Short reply to: Bravo: Fareed Zakaria’s Ethical Stand on Mosque

By Steve Clemons The Washington Note August 06, 2010

Clemons, and his senseless and insensitive cohorts on this thread, may well “salute” Zakaria for “this exceptional leadership.” But he can only do so by the devaluation of all values. To put the ‘sensitivities’ of ‘moderate’ Muslims who can still blame America for 9/11, like the imam behind the building of the Mosque, whose religion for hundreds of years has profoundly failed to produce anything of value in the social, economic, political, and scientific sphere of man and whose sole contemporary staple product is terror, above the sensitivities of the victim’s relatives and of a fully justifiable aggrieved America emanating from the barbarous and atrocious attack of 9/11 that was bred and nourished within the confines of Muslim religion and culture, is to devalue all morality and human decency, not to emphasize the political bankruptcy of those who espouse such “exceptional leadership.”

Clemons is desperately trying to find support for his stupidity Obama “gets it right” on the building of the mosque on Ground Zero by ironically compounding this stupidity by adding the gargantuan dopiness of Norquist on the pro-mosque argument. Norquist refers to a resolution passed by Republicans in 2000 which was prior to the murderous event of 9/11 without realizing how different such a resolution would look among these same Republicans after that ominous attack in the heart of America. He is also astonishingly blind to the negative reaction of 70% of Americans in regard to the building of the mosque in the vicinity of the sacred ground of Manhattan. But the crowning of this stupidity is his statement that Republicans would lose Jewish votes on this issue. It is like saying, as someone remarked that if the Democrats had a Hitler as candidate the Jews would not vote for the Republicans. This is a theatrical performance of the absurd that only an impresario of Clemons qualities could stage on Broadway.

The issue is not about “legal rights,” but whether a religion that irreversibly hates and reviles the values of Western civilization, and whose radical jihadists have declared a war on the latter, should have the right to build a mosque on the sacred ground of this civilization that has spilt its blood as a result of the murderous attack of the Islamists in Manhattan.

This is on the part of Obama, which includes his day after nuanced retraction of his original statement, and by all those who support him on this issue, like the Times columnist Zakaria, Clemons, and Norquist, not to mention others, the continuation of stupidity by all means.

Reply to: Israel/Palestine and Iran: Linkage Should be Hard Wired by Obama Team

By Steve Clemons The Washington Note August 07, 2010

Clemons’s piece is political metaphysics at its best. “Brilliant leadership,” “strategic leaps,” “visionary re-crafting,” “mystique,” all ripe fruits ready to fall from the tree of abstractness. No definition of their meaning in concrete terms, no concrete description of the characteristics of these “strategic leaps,” which he mentions half a dozen times, and how they are going to be affected. In short, fire crackers thrown over the tumultuous geopolitical terrain of the Middle East and beyond.

Further, to link the Israel/Palestine conflict as pivotal to the issues of the Middle East and of the Arab world, is to link it to Clemons’s simulacra and not to the real cause of Islamist radicalism that will remain fanatically athirst for its eschatological goals even in the aftermath of a resolution of the I/P bellicosity. Clemons’s proposal that this erroneous idea of the “linkage,” that apparently could even resolve the impasse with Iran, “should be hard wired” to the Obama team, makes him a fall guy to Islamist propaganda. And the seriousness of Clemons’s dissertation finishes with the fall of the curtain on a vaudevillian act: Does he seriously believe that if Obama possessed “strategic skills” he would not have them exhibited and used them by now?

It is the cackling of the nihilistic geese, like Kervick’s, embittered by the fact that their loquacious gaggle is persuading no one other than the mentally ‘scleroid’ and unimaginative, that makes them spit their bile over the great political, economic, and scientific achievements made in the image of unflappable rugged individual action of capitalist America imbued by the ethos of captain Ahab—who would strike the sun if it insulted him–and Atlas Shrugged. It is the complete and total failure of Kervick and his ilk to approach, and least of all to reach, the mountain tops of this ethos of unsurpassable individual success that turns them into irredeemable nihilists and whose cynicism attempts to belittle and blemish America, the best of all possible worlds.

Is it conceivable to Kervick, the student of David Hume, that cosmopolitan America would have accomplished all these great achievements in the field of politics, economics, and science, and having the greatest number of Nobel Laureates in its midst, if it was populated by “cretins?” (It is interesting that he uses Lenin’s word which reveals on whose lap he was sitting as a junior learning his politics.) It is clear that Vergil’s apophthegm Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito, is not Kervick’s motto.

As Drew correctly states none of the classical liberal economists, Smith, Mises, Hayek, and I would add in this brilliant constellation Mill, Bawerk, and Schumpeter, ever argued that the free market was perfect and “market failure” was inconceivable. On the contrary they argued that the three cardinal principles of the free market were imperfect knowledge, uncertainty, and risk. How could any rational and economically literate person accuse the classical liberal economists of contending that the free market were free from market failure, when their whole argument was premised on the above three principles? Moreover, they did argue, that market failure could be cured mainly by the ‘elixir’ of the free market, and not by unqualified and ubiquitous government intervention.

It is the critics of the free market that engendered the ‘straw man’ of the perfect market so they could knock it down easily without any effort of critical thinking, which of course they lacked, and replace it with the socialist planning nostrums or, a la Kervick, with the hybrid panacea of the “mixed economy,” whose avatar was and is modern Europe, and which presently is at the threshold of economic bankruptcy. The sun is still shining in sunny Greece, but there are no more free suntans for its denizens.

