Obama's National Security Advisor "Went Native" Years Ago

John Brennan, Obama National Security advisor, addressing an unidentified group

By Alan Caruba

There’s a YouTube video of John Brennan, the President’s national security advisor, praising Islam and the Arab culture to an unidentified group of Arabs that is so revealing it should be probable cause for his removal from office. At one point, he addresses them in fluent Arabic, a language acquired in his studies and CIA posts over the years.

When the British Empire spanned much of the globe there was a term for men who embraced the culture and nations to which they were assigned. They were deemed to have “gone native”, often wearing Arab garb and becoming apologists or advocates. Among the most famous was Lawrence of Arabia, but there were many others such as Lieutenant-General, Sir John Bagot Glub, called "Glub Pasha" and best known for leading and training Jordan’s Arab Legion from 1939 to 1956; the same Legion that took part in attacks on Israel after it declared independence in 1948.

In the video, Brennan waxes poetic about Arab culture. In 1977 Brennan had received a degree in political science from Fordham University. During his studies he had spent his junior year learning Arabic and taking Middle Eastern Studies courses at the American University in Cairo. He received a Master of Arts degree in government with a concentration in Middle East studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.

His career in the Central Intelligence Agency was one in which he reached the highest rungs as an analyst, serving at one point as a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton. In 1996, he was the CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when the Khobar Towers, a housing complex, was blown up by a truck bomb, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen billeted there. He would serve under CIA Director George Tenet as the director of its newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004. He would serve as director of the CIA’s National Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2005.

One might assume from such an impressive resume that Brennan was the ideal man to be appointed President Barack Hussein Obama’s chief counterintelligence advisor with the title of Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

One might assume that, but Brennan, from his earliest days in that post made a number of statements and authored a USA Today opinion editorial that revealed deeply felt sympathies for the very people who were and are attacking Americans at home and overseas. In his USA Today opinion, Brennan criticized “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering that only serve the goals of al Qaeda.”

Commenting on Brennan’s USA Today opinion, Jed Babbin, in an article for Human Events on February 11, 2010, wrote of Brennan and the Obama administration’s incomprehensible national security actions, “Consider their consistent record of bad decisions only one year into Obama’s presidency: to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; to move Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other al Qaeda varsity out of the military commissions system and try them in civilian criminal court; to war against the intelligence community; to put the White House in charge of interrogations of captured terrorists; and, most recently, the hasty decision to put the Christmas Day underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in civilian custody thus preventing professional intelligence interrogators from having access to him.”

Babbin characterized Brennan’s USA Today article as “a string of fibs and misleading statements so easily disproved (that) it leaves observers wondering about Brennan’s sanity.”

Writing in the Washington Observer on May 26, 2010, Spencer Ackerman reported that “Brennan signaled as well that the administration is concerned that blowback from civilians killed by drones could turn tactical success into strategic failure.” Brennan said the U.S. had an obligation to destroy al Qaeda proactively, “but also has a responsibility not to overreact in the event of a successful attack.”

One wonders if he thought that President George W. Bush overreacted to the al Qaeda attack on 9/11. One can only assume he agreed with President Obama’s decision to send a SEAL team to assassinate Osama bin Ladin. In his defense of the decision to have Adulmatalleb read his Miranda rights, Brennan said, “Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lacks foundation.” This ignores the long history of trying people who commit acts of war against the United States the use of military courts.

The fact that Brennan is one of the chief advisors to President Obama explains a lot about the decisions Obama has made since taking office with regard to protecting the nation against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. It explains Obama’s now famous “apology tour” of the Middle East that he took in 2009 and his conciliatory speech delivered at the University of Cairo.

Egypt has now moved outside the nation’s zone of influence and Iran openly mocks the Obama policies of using diplomacy and sanctions to stop their quest for nuclear weapons. Israel, despite Obama’s latest reassurances, was earlier told to stop building housing in its capitol city and to retreat to indefensible 1967 borders.

Inside the White House, Obama continues to be advised by a man whose sympathies, despite his long service in the CIA, appear to be with the Islamic enemies of the nation. It is no surprise that Brennan has maintained a very low profile since 2009-2010.

There have been many calls for Brennan’s resignation or firing, but he remains in Obama’s good graces. That, too, is no surprise.

