Mills captures Flynn’s characters perfectly

By Elise Cooper

http://www.militarypress.com/

October 7, 2016

“Order To Kill” by Kyle Mills is a vintage Vince Flynn book. It is a reminder of the early Rapp novels with Mitch going full circle between his personal and professional life. Readers who enjoyed the character and plot lines will think of “Transfer Of Power” and “Consent To Kill.” Kyle has done a top-notch job of blending the beloved characters of Irene Kennedy and Mitch Rapp with a high adventure, action packed plot.

This book brings back former Navy SEAL Scott Coleman, who is working with Mitch to find Pakistani nukes so they do not fall into terrorists’ hands. As the story progresses, it becomes abundantly clear that Russia’s president, Maxim Vladimirovich Krupin, is working with ISIS terrorists to destabilize the oil resources in the Middle East. The only way to find the culprits and stop these catastrophic consequences is for Mitch to pose as an American ISIS recruit in Iraq, while trying to find and eliminate his Russian nemesis, Grisha Azarov.

Kyle Mills has come into his own. He expands the setting, introduces new characters, and yet is able to stay true to the characters and details created by Vince Flynn. Readers will now see Rapp as someone who realizes he is comfortable with his professional life and can possibly have a personal life as well.

Irene Kennedy continues to be an imperative player in the story in the role of the CIA Director, Mitch’s confidante and the person who is able to connect the dots. She is important in being the focal point for understanding the issues presented in the book. Mitch depends on her to make the hard decisions.

There is a scene in “Order To Kill” where Mitch is confronted with eliminating someone. As in “Consent To Kill,” he walks away from that desire. It is almost as if readers will close their eyes and think of the line Mitch says in the former novel, “Because I’m not a coward. Because… I don’t blow up houses and kill innocents and bystanders.”

“Transfer Of Power” propelled Mitch to the beloved character he is today. In that book there were a number of scenes with him rescuing Anna. In Kyle’s latest book he introduces the character Laleh. The scenes between Mitch and Laleh will once again show how Mitch is a true hero, getting angry when a woman is mistreated while attempting to rescue her. But these scenes are also heart breaking because it shows how ISIS captures women, makes them become sex-slaves, and the desperation faced by these women because there is no way out.

Fans of the legendary Vince Flynn were unsure if Kyle Mills could fill his shoes with the well-developed characters and plots. They loved and hated the month of October. Loved it because a new Mitch Rapp novel came out and hated it because they would have to wait another year for the next one. With “Order To Kill,” readers will get those same feelings. It appears the torch has been passed to Kyle Mills.

See the Q/A Below:

Elise Cooper: Where did you get the idea for this story?

Kyle Mills: My favorite Vince Flynn book, “Consent To Kill,” was the inspiration. In that book Mitch re-found his humanity. I am trying to bring Mitch around to that viewpoint, where he desires a personal life. As a sustainable character Mitch could not stay frustrated and angry, as he was in the last few books. His new attitude, “I have to move on with my life.”

EC: Claudia was married to the man who killed Vince’s wife, Anna. How important is her role in this book?

KM: I wanted to resurrect her as well as other characters. There were all these unresolved ideas in the past books: what ever happened to Claudia, Donatella Rhan or Greta; where are the notes Mitch made before being injured? I hope to continue including Claudia in the books, since she is not the goody good character like Anna. Plus she could be involved in some operations because of her experience.

EC: What do you see as Irene Kennedy’s role in future books?

KM: I see Irene as a pivotal piece in everything that happens in the books, even if sometimes she does not get as much ink as Mitch. I always think of her as the puppet master. By her own admission she is not involved but watches and waits until it becomes necessary for her to be involved.

EC: Your story is very realistic. It is almost like you can pick the U.S. enemy of the week?

KM: There is a lot to draw upon for U.S. thriller writers. The chessboard is getting very complicated. In this book I had Russia using ISIS as well as the dangers of the countries with nuclear arsenals. Putin uses them for his own purposes, and Pakistan is an unstable country, a failed state.

EC: What did you want readers to understand about Russia?

KM: I always found Russia to be very interesting. I liked the complexity of Cold War thriller books, having been a fan of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. The description in the book of how Krupin came to power comes straight out of how Putin came to power. In many ways Russia is a collapsing country with an economy smaller than Italy’s. The minute he does not help the Oligarchs he is in trouble and can find a bullet in his head. I want to show that the U.S. cannot be one dimensional in confronting its enemies that include Jihadists, Russia, North Korea, and China. Russia is seen as a one-man show, where Krupin (Putin) is more concerned about his own power and influence, using the Oligarchs as a crime syndicate organization. I want to demonstrate the desperation of Krupin, how Russia is the poster child for income inequality, and is ridden with drugs.

