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Clinton. Christie. Cringe.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

On Jan. 20, 1981, Michael Deaver, a political aide, peered into a bedroom in Blair House, across from the White House, and said to the man still abed, “It’s 8 o’clock. You’re going to be inaugurated as president in a few hours.” From beneath the blankets, Ronald Reagan said, “Do I have to?”

Some are so eager to be inaugurated in 2017 that the 2016 campaign has begun 28 months before the 1.4 percent of Americans who live in Iowa and New Hampshire express themselves. It is, therefore, not too soon to get a head start on being dismayed. Consider two probable candidates.

Hillary Clinton comes among us trailing clouds of incense, so some acolytes will call it ill-mannered, even misogynistic, to ask: What exactly is it about the condition of the world, and about America’s relations with other nations, that recommends the former secretary of state for an even more elevated office?

Granted, neither she nor any other U.S. official can be blamed for the world’s blemishes. To think otherwise is to embrace what Greg Weiner, an Assumption College political scientist, calls “narcissistic polity disorder.” It is the belief that everything everywhere is about us. Today, it is the delusion that, although events in Egypt and Syria look like violent clashes between Egyptians and Syrians concerning what those countries should be, the events really are mostly about what America has or has not done.

That said, however, this also should be said: Clinton’s accomplishments are not less impressive than those of many who have sought, and some who have won, the presidency. But the disproportion between the thinness of her record and the ardor of her advocates suggests that her gender is much of her significance.

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Obama, Biden, Kerry, Hagel, Clinton Backed ‘Reformer’ Assad During Bush Administration

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Photo Credit: AFP

Photo Credit: AFP

Kerry’s cozy dinner with Syria’s ‘Hitler’: Secretary of State and the man he likened to German dictator are pictured dining with their wives at Damascus restaurant before civil war broke out

By Anthony Bond and David Martosko.

An astonishing photograph of John Kerry having a cozy and intimate dinner with Bashar al-Assad has emerged at the moment the U.S Secretary of State is making the case to bomb the Syrian dictator’s country and remove him from power.

Kerry, who compared Assad to Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein yesterday, is pictured around a small table with his wife Teresa Heinz and the Assads in 2009.

Assad and Kerry, then a Massachusetts senator, lean in towards each other and appear deep in conversation as their spouses look on.

A waiter is pictured at their side with a tray of green drinks, believed to be lemon and crushed mint.

The picture was likely taken in February 2009 in the Naranj restaurant in Damascus, when Kerry led a delegation to Syria to discuss finding a way forward for peace in the region.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: EPA

Photo Credit: EPA

Excerpted from Washington Times: The Obama national security team that wants to go to war with Syria and demonizes President Bashar Assad is the same group that, as senators, urged reaching out to the dictator.

As a bloc on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden all opposed the George W. Bush administration’s playing tough with Mr. Assad.

None grew closer to Mr. Assad and promoted him in Washington more than Mr. Kerry.

“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Mr. Kerry, as a senator from Massachusetts, told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2011. He predicted that Mr. Assad would change for the better.

But that same month, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria that would lead to a civil war, unmasking Mr. Assad’s brutal tactics, including the Aug. 21 unleashing of nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians.

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Chelsea Clinton Stuck on Stupid: Laments Great-Grandmother’s Lack of Access to Planned Parenthood

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Photo Credit: LifeNews

Photo Credit: LifeNews

From the stage at the recent Women Deliver conference, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea revealed that her much-admired maternal grandmother was the child of unwed teenage parents who “did not have access to services that are so crucial that Planned Parenthood helps provide.”

Chelsea’s grandmother was born of an unintended pregnancy. And new research shows that her family is not alone in treasuring a person who – if Planned Parenthood had been successful – would not have been born.

“Every child a wanted child” is the rallying cry of family planning organizations that promote abortion as a way to achieve that goal. The New York Times Magazine recently described a study of women who were turned away from abortion clinics because their pregnancies were too far along. Researchers found that in the vast majority of cases – 95% – the mothers bonded with their babies. A significant percentage later denied having ever sought an abortion, despite the fact they were included in the study on that basis.

In a different long-term study, Dr. Rebecca Callahan observed a similar change in attitude among mothers with unwanted pregnancies in rural Bangladesh. Although 42% of the women initially labeled their pregnancies as unwanted, over half of them changed their views retrospectively. Over 60% of women who originally stated their intention to have no more children classified subsequent births as wanted or, at worst, mistimed. Callahan presented her findings at the 2013 meeting of the Population Association of America.

Instead of focusing on the positive finding that women’s initial aversion or ambivalence about pregnancy does not mean the child will be unwanted, Callahan expressed concern that “the rationalization of births as wanted distorts the true level of unintended pregnancy.”

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US State Department in Crisis: “Endemic” Sexual Assaults, Prostitution by Clinton’s Security Detail, Unnamed Ambassador Implicated (+video)

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Photo Credit: Medill DC

Uncovered documents show the U.S. State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal behavior ranging from sexual assaults to an underground drug ring.

CBS News reports that is has unearthed documents from the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), an internal watchdog agency, that implicate the State Department in a series of misconducts worldwide.

The memo, reported by CBS News’ John Miller, cited eight specific examples, including allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” with foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” — a problem the report says was “endemic.”

Former State Department internal investigator Aurelia Fedenisn told CBS News, “We also uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases.”

Often times, other DSS agents were simply told to back off of investigations of high-ranking State Department members. Fedenisn told CBS that “hostile intelligence services” allow criminal behavior to continue.

