Category: Barack Obama

‘Arab Spring’ Update: Foreign News the Media Doesn’t Want to Ask Obama About

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Kirsten Powers points out what was so obviously missing from Sunday’s 60 Minutes softball interview:

Now, I’m sorry, is anyone paying attention to what’s going on in North Africa? Why is the president not asked about Algeria, Mali, Libya? These are front and center in the news right now.

Indeed. Lots of news out there:

Algeria has bolstered its military presence along the southern border.
Security sources said the Algerian Army was ordered to send thousands of troops along the southern border with Mali. . . .
The sources said [Al Qaeda in the Maghreb] units were believed to have fled Mali amid French air strikes. They said the Algerian Army was ordered to open fire on suspected insurgents and attack strongholds.

Yeah, what’s going on in Mali?

A rebellion in Mali that might have otherwise excited little interest commanded international attention when word came of its hardline Islamist nature and, more importantly, its ties to Al Qaida in the Maghreb (AQIM). . . .
The alliance between AQIM and the Tuareg people of Northern Mali and adjacent lands is a curious one. The Tuareg have a long history of opposing encroaching peoples . . .
The Tuareg see AQIM as an ally in their cause, but the latter is more of a burden because it brings regional and international opposition to the Tuareg movement for autonomy. Instead of bringing needed help to the Tuareg, AQIM is bringing a formidable invasion. Realization of the overwhelming opposition before them may be behind the recent split in the Tuareg forces . . .

So there’s a Tuareg rebellion that al-Qaeda has exploited in northern Mali — has anybody asked Obama about this? I think not. What about security problems at our embassies and consulates?

Foreign security contractors for U.S. diplomatic facilities have been deemed inadequate, a report said.
The State Department said the majority of foreign security contractors hired to protect U.S. embassies and consulates were deemed insufficient and inadequate. The department’s inspector-general surveyed foreign guards deployed around 86 diplomatic posts.
“OIG [Office of the Inspector-General] also found at some overseas posts that local guard contracts let under the current lowest-price award method had performance problems and an increased need for oversight from department officials — a condition that may be alleviated by the use of the best-value method where price is not the overriding factor in awarding the contract,” the inspector-general said in a report.
The report, released in February 2012, said foreign security guards deployed at two-thirds of the 86 posts were deemed inadequate. The inspector-general said the biggest problems included the U.S. embassy in Iraq.

Hmmm. A report in February 2012 — seven months before the attack on the consulate in Benghazi — warned of “performance problems” with hired guards at facilities. Kinda curious that they couldn’t ask Obama about that during his 60 Minutes interview. More headlines:

Timbuktu liberated but priceless manuscripts destroyed
— ABC News

Iran denies reports of explosion at Fordo nuclear site
— BBC

U.S. Weighs Base for Spy Drones in North Africa
— New York Times

Lots of news out there, but the hard-hitting investigative journalists at CBS News couldn’t be bothered to ask Obama about any of it.

 

BREAKING: Lightworker Astride Unicorn Transcends Space-Time Continuum

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“Difficult as it may now be to recall, there were once ‘spiritually advanced people’ who looked at this Chicago machine politician and saw ‘a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being . . . who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.’”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 25, 2012

Ever since that historic moment in June 2008 when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal, spiritually advanced Americans have waited for the Lightworker™ to be transfigured into his cosmic essence, in which exalted form he merely speaks the Word, and the Word is made manifest:

One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it. . . .
The same dynamic happens on the Democratic side. I think the difference is just that the more left-leaning media outlets recognize that compromise is not a dirty word. And I think at least leaders like myself — and I include Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in this — are willing to buck the more absolutist-wing elements in our party to try to get stuff done.

The laws of physics have been repealed by the Lightworker’s cosmic essence. Obama has transformed Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi into unifying centrist bipartisan moderates whose only desire is to resist “absolutist-wing elements” and bring together all Americans in the tolerant spirit of inclusive cooperation to Get Stuff Done.

What’s that wonderful smell? Ah, unicorn farts!

 

 


Fake Singing, Real Tyranny

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Beyoncé lip-synched “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Obama’s inaugural. She’s as real as Manti Te’o’s dead girlfriend. Meanwhile, Harry Reid — who hasn’t passed a budget in four years — is threatening to turn the U.S. Senate into North Korea with himself as Dear Leader.

Isn’t this the part of the story where the barbarians storm the city gates while the emperor is having an orgy with his decadent courtiers?

The Next 1,460 Days: I Still Hope He Fails

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If only more people had listened to Rush Limbaugh . . .

My post this morning about how to hate Democrats reminded Andrew J. Patrick of the bitter debate between Jeff Goldstein and Patterico, and Andrew makes a good point:

The Democrats did not respond to getting their teeth kicked in by George Bush in 2004 by embracing civility, by congratulating the President on his re-election. They doubled down on outrage. They fought the President on his second-term agenda tooth-and-nail.
That worked out rather well for them, all things considered.

This is exactly right. You must know your antagonist. You must study his successes, and you must also study your own failures.

One of the great blunders of the Republican Party is that as soon as the 2004 election was over, they began looking ahead to 2008 when they were sure that they would be running against Hillary Clinton. How many anti-Hillary books were published in 2005-2007? So many Republicans bought into the Hillary-as-Antichrist message that in March 2008, when Rush Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos” — aiming to turn the Democrat nomination fight into an absolute deadlock — his phone lines lit up with dimwit callers who had let themselves be convinced that Barack Obama was actually the lesser of two evils.

Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

I remember it well: I saw exactly what Rush was doing. It was pure genius, and if enough Republican voters had listened to him — especially in Indiana and North Carolina — “Operation Chaos” may have resulted in such a vicious bloodletting within the Democrat Party that they never would have recovered from it. For want of a nail . . .

Well, there’s no point recounting the history of everything that went wrong the past five years. But it exposed a fundamental problem of the conservative blogosphere: It developed during the Bush years, amid the Global War on Terror, and its accustomed task was to defend the president and the war effort against the Left. As far as fighting elections, conservative bloggers had 2004 as their basic model — the patriotic Republican incumbent vs. the treacherous Democrat challenger — and this proved a poor template for future conflicts.

In general, by 2009, too many Republicans didn’t have any useful memory of how to be the Opposition Party. The experiences of 1964 and 1974 were remembered only by a graying generation of Elder Statesmen types who, unfortunately, were neither tech-savvy nor culturally attuned to the 21st century. The long 12-year Reagan-Bush ascendancy had been followed by a brief two-year loss of power after the 1992 election, but then the latent vigor of the Party Reagan Built came bouncing back with the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” Dole predictably lost in 1996, and the Lewinsky-inspired impeachment drama of 1998 threw the GOP off its game, but by 2003, they were back on top, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress.

Accustomed to success, to acting in defense of power, Republicans (and by extension, many conservative spokemen, including bloggers) were unaccustomed to the task that faced them after Democrats won Congress in 2006 and captured the White House in 2008.

Ah, but Rush Limbaugh knew what he was doing! Rush had risen to talk-radio superstar status during the low ebb of Republican fortunes in the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1992 defeat of George H. W. Bush. In fact, it is now often forgotten that Limbaugh supported Pat Buchanan’s challenge to Bush in the 1992 primaries. Limbaugh knew that Bush was doomed to defeat in 1992, and that the key was to give conservatives a cause worth fighting for. After Bush lost, Limbaugh’s show became the focal point for the Republican opposition that triumphed in 1994.

It should be pointed out, by the way, that Limbaugh is old enough to remember the true Wilderness Years of the GOP, the post-Watergate era of 1974-78, when such eminent figures as William Rusher, publisher of National Review, thought the Republican Party was done for and were ready for Ronald Reagan to lead a third-party movement.

Too many have forgotten that history — if they ever bothered to learn it in the first place — and no one under 40 has any real direct memory of it, so that there is a sort of “Generation Gap” within the conservative movement. If you don’t remember where you were when Saigon fell (I was a sophomore at Lithia Springs High School) or the Berlin Wall came down (I was a 30-year-old sports editor for the Calhoun [Ga.] Times), it’s impossible for you to understand the Cold War mentality, the petri dish within which the post-WWII conservative movement was incubated.

Conservatism was originally and fundamentally about foreign policy: Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?

