Romney Surges

My article from the October 10, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Romney Surges

By Matthew Vadum

What a difference a week makes.

Before Republican candidate Mitt Romney gave President Obama a historic shellacking in the first presidential debate of the season last Wednesday, some prominent GOP operatives were reportedly close to striking the colors in the battle against Obama.

It was just a few days ago more than a few GOP-leaning pundits were claiming Republican power brokers were on the verge of abandoning Romney in order to salvage the party’s effort to capture the Senate.

But now even Obama idolator Andrew Sullivan, who previously called the president “the Democrats’ Reagan,” and wrote an article titled “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” has fallen into a deep pit of despair.

Romney “is kicking the president’s ass,” Sullivan wrote earlier this week. New polls show that “[o]n every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion.”

Sullivan wrote that he had “never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in (sic) the way Obama did last week.” The president, he opined, has been “too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility seriously. Too arrogant to give his supporters what they deserve.”

Sullivan is hardly alone in his bitter disillusionment.

Other signs portend electoral disaster for Barack Hussein Obama, who, incredibly, reportedly left the debate stage believing he had cleaned Romney’s clock.

For the first time, Romney has taken the lead in the much-watched Real Clear Politics poll average, scoring 48.0 percent to Obama’s 47.3 percent at press time Tuesday night.

According to Scott Rasmussen, the most accurate pollster in the 2008 race, as of yesterday Romney was ahead of Obama by 49 percent to 47 percent in the critically important 11 swing states won by President Obama four years ago and considered to be competitive in the 2012 contest.

Representing 146 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory, those states are Colorado (9), Florida (29), Iowa (6), Michigan (16), Nevada (6), New Hampshire (4), North Carolina (15), Ohio (18), Pennsylvania (20), Virginia (13), and Wisconsin (10).

Not surprisingly, Romney also appears to be leading in states that in recent decades have backed Republican presidential candidates. Those states, worth 172 electoral votes, are: Alaska (3), Arizona (11), Arkansas (6), Georgia (16), Idaho (4), Indiana (11), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Louisiana (8), Mississippi (6), Montana (3), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), South Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Carolina (9), Tennessee (11), Texas (38), Utah (6), West Virginia (5), and Wyoming (3).

If Romney wins the 11 swing states identified by Rasmussen and the traditionally Republican states, this brings the former Massachusetts governor’s Electoral College total to 318 votes and he will be sworn in as the 45th president of these United States on January 20.

Of course a lot could happen between today and Election Day but it’s safe to say that with the debate last week Obama’s media-created aura of invincibility evaporated.

The voters’ overwhelming belief that the country is on the wrong track, coupled with the president’s mediocre approval ratings, have long suggested that the American electorate has been open to the possibility of new national leadership.

But it took a televised 90-minute debate to sell voters on Romney — assuming that is indeed what is underway in the nation.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign keeps “losing” the news cycle.

Every day brings new revelations of official incompetence in connection with last month’s attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. There is credible evidence that the Obama campaign has been illegally accepting contributions from abroad. (Only donations from U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents are allowed.) Reports indicate that the Obama campaign is engaged in an eleventh hour campaign management shakeup.

Across America there is anecdotal evidence that Obama supporters believe their candidate is losing as Romney-Ryan bumper stickers and yard signs are defaced. The bettors at the Intrade predictions website put Romney’s likelihood of unseating Obama at 38 percent last night, dramatically up from 21 percent before the debate.

The bad news for Obama goes on and on and on.

All the president’s campaign can do is strike out at straw men and fictional characters, hoping to distract the public from Obama’s failed policies.

In August we heard endlessly about the Republicans’ “war on women” and how expensive birth control supposedly was. In September we heard endlessly about the Romney “47 percent” video, which, even though it showed the candidate matter-of-factly discussing strategy, was twisted into supposed proof that the Republican candidate was an unfeeling monster.

Now in October, it’s Big Bird. Over and over and over again.

In the debate Romney slammed useless government spending on public broadcasting.  He said “I love Big Bird,” referring to the large yellow bird character from TV’s “Sesame Street” show, adding that taxpayers shouldn’t be borrowing money from China to pay for its on-screen exploits.

As Obama himself mockingly raised the Big Bird comment in speeches, his campaign started running a bizarre, politically tone-deaf TV ad, that suggested Romney’s priorities were out of wack.

In what could have passed for an ad parody on “Saturday Night Live,” the ad showed images of über-embezzler Bernie Madoff and corporate crooks.

Then in a jab at Romney a narrator says ominously, “And the evil genius who towered over them?” as Big Bird appears.

“You have to scratch your head when the president spends the last week talking about saving Big Bird,” Romney said during a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday. “I actually think we need to have a president who talks about saving the American people and saving good jobs.”

If the latest polls are to be believed, the American people are beginning to agree.

Leftists Gone Wild Against Obama

My October 5, 2012, article from Front Page Magazine:

Leftists Gone Wild Against Obama

By Matthew Vadum

Following Wednesday’s historic presidential face-off in Colorado, supporters of America’s failed president have already begun their journey through the Five Stages of Grief.

It’s a necessary part of healing.

After Republican Mitt Romney gave Barack Obama the most savage beat-down of his political career during the presidential debate in Denver, Obama-worshippers are understandably despondent. 

Incidentally, it was quite possibly the only beat-down the coddled radical who is unaccustomed to being challenged by anyone has ever experienced.

Most Obama idolators will eventually recover but those who don’t may turn on Obama. Many TV talking heads, like the ones discussed below, are already turning on Obama. That’s what happens when one’s god falls short and reveals himself to be merely human. Look at what happened to Daniel Dravot in Rudyard Kipling’s novella, The Man Who Would Be King.

People don’t like learning that their messiah is no messiah.

According to the Kübler-Ross model, there is denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Even though most Obama zealots are in the denial or anger phases they remain outwardly consistent, clinging to their religious belief that America is an irretrievably racist nation. In a sense, they believe that Obama is too good for rotten old America.

On debate night as the Left saw Obama going down in flames, MSNBC blabbermouth Ed Schultz could not accept that the great prophet of hope and change was weighted down by his record of failure and hopelessly outgunned by Romney. When in doubt, it’s about race:

“It was just very frustrating to watch a guy [i.e. Romney] lie to the American people and not be counter-punched because we’re afraid he’s going to be called an angry black man. When I see the president, I don’t see a black man. I see a president who has inherited an untenable position and turned it around to a great positive to where we are right now. He has brought it down to 8 percent unemployment without any help from the Republicans.”

