Election Coverage 2048 - Al-CNN
 Yusuf Al-Amiriki, a member of Hamdini's foreign policy defense team and a first generation convert descended from two American presidents, courted controversy with a proposal to set up a coalition government of Muslim and moderate Christian groups in the Netherlands. Such governments had been tried in Europe before during the 2030's, but invariably fell apart. Leading Senators from the Freedom and Justice Party accused Hamdani of selling out Muslim interests in order to court the Christian vote. Hamdani's spokeswoman, Aisha Zubedi, has refused to comment on the Amiriki proposal except to say that Hamdani was open to any solution that would restore peace to the people of the Netherlands and protect the rights of European Muslims.

Hamdani courted further controversy by appearing at the funeral of former President Bob Thompson. Thompson had served two terms and while his administration had worked hard on outreach to the Muslim world, he also engaged in the targeted murder of Muslim religious leaders and provided aid to the Zionist entity. For these reasons, President Al-Thani chose not to appear at his funeral even though President Thompson had been a member of the pre-transition Freedom and Religion Party, which was then known as the Republican Party.

Despite the official disapproval, Thompson was viewed positively by many in the Muslim community. Tens of millions of Pakistani-Americans remember how after the India-Pakistan war, the Thompson Administration generously opened its borders to victims of the nuclear fallout in Pakistan. Without that step it might have taken decades more before America achieved a Muslim majority.

During the beginning of his second term, Thompson became the first president to take the oath of office on both a Bible and a Koran declaring that he wanted to make no separation between the books of god. At the Thompson funeral, Hamdani appeared to promise that he would repeat that gesture, but his spokeswoman quickly disavowed any notion that he would ever take an oath on a text that was not the Koran.

"No American president has taken an oath on a bible in over a decade, all that the governor meant was that he would keep both Christians and Muslims in mind as the people of Allah when he takes his oath to protect and defend the Sharia," Aisha Zubedi said.

While the Democracy and Justice Party has often appealed to the poor, its missteps have raised concerns in traditional Muslim communities that Hamdani is going too far in pandering to non-Muslims. "Next thing you know he'll say we should let the Jews come back to America," Congressman Mohammed Mogabe declared. "If Hamdani wants votes out of Cleveland then he is going to show he will fight for us, not for the enemies of the prophets."

Hamdani has hurriedly scheduled an upcoming visit to the Ground Zero Mosque, but it may not be enough to improve his image in the eyes those who have accused him of flirting with apostasy. While the Mosque is a traditional stop for presidential candidates, Hamdani is unlikely to pay tribute to the souls of the 19 martyrs as Al-Thani did during the previous election.

Hoping to refocus attention on his economic program, Hamdani called for higher corporate taxes and accused some corporations of abusing Islamic banking, in particular Hibah payments, to avoid paying taxes. Such charges are not new, but particularly galling at a time when over half the country is out of work and tycoons like Ahmed Shalafi and Sheikh Johnson have used their connections with the Al-Thani government to become billionaires.

To counter Hamdani, Al-Thani's economic advisers have offered up a stimulus plan that raises the Jizya tax on infidels for the second time in a year and vowed to cut spending even further without affecting subsidies to Islamic schools or military preparedness for the Global Jihad. Though the election is still some time away, the Al-Thani campaign has also rolled out a series of ads targeting poor communities which accuse Hamdani of plotting with Jewish and Christian tycoons to subvert the Islamic system of finance through freemasonry and Communist class warfare tactics.

Adding further drama to the election is the possibility of a third party campaign. Andrew McMillan who has been running as an independent in elections for almost twenty years without appealing to anyone but the same racist groups who have been disavowed even by most Christians and Jews, but there is talk that McMillan's America Party might consider replacing the eccentric millionaire with sports star Ted March. As leading goalscorer who helped the United States win the 2042 World Cup, March is one of the most admired non-Muslims in the country. With him on the ticket, the America Party might be able to adopt a new moderate image that is no longer associated with bigotry and intolerance.

But frustrating his own party members, the septuagenarian McMillan appeared to an event commemorating the 2045 riots and gave a rousing speech which hit on many of the same old themes. "For thirty-six years I've been involved in politics and the only thing that I can tell you about politics is that it's all bunk. We weren't talking about the things that mattered thirty-six years ago and we aren't talking about them now."

Mohamed Rasul is homeless in New York City. But don’t feel too sorry for him, he’s “homeless by choice.”  He’s got a free laptop and free Wi-Fi in Bryant Park.

According to Mohamed, he’s “never been as comfortable as under de Blasio” because no one forces him to leave the park where a miniature carousel spins children around on painted horses and a yoga lesson takes place on the main lawn. These things, the carousel, the yoga lesson and the free Wi-Fi, only exist because the park was restored from its old days as Needle Park.

Back then the stretch of park behind the New York Public Library had more crimes than some towns. Cleaning it up took a lot of hard work.

Now that hard work is being undone by a pro-crime mayor.

When you have enough Mohameds in the park then the kids, the coffee, the Wi-Fi, the yoga mats and the lunch break crowd goes away to be replaced by junkies, needles, drug dealers, muggers and rapists.

As Mohamed can tell you, being homeless in the city under Bill de Blasio isn’t too bad for the bums.

To be homeless in New York City today means three meals a day, a microwave oven, TV, free laundry, free Internet, free health care and a prepaid cell phone with 300 minutes a month.

That was a few years ago. Maybe they have free laptops now.

If that sounds like a better deal than most New Yorkers or tourists get, you’re right. It’s why bums from across the country and even the world have been flocking to the privileged life of a Big Apple bum.

One in four homeless in New York list addresses outside the city. There are tourists who come to hang out in the city. Instead of forking out a small fortune for a hotel, they stay in a homeless shelter. And then there are the “Oogles.” Most New Yorkers have seen them even if they don’t know what they are.

Oogles are homeless hipsters who panhandle with ironic signs. Usually white and young, they made up a sizable section of the Occupy Wall Street encampments. Also known as travelers, crusties and voluntary homeless, they travel to music festivals around the country. Many are heroin addicts. They usually come from prosperous homes, but are great at gaming the social welfare system.

Homelessness is so hip that the Oogles have displaced the classic city panhandler with hordes of pierced flannel-wearing white kids in their twenties toting signs about how they need to get to Seattle or Portland. That is when their witty signs aren’t openly boasting about how they need drugs.

Oogles dramatically inflate the homeless population not only in New York City, but around the country. As they pass through different cities, the social welfare infrastructure of each area counts them as part of its “homeless crisis.” The same Oogle can add to the “crisis” of a dozen cities. But the Oogle isn’t homeless. He’s just a bum.

The media says that the homeless crisis is a disgrace. It’s half-right. The real disgrace is that we are once again allowing a breed of entitled leftists to destroy our cities.

It’s no wonder that New York City’s homeless problem keeps growing the more resources are thrown at it. It already increased 10 percent under Bill de Blasio. There are now more “homeless” in the city than there are people living in the entire city of Manhattan, Kansas. And their numbers will keep on growing.

By focusing on homeless families, we can eliminate most of the Oogles. And the homeless data shows that the issue is a broken culture, not gentrification, rising rents or any of the other excuses.

Even though black people are less than a quarter of the population, they account for up to 61 percent of homeless families. While the Hispanic population rose 10 percent, Hispanic homeless fell from 38 percent to 31 percent. Even while the black population was declining, its homeless share was rising.

White families in the city, who were hardest hit by the Obama Depression, went from 2 to 5 percent of the homeless population. White people make up a third of the city population and their numbers have been rising. Even though there are a million Asians in the city and 1 in 5 of them live below the poverty line, there appears to be no statistically significant number of them in the homeless population.

So the issue clearly isn’t racism.

What is the Asian secret? Even poor Asian families have a mother and a father. Meanwhile 93 percent of homeless families are single parent. More than half of them went into the system complaining of overcrowding or domestic violence. Another 8 to 12 percent complained of “discord.”

This isn’t a homeless problem. It’s a broken family problem.

The homeless families held up by the media as proof of how uncaring New Yorkers are are not suffering from gentrification. If that were the case, the majority of them would be coming from Brooklyn and Manhattan, not the Bronx. Their situation has its roots in the same pathology that causes crime.

No amount of homeless shelters or social services spending will fix it. It will only make it worse.

