Remaining Democratic government underground must also be drained from the swamp

Posted on by in Blog, Elections, Foreign Policy and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , .

Draining the swamp means cleaning out the remaining Democratic government underground too. President Donald John Trump is reported to be furious with his communications staff for steadily being outsmarted by well-timed and –placed leaks from Democratic operatives, suggesting collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government agents in preventing Hillary Clinton’s election, even surmising that this may have involved treasonous activities by Trump operatives.

With so far not an iota of evidence in support of such collusion, and completely ignoring that not only Hillary Clinton lost the election but the Democrats all over the country by failing to achieve expected gains in Congress and local state elections, he has reason to be upset that his government is unable to control the message. Less than 24 hours after giving before a joint session of House and Senate one of the best presidential speeches in U.S. history, he found himself once again on the defense under relentless leaks from former members of the Obama administration and government bureaucrats in various agencies who very obviously oppose the Trump agenda.

The Canary predicted in several prior blogs that Obama and his “army” of organized supporters would be a dangerous and divisive political force in strident attempts at delegitimizing the Trump presidency. Increasing evidence now has become public that during the last two weeks in office, the Obama administration carefully planned and executed a strategy of not only delegitimizing President Donald J. Trump but by claiming he won the presidency illegitimately by colluding with the Russian government in treasonous fashion.

These largely Obama-driven attacks on Trump and his administration, therefore, go far beyond just attempts at political deligitimization; they are meant to introduce the concept of treasonous behavior by a sitting president and, therefore, are attempts at criminalizing the arguments against his presidency with the potential goal of impeachment.

The deviousness of this campaign is unprecedented because it was initiated while, publicly, President Obama was extending a helping hand to the incoming Trump administration since, as he himself stated, despite political differences, he had been at the receiving end of such a helping hand from President Bush when he moved into the Oval Office.

18 U.S. Code §2381 defines treason as: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall …..”

This definition is of importance when considering the allegations swirling around. While it is important to reemphasize that, as of this writing, there is not an iota of evidence to support any collusion, indeed, not even that discussions regarding the subject took place between Trump’s campaign and Russian government officials, let us for a moment assume that there, indeed, have been discussion between these two parties, in which Trump operatives were made aware that the Russian government was in possession of e-mails generated by Hillary Clinton’s and the Democratic National Committee. Let us further assume that the Trump team even encouraged their publication. Would that have constituted treason?

Since President Putin’s Russia is, rightly, widely considered a hostile nation to the U.S., this is basically the argument made by Trump bashers. Moreover, opponents of Trump further argued during the election campaign (and still do) that the involved e-mails not only came from a hostile power but, in addition, were “stolen.” Their use in the campaign, therefore, would establish complicity with the thieves (i.e., hackers).

On both issues the Canary disagrees with the underlying logic of the anti-Trump crowd , and here is why: Though Russia under its current government has, indeed, to be considered a political and military adversary, promises of favorable treatments, disclosures of national secrets or any other potentially harmful acts to the security and interests of the U.S. in return for publication of these e-mails by the Russian government (or a potential third party agent, like WikiLeaks) could, in fact, potentially be considered treasonous. But in absence of any quid pro quo, disclosures of political fraud, undermining the democratic election process (like the interventions in the Democratic primary process in favor of Hillary Clinton and to the disadvantage of Bernie Sanders by Democratic National Leadership) are, especially before a crucially important presidential election, in the best interest of the electorate. Opposition research, routinely pursued by both major parties, frequently involves “stolen” data. To offer just one example, the Clinton campaign, for example, had no hesitation to use Trump’s stolen tax returns in the campaign.

Even repeated contacts with the Russian government, if it did not involve any quid pro quos, therefore, would appear not only perfectly permissible but are routinely taking place before elections all over the world because all countries are proactively assessing who may be the next government leader they would have to face.

The Russian government, of course, is also perfectly entitled to favor candidates in U.S. elections and, indeed, even to support them. It is the responsibility of U.S. politicians to make sure that any such “help” does not contradict U.S. law. The U.S, rather routinely, intervenes in national elections by supporting favorite candidates politically and even financially. A principal motivation why President Putin apparently opposed Hillary Clinton’s election has been her active support as Secretary of State for opposition groups to Putin during the last presidential election. The Obama administration also quite openly intervened in Israeli elections when sending financial support (using U.S. tax dollars) as well as expert staff help from Obama’s own election campaign to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s opposition in a blatant attempt to subvert Bibi’s reelection. The effort failed and, indeed, misfired once it became public but, if this is what the U.S. does to friends, imagine how much we, likely, meddle in elections of less friendly countries.

The furor expressed by Democrats and the media about Russian meddling in the recent U.S. presidential election, therefore, appears hypocritical and highly exaggerated.

Which returns the analysis to the recognition that there are significant differences between a presidential candidate, who may or may not assume the presidency in the future, and a sitting president, who already assumed all presidential powers. A candidate for the presidency, in principle, still only speaks for himself. Moreover, candidates are widely known to switch campaign positions on the journey from candidate to elected president. Representations and deeds of a sitting president, therefore, are, of much greater significance.

