Category: Barack Obama

Obama Has Consequences

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“God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs . . .”
— Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Lots of bloggers are science-fiction buffs, but I prefer reality, regarding fiction generally as a puerile waste of time. If you wish to improve your mind, it is much more productive to read history than any work of fiction. (I’ve recently been re-reading Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli, which I borrowed from Joe Fein in 2010 and feel guilty for not having returned.)

However, it must be admitted that great science fiction makes us think, and Jurassic Park is a fine lesson in unintended consequences, a sort of Hayekian insight into the failure of planning and “expertise.” Genetically engineering the re-creation of extinct monsters might seem like a great idea for a theme park, but to quote another witty line by Jeff Goldblum’s intellectual character from the movie, “if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”

Yes, and I’m sure it must have seemed like a great idea during the “Arab Spring” to arm Islamic extremists in Libya:

In spite of the threat of American weapons ending up in the hands of terrorist groups, President Barack Obama secretly approved an arms transfer to Libyan rebels through Qatar at the height of the rebellion against Moamar Khadhafi, a knowledgeable source noted on Friday.
However, American counterterrorists are discovering that some of those U.S. weapons ended up in the hands of radical Islamists including associates of al-Qaeda, according to a law enforcement source who trained police in the Middle East.
Some Americans who are retired from the military, as well as intelligence and law enforcement agencies, believe there should be an investigation into possible connections between the weapons provided by the Qataris back then and the attack that killed an American ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

More at Gateway Pundit: “Benghazi Terrorists Were Armed By Obama”

One of the lessons of Gallipoli is how seemingly minor mistakes can have enormous consequences. The Allied effort to force a passage through the Dardenelles, capture Constantinople and thus knock Turkey out of the war was meant to relieve pressure on Russia and open a second front against the Central Powers.

Before the campaign began, it was suggested that the Greeks be brought in to aid the effort against the Turks, but the Czar objected to the idea that the Greeks might gain a colonial foothold in Turkey. It is speculation to wonder what might have happened in the historical alternative, but as it was, the campaign against Constantinople failed, the war lasted until 1918, and the Czar was executed by the Bolsheviks.

Exit question: Is comparing Obama’s policies to dinosaurs racist?

 

Benghazi => ‘High On A Mountaintop’

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by Smitty

I’ve been waiting to see this video. Stevens, Smith, Doherty and Woods did their part. Cassone has done his. Now, you know what to do for your part: make this viral. All over twitter, blogs, and inboxes.

“Who gave the order to let his son die?” indeed. I think we need to get what we know to be the truth out there, and have #OccupyResoluteDesk stand tall. He’s really adept at hiding behind Susan Rice’s skirts, admittedly.

Update: thanks, Instapundit, and thank you again, Cassone!

People Are Not Paying Attention To What Obama Says

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by Smitty

She said she was honored to meet Obama, but she is also frustrated that she has yet to receive help from either her insurance companies or the government. “The president told me I would get immediate help,” she said.


In President Obama, you have a man who fetishes the power of his utterances themselves. If he says ‘immediate help’, then it has been granted. If he says ‘jobs’, then a million flowers of work bloom, unless mowed down by those pesky Republicans, of course.

They’ve slathered savior savor upon him, and he certainly delivers, in the fashion of Steven Wright’s subliminal advertising executive. You closed your eyes, only for a moment, but the moment’s gone. Hope that moment was worth the vote.

If you want help help, well, that gets back to old-fashioned concepts of thrift and neighborliness. Up that: Forward!

via Jammie Wearing Fool

Update: linked at Dailey Gator.

BHO, Theoretically Best President EVAR!

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by Smitty

Of course, as I’m wont to say, “The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory.” The Right Scoop, and Radio Equalizer  point to Al “Not so” Sharpton, who seemingly cannot differentiate between public and private sector:

One of the reasons that I think people do not understand that unemployment has gone down and in some cases black unemployment and Latino’s has remained stagnant, is over the last thirty two months Dr. Hutchinson, they’ve increased jobs and found jobs – unemployment has gone down in the private sector. What has not gone down is [unemployment] in the public sector and blacks in particular are disproportionately in the public sector.
One of the reasons those jobs have gone down or have remained down is one, the Republicans are cutting a lot of the agencies where we are the employees of government jobs – government employees, and a lot of those jobs go to governors and mayors who also have had cutbacks. So what we’ve got to do – and we addressed this to the President – is take on these governors and mayors as well as the private sector on why the private sector is getting all these contracts and bailouts and not hiring and correcting the disproportionate amount of their employment does not touch our community and have the President and them support us in that.

