In the service of his loathsome ideology, Representative Ron Paul is willing to distort things quite a bit.

According to the Des Moines Register:

At a campaign stop on Saturday in Winterset, one man asked Paul how terrorist groups would react if the U.S. removed its military presence in Middle Eastern nations, a move the candidate advocates.

“Which enemy are you worried that will attack our national security?” Paul asked.

“If you’re looking for specifics, I’m talking about Islam. Radical Islam,” the man answered.

“I don’t see Islam as our enemy,” Paul said. “I see that motivation is occupation and those who hate us and would like to kill us, they are motivated by our invasion of their land, the support of their dictators that they hate.”

There’s one small problem with Paul’s Unified Theory of American Hatred: it’s nonsense. The September 11 attacks on the United  States came before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There was no “occupation” to ground jihadist hate in. We did have a presence in Saudi Arabia, but that hardly qualified as an “occupation.”

Paul seems intent on blaming America for the burning hatred directed against us, to the point that he has to disfigure history to justify it. It’s a peculiar citizen of this nation who would do such a thing. I suppose I understand why most Republicans (with the fine exception of Rick Santorum) have not taken on the noxious ideology of Representative Paul. But the dirty little secret is Ron Paul holds views that are disgraceful. It seems to me that conservatives, in the name of reaching out to those who inhabit the loony fringes of the libertarian movement, shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

John Boehner’s objection to the date of President Obama’s upcoming jobs speech is a little surprising, considering how much flak Obama was getting for making such a transparently political timing decision. But the House Speaker just sent a letter “respectfully” calling on the president to move the speech forward one day, ostensibly because the current House schedule won’t allow enough time for proper security screening procedures before Obama’s 8 p.m. address:

As you know, the House of Representatives and the Senate are each required to adopt a Concurrent Resolution to allow for a Joint Session of Congress to receive the president. And as the Majority Leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, September 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening. With the significant amount of time – typically more than three hours – that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House Chamber before receiving the president, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.

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I wrote last week, Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner’s defense of the right of Palestinians to murder Israelis “was beyond the pale of civil debate and that he would deserve every bit of the abuse that comes his way from fellow Israelis.” If anything, I underestimated the opprobrium that rained down on Derfner, who subsequently gave a non-apology apology and took down the controversial post from his personal blog. But his evasions were of no use, and he wound up losing his job at the Post this week.

While Derfner’s critics are celebrating his demise, his firing generated a predictable wave of sympathy from liberals who are claiming he is a martyr to freedom of speech. In particular, New York Times blogger Rocker Mackey takes up Derfner’s talking point about the use of terror during Israel’s struggle for independence in a specious attempt to portray the writer as doing nothing more than telling the truth. Such absurd arguments miss the main point about Derfner’s piece. There’s nothing new about treating Palestinian terror as morally equivalent to Israeli self-defense. Derfner’s main fault was his claim Israelis deserved to be killed because they were the only party at fault in the conflict. Read More

Some of the reaction to Politico’s tireless quest to find out if Democrats think Rick Perry is “dumb” centered on the fact reporters conveniently have yet to produce President Obama’s school records. That’s true–and a point worth making. But David Harsanyi has an excellent article on the other double standard in the Politico piece.

Harsanyi notes that Perry gets hit with the accusation he doesn’t stay up late reading Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute white papers because, apparently, he’d rather listen to his advisers. Harsanyi pounces:

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Jonathan writes President Obama’s long-awaited jobs speech may upstage the GOP debate. But I’m not so sure, and think a case can be made the president made a serious error by scheduling his speech at the same time as the Republican event.

First, this is the MSNBC-Politico debate. So in the process of trying to outshine the GOP candidates, Obama’s actually causing serious problems for two of the most important news outlets for him in the election. Really bad move.

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Throughout the last several months as dissidents have sought to bring an end to the Assad family’s reign of terror in Syria, the regime’s most steadfast ally has been Iran. Tehran and its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries have done their best to buck up the Syrian security forces suppressing protesters as well as offering staunch diplomatic backing. But in recent days, it appears the Iranian ayatollahs are starting to think about hedging their bets.

During the past weekend, Iran’s foreign minister shockingly declared Syria’s government should listen to the “legitimate demands” of protesters. More ominous for dictator Bashar Assad is the news representatives of Iran met recently in Europe with Syrian opposition leaders. Even worse, the Jerusalem Post reports Le Figaro is saying Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah also reached out to Syrian dissidents. Nasrallah apparently wanted to see if they were willing to do business with the Lebanese terrorist group whose power rests in part on their alliance with their country’s Syrian overlords. If these stories are correct, this could mean both Iran and Hezbollah are convinced the end of the murderous Assad regime is in sight.

