Category Archives: morality

Mindset Matters

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David Brooks had an interesting piece in Friday’s New York Times concerning our defeat at the “negotiating” table with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear weapons program. RTWT, but a couple of comments of his really jumped out at me as he explored how this administration’s failure came about.

The big question is, Why did we lose? Why did the combined powers of the Western world lose to a ragtag regime with a crippled economy and without much popular support?

The first big answer is that the Iranians just wanted victory more than we did. They were willing to withstand the kind of punishment we were prepared to mete out.

Further, the Iranians were confident in their power, while the Obama administration emphasized the limits of America’s ability to influence other nations.

As an aside, I say “this administration’s failure” when it was the “combined powers of the Western world” because we’re the big dog in that pack, or we used to be, and on top of that, French dissatisfaction with the way things were going was palpable. Had we actually been interested in a serious outcome, they could have brought the Germans along, and that would have left the Russians and Chinese having either to admit that they wanted a nuclear-armed Iran or to go along with us.

More important, though, is that mindset. President Barack Obama and his motorboat skipper SecState didn’t want to mete out sufficient pain to force Iran’s acquiescence to our nominal going-in position because those two gentlemen didn’t think that was an appropriate use of our ability to influence other nations. Even terrorist supporting rogue nations.

Another Fine VA Mess

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And another reason to disband the thing and send its budget as health care vouchers to our veterans.

A VA employee tossed files containing the Social Security numbers and other personal information of 1,100 patients of a South Dakota VA hospital into a dumpster, where they sat for two days before they were discovered and recovered. This happened last May, but the VA chose not to tell anyone, like those patients, about it until the end of July.

Mistakes happen, even egregious things like this. What’s unacceptable is the decision by this VA hospital, condoned by the VA itself (if only through its own inaction and silence) to withhold information about this breach from the breach’s victims for so long.

That decision is part of a too-long standing pattern of VA malfeasance and VA decisions to do nothing about themselves.

Some of the Wages of Terror

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Families of victims, and some victims, of Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization terror attacks against Israel from 2001 to 2004 won a judgment of nearly $220 million in February. Naturally, the PA is appealing the judgment.

“This could be the end of the Palestinian Authority,” Palestinian Authority attorney Mitchell Berger said in court. “And that’s why we’re here to argue over the judgment.”

Tough. You should have thought about that first. Your alleged inability to pay for your atrocities is not relevant to whether you should pay for your atrocities.

Just to add interest to the matter, President Barack Obama’s DoJ

which had previously not been involved in the 11-year-old case, informed the court it was considering filing a “statement of interest” in the case by Aug 10….

Naturally, Justice is refusing to tell us what its intervention is about. On the heels of the travesty of a deal just concluded with Iran over the latter’s nuclear weapons program, and considering that the PA terrorists remain clients of Iran, look for Justice to try to tell the appellate court that it must set aside the judgment.

Democrats and Planned Parenthood

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The Senate failed a cloture vote on a bill related to one already passed by the House that would have diverted some $550 billion of American taxpayer money from Planned Parenthood and sent it, instead, to a number of other women’s health facilities around the country, facilities that don’t do abortions. The bill would have preserved access to health care for women who need it and don’t have, for instance, the economic resources to get it. As a result of the failure, the bill is near death—Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) voted against it when it became clear it would fail; his vote means he can bring it up again this session. He and his fellow Republicans have said the question is far from dead.

The Senate Democrats who caused the cloture vote to fail, though, did so explicitly because they want that money to keep going to Planned Parenthood. The key distinction between Planned Parenthood and the other women’s health facilities? One dissects aborted babies’ bodies for parts, and the others do not abort babies in the first place.

So much for any war on women. Sending money to women’s health facilities—regardless of whether you think the Federal government should be doing that at all—hardly constitutes a war on women.

Never mind, too, the increased risk of breast cancer that women face from pregnancies that are catastrophically interrupted (from any of a variety of causes of which abortion is one).

The Democrats’ war on babies, though….

Obama Gets One Right

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Edward Snowden will likely remain hiding in Russia for some time, with Washington officials and most Americans offering no leniency or forgiveness for him notoriously stealing classified information and jeopardizing U.S. national security.

President Barack Obama, through his Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco, said this about that:

Mr Snowden’s dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work…to protect it[.]

And then he tossed a petition to pardon this…scofflaw, the petition a product of a two year effort to let Snowden skate, into the round file.

Hear, hear.