Boehner's Syria Surrender

My article from the Sept. 4, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Boehner's Syria Surrender

By Matthew Vadum

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated yesterday he trusts President Obama to carry out military strikes against Syrian government targets as punishment for that government’s alleged use of poison gas against its own citizens.

“The use of these weapons has to be responded to, and only the U.S. has the capability,” Boehner said after President Obama feted him at the White House. “I’m going to support the president’s call for action and I believe my colleagues should support this call for action.”

Boehner’s decision is already hurting his standing in his own political party, further embittering rank-and-file conservatives who accuse him of being a weak leader. Boehner’s action amounts to siding with the same administration that lied its way into war in Libya, tried to cover up the deadly fiasco in Benghazi, Libya, and that even now sides with the Islamofascist terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

On Aug. 31, with his approval ratings and second-term agenda in tatters, President Obama said ”after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.”

It will not be “an open-ended intervention” and there would be no “boots on the ground,” he said. “I’m confident we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior, and degrade their capacity to carry it out.”

“What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?”

After Obama described himself inaccurately as “president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy” –the U.S. is a constitutional republic, not a democracy– he said he would ask Congress for authorization to use force overseas.

Conservative Enemies of the State

My article from the Sept. 2, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Conservative Enemies of the State

By Matthew Vadum

Conservative organizations are “hate groups” and Tea Party supporters are potentially dangerous extremists, according to educational materials the Obama administration is using to indoctrinate members of the nation’s armed forces.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by good-government group Judicial Watch, the Pentagon recently released 133 pages of lesson plans and PowerPoint slides provided by the Air Force from a January 2013 Defense Department diversity training center “student guide” entitled “Extremism.”

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton slammed the Department of Defense documents for what he described as their bias against conservatives.

“The Obama administration has a nasty habit of equating basic conservative values with terrorism. And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military,” said Fitton.

And it is striking that some of the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and Tea Party investigations. After reviewing this document, one can’t help but worry for the future and morale of our nation’s armed forces.

The DoD materials not only take aim at modern conservative groups but label America’s Founding Fathers as extremists who would be unfit to serve in today’s military.

The teaching guide advises that instead of “dressing in sheets,” radicals today “will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.” American patriots who fought for Independence from the United Kingdom in the 1700s are identified as adhering to “extremist ideologies.”

Mangling MLK’s Dream

My article from the Aug. 29, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Mangling MLK’s Dream

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama hijacked a solemn national occasion yesterday, fomenting racial resentment and making crass appeals to envy on the 50th anniversary of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.

In his mercifully brief 29-minute oration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Obama attacked Republicans without naming them. Obama and other Democratic politicians routinely beat up Republicans rhetorically. They claim Republicans want to prevent blacks and other minorities from voting, and accuse them of being fiscal tightwads who refuse to spend enough on education, the courts, the correctional system, and whatever else is on the Left’s hit parade that day.

“To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency,” Obama said.

“Whether by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote, or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all, and the criminal justice system is not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails, it requires vigilance.”

Of course Obama hasn’t lifted a finger to improve black educational outcomes or to strengthen the black family. Left-wing policies have made things worse, but Obama refuses to admit that. He prefers to use social misery to generate race hatred which can then be used to advance his political program.

Obama declared that “black unemployment has remained almost twice as high as white unemployment,” but somehow failed to mention that it is his policies that are largely responsible for those high unemployment rates.

Top 10 Racist African-Americans

My article from the Aug. 27, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Top 10 Racist African-Americans

By Matthew Vadum

Sadly, racism is very much alive in America — among influential black Americans.

It was very much on display Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial where prominent black activists gathered a few days ahead of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I have a dream” speech in order to advance their careers by pretending to care about the state of race relations in the nation today.

Instead of simply using the opportunity to honor the work of his father in a dignified way, King’s son, Martin Luther King III, cheapened it by attempting to stir up racial hatred. He said the Trayvon Martin killing last year, ruled by a jury to be a justifiable homicide in which race played no role, shows that America is a deeply racist country.

“The task is not done, the journey is not complete,” he said. “The vision preached by my father a half-century ago was that his four little children would no longer live in a nation where they would judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

“However, sadly, the tears of Trayvon Martin’s mother and father remind us that, far too frequently, the color of one’s skin remains a license to profile, to arrest and to even murder with no regard for the content of one’s character,” King said, throwing in a pitch to repeal “stand your ground” self-defense laws, which had no bearing on the Martin case.

