Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 7

Obama's Regulations Already Double the Combined Cost of Clinton and Bush 43 Regs

Read it and weep.

Israel Attacks Target in Syria

The NYT has details. American officials are said to have confirmed that Israel was targeting a truck convoy bound for Lebanon -- probably hauling anti-aircraft weapons for Hezbollah. The Assad regime claims the target was a scientific-research facility.

Are We Really Back to Relying on the Egyptian Military to Save the Day?

Back when Mubarak was clinging to power and the Tahrir Square rioting was intensifying, I cautioned that it would be foolish for the West to assume that the Egyptian military -- principal recipient of tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars over the last 40 years -- would step in and stop the country from falling into the grip of Islamists. The Egyptian military is a reflection of Egyptian society which, as we have now seen in election after election, is dominated by Islamists. Indeed, despite the good relations some top Egyptian military brass have had with the Pentagon, the fact is that some of the most important members of al Qaeda and other jihadist organizations have served in the Egyptian armed forces.

It is thus remarkable to hear commentators now speculating that, as Egypt is imploding, the armed forces may finally be poised to step in and save the day -- perhaps even oust the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohamed Morsi. This supposition is based on a warning just issued by General Abdel Fatah El Sissi, the defense minister: "The continuation of the conflict between the different political forces and their differences over how the country should be run could lead to the collapse of the state and threaten future generations." 

Understand: Gen. Sissi is Morsi's guy. As I observed here back in August, when Morsi succeeded in sacking the military's Mubarak-era leaders, Sissi is well known in Egyptian military ranks as a Brotherhood supporter. Moreover, Sissi's elevation was not Morsi's only move to tame the military. As recounted in another column at the time, Morsi installed Gen. Sedky Sobhi as army chief of staff. Sobhi is an Islamist who has called for the permanent withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East, deriding what he takes to be American hostility to sharia and American creation of the "popular grievances" that fuel al Qaeda's popularity.

As outlined in my book Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (which is about to be released in paperback), Morsi's actions fit the pattern of Islamization in Turkey. There, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan steadily hollowed out the Kemalist, pro-Western military, the most important obstacle to his Islamist agenda. Things, just as we predicted, have gone south much faster in Egypt, where there never was a decades-long secularization project and where the military has always had a strong Islamist elements.

Gen. Sissi has not issued a warning to Pres. Morsi and the Brotherhood. The warning, instead, is intended for Morsi's opposition -- mainly Leftists led by Mohammed ElBaradei. The general is essentially calling for the opposition to dial down their differences with the regime and agree to dialogue. This has been Morsi's mantra for several weeks -- ever since he claimed dictatorial powers in order to protect the "constituent assembly" so it could ram through a sharia constitution without interference from the courts. The military is backing Morsi's play.

Here's the really interesting part: The Left does not have the numbers needed to defeat the Islamists at the ballot box. That is why the latter have won election after election, usually by overwhelming numbers, thus putting Islamists firmly in charge of the government and ensuring passage of the sharia constitution. So what has finally happened? The Left-leaning press in the West is suddenly discovering that maybe popular elections do not equal democracy after all. Maybe there really is something to the notion that democracy is not merely a procedural means by which majorities achieve power; maybe democracy, as us Islamophobes have been contending all along, really is a culture that is committed to equality and respect for such minority rights as freedom of conscience and speech.

By the way, I don't mean to suggest that the Left is the Brotherhood's only opposition. Egypt does have non-Leftist, pro-American factions, but they are negligible compared to the Left, which in turn is small compared to the Islamists.  

I've caught my share of slings and arrows over the years for stating something that ought to be obvious to anyone with eyes to see: Islamists and Leftists frequently collaborate with each other. The Grand Jihad and Spring Fever both explain why this happens. But I've always included this caveat: the two sides have significant differences and thus their partnerships tend to explode once the common enemy that drew them together has been defeated. That is what we are seeing in Egypt now: The Egyptian Left needed the Islamists in order to overthrow Mubarak, but is now chafing under the Islamists' theocratic totalitarianism. The progressive Western media is thus discovering that Morsi & Co. are not so "moderate" after all.

It is nice to see some reality creep into the "Arab Spring" narrative. But we really should stop being unrealistic about the Egyptian military. The armed forces did not step in to stop the Brotherhood while still under the command of Mubarak's generals. Why would they step in now when they are under the command of Islamist generals chosen by the Brotherhood.

