The Daily Mail reports:

Leaked emails have allegedly proved that the White House gave the green light to a chemical weapons attack in Syria that could be blamed on Assad's regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country.

A report released on Monday contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence where a scheme 'approved by Washington' is outlined explaining that Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons.

Barack Obama made it clear to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad last month that the U.S. would not tolerate Syria using chemical weapons against its own people.

According to Infowars.com, the December 25 email was sent from Britam's Business Development Director David Goulding to company...

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An important and encouraging bulletin came in last night from Scott Behenna, 1st Lt. Michael Behenna's father.

Today, the Supreme Court requested a response from the Government concerning Michael's petition. The Government had previously waived their right to respond. We knew Michael's petition did not have a chance of moving forward in the Supreme Court without the Court asking for the Government's position about Michael's petition. Today's request allows the Court to fairly analyze the petition and requires the Government to defend the military's actions against Michael.

We pray this step will increase the likelihood that Michael's case will be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. Thanks for your support and we will advise you of any new actions by the Court.

...

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From Sunday's 60 Minutes joint-interview of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Steve Krofts: When we come back, the president and Secretary Clinton discuss the disaster in Benghazi and the state of her health.

I didn't watch this live, but if I had I would have spent the commercial break parsing the duality of the question. Why "disaster in Benghazi" and "state of her health" together? Mind you, the interview has been going on for sometime at this point, and Clinton's health would seem to be something better addressed in the opening niceties. But no. Will "disaster" be cushioned by "health"?

See how it worked out:

Steve Krofts: Hillary Clinton's final days as secretary of state included one of her most difficult. On Wednesday, she spent more than five hours being grilled on Capitol Hill for the security failures in Benghazi that led to the deaths of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans; the biggest diplomatic disaster of this administration. The Accountability Review led by Admiral Mike Mullen and Ambassador Thomas Pickering found, among many failures, that Stevens' repeated requests for better security never made it to Clinton's desk. And representatives and senators pressed her on whether the administration covered up the nature of the terrorist attack.

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Libya Shield -- a security provider to USA in Benghazi -- and the AQ flag of jihad. As Hillary Cinton testified last week: The United States has to be "effective in partnering with the non-jihadists, whether they fly a black flag or any other color flag."

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At Hillary Clinton's House "Benghazi" hearing last week, Rep. Tom Marino brought up the Library of Congress report "Al Qaeda in Libya: A Profile." The August 2012 report was prepared by the Library's Federal Research Division in conjuction with the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office's Irregular Warfare Support Program. Marino wanted to know whether the secretary of state had read it.

...

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The sidebar to my Dispatch International article introducing European readers to Blacklisted by HIstory (2007) by M. Stanton Evans, and Stalin's Secret Agents (2012) by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, is now no longer behind the subscription wall. This second part provides synopses of some of the sensational findings Evans and Romerstein published in the new book.

Alger Hiss The treachery of Hiss, the most famous Soviet military intelligence agent/State Department official, is now grudgingly accepted (after decades of warlike controversy). The conventional wisdom, however, still holds that Hiss did little at the final wartime Yalta conference of the so-called Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin).

Not true, as Evans and Romerstein discovered in previously unpublished portions of the papers of Secretary of State Edward...

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I cannot overestimate the fearless excellence of M. Stanton Evans' work as a historian, and, I am fortunate to say, mentor. His 2007 book Blacklisted by History is not only a shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and "McCarthyism" -- and, by extension, obfuscation about the successful penetration and subversion of the US government -- it is also an exercise in courage, in confronting a false and crippling consensus with an unshakeable dedication to fact and logic. On a personal note, the book served me as a rosetta stone by which I was able to begin deciphering the mendacious history we "know" as our shining cultural legacy. The results of this unnerving research-odyssey will be published in my forthcoming book, American Betrayal.

That said, I am delighted to post an article written for this week's edition of Dispatch International. My task was to introduce a European audience, in brief, to Evans' work. The piece below is the main article, which is available for free at the DI website. I also wrote accompanying piece assembling a series of thumbnail sketches of some of the sensational revelations Evans and co-writer and Cold War expert Herbert Romerstein discovered in their brand new book, Stalin's Secret Agents. It is behind the online-subscription wall -- so subscribe!

...

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Rounding out Hillary-week at this blog, this week's syndicated column:

One day, I hope, Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi hearings will stand as testament to the smoke-and-mirrors dangerousness of U.S. foreign policy, circa 2013 – both as executed by the executive branch of government and as weakly grasped by the legislative branch.

Did we learn who in the Obama administration concocted and/or coordinated the story about a totally imaginary video protest that was supposed to have led to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on 9/11/12? No.

