This is a fascinating piece of 1952 footage featuring former US Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane discussing a Big Lie put over by the Soviets in 1943 concerning their 1940 massacre of thousands of Poles in what is known as the Katyn Forest Massacre.

I'm not sure the facts come through clearly in this short exchange, but the basic outline of events is as follows. The Germans uncovered mass graves containing thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk in April 1943. The Soviets blamed the Germans for the massacre. The Germans blamed the Soviets. The Soviets -- our bosom allies led by "Uncle Joe" Stalin and appeased at all costs by FDR and Churchill  -- were, in fact, guilty. The US and British governments under FDR and Churchill not only accepted this Soviet Lie, they amplified, supported and perpetuated it, and for most of the next decade -- even in the face of overwhleming evidence to the contrary. I discuss this notorious cover-up and its deep implications at length in American Betrayal,...

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Sgt. 1st Class Frank Limtiaco, left, exults as 1st Battalion, 294th Infantry Regiment, Guam Army National Guard leaves Afghanistan on December 28. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Eddie Siguenza/Released)

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The latest National Intelligence Estimate, the Washington Post reports, conveys the glaringly, painfully, tediously obvious: That "gains" in Afghanistan, repetitiously labeled "fragile and reversible" by the vaunted, disgraced, then vaunted again David Petraeus for years, "are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report." (Emphasis added.)

Bring them all home, yesterday. The sooner this...

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In the interest of tying up some loose ends, here are a few updates before the new year.

Principle, what principle?

Remember how 2013 began with much ado over Al Gore’s unseemly $500 million sale of Current TV network to Al Jazeera, aka “the Muslim Brotherhood channel”? Even anything-for-a-buck Time Warner Cable saw fit to drop the Qatar-owned “news” organization from its package. Well, TWC this month announced that, yes, it will be bringing Al Jazeera America into 55 million American homes after all. “Financial terms weren’t disclosed,” USA Today reported.

The Few. The Proud. The Gender-Normed.

Remember how, with a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role would be off-limits to women? Call it the Equal Rights Amendment by executive fiat. But hold on about “equal.” As Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness has reported, “gender-norming” is the Pentagon’s idea of “equal.”

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My syndicated column:

It’s been weeks now, more than a month in some places, but it is all about to come to an end.

“It” is the soundtrack of the season – Christmas carols. From mall to shining mall, these carols sync American life in a rare shared cultural experience that lasts exactly as long as the holiday shopping season itself. Most of the widely – OK, incessantly – played songs are secular in content: “White Christmas,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and more. But their glory days run according to the holiday calendar. They vanish from audio range as soon as Christmas Day is over and the sales begin.

Many will say good riddance, having been Frostied, Rudolphed and Silver-Belled to a tinseled pulp by year’s end. But I will confess to regret on seeing many of the great voices of American popular song once again retired to seasonal oblivion. I refer...

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This week's syndicated column

Feeling soaked after the gushers of drenching hagiography that crashed over the world on the death of the Nelson Mandela, I have been trying to reconcile what I know with what we are supposed to believe.

For example, I know Mandela was a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the combat wing of the African National Congress, which was closely allied with the South African Communist Party. Starting in 1961, MK carried out hundreds of bombings, including of civilian targets. When Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, I know his crime was sabotage and related charges – not political opposition to apartheid, as we are supposed to believe, at least if those comparisons to symbols of non-violence, from Martin Luther King to, yes, Jesus Christ, are to stick.

Another founder of MK was Ronnie Kasrils, a Soviet-trained, South African Communist agent and militant, who, decades later, would serve President Mandela and then President Thabo Mbeki (also...

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Michael Goodwin of the New York Post, a former colleague on the old Lou Dobbs shows at CNN, has a column out today interpreting Obama's unseemly behavior at Mandela's funeral. He writes:

But the “selfie” episode also symbolizes the greater global calamity of Western decline. With British prime minister David Cameron playing the role of Obama’s giggling wingman, the “look at me” moment confirms we have unserious leaders in a dangerously serious time.

To say the very least.

Goodwin continues, lambasting Obama & Cameron as empty suits.

Obama and Cameron were posing as world leaders. They will never be confused with FDR and Churchill. The fratboys stand in stark contrast to the days when the “special relationship” meant two great leaders uniting two great countries in the fight for freedom.

