http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20334575

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the country's
military is prepared to extend its operation against Palestinian
Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

His comments came after the head of the military wing of Hamas, Ahmed
Said Khalil al-Jabari, was killed.

He died when when his car was targeted during Israeli air strikes in
the territory.

These followed a wave of rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.

Mitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates
favored by the Republican establishment: nice, moderate losers - people with
no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points
they may have.

The list of Republican presidential candidates like this goes back at least
as far as 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey ran against President Harry Truman.
Dewey spoke in lofty generalities while Truman spoke in hard-hitting
specifics. Since then, there have been many reruns of this same scenario,
featuring losing Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Bob Dole,
Gerald Ford, and, when he ran for reelection, George H. W. Bush.

Bush 41 first succeeded when he ran for election as if he were another
Ronald Reagan ("Read my lips, no new taxes"), but then lost when he ran for
reelection as himself - "kinder and gentler," disdainful of "the vision
thing," and looking at his watch during a debate, when he should have been
counterattacking against the foolish things being said.

This year, Barack Obama had the hard-hitting specifics - such as ending "tax
cuts for the rich" who should pay "their fair share," government "investing"
in "the industries of the future" and the like. He had a coherent vision,
however warped.

Advertisement Most of Obama's arguments were rotten, if you bothered to put
them under scrutiny. But someone once said that it is amazing how long the
rotten can hold together, if you don't handle it roughly.

Any number of conservative commentators, both in the print media and on talk
radio, examined and exposed the fraudulence of Obama's "tax cuts for the
rich" argument. But did you ever hear Mitt Romney bother to explain the
specifics which exposed the flaws in Obama's argument?
On election night, the rotten held together because Mitt Romney had not
handled it roughly with specifics. Romney was too nice to handle Obama's
absurdities roughly. He definitely out-niced Obama - as John McCain had
out-niced Obama in 2008, and as Dewey out-niced Truman back in 1948. And
these Republicans all lost.

In this year's first presidential debate, Obama out-niced Romney. But, when
he lost out doing that, he then reversed himself, became the attacker, and
ultimately the winner on election night, despite a track record that should
have buried him in a landslide.

When you look at this as a horse race, there is no question that the
Republicans deserved to lose. But the stakes for this great nation, at this
crucial juncture in its history and in the history of the world, are far too
momentous to look at this election as just a contest between two candidates
or two political parties.

Quite aside from the immediate effects of particular policies, Barack Obama
has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the
United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the
direction of arbitrary one-man rule.

Now that Obama will be in a position to appoint Supreme Court justices who
can rubber-stamp his evasions of the law and usurpations of power, this
country may be unrecognizable in a few years as the America that once led
the world in freedom, as well as in many other things.

Barack Obama's boast, on the eve of the election of 2008 - "We are five days
away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America" - can now
be carried out, without fear of ever having to face the voters again.

This "transforming" project extends far beyond fundamental internal
institutions, or even the polarization and corruption of the people
themselves, with goodies handed out in exchange for their surrendering their
birthright of freedom.

Obama will now also have more "flexibility," as he told Russian president
Dmitri Medvedev, to transform the international order, where he has long
shown that he thinks America has too much power and influence. A nuclear
Iran can change that. Forever.

Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been
rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that
as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on Election Day in 2012.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333237/nice-losers-thomas-sowell

-Eddie Haskell