Syria: The Next Libya?

My article from the June 14, 2013 edition of FrontPage Magazine:

Syria: The Next Libya?

By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration has finally officially acknowledged that the Syrian government has used illegal chemical weapons in its bloody civil war half a year after reports first surfaced, which opens the door to U.S. involvement in the conflict.

After months of heel-dragging, the administration admits Syria crossed the much-vaunted “red line” President Obama laid down for U.S. action in that regime’s two year war against opposition forces. Obama said last summer that if Syria used chemical weapons such an action would be a “game-changer” for the United States. Despite reports that the Assad regime has done precisely that, Obama has been taking his sweet time making an official finding.

But yesterday Ben Rhodes, a young White House speechwriter who works as the White House’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said “the president has made his decision.”

Rhodes, for what it’s worth, may be responsible for concocting the official lies about last September’s deadly terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Rhodes said U.S. intelligence reports indicate Hezbollah-backed Syria has used sarin and various chemical weapons “on a small scale” against multiple rebel targets on at least four occasions over the past year. The death toll from such attacks could be 150 or higher, he said. The United Nations says 92,000 have died in the civil war so far.

Roger Ailes attacks political correctness, multi-culti nonsense

Money quote from a speech tonight at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., by Fox News CEO Roger Ailes as he accepted a 2013 Bradley (Foundation) Prize:

"We have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by others many of whom want to impose their culture and laws under the manufactured utopian idea that all cultures are equal and most are better than America's. Now of course all people should be proud of their heritage. They should teach their children to be proud of their history and their traditions and they should be welcomed in America but America is a culture, it has a culture, and it must be recognized."

Obama’s Disasters in the Middle East

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

Obama’s Disasters in the Middle East

By Matthew Vadum

As the Obama administration quietly transferred $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid to the Islamist government of Egypt, Syria is burning and totalitarian Islam continues its march in the Middle East and North Africa.

President Obama’s manmade disasters continue to mount.

It turns out Secretary of State John Kerry surreptitiously gave Egypt U.S. military aid last month, rewarding that country’s Islamofascist dictatorship for its increasingly vicious assaults on foreign workers, religious minorities, and civil society.

Kerry authorized aid to the violent, totalitarian, anti-American regime despite finding in a May 9 memo that “we are not satisfied with the extent of Egypt’s progress and are pressing for a more inclusive democratic process and the strengthening of key democratic institutions.”

In order for the aid to flow U.S. law requires the secretary of state to certify that the Egyptian government “is supporting the transition to civilian government, including holding free and fair elections, implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association and religion, and due process of law.”

Despite Egypt’s failure to meet any of these criteria, Kerry waived legal requirements in order to curry favor with Egypt’s “military leadership, who are key opinion makers in the country” and to maintain “[a] strong U.S. security partnership with Egypt” as the U.S. encourages “Egypt to continue its transition to democracy,” according to the memo.

Of course Egypt isn’t moving forward to democratic reforms; it’s moving backwards toward the seventh century. Egypt is now in the hands of President Mohammed Morsi and the terrorist-friendly Muslim Brotherhood thanks to Obama’s meddling. The Arab Republic is threatening Israel, a nation with which it has had a peace treaty since 1979.

Spy Games & Double Standards

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

Spy Games & Double Standards

By Matthew Vadum

As details of President Obama’s massive domestic spying operation continue to dribble out into the public domain, the Left for the most part is quiet and content.

Left-wingers are unable even to entertain the idea that Obama, who billed himself on the campaign trail as a champion of civil liberties, is a power-mad authoritarian who views the Constitution as worthless parchment.

Obama promised:

“no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.”

But that was then when Obama was still just a senator.

The Obama administration’s spying is ostensibly aimed at combating al-Qaeda and protecting America from attack.

But today the relentless cries of “fascism!” we heard all throughout George W. Bush’s presidency are absent. There are no riots in the streets. No rowdy Occupy Wall Street-sponsored demonstrations. No candlelight vigils.