New York City doesn’t have a homeless problem. It has a drug problem. It has a broken family problem. And it has a hipster problem. It has an activist problem and a bloated social services sector problem.

Homelessness remains a political term that manufactured a condition for which society is responsible.

We can see by looking at the hard numbers that society did not cause this. Individual behaviors did. New York’s welfare spending has created a massive magnet that attracts freeloaders and encourages bad behavior. And Bill de Blasio has taken those bad policies and turned them into a way of life.

The decline of the quality of life in the city has hurt blacks more than it has hurt whites. There has been a sharp population drop in the black middle class as their neighborhoods began turning bad.

Their departure lowers black net worth and turns the city back into a political poverty plantation. The homeless crisis is a weapon that the left uses to destroy the quality of life in cities. Especially in working class and middle class neighborhoods.

Bill de Blasio rammed homeless shelters into formerly nice neighborhoods, including an Asian neighborhood in Queens, bringing along panhandling, public urination and crime. One local resident asked. “Why does the government want to support this group? Why do they want to give them free money? We have to work from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.”

The left is not fond of those who work twelve hours a day. They’re filthy “bootstrappers” who interfere with their political program of destroying communities and replacing them with broken families.

The homeless crisis is the kind of self-perpetuating crisis that the left loves. The more money is thrown at it, the worse it gets. The money will mostly go into its own bureaucracy and its networks of allied non-profits who double as the political infrastructure for the left.

And how else is Bill de Blasio, who has won the opposition of a majority of city voters with his disastrous policies, supposed to win reelection?

The trouble with the donor class, by and large, is that it is resistant to change because it doesn't want to change. The Democratic and Republican donor classes donate for their business interests, but the Democratic donor class has a radical edge. Groups like the Democracy Alliance want a fundamental transformation of the country. And they understand how they can make money off that.

There are too many Republican single issue donors who are fairly liberal on everything outside that issue. And there are too many big business interests and financial folks who live in major cities and only differ from liberals in their economic policy.

The trouble with fiscally conservative and socially liberal is that the left is not a buffet. You don't get to pick a combo identity. Fiscally liberal follows socially liberal as day follows night. All those single people, their babies need assorted government benefits. No amount of lectures on "liberty" will change that. Austrian economics is never going to displace food stamps for the socially insecure.

A lot of the Republican donor class would like to have its cake and eat it too. It wants the fun of a liberal society without having to pay the bill. It wants cheap Third World labor without wanting to cover their health care, the school taxes and all the other social welfare goodies.

But it doesn't work that way. There's no free ride.

Yes, they can move to a township where the property taxes are killer, and dump their pool guy and tree trimmer and maid in some city to live in housing projects at the expense of that city's shrinking middle class and working class. And it can work for a while, until all those cheap laborers get community organized and the organizers take over the city. And then the state.

And then there are housing projects in the township, everyone is plugged into the same statewide school tax scheme and the left runs everything and taxes everything.

The wealthier members of the donor class can outrun this process longer. Or just live with it while funding groups that promote "Liberty", the way the Koch Brothers do, but the bill always comes due.

You can't outrun the political implications of poverty in a democracy. And you can't stop those political trends without addressing the social failures that cause them. A socially liberal society will become politically and economically liberal. Importing Third World labor also imports Third World politics, which veer between Marxism and Fascism all the way to the Islamic Jihad.

Everything is connected. You can't choose one without the other.

We're not going to have some libertarian utopia in which everyone gets high and lives in communes, but doesn't bother with regulations and taxes. The closest thing you can find to that is Africa. Nor are we going to be able to import tens of millions of people from countries where working class politics is Marxist without mainstreaming Marxism as a political solution in major cities across America.

People are not divisible that way. Human society is not a machine you can break down.

The left has fundamentally changed America. Much of the donor class hesitates to recognize this or prefers to believe that it can isolate the bad changes from the good changes. It doesn't work that way.

Getting the kind of fiscal conservatism that a lot of the donor class wants requires making fundamental changes to the country. You can't just tinker with economic regulations in a country where schoolchildren are taught to demand taxes on plastic bags to save the planet or where a sizable portion of the population is dependent on the government. Those tactics can rack up ALEC victories while losing the war.

Fiscal conservatism requires a self-reliant population that believes in the value of honesty and hard work. Those are not compatible with social liberalism or casual Marxism. Individually, yes. It's possible to make money while being a leftist. But spread across a large population with different classes and races, those individual quirks will not be replicated. And you can't create that population with slogans. You have to be able to shape national values, not just economic policy.

That's the hard truth.

There are no single issue solutions. At best there are single issue stopgaps. But the left is not a single issue organization. It has narrowed down most of its disagreements and combined its deck of agendas. Its coalition supports a large range of programs from across the deck. It's still possible to be a pro-abortion Republican, but the political representation of pro-life Democrats is disappearing.

You can be a Republican who supports the Muslim Brotherhood, but a Democrat who says anything too critical about Islam has a limited future in his party at any national level. The same is true across the spectrum. Kim Davis is a Democrat. How much of a future do Democrats opposed to gay marriage have? Meanwhile it's possible to be a pro-gay marriage Republican.

The Republican "big tent" is more a symptom of ideological disarray, as we've seen in this primary season, by a party that doesn't really know what it believes, than of tolerance. But the left has taken over the Democratic Party and made its agendas into the only acceptable ones.

There are still some national Democrats hedging weakly on gun control and environmentalism, but they're going to be purged. Their party will abandon them and Republicans will squeeze them out.

A lot of the donor class is really seeking an accommodation with the left. The election was warped when the Koch brothers decided to find common ground with the ACLU on freeing drug dealers. They dragged some good candidates in with them and down with them destroying their credibility on key issues.

You can't have an accommodation with the left. The left isn't seeking a compromise. It wants it all.

The left has to be fought all the way or surrendered to all the way. There's no middle ground here regardless of what philosophical objections are introduced, because that is what the left is doing. It's easily observable just in Obama's two terms.

The left has defined the terms of battle. And its terms are total control over everything.

You can't be pro-life and pro-Obama. You can't be pro-business and pro-Obama. You can't be pro-Israel and pro-Obama. You can't be fiscally conservative and pro-Obama. You can't be socially conservative and pro-Obama. You can't be anything less than full leftist and pro-Obama.

The left has to be fought totally or not at all.

Single issues can be important and it's good for people to pick one or two things to focus on, but that has to come with the understanding that there can be no accommodation with it in any other area. An organization fighting gun control is doing important work, but its backers should never fall under the illusion that the 2nd amendment can be maintained if the left wins on all the other fronts.

As Benjamin Franklin said, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately". The quote is true today in all its implications as it was then. We must have a conservative movement that is united in a common front or we will be dragged down one by one. There will be no conservative issue islands left to stand on if the red tide comes in.

The final point is that it is not enough to resist. That's just delaying the inevitable. Even the strongest resistance can be worn away with time. If the left can't win directly, it focuses on the next generation. If cultural barriers are in the way, it goes for population resettlement, as it's doing in parts of this country and Europe. There is no such thing as an impregnable issue island.

Winning means pushing forward. Winning means advocating for change, not just fighting to keep what we have. Winning means thinking about the sort of free society that we want. Winning means having a vision to build, not just resist. Winning means advancing forward.

To do that, we have to accept that fundamental change is necessary. Right now we're fighting a losing battle. We're trying to keep the tide out, when we must become the tide.

Hillary Clinton has spent a third of her adult life trying to become president. All for nothing.

The first time around, she wasted $200 million just to lose to Obama. $11 million of that money came from the notoriously "flat broke" couple. This time around she was determined to take no chances.

Together with her husband she built up a massive war chest using money from foreign governments and speaking fees from non-profits, funneled into her own dirty non-profit and a complex network of unofficial organizations staffed by Clinton loyalists, secured an unofficial endorsement from Obama and carefully avoided answering questions or taking positions on anything. There was no way she could lose.

Now she’s losing all over again.

Hillary has a ton of money, but can’t buy the nomination. She’s spending a quarter of a million a day on a campaign operation with no actual organized opposition to speak of. Even before Biden officially enters the race, she’s falling behind the joke candidacy of Bernie Sanders in key states.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars without making an impact. She spent almost a million on polling only to see her poll numbers drop every week. She dropped $2 million on ads about her mother to try to make women like her. It didn’t work. Nothing is working anymore.

