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Caroline Glick writes on the Netanyahu slurs by the French and American presidents.
The slurs against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu voiced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President Barack Obama after last week’s G20 summit were revealing as well as repugnant.
Thinking no one other than Obama could hear him, Sarkozy attacked Netanyahu, saying, “I can’t stand to see him anymore, he’s a liar.”
Obama responded by whining, “You’re fed up with him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.”
These statements are interesting both for what they say about the two presidents’ characters and for what they say about the way that Israel is perceived by the West more generally.
To understand why this is the case it is necessary to first ask, when has Netanyahu ever lied to Sarkozy and Obama? This week the UN International Atomic Energy Agency’s report about Iran’s nuclear weapons program made clear that Israel – Netanyahu included – has been telling the truth about Iran and its nuclear ambitions all along. In contrast, world leaders have been lying and burying their heads in the sand.
Since Iran’s nuclear weapons program was first revealed to the public in 2004, Israel has provided in-depth intelligence information proving Iran’s malign intentions to the likes of Sarkozy, Obama and the UN. And for seven years, the US government – Obama included – has claimed that it lacked definitive proof of Iran’s intentions.
Obama wasted the first two years of his administration attempting to charm the Iranians out of their nuclear weapons program. He stubbornly ignored the piles of evidence presented to him by Israel that Iran was not interested in cutting a deal.
Perhaps Obama was relying on the US’s 2007 National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. As Israel said at the time, and as this week’s IAEA report proves, it was the NIE – which claimed that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 – not Israel that deliberately lied about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the US intelligence community that purposely deceived the American government and people about the gravest immediate threat to US national security.
Israel, including Netanyahu, was telling the truth. …
Power Line posts on the Keystone Pipeline non-decision.
President Obama’s announcement that he will delay a decision on approval of the Keystone Pipeline until after the 2012 election typifies his feckless presidency. Torn between the need to create jobs, reduce the cost of energy and get our economy going on one hand, and the emotional biases of his environmentalist base on the other, Obama punted. I assume that if and when the time comes–post-election–Obama will do what he has wanted to do all along, and kill the pipeline.
We have written about Keystone a number of times. In this post, we quoted a study that concluded the pipeline would moderate the price of oil and create between 250,000 and 553,000 permanent American jobs. Here, we quoted at length another study of the beneficial effect of the pipeline on our economy, along with related energy development policies. There simply is no doubt that building the pipeline and transporting Canadian oil efficiently to refineries in the U.S. would give our economy a major boost.
I don’t suppose anyone remembers the speech that President Obama gave in support of his “Jobs Act” on September 7–ancient history, I know–and it is almost cruel to remind this inept president of his own words. This is what we wrote at the time: …
Walter Russell Mead thinks the president may regret his pipeline punt.
… The President may think he’s dodging a bullet by putting off his decision until after the election, but he has given the GOP a big pre-Christmas present, one that will go on giving as long as unemployment is a major political issue.
The nexus of environmental policy and jobs has been a kind of Bermuda Triangle for this administration, where good intentions go awry and the best laid plans misfire. The failure of Solyndra demonstrated the poverty of “green jobs” initiatives, while the economic success of states like North Dakota and Texas are a testament to the continued effectiveness of old-style brown jobs. The President may be retreating from his failed green jobs plans, but still appears reluctant to embrace the more successful brown ones.
If times are good by 2012, voters may vote their green hopes. If the economy is (as seems likely) still a problem, they will be voting their less verdant fears. This may be one can the White House will come to regret having kicked down the road.
More from Canada’s Financial Post.
President Barack Obama has kicked the can down the road by postponing permission to build Canada’s Keystone XL oil sands pipeline to Texas until 2013, after the next election.
This decision, in essence, strands the oil sands indefinitely and shuts it out of the U.S. market for years, if not forever.
It’s being billed as a temporary setback, but it’s a major and devastating development.
