Netenyahu To Speak As Obama and The Mad Mullahs Slouch Towards Bethleham

Barack Obama intends the centerpiece of his foreign policy legacy to be a de facto alliance with Iran–a stroke so brilliant that only he could think of it. The U.S. will set Iran up as the dominant regional power in the Middle East, in part by allowing it to develop the nuclear capability for which its rulers have long yearned, and in exchange, Iran will keep the peace and subdue troublesome upstarts like ISIS. To someone who grew up thinking that the call to prayer from a minaret is one of the most beautiful sounds on Earth, this might make some kind of sense. To those of us forced to live in the real world, it is bonkers.

John Hinderaker, Powerline, The Mullahs: Still Crazy After All These Years

The left has continuously and catastophicly misjudged Iran's theocracy since 1979, when Jimmy Carter made Iran's theorcratic revolution possible. Carter wholly misunderstood the ideology and threat of Ayatollah Khomeini, allowing him back into Iran to take over the revolution under the belief that Khomeini was rational and could be swayed by American economic benefits. We are still paying for Carter's catastophic naivety today, as Iran remains the single most destabilizing influence, not just in the Middle East, but the world. You can read the roll-up of Iran's actions here. Since I wrote that in 2008, little has changed other than Iran's machinations are starting to pay off. The theocracy is playing an ever-more dominant role in Iraq, and the Shia rebels they were backing in Yemen have forced that country's leadership to flee. The rebels now control the capital.

Now things portend to get much worse. Obama too misjudges Iran, seeing them as a ratonal actor that can be a "partner for peace" in the Middle East and that can be entrusted with nuclear weapons. To call Obama's plans "bonkers," as John Hinderaker does in the quote at the top of this post, is to understate the existential danger of Obama's plan by an infinite order of magnitude. While Israel of course sees this Obama madness as the greatest of dangers, it is certainly not just Israel in the Iranian sites. If anyone in this country does not see the same existential danger to America and Western civilization as a whole, they are suicidally delusional. Yet if nothing is done to derail this insanity, the Obama deal, a deal of Chamberlainesque proportions, will be done.

Enter PM Bibi Netanyahu, who will speak to Congress this week. Obama is pulling out all the stops to delegitimize Netanyahu and his speech, for it really is only the Israeli PM and his ability to sway American public opinion that can stop Obama's suicidal march. As Caroline Glick writes:

Netanyahu is not coming to Washington next Tuesday to warn Congress against Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, because he seeks a fight with Obama. Netanyahu has devoted the last six years to avoiding a fight with Obama, often at great cost to Israel’s national security and to his own political position.

Netanyahu is coming to Washington next week because Obama has left him no choice. And all decent people of good will should support him, and those who do not, and those who are silent, should be called out for their treachery and cowardice.

Treachery and cowardice indeed. Unfortunately, such people rarely pay the price their acts so justly deserve. As it is, Obama and the entire left, whose hands are bloodied from throwing away our victory in Iraq for the benefit of their domestic political narrative, will pay no price except perhaps in the history books, assuming our nation survives to write them.

I'll shift gears here and close this post with the single most prophetic and troubling poem ever written. It's by William Butler Yeats, who penned it in 1921, in the wake of the horrific destruction wrought in World War I. And when one thinks of the world today, it is far too easy to think that it could have been penned to describe our reality.

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Update: This from the sidebar and headline on Drudge at the moment:

Netanyahu takes off on 'historic' US mission...
Tickets in High Demand Despite Dems' Boycott...
White House Offers Rebuttal Before Speech...
Collision Course 6 Years in Making...
'Fateful'...
KRISTOL: Vindication for Zionism...
Kerry asks for benefit of doubt on Iran...
Palestinian activist: Boycott of Israeli products begins...

PAPER: OBAMA THREATENED TO SHOOT DOWN ISRAELI JETS

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Rockwell's Puppy Love; Yeat's & "The Clothes Of Heaven"

Puppy Love, Norman Rockwell, 1926

Norman Rockwell is the most iconic of American painters. With a carreer spanning almost six decades and including over 4,000 original works, he was also one of the most prolific. He explained his philosophy of art thusly: "My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller." And that he was, with every one of his works seeming to capture a little piece of the best of life in America. Thus it is not surprising that his work was utterly panned by much of the left wing art world. But as for the rest of us, Rockwell was and is a national treasure. The above painting, Puppy Love, debuted as the cover of a 1926 edition of the Saturday Evening Post.

As to this week's poetry, in line with Rockwell's theme, there is this great poem from Yeats

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Yeats is the greatest of 20th century Irish poets. Like Rockwell, incredibly prolific over a period of decades, Yeat's work was much more varied, ranging from romantic poetry in his early years to striking dark, occult imagery in his latter, post WWI works.

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This Day In History - June 13: Slouching With Yeats, Japans Greatest Swordsman Dies

Art: The Bard, John Martin, 1817

1525 – Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora against the celibacy rule decreed by the Roman Catholic Church for priests and nuns. Luther, a critical figure in the history of Western Civilization, gave birth to the Reformation. One of Luther's deepest criticisms was against the Catholic Church's then practice of selling indulgences as a means of forgiveness of sin. In 1517, Luther nailed his famous criticism of the Catholic Church, 95 Theses, to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg on the 31st of October, 1517. It kicked off a firestorm that resulted in his excommunication by the pope in 1521.

1774 – Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain's North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves.

1777 – Marquis de Lafayette landed near Charleston, South Carolina. He came to the U.S. in order to help the Continental Congress to train its army. He would play a pivotal role in helping the U.S. during our Revolutionary War, leading troops in several major engagements, not the least of which was Yorktown.