Obama gave Biden his blessing to run. White House spokesman Josh Earnest praised Joe Biden to reporters, saying that there is “no one in American politics today who has a better understanding of exactly what is required to mount a successful national presidential campaign.”

It wasn’t a subtle message.

Earnest suggested that Obama might endorse a Democratic primary candidate. Despite the deal that the Clintons made in which Bill would campaign for Obama in 2012 in exchange for a Hillary endorsement, it’s looking less and less likely like that he will back Hillary Clinton. Instead Biden appears to be his man.

Biden is already polling better than Hillary in a national election. With Obama’s backing, he can strip away Hillary’s minority vote while Bernie Sanders takes the leftist vote. Hillary Clinton is already doubling down on gender politics by accusing pro-life Republicans of being terrorists, but it won’t work.

It didn’t work last time. It won’t work this time. Once again, Hillary has lost.

The only lesson that Hillary Clinton drew from her last election was to double down on all the things she did wrong. Her organization was big last time so she made it even bigger. It got so big that the different Super PACs were fighting each other over fundraising for her campaign. She had lots of money last time, so she was determined to have even more money this time. But that money has been wasted paying an army of useless people who couldn’t even do something as basic as produce a good logo.

Hillary Clinton was paranoid, controlling and dishonest last time. She decided to be twice as paranoid and dishonest this time around and it destroyed her image and her campaign.

Even before the rope lines and the interview boycotts, the media hated her. Once she began to aggressively shut out the media, its personalities gleefully reported on every email server scandal detail that her enemies in the White House fed to the New York Times and other administration mouthpieces.

It wasn’t a vast right wing conspiracy or even a more real left wing conspiracy that destroyed Hillary Clinton. If she were a stronger candidate, Obama and the left would have fallen in line behind her.

Once again, Hillary Clinton destroyed her own candidacy. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows that the top three words people associate with her are “liar,” “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.” If she hadn’t planned a cover-up before there was even anything to cover up and then responded to its disclosure with a series of terrible press conferences climaxing in asking reporters if they meant that she had wiped her email server with a cloth, her old reputation might have stayed buried long enough to win an election.

Now Hillary is right back where she was last time around. She has lots of money, but no one likes her. She’s trying to build a cult of personality, but none of the myriads of people who work for her will tell her the truth about her personality. She inspires no one and there’s no actual reason to vote for her.

With her popularity rapidly vanishing, Hillary is moving to her Führerbunker. Her aides plan to absorb defeats in early states and concentrate all the money and organization on crushing the opposition on Super Tuesday. They’re conceding that Hillary isn’t going to out-campaign her rivals individually, but are betting that her war machine is big enough to destroy them in eleven states at the same time.

Hillary still hasn’t learned that she can’t just buy an election. And she may not have the money to buy it. Donors lost a lot of money funding her failed campaign last time. They came on board again because they were convinced that she had a smooth ride to the nomination. Once Biden enters the race, donors will wait rather than pour more money into the struggling campaign of an unpopular candidate.

And many of the Obama donors who haven’t committed to Hillary will open their wallets for Biden.

ClintonWorld is an expensive theme park to run. All those staffers the Clintons have picked up have to be paid. And the Clintons can’t stop paying them because they have no true loyalists, only mercenaries. If their checks don’t clear, they’ll be working for Biden or O’Malley before you can say "Whitewater."

It will take that machine some time to slow to a halt. Hillary Clinton burned through $200 million fighting Obama. Elections have only gotten more expensive since then. But her donors will learn the hard way that money alone can’t make an unlikable politician with no charisma or compelling message, president.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a message, she has ambition. Her obsession with becoming president has overshadowed any reason that anyone might have to vote for her. She offers no hope and less change. Her candidacy is historic… but only for her. There is no promise she can make that anyone will believe.

After having spent much of her life trying to become president, she will leave once again a failure.

Some are hoping that Hillary will go to jail. But the anger, frustration and bitterness that will gnaw on her after wasting decades and a small fortune on two failed efforts to win the White House in which she had every advantage only to lose before even leaving the starting gate will be worse than any prison.

In January 2017, Hillary Clinton will be sitting in front of a television set watching someone else take the oath of office. Nothing the penal system has to offer would be a harsher punishment than that moment.

It's an article of American faith that Japan is an incredibly strange place. The world has been mapped and GPS'ed to death ruining much of the thrill of discovery. There probably aren't any hidden cities with remnants of lost civilizations lurking in the deserts of Africa or the jungles of South America. That just leaves the land of the rising sun as the X on the map, the strange place that suggests that the world that we know all too well, might still be odder than we can imagine.

But Japan isn't really all that strange. We are.

Depressed post-industrial economy, low birth rate, social disintegration and a society obsessed with pop culture and useless tech toys? A country that has embraced pacifism to the extent that it can hardly defend its own borders? A nation where materialism has strangled spirituality leaving no sense of purpose?

We are Japan. And so is Europe. Or rather Japan is the place we all reach eventually.

Japan is strange because it aggressively hurled itself into a postmodern void without knowing what was on the other side. It did this with the same dedication that its soldiers once marched into machine gun fire.

Japan had been in a race with the West, as it had been ever since Commodore Perry showed up with a fleet to open up a closed nation. It wasn't unique in that regard. A lot of countries tried to do the same thing. Most found that they couldn't keep up with either our technology or our decline. Japan shot past us in both areas. It beat us technologically. And then it outpaced our decline.

In the 80s, there were dire predictions that the future would belong to Japan. America would be broken up and run by a bunch of Japanese corporations. There were even predictions that after the fall of the USSR, the next war would be with Japan. Some of those predictions came from some surprisingly high profile analysts.

The future doesn't belong to Japan. It may not, at this rate, belong to anyone. Japan hurled itself into the future, but didn't find anything there.

Korea hurled itself into that same future and found only emptiness. Now China's elites are rushing into that same void and are beginning to discover that technocracy and materialism are hollow. That is why China is struggling to reassert Communist values even while throwing everything into making Walmart's next product shipment. Like Japanese and Korean leaders, Chinese leaders are realizing that their technological and material achievements have left their society with a spiritual void.

That isn't a problem unique to Asia. Asian countries were just less prepared for a rapid transition to the modern age. Europe and America, which had more time to prepare, are still on the same track.

Japan isn't really a technocratic wonderland. It has a few robot cafes, but not a lot of ATMs. Its tech companies got by on Western products that initially never caught on in the West, like the Walkman and the tax machine. There's not much of a digital economy and the computer isn't all that ubiquitous. Daily life for the Japanese these days is usually lower tech than it is for Americans or Europeans.

It's not as bad as some Gulf Sheikdom where desert Bedouins fire off assault rifles in view of the glittering new skyscrapers whose waste products have to be manually removed from the building, but the strain of a feudal society rapidly transitioning to the modern world is still there, as it is in Russia.

Like Russia, Japan tried to beat us. Unlike Russia it did, only to stop halfway there and wonder what the whole point was.

And that's the problem. There is no point.

American technocrats talk incessantly of beating China. But what is it that we're supposed to beat China to? The largest pile of debt? The biggest collection of light rail and solar panel plans? The lowest birth rate and the most homeless farmers? The greatest disastrous government projects?

A country should move toward the future. But it should have a goal that it's moving toward and a sense of connection with its past values.

The thing we have in common with Japan, China and Europe is that we have all moved into a post-modern future while leaving our values behind and our societies have suffered for it. It is a future in which stores have robots on display but couples are hardly getting married, where there are high speed trains and a sense of lingering depression as the people who ride them don't know where they are going, and where the values of the past have been traded for a culture of uncertainty.

Marriage and children are more extinct in Japan than they are here. They are more extinct in Europe than they are here. And China is still struggling with a bigger social fallout headed its way.

Japanese modernism has made for a conservative society of the elderly. That is what Europe nearly had a few decades ago and it is what it would have had if it hadn't overfilled its cities with a tide of immigrants. Japan survived the consequences of its social implosion only because of its dislike for immigration. If not for that, Japan really would have no future the way that the European countries which have taken in the most immigrants have traded their past and their future for the present.


The cultural eccentricities that Americans fixate on come from a society of young men unmoored from normal human connections, a decline of national values and an obsession with trivial consumerism-- all commonplace elements in postmodern American and European life.

The difference is that Japan got there first.