Of course Obama helped to cause the massive spike in unemployment that he is now supposedly helping to ameliorate, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The same night one of the Left’s most televised pseudo-intellectuals, academic fussbudget Michael Eric Dyson, suggested that the real Obama would have skewered Romney. But the real Obama was nowhere to be seen as the president allegedly held back during the debate.

“Lest we forget this, lest we pretend that that doesn’t make a difference, the specter hanging over his neck that, ‘I can’t come off as too vigorous because then it looks like I’m being an angry black man.’ And because of the angry black man phenomenon, Mitt Romney is able to be a vigorously engaged man who’s able to play to his strength.”

Bill Maher, who gave $1 million to a pro-Obama super PAC, posted a distress call on Twitter in mid-debate, writing, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter.”

Alas, Maher showed minutes later that, like so many other left-wingers, he too remained in denial. Although “Romney won the debate, Obama had the facts on his side,” he tweeted. It’s so sad when people who don’t grasp economics have to reckon with reality. Painful, really. They need our understanding and support.

Former Vice President Al Gore blamed the high altitude of the debate forum. On his Current TV network, Gore said that “Obama arrived in Denver at 2 p.m. today – just a few hours before the debate started. Romney did his debate prep in Denver. When you go to 5,000 feet, and you only have a few hours to adjust – I don’t know.”

Self-described “communist” Van Jones did his best to cover for his former boss. “I think he took Romney too lightly. I think he did not expect Romney to be able to throw that kind of heat,” he said. “Romney was able to ‘out-Obama’ Obama. On the connection piece, on the authenticity piece, on the being able to tell the story.”

After the debate, the logorrheic Chris Matthews skipped to the bargaining stage in which the patient argues that an approaching trauma can somehow be postponed. On MSNBC he apoplectically critiqued Obama:

“There’s a hot debate going on in this country and you know where it’s being held? Here on this network is where we’re having this debate. We have our knives out, we go after the people on the facts, what was he doing tonight?! He went in there disarmed, he was like, ‘oh wait, an hour and a half, I think I can get through this thing and I don’t even look at this guy.’ Whereas Romney — I love the split-screen — staring at Obama, addressing him like prey. He did it just right. ‘I’m coming at an incumbent. I got to beat him. You’ve got to beat the champ and I’m going to beat him tonight. And I don’t care what this guy, the moderator, whatever he thinks he is because I’m going to ignore him.’ What was Romney doing? He was winning.”

If somehow Obama fights harder, redoubles his efforts, watches and learns from the skilled debaters on MSNBC, he’ll be able to turn it around, an exasperated Matthews said. If not, he’s toast. “If he does five more of these nights, forget it,” said Matthews.

Former faux conservative Andrew Sullivan seemed unhappy as he live-tweeted the debate. “How is Obama’s closing statement so fucking sad, confused and lame? He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight.”

At 10:31 p.m. he tweeted,

“Look: you know how much I love the guy, and you know how much of a high information viewer I am, and I can see the logic of some of Obama’s meandering, weak, professorial arguments. But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look.”

Romney commanded the stage. “This was Romney the salesman,” Sullivan wrote. “And my gut tells me he sold a few voters on a change tonight. It’s beyond depressing. But it’s true.”

Strangely, Michael Moore seems to have the healthiest perspective of the bunch. Five weeks ago he accepted that Obama was doomed:

“I think people should start to practice the words ‘President Romney.’ To assume that the other side are just a bunch of ignoramuses who are supported by people who believe that Adam and Eve rode on dinosaurs 6,000 years ago is to completely misjudge the opposition.”

Michigan’s answer to Leni Riefenstahl (but without the cinematography skills), offered merely perfunctory criticism of the debate process on Wednesday. “Fire all debate consultants now,” he limply tweeted, giving some the impression he still cared. “This is what happens when [you] pick John Kerry as your debate coach.”

Most Jimmy Carter supporters from 1980 have reached the acceptance stage but many Al Gore supporters from 2000 have never moved on. Poor things. For many, it can be a long, painful process.

Let the healing begin.

Official Victim Status for Arab-Americans?

My article from the October 2, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:


Official Victim Status for Arab-Americans?

By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration may soon classify Arab-Americans as a “socially and economically disadvantaged group” entitled to receive taxpayer-funded goodies and special privileges from the Commerce Department.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), founded by the Israel-hating far-left former U.S. Sen. James Abourezk (D-S.D.), petitioned the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) for special status on January 4 of this year.

Business owners of any ethno-cultural background are allowed to seek official victim status from MBDA, a unit of the political pork-dispensing Department of Commerce. Once awarded, that status, ADC acknowledges, would “create a presumption of eligibility” for Arab-Americans “thereby eliminating the need for amassing and producing evidence of social and economic disadvantage” by individual business owners seeking government aid.

This is out-in-the-open vote-buying facilitated by an administration that sprang forth from the bowels of Saul Alinsky’s Chicago. The petition, taken very seriously by the Obama administration, seeks to give Arab-Americans access to a race-based spoils system that seems more appropriate to Apartheid-era South Africa than modern day America.

If the status is granted, Arab-Americans will be able to join what National Review writer Alexander Kazam, an American with Iraqi roots, calls the “already comically long” list of officially-designated racial victim groups feeding at the MBDA trough. Right now the list includes Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, Hasidic Jews, Spanish-speaking Americans, American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, Asian Indians, and Asian-Pacific Americans. Some of these groups might be able to come up with a few examples of present discrimination but most would be hard-pressed to do so in 2012.

ADC claims prejudice in the marketplace and legislation such as the PATRIOT Act, whose enactment the group fought, make it difficult for Arab-Americans to compete.

Given that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not racist and aren’t quite certain what the definition of “Arab” consists of –and probably wouldn’t even be able to identify someone as an ethnic Arab unless the person were dressed in traditional garb– it is very difficult to believe ADC’s assertion.

Over the years most Arab immigrants and their children, despite the efforts of multiculturalism cultists, have easily been subsumed in the great American melting pot. Successful people of Arab ancestry abound in every field of endeavor in America.

Were successful Arab-American NFL players Doug Flutie, Jeff George, and Drew Haddad hindered by anti-Arab bigotry?

What about high-octane business leaders of Arab ancestry, including the late Steve Jobs, pollster John Zogby, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Accenture founder George Shaheen, Kinko’s founder Paul Orfalea, billionaire attorney Joe Jamail, former Ford Motor Co. president Jacques Nasser, and former Goodyear CEO Samir G. Gibara?

How about public servants of Arab descent including former National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni, the late astronaut Christa McAuliffe, retired Army General John Abizaid, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), former Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and current Energy Secretary Ray LaHood, University of Miami president and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, and former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu? And Arab-American journalists Helen Thomas, Jim Avila, and Hala Gorani, and activists Ralph Nader, Mothers Against Drunk Driving founder Candy Lightner, and late United Auto Workers president Stephen Yokich?