Exploring this thought further, it, therefore, would appear that the risk of treasonous acts is much higher for sitting presidents than for candidates for president, who still lack access to confidential government information and have no decision-making powers yet. In other words, candidate Trump had very little opportunity for being involved in treasonous situations with the Russians; Obama, however, as has been well documented, in highest government levels communication with Russia, meeting then Russian (temporary) President Dmitry Medvedev, in an open microphone gaffe on March 26, 2012, just before his reelection, revealed the message to Putin, “tell Vladimir that I’ll have more flexibility after the election.”

What Obama in those very few words communicated to the President of a hostile country could be, indeed, considered treasonous because he, basically, told him that, once the elections were over, he could give Russia concessions the American people, likely, would not approve of (because why would he, otherwise, wait with those concessions till after the election).

The irony is that, in contrast to current collusion rumors spread by the Obama propaganda machine, this event in 2012 really took place. It received minor media attention as a “gaffe,”- a more humorous than serious political occurrence; but, when closely examined, this event represented a truly astonishing statement from an American president in a one-on-one meeting with the president of a hostile country, and clearly evidence of collusions, – not only to the benefit of an election outcome but, in addition, behind the back of the American people.

For the Trump administration, it is high time to recognize that the Democratic Party establishment and many other well-financed interest groups are determined to prevent President Trump from completing his term and running again. In other words, the swamp Trump promised to drain is fighting back and, interestingly, is doing so with what psychologists call psychological projections, by accusing Trump of exactly the transgressions the Democrats have been guilty of over the last eight years. It is time for the Justice Department to take the gloves off, and open the public’s eyes to the corruption and abuse of state powers that pervaded the Obama administration for almost a decade. It, indeed, is a very deep swamp that needs to be drained!

 

  

 

Watch out for past president Barak Hussein Obama: The most dangerous phase is yet to come!

Posted on by in Blog, Psychology of Obama and tagged , , , , , , , , .

We in these pages on several occasions, the last time in the preceding blog, described former president Barak Hussein Obama as a strategic revolutionary. To see him as such is almost obvious if one follows his upbringing, as previously in a series of blogs in detail described in these pages.

The formative years of his youth he spent under the influence of radical Socialists (often even Communists). In and after college, his associates were practically exclusively leftist radical revolutionaries, including Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of Weather Underground fame, once he came to Chicago to work as a community organizer. His Marxist revolutionary underbelly then further expanded when he got caught up in Chicago’s South Side’s Afrocentric radicalism, represented by such individuals as Minister Louis Farrakhan of The Nation of Islam, the Roman Catholic priest and social activist Michael Louis Pfleger and then, of course, his ersatz-father, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who married him and spiritually counseled him for over 20 years until this association became too politically controversial during Obama’s 2008 campaign for the presidency.

His anti-American political worldview, that became increasingly apparent once he assumed the office of president, characterized by a worldwide apology tour decrying alleged past misdeeds of the U.S., his very obvious internationalism, anti-colonialism and anti-Zionism, his emotional sympathies for non-Caucasians, radical Socialistic and Third World countries, like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua were the consequence of an amalgam of influences: his Marxist upbringing, the emotional influences of his almost unknown father, a dedicated anti-colonialist Marxist, still exerted upon him, as well demonstrated in Obama’s own writings, and longstanding personal friendships with people like Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and well-known anti-Zionist, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.   

During his time in Chicago, Obama also became versed in, and committed to, the most radical concepts of community organizing, based on the concepts of the Marxist founder of modern community organizing, Chicago’s Saul David Alinsky, published in his by now classical 1971 book, Rules for Radicals.  

To quote from an article Jen Kuznicki published on August 25, 2016 in the Conservative Review, Hillary Clinton, another devoted Alinsky disciple, in her 92-page thesis at Wellesley College noted Alinsky’s relevance for a continuous assessment of Obama, when describing Alinsky as a “neo-Hobbesian who objects to the consensual mystique surrounding political processes; for him, conflict is the route to power, …dedicated to changing the character of life of a particular community [and] has an initial function of serving as an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions… to provide a channel into which they can pour their frustration of the past; to create a mechanism which can drain off underlying guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so long a time. When those who represent the status quo label you [i.e. the community organizer] as an ‘agitator’ they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function–to agitate to the point of conflict.”

The Canary noted in these pages before that, in contrast to widespread representations in the media, especially in the years of his second administration, we found the presidency of Obama to be extremely divisive. We, indeed, saw in his actions on a grand scale exactly what Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals on a smaller scale recommend would bring about revolutionary societal change. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter would not have been sustainable without financial resources and logistic as well as legal support. These movements longevity, therefore, supports the notion that an organized network of support has in recent years been sustaining them and other potentially revolutionary splinter groups, likely with full backing of the Justice Department and other Obama administration resources.

In this context, it is important to remember that Scott Foval, National Field Director of American United for Change, only a few weeks before the November election told an undercover reporter that the Democratic National Committee (i.e., the Democratic Party) indirectly paid his organization through the political consulting firm, Democracy Partners, for sending trouble makers to Trump rallies with the specific goal of steering up violence. The founder of Democratic Partners, Robert Craemer, a longstanding Democratic party operative, per official logs, visited the White House during the Obama administration not less than 340 times, with 45 of these meetings involving the President, himself. Even members of Obama’s cabinet have not had that kind of access to the White House, strongly suggesting that Craemer’s, at times illegal political operations, to a large degree, likely, were run out of the White House.

