Stand Down

Special Forces operatives ordered to stand down during Benghazi attack

A team of U.S. Special Forces in Tripoli preparing to respond to the attack last September on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was ordered to stand down by U.S. Special Forces Command Africa, according to written congressional testimony from the deputy to murdered Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

Special Forces officers were slated to board a C-130 from Tripoli to Benghazi at around 6 a.m. on the night of the attack when their commander, Lt. Col. Gibson, was told he did not have the authority to send in his team, according to excerpts of Gregory Hicks’ testimony published by CBS News.

Hicks said the U.S. mission in Benghazi was in touch with the Special Forces team during the attack and expected them to respond.

“We fully intended for those [Special Forces] guys to go [on the flight], because we had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum,” said Hicks in testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “They were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C-130 when [Lt. Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, you can’t go now, you don’t have authority to go now. And so they missed the flight.”

Hicks said Gibson told him that “I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.”

The new allegations appear to contradict the Obama administration’s claim that State Department officials did not request military backup. Hicks and other whistleblowers will testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is resuming its hearings into the Benghazi attack on Wednesday.

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The Immigration Transformation

Mark Steyn

A rational immigration reform would attempt to reorient, not accelerate, current policy.

Most countries in the world have irrelevant numbers of “immigrants.” In the Americas, for example, only Canada, America, and the British West Indies have significant non-native populations. In Mexico, immigrants account for 0.6 percent of the population, and that generally negligible level prevails all the way down through Latin America until you hit a blip of 1.4 percent with Chile and 3.8 percent in Argentina. There’s an isolated exception in Belize, which, like the English Caribbean, has historical patterns of internal migration within the British Commonwealth, such as one sees, for example, in the number of New Zealand–born residents of Australia. But profound sweeping demographic transformation through immigration is a phenomenon only of the Western world in the modern era, and even there America leads the way.

Over 20 percent of all the immigrants on the planet are in the United States. The country’s foreign-born population has doubled in the last two decades to 40 million — officially. Which is the equivalent of Washington taking a decision to admit every single living Canadian, and throwing in the population of New Zealand as a bonus. Thank goodness they didn’t do that, eh? (Whoops.) Otherwise, America would have been subject to some hideous, freakish cultural transformation in which there would be hockey franchises in Florida, and Canadian banks on every street corner in New York trumpeting their obnoxious jingoistic slogans (“TD: America’s neighborhood bank”), and creepy little pop stars with weird foreign names like Justin and Carly Rae doing the jobs America’s teen heartthrobs won’t do. What a vile alien nightmare that would be to wake up in.

Not so very long ago, its national mythology notwithstanding, the United States was little different from most other countries. In 1970, its foreign-born population was 4.7 percent. And, while most of the West has embraced mass immigration in the last half-century, America differs significantly from those developed countries, like Canada and Australia, that favor skilled migrants. Personally, I don’t see what’s so enlightened and progressive about denuding Third World nations of their best and brightest to be your doctors and nurses, but it does demonstrate a certain ruthless self-interest. By contrast the majority of U.S. foreign-born residents now come from Latin America, and more than a quarter of them — 12 million — from Mexico. A policy of “family reunification” will by definition lead to low-skilled immigrants: An engineer or computer scientist is less likely to bring in an unending string of relatives — because his dad’s a millionaire businessman in Bangalore and his brother’s a barrister in London, and they’re both happy and prosperous where they are. Insofar as there is any economic benefit to mass immigration, it’s more than entirely wiped out by chain importation of elderly dependents and other clients for the Big Government state.

So any rational immigration reform that respected the interests of the American people would attempt to reorient present policy. Instead, the Gang of Eight’s bill will cement it, and accelerate it. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill passed, it would increase the legal population of the United States by 33 million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through chain migration, with a few software designers on business visas to round out the numbers.

