To The Mass Shooting Of Jews Is An Act Of Bad Faith

How are Americans ever going to 'come together' if the first thing a political party sees when it sees dead Americans is a partisan cudgel?

By David Harsanyi

It was ironic to see many of the same liberals, who recently fought to prop up the world’s most powerful Jew-hating terror state, lecturing us on the importance of combating anti-Semitism. But there they were yesterday.

The same Voxers who had long rationalized, romanticized, and excused the Jew-killing terror organization of the Middle East were now blaming the existence of the evil, anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooter on Republicans. The same Pod bros whose echo chamber deployed anti-Semitic dual-loyalty tropes to smear critics of the Iran deal were now incredibly concerned about the Jewish community.

There were many others, and that was bad enough. But others decided to dip into a little victim blaming, as well. Hadn’t American Jews been little too Jew-centric and pro-Israelfor their own good?

Franklin Foer of The Atlantic demanded that Jews finally dispense with their faith, adopt his, and start expelling co-religionists for their political opinions. (If you want to read about the left’s co-opting of American Judaism, I recommend Jonathan Neumann’s excellent book, “To Heal The World?”) Wire creator David Simon went bold, embracing a transparent anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, accusing the Israeli government of intervening in the American democracy.

For those who confuse progressivism with Judaism — which is to say many — it might be difficult to understand that undermining the Democratic Party isn’t an act of anti-Semitism. The Trump administration, in fact, has been the most pro-Jewish in memory.

Every Jew who’s ever prayed understands the importance of Jerusalem in our faith, culture, and history. It was President Trump, not any of the other presidents who promised the same, who recognized Jerusalem as the undisputed Jewish capital, putting an end to the fiction that it’s a shared city.

It was Trump who withdrew from the Iran deal and once again isolated the single most dangerous threat to Jewish lives in the world, the Holocaust-denying theocrats of the Islamic Republic.

It was Trump who cut more than $200 million in aid to a Palestinian government that was not only inciting terrorists (including the murder of a Jewish-American citizen named Ari Fuld; but since he never wrote for The Washington Post, you might not have heard of him) but also rewarded the killers’ families.

It was his administration that kicked the Palestine Liberation Organization, the most successful Jewish-civilian murdering organization of the past 60 years, out of DC. It was the Trump administration that cut funding to the anti-Semitic U.N. Relief and Works Agency. It was also the Trump administration that turned around the unique Obama-era legacy of standing against Israel at the United Nations. And it is his administration that cracked down on anti-Semitism on college campuses and that deported one of the last real-life Nazis.

At the same time, the liberal activist resistance wing is being led by a couple of Louis Farrakhan fangirls, and most Jewish Democrats are scared to death to say a single word in protest. But that’s another story.

Anti-Semitic shootings aren’t new, and anti-Jewish hate crimes have long dominated religious bias in this country. This ancient hatred comes from both fringes and runs through presidents of both parties and occurs in nations across the world. Yet what was the most vital lesson partisans could derive from the massacre of elderly Jews attending a bris in Pittsburgh? Stop saying mean things about billionaire progressive sugar daddy George Soros.

As a Hungarian Jew who is a descendant of Holocaust survivors and victims, I am wholly comfortable attacking Soros, who is both a hard-left activist and a funder of the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. Now, there are surely anti-Semites out there peddling conspiracy theories about Soros, just as there are people peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Sheldon Adelson and other wealthy Jews who involve themselves in politics. It’s often overdone, and often by Republicans.

But if you’re not upset about the vile accusations that are incessantly thrown at someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, while you think calling out Soros is de facto anti-Semitism, your main concern is liberalism, not the Jewish people.

If you think Trump should bring down the temperature, you have a point. If you think Trump should turn down the temperature but you fail to mention that a progressive yelling about “health care” tried to assassinate the entire GOP leadership on a baseball field, you don’t really care about the temperature.

