The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

#YouDidntBuildThat But You Still Went There (Sarah Palin Edition)

Posted on | July 28, 2012 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Not exactly a ‘build’ per se, but Sarah Palin has certainly built an enviable reputation as a traditional American. God bless the lady and her family.

I hope Doug Mataconis reads this post and notices this Easter Egg

Hopefully we overcome the raaaaacism and misogyny of the Left and put this lady on a ballot someday.

via Twitchy

Update: OK, Daily Pundit: everybody Left of me. 🙂

Category: Sarah Palin

Standing By For ‘Lefties Decry Money In Politics’ In 3…2…1…

Posted on | July 28, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Oh, wait: this is 2.5 mil to defend the Left’s position, so it’s casual:

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced Friday they are donating $2.5 million to the campaign to defend Washington’s same-sex marriage law.
With the gift, Washington United for Marriage has raised more than $5 million for its referendum campaign.
“It’s a game changer for us,” said campaign manager Zach Silk in Seattle. “It puts us in unique position to win.”

A few points:

  • I don’t live in Washington any longer. I truly love Seattle, as a Franklin High alumnus. So this is not my particular fight, and I respect the political capacity of Washingtonians to legalize goat marriage. And why not? Surely, one must COYOTE, no?
  • What Bezos does with his legally garnered geld is just not my business. If he’s buying a little insurance from the rabid Left, so that they don’t drown him in Koch-a-cola, or lay on a Chick-Fil-A-buster, that makes sense. Not everyone can be Rush Limbaugh. Non-Rush people, in fact, have trouble being Rush.
  • The Blaze: “But, his group is still the underdog, he said. In 32 previous elections nationally, same-sex advocates have lost.” or, the common-sense opinion that the symbol “marriage” is long-since “settled-law” and should continue to mean what it has mostly always meant, for the societal Pareto optimal outcome. I mean, with an 0 and 32 record, maybe skating on the other side of the ice isn’t a swift plan. Just sayin’.
  • Even given a “win”, those who’d alter “marriage”, which is as foundational to society as “man” and “woman” (two more symbols under relentless Postmodern attack) the proponents of the change aren’t going to fare well in the Court Eternal. You can extend the term “marriage” to support binding a human with an entire kindle of cats*, if you want. For my common-sense reading of scripture, the Almighty shan’t be too impressed with your foolishness. I merely need to know to stay out of range when any potential doom befalls.
  • If the Koch brothers have some spare change, maybe they can support the traditional position. I guess the Kochs are kind of libertarian, and probably don’t care, but it’s always a pleasure to drop a quarter in the Screechy Chorus to hear their Fred Phelps inversions, as the Left offers their own flavor of lousy, un-persuasive preaching.

Hopefully Washington extends the track record for common sense on the matter. However, the population of California ex-pats there, I fear, may have reached critical morass.

*Don’t kindle your Kindle, kids: unkind.

Category: Culture

The FBI and ‘Fedora’

Posted on | July 28, 2012 | 15 Comments

Wow. OK, I just finished reading Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, a 1978 book by Edward Jay Epstein, and as soon as I finished it, I got on Google to solve the mystery.

This is complicated. The mystery at the heart of Epstein’s book is this: Why did Oswald defect to the Soviet Union in 1959, and then re-defect to the United States in 1962? What did Oswald do while in the Soviet Union and what was his relationship with the KGB?

There is no evidence that Oswald’s assassination of John F. Kennedy was part of a conspiracy. We have no reason to believe that the Soviets (or anyone else) ordered Oswald to commit the assassination. The evidence clearly shows Oswald’s motives were idiosyncratic, the product of a defective personality exhibiting a hostility to authority, profoundly alienated from society and thus adopting an anti-American ideology.

However, we do have good reason to believe that the Soviets were worried that they would be blamed for Oswald’s act, and that in order to prejudice the conclusions of the Warren Commission, the KGB deployed an elaborate deception: They assigned a KGB officer to defect to the U.S. in early 1964, claiming to have been in charge of Oswald’s case at the KGB, and to deny that Oswald had been of any value to Soviet intelligence.