Did we learn why the maker of the so-called anti-Islamic YouTube video clip is the only person in the world in jail for the attacks (for “parole violations”)? No.

Did we learn whether it was coincidental that the video-protest lie ended after President Obama blamed the video (six times) in a Sept. 25 address before the United Nations in which he declared, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”? No.

Did we learn anything about the decision-making process that prevented U.S. military relief from being ordered to Benghazi during the seven-hour attack? No.

...

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When US forces killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, Hillary Clinton hailed the event as coinciding with the end of the jihadist era -- sorry, "extremist narrative" era (she was still parroting Obama-approved lingo) -- in the Middle East and North Africa, just where we see it resurgent today.



Hillary Clinton, May 2, 2011:



History will record that bin Ladin's death came at a time of great movements toward freedom and democracy, at a time when the people across the Middle East and North Africa are rejecting the extremist narratives and charting a path of peaceful progress based on universal rights and aspirations. There is no better rebuke to al-Qaida and its heinous ideology.







Clinton's statement crystallizes the Western delusion, which is also the Western desire. In May 2011, Clinton's "freedom and democracy" -- a.k.a., the even more euphemistic and inaptly metaphoric "Arab Spring" -- were indeed moving across the Middle East and North Africa, but they were powered by the "extremist narratives" Clinton told us these Islamic lands were "rejecting." This phenomenon is something Clinton, Obama, Sarkosy (Bernard Henri Levy), Cameron will never, can never admit. Their claim to authority and respect, their reputations, their careers, their future exercise of power are all threatened -- doomed -- by any reckoning, any admission of the purely Islamic will to sharia, to conquest, to a caliphate, which the postmodern, 21st-century world is witnessing, and which these leaders have done so much to enable (George W. Bush et pere, also).

...

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Black flags of AQ over post-Qaddafi Benghazi, compiled by Libya 360

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The unexpected news of SecState Clinton's appearances on the Hill yesterday is the "spreading jihadist threat." The news is not that it's spreading, or that it's a threat, but rather that Hillary Clinton invoked the term "jihadist." Repeatedly. In both the Senate hearing and in the House hearing after lunch, during which, presumably, Obama administration speech commissars could have emergency-texted her that the terminology of O-choice remains "violent extremism." But no. Clinton talked "global jihad" all day, even if she did echo the same old Bush-Obama-disaster-policy that believes strengthening/stabilizing the new "regimes" of the Arab Spring is the way to combat it. Never mind that the jihadists and the regimes share a common goal: Islamically correct (sharia) totalitarianism.

Live-tweeting yesterday's proceedings, I first logged the J-phrase at 9:52 am EST, writing: "Clinton notes `global jihadist threat.' A first?"

...

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I live-tweeted Hillary Clinton's appearances before both the Senate and House today.

To quote the SecState, "What difference, at this point, does it make?!"

I don't know, so read it on Twitter or Facebook.

While contemplating (in horror, I hope) the Obama administration's unchecked delivery this month of F-16s to Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt, consider what target Egypt is most likely to deploy them against: Israel.

But the Muslim Brotherhood is pledged to destroy Israel....

Right. That flag of ours may still be red, white and blue, but it waves over a brave new land where Uncle Sam increasingly and unopposedly supports the 21st-century-jihad, the same jihad fought and advanced over 14 centuries to spread Islamic law. Israel happens to sit on the front line of that jihad (Middle Eastern front), so naturally (?) Uncle Sam arms her open enemies -- and our own (or those we once thought of as our own).

What next -- F-16s to Iran? Our world-alignment seems that twisted. But no, our allies-in-jihad (Egypt, Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Turkey, Libya) wouldn't like that, so maybe that's off the table.

So, contemplating those F-16s about to enter Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood hands, consider...

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Below is the text of a speech I presented to the Maryland Conservative Action Network, January 12, 2013, in Annapolis. It was published yesterday at The American Thinker.

What might a "conservative" foreign policy look like?

In the post-9/11 era, it's fair to say we have mainly followed a "neoconservative" foreign policy. This policy has been based on the rock-solid belief that there exist universal values that all peoples everywhere share and indeed yearn for if they don't already enjoy them. Our neoconservative foreign policy, then - our war-fighting policy, too - has been a matter of spreading such universal values.

This has been a disaster. Think of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan -- policies predicated on this denial of the existence of cultural difference. Certainly in this decade since 9/11 we should have learned that cultures, the West and Islam, namely, are different and that such universalism is a fantasy. The West enshrines the liberty of the individual, while Islam, like other totalitarian systems, enforces a collective will. Still, to this day, we don't permit this simple reality to be discussed let alone reflected in any meaningful policy way.

