One World Government Obama

One World Government Obama
By Ben Stein on 3.22.11 @ 6:09AM

Maybe I missed something, but wasn't that The Constitution of the United States of America that we just laid to rest this weekend?

It was buried in a private ceremony by Mr. Barack Obama of Chicago as he silently signed America on to the One World Government some of us have been worried about for decades.

Look at it this way: Where did Mr. Obama get the authority to commit United States forces to war in Libya? There was no declaration of war. There was no authorizing resolution by Congress allowing money to be spent on a war against Col. Gaddafi. As far as I know, there was no meeting of Mr. Obama and top leaders of Congress to discuss the subject in even rough form, let alone detail. There was no lengthy buildup in which the Congress was "allowed" to express the people's opinion on whether we want to be in a third concurrent war.

There was just a vote by the United Nations Security Council, a very far from unanimous vote, and suddenly, the President's Secretary of State, Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, solemnly announced that we were at war.

But, when did we amend the Constitution to declare that the United Nations had control over our military? When did we abolish the part of the Constitution that said Congress had the right to declare war? Now, I well know that in recent postwar conflicts, we don't have declarations of war. But we have Congressional debates. We have funding votes. We have a sense of the Congress or some kind of resolution.

This time, zip. Nada. Nothing. Just France and the U.K. and Norway saying that it's time to go to war, and off America goes to war. And off Mr. and Mrs. Obama go to a South American "fact finding" trip for the POTUS and a fun sightseeing junket for the Obama girls.

(I wonder if there has ever before in history been a national leader who sent his country to war -- and the same day went off on vacation. Has that ever happened before? )

Something's missing here. Libya and Col. Gaddafi were and are no threat to the United States. It is sad and cruel that the Gaddafi regime was murdering its own civilians, but so do many governments all across the world, including North Korea, Iran, the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, and Cuba. Are we going to war with all of them, now?

Meanwhile, again, what the heck happened to the Constitution? Is this Mr. Obama's legacy to our children? The junking of the Constitution in the middle of the night and the turnover of our sovereignty to the United Nations? (By the way, this is the same UN where Libya until recently sat on the Commission on Human Rights.) Why aren't any questions being asked? Is the Constitution that meaningless to us? Are we that pitiful now? Are we willing to toss overboard the Constitution for the writ of the United Nations? I guess so. Sad days.
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The First Casualty of War
By Robert Stacy McCain on 3.22.11 @ 6:08AM

Shortly after the first U.S. cruise missiles hit their targets Saturday, the collateral damage became apparent -- not in Libya, but on the home front, where liberal credibility was shattered by President Obama's sudden resort to military action against Moammar Gaddafi's regime. Those who had hailed Obama's ascent as the dawn of a new age of peace, an end to the alleged "cowboy" belligerence of the Bush years, exploded with a mixture of outrage, confusion and chagrin as their hero flung the country into war in North Africa.

None was more indignant than Michael Moore. The left-wing filmmaker had spent George W. Bush's presidency in frothing rage at Republicans whom he accused, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, of practicing "the politics of hate." That same year Moore released Fahrenheit 9/11, a dubious "documentary" which portrayed Bush as a secret ally of Osama bin Laden. And in April 2008, on the eve of the crucial Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, Moore publicly endorsed Obama because, he said, "the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting."

Evidently, in Moore's view, Obama's words and actions have recently gone in the same direction. Saturday afternoon, the director unleashed a torrent of mocking messages on Twitter: "We're going to keep bombing countries until we get it right.… May I suggest a 50-mile evacuation zone around Obama's Nobel Peace Prize?… Bombing Libya today was like an Iraq War anniversary present to ourselves!" Indeed, in an irony not lost on Moore, the attacks on Libya by a U.S.-led coalition fell on the eight-year anniversary of the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which liberals had long cited as Exhibit A in their case against the Bush administration.

While Moore's outbursts were sarcastic -- and nearly hysterical -- more sober reflections occurred to Josh Marshall of the liberal Talking Points Memo blog. Marshall went on for more than a thousand words Sunday before concluding that the Libyan intervention "strikes me as a mess, poorly conceived, ginned up by folks with their own weird agendas, carried out at a point well past the point that it was going to accomplish anything."

