The Other McCain

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

Obama Administration Won’t Release Photos of Osama Bin Laden Dead UPDATE: Sarah Palin Urges Release of Photos ‘As a Warning to Others’

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | 34 Comments

CBS News reports:

In an interview with Steve Kroft for this Sunday’s 60 Minutes, President Obama says he won’t release post-mortem images of Osama bin Laden taken to prove his death. . . .
Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Wednesday that the Obama administration should not release the gruesome post-mortem images, saying it could complicate the job for American troops overseas. Rogers told CBS News he has seen a post-mortem photo.
“The risks of release outweigh the benefits,” he said. “Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway, and there is a real risk that releasing the photos will only serve to inflame public opinion in the Middle East.”

UPDATE: ABC has more from Mike Rogers:

“If you’re a sergeant in a town in Ghazni, Afghanistan and you’re trying to get some local elder to cooperate about what’s happening in your village, are you going to do it if this inflames into some kind of trophy — we have a trophy of Osama bin Laden? I worry about that,” Rogers told [George Stephanopoulos]. “And if we can’t answer for sure and for certain this doesn’t make the job of that soldier easier, if it makes it harder, I say it’s not worth it.”

Just saw Fox News interview John McCain, who said: “My initial opinion is that it’s not necessary to [release the photos].”

UPDATE II: Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown:

Sen. Scott Brown on Osama bin Laden; attack ad: MyFoxBOSTON.com

“If it’s just trying to sell newspapers, then I don’t think it’s appropriate,” says Brown, who is preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

UPDATE III: Bryan Preston at Pajamas Media:

If he sticks to this, it’s a bad move in my opinion. If the photo is being withheld out of sensitivity to Muslims, we are once again baptizing Osama bin Laden into mainstream Islam, after years of telling the world that OBL wasn’t a good Muslim. Stupid. Obama has just created his own pet version of the Warren Commission Report. If Obama sticks to this decision, we’ll get a lifetime of bad Photoshops and conspiracy theories out of it. And the radicals who want to kill us will still want to kill us.

Now the top thread at Memeorandum.

UPDATE IV: In a White House briefing just now, spokesman Jay Carney said, “It’s not in our national security interests” to release the photos.

Right: But one way or another, the photos will be public within weeks — perhaps within days. The National Enquirer will pay somebody $50,000, the photos will be leaked, and then the White House will engage in public hand-wringing about how “irresponsible” it is for the Enquirer to publish the photos.

Does the phrase “plausible deniability” ring a bell?

UPDATE V: Drew M. at AOSHQ:

As for our betters who say don’t release the photos because it might inflame the Religion of Peace into a murderous rage (a state also known as “everyday”) …everyone of you bastards better be on record either urging the withholding of or condemning the release of photos from Abu Ghraib.

UPDATE VI: Michelle Malkin sees the decision as evidence of gutless “dhimmitude.”

UPDATE VII: Sarah Palin is not afraid to disagree with Obama:

What percentage of Iowa GOP caucusgoers would agree with Palin? A lot of them, I bet.

UPDATE VIII: Here’s how the story was reported on MSNBC:

(Via Mediaite.)

UPDATE IX: Linked by Josh Painter at Texas for Palin — thanks!

UPDATE X: Linked at Confessions of a Constitutional Crusader — thanks!

UPDATE XI: Professor Glenn Reynolds: “This seems like a mistake to me, and the double-shuffle of contradictory messages that has led up to this decision hasn’t looked ready for prime time.”

UPDATE XII: Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom recaps the arguments justifying all this:

Rather than bomb the compound, Obama (after 16 hours of deliberation and a half-round of golf) made the “gutsy” call to send SEAL troops into harm’s way so that he could make sure the US had proof of death. This was a “Kill Only” mission, we’re told — and the SEAL “assaulters” dutifully shot the unarmed bin Laden and his young bride. Obama then ordered a 45-minute burial ceremony, performed Arabic, in which bin Laden’s “Kill Only” corpse was cleaned and dressed and placed in a burial shroud. Then dumped into the sea.
And now Obama is saying he won’t release the proof of death he claimed was so vital — and Andrea Mitchell, among others, is satisfied with this: the government has all the proof it needs, so why show anyone else? Per Mitchell, we’re inherently to trust the government. Because it isn’t a Republican in the White House. So it must be good and righteous.
And besides, we don’t want to offend Muslim sensibilities. After all, there’s no telling how these inherently peaceful people might react to photos of a dead bin Laden, who doesn’t represent Islam in any way.