This has major relevance in view of an article by Paul Sperry in the February 12, 2017 New York Post, which claims that Barak Obama, behind the scenes, is taking previously unprecedented measures for a past president to oppose Donald Trump’s White House. Per Sperry, Obama is setting up a “shadow government” to protect his presidential legacy but also to sabotage the Trump administration’s popular “America First” agenda that will involve a network of leftist not-for-profits led by one, called Organizing for Action (OFA), which is gearing up for battle with a growing war chest and more than 250 offices around the country.

Some of these activities have already become visible, from suddenly overrun Republican town hall meeting by obvious anti-Trump forces, to anti-Trump marches, which at times even have turned into riots.  Sperry claims that OFA, evolved out of Obama’s campaign organization Obama for America in 2013, has 32,525 volunteers and raised so far over $40 million. Its IRS filings claim that OFA trains young activists in developing organizing skills, closing the circle regarding our above made comments about Obama always having been a strategic Marxist revolutionary in the Saul David Alinsky mode.
Despite the power of the position, being President of the U.S. is, surprisingly, restrictive. If President Jimmy Carter surprised many by his political activism following his presidency, wait for the spectacle that President Obama will offer the world. For the first time, we will have the opportunity to see the real Obama, giving the country the opportunity to recognize how lucky we have been that his two administrations did not cause even more damage.  

We live in “crazy” times, – we better be careful!

Posted on by in Blog, Foreign Policy and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

 

Somehow, the whole world appears out of joint; crazy stuff seems to be happening in all spheres of life. Just think about the statistical likelihood that in the same one year the NBA finals would be won by a team three to one games behind, even if that team has LeBron James; that the Chicago Cubs (the Chicago Cubs!) after 108 years would win the World Series of Baseball, also being three to one games behind, and in overtime of game seven away from home; and that after being 28 points behind, the Patriots would rally to win the Superbowl in the first overtime game ever played.

That alone would be more than enough to declare 2016 the most “crazy” year in decades. Add to that BREXIT and, of course, the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the USA, and whatever other crazy things are happening all around the world, from ISIS medieval regressive behavior, North Korea’s obviously insane leadership, Pakistan’s poorly secured nuclear arsenal, over Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism all over the world, Russia’s and China’s newly expansive behavior, Erdogan’s dream of reversing Kamal Atatürk’s historic definition of Turkey as a Muslim but, nevertheless, secular state, the European Union on the verge of collapse, the Middle East, a tinder box, – ever-closer to explosion and then, returning to the U.S., as likely never before in history since the Civil War of 1861-1865, a radically divided nation, with both sides, seemingly, incapable of even talking to each other.

These are dangerous times, – likely the most dangerous since the 1930s, which were followed by the last big authoritarian world revolution that, ultimately, brought fascism and communism to power in large swaths of the world. World War II defeated fascism but, by doing so, led to the division of the world between Western democracies, led by the U.S., and Communist authoritarian dictatorships, led by the no-longer existing Soviet Union. It took almost half a century to defeat the socio-fascist concept of post-World War II Communism before the Soviet Union imploded and the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989.

The disappearance of Communist eastern Europe led to the expansion of an, until recently, increasingly united and democratic Europe under the framework of the European Union. This expansion, however, in recent years increasingly ran out of steam, and the European Union is currently in imminent danger of collapse, as governments of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and even France, are under increasing pressure from their citizenries to leave the Union, as the UK, with BREXIT, obviously already did.

Concomitantly, authoritarian forces, long believed morally disqualified from ever again finding access to power, are in almost all European countries battling for government positions on the left and right, recreating a potentially frightening world of increasing authoritarianism, instability and radical conflict between liberal and conservative view points, with on both political extremes, the most extreme setting the agenda.

Mostly unrecognized, this trend has been under way for a good number of years. One could argue It started in authoritarian Russia and China before reaching the West, including the U.S., with Putin pursuing much more radical domestic as well as foreign policy agendas after his return to the presidency, and China, by selecting Xi Jinping as president, demonstrating the most repressive domestic and most aggressive foreign policy since Mao Zedong. Even democratic Japan elected a relative radical conservative in prime minister in Shinzõ Abe, who only years earlier would have been considered unelectable because of many of his conservative view points.

Similarly, conservative extremists have been in power in Hungary since 2010, when Viktor Orbán was for the second time elected Prime Minister and in Poland when the Law and Justice Party in 2015 won an absolute majority in parliament. In Greece and Italy, on the other hand, leftist parties have swept to power, though strongly opposed by an at least equally radical right in the opposition. It, indeed, looks all like the 1930s all over again, where the extreme left and right were battling each other in most European nation states, only for ultimately allowing Fascism and Nazism to gain the upper hand.

One, indeed, could also argue that it all started with the Green revolution in Ukraine, followed by the Arab Spring, both national movements of discontent. Remarkable is, however, how this worldwide discontent has failed in leading to even minimally satisfying political solutions. Ukraine is anything but a functioning democracy and the Arab Spring has given rise to an unprecedented political, societal and humanitarian disaster, consuming almost all the Middle East, and resulting in the biggest wave of refuges since World War II.

As the election of Trump and BREXIT well demonstrated, the discontent with current governance is not only restricted to past Communist countries and the developed world. Indeed, discontent in the Western world may be even more intense. Observing the first three weeks of the Trump administration must be troubling for every U.S. citizen, whatever side she or he may be on. The break down in political decorum is unprecedented and further accentuated by a President, completely irreverent for longstanding presidential traditions.

