Secret Diplomacy: Obama twitters to people of Iran

One of my favorite preachers is Ravi Zacharias and I'm not sure whether it was in a sermon or a book of his, (I listen to him regularly on radio as well as read his books) but he made a very perceptive statement about Islam.

He was quoting an Islamic man he met in one of the countries under Islamic rule, or Sharia Law as the 14th century legal system is known, and the Muslim said this: "If the mullahs ever take their foot off our necks, they'll find out how many us are really true believers in Islam."

The mullah's foot seems to be slipping a bit from their perch on the necks of the people of Islam, as Michael Totten says a genuine revolution is now under way and the people continue to protest the stolen election.

And what is President Obama's public response to date? He's continuing to "vote present."

But perhaps he's taking a brave stand behind the scenes? Iowahawk has the inside scoop on a special secret message President Obama has sent by Twitter to the people of Iran in their hour of trial.

A Special Message to the People of Iran

By Barack Obama
President of the United States

Greetings. As president of United States -- or, if you prefer, the Great Satan -- I have have been following with keen interest the vigorous post-election debate and vibrant political dialogue which has been taking place in your great and noble Islamic Republic of Iran over recent days. It has been both educational and fascinating, and as a sports fan I have thrilled to the pageantry, the suspense, and the fast-paced, hard-hitting action. I have to say It's been as exciting as a double overtime game seven NBA final between the Lakers and Celtics! Like millions of others around the world, I can't wait for the exciting conclusion of your distracting nail-biter so I can finally focus on my big health care project at the office.

(Now that's what I call a real crisis!) But no matter who prevails in your hard-fought contest, you can rest assured that I will be out there in the stands watching, and ready to congratulate the team who brings home Tehran's coveted Golden Centrifuge Cup.

Carter-Clinton Redux: 'The Hollow Superpower' returns

Mark Steyn, a Canadian journalist, is becoming the Elijah of our times, warning America of our pending collapse, our fall from grace, our twilight as we become 'The Hollow Superpower."

Steyn draws an uncomfortable paralell between the decline of GM and the decline of our nation.

As recently as last summer, General Motors Corp.'s filing for bankruptcy would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it's not such a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the time it actually happened, the market barely noticed and the media were focused on the president's "address to the Muslim world."

As it happens, these two stories are the same story - snapshots, at home and abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It's been a long time since anyone touted GM as the emblematic brand of America - what's good for GM is good for America, etc. In fact, it's more emblematic than ever: Like GM, the U.S. government spends more than it makes and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people. It's not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?

But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department Web site, "President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From Cairo."

Let's pause right there: It's interesting how easily the words "the Muslim world" roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who would choke on any equivalent reference to "the Christian world." When such hyperalert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they're implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith, but a political project, too...

At a stroke, the administration has endorsed the view of "the Muslim world" of those non-Muslims who find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: The Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Mr. Obama be comfortable mandating "no natural growth" to Israel's million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced commitment of "the Muslim world" to one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East.

And so it goes. Like GM, America is "too big to fail." So it won't, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence, sclerotic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what's happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past but able on occasion to throw out impressive words, albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity - just to take one windy gust from the president's Cairo speech.

There's better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Gelb is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, "The country's economy, infrastructure, public schools, and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit."

That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not "a mediocrity of spirit." A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.

Steyn is the author of the surprise Noo Yawk Times best-selling book America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It.

I hope he's wrong, but I lived through the "hollow military" of the Jimmy Carter administration and the "peace dividend" military and defense spending cuts of the Clinton administration, so it's not a stretch to see we're entering into even more perilous times with Obama in power. If it had not been for the Reagan years of restoring America's power in between Carter and Clinton, our nation might well have not survived those two downturns in security. And now comes Obama and we start the same sorry cycle all over again, cut defense and buy voters with socialism.

Closing Gitmo and turning the terrorists loose on American soil is just the opening act for his reign. After all, they're no longer terrorists, they're just poor misunderstood Muslim "victims."

And while I'm quoting one of the few wise heads in today's media, Victor Davis Hanson is another. He writes there's one sure way to tell when Obama lies. His lips will be moving.