How about Arab-Americans such as designer Joseph Abboud, broadcaster Casey Kasem, and “Exorcist” novelist Peter Blatty? How about singers Paula Abdul, Paul Anka, Shakira, and Tiffany? And actors Teri Hatcher, Kathy Najimy, Tony Shalhoub, Wendie Malik, Salma Hayek, Shannon Elizabeth, F. Murray Abraham, Yasmine Bleeth, and Jamie Farr? How about Lebanese-born, Muslim beauty queen Rima Fakih, who was named Miss USA 2010?

Do most Americans even know these successful individuals have Arab roots? And even if they did what evidence is there that they would care?

But ADC marches on, undeterred, determined to secure the “victim” imprimatur from the government, arguing without much in the way of evidence that the “ubiquitous demonizing of Arab-Americans has undermined this community’s progress in American society.”

ADC’s petition is an ill-conceived document that takes the reader on a winding, politically correct journey through fantasyland. (Read the petition which is available here.) The document is incoherent and contradictory, presenting self-serving (and often very old) anecdotal evidence that proves, at most, that there have been isolated incidents of racial discrimination against Arab-Americans. It fails to produce proof of widespread, generalized discrimination against ADC’s constituency because none exists.

The petition treats counter-terrorism measures enacted by the federal government as racist because they supposedly “had a disparate impact on the Arab-American community.” Of course, all 19 hijackers who took over commercial U.S. airplanes on September 11, 2001, were Muslim Arabs. Of the 19, 15 hailed from Saudi Arabia. The rest came from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. After 9/11 it’s hard to fault government officials at airports for carefully scrutinizing people of Arab ancestry. (In any event, those days are long gone, having given way to annoying body scans and pat downs of all travelers, including 90-year grandmas in wheelchairs.)

And even though two-thirds of Arab-Americans are Christians, and just one-quarter are Muslim, ADC argues that non-Muslim Arab-Americans nevertheless suffer because Americans are afflicted by a make-believe mental illness called Islamophobia that makes them commit so-called hate crimes. “[M]any Americans still assume all Arab-Americans are Muslims and apply their Islamophobia to all Arab-Americans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike” (page 32).

Kazam rips that claim to shreds:

[I]f we are to use hate crimes as a proxy for “disadvantage,” then Jews would have to be the considered the most disadvantaged group in the country. Despite a significant uptick in “anti-Islamic” incidents in 2010, Jews remain the faith group most likely to be targeted. The nearly 900 “anti-Jewish” incidents in 2010 account for a full two-thirds of hate crimes linked to religion: nearly six times the number of anti-Islamic incidents, despite the fact that Jewish Americans outnumber Muslim Americans by a factor of only two and a half.

To ADC, rational responses to terrorism based on suspects’ common characteristics, including tightened port-of-entry controls, the creation of “no-fly” lists, and longer-than-usual questioning by immigration officials, were all examples of invidious racial discrimination.

One passage in the petition about small businesses stands out as particularly kooky.

At page 29, ADC argues that the very existence of Arab-American businesses is proof in and of itself of discrimination. “A large percentage of Arab-American workers are small business owners, which is convincing evidence of the discrimination against Arab-Americans.” Huh? It’s not at all clear how the ADC came up with this formulation.

The petition describes Arab-Americans at page 30 as “a well-educated demographic,” but then downgrades them on the next page to being “a relatively well-educated demographic” that “suffers from educational disadvantages as a result of discrimination and prejudice.” On page 34, the petition states that “government anti-terrorism policies” are discriminatory and this has something to do with the supposed fact that Arab-Americans are “under-educated.”

Obviously, the petition is loaded with many ridiculous assertions, Kazam argues. Arab-Americans enjoy a mean individual income that is 27 percent above what Americans typically earn. Their median household income weighs in at $59,000, which is more than 10 percent higher than the national average. Almost half of Arab-Americans hold a college degree and they are two times as likely as a typical U.S. resident to have earned a Ph.D. As Kazam notes, the American Arab Chamber of Commerce acknowledges on its website that “large business ownership” and “active political participation” are both “testimony to the power and development of Arab Americans today.”

There’s no question that Arab-Americans are immeasurably better off than residents of Arab countries.

Only in America.

‘Panicked’ Soros Bankrolls Obama Campaign

My article from the October 1, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

‘Panicked’ Soros Bankrolls Obama Campaign

By Matthew Vadum

George Soros is airdropping bushels of cash to the Obama campaign because the preeminent funder of the Left is reportedly “panicked” that Mitt Romney could win in November and halt America’s ongoing slide into socialist chaos and civil unrest.

Soros’s alarm at the prospect of a Romney victory may also have led him to squelch a report in the Soros-funded Mother Jones magazine that revealed his desperate state of mind.

“Is there possibly some panic among the liberal elite that the media are not telling us about? Amazingly, Mother Jones might have accidentally provided a clue – and then quickly covered it up,” opines Big Journalism.

After Romney pulled even in recent national polls –and after pledging for the umpteenth time to get out of electoral politics– America’s anxious would-be undertaker committed to spending an extra $1.5 million on reelecting Obama and helping congressional Democrats. Soros previously bankrolled a leftist scheme called the Secretary of State Project that aspired to rig elections from coast to coast. He also indirectly funded Occupy Wall Street.

A currency speculator and convicted inside-trader, Soros is a practiced hand-wringer who frequently tells gullible reporters he is getting out of electoral politics altogether. This is his mantra between elections even though he never actually follows through on the threat.

Soros openly favors the collapse of the greenback and the decline of America in general. “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States,” he has said. He has also said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now.” He praises Communist China effusively, saying the brutal totalitarian nation that literally cuts babies from unauthorized pregnancies from the wombs of their mothers and runs over eminent domain resisters with steam-rollers, has “a better-functioning government than the United States.”

Soros also seems to suffer from messianic delusions, describing himself as “some kind of god, the creator of everything.” During World War II, Soros accompanied his guardian around Nazi-occupied Hungary as he confiscated the property of Soros’s fellow Jews. Years later he referred to that time as “probably the happiest year of my life” and “a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.”

Soros will give $1 million to Priorities USA Action, the super PAC that produced the infamous TV ad in which ex-steelworker Joe Soptic falsely blamed his wife’s tragic cancer death on Romney. Soros is splitting $500,000 between Majority PAC and House Majority PAC, both of which back Democrats seeking congressional office, the New York Times reports.

The Obama campaign also appears to be panicking. Chicago’s mayor, the ruthless former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, is exiting the Obama campaign to help raise money for Priorities USA Action. If anyone can put together an ad more loathsome than the Soptic spot, Emanuel’s the man.

