Category: Barack Obama

Oh, Say, You Can’t See, By The Hope Or The Change, What So Sadly We Beheld, Like Benghazi’s Last Blood Streaks

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by Smitty

First, the United States has not properly mourned the deaths of our Libyan Ambassador, or the other three victims in the Benghazi tragedy. The Obama Administration piled deceit after the fact upon incompetence beforehand, and has still not come fully clean.

Thus it was with grisly irony that the blogs seized on Obama’s vainglorious corruption of our national flag:

Alongside the literal handwriting on the wall in Benghazi where the some final thoughts were communicated, perhaps while Barack was getting some much-needed rest:

And how do you know that American voices penetrated the fog in Obama’s head in a way those fingers in Benghazi couldn’t penetrate the wall? “Whoops! Our bad”

“Our bad”, indeed. In 2008. We either voted for an incompetent, or didn’t work hard enough to fend off an incompetent. While it’s a great thing that the U.S. elected a black man, removing the final stain of racism (except where evil ones on the Left strive to keep the stain in place) just about everything else about Obama has been a wash. And, if you take away bagging Osama, you lose that “just about”.
Obama deserves to be pilloried about taking down that flag ad, roughly as much as putting it up there in the first place.

via PowerLine

Update: linked at Maggie’s Notebook

If The Sitting President Says Michelle Obama Is Qualified For POTUS, Then @SarahPalinUSA Surely Rates

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by Smitty

The Blaze:

President Barack Obama offered a boost for his wife on Friday, saying first lady Michelle Obama could “definitely” win the presidency but that she has “too much sense” to run for office.
“She definitely could be the president but she will never run for the presidency ’cause she’s got too much sense,” Obama said Friday in an interview on Washington, D.C. hip hop radio station WKYS.

Conor, You Lost Me At ‘Fix’

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by Smitty

Friedersdorf is normally Dan Riehl’s favorite target of derision, but one of our readers emailed a URL to article #74,325 in the “Until Republicans Fix [The Signal-To-Noise-Ratio], They Can’t Fix Any Problems” series.

The inability to judge arguments on their merits and separate fact from fantasy is what ails the conservative movement.

Later,

The right needs to value robust argument more highly. And to denigrate those who subvert it more forcefully. For public discourse is all it has to test ideas and formulate an evolving agenda.

Three replies:

  1. This is not a ‘fixable’ situation, Conor. The list of people involving themselves in the public discourse vary continuously. Also, the people themselves vary continuously, growing, learning, and retiring in various ways. It is abject foolishness to bemoan the unfixability of the situation. If you follow that foppish line of reasoning long enough, you’ll decide that it is ‘unfair’ that the situation cannot be ‘fixed’, and appeal to some authority to redistribute the attentino paid to speakers more ‘equitably’.
  2. This is a capitalism of ideas, Conor. You can produce sentences with flower prose, e.g.:

    But respect for empiricism and reasoned, intellectually honest debate could ensure that the best critiques would be aired; the best ideas attempted; and the very worst rejected, whatever their provenance. At minimum, it’s possible to imagine a coalition where sound argument was valued enough to render the most vile ad hominem and the most hair-trigger heretic-shaming beyond the pale. Instead Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson remain among the right’s most influential voices.

    However, if no one buys what you’re selling, you have to admit that maybe your product is inferior. Rush Limbaugh is not immortal. How are you sharpening your rhetoric, even now, to rescue Rush’s beleaguered audience, sadly led astray these decades, mistaking bombast for basis, passion for principle, volume for veracity? Do you brush aside riff-raff like Mark Steyn* and start out as a sub for Rush when he’s away? Or do you take baby steps, and out-Erickson Erick, and build a redder Red State?

  3. We are watching the traditional media crater in the marketplace because they do suck, Conor. They know that they are on the RMS Progressive Titanic, and striking that iceberg called ‘math’ has us all taking on far too much water. And to read you whinging on about reasoned argument, and then see you collide with this drivel:

    National Review’s readers have been exposed to the argument that President Obama is allied with our Islamist enemy in a “Grand Jihad” against America; in Forbes, Dinesh D’Souza set forth the thesis that Obama’s every action is explained by a Kenyan anti-colonial ideology that overwhelms all else. I mention those magazines not because they’re worthless, but because both publish good stuff, and employ a lot of talented people who are more than smart enough to see through this nonsense. An ideological movement that prided itself on openness to all ideas could be forgiven for the most laughable that made it onto the pages of marquee magazines, but on the right, this madness gets published in venues where David Frum is deemed beyond the pale.
    A bit farther toward the fringes you’ve got the birthers.
    Just now, the GOP nominee was exposed as believing, or pandering to donors who believe, that the 47 percent of Americans who vote Democratic are the same 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes. That is demonstrably false, but many on the right have lined up behind his remarks, and started to shame co-ideologues who dared to criticize the Republican standard-bearer.