When our President talks about his relatives’ war experiences, his own family’s Muslim connections, or anything much about the past, I expect it to be flat-out ahistorical, misleading, or contextualized by an aide over the next two months. So yes, I do not believe that any of this relatives liberated Auschwitz or knew those who freed Treblinka. I do not believe any of his numbers concerning, or analysis about, Muslims in America. I do not think he has a clue about the Renaissance and its relationship to the flight of Greek-speaking scholars to Western Europe from the fear of Turkish Muslims, or the Enlightenment’s interest in a Greece suffering under the yoke of an oppressive Ottoman fundamentalism.

And how can I quote wise men and leave out Sir Charles Krauthammer? In this Fox News clip, he sums up Obama's foreign policy adventures thus far, turning Iran loose to build its nukes with no fear of intervention and doing more to delegitimize Israel than any president in history.

God help us and save us from Obama.

Hanson says 'It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings'

President Obama?! God help us all, it's looking more likely daily for one reason and one reason only. Panic. We're in the middle of something here that nobody seems to know how to end. It just sucks all the air out of a political campaign and sanity leaves along with it. 1929. Depression.

Is it happening again? If it does, we can just lean over and kiss our behinds goodbye. Maybe Obama won't be such a terrible President after all, but it won't matter if the bottom really does fall out because none of us will have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of. But. If.

There's always a but. Usually followed by an if. Nothing is certain in this life but death and taxes.

The fat lady ain't sung yet. She does seem to be warbling, warming up for the final aria.

But if... the rescue plan here and worldwide finally kicks in. If Wall Street finally gets over it's panic party and investors open up their Swiss accounts and start buying stocks again.

Suddenly, the sun will be shining again and voters will get their heads out of their behinds.

Then we will look around and start paying attention to this election and consider who to vote for with our common sense instead of our fears. And Victor Davis Hanson will say "I told you so."

Yet for all the gloom, there are several reasons why this race is by no means over...

It is still possible that, by the week before the election, there will be a sense of respite rather than continued anger and panic — and any day in which hysteria is not the topic of the day benefits McCain. In this regard, McCain must keep reminding in simple fashion that Freddie and Fannie were catalysts that drew in the Wall Street sharks: crooked officials cooked the books to get mega-bonuses; they got away with their crimes by lavishing money on mostly Democratic legislators (including Obama); and hand-in-glove they all covered — and still are covering — their tracks under a reprehensible politically correct cynicism.

Iraq is no longer the contentious issue of the primaries where Democratic candidates outdid each other in predicting failure, but mirabile dictu turning out to be a clear American victory. No one can now believe that withdrawal by March 2008, as Sen. Obama once advocated, would have been anything but an utter calamity. McCain needs to continue to emphasize the dire consequences of accepting such a defeat. The military is not broken, but now the most experienced, battle-hardened force in the world. Iraq is not, as Joe Biden once demanded, trisected into feuding fiefdoms, but an emerging consensual state. The more Iraq is out of the news, the more the growing public acceptance that it is becoming a success. McCain should continue to ask: Did Americans want victory in November 2008 or defeat in March 2008?

The Ayers controversy is cited by the in-the-tank media as signs of McCain’s desperation. Perhaps. But amid the tsk-tsking, there are also certain deer-in-the-headlights moments among Obama’s handlers.

Why? There are simply too many ACORNs, Ayers, Khalidis, Pflegers, Wrights, et al. not to suggest a pattern unbecoming of a future President of the United States. Obama’s past statements about his relationship with Ayers (and others) simply cannot be reconciled with the factual circumstances of their long association. McCain must focus on Ayers between 2001–2005. Then in the climate of national worry following 9/11, Ayers was on recent record as lamenting that he had not set off enough bombs, and yet until 2005 still in contact with Obama — about what and why, voters might wish to know.

When Iraq and Wall Street were off the front page, Obama went moribund in the last months of the Democratic primary. Why? Not because of racism, or even public weariness with Obama’s hope and change fluff, or his flip-flops, or occasional striking ignorance about basic history and geography. He finally began to wear on the public — as he continues to when events of the day do not smother the attention of the voter — for two reasons.