Trying to get Americans to listen to conservative ideas on domestic policy has always been much more difficult, and we are really now back to an era that precedes my own birth, which I know only from history books and from tales of old-timers like M. Stanton Evans. We’re back to the Truman era, when the godless Commies who threatened America were clandestine subversives who called themselves “liberals.”

Really, it’s in some ways much worse now. Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were traitorous stooges of Moscow, but today’s “liberals” pursue a Bolshevik agenda of strictly domestic origin. The disciples of Howard Zinn, Saul Alinksy, Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis are most certainly Marxists, and we should not be afraid to call them what they are. Hell, “neo-Marxism” is the fashionable style for young hipsters.

The Sovietization of America is an agenda every patriot should oppose, and when Rush Limbaugh famously said, “I hope he fails,” he was right. That’s why I sided with Jeff Goldstein in his fight with Patterico four years ago. Jeff’s essay “How I learned to stop worrying and love the f-bomb” is worth re-reading today, as we begin the final 1,460 days of this catastrophic Reign of Error.

Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?

 

 

 

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein reacts to Andrew J. Patrick, describing Obama’s agenda as “a malicious attack on our individual sovereignty and an intentional plan to undermine our constitutional republic and replace it with an beneficent police state peopled by industrious worker bees, helpfully directed and nudged toward happiness by a permanent ruling elite.” Basically, Sweden, with better weather and uglier people.

 


Democrats: You Can Never Hate Them Nearly as Much as They Hate You

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Last night, I saw a post at an anti-Palin blog that had more than 200 vitriolic comments about the woman they called “the Creature from Lake Lucille.” More than four years after Sarah Palin was the Republican vice-presidential candidate, she still inspires frothing rage from the Left.

What prompted that particular outburst of hatred? Palin put up a Facebook post commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Think about that for just a minute. And then think about something Erick Erickson wrote on Inauguration Day:

Congratulations Mr. President on your second inaugural.
Saying that makes some of you really enraged. I said the same on twitter shortly after his official swearing in. Several of the replies were embarrassing and atrocious. Some accused the man elected by a majority of Americans of treason. Some accused him of willfully destroying the nation.
I believe the President’s policies are destructive and will harm our economy, our nation, and our sense of national self long term. I believe his policies have the effect of turning us into subjects of the government, not citizens in charge of it. Because of his expansion of the social safety net funded through class warfare, Mr. Obama’s policies will cause too many Americans’ fortunes to rise and fall with those of the government, unable to chart a course for themselves apart from government.
But I do not think the President means to do this maliciously. I do not think he is treasonous. I do not hate him. I am not outraged by it.

As soon as I saw that, my attention focused on one sentence: “Some accused him of willfully destroying the nation.”

Yes, of course: David Limbaugh, author of The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic, a book I heartily recommend.

Erick Erickson didn’t title his post “David Limbaugh Is Wrong,” or “Don’t Listen to That Idiot David Limbaugh.” He merely dismissed as “embarrassing and atrocious” anyone who agrees with Limbaugh’s argument that Obama’s “War on the Republic” is deliberate.

As to how one should deal with Monday decorously, I took a vow of silence: I simply wouldn’t say a damned thing about Re-Coronation Day.

Didn’t watch it on TV. Didn’t blog about it until it was over. The last time I checked, I still had the right to remain silent. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” and what conservative could possibly say anything nice about America’s public humiliation?

That’s what we’re dealing with here: A stain on our national honor, the negation and antithesis of everything that makes our country great.

Americans should be outraged by it, and we should not be dismissing their expressions of outrage as “embarrassing and atrocious.”

Ordinary Americans don’t always express themselves in such eloquent and measured phrases as meet with the approval of the elite, but why is it that no one on the Left ever bothers to chastise the commenters frothing with rage at Sarah Palin, whereas Erick Erickson feels the need to scold Republicans who don’t like Barack Obama? Why is Erickson embarrassed to be associated with these Republicans, when no one on the Left ever bothers to notice the non-stop messages of hate emitted by the immoral monsters who constitute the Democrat Party’s grassroots? My answer:

The problem, really, is that Republicans just don’t hate Democrats the way Democrats hate Republicans.
Most Republicans are born and raised Republicans, and are spiritually attuned to the sentiments of bourgeois respectability that are core values to the decent, honest people the GOP represents. By contrast, Democrats owe their power to the vilest dregs of humanity — corrupt union goons, Marxist academics, criminals, drug addicts, sexual perverts and race hustlers — who have no respect for the values of decent, honest people.