Editor's note: This YouTube video's URL is
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VQbAhqHoAo&fb_source=message

© Alan Caruba, 2012

World's Largest Army?

Here's a news item from the editor of The Tribune, a weekly newspaper published in North Carolina.

The World's Largest Army. America's Hunters?

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That's great. There were over 600,000 hunters. Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world -- more men under arms than Iran ; more than France and Germany combined -- deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay. But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan 's 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia  and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world. America will forever be safe from foreign invasion of troops with that kind of home-grown firepower.

Hunting - it's not just a way to fill the freezer. It's a matter of national security!

The Jihad Against America is Increasing

By Alan Caruba

Muhammad, the self-proclaimed prophet of Allah, died in 632 AD. As historian James Carroll notes in his forthcoming book about Jerusalem, “The next year, only two years after the Byzantine Christians had reconquered Jerusalem…a mounted force of Bedouin fighters who revered the Prophet’s memory invaded the Byzantine-controlled territory of Palestine, near Gaza.” They called themselves Muslims.

Only five years after Muhammad’s death, Umar ibn al-Khattab, his successor “led tribal bands as one army, quickly taking control of lands from Iraq to Egypt.” In 637 AD, “Muslim forces laid siege to Jerusalem.” With the exception of a brief period in the twelfth century, Muslim rule of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Jews and Christians, “would last one and a third millennia until 1917.”

A recent survey taken in Islamic countries by the Pew Research foundation revealed that a majority in the Muslim world still favor cutting off hands for theft, stoning people to death for adultery, and insist that Islam play a major role in politics. What many in the West still fail to understand is that the grip of Islam and its seventh century mindset remains fully intact for many of the more than a billion Muslims worldwide.

The resurgence of a militant Islam threatens to drag the entire world back to an era of barbarity and ignorance banished by Western civilization, the enlightenment, and the spread of Democracy. The brief period of tolerance for other faiths exhibited during the Islamic conquest of Spain was the exception, not the rule.

In our era it was George W. Bush who thwarted Muslim dreams of world domination. Following 9/11 it was his resistance that protected Americans against further attacks during his two terms in office.

In a November commentary, Dr. Walid Phares, a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and author of “Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America”, noted that “Throughout the summer and fall, U.S. authorities witnessed a significant rise in jihadist activity, using increasingly sophisticated operational strategies.”

“According to open-source reports, between 2001 and 2008, U.S. agencies stopped one or two terror attempts a year. However, from 2009 until today, the government has been uncovering one or two cases a month, a troubling growth in jihadist activities.”

It should be lost on no one that the increase coincides with the advent of the Obama administration and his absurd claims that America is not a Christian nation or that Muslims played any role in its history other than as Barbary pirates.

Largely unreported, on a weekly basis throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, Islam’s holy warriors continue to kill Muslims and Christians. In the West, they have perpetrated terrorist attacks in London, Madrid, and on 9/11 in New York.

On December 9, federal officials arrested a Maryland man and charged him with plotting to blow up an Army recruiting center near Baltimore. Antonio Martinez, a 21-year-old Muslim convert who calls himself Muhammed Hussain, wanted to kill as many U.S. soldiers as possible.

Earlier, in Portland, Oregon, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali youth, was thwarted from killing Americans during a Christmas tree lighting celebration. Farooque Ahmed, a Virginia man, was arrested in connection with a plot to attack the Washington, D.C. subway system; Ahmed, a native of Pakistan, had been granted U.S. citizenship.

Only the failure of his car bomb prevented Faisal Shahzad, also formerly of Pakistan and a U.S. citizen, from killing and injuring Americans in New York’s Times Square. A trial is set for Najibullah Zazi, the father of Mohammad Wali Zazi who pled guilty to a terrorist plot involving the New York subway system.

It is folly to think that America will not continue to be subject to terror attacks, but the Obama administration has largely refused to publicly confront this reality except in the form of the intrusive and objectionable airport pat-downs and scans. If a commercial airliner is bombed, it will surely have begun its flight in a foreign airport.

Incredibly, Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security recently announced that Ari Alikhan, who DHS identified as “a devout Muslim”, as the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and swore in Kareem Shora, another “devout Muslim” born in Damascus, Syria, as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.