Such unanimity of worldwide discontent has not been witnessed since the Great Depression (1929-1939) and, like then, must be viewed a pre-revolutionary. It is in times when national discontent reaches such levels, and political opponents are increasingly dehumanized, that revolutions tend to overthrow existing orders. To a degree, Trump’s election can, because of his advocacy of radical (in contrast to evolutionary) changes, be viewed as a revolutionary occurrence; but, because this change took place via the ballot box, it does not fulfill the definition of a revolution. If one views the evolving anarchy on university campuses and streets of major cities since Trump’s election, one, however, does see rather characteristic initial features of a truly revolutionary movements with no love for democratic order.

The Canary has warned before in these pages that we live in pre-revolutionary times. We, indeed, more than ever are convinced that former president Obama, likely as the only leading politician in the country, not only recognized this fact but, especially over the last 2 years of his presidency, used these circumstances as an opportunity to enhance the chances of a revolutionary overthrow of the country’s current order by instigating conflicts between races and reinvigorating class warfare, diminishing the government’s authority, whether on the nation’s borders, by diminishing the credibility of law enforcement, weakening the military or conducting an internationalistic rather than nationalistic foreign policy.

Trump’s election was the natural repeal of such revolutionary policies by a basically, overall, still mildly conservative country. His election, however, now mandates rapid changes to demonstrate to the American people that there, indeed, is a better option than Socialism for improving the quality of life for most citizens. The financial crisis of 2008 left even strong proponents of Capitalism with considerable doubts. Trump now must demonstrate with lightning speed that “honest” Capitalism, if not allowed to become Crony-Capitalism (as it, unfortunately, has become under prior Democratic as well as Republican administrations), is, still, the best economic system the world offers for those who wants personal freedom and ability to accumulate property.

If economic reforms will not succeed quickly, as we already have been witnessing, the left will become increasingly aggressive in promoting revolutionary steps toward an increasingly socialist market structure with full support by the Democratic Party establishment, which is frightened to death by the party’s base of supporters, mostly made up of Bernie Sanders supporters, the most radically left wing of the party.

Emigration reform, as important it is, should, therefore, receive less priority than tax reform, gaining control over medical costs and, finally, after almost 20 years of failure to do, supporting the middle class with adequate availability of well-paying jobs and reasonable social as well as medical security. In absence of rapid economic improvements, the radical left will start gaining strength, threatening the democratic as well as geographic stability of the Union. Like the current California Independence Movement, BRXIT also once started as a “crazy” fringe idea, and look where it brought us to! We are living in “crazy” times, where, if the Cubs can become baseball champions, almost everything can happen. We better be careful!

 

The post-Obama world

Posted on by in Blog, Foreign Policy, Psychology of Obama and tagged , , , , , , , , , .

In business, it would be called “on spec” how Europe, already in 2009, shortly after being elected and ahead of any major foreign policy decisions, awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. In doing so, “Europa got the kind of transnational American president it wanted,” The Wall Street Journal recently noted in a commentary. After almost eight years of Obama foreign policy, one, however, must wonder how much regret the selection committee may now experience about its decision.

It was President Obama, himself, who after his election made the point that “elections do have consequences.” While his comment was made about domestic politics, U.S. presidential elections, of course, always also have worldwide consequences. It now appears that the awarding of Nobel Peace Prizes “on spec” may also have (unforeseen) consequences.

In Obama, the country elected not only the least qualified and least informed president in foreign affairs in recent memory but, in addition, also an individual whose very limited knowledge of world history had been formed based on extremist anti-colonial and anti-imperialistic indoctrination from childhood. Under this worldview, the U.S. and most of the Western White World were the bad boys of history, while the mostly brown and black Third World, as victims of Capitalism, Colonialism and Imperialism, were the good guys.

Removing Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office, therefore, became a very symbolic first foreign policy act the new president took after moving into the White House, since Churchill, of course, represented British Colonialism at its best, which Obama’s father, Barak Obama, Sr., had so valiantly fought in his home country Kenya. That this world view would affect all of Obama’s foreign policy decisions, therefore, was not only predictable but, simply for psychological reasons, likely unavoidable. Add to this psychological predilection, the overconfident self-appreciation of a highly intelligent, yet severely egomaniacal personality, who in addition, just based on his rhetorical representations, is awarded the Peace Nobel Prize, and a historical constellation of personalities and circumstances becomes apparent, which explains why even Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, a committed Liberal and strong former supporter, recently concluded that history will view Obama as one of the country’s worst presidents in executing foreign policy.

Being awarded the Nobel Prize so early in his presidency, and only based on expression of his obviously deviant political world views from those of his predecessors, undoubtedly, further strengthened Obama in his political convictions and, at least in part, explains his practical unprecedented audacity in making major foreign policy decisions in complete isolation and, often, against the expressed recommendations of his national security staff and military leadership. These decisions then often led to disaster, nowhere more obvious than in Iraq and Syria, with over half a million dead and millions of refugees in camps in neighboring countries and flooding Europe.