Apes, Pigs, and F-16s

When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here:

Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil -- these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!

You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates that Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them,” he is taking his cues straight from the Koran. Or rather, from the Holy Koran, as “progressive” American politicians take pains to call it in the off hours from their campaign to drive every last vestige of Judeo-Christian culture from the public square.

#ad#The excerpt above is not from the Life and Times of Mohamed Morsi. It originates with that other Mohammed. Specifically, it is Sura 5:60 of the Koran, the tome Muslims take to be the immutable, verbatim commands of Allah, as revealed to the prophet. And as Andrew Bostom illustrates (with a disquieting amplitude of examples), the verse is not an outlier. It states an Islamic leitmotif.

Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis (with whom Middle Eastern Muslims enthusiastically aligned). Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is -- and will remain -- a pillar of Islamist ideology.

You may recall hearing this little ditty from the Hamas charter -- often echoed by ministers of the Palestinian Authority and in the preachments of Brotherhood jurist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, on whose every word millions hang weekly on al-Jazeera (or is it al-Gore?):

The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Muslims make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!”

Again, these are not sentiments dreamt up by “violent extremists” waging a modern, purely political “resistance” against oppressive “Zionists.” The prophet’s admonition that Muslims will be spared the hellfire by killing Jews is repeated in numerous authoritative hadiths (see, e.g., Sahih Muslim Book 41, No. 6985; Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 56, No. 791).

Hadiths, it is worth emphasizing, are the recorded actions and instructions of Mohammed, who is taken by Muslims to be the “perfect example” they are to emulate. And in case you suppose, after years of listening to Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama, that the prophet must ultimately have come around on the Jews, you might want to rethink that one. Another hadith, relating Mohammed’s dying words, recounts his final plea: “May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians.” (Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 8, No. 427.)

Now of course, none of this is to say that it is impossible for Islam to evolve beyond anti-Semitism. As individuals, millions of Muslims want no part of the ancient hatreds. As scholars and activists, a number of Muslim reformers admirably endeavor to erase this legacy by limiting it to its historical context, reducing it to allegory, or casting doubt on its provenance. Let’s hope these efforts eventually bear fruit. After all, as noted above, anti-Semitism stains the West’s legacy, too; and as discussed in this space before, the history of Christianity in America is a history of evolving beyond punishments and practices akin to those we today presume to look down our noses at as if we were total strangers to invidious discrimination and assaults on freedom of speech and conscience.

#page#Nevertheless, the humility with which we must acknowledge this history is not an excuse for failing to grapple with what it means. Elite Western opinion came to condemn what it once practiced by correctly reasoning that those noxious practices cut against the grain of our guiding doctrine, which is predominantly Christian. Evolution was in no way easy, but it was logical.

In Islam, to the contrary, the doctrine itself is the most daunting barrier against evolution. And now, with the self-defeating encouragement of the West, Islamic-supremacist ideology has, throughout the Middle East, broken out of the shackles that kept it in check. The result of this “democratization” (the regnant euphemism for sharia installed by popular vote) is an increasingly rabid rise of intolerance.

#ad#The answer to this challenge is to take the Islamists head-on. It is to show them for what they truly are: enemies of civil rights, totalitarian tormentors of women and non-Muslims. The answer is not to arm them -- as the Obama administration, with the maddening support of some leading Republicans, is arming Morsi’s regime -- with a score of F-16 fighter jets and a couple of hundred Abrams tanks.

When not manufacturing history, tears, and indignation this week during her long-overdue testimony on the Benghazi massacre, outgoing secretary of state Hillary Clinton stunned careful listeners by repeatedly mentioning the “global jihad” against America. These were stark violations of Obama-administration strictures against any reference to Islam in discussions of the threat to the West.

They also marked quite a departure for Mrs. Clinton. She has played no small part in propagating the “Islamophobia” canard. She has championed the imposition of sharia blasphemy standards on speech that is protected by the First Amendment. And, with an assist from Senator John McCain, she has cowed 99 percent of Beltway Republicans into silence over the longstanding ties of her top adviser, Huma Abedin, to the Muslim Brotherhood and to an al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef, whose now-defunct “charity” (the Rabita Trust) was designated as a global terrorist organization under American law. Who knows: Maybe someday, after enough F-16 transfers and sharia constitutions, Charles Krauthammer will be moved to a fleeting mention of these irrefutable facts, making it socially acceptable for our heroes to come out from under their desks and talk about the national-security implications. I can dream, can’t I?

