I commend the effort by Senators Graham and Inhofe to get answers from the White House about Benghazi before a confirmation vote is held for John Brennan as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Beyond mishandling Benghazi, additional items in Mr. Brennan’s background are cause for concern.
Brennan’s misunderstanding of the global jihadist threat facing America was on display during a February 2010 speech at New York University. Outlining his understanding of the War on Terror, Brennan claimed it wasn’t a war on terror at all, but a war targeted exclusively at Al-Qaeda:
They are not jihadists, for jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose, and there is nothing — absolutely nothing — holy or pure or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children. We are not waging a war against terrorism because terrorism is but a tactic that will never be defeated, any more than a tactics of war will. Rather, such thinking is a recipe for endless conflict…We are at war with Al Qaeda and its extremist allies, and any comment to the contrary is just inaccurate.
But the exclusive focus on Al-Qaeda as the sole enemy was rejected by none other than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the testimony she gave to the Senate Armed Service Committee just a few weeks ago, where she warned of a “spreading jihadist threat” in North Africa, one that is growing into a “global movement.”
So it seems that Brennan’s views are extreme even within the senior levels of the Obama administration.
Brennan said as a matter of national policy we needed to reach out to the ‘moderates’ in the Hezbollah terrorist organization, a view he apparently has held for a while as evidenced by a 2006 CSPAN interview where he said that “you can’t divide the world into good and evil.” “Moderate” terrorists?
It bears mentioning that prior to 9/11, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group in the world, not only the 238 Americans killed in the 1983 suicide bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, but the kidnapping and death of U.S. Embassy CIA Station Chief William Buckley.
To sign the Freedom Center’s petition to stop the witch-hunt against Rep. Michele Bachmann, click here. And please spread the word about this petition far and wide!
Israel has many passionate supporters on Capitol Hill, particularly on the Republican side of the aisle. These are men and women who are deeply committed to Israel and understand that Israel is the US’s only reliable ally in the Middle East and America’s most vital ally in the world today in light of the rise of radical Islamic regimes, movements and leaders.
Now that Obama has officially entered his second term in office, Israel enters a period unlike any it has experienced before. It will face a hostile US president who does not fear the voters. Moreover, it faces a US president who is so hostile to Israel that his first serious act after his reelection was to appoint Chuck Hagel Defense Secretary, (and John Brennan CIA Director).
As I wrote last week, I believe that Israel will not be the hardest hit by Obama’s “transformative” foreign policy over the next four years. As an independent state, Israel has the ability to diversify its network of strategic allies and so mitigate somewhat the hit it will take from the Obama administration. The US, and first and foremost the US military, will not be so fortunate.
Not surprisingly, Israel’s biggest defenders in the US Capitol are also the most outspoken allies of the US military and the most concerned about maintaining America’s ability to remain the most powerful nation on earth both economically and militarily. They are as well, Obama’s most outspoken critics on the Hill.
For their outspoken criticism, and their competence, these men and women have been targeted for political destruction by Obama and his allies. Last November we saw this leftist machine outgun and so defeat Cong. Allen West in Florida and Joe Walsh in Illinois. Both men were targeted by Obama’s smear machine that included, among other things, J-Street endorsements of their opponents, and rancid attacks against them.
One of the voices that Obama’s machine has spent millions of dollars trying to silence is that of Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.
As a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and as a contender in the Republican presidential primaries, Bachmann has been one of Israel’s most passionate and articulate defenders and one of Obama’s most effective critics on everything from federal spending to Obama’s abandonment of the US-Israel alliance to his opening of the US federal government and intelligence apparatuses to members of the Muslim Brotherhood – that is to members of a movement dedicated to the destruction of the American way of life.
For her efforts, Rep. Bachmann has been the target of repeated media smear campaigns, often joined by skittish Republicans like John McCain who failed to recognize the danger of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise in Libya and Egypt, and failed to understand the danger that the penetration of the US federal government by Muslim Brotherhood members constitutes to US national security.
I have had the privilege and pleasure of meeting with Rep. Bachmann on several occasions over the years. She is one of the most intelligent women I know. And her grasp of the nature and importance of the US-Israel alliance is extraordinary. So too, her understanding of the challenges to US national security is clear, educated and sophisticated.
Watch for instance these speeches that she has delivered in recent months.
The day she announced her candidacy for President:
And at the Values Voters Summit shortly before the Presidential election:
In the past, every time that I have written about Cong. Bachmann, I have been bombarded with comments from readers who say that they cannot believe I can support her, since they claim, she is such an extremist. But Cong. Bachmann is not an extremist at all.
