Category: Barack Obama

What Hath Daily Caller Wrought?

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Slept late today because I figure I’ll be up late writing about tonight’s debate, and I didn’t participate in the Drudge-induced hype over yesterday’s Daily Caller/Sean Hannity release of a 2007 video, e.g., Allahpundit:

It’s the talk of Twitter and of our comment threads, so here’s a dedicated post to let your imaginations run wild.

Really? I was working on other things and didn’t much notice the hype, but Ace got gripped by it, really completely gripped by it — I mean, totally enthralled by it, madly obsessed with it — and so after sleeping late today, maybe I should say something about the EXCLUSIVE VIDEO which apparently was expected to shock the entire English-speaking world yesterday.

Meh.

 

 

A source informs me that some Romney campaign staffers actually got swept up in the speculation that this video was the silver bullet which would magically slay the Obama werewolf. And as usual in such matters, the event didn’t live up to the hype.

Let me here insert a bit of background — historical context, as it were — that might explain why I didn’t get too excited about the revelation of a 2007 video in which Obama gave a shout-out to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and otherwise said controversial things: I remember the 1990s.

During Bill Clinton’s first term, enormous efforts were expended by certain people to dig up The Real Truth about what went down in Arkansas during Clinton’s governorship.

The worst of it was the Mena Airport conspiracy theory: Allegedly, in order to protect a drug-smuggling operation based out of this small airport in rural Arkansas, several people had been murdered and, according to the conspiracy theorists, Clinton and his cronies were up to their necks in this massive corruption and cover-up.

Somebody produced a video about this, and the video became a sort of cult classic, particularly in Christian conservative circles. It appealed to a fairly widespread sentiment that Americans didn’t know everything they needed to know about the Clintons. After the suicide of Vince Foster, especially, there was a sense that all kinds of clandestine shenanigans were being covered up and ignored by the mainstream media. The Internet was still in its infancy back then, but even then there were sites devoted to “exposing” this Mena Airport scandal.

Was there ever anything to it? I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter, because that’s not the point.

THIS IS THE POINT: Whatever happened at Mena Airport happened before Clinton was president, you see, and once a guy gets elected president, you’re never going to take him down based on some previously unknown thing that happened before he was president.

Trust me when I say that there are plenty of people out there trying to contact reporters with The Real Truth About Barack Obama. At one point this past summer, I was prepared to fly to Chicago to meet with sources who had something serious that seemed to deserve checking out. Scheduling conflicts and other unexpected hassles prevented that trip from happening, which I sincerely regret — not only did I miss a chance to get paid for a lengthy print article, but I believe the article could have added significantly to public understanding of the corrupt environment in which Obama’s early political career was nutured.

Still, I never believed it was a “silver bullet” story, because you’re just not going to get that kind of story based on stuff that happened before Obama became president. Sean Hannity and others are correct in saying that Obama was never properly “vetted” by the media in 2008, but you cannot defeat Obama for re-election by attempting to “vet” him retroactively.

Public perception of presidents simply doesn’t work that way, and so this 2007 video was never going to be a “silver bullet,” no matter how much promotion Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Matt Drudge put behind it. Tucker went on Fox & Friends today to explain why the video matters:

Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson said on Fox and Friends this morning that the “very revealing” clip is an example of Obama using racially-charged rhetoric. . . .
Carlson explained that in his view, “Obama is telling a majority-black audience that the federal government doesn’t like them because they’re black. He is whipping up fear, and paranoia, and hatred.”

Right. Tell us something we didn’t already know. Ed Morrissey:

The larger point here is that the media has a double standard on race, and a double standard for Republicans.

Again: Tell us something we didn’t already know. I’m not discounting either the reality or the importance of this, but I hate seeing people buy into false hope that this EXCLUSIVE VIDEO!! — how do you spell “eleventy”? — or anything else like it could ever be the “silver bullet” that magically defeats Obama.

Here’s a SHOCKING REVELATION for you: The economy sucks.

Let’s see if we can’t win with that simple message, OK?