1893 – Grover Cleveland undergoes secret, successful surgery to remove a large, cancerous portion of his jaw; operation not revealed to US public until 1917, nine years after the president's death. All that is not too notable. What is notable is that the portion of his jaw that was removed is on display at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. Mutter is sort of the night of the living dead of the museum world.

1927 – Aviator Charles Lindbergh receives a ticker-tape parade down 5th Avenue in New York City in celebration of his solo non-stop flight from Long Island to Paris in the single-seat, single-engine monoplane the Spirit of St. Louis.

1934 – Adolf Hitler and Mussolini meet in Venice, Italy; Mussolini later described Hitler as "a silly little monkey".

1942 – The United States established the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to our modern Central Intelligence Agency.

1944 – Germany launched a V1 Rocket attack on England. Only four of the eleven bombs actually hit their targets. Interestingly, many of the German scientists who worked on Hitler's rocket program would be spirited to the U.S. after the war to work on our own space program. I had the unique opportunity to grow up next door to one of these scientists. A fascinating man.

1966 – The United States Supreme Court rules, in Miranda v. Arizona, that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.

1970 – "The Long and Winding Road" becomes the Beatles' last Number 1 song.

1971 – The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers. I did my senior thesis at college on the Pentagon Papers and how we went from WWII to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. I still don't understand why Nixon fought the publication of these documents. There was little if anything in there that was of intelligence value by 1971, and the story it told of how we stumbled into Vietnam was mainly a story of missteps by JFK and LBJ.

1978 – Israeli Defense Forces withdraw from Lebanon.

2000 – South Korean President Kim Dae Jung meets North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-il, for the beginning of the first ever inter-Korea summit, in the northern capital of Pyongyang.

2000 – Italy pardons Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981. Agca recently convert to Catholicism.

2002 – Bush withdraws the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

2005 – A jury in Santa Maria, California acquits pop singer Michael Jackson of molesting 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo at his Neverland Ranch.

2007 – Al Qaeda - or Iran - does a second bombing of the Al Askari Mosque, one of Shia Islam's holiest sites in Iraq. The first bombing in 2006 brought the country to the brink of civil war. The second bombing, coming in the midst of the surge, had little if any impact.


Births

823 – Charles the Bald, Holy Roman Emperor and King of the West Franks - essentially the area today corresponding to France.

1752 – Fanny Burney, English novelist and diarist. Her novels were satirical peeks into the lives of English aristocrats. My favorite is Camilla published in 1796.

1786 – Winfield Scott was one of the greatest and most successful Generals ever to serve our nation. He served on active duty as a general longer than any other man in American history. Over the course of his fifty-year career, he commanded forces in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Black Hawk War, the Second Seminole War, and, briefly, the American Civil War, conceiving the Union strategy known as the Anaconda Plan that would be used to defeat the Confederacy.

1865 – William Butler Yeats, Irish writer and my favorite poet. Some of his poetry is of incredible beauty. But his most famous work, The Second Coming, written shortly after the end of WWI, is a poem famous for its disturbing vision.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

1892 – Basil Rathbone, English actor who is perhaps most famous for his role as Sherlock Holmes in a series of movies.


Deaths

1645 – Miyamoto Musashi, Japan's most celebrated Samauri swordsman. He became famous for his numerous duels - over sixty of them without a loss. He was the founder of the Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū of swordsmanship and the author of The Book of Five Rings a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy.

1918 – Tsar Mikhail Alexandrovitch Romanov was first of the Romanovs murdered. His execution was ordered by Lenin.

2008 – Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press, died of a sudden heart attack.


Holidays and observances

In ancient Rome, today was the fesival of Quinquatrus Minusculae held in honor of the goddess Minerva, the virgin goddess of warriors, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, weaving, and the inventor of music. She is often depicted with an owl and came to symbolize wisdom.

In the Catholic pantheon of saints, today is the feast of Saint Cetteus and Saint Leo III.

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Financial Panic

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. . . .

- - From The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

The contagion in the world's economy is the credit crunch brought about in reaction to the subprime crisis. The stock markets have been infected and are tanking as investor's flee. For the first time in four years, the DOW has fallen below 10,000. Markets in Asia and Europe are tumbling while the EU nations scratch about for some sort of response. Coming on the heels of the U.S. bailout, while this is not the sealing of economic doom, it is a measure of how dire this crisis has become. I will update stories below the fold as they become available.

Panic Engulfs Global Stock Market - "World markets suffered massive losses Monday, striking four-year lows, as panic-stricken investors doubted whether a Wall Street bailout package would stem the global financial crisis."

Euro-markets tumble while the EU searches for a response - "Investors will learn today whether the Paulson bail-out - fattened to $850bn (£480bn) by Congress - can begin to halt the death spiral in the credit system. So far, the response looks terrible."

CNBC's Jim Cramer of "Mad Money" is saying now is the time to get out of the stock market. He predicts a 20% drop in value for stocks in the near term.

The Lamps Are Going Out - "Today, prominent members of the political, financial, and journalistic establishment are warning of a Depression, and those of us who resist their panic solutions are accused of being crackpots or lunatics."

Speaking Ex Venalicium - "Pope Benedict XVI today said that the global credit crisis shows that the world's financial systems are "built on sand" and that only the works of God have "solid reality"."



The full text of William Butler Yeats's poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Friday's Art & Prose

Art: Circe Offering The Cup To Ulysses, John Waterhouse, 1891


He Wishes For The Clothes Of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

- William Butler Yeats, 1899

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Friday's Verse (a bit late)

Art: The Rape of Europa, Vecellio Tiziano, 1562


The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats, 1920

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