King is not alone among black leaders in trying to leverage the Martin killing for political purposes and self-advancement. Pseudo-intellectuals like Georgetown’s Michael Eric Dyson said after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin that it would be a good thing for more white children to be murdered so Americans could better understand racism.

These people have become rich and famous by vilifying white people and the American system, claiming blacks are persecuted and discriminated against, and asserting that there is an invisible conspiracy of white supremacists preventing black people from becoming successful. Not everything they do or say is actually racist in any meaningful sense, but they routinely say things that conservatives would be pilloried for had they said them about people of a different race.

Hillary Clinton: Racial Demagogue

My article from the Aug. 20, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Hillary Clinton: Racial Demagogue

By Matthew Vadum

Hoping to keep Obama-generated racial animosity alive long enough to get her past the presidential finish line in 2016, Hillary Clinton has been bloviating about what racist election laws America supposedly has.

“In 2013, so far, more than 80 bills restricting voting rights have been introduced in 31 states,” Clinton told fawning admirers at a meeting of the American Bar Association. Such laws are part of a Jim Crow-like effort to “disproportionately impact African-Americans, Latino and young voters,” she said.

Hillary, of course, is a seasoned race-monger who knows when to pour it on thick.

This is the person who patronizingly stretched her syllables out in a slow drawl when she last ran for the presidency. “I don’t feel noways tired,” she said, quoting a hymn by the late Rev. James Cleveland.

Race-baiting and racial pandering have always been part of Hillary’s oeuvre. She was close to ACORN just as her husband was when he was president and Arkansas governor. She spoke at ACORN conferences and played up her ties to the group.

Speaking at ACORN’s 2006 national convention, Mrs. Clinton looked back fondly on her memories of the group’s early days in Arkansas. It was a love fest. After noting that she founded a group called Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families that dealt with many of the same issues ACORN focused on, she hailed ACORN as a group of vision. “I thank you for being part of that great movement, that progressive tradition that has rolled across our country.”

Quoting Martin Luther King Jr., Clinton said, “Let’s move it forward, let’s be drum majors for justice.”

More recently, Mrs. Clinton falsely claimed that the Supreme Court was in on the supposedly racist plot because it had “struck at the heart” of the Voting Rights Act this summer in a ruling denounced by left-wingers and the misinformed.

Reaping What Obama’s Sown in Egypt

My article from the Aug. 16, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Reaping What Obama’s Sown in Egypt

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama continues to offer his blessings to the theocratic totalitarians of the Muslim Brotherhood as they spill blood on Egyptian streets in an effort to restore Mohamed Morsi to power.

Our terrorist-supporting president has the gall to scold the military, the most stable, trusted institution in Egypt, while his Islamofascist allies burn scores of Coptic churches in the region where Christianity began more than six centuries before the birth of Mohammed. The military has been struggling mightily to shut down Morsi supporters’ camps that Islamists use to launch attacks.

Yesterday an angry-sounding Obama took time out from his busy golf schedule while vacationing in a $7 million mansion on Martha’s Vineyard. Ignoring the violent provocations of his friends in the Muslim Brotherhood, he declared that the interim government and security forces in Egypt were out of control.

The Egyptian government has embarked on “a more dangerous path taken through arbitrary arrests, a broad crackdown on Mr. Morsi’s associations and supporters, and now tragically the violence that’s taken the lives of hundreds of people and wounded thousands more.” Obama left out the fact that 

Morsi is a Holocaust denier who calls Jews “bloodsuckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs” and who has vowed to wage war against Israel.

Without mentioning the weeks of murderous Morsi-supported attacks on innocents, Obama pontificated:

We deplore violence against civilians. We support universal rights essential to human dignity, including the right to peaceful protest. We oppose the pursuit of martial law, which denies those rights to citizens under the principle that security trumps individual freedom, or that might makes right. And today the United States extends its condolences to the families of those who were killed and those who were wounded.

Just as he pretends not to be author of growing chaos stateside, Obama spoke as if a bystander, as if he himself were not the author of the events in Egypt. Obama, of course, backed the removal of Hosni Mubarak, a longtime U.S. ally who kept Morsi’s barbaric followers under control and respected Israel’s borders. Mubarak was forced out as Egyptian president on Feb. 11, 2011, after weeks of massive, violent, Obama-supported protests against his government.

What is happening in Egypt now is Obama’s will.

Obama’s Neighborhood Race-Watch Program

An article of mine from the August 14, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Obama’s Neighborhood Race-Watch Program

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama is quietly moving forward with a plan to use your tax dollars to loot American suburbs in order to help Democrats and fund their corrupt big-city political machines.