After his reelection, the need to obfuscate his ideological background further diminished. His national security team was increasingly made up of individuals with similar ideologies or with yes-man and women, who only further strengthened him in his political convictions. Consequences were the Iran deal, the normalization of relations with the Castro brothers’ Cuba, cordial and rather uncritical relationships with Socialist regimes in Venezuela and elsewhere in South America and persistent outreach to the Muslim world while, at best, demonstrating benign neglect of friendly Western countries but, often, indeed, hostility to traditionally friends, like the state of Israel.

How much the world has changed in eight years of Obama presidency is, indeed, almost impossible to comprehend. Whatever one may think about the preceding Bush years, Obama inherited a relative stable world order. In eight years of Obama foreign policy, the world order established after WWI appears completely uprooted, and the incoming Trump administration, likely faces the most complex and dangerous security situation in the world since the 1930s and start of WWII.

Europe

Like in the 1930s, we here at The Canary, once again, consider Europe to be the most dangerous flashpoint. With the European Union facing an existential crisis, Western Europe being overrun by Muslim migrants, and several central European countries facing Muslim majorities within just a few short decades, with Russia again pursuing an expansive foreign policy in efforts to reconstitute the geo-political power base of the old Soviet Union, Europe appears a powder cake, ready to explode.

No easy solutions are apparent. The most likely solution is contraction of the European Union back to a smaller but economically and politically more cohesive union of states, with other former member states in looser affiliated positions, and, potentially serving as buffer states between Europe and Russia. This core group of countries making up the United States of Europe (USE), in analogy to the U.S., must be able to function as one federally governed country of individual states, with its own border security and military, capable of defending itself against Russian expansionism without being dependent on the U.S. Despite BREXIT, we can see the United Kingdom as a cornerstone of such a USE, joined by Germany, Austria, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and, possibly, other countries.

President Trump’s foreign policy should be strongly supportive of such a USE, which could become a strong economic as well as military ally of the U.S. if relationships are properly managed.

The Middle East

This region of the world is characterized by the largest number of failed states. Moreover, since this is the center of the Muslim world, everything is linked to religion. Developments in Turkey, which by the West was considered the example how Muslim countries could evolve as liberal secular democracies, have, unfortunately been regressive, as Erdogan has been concentrating power in his hands, democratic freedoms are receding and a national policy of secularism is replaced by religious Islamism.

Though Sunnis, it appears increasingly likely that, out of a common fear that the Kurds in their countries may form a new continuous state of Kurdistan, Turkey will continue developing closer relationships with Shiite Iran. Though for the longest time a primary foe of Syria’s Assad, this coalition may, in the end, also include Syria and Iraq since these two countries also contain major Kurdish minority areas, and have close relationships with Iran. Finally, because of Iran’s influence, Lebanon can also be expected to join this coalition of states which, of course, will have strong political and military support from Russia

The rest of the Arab Sunni world, from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates to Egypt and the North African Muslim countries of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, appears less united than in the past. Disappointed by U.S. policy under President Obama, these countries in recent years have for the first time in decades again developed relationships with Russia. The whole region has remained a minefield of danger, at any given moment subject to a new political disruption.

This, of course, also includes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which since 1967, now for almost 50 years, includes Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory on the West Bank (in Biblical terms, Judea and Samaria) and of the Golan Heights from Syria. Though in view of recent events in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, this conflict has lost its centrality, it, nevertheless, cannot be overlooked because it no longer is only a conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. It for many years has become a proxy-war between Iran and Israel, with the Iranian goal being to encircle Israel from the north (Hezbollah in Lebanon) the west (Hezbollah and Iranian Quds forces from Syria and Hamas from the West Bank) and the south (Hamas in Gaza)

Publicly sworn to the destruction of the state of Israel (the only United Nations member state that expressed publicly its desire to destroy another U.N. member state), Israel, not surprisingly, therefore views Iran as an existential threat. In contrast to President Obama’s administration, the incoming Trump administration appears to share this opinion. Moreover, since Obama has, unopposed, ceded so much influence to Russia in the region, Israel has, strategically, become even more important to U.S. national interests as the only truly politically stable state which, in addition, also maintains the strongest and most sophisticated military in the region.

We, therefore, anticipate from the Trump administration a more forceful and open military and political affiliation with Israel, either as direct pact between the two countries or, if not opposed by other member states like Turkey, possibly even including the NATO alliance.

Russia

U.S. relations with Russia have reached the lowest nadir since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This is a remarkable development, considering the “reset” of relations Obama and Hillary Clinton had been striving for. Who, indeed, can forget the live microphone that allowed the world to hear President Obama telling, then Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, that he ”would have more leeway after his reelection in dealing with Russia.”

Things quite obviously did not work out as expected! As in so many other political hotspots around the world, the Obama administration viewed the Russian – American relationship through pink rather than realistic geopolitical glasses, completely misreading Putin’s intent on “making Russia great again.”

President Elect Trump’s approach to Russia will be interesting to watch. His selection of Rex Tillerson, who is known to have a personal friendship with Putin, as Secretary of State, can be a double-edged sword. It may not hurt to develop a better relationship with Putin; though “trust but verify” (ala Ronald Reagan) must be a guiding principle in dealing with Putin and his former KGB colleagues.

Here at The Canary, we are rather skeptical that one can do business with people who murder their opponents, deny the obvious (i.e., shooting down of airplanes, and use of their military in the invasion of Ukraine and other neighboring countries) and have turned their country back into a dictatorship; but who knows; maybe, Trump and Putin will succeed in reestablishing detente. It, certainly, would help in stabilizing a very unstable world.