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Today’s Rasmussen poll shows President Obama with a “presidential index” of Minus 25 — the gap between the 19 percent who “strongly approve” and the 44 percent who “strongly disapprove.” Obama’s total approval of 42 percent trails his overall disapproval of 57 percent by 15 points.

The Boker tov, Boulder graph dramatically illustrates the significance of these figures: most of Obama’s total approval is soft, while nearly 80 percent of Obama’s total disapproval is hard; and his 42 percent total approval is not only anemic, but two points below the 44 percent who strongly disapprove. In other words, it is not simply Obama’s negative numbers that are noteworthy, but the sheer intensity of the opposition.

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This is yet another example of why it’s tough to calculate the actual job-stimulating benefits of the stimulus plan. The Recovery Act’s success is typically measured by looking at how many jobs have been created. But there’s also job “shifting,” which happens when a business uses stimulus funds to hire someone who was already employed at another company. And according to a new study from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, that’s been the case with nearly half of the workers hired under the Recovery Act:

Hiring isn’t the same as net job creation. In our survey, just 42.1 percent of the workers hired at ARRA-receiving organizations after January 31, 2009, were unemployed at the time they were hired (Appendix C). More were hired directly from other organizations (47.3 percent of post-ARRA workers), while a handful came from school (6.5 percent) or from outside the labor force (4.1 percent)(Figure 2). Thus, there was an almost even split between “job creating” and “job switching.” This suggests just how hard it is for Keynesian job creation to work in a modern, expertise-based economy: even in a weak economy, organizations hired the employed about as often as the unemployed.

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The Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in California was scheduled months ago for next Wednesday night. But that didn’t stop the White House from deciding to have President Obama address a joint session of Congress on his economic plan on that very same night. The GOP may grumble, but White House Press Secretary Jay Carney dismissed their complaint about the high-handed manner in which the White House relegated a much anticipated gathering of contenders to a secondary news event: “One debate of many was not reason not to have a speech when we wanted to have it.”

In a sense, Carney’s right. The Reagan Library event is just one GOP debate among many. But as the first such forum since Perry entered the Republican race, it was viewed as a chance for the country to take its first good long look at Perry in this context. It was an opportunity for Perry to make a good first impression for many viewers, but it was even more crucial for his challengers. Since Perry has vaulted to an enormous lead in the polls, the California debate was a chance for Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, the two candidates whose hopes have suffered the most since Perry’s entry, to score points at their rival’s expense. If Perry falters badly at the debate it might erase his lead as quickly as it was built. But will any of this matter if nobody is watching?

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In Marc Thiessen’s column about Mitt Romney v. Rick Perry, Thiessen writes this:

If Perry fails to implode and continues to surge in the polls, Romney eventually will have to go on the attack — an assault his advisers say will commence “at a time of our choosing.”

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Recent word that Atiya Abdul Rahman, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan adds to the impression we have little to fear from the remnants of what was once seen as the world’s most dangerous terrorist group. And indeed, it may be the case we have a good less to fear–at least for the time being–from al-Qaeda Central. But, as I have been arguing for some time, that does not mean we have nothing to fear from jihadist terrorists. They remain active around the world and have been making dangerous gains in such countries as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The turmoil of the Arab Spring may provide further openings for them, as Joshua Muravchik warns in a perceptive article in the new COMMENTARY.  The U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan and Iraq provides yet more opportunities they can take advantage of.

Further confirmation of how far-flung the threat is comes from Nigeria where yet another al-Qaeda affiliate known as Boko Haram claimed credit for a suicide bombing at the UN compound which killed 23 people. There are reports Boko Haram personnel have been trained by al-Qaeda.

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Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan has always been the greatest impediment to his hopes of winning the Republican presidential nomination. However, the surfacing of a 1993 letter from Rick Perry praising Hillary Clinton’s health care initiative may provide a glimmer of hope to Romney. In the letter, which was published by the Daily Caller, the then Texas Agriculture Commissioner lauded the First Lady’s health care plans as “commendable” and lobbied her to make sure farmers and other agricultural workers would be included in the plan which had, as of the time of the writing of the missive, not yet been announced.