Obama’s Secret Invisible Government

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

Obama’s Secret Invisible Government

By Matthew Vadum

A media outlet has uncovered what may be a massive conspiracy by the Obama administration to evade public accountability laws — and in at least one case to intimidate the media from asking questions.

“There is widespread use throughout the administration of private email accounts to do public business for the obvious reason that it avoids transparency,” Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow and attorney Christopher C. Horner told this writer in an interview yesterday. Horner is also author of The Liberal War on Transparency.

Horner spoke in light of the Associated Press discovery that some of President Obama’s political appointees — including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other HHS officials — are using secret email accounts to communicate. This appears to be illegal because federal law requires that certain government records be preserved. Federal agencies are required to keep emails in the event they are needed for congressional or other investigations or for lawsuits.

The lame explanation offered by the scandal-plagued Obama administration is that officials like Sebelius need the secret email accounts so they’re not swamped with unwanted emails.

In other words, the Obama administration knows what the law is but chooses to ignore it.

The Tea Party v. The Obama IRS

My FrontPage Magazine article today:

The Tea Party v. The Obama IRS

By Matthew Vadum

The IRS is being sued by 25 Tea Party groups in federal court over the political witch-hunt the agency has been conducting against conservative and libertarian grassroots organizations since the start of the Obama presidency.

The action comes three weeks after the Internal Revenue Service apologized to Tea Party groups and similar organizations for what it described as overzealous investigations of their requests for tax-exempt status. The White House denies directing the IRS to crack down on the groups.

Apart from Obama shills like Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, who slavishly lap up whatever propaganda the administration feeds them, not too many informed observers believe the White House. The White House position was undermined significantly when it was revealed that then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the Obama White House a minimum of 157 times. “Even Attorney General Eric Holder, one of Obama’s closest allies, visited only 62 times according to the records,” a Daily Caller report noted.

Crimson Tide: Two Tea Party Candidates Vie for GOP Nod in Alabama’s 1st C.D.?

My piece from PJ Tatler yesterday:


Crimson Tide: Two Tea Party Candidates Vie for GOP Nod in Alabama’s 1st C.D.?

By Matthew Vadum

Two Tea Party-friendly Republicans may soon vie for a safe GOP House seat in Alabama in a contest that could foreshadow 2014 GOP nomination battles.

The vacancy will occur in Alabama’s solidly Republican 1^st congressional district in the southwest corner of the state. Since 2003 it has been represented by Rep. Jo Bonner, a moderate Republican. Bonner announced last week he’s leaving Aug. 15 to become the University of Alabama System’s vice chancellor of government relations and economic development.

The two Tea Party contenders are journalist Quin Hillyer (who declared he’s running) and Alabama state representative Chad Fincher (who hasn’t yet decided).

Fincher, a member of the Alabama House Ways and Means Committee, told me in an interview that he will probably make a decision in the coming week.

“I definitely relate to the Tea Party movement,” he said. “I want to have that conservative voice that we desperately need” in Washington. “I want to have someone who pays taxes and has to meet a payroll.”

In addition to his legislative duties, Fincher is a broker/agent at Fincher & Associates Realty Services in Semmes.

Longtime conservative journalist Quin Hillyer announced his candidacy May 23 in a farewell post at the American Spectator website.

“I am a constitutional conservative—and an ‘opportunity society’ conservative as well, hearkening back to the Reagan-Kemp era of prosperity and liberty … Readers of this site know I am a full spectrum conservative. Mostly libertarian on economics, firmly for a strong defense, and for traditional values.”

Social conservative and former presidential candidate Rick Santorum has endorsed Hillyer.

The field for the soon-to-be-open seat may get crowded.

Other possible candidates for the GOP nod include state senators Trip Pittman, Bill Hightower, and Rusty Glover. Former state senator Bradley Byrne, a Republican establishment figure who ran for governor in 2010, could also throw his hat in the ring.