The story told by the defecting KGB agent, Yuri Nosenko, aroused suspicion among Soviet experts at the CIA, in part because Nosenko falsified elements of his own biography. However, Nosenko’s description of his handling of Oswald’s case was also highly dubious.

Oswald had been a Marine radar operator whose unit had worked with top-secret U-2 spy aircraft. Surely the Soviets would have debriefed Oswald on that highly valuable information. Nosenko denied this, claiming that at no time during Oswald’s nearly three-year stay had Soviet intelligence sought or received any such information from the avowed Marxist.

Oswald defected to the Soviets in October 1959. Barely six months later, in May 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton shared the suspicions of the agency’s Soviet experts that Nosenko was a KGB plant. Nosenko was confined and subjected to hostile interrogation. Although repeatedly caught in lies, Nosenko never “broke.”

Meanwhile, the FBI got involved. The FBI had its own Soviet source, code-named “Fedora,” who worked in the Soviet U.N. mission in New York and was so highly valued by J. Edgar Hoover that the FBI director sometimes sent information from “Fedora” directly to the president, without even attempting to verify it with other sources.

“Fedora” vouched for Nosenko’s authenticity as a sincere defector.

Well, that raised eyebrows at the CIA, for obvious reasons: They had solid circumstantial evidence that Nosenko was actually a KGB spy, and if “Fedora” said Nosenko was legit, this was a pretty big clue that “Fedora” was also a KGB agent, feeding disinformation to the FBI.

So the CIA didn’t trust Nosenko, and they believed his mission was to cover up whatever connections there had been between Oswald and Soviet intelligence. But the FBI’s source “Fedora” said Nosenko was legit, and J. Edgar Hoover had a special reason to want to keep the Warren Commission from getting too curious about a possible KGB-Oswald connection.

The FBI had badly mishandled Oswald’s case. As a former defector to the Soviet Union and an avowed Marxist, Oswald should have been under surveillance as a security risk from the time he returned to the United States in June 1962. Beyond that, Oswald’s wife Marina — who was in fact the niece of a Soviet official — should have been viewed as a security risk in her own right. Oswald subsequently engaged in numerous suspicious activities, staging pro-Castro protests on behalf of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and traveling to Mexico to visit the Cuban and Soviet embassies, seeking to immigrate to Cuba. Yet the FBI never created a “Security Index” on either Oswald or his wife.

Hoover was furious about the failures of his agency, remarking at one point that “no one in full possession of all his faculties” could have failed to see that Oswald was a security risk. For their failures in the Oswald case, Hoover censured five field agents, one field supervisor, three special agents in charge, four headquarters supervisors, two headquarters section chiefs, one inspector and the assistant director of the FBI.

However, Hoover took these unprecedented disciplinary actions secretly, because he feared that if the full extent of the FBI’s mishandling of the Oswald case became public, the bureau would be entirely discredited. Therefore, Hoover was very happy to learn that the KGB defector Nosenko said that Oswald wasn’t a Soviet agent or of any serious interest to the KGB — and was glad that the FBI’s own Soviet source, “Fedora,” vouched for Nosenko.

Espstein’s book was published in 1978, when no one outside the FBI knew who “Fedora” was. So when I finished the book, I immediately did a Google search and learned that “Fedora” was Victor Mechislavich Lesovski and was — you guessed, didn’t you? — “among the most successful Soviet KGB agents of the Cold War.”

“Fedora” was feeding the FBI disinformation, which means Nosenko was almost certainly also providing disinformation on behalf of the KGB, in order to cover up . . . what? We still don’t know.

This is one of those Cold War mysteries that may never be solved. It’s possible, as Epstein clearly suspected, that Oswald did provide classified military information to the Soviets, but once he returned to the United States, there is nothing to indicate the Oswald was acting under the control of the KGB. As a repatriated defector, he would have been a very risky “asset.” Nosenko’s mission seems to have been to act as sort of an insurance policy to undermine any official suspicion that Oswald was a Soviet agent.