This is a potential embarrassment for Perry, who has stood second to none in the GOP in his denunciations of both Obamacare and the government-mandated health care bill that Romney shepherded to passage in the Massachusetts legislature while he was governor. Though Perry’s defense that he didn’t know what Clinton’s plan entailed when he wrote it takes a lot of the sting out of this story, it can still be trotted out by Romney who has twisted himself in knots trying to distinguish his health care initiative from the similar bill passed by Congress last year. Yet, given the fact the first attempt to use the letter against Perry was a flop, Romney ought not to get his hopes up.

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After a few short weeks, John’s prediction that Rick Perry would become the new “conservative boogeyman” in the mind of the left is coming to fruition. Perry’s soaring poll numbers apparently have liberals scrambling into full-out panic mode, and Politico’s Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman report on the chaos:

Perry panic has spread from the conference rooms of Washington, D.C., to the coffee shops of Brooklyn, with the realization that the conservative Texan could conceivably become the 45th president of the United States, a wave of alarm centering around Perry’s drawling, small-town affect and stands on core cultural issues such as women’s rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the separation of church and state.

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You would think there is nothing a critic could write about MSNBC’s decision to give a disreputable figure such as Al Sharpton a prime-time show that would create sympathy for the network. But when a dull, uniformly liberal newspaper criticizes a cable outlet for broadcasting material that is dull and uniformly liberal, one’s first reaction is to feel as if such hypocrisy reeks of injustice.

Yet as unfair as it may be for the New York Times to accuse MSNBC of being complacently and boringly liberal, the charge still sticks. Alessandra Stanley’s Arts Beat critique of the debut of the Sharpton show was very much on target, especially in her takedown of the way it copied the pattern of everything else seen on the network:

And that may be the problem with Mr. Sharpton’s cable news pulpit: what he means to say is in lockstep with every other MSNBC evening program, making the stretch between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. a nonstop lecture on liberal values and what is wrong with the Republican Party.

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Why on earth would anyone question Barack Obama’s belief in America? From the New York Times:

Some senior administration officials … noted that the tone set on this Sept. 11 should be shaped by a recognition that the outpouring of worldwide support for the United States in the weeks after the attacks turned to anger at some American policies adopted in the name of fighting terror — on detention, on interrogation, and the decision to invade Iraq.

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In May, Jon Ward revealed just how much effort the conservative group FreedomWorks was going to put into derailing a possible Mitt Romney nomination. The group has followed through, announcing they will withdraw their support from a Tea Party event at which Romney will speak, and will instead protest the event.

“We have to defend our brand against poseurs,” said Brendan Steinhauser, one of the lead organizers for the group. The plan to protest Romney’s Sunday speech is certainly an example of the group making good on its word to oppose Romney’s candidacy. But there might be another, just as consistent, reason: to torpedo a possible–though not probable–endorsement of Romney by Tea Party favorite Jim DeMint. Politico reports Romney will now attend an event this weekend hosted by the South Carolina senator after first saying he would pass:

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Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, reports, “Consumer confidence deteriorated sharply in August, as consumers grew significantly more pessimistic about the short-term outlook. The index is now at its lowest level in more than two years. A contributing factor may have been the debt ceiling discussions since the decline in confidence was well underway before the S&P downgrade. Consumers’ assessment of current conditions, on the other hand, posted only a modest decline as employment conditions continue to suppress confidence.”…

The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index®, which had improved slightly in July, plummeted in August. The Index now stands at 44.5 (1985=100), down from 59.2 in July. (The Consumer Confidence Index is benchmarked to 1985=100 because it was neither a peak nor a trough year). This simply confirms what other (depressing) economic data has shown.

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The Pew Research Center released an 8-page report on Muslim American opinion polling yesterday, and it’s a must-read. With the recent controversy over Rep. Peter King’s radicalization hearings, it was interesting to see Muslim Americans have the same misgivings about Muslim community leaders that the congressman does. Nearly half – 48 percent – say Muslim leaders haven’t done enough to speak out against Islamic extremists, while 34 percent disagree. And the percentage of those who believe leaders need to speak out more on extremism is even higher among women and American-born Muslims:

Men are evenly divided in their views of whether Muslim leaders have done enough to speak out against Islamic extremism – 44 percent say they have, while 46 percent say they have not. By comparison, just 23 percent of women say Muslim leaders have done enough to speak out against extremism, while 51 percent say they have not done enough; 26 percent of women offer no opinion.

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