EC: Vince always had comments on the Saudis participating in terrorism. You appear to be continuing this arc?

KM: Yes, that is why I put in the book quote, “Abdullah was extremely conservative in his religious beliefs… He despised Christians in general and American Christians in particular.” Vince always spoke of the Saudi money and influence in his books. I want to continue with that, and to strike a balance between fun, satisfying, and realistic.

EC: Can you give a heads up about your next book?

KM: I like resurrecting the old characters because I have a long history with them as a fan. The next book brings back Donatella and the FBI Agent Joe Wilson. Mitch will be doing some things against the Saudis and all the politicians want hands off. He will be more a lone wolf. Grisha Azarov, Mitch’s Russian nemesis, will return because he is really popular with the readers.

Trumped-Up Outrage

By Heather Mac Donald

http://www.city-journal.org/

October 9, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a town hall-style forum, Thursday, Oct. 6, 2016, in Sandown, N.H. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

Democrats and their media allies, joined by many Republicans, are calling on Donald Trump to withdraw from the presidential race after a newly released, decade-old tape of a frat-house-level conversation between Trump and television host Billy Bush in 2005, in which Trump boasted of his heavy-handed pursuit of females. Trump describes trying unsuccessfully to seduce a married woman by taking her furniture shopping, speaking in the crudest terms. He brags that because he was a star he could “grab [females] by the pussy” and claims to Bush that he starts kissing beautiful women “like a magnet. Just kiss.  I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it.  You can do anything.”  Bush eggs him on:  “Whatever you want!” (Bush being a more admiring confidante than Leporello to Don Giovanni).

The response has been swift and apocalyptic. Hillary Clinton tweeted: “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president.” Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine told reporters: “It makes me sick to my stomach.” Slate’s science editor wrote that “I feel sicker after seeing it than I can remember feeling in a while.” Another Slate columnist writes that Trump and Bush “can’t see their female colleagues as anything but collections of fuckable or unfuckable body parts. They exhibit a complete disregard for women’s humanity, agency, and internal lives.”

Now why might it be that men regard women as sex objects? Surely the ravenous purchase by females of stiletto heels, push-up bras, butt-hugging mini-skirts, plunging necklines, false eyelashes, hair extensions, breast implants, butt implants, lip implants, and mascara, rouge, and lipstick to the tune of billions a year has nothing to do with it. Females would never ever exploit their sexuality to seek attention from men. Bush and Trump, driving to the set of Days of Our Lives on a studio bus, comment on the legs of actress Arianne Zucker who is coming to meet them: “Oh, nice legs, huh?” Trump says. “Your girl’s hot as shit, in the purple,” Bush says. How surprising that Trump and Bush noticed Zucker’s legs! As documented in the video, she is wearing a skimpy purple dress, with an extremely short hem cut on the bias, a low neckline and fully exposed back. She is in high heels to accentuate her bare legs. The ratio of exposed skin between Zucker, on the one hand, and Trump and Bush, on the other, is perhaps 100 to one. But all that bare flesh must simply be because Zucker has a high metabolism and gets exceedingly warm; she would never want to broadcast her sexuality to men or have men notice her. The fact that she swishes her hips when she walks must just be a quirk of anatomy.

When Trump and Bush emerge from the bus, they are the embodiment of jocular decorum—this too counts against them in the eyes of the feminist brigades. Writes Slate’s Susan Matthews: “As if public Donald Trump wasn’t bad enough, this video reminds us that there’s an aspect of the man that’s even worse than what he shows to the public. You see it in the transformation Trump and his conversation partner Billy Bush undergo when they exit the bus and move from [what they assumed was] a private sphere into a public one. They are still committing acts of sexual harassment and abusing their power when they ask the actress who greets them to give each of them a hug. But they’re buttoning up—they know the tone of the conversation they had on the bus cannot be repeated in anything close to a public sphere.” Isn’t this a good thing that Trump in this case at least has obeyed the rules of public behavior? Matthews, we are to believe, would never say anything in private that she would not repeat in the public sphere.