The new donations were announced by Soros spokesman Michael Vachon at a luncheon Thursday hosted by the Democracy Alliance, an invitation-only club for radical plutocrats. (Former President Bill Clinton and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were also in attendance.) Members of the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance have committed to swamping Democrats and President Obama’s re-election campaign in an ocean of cash this year. Donations could easily reach $100 million or much more before Election Day, especially because other Democracy Alliance members are following Soros’s lead.

The ultra-secretive group, founded in 2005, is a financial clearinghouse that recommends to its wealthy members projects and groups that aspire to dismantle America as we know it, delivering the nation to Greek-style socialist mayhem. The group has directed untold hundreds of millions of dollars to left-of-center causes.

To quell rumors that he was unhappy with Obama, Soros sent an email to other luncheon guests saying, “I fully support the re-election of President Obama.” Soros wrote that he was “appalled by the Romney campaign, which is openly soliciting the money of the rich to starve the state of the money it needs to provide social services.”

This new $1.5 million is over and above the $1 million that Soros pledged to America Votes, a get-out-the-vote group, and the $1 million he pledged to American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC headed by the legendarily sleazy gossip columnist and admitted serial liar David Brock.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones, the media outlet that described Soros as “panicked” because Obama has yet to deliver a knockout blow to Romney, offered what looks like a case study in media corruption. The magazine posted a hard-to-believe retraction of the online story that contained the otherwise perfectly believable description of Soros’s state of mind. (Big Journalism has a screen grab of the article that you may read here.)

Integrity is in short supply at Mother Jones, which recently published the Romney “47 percent” video in an effort to help Obama even though possibly critical minutes of the off-the-cuff speech were missing. 

The magazine was founded by the same Marxists, hippies, and Sixties leftovers who facilitated America’s suicide attempt more than 40 years ago.

The article appeared on the magazine’s website for a while Thursday but was abruptly spiked. A notice 

indicated, “The story was based on information provided by a source; the source contacted us after the story was published and said the information was incorrect.”

The article quoted an unidentified friend of Soros saying, “I was really dumbfounded when I heard his voice on the other end of the phone. He was the last person I ever expected to hear from, given how antithetical he was to the big money slopping around the system. But he said that he was panicked about the fact that Romney could win this.”

An unidentified Democratic strategist –it’s not clear if it’s the same person as the unidentified friend— was described as saying, “What I find amazing about liberals and progressives is that they always wait till the last minute. It hadn’t dawned on this group of people before that this was a tight race. It stupefies me.”

It seems likely that Soros or someone close to Soros complained to Mother Jones and the story was pulled.

I tried to find out what happened.

The author of the article, Andy Kroll, referred my inquiries to Clara Jeffery, the magazine’s co-editor-in-chief. Jeffery denied being pressured. In an email she said:

Not sure what else I can add without repeating the error. Basically a source in a position to know about Soros’ donation (the fact of which has been previously reported far and wide), told us details that they then realized they’d been in error about. The source admitted the fault was theirs, and not Andy Kroll’s. We took the story down immediately upon hearing from source and issued the correction. To do otherwise would, in our opinion, [have] been journalistically irresponsible. We did not hear from Mr. Soros or his representatives.

With that said, it is a fact that the magazine’s 501c3 nonprofit, Foundation for National Progress, has received funding through Soros’s philanthropies, Open Society Institute ($225,000 since 2008) and Foundation to Promote Open Society ($100,000 since 2010).

Democracy Alliance chairman and Taco Bell heir Rob McKay was a member of the magazine’s board. 

Through the McKay Foundation he has given the Foundation for National Progress $165,000 since 1999.

Democracy Alliance member and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser has given FNP $211,329 since 1999. Another member, Stephen M. Silberstein, has given $117,000 since 2001 through his eponymous foundation. The Soros-funded Tides Foundation, founded by Democracy Alliance member Drummond Pike, has kicked in $126,417 since 2003.

Jeffery suggested the money played no role in the retraction:

The individuals (or their foundations) you mention are among the many people and institutions who have donated money to the FNP over the years; some of those you mention have not donated to the FNP in many years.  Nevertheless, when we’ve had occasion to write about them, or the Democracy Alliance, or OSI, we disclose this to our readers.

When I pressed Jeffery, asking her if the source specifically took back the claim that Soros “panicked,” she refused to answer, writing, “Sorry Matt, [I] just don’t have anything to add past what I’ve told you and what we’ve posted.”

Who knows how many more intrigues, cover-ups, and October surprises the Soros-funded magazine has waiting in the wings.

Terrorist? Don't Ask, Don't Tell

My article from the September 25, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Terrorist? Don't Ask, Don't Tell

By Matthew Vadum

FBI agents aren’t allowed to treat individuals associated with terrorist groups as potential threats to the nation, according to a startling, newly discovered FBI directive.

The fact that a terrorism suspect is associated with a terrorist group means nothing, according to the FBI document, “Guiding Principles: Touchstone Document on Training.” The “touchstone” document, dated March of this year, is available online but hasn’t been reported on by major media outlets.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents are to be instructed that “mere association with organizations that demonstrate both legitimate (advocacy) and illicit (violent extremism) objectives should not automatically result in a determination that the associated individual is acting in furtherance of the organization’s illicit objective(s),” the touchstone document states.

This is a bizarre kind of procedural fairness as viewed in a funhouse mirror, applying something akin to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to an FBI investigation. Such an evidentiary threshold may be appropriate for a criminal trial, but it sets the bar far too high for mere investigations. This new rule no doubt provides aid and comfort to the much-investigated phony civil rights group known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

After first handcuffing FBI agents investigating terrorism, the touchstone document also invokes the gods of political correctness by making FBI agents afraid of being called “racist” – even though almost all Islamic terrorism suspects come from the same part of the world.

“Training must emphasize that no investigative or intelligence collection activity may be based solely on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious affiliation,” the touchstone document reads. “Specifically, training must focus on behavioral indicators that have a potential nexus to terrorist or criminal activity, while making clear that religious expression, protest activity, and the espousing of political or ideological beliefs are constitutionally protected activities that must not be equated with terrorism or criminality absent other indicia of such offenses.”

The touchstone document is examined in The Project, a film about the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America that is airing this week. (The movie was produced by The Blaze’s documentary unit. Part I of The Project premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern, followed by Part II the next evening at the same time. Dish subscribers may watch it on channel 212.)

One of the movie’s arguments is that Americans’ civil rights and political correctness are weapons of infiltration used by our Islamofascist enemies. This happens to be consistent with Saul Alinsky’s fourth rule of “power tactics”: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” In other words, Islamists are using Americans’ goodness, their sense of fair play, including an aversion to being accused of racial stereotyping, against America.

Five congressmen sent a letter in June to Michael E. Horowitz, Inspector General at the Department of Justice, about the touchstone document, protesting that it and other Obama administration “policies and initiatives strike us as deeply problematic with respect to our national and homeland security.” The letter was signed by Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Thomas Rooney (R-FL), and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA).

The touchstone document brings to mind the 1995 memo written by Bill Clinton’s “Mistress of Disaster,” then-Deputy Attorney Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick’s directive, titled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,” provided proof of the Clinton administration’s distaste for fighting Islamic terrorism and hindered investigations, according to DiscoverTheNetworks:

Because the memo created a barrier for U.S. intelligence agencies to share information with the FBI, one of its unintended consequences might have been to prevent the FBI from receiving the necessary intelligence to stop the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the worst in American history.

While two George Soros-funded nonprofits, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America, use the Alinsky playbook to try to convince Americans that “Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness, is a threat to American democracy and pluralism, the embattled Obama administration is currently in full-time damage control mode as the president’s foreign policy aimed at appeasing totalitarian Islamic theocrats collapses. The administration has been sucking up to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a 57-state (56 sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority) group that considers itself the Caliphate reborn. The Obama administration may even be planning to promote Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws at the behest of Islamists, as Rep. Trent Franks discovered.

News of the touchstone memo comes amidst reports that the Obama administration is considering releasing 55 terrorist detainees from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp. One of those former detainees is thought to be behind the recent torture-killing of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.

The news also comes amidst reports that the Obama administration is working on sending the “Blind Sheikh,” convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, back to Egypt where that country’s new rulers would hail him as a hero for orchestrating the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Hani Nour El-Din, a member of Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist group, Jamaa Islamiya, visited the Obama White House in June. He asked the Obama administration to free Abdel-Rahman, saying such a move “would be a gift to the revolution” in Egypt. Hillary Clinton’s State Department had granted El-Din a visa to travel to the U.S. even though as a member of an officially designated terrorist group he is clearly ineligible.

Samuel Tadros, an Egyptian citizen and research fellow in Egyptian politics at the Hudson Institute, was astonished that El-Din was allowed into the U.S. “It would have taken the State Department five seconds to Google his name in Arabic and realize he is a member of a designated terrorist organization,” he said in June.

Bachmann-Clinton Showdown over Blind Sheikh

My article from the September 21, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:


Bachmann-Clinton Showdown over Blind Sheikh

By Matthew Vadum

In a dramatic confrontation with a conservative lawmaker on Capitol Hill yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flatly denied that the Obama administration is planning to send the 1993 World Trade Center bomber back to Egypt.

The face-off between Clinton and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) came after The Blaze news website started a firestorm Monday by reporting that a source close to the Obama administration said the Department of State was contemplating returning the “Blind Sheikh,” convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, to his homeland “for humanitarian and health reasons.” The embattled Obama administration is currently in full-time damage control mode as the president’s foreign policy aimed at appeasing totalitarian Islamic theocrats collapses.

As FrontPage Magazine exclusively reported earlier this week, Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist group, Jamaa Islamiya, helped to foment last week’s deadly violence against U.S. diplomatic missions in Egypt and Libya.

During a bipartisan closed-door briefing for House members on developments in the Middle East, Clinton was questioned pointedly by Bachmann, who asked if the administration intends to repatriate Abdel-Rahman, a highly placed congressional source told this writer.

Frustrated after the Department of State refused for days to confirm or deny reports about a possible transfer of the Blind Sheikh to Egyptian custody, Bachmann wanted to get Clinton on the record on the issue in front of House members. In an environment described by the source as “tense,” the lawmaker asked Clinton if anyone in any department or agency in the federal government was negotiating, corresponding, or in any way moving forward with plans to expel the terrorist from the United States.

“No,” was Clinton’s terse reply.

Later the same day Clinton gave another classified briefing to members of the Senate. Senators complained that Clinton stonewalled their requests for new information about the attack last week on the U.S. consulate in Libya that claimed the lives of four Americans including the U.S. ambassador.

“That was the most useless, worthless briefing that I have attended in a long time,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). “Believe me, there is more written in every major and minor publication in America about what happened.”

Despite Clinton’s denial, evidence continues to mount that the Obama administration is seriously considering handing over the ailing 74-year-old Blind Sheikh to the Egyptian government. Diabetic since childhood, Abdel-Rahman was formerly a guest of the federal Supermax prison in Colorado. Today he resides in the medical wing of the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina.

More proof of secret State Department negotiations came yesterday in the pages of the New York Post. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and an unnamed Obama administration source confirmed that the government is considering sending the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing back to Egypt where he is now a revered figure for attacking the U.S.

King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter to Secretary of State Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder demanding answers.

Releasing “Abdel-Rahman or any terrorist who plots to kill innocent Americans would be seen for what it is — a sign of weakness and lack of resolve by the United States and its President,” King wrote.

“While considerations regarding the blind sheikh’s release would be disturbing in any context, they are particularly alarming given recent events. The 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks was marked by the assassination of America’s ambassador to Libya and an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt. The violence in Egypt has been attributed, in part, to that government’s demands for the blind sheikh’s release.”

The letter was signed by other House leaders including Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), and Armed Services Committee chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.).

The new Muslim Brotherhood-backed president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, considers Abdel-Rahman to be a U.S. political prisoner, and has asked the Obama administration to release him. The Arabic language newspaper al-Arabiya reported more than six months ago that the Obama administration offered to send Abdel-Rahman to Egypt as part of a prisoner swap. Called the “Emir of Jihad” by some, Abdel-Rahman is a spiritual leader to al Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups.

Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution team that put Abdel-Rahman behind bars, is worried about the Obama administration’s intentions. “There’s no way to believe anything they say,” he said. “I believe there may already be a nod-and-wink agreement in place.”

On September 10, the day before terrorists assaulted the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist organization demanded the release of the Blind Sheikh and all detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His group, Jamaa Islamiya (also known as al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya or, in English, Islamic Group), works closely with al Qaeda, the group that ultimately succeeded in incinerating New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. At least two of the other groups that demanded Abdel-Rahman’s release — Islamic Jihad and the Sunni Group— also have al Qaeda ties.

Releasing the Blind Sheikh?

My article from the September 19, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:


Releasing the Blind Sheikh?

By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration may give a get-out-of-jail-free card to an Islamic terrorist whose group helped to ignite a wave of deadly attacks last week against U.S. diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

The U.S. Department of State “is actively considering negotiations with the Egyptian government for the transfer of custody of Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as ‘the Blind Sheikh,’ for humanitarian and health reasons,” The Blaze news website reported, citing a confidential source close to the Obama administration.