If you fail to mention that Democrats have been accusing Republicans of wanting to the kill the poor and young, of trying to destroy the planet, of being “terrorists” after every school shooting, you don’t care about the temperature.  If you rationalize mob behavior every time you don’t get your way in the electoral process, you don’t care about the temperature. And if your first instinct is to play politics with tragedy for partisan gain, you are part of the problem.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the new book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/28/the-lefts-response-to-the-mass-shooting-of-jews-is-an-act-of-bad-faith/

Jews Must Defend Themselves and Fight Their Enemies

Jews Must Defend Themselves and Fight Their Enemies

 

BY MICHAEL LEDEEN 

[Shutterstock]

I studied antisemitism with the great George Mosse and later on with Walter Laqueur, Renzo de Felice, and others, and I learned a lot about what drives modern anti-Semites, but what really drove me, from the very beginning, was a question about the victims. I could not imagine getting on the trains to Auschwitz and the other death camps. Yet millions did, even though they knew where the cattle cars were headed and what that meant for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Why didn’t they fight? Why did they make it so easy for Hitler, Eichmann, and the other monsters of the Third Reich? That was the question that drove me, and still drives me, most recently in my current project on the Italian Jews.

I don’t believe there are simple answers to such questions—we’re not very good at decoding the human spirit—but it helps to look at those who did fight. Who were they? They fall into different categories. Some were Orthodox Jews, very observant. Others were involved in secular politics, primarily of the Left, socialists and Communists. Those who did worst, those who went quietly, were good liberals for the most part, as were most European Jews. This certainly doesn’t mean that only liberals got on the trains. Plenty of secular radicals and Orthodox practitioners went to the death camps. But I was taught early on that resistance mostly came from those who understood very well why the Nazis and fascists hated them, and saw clearly that their enemies had dehumanized the Jews, and were thus intent on eliminating them.

The bulk of the Jewish community thought of themselves as good citizens, and did not accept the fact that they were hated and targeted for death. Most believed that all people were the same, that all people were basically good, and shared a common humanity. The Jews who thought otherwise (I am tempted to say “those who knew better”), who thought of themselves as different, understood that there were many bad people quite ready to do in the Jews. Of these, both religious and secular were early believers in Zionism. After all, Herzl was radicalized by the spectacle of the Dreyfus Affair, which showed how many French officials were anti-Semites, and that even distinguished service in the Army could not save their Jewish target.

Those who saw the world plain constituted the core of the Jewish resistance. Hardly anyone remembers the name of Enzo Sereni, but he is a legendary figure to the Italian Jews who fought back against Nazis and fascists. Sereni was a Roman Jew who, along with his wife, emigrated to Palestine and organized Italian Zionism and antifascism. During the Nazi occupation of Italy he traveled frequently to train the Jewish resistance. On one of these missions he was captured and executed. He remains one of the heroes of the resistance to those who still cherish its accomplishments. I am one of those who remember him.

All this speaks volumes today, on the heels of the massacre of the Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. I am dismayed at the number of people who are furious at President Trump for saying that maybe there should have been some armed security at the synagogue. They remind me of the Jews who quietly climbed onto the trains and went quietly to the death camps. No doubt they are a majority in Jewish communities throughout the diaspora, as they were in the early and mid-twentieth century. Despite the clear evidence—Jewish cadavers—they want to insist that weapons don’t belong in our houses of worship. Yet we should have learned one of the lessons of the Holocaust, namely that we must defend ourselves, and fight our enemies.

All people are not the same, and all people are assuredly not good. Yet today I understand, more than ever, how hard it is for the intended victims of evil to face these unpleasant facts and act accordingly.