If any of these newfound exponents of female modesty felt any comparable nausea at the blatant display of female sexuality and, dare I say it, “pussy,” in Beyoncé’s acclaimed rock video “Formation,” say, they kept it to themselves. Beyoncé and her female chorus line rhythmically thrust their butts, crotches, and breasts to the camera, while Beyoncé brags of her sexual prowess:

Paparazzi, catch my fly, and my cocky fresh
I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress (stylin’)
Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah I, ohhhhh, oh, yes, I like that
I did not come to play with you hoes, haha
I came to slay, bitch
When he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster, cause I slay
If he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper, cause I slay
Drop him off at the mall, let him buy some J’s, let him shop up, cause I slay
I might get your song played on the radio station, cause I slay

Sounds like a sexual quid pro quo, ripe for a harassment lawsuit. The “Formation” video, which inspired Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime performance in January (to another universal swoon from the entertainment industry), also shows a very young girl engaging in some precocious twerking, a grotesque travesty of childhood. No objections to that destruction of the innocence of childhood from the DNC.

President Obama has singled out Beyoncé for praise, and the singer is a big Hillary Clinton supporter, to not a word of protest from Clinton regarding her status as a role model for young girls. Bill Clinton met with Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay Z, in September. If Bill or Hillary thinks the lyrics of Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin‘” “horrific,” in Hillary’s words, they are not letting on:

You know I thug em, fuck em, love em, leave em
Cause I don’t fuckin need em
Take em out the hood, keep em lookin good
But I don’t fuckin feed em
First time they fuss I’m breezin
Talkin bout, “What’s the reasons?”
I’m a pimp in every sense of the word, bitch
Better trust than believe em
In the cut where I keep em
til I need a nut, til I need to beat the guts
Then it’s, beep beep and I’m pickin em up
Let em play with the dick in the truck
Many chicks wanna put Jigga fist in cuffs
Divorce him and split his bucks
Just because you got good head, I’m a break bread
so you can be livin it up? Shit I
parts with nothin, y’all be frontin
Me give my heart to a woman?
Not for nothin, never happen.

The Washington Post primly headlined its scoop on Trump’s bus conversation with Bush: “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.” The New York Times’ follow-up story also labelled Trump’s remarks “lewd.” If either of those paper’s critics have ever objected to such lewdness in popular culture, it has escaped attention. Have they objected to college campus sex weeks, which routinely invite porn stars to offer how-to demonstrations on S & M sex? Do they squirm with discomfort when campus administrators pass out tips on the use of sex toys to achieve better orgasms? Not on the record, at least.

Other Hillary Clinton supporters have hardly been shy about exploiting sex to get ahead. Clinton fan Amy Schumer admits: “I have used sex as a marketing tool and it has worked. I mean, my TV show is called Inside Amy Schumer.” This blushing Victorian violet explains: “My whole life I found friends that are just like me, young girls that were just like me, like we were all whores.” During a lace-clad photo shoot for Marie Claire that of course had nothing to do with projecting sexuality, Schumer joked about her sexual exploits: “My best friend would describe me as loyal . . . to the boyfriend I stole from her.” She confesses to a “weakness for orgasms.” Democratic National Convention star, Hillary fan, and pseudo-campus rape victim Lena Dunham has not exactly set herself up as a model of sexual prudence, either, nor has she shrunk from using her promiscuity as a selling point in the entertainment market.

The sudden onset of Victorian vapors among the liberal intelligentsia and political class at the revelation of Trump’s locker-room talk is part and parcel of the Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to feminism and sexual liberation. A routine objection to Trump is that he makes, in the words of the New York Times, “gutter attacks on women.” But why should women be exempt from Trump’s gutter attacks on anyone he wants to humiliate? Trump’s gratuitous nastiness to men and women alike, kicking  people when they are down, unfits him to serve as the premier civic role model for the nation’s children. But the feminists can’t have it both ways: declaring that women should be equal to men in all things and then still demand a chivalric deference to female’s delicate sensibilities. Either women are the same as men or they’re not. It is particularly galling to see the selective resurrection of Victorian values from the same crowd that has been pushing transgender locker rooms on the world, in an effort to destroy the last shred of girls’ innate sexual modesty.

This opportunistic, on-again, off-again appearance of traditional sexual values characterizes the campus-rape myth as well. Needless to say, actual sexual assault is both criminal and intolerable. But college co-eds insist on the prerogative of maximal promiscuity at the same time that they revert to the role of helpless damsel in distress, when, after drinking themselves blotto to lower their sexual inhibitions, they regret a boozy hook-up and declare themselves raped. The logic is always that the male was responsible for the female’s well-being; the female cannot help drinking herself to a reckless state. It is for the chivalric male to look out for her.

