Frank Gaffney Jr.

Obama’s national security fraud

Andrew C. McCarthy is a highly accomplished former federal prosecutor and indisputably one of the most formidable legal minds of our time. On November 10^th, he persuasively made the case at National Review Online that President Obama has engaged in criminal fraud with his deliberately deceptive promises about Americans being able to retain their health insurance policies.

The real American blackout

Seventy-five years ago this week, the media perpetrated a massive hoax on an unsuspecting American audience. A Halloween radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ rendering of the sci-fi thriller War of the Worlds sent the public into a frenzy over seemingly authentic news reports that martians were attacking New Jersey.

Obama’s friends are America’s foes

For nearly five years, this column has described the Obama Doctrine with nine words: Embolden our enemies. Undermine our friends. Diminish our country.

It’s time to shock O.P.E.C.

Forty years ago this week, America received a harsh lesson about the dangers of relying on others for energy. President Nixon’s decision in the midst of the Yom Kippur War to resupply Israel with U.S. weaponry gave members of the OPEC cartel an excuse to embargo oil supplies to this country and drive up prices worldwide. It became known as the “oil shock” of 1973.

An anniversary to remember – and learn from

Forty years ago this week, Arab armies launched the Yom Kippur War at a moment when practically every Israeli was preoccupied with religious obligations. The Arab coalition very nearly succeeded in their longstanding goal of driving the Jews into the sea.

Obama’s disarmed diplomacy

In the past month, Americans have been led to believe that President Obama has achieved diplomatic breakthroughs with Syria and Iran, thereby avoiding looming conflicts with those two rogue states. If the result being promised is not exactly “peace in our time,” the White House certainly is encouraging the notion that its robust threats of military action against these allied enemies brought them to the negotiating table.

Allowing Iran to fool us again

“Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz made an enduring contribution to American political life with his famous sequence in which insistent promises by Lucy not to pull away the football overcome Charlie Brown’s hard experience with her unfailingly doing so. This happens at the moment to be a perfect metaphor for what Iran’s newly elected president, Hassan Rouhani, has in store for Barack Obama.

Wanted it bad, got it bad

Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, announced a deal last weekend that is supposed to make the Syrian problem go away. Er, that is, make Bashir Assad’s chemical weapons go away. Or at least disappear President Obama’s immediate political problem with breached red-lines and an America with no appetite for war with Syria in response.

Just say no on Syria

Team Obama’s public campaign to embroil the United States in Syria’s civil war has kicked into high gear. The President’s senior subordinates have been warning incessantly about the costs of inaction, and making preposterous promises about the benefits of conducting a limited attack on Bashir Assad’s regime.

Obama’s ‘Goldilocks’ strike on Syria

President Obama surprised friends and foes alike with his announcement in the middle of Labor Day weekend that he would attack Syria, but ask Congress for approval first. Even more surprising is the idea that anyone – friends, foes or Congress – would take seriously his Goldilocks-like strike plan, with its promise of “not too much, not too little, just right” amounts of death and destruction somehow calibrated to punish Hafez Assad for using chemical weapons, but not defeat him.

Obama’s vanishing deterrent

Barack Obama appears at this writing to be poised to embroil the United States in a new war in Syria in response to the recent, murderous use of chemical weapons there. Ill-advised as this step is, it is but a harbinger of what is to come as reckless U.S. national security policies and postures meet the hard reality of determined adversaries emboldened by our perceived weakness.

Don’t rescue the Muslim Brotherhood

Ever since President Obama came to office, his administration has cultivated relations with, legitimated, emboldened, empowered, funded and even armed the Muslim Brotherhood. This policy has amounted to our changing sides in what is best described as the War for the Free World.

Farewell to ‘the Judge’

Last Sunday, we lost a truly great American. The man Ronald Reagan rightly thought of as his Top Hand, William P. Clark, finally – to use his old friend and boss’s immortal phrase – slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

Willful blindness, mortal peril

Diana West’s splendid new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, is an expose of a practice that she persuasively argues has cost us dearly in the past and endangers our future. Former federal prosecutor-turned-pundit Andrew C. McCarthy calls it “willful blindness” and we indulge in it at our extreme peril.

E.M.P. vulnerability invites catastrophe

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted long ago that there is a geopolitical counterpart to Aristotle’s axiom that “nature abhors a vacuum.” As the author of the terrific new book, Rumsfeld’s Rules, quipped: “Weakness is provocative.”

Kerry’s folly, Israel’s peril

In one of Team Obama’s trademark Friday afternoon specials, Secretary of State John Kerry announced last week that his six rounds of shuttle diplomacy had resulted in an agreement to reconvene Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. As usual, the timing was appropriate for an initiative designed to garner favorable headlines, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

If the Senate ‘Goes Nuclear’

At this writing, Senate Democrats are threatening to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” – a parliamentary maneuver that would end, once and for all, the minority’s ability to block presidential nominations with just forty-one votes. It is a safe bet that, if Majority Leader Harry Reid can get away with doing this for the president’s appointees to executive branch positions, he will soon apply the rule change to his nominations for judicial ones and then to all other Senate legislative business.

Who’s for dismantling the defense industrial base?

A perfect storm is brewing – one that threatens to devastate what is left of America’s military and its associated industrial base. This would be a bad idea under the best of circumstances. Events in Egypt and elsewhere around the world make clear that at present and for the foreseeable future, such a prospect invites calamity.

The G.O.P.’s Gettysburg

This week’s anniversary of the sesquicentennial of the battle of Gettysburg is a reminder of the horrific costs of war – and of the dangers of not being prepared to wage and win such conflicts when they arise. It should also serve as a wake-up call about a fratricidal struggle over the failure to learn such lessons that is now going on with the Republican Party.

The Senate’s serial contempt

Contempt of Congress used to be a serious offense. Those who were accused of it faced prosecution, fines and perhaps worse.