The loonier elements of American pop subcultures were predated by Japan. Indeed the latter are often influenced by the former. The same holds true with petty plastic surgeries, a truly epic plague among Asia's newly rich, and some of the more ridiculous accessories for living a life with no meaning or human companionship, but we're all going to the same place. Just not at the exact same speed.

The common problem is that our journey has no meaning. The postmodern world of robots, fast trains and handheld computers is shiny, but not meaningful. It's less meaningful than the earlier technological achievements that saved lives and made ordinary prosperity possible.

We can go fast, but no matter how fast we go, we seem to keep slowing down. That's what Japan found out. Its decline was social. And social decline translates into a technological decline, because technological innovation is powered by a society, not some soulless force of modernism. Innovation must have goals. And those goals must be more than mere technology. They must emerge from some deeper purpose.

American innovation hasn't halted entirely because its tech culture had enough purpose to make the latest set of digital revolutions possible. But each revolution has slowed down, becoming another shopping mall with microprocessors, replicating the Japanese problem. And at some point we'll run out of revolutions and be left with the skeleton of a digital shopping mall that is no longer anything but a place to buy more things we don't want and can't afford.

A healthy culture transmits values. When it stops doing that, it dies. When the values no longer seem to be applicable, than the culture hunts around for new values, it undergoes a period of confusion while its forward motion slows down. That is where Japan is now. It's where America has arrived.

The values of the left, that are present in both Japan and America, are a cultural suicide pact. The left pretends to add a spiritual dimension to modernism. It has been peddling that lie for two centuries and it has yet to deliver. In countries where it wielded full control, there was neither modernism nor values. Russia destroyed the economic, technological and spiritual potential of generations of its people. China is trying to use Communist values to avoid turning into another Japan, not realizing that those are little better than the collective obligations with which Japan rushed into the future.

As America gazes at the ruins of Detroit and the insanity spewed forth by a digital frontier that increasingly looks every bit as eccentric and toxic as anything coming out of Japan, it is all too clear that we are Japan.

There is no unique insanity in East, only a common disintegration of values in the East and the West.

Asia and Europe have both witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations. It isn't technology that destroys civilizations, but a lack of values.

To understand where Japan and Europe are, imagine an America decaying with no new ideas, losing its religion and values, losing its economy and finally its sanity, becoming coldly conformist and inhuman, while its families fall apart and its youth retreats into their own makeshift worlds. That reality is closer to home than we might like to think.

America is destroying its values on an industrial scale. In a post-industrial nation, the destruction of values has become one of its chief industries. And while there is value in challenging values, in the conflict and clash of ideas, that requires that values go on existing, or there is no longer anything to challenge. And then there is nothing left but emptiness and madness.

Another stupid product that promises to change our lives, but doesn't. Another ridiculous politician that promises to change our country, but doesn't. Another protest that promises to change everything.

Another indicator of economic decline. Another day, week, month, year of empty nothingness.

That is the modern abyss. And Japan is waiting for us there.

In his sales pitch for the nuclear deal with Iran that even he admitted gives the terrorist regime a near zero breakout time to the bomb, Obama pulled out every conceivable stop. He even accused opponents of trying to get the country into a war with Iran just as they had “brought the country” into the Iraq War.

But Obama was responsible for the rise of ISIS and his deal with Iran sets the stage for the next Iraq War. His original Iraq treason led to his Iran treason today.

To understand why that is, it’s important to realize how we got here.

Obama campaigned on a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. As with so much else, he lied. But his plan for a rapid withdrawal did win an endorsement from one key ally. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki backed Obama’s push for a swift withdrawal, stating that American soldiers should leave “as soon as possible.”

Maliki was Iran’s man in Baghdad who had been picked by Qasem Soleimani of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC had conducted the Shiite terror campaign against American soldiers in Iraq. Maliki’s endorsement of Obama meant an endorsement from the godfather of Iran’s terror machine whose IEDs were responsible for the murder of over 500 American soldiers.

In exchange for backing Maliki, the Iranian terror boss had demanded that the Iraqi leader get all American soldiers out of the country. Obama’s proposal for Iraq was really Iran’s proposal for Iraq.

Soleimani and Maliki both wanted Americans out so that Iran could advance the Shiite takeover of Iraq.

While Obama had no say during Maliki’s first government, he made sure that Iran’s puppet would get a second government. Ayad Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister, stated that Biden told him to drop his bid. Allawi claimed that the administration wanted to keep Maliki in power so as not to upset Iran.

"They wanted to leave, and they handed the country to the Iranians," Allawi said.

Handing over Iraq to Iran had been a key part of Obama’s plan.

In the Senate, Obama had insisted that the only answer to Iraq was a “political solution.” This “political solution” in which Iraqis and their “neighbors” would work things out could only take place after a troop withdrawal. All these were euphemisms for letting Iran and its puppets in Baghdad take over Iraq.

When asked about the danger of Iran taking over Iraq, Obama replied, “We have to send a clear message to the Iraqi government as well as to the surrounding neighbors that there is no military solution to the problems that we face in Iraq.”

Iran and Soleimani however remained unconvinced that there was no military solution to Iraq. After all they had used military means to force the United States out of Iraq by discrediting the war so badly that no one except a known anti-war activist like Obama could possibly be elected on the Democratic ticket.

Obama owed his White House win to the “military solution” that Iran’s terrorists had imposed on Iraq.

The idea of using Iran to get out of Iraq was not a new strategy. It was being pushed aggressively in ’08. But once Obama turned over Iraq to Iran’s Shiite proxies, the Sunnis began revolting against Shiite rule. ISIS, in its earlier form, began building support, but so did a variety of Sunni terrorist groups, including Baathists, and some factions that the United States had supported and worked with.

The Arab Spring turned ISIS into a terror empire, but the momentum for the civil war had been created by Obama’s Iranian “political solution” for Iraq.

Seven years later, the left has no new ideas for Iraq except turning it over to Iran. Underneath the various arguments in favor of negotiations with Iran was the suggestion that a nuclear deal would somehow lead the Iranian regime to stabilize Iraq out of the goodness of its murderous little heart.

The problem with that plan is that Iran had been the single biggest regional destabilizing force in Iraq.

When the United States was there, Iran funded the Shiite end of the civil war while the Al Qaeda terrorists passed through Syria. The combination of terror tactics made it difficult to stabilize Iraq. Once the United States left, Iran began strangling the Sunnis. By the time ISIS genocide forced Obama to demand the removal of Maliki, the Iraqi army was toast and in its place were Shiite militias.

The same Shiite terrorists we had been fighting in Iraq were now in control of Baghdad and operating under the command of Soleimani. And Obama let them use us as their air force for a war they started.

Whatever happens next, it won’t be a stable Iraq. The United States has an interest in stabilizing Iraq. Iran wants it to be as unstable as possible. A divided unstable Iraq will be dependent on Iran. Its isolated Shiite regime will need Iran’s protection. And in exchange, Iran will have free run of the place.

Obama’s “political solution” let Iran destroy the Iraqi government and its military leaving behind empty shells. The country is run by Shiite militias and clerics and Obama is defending their rule and his “political solution” in an endless war in which the Shiites oppress Sunnis and the Sunnis go on the warpath.

The next Iraq War may take place when ISIS becomes strong enough that Obama or his successor are forced to send in group troops. It may come with a resurgence of ISIS’ Baathist allies. Or it may come when Iran’s own ISIS, its bloodthirsty Shiite militias, begin engaging in blatant genocide.

The fighting will not stop and the odds are good that the United States will be drawn into it again.

Obama accused Iran deal opponents of being responsible for the Iraq War, but it’s his deal that once again ratifies Iranian authority in the region in general and in Iraq specifically. Deal supporters claim that letting Iran go nuclear will dispose it to work with us on Iraq. The State Department claimed Iran and the US had a “shared interest.” Kerry had already suggested last year that Iran could help in Iraq.

But the last thing that Iran will be doing on its victory lap is helping America.

Obama’s sanctions relief will help Iran increase its funding to sectarian Shiite forces in Iraq and the flow of cash to its terror militias. Meanwhile the deal sends the clear message that Iran beat America. That will further alter the balance of power in Iraq while driving more Sunni and Shiite internecine warfare.