The excuse is that a new route is going to be sought to avoid putting pipelines across the aquifer that straddles mid-America. The reality is that the environmental movement, not an aquifer, straddles the United States and cannot be circumvented. The Keystone, and Canada’s oil sands, has become the environmental movement’s line in the sand in a battle to shut down fossil fuel usage even though there are no alternative fuels for 20 or 30 more years.
These Keystone Cops have scored a victory that likely marks the beginning of a de facto pipeline moratorium south of the border. And this could cripple America’s economy and energy industries.
Keystone has received approvals over a number of years from dozens of environmental and other government agencies, been scrutinized more than other project and yet, in the end, has had its permit postponed on environmental grounds. …
Just like the Soviets, the president likes everything big; government, labor and business. Fred Barnes has the story.
By his own account, President Obama is the champion and protector of the little guy. He said last week he wants no one left “in a second-class status in this United States of America.” He’s “determined” to “make sure that nobody out there is going bankrupt just because somebody in their family is getting sick.” He’s committed to making Washington “responsive to the needs of people, not the needs of special interests [and] not just people who are hurting now, but also responsive to future generations.” Obama identifies himself with the 99 percent.
Yet the winners in the nearly three years of Obama’s presidency are the big guys?—?big business, big labor, and big government. Corporate profits have reached record levels. The influence of the biggest labor unions has surged in Washington, where it matters most. The federal government has grown in size and reach.
Meanwhile, the weak economy has hurt small business, the country’s number one job creator. Temporary tax breaks haven’t helped, and the threat of new taxes and a fresh barrage of regulations have put a crimp in expansion and hiring. Big business isn’t expanding or hiring much either. A headline in Slate reflected this: “More Profits, Fewer Jobs.”
Labor leaders have entrée at the White House and federal departments and agencies as never before. The most frequent visitor to the White House in Obama’s first year was Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union. The president delayed trade treaties with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia until they were altered to satisfy labor officials. If Obama understands that higher levels of unionization are associated with greater joblessness, he’s never let on.
Big government is a cliché that’s all the more true in the Obama era. Federal employment grew by 140,800 in Obama’s first two years, and the clout of federal officialdom has increased substantially. …
George Mason econ prof Tyler Cowen reviews a new book on Keynes and Hayek.
Keynes vs. Hayek” has turned out to be a more durable theme than could have been expected in the 1930s. As recently as the 1990s, big-time macroeconomic debates seemed to be over forever; the Nineties seem now like a very long time ago.
On the side of Hayek, Glenn Beck propelled The Road to Serfdom to No. 1 on Amazon with his repeated warnings that President Obama was bringing socialism to the United States. The man overseeing the Federal Reserve in the House of Representatives, Ron Paul (R., Texas), is an avowed fan of Hayek’s 1970s “denationalization of money” idea.
On the other side, Paul Krugman, through his New York Times column and blog, has revived the fortunes of Keynesian economics by insisting that we are suffering from a shortfall of spending or “aggregate demand.” A big swath of the economics profession has become more Keynesian in the last five years. Krugman, Brad DeLong, and other writers devote a lot of energy to attacking the Hayekian vision of macroeconomics, which by now is over 80 years old; Krugman coined the now-current term “Austerian” to describe those who believe in both Hayek’s “Austrian” economics and a policy of fiscal austerity.
Most notoriously, Hayek and Keynes square off in two rap videos, produced by economist Russ Roberts and filmmaker John Papola. The first video has received over two and a half million views and the second, released this year, is already over 1 million views. The auteurs present both sides of the debate, but a careful viewing of the second video shows that while Hayek wins the fight, analogized in terms of a boxing match, the referee calls it for Keynes. In July, the London School of Economics staged an actual Hayek vs. Keynes debate, with contemporary scholars filling the roles.
So what’s all the fuss about? Nicholas Wapshott’s new book, Keynes Hayek, does an excellent job of setting out the broader history behind this revival of the old debates. …