In the Clinton tradition, there was more calculated confusion than clarity in the secretary’s meandering testimony. Mrs. Clinton frets over the “jihadists” but insists that we must be able to “partner” with the region’s Islamists#...#like Morsi and the Brotherhood. Do you suppose she’s noticed that the Muslim Brotherhood demands the release of the Blind Sheikh, just like al-Qaeda does? That Morsi and Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch) publicly yearn for the destruction of Israel, just like al-Qaeda does? That the Brotherhood’s top priority is the imposition of sharia, the same imperative that drives al-Qaeda’s rampage?

Alas, this is not a series of strange coincidences. These are the major points that define a Muslim -- violent or nonviolent -- as an Islamist. When you “partner” with Islamists, you are abetting the global jihad, not opposing it. When you arm Islamists, you become a willing participant in your own undoing.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.

Back in the Saddle

Fellow Cornerites, I've returned from a much needed mental health break -- which left me feeling a lot better about life, if not about the direction of the country.

As Sen. McCain works his magic in Cairo, my weekend column (here) asks whether it matters to the GOP that, when it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood, Rep. Bachmann has been right all along -- which is why People for the American Way, the original Borker, is so busy Borking her.

McCain’s Mideast Blunders

I wonder if the jihadists of eastern Libya are still “heroes” to John McCain. That’s what he called them -- “my heroes” -- after he changed on a dime from chummy Qaddafi tent guest to rabid Qaddafi scourge.

See, the senator and his allies in the Obama-Clinton State Department had a brilliant notion: The reason the “rebels” of eastern Libya hated America so much had nothing to do with their totalitarian, incorrigibly anti-Western ideology. No, no: The problem was that we sided with Qaddafi, giving the dictator -- at the insistence of, well, McCain and the State Department -- foreign aid, military assistance, and international legitimacy. If we just threw Qaddafi under the bus, the rebels would surely become our grand democratic allies.

This, of course, was a much more sophisticated theory than you’d get from lunatics like Michele Bachmann. Sit down for this, because I know it’s hard to believe anyone could spout such nutter stuff, but Bachmann actually opposed U.S. intervention in Libya. She claimed -- stop cackling! -- that many of McCain’s heroes might actually be jihadists ideologically hostile to the U.S. and linked to groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror enterprise’s North African franchise. She even thought -- yeah, I know, crazy -- that if Qaddafi were deposed, the heroes would get their hands on his arsenal, ship a lot of it to AQIM havens in places such as Mali and Algeria, and maybe even turn rebel strongholds such as Benghazi into death traps for Americans.

#ad#Good thing we listened to McCain, no?

This week, while the guys the senator and the Obama administration aligned us with in Libya (and would like to align us with in Syria) were busy taking Americans and other foreigners hostage in Algeria, in addition to using Qaddafi’s arsenal to fight the French in Mali, McCain was working his magic in Cairo.

An unfortunate hiccup: McCain and his entourage, including fellow Libya hawk Lindsey Graham, showed up on President Mohamed Morsi’s doorstep just as it was revealed that Morsi, while a top Muslim Brotherhood official in 2010, had inveighed against Jews, calling them “blood-suckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs” and claiming it was incumbent on Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” toward them.

Thank goodness Morsi was able to explain to McCain that his remarks had been “taken out of context.” I mean, you can see how that could happen, right? You’re making a few benign remarks about perpetuating hatred for enemies you describe as subhuman and all of a sudden they’re calling you an anti-Semite. Why, next thing you know, they’ll be saying Morsi could be an Islamic supremacist who is hellbent on imposing a sharia constitution on Egypt when he’s not otherwise rolling out the red carpet for Hamas and demanding the release of the Blind Sheikh!

Not to worry: McCain & Co. have promised to go to bat for Egypt’s swell president. Sure, he has imposed a sharia constitution just as crazies like Michele Bachmann predicted the Muslim Brotherhood would do if it took power. That would be the same sharia that, less than two years ago, McCain condemned as “anti-democratic -- at least as far as women are concerned.” Back then, McCain was warning that the Brotherhood had to be kept out of the government if there was to be any hope for democracy in Egypt. After all, he explained, the Brothers “have been involved with other terrorist organizations.”

