Click on WORD or PDF for full content
David Goldman has long predicted Egypt would descend into chaos.
Sunday’s massacre of protesting Copts is heartbreaking; from the initial reports, several thousand Christians marched to protest the military government’s blind eye towards Muslim violence “when they were attacked by thugs carrying swords and clubs,” according to one Copt. The Egyptian government says that the Christian protesters began firing live ammunition at soldiers. That stretches credibility. …
… No-one appears in charge. Central bank foreign exchange reserves are down to just $19 billion, or four months’ imports, the Financial Times reported last week. “After negotiating a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the military council decided to scrap it, partly on fears of popular criticism – the IMF has a negative reputation in Egypt because of its association with harsh structural adjustment programmes. In addition, only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far.”
Egypt literally will run out of food. It imports half its caloric consumption, mainly wheat (although Egyptians eat less wheat than Iranians, Moroccans, Canadians, Turks and Russians). Egypt spends $5.5 billion a year on food subsidies. Its social solidarity minister wants to change the system (which subsidizes some people who can afford to pay more than the penny a loaf the government charges), but seems deeply confused. “‘We need to change consumer habits so that we are not consuming so much bread. In Mexico, for example, they rely more on potatoes. Why can’t we start shifting toward that?’said Saad Nassar, adviser to the agriculture minister.” Mr. Nassar seems unaware that Mexicans eat more corn than wheat or potatoes. This discussion would be comical if not for the fact that Egypt is about to run out of money to pay for any sort of food. …
Andrew McCarthy and Mark Steyn post on Egypt in The Corner. Here’s Mark.
Andy, good luck rousing the western media to the plight of Egypt’s Christians. The boobs proclaimed Tahrir Square an “Arab Spring” and then moved on. I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly half-an-hour after Mubarak threw in the towel, and, while Anderson Cooper was cooing orgasmically over on CNN, offered the cheerless thought that this was the dawn of the post-western Middle East, and the beginning of something potentially very dark. I’ll stand by that. As I wrote in February:
“The Kingdom of Egypt in the period between 1922 and 1952 was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it got closer to a functioning, pluralist society than anything in the 60 years since. For example, in 1923, Egypt’s first full year as a sovereign state, the country’s Minister of Finance was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament and a Jew.”
Try to imagine that now: a Jew serving as an Arab Muslim nation’s Finance Minister – or even getting elected as an obscure backbench MP. Sounds like something from a Give-peace-a-chance multifaith fantasy. But it actually happened – and then it stopped happening, and then it became inconceivable for it to happen ever again under any plausible scenario.
Shortly thereafter, Mr Cattaui’s great-grandson wrote to me from France, where he now lives. Because it’s not just that in Egypt a Jew can’t be Finance Minister but that a Jew can’t be. Because Egypt spent the second half of the 20th century getting worse, and is spending the new century getting worser. We now accept a Jew-free Egypt as a normal feature of life. No doubt we shall soon do the same with a Copt-free Egypt. But we could at least stop insulting those on the receiving end of the “Arab Spring” by pretending that it’s any kind of flowering of freedom.
Marc Thiessen details the mistakes of the “hapless” Holder.
President Obama says that he has “complete confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder. That’s good news for Republicans. Pick almost any unnecessary, losing battle in Obama’s first term, and his hapless attorney general is at the center of it.
If not for the fact that so many of Holder’s decisions harm national security, he would be a political dream come true for the GOP – delivering up reliably disastrous controversies for the president every few months.
The latest controversy over whether Holder misled a House committee on “Operation Fast and Furious” — the botched federal gun sting that allowed hundreds of weapons to flow to Mexican drug cartels and resulted in the death of an ATF agent — is only the most recent of these debacles.
Holder’s bad advice began almost immediately after Obama took office, when he and White House counsel Greg Craig convinced the president to announce the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 — without even examining the feasibility of doing so. Not only did the president suffer the indignity of missing this deadline, public opinion turned against the decision so sharply that Democrats abandoned the president and joined Republicans in voting 90-to-6 in the Senate to block funds for the facility’s closure. Almost three years later, Guantanamo remains open and the administration has given up hope of closing it.
The next unneeded firestorm came with Holder’s decision to release classified Justice Department memos on the CIA terrorist interrogation program and reopen criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators. Holder overrode the objections of five CIA directors, including Leon Panetta. According to The Post, “Before his decision to reopen the cases, Holder did not read detailed memos that [career] prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecutions.” If he had bothered to do so, he could have predicted the eventual outcome: The special prosecutor he appointed came to the same conclusion as the career prosecutors under the Bush administration and found no criminal wrongdoing by the CIA officials involved in the agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. After two years of wasted resources and needless controversy, Holder came up empty. …
Continuing with the Holder theme, Roger Simon reviews the book written by a career lawyer in the Justice Dept. who quit in disgust.
J. Christian Adams is an American hero and his new book INJUSTICE: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department is an indispensable work for our time.
But be warned that I — as reviewers often are, even if they don’t say so — am biased, quite obviously so. From page 155 of Adams’ book: “The following week, I received an unexpected phone call from Roger Simon asking me to become a contributor to his media site Pajamas Media, one of the leading conservative news websites. I accepted his offer, and soon began writing about issues such as civil rights and the ongoing activities of the Obama DOJ.”