Less sober, but more personally aggrieved, was the Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan, who during the Bush years went from being an initial supporter of the president's aggressive anti-terrorism stance to being one of Bush's most outspoken critics. After Saturday's first air strikes against Gaddafi, Sullivan recalled Obama's own words from a December 2007 interview with the Boston Globe: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Libya posed no such threat, Sullivan wrote Saturday, saying he had supported Obama in the Democratic primaries against Clinton and in the general election against Republican Sen. John McCain because "both Clinton and McCain were unrepentant fans of presidential war-making powers.… But the president we supported is not, it is now clear, the president that we have." And in a Sunday TV appearance with Chris Matthews, Sullivan huffed: "I don't know why anybody voted for Obama in the primaries."

The sense of being betrayed by Obama wasn't limited to liberal pundits. Members of Congress on the left wing of the Democratic Party, many of whom had supported Obama against Hillary in the 2008 primary campaign, expressed their outrage in a caucus conference call Saturday. Politico reported the complaint offered by one unnamed Democrat on that call: "They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress." Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who had been one of Obama's rivals for the 2008 nomination, said the attack on Libya "would appear on its face to be an impeachable offense," because the president hadn't sought congressional approval.

In an accusation reminiscent of the Bush era -- when the president was often accused of invading Iraq to take over that country's oil resources -- Massachusetts Democrat Rep. Ed Markey alleged similar motives for Obama's intervention in Libya. "We're in Libya because of oil," Markey flatly declared Monday in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. "I think all Americans know why the president made this strike."

Conservatives were themselves divided on the wisdom of U.S. intervention in Libya, but the burden of justifying Obama's policies fell on the president's liberal supporters, and few seemed eager to defend him. Indeed, the attacks on Gaddafi's forces were the latest in a long list of liberal grievances about Obama's failures to reverse Bush-era national security policies. U.S. troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign terror suspects are still being detained at Guantanamo Bay and, during two years when Obama had an overwhelming Democrat majority in Congress, he failed to repeal the PATRIOT Act.

Whether or not U.S. air power will be enough to overthrow Gaddafi, the president's resort to military action has clearly wounded his liberal supporters -- and conservatives were more than happy to apply salt to those wounds. In his Saturday cri de coeur, Sullivan complained of the "stingingly smug words" of conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds, mocking liberal discomfiture over the Libyan intervention. Reynolds responded on his Instapundit blog: "You were played. I told you so at the time. The whole hope-and-change thing was an obvious con, and you were among the rubes who fell for it anyway. And yeah, I'm rubbing it in."
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We Have an Illegal War
By Ben Stein on 3.23.11 @ 9:48AM

Okay, kids. Now, let's see where we are today in the wacky, mad, wonderful world of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton playing at war and diplomacy.

When we last looked in, Hill and Barack had just junked the U.S. Constitution and gone to war at the order -- not of Congress but of the United Nations Security Council... But look. It gets a LOT more interesting than that....

First, as of early morning Wednesday, we were learning that France actually began bombing the Gaddafi forces before there was any international agreement on the whole subject. Just on its own, France declared war or at least started fighting against Libya, or so it is reported. They then persuaded the clubbable Mrs. Clinton to go along, and Mr. Cameron was keen, so off we went.

Now, we have France, which has not really done us any favors in the world for a good long time now, bringing us into a third concurrent war. And what are our aims in this war? That's the beauty part! No one knows.

President Obama says it's to stop Col. Gaddafi from killing civilians. But how can he stop Gaddafi's men from going into homes and killing people except by putting a Marine detachment into each of Libya's roughly five million homes? He cannot do that with F-15's flying at Mach 2 two miles above the ground. But he's promised he won't send in ground troops.

So, that part about stopping Gaddafi from killing civilians was just a big fat joke.

Then, there's the aim of making Gaddafi leave office. But wait. Didn't Mr. Obama say that was specifically not his goal one day, then say it was his goal the next day? So, what's the goal? If it's making Gaddafi leave office, how will he do that without ground troops?

Then there's this nonsense about how we're just one little player on a big team and we're leaving the game soon. To hand off the combat to… well, that's another problem. No other Western nation has a large, up to date military. So, that part about handing over combat to someone else… that was a joke, too!

So, we have an illegal war. No honest goal. No way of reaching any meaningful goal except by getting us into a third ground war… and here's the best part:

We don't even know who our allies in Libya are. We don't know if they're pro-Iranian, or pro al Qaeda, or just who the heck they are.

So we are going to war illegally, with the stated reasons a complete joke, and we may be placing on the throne in Libya people who are more dangerous to us than Gaddafi.

It is a terrifying thing to leave the governance of a first class nation to third-rate people. Let's see what tomorrow brings.