Following the release of the studio bus tape, Trump said in his defense that Bill Clinton “has said far worse to me on the golf course.” That may be the most credible thing that Trump has ever uttered. But both Republicans and Democrats are fatally compromised in their responses to the Trump tapes, deliberately released right before the make-or-break second presidential debate. Republicans, having flogged the Bill Clinton sex scandals way past any possible point of relevance, are now not well positioned to dismiss these comments (nor are they trying to), though there is a huge difference between the reality TV star Trump bragging about his libido on a studio bus and Bill Clinton exploiting the power of the presidency to seduce a young intern. But Democrats are the most shameless in their outrage over the Trump braggadocio, having dismissed Bill Clinton’s White House and gubernatorial escapades for years, and standing as the party of maximal sexual liberation, unlike the Republicans. The New York Times rejects the relevance of Clinton’s predatory White House behavior on the ground that “Mr. Clinton is not running for president.” But the Times did not find Clinton’s behavior significant when Clinton was in office, either.

Ideally, no man would ever paw a female or push himself on her. The default norm of sexual modesty, coupled with the chivalric ideal that gentlemen should treat females like ladies, used to be the most effective defense against such high-testosterone behavior. Feminism, however, has declared both modesty and chivalry sexist, leaving females to improvise a response to the inevitable excesses of the male sex drive, when they are not trying to leverage it to their own advantage.

The only good thing to come out of this tacky episode may be the jettisoning of the ongoing resurrection of the tired Clinton White House escapades by Trump and his supporters. Otherwise, it stands merely as a reminder of how enduring the stance of offended female virtue is, even in the age of crude sexual exhibitionism.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.

Trump Will Win the National Battle for Legitimacy

BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN

https://pjmedia.com/

October 9, 2016

(Credit: Bloomberg/Andrew Harrer)

The referee should have stopped it in the tenth. Punching at will, Donald Trump said, "Hillary used the power of her office to make $250 million. Why not put some money in? You made a lot of it while you were secretary of State? Why aren't you putting money into your own campaign? Just curious." Reeling and against the ropes, Clinton gasped that she supported ... the Second Amendment. It was a brilliant rhetorical device: under the rubric of campaign financing, Trump slipped in an allegation that Clinton corruptly enriched herself by using the power of her office for personal gain--and Clinton didn't even respond. That's a win by a knockout.

That's the decisive issue of the campaign: the corrupt machinations of a ruling elite that considers itself above the law, and the rage of the American people against the oligarchical ruling class that has pulled the ladder up behind it. Trump's bombshell below Clinton's waterline came at the end of the debate, well prepared by jabs at Clinton's erased emails and Bill's rapes. Trump used the "J" word--that is, jail. That was perhaps the evening's most important moment. This is not an election fought over competing policies but a struggle for legitimacy. A very large portion of the electorate (how large a portion we will discover next month) believes that its government is no longer legitimate, and that it has become the instrument of an entrenched rent-seeking oligarchy.

By and large, I agree with this reading. "America's economy is corrupt, cartelized and anti-competitive," I wrote in August. It is typical of rent-seeking that Lockheed Martin's stock price has tripled during the past three years, and payment to its top management team has risen from $12 million a year to over $60 million a year, while Lockheed Martin's F-35 languishes in cost overruns and deployment delays. Produce a lemon and get rich: that's Washington. It is not a trivial matter, or unrepresentative of our national condition, that the FBI director who declined to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling of classified material just returned to government from a stint at Lockheed Martin, where he was paid $6 million for a single year's service. I don't know whether FBI Director Comey is corrupt. But it looks and smells terrible.

That's why it was so important for Trump to talk about jail time for his opponent. If things had not gotten to the point where former top officials well might belong in jail, Trump wouldn't be there in the first place. The Republican voters chose a reckless, independently wealthy, vulgar, rough-edged outsider precisely because they believe that the system is corrupt. They are right to so believe; if the voters knew a tenth of what I know about it, they would march on Washington with pitchforks.

The whole weekend news cycle centered around Trump's potty-mouth tape, which will count for exactly nothing in the final tally. No-one who has followed Donald Trump in public media for the past thirty years expected anything less from the great vulgarian. We are stuck with Trump precisely because the Republican establishment imploded over Iraq and the economy.

I assumed that Trump's diffidence during the first debate amounted to profiling his opponent. No-one would remember what was said in the first debate come the general election, and Trump appeared to be probing and watching Clinton's responses. This time he has bloodied her. Whether there is more to come--a thermonuclear revelation of some kind--I have no idea. But given Trump's experience in the entertainment business, we can assume that the really nasty stuff will come out later.

Whoever wins, a very large part of the electorate--perhaps more than a third--will believe that the government lacks legitimacy. We have not had circumstances like this since the Civil War. If Trump loses, his voters will blame a corrupt oligarchy and its allied media for electing a criminal to the White House; if Clinton loses, the minority constituencies of the Democratic Party will respond as if the Klu Klux Klan had taken over Washington. There has never been anything like this in the past century and a half of American history, and it is thankless to predict the outcome. Nonetheless I will: Trump will crush it. Clinton, the major media, the pollsters, and the mainstream Republican Party have badly misread the insurrectionist mood of the electorate.

