How Long Before Accurate Appraisal of White House Policies?

It usually takes about 50 years. But sometimes it takes longer as with the JFK presidency. The greater the deceptions and abuses the longer it takes. Kim Philby was a double agent working for the USSR while an agent for British MI6. It took over 50 years for the truth to be revealed, and he was just one spy. See e.g., Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends. 

[From article]
I hope to live long enough to see the Obama administration’s disastrous track record objectively evaluated. The overwhelming media support Obama has received, combined with his demographic characteristics, personal charm, winning smile, sense of humor, and comedy timing, has kept his level of public esteem far above the merits of his presidential decisions.
As his second term winds down, some truth-tellers are beginning to emerge and discuss the quality of decision-making they experienced. Among the first is Robert Gates. Aaron Kliegman reports in the Free Beacon:
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that President Obama thinks he is smarter than his advisers and that he surrounds himself with people who will not question his views. As a result, the White House has struggled to develop and implement effective strategy during the Obama administration, according to Gates.
“You know, the president is quoted as having said at one point to his staff, ‘I can do every one of your jobs better than you can,’” Gates said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
“Oh my God, ” host Joe Scarborough said.
Gates’ statement was in response to Scarborough, who asked, “President Obama has actually been criticized for always thinking he’s the smartest guy in the room … Did Barack Obama always think he was the smartest guy in the room?”
As someone who studied and taught group decision-making at Harvard Business School (as well as a non-idiot with a few scraps of common sense), I can attest that this is the worst possible way to go about reaching collective decisions. The entire idea of such an approach is to bring together diverse information, experiences, and perspectives; weigh them; and reach a conclusion reflecting more considerations than one person could bring to the table.
So how did Obama come to such a level of arrogance?
One answer must be doting grandparents who raised him in the absence of both parents (who had better things to do with their lives). They must have consoled him with stories that he was very, very special.
[. . .]
As fate would have it, young Barack Obama entered the educational system of the United States at the precise moment when a desperate need to atone for past sins led to the lionization of black students who showed promise, and a corresponding reluctance to criticize them. This sort of condescension is racist at its heart, anchored in an unspoken belief in racial inferiority, but it masquerades as righteous anti-racism.
This is all speculation, of course. But something has to explain such an intellectually inadequate man rising to the level of responsibility Barack Obama achieved.
On second thought, I am very unlikely to live long enough to see any of this honestly and fairly appraised.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/01/beginning_the_autopsy_on_obama_administration_decisionmaking_disasters.html

January 21, 2016
Beginning the autopsy on Obama administration decision-making disasters
By Thomas Lifson

https://youtu.be/pDHireIp2Zk

Savage Behavior Becoming The Norm, Where Did United States Go Off The Rails?

[From article]
Once my husband and I rounded the wrong bend in the middle of Montana and, being as far from civilization as one can get in the lower 48,
[. . .]



America is now living through such a lost period in our history, and it’s high time we thought about where things went wrong. In my Montana wanderings there were several factors involved; we’d neglected to bring the charger for the GPS, had consulted the wrong map, and had failed to pay attention when the road veered gradually to the left. The same is true for our national journey.
As with most errors this one started with bad thinking; we’ve made two huge philosophical mistakes, one an outgrowth of the other, and they may cost us everything: 1) we have been lazy and wimpy on the issue of truth and, as a result, 2) we have bought the lie that human nature is basically good.
Let’s look first at the issue of truth. I say we wimped out because it is much easier, at least for a while, to whitewash all controversies and claim that truth is so flexible that it can take any shape we want it to. If we assume that truth is merely a human construct, we can claim that it comes in thousands of differing colors and sizes, tailor made to fit any need. Thus we avoid having to discern differences, make moral judgments, or stand up for anything. We can act superior to those who still see vast chasms between belief systems and we claim “open-mindedness” utterly unaware of the meaninglessness of that term.
If nothing is really true, then there’s no reason to knuckle down and learn anything, no reason to think very hard, no reason to amass facts –- we suspect they’re not true anyway. I am dumbfounded by the ignorant assertion that Muslims and Christians worship the same god. A person doesn’t have to know, can’t know, anything much about either belief and make that statement. In an untruthful world ignorance is not only bliss, it is the inescapable condition.
[. . .]



You see, if one decides against absolute truth, one decides against logic; it is, after all, a self-refuting logical impossibility to say, “There is no such thing as absolute truth.” And what happens when a society decides to ignore the nonsense factor and base its “thinking” on such a floppy foundation? Insanity is what happens.
We have a society in which one can scream about a “war on women” but support passionately a group that excels at subordinating, torturing, mutilating, raping, and terrifying its women from their childhood. We have a society that has frozen in the face of an enemy so horrifying that we can’t even work up the courage to publicly condemn them, let alone commit to war. We have a society that has no moral boundaries, other than avoiding offending another person’s sensibilities. We have no problem with killing inconvenient babies in spite of its genocidal results, no problem with sexual promiscuity regardless of the physical disease and family turmoil that causes, and worst of all, we no longer expect our leadership to be truthful people of integrity.
As the Clinton campaign drags itself forward I am amazed at the number of her supporters – both public figures and private acquaintances of mine -- who are content to make excuses for her habitual, pathological duplicity.
[. . .]