And whatever became of “Fedora”? There’s an ironic denouement because it was “Fedora” who, in 1971, told J. Edgar Hoover that a copy of the so-called “Pentagon Papers” had been sent to the Soviet embassy in Washington. Hoover reported this to President Nixon, resulting in a national-security panic that ultimately helped lead to the Watergate scandal.

The aftermath of the Watergate scandal, of course, devastated the ability of both the FBI and the CIA to conduct domestic surveillance against suspected national security risks, and you can blame it all on J. Edgar Hoover, who trusted the wrong Russian.

 

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Books, Crime, History

Mitt Reveals What ‘It’ Is

Posted on | July 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

I admit to having been confused by a certain cryptic utterance for the longest time. Here, for CNN, Mitt lays it out plainly: Success.

Prior to this moment, we only had this to go on:

If you have it, you don’t need it.
If you need it, you don’t have it.
If you have it, you need more of it.
If you have more of it, you don’t need less of it.
You need it. . .to get it.
And you certainly need it to get more of it.
But if you don’t already have any of it to begin with, you can’t get any of it to get started, which means you really have no idea how to get it in the first place. Do you?
You can share it. Sure. You can even stockpile it if you like. But you can’t fake it.
Wanting it. . .needing it. . .wishing for it.
The point is: if you’ve never had any of it. . .ever. . .people just seem to know.

And, considering the economy currently parked in the toilet, we finally know who is in the second-person receiving posture of this soliloquy: #OccupyResoluteDesk.

You sort of knew all along

Remember, the #Occupation ends next January, Choomly.

I suppose you could argue that being President, itself, is a form of success. Is it fair to quote the Philosopher-King who said “You didn’t do that?”

Category: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney

‘Abysmal Failure’

Posted on | July 27, 2012 | 22 Comments

That’s how the 2008 TARP bailout is described by Neal Barofsky, the former special inspector general (“SIGTARP”) who was responsible for investigating how the funds were spent.

Did you know, for example, that the Treasury Department still owns 61% of the “too-big-to-fail” insurance giant AIG, and that bailout recipients still owe taxpayers more than $100 billion?

Those are a few of the unpleasant facts Barofsky details in his new book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.

Before TARP failed as policy, it first failed as politics, with John McCain’s panicky announcement — Sept. 24, 2008 — that he would fly back to Washington to push for passage of the bailout. As I explained two weeks later, this was the decision that ensured Obama’s election:

An L.A. Times poll found 55 percent opposed a taxpayer-funded financial bailout; an Associated Press poll found only 30 percent supporting the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
Why such widespread opposition? According to a CNN poll, 77 percent believed the bailout would benefit those who had caused the financial problems in the first place.
As with immigration reform in 2006 and 2007, McCain’s pro-bailout stance made him the most prominent advocate of an unpopular proposal. His attempt to push for quick passage of the measure was rebuffed. A Sept. 25 White House conference reportedly turned into a “contentious shouting match,” and the bailout bill was defeated Sept. 29 in the House, with most Republicans voting against it. . . .
[B]y siding with [Bush] on an issue that voters identified as favoritism toward Wall Street, the Republican cemented in the public mind a message that Team Obama had been promoting for months: A vote for McCain would mean a third term for George W. Bush. . . .
It was McCain’s outspoken support for the unpopular bailout — a big-government intervention incompatible with conservative economic philosophy — that handed the election to Obama.

Michelle Malkin was among the most outspoken conservative opponents of the bailout, and deserves credit for having been right when so many Republicans — not just John McCain — were wrong.