How crazed is this? Or are we meant to wait until President Obama is voted out of office until we can begin to feel safe anywhere in America?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Obama gets "serious" about national security

How NOT to Defend America

By Alan Caruba

Does anyone believe that we don’t live in an increasingly dangerous world; one in which nuclear weapons are proliferating and worldwide Islamic terrorism threatens our nation and others?

The first months of the Obama administration bode ill for the safety of the United States. Calling on the United Nations to rebuke North Korea for what North Korea has always done, fire off missiles and test atomic bombs, is as useless a response as could be imagined. Consider this approach in light of the administration’s cuts to a much-needed missile defense system for the homeland.

Organizing a serious inspection system of every ship entering or leaving North Korean waters would go much further to reducing its ability to ship its weapons to others with bad intentions. Is it an act of war? Is routinely using U.S. national holidays to demonstrate its belligerence a signal of their intentions? They have already said they do not intend to abide by the 1953 armistice agreement.

What has been Iran’s response to President Obama’s extended hand of friendship? They have sent their warships into international waters, although it can be argued they want to protect the oil tankers on which their economy depends. They have tested new longer range missiles, making it clear they can now target Israel and others in the region. They continue to work on developing nuclear weapons.

In a recent commentary, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, warns that the Obama administration has dispatched a diplomat to Russia to negotiate a new bilateral treaty to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with the possibility of reducing by as much as a third of what is left of our arsenal of nuclear weapons. You can bet the Kremlin is delighted with this prospect.

In another move, Gaffney warned that the Obama administration wants to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was rejected by a majority of the Senate a decade ago. The treaty would permanently prohibit the U.S. from underground nuclear testing. Good news for North Korea, Iran and every other nation that wants to threaten us.

At the same time, while babbling endlessly about “energy independence”, we live in a nation that sits atop vast reserves of coal and oil. Since the 1970s, however, successive administrations have taken steps to ensure that we can neither mine, nor drill for any of it.

Not a single new oil refinery has been built in the U.S. since those years when the oil industry had windfall profits taxes imposed and other measures that deterred the prospect of domestic exploration and development.

We have a President who is on record opposing the building of any new coal-fired plants to provide for our growing need for more electricity and has rescinded any exploration for oil or natural gas reserves along our vast continental shelf.

Thanks to the environmental organizations the United States has allowed ideology to trump common sense regarding our energy needs and the arms agreements the Obama administration is pursuing would leave us unable to fulfill our obligations to the many nations that depend upon our nuclear umbrella to protect them.

The Obama administration has a Transportation Secretary who wants the government to “coerce” everyone to abandon automobiles in favor of mass transit and bicycles.

We have an Energy Secretary who says the answer to a non-existent global warming is to paint the roofs of all buildings white to reflect the Sun’s radiation.

The administration has a science advisor who wants to shoot soot or something else into the atmosphere for the same purpose.

We have an Environmental Protection Agency Director and an environmental advisor to the President who believe that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” instead of a gas that is vital to all life on Earth.

We have a Congress that is contemplating a ludicrous Cap-and-Trade bill that would impose a tax on the emission of carbon dioxide on all energy producers and users for the purpose of deterring global warming at a time when the Earth is now ten years into a cooling cycle. It would destroy an already fragile economy.

As General Motors and Chrysler ready themselves for bankruptcy and huge downsizing measures, the Obama administration has imposed a new standard for gasoline use in automobiles that will require that they be smaller and more dangerous. Nor is there any indication that Americans want to purchase or drive such models.

A recent Rasmussen telephone survey revealed that 75% said that finding new sources of energy to reduce our dependence on imported sources of energy should be the goal of our government.

And, finally, we have a President who has rather casually said that the nation has run out of money.

Does any of this suggest that Congress and the White House have abandoned anything that resembles common sense? Has the unconstitutional looting of the national treasury done anything other than to debase and devalue the dollar? Are we less safe now that we no longer have the robust national security policy of the past eight years?

The Obama administration, in concert with Congress, is seeking to disarm the nation at the very time we need to expand our military capabilities. The same administration is seeking to impose “global warming” mandates and restrictions that threaten our economy.

Ideology, whether it is about the environment or about national security, endangers our nation at every turn.

