Foreign News and Analysis Since April 2005 -- formerly China Confidential -- for America and Israel and their friends abroadForeign Confidential ™
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Can the GOP Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?
Iran Accused of Plot to Kill Saudi Envoy to US
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Can President Obama win next November, even if the U.S. economy again goes into recession?
Yes. The country that elected Obama can re-elect him.
The economy is the number one issue. But the Republicans have no acceptable answers or solutions to the number one economic problem--joblessness--i.e. unemployment and underemployment. Therefore, the electorate is likely to reject the Republican Presidential candidate in 2012, despite Obama's alien and aloof manner, mysterious origins and associations, and utterly disastrous foreign policy.
Listening to Obama and the Democrats one might think the whole United States was one big New York City or Chicago neighborhood--in need only of organizing, as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani once said of Obama, a few good government programs, and a bunch of strategically sited solar panels and windmills.
But the Republicans are just as unrealistic. Enthralled by rightwing economic ideology, the GOP hopefuls talk as if most Americans are entrepreneurs or Wall Street bankers, or venture capitalists, or, at the very least, owners of small businesses. The GOP view--and vision--of the nation and its economic future is false and propagandistic. With the exception of Texas Governor Rick Perry, the ideas of Republican candidates are for the most part as hollow as the economy they helped to create--a so-called service economy in which mining, manufacturing, and drilling are despised and discouraged, natural resources are neglected and left untapped, and politicians and fawning media pundits routinely blur critically important distinctions between free and fair trade and the interests of the overwhelming majority of ordinary Americans and relative handfuls of American stockholders in American-in-name only multinational corporations, meaning, mainly, the need for (properly paid) American workers to make the things that American companies sell at home and abroad in order for the American middle class to both survive and thrive.
Which is why this reporter believes that barring some horrific event, such as another major Islamist terrorist attack on American soil, the Republican candidate, whomever he or she might be, is probably going to lose the next Presidential election.
In 2008, Americans needed and yearned for a new FDR. So they elected Barack Obama, seeing his elderly opponent, John McCain, as a new Herbert Hoover. But Obama turned out to be the new Jimmy Carter--an utter failure. In 2012, it seems, voters will be asked to choose between yet another Hoover type and four more years of Obama/Carter.
How tragic ... and truly terrifying.
Two Iranian residents of the United States--men allegedly linked to and directed by an arm of the Iranian government--are accused by U.S. federal authorities of plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, DC. Click here for the story.
The suspects are allegedly connected to the Quds Force, a special unit of Islamonazi Iran's SS-like Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Responsible for carrying out overseas terrorist missions, the Quds force reports directly to Iran's top turbaned tyrant, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He would have to have approved the alleged terrorist plot.
The IRGC was labelled a “specially designated global terrorist organisation” by the Bush administration in 2007 for aiding the Taliban and other terrorist organizations and for its involvement in attacks on the Israeli embassy and the Jewish community cultural center in Argentina in 1992.
One of the suspects in the Washington, DC terrorist plot, Manssor Arbabsiar, is reportedly a naturalized U.S. citizen. His photo appears above.
The other suspect, Gholam Shakuri, is believed to be an actual Quds Force member.
Arbabsiar is said to have confessed to the plot following his recent arrest. Shakuri is still at large.
POSTSCRIPT: The brazen plot recalls the 1980 assassination of Ali Tabatabai, who was shot to death in the doorway of his Bethesda, Maryland home by an American convert to Islam working for Iran's revolutionary Islamist regime. The killer escaped--in fact, he was allowed to escape--by the craven Carter administration, which had helped the Islamists come to power. The Obama administration, which has been advised and influenced by former President Jimmy Carter and his former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was committed to engaging (appeasing and attempting to align with) Iran. The policy was an utter failure: the monstrous mullahocracy, which is closer than ever to acquiring atomic weapons, continues to threaten both the U.S. and Israel with destruction.
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