Thirty-three million is like importing the entire population of Canada . . . oh, wait, we did that shtick three paragraphs ago. Okay, if you’re black, look at it this way: The demographic clout it took you guys four centuries to amass can now be accomplished overnight at a stroke of Chuck Schumer’s and Lindsey Graham’s pens. And, if you belong to the 40 percent of Americans who’ll be encountering many of these “chain migrants” in the application line for low-skilled service jobs, isn’t it great to know that in this gangbusters economy you’re going to have to pedal even faster just to go nowhere?

Speaking of demographic clout, the main reason for not importing 33 million Canadians is that they’re supposedly a bunch of liberal pantywaists and the Republican party would never be elected to anything ever again. But fortunately 33 million Latin Americans are, as we’ve been assured time and again by Charles Krauthammer and other eminent voices, “a natural conservative constituency” — which I think translates into Spanish as “una parte del electorado conservador natural.” I Googled this phrase and it got no hits, so perhaps Dr. Krauthammer got lost in translation. But I’ll take his word for it that, once America assumes the demographics of California, the Republican party will be unstoppable.

Aside from that electoral windfall, the benefits of Schumer-Rubio “comprehensive” “reform” seem doubtful. Every new arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing reveals some laughably obvious breach of the system. Alert to the possibility that the involvement of various hardworking immigrants in the recent unpleasantness might not be the best advertisement for his bill, John McCain is now proposing that the United States look more carefully at admitting persons “from countries that have histories such as Dagestan and Chechnya and others where there has been significant influence of radical Islamic extremism.” Incendiary Chechens is nothing a bit more bureaucratic oversight can’t cure.

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And there is this...

The Rubio Amnesty

Clinton sought end-run around counterterrorism bureau on night of Benghazi attack, witness will say

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department's own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a "whistle-blower" witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agency’s counterterrorism bureau. Sources tell Fox News Thompson will level the allegation against Clinton during testimony on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Fox News has also learned that another official from the counterterrorism bureau -- independently of Thompson -- voiced the same complaint about Clinton and Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy to trusted national security colleagues back in October.

Extremists linked to Al Qaeda stormed the U.S. Consulate and a nearby annex on Sept. 11, in a heavily armed and well-coordinated eight-hour assault that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans.

Thompson considers himself a whistle-blower whose account was suppressed by the official investigative panel that Clinton convened to review the episode, the Accountability Review Board (ARB). Thompson's lawyer, Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney, has further alleged that his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation by as-yet-unnamed superiors at State, in advance of his cooperation with Congress.

Sources close to the congressional investigation who have been briefed on what Thompson will testify tell Fox News the veteran counterterrorism official concluded on Sept. 11 that Clinton and Kennedy tried to cut the counterterrorism bureau out of the loop as they and other Obama administration officials weighed how to respond to -- and characterize -- the Benghazi attacks.

"You should have seen what (Clinton) tried to do to us that night," the second official in State's counterterrorism bureau told colleagues back in October. Those comments would appear to be corroborated by Thompson's forthcoming testimony.

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The Reactionary Republicans

Jeffrey Lord

The only thing GOP moderates have to fear: Can they get over FDR?

You can call them The Reactionary Republicans.

Or, if you prefer, The Collectivist Conservatives.

Whether in the media or think tanks or elsewhere, they are out there to carry water for the oldest and stalest of thread-bare political arguments, desperately trying to make the idea of eagerly reacting to liberals and liberalism a shiny new idea all over again.

Over at the Washington Post, the wonderfully misrepresented “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin believes conservatives should ditch Reagan for Franklin Roosevelt.

At the Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz is out with his rule book for Gerald Ford Republicans.

While over at MSNBC ex-Republican Congressman-turned-morning-talk show-host Joe Scarborough (as detailed here by Sean Hannity and the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell in a Hannity Media Mash segment) prattles on with the liberal line on everything from gun control (he’s for it) to talk radio (he’s against it).

All three — and by no means are they alone — are following the age-old path that has been trod by Republicans of moderate stripe from Herbert Hoover to the Bushes. And don’t forget Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, the Richard Nixon of 1960, Ford, Bob Dole, John McCain and the ideologically mushed Mitt Romney.