November 22, 1963

By Alan Caruba

I doubt that most Americans will recall that, forty-five years ago, on November 22, 1963, the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Clearly, part of the reason is that a lot of Americans have been born since then, but the other part of the reason is that, according to a newly released study, most Americans simply have not been successfully taught American history or civics since the 1960s. They have no real knowledge, facts, dates, events, to call upon.

That is no accident. There has been a deliberate effort to “dumb down” Americans to a point where they literally do not know how their government came to be and what its guiding principles, embodied in the U.S. Constitution, permits, proscribes, and limits.

Assassination is the ultimate act of treason. It renders the entire electoral process null and void despite the rule of succession that elevates the vice president to the position of chief executive. Only once in our history, the accession of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, has an assassination produced a President of truly great stature.

I recall hearing the news of JFK’s assassination. I was working in Miami at the time, a callow youth of 26, well educated, but lacking any real insight to the event. Two other things happened that day. Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the new President and I quit my job and returned home. Shortly after, I became a journalist.

What would follow in fairly short order would be the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy while campaigning in Los Angeles against a first full term for Johnson and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. At that point, the nation was engulfed in the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement and, with the election of Johnson, would find itself mired in the Vietnam War. The streets of Washington, D.C. would fill, time and again, with Americans protesting that war.

Johnson would decide not to run for a second term. The nation would elect Richard M. Nixon twice, only to see him disgrace the office with the Watergate scandal and become the first President to resign.

In a very real way, all of these events began on November 22, 1963.

I was struck by the adulation, the exuberance of the huge crowds that turned out during President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign. It reminded me a great deal of the same response the then-youngest President, John F. Kennedy, engendered. Rumors would circulate after his election that the Chicago machine, led by then-Mayor Richard J. Daley, had stuffed the ballot boxes to ensure his victory.

The reason it is essential to know something of the history of the nation is the ability to draw lessons from it. As popular as JFK was, he quickly blundered into the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, having won office in 1960. This was redeemed only by the standoff with the Soviets that forced them to withdraw their missiles from Cuba in 1962. A year later, JFK was dead; the victim of what some have said was an extraordinary feat of marksmanship attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald, a leftist malcontent.

The election of Barack Obama has been hailed as historic and, as the first Afro-American President, it surely qualifies, but history has a relentless repetition to it.

I am not suggesting the President Obama will fall to an assassin’s bullet, but I am suggesting that whoever holds the office of President will determine whether America continues to lead the world economically, militarily, culturally, and—yes—physically. If 9/11 was just a taste of what the Islamofascists have in mind for us, we are surely as threatened today as ever in history. Taking a longer view, we need to be mindful of the military buildup in China.

That is why it is essential to pay attention to Obama’s expressed views on homeland security and defense issues. President Ronald Reagan said that there was no evidence in all of human history that a nation was attacked because it was too strong. Even the ancient Romans knew that truth. “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If you want peace, plan for war.

That’s why, as we commemorate the loss of John F. Kennedy to an assassin’s bullet, we need also to ask why an Arizona Governor, Janet Napolitano, is being considered for Director of Homeland Security. If she could not or would not defend the border of her State with Mexico against illegal aliens and drug smugglers, why should we expect her to do this and more for the entire nation?

President-elect Obama is already on record saying, “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear systems.” It can be argued that nuclear weapons have deterred a fourth world war and conflicts between nations that possess them.

Leaving America defenseless or at least greatly weakened in a dangerous world is a suicidal policy.

It is said that Obama sees himself as some kind of national and international “transformative” figure. History will write the final chapter on that.

Can America Retain Its Power?

By Alan Caruba

This is when “pundits” and assorted “experts” make their predictions about the year ahead. I will spare you that.

There is no way to make predictions because the future is always a great unknown and events always overtake everyone, followed by recriminations that demand to know “Why didn’t they anticipate that?” or “Why were they so unprepared?”

Accidents are called “accidents” because few anticipate or plan for such events. The levees of New Orleans are an example.

The weather, day to day, anywhere on the face of the Earth is unpredictable because it is subject to so many factors over which no one has any “control”. The weather is the result of immense forces at work such as sunspot (magnetic storms) activity, the shift of tectonic plates, vast underwater volcanoes erupting unseen and unknown. And, of course, a massive volcanic explosion in 2008 would transform the weather for years as the result of all the dust it would spew into the atmosphere.