The overt racism in Sharpton’s point, which seems to be that governments exist to employ people of a certain racial background, is astounding.

The hilarity atop that, though is “Republicans are cutting a lot of the agencies where we are the employees of government jobs”. Past the garbled “employees of government jobs” diction, one would sure like to know when the last time any government agency, itself, was cut. Maybe Sharpton looked here and blames the GOP for the lack of any agencies beginning with K, Q, X, Y, or Z. How do you spell racist dog-whistle? Possibly ‘KQYXZ’, if you went to the Sharpton School of Illogic.

But what the gag ultimately gets at, in my mind, is the notion that the country elected some über-cerebral chap who gonna pay my mortgage, and run around fixing things. This administration running Paradox of the Incompetent Wunderkind is, for me, the crowning achievement. Never, in the history of mankind, has so much sunshine been blown up so many bottoms, by such egregious media nitwits, at such vast national expense.

Taxation without representation? Suck it, great7 grandkids!

via Mind Numbed Robot

Sun Rises In East, And President Obama Knew About Benghazi

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by Smitty

We explore realms of the obvious:

In a blockbuster report, John Solomon, the former Associated Press and Post reporter, has ferreted out the president’s daily brief that informed him within 72 hours of the Sept. 11 attack that the Benghazi attack was a jihadist operation.

Citing officials directly familiar with the information, Solomon writes in the Washington Guardian that Obama and other administration officials were told that “that the attack was likely carried out by local militia and other armed extremists sympathetic to al-Qaida in the region.”

. . .

How could the president and his senior staff then have allowed (or rather, sent) Rice to go out to tell an entirely different tale to the American people on Sept. 16 on five TV shows?

One explanation might be that the President figures we “can’t handle the truth”. And by “can’t handle” I mean “do not deserve” or “lack the power to hold him to anything like doing the job of President”.

Chris Cassone has recorded the Benghazi anthem. Spread it virally. May the deaths of Stevens, Smith, Woods and Doherty, arguably the most blatant combat snuffing since Uriah the Hittite, be a millstone about Obama’s neck.

Aside: just to let you know how far America has fallen, the Russian government has passed a budget, while a buried Ronald Reagan spins with sufficient angular velocity for use as a stable element.

via Insty

Obama Administration’s Benghazi Gambit: Protect Rice, Scapegoat CIA

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A suspiciously timely scoop:

CBS News has obtained the CIA talking points given to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 15 regarding the fatal attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, four days earlier. CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan says the talking points, which were also given to members of the House intelligence committee, make no reference to terrorism being a likely factor in the assault, which left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.
Rice . . . has been attacked by Republican lawmakers for saying . . . on Sept. 16 that all indications were the attack “began spontaneously” – suggesting it likely sprang from a protest against an anti-Muslim video found on the Internet. Protests of that nature had been seen in other Muslim nations in the days and weeks before the Benghazi attack.
“Available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault… There are indications that extremists participated,” read the CIA’s talking points.

Ed Morrissey observes:

It seems interesting this CBS scoop comes shortly before both the current and former directors of the CIA will testify as to what they know about the terrorist attack on our consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi. Why, it’s almost as if someone at the White House or State Department wanted to follow up on Barack Obama’s defense of Susan Rice during yesterday’s press conference and pre-empt any potential fallout from whatever Mike Morell and David Petraeus have to say today and tomorrow.

Extreme naïveté is necessary to believe anything the Obama administration says and extreme cynicism is necessary to pretend that the Obama administration is telling the truth. So, are the pro-Obama media naive fools or cynical hacks? We report. You decide.

Meanwhile, Jill Kelley has lost her “honorary consul general” privileges, whatever the heck that means.

 

2013: A Century Of Progress

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by Smitty

Conservatives should plan to mark the century since the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson on 17 January, 1913 with somber reminders of how bad the results of Progressivism have been. The 1910 census marked the end of the House of Representatives growing to represent the people. Thus, it is in danger of being the Lesser Senate. The 17th Amendment, of course, made Senators relatively more loyal to their parties than their States, and has turned the Senate into the Greater House. The Federal Reserve Act has flipped the cart and the horse, as DC borrows from the unborn to bribe the living. Meanwhile, the re-election rate for Congress is north of 95% since all this.