We do not have to lower ourselves to their level. We merely have to tell the truth about who the Democrats are. People who voted for Obama (or any other Democrat) should be ashamed of themselves.

The GOP’s ridiculous defensive flinch reflex — “Oh, no! Somebody said rude things about Democrats!” — is symptomatic of a larger problem: Republicans let liberals dictate the terms of debate.

If liberals say the problem is that Republicans lack “civility,” then the GOP is beset by hall-monitor types telling us to watch our language. If liberals say the problem is Republicans need to appeal to Latinos, we’ll hear a lot of sermonettes from the open-borders crowd. If liberals say Republicans are losing because of gay-rights issues, we’ll be told to drop our pants and bend over to demonstrate our support for sodomy.

At what point will Republicans figure out they’re being scammed? Liberals lie constantly, routinely and habitually, but never do they lie so predictably as when they’re giving advice to Republicans.

Mitt Romney lost the presidential election. His defeat cannot be blamed on “outrage pimps” (Erickson doesn’t name names, so we don’t know if he meant that term to apply to David Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Michelle Malkin). Nor can the GOP’s problems be excused by scolding people who say rude things about Obama on Twitter.

Why did Erickson feel the need to tee off on “humorless, angry opponents of the President” who “scream ‘Benghazi’ and ‘Fast & Furious'”? Was that aimed at Katie Pavlich, author of Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up?

Katie wasn’t offering any “congratulations, Mr. President” sentiments there, so maybe she’s one of those “humorless, angry opponents,” eh?

Here’s the point: All Sarah Palin had to do is put up an MLK Day post on Facebook, and the haters swarmed all over her without anyone in the Democrat Party noticing or complaining. Democrats don’t get any “civility” lectures from their liberal spokesmen. They just win elections.

Democrats hate Republicans with the heat of ten thousand suns. When are Republicans going to give themselves permission to hate back?

 

 


Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

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By which, of course, I mean Monday. It’s now 12:01 a.m. ET Tuesday, and so I kept my vow not to say a word about Re-Coronation Day.

Others who chronicled the event now have stains on their pants from the orgasmic gush. Chris Matthews emitted his usual effusion of idiocy, and over on the Third-Place Cable News Network With Lower Ratings Than MSNBC (The One That People Only Watch When They’re Stuck in Airports), Jim Acosta was trying to out-gush Matthews:

“You know, I feel like I should pinch myself right now, Wolf. I can’t believe I have this vantage point of history in the making . . . It’s good to be the President. It’s almost like being a rock star on every street corner of Washington on this day.”

Further mockery from The Lonely Conservative, American Power and Poor Richard’s News. This stuff does not amuse me. It depresses me.

Our nation is being destroyed, and the press corps is reduced to the role of partisan pom-pom girls for The Great Destroyer. Meanwhile, the alleged leaders of the opposition have no clue of how to rescue themselves from their current condition of helpless impotence. The search for any reason to smile amid this catastrophe — which I blame entirely on the gross ineptitude of the overpaid dimwit fratboys running the Republican Party — turns up precious few nuggets of encouragement:

The bimbo was a guest Monday on Anderson Cooper’s show on the Third-Place Cable News Network With Lower Ratings Than MSNBC (The One That People Only Watch When They’re Stuck in Airports). Her “brand” is even more irrelevant than her failed father, assuming that such complete irrelevance is even possible.

It’s going to be a long 1,460 days ahead.

Show Some Civility, You Nazi Racists!