TRUMP MAKES THE CASE FOR JAILING HILLARY

The White House or the big house.

Daniel Greenfield

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

October 10, 2016

Credit: AP / John Locher)

At the lowest point in the second presidential debate Hillary Clinton tried to blame her compulsive lying on Abraham Lincoln. Not the real Lincoln, but the fictional version depicted in the Spielberg movie.

“She lied. Now she's blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said in exasperation. “Honest Abe never lied.”

The only thing Hillary and Lincoln have in common is Illinois.

If Hillary had been looking for wisdom from Lincoln, she might have started with the famous quote often attributed to him. “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” It’s been a while since Hillary has been able to fool anybody.

The majority of the country holds an unfavorable view of her. Even in a blue state like California, 53 percent of the voters have an unfavorable view of the woman they are most likely going to end up voting for. It’s not just that Hillary is a liar and a crook. Plenty of politicians are. It’s that her dishonesty and corruption are so blatant as to be insulting to the intelligence of even the dimmest voter.

Hillary’s lies come apart within 5 minutes of being told. And yet nothing is ever her fault. Previously she had blamed her rogue email operation on Colin Powell. Now she decided to blame her lies on Lincoln.

By the second debate, the topic was no longer who should be president, but who should be in jail. Both candidates were clear that their opponent was utterly unfit to hold office.

Trump was the clearest of all about it. “Because you'd be in jail,” he said. “If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” he promised.

Jail is where Hillary belongs. Her stained sheet of crimes goes back quite a few decades by now.

And her campaign has done more to demonstrate the widespread networks of establishment corruption than a thousand investigations could have ever managed to do. From the Clinton Foundation to the media, her base of support is as rotten as she is. And just as ruthless and determined.

There she was stumbling around on stage, haggard and still laughing her horrifying brittle laugh and reciting canned applause lines in the hope that someone would cheer. And to complete the pairing, Martha Raddatz was there as her doppelganger, berating Trump the way that Hillary would have liked to if she weren’t still delusional enough to think someone out there might still be fooled by her current act.

That’s why the Clinton campaign and its extensive network of media allies want to make the campaign about anything and everything but Hillary. Including an old tape. “What we all saw and heard on Friday was Donald talking about women. What he thinks about women. What he does to women,” Hillary hectored.

We all know what her husband thinks about women and does to women. We also know what Hillary did to her husband’s victims. They appeared together with Trump at a press conference before the debate.

We also know what Hillary Clinton did to Kathy Shelton, a 12-year-old girl who had been raped and beaten into a coma by her client. Hillary accused that child of fantasizing and making it all up.

There is a tape of Hillary laughing about the case.  

But we also know, in the macro, what Hillary and her allies have done to America. And what they intend to do to it. They were outraged when Trump talked about illegal alien rapists. But how many women were sexually assaulted and even murdered by the “undocumented” migrants whom Hillary and her political party shelter in sanctuary cities and want to protect with a national amnesty?

How many will be assaulted by the Syrian Muslim migrants whom Hillary wants to bring to America, the way that thousands of women in Germany have been assaulted by the violent Muslim mobs?

Trump made the case at the debate that Hillary isn’t just a bad person, but that her policies will destroy this country. “To solve the problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name. She won't say the name,” he said of Islamic terrorism.

“Obamacare is a disaster, you know it, we all know it,” he said, plainly and definitively.

He ridiculed Hillary’s classified email pretenses, “She didn't know what the letter C meant on a document.” He dismissed her lies about trying to protect emails about yoga classes and her daughter’s wedding.

And most of all he made it obvious that the media was in Hillary’s corner. Once again the moderators debated him. Once again they repeatedly interrupted him and bent the rules in Hillary’s favor.

Hillary is convinced that rigging the debates will help her. But she’s forgotten that the biggest reason she is disliked is because she is the privileged beneficiary of a rigged system. Americans have a soft spot for rogue corrupt politicians. But they loathe and abhor corrupt insiders who brandish their fake virtue.

The people around Hillary have convinced her that she can only win by making her opponent as unlikable as possible while striving for a false cheerfulness about the whole thing. But all this does, as it did at the debate, is remind everyone of why they hate her.

Hillary is here because of a combination of her last name and dirty deals. In better times, the people might be more tolerant of such corruption. But when millions are out of work and see no hope in the future, there is much less tolerance for a politician who represents the rigged insider game.