The latter — who famously was an icon of “conservative” columnist Rubin (she managing the decidedly rare feat of bringing Left and Right together on the notion that she was a Romney “shill,” as and here at the Right’s Red State) — managed to carve a career where he was both for and against abortion, against Reagan before he was for Reagan, not to mention being the gubernatorial architect of Romneycare, the ideological father of Obamacare. No wonder Jen Rubin was crazy about the guy.

With all these miserably lost elections based on “moderation” you would think those who keep on keeping on with the idea of moderation that has repeatedly certified so many Republican presidential losers or closer-than-should be victories would have the decency to quietly slink off to re-think. Re-think the idea that “moderation” has anything new to contribute beyond losing presidential campaigns and what Mark Levin calls “Neo-Statist” government.

But…. Nah.

Now comes the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz to amusingly enter Republican moderation in the philosophies-of-the-ages sweepstakes, writing a book titled Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation.

In which Mr. Berkowitz, who has been down this road many times in various articles, insists that Big Government is here to stay, that the political moderation of conservatism “is a constitutional imperative and a demanding virtue” and that, oh by the way, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan were really moderates.

And all of this old moderation is to be laundered and tidied-up to be reborn under the new name of “Constitutional Conservatism.”

So says Berkowitz in a book that confuses timidity with moderation, resignation with political wisdom and in spite of the book’s title cannot hide the fact that what’s being presented isn’t about the constitution, much less is it about conservatism.

Where to begin?

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Are Gay Basketball Players Greater Heroes than Decorated Soldiers?

Glenn Beck Keynote Speech at 2013 NRA Convention

2013 NRA Convention Speeches

This year's NRA Convention is being held in Houston, Texas this weekend and it may be their most important convention ever.

Glenn Beck will be delivering the keynote tonight and I will post it as soon as I get it. Until then, enjoy the patriots below.

Reggie

Pentagon: Soldiers Could be Prosecuted for Promoting their Faith

“It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”
 ― George Washington

 “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” ― George Washington

The statement, released to Fox News, follows a Breitbart News report on Obama administration Pentagon appointees meeting with anti-Christian extremist Mikey Weinstein to develop court-martial procedures to punish Christians in the military who express or share their faith.

(From our earlier report: Weinstein is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and says Christians--including chaplains--sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military are guilty of “treason,” and of committing an act of “spiritual rape” as serious a crime as “sexual assault.” He also asserted that Christians sharing their faith in the military are “enemies of the Constitution.”)

Being convicted in a court martial means that a soldier has committed a crime under federal military law. Punishment for a court martial can include imprisonment and being dishonorably discharged from the military.

So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime--possibly resulting in imprisonment--for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains—military officers who are ordained clergymen of their faith (mostly Christian pastors or priests, or Jewish rabbis)--whose duty since the founding of the U.S. military under George Washington is to teach their faith and minister to the spiritual needs of troops who come to them for counsel, instruction, or comfort.

This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life. It’s difficult to imagine how a member of the clergy could give spiritual counseling without saying anything that might be perceived in that fashion.

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Why Ted Cruz is not a Typical Freshman Senator

Cruz is fantastic and we need 97 more like him. We know we can count on Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) & Senator Rand Paul (R-KY). America is in a sorry state when we realize there are 3 out of 100 Senators that will protect and defend the Constitution. - Reggie

Dianne Feinstein was agitated.

The Democratic senator from California did not like the line of questioning she was getting from Sen. Ted Cruz, the freshman Republican from Texas, as she defended her so-called assault weapons bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March.

Cruz was reciting from the Constitution. He then asked that given Feinstein’s position on the government banning certain types of guns: Would she also approve of the government banning books it found harmful?

“I’m not a sixth grader,” Feinstein responded, expressing contempt for the question. She went on to point out that she had “studied the Constitution myself,” and “am reasonably well-educated.”