Like I said: “Plausible deniability.” The photo will leak, and the official reaction from the White House will be to denounce the leak. But this is just about maintaining appearances.

UPDATE XIII: Dan Collins at Piece of Work in Progress:

Sadly, I suspect the possibility of permanently elevating ObL to a near mythical stature was disregaded in favor of a more self-serving domestic political calculus.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE XIV: Linked by The Rhetorican — thanks — and notice this Obama quote from the CBS interview: “We don’t need to spike the football.” Which is to say, it’s all about perception.

What’s the over/under on how long before the photos are leaked? I’m betting 72 hours.

UPDATE XV: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks!

UPDATE XVI: Jimmie Bise Jr. has strong words for Mike Rogers. And not in a good way.

Really: Why is it that jihadis post online videos of the executions of innocent Americans (e.g., Daniel Pearl) and yet, when we finally get the world’s most bloodthirsty terrorist, we can’t publish the photo because we’re afraid of inflaming “the Arab street”? I don’t give a damn one way or another whether they publish the photos, but I very much give a damn about U.S. officials kowtowing to the sensitivities of such savages: “Oh, we don’t want to offend them.”

They need to be offended, and often, and by someone who knows how.

UPDATE XVII: Linked by Chris Wysocki — thanks!


Category: Barack Obama, Pakistan, Terrorism

Wisconsin: Kloppenburg’s Folly

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | 12 Comments

Steve Eggleston reports that the recount demanded by JoAnne Kloppenburg in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election has now reached the 69% point, and that the liberal Kloppenburg has gained less than 200 votes, an insignificant dent in Judge David Prosser’s 7,000-vote margin.

It’s always nice when liberals waste their time and money on such futile quixotic efforts and get their hopes crushed anyway.

Category: Wisconsin

It’s Kinda Hard to ‘Work the Refs’ When the Refs Are Playing for the Other Team

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | 2 Comments

One of my habits is re-reading good books. Any book worth reading is worth re-reading, and there are some books that I have read multiple times, including William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores.

Another habit, picked up during my college days: I always prefer to read while lying down. When I was in college, I’d take my textbooks to bed with me, fall asleep reading them, wake up and read some more until I fell asleep again. I’d sometimes spend most of the weekend like that, reading and napping all day, only leaving my dorm room to go eat lunch, until it was time to go out and party at night.

All of which is preamble to saying that I was re-reading Ann Coulter’s Slander last night when I went to bed. It had been a while since I first read it — it was published in 2002 — and I had almost forgotten how good it is. People who only know Coulter as a TV personality, trading snark with Hannity and O’Reilly on Fox News, ought to take time to read some of her books. She is a much better writer than most of her critics give her credit for, and probably even better than most of her fans realize.

Coulter’s writing is often aphoristic: She writes brilliant little sentences that hit the nail square on the head. At her best, she strikes those hammer blows in succession — bam! bam! bam! — and keeps it up for page after page. Such is the case with the seventh chapter of Slander, “The Joy of Arguing With Liberals: You’re Stupid!” Read more

Category: Ace of Spades, Ann Coulter, Books, Hot Air, Jimmie Bise Jr., Media Bias

Youthful Ignorance

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | 10 Comments

Megan McArdle observes an important phenomenon:

A significant number of teens didn’t know who Osama Bin Laden was until we killed him. I can’t believe it — and yet I do believe it. I didn’t know what Iran Contra was when I was in high school, and I was a sophomore when it happened. Teenagers live in their own little world, only tangentially connected to the one the rest of us occupy. Today’s high-school freshmen weren’t even in Kindergarten when 9/11 happened. Why would they remember?
I think it’s just as significant in a way that so many of the people celebrating at Ground Zero and the White House seemed to be college kids. These were people who were nine or ten when the towers came down. I wonder if for them, hearing that Bin Laden had been killed wasn’t a bit like hearing that we mowed down Satan, or the Grinch — not the death of a specific person, but striking down the personification of evil in the world.

One of the most pernicious ideas of recent decades — originating in the 1960s “Generation Gap,” but getting worse all the time — is the belief that youth per se has some distinct political value, a belief which in turn involves a willingness to accept pop-culture hipness as actual knowledge.