Obama also supported the TARP bailout, and every other bailout and “stimulus” that Democrats could come up with, and what did taxpayers get for all those billions? Not a recovery. (Hat-tips: Instapundit, Memeorandum.) Reacting to today’s bad economic news, Mitt Romney’s policy director Lahnee Chen issued this memo:

This Sunday marks 100 days until Election Day. Poll after poll shows us that jobs and the economy are the most important issues on the minds of the American people. Voters will be asking themselves a simple question: Which candidate is best equipped to finally get our economy back on the right track?
Under President Obama, the economy continues to weaken. Today’s GDP estimate, which revealed that our economy grew by a paltry 1.5% last quarter, is only the latest sign that we are moving in the wrong direction. Some economists have expressed fears that we are heading toward a period of zero growth — or worse. America’s jobless rate has been over 8% for 41 straight months and is likely to remain chronically high for the foreseeable future. The number of Americans living in poverty is at record levels. China has overtaken the United States in manufacturing for the first time ever. All the while, our national debt climbs higher and higher, leaving a multi-trillion dollar unpaid bill for future generations.
President Obama has no one but himself to blame for the state of our economy. Shortly after taking office, he promised to turn things around in three years or he’d be looking at a “one-term proposition.” He said he welcomed the responsibility of solving the serious problems our country faces. But he has not solved them. Now, instead of solutions and substance, the Obama campaign will offer little more than diversions and distractions over the next 100 days. Since the President can’t run on his record, this is all his campaign can do.
Americans are too smart — and too tired of politics as usual — to be fooled by this. They know President Obama has had enough time to live up to the promise of his last campaign. They know they aren’t better off than they were four years ago. Most importantly, they know they have the final say — and a clear choice.
In Mitt Romney, the American people will find someone who has the kind of personal strengths and professional experience they are looking for. As a businessman, and later as governor, he compiled a record of promoting innovative solutions, turning around struggling enterprises, and creating jobs. Unlike President Obama, he has a comprehensive plan to unleash the potential of the American economy and give hope to middle-class families that are struggling. He knows the power of free enterprise and free people — and he believes small-business owners and entrepreneurs deserve every last bit of credit for serving as the backbone of America’s economy.
From Day One of his presidency, Mitt Romney will be focused on job creation and economic growth. He will lead where President Obama has not, and he will succeed where President Obama has failed. Just over 100 days from now, the change we need will finally arrive.

 

Category: Economics

St. Louis Post-Disgrace

Posted on | July 27, 2012 | 19 Comments

The World’s Worst Excuse for a Daily Newspaper today published an editorial of unimaginable wretchedness, comparing Republicans to Stalin — yes, Stalin — for their opposition to ObamaCare.

Republicans, according to this perverse analogy, are the moral equivalent of a genocidal mass murderer because a study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that a certain number of non-insured people would die if ObamaCare isn’t fully implemented:

So you’re OK with people suffering needlessly? And you’re OK with killing 17,000 people a year? Because if you are, admit it. Don’t hide behind “we can’t afford it.”

Voting against ObamaCare is therefore — according to the vicious dimwits who write editorials at The World’s Worst Excuse for a Daily Newspaper — the same thing as the Ukrainian terror-famine and the systematic liquidation of the kulaks.

Dan Riehl believes he has identified the author of this unsigned editorial, but in checking the staff listings, I don’t see that guy’s name.

At any rate, you can call 314-340-8000 and let the editors of The World’s Worst Excuse for a Daily Newspaper know that you don’t like being compared to a mass-murdering dictator.

(Hat-tip: Gateway Pundit.)

UPDATE: Apologies to Dan Riehl who, as usual, was right: Tony Messenger is indeed editorial page editor of the Post-Disgrace.

UPDATE II (Smitty): welcome, Instpundit readers!

Category: Uncategorized

NYMag Plays The Race Card On #YouDidntDoThat

Posted on | July 27, 2012 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

Raaaaacism, like flatus, is often closest to the emitter:

The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.

Actually, President Obama’s voice is one of his better qualities. He consistently achieves a pleasant tone and cadence while serving a bunch of statist idiocy. To the tune of the Flintstones theme:

Race card. Meet the race card.
It’s the modern Commie’s favorite trope.
From the mouth of the Left,
It’s used like you’re a clueless dope.