Trump’s readiness to engage in another nuclear proliferation race with either Russia, China or whoever challenges the U.S., should be viewed as a positive statement. As the multiple diplomatic disasters of the Obama administration so well demonstrate, diplomacy can only be effective from a position of strength.

Asia

Considering how messy a world the Obama administration is leaving behind, we, despite the obvious danger a nuclear North Korea with intercontinental ballistic capabilities represents, consider Asia the least threatening part of the world to U.S. national security. China’s saber-rattling in the South China Sea is, of course, disturbing but, very obviously, is again to a large degree a product of foreign policy weakness of the Obama administration. President Elect Trump has been sending the correct messages to the Chinese leadership when taking the congratulatory phone call from Taiwan’s president.

The message is loud and clear; when the U.S. agreed to a one-China policy under Richard Nixon, there was also a clear understanding about mutual political behavior of both parties. Trump is absolutely correct in pointing out to the Chinese that agreements go both ways; If they want the U.S. to adhere to the agreement, then the U.S. can expect appropriate behavior from the Chinese in return. In other words, building artificial island in the South China Sea is not appropriate; refusing to take tough actions against a rogue North Korea is also unacceptable; stealing billions of dollars in intellectual property through hacking and other illegal measures every year is also unacceptable behavior for a nation that wishes to assume a leadership position in the world; and, finally, trade agreements between nations need to be fair.

We also trust that Trump’s comments about the potential nuclearizing of Japan and South Korea were not only empty threats. Those are, indeed, the logical next steps if China continues its aggressively expansive policy in the South China Sea and refuses to help in the denuclearization of North Korea.

Trump is also correct that China is economically more dependent on the U.S. than the U.S. is on China. As a senior government official once noted to The Canary, “China is not a country of 1.3 billion citizens, as is widely believed. It is more a country of ca. 300 million citizens (like the U.S.) with the additional burden of 1 billion peasants, the Chinese leadership must bring out of poverty to maintain the current government structure.”

Though there may be hiccups on the way, we, therefore, are confident that a usually highly rational Chinese leadership will in a Trump administration conclude that, considering the alternatives, it behooves them to step back from the kind of aggressive posturing we have seen over the last few years.

Pakistan

After Europe, Pakistan is, likely, the most dangerous spot on the globe, considering that this is a Muslim country with usually unstable governments. The good news is that the country just underwent a completely uneventful change in military command, with a highly regarded and militarily successful commander stepping down at the end of his term. While nothing unusual in Western democracies, this unchallenged change of command represented a big step forward for Pakistan, where the military is the real power behind the civilian government, and controls the nuclear hardware of the country.

The country’s nuclear arsenal is especially dangerous for the world because Pakistan is, likely, the most unstable nuclear power in the world. The risk that nuclear material falls into the hands of terrorists is, therefore, always substantial. Because of its financial problems, North Korea, of course, represents similar risks since it, in the past, has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to supply weapons and know how to whoever is willing to pay.

A new world order

Post WWI, the world established a new world order, based on two principal power centers, the Soviet Union and the U.S. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. remained the sole super power, and learned the hard way that this is not necessarily as good as it sounds, comes with considerable responsibilities and becomes politically as well as financially overbearing.

President Obama recognized this but decided on categorically incorrect solutions. Instead of trying to establish a new power balance between the strongest economic (U.S., China and European Union) and military powers (U.S., Russia and China), Obama decided to retreat and “lead from behind.” Instead of a rational new order, what evolved was then the chaos around the world we just described.

A new worldwide foreign policy strategy, which we believe Trump has in mind, must attempt to return the world from a unipolar, U.S.-driven to a multi-polar balanced world, in which the U.S., Russia and China (and, if not dissolving, the European Union or its successor), combined, assume responsibility for a balanced tri- or quatro-polar world. In other words, the only chance of cleaning up the mess left behind by eight years of Obama foreign policy, is a balanced “Kissinger world” and this, we believe here at The Canary, is why President Elect Trump has spent so much time with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

In the end, he just “cannot help himself,” – a final assessment of Obama

Posted on by in Blog, Domestic Politics, Psychology of Obama and tagged , , , , , , , , .

With less than a month of Obama administration left, it would be a mistake to assume that no further consequential activities by the White House will occur out of respect for the incoming administration, even if the President and his family are at their usual Christmas vacation in Hawaii, symbolically within the U.S. at the, likely, farthest territorial spot from Washington, DC.

The last two weeks have, indeed, been telling, with the Obama administration utilizing an obscure law from the 1950s to declare huge swaths of coastal areas off limits for oil and gas explorations, knowing full well that the incoming Trump administration will do everything possible to reverse this decision. Showing, despite all assertions to the contrary, the finger to his successor even more blatantly, was his government’s non-action (i.e., abstention) in the U.N. Security Council vote that condemned Israel’s settlement policies and, for all practical purposes mandated that Israel return all occupied territories to the Palestinians without receiving anything of substance in return to secure the country. The decision to abstain, and allow the absurd condemnation of the only democracy in the Middle East at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are being murdered next door in Syria (with active participation of permanent Security Council member Russia, and millions have become refugees without U.N. Security Council interventions, not only reflects a momentous change in 40 years of U.S. government policy over Democrat as well as Republican administrations but is also very telling about Obama’s character.