Sooner or later reality will come crashing through the door and it will have to be dealt with. That’s where we are right now. Grendel is splintering the gates and we can no longer just pass the joint, sing loudly and pretend he’s not out there. He is.
Because we have treated reality like a do-it-yourself kit, we’ve arrived at a second philosophical no-man’s land; we’ve decided that, despite all evidence to the contrary, humanity is basically good. [. . .]
If we are basically born good, then childrearing becomes nothing more than keeping the child alive until he can fend for himself, never mind the fact that such parental neglect has created at least two generations of self-centered, amoral monsters. We are not naturally good. We can be good, but we don’t start that way. What baby has ever given a rip that his mother hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since he was born? What two-year-old goes sweetly off to her nap because she knows mommy needs some quiet time? Children need to be taught, sternly and consistently, to put others first.
If our children aren’t trained out of their natural tendencies we end up with mobs of teenagers terrorizing mall shoppers, having sex at school (sometimes with the teacher, because that generation doesn’t know any better either), and destroying any learning that might be able to happen in a classroom.
[. . .]
How can we process the knowledge that some of our fellow human beings are quite at ease with the idea of raping babies, beheading fellow countrymen, burning people alive? How do we explain that?
We try to blame such behavior on poverty, on racism (which also needs explaining), on society in general, which is a pretty rocky hypothesis since society is built of the crooked bricks of fallen, sinful individuals; it’s not a separate entity, but an outgrowth of all that is rotten in Denmark.
Human beings, unless trained to be decent, humble, and caring, have in our very DNA the capacity to think and commit evil –- absolute evil. Each generation comes face-to-face with that fact. All of human history has been a trail of tears –- not because the rich have too much, or because our parents didn’t love us enough, or because some stranger didn’t approve of us. We hurt each other because something in us pushes us to do so. This is why humanity needed a Savior. Only with His sacrifice and His influence has the world crept slowly out of the toil and horror of life on this earth.
But if we deny truth (i.e. God) and continue looking past all the evidence of our flawed nature, the prosperity and progress of the last 2,000 years will be lost, is being lost. I pray consistently that enough of us will wake up and realize that there is an absolute mountain of truth out in front of us, and we’re about to crash headlong into it. truth is immutable; it isn’t going to move out of our way.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/the_wrong_turn_.html

January 18, 2016
The Wrong Turn
By Deana Chadwell

You Can't Stand The Truth

[From article]
Opponents of the truth (whose side we were all on at one time or another) find themselves in what C.S. Lewis describes as a “terrible fix.” They have made themselves enemies of the one thing which they cannot stand to be with, which is also the one thing which they cannot really do without. As Lewis puts it, the Author of truth “is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible-ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies.”
[. . .]
“Truth is incontrovertible,” wrote Winston Churchill. “Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it; but there it is.” And it will be there for all time and beyond time. In spite of all our efforts, we will all ultimately answer to the truth -- better to do so in this world than the next.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/the_truth_is_always_offensive.html

January 25, 2015
The Truth is Always 'Offensive'
By Trevor Thomas

Year of Stupidity, 2014

[From article]
Robert Tracinski calls it the year of Ben Trovato, a name taken from an Italian adage meaning “if it’s not true, it’s a good story”.
Among the false narratives peddled by the left last year, he counts the following:
That Michael Brown had his hands up, indicating surrender, when he was shot by a Ferguson police officer;
Michelle Obama was the victim of racism at Target when someone asked her to get something from a top shelf;
Gruber’s truthful account of how Obamacare was foisted on us, made that a totally Ben Trovato operation from the outset;
The rape culture at the University of Virginia “where everybody forgot about Charlottesville’s real-life rapist and serial killer and spent weeks in a frenzy over a rape accusation that was not only false but had its corroborating details plagiarized from “Dawson’s Creek”;

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/2014_the_year_of_peak_stupidity.html

January 4, 2015
2014: The Year of Peak Stupidity
By Clarice Feldman

Truth and Love Always Prevail?

"When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always."

Mohandas Gandhi 

Truth Detectors Developed For Middle East Warriors

OK, so how long before dating services, local police, crime families and universities use these devices on civilians to check on their bona fides? 

[From article]
So, if you’re a U.S. soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan today, how do you determine whether or not the Iraqi or Afghan soldier next to you is going to give up your location to the enemy at the first chance? One solution, developed by a former Army counterintelligence agent, is scanning the brains of Iraqi troops for signs of potential betrayal.
AUTHOR

Veritas Scientific, based in Virginia, markets a truth detection system called HandShake for soldiers to diagnose the trust-worthiness of people they may have to work with.

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/could-brain-scan-protect-us-troops-insider-attacks/88801/

Could a Brain Scan Protect U.S. Troops from Insider Attacks?
Patrick Tucker
July 15, 2014

Lie Of The Year Turns Out To be True

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/whoops-politifacts-lie-year-turns-out-be-true_696223.html

Whoops: PolitiFact's 'Lie of the Year' Turns Out to Be True
12:25 PM, JAN 18, 2013
BY MARK HEMINGWAY

Obama Gets It Wrong Again

Does the call to end human trafficking apply to the FBI, police and crime families in the USA? They all use women for rewards and to punish men. How many women were and are being used by US agencies for paying bills? Regarding Obama's misguided historical references what else is new? Seldom can voters rely on what the man says. He admitted as much when he said to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "Your problem is you have to tell the truth." 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/25/obama-garbles-us-history-human-trafficking-speech/

Obama garbles U.S. history in human trafficking speech
By Dave Boyer and Susan Crabtree
The Washington Times
Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Lynne McCord Truth

Lynne McCord

Melina Kanakaredes Truth

Melina Kanakaredes Truth