On September 10, the day before terrorists assaulted the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist organization demanded the release of the Blind Sheikh and all detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His group, Jamaa Islamiya (also known as al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya or, in English, Islamic Group), is linked to al Qaeda. At least two of the other groups that demanded Abdel-Rahman’s release — Islamic Jihad and the Sunni Group— also have al Qaeda ties.

The new Islamist president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, considers Abdel-Rahman to be a U.S. political prisoner, and has asked the Obama administration to release him.

The Arabic language newspaper al-Arabiya reported more than six months ago that the Obama administration offered to send Abdel-Rahman to Egypt as part a prisoner swap. Called the “Emir of Jihad” by some, Abdel-Rahman is a spiritual leader to al Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups. He would almost certainly be hailed on his return to Egypt as a conquering hero for attacking America, the “Great Satan.”

It was unclear at press time if the 74-year-old Abdel-Rahman, convicted of “seditious conspiracy” in 1995 in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was suffering from any particular medical condition that might justify such a release. Now serving a term of life imprisonment in the United States, early in life he went blind after becoming diabetic.

The Blaze indicates the State Department has “neither confirmed nor denied the report,” but Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, trashed the report. “The assertion that the Blind Sheikh may be transferred to Egypt is utter garbage.” Boyd piled on the rubbish metaphor adding that suggestions that there are “discussions to transfer or release him are absolute garbage and completely false.”

Of course it might be wise to take Boyd’s remarks with a grain of salt. Boyd works for the same Department of Justice that collaborates with the George Soros-funded attack group Media Matters for America to spin news deemed harmful to the Obama administration. Hard-driving investigative journalist Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller reported yesterday that internal emails from the DoJ show that the pretend media watchdog works with embattled Attorney General Eric Holder’s communications staff “in an attempt to quell news stories about scandals plaguing Holder and America’s top law enforcement agency.”Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist organization, Jamaa Islamiya, is a “radical offshoot” of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Jamaa Islamiya was complicit in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who was reviled among Islamists for making peace with Israel. Abdel-Rahman had issued a religious edict condemning Sadat to death. Jamaa Islamiya also tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995. To try to force the release of Abdel-Rahman from the U.S., Jamaa Islamiya murdered 62 people in Luxor, Egypt, in 1997.

In 2006 al Qaeda aligned itself with Jamaa Islamiya. At the time Ayman al-Zawahiri, then Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant, said the two groups would form “one line, facing its enemies,” adding, “May God give us victory with his help.”

This past September 10, al-Zawahiri, now in charge of al Qaeda, released a video marking the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. He also called for fresh assaults against U.S. interests in retaliation for the drone-strike killing in June of his Libyan lieutenant, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in Waziristan.

Meanwhile, Abdel-Rahman’s now-disbarred lawyer, Lynne Stewart, also remains in prison. Stewart is serving a decade-long prison term for providing material support for terrorism by illegally passing on a message from Abdel-Rahman.

The communiqué was “the blessing of a return to violence from a terrorist leader,” prosecutor Anthony Barkow said during Stewart’s 2006 trial. In it, the sheikh urged disciples to abandon a ceasefire with the government of Egypt and resume terrorist operations.

Stewart has hailed Muslim fundamentalists as “forces of national liberation.” Americans on the left, “as persons who are committed to the liberation of oppressed people, should fasten on the need for self-determination, and allow people … to do what they need to do to throw off that oppression,” she told Monthly Review, a Marxist publication.

Stewart, a Maoist, has said she supports “violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism and sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions.”

Throughout the pre-sentencing process, Stewart argued that no one was actually hurt or killed as a result of the communiqué. The argument, familiar to criminal lawyers, is akin to a bank robber asking for leniency because the bank vault was empty.

Perhaps Stewart will petition President Obama to be transferred to Egypt as well.

Occupy at One Year

My article from the September 17, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Occupy at One Year

By Matthew Vadum

The violent anti-American radicals of Occupy Wall Street plan to celebrate the anniversary of their neo-communist movement today by shutting down the New York Stock Exchange and hitting dozens of corporate targets.

The anniversary comes days after an operative for the Anonymous computer hacker group was arrested for allegedly threatening a federal agent. Barrett Brown, a self-described spokesman for Anonymous, which is allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement, boasts that he carried out cyber-attacks against Visa and MasterCard.

These Bolshevik banditos plan to begin the day with occupying “Wall Street with non-violent civil disobedience and flood[ing] the area around it with a roving carnival of resistance,” according to adbusters.org. The group will “surround access to [the NYSE] with the People’s Wall sit-in” and then conduct “a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections.” Operation Latte Thunder will then “Storm Wall Street and demand it stop bankrolling climate change.”

As always the leaders of Occupy Wall Street are lying about non-violence. The violence is the whole point of the demonstrations. When he interviewed OWS protesters in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park last year Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen discovered that 31 percent of the movement supported using “violence to advance their agenda.”

And as Arnold Ahlert writes there have been at least “6,990 documented arrests in 114 cities across the nation directly associated with the OWS movement.” Apologists for the movement, especially the mainstream media, treat all these antisocial behaviors as freak occurrences, as if the Occupiers themselves were victims of saboteurs and dirty tricksters. “[B]ut thousands of arrests in hundreds of cities, coupled with instances of anti-semitism, sexual assaults (including rape), vandalism, and even murder can hardly be attributed solely to ‘fringe’ or ‘rogue’ elements ‘hijacking’ an otherwise peaceful movement.”

The reason the movement exists “is to disrupt the normal course of everyday life at every opportunity and to turn ‘one percent’ of Americans into literal enemies of the nation,” Ahlert writes.

It is true that the Occupy Wall Street movement has petered out since it was launched on September 17, 2011, amidst photos of defaced ten-dollar bills showing Founding Father Alexander Hamilton with black hair and a Hitler mustache. Its stated goal at the time was to condemn “greed” and “profit over and above all else” and to undermine economic freedom.

That protest was originally promoted as a “US Day of Rage” named after the so-called Days of Rage that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground, the terrorist organization of Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against “The System.” Leftists continue to insist that Occupy Wall Street was inspired largely by last year’s Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings against authoritarian Middle Eastern governments that many mistook for a desire for democratic rule. To provide cover for his radical friends leftist pseudo-intellectual Cornel West refers to OWS as “a democratic awakening,” the same expression he used to describe Hugo Chavez’s brutal communist revolution in Venezuela. Leftists say it’s not true democracy unless they win.

