Category: Barack Obama

‘Pretending Not to Know’

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In 2011, explaining his abandonment of “brain-dead” liberalism, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet published The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. It was there that he expressed what has become known as The Mamet Principle: “In order to continue advancing their illogical arguments, modern liberals have to pretend not to know things.” We see this all the time in the make-believe play-acting of TV personalities like Jake Tapper, who did a perfect imitation of Claude Rains in Casablanca in describing how he was shocked — shocked! — by the revelation that Joe Biden was senile.

As a journalist, one of my biggest gripes is that TV news has given people a mistaken idea about what journalism actually is. Writing a 700-word news article is a full day’s work for the reporter who has to rely on his own notes of conversations with sources. To be an actual reporter — as opposed to a TV talking head — means spending a lot of time on the phone, trying to get people to tell the truth when it would better suit them to keep the truth out of the newspaper. By contrast, if you understand what TV news actually is, you realize that the anchorman is paid for his ability to convey the proper emotion about what he’s telling you.

As Mamet remarked, newscasters are hired “not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their ‘believability,'” and that is how Barack Obama became president — he had that same kind of superficial “believability” that characterizes a successful TV news anchor.

This brings us to Obama’s disingenuous (unsolicited and unnecessary) comment about Cole Allen’s botched assassination attempt Saturday night at the annual White House Correspondents dinner. By the time he pushed the “publish” button on that tweet, we did indeed “have the details about the motives” of the gunman. Allen’s social-media archives and his written “manifesto” made clear that Allen was a Democrat, inspired by the same vicious lies about Trump that Democrats and their media allies have been promoting for the past decade.

“His beliefs mirrored mainstream Democrat talking points” — in other words, he was radicalized not by some obscure fringe website, but by what every Democrat with access to a microphone or a camera has been saying publicly ever since Trump beat Hillary nearly 10 years ago.

Barack Obama’s intent was to conceal and obscure this truth, to assert that Democrats are against political violence, no matter how often we have seen them incite, defend, justify and participate in such violence (e.g., the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots of 2020). As David Mamet said, Obama must “pretend not to know things” (and encourage others to join him in that pretense) or else the very existence of the Democratic Party might be jeopardized, because everybody would realize what a colossal scam it is (as all honest and intelligent people already do).



 

To Cap an Action-Packed Week of #Winning, Tulsi Nukes ‘RussiaGate’

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Easy to see now why the Deep State went all-in to try and wreck Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence. I have more thoughts, but let’s get the news out of the way first:

The Obama administration’s top officials committed a “treasonous conspiracy” by manufacturing and politicizing intelligence to create the false narrative that led to the years-long Trump-Russia collusion probe, according to newly-declassified documents released by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard. . . .
Despite the intelligence community’s consensus that Russia “lacked the intent and capability to hack U.S. elections” prior to Trump’s 2016 win over Hillary Clinton, Gabbard said Obama’s officials changed their tune soon after the president won, ignoring the evidence. . . .
On the day the [Presidential Daily Briefing] was supposed to be published on December 9, NSC officials including Clapper, then-CIA Director John Brennan, then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then-Secretary of State John Kerry, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and others, met in the White House Situation Room to discuss Russia. . . .
Following the meeting, Clapper’s assistant emailed intelligence leaders telling them to create a new assessment “per the president’s request,” detailing the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.”

You can read the rest. The most important revelation — based on newly declassified documents, keep in mind — is the extent to which the “Intelligence community,” in assembling this frame-up against Trump, were acting on direct orders from Obama. We’ve known the basic outlines of the Russian “collusion” hoax for a while now, but what Gabbard has done is to prove that Obama administration officials perpetrated this hoax on the basis of presidential orders. That’s what the December 9, 2016 meeting was about, and Tulsi’s got the receipts to prove it.

As I said previously, I have some thoughts about this, e.g., do you believe it is just a random coincidence that, hours before Gabbard released this RussiaGate bombshell, the Wall Street Journal published a flimsy smear about Donald Trump sending a birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003?