I worship at “the national synagogue” in Washington, D.C., which has a very active rabbi and a congregation including numerous luminaries. It is therefore an obvious target for Jew haters, yet it took years to convince the synagogue’s officials to install minimal security, and offers to create a gun club so that our congregants can learn to use weapons have so far gone without any positive response. I have long urged Jews to apply for concealed carry permits, but I doubt there are more than a tiny handful who have done it.

https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/jews-must-defend-themselves-and-fight-their-enemies/

Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson    Red Bluff Daily News   10/30/2018

      Anti-car plans? Bombers and killers

There was an article about a county “active transportation” plan seeking input. My reaction was similar to the cautious reaction I had to the announcement about Cal Trans seeking input on the realignment of Hwy 36/Main Street lanes to facilitate traffic movement. Caution is due because we’ve seen from Sacramento to Portland that when it comes to idealistic and seemingly reasonable measures designed to “help” us “for our own good,” there can often be a hidden, anti-automotive-transportation agenda.

Gov. Brown talked openly about a “road diet” to slowly squeeze drivers with inconveniences associated with, if not fewer lane-miles to use, a concerted plan to shift transportation dollars away from additional roads serving cars to bike lanes, buses and light rail. None of those fit into the choices freely made by people who clearly prefer to get in their cars to get somewhere, expecting the exorbitant taxes we pay to provide the greatest possible ease for their work, recreation, entertainment and errand trips.

When in Oregon, we became aware of efforts involving their own Gov. Brown’s similar plans to disfavor cars on Portland’s streets. They have taken some major traffic corridor streets, which had four lanes and parking, and re-purposed enough of the roadway to bike lanes that drivers are left exasperated with one lane in each direction, watching mostly unused, empty bike lanes while they are stalled in traffic. Beware.

There was a supposedly straight news article from the AP that described President Trump as (maybe the writers didn’t choose the title) a “scaremonger” stoking fears among his base. I almost spit my coffee to read those descriptors and wondered if I had ever seen similar words used over the last 30 years as Democrats have waged campaign after political campaign devoted to scaring seniors that Republicans will take away Medicare and Social Security. They made a crude cartoon of Rep. Paul Ryan pushing a wheelchair-bound granny off a cliff, for Pete’s sake. Republicans stealing lunches from school kids was shamelessly, unquestioningly regurgitated by some of those same writers and Associated Press stories.

Witness the proven lies I exposed in this column being used against Rep. LaMalfa by his opponent, Ms. Denney, and her mouthpieces, supporters and campaign flyers. Democrats own fear-mongering tactics. When you consider that Democrats are the party of “sanctuary” cities and states, we have good cause to fear for our property and lives at the hands of illegal alien criminals released to prey on the innocent instead of being transferred to I.C.E for deportation. It’s obvious that Americans living near the border have more to fear from aliens hauling drugs or human chattel without a border wall than with it. I don’t like Democrats because they get people killed through anti-gun and pro-illegal alien laws, and soft-on-crime judges and “reforms.”

Had the dozen or so dud (not hoax or fake) bombs—as well as the abominable anti-Semitic mass murders—appeared yesterday instead of days ago, this column would have a very different message, borne of grief and condolences. Since less than 24 hours passed before the most despicable political, Trump-deranged reactions, I have nothing but anathema for the Democrat/progressive/media’s leftist knee-jerk spewing of obsessive hatred.

Here are some thoughts, in no particular order: All of the blathering about how “Trump needs to tone it down” and “reverse statements that condone violence” so misses the essential truth (intentionally, as I see it) of Trump’s rhetoric and tweets as to render their criticism null and void. First, candidate Trump’s campaign event attendees were repeatedly assaulted by antifa/occupy/black lives matter types; Trump never once told his fans to go out and attack anyone. He encouraged rough treatment at times in his rallies when they were disrupted by protesters—you can disagree with that but one protester actually attempted to rush the stage while others engaged in middle-finger insults and sign-wielding interruptions.

I think they had it coming when attacking his rallies; you don’t see any of that now when many thousands are showing up. Charlottesville? Trump never praised white nazis; he rightly said that “good people were on both sides” of the Confederate monument removal debate and protests. That is all.

