BENGHAZI EMAILS

In attempting to protect President Obama, an innocent film-maker was blamed for the embassy deaths.

Emails sent by senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes to other top administration officials reveal an effort to insulate President Barack Obama from the attacks that killed four Americans.

Rhodes sent this email to top White House officials such as David Plouffe and Jay Carney just a day before National Security Adviser Susan Rice made her infamous Sunday news show appearances to discuss the attack.

The “goal,” according to these emails, was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure or policy.”

Hotair has a copy of one memo.

POST WORLD WAR II US MIDDLE EAST POLICY

A review of Hugh Wilford's book, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East. Truman stood alone in favoring Israel.

One of the most famous anecdotes of the Truman administration was first revealed by presidential adviser Clark Clifford in his memoirs. Secretary of State George Marshall and his undersecretary were called into the Oval Office to debate with Clifford the merits of recognizing Israel. After Clifford argued in favor of Israel, Marshall, whom Winston Churchill called the “Organizer of Victory” for his role as army secretary during World War II, made what Clifford called “the most remarkable threat I have ever heard anyone make directly to a president.” Said Marshall to Truman: “If you follow Clifford’s advice and if I were to vote in the election, I would vote against you.”

Marshall’s stunning comment reflected the viewpoint of “almost every member of the brilliant and now legendary group of presidential advisers, later referred to as the Wise Men, who were then in the process of creating a postwar foreign policy that would endure for more than forty years,” recalled Clifford. Those advisers included such luminaries as George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, and Charles Bohlen. They were later dubbed the “Arabists” because they believed that the Arabs could be allied with America after World War II—and should be courted instead of Israel.

BENGHAZI

One report indicates that if the Obama administration had not been arming al-Qaeda groups to depose Gaddafi Benghazi would never have happened.  If you play with fire,  you can get burned.

The Citizens Commission on Benghazi, a self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn't been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier.

'The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,' Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.

She blamed the Obama administration for failing to stop half of a $1 billion United Arab Emirates arms shipment from reaching al-Qaeda-linked militants.

DEMOCRAT STRATEGY FOR 2014 ELECTIONS

John Fund.

Increasingly, journalists who cover the White House are concluding that the smears are part of a conscious strategy to distract voters from Obamacare, the sluggish economy, and foreign-policy reverses; the attacks are intended, the thinking goes, to drive up resentment and hence turnout among the Democratic base.

Major Garrett, the CBS White House correspondent, has talked with White House aides who confirm that the administration is working from the theory of “stray voltage,” as developed by former White House senior adviser David Plouffe. “The theory goes like this,” Garrett wrote. “Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness,”

RUSSIAN MILITARY

Putin has been upgrading the Russian military.

Elite Russian troops are displaying a new arsenal of body armor, individual weapons, armor-piercing ammunition and collar radios — a menu of essential gear that gives them a big tactical advantage against a lesser-equipped Ukrainian army.

If President Vladimir Putin orders an invasion, the new-generation body armor, in particular, would provide exceptional protection against small arms if Russian troops go street by street to capture Kiev and other cities.

U.S. soldiers have complained that their main rifle and round, the M4 carbine and its 5.56, lacked lethality in Afghanistan against a Taliban enemy that does not often wear body armor. Without a shot to the head, the enemy could take several 5.56 hits and keep going, soldiers said in surveys.

“If the Russians are coming across mechanized, with airborne and infantry units wearing their body armor, it basically means the Ukrainian rifles have no ability to penetrate the body armor worn by the Russian troops, meaning you’re talking about having to shoot somebody six, seven, eight times, in the chest,” Mr. Traudt said. “They’re going to get bumped, but there’s no lethality involved.”

It would appear that the Russians are better prepared for the new non-nuclear warfare than the US is. This raises a lot of ramifications for any future US-Russian confrontation.

OBAMA'S FOREIGN POLICY

From the Financial Times. Obama is a president focused on America and not the rest of the world.  His foreign policy has not just failed with regard to Russia and the Middle East, but it has led to a diminished US friendship with countries such as India and Brazil, not to mention China and Japan.

And then there is this comment by David Goldman:  " Putin isn't a genius -- we are complete idiots."

UKRAINE: WORLD WAR III?

From the Daily Mail.