How to Deal With Biased Media Liars (and Other Such Worthless Scalawags)

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“My God, Scarlett O’Hara! When I start out to cut somebody up, you don’t think I’d be satisfied with scratching him with the blunt side of my knife, do you? No, by God, I cut him to ribbons.”
— Tony Calvert, in Gone With the Wind

Well, that’s merely an analogy — a colorful literary allusion — and my concern for the First Amendment requires that I condemn anyone who might contemplate dealing with even the most dishonestly biased journalist in the manner by which hot-tempered young Calvert dispatched his villainous hellbound foe.

No, not even Chris Matthews.

“When I start out to cut somebody up,” therefore, I’m limited to such damage as can be done by words, but I’m pretty handy with a rhetorical knife. With that in mind — and thinking what might possibly pain the conscience of even the most shameless liberal hack — please read my latest column at The American Spectator.

And be sure to read it all the way to the end.

VIDEO: Paul Ryan Slams Obama’s ‘Tax Increase Which Would Cost 700,000 Jobs’

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“The average tax rate in the industrial world on businesses is 25% and . . . our successful small businesses, a million small businesses, will get hit with a tax increase which would cost us 700,000 jobs if we go down the path the President wants us. We are not going to do that.”
— Paul Ryan, interviewed by Bloomberg News

EXPOSED: Obama Administration Had Advance Warning of Libyan Terror Threat

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Eli Lake has the exclusive report:

In the five months leading up to this year’s 9/11 anniversary, there were two bombings on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and increasing threats to and attacks on the Libyan nationals hired to provide security at the U.S. missions in Tripoli and Benghazi.
Details on these alleged incidents stem in part from the testimony of a handful of whistleblowers who approached the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in the days and weeks following the attack on the Benghazi consulate. The incidents are disclosed in a letter to be sent Tuesday to Hillary Clinton from Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the oversight committee’s subcommittee that deals with national security.

More from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

[I]ncompetence and dishonesty go together hand in hand — and we’re seeing plenty of both from Obama and his team in the wake of the Benghazi terrorist attack. The White House and State Department were asleep at the switch before the 9/11 anniversary attack, and they’ve been lying ever since about the circumstances behind it, too.

UPDATE: One of the lessons you learn in life is that truth is constant, whereas liars will change their stories as their lies are exposed. An editorial in USA Today makes the point:

Three weeks after an attack in Libya killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, we now know that it did not spring from a spontaneous protest, spurred by an anti-Muslim video, as the Obama administration originally described it. In fact, every aspect of the early account — peddled most prominently by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice — has unraveled.

The first instinct of the Obama administration is always to lie.

UPDATE II: Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom provides excerpts of the letter from the House Oversight Committee leadership:

“Based on information provided to the Committee by individuals with direct knowledge of events in Libya, the attack that claimed the ambassador’s life was the latest in a long line of attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya in the months leading up to September 11, 2012. It was clearly never, as Administration officials once insisted, the result of a popular protest . . . In addition, multiple U.S. federal government officials have confirmed to the Committee that, prior to the September 11 attack, the U.S. mission in Libya made repeated requests for increased security in Benghazi. The mission in Libya, however, was denied these resources by officials in Washington. . . .
“Put together, these events indicated a clear pattern of security threats that could only be reasonably interpreted to justify increased security for U.S. personnel and facilities in Benghazi.”

 

 

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Federal Law? What Federal Law?

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Ace gave this the Flaming Skull™ and pinned it to the top of his blog: There is a federal law that requires employers to give advance notice of layoffs. Because of Obama’s massive deficits, defense contractors will have to lay off tens of thousands of employees.

Obama convinced Lockheed Martin to delay the layoff notification until after the election. Don’t like it? You’re a racist!

(Trying to get me one of those Elspeth Reeve gigs at the Atlantic.)

Last week, one of my tip-jar hitters informed me that he was one of the 575 people to be laid off when Sikorsky shut down its Black Hawk helicopter plant in New York State. When the Obama deficits start hurting my tip-jar hitters, I get angry.

UPDATE: Gabriel Malor at New York Daily News:

In case you missed it over the weekend, the Obama administration’s Friday afternoon document drop was a memo from the Department of Labor telling defense contractors not to provide legally-required notice to thousands of employees that they are about to be laid off, if automatic spending cuts agreed to by the President and the Congress take effect.
Translation: President Obama wants to prevent thousands of employees, especially in swing-state Virginia, from being told that they are going to be laid off due to Department of Defense funding cuts. Because of the timing of the cuts, those notices would have been sent to employees just prior to the election in November. The man who signed those funding cuts into law would like to avoid that.

It’s worth noting that blog sidekick Smitty works for a defense contractor. Are they going to lay Smitty off? We don’t know.

Because, hey, who cares about a freakin’ federal law, when following it might hurt Obama’s re-election chances?

UPDATE II: Yeah, let’s add this:

Update III (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers! While you’re here, check out Ambassador John Bolton’s recap of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy debacle, recorded Monday, 01 October 2012.

Democrat Sluts Can’t Do Math

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The image above is one of the “e-Cards” available at BarackObama.com that offers a phony statistical argument for ObamaCare:

Dear Mom,
Mitt Romney says he would repeal the Affordable Care Act.
So here’s a quick question:
Can I borrow $18,000 to help pay for my birth control?
Thanks!

Whoa! $18,000 for birth control? If that number sounds strangely large to you, join the club. Conservative college student Christine Rousselle does the math, based on the simple fact that there are 14,600 days between the ages of 12 and 52:

Because our letter-writer has been reduced to asking her mom for money, we’re going to assume that she’s not very well off and she’s a bargain hunter. On Amazon.com, one can purchase a fishbowl filled with a variety pack of 144 Durex brand condoms for $25.89. Assuming she’d use one condom per day every single day between the ages of 12 and 52, that only equals $2,624.96 for 14,600 Durex condoms. For those of you who aren’t great at math, $2,624.96 is far less than $18,000. She’d have to be using around four or five condoms a day for 40 years for that number to even approach $18,000.
Suppose our cash-strapped friend prefers to use the birth control pill instead of condoms. In 41 states, she can get the pill for $9 a month at a Target or Walmart. That totals $108 per year, and $108 multiplied by 40 is $4,320, which still winds up less than $18,000. In the nine other states, the cost per month is around $30, which reaches around $14,400 over 40 years. These figures assume that our letter-writer plans on using birth control pills over the full length of time that she is able to get pregnant.

Using birth control every single day for 40 years, a slut’s total cost is still not $18,000 in a lifetime. So even if she’s putting out like a Pez dispenser — and, after all, she’s a Democrat, IYKWIMAITYD — she’ll have plenty of cash left over for vodka and Newports.

Another conservative student, Inez Feltscher, explains that to reach the $18,000 number, the Democrat propagandists assume that a woman will need “high risk AIDS testing”:

 

 

 

So the moral of the story: If you’re a slut who can’t do math — and you’re dumb enough to date Bill Maher — vote Obama!

 
Update (Smitty): glad I made it home to figure out what Blutarsky was on about. I’m looking at the Twitter client on the ‘droid phone and just rolling with whatever arrives:


 


Is The DNC Raaaaacist for Saying That a Black Man Can’t Win a Debate?

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by Smitty

Bluegrass Pundit points to the NY Post quoting Brad Woodhouse engaging in a little soft bigotry of low expectations:

It’s a further lowering of expectations ahead of the first debate in Denver next week. Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse tells Fox News he thinks Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will win.
Woodhouse says the way the DNC sees it, challengers win the first debate when they are up against incumbents.
“Mitt Romney has had a lot more time to debate, the president has not debated in the past four years in terms, of a campaign debate. I think the president will hold his own, but he’s not known for sound bites. And these are 60 second, 90 second responses.”

Not known for a bites. Probably because he didn’t build that.

Seriously, Brad: get stuffed. The American people have had three and a half years of Barack “Spock” drivel crammed in an uncomfortable location. The guy can stand and deliver. If he’s so purportedly smart, let him dazzle us with brains.

This notion that a black man somehow ain’t packin’ the gear in a debate after 3.5 years on the job as President is the saddest sort of raaaaacism.