Category Archives: Bush

A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Nationhood, War

“A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ ‘Duty,’ a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of ‘evening sessions’ during which he’d write condolence letters ‘to the families of service members killed in action.’ There ‘probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,’ he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became ‘on the strain on our troops and on their families.’ After all, ‘they’d been at war for 10 years.’ ‘My highest priority,’ he averred in an interview with NPR, was ‘trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,’ and expressing ‘concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.’

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or ‘save’ another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. …

Read the complete column. “A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is on WND.

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UPDATED: Obama, Love Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry (Fix News)

Barack Obama, Bush, Ethics, Healthcare, Media

“Obama: Love Means Never having To Say You’re Sorry” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

So where do we stand in the health care chain reaction, cooked-up in the Barack Obama command-and-control centers? Let’s see. Having destroyed the market for health insurance, the president turned to another parlor game, hailed by the daytrippers at CNN and the New York Times as a “health fix” and a “fix for canceled plans.”

Yes, the fix is in. Parsed, the president’s advice to the millions who’ve lost coverage is, essentially, “I’ll let you keep your already canceled policies through 2014. Feel free to take it up with your insurance company.”

In the preceding weeks, and against the backdrop of polls in which 50 percent of voters said, “President Obama knowingly lied when he repeatedly told Americans they could keep their plans under his signature health care law,” the paper of record took a “different” view. Obama, the apple of their eye, “wrongly assured Americans that they could retain their health care plans.”

An “incorrect promise” was another euphemism used by NYT story tellers.

Quite the opposite, opined Patrick J. Buchanan:

WHO’S THE BIGGEST LIAR OF THEM ALL? In the grand scheme of history, Obama’s rank lie “now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s ‘Read my lips! No new taxes,’ Bill Clinton’s ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.”

As wrecking balls go, Obama and “W” are tied in ignominy. Christopher Conover of Duke University estimates that “129 million, or 68 percent of Americans, may not be able to keep their current health care plans once Obamacare is fully implemented. [Conover’s] study also suggests that 18 to 50 million people will lose their plans altogether.”

The butcher’s bill of human suffering—Bush’s—has been tallied. Obama’s is still to come. …

The complete column is “Obama: Love Means Never having To Say You’re Sorry.” Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE (11/15): FIX NEW. Megyn Kelly of Fox News uses the exact reference and title of my Friday, WND column, even cues the music from “Love Story” referenced. Did she or her producer have the decency to credit the column? You know the answer to that.

Who’s The Biggest Liar Of Them All?

Barack Obama, Bush, Iraq, Morality, WMD

In this scribe’s opinion, “Obama’s assurances of keeping your insurance plan if you like it” is on par only with Genghis Bush’s deceit about the imperative of going to war with Iraq. Pat Buchanan thinks that Obama’s rank lie “now enters presidential history alongside George H.W. Bush’s ‘Read my lips! No new taxes,’ Bill Clinton’s ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ and George W. Bush’s tales of yellow cake in Niger and hidden arsenals of WMDs.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano begs to differ:

… According to Napolitano, President Obama’s lie is the most egregious. “Richard Nixon told a lie about his personal knowledge of a third-rate break-in, burglary. Bill Clinton told a lie about a personal sexual liaison. Barack Obama has told a lie repeatedly, readily, consistently, systematically, over and over again that will affect the wealth, the health of millions of innocent Americans. The first two […] are so insignificant compared to these lies.”
On today’s Your World, Neil Cavuto drew a comparison between Bill Clinton’s denial that he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky to President Obama’s assertion to the American public that they could keep their health care plans.

Judge Napolitano weighed in saying that the president “doesn’t have to worry legally about lying.”

“Even though the president and the Justice Department can prosecute people, Americans, who lie to the government, the president and the whole governmental apparatus are free to lie to us,” the judge said.

In terms of sheer economic destruction, I suspect that Obama and Bush are tied in ignominy. Christopher Conover of Duke University estimates that “129 million, or 68 percent of Americans, may not be able to keep their current health care plans once ObamaCare is fully implemented. The study also suggests that 18 to 50 million people will lose their plans altogether.”

More on how Conover arrived at these figures, at The Daily Caller.

Media-Enabled MEGALOMANIAC Speaks

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Homeland Security, Individual Rights

Barack Obama is an out-of-control megalomaniac—a mindset that has been mediated by media. The intrepid press sat in today rather quietly on a press conference, and listened to the monster speak about his willingness to “jiggle” his surveillance programs here and there so as to allay unnecessary fears (“provide greater assurances,” as he put it).

To quote the moron, “The men and women of our intelligence community work every single day to keep us safe because they love this country and believe in our values. They’re patriots. And I believe that those who have lawfully raised their voices on behalf of privacy and civil liberties are also patriots who love our country and want it to live up to our highest ideals. So this is how we’re going to resolve our differences in the United States — through vigorous public debate, guided by our Constitution, with reverence for our history as a nation of laws, and with respect for the facts.”

In remarks that are not yet all online (or may not find their way there), Obama said—in defiance of the evidence—that he was comfortable that “the NSA program is not being abused,” going on to promise that he’d outsource the matter to a … new hire: A Civil Liberties Officer.

Yes, this “ass with ears” will bring in a civil-liberties bureaucrat to calibrate our unalienable individual right to “be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

This is the essence of the modern-day Managerial State: common-law and constitution is overridden; rights outsourced to the better judgment of bureaucrats and hired “experts,” in this case, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. It