Do you remember candidate Obama, the guy who said he would sit down and negotiate with Iran- pursue a diplomatic approach with the nefarious regime?  How, through his leadership, he’d bring together UN Security Council members to impose sanctions that would force Iran to halt their nuclear ambitions?  Well, after 13 months of lost time and wasted efforts it appears that the Obama administration is about to adopt the same Bush policies Obama campaigned against.

As the apprentice President continues to discover,  you can’t negotiate with terrorist or terrorist regimes.  Regardless of how many times you apologize or placate those with a radical ideology, it will not alter their determination to destroy you.  Regardless of whether you try terrorist in military court or in civilian courts, you will not earn their respect.  Perhaps the apprentice President has finally learned a lesson from a seasoned President, and that lesson is that it’s his duty to protect and defend this country even if he means you won’t be personally loved.

From the Guardian:

Hillary Clinton’s sudden volley of shots at Iran marks the end of an engagement policy that never really began. She wants to convince the world that the regime in Tehran is opposed to serious talks with the west. That may be true, but we’ll probably never know because in fact, no one has offered such talks.

In laying out the American approach to Iran, Clinton showed how little US foreign policy has changed since the last years of the Bush administration. President Bush famously explained that he would not negotiate with unfriendly regimes because he didn’t want to “reward bad behaviour”. He wanted states like Iran to change of their own accord, not as a result of negotiation but as a pre-condition for being allowed to negotiate.

Clinton embraces this same idea. She rejects the view that as Iran becomes more threatening and approaches nuclear breakout capacity, diplomatic engagement becomes more urgent. Instead she takes the opposite view. “We don’t want to be engaging while they are building their bomb,” she said this week.

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1.  Epic snow across the East Coast forces Obama and Nancy Pelosi to cut short their global warming trip to Copenhagen yesterday, while in the South of France snow fell along the beaches.

2.  In an explosive book set to be released, author Ken Gromley reveals that prosecutors were prepared to indict Bill and Hillary Clinton for their roles in the Whitewater Scandal.  “Yet the consensus was that any effort to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be extremely risky,” Gormley wrote. Prosecutors believed that “getting an Arkansas or a Washington grand jury to indict the First Lady seemed like a long shot.” Starr prosecutors instead decided to focus efforts on charges against the former president, the book says.

3.  TMZ is reporting that Liberal Maria Shriver feels that the laws don’t apply to people like her; talking on the cell phone, rolling through stop signs, parking in red zones- read more about it here.

4.  There may be no dancing his way out of this one. ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ choreographer Shane Sparks was arrested yesterday on 8 charges related to lews conduct with a child.  You can read the arrest warrant here.

5.  Men’s Health did a study of the absolute worst fast-food burger in the world coming in at 1,450 calories and 84 grams of fat.  Hint,  it wasn’t the Big Mac. Read the list after the jump.

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Do you recall the outrage that was Abu Ghraib?  For those who might have forgotten, Abu Ghraib was a prison in Baghdad where some recalcitrant soldiers threatened prisoners with dogs, placed hoods over their heads, and had them pose in lewd positions.  The media and the Democrats were outraged and immediately branded these acts as torture.  Some Democrat leaders called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

Fast forward to August 2009 and CBS is reporting that contract guards at the embassy in Afghanistan were filmed urinating on other guards, made to perform lewd acts, photographed naked, etc. as part of an indoctrination.  The report goes on to say that there was a “climate of fear and coercion”. CBS was quick to point out that this was “hazing”.  That’s the word they use under a Democrat administration.  Despite the obvious lack of leadership, there have been no calls for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to resign.

And the news gets worse.  According to “Project on Government Oversight”, prostitution, boozing, and other deviate behavior has been on full display at the embassy and quarters of these guards.  New male guards were made to perform sexual acts on male supervisors in order to get promotions or better shifts.  These were the very guards whose role is to protect the embassy in war-torn Afghanistan.

Had these events been conducted under the Bush administration, have no doubt that the Democrats would be calling for the immediate resignation of Secretary Rice, and the photos would have been shown on every media outlet around the world.

Obama insisted that his administration would “change the image of America in the world”, and thus far, he’s definitely kept his promise.  Unfortunately, for the rest of us, I don’t believe this is the image we expected to have projected.  Video ——- Report send to Sec. Clinton

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Clinton ordered an investigation on Tuesday into the Animal House revels of private guards at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan – including booze, hookers and other “deviant behavior.”

“These are very serious allegations, and we are treating them that way,” State Departmentspokesman Ian Kelly said of photo and e-mail evidence of the “climate of fear and coercion” at the living quarters of ArmorGroup guards.

The investigation by the State Department’s inspector general follows a shocking report to Clinton by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight detailing a “Lord of the Flies environment” at the Camp Sullivan compound a few miles from the embassy in Kabul. Prostitutes allegedly were brought in for birthday parties, drunken guards engaged in brawls and boozy lawn parties turned into naked affairs where guests urinated on one another, according to photos and videos obtained by the nonprofit group.

Clinton has “zero tolerance” for the behavior described and has directed a “review of the whole system” for farming out security to private contractors that may have threatened the safety of embassy personnel, Kelly said.

Earlier, hearings in June by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), head of the subcommittee on contractor oversight, questioned whether the contract with ArmorGroup, now owned byWackenhut Services Inc., should be renewed.

In a separate letter to Clinton, McCaskill said the Project on Government Oversight report “calls into question the ability of the contractor to provide sufficient security for the embassy.”

Wackenhut did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The report found sleep-deprived guards regularly logging 14-hour days, language barriers that impair critical communications and a failure by the State Department to hold the contractor accountable.

About 300 of the 450 ArmorGroup guards employed to protect 1,000 personnel at the embassy are Nepalese Gurkhas and the rest are a mix of Australian, South African and American expats, the oversight project report said.

Although the Gurkhas were described as “serious about their jobs,” their difficulty with English had forced the English speakers to “use pantomime in order to convey orders or instructions,” the report said.

“One guard described the situation as so dire that if he were to say to many of the Gurkhas, ‘There is a terrorist standing behind you,’ those Gurkhas would answer ‘Thank you, Sir, and good morning,’” the report said.

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