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Susan Rice: Clinton ‘Didn’t Want To’ Talk on Sunday Shows After Benghazi (+video)

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photo credit: Donkey HoteySusan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said she spoke on the Sunday news shows following the terror attack on Benghazi because then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “didn’t want to.”

“I’ve spent many a Sunday doing the Sunday shows,” she told “The Daily Show” host John Stewart on Thursday. “In this case, Secretary Clinton, who had been asked originally to do it, felt that she didn’t want to, couldn’t do it that week, having been through quite a pretty intense week with the loss of our colleagues in Benghazi, the violence against our embassies all over the Arab and Muslim world, and then also that Friday having to join President Obama in greeting the families of our fallen colleagues and bringing their bodies back.”

Pressed about confusion over the talking points she was given on September 16, which blamed the attack on an allegedly anti-Muslim YouTube video, Rice said the notes she was given was the best information the intelligence staff had then.

“I shared the best information that our intelligence community had at the time, and they provided the talking points that I used,” she said. “They were wrong in one respect, we learned subsequently.”

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Video: Bill Wittle Tells Us What Difference Last Week’s Benghazi Hearing Makes

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Whatever Mrs. Clinton thinks about the difference between good judgment and dead Americans, the American people do care whether their leaders are able to negotiate tough situations in a competent manner.

The Benghazi hearings last week, though not particularly productive, were revealing when it comes to the attitudes of this Administration toward ordinary Americans.

Wittle says the difference made is between the freedom to speak one’s mind, and that of being imprisoned for speaking out of turn. In short, the difference is what we make of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

For the unfortunate man who created the anti-Islamic video, Benghazi made a world of difference, since he now sees the world from behind bars.

The difference we make of the Benghazi debacle is either truth or error, liberty or tyranny.

See video:

The Obama Simulacrum

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If I’m following this correctly, according to one spokesperson for the Marine Corps Band, at Monday’s inauguration Beyoncé lip-synced to the national anthem but the band accompanied her live. However, according to a second spokesperson, it was the band who were pretending to play to a pre-recorded tape while Beyoncé sang along live. So one or other of them were faking it. Or maybe both were. Or neither. I’d ask Chuck Schumer, the master of ceremonies, who was standing right behind her, but he spent the entire performance staring at her butt. If it was her butt, that is. It might just have been the bulge of the Radio Shack cassette player she was miming to. In an America with an ever more tenuous grip on reality, there’s so little to be sure of.

Whether Beyoncé was lip-syncing to the band or the band were lip-syncing to Beyoncé is like one of those red pill/ blue pill choices from The Matrix. Was President Obama lip-syncing to the Founders, rooting his inaugural address in the earliest expressions of American identity? (“The patriots of 1776 . . . gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.”) Or maybe the Founders were lip-syncing to him as he appropriated the vision of the first generation of Americans and yoked it (“preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”) to a statist pitch they would have found utterly repugnant.

The whole event had the air of a simulacrum: It looked like a presidential inauguration, but the sound was tinny and not quite in sync. Obama mouthed along to a canned vocal track: “We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.” That’s great! It’s always reassuring to know the head of state is going to take issue with all those people wedded to the “belief” that America needs either to shove every granny off the cliff or stake its newborns out on the tundra for the wolves to finish off. When it comes to facing the music, Obama is peerless at making a song and dance about tunes nobody’s whistling without ever once warbling the real big numbers (16 trillion). But, like Beyoncé, he’s totally cool and has a cute butt.

A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton’s instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath: “Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?”

“Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?”

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Video: Rand Paul Smokes Clinton, Says She Should’ve Been Fired Over Benghazi

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By Allahpundit. …I figured [Rand Paul] might be the boldest Republican questioner but I had no idea how bold. The key line: “I think it’s good that you’re accepting responsibility because no one else is.”

He’s taking dead aim at the insulting charade of buck-stops-here bravado among American politicians who are happy to “show leadership” by admitting to their failures on the condition that they’ll suffer no consequences for them.

Accountability’s a smart theme for a populist would-be presidential candidate to take up. And telling a Clinton to her face on TV that she should have been fired for negligence, which is true, is a smart, splashy way to do it. It’s a dual critique, superficially a reprimand to Obama’s secretary of state but more broadly an indictment of how Washington tends to do business. I’ve always assumed there’s no way he’ll leapfrog Rubio and Ryan as a frontrunner among grassroots conservatives in 2016 but it’s getting harder to believe that every day.

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Benghazi Review Finds Systemic Security Failure

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WASHINGTON (AP) — An independent panel charged with investigating the deadly Sept. 11 attack in Libya that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans has concluded that systematic management and leadership failures at the State Department led to “grossly” inadequate security at the mission in Benghazi.

“Systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” the panel said.

The report singled out the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Bureau of Near East Affairs for criticism, saying there appeared to be a lack of cooperation and confusion over protection at the mission in Benghazi, a city in Eastern Libya that was relatively lawless after the revolution that toppled Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

Despite those failures, the Accountability Review Board determined that no individual officials ignored or violated their duties and recommended no disciplinary action now. But it also said poor performance by senior managers should be grounds for disciplinary recommendations in the future.

The report appeared to break little new ground about the timeline of the Benghazi attack during which Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens, information specialist Sean Smith and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – who were contractors working for the CIA – were killed. Stevens’ slaying was the first of a U.S. ambassador since 1988.

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