...

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Four months and counting until American Betrayal comes out. (Canada) Sun News' Michael Coren and I discuss. 

...

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Saudi interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Naif. This first cousin of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was last noted in this blog for ordering the arrest last month of a Saudi novelist, Turki al Hamad, for tweeting that Islam required a "correction." Al Hamad now faces the death penalty for apostasy.

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From Al Arabiya (hat tip Ruth King):

Saudi Arabia and the United States have signed a “Trusted Traveler” agreement to facilitate and accelerate the trusted passenger screening on the principle of reciprocity in both Saudi and U.S. airports.

Yes, you are going mad.

The Saudi state agency reported that Minister of Interior Prince Mohammed bin Naif and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano “signed an agreement on arrangements relating to the implementation of a program of the 'Trusted Traveler' between the two countries.”

There is something extra grotesque in the newspeak, Mr.-Rogers-style.

According to the agreement U.S. Customs...

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Back in 2010, I wrote here about Pvt. Corey Clagett, a prisoner of the US military at Ft. Leavenworth. Pvt. Clagett was convicted of the crime of following an unlawful order and killing two al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq. His superior who ordered the killings is free on parole, and the man who killed a third one is not only free but has been promoted. Corey, the most junior of all those involved received an 18-year-sentence and a dishonorable discharge.

Corey, the most junior of them, Corey, the least prepared, Corey, the youngest, Corey, who has been made to pay more than anyone else for this crime, has now spent over four years in solitary confinement. It's not by any measure fair.

Corey, I find from visiting the admirable United American Patriots website, has a clemency hearing coming up on or about February 2. I am going to write a letter on his behalf according to the instructions...

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This week's syndicated column:

Not one of the 23 executive orders that President Obama signed -- flanked by schoolchildren whom none of us want to see murdered and before an audience that included relatives of murdered schoolchildren -- would have prevented the massacre at Sandy Hook.

Did the main idea of the sentence above come through -- that the president's latest orders would not have stopped the heavily armed monster who entered a Connecticut school last month and killed 20 children and six adults? Or was your brain overwhelmed by anxiety signals arising from the imagery of vulnerable youngsters?

The overwhelming imagery is no accident. It's emotional manipulation, and I've never seen a more lowdown exercise of it than the White House's "gun violence" event this week. What President Obama put the nation through was the propaganda equivalent of a slasher movie, a disgustingly crude attempt to jam our emotional buttons and frighten us into surrendering more of our rights...

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UPDATE: 7:08 pm EST: GoV back up and running.

UPDATE 2:15 pm EST: Still no definitive understanding of why GoV went dark last night, but it seems that other Blogger sites also went down, which means it could well have been a technical problem.

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Last night, the invaluable blog Gates of Vienna disappeared from the Internet. Gate of Vienna, which chronicles like no other news and commentary outlet the Islamization of Europe and the wider West, simply vanished, removed without warning or explanation by its host Blogger (UPDATE: or by an attack, Vlad Tepes notes, pointing out the causes remain unknown).

Earlier this week, the Commentator (hat tip The American Thinker) reported that Facebook had removed the page of noted Arab-Israeli writer Khaled Abu Toameh.

From the Commentator:

The Commentator has learned that following...

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Pts. 1, 2, and 3 may be found here.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Last night, Bill O'Reilly devoted his "Impact Segment" to the Silence of the Non-Fox Media on the Gore-Al Jazeera deal. As noted in the past week of coverage at this website, Fox has been covering the deal with righteous, if micro-targeted indignation (Al Gore, Hypocrite) while overlooking choice hypocrisy (and worse) on its own team (Murdoch's House of Saud connections).

O'Reilly's "Memo" last night (video above) only underscored this troubling pattern.

O'Reilly:

Network news pretty much ignored Al Gore selling his cable network to Al Jazeera. Scant mention. MSNBC in prime time didn't mention it at all. Again, are you surprised? But think about this: What if Mitt Romney had sold one of his companies to Al Jazeera?

...

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Pt. 2 is here.

Pt. 1 is here.

Saudi journalist Hazma Kashgari has spent almost the entire past year in a Saudi prison -- the Islamic Gulag -- for tweeting an imaginary conversation with Mohammed. King Abdullah -- the man Barack Obama bowed to, the man George W. Bush kissed and held hands with, and the man whose nephew, Prince Talal bin Alwaleed, is a major stock-holder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. -- put him there. Kashgari's story, and treatment of his story at Fox and elsewhere, is below.



From the vault:

1) Blog post, February 14, 2012: "(Prince Talal's) Fox News AWOL on (Prince Talal's) Twitter Story"

...