No respectable, legitimate conservative Trump supporter held Bernie Sanders responsible for James Hodgkinson who attempted to murder Rep. Steve Scalise and, but for armed security, would have slaughtered as many Republicans as his ammo could allow. No one held Al Gore to blame for the environmental fanatic Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who had a dog-eared copy of Gore’s book, “Earth in the Balance” for inspiration due to the impending disasters outlined therein. Obama was buddies with the Weathermen bomber, Bill Ayers, who wished he’d done more bombing, to no condemnation by Obama.

If President Trump’s and his supporters’ vitriol over the “fake news” media seems untoward and intemperate, please explain how 2-years’ worth of demonization, lies and Trump-as-Hitler is within the bounds of decency for honest reporting and opining. The hyperbolic voices in the news and commentary should be responsible enough to know that equating someone to Hitler or other evildoers is tantamount to saying that it would be justified to kill him, wouldn’t it?

The wannabe bombmaker, Sayoc, was a 25+year criminal who demonstrates that Broward Co. Florida has a problem with putting and keeping criminals in jail. Trump had nothing to do with inspiring a self-deluded, fake-Seminole, strip club worker and exaggerator-of-his-own-resume.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, are we really being asked to disregard the clear evidence of Trump’s support of Israel and close family ties to the Jewish faith? The synagogue murderer hated Trump for all of that. Does the decades-long affinity of the left with Jew-hating Muslim fundamentalists and racists, up to and including Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and the Women’s March leader and sharia-devotee Linda Sarsour—that means nothing?

How does Barack Obama get no responsibility for his anti-Israel, Iran-supporting nuclear deal? More next week.

Did Anti-Semitic BDS Rhetoric Trigger the Synagogue Shooter?

Did Anti-Semitic BDS Rhetoric Trigger the Synagogue Shooter?

 

BY RICK MORAN 

(Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press) *** Please Use Credit from Credit Field ***

"Violent rhetoric leads to violent actions" is a meme that's all the rage these days, despite there being little scientific evidence that it's true.  But it appears to be true when applied to the Ogre Trump. Then, every word he utters is an invitation to some disturbed person to open fire.

We've seen this meme applied liberally to explanations for what encouraged Cesar Sayoc to send bombs to all those Democrats. His lawyer even blames Trump for his client's impulse-control problem. Should Trump be blamed for the synagogue massacre also? Many on the left are trying to make the connection, despite the fact that the shooter was virulently anti-Trump

But if Trump is to blame for the attempted bombings,  yesterday's anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh could just as easily be blamed on the vicious anti-Jewish rhetoric coming from the left.

We may never know the inner workings of the minds of Sayoc and Robert Bowers, the shooter who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Their "justification" for their actions are divorced from reality. But if, indeed, there was a "trigger" that sent Sayoc to the post office to mail a dozen bombs to Democrats, the anti-Semite Bowers may very well have been triggered by the rhetoric coming from BDS proponents and other leftists whose anti-Semitism has been widely circulated in American media.

Monica Showalter writing at American Thinker:

The mass murderer who opened fire on a Pittsburgh synogogue was an anti-Semite and a rabid Trump hater. Yet that hasn't stopped the left from trying to pin the massacre on Trump as they pin all calamities. Never mind Trump's kind words. Never mind the strong support of him from Israel. Never mind that his favorite daughter is an Orthodox Jew and his three grandchildren are Jewish as well. The desperate logic of Blaming Trump can be read here, here, and here.

And don't forget this unbelievable (and still unapologized-for) tweet here, cited by Clarice Feldman in her column, not only pinning the evil on Trump but blaming the Jews for the attack as well, an amazing feat of disgustingness from the left:

https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1056219660444676097

The most famous anti-Semite in America is not David Duke or any right-wing nut. It's the nauseating Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan, who is a friend to (Democratic) presidents. The list of anti-Semitic quotes made by the black nationalist "religious leader" is a long and sickening one. Most recently, the good reverend offered the casual observation that he wasn't anti-Jewish, he was "anti-termite."