Now, however, McCain says he will push for American taxpayers to fork up another $480 million for Morsi. Or, to be accurate, borrow another $480 million. You see, the United States is already so deep in the red that a $16.3 trillion debt ceiling is not high enough. In fact, we’re such a basket case that our debt-service and “entitlement” payments alone put us in a quarter-trillion-dollar deficit hole even before we borrow and print another trillion-plus for such ancillary expenses as the Defense Department, the Obama family’s vacations, and the $80-odd million that funds “democratization” programs at McCain’s International Republican Institute. But hey, no problem -- what’s another $480 million on top of the $2 billion–plus the Obama administration has already extended to Morsi’s regime#...#to say nothing of the sizable U.S. taxpayer chunk of the $4.8 billion IMF loan the Brotherhood government is also about to get its mitts on?

#page#Naturally, “extremist” conservatives like Michele Bachmann are wet blankets when it comes to this gravy train, too. Get this: She thinks that when you get to the point where you have to borrow in order to pay the interest on the loans you already can’t pay off, somebody needs to cut off your credit line -- not inflate it by another two or three trill. Even more daft: She thinks that if you subsidize an organization, like the Brotherhood, that promotes sharia and Hamas, you’re apt to get more sharia and more terrorism.

#ad#But look, that’s the kind of passé thinking we’ve come to expect from Bachmann. She’s the one, you may recall, who had the audacity to argue last year that it might not be a good idea for the secretary of state to keep as a key staffer a woman who worked for several years with a notorious al-Qaeda financial backer whose “charity” is formally designated as a terrorist organization -- indeed, worked with him at a sharia-promotional journal he founded and in charge of which he put her parents, Muslim Brotherhood operatives (the surviving one of whom runs an Islamist organization, the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, that is part of an umbrella entity called the Union for Good -- a designated terrorist organization run by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist).

Congresswoman Bachmann was acting on the obviously irrational belief that Muslim Brotherhood influences in our government might lead to pro-Islamist policies detrimental to American security and interests -- as if the State Department might tell pro-American Egyptian military rulers that they should stand down so the Brotherhood could take over; as if the Obama administration might order that information about Islamist ideology be purged from the materials used to train our intelligence agents; as if the Brotherhood, even as it counted its American aid dollars, would impose sharia, prosecute its detractors, and green-light the persecution of minority Christians.

Such insane, Islamophobic scaremongering! Insane enough that McCain, between praising his Islamist “heroes” and championing ever more funding for Islamist Egypt, made certain to lambaste Bachmann on the floor of the Senate over her concerns about Brotherhood infiltration of our government -- leading other influential Republicans to follow suit. And now, aping that display, People for the American Way -- “PAW,” the outfit created by a hard-left Hollywood icon to smear Robert Bork and derail his Supreme Court nomination -- is campaigning to have Bachmann booted from the House Intelligence Committee.

There is a war on over the course of American foreign policy and the security of the United States. The Left has aligned with the Brotherhood -- some naïvely relying on the fiction that the Brothers are not the enemy vanguard, others seeing the Brothers as comrades in the quest for a utopian, post-American future. In opposition, the GOP can either continue looking to McCain for leadership or rally behind Bachmann the way the Left always circles the wagons around its stalwarts.

Anyone want to bet me on which way the Republicans will go?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.

Spring Fever: Brotherhood Pours It On in Round II Of 'Slim' Landslide

Last week, we noted the sadly hilarious attempt of the Western media to portray the emerging landslide victory of Egypt's new sharia constitution as a "slim vote win." As observed here at the time:

Cases of spring fever abound in the West, but this one is clearly terminal. The sharia constitution is not winning by a slim margin. It is winning in a landslide. At the moment, the vote stands at about 56.5% to 43.5% against the “opposition” — which is called the “opposition” rather than the “supporters of democracy” in order to avoid the embarrassing reminder of what is being so soundly thrashed.

The referendum is already a rout for Islamic supremacists, but there is more. As noted here last week, Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader Egyptians freely elected to be their president, bifurcated the referendum. Only about half the country voted, the rest will vote next Saturday — after being fired up by pro-constitution imams in the mosques on Friday. Understand that of the two halves, the one that already voted this past weekend was expected to have the larger number of “opposition” votes. When all is said and done, the final tally will be closer to a 2-to-1 romp for the Islamists.

Well, the Round II tally is coming in and, as predicted, it was even more of a rout for the Brotherhood -- looks like about 71 to 29 percent. Cumulatively, that means sharia wins by about 64 to 36 percent -- i.e., close to a 2-to-1 romp for the Islamists.

If you've been following along for the last few years, you heard it here first.