What she is is a victim of a very successful smear campaign undertaken by people who recognize her talent, conviction, intelligence and effectiveness. They set out to destroy and marginalize her, just as they set out to destroy and marginalize Mitt Romney and West and Walsh and many others, because they perceive these leaders as a threat to their agendas.
Today Cong. Bachmann is the target of a new leftist smear campaign, organized by the far Left People for the American Way. The campaign involves a petition that has reportedly been signed already by 178,000 people demanding that House Speaker John Boehner expel Rep. Bachmann from the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
The proximate cause for the petition is a series of letters Bachmann and five other (wonderful and similarly courageous) Congressional colleagues penned to the Inspectors General of the Departments of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the State Department, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice asking for the IGs to conduct an investigation of the ties senior officials in these departments have with the Muslim Brotherhood.
For her efforts, Bachmann was condemned not only by the Left, but by Senator John McCain as a bigot and a McCarthyite.
But she is none of these things. And last month, her concerns were borne out when the Egyptian magazine Rose al Youssef published an article about Muslim Brotherhood operatives in senior positions in the Obama administration. According to the article, these operatives have transformed the US “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world, to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.” (Here is the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s translation of the article.)
To sign our petition to stop the witch hunt against Rep. Michele Bachmann, click here.
Over the last four years, the United States has suffered a series of comprehensive intelligence failures. These intelligence failures ranged from a lack of preparation for the attacks of September 11, 2012, the misguided assessment that there was a moderate group of Taliban willing to form a government and the refusal to believe that the Arab Spring would lead to Islamist takeovers, rather than liberal open societies.
The Obama Administration’s foreign policy has been one disaster after another and it has been quick to blame intelligence failures for its own mistakes. When accounting for its lies about a YouTube trailer leading to the attack on the Benghazi mission, Obama blamed the intelligence. But it turned out that the intelligence had been edited and censored for political reasons. What appeared to be an intelligence failure in Benghazi was actually political manipulation. And the same may well be true of the entire Arab Spring, of Afghanistan and the entire spectrum of attacks on September 11, 2012.
As a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was proven correct in all the areas where the Obama Administration and its political allies suffered from intelligence failures.
In September 2011, one year before the attacks, Michele Bachmann warned that the Arab Spring was a disaster that would lead to the rise of radical elements across the Middle East. Widely ridiculed for it at the time, she was demonstrating the insight and foresight that a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is supposed to have.
Where Obama was proven wrong; Bachmann was proven right. When Michele Bachmann first warned about the Muslim Brotherhood, it was an obscure organization to most people in Washington D.C. After its successful seizure of power in Egypt however, Bachmann’s critics no longer have any excuse for pretending that condemning the group’s ruthless manipulations is a conspiracy theory. Not when Egyptian liberals are among the loudest voices warning about the Muslim Brotherhood threat; not just to Egypt or the Middle East, but to America as well.
A recent article in the Egyptian magazine, Rose El-Youssef listed some of the prominent and influential Muslim Brotherhood figures with access to the policymaking apparatus of the Obama Administration. Two of those figures were in the Department of Homeland Security. This article was another piece of evidence in a mountain of evidence, much of it collected by the FBI, about the conspiratorial activities of the Brotherhood and its front groups in the United States.
It wasn’t the intelligence that failed. It was the political operation that allowed Muslim Brotherhood operatives close access to the policymaking apparatus of the United States government that led to the politicized intelligence and the policy failures. Those policy failures led to the ascendance of Al Qaeda in North Africa and the Middle East, the triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the attacks of September 11, 2012.
Nevertheless liberal organizations have launched a petition demanding that she be removed from the intelligence committee for spreading “conspiracy theories” and attacking “dedicated public servants”. After the complete implosion of Obama’s foreign policy, such attacks should be seen for what they are; an attempt to silence one of their critics who had been right all along while covering up their own lies.
To understand the source of the politicized environment that led to the foreign policy disasters, we need look no further than the Center for American Progress and its tentacle, Think Progress.
The Center for American Progress is a secretive think tank funded by covert donors which was described by Time Magazine as Obama’s idea factory and the single greatest influence on his administration. For all intents and purposes, CAP was the criminal brain in the Frankenstein of old Clinton staffers that would become the Obama Administration.
People for the American Way (PFAW) has launched a new campaign against Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who, after her recent re-election to Congress, has been re-appointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).
A PFAW-sponsored petition with 178,000 signatures is to be presented to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Monday 21 January 2012 to protest Bachmann’s HPSCI appointment.
Although it does not say so specifically, the PFAW petition likely refers to a set of letters signed by Rep. Bachmann and four Congressional colleagues – Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Tom Rooney (R-FL) and Lynn Westmorland (R-GA).
The letters were sent in June 2012 to the inspectors general of the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State and the Office of the Director of National Security (ODNI). The letters note that U.S. foreign policy has undergone a dramatic shift in the direction of open support for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and question whether that policy shift may be the result of Brotherhood influence operations.
Given that the 2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding case had established with voluminous documentary evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood’s own archives that its mission in America is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,” Congressional requests, most particularly from the HPSCI, that inspectors general look into the possibility of Brotherhood penetration into the highest levels of the U.S. government would seem to be most appropriate.
As the debacle of the Islamic Awakening continues to churn across the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region, and Muslim Brotherhood operatives consolidate their sharia rule in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt (and move closer to ousting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad), the collaboration of the U.S. government in the Brotherhood’s “grand Jihad” is as critical to the jihadis as it is inexplicable to defenders of genuine democracy both at home and abroad.
As Rep. Bachmann and her colleagues rightly pointed out, U.S. policy, once implacably opposed to the march of Islamic jihad, shifted dramatically during the years following the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, individuals with close links to the Muslim Brotherhood were named to advisory and appointed government positions.
Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at RadicalIslam.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 20 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The Leftist advocacy group People for the American Way (PFAW) has launched an all-out war against Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN). On Monday it plans to present House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) with a petition bearing 178,000 signatures, demanding that Bachmann not be reappointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Michael Keegan, president of PFAW, explained Bachmann’s crime: “Michele Bachmann has used her position on the Intelligence Committee to spread baseless conspiracy theories and smear the reputations of honorable public servants. Speaker Boehner himself called her actions ‘dangerous.’ It’s mysterious, then, why he has chosen to reward her reckless extremism with continued access to sensitive national security information and a powerful platform for her agenda.”
Since Boehner has indeed previously thrown Bachmann under the bus, he may be susceptible to this appeal; if he is at all fair-minded, however, he will recognize not only that Bachmann deserves her place on the Intelligence committee, but that she may be more deserving than any of her colleagues of such a place.
For while Bachmann was widely criticized and ridiculed for daring to suggest that Muslim Brotherhood elements had infiltrated the U.S. government, corroboration of her allegations has recently come from an unlikely quarter: Egypt’s Rose El-Youssef magazine, which asserted in a December article that six highly-placed Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators within the Obama Administration had transformed the United States “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.” (A translation of the article is available from the Investigative Project here.)
According to the Investigative Project, “the six named people include: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for policy development; Mohammed Elibiary, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Eboo Patel, a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships.”
These represent many of the individuals and groups about whom Bachmann had raised concerns. For example, Bachmann’s letter last summer to the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security stated that Elibiary had “extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood” and “sympathy for Islamist causes,” and accused him of “gain(ing) access to classified documents.”
And indeed, in 2011 investigative journalist Patrick Poole reported that “Elibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of those materials to a media outlet.” According to Poole, Elibiary approached “a left-leaning media outlet” with reports marked For Official Use Only that he said demonstrated rampant “Islamophobia” in the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). The media outlet declined to do a story, but what was Elibiary doing shopping the Official Use Only documents in the first place?
Poole checked with Steve McCraw, director of the Texas DPS, who “confirmed that Elibiary has access to the Homeland Security State and Local Intelligence Community of Interest (HS SLIC) database, which contains hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports and products that are intended for intelligence sharing between law enforcement agencies.” Said McCraw of Elibiary: “We know that he has accessed DPS documents and downloaded them.”
There have been questions about Elibiary’s true allegiances for years. He was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas titled “A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary.” The visionary in question was none other than the founding father of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
When I questioned him about his appearance at such a conference, Elibiary claimed that he hadn’t known what kind of conference it was going to be, although he didn’t explain why he went ahead and appeared there anyway once he found out. Among those who found this explanation wanting was journalist Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, whose skepticism angered Elibiary. The great moderate subsequently threatened Dreher, telling him: “Expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe.”
As the Benghazi story played out in the media, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham emerged as two Republican voices spearheading the fight against the White House’s ridiculous narrative. As the Muslim Brotherhood gains power in Egypt, a serious examination of the Brotherhood is increasingly critical to our national security.
Senators McCain and Graham led the charge against Rep. Bachmann this past summer when the Minnesota Congresswomen raised concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence and more specifically about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin and her connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. At the time, McCain railed against Bachmann on the Senate floor:
These sinister accusations rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma’s family, none of which have been shown to harm or threaten the United States in any way. These attacks have no logic, no basis, and no merit and they need to stop. They need to stop now.
Actually, the accusations were both specific and substantiated. Rep. Bachmann responded by saying she was concerned about “the serious national security concerns I had and ask[ed] for answers to questions regarding the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical groups’ access to top Obama administration officials.” Senator Lindsey Graham also attacked Bachmann, saying:
The person saying it (Michele Bachmann) has no idea what they’re saying because they’ve never met (Huma.) She is about as far away from the Muslim Brotherhood view of women and ideology as you possibly could get. She’s a very modern woman in every sense of the word, and people who say these things are really doing her a disservice because they don’t know what they’re talking about.
However, Bachmann’s accusation was never that Huma Abedin wasn’t “a modern woman.” It was that Ms. Abedin had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fact that neither McCain nor Graham can dispute.
Two months later, on September 11th, multiple violent assaults took place on Americans in Egypt and Benghazi, Libya. As we now know, the Obama administration covered up the true nature of the attacks and blamed it on a YouTube video.
The disturbing truth is that the reason for the repeated mentions of the video may be the Obama administration’s longstanding work to help aid the Muslim Brotherhood in censoring critics of Islam. About a week after the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, an event happened that went largely unnoticed in the election-focused United States when a French magazine published cartoons of Muhammad that fueled more Islamist ire:
Essam Erian, acting head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, told Reuters: “We reject and condemn the French cartoons that dishonor the Prophet and we condemn any action that defames the sacred according to people’s beliefs.”Calling for a U.N. treaty against insulting religion, he added: “We condemn violence and say that peaceful protests are a right for everyone. I hope there will be a popular western and French reaction condemning this.”
That U.N. treaty against ‘insulting religion’ that the head of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood called for is something that the Obama administration has been actively working with Islamist nations to ratify for years. As Professor Jonathon Turley has pointed out:
…the Administration is legitimating the prosecution of religious critics and dissidents with this initiative. It should immediately end its support for the standard and reaffirm the protection of religious critics in the United States.
Senator McCain and Senator Graham aren’t telling the American people that the Obama administration used the Benghazi attack to promote the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda of silencing critics of Islam. That appears to be the purpose of President Obama’s speech to the United Nations on October 25th, where it’s no coincidence that he mentioned the YouTube video six times. The idea that the Obama administration is working to silence critics of Islam isn’t just a theory; the Obama administration put this affront to American First Amendment freedoms into action after Benghazi.
Hillary Clinton told Charles Woods, the father of slain ex-SEAL and Benghazi hero Ty Woods, that the Obama administration would “make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” This wasn’t just bluster. The filmmaker was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison, just as Secretary of State Clinton said would happen. It’s one of the most outrageous acts in the entire Benghazi affair and indicates a Muslim Brotherhood influence on U.S. Policy, which is exactly what Rep. Bachmann was concerned about:
The Muslim Brotherhood is not shy about their call for jihad against the United States. We seek answers through these letters because we will not tolerate this group and its affiliates holding positions of power in our government or influencing our nation’s leaders.
Rep. Bachmann was right. Her concerns were not just real, but prescient. Senator Graham and McCain attacked the clear truth that the Muslim Brotherhood is influencing our nation’s leaders. The truth was evident at the time. After Benghazi, it’s glaring.
In the wake of the Islamic attacks on U.S. Embassies in Cairo, Benghazi, and elsewhere continue to reveal lapses in both judgment and security on the part of the State Department, perhaps it’s time to revisit the concerns of Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), et. al. about Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. Government.
Though there were five letters sent to five separate Inspectors General (IG) back on June 13th (with a 90-day deadline given to those IG’s to respond with a report; that deadline passed this week), it might be time to take a look at the one letter that has been the most controversial – the one sent to the Deputy Inspector General for the State Department – Harold Geisel – that included a copy that went to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The letter chronicled several items of concern with respect to actions taken by Clinton. One of those concerns is extremely relevant in light of the recent embassy attacks and the real reason behind them (quashing free speech rights). Here is that excerpt:
A succession of meetings with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – a multinational group that is, like the Muslim Brotherhood, determined to impose shariah worldwide. These are now known as “the Istanbul Process” and are aimed at finding ways to accommodate the OIC’s demands for restrictions on freedom of expression guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, so as to preclude “blasphemy” against Islam and its adherents.
Furthermore, Col. David Hunt (Ret.) is pointing directly to Hillary Clinton for making the decision not to assign Marines to Benghazi.
Foreign Policy is reporting that the State Department has essentially shut down when it comes to discussing the Benghazi attack.
PowerLine is citing a ‘well placed’ source with some information about the State Department that doesn’t sound good:
I spoke with a well-placed journalist last night whose sources describe the situation at the State Department in one word: “Chaos.” The working assumption is that several American embassies may have been penetrated, or are vulnerable to attack, because so many of them rely on local residents for staff needs at the embassy, and as such may be in a position to breach security if they have been recruited by Al Qaida.
Penetration of multiple U.S. Embassies IS penetration of the State Department.
That leads us to the most controversial name in the letter from Bachmann, et. al. to the Inspector General’s office at State – Huma Abedin.
Did we say the deadline for the Inspectors General to respond to Bachmann, et. al. is up?
In 2004 the FBI raided the Annandale, VA home of Ismail Elbarasse. Confiscated documents established a link between the Muslim Brotherhood and U.S. based terrorist groups. Also discovered within the archives was An Explanatory Memorandum. Dated in 1991, the document outlined the strategic goals of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. This document was later submitted as evidence in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial.
The Holy Land Foundation billed itself as dedicated to humanitarian needs — complete with the catchy motto A helping hand for all mankind. But the trial established that U.S. based Muslim groups, using the Holy Land Foundation, had funneled some $12 million to Hamas. Designated as a terror group by U.S. State Department in April 1993, Hamas is an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas was founded in 1987 and within its charter is the goal of establishing an Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
A special note should be made of the Hamas Charter, or Covenant. It is littered with antisemitism and the language projects a tone of deep seated rage. It is hardcore. So much so that it is often referenced by foreign leaders to justify reprimands of the organization. Perhaps because the Charter has proved to be a political liability, there has been a public relations effort put forth by Hamas to de-emphasize the Charter. Khaled Meshaal, a top Hamas scoundrel, once said the Charter is “a piece of history and no longer relevant, but cannot be changed for internal reasons.” Apparently they’ve spent all their money for explosives — not for paper shredders.
Anyway, back to the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Frank Gaffney, former Deputy Assistant of the Secretary of Defense, author and founder of the Center for Security Policy, called the trial a “Rosetta Stone” as it unlocked the true nature of the enemy and it’s goals. “It’s ambitions, which are clearly said to be destroying western civilization from within,” Gaffney stated.
The trial also shed light on the money funneling activities of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), founded by convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian. Both organizations were named as “unindicted co-conspirators”.
It is here that things become a little more insidious. As outlined in Michele Bachmann Smells Something Foul there remains deep skepticism about the political motives of the Department of Justice regarding the trial. In short, claims have been made that the DOJ changed the emphasis of the trial to prosecute the organizations rather than the individuals. Thus, the individuals were able to walk out of the courtroom and, with a little bit of re-branding, continue their activities. Proponents of this belief point out that Obama, Hillary Clinton and others within the administration, have documented political associations (fundraisers, pictures, meetings, speeches, etc.) with these individuals and prosecution of them would have shed a negative light upon the administration or key members within it. (emphasis added)
Ronald Reagan forged a winning electoral majority on the stable foundation of what he described as a three-legged stool: fiscal discipline, traditional values and peace through strength. He understood it to be an appealing platform to the American people writ large, including of course economic, social and national security conservatives and the rest of his Republican Party.
Unfortunately, it seems increasingly, that today’s Republicans want to bet that they can regain the White House by cutting off two legs from that stool – disregarding, if not dismissing outright conservative social issues and national security themes.
A case in point came last week as the G.O.P.’s 2012 presidential nominee, Governor Mitt Romney, declared that his campaign was “not going to talk about” the Left’s attempt to punish the owners of Chick-fil-A for their stand on gay marriage. Neither would it be talking about the request made by Rep. Michele Bachmann and four of her colleagues for an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood influence operations that appear with increasing success to be targeting the Obama administration.
Whatever one thinks about marriage between people of the same sex, surely a man running as a business-friendly candidate would say whether he favors boycotts of privately owned businesses on the basis of the beliefs of their shareholders?
Similarly, the Republican standard-bearer could surely observe that there are statutes and administrative guidelines designed to protect individuals and the government from the possibility that foreign associates may seek to exercise influence on family members, friends, colleagues or their federal agencies that employ them. He could make clear that he supports the rights of members of the House of Representatives to inquire whether there have been breaches of those rules. He can say that he’s reserving judgment on their concerns until we learn the results of the requested Inspector General inquiries.
Instead, Gov. Romney is signaling an indifference to these topics – and, in the process, sending a message that can only alienate those for whom such issues are not just important but determinative of their votes.
By Michele Bachmann:
By Robert Spencer