Let’s ride with the family down the street.
The ACORN auto’s really sweet.

When you’re with the Flintstones
You’ll have a racially-guilted doo time.
A quota doo time.
You’ll have a gay old time*.

*In a future when all are legally required to co-star on an unspeakable 15 minute reality show to prove they’re not homophobic.

I realize that, to these flailing Lefties, playing the raaaaace card is the only way they can get electrolytes back into #OccupyResoluteDesk’s flagging campaign. It’s certainly easier than admitting the Progressive project is completely out of gas.

via The Corner

More at Ace.

Jonah Golberg:

Jonathan Chait’s entry into the “if it’s bad for Obama, it’s racist” games is a keeper. What I love about this stuff is that liberals tend to insist how racism is not only repugnant to them, but alien to them. And yet, they continually demonstrate a sensitivity and acuity for spotting it that even real racists seem to lack.

We really need Amanda Marcotte to spin some theory that buggy makers in Lancaster County, PA are driving all this racial tension, due to hatred of the internal combustion engine.

Still more at VodkaPundit, also, Memeorandum and His Mexi-badness:

Notice also that [Chait] inadvertently confirms the conservative criticism that it’s the liberals who are race-obsessed. In a melanino-centric politics, all events, people and ideas have to be translated through dark brown-colored glasses. Thus, conservatives criticize Obama for being essentially socialist, extremist, radical, and statist, which are all supposed “dog-whistles” for race. But when Chait expressly says that “the core of Obama’s entire political identity” is a political fear of being seen as a black politician, this is intellectual brilliance!

Or auto-moronic asphyxiation–you make the call.

Also, Breitbart:

Sorry, Jonathan, but the only one “blatantly lying” here is you. And your vile race-baiting is equal parts hilarious, maddening, unAmerican, and just plain pathetic.

Category: Neutral Objective Journalism, The Flemish Menace

CNN President Jim Walton Resigns; Network Stuck in Third Place

Posted on | July 27, 2012 | 22 Comments

Associated Press:

CNN chief Jim Walton said Friday he is quitting, saying the company needs new leadership at a time its flagship U.S. network is suffering through some of its poorest ratings ever.
Walton built the company into a profitable international news organization in his 10 years as president of CNN Worldwide, and said it is on track for record profits this year. But the U.S. network is the most visible part of the business and is now entrenched in third place behind rivals Fox News Channel and MSNBC in prime time

Let’s see if we can’t locate your problem, OK, Jim?

Your idea of a morning anchor is Soledad O’Brien, and Nielsen ratings indicate she’s slightly more popular than syphilis.

Your primetime anchor is so obviously gay that when he finally “came out,” no one cared. He’s the Liberace of network anchors. NTTAWWT, except that Anderson Cooper’s getting out-gayed (not to mention out-machoed) by Rachel Maddow.

Seriously: Maddow’s Nielsen ratings at 9 p.m. ET on MSNBC (997,000 viewers, 294,000 in the key 25-54 demographic) are better than Cooper’s CNN ratings at 8 p.m. (507K/147K).

In general, Jim — with the exception of hiring Erin Burnett — your eye for on-air talent hasn’t been impressive. There has been a horrible inertia problem at CNN, which has accumulated a bunch of unexciting dead-weight personalities that nobody else wants to hire. I mean, the last time you negotiated Wolf Blitzer’s contract, did you ever get any indication that you were bidding against some other network for his services? If CNN cut Wolf loose next week, is it possible that he might land at NBC or Fox or even Current TV?

In consideration of the facts, Jim, I was rather amused by the self-congratulatory tone of your farewell note:

I am proud of what we have accomplished together over these last 10 years – innovative programming, the development of great talent in front of and behind the cameras, expansion in digital and mobile, significant investment and expansion in international coverage, financial success and, most importantly, great and trusted journalism.  Thank you for the role you have played in our successes.

“Our successes”! If CNN can continue your 10-year record of “successes,” they’ll be lucky to beat Home Shopping Network in the Nielsens.

Category: CNN
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin