#1260 Pipes blog in NRO: "Obama to Save Presidency by Bombing Iran? Round Two"

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Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area. Dear Reader: For a video interview with me Islamic "Threats in America" by PolitiChicks at Liberty Alliance, recorded on June 9 and posted on June 18, click here. Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes Obama to Save Presidency by Bombing Iran? Round Two by Daniel Pipes June 27, 2013 Cross-posted from National Review Online, The Corner http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/06/obama-to-save-presidency-by-bombing-iran-round-two Send Comment RSS Share: Be the first of your friends to like this. I wrote an article 3½ years ago, at a low moment in Obama's first term, when his ratings tanked and his party just lost Edward Kennedy's senate seat to a Republican, that usefully suggested that Obama could "salvage his tottering administration" by taking "dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations." He could do well and do good, I offered, by taking out the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Well, as the world knows, he did not follow my advice. But the time has come to crank it out again at a moment when Obama seems close to imploding. As the distinguished historian Andrew Roberts puts it in the July/August issue of the British magazine Standpoint, he is credibly accused by the internal opposition of serious civil liberties violations, the secret seizure of journalists' phone and email records, the illegal use of the state tax authorities to harass citizens, a full-scale government cover-up over the circumstances of four murders and the "systematic targeting" of news organisations. … this summer Barack Obama has no fewer than four separate scandals pending, which are collectively referred to as "Obamagate". Astonishingly, less than a year after his re-election, we may be witnessing the unravelling of the Obama presidency. Given this background, I propose that (updating my 2010 article) a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama's feckless fifth year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline immigration reform, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon. (June 27, 2013) This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.

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