I make no claim of editorial brilliance for drafting Christian then. An attorney for the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice, he had just resigned after the testimony of Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez in the now infamous New Black Panther case. He wanted to blow the whistle on what he came to call the racialist (inordinately tilted in favor of minorities, largely African-American) policies and actions of the DOJ. And I was the perfect audience — having been a voter registration worker myself during the Civil Rights Movement (South Carolina 1966). I was appalled by what he told me.
So I do take inordinate pride in the subsequent writings of Christian Adams on PJMedia. They have had a significant, and growing, impact on our country and justice system. They are arguably the most socially useful articles our company has published.
That out of the way, let me turn to why I believe Injustice may be the most important American publication this year. …
Thomas Sowell also reviews Adams’ book.
… Attorney General Eric Holder became a key figure epitomizing the view that government’s role in racial matters was not to be an impartial dispenser of equal justice for all, but to be a racial partisan and an organ of racial payback. He has been too politically savvy to say that in so many words, but his actions have spoken far louder than any words.
The case that first gave the general public a glimpse of Attorney General Holder’s views and values was one in which young black thugs outside a voting site in Philadelphia were televised intimidating white voters. When this episode was broadcast, it produced public outrage.
Although the Department of Justice’s prosecution of these thugs began in the last days of the Bush administration, and the defendants had offered no legal defense, the case was dropped by the Justice Department after Eric Holder took over. One of the lawyers who were prosecuting that case resigned in protest.
That lawyer — J. Christian Adams — has now written a book, titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It is a thought-provoking book and a shocking book in what it reveals about the inner workings of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
Bad as the Justice Department’s decision was to drop that particular case, which it had already won in court, this book makes painfully clear that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. …
Peter Wehner writes on the “divisive” president.
A Washington Post story from earlier this week reports, “There is a noticeably more aggressive, confrontational President Obama roaming the country these days, selling his jobs plan and attacking Republicans for standing in the way of progress by standing up only for the rich.” That report, if anything, understates things a bit. Obama has essentially given up on his governing responsibilities (at which he has shown himself to be terribly inept) in lieu of a fierce and near constant attack on his political opponents. I have my doubts as to whether that strategy will work. But the point I want to make is a different one, which is that Obama has become the most intentionally divisive president we’ve seen in quite some time.
It’s not unusual, of course, for the policies of presidents to divide the nation. And politicians running for re-election often highlight differences. But Obama now belongs in a separate category. Each day, it seems, he and/or his supporters are seeking to divide us. The rhetoric employed by the president and his allies is meant to fan the flames of resentment, to turn Americans against one another, and to stoke up feelings of envy, grievances, and rage.
This is not healthy for our country or good for our political culture. And while we all contribute to what constitutes public discourse, there is one officeholder, the president, who bears the greatest responsibility for creating a sense of common purpose and for reminding us that we are, in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Yet the president is trying, with almost every speech, to pry us apart. It’s a strategy he clearly believes is necessary for him to win re-election. But that doesn’t make what he’s doing any less shameful or any less hypocritical. …
And Steve Hayward posts in Powerline on the ignorant president. Seems he wanted to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to apologize. The Japanese saved him from that mistake. If you read Pickings from July 14th, you’ll remember Pickerhead retailed the thought that Truman saved many Japanese lives with his decisions to drop the bombs.
I recall seeing some online grandee—I thought it was Rich Karlgaard of Forbes, but I can’t find it—explain that in the fullness of time Wikileaks would turn around and bite liberals in the rear end, and sure enough there’s been a steady stream of Wikileaks that confirm what we already know about Obama. But still.
Over the last couple of weeks several Japanese newspapers have been all over a new Wikileak that so far has not made much of an impression anywhere in American media. (I know: This is a surprise?) It seems that Obama wanted to include stops at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of his 2009 World Apology Tour, so that he could apologize for Harry Truman dropping the Big One to end World War II.
Telegraph, UK with a story about a photo from our difficult past.
On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown.
In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.
Central was the first high school in a major southern city set to be desegregated since the United States Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier in Brown vs Board of Education that separate and ostensibly equal education was unconstitutional. Inspired both by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case of plaintiff Oliver L Brown, and Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth wanted to become a lawyer, and she thought Central would help her realise that dream.
On the television as Elizabeth ate her breakfast, a newsman described large crowds gathering around Central. It was all her mother, Birdie, needed to hear. “Turn that thing off!” she shouted. Should anyone say something nasty at her, she counselled Elizabeth, pretend not to hear them. Or better yet, be nice, and put them to shame.
Lots of white people lined Park Street as Elizabeth headed towards the school. As she passed the Mobil station and came nearer, she could see the white students filtering unimpeded past the soldiers. To her, it was a sign that everything was all right. But as she herself approached, three Guardsmen, two with rifles, held out their arms, directing her to her left, to the far side of Park.
A crowd had started to form behind Elizabeth, and her knees began to shake. She continued down Park. For an instant, she faced the school: it just looked so big! …