Last year’s US Day of Rage was heavily promoted by the Vancouver, Canada-based Adbusters Media Foundation, the nonprofit behind the “anti-consumerist” magazine. The foundation is funded by organizations associated with George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a radical billionaires’ club that wants to turn America into Greece. Soros is a convicted criminal who prefers Communist China’s government over America’s and who openly aspires to bring European-style socialism to the United States. He told Newsweek earlier this year that he was delighted with the violence and civil unrest percolating across the fruited plain. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible,” he said, echoing Saul Alinsky’s adage that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Since 2001 Adbusters has received $317,773 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation and $176,500 from the Glaser Progress Foundation, which was created by Alliance member and RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser.

Occupy Wall Street was organized by various far-left organizations including a constellation of ACORN front groups, labor unions, and anarchist collectives, and hailed by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, various Communist and neo-Nazi parties, and America’s enemies abroad. The movement came on the heels of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke called an “anti-banking jihad,” an SEIU-led effort aimed at destabilizing the nation’s financial system. SEIU organizer Stephen Lerner promised to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption.

Despite being endorsed by left-wing politicians from coast to coast the movement never evolved into a major player in U.S. politics today — but it has nevertheless had a lasting impact on the American body politic.

Through endless repetition of the terms “the 99 percent” and “the one percent,” Americans have begun to view their society through a Marxist lens. They have absorbed this central Big Lie of Marxist thought through a kind of osmosis.

And now this Marxist meme, long banished to the academy and union halls, is everywhere. To the delight of radical socialists it is impossible to turn on conservative talk radio without hearing hosts explain issues using this false dichotomy of the one percent versus the 99 percent. To use the loaded language of the Left is to accept the Left’s premises.

Certainly there has long been vague talk of “the rich,” “the poor,” and “the middle class,” but Occupy Wall Street somehow managed to get Americans to see their society in Marxist terms, something more than a hundred years of Progressive agitation could not do. This in itself is a huge and unwelcome development because it allows the Left to define and set the parameters of political discourse. Instead of talking about cutting taxes and reducing government spending, now right-wingers get distracted arguing about make-believe issues like income inequality and social justice. Only time will tell if this meme will fade away eventually.

But there is still room for optimism. Occupy’s very success has laid the foundation for its own destruction.

The movement has provided a valuable service to the American public. Occupy Wall Street has been a yearlong, Obama administration-approved, media-saturated exercise in consciousness-raising.

It has helped to remind Americans just how dangerous, lawless, and out of touch the modern, Occupy-embracing Democratic Party is. The anti-American Occupy Wall Street movement has also helped to reinforce the message of the patriotic Tea Party movement which supports Americans’ unalienable rights, limited government, fiscal restraint, and the rule of law.

For this, Americans who love their country should be grateful to the rabble of Occupy Wall Street.

Obama Had Advance Knowledge of Mideast Attacks

My article from the September 14, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:

Obama Had Advance Knowledge of Mideast Attacks

By Matthew Vadum

Although the Obama administration had “credible” evidence of this week’s deadly Islamist attacks on U.S. missions in Libya and Egypt a full two days before they happened, no effort was made to protect U.S. government personnel, The Independent reports.

The Islamofascist offensive took place on September 11, a day of great symbolic importance to both America and the Islamic world because it was the eleventh anniversary of al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The U.S. media, of course, seems barely aware of this symbolism because it has been focused laser-like on savagely attacking President Obama’s opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, for daring to criticize Obama’s foreign policy.

Senior diplomatic sources told the British newspaper that “the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and ‘lockdown’, under which movement is severely restricted.”

Unfortunately, there’s much more bad news. Important secret papers are missing from the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and refuges for U.S. personnel across that recently liberated North African nation are no longer considered “safe.”

The AWOL documents are sensitive enough to make Julian Assange salivate.

“Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts,” the paper reports.

Americans have also been subjected to the grotesque spectacle of a dead envoy’s body being dragged around Benghazi. U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and at least three other Americans were killed in a firefight at the U.S. consulate in that city. Stevens was apparently tortured and may have been sodomized by his assassins in a ritual of humiliation popular among Islamic terrorists.

Libyan leader Mohammed Magarief promptly apologized “to the United States, the people and to the whole world for what happened” in Benghazi.

Although U.S. Marines are normally stationed at the full embassy in Tripoli, for reasons unknown, no Marines were guarding the facility in Benghazi. President Obama has reportedly since dispatched a contingent of Marines to Libya.

Despite President Obama’s curious statement about Egypt, that “I don’t think we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” U.S. officials in Cairo had been counting on increasingly hostile Egyptian authorities to protect the diplomatic compound. Hillary Clinton’s State Department reportedly ordered the Marines defending the embassy in Cairo not to carry live ammunition. At the Pentagon, Marines Lt. Col. Chris Hughes denied the report, saying, “No restrictions on weapons or weapons status [had] been imposed.”

At press time anti-American protests had spread to the Gaza Strip, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, and Bangladesh, and were still continuing in Cairo. Egypt’s Islamist President Mohamed Morsi has condemned the Benghazi assault but his critics don’t believe he was being sincere.

Initially it was reported that the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo were spontaneous, prompted by a movie trailer on YouTube for Innocence of Muslims, which offers an unflattering portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed. This is a convincing enough cover story because Muslims have rioted over far less. Muslims not only do not tolerate unkind cinematic depictions of Mohammed, they do not tolerate any cinematic depiction of Mohammed. (Watching The Message, a Muslim-approved full-length feature film from 1977 starring Anthony Quinn, requires an unusual degree of suspension of disbelief. Mohammed is a character but he’s not shown or heard.)

But now it is unclear if such a movie actually exists. Innocence of Muslims might even turn out to be a so-called false flag operation created as a pretext for Islamist attacks on U.S. interests. Hollywood figures are reportedly unaware of the film and the actors in the 14-minute Ed Wood-quality production now claim they were misled about the storyline.

The story gets stranger. The Wall Street Journal spoke to someone who called himself Sam Bacile. Bacile claimed to be the director of the celluloid schlock. The newspaper of record said Bacile “described himself as a 52-year-old Israeli-American real-estate developer, called Islam a ‘cancer,’ and said the film had been funded by Jewish donors to the tune of $5 million.”

Bacile, it turns out, may not exist. There are no records of him in the U.S. or Israel. Bacile’s telephone number corresponds to an address in Cerritos, California, which seems to be the home of someone else. Someone who answered the phone and might reside there reportedly may or may not be a man who did time in prison for bank fraud. And so on and so on.

An under-secretary named Patrick Kennedy at the State Department said the assault in Benghazi was carefully planned. The attack might have been payback for the U.S. killing of Libyan-born Mohamed Hassan Qaid (also known as Abu Yahya al-Libi), a senior al Qaeda official. Qaid was cremated in a drone strike in Pakistan three months ago.