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Pt. 1 is here.

How could this -- Alwaleed's editorial interference to omit "Muslim" from "Muslim rioting" in a Fox crawl in 2005 --  not have been the begining?

That's the question I weigh in this week's column, testing it in those perplexing omissions in News Corp.'s coverage of the Gore deal -- omissions regarding Al Jazeera's strong ideological linkage with and political bias toward the Muslim Brotherhood, and omissions regarding Muslim Brotherhood leading figure Yusef Al Qaradawi and his role at Al Jazeera.

But there is a more important connection to make and Fox omission to note.

In the column and related news report, I discuss Al Risala, an Islamic channel that both Alwaleed and -- through Murdoch's 18.97 percent ownership of Al Risala's parent company Rotana -- Murdoch own. (Rotana is Alwaleed's Arabic media company.) On the "supreme advisory board" of Al Risala sits Abdullah Omar Naseef. Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has decribed Naseef as...

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It is nothing if not disorienting to live in times when a former Vice President of the United States finds the deeply patriotic, Constitution-respecting worldview of Glenn Beck to be political anathema in direct comparison with that of the sharia-compliant Qatari dictatorship that owns and controls Al Jazeera, better known as "the Muslim Brotherhood channel." I'm referring to Gore's decision to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera and not Beck's The Blaze TV, a subject that has occupied this blog this week.

By the way, "controls" is the appropriate verb to describe how the muscular little dictatorship runs its international media org. Qatar, after all, is a country Freedom House deems "not free" where, as reported in Freedom House's the 2012 Freedom of the Press Report, it is against the law for journalists to "criticize the Qatari government, the ruling family or Islam." The country's seven newspapers are all owned by the ruling family or its business associates, while "the state [i.e., the ruling family] owns and operates all broadcast media." That would include the country's two TV networks, Al Jazeera and Qatar TV. As for the Internet, "the government censors political, religious, and pornographic content through the sole, state-owned internet service provider." Interestingly enough, Qatari totalitarians are harder on foreigners than nationals when it comes infringements on goverenment speech controls. As Freedom House reports: "While local reporters often receive warnings and threats when they push the limits of permissible coverage, noncitizens employed by Qatari media outlets risk harsher repercussions, including termination, deportation, and imprisonment."

...

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This week's syndicated column:

Ever since Al Gore sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, the network founded and funded by the oil-rich emirate of Qatar, the former vice president has drawn continuous fire in conservative media. Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have all castigated Gore, a man of the left and leading avatar of “global warming,” for such hypocrisies as timing the deal to avoid lefty tax hikes and bagging $100 million in greenhouse-gas money.

These same news outlets share something else in common: They all belong to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. That means they also belong to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Alwaleed owns the largest chunk of News Corp. stock outside the Murdoch family. Shortly after his purchase of 5.5 percent of News Corp. voting shares in 2005, Alwaleed gave a speech that made it clear just what he had bought. As noted in The (U.K.) Guardian,...

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While I researching this week's column (to come), I ran into some breaking news and published it at WorldNetDaily.com:

WND EXCLUSIVE Gore deal follows Murdoch into Arab TV Sale of Current to Al Jazeera highlights Fox owner's link to Muslim Brotherhood channel By Diana West

The news that Al Gore chose to sell his Current TV to Al Jazeera, which some think of as Muslim Brotherhood TV, recently has raised eyebrows. But what few people realize is that Fox chief Rupert Murdoch already co-owns what amounts to a Muslim Brotherhood channel in the Middle East.

The channel is Al Risala, which translates into “the (Islamic) message.” It was launched in 2006 by Saudi prince Talal bin Alwaleed, the nephew of the King of Saudi Arabia and a Murdoch business associate who also owns a 7 percent stake in Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent company of Fox News and other U.S. media outlets.

...

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Scott and Vicki Behenna have now taken the final legal step on their son Michael's behalf: petitioning the US Supreme Court. If you are unfamiliar with the gross travesty of justice that is Michael's case -- he serves a 15-year prison sentence because the US military determined he lost his right to self-defense while interrogating a member of al Qaeda in Iraq, here is coverage of his final military court appeal in April 2012, where his conviction of unpremeditated murder was narrowly upheld 3-2 (more stories here).

Below read Scott and Vicki's letter to Michael's thousands of supporters. They invoke the great Holocaust witness Victor Frankl to help us understand Michael's indomitable spirit; they could easily have quoted Kafka to describe the ordeal the US military has inflicted on him.

...