Over the last few years, we here at The Canary, have repeatedly attempted to described who, behind his widely acclaimed façade of reserved “coolness,” Obama is. In doing so, we studied his upbringing under the old Jesuit believe that strong influences in their “youth,” ultimately, make the adult man or woman. We, thus, followed the young Barry Obama through religious Muslim schooling in Indonesia, his return to Hawaii, where under truly radical Marxist tutelage (for details, please revisit our 2015 blogs) he graduated high school and went on into a radical leftist environment at Occidental College in California, only to transfer to Columbia University in New York City and later attending law school at Harvard University, throughout, though, remaining within a cocoon of radical Marxist colleagues and teachers, intermingled with Afrocentric radicals and friends from the Muslim world. From the Canary, this is a final assessment of Obama.

Simply based on his biography, we therefore, concluded a long time ago that Obama had to be viewed as sympathetic to Third World anti-imperialism, classical Marxist dialectics and would, likely, be hostile to the idea of Zionism and, therefore, the State of Israel. To expand on the latter, we furthermore concluded that his decades-long extremely close relationship with the Pastor Jeremiah Wright, a virulent Afrocentric Anti-Semite of no lesser proportion than the Nation of Islam Leader, Reverend Louis Farrakhan, Jr., located just a few blocks away from Wright’s church on Chicago’s South Side.

It was over nine years ago that, then first-term Senator (from Illinois) Barack Hussein Obama decided to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democrat nomination for president. Reviewing Obama’s political evolution in his explosive career from that early starting point, is not only fascinating but also highly revealing because it demonstrates an intelligent and determined individual and unscrupulously masterful politician, willing to use anything and anybody to achieve his goals.

When it came to Afrocentricity, Anti-White rhetoric and Anti-Semitism, Pastor Wright’s church was since its inception known as the Christian counterpart to Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam Headquarters on Chicago’s South Side. Both religious leaders, preached in each other’s religious facilities, and both did not mince words in their sermons, when it came down to the wickedness of Whites, and especially Jews. And, yet, Wright’s church remained Obama’s and his family’s religious home until Wright’s sermons became public knowledge, and threatened to derail Obama’s chances against Hillary Clinton in 2008. Likely even more importantly, however, his association with Wright threatened the backbone of his financial support, which primarily came from two wealthy Jewish family dynasties in Chicago, The Pritzkers and Crowns.

Though they practically considered each other family, Obama, overnight, distanced himself from Pastor Wright, who over all eight years of the Obama Presidency has remained invisible, – and the Jewish money continued flowing (Penny Pritzker also became Secretary of Commerce in Obama’s second administration). Attending an obviously Afrocentric, Anti-White and obviously Anti-Semitic church and developing a close relationship with its pastor, can be a potentially useful strategy for an African American politician building a political career within the African American community, which has become more Afrocentric and Anti-Semitic. But doing that, and at the same time catering to White Jewish Chicago Gold Coast Liberals is, of course, politically ingenious, – if it can be pulled off. And Barack Hussein Obama was the one politician who could pull off this feat, and he could even do it with his Muslim middle name.

This, however, did not mean that, once elected, he would feel an obligation “to give back.: This is, indeed, one of the most surprising of Obama’s character traits: he never felt that he owed anybody for their support; he simply thought he deserved support, whether financial during campaigns or politically, once elected. His narcissism, simply, did not allow him the understanding that people who helped, at least, wanted to hear a “thank you.” Yet, when politically opportune, he would have no hesitation in “rewarding” those who he needed. So, while attempting to develop Obamacare, he was willing to sacrifice even some of the most important principles to “buy off” those groups that had conspired against earlier attempts at building a national health care system under the first Clinton administration (”Hillary care”), including medical insurances, hospital organizations and drug companies.

Following his Marxist education during his youth, later amplified by Saul Alinsky’s “Twelve Rules of Radicals,” Obama never forgot that an important goal warrants all possible means. This became very apparent when major laws, like Obamacare or the rescue legislation for the U.S. car industry, were passed without even a single Republican vote, and when, later in his second administration, after the Democrats lost the House and Senate, he started an unprecedented rule by executive orders and, like in the Iran deal, circumvented the need for Congressional approval by other means. Since the goals warrant the means in Marxist dialectic, these authoritarian actions taken by Obama should not surprise, and more can be expected.

What we can expect in the next three weeks, is difficult to predict. But we only recently noted our suspicion that President Obama will offer generous pardons to a surprisingly large group of people in his administration to prevent further investigations under the Trump administration. And, despite severe criticism not only form Republican but also from leading (though, interestingly, only Jewish) Democratic politicians, we would also not be surprised if further anti-Israeli activities would occur. After all, eight years of Obama administration have very clearly demonstrated that, while Obama may not be the obvious Anti-Semite, Pastor Wright or Reverend Farrakhan are, he, most certainly, has never been and never will be a friend of Israel.

Knowing his background as the child of a Muslim father, his youth in a Muslim school system in Indonesia, his Muslim friends in college, his close friendship with the official representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of Yasser Arafat in later years, and his close emotional association with the third world and the radical left, which both view Israel as a Colonial power usurping legitimate Palestinian rights, one can really not blame him for being more sympathetic to the Arab world. After all, we all have our biases!

