“History never repeats itself exactly. But Barack Obama is making the same mistakes today that LBJ made in 1965.” *
Pat Buchanan, see below
.(Domestic policy in chaos as well).
One can hope this President starts doing a few things right, but so far, it is looking grim. We appear hell bent on appeasing our enemies, even accommodating them, while we further alienate and insult our friends. In short order the U.S. State Department headed up by HRC has ruffled feathers from Eastern Europe through Russia and out to China and North Korea, alienated our British and Israeli friends, and encouraged Al Qaeda and the Muslim forces promoting financial and stealth jihad.
Consider the following specific, documented example.
President Obama’s treatment of Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week was shameful, as detailed by Frank Gaffney HERE:
FAREWELL TO BRITAIN
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
3.9.09
EXCERPTS
LONDON – The British are understandably mystified. Long accustomed to a “special relationship” with the United States, they are trying to figure out why the latter’s likeable new president would be going to such lengths to distance himself from the country that has for generations been America’s closest ally.
The real answer, however, was supplied by an unnamed State Department official whom London’s Sunday Telegraph reported on March 8 “reacted with fury” when asked by the paper why the Brown visit was so, er, “low-key.” According to the Telegraph: “The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship. ‘There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.'”
Arguably, the need for a special relationship with Great Britain rooted in shared Western values and a mutual commitment to the common defense is as great today as at anytime since World War II. Unfortunately, Gordon Brown’s government is conducting itself in ways that undermine those values and jeopardize the security of the Free World. Particularly worrying are British concessions to the repressive and seditious theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls “Shariah”:
– Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF): Even though promoters of this industry, like “Shariah advisor” and al-Jazeera host Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, have described SCF as “financial jihad” and al Qaeda has publicly embraced its practice, Mr. Brown has declared he wants Britain to be the world capital of Shariah finance.
– Shariah courts: Brown’s government has begun institutionalizing the practice of separate legal systems for Muslims with the proliferation of “family law” courts where women can be treated, in accordance with Shariah, as second-class citizens – less-than-equal to male Muslims and entitled to a fraction of the property due the latter in the adjudication of divorce or testate matters.
– Terrorism charities: The British government has refused to take punitive action against British-based Islamic “charities” that provide money to terrorist organizations. The latest is Interpal, a Palestinian organization that even the BBC was able to figure out provides support to Hamas.
– Engaging with terrorists: British civil servants are paying thousands of dollars to attend a conference next month on “Political Islam” at which Ibrahim Moussawi has been invited to speak. Moussawi is a top propagandist for Hezbollah. The same Brown government that prevented Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders from presenting his film “Fitna” to the House of Lords on the grounds that he constituted too much of a threat to “community harmony” is evidently untroubled by having a flak for terrorists inciting in the U.K.
The irony of the evident distancing from Britain by the Obama administration is that Brown’s government is pursuing policies that Barack Obama seemingly espouses. The U.S. taxpayer now owns most of AIG and Citigroup, two companies massively engaged in Shariah-compliant transactions, at odds with our constitutional separation of church and state.
In this and other ways, Mr. Obama is effectively acquiescing to Islamists’ demands to establish here as in the U.K. their own, “parallel” society observing Shariah rules, not the laws of the land. Among the concessions in the works appears to be bans on so-called “hate speech” that defames Islam, an idea implicit in the President’s injunction to use “respectful language” towards Muslims.
Last week, moreover, Hillary Clinton effectively promised a whopping $900 million charitable contribution from the U.S. taxpayer to Hamas – or at least a future Hamas-Fatah “unity” government. This is a part of the President’s determination to reset Mideast diplomacy by forging what might be called “special relationships” not only with Syria and Iran but the major terrorist organizations they sponsor, Hamas and Hezbollah.
As the Free World increasingly engages in submission to Shariah, it appears the special U.S. tie to the U.K. that served to block the global ambitions of successive totalitarian ideologies will no longer operate. Under President Obama, the question increasingly is: Will the U.S. perform that vital role alone, or succumb as Britain is doing to what Islam scholar Robert Spencer calls the “Stealth Jihad” now being mounted against every freedom-loving country?
Townhall’s John Hawkins notes: “After Brown presented Obama with a pen holder crafted from the timbers of the 19th century British warship HMS President (whose sister ship, HMS Resolute, provided the wood for the Oval Office’s desk), Obama offered up … 25 DVDs of American movie classics. The Brits offered Obama a thoughtful, priceless gift and he handed them back a bad Netflix queue that was probably picked up at Wal-mart earlier that day.”
Critics also noted Obama’s gift was especially inappropriate and insensitive for another reason: Brown is going blind.
Apparently Brown is not the only one.
AND PAT BUCHANAN DRIVES THE NAIL HOME:
Full of hubris in 1965, Lyndon Johnson had seized his moment. He had launched a Great Society that would outdo his beloved patron FDR. He would dispatch 500,000 troops to Vietnam to “bring the coonskin home on the wall” and create a “Great Society on the Mekong.” Those were heady days of “guns-and-butter.”
By 1968, LBJ’s coalition was shredded. Gov. George Wallace had torn away the populist right. Sens. Gene McCarthy, George McGovern and Robert Kennedy had rallied the antiwar left against him. LBJ and Hubert Humphrey were left to preside over a shrinking center.
Why did LBJ fail? He overloaded the circuits. He tried to do it all. He misread a national desire for continuity after Kennedy’s death as a mandate for a lunge to the left and a great leap forward with the largest expansion of government since the New Deal.
By 1968, racial riots had torn apart almost every great city. The most prestigious campuses had been rocked by student violence. Thousands of antiwar demonstrators had taken to the streets. And 100 to 200 body bags were coming home from Vietnam every week.
By the winter of 1968, Lyndon Johnson was a broken president.
* History never repeats itself exactly. But Barack Obama is making the same mistakes today that LBJ made in 1965.
He has ordered 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, as the situation deteriorates and the NATO allies pull out. He has no exit
strategy. He has read a repudiation of George Bush as a mandate for a government seizure of wealth and power that exceeds anything attempted in the Great Society.
Fully half of the $3.55 trillion in spending Obama will preside over this year will not be covered by tax revenue but by red ink. The money will have to be borrowed from abroad or printed by the Fed.
Not only is Barack running a deficit four times as large as Bush’s largest, he has called for $1 trillion in new taxes on America’s most successful, who have already seen their savings and pensions ravaged.
He wants a cap-and-trade system to deal with a global-warming or climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax. He is going to provide health care for all, including immigrants, millions of whom arrive uninsured every year.
He is going to plunge scores of billions more into education, though education has eaten up the wealth of an empire, as SAT scores sink further and further below the apogee of 1964, before LBJ and the feds barged in. He is going to ask Congress for authority to spend another $750 billion rescuing the banks.
He is going to find the cure for cancer. He is going to ensure every kid gets a college education. He is going to drop half of all wage-earners off the tax rolls, while the top 2 percent, who already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, are forced to cough up more.
Obama is misreading the election returns. When America voted to cancel the White House lease of Mr. Bush, it did not vote Barack Obama a blank check.
By misinterpreting his mandate, Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not — unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party — that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.
By daring Republicans to fight on the issue of a $1.75 trillion deficit, Obama has liberated the GOP from any obligation to him. He has come out of the closet as a radical liberal spoiling for a fight over an agenda of radical change.
Sooner than any might have thought, we have clarity.
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Posted by Allan Erickson 
GOODNESS WORLD LIFE BLOG 