The same reasons that explain why Hillary was on stage also explain why she isn’t in prison. And no one is fooled by any of it. That is why Hillary Clinton is loathed even by her own voters.

From Whitewater to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton got away with everything. But unlike the FBI, the public can’t be threatened or bought. And that is what Hillary and her allies are truly afraid of.

Tonight at the debate, Donald Trump made the case for why Hillary is unfit for office and fit only for prison. It was a simple case. It’s a case that even most Hillary voters are familiar with.

Because the time when Hillary could fool even some of the people has passed.

But there is an even more relevant quote, from the real Lincoln, rather than Spielberg’s fraudulent one. It is a quote that the Clintons and their ilk ought to ponder with the greatest of caution and care.

“The people… are the rightful masters… not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it,” Lincoln had said. It is this question that is at the center of the election.

The one thing that both sides can now agree on is that the other is utterly unfit. It will soon be the choice of the people that will determine whether Hillary will be in the White House or the big house.

 Tags: debate, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton

Obama’s hostile eulogy

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/
October 6, 2016


US President Barack Obama speaks during the funeral of former Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl national cemetery on September 30, 2016. (AFP)


US President Barack Obama’s eulogy of Shimon Peres at Mount Herzl last Friday was a thinly disguised assault on Israel. And he barely bothered to hide it.

Throughout his remarks, Obama wielded Peres’s record like a baseball bat. He used it to club the Israeli public and its elected leaders over and over again.

Peres, Obama intimated, was a prophet. But the suspicious, tribal people of Israel were too stiff necked to follow him.

In what was perhaps the low point of a low performance, Obama used Peres’s words to slander his domestic critics as racist oppressors.

“Shimon,” he began harmlessly enough, “believed that Israel’s exceptionalism was rooted not only in fidelity to the Jewish people, but to the moral and ethical vision, the precepts of his Jewish faith.”

You could say that about every Israeli leader since the dawn of modern Zionism.

But then Obama went for the jugular.

In a startling non sequitur he continued, “‘The Jewish people weren’t born to rule another people,’ he [Peres] would say. ‘From the very first day we were against slaves and masters.’” We don’t know the context in which Peres made that statement. But what is clear enough is that Obama used his words to accuse the majority of Israelis who do not share Peres’s vision for peace – including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who was sitting in the front row listening to him – of supporting slavery.

This libelous assault on Israel was probably the most unhinged remark ever directed at the Jewish state by an American president. What does the fact that Obama said this at Peres’s funeral tell us about Obama? What does it tell us about Peres? Obama was not merely wrong when he accused Peres’s detractors of support for slavery, he was maliciously wrong.

Due to Peres’s Oslo Accords, since 1995, all the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria have been governed by the PLO. Israel hasn’t been in charge of any aspect of their daily civic existence.

And they have only suffered as a result. Between 1967 and 1996, when the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria were governed by the military government, the Palestinians were free. They only became “enslaved” when the PLO took over.

Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians enjoyed far more expansive civil rights than they have since we left. The PLO transformed their lives into chaos by implementing the law of the jungle, enforced by mob-style militias. Their property rights were trampled. Their civil rights have been gutted.

The fact that PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies delayed their municipal elections indefinitely the day after Peres’s funeral is yet another testament to the absence of freedom in the PLOas opposed to Israeli-ruled areas.

But really, Obama couldn’t care less. He didn’t come here to tell the truth about Peres. He came here to use Peres as a means to bludgeon the government the people elected.

Obama began his attack as he often begins his political assaults on his opponents. He created a straw man.

Peres’s critics on the Right, he said, “argued that he refused to see the true wickedness of the world, and called him naïve.”

In other words, as far as Obama is concerned, Israelis are prisoners of their dark view of the world. Unlike Peres the optimist, his countrymen are tribal pessimists.

Peres, whose vision for peace rested on giving the outskirts of Tel Aviv and half of Jerusalem to terrorists, wasn’t naïve. He “knew better than the cynic.”

He was better than that. He was better than us.

This brings us then to the paradox of Peres’s life’s work. Over last quarter-century of his life, we, the people of Israel wanted to feel empowered by Peres’s superstar status. We wanted to get excited when Hollywood stars and A-list politicians came to his birthday bashes at the President’s Residence and the Peres Center.

But every time we tried to see Peres’s success as our success, some visiting VIP would smile before the cameras and kick us in the shins.

The higher Peres’s star rose in the stratosphere of celebrity stardom, the worse Israel’s global position became. The international A-listers who showed up at all of Peres’s parties always seemed to view him as their guy, not our guy. He was one of them – and above the likes of us.