In the same way that the greatest meteorologists in the world cannot explain why clouds do what they do from minute to minute, we could all use a long rest from the idiots who claim to know what the climate is or will be at any time.

As to unknown human events in the world, the only predictable thing is that there will be conflict somewhere. Man is the “killer ape” that says it abhors war and cannot seem to resist its strange appeal.

The result is that we will focus our attention for however long on the Middle East as it deals with its problem of death-dealing, death-loving, and death-seeking lunatics for whom Islam is a convenient excuse to seek political power over others.

The big question on everyone’s mind is whether and when Iran will acquire nuclear weapon status. The answer is yes. At some point Iran will demonstrate that it has these weapons, joining Pakistan, India, and Israel in their region of the world, as well as its neighbor, China. The Bomb makes these nations feel safe, but its use would turn any one of them into a parking lot.

I often talk about “the tyranny of demography” which is a fancy way of saying that population, the sheer numbers of people, determines policies and actions. In 2008, the United States of America will add a new immigrant—legal and illegal—every thirty seconds. The Census Bureau says our total population will increase by one person every 13 seconds. As of January 1, the total U.S. population will be 303,146,284, a 0.9 percent increase since last New Year’s Day.

Frankly, that is too many people in a nation whose bridges are failing, whose roads need repair, whose electrical “grid” is a product of the 1950s, and which resolutely resists the construction of any new sources of electrical power, either coal-fired or nuclear. That is idiocy.

The failure to stem the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border is an ugly problem that, if ignored, will continue to contribute to a lot of ugly problems that already exist and which the elites that run our government want to ignore. Someone has to pick up the cost of educating their children. Someone has to pick up the health care costs of tending to them. Someone has to pay for their incarceration if they commit crimes.

That someone is you, the U.S. taxpayer. These problems are causing hospitals to close, filling our jails, and contributing to a failed educational system.

Any candidate who promises to build a big wall on the southern border and to put U.S. soldiers on our side to ensure that no more illegals come across will be elected. It would also do wonders to ending the corruption and control of the Mexican drug cartels.

Where would we find those soldiers? We have some 30,000 guarding the South Korean border since the 1950s. Bring them home. We have some 79,000 in Europe. Bring them home. These nations have been getting a free ride on our dollar for two full generations.

It is the U.S. dollar that keeps the United Nations afloat. We have one vote in the General Assembly. So does Togo. We have a veto power on the Security Council. So do the other members, most of whom are leftovers from the nations that won World War Two. China is a member because China has more than a billion people, but India with a comparable population is not.

The United Nations needs to be allowed to fail. It has evolved into a poisonous conglomeration of regional cliques that engage in horrible insults to humanity as a whole. It can and would be replaced.

The first action following the demise of the UN would be to create a U.S.-led alliance of democratic nations. Nations failing to respect the rules would be frozen out of world trade and aid. An example? North Korea needs to be shut down, not negotiated with. Then make a list of African nations that require the same action. Then add to the list others that haven’t gotten the message yet.

The invasion of Iraq was a message to the world that dictators who are real threat regionally will be deposed, even if the U.S. has to spend a great deal of treasure and blood to do it. Historians will look back kindly on George W. Bush for taking this action. It immediately convinced Libya’s dictator to give up his nuclear program. It put Iran on notice. Et cetera.

What is most needed in 2008? Patience. Events in the world are not movies or television shows. They require time and consensus to evolve.

Most people in the world will trade a measure of freedom for stability, but humans inherently want freedom, so we can expect to see them in the streets as in the case of the Buddhist monks of Myanmar. As in the defeat of Hugo Chavez’s dictatorial aspirations in Venezuela. As in unexpected changes that will likely occur in Cuba when Fidel dies.

The United States needs to be far more cunning in our use of statecraft and spycraft. We need to negotiate our way to a better world and, where that is impossible, we need to use all the arts of espionage and infiltration to undermine and overthrow bad governments.

The Chinese probably have enough spies in the U.S. to populate a small city. In a generation, more Chinese will speak English than all the people in the English-speaking world today. If they can take the time to achieve hegemony, we can take the same time to retain it.