“I thank you for the lecture,” she added.

The heated debate between the two senators was significant. Cruz now admits he thinks his aggressive questioning helped draw negative attention to the bill, stopping it from ever having a serious chance of passing.

It also illustrates the kind of first-term senator Cruz has become. In his first 100 days on Capitol Hill, Cruz has been tireless in trying to shape the political debate in the Senate, from guns to Obamacare to drones to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s nomination hearings.

In an interview with The Daily Caller last week, Cruz said, “My focus every day in office has been on two things. Number one, defending the Constitution. And number two, fighting to restore economic growth.”

Cruz’s outspokenness has not gone unnoticed by his colleagues.

“He’s been right in the middle of almost every major debate we’ve had,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, told TheDC in an interview. “And that’s pretty unusual for somebody who just arrived and was just sworn in.”

Speaking by phone, McConnell said of Cruz: “He’s a force. Already.”

Asked if the 42-year-old Cruz is more outspoken than the typical freshman lawmaker, the leader said there’s “no question.”

“I say that with admiration,” McConnell said. “Now others, some people are saying that with a different connotation. I think he was fully prepared intellectually and temperamentally to hit the ground running and not, you know, be intimidated by the place. And I think that’s something to be admired.”

As his encounter with Feinstein indicates, the former Texas solicitor general is fond of talking about the country’s founding documents.

“Ted is one of these guys you can ask about any provision in the Constitution and he can recite it for you almost verbatim,” Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee said.

With all of his activity, Cruz is developing a national fan base of conservatives. He keynotes national conservative confabs, like the Conservative Political Action Conference. He is also comfortable taking the conservative message to the Sunday shows, once battling New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer on “Meet the Press.”

His supporters argue he can help improve the Republican Party’s image with youthful vigor, humor and a positive message. He often speaks of what he calls “opportunity conservatism.”

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Texas Senator Ted Cruz

Immigration Sophistry

Thomas Sowell

Most laws are meant to stop people from doing something, and to penalize those who disregard those laws. More generally, laws are meant to protect the society from the law breakers.

But our immigration laws are different. Here the whole focus is on the "plight" of those who have broken the laws, and on what can be done to lift the stigma and ease the pressures they feel, so that they can "come out of the shadows" and "normalize" their lives.

Merely using the word "illegal" to describe their breaking the law is considered to be a sign of mean-spiritedness, if not racism. The Associated Press refuses to let their reporters refer to people who sneaked across the border into this country, in violation of American immigration laws, as "illegal immigrants."

On the other hand, if an ordinary American citizen breaks a law, no one cares if he has to live in fear for years -- "in the shadows," as it were -- worrying that his illegal act will be discovered and punished. No one bothers to come up with euphemisms to keep from calling what he did illegal.

No cities announce that they will provide "sanctuary," so that American shoplifters, or even jay-walkers, will be protected from the law. But, in some places, illegal immigrants are treated almost as if they were in a witness protection program.

What is even more remarkable about this special treatment is that you are not supposed to think about it as special treatment. When a new immigration law is proposed that simply overlooks violations of the old law, that is not supposed to be called "amnesty" -- even though the word "amnesty" has the same root as "amnesia." It is all about forgetting.

Why is it not supposed to be called "amnesty"? Because illegal immigrants must "earn" their citizenship. But if an ordinary American citizen gets a traffic ticket, the law is not going to just forget about it, no matter what good deeds he does afterwards.

People who come here perfectly legally have to earn their citizenship. Why is earning citizenship some special reason for ignoring the illegality of others?

Impressive feats of sophistry have become the norm in discussions of illegal immigration.

For example, we are told that there is no way that the government can find all the people who are in the country illegally and deport them. Does anyone imagine that the government can find all the embezzlers, drunk drivers or bank robbers in the country? And does anyone think that this is a reason why the government should stop trying to enforce laws against embezzlement, drunk driving or bank robbery? Or let embezzlers, drunk drivers and bank robbers "come out of the shadows" and "normalize" their lives?