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Before we heard that Al Gore's Current TV had rejected Glenn Beck's The Blaze TV as a buyer for, as Beck put it, "legacy" reasons and selected Al Jazeera as its white knight instead, Fjordman passed along this December 25 Deutche Welle interview with Aktham Suliman, Al Jazeera's former Berlin correspondent. Suliman argues that Al Jazeera's coverage is a policy instrument of its owners the Qataris, who, as he puts it, "tend toward the Muslim Brotherhood." Saudi-investor-funded Al Arabiya TV, on the other hand, is more Salafist. Big difference? Hah -- not when it comes to extending sharia. "Generally speaking, the Arab media landscape is very uniform," Suliman adds.

From DW:

The long-time Berlin correspondent for Al Jazeera, Aktham Suliman, recently resigned from his post. The journalist tells DW that the Qatari government is exercising undue influence on Al Jazeera's reporting.

DW: You've criticized...

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is a new weekly newspaper, for which, as some readers know, I am Washington correspondent. Our motto, from Thomas Jefferson, is "Freedom of the press cannot be limited without being lost." Co-edited by Lars Hedegaard of Denmark and Ingrid Carlqvist of Sweden, veteran journalists of note in Europe and determined free-speech-warriors, the paper now appears in three languages: English, Danish and Swedish.

But powerful forces with deep pockets are trying to destroy Dispatch International even as we try to set up shop in the Public Square. Small as we are at this early date, we have come under intense and sustained and no doubt expensive hacker attack to deny us a place on the web. Such attacks have happened before, during our run-up to regular publication, as noted most recently last month here. Now, with the new year, the attacks have begun again. Someone -- some people, some groups, some extremely repressive...

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Patrolling the boondoggling Kajaki Dam

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Armed Forces Journal posted this Letter to the Editor in December 2012. It is a concise, nuts-and-bolts argument for what I believe should be done: Declare the defeat of COIN, get out of Afganistan ASAP, and hold Congressional hearings to determine who was responsible for the strategy, and why they were permitted to procede in failure unchecked. Maybe that would help prevent such lunacy from taking hold again, although I doubt it. Still, the deceptions and self-deceptions should not slip away unrecorded by history.

The letter is headlined "Get out of Afghanistan":

I cannot believe that anyone in their rational mind would believe that there is anything to salvage out of the Afghanistan fiasco as described by Joseph Collins in “No time to go wobbly” [September]. The thought of even staying...

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There's nothing theoretical about the war on free speech, as Mark Steyn well knows.

From Mark Steyn at The Corner:

Thank you for your kind donations to our legal defense fund against a nuisance suit from self-endowed Nobel laureate Michael Mann. We can always use a little more — we’re in court in D.C. later this month, and the framed copy of my online legal diploma (valid most jurisdictions except the Northern Mariana Islands and Abkhazia) from a website in Tajikistan has apparently been delayed in the Christmas mail.

But here’s the thing. South of the border, National Review is being sued for defamation for publishing a piece by me. North of the border, they’ve gone to the next stage: one of Canada’s top bloggers is being sued for defamation merely for linking to me...

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This week's syndicated column:

Americans, Gallup tells us, admire Hillary Clinton more than any other woman in the world – again. This latest accolade marks the 17th time Gallup has found Clinton to be the Most Admired Woman (MAW?) since she became first lady nearly 20 years ago. Only Eleanor Roosevelt (13 MAWs) comes close. Only Mother Teresa (1995 and 1996) and Laura Bush (2001) have interrupted Clinton’s winning streak, and even then, Clinton came in second.

And therein lies America’s cosmic flaw. A country that could time and again embrace Hillary Clinton as its MAW has lost its mind or its memory or both.

Does the phrase “congenital liar” tinkle any bells? I know such non-admirable sentiments are thought to be in the worst of taste, if not also banishable offenses. Still, as conjured by the late New York Times columnist William Safire in 1996, the phrase described the...

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Four years ago, as Hillary Clinton awaited Senate confirmation, I had the terrifically bad manners to write the following column. It is in the utmost of bad taste, then, that I rerun it today. What is history, accountability and patriotism next to power, beatification and hospitalization?

January 9, 2009: A Rubber Stamp for Hillary If I were Gov. Bill Richardson, still smarting somewhere in New Mexico over his lost Cabinet post in the incoming Obama administration, I would be plenty sore about Sen. Hillary Clinton. According to all rosy media predictions, Clinton is destined to sail through Senate confirmation hearings and become secretary of state next week, a veritable regatta's worth of clapping senators trailing in her wake. Richardson, meanwhile, is out on his ear.

Why? As the story goes, Richardson wasn't forthcoming enough about a federal probe into whether officials in his New Mexico administration tipped a state project to a firm run by a major financial contributor...

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