I don't recall Farrakhan endorsing Trump for president.

Jewish Republicans have pointed out that the Democratic Party from the leadership on down is lousy with Jew haters.

Seven long-serving Democrats have close ties with Louis Farrakhan. Each of them should resign.

They include former Nation of Islam employee, Congressman Keith Ellison, who is Deputy Chair of the DNC. Ellison has tried to excuse his 2013 meeting with Farrakhan, while ignoring his more recent meeting with the NOI leader in Farrakhan’s hotel room, in 2015. At least six other Democrats are known to have embraced Farrakhan. These members of Congress - Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Danny Davis, Andre Carson, Gregory Meeks, and Al Green - have all, while in office, sat down with Farrakhan for personal meetings.

There can be no question about how abhorrent it is for these Democrats to be connected to Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan is first and foremost a preacher of hate. He preaches about Jewish “control” over the government and media and has claimed to have “pulled a cover off of that Satanic Jew,” saying “your time is up, your world is through.” And those were just the comments from last week.

Anti-Semitism is unacceptable. Farrakhan is the moral equivalent of a leader of the KKK. If it was discovered that members of Congress had met with the leader of the KKK, they would need to resign. In this case, for meeting with, and embracing, Louis Farrakhan, nothing short of resignation is acceptable from these seven Democrats.

Liberals will say that Farrakhan and those who tolerate him are old news and not relevant to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who adore Trump. But the anti-Jewish BDS movement (boycott, divestment, sanctions) aimed at Israel would give someone like Bowers plenty of ammunition to open fire.

One of the most notorious BDS anti-Semites is Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian "activist" who has been called an "anti-Semitic terrorist" for "using feminism as a tool to promote her radicalism." Sarsour has been in the forefront of the resistance against Trump and has advocated for Palstinian statehood at the expense of Israel.

Indeed, the Democratic Socialists of America went even further:

The national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America voted the other day in favor of the boycott-Israel movement, or BDS, and the success of the pro-BDS resolution caused the assembled delegates to break out into a rousing chant of “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free!”

Should we ask them where Israel might fit on this new map? Never mind.

As a dedicated anti-Semite, there is no doubt Bowers has been continuously exposed to BDS eliminationist  rhetoric about the evil of Israel and the Jews. So why give anti-Semitic liberals a pass on encouraging violence against Jews?

Their rhetoric may be rancid but their intent and motives are pure. So forget about the notion that the left is in the business of inciting disturbed people like Bowers. The rhetoric=action theory just doesn't hold water.

Unless you're Trump.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/did-anti-semitic-bds-rhetoric-trigger-the-synagogue-shooter/

Voter fraud exists – Even though many in the media claim it doesn’t

Voter fraud exists – Even though many in the media claim it doesn’t
John Fund By John Fund, Hans A. von Spakovsky | Fox News

President Trump warned on Twitter last week that law enforcement would be looking for “voter fraud” in the midterm elections. Many journalists quickly responded – as they always do – by dismissing the very existence of voter fraud.

CNN’s Jim Acosta tweeted “voter fraud in this country is actually very rare.”

Glenn Thrush of The New York Times claimed: “there is essentially no voter fraud in this country.” He instead asked, "Will the (Justice Department) Civil Rights division prevent/investigate a real threat-voter suppression?"

Journalists have credulously repeated unsupported, patronizing claims that in Georgia and other states, voter registration and absentee ballot laws somehow suppress minority votes.

The preference for opinion journalism over real reporting prompted Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame to tell a CNN summit last Monday, “We need to be doing stories that really look at whether or not there is widespread voter fraud…. we still need to be doing that basic aspect of the reporting.”

David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report said there are “valid concerns about the restrictive impact of new voting laws and voters improperly removed from rolls, but there's also a lot of outrage-stoking and sloppy journalism in this realm that are counterproductive to fixing real problems.”