The Fiscal Cliff and the Middle East

When your dissolute political establishment sinks to the point of being fit for lectures from Chinese Communists on spending restraint, and from erstwhile Soviet revanchists on foreign-affairs modesty, you are at rock bottom. Welcome to Washington.

Remember two summers ago, the depths of the last Beltway debacle on out-of-control borrowing that charted the course for today’s latest Beltway debacle on spending and taxes. It was then that China’s rulers blasted Uncle Santa for our “debt addiction,” our failure to observe “the commonsense principle” that a nation, like a family, must “live within its means.” At the time, U.S. sovereign debt -- of which China is, not coincidentally, a major holder -- had been downgraded below triple-A for the first time ever.

The Obamedia, fearing that their hero would be irreparably harmed by this signature achievement, reliably promoted a false narrative: Conservative “extremists” were refusing to extend the president’s tapped-out credit line, sending shivers through the bond markets. In reality, the explanation for the downgrade was not the contretemps over the statutory “debt ceiling”; it was the astronomical debt itself. The ceiling was significant only because it occasioned convincing proof that Washington is not serious about addressing our spending crisis. When you are borrowing to pay the interest on prior borrowing, it is time to cut spending -- drastically. Washington won’t even consider it. That is what signals to creditors that our “full faith and credit” may not be credible. When you are burning through other people’s money because you’ve already spent your own people’s money for the next few generations, promises to pay are not very reliable.

#ad#So dire are our straits that the stated national debt -- an obscene $16.4 trillion -- does not even begin to reflect the actual national debt, which probably exceeds ten times that amount when unfunded liabilities and bankrupt, bailout-craving states are factored in. The government annually spends over a trillion dollars more than the enormous $2.4 trillion it takes from us in taxes. Structurally, our “mandatory” spending (entitlements plus interest on the accumulated debt) puts us in a perennial deficit hole of $250 billion (and rising fast) before one thin dime is spent on “discretionary” items#...#such as the $700 billion defense budget. You may remember national defense -- not wealth-redistribution, health care, or running commercials to recruit new food-stamps recipients -- as the reason we actually have a federal government.

Washington’s current “fiscal cliff” farce results inevitably from the craven failure to confront geometrically unsustainable spending. We are already over the cliff. The public has seen fit to reelect as president a hard-nosed movement leftist who revels in chaos. For Obama, spending, which expands his taker-base, can never be high enough, so taxes will always have to rise. Beltway Republican leaders keep mistaking him for a conventional Washington Democrat with whom they can negotiate. But with the wind at his back thanks to his fellow statists in the press corps, Obama keeps pocketing GOP concessions, pushing for more, and relying on the media to depict Republicans as intransigent sentries for the “millionaires and billionaires.”

Last time, Republicans caved on the debt ceiling and joined Democrats in paving a road to hell -- the looming explosion of tax hikes and indiscriminate defense cuts -- with good intentions: Pushed to this brink, they assumed, the president would have to negotiate reasonably because his self-interest lay in the well-being of the nation. But no, the president’s self-interest is in the transformation of the nation along socialist lines. Diving over the “fiscal cliff” suits him just fine -- after all, you can’t have transformation without tumult.

So this time, House conservatives told their leadership, “No.” The conservative punditocracy, which often seems more interested in cheerleading for the GOP than advancing conservative positions, is in something of a snit. Yet the calculation of conservatives who are accountable to an angry, anti-Washington base is simple: It makes little sense to cave on tax hikes, as Speaker John Boehner’s “Plan B” would have them do, when (a) Obama is offering nothing in return, nothing, on the only issue that matters -- spending; (b) raising taxes on the top 1 percent of earners is a populist gimmick that does absolutely nothing to address our crisis; (d) Plan B has zero chance of being enacted; and (c) Obama has the media in his pocket, so it is pointless to take a futile, principle-breaking step in the hope of avoiding political blame -- Republicans will be scapegoated regardless of what happens.

There is only one way to deal with a leftist revolutionary like Obama: Take away his credit card. We have again crashed into the debt ceiling. Because Republicans have not caved again on the ceiling as Obama was demanding, they have leverage: The Treasury Department, within a few weeks, will be out of accounting tricks to stave off a shut-down. There will be enough tax money streaming into the till to make bond payments, so -- despite media scaremongering to the contrary -- our full faith and credit will remain intact. So let Obama figure out how to run Leviathan on $2.4 trillion -- which is over half a trillion more than the federal government was spending at the end of the Clinton years that Democrats portray as the golden era of fiscal responsibility.