Because I do not believe it’s a coincidence. Democratic operatives of the Deep State, and their media minions, are certainly not naïve as to how this game is played. It took many weeks for Gabbard’s team to put together the contents of that document trove she dumped on Friday, and this Epstein thing was timed as a “spoiling attack,” as such tactics are called in the military. So I don’t doubt for a minute that the timing of the Wall Street Journal story was part of an attempt to distract from Gabbard’s release of the RussiaGate documents. Despite every effort that Gabbard might make to keep the preparation of this report a secret, the Deep State still has assets inside the bureaucracy who would tip off Democrats about what was coming down the pike and, having advance notice of when it was slated for publication, this “spoiling attack” was set up to be published previous to Gabbard’s bombshell. That’s not paranoia talking, it’s a logical deduction based on facts:

One of the co-authors of the WSJ report, Joe Palazzolo, previously wrote for a publication called Main Justice, which was founded by Mary Jacoby, who happens to be the wife of Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS founder behind the debunked Steele Dossier and the Russia hoax. Both Simpson and Jacoby previously worked at the Wall Street Journal themselves, which tells you everything you need to know about the political rot festering in that newsroom.

Anyway, a lot of people are demanding “accountability,” i.e., criminal prosecutions of everyone involved in the RussiaGate scandal, up to and including Barack Obama himself. While I would enthusiastically applaud such a Payback Is Hell and Karma Is a Bitch reprisal — given everything these vile swine did to Trump — I don’t think it’s likely.

It is one thing to expose such scandals, and another thing altogether to turn the scandal into a criminal indictment that can result in a jury voting unanimously for conviction. There is a reason why the protest mobs who wave signs demanding “#Justice for [Insert Dead Criminal’s Name Here]” are so often disappointed when the local District Attorney announces that the cops won’t be charged for shooting the suspect. Our criminal justice system is, thank God, designed to make it difficult to get a felony conviction in court. In the case of a suspect getting shot by cops, before a prosecutor can charge the cops with any wrongdoing — even mere negligence, let alone deliberate murder — he must first ask whether the cop can make a plausible case for self-defense or otherwise justify the shooting as necessary to public safety. Over and over again, in such cases, the prosecutors find themselves facing a self-defense argument they can’t beat. This is why, even when it’s a Soros-funded anti-police district attorney like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, the cops aren’t prosecuted for shooting suspects, no matter how sketchy the case may seem to Ben Crump and the #Justice mobs. And so it is with RussiaGate.

Those of us who’ve been angry for years about the Steele Dossier, etc., now find ourselves in the shoes of the urban protest mobs demanding #Justice. We know damned well that Team Obama and Team Hillary engaged in wrongdoing, and that they deserve to be punished for it, but what are the chances that Pam Bondi could actually get a criminal conviction in a federal court? Not good — not good at all.

As egregious as the RussiaGate scandal is, the overwhelming likelihood is that nobody involved in this sordid mess will ever be charged with a crime, and that if somehow Bondi does find a way to get indictments against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al., the subsequent trial will end in a verdict of acquittal. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird,” to quote Weather Underground alumnus Bill Ayers. “America is a great country.”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

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Obama: Still the Divider-in-Chief

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Because I’m watching CNN, so you don’t have to:

Former President Barack Obama said in a new interview that racial inequality, nationalization of politics and “siloing of the media” is contributing to the intense political divisions in the country.
In a special interview with Anderson Cooper that aired on CNN Monday, the former president bashed Republicans for not pushing back on accusations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen — and questioned a growing debate on critical race theory.
Cooper asked Obama if he felt he had told “the story of race in America” during his eight years as president.
“Each and every time I tried to describe why it is that we are still not fully reconciled with our history,” Obama said. “But, the fact is, it is a hard thing to hear.”
“It’s hard for the majority of this country of white Americans to recognize that, look, you can be proud of this country and its traditions and its history and our forefathers — and yet it is also true that this terrible stuff happened,” he added.
“And that, you know, the vestiges of that linger and continue.” . . .
“But I also think there are certain right wing media venues for example that monetize and capitalize on stoking the fear and resentment of a white population that is witnessing a changing America and seeing demographic changes,” he said.
“And do everything they can to give people a sense that their way of life is threatened and people are trying to take advantage of them.”

Here’s an idea for you, Barry: Since you’re paying so much attention to “certain right wing media,” maybe you’re reading my blog, and let me suggest that perhaps this “fear and resentment” is not entirely irrational, that maybe “their way of life” really is being threatened.

See, for all their talk about “critical theory,” a lot of liberals don’t seem to spend much time critically examining their own beliefs. At least once or twice a week, I switch my TV off Fox News and watch CNN or MSNBC instead, just so I can see what kind of media diet liberals are consuming. This morning, while watching CNN, I not only saw them endlessly replaying and discussing video clips from the Obama interview, but I also noticed what they aren’t covering: Not a single mention of Dr. Fauci and U.S. funding for “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Because the media narrative isn’t only about what they report, it’s also about which stories they downplay or ignore altogether.

Why do you think “certain right wing media” attract an audience, Mr. Obama? Isn’t it because the mainstream media deliberately ignore everything that doesn’t fit their partisan political narrative? Let me know after you read my blog, and we’ll have a “beer summit,” OK?




 

Is Obama Living in an Alternative Reality?

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“I’m not making this up, you know,” remarks my podcast partner John Hoge, in reaction to this mind-boggling bit of news:

Former President Barack Obama on Friday stated the “rule of law is at risk” in response to the Department of Justice dropping its criminal charges against retired Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, according to an audio call obtained by Yahoo News.
“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn,” Obama said during a virtual discussion with members of the Obama Alumni Association. “The fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
During his remarks on Flynn, Obama erroneously said the former White House national security advisor pleaded guilty to perjury. Rather, he was charged for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak during President Trump’s transition period. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 as part of then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into now-debunked collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. In January, the Justice Department changed its sentencing recommendation for Flynn from probation to six months in jail, prompting the former Trump official to withdraw his guilty plea, citing prosecutors breaking their plea agreement.

What’s interesting here is when Obama says that the dropping of the charges against Flynn has been “somewhat downplayed” in the news, which tells me that he must be watching CNN, because if you’re watching Fox News, this story has gotten heavy coverage there. Why would this story be “somewhat downplayed” by whatever media Obama watches?

In court documents, the Justice Department said it dropped the case “after a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information.” . . .
In its filing, the Justice Department said it concluded that Flynn’s interview by the FBI was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the interview on Jan. 24, 2017, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

Newly released documents, including FBI agents’ notes, show that they were aware Flynn was the target of a set-up ordered by James Comey.

Is Obama so isolated within a cocoon of friendly media that he actually doesn’t know any of this? We know Obama was prejudiced against Flynn, who in 2014 as head of defense intelligence had contradicted in congressional testimony Obama’s claim to have al-Qaeda “on the run.” But does the president know that other people are aware of this? See, if you’re watching CNN or MSNBC, you’ll never see any information that reflects negatively on Obama (or positively on Republicans), and thus Obama might be completely unaware of what Fox News and other organizations have reported in relation to “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Many millions of other Americans are as clueless as Obama, of course. If all you know is what you get from CNN or MSNBC, for example, you may not even be aware that someone named Mollie Hemingway exists, so you would never read her excellent article showing a timeline of how Obama’s Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting with John Brennan, James Clapper and others, led to the spurious prosecution of Flynn.

There’s a whole lot of information in that article which has never been reported by either CNN or MSNBC, nor by any of the three major broadcast network news divisions. Unless you actively and deliberately seek out information that the liberal media don’t want you to know about, it’s very easy to believe whatever narrative they’re selling you. This is why your liberal friends on Facebook are so smugly confident about their intellectual and moral superiority; they have simply never encountered any information that contradicts their worldview. Because liberals so dominate the journalism industry — to say nothing of their hegemonic control of Hollywood and academia — it requires a lot of effort to become a conservative. But I digress . . .

If your liberal friends haven’t yet figured out that “Russian collusion” was hoax, why? It’s confirmation bias, of course. Your liberal friends hate Donald Trump — in fact, they hate you for voting for him — and therefore make an active effort to avoid encountering any information that might reflect favorably on Trump. It’s very easy for them to do this, for the reasons I’ve explained, and so their minds would melt down in cognitive dissonance if they watched this 12-minute Tucker Carlson monologue:

 

You should probably share that video on your Facebook page, so that your liberal friends will have one more reason to hate you. Also, you should probably hit my tip jar, for giving you that suggestion.