The next Iraq War may already be here. When it drags in our soldiers, it will be because Obama’s Iraq policy continues driving a civil war by favoring Iran over Iraq’s Sunnis. The nuclear deal gave Obama the opportunity to avert that war by sending a clear message to Iran. Instead Obama sent up a white flag.

The current phase of the war in Iraq was caused by Obama’s original Iranian political solution. The next phase of the war will be caused by the fallout from his latest dirty deal with Iran.

The phrase “Only a Clinton” entered our lexicon in the nineties. Ever since then the unsinkable Clintons have continued spewing outrageous lies and ridiculous ploys that only a Clinton could get away with.

Hillary Clinton tried campaigning for the White House without actually taking positions on anything. Iran was a particularly touchy subject because the Democratic Party has two constituencies that are sharply divided on the issue. Jewish voters oppose the deal while left-wing voters back it.

Hillary Clinton couldn’t pander to both at the same time. Or could she?

Hillary Clinton endorsed the deal while in true “Only a Clinton” style running against it. She endorsed the deal using militant rhetoric that threatened Iran with war. Her message is that she endorses a deal that gives Iran near zero breakout time to the bomb and lets it self-inspect and fund terrorists, but that she’ll be the toughest terror deal supporter you ever saw. No one will be tougher on that deal than her.

Only a Clinton.

This isn’t the first time that Hillary Clinton pulled that particular scam. Trying to get Americans to forget about her infamous “Reset Button” photo, she compared Putin to Hitler. (But if Putin was Hitler, that would have made her Neville Chamberlain or, considering her politics, Vyacheslav Molotov.) It was over the top and even the media took her to task for it.

Her Iran speech is equally over the top. It tries and fails to cloak her support for a deal that lets a terrorist regime get the bomb by sounding like she’s about to drop the bomb. Like Dukakis trying to channel Patton, it’s an awkward fit. But “Tough Foreign Policy” Hillary is her brand. It’s how her associates have been positioning her.

When Hillary Clinton mocks Putin, you’re supposed to believe that she would be tougher on him than Obama. In her Brookings session, she explicitly drove that point home, in her usual lawyerly style, by contending, "I am in the category of people who wanted us to do more in response to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing destabilization of Ukraine."

Why couldn’t Hillary Clinton actually stand up to Putin? The unspoken suggestion is that it was Obama’s fault. The only thing keeping Hillary from marching the Russians out of Ukraine was Obama.

But the “Reset Button” was Hillary Clinton’s idea. When asked about it, she had said, “I thought it was a brilliant stroke, which in retrospect appears even more so.”

If you can follow Hillary’s reasoning, her appeasement of the man she compared to Hitler was a “brilliant stroke” of genius, but the only thing keeping her from getting tough on “Hitler” was Barack Obama.

The only person who could possibly believe that is either a deluded idiot or a compulsive liar.

Comparisons to Chamberlain and even Molotov appear unfair. A more accurate analogy might be to Petain who at his trial insisted that his collaboration with the Nazis had helped the Allies win the war.

Hillary’s Iran deal speech offers more of the same schizophrenic worldview in which she promises to get tough on her own appeasement.

She began back-channel talks with Iran, even though she had opposed it while running for office. But her opposition was just another Clinton lie. It was Hillary who agreed to let Iran enrich its uranium, formerly one of those red lines that her administration would discard like confetti at a ticker tape parade.

Now she is once again trying to distance herself from her own foreign policy by pretending that she would take a harder line on Iran as President Hillary Clinton than she did as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeased Moscow and Tehran, but President Hillary Clinton will really crack the whip by disavowing all her own policies during the campaign.

Just like she did the last time she ran for office.

Hillary Clinton is trying to have her uranium yellowcake and eat it too by pulling a bait and switch. The foreign policy basis for the deal is reapproachment and alliance with Iran. Hillary Clinton is selling the deal as a means of fighting Iran. Before Hillary’s speech, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, a Clinton loyalist, defended the deal in the same terms as a means of putting pressure on Iran.

Panetta’s description of the deal had no relationship to reality. It was just prep work for Hillary’s brand.

The deal is not about pressuring Iran or building a coalition against it. You don’t pressure an enemy regime by giving it billions of dollars and you don’t build a coalition against it by acting as its lawyer.

When you remove sanctions from a terror state, that isn’t a way of stopping its terrorism.

But in “Only a Clinton” style, Hillary Clinton has decided to invent her own imaginary Iran Deal and campaign on it. It’s a better choice than trying to campaign on the real deal which only 1 in 5 Americans supports. It won’t fool Iran, but it might fool some of her dumber Jewish donors.

And that’s what it’s really all about.

Hillary Clinton wants to break from Obama in style rather than substance. Her occasional criticisms infuriate Obama, whose skin is even thinner than hers, but they are never more than stylistic. She doesn’t differ with specific actions. Instead she talks about attitudes and organizing principles.

The real message that she’s trying to send is that with her experience, she can make Obama’s terrible foreign policy work. But his terrible foreign policy is really her terrible foreign policy.

Instead of getting a better foreign policy, Hillary ‘butches’ up the bad foreign policy of her old boss.

“Yeah, if I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security,” she barks to Jeffrey Goldberg. But then she rushes off to apologize to Obama at a ‘hugging summit’. That theatrical “damn right” comes from the same woman took Abbas’ side over Netanyahu and whose husband had taken Arafat’s side over Netanyahu. Their backing for the PLO destroyed Israel’s security and took the lives of many Israelis and Americans.

But it’s not hard to see where Hillary gets it.

Bill Clinton told a Jewish audience at a charity dinner that if Israel were invaded, “I would grab a rifle and get in the trench and fight and die.” Then he claimed that there was no military solution to terrorism. Only a Clinton.

Hillary’s Iran speech just borrows Bill’s “rifle” by vowing that she "will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Iran has been trying to obtain a nuclear weapon for a long time now. That’s been the entire purpose of its nuclear program. Hillary Clinton’s hesitation on Iran’s nukes has lasted for decades.

It’s not just that Hillary Clinton is lying. We expect to be lied to be politicians, especially if their last name is Clinton. It’s that she’s trying to sell a third Obama term by dressing it up in combat boots.

Americans hate Obama’s foreign policy. They hate the Iran Deal. They hate that the world is melting down and that their government can’t seem to do anything about it. Instead of offering real change, Hillary Clinton is promising a tougher foreign policy that is the same old policy, but tougher.

Hillary Clinton will still let Putin walk all over her, but she’ll also compare him to Hitler and do mocking imitations of him. She’ll still pressure Israel to open checkpoints and make infinite concessions, but she’ll occasionally offer a “damn right” when addressing a Jewish audience. And she’ll hold on to the Iran Deal, but make more empty threats of military intervention… at least during her elections.

"We should anticipate that Iran will test the next president. That won't work if I am in the White House," she boasts. But Iran has already tested Hillary and found her wanting. When she gave up on uranium enrichment, the race to pile up American concessions to the terrorists was on. Everything else was anticlimactic.

Hillary Clinton has already been discredited. So she’s running against her own foreign policy. Only President Hillary Clinton can make Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s discredited policies work again.

The two white beams memorializing the lost towers cut diagonally across the sky. On the empty white panel of a broken phone booth someone has scrawled "Free Kim Davis". And on another one and another one following someone's zigzag route through the East Village's maze of hipster joints.

This is the America we live in now.

We will spend 9/11 debating the merits of letting a terror state that helped the 9/11 hijackers go nuclear. #PeaceWins #LoveWins. The heat and humidity is broken by a thunderstorm. The faint lights vanish behind the clouds.

History must have grown tired of repeating itself because no one talks about it. That old kind of news has become a formality. Our news is a crazed jumble of Kardashians, pet videos and social justice outrages. Media is an ADD lifestyle section where all the outrages that matter are petty.

The big stuff, wars, moon landings, civilizations, doesn't matter. Everything has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of personal insecurities masquerading as politics and entertainment reduced to fame for fame's sake celebrities. All of it is calculated to match the workday routine of a twenty-something female college graduate working in media. Because that is mostly who writes it.

Today's Time or Washington Post make the old Entertainment Tonight look like serious journalism.

What used to be the media is a Tumblr of someone's favorite TV shows, celebrities, cat gifs and outrages of the moment. Its grasp of politics does not extend beyond its hashtag. Beneath its old fonts and styles is a jumble of social justice warrior phrases of political destruction.