EDWARD LUCAS: I hope I'm wrong but historians may look back and say this was the start of World War III

• 'Vladimir Putin is striking at the heart of the West'
• 'We can chose to surrender any responsibility we have to protect Ukraine and the Baltic states'
• 'Or we can mount a last-ditch attempt to deter Russia from furthering its imperial ambitions'
• 'If we choose to resist Putin, we will risk a terrifying miltary escalation'
• 'I do not think it an exaggeration to say this could bring us to the brink of nuclear war'

REVIVAL OF AL QAEDA

Hard to believe American intelligence missed this event--maybe they were too busy listening to the phones of Americans or German Chancellor Merkel?

A new video shows what looks like the largest and most dangerous gathering of al Qaeda in years. And the CIA and the Pentagon either didn't know about it or couldn't get a drone there in time to strike.

U.S. officials won't comment on that, but every frame of the video is now being analyzed by the United States.

WASHINGTON LOBBYING

The divorce of a big Democrat lobbyist, Tony Podesta, is revealing how lobbying works inside the beltway. It is not pretty if you believe in integrity in the public square.

Corporations give to Democratic politicians, avoiding the scrutiny of liberal attack dogs in the media and nonprofit sectors, and enjoying the ego boost that comes with being on the “right side of history.” Then those corporations hire the Podestas to get them out of the Rube Goldberg traps the Democrats have enacted into law. John’s innovation was to establish a corporate-funded think tank where the burdensome policies would be concocted, and whose staff would go on to man the regulatory agencies that put their wool-headed ideas into practice. And to whom do the corporations turn when they find themselves on the receiving end of all this uplift, all this do-goodery, all this progress, hope, and change? Why, to the man in the red Prada loafers, and to his flamboyantly patterned wife.

IRS "IMPROPRIETY"

According to allegations employees in the Dallas IRS office were involved in the 2012 presidential campaign while working in the IRS office.  It is illegal for government employees to bring the campaign of any public figure into the work they do while on government time.

According to this Office of Special Counsel document, employees at the Dallas IRS Taxpayer Assistance Office were seen wearing pro-Obama campaign paraphernalia: stickers, buttons, and T-shirts, even putting campaign screen-savers on work computers.

And according to the Hill, it was happening in other IRS offices as well.

Evidently Democrat Representative Elijah Cummings was pushing the IRS to go after conservative groups according to the Republican chair investigating the IRS.

Issa said records obtained last week from the IRS show communications from the office of ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., about True the Vote, a Texas-based, non-profit conservative group that aims to prevent voter fraud.

RUSSIA, THE NEW LEADER OF CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION?

Conservative Pat Buchanan has written a very interesting article on Putin.  He reflects on Russian history and its Christian mission and how Putin is attempting to revive Russia's Christian mission.  Many Russians see the West as decadent and believe it will be Russia which will carry out the revival of moral values.  Putin rejects Marxism-Leninism as the way to revive Russia in favor of what he sees as Christian values.  In doing this he is in the tradition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn who saw the West as decadent decades ago.

Many Russians see the west as engaged in the "sewage of hedonistic secular culture".

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/is-god-now-on-russias-side/#315lQ2tzSQgJm569.99

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/is-god-now-on-russias-side/#315lQ2tzSQgJm569.99

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/is-god-now-on-russias-side/#315lQ2tzSQgJm569.99

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/is-god-now-on-russias-side/#315lQ2tzSQgJm569.99

HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS FANATICISM?

Andrew Sullivan, a homosexual himself, writes about the homosexual attacks on the founder of Mozilla Firefox because of his support of Prop 8 in California.  And as  Instapundit points out, Barack Obama held the same position in 2009.

The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

And a google exec is "forced" to resign from World Vision because of its view on homosexual unions.

EGYPT IN DECLINE

A Jewish analysis of the declining fortunes of Egypt--it looks like a country ready to disintegrate into chaos. The comments about America's role in the Middle East were interesting.

The Obama White House is clearly eager to divest itself of American commitments in the Middle East. Minimizing the American footprint in the Middle East and elsewhere makes sense since, it claims, we don’t have the resources to regulate the rest of the world. Americans are war-weary, the president repeatedly intones, and besides, American military force just tends to make things worse. But it’s not clear that any other global actors are willing to spend billions of dollars to prevent Egypt from further spinning out of control.

The White House and its surrogates in the press and intelligentsia speak of American decline, which even if it’s true is relative only to the status of a superpower weakened by a financial crisis.

If Washington doesn't help Sisi establish stability in Egypt, will terrorism increase even more?