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Steve McCann on the divisiveness of the Obama Age:

This past week, Bob Sheiffer of CBS compared defeating the NRA to defeating the Nazis in World War II. Not to be outdone Martin Bashir of NBC said the NRA “…deserved to be compared to Hitler.” Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) claimed:  “…they [NRA] cannot get over the fact that Obama is black.” And the ever reasonable Charlie Rangel (D-NY) in discussing gun control said: “..the Southern states have cultures that we have to overcome.” These are but a few of the many references to either Hitler, the Nazis, racism or backwoods gun-totting hicks in fly-over country since the debate spawned by Obama’s determination to impose more stringent gun control measures began. . . .
Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in January of 2009, the use of the race card has reached epidemic proportions. Anyone who disagrees with his policies is branded a racist — a term filled with negative and ominous connotations. Its use is solely intended to demonize and intimidate the political opposition and is succeeding only in creating the most polarized society since the 1960’s.

Actually, America is much more polarized than we were 50 years ago. In 1963, pro-Castro Marxists were relatively few. “Lone nuts,” we called ’em. Even as late as 1968, pro-Palestinian radicals were so rare in America that nobody could comprehend their sentiments. I remember one day in June 1968, my mother crying, “Why? Why?”

Now those people are in charge of the country and, if you disagree with them, you’re the radical . . .

 

‘Arab Spring’ Update: Hostages Killed in Algeria; French Fight Islamists in Mali

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“The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! . . . But it was a beautiful piece of writing. . . . It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’”
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

If you have been troubled recently by the thought that Mr. Kurtz may have been onto something, certainly you aren’t alone. We haven’t been doing too well in the Suppression of Savage Customs lately:

In a bloody finale, Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the Sahara desert on Saturday to end a standoff with Islamist extremists that left at least 23 hostages dead and killed all 32 militants involved, the Algerian government said. . . .
The siege at Ain Amenas transfixed the world after radical Islamists linked to al-Qaida stormed the complex, which contained hundreds of plant workers from all over the world, then held them hostage surrounded by the Algerian military and its attack helicopters for four tense days that were punctuated with gun battles and dramatic tales of escape. . . .

The Obama administration remains clueless:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said much remains “sketchy” about what  happened at the remote Ain Amenas gas field.
“We know that lives have been lost,” he said.
Asked how many Americans were in danger and what happened to them, Panetta  said he knew Americans were still being held hostage earlier Saturday. On what  happened to them, he said, “we need to get better information.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on events in neighboring Mali:

With French officials saying confidently on Saturday that an advance by Islamist militants on Bamako, Mali’s capital, had been halted, France’s foreign minister told African leaders that “our African friends need to take the lead” in a multilateral military intervention in Mali. . . .
The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said Saturday that France now had 2,000 troops in Mali, with more in the region, and that France was likely to add to its forces there. . . .
Residents have told local news agencies that the Islamists have left Diabaly, which they seized as an important way station on the road to the administrative capital, Ségou, north of Bamako.
French airstrikes have halted the Islamist advance toward Mopti and nearby Sévaré, French officials said, while they confirmed that the village of Konna, north of Mopti, was now back in the hands of Mali’s government. The French have also sent troops along with Malian forces to secure a bridge over the Niger River at Markala, north of Ségou.

Mitt Romney was mocked for mentioning Mali in his final debate with President Obama. Professor Stephen Clark observed this week that the connection between “the Islamist takeover of northern Mali with the NATO-led overthrow of the Gaddafi” in Libya was overlooked by the media:

Mali is a knock-on consequence of a failed north-African policy. Just such consequences were the fear expressed by some with US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those failed to materialize. Now that they have materialized as a consequence of Obama’s policies the grand-high poobahs and their courtiers are as silent as church mice.

William Wallis in the Financial Times described the uprising in Mali as a “boomerang” of U.S. anti-terror policy, and this inspires bitter Kurtz-like reflections from Ed Morrissey:

The boomerang in this case came from our extremely ill-advised and reckless intervention in Libya, which turned that nation into a failed state and sent tentacles of radicalism throughout the Sahel. And what did we gain from the Libyan adventure and the revolution we blessed in Egypt by tossing a 30-year ally to the wolves? In the latter, we now have leadership that feels entirely comfortable using eliminationist rhetoric against Israel; in the former, we have a burned-out consulate, four dead Americans, and a central government whose writ won’t run in half the country. Our policies in the last two years in this region have emboldened our enemies and disillusioned our allies, and in this case we didn’t get anything at all in trade for the unintended consequences we have reaped.

Don’t worry, Ed: The President’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner! And I’m sure the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs is eagerly awaiting your final report.

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