How did this happen? How did the last surviving member of Israel’s founding generation become a prop for Israel’s chorus of international critics? The most extraordinary aspect of Peres’s long life is that he packed two full – and contradictory – careers into one lifespan.

Peres’s first career began with Israel’s founding.

It ended with the Likud’s victory in the 1977 Knesset election.

Over the course of that career, Peres used his formidable diplomatic skills to build and strengthen Israel’s defenses. He cultivated and expanded complex strategic relationships with the French and the British. Those ties led the two major powers to fight at Israel’s side in the 1956 Suez Campaign. They led to France’s decision to help Israel build its nuclear program and its arms industry.

In the 1970s as defense minister, Peres was able to rely on his warm ties to foreign leaders to shield the country as he established the Jewish communities in Samaria and Hebron. They empowered him to oversee the hostage rescue mission at Entebbe.

But following the Likud’s rise to power, Peres changed gears. Ever since 1981, when he almost managed to scuttle the air force’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, Peres used his diplomatic talents and ties to foreign leaders to advance his own agenda, regardless of whether that agenda was aligned or contradicted Israel’s national agenda, as set out by its elected leaders.

Time and time again, on the backs of the public that failed to elect him and of the politicians the public elected instead of him, Peres cultivated and used the relationships he enjoyed with foreign leaders to press his own policies. Each attempt to derail the policies of the government expanded Peres’s chorus of supporters abroad.

Peres’s second career reached its high water mark in 1994 when along with Rabin and Yasser Arafat he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo process. The world embraced and celebrated Peres for his peace deal that brought neither peace nor security to his people.

And the public rejected him for it. Between 1977 and 1996, Peres stood for election five times. He lost all five races along with a primary battle against Yitzhak Rabin for leadership of the Labor Party.

Contrary to Obama’s assertion, Peres’s critics on the Right didn’t oppose his Oslo process because they saw “the true wickedness of the world.” They opposed the Oslo process because they saw the reality on the ground.

Ahead of the 1996 election, where Peres ran against then-opposition leader Netanyahu, the Palestinians launched an onslaught of bus bombings that killed 60 people in eight days. After the second bus bombing in Jerusalem, a television crew stuck a microphone in front of a teenage boy who had just seen the bus blow up.

Standing amid the wreckage, he let out a primal wail and called out, “Peres, what is wrong with you? We are Jews! They are murdering us!” The next week, then-US president Bill Clinton arrived in Jerusalem to campaign for Peres, whom he extolled as a brilliant statesman. But to no avail.

Netanyahu won.

It was reality, not cynicism, which dictated the outcome.

Peres’s second career left its deepest mark on the Foreign Ministry. As foreign minister during the heady days of Oslo, Peres told Israel’s diplomats to stop talking about PLO incitement and anti-Semitism.

The best hasbara, he said, was peace. Israel needed no other policy.

Beyond the obviously destructive implications of tethering Israel’s diplomatic standing to the fortunes of a peace process with a terrorist group, Peres’s directives forced our diplomats into passivity.

Why bother defending Israel when the status of the peace process alone would determine our standing? Why bother using the diplomatic tools of carrots and sticks when whatever hostility Israel suffered from would be magically erased the minute Israel concluded a peace deal with the PLO? A few weeks ago, it was reported that Netanyahu rebuked the diplomatic corps. It isn’t sufficient for you to simply send in reports about what is happening in your host countries, he reportedly said. I want you to actually do something to affect the situation for the better.

In other words, Netanyahu ordered Israel’s diplomats to abandon the legacy of Peres’s second career and embrace the legacy of his first career. He effectively said: Use whatever tools you have – just as Peres used the little leverage Israel had in its first 15 years of independence – to advance Israel’s position.

That is your job. I can read about current events in the newspapers.

This brings us back to Obama and Peres’s other foreign admirers who descended on the country Friday morning in their private jets and limousines.

A few hours after the funeral ended, the White House published a correction to the original text it had released of Obama’s eulogy. The correction related to the dateline. The original version had the dateline as “Jerusalem, Israel.”

The revised, corrected version had a line going through the word Israel. As far as the Obama White House is concerned, Jerusalem – along with Mount Herzl, the Knesset, and all the rest – is not in Israel.

It was a petty, puerile thing to do. And it revealed a breathtaking animosity for Israel.

Any moderately sane observer knows that Israel won’t transfer sovereignty over its national war cemetery to a foreign power in exchange for peace.

The “correction” wasn’t about advancing the cause of peace. It was about venting hostility toward the members of a primitive tribe who prefer their darkness to the optimistic vision of their spurned prophet.