 

Report: Leader of Attack on U.S. Embassy Met With Obama in 2011

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Violent mobs in Baghdad:

Iranian militia leader Hadi al-Amiri, one of several identified as leading an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, reportedly visited the White House in 2011 during the presidency of Barack Obama.
On Tuesday, a mob in Baghdad attacked the U.S. embassy in retaliation against last weekend’s U.S. airstrikes against the Iran-backed Shiite militia Kataib Hezbollah (KH), responsible for killing an American civilian contractor. KH is one of a number of pro-Iran militias that make up the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF/PMU), which legally became a wing of the Iraqi military after fighting the Sunni Islamic State terrorist group.
President Donald Trump has since accused Iran of having “orchestrated” the embassy attack and stated that the government would be “held fully responsible.” . . .
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that among those agitating protesters in Baghdad on Tuesday was Hadi al-Amiri, a former transportation minister with close ties to Iran who leads the Badr Corps, another PMF militia.
In 2011, both Fox News and the Washington Times noted that then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki brought his transportation minister, al-Amiri, to a meeting at the White House. . . .
At the time, the outlets expressed concern that al-Amiri had ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the FBI has stated played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. President Donald Trump designated the IRGC a foreign terrorist organization, the first time an official arm of a foreign state received the designation. . . .
In 2016, Obama secured a deal with Iran which included a payment of $1.7 billion in cash.



 

‘The Most Vulnerable Among Us’

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Ed Driscoll calls our attention to this Daily Caller item:

Writers bashed former President Barack Obama after he criticized “woke” social justice warriors during a speech Tuesday.
Obama spoke at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago and hit back at alleged activists who attack other people on the internet because of their “flaws,” according to the former president. His comments saw bipartisan support, but some liberals disagreed with his thought that this rhetoric is “not activism.”
Journalist Ernest Owens wrote that he “gasped” when he heard Obama’s comments and called the former president’s views that of a “boomer” in an op-ed featured in The New York Times Friday.
“But the former president’s disdain for the kind of criticism that has become popular to dismiss as ‘cancel culture’ … is misguided,” [Owens] wrote, adding:

“His eagerness to dismiss one part of what happens when young people stand up for what they believe in as ‘casting stones’ is a reminder of a largely generational divide about whether it’s impolite to speak out in favor of the most vulnerable among us and the world we’d like to live in. While there’s some debate about which generation Mr. Obama belongs to, he’s solidly in the older camp.” . . .

To further quote Owens:

The issues that my fellow millennials, along with even younger people in Gen Z, tend to be “judgmental” about are the same ones many of our parents and grandparents have been debating for decades. Being outspoken about climate change, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBTQ inclusivity and gun control — and critical of those who stand in the way of progress on these issues — is work that’s been left to us. . . .
The group that Mr. Obama joins in his scolding of outspoken young people is dominated by white straight men, far-right conservative talking heads, and celebrities who feel entitled to audiences who appreciate their art and dutifully ignore their missteps. It’s no surprise that Fox News fretted that his comments were “snubbed” and didn’t receive sufficient coverage from broadcast television networks.

Whatever one might say about this controversy, it is obvious that Ernest Owens is profoundly ignorant, despite his Ivy League education. He is a man who thinks in slogans, and has never made any effort to understand the reasoning of anyone who might sincerely disagree with him, instead dismissing them in terms of identity-politics formulations and ideological labels — “white straight men, far-right conservative talking heads.” Why would any intelligent person take me seriously if, in offering a rebuttal of Mr. Owens, I made a point of his being a gay black man?

 

Well, ad hominem arguments are sometimes relevant, as a way of understanding motives in an age of identity politics. Democrats seek power by leveraging our tribal impulses — “You are [insert identity category] and therefore should vote Democrat” — and this formula has the effect of turning every policy debate into tribal warfare. The perpetrators of identity politics claim to be on the side of Progress, with a capital P, and define their opponents as advocates of Hate, with a capital H. In reality, however, “progressives” are the ones fomenting hatred and, rather than leading us into a utopia of enlightenment, instead point us toward the darkest depths of a degenerate and atavistic barbarism.

How does one refute the libelous accusations implied by Mr. Owens’ argument (which, I hasten to add, is not actually an argument as any student of formal logic would define an argument)? For you see that his assertion is that he and his generation have a monopoly of wisdom and charity, while their elders are all selfish fools. According to Mr. Owens, we of older generations are ignorant — we don’t know nothin’ about no “progress on these issues” — and are guilty of insufficient sympathy for “the most vulnerable among us.” Obviously, I don’t have an Ivy League diploma, and therefore can perhaps be forgiven my ignorance, but how is Mr. Owens (Penn, Class of 2014) better qualified than me to determine whether our former President is “misguided”? Upon what credentials does Mr. Owens claim this authority to sit in judgment of his elders?

Did I mention — because I think it’s relevant — that Ernest Owens fell hook, line and sinker for the Jussie Smollett hoax?

On Monday night, a black gay man was attacked for existing in both of these identities.
Empire actor Jussie Smollett was hospitalized after allegedly being assaulted in Chicago by two individuals who also tied a noose around his neck, and who poured an unknown chemical substance on him. The unidentified culprits appear to be Trump supporters who, according to TMZ, yelled at Smollett, “This is MAGA country,” along with hurling racist and homophobic slurs. . . .
It shouldn’t be a coincidence that such bigotry escalated from written hate mail to physical violence. History often showed us during the Jim Crow era of the 20th century that discriminatory laws led to lynchings and other legalized acts of white supremacy. What happened to Smollett was a form of white terrorism that targeted both his racial identity and sexual orientation simultaneously.

 

Of course, Jussie Smollett was not a victim of “white terrorism,” yet having been so naïvely credulous as to believe this hoax — which never fooled any intelligent person — now Mr. Owens expects us all to accept his authority to pass judgment upon former President Obama.

As a “white straight . . . far-right conservative,” of course, I could never expect the New York Times to publish anything I wrote (even if I would consent to have my byline appear in that disgraceful publication, which of course I wouldn’t), but they do not hesitate to provide a platform for the opinions of Mr. Owens, who is demonstrably a fool.

And that, you see, is the point of my argument. Once it can be shown that one’s antagonist is a fool, the debate has concluded, because no intelligent person would take advice from a fool. Selah.


 

HUGE: Former Top Spy Admits Obama Ordered Investigation of Trump Campaign

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James Clapper, who was Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in the Obama administrations, was on CNN yesterday and was asked, “Are you concerned that Barr or Durham’s investigation will find wrongdoing and seek to punish former intelligence officials like you?”

The message I’m getting from all this is, apparently what we were supposed to have done was to ignore the Russian interference, ignore the Russian meddling and the threat that it poses to us, and oh, by the way, blown off what the then commander in chief, President Obama, told us to do, which was to assemble all the reporting that we could that we had available to us and put it in one report that the president could pass on to the Congress and to the next administration. And while we’re at it, declassify as much as we possibly could to make it public, and that’s what we did. It’s kind of disconcerting now to be investigated for, you know having done our duty and done what we were told to do by the president.

 

Rush Limbaugh went off on this yesterday, because what we now know about the “Russian interference” — an illusion of “collusion” created as a pretext to spy on the Trump campaign — exposes Clapper’s investigation as part of political hit-job orchestrated by Democrats. For Clapper to twice say this was done on Obama’s orders is huge.



 

Obama’s Legacy Is Still Kicking

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by Smitty

As I stand adjacent the crater
Of “Obama’s legacy”, who’s the debater,
Saying that No-Talent Rodeo Clown
Sought to bring us ought but down?

Call him “idealist”; call him “naive”;
Call him “brilliant”: did he deceive?
Or was he as honest as they get:
Postmodernists against the simple truth bet.

Who say “It is all just so much baloney.
Fake it until you are no longer phony.”
Falsehood is a tactical call,
A lying Lucy teeing a ball.

And Charlie, be he white or Brown,
Simpleton running, bearing down,
Kicks and misses, cratering, then,
Strategically blaming others again.