For example, to improve the accuracy of Georgia’s records, state legislators last year required  that information on a voter registration application match a “driver’s license, state ID card or Social Security record.” Inconsistencies can cause a voter’s registration to be flagged as “pending” while the discrepancy is investigated.

Brian Kemp, the GOP candidate for governor and current secretary of state in Georgia, is being accused of “voter suppression” because of this law. But a “pending” status does not prevent anyone from voting as long as he or she has a government ID that substantially matches the registration application. In any event, every voter can cast a provisional ballot that will be counted once the registration information is verified.

As the secretary of state told radio host Erick Erickson, there are 75,000 pending voters among a record total of 7 million registered in the state. Of these, 9,224 are minors under 18; 2,935 used a fake address; 3,393 are not citizens, and 5,842 were already registered.

Of the remaining applications, 75 percent submitted erroneous Social Security information. Almost a quarter of those “sloppy forms” came from a registration effort by the New Georgia Project, a group founded in 2014 by Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor.

Abrams seems unconcerned about voter integrity, telling a crowd in Jonesboro that the "blue wave" would include "those who are documented and undocumented.” She later claimed she didn’t mean to imply noncitizens should actually vote.

While journalists have chased down the Georgia rabbit hole, law enforcement and citizen watchdog groups have uncovered serious voter fraud problems that have received almost no national attention.

For example:

In Texas

Court filings by the Texas attorney general reveal that funding for a voter fraud ring came from the former head of the Texas Democratic Party in Fort Worth.

Leticia Sanchez and three other vote “harvesters” have been indicted for allegedly submitting fraudulent absentee ballot applications and then either intercepting the ballots in mailboxes or improperly “assisting” elderly voters in filling out their ballots.

Separately, the Texas attorney general has announced he’s investigating mailers sent to non-citizens by the state Democratic Party asking them to register using applications that already had the box asking about citizenship checked ‘Yes.’”

In California

California was recently forced to admit that it had mistakenly registered almost 25,000 ineligible voters. The state didn’t even realize it was registering noncitizens until a Canadian who is a permanent resident of the U.S. contacted The Los Angeles Times to say he had been improperly registered under the state’s new automatic voter registration system.

In a letter calling for an audit, Democratic Secretary of State Alex Padilla admitted that such “persistent errors” will “undermine public confidence.”

In Pennsylvania

Over a 20-year-period, Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles officials have allowed thousands of noncitizens to register to vote and many have actually voted.

After state officials withheld documents from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and even state legislators with oversight authority detailing this mess, the PILF sued to enforce a federal disclosure law. After months of litigation, state election officials are still concealing the information that no one in the media seems interested in uncovering.

In Michigan

PILF found that Michigan lacks a system to keep false citizenship claims from being accepted during voter registration. The group’s preliminary study of the Detroit metro area found at least 1,444 non-citizens have been registered to vote in recent years.

PILF has also found thousands of non-citizens – many of whom have voted – on voter rolls in other jurisdictions, including New Jersey, Illinois and numerous sanctuary cities.

In states around the U.S., major problems with our voter registration systems have been tolerated for years. A 2012 report by the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million dead people were registered to vote and 2.75 million people were registered in more than one state.

The Pew report found that 24 million registrations were either invalid or inaccurate, making the registration systems vulnerable to fraud. Despite this abysmal record, the Justice Department under President Obama decided it wouldn’t take any action to enforce a federal law that requires states to maintain accurate voter rolls by regularly removing ineligible voters

When the 2002 Help America Vote Act  passed Congress with bipartisan support in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle in Florida, it’s co-author – Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut – declared the goal of our laws should be to “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

Indeed, there is no reason why we can’t pursue both goals. But the media aren’t doing our democracy any favors by summarily dismissing the existence of voter fraud – like the almost 1,200 proven cases in the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database – while questioning the very need for accurate voter rolls.