Then again, maybe not.

Stateside, the apoplectic Obama-worshipping media has been pounding Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for days for speaking truth to power.

In response to perceived Muslim anger over Innocence of Muslims, the U.S. mission in Cairo released a bizarre statement Tuesday condemning “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”

Expressing the views of many Americans, Romney said it was “disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

In words that will likely come back to haunt him, President Obama, the man who once mocked Cambridge, Massachusetts police by saying they “acted stupidly” by arresting Obama’s close personal friend, told “60 Minutes” that Romney’s comment wasn’t presidential. Romney has “a tendency to shoot first and aim later.” This is the same thing that unlucky Jimmy Carter said of then-challenger Ronald Reagan.

Some might criticize President Obama for not seeming to care about national security issues and foreign policy.

After all, his wife, First Nanny Michelle Obama, just said that obesity is “absolutely” the greatest threat to national security.

And remember, as I reported in Subversion Inc., this is an administration that views each September 11 not as a solemn day of remembrance but as a Kumbaya-encrusted day of rainbows and unicorns. Obama’s September 11 observance isn’t about the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans by Norman Invasion-era theocratic totalitarians. In Obama’s words, it’s about “solving today’s most pressing challenges: clean energy, energy efficiency, health care, education, economic opportunity, veterans and military families.”

At the 2009 law-signing ceremony creating the “National Day of Service and Remembrance,” President Obama said nothing about 9/11, except in passing. He said he hoped that the generation of young people “that came of age amidst the horrors of 9/11 and [Hurricane] Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economic crisis without precedent,” would come forward and volunteer to work for “change.” And it’s never been clear why this National Day of Service has to be held – of all the 365 days in a year – on September 11.

President Obama, an avid golfer, doesn’t even show up for many of his regular intelligence briefings. His fans suggest the president is able to fully absorb the daily terrorist threat matrix by osmosis.

As Election Day draws nearer, now Governor Romney will be given daily intelligence briefings.

Chances are he’ll show up.

Obama’s Military Voter Suppression Campaign

My article from the September 12, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:


Obama’s Military Voter Suppression Campaign

By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration appears to be violating the civil rights of nearly 200,000 U.S. soldiers around the world by deliberately disenfranchising them.

These are the same servicemen and servicewomen who may have to put their lives on the line at some point to respond to the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic missions in Egypt and Libya yesterday.

News of the Obama administration’s apparent crackdown on military voting comes days after the Obama campaign succeeded in convincing a liberal federal judge to strike down parts of an Ohio election reform law. Analysts say the ruling gives Obama an electoral advantage in the crucial battleground state.

Perhaps the administration’s lack of enthusiasm for safeguarding soldiers’ votes has something to do with the fact that Republican John McCain garnered 54 percent of the military vote in 2008. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that GOPer Mitt Romney scored the support of 58 percent of the military compared to the anemic 34 percent support that President Obama received according to a Gallup poll this past May.

Although the federal government moves with lightning speed to attack desperately needed state voter identification laws, it seems barely aware of its obligations under the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2009.

The law was created to help deployed soldiers, many of whom are constantly on the move, to exercise the right to vote that they fight to protect. The law requires the Pentagon to create an “installation voting assistance office,” or IVAO, for every military base close to a combat zone.

IVAOs are supposed to help military personnel navigate the labyrinth of often confusing voting rules of the nation’s 55 states and territories. But IVAOs can’t help anybody vote if they don’t exist.

A recent report by the Department of Defense’s inspector general found that in half of the 229 overseas military installations the DoD hadn’t even bothered to set up the IVAO facilities that the law mandates.

“Results were clear. Our attempts to contact IVAOs failed about 50% of the time,” according to the Pentagon watchdog’s report. “We concluded the Services had not established all the IVAOs as intended by the MOVE Act because, among other issues, the funding was not available.”

Pam Mitchell, acting director of the DoD’s Federal Voting Assistance Program, brushed off the report. “I strongly believe that voting-assistance is the best that it has ever been,” she said, presumably with a straight face.

Setting up IVAOs as required by the law costs a piddling $15 million to $20 million per year — yet it’s not happening. Remember that President Obama presides over the most spendthrift administration in the history of the world. His administration endlessly hypes phantom voter suppression stateside, accusing good government groups like True the Vote of voter intimidation while letting the baton-wielding black shirts of the New Black Panther Party run wild.

As Investor’s Business Daily reports, the Obama administration “appears unconcerned that a study by the nonpartisan Military Voters Protection Project found that in 2008 less than 20% of 2.5 million military voters successfully voted by absentee ballot.”

“In 2010, that participation shrank to a scandalous 5%,” the editorial added.

Under the MOVE Act, the Defense Department has granted waivers to states that claim to be unable to mail absentee ballots to soldiers the required 45 days before Election Day. That period is mandated to make sure there is sufficient time for ballots to be sent to and then returned by soldiers.

In 2010 all the jurisdictions that received waivers under the MOVE Act were won by President Obama in the 2008 election. Those states and the corresponding popular vote for the Obama-Biden ticket were Delaware (62 percent), Massachusetts (62 percent), New York (63 percent), Rhode Island (63 percent), and Washington (57 percent).

The Obama administration has every reason to believe it can get away scot-free with disenfranchising America’s fighting men and women.

After all, soldiers can’t fight back.

They’re easy to push around because they are not allowed to openly complain about the way their Commander-in-Chief is treating them. Look at what’s happening to former U.S. Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette (pen name: Mark Owen) who wrote the book No Easy Day, a firsthand account of how SEAL Team Six put Osama bin Laden on an express train to Jahannam. Obama’s handpicked secretary of defense, radical leftist Leon Panetta, is reportedly considering legal action against Bissonnette.

When Republicans complain about the Obama administration’s flagrant, obscene violation of soldiers’ voting rights, their protests can easily be dismissed by the media as self-interested grandstanding.

Six U.S. senators — John Cornyn (R-TX), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), John Barrasso (R-WY), Richard Burr (R-NC), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), and James Inhofe (R-OK) — have asked the Pentagon to make a serious good faith effort to protect the votes of military personnel.

“The price of [the Department of Defense's] failure to follow the law will likely be paid this November by military service members and their families, whose voting rights were to have been safeguarded by this provision,” they wrote.

It is a safe bet that the senators’ letter of complaint is gathering dust in the office of an Obama bureaucrat somewhere.

“You guys make a pretty good photo-op,” President Obama quipped three years ago when he visited 1,500 soldiers at a U.S. air base in South Korea.

Indeed they do.