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Gosnell is Not an Exception

Star Parker

Kirsten Powers has done a national service, by virtue of her now famous USA Today column, of getting the news of the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell on the national radar screen.

This of course, is the horror story of a cesspool in Philadelphia posturing as an abortion clinic, operating without inspection for 17 years. Gosnell, the doctor who ran the place, has been formally charged of murder of one woman and seven infants.

However, the grand jury report and testimony of family and staff at the trial indicate that if there were records in this dump, where life and death were meted out daily, Gosnell would be indicted for hundreds of murders of live children.

Most likely, and sadly, this horror story will have its fifteen minutes of fame and the nation will move on. The national press got dragged unwillingly to report it, finally, because of Ms. Powers’ courageous column. But there is no way to keep them on a story they don’t want to cover.

Maybe we can keep this story alive by keeping in mind a few things.

What was happening in Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society clinic was not some bizarre exception to the rule.

You can ask Day Gardner, founder and president of the National Black Pro-life Union. Her life is dedicated to covering these realities. In her words, “This is not an exception. These realities are happening every day all over our country.”

Despite the sense that no one was paying attention to the Gosnell story before Kirsten Powers wrote about it, know that Dr. Gardner, Dr. Alveda King, and other pro-life activists were demonstrating outside Gosnell’s clinic as early as February 2011.

They held a press conference about the trial on April 4, a week before Powers’ column appeared. Alveda King wrote in her blog the day before, “…Rev. Clenard Childress and Dr. Day Gardner…are in Philadelphia reporting on the Kermit Gosnell trial that the mainstream media is virtually ignoring.“

Just this week, The Washington Times has reported that Gosnell-like conditions have existed at a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Vice President Biden’s own backyard in Delaware.

The Times reports “Abortions have been suspended at a Delaware Planned Parenthood, after several 911 calls made from within the clinic prompted a new investigation by Health and Human Services.”

Two nurses quit to protect their licenses, one saying “I couldn’t tell you how ridiculously unsafe it was.”

According to the story, “Since Jan. 4, five patients have been rushed to the emergency room.”

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Why Do Radical Muslims Hate Us?

Dr. Michael Brown

What would motivate two young Muslims to blow up innocent men, women, and children? What did America do to deserve such an outpouring of irrational, blind hatred? In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it is clear that most Americans still do not understand the ideology of radical Islam.

Bill O’Reilly noted that America had been very kind to the Tsarnaev family, wondering how they could have paid back our generosity with such barbaric acts of terror. America is a great, open-hearted country that welcomed this immigrant family and made the American dream accessible to them. Now they kill and maim our people?

More than two decades ago, Daniel Coleman, an American intelligence agent, wondered what it was that fueled the fires of an obscure Islamic radical named Osama bin Laden. Reading one of bin Laden’s writings, Coleman observed that “one of the striking features of the document was that time seemed to have stopped a thousand years ago. There was now and there was then, but there was nothing in between. It was as if the Crusades were still going on in bin Laden’s universe. The intensity of the anger was also difficult for Coleman to grasp. What did we do to him? he wondered” (as recounted by Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower).

As Coleman was to learn, and as all of America should have learned by now, in the eyes of radical Muslims, America has done much to deserve their wrath.

First, America’s wars in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are considered to be Western intrusions into the Muslim world, power-grabbing moves aimed at world domination, sometimes motivated by greed (= oil), always motivated by a sense of the superiority of American democracy.

What we view as wars of liberation at the cost of precious American lives, they view as acts of exploitation, as murderous incursions that are wiping out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of their people. (I am not supporting these views; I am simply stating how radical Muslims view us.)

How many Iraqi and Afghani citizens have been killed by American bombs? they would ask. How many innocent Muslim men, women, and children have been slaughtered? They will now inflict that same terror on us, not by dropping bombs on us from the air (since they don’t have the capability of doing so), but by planting bombs on our busy city streets.

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