John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky are coauthors of “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk”

John Fund is a columnist for National Review. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFund.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/voter-fraud-exists-even-though-many-in-the-media-claim-it-doesnt

Did Years Of Obama’s Anti-Semitic Words and Actions Incite Pittsburgh Shooting?

by Jeff Dunetz

• Obama

Obama

Shabbos is supposed to be a day of peace and family. But this Shabbos at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh it was a day of hate and murder. According to officials, eleven people were killed, and six people were wounded.  Four of the injured were police officers who rushed to the scene to stop the shooter.

All last week the MSM was suggesting that President Trump’s words incited the bomb mailing suspect if that’s the case then shouldn’t they be blaming Barack Obama’s anti-Semitic words and actions for the horrible Synagogue shooting?

For example, ex-President Obama’s July 31, 2015 phone call organized by the Anti-Israel group J Street and other progressive Jewish groups could be summed up in one sentence. Please help because those rich people are helping those warmongering Jews to fight this incredible Iran deal because they don’t like me and they want to start a war just like they did in Iraq.

In the 20-minute phone call Obama said over and over those opponents of the Iran deal come from the same “array of forces that got us into the Iraq war,” he said a “bunch of billionaires who happily finance super PACs” are “putting the squeeze on members of Congress.”

William Daroff

✔@Daroff

Replying to @nathanguttman

@nathanguttman @ChemiShalev @kampeas Jews are leading effort to kill #Irandeal. "Same people opposing the deal led us into Iraq war."

3:40 PM - Jul 30, 2015

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The message was clear to the Jewish participants, William Daroff Senior Vice President for Public Policy & Director of the Washington office of The Jewish Federations of North America tweeted during the meeting “Jews are leading effort to kill #Irandeal. ‘Same people opposing the deal led us into Iraq war,’” and followed with “Canard: Jews got us into Iraq War.”

William Daroff

✔@Daroff

Replying to @nathanguttman

@nathanguttman @ChemiShalev @kampeas Canard: Jews got us into Iraq War.

3:32 PM - Jul 30, 2015

• 1
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In a meeting with a hand-picked list of Jewish leaders, Lee Rosenberg of AIPAC questioned Obama’s statement comparing people who object to the Iran deal with those who supported the invasion of Iraq because many anti-Semites claim the Jews pushed Bush into invading Iraq. Obama explained that Netanyahu supported the Iraq invasion (true). What the president left out was that the prime minister at the time Ariel Sharon strongly urged Bush not to invade. Obama also forgot to mention that his vice president Joe Biden, both of his secretaries of state Kerry and Clinton, and his biggest ally in the Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid all supported the invasion of Iraq in Congress and now support his flawed Iran deal.

Why this matters is that anti-Semites such a Pat Buchanan have been pushing the false canard that the warmongering Jews pushed America into the Iraq war. Apparently, Obama agreed with that anti-Semitic story. He even doubled down accusing the Jewish State of being a bunch of warmongers.  During an August 2015 speech at American University, Obama again tried to scapegoat the Jews, saying:

So this deal is not just the best choice among alternatives, this is the strongest nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated, and because this is such a strong deal, every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support.”

Yes, Israel opposed the deal, so did Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UAE, Bangladesh and most of the other Sunni Muslim States vehemently opposed the deal because of their fears that Shia Iran would use nukes to attack them. But Obama wanted to scapegoat the Jews, and the media was quiet.

And what was the message sent by Obama’s continued support of Jew haters?

Beginning with his first campaign for president, Obama surrounded himself with anti-Semites like General Merrel McPeak.  McPeak was the 2008 Obama for President Co-Chair who had an impressive resume of blaming our foreign policy on the “Jewish Lobby,”  Perhaps the best example of McPeak’s Antisemitism was when he was asked during an interview why there isn’t peace in the Middle East, and he said, “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.” (in other words, those pesky Jews, who control America’s policy on the Middle East).