Enemies are "Called out" in tweets and "Destroyed" by viral videos starring failed comedians. These enemies engage in futile "Freakouts", but are promptly destroyed once more by someone's abused three-year old who is encouraged to recite their support for trannies, eliminating borders or banning plastic bags by their pierced off-camera Munchhausen progressive politics-by-proxy stage mothers.

Then the failed comedians say something "Problematic" and are "Called Out" in turn and "Destroyed". Until it is learned that those who called them out have their own "Problematic" history and are "Called Out" and "Destroyed" by the fleas who live upon the fleas of the American dog. And so it must be until there is no one left to call out or destroy.

These are the wars we fight now. Share if you agree. You will be amazed at how we nailed losing 9/11. How these formal memorials perfectly capture the experience of losing a war to terrorists and their leftist allies will bring tears to your eyes. What happens next is not what you think. But mostly it's exactly what you think. It's wasted time, wasted minds and wasted lives.

This isn't America. It's just the occupied space where its culture used to be. It's a depersonalized culture of personalities. Its frivolity inversely proportional to the despair of its consumers. But it's also the America we live in now. It is the arrogance of its rulers, the mindless maze of their minds and the inner despair of their hearts.

Politics and pop culture are only a few of the mirrors of that despair. The Weimar Germany cabaret pop stars celebrating the end of an empire with the destruction of its culture and the politicians glorying in their liberation from any common covenants and lawful limitations are symptoms.

There is still a nation under the shadow of that despair struggling to be reborn, but it does not know how. Its culture is occupied. Its lines of communication are hijacked by frauds and crazies. It has learned that its good intentions count for nothing and so it has learned despair instead.

This is the America we live in now.

Its common currency is contempt. Hope was a fraud. Hate is real. Every enemy of social justice destroyed makes the world a better place. Anger is righteous. Knowledge is meaningless.

9/11 has no place in this world. It's a puzzle piece that doesn't fit between the cat videos and the Kardashians. There's way to social justice it up. It's the elephant in the room. Steel and fire. A rain of ash. Falling corpses. People fleeing past coffee places. Panicked cops shouting wildly.

It's the end of the world. And the world we have built carefully insulates its consumers from the knowledge of its own shocking fragility. Its algorithms pile on distractions, feeding mass media to mobile phones in techniques garnered from casino slot machines. Buttons are pushed. Shallow momentary emotions are felt. Families fall apart. Civilizations fall apart.

The 9/11 lights cut across a night sky, but they can't stop the weapons of mass distraction. They are a futile protest against a memory hole big enough to swallow that terrible day and all it meant.

Despair at its utmost becomes celebration. When there is nothing more to live for, nothing more to hope for, life becomes momentary, its fragmentation an escape from the future, its purpose impossible to grasp, its contradictions easily escapable and its end, impossible to conceive of.

In despair, destruction becomes celebration. When the solutions are difficult, they must be destroyed. When they remind us of how low we have fallen, they must be denounced. These acts are joyful because they liberate the destroyers from responsibility and accountability. They free them from hope. They offer them an imaginary future that lacks the difficulties of the real one.

The only religion at the heart of Islam is a deep despair, in humanity and its own civilization. Its truest expression is the purposeful destructiveness of ISIS. But it has always been what Islam is. That despair is just as present in the heart of the left. Theirs is not the despair of the savage confronted with moral creeds, with empathy and nobility that beggar him, or with technologies that mock him. Theirs is the despair of the egotistical idealist who would rather destroy the world than tolerate its flaws. It is the despair of tyrants that hardens to a cynical amused brutality at the exercise of power.

Our civilization is coming apart.

There have always been many Americas, but they are infinitely fragmenting. The culture that aspires to bond them together has become an insane egotistical monster trying to survive its own crippling insecurities with the personal destruction of others. Millions walk away from it, but have nowhere to go. They tell their own isolated stories on islands of social media, scrawl things on walls and howl at the night. They feel a sense of infinite loneliness at the nation and the culture coming apart.

This is the America we live in now.

We don't have to give in to despair. If we do, we are lost. Lost the way that the left is lost. Lost the way that the Muslim world is lost.

We are not savages and feral children. We are the inheritors of a great civilization. It is still ours to lose. It is ours to keep if we understand its truths.

We are not alone. A sense of isolation has been imposed on us as part of a culture war. The task of reconstructing our civilization and ending that isolation begins with our communication. We are the successors of revolutions of ideas. We need to do more than keep them alive. We must refresh them and renew them. And, most importantly, we must practice them.

We are not this culture. We are not our media. We are not our politicians. We are better than that.

We must win, but we must also remember what it is we hope to win. If we forget that, we lose. If we forget that, we will embrace dead end policies that cannot restore hope or bring victory.

What we have now is not a movement because we have not defined what it is we hope to win. We have built reactive movements to stave off despair. We must do better than that. We must not settle for striving to restore some idealized lost world. Instead we must dream big. We must think of the nation we want and of the civilization we want to live in and what it will take to build it.

Our enemies have set out big goals. We must set out bigger ones. We must become more than conservatives. If we remain conservatives, then all we will have is the America we live in now. And even if our children and grandchildren become conservatives, that is the culture and nation they will fight to conserve. We must become revolutionaries.

We must think in terms of the world we want. Not the world we have lost.

This is the America we live in now. But it doesn't have to be.

The Syrian refugee crisis that the media bleats about is not a crisis. And the Syrian refugees it champions are often neither Syrians nor refugees. Fake Syrian passports are cheaper than an EU politician’s virtue and easier to come by. Just about anyone who speaks enough Arabic to pass the scrutiny of a European bureaucrat can come with his two wives in tow and take a turn on the carousel of their welfare state.

Or on our welfare state which pays Christian and Jewish groups to bring the Muslim terrorists of tomorrow to our towns and cities. And their gratitude will be as short-lived as our budgets.

The head of a UNHCR camp called Syrian refugees "The most difficult refugees I've ever seen. In Bulgaria, they complained that there were no jobs. In Sweden, they took off their clothes to protest that it was too cold.

In Italy, Muslim African “refugees” rejected pasta and demanded food from their own countries. But the cruel Europeans who “mistreat” migrants set up a kitchen in Calais with imported spices cooked by a Michelin chef determined to give them the stir-fried rabbit and lamb meatballs they’re used to. There are also mobile phone charging stations so the destitute refugees can check on their Facebook accounts.

It had to be done because the refugees in Italy were throwing rocks at police while demanding free wifi.

This is the tawdry sense of entitlement of the Syrian Muslim refugee that the media champions.

Hussein said: "We have the feeling that the aid workers are heartless." (He) lives in a trailer that cost $3,000. The air-conditioner runs with electricity he is tapping from the Italian hospital. The water for his tea is from canisters provided by UNICEF. He hasn't worked, paid or thanked anyone for any of it.”

And why would he? He’s entitled to it by virtue of his superiority as a Muslim and our inferiority as infidels. There is no sense of gratitude. Only constant demands as if the people who drove out their own Christians and Jews have some moral claim on the charity of the Christians and Jews of the West.

The media howls that the Syrian refugee crisis is our fault. That is a lie.

What is happening in Syria is a religious civil war fought over the same ideologies as the ones practiced by the vast majority of the refugees. This is an Islamic war fought to determine which branch of Islam will be supreme. It is not a war that started last week or last year, but 1,400 years ago.

We can’t make it go away by overthrowing Assad or supporting him, by giving out candy or taking in refugees. This conflict is in the cultural DNA of Islam. It is not going anywhere.

This war is not our fault. It is their fault.

There are Christian and non-Muslim minorities who are genuine refugees, but the two Muslim sects whose militias are murdering each other are not victims, they are perpetrators. Just because Sunnis are running from a Shiite militia or Shiites from a Sunni militia right now doesn’t make them victims.

The moment that their side’s militia wins and begins slaughtering the other side, the oppressed will become the oppressors. Such shifts have already taken place countless times in this conflict.

The refugees aren’t fleeing a dictator, they’re fleeing each other while carrying the hateful ideologies that caused this bloodshed with them.

We aren’t taking in people fleeing the civil war. We’re taking in their civil war and giving it a good home.

The Tsarnaevs left behind their old war with the Russian infidels to begin a new phase of it against the American infidels. The children of the Syrian Muslim refugees we’re taking in will be raised in a faith and a culture that will cause them to play out the same old patterns that led to the current tragedy.