Obama did get one thing right in his speech. In his round about, condescending way, Obama noted that due to their rejection of Peres’s vision of peace through appeasement, some Israelis have forgotten the important role Peres played in his first career in building the architecture of national defense on which Israel has successfully defended itself throughout the years.

And he is right, that with Peres’s passing, we should remember the tremendous good he did for the country in his first career, when he was working for us.

We should embrace that Peres legacy and cherish it always.

The stillborn legacy of Barack Obama

By Charles Krauthammer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

October 6, 2016

(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Only amid the most bizarre, most tawdry, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, a.k.a. Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.

Obamacare.

On Monday, Bill Clinton called it “the craziest thing in the world.” And he was only talking about one crazy aspect of it — the impact on the consumer. Clinton pointed out that small business and hardworking employees (“out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week”) are “getting whacked . . . their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.”

This, as the program’s entire economic foundation is crumbling. More than half its nonprofit “co-ops” have gone bankrupt. Major health insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, having lost millions of dollars, are withdrawing from the exchanges. In one-third of the U.S., exchanges will have only one insurance provider. Premiums and deductibles are exploding. Even the New York Times blares “Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive.”

Young people, refusing to pay disproportionately to subsidize older and sicker patients, are not signing up. As the risk pool becomes increasingly unbalanced, the death spiral accelerates. And the only way to save the system is with massive infusions of tax money.

What to do? The Democrats will eventually push to junk Obamacare for a full-fledged, government-run, single-payer system. Republicans will seek to junk it for a more market-based pre-Obamacare-like alternative. Either way, the singular domestic achievement of this presidency dies.

The Obama Doctrine.

At the same time, Obama’s radically reoriented foreign policy is in ruins. His vision was to move away from a world where stability and “the success of liberty” (JFK, inaugural address) were anchored by American power and move toward a world ruled by universal norms, mutual obligation, international law and multilateral institutions. No more cowboy adventures, no more unilateralism, no more Guantanamo. We would ascend to the higher moral plane of diplomacy. Clean hands, clear conscience, “smart power.”

This blessed vision has just died a terrible death in Aleppo. Its unraveling was predicted and predictable, though it took fully two terms to unfold. This policy of pristine — and preening — disengagement from the grubby imperatives of realpolitik yielded Crimea, the South China Sea, the rise of the Islamic State, the return of Iran. And now the horror and the shame of Aleppo.

After endless concessions to Russian demands meant to protect and preserve the genocidal regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, last month we finally capitulated to a deal in which we essentially joined Russia in that objective. But such is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for our president that he wouldn’t stop there.

He blatantly violated his own cease-fire with an air campaign of such spectacular savagery —targeting hospitals, water-pumping stations and a humanitarian aid convoy — that even Barack Obama and John Kerry could no longer deny that Putin is seeking not compromise but conquest. And is prepared to kill everyone in rebel-held Aleppo to achieve it. Obama, left with no options — and astonishingly, having prepared none — looks on.

At the outset of the war, we could have bombed Assad’s airfields and destroyed his aircraft, eliminating the regime’s major strategic advantage — control of the air.

Five years later, we can’t. Russia is there. Putin has just installed S-300 antiaircraft missiles near Tartus. Yet, none of the rebels have any air assets. This is a warning and deterrent to the only power that could do something — the United States.

Obama did nothing before. He will surely do nothing now. For Americans, the shame is palpable. Russia’s annexation of Crimea may be an abstraction, but that stunned, injured little boy in Aleppo is not.

“What is Aleppo?” famously asked Gary Johnson. Answer: the burial ground of the Obama fantasy of benign disengagement.

What’s left of the Obama legacy? Even Democrats are running away from Obamacare. And who will defend his foreign policy of lofty speech and cynical abdication?

In 2014, Obama said, “Make no mistake: [My] policies are on the ballot.” Democrats were crushed in that midterm election.

This time around, Obama says, “My legacy’s on the ballot.” If the 2016 campaign hadn’t turned into a referendum on character — a battle fully personalized and ad hominem — the collapse of the Obama legacy would indeed be right now on the ballot. And his party would be 20 points behind.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more on this topic:

Samer Attar: In Aleppo, U.S. inaction green-lights war crimes

The Post’s View: The U.S. must act — finally — to end the calculated carnage in Syria

Dana Milbank: Republicans predicted an Obamacare apocalpse. It hasn’t happened.

The Post’s View: As Aleppo burns, the U.S. hems and haws

David Ignatius: ‘Surrender and you can eat again’: Aleppo on the brink