One of his first presidential appointments was the anti-Semitic Chas Freeman who blamed his resignation on the evil Israel lobby (a nicer way of saying Jewish lobby). Actually, Chas, it was a lot less than an evil Israel lobby, much of it was the work of a few Jewish bloggers — one of whom was named The Lid.

Obama denied Jewish ties to the Land of Israel in his 2009 Cairo speech, saying Israel was created only because people felt guilty about the Holocaust.

America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and Antisemitsm in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.

Obama’s first Presidential Medal of Freedom honorees was Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson. The friendliest thing Bishop Desmond Tutu ever said about Jews was “People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful.” He also once said, that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly on God.”

Tutu’s co-honoree Mary Robinson presided over the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” that turned into a non-stop hate-fest against Jews and Israel. The conference was so anti-Semitic that Colin Powell, the Secretary of State at the time, walked out.

One of the flyers distributed at Mary Robinson’s Conference

During his presidency, Obama has allied himself with Al Sharpton who was a leader of the anti-Semitic pogrom in Crown Heights and incited the anti-Semitic firebombing of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem. He sent his closest adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to keynote an anti-Semitic ISNA conference whose discussions included: how key Obama aides are “Israeli,” proving Jews “have control of the world,” or how the Holocaust is the punishment of Jews for being “serially disobedient to Allah.”

In 2010 Obama’s National Security Adviser, Gen. Jim Jones gave the keynote speech at a Washington Institute For Near East Policy and started it out with an anti-Semitic “joke,” teaching the crowd that Jews are just greedy merchants in the same vein as Shakespeare’s Shylock.

He sent one of his closest advisers Valarie Jarrett to be the keynote speaker at a conference for the Muslim Brotherhood-associated ISNA, other topics at the meeting included Jews “have control of the world, and the Holocaust as punishment of Jews for being “serially disobedient to Allah.

For his second Secretary of Defense Obama appointed Chuck Hagel who believed in the nefarious “worldwide Jewish conspiracy.” Hagel was once quoted as saying “The political reality is that…the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here.”

Obama once called Zbigniew Brzezinski someone I have learned an immense amount from”, and “one of our most outstanding scholars and thinkers. Back in back in 2007, Brzezinski schooled the future president on foreign policy. The former National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter is a Judeophobic conspiracy theorist, who believes the Jews control U.S foreign policy and Congress.

Of the anti-Semitic Occupy Wall Street movement the President said, “We are on their side.”

Radical Islamists attacked the Kosher supermarket Hyper-Cacher (French for Super Kosher) in Paris on a Friday afternoon. The attack happened just before the Jewish Sabbath when they knew it would be crowded with Jews. Obama first insisted it was a random act and not an anti-Semitic act. And when the world leaders came together to march in Paris as a protest against the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the anti-Semitic Hyper-Cacher attack Obama was conspicuous in his absence.

During his last year as president, Obama’s State Department condemned Israel for allowing people to build houses on land on the western side of the Jordan River. But that’s only part of the story.  The property was legally purchased in 2009 by Dr. Irving and Cherna Moskowitz from a US Presbyterian Church. There were no complaints when the  Presbyterian Church owned it. Team Obama wasn’t objecting to the fact that houses were being built on that land back then. If the homes were intended for Christian or Muslim families, there would have been no issue. As it is was with so many other cases during the Obama administration, the objection was based on the fact that Jews were going to live in those buildings.

The list of Obama’s Antisemitism would be much longer if examples from the Obama administration’s own definition of how anti-Israel acts and statements could be considered anti-Semitic were added. Obama’s hatred of Jews met that definition also. But you get the idea.

Here’s the bottom line, do I believe that Obama’s anti-Semitic speech and actions motivated the shooting at the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting? No, but if people are blaming President Trump’s words for prompted the idiot who mailed pipe bombs, then it is just as legitimate to blame Obama for the horrible shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

https://lidblog.com/obama-incite-pittsburgh/