To shriek over a contrived “fiscal cliff” when we are already immersed in a sea of red ink is foolish -- but, alas, no more so than acting out the clinical definition of insanity on the world stage. With reelection secured and all eyes on the “Taxmageddon” drama, Obama is also intervening more directly on behalf of the anti-American Sunni Islamists who seek to topple the despicable, Iranian-backed Assad regime in Syria.

It is remarkable. If there were no Syrian civil war, we would be thumbing our chins, wondering if there were any way to weaken all our enemies by turning them against each other. Syria has done just that. Not only is Assad teetering and Iran being bled; Sunni Islamists are at the throats of Shiite Islamists, Iraq and Turkey are squabbling, a wedge has been driven between Hezbollah and Hamas, and even the PLO is riven as Assad’s supporters in the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine butt heads with the Islamist factions.

All this, and we haven’t had to do a thing except stay out. Now, however, with the usual urging from Washington’s progressive bipartisan phalanx of “Islamic democracy” builders, Obama is openly colluding with Islamist regimes -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar -- to show Assad the door and install the Brotherhood. The administration is hell-bent on creating yet another “Islamic democracy” even as the one it midwifed in Egypt shoves a sharia constitution down the throats of persecuted Copts and other beleaguered minorities.

#page#The president has been helping the Syrian Brotherhood from the sidelines (“leading from behind”) all along. The pretext for his current, stepped-up efforts is the stated fear that Assad will use his inventory of chemical and biological weapons against “his own people” -- a euphemism for “Sunni Islamist opposition” that enables the media to skirt the inconvenient fact that Syria’s religious minorities prefer Assad, the devil they know, to the specter of persecution under Brotherhood rule. But there is no more WMD danger than there has ever been -- Assad is a rogue, so the fact that he has such weapons has always been a big problem. Moreover, the overthrow of Assad would mean his WMDs end up in the hands either of his Hezbollah allies or his al-Qaeda-affiliated enemies. Those outcomes are even worse for us.

In fact, weapons falling into the wrong hands was precisely the outcome of Obama’s Libya catastrophe. There, the president joined with Sunni Islamists to overthrow a regime that, though unsavory, was cooperating with the United States. The result was jihadists raiding Qaddafi’s high-powered arsenal; the installation of a feckless government that cannot control its tribal and Islamist enclaves; the destabilization of North Africa; and the eventual murder of four Americans, including our ambassador, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.#ad#

With regard to that latter massacre in Benghazi, a State Department report issued this week could not help but condemn the reckless security lapses even as its authors whitewashed the culpability of Secretary Clinton. They also sidestepped the simple, central questions to which Washington, after three months, cannot produce answers: How and when during the seven-hour terrorist siege did President Obama learn about it, and what orders did he give to mobilize available military assets to protect the Americans who were under attack?

Outside of Washington, the similarities between the mess Obama’s Islamist-empowerment strategy made of Libya and the mess it is likely to make of Syria are not lost, even on such neo-imperialists as Vladimir Putin. At a news conference in Moscow this week, the Russian strongman explained his opposition to military intervention against Assad by pointing to Libya as evidence that such adventures can do more harm than good. Ripping the Obama administration, Putin blamed the killing of Ambassador Stevens in Benghazi on the president’s policy of ousting Qaddafi in favor of a “state that is falling apart” as its “interethnic, inter-clan, and intertribal conflicts continue.”

It should go without saying that Putin is being disingenuous. The Russians, their disclaimers notwithstanding, are aligned with Syria and Iran. Ever the champion of anti-American dictators, they are determined to prop Assad up. Analogously hypocritical, the Chinese who presume to lecture us on debt are themselves close to imploding.

Still, the impurity of their motives does not invalidate their observations. Our debt is a travesty. Our facilitation of the Brotherhood is self-destructive. Those are facts. Washington is so broken that our enemies no longer need to make things up to embarrass us. Rock bottom.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which was published by Encounter Books.

One Out of Every 6.5 Americans Is on Food Stamps

The new all-time record number of recipients, 47.7 million (up from 31.6 million when Obama took office) exceeds the combined populations of Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Zero Hedge includes these among 75 mind-blowing economic numbers from 2012. We're already over the cliff.

Obama Taps Kerry to Replace Clinton at State

Talk about your late Friday bad news dump. NYT has details.