Thus, we have arrived, in the space of a century, at the door of a de facto aristocracy. 8 out of 10 of the richest counties voted for Obama, for all his re-election was substantially a class-warfare play. The rich Left team with the mob and crush the middle, and liberty. Does this explain the decline in voter turnout? While it may significantly be the case that conservatives bore some animus toward Romney for RomneyCare or even his faith, I submit that the larger problem may be the perception that our politics has become a farce dipped in debt:

 

To what extent has the GOP played right along with all this? Substantially, I’d say. While there has been willingness to co-op fiscal conservative energy since Ross Perot in 1992, on through the Tea Parties in 2010, a cynic might say that Tea Partiers were merely a tool to regain power for the GOP. I used to be an apologist for Boehner and the boys, saying that they needed to see some staying power from Tea Partiers, some maturity, some professional commitment to reform. If that’s the case, then the GOP elite really should consider throwing the Tea Parties a bone, because the cynical model seems to have more predictive power. Senator John McCain has been given leave to bleat about Susan Rice as Secretary of State. Why bother? Is the point to spend whatever rounds remain in the magazine on small issues, so that there is nothing left for the coming Commie Supreme Court?

There doesn’t seem to be any soft landing for this. No telling what the Ryan Budget might have done, if implemented. We appear to be on a collision course with the wall. So that bites. The only good news is that we don’t have to spend time planning what to do to reform. We already have our 1787 Constitution. The challenge is locating the will to wrest some power from DC and return it to the people.

  • Expand the House so that it again Represents the people.
  • Return the Senate to being driven by the 57 States.
  • Reform the Federal Reserve, so that we aren’t engaging in taxation without representation against the unborn.

Never in the history of humankind, I’ll venture, has a society been more stared in the face by the answer to its problems, yet not quite seemed to see it. Read and heed Schlichter:

In 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army insurgents rose up against the American and South Vietnamese forces in the Tet Offensive. They were wiped out, yet seven years later they were in control of the country. There are lessons there for us conservatives.
Conservatives, as opposed to the Republicans who partially overlap them on the Venn diagram of American politics, need a strategy. Strategy differs from mere tactics – it is a synchronization of potential ways (think courses of action) and available means (think resources) to achieve a long term end. Tactics are the techniques supporting the strategy. The Tea Party/conservative revolt had effective tactics – rallies, town halls – but the movement’s decentralized nature, with groups springing up around the country, kept it from developing an effective, coherent strategy this year.

The whole thing is important. Should we treat the GOP as guilty until proven innocent in this case? I’m moving in that direction.

Progressivism Delenda Est

Update: linked at The Rio Norte Line

Heckuva Job, Susan Rice!

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She went all over TV and repeated the administration’s lies about Libya, and how dare you criticize her!

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham both said today that they want to have Watergate-style hearings on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and said that if you nominate Susan Rice to be secretary of state, they will do everything in their power to block her nomination. As Senator Graham said, he simply doesn’t trust Ambassador Rice after what she said about Benghazi. I’d like your reaction to that. And would those threats deter you from making a nomination like that?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, first of all, I’m not going to comment at this point on various nominations that I’ll put forward to fill out my Cabinet for the second term. Those are things that are still being discussed.
But let me say specifically about Susan Rice, she has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace. As I’ve said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her. If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me. And I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.
And you know, we’re after an election now. I think it is important for us to find out exactly what happened in Benghazi, and I’m happy to cooperate in any ways that Congress wants. We have provided every bit of information that we have, and we will continue to provide information. And we’ve got a full-blown investigation, and all that information will be disgorged to Congress.
And I don’t think there’s any debate in this country that when you have four Americans killed, that’s a problem. And we’ve got to get to the bottom of it, and there needs to be accountability. We’ve got to bring those who carried it out to justice. They won’t get any debate from me on that.
But when they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me. And should I choose — if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity — the State Department, then I will nominate her. That’s not a determination that I’ve made yet.

This is the moral lesson that Obama is teaching your children: Successful liars deserve to be praised and rewarded. Obama keeps saying that he’s going to “get to the bottom of it,” as if his own failures were not at “the bottom of it.” Ace of Spades comments:

Ed Henry points out that Obama admitted what had long been assumed (but not explicitly said), that Susan Rice was sent out to talk about Benghazi at the White House’s request.

Exactly: They pick this liberal ideologue — a State Department stooge who knows nothing about terrorism, nothing about intelligence, nothing about the military — hand her the dishonest talking points, and send her out to parrot their propaganda. When Rice’s explanation is proved false, then Obama starts saying he’s going to “get to the bottom of it,” as if someone else were responsible for crafting these lies which were calculated to benefit him politically.