What is, however, worrisome is the impression that arises from Obama’s recent activities that, now unimpeded by political considerations (i.e., elections, fund raising needs, etc.), he is free to pursue his most extreme ambitions without fear of reprisals. And as president of the U.S. that gives him almost unlimited power until January 21, 2017, which is a quite concerning thought, considering the potential damage that can be done to this country and the world in the dangerous times we are living in.

 

Why all we hear about Russia is really about “drain the swamp”

Posted on by in Blog, Domestic Politics, Elections and tagged , , , , , , , , .

Josh Earnest, President Obama’s Press Secretary was anything but earnest, when in official function and from the podium of a press briefing in the White House he, for all practical purposes, accused President Elect Trump of willfully ignoring the Russian interference in the presidential elections and, indeed, encouraging it. Doubling down on his comments the next day, he not only claimed that Trump “knew of the Russian interference” but also was fully aware that these Russian activities “hurt Secretary Clinton’s campaign” and by implication, therefore, helped his own election “by encouraging Russia to hack his opponent.”

Describing his statement as an “indisputable fact,” while referring to a very obvious joke Trump made on the campaign trail when commenting on the 35,000 e-mails Hillary Clinton had made disappear by ordering their professionally erasing, a last line of decency was crossed in the rapidly deteriorating political relationship between the country’s two main political parties.

Though in this election cycle almost nothing surprises any longer, the evolving hypocrisy in how the Democrat party establishment, now apparently including President Obama’s White House, is handling the November election losses (and not only in the presidential race), is disturbing. Instead of analyzing what lead to the disastrous performance of the Clinton campaign, the party, as we outlined just a few days ago, with increasing vengeance has been propagating a typical “Dolchstoßlegende,” which can have only one purpose, – the delegitimization of Donald J Trump as the incoming 45th President of the United States.

One, therefore, has to ask what, likely, motivates such behavior, especially since Trump, after an obviously aggressively fought presidential election campaign, has been surprisingly accommodating. He, after all, was willing to forgive excesses of his opponents, including those of Hillary Clinton, practically, offering her legal amnesty. Superficially, President Obama and President Elect Trump also appeared to have found political detent, – at least until Josh Earnest’s comments suggested otherwise. And that President Obama allowed their reaffirmation, sends the very clear message that Trump better get ready for more proactive opposition to the promised smooth transition from the current White House and, possibly, outright warfare.

Here at The Canary we are not surprised by these developments. We, indeed, were caught somewhat off guard by Obama’s initially very accommodating comments following his first face-to-face meeting with Trump. While such behavior is what one would expect from any sitting president, it did not match our psychological profile of President Obama. As our very detailed series of biographical articles on Obama documented, we from the very beginning saw him as a highly partisan, Afro-centric third-world Marxist ideolog, more in line with the highly malignant personal attacks (for a sitting president) he unleashed against Trump during the later stages of the Clinton campaign, when serving as her principal surrogate. History proved us correct, we believe, and there is really no reason to assume that his personality has or would change in his last few weeks in office.

We, indeed, predict that in these last few weeks in power, President Obama will do everything possible, overtly and covertly, to subvert Trump’s successful ascendance to the presidency, and not only for political and/or ideological reasons. Much more is at stake, as we also noted a number of months ago in these pages, in trying to understand why the Obamas, suddenly, so vehemently embraced Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, even though many reliable sources had let it be known that there was no love lost between Obamas and Clintons.

We suspect that a principal reason why Obama and the Democrat Party are striving to delegitimize President Elect Trump as much as possible, is the still existing threat to the Obama administration from Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp.” As we also previously noted in these pages, considering the extreme partisanship of Obama’s Justice Department under two Attorney Generals, the swamp two Obama administrations are leaving behind is deeper, smellier and more contaminated by fraud and other crimes than anything seen in recent memory (including the notorious second Nixon administration). We, therefore, would not be surprised if Obama “in the national interest” proactively pardoned Hillary Clinton and a whole coattails of other members of his administration under the offered rational “that they, otherwise, would be subject to unfair prosecution by an illegitimate President.”

The more delegitimized Trump can be made to appear prior to assuming his presidency, the more credible will these pardons appear, especially if presented by public unions and the overwhelmingly liberal media as the rescue of well-meaning public servants from the venomous ire of a vicious and illegitimate president.

President Obama cannot permit such prosecutions even to be initiated since, not only would they negatively affect his legacy, but, once a first dam brakes, the waters threaten to wash away much more than that downstream. It would become quickly apparent how politicized the Justice Department had become under Obama, how much under direct White House orders FBI and CIA civilian and military analyses were dictated by political expedience, and how much obstruction of justice took place at the FBI and at Justice, itself, at the IRS and at other government agencies, like the Veterans Administration and the State Department (remember, we still don’t know where President Obama was during the hours of the Benghazi crisis when Hillary was “in charge”). And since nobody knows more about all of these hidden skeletons than Hillary Clinton, nobody’s legal protection is of more importance for President Obama than Hillary’s. Unless she (and the Clinton Foundation) feel protected, everybody in the Obama administration will be at legal risk, and everybody in the Obama administration knows that.

On the other side of the equation, this makes really “drain the swamp” absolutely essential for the upcoming Trump administration. Not doing so, would not only lose significant credibility for the Trump agenda but would remove the fear factor from dealing with Trump. Successful political leaders are not only loved but also feared by many, – not different from what happens in foreign policy!

The Canary