There are already Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans fighting each other in Greece. Muslim migrants are murdering Christian refugees on the journey over. And this is only the beginning.

The ranks of the refugees include possible war criminals like Abu Hussein, the commander of a Free Syrian Army militia named the Falcons of the Tribe of the Prophet Mohammed, who controls portions of a UNHCR refugee camp and threatens to kill aid workers when they won’t give him what he wants.

The bleeding hearts of Europe and America want to take in the cute kiddies, but they’ll be getting the Husseins instead who will be running neighborhoods in London, Paris and Toronto. And then the kindly natives will notice that their daughters are coming home late and wonder what is happening to them.

Syria will happen to them. Just as Pakistan and Afghanistan happened to the British girls victimized by the Muslim sex grooming gangs in the UK. Just as Saudi Arabia happened to us on September 11.

A popular meme claims that the UK has taken in only enough refugees to fit on a subway train. My question to the meme spreaders is how would they like to be on that train, wedged between the terrorists, the sex groomers and the Sunnis and Shiites trying to reach across and throttle each other.

We are told that the Syrian refugees “stir the conscience” of the world; certainly not the Muslim world. The Saudis don’t want them. Jordan and Turkey have resentfully set up refugee camps without actually offering permanent legal status to them the way that Europe, Canada and America are expected to.

What do Muslim countries know about the Syrian Civil War that we don’t?

The Saudis, Jordanians and Turks have their own problems. They don’t want to import the Syrian Civil War into their own borders. Only Western countries are stupid enough to do that.

The Syrian refugee crisis is a voluntary crisis. It would go away in a snap with secure borders and rapid deportations. The fake Syrians would stay home if they knew that their fake passport wouldn’t earn them a train ride to Germany’s Hartz welfare state, but a memorable trip to the Syrian Civil War.

Even announcing such a policy would lead to a rapid wave of self-deportations by finicky refugees for whom Bulgarian jobs, Italian food and Swedish weather aren’t good enough.

Plenty of Syrian refugees returned on their own from the Zaatari camp in Jordan when they saw that there weren’t enough treats for them. They went back to Syria from Turkey and even Europe when they didn’t find life to their liking. If they were really facing death back home, they would have stayed. There were no Jews going back to Germany during the Holocaust because they couldn’t find jobs in New York. Nobody goes home to a genocide. They go home because they were economic migrants, not refugees.

The crisis here is caused by the magnet of Western welfare states. Get rid of the magnet and you get rid of the crisis. Stop letting migrants who show up stay and there will be no more photogenic rafts filled with “starving” and “desperate” people who pay thousands of dollars to get to Europe and then complain about the food and the weather. Put up border fences and the “hikers” will go back home.

Keeping the doors open intensifies the crisis. It’s the sympathy of the bleeding hearts that leads to dead children whose parents are willing to risk their lives for their own economic goals. The left creates the crisis and then indicts everyone else for refusing to accept its solution that would make it even worse.

The “humanitarian catastrophe” in which the migrants use their children as photogenic human shields would go away if the doors were closed to everyone except real refugees who were not part of this war. The only thing that taking in fake refugees does is attract more of them and that empowers the left which uses dead children for its power and profit at more places than just Planned Parenthood.

Slovakia has announced that it will only take in Christian refugees and that’s the right thing to do. Christians are the real victims of this Muslim conflict. The vast majority of the refugees, many of whom aren’t even Syrians, aren’t. The rest of Europe should use Slovakia’s refugee policy as a model.

Obama claimed that ISIS was only a “jayvee” team even as it was capturing Iraqi cities. Now he wants us to believe that Iran is just another “jayvee” team even as it’s taking over Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Like the rest of his Iran deal talking points, the one about Iran’s tiny military budget is false, and not only is it false, but his claim about how small Iran’s military budget keeps changing.

A few weeks ago, in a speech at American University, he was  claiming that "The defense budget of the United States is more than $600 billion. To repeat, Iran's is about $15 billion."

"Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us," Obama had told the New York Times in April.

Just now, he told the Forward, "As I pointed out repeatedly, Iran’s annual defense budget is about $15 billion."

What is Iran’s military budget? Read Obama’s lips. It’s either $15 billion or $30 billion.

Either Iran’s military budget changes every time Obama gives a speech or he’s playing with numbers to make it seem small. If $30 billion still seems big, how about $15 billion? And if $15 billion is still too big, get ready for the $7.5 billion Iranian defense budget. How can you be worried about that?

Obama is borrowing a trick from the Manchurian Candidate. No one is talking about how big Iran’s military budget is, but debating how small it is. And how small is it?

Iran’s military is at over 500,000 in strength. The Basji militia claims to be able to mobilize millions more. It has a nuclear weapons program and some of the most advanced indigenously developed weapons programs in the region. Iran is currently involved in wars in Syria and Iraq. Its proxy armies have carved up Lebanon and Yemen, and are slavering over Bahrain.

Not bad for $15 billion or $30 billion or whatever Obama is claiming it is this week.

Of course Iran’s budget isn’t $15 or $30 billion. It spent $11 billion on the Bushehr reactor alone. Its nuclear program cost upward of $100 billion. Obama’s deal requires him to claim that the program is peaceful, but who really believes that a country sitting on a mountain of gas and oil blew that much money just to lower the cost of electricity a little bit?

How much money is Iran really spending to expand its territory and influence?  Iran is allegedly spending billions a month to back Assad’s military campaign. The total may come to as much as $35 billion a year.

That’s more than more than twice as much as Obama’s current estimate of its military budget.

The Hezbollah terror group has received billions from Iran over several years. Islamic Jihad in Israel gets between $100 and $150 million a year.  Iran cut off aid to Hamas due to the Sunni-Shiite shift.

Since then relations are slowly being restored, but it’s unclear how much money this will mean for the terror group. In 2007, Iran had pledged $250 million in aid. It’s unknown how much money Iran is spending on its Houthi terrorists in Yemen or how much money it’s spending on Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria.

In 2007, a senior Hezbollah terrorist captured by the US claimed that Iran was providing $3 million a month to Shiite terror groups to attack Americans in Iraq. Considering that the Shiite militias now dominate Baghdad and other parts of Iraq and number in the tens of thousands, it’s a safe bet that the bill for maintaining Tehran’s terrorist army in Iraq has gone up a whole lot since then.

 It’s unknown how much Iran is spending on its Shiite militias in Syria, but the NDF reportedly has 100,000 men and is being trained and financed by Iran.

And this is just the visible ground forces.

Iran also has an international terrorist network which it has used to carry out terror attacks everywhere from Argentina to Thailand to Saudi Arabia to Paris. No country since the USSR has anything like it in its scope and organizations like that cost money. We can’t even begin to guess how much Iran spends on it.

But there are hints. The investigation into Iran’s bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Argentina was stymied by bribery attempts and climaxed in the assassination of Alberto Nisman, the Special Prosecutor who had accused President Kirchner of a cover-up in return for business deals with Iran.

That sort of arrangement doesn’t come cheap. Iran is willing to spend a lot of money to maintain a global terror network and then to clean up after it.

So what is Iran’s real military budget?

It has the biggest ballistic missile arsenal and the only known nuclear weapons program in the region.

It has the largest number of active military personnel in the region and its militias control large sections of four other countries. It has indigenously developed fighter jets and a global terrorist network. It has drone bases, submarines and is the "the holder of the largest chemical weapons stockpile" in the area.

This doesn’t come cheap and you can’t have all that on the military budget of Colombia. If you believe Obama, then Iran has a smaller military budget than Israel and Saudi Arabia even though the military spending in both countries is largely focused on countering threats from Iran. If you believe Obama, Iran is no match for any of its neighbors, and yet it’s conquering or terrorizing them one by one.

But with Obama, the devil is usually in the details. He emphasizes the “defense budget”, but despite its official claims, Iran doesn’t play defense. It goes on the offensive. Its constitution states that its military is an “ideological army” built to fulfill “the ideological mission of jihad in Allah's way; that is, extending the sovereignty of Allah’s law throughout the world.”

Or as the Ayatollah Khomeini said, “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males... to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.”

Iran doesn’t have a defense budget. Like Nazi Germany or the USSR, its entire system is militarized. A portion of its money goes to the business of government. A portion of that exists officially as a defense budget, most of which is swallowed up by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC). The IRGC is a terrorist group with its own army and air force that is involved in wars across the region.