    One sees what you did there, Conor. You’ve juxtaposed some serious theories about what’s going on in the mind of BHO with birtherism. Nice discrediting by proximity. But don’t you think, even if wrong, the ideas of Andrew McCarthy and D’Souza are theories that have substantial explanatory power? Doesn’t the resonance of 2016 with Americans mean something? (Catch a great D’Sousa interview here.)
    And then the whole 47% ‘controversy’. Could you at least, speaking of intellectual honesty, balance a (perhaps cleverly) edited excerpt of Romney’s remarks against the corpus of what the man’s said?

Sporting fellow that I am, Conor, let me buy you a cup of coffee at CPAC next year. It would be instructive to figure out if you’re playing the mercenary Dave Weigel game, where you’re writing for a paycheck and serving an editorial overlord, while not necessarily being evil, the Rick Moran game, where you’re quietly statist, bookish, and keen on making theoretical arguments, or merely an oaf.

*Steyn deletes better prose than I write. Take that remark in context, please.

Oh, That’ll Go Over Like The Vagina Monologues In Quantico

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by Smitty

Breitbart:

The Obama administration’s shifting claims on what took place in Benghazi, Libya on 9/11 became more defiant yesterday when unnamed officials suggested that no amount of security would have mattered in Libya, not even a detachment of US Marines.

Yeah, “unnamed officals”, you’d best ensure that you’re anonymous while tossing the U.S.M.C. under your #Fail bus.

This plaintive whine may actually be true in the sense that a Marine detachment with reasonable ROE would have waded into the attackers before it became too problematic. See what I did there? ROE vs. wade? I kill me. About like the Marines would have whacked these scum. But, strangely, not like the Marines would respond to these officials so quick to opine on tactical matters when the Obama Administration simply needs to slink into the pit of historical shame.

Say hello to the Carter Administration when you get there, Obama.

Update: linked by Jackie Wellfonder

Obama Talking Point: ‘Opportunistic’

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“The best information we have now, the facts that we have now, indicate that this was an opportunistic attack.”
— Matt Olsen, head of the U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center, testifying to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee

“President Barack Obama said he thinks Muslim protests against Western criticism of Islam are ‘natural.’
” ‘The natural protests that arose because of the video… were used as an excuse by extremists,’ Obama said during an hour-long town-hall interview on the Spanish-language Univision channel.”
— Daily Caller via AOSHQ

Finally, a punchline to the sick joke of Obama’s foreign policy. After the Idiot Ambassador Susan Rice was all over TV Sunday insisting that the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was not — repeat, not — a “pre-meditated” attack, now the facts that contradict the original White House spin are becoming public, and so the slow-motion walkback is underway.

“Opportunistic” was still somewhere between “spontaneous protest” (Spin #1) and the final “yeah it was totally a pre-planned al-Qaeda hit” admission. And, no, Jay Carney doesn’t want to get into the details because — nudge, nudge — it’s an “ongoing investigation.”

At no point, whowever, will the White House ever admit that their Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Islamaphobe game was all about political damage control, nor will any of the mainstream media people who enthusiastically pushed the Obama spin ever admit that they were, in fact, totally in the tank for their Democrat buddies and thus complicit in a deliberate deception.

Source: Slain ambassador said
he was on al Qaeda hit list

What? The slain ambassador himself knew he was targeted for assassination by radical Islamic terrorists? And the Obama administration did . . . what? Nothing?

“Can we ask a question, Mr. President? No? OK, then . . . ” And then it’s on to do the Letterman show and party down with Jay-Z.

Grant that they’re totally in the tank for their Democrat buddies, but do these “reporters” have no sense of professional pride? Are they just gonna roll over and take it? Are they going to let themselves be played for fools by this administration?

“What’s clear,” the CBS reporter concludes, “is that the public won’t get a detailed account of what happened until after the election.”

Yes, of course. That’s exactly the arrangement. And they like it.

Lots more at Twitchy, but the hands-down best line of the day was a commenter at Ace of Spades HQ:

There was no advanced planning for what happened in your mouth. It was merely an opportunistic event.

OMG! I Thought The Obama Flag & Blood On The Wall A Tasteless Joke. . .

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by Smitty



But no, that upper image is, unexpectedly, a sale item:

Let me be perfectly clear. Obama wasn’t joking when he talked about ‘fundamentally transforming America‘. This is why I tell people: the election in five weeks is nothing short of a Constitutional referendum.

If given another 48 months to wield his Commie wrecking ball on our notion of limited government, know this: he’ll be hanging on to power for more like 480 months.

You know what you’ve got to do.

(h/t HotAir)

Obama: An Authentic Phony

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Back during the 2008 GOP primary campaign — most of which actually happened in 2007 — I wasn’t yet an independent blogger, but was “a man under authority” at The Washington Times.

Working on the news side of the operation, the public expression of my opinions was streng verboten, which of course didn’t mean I had no opinion. So it was only in private that I was able to bitch, bitch, bitch about the stupidity of nominating a bald septuagenarian. Never mind that John McCain was an unprincipled backstabbing crapweasel; the real problem was that the “optics” were all wrong.

Even if you could tolerate his self-serving mendaciousness and erratic temper, Crazy Cousin John never looked or sounded remotely presidential in the superficial way that candidates are judged in the TV age. No Hollywood producer would cast someone who looked and sounded like that as president, except in a thriller-drama where the good guy is a rogue CIA agent who exposes the hidden betrayals of the corrupt and craven leadership.

I said that — often and loudly, in private conversations — at a time when it was thought the Democrats would nominate Hillary Clinton, who doesn’t exactly exude empathy. Maybe in a contest against the Chilly Bitch stereotype, the Embittered Old Bald Guy could squeak out a win, just barely, but John McCain never stood a snowball’s chance in hell against the Allstate Man.

It is perhaps unnecessary and unwise to invoke the phrase, coined by a liberal writer for the Los Angeles Times but made notorious by Rush Limbaugh, “Magic Negro.” What the phrase originally suggested was a certain type of modern Hollywood casting, in which the Good Wise Black Man serves as a sort of moral symbol, an embodiment of virtue, the voice of authority.

If  there is anything “racist” about the Magic Negro, it is a liberal racism in the souls of the liberal screenwriters and directors who seem psychologically trapped with Jim Crow-era white guilt manifestations. A $250-an-hour therapist might be able to help them with those hangups, but instead these Hollywood people keep foisting their weird insecurities on us as  TV primetime crime dramas and Oscar-bait movies that feature this stock character, the Magic Negro, as an emblem of righteousness.

Whatever. I’m over it.

As soon as Obama emerged as a genuine contender in the Democrat primary field — after the October 2007 debate in which Hillary got tripped up over a question about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants — I witnessed with increasing horror the GOP primary campaign in which John McCain, counted out in late summer, gradually worked his way back to front-runner status.

“No! It’s all wrong! It doesn’t work!”

Millons of Americans have been programmed by their voracious consumption of popular culture to react automatically to superficial perceptions — “image” — and the match-up between Obama and McCain was a disaster for Republicans in that sense.

Denzel Washington vs. Tim Conway? No, dear God, no.

Beyond the purely racial component, the problem was that Obama has a deep baritone voice and a calm demeanor (the Allstate Insurance Man) whereas John McCain’s voice is a raspy tenor, and his manner is nervous and edgy. This presented an insuperable political problem in the 24/7 Media Age, where the President of the United States is a celebrity — famous for being famous — and is judged by People Who Watch Too Much TV in the same superficial stereotypical way they judge everybody else.

Obama seems presidential, and vast numbers of Americans have lost the ability to distinguish between seeming and being.

The election of Obama was made easier by the media, which provided this superficially appealing celebrity with a personal narrative that didn’t quite match the reality of Obama’s life. Correcting that mythos is the purpose of a series entitled “The Obama You Don’t Know” in the Washington Examiner.

As Jeff Dunetz says, this report has blown a huge hole in the fake biography of our 44th president, and the question is whether the realization that they’ve been conned by media image-makers will cause the American people to re-think the difference between seeming presidential and being presidential.

 


$105,000 Worth of Champagne

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What else would you expect to drink when you attend a fundraiser for the Man Who Stopped the Rise of the Oceans?

President Barack Obama attended a fundraiser at Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club in Manhattan that featured a champagne tower of 350 bottles worth $105,000 — more than twice the median household income of an American family.
The tower of $300-a-bottle Armand de Brignac Brut Gold . . . is a permanent fixture at the club. ‘It’s floor-to-ceiling gold bottles in the entire space,’ a 40/40 representative told the New York Post. ‘It’s beautiful—breathtaking. It’s the first thing you see when you walk in.’ The median income for an American family was $51,413 in 2011.

Obama campaign slogan 2008: “Change We Can Believe In.”

Obama campaign slogan 2012: “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.”

BTW, don’t confuse this with the “excellent armagnac” served at Chez McCain to members of the Elite Cabal of Bloggers to which The Lonely Conservative was not invited.