You saw this attitude displayed, for example, in the mainstream media’s attempt to elevate Meghan McCain as a Republican spokesperson, the apparent thought being: “She is young and is therefore presumably tuned into future trends.” A similar attitude explains the Tiger-Beat-meets-the-Jonas-Brothers enthusiasm for the “Juicebox Mafia.”

What accounts for this attitude? I would argue that it is actually rooted in Baby Boom nostalgia. Read more

Category: Culture

Moving On Up: Herman Cain Places Third in Patrick Ishmael’s ‘Hot Air Primary’

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | Comments Off on Moving On Up: Herman Cain Places Third in Patrick Ishmael’s ‘Hot Air Primary’

Sarah Palin was the runaway winner with 27%, while Mitt Romney (11.6%) edged out Herman Cain (11.3%) for second. It’s also interesting to see that all the hype for Tim Pawlenty couldn’t boost the former Minnesota governor past 6%, while Newt Gingrich didn’t crack 2%.

Of course, this isn’t a random-sample scientific poll, but it does indicate how competitive Cain is among conservative activists online.

Isn’t it time you joined the online grassroots army at Citizens for Cain?

Category: Election 2012, Herman Cain, Hot Air, Polls

St. Lawrence the Sanctimonious

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | 10 Comments

Since taking over the 8 p.m. spot vacated by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell has mounted an extraordinary effort to achieve what many would consider an impossible goal: Being more absurdly self-righteous than Olbermann.

Tuesday night, O’Donnell may have reached that mark by asserting that John Kerry was the gold standard in national security policy:

“Now is the time for the Bush-Cheney fanatics – the people who created the war on terror and who got so much of it wrong – to listen to John Kerry and to listen to President Barack Obama teach them how to fight terrorists.”

(Via Memeorandum.) Is O’Donnell serious? Did he even listen to his own video clip, when Kerry said that fighting terrorism “requires cooperation around the world”? In point of fact, although the U.S. shoveled out all kinds of foreign aid to Pakistan, we did not get that kind of cooperation. It wasn’t “cooperation” that resulted in finding Osama bin Laden: It was the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees captured by the CIA and U.S. military during the Bush presidency — interrogations that Democrats condemned, involving terrorists they insisted were being detained illegally. And the raid that killed bin Laden was conducted by military Special Operations troops (a branch of the service increased under Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense), not by “law enforcement,” and certainly not by the European allies that Kerry kept insisting should be granted veto authority over U.S. policy.

All of which is to say that the facts are 180 degrees out of phase with O’Donnell’s argument. With complete disregard for facts, O’Donnell evidently believes that counterfactual things can be made true merely by his say-so. “Fiat lux!”

My God, did you ever believe you’d see such a thing? O’Donnell has got me pining for the Good Old Days of Keith Olbermann!

But some things remain constant at MSNBC, especially the familiar douchebaggery of Chris Matthews who, amid his otherwise giddy celebration of the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s successful assassination of a Muslim leader, described Dick Cheny as a “sadist” :

Did you see that? It was a complete non sequitur. They were sitting there praising all Obama’s wonders when Howard Fineman mentioned Dick Cheney, so out of the blue, for no discernible reason whatsoever, Matthews says: “There’s a difference between being cold blooded — I think presidents have to be cold blooded — and being a sadist.” Howard Fineman then begins to say something else, but Matthews interrupts: “I was referring to Cheney, of course.”

Fineman, certainly no fan of Dick Cheney, wisely ignored that idiotic remark. You really have to feel sorry for the guests on Matthews’s show, who have to sit there and be polite while he blabs out that kind of nonsense.

UPDATE: Welcome, Don Surber readers!


Category: Barack Obama, Military, MSNBC, Pakistan, Terrorism, Video

LIVE AT FIVE – 05.04.11

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | Comments Off on LIVE AT FIVE – 05.04.11

TOP NEWS
Levee Breach Diverts River Water Into Floodway To Save Cairo

Birds Point Levee, Missouri after Corps of Engineers demolitions

About a third of rural Mississippi County flooded, certainly out of production this year and possibly for several due to river silt and debris






Shelter Shortage For Alabama Storm Survivors
Thousands homeless, but there’s only shelter for hundreds

Portugal Agrees To Bailout Terms, Will Receive 78 Million Euros
But will the likely conservative successors to caretaker PM Socrates stick to the agreement?