None of these numbers really mean anything because Iran’s accounting would make the mafia blanch. Iran is an oligarchy built on a complex network of organizations. State-owned enterprises, generals, Islamic foundations and terrorist bosses move money around using everything from oil to heroin.

The official budget means even less than it does in Russia. It’s just a number you read in the newspaper.

The IRGC controls construction companies, nuclear plants, airports, banks and ports. Imagine if GE, HSBC and Berkshire Hathaway were all one entity and had their own army. That’s the IRGC. Its annual revenue is estimated to be higher than Obama’s estimate for Iran’s entire defense budget.

Iran doesn’t have a defense budget. Its economy is its military budget. The IRGC controls at least a third of the country’s GDP and the vast majority of its exports. It claims a majority of the official defense budget, but unofficially it controls a majority of Iran’s economy.

It’s also responsible for exporting terrorism worldwide.

Obama’s claims about Iran’s tiny defense budget, which shrinks every time he gives a speech, are a lie. He claims that the “Gulf States, combined, spend about eight times” as much as Iran does. In fact, Iran spends at least as much if not more because most of its military budget is as black as night.

Ever since he struck a deal with Iran’s terror regime, he’s been knowingly passing on misinformation from that regime. And Obama can’t even seem to keep the phony budget numbers he’s using straight
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Obama has told many lies about his Iran deal. But this is more than just another lie. Minimizing Iran’s military spending to make it look as harmless as possible endangers American national security. There are already reports that Obama worked to tamper with ISIS intelligence materials to make the terror group look weak. It was his insistence that ISIS was only a jayvee team that let it take over cities.

Now he wants to convince Americans that Iran is just another jayvee team we shouldn’t take seriously. Pay no attention to the nukes or the worldwide terror rings. Its fake military budget is so small.

Obama deserves to be called out for every lie he has told about his disastrous Iran deal. But it’s important to our national security to call him out for his big lie about Iran’s little military budget.

Here is how the pro-Israel theater works.

Every other country has its American embassy in its capital. Except Israel. Every few years, Congress would bring up a bill or a resolution calling or even mandating that the embassy be moved to Jerusalem. Even politicians not known for their great love of the Jewish State would vote for it.

Some like Biden or Kerry would even sponsor them.

The bill would have a loophole allowing a president to waive it in the interests of national security, which he always did, even when he had promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem in his campaign.

The politicians were happy. The pro-Israel lobby got to justify its budget. Some Jews however were baffled why the embassy never seemed to get moved.

A similar farce would play out on other issues like cutting off aid to the PLO. There would be a bill and then a waiver and everyone would issue the appropriate press releases. And terrorists would go on killing people and then getting paid salaries with money provided by US taxpayers.

Iran's nukes are the acid test. This is the one that matters. It's the one that activists are frantically fighting for.

But Congress is not about to override the White House on Iran, no more than it wanted to on Jerusalem or the PLO. The Republicans certainly didn't want to be put in the position where their vote against Iran might actually count. And then Obama would blame them.

That's what the Iran Nuclear Review Act was for.

It sets up a grand theatrical production in which Republicans damage Democrats by splitting the Jewish vote without any of it actually mattering. Everyone gets to posture, to play their parts, not to get anything done, but to advance their own careers.

Some Democrats will 'choose' Israel over Iran and win the undying affection of Jews. Others will back Obama to the cheers of the left. The Republicans will chortle over the split in the Dems. A few who know better, like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, will grind their teeth at the betrayal.

AIPAC will once again nobly lose, while increasing its donations and membership. The Republican Jewish Coalition will point to this as proof that the GOP is more pro-Israel. J Street will use the number of Jewish Democrats who defected to the Iran side as evidence that they won.

Obama will do what he intended to do all along. And all this will turn out to have been the same hollow charade as the votes over recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital or defunding the PLO.

The game is rigged. It's been rigged all along.

Some Congressmen really do believe in what they're doing. There are a few "righteous men in Sodom", but for the most part Congress is a way of moving money around, of making speeches without taking responsibility, of making grand gestures that don't rock the boat.

The Republican Party is indeed more pro-Israel ideologically, but Republican ideology is hypothetical. While the Democrats turn left, the Republicans turn in circles. The left acts on its ideology, the right talks about it.

The most pro-Israel Democratic administration was LBJ's. The most anti-Israel Democratic administration was Obama's. With a certain amount of wavering, the trend between those two markers has been negative.

The most anti-Israel Republican administration was Eisenhower's. The most pro-Israel was Bush II's. The trend here has mostly been positive.

But while there's no limit to how anti-Israel the Democrats can go, there is a hard limit on how pro-Israel the Republicans can go. And Bush II was probably it.

The pro-Israel politics of Republican presidents, like the rest of their conservative ideological commitments, is more talk than reality. You can get a Republican president to say nice things about Israel, small government, the value of life, religious freedom and all that, but you can't get him to do anything about it, like moving the embassy, ending the funding of terrorism or ending the pressure on Israel to comply with assorted PLO demands. That and 5 bucks might get you a cup of coffee on Capitol Hill.

When I encourage Jews to go Republican, it's not because it will usher in a glorious pro-Israel era. It's because being associated with a Democratic Party dancing to the fiddle of the left is deeply corrosive. Being around the left is damaging. It's a destructive movement that poisons everything it touches.

Especially people.

Maybe the GOP can become what it should be. We should certainly work toward that. And the first step is to be realistic about what it is and what it does.

The Republican Party tells conservatives what they want to hear while taking its marching orders from an infrastructure of advisers, experts and consultants who urge it to implement the same old bad ideas while lying to the public.

That is how we got here in more ways than one.

Republican politicians want to win elections without changing anything. They want to do the 'sensible' thing which means keeping up the status quo and not rocking the boat. The only way to do that is by lying a lot.

Some Democrats, perversely the ones who actually have retained some sense of right and wrong, are the same way.

So are most organizations. At the end of day everyone just wants to collect their paycheck, put in the same hours they did yesterday following a familiar work routine, and go home.

It's human nature.

Our enemies have taken advantage of that. They have taken over the system step by step, by exploiting the apathy of the system in the traditional manner of the left, be the first to show up, be the last to leave, organize, lie, aid your comrades and drive out any form of opposition.

We have been lulled to sleep by the promises and lies of those we thought were on our side.

If we're going to change anything, let's deal with these realities. There are no easy solutions. Our friends have no appetite for a fight and our enemies control the high ground. The cavalry isn't coming. We can change things as long as we are determined to really shake things up.

And that means realizing that much of what we've been investing our energy in has been theater, not truth. We can't change things until we stop letting ourselves be fooled.

None of this means that we should stop fighting the Iran nuke deal.

The harder we fight it, the more significant it will be when the deal comes apart. We don't want this to be another North Korea in which the opposition goes down the memory hole. We need to be able to say that we fought this disaster ever step of the way and called it out for what it was.

Because this is the beginning, not the end.

The deal is not impossible to stop. It's just impossible to stop playing by the rules of the GOP and Democrats. It's impossible to stop by playing out a game whose outcome was predetermined by Obama, the GOP and the Democrats. That game was over before it started.

It is important for people to understand that. It's not just the Iran deal where the outcome was known ahead of time. It's true for most pro-Israel efforts in Congress that bump up against the two-state solution. It's true for most conservative political efforts for that matter.

Playing that game makes lobbyists, consultants and politicians look good. And we pay them and lose. Nothing will change until we make it clear that we understand the game and that we want real change, not more theater. The left didn't get its change by playing by the same old rules.

Neither will we.

Change happens when politicians recognize that they will be held accountable and that their lies and games have been exposed. It happens when they are forced to realize that the people not only see through them, but that they're angry and their anger will impact their support and their opposition.

Everything else is business as usual. And business as usual is what got us here.

It's time for the lies to end and for the truth to be heard. It's time to end the fake votes, the fake resolutions, the theater whose weekly productions change, but whose theme is the same.

There are politicians who want to fight and politicians who want to appear to be fighting. The latter have done more damage than any enemy by draining time and energy, providing false reassurances and empty hopes. It's time to bring the curtain down on their latest production in which a big chunk of Congress walks away hiding a smirk after having pulled off its latest scam.