The Orwellian Obama Presidency

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Bret Stephens:

The humiliating denouement to America’s involvement in Yemen came over the weekend, when U.S. Special Forces were forced to evacuate a base from which they had operated against the local branch of al Qaeda. This is the same branch that claimed responsibility for the January attack on Charlie Hebdo and has long been considered to pose the most direct threat to Europe and the United States.

So who should Barack Obama be declaring war on in the Middle East other than the state of Israel?

There is an upside-down quality to this president’s world view. His administration is now on better terms with Iran—whose Houthi proxies, with the slogan “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews, power to Islam,” just deposed Yemen’s legitimate president—than it is with Israel. He claims we are winning the war against Islamic State even as the group continues to extend its reach into Libya, Yemen and Nigeria.

He treats Republicans in the Senate as an enemy when it comes to the Iranian nuclear negotiations, while treating the Russian foreign ministry as a diplomatic partner. He favors the moral legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council to that of the U.S. Congress. He is facilitating Bashar Assad’s war on his own people by targeting ISIS so the Syrian dictator can train his fire on our ostensible allies in the Free Syrian Army.

He was prepared to embrace a Muslim Brother as president of Egypt but maintains an arm’s-length relationship with his popular pro-American successor. He has no problem keeping company with Al Sharpton and tagging an American police department as comprehensively racist but is nothing if not adamant that the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” must on no account ever be conjoined. The deeper that Russian forces advance into Ukraine, the more they violate cease-fires, the weaker the Kiev government becomes, the more insistent he is that his response to Russia is working.

To adapt George Orwell’s motto for Oceania: Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory.

The current victim of Mr. Obama’s moral inversions is the recently re-elected Israeli prime minister. Normally a sweeping democratic mandate reflects legitimacy, but not for Mr. Obama. Now we are treated to the astonishing spectacle in which Benjamin Netanyahu has become persona non grata for his comments doubting the current feasibility of a two-state solution. This, while his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas is in the 11th year of his four-year term, without a murmur of protest from the White House.

It is true that Mr. Netanyahu made an ugly election-day remark about Israeli-Arab voters “coming out in droves to the polls,” thereby putting “the right-wing government in danger.” For this he has apologized, in person, to leaders of the Israeli-Arab community.

That’s more than can be said for Mr. Abbas, who last year threatened Israel with a global religious war if Jews were allowed to pray in the Temple Mount’s Al Aqsa mosque. “We will not allow our holy places to be contaminated,” the Palestinian Authority president said. The Obama administration insists that Mr. Abbas is “the best interlocutor Israel is ever going to have.”

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Abbas, who last year threatened Israel with a global religious war if Jews were allowed to pray in the Temple Mount’s Al Aqsa mosque. “We will not allow our holy places to be contaminated,” he said.

I wonder what Abbas is going to do when one side of that mosque collapses and the whole thing falls down?
There has been a bulge in the ancient wall on which this mosque was built.
It was first noticed by Jewish archeologists several years ago.
They started to reinforce it but Abbas’ supporters accused them of trying to destroy their mosque.
So, work has been stopped for years and the bulge is growing.
Won’t be long now, what with all the hard head-banging in the place.

Speaking of Big Brother Obama:

Obama Justice Dept. Floats New Plan to Push Banks to Inform on Customers

Obama’s Department of Justice has announced new plans to give banks more power to inform on customers’ “nefarious activity” and trigger immediate investigations by federal or local authorities.

One of the ways that banks currently flag the possibility of suspicious activities of their customers is to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the federal government. After an SAR is filed, it can sometimes take weeks, even months to see results on a suspicious bank account.

(Snip)

The call by the DOJ for banks to increase their level of vigilance, though, has raised concerns of some who feel that the criteria for calling authorities on customers is too loose and indistinct.

Some worry that “basically anything” can lead to a bank siccing law enforcement on customers.

FDIC Chairman in Hot Seat Over Operation Choke Point

Martin Gruenberg, Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, will be in the hot seat Tuesday afternoon. He’ll be facing the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee as it holds a hearing on the FDIC’s role in Operation Choke Point, the Obama administration’s under-the-radar project designed to destroy several industries (payday lending, firearms dealers, pawn shops) by “choking off” their banking relationships.

(Snip)

“When we pass laws and make them legal, but the FDIC, through their activist bureaucrats, try to put them out of businesss under the cover of darkness that’s not American and it’s beyond the control and the charter given [the FDIC] by Congress,” Duffy told Fox News on Monday.

(Snip)

“We cannot know precisely the reasons for Mr. Osterman’s recent demotion but we do know that Congress was misled and there should be consequences for covering up the FDIC’s role in Operation Choke Point,” Amy Cantu, a spokesperson for the Community of Financial Services Association tells Breitbart News.

“This program is an unwarranted and improper intrusion by federal regulators and it sets a dangerous precedent for any legitimate business that could one day be deemed unfavorable by unelected bureaucrats,” Cantu adds.

The collapse of the Al Aqsa Mosque will be Bush’s fault.
Trust me.
Alas. I thought that 1984 was “just” fiction. But we now live in a Brave New World, where black is white, bad is good, and terrorism is workplace violence.
It is as bad as Alice in Wonderland, where words mean “just what I want them to mean.”
Can the WH be trusted?
Yes. They can be trusted to lie.

@mathman:

Alas. I thought that 1984 was “just” fiction.

Orwell was a wise student of history (just as the founding fathers were,) knowing very well how Statist socialist-fascism could be enacted by the political progressive’s agenda. Nor was 1984 or his other works Democrat v. Republican books. They were warnings about about the possible future results of totalitarian government oppression (via the Washington D.C. establishment elite progressives) and where it would lead. Obama’s administration has created “Big Brother”.