POLITICS
Indiana Ready To Rumble With Administration Over Abortion

No more state or Federal money for Planned Parenthood in Indiana

Indirect funding vs. the Medicaid Act

TurboTax Timmy Blinks; Extends Date To Avoid Default By Three Weeks

President Ford Honored With Capitol Statue




Massachusetts Lawmakers To Hear Casino Bills (Again)

Huntsman Forms Committee Ahead Of Possible 2012 White House Bid



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
US Sues Deutsche Bank, Alleging Fraud
Dollar Rises After Profit-Taking By Forex Traders
US Stocks Close Unchanged; Energy & Materials Down, Telecoms Up
Gold, Silver Continue Declines In Asian Trading
Small Cars Spur April Sales
Sears Earnings Warning Raises Concerns About Retailer’s Future
Mobile App Stores A $3.8 Billion Business In 2011
Android Tethering Free Ride Is Over
Windows TPC Turns Old PCs Into New Thin Clients



SPORTS
Liriano-No! Twins Lefty Hurls No-Hitter Against White Sox

Liriano (W, 2-4) 9 IP, no hits, no runs, six walks, two K's and some awesome defense by the Twins

Snaps Twins’ six-game losing streak

Heat Beat Celtics For 2-0 Playoff Lead

Huff Hits Leadoff Homer In 10th To Lead Giants Past Mets

Astros Rout Reds 10-4 With Six-Run Fourth

Lightning Take 3-0 Lead Over Capitals

NFL Appeal Of  Lockout Order Expedited



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Katy Perry: “My Career Is Like An Artichoke”

Katy Perry. Need I say more?

The Vanity Fair interview.

Lindsay Lohan May Dodge Jail

Kristen Wiig: The Anti-Comedian

Andy Dick Arrested For Drunken Restaurant Ruckus

Rachel Weisz To Play Evil Witch In Disney’s Oz Reboot

MTV Movie Award Nominations Announced: Twilight And Inception Lead The Pack

Great Dress, Beyonce- Unless You Want To Climb Stairs

Carla Bruni Pregnant With Twins

Jesse James: I Have Started Life Over



FOREIGNERS
Israeli Foreign Ministry Sees Palestinian Deal As An Opportunity, Contra Netanyahu
Syria Protests Defy Deadly Crackdown (Video)
Turks To Unveil Libya Cease-Fire Plan At Rome Meeting
Five Arrested Near UK’s Sellafield Nuclear Plant
Canada’s Tory Majority Gives PM Harper Economic Policy Flexibility
Norks Behind Cyber Attack On ROK Bank



BLOGS & STUFF
Jammie Wearing Fool: W Nixes Appearance At Obama’s Ground Zero Victory Lap
Atlas Shrugs: Jerusalem Imam Threatens Obama
Ace Of Spades: 7 Minutes V. 16 Hours – How The Media Reports Delay
Jihad Watch: Honor Killing In Michigan


— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

Fun With Pneumonia Update: I’m Still Sick, But These Drugs Are Great!

Posted on | May 3, 2011 | 25 Comments

Well, I was feeling pretty good yesterday, but now I realize that was just the Percocet talking. Woke up this morning feeling awful. The good news? Re-reading the directions on the Percocet, I saw that it says “take one or two every four to six hours.” The “or two” is definitely more fun. So while there is hope that I’ll recover from the pneumonia, I’m afraid I’ll be a total junkie by then.

Just kidding. But thanks to everyone who has hit the tip jar for the “Get Well fund” so far: John in Vienna, Michael in Ardmore, Nathan in Missouri, Joseph in Olympia, Joel in Hollister, Jon in Isle of Palms, Jeff in Walla Walla, Charlie in Oregon, Ronald in Oakland, Catherine in Alexandria, Gregory in Elmhurst, Rick in Huntsville, Chris in South Dakota, Peter in Jacksonville and Ladd Ehlinger.

If you haven’t contributed yet, what are you waiting for? Hit the freaking tip jar! And, to show my patriotic support for the Navy SEALs who took out Osama bin Laden — also to continue our celebration of National Offend a Feminist Week — here’s a tasty selection of vintage nautical-themed cheesecake: Read more

Category: Health Care, Shoe Leather Fund
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