We will not achieve this if our schools continue to graduate illiterates and young people who haven’t a clue about our nation’s history, our governmental system, and the values that have made us Number One since the end of WWII. We will not achieve this if we keep electing people to Congress who spend money faster than it can be printed or pass bills banning the incandescent light bulb—which Congress has just done.

Stupid people deserve what they get and we are allowing too much stupidity to govern us and determine policies essential to our future. On that note, I shall rest.

Green PR to Influence Presidential Candidates

By Alan Caruba

Have you ever wondered why hardly a day goes by without your reading or hearing about some Green program? It’s not just happenstance. The environmental movement has one of the most varied and impressive public relations programs extant. And it spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on it.

Take, for example, a $250,000 contract that Fraser Communications, a Los Angeles PR and advertising firm, just secured to promote the Presidential Climate Action Project. It is described as “an academic, government and interest group push to make climate change a priority for the next U.S. president.” Think about that, we haven’t even had a primary yet, but this program is already thinking about how to bring pressure on whoever is elected to continue dealing with climate change or, as it used to be known, “global warming.”

About the only person still using the term “global warming” is the gaseous former Vice President, Al Gore. He has, despite his Nobel Prize, evolved into a laughing stock for his near-term predictions of global catastrophe.

The Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) has an “advisory committee” that includes the Johnson Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and the National Wildlife Federation, among other groups.

One almost instantly wonders why a governmental agency like NOAA that presumably takes its direction from Congress is involved in trying to influence a future president? Isn’t that just a tad inappropriate? Unethical?

As to the others, from the beginning when the environmental movement first took off, it has been leftist foundations that have provided the funding, so there’s no surprise in that. Here again, however, one wonders what the National Wildlife Federation’s interest in climate change is all about? Since the Green mantra is that climate change is manmade, the result of human activities, why is a group devoted to bison, bunny rabbits, and other furry creatures involved?

The whole object of this endeavor and the charge that its PR firm will undertake is to apply “public persuasion” strategies related to policy and the environment. The key goal is to “set the stage for candidates running for public office in 2008 to take positions on specific proposals to address climate, energy, and national security.”

Whoa! The name of the project is “Climate Action”, but it turns out that this Green project is also about energy and national security.

One can understand “energy” because the primary goal of the Greens is to cripple the ability of the U.S. to acquire the energy resources it requires to maintain our economy and our lifestyle. Using the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and every other means, the bottom line is to insure that no coal-fired electricity utilities be built anywhere and to continue to slow any progress toward nuclear facilities. As for oil, they hate it. That’s why they have conspired to limit access to the billions of barrels of oil untapped in ANWR, Alaska’s North Slope, and 85% of our nation’s continental shelf.

You want national security? You better be able to fuel our Air Force squadrons, our Army’s tanks, and our Navy’s carrier fleets. You better cut our current 75% imports of oil and become more self-sufficient.

But somehow I suspect that PCAP’s agenda is about influencing presidential candidates to take positions that they genuflect to the myth of global warming. That means a President who will sign off on carbon dioxide limits on every industry and activity that might emit CO2. And that includes backyard barbeques.

Welcome to Facts Not Fantasy

http://www.anxietycenter.com

Welcome to Facts Not Fantasy, a blog by yours truly, Alan Caruba. This blog is intended to augment my weekly commentaries on my website for The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about "scare campaigns" intended to influence public policy and opinion.

The range of topics FNF will cover will include environmentalism, energy, education, immigration, the North American Union which is being stealthily imposed, Islam and the Middle East, natural security issues and, of course, politics.

For indepth comment on any of these topics, you should visit the Center's website. Its archives provide carefully researched and documented information, along with opinion.

This is the result of my having begun my professional life as a journalist. For most of the past years, however, I have been a public relations counselor and this has brought me into contact with many different aspects of the economy through the many people who get up every morning and set out to do the very best job they can.

Another website of mine you might want to visit is http://www.bookviews.com. Since the 1960s I have been a reviewer and am, in fact, a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle. In addition, I am a longtime member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Association of Science Writers.

This blog is called "Separating Fact from Fantasy" to represent my dedication to facts, to the truth as best as it can be determined.