Here is the AP photo that runs in the Post illustrating Goodwin's point:

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I am reposting a couple of columns below from 2009, written at a time before the Obama "surge" in Afghanistan, based on Bush's "surge" in Iraq, was in full swing. 

I have long argued that the Bush surge failed (explanation in three parts here). The Obama surge has failed, too, and for the same basic reason that has nothing to do with leaving Iraq "too soon," or, I deeply hope, "leaving Afghanistan" in 2014. It is vital to stress that these failures are not due to the bravery and sacrifice and skill of our military forces. These forces have resolutely fufilled their impossible missions, to say the very least. The failures lie in war-planning and political strategy, ignorance and fecklessness, at the highest levels of the Bush and Obama White Houses, in the Pentagon, and in the Congress that failed to check them.

(To such ignorance and fecklessness we may also add an epic show of institutional callousness.)

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From the Wash Times.

The setting: House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The Issue: Afghanistan and the transition to fewer U.S. troops post-2014.

The witnesses: James F. Dobbins, State's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan; Donald Sampler, assistant to the administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides civilian foreign aid; and Michael Dumont, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.

The questions: How much is the US budget on Afghanistan, and how many Americans have been killed and wounded in the last 12 months?

None of the witnesses knew the answers.

Rowan Scarborough reports:

According to the Pentagon's fiscal 2013 budget, it is spending about $88 billion this year to wage the war in Afghanistan. The State Department...

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... I will be speaking and signing books on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.

On Tuesday, December 10:

Location: Skirball Cultural Center
2701 North Sepulveda Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90049

M. Stanton Evans and Sebastian Gorka will be joining in via Skype.
 
Admission: $15.00
 
Parking: Free (on site)
 
To register and for more information call the AFA office at: 310-444-3085

On Wednesday, December 11:

A dinner followed by a book-signing.

More information here.

"If he wants to make a lot of money advising Huawei, that's his prerogative," Wolf told the AP. "But he shouldn't be on a critical advisory board that provides intelligence advice on foreign investments in our country."

Once again, thank you, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). The story below is a coloring book example of influence -- Chinese Communist influence -- in the US intelligence chain: a paid consultant of a Chinese tech company who is also (until recently) an advisor to US intelligence regarding foreign investment in the US. That this conflict of interest ( a nice phrase for it) did not strike the intelligence establishment as a concern (another nice word) is, of course, the biggest problem of all.  

From the AP:

WASHINGTON -- A longtime adviser to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for Huawei Technologies Ltd., the Chinese technology company the U.S. has condemned as an espionage...

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The following open letter to Pope Francis was written today by Geert Wilders, the leader of the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid, Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands.

Your Holiness,

In your recent exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (Paragraphs 247-248) you draw the world’s attention to the indebtedness of Christianity to the Jews and their faith. The exhortation also contains a sharp condemnation of the terrible persecutions which the Jews have endured from Christians in the past.

Your words are words which might inspire many.

Unfortunately, they are in sharp contrast to the expressions of hatred which were voiced last October by the spiritual leader of Sunni Islam, Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo.

During an interview, aired on Egyptian television on October 25, Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayeb reaffirmed the relevance of Koranic verse 5:82, which states that of all people the Christians are closest to the Muslims, while the Jews...

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This week's syndicated column

An extraordinary thing happened in Washington, D.C., this week. Appearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee, several constitutional scholars forthrightly and unmistakably outlined the leading danger to the survival of our constitutional republic: the usurpation of powers by President Barack Hussein Obama.

This wasn’t just me, a non-lawyer, perplexed by how out-of-whack constitutional checks and balances have become and, in particular, how enfeebled the legislative branch is. This wasn’t even Mark Levin, a constitutional lawyer himself, explaining to his radio audience that we are living in “post-constitutional” times.

This was, for starters, Jonathan Turley, a liberal Georgetown law professor, who, noting that he once voted for Obama, nonetheless warned America that the concentration of executive branch powers, having accelerated under George W. Bush, is approaching a crisis under Obama. “The problem with what the president is doing...

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A little birdie tells me that the upcoming Christmas Books feature at the American Spectator will include American Betrayal on my friend Jed Babbin's list. Babbin, a noted author and commentator, is also former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, and long familiar to readers of the Spectator, Human Events and National Review.

Jed writes:

Last and certainly not least, American Betrayal by Diana West documents Soviet penetration of the U.S government during World War II and the parallels today to how the “free world” is reacting to Islam. Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around the book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized...

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