What Did Nixon Do?

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

What Did Nixon Do?

By Matthew Vadum

Although Richard Nixon left office under a cloud for trying to subvert the democratic process for his own political advantage, Barack Obama’s behavior has been far more serious in its corruption and blatant attempts to manipulate the electoral process by unethical and unconstitutional means.

Nixon, bad as he may have been, has been oversold as a villain. He serves as a convenient bogeyman for left-wing historians and journalists to spew self-serving narratives in which they paint him as a devil and themselves as victims. It would, therefore, do well to review some of the facts of what really transpired in the Nixon presidency and how they stack up against Obama’s unprecedented malfeasance:

First, the much-vaunted “enemies list” that was maintained by Nixon is more the stuff of myth than underhanded politics. In his 1979 book, Blind Ambition, Nixon White House counsel John Dean explained that the list consisted merely of names of individuals not welcome at White House functions. White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman singled out about 20 people on the list for IRS audits and other official torments, “but no action had been taken as far as I knew,” Dean wrote.

So what did President Nixon actually do?

IRS Targeting of Conservatives: Indisputably Political

My article from the May 23, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

IRS Targeting of Conservatives: Indisputably Political

By Matthew Vadum

To order David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin’s The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future, click here.

Despite propaganda relentlessly churned out by the mainstream media to justify the Obama IRS crackdown on conservative groups, the fact remains that the American Right is severely outgunned by the much better funded Left. And while highly political left-wing organizations far outpace their conservative counterparts in number and assets, they have never been subjected to the kind of rigorous scrutiny and interference that the IRS has recently inflicted on right-wing groups, making allegations of partisan abuse by the agency difficult to refute.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin stands as a case in point of the kind of misinformation being peddled by the Left to shield the Obama administration from the IRS scandal. Toobin writes in the New Yorker that Obama’s IRS didn’t do anything wrong. The Tea Party groups targeted by Obama’s bureaucrats got what was coming to them. Those organizations

were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates.
If that definition sounds murky—that is, if it’s unclear what 501(c)(4) organizations are allowed to do—that’s because it is murky. Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work.

However, as David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin show in their meticulously researched 2012 book, The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future, the greatest exploiters of the “murkiness” of “social welfare” activism are by far left-wing organizations. The collective assets of liberal-progressive grant-making foundations are in fact 10 times the size of the assets of conservative foundations.

Obama Scandals vs. Watergate

My article today in Front Page Magazine:

Obama Scandals vs. Watergate

By Matthew Vadum

How does President Barack Obama compare to Richard Nixon who was nearly impeached in 1974 for corruption and egregious abuses of power?

The short answer? Not well.

Obama’s serial acts of malfeasance have cost hundreds of lives while Nixon’s caused no loss of life. Both attacked their political enemies using taxpayer resources and tried to rig the system to favor their side.

But Nixon, unlike Obama, didn’t come from what bestselling author Michelle Malkin termed a “culture of corruption.” Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to Democrat John F. Kennedy probably because Democrats committed massive vote fraud. In a move some consider noble or patriotic, he refused to put the country through a drawn out fight over the election result. Nixon was not a so-called people person. He was a political outsider who fought hard and bitterly for whatever political victories he achieved. He wasn’t regarded as much of a dirty trickster, at least he wasn’t until he ascended to the presidency.

Obama, on the other hand, might as well have been heir to Chicago crime boss Al Capone. Obama was a community organizer who taught left-wing activists how to blackmail and pressure governments and corporations into doing their bidding. He preached class warfare and hatred against productive members of society. Obama specialized in having his political opponents knocked off the ballot. He unsealed court records to embarrass his adversaries. He launched his career in electoral politics in the 

home of unrepentant Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

When Obama does something noble or on the straight-and-narrow it’s probably a mistake on his part.

Let’s recall the bad things that Richard Milhous Nixon actually did while in the White House: