Category: Democrats

‘People Need to Be Sent to Jail’

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“Our goal is for ‘We the People’ to be an educated and informed electorate, involved in our government, and working with and holding our elected representatives accountable to their oath of office to uphold the Constitution.”
— Laurens County (S.C.) Tea Party mission statement

In 2009, Diane Belsom was one of millions of Americans who answered the rallying cry of the Tea Party movement:

“After Obama was elected, I was devastated. And they were calling for Tea Party rallies, and I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing but I’ll figure it out and I’ll do one,’ so I did.”

A homeschooling mom in Laurens, South Carolina, Belsom started a local Tea Party group that held its first rally in April 2009. She became involved in networking with other activists who told her she should incorporate the group and apply for non-profit status. Nearly three years after she filed her application — and after she complied with burdensome, intrusive and, in some cases, redundant requests for additional information — Belsom still has not received word on whether the group’s 501(c)4 status will be approved.

The experience of the Laurens County Tea Party was replicated for dozens of other groups across the country. We now know why.

Lauren Belsom and her fellow patriots were victimized by an Internal Revenue Service that deliberately and systematically targeted President Obama’s political opponents for harassment:

“I think people need to be held accountable,” said Belsom, who has contacted her congressman, Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan, to complain about her group’s problems with the IRS.
“We’re supposed to be living in a republic, not some kind of totalitarian system,” she said. “People need to be sent to jail if they’ve broken laws or, at a minimum, fired.”

Read the whole thing at Viral Read.

 

The Fate of Basseley Nakoula

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“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”
— Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012

The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:

“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
— Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012

There was a sort of argument last week between Ken White at Popehat and some conservatives who insist on calling Nakoula a “political prisoner.” Alternately, Rich Lowry calls Nakoula a “patsy,” but this really isn’t the argument we need to be having.

The Nakoula case isn’t about anyone’s free speech rights. The First Amendment doesn’t protect the right of convicted criminals to operate under aliases in potentially lucrative business while owing restitution to the victims of their earlier crimes. While I wholly endorse the right to speak truth about Islam — and to hell with any mob of violent savages who object — Ken White is correct that Nakoula is neither a “political prisoner” nor a heroic martyr for free speech.

But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?

What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.

Genuinely dangerous people seem to have no problem eluding federal investigators. Ariel Castro kidnapped women and kept them in his Cleveland basement for more than a decade, while the FBI never even considered the wife-beating school-bus driver a suspect. Nor was Castro the only menace to evade the FBI.

The good news? The feds are finally cracking down on those dangerous high-capacity pressure cookers. About damned time, too . . .

 

The ‘How Dare You’ Defense on Benghazi

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“This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing do to with. It’s hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.”
— Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012, while standing over the caskets of the four Americans killed at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya

Jeff Goldstein cites the important testimony that “a State Department official emailed the Libyan government on September 12 that the consulate attack was in fact a terrorist operation — specifically identifying Ansar al-Sharia in the email.” But why bother with facts? What difference, at this point, does it make?

Quite obviously, it makes a very important difference to Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) in their tireless efforts to convince Americans that Obama’s foreign policy is working, and especially to persuade us that the fine public servants at the top levels of the State Department did nothing wrong in the Benghazi affair.

When you point out the obvious facts — that the “Arab Spring” was a bad idea, that everybody in the administration lied through their teeth about Benghazi, and that the major media are enthusiastic volunteers in a partisan P.R. effort to assist in the cover-up — liberals go into fake indignation mode: How dare you?

If you’ve watched Democrats do this for years, you know how the tactic works: They’re trying to do the Jedi mind trick — “This is not the scandal you were looking for. Move along.” — and if you refuse to cooperate, they act as if your non-cooperation is proof of your bad motives. They have decided that none of the evidence or testimony means what you think it means, and that your interpretation of facts is therefore illegitimate, so you must be shunned as a bad person.

Our Moral Superiors™ get away with this trick often enough that they’re genuinely shocked when they don’t get away with it.

There are multiple layers to the Benghazi scandal, from the policy failures that left the consulate vulnerable to the mysterious “stand-down” order to the Special Ops rescue team — and with my son training as an 18X recruit, I can easily imagine how “furious” the troops were about that — and on to the “Internet video rage” talking points. As has been said, the administration failed before, during and after the Benghazi attack, and are now attempting to avoid accountability.

Damn, I need me some Chick-Fil-A.

 


Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up

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Flaming skull alert at Ace of Spades for the release of e-mails confirming that (a) officials knew from the outset that the attack on the consulate in Libya was the work of terrorists, but (b) this information was suppressed for political purposes:

State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to [CIA] warnings.”

So, it was CIA vs. C.Y.A. at the State Department which, quite frankly, has been infiltrated by Edward Said-influenced Arab specialists to such an extent that it was practically a Muslim Brotherhood outpost even before the Obama administration took over.

Seriously, you can ask Bush administration people about this: Middle Eastern scholarship within academia is so dominated by anti-Western views that, insofar as anyone has the credentials to qualify as a specialist in the field — i.e., to get hired into and promoted within the bureaucracy — they’re certain to have been saturated in ideas about “Western imperialism” and the legitimacy of Arab/Islamic grievances. And while this has also been a problem at the CIA and the Pentagon, the State Department is absolutely chock-full of such people in staff positions, so that even with hawkish neocons in the political appointee roles during the Bush years, the pro-Arab/pro-Muslim culture at Foggy Bottom never really changed.

I feel the need to point this out now because some of my well-meaning conservative friends, who (quite correctly) complain about the dubious influences within the Obama administration, often neglect to discuss the larger problem, which pre-dates Obama. However, there is good reason to think it is more of a problem now:

In 1998 Obama attended a speech by [Edward] Said, in which the scholar called for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.” In a well-publicized photo, Obama and Said can be seen talking over dinner at this pro-Arab event.
According to the Los Angeles Times, in the early 1980s Obama had been one of Said’s students in an undergraduate English class at Columbia University.

None of this is necessarily related to the Benghazi cover-up — I don’t mean to feed anyone’s conspiratorial paranoia — but it does highlight the nature of the larger problem, what Jeanne Kirkpatrick rightly called the “Blame America First” mentality.

There is a sort of  perverse narcissism involved in this worldview: Encountering people who hate us, liberals think, “It’s about us.”

This error was what crippled liberalism during the Cold War. If the Soviet Union wanted to destroy America, liberals imagined, this must be because of something wrong with America, rather than something wrong with the Soviet Union. So liberals wanted to change American foreign policy — détente! — in a more pro-Soviet direction, accepting the Leninist critique of “Western imperialism” as essentially accurate, so that you had Jimmy Carter claiming (and evidently believing) that a U.S. commitment to “human rights” would somehow repair the damage to American international prestige.

Except it wasn’t about us. It was about them. Continue reading Obama Administration’s Benghazi Lies Exposed as State Department Cover-Up →

Economics, Translated to Plain English

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The eminent James Pethokoukis gives you the technocratic jargon:

US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment.
While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons — “involuntary part-time workers” as the Labor Department calls them — increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate — a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig — rose from 13.8% to 13.9%.

Which is all very interesting, although for those of us who lack the necessary expertise — and hell, I can barely even spell Pethokoukis — further simplification may be required:

“Low-information voters.”

Has anybody heard from Peggy Joseph lately?

 

Just When You Think Democrats Couldn’t Possibly Get Any Crazier …

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. . . they somehow manage to surprise you:

Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to “transactional sex” for survival.
The resolution, from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and a dozen other Democrats, says the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women.
“[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health,” it says.

Lance Burri points out the oddity of “early marriage” — an evil as bad as HIV, according to Democrats — being listed among the harmful effects attributed to global warming.

 

Obama’s Syrian Dilemma

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

President Gutsy Call promised serious consequences if Syria’s Assad regime crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons against anti-government rebels. Now that there is clear evidence that Assad used chemical weapons? Well, it’s nuanced, Chuck Todd explains:

“I can tell you there is regret about that red line comment … I mean, they meant it. They do mean it on the chemical weapons. But saying it creates this political conversation. They didn’t want to go public last week that they had this early evidence yet. They weren’t ready. And yet they knew Congress was going to get this briefing and it was all going to get out, so they decided to go public with it last week because they felt they had no choice, that it was all going to start leaking out … But they’re not ready. There is no good answer.”

Frank J. assesses Obama’s miscalculation:

I guess he never actually thought Syria would use chemical weapons, thus he could sound tough threatening them and then never actually have to do anything.

Ed Morrissey rounds up the latest Syria news and weighs the options for the administration, but as I explained yesterday, there are no good options in Syria, unless you count as “good” the likelihood that Obama will suffer further disastrous embarrassments.