The new plan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to use federal housing policy to uproot and change American neighborhoods is part of Obama’s effort at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Long ago Democrats declared war on the suburbs and rural areas because, among other things, they tend to be Republican strongholds.

HUD is the right vehicle for this scheme because its bureaucracy is adept at telling people how to live and where to live. It tells cities they are racially out of balance and pressures them to change their zoning to allow more “affordable housing” so communities have the politically correct mixture of economic development and racial diversity.

HUD, by the way, ought to stand for the Department of Homewrecking and Utopian Development.

Ripping apart the suburbs and throwing them back together under the guidance of central planners and bureaucrats would be done in the name of “fairness” and “diversity,” the twin obsessions that haunt the psyche of the modern leftist. Instead of letting market forces and individual choices determine where people live, these statists want to boss people around, using the heavy hand of the government to force a perverse version of economic and racial integration onto neighborhoods.

It’s not fair that some people live in nicer, safer, wealthier neighborhoods than other people, whines HUD’s far-left secretary, Shaun Donovan.

He claims there is a huge divide in the nation that could be termed “the tyranny of the ZIP code.” This specious doctrine holds that if you live in the right ZIP code, you have greater access to opportunities, and greater chances of success. Individual initiative, drive, and ingenuity don’t count, according to this line of thinking,

VIDEO: Vadum on the stupid Obama-masked rodeo clown controversy

It's beyond silly but that's the American Left nowadays. Obama zombies are freaking out over a rodeo clown wearing an Obama mask at a show at the Missouri state fair.

Here I am on Sun News Network (Canada) yesterday talking about this phony controversy:

Paul Ingrassia vs. The Green Inquisition

My article from the Aug. 2, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Paul Ingrassia vs. The Green Inquisition

By Matthew Vadum

As interest in the alleged warming of the planet wanes, the global warming inquisition is hoping to make an example of a heretical reporter whose only sin is healthy skepticism.

The enviro-Left is busy attempting to subject London-based Paul Ingrassia, an American journalist brought in by Reuters to beef up its worldwide news operation, to a digital auto-da-fé for insisting that the 2,800 journalists at the news agency at least try to provide fair and balanced accounts of the events of the day.

Ingrassia, by the way, won a Pulitzer Prize and a Gerald Loeb Award in 1993 for his news coverage of management turmoil at General Motors.

This newfound interest in objectivity at Reuters, where the word militant is still preferred over terrorist, appears to mean the agency is running fewer stories about climate change.

That’s fewer, not none. Reuters still diligently covers climate-related issues.

But that’s not good enough for those who embrace the increasingly shaky theory of anthropogenic global warming with religious zeal.

“It is just not responsible in our opinion to be cutting back on an issue that is having such a profound impact on every sector of the economy,” emoted Mindy Lubber, who runs the Ceres sustainable business network, which represents companies and investors worth more than $11 trillion in assets. 

“This is a financial risk that needs to be looked at and addressed.”

Murder and Double Standards

My article from the July 31, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Murder and Double Standards

By Matthew Vadum

Few Americans outside of Knoxville, Tenn., know about the case of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, two young people who were kidnapped, savagely assaulted, raped, and murdered by people of a different race.

If Christian and Newsom had been black, and they had been raped, tortured, and murdered by a group of white people, the victims’ names would be painfully seared into the national psyche by the media’s saturation coverage of the atrocities and their aftermath.

The reason the case attracted so little media attention was because Christian and Newsom were white. All of their attackers were black. Somehow investigators concluded that racial hostility was not a factor in the crimes.

“If this wasn’t a hate crime, then I don’t know how you would define a hate crime,” said Newsom’s mother Mary. “It may have started out as a carjacking, but what it developed into was blacks hating whites. To do the things they did, they would have to hate them to do that.”

It’s worth looking back at this case now to see what we can learn from it. Two weeks after so-called white Hispanic George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, there is still no end in sight to the self-righteous pontifications of leftists, politicians, race industry profiteers, and the mainstream media.

They all want us to have a national conversation on race. They’ve been pushing this notion for decades, even though race is discussed all the time everywhere in American society. Even though incidents of race-based discrimination have become almost as rare as four-leaf clovers in recent decades, we are constantly told minorities are little better off now than they were during the era of Jim Crow.

Violent crimes involving persons of different races or ethnic backgrounds tend to become national news only when the victim is a member of a minority group. This is because the radical left-wingers who serve as cultural gatekeepers don’t like to give oxygen to stories that challenge their preconceived, politically correct notions of how society works.