First, the public tires of all the media slant, the celebrity rants, and the shills in popular culture, that in concert hourly berate, beg, threaten, and ridicule voters on behalf of Obama. We are supposed to accept Obama’s apotheosis, replete with Latinate seal, Greek columns, biblical injunctions about the seas and atmosphere, and prophesies that he is The One whom we have been waiting for. The creepy effect of ordering us to accept our own salvation becomes cumulative. So there is a quiet unease among the voters, as there always is in America, when someone finger-points and lectures them what they must do — or else!

Second, for all the two years of nonstop campaigning, Obama somehow still remains an unknown — and for apparently good reason. He has almost no record in the Senate to speak of — other than one as America’s most predictably partisan and liberal Senator. What is known of his Chicago associates is not reassuring, and so the only defense can be silence rather than exegesis. No one knows anything of his record at Columbia University, how he got into Harvard Law School, or what he was doing until he reached Harvard, or exactly what he did as a community organizer in Chicago, or how a person with no record of legal scholarship was about to be offered tenure at the Chicago Law School. Each doubt in and of itself is of little import, but again in aggregate even the generalities make voters uneasy — especially when they hear of fraud among voter registration drives, swarming radio stations to stifle those critical of Obama, and threatened lawsuits to yank pro-McCain ads.

The odds always were against McCain. And the outcome in these last few days may be seem contingent in large part on breaking news beyond the candidates’ control. Yet McCain still has it within his own power to win the election. Obama’s view of America is mostly rosy emulation of the European Union; McCain’s is to restore fiscal sanity, keep our defenses strong, and ensure that American exceptionalism remains a fact, rather than descends into an empty slogan. In that context, it makes no sense to sneer at McCain for being behind, but a great deal to hope that he isn’t.

Hanson on McCain: Wall Street Morality Tale

Historian Victor Davis Hanson is about a zillion times smarter than me and most folks and has the first analysis I found on the McCain speech. Here's his entire post from the Corner at NRO.

Wall Street Morality Tale

I think McCain, so far better than Obama, is trying to put the meltdown in human terms as analysts, economists and financiers are sorting out the financial mess. This week and next the campaign boils down to whether the voters believe the Obama generic message that Republican free-market philosophies fostered a culture of excess and proverbial "Wall Street greed," or McCain's more specific responses that many of the necessary regulatory firebreaks were removed by the Clinton administration, and not reinstated by the Bush administration — and that many of the compliant Democratic senatorial class, Obama himself among them, were well rewarded in turn with donations from hedge-funders and speculators.

That said, McCain, as a Republican free-market advocate who will be tarred for the mess, has the burden of getting out in front and grounding his message in specific human terms that explains why this is so bad, and the ethical story of who got hurt and why.

What we are seeing is that billions, no trillions, of speculation debt is being called in, and those who must pay for it in the end are mostly retirees who will get almost nothing in interest on their passbook and T-bill accounts at precisely the time they retire and are vulnerable, on the working and professional classes who contribute each month to their retirement 401K mutual funds and have seen tens of thousands wiped away in a few days, and are told they are lucky to have anything at all in those accounts, and those who must borrow for college, housing, and transportation and will find it hard to get a loan, in an Orwellian banking market in which interest paid out by banks—themselves cash strapped from bad investments— to depositors declines while interest charged to borrowers increases. The common theme is the hard-working American who tried to save is being punished by those who used his set-asides to unduly enrich themselves, aided by revolving-door politicians who now wanted cash donations from, and later good jobs on, Wall Street.

Who then were the beneficiaries? Many in the management and investor class that earlier saw the dangers of what they were doing, and so partially cashed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars the last few years, little worried about the reputation of Wall Street after losing someone else's money, housing speculators and the unqualified borrower who simply walked away from unsound debt, arguing the home was overpriced anyway and why keep paying for something not worth the value of the debt?, and lending agencies and investment firms who made a killing on crass speculation the last 6-7 years, and, when the game was up, got the government to bail them and keep them afloat.

Like it or not, the current mess is morality tale, and the candidate who can best convey that without crass demagoguing, will best handle the issue.