It is not surprising that Kervick after losing so much blood from the hammering nails of WigWag would make such an intellectually bloodless counter-riposte to the latter’s concrete and cogent argument. To back up his phantasms of “Zionists undermining European Unity” and the resurgence of Enlightenment in Europe, what does he bring up, the “Erdogan exchange with Peres” and the “racialist and sectarian haters to alienate Europeans from their Muslim citizens.” The so called “attempt by Zionist activists to drive a wedge between the US and Turkey,” to quote Kervick, even if it was true, has nothing to do with the major premise of his contention that Zionists were undermining Europe.

Further his argument that Zionists promote conflict among Europeans against their Muslim citizens is staggering in its vacuity and lack of contact with the real world. The Europeans are in conflict with their Muslim citizens not because of racialism and sectarianism but as a result of the great threat of internal and external Muslim terror. To suggest that the reasonable fear and concern that Europeans have against Muslims after the murder of their filmmakers and threatened lives of their cartoonists by Muslim fanatics has its roots in racialism, sectarianism, and ethnic chauvinism spawned by Zionists, shows how completely Kervick is detached and uprooted from reality.

In a famous interview, now infamous, given by President Obama three months ago to Kerry O’Brien on the Australian network ABC, Obama proudly likened himself with Kevin Rudd who historically has been the worst Prime Minister Australia ever had and a paradigmatic wimp to boot, and who unceremoniously was dismissed from his position as Prime Minister. This not only speaks volumes about the character of Obama but also ominously presages the fate of his own presidency.

And WigWag as usually wisely notes the bleak record of Clemons predictions. Clemons had an adulatory stand toward Kevin Rudd and also likened him to Obama, as he himself avers. His predictive powers about major events and politicians, such as the outcome of the war in Iraq and his praising of Obama for his intervention in Copenhagen on climate change, and his liking of that shallow politician Biden, the vice-President, who believes he can win wars with ‘toys’, drones, not to mention others, have the ‘brightness’ of the multiple colourful patches of a ‘pantaloonist’. But in one prediction Clemons might be inadvertently right. By coupling Obama with Rudd, the former might turn out to be the worst president America ever had.

A short response to: Afghanistan Exposing Huge Limits on American Power By Steve Clemons Washington Note September 09, 2009

Clemons, from his political labyrinth as the modern Theseus but without his Ariadne with any hope of escape, sends desperate signals about America’s “limits” in Afghanistan and the dire repercussions these will have on American power and prestige. From the boundless darkness of his labyrinthine domicile he is bound to be pessimistic of any prospect that the US could defeat the Taliban. It’s the same kind of pessimism that he also had for years about the war in Iraq, which he had also pontificated as being unwinnable–and he has as yet to acknowledge that the US under General Petraeus had defeated the insurgency in Iraq.

Only Clemons, in his strategic myopia, could make the statement, “One really can’t tell what our overall goal is at this point.” Really, the Taliban which was a host to al-Qaeda and which would continue to be so in the event it took over once again Afghanistan, and moreover threaten the Talibanization of Pakistan, is not a strategic goal for the United States? The US would be strategically foolish to abandon this aim of defeating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in one stroke and hence inflicting a devastating blow of global dimensions to the holy warriors of Islam. Nor can he envisage that any withdrawal from Afghanistan would be perceived as a defeat of America by Islamists and would embolden their threats against, in their eyes, a weak America. And the consummation of these threats would be of a greater magnitude of destruction than that of 9/11. Afghanistan therefore is pivotal to America’s strategy to defeat borderless Islamist fanaticism on a world scale.

The United States is not in a ‘labyrinthine’ situation wasting and reaching the limits of its military power in Afghanistan from which it needs to escape. Its task is, like in Iraq, to persevere in the defeat of the Taliban and prevent Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary and a training ground for the recruits of al-Qaeda from which it could launch its ‘apocalyptic’ attacks against the Great Satan America and on the infidels of the West. In this task a combination of American intelligence, military professionalism and might, and strategic nous and determination, has a better than an even chance in defeating ‘blindfolded’ fanaticism.

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In traditional Africa the medicine man by uttering a name he would identify and cure evil. In contemporary America an Afro-American modern medicine man who by a caprice of a volatile electorate became president, believes in contrast, that by not uttering the name of ‘evil’, America will be safer. This is the presidency of voodoo sorcery as depicted in the National Security Strategy of Obama who refuses to identify the great danger of our times by name, fanatical Islamist Terror. Instead the Obama administration prefers to name it as “violent extremism.”

In Benjamin Franklin’s “Tree of Liberty,” the United States of America, a spineless malignant worm is crawling on its trunk sucking its sap and strength that has been sustained by the water of blood of past and present generations of Americans.

America hijacked by a Lemon! This will be the historical caption and history’s verdict on President Obama in his foreign policy misadventures of weakness. Who could have thought that the third rate powers of Brazil and Turkey would have the chutzpah and insolence to rudely supplant and supersede U.S. diplomacy on a most grave issue of our times, i.e., the attempted acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran, by their own diplomacy, if America was not perceived under Obama as being weak and disrespectful? And the West Point speech clearly showed that the President still believes that diplomacy sans ‘rattling the sabres’ remains the pivot of his foreign policy despite the fact that this policy abysmally failed to deliver on his primary goals. That is, enticing the enemies of the U.S. to take the diplomatic road and repossess, by this ‘loving diplomacy’ toward implacable foes, the prestige and respect America had prior to the so called dispossession of these attributes by his Texan predecessor.

President Obama stuck to his geopolitical ignorant denial, due to lack of imagination and political nous, does not realize that a symphony, a ‘concert of peace’ having as players other powers can only succeed and be applauded if it has a Karajan as conductor. It is this role of the indispensable conductor in the realm of geopolitics that America has lost with the ‘sitting’ of Obama in the Oval Office. However, there are dawning auspicious signs that the lemon that Americans elected as president is in the process of being squeezed out. But the danger is that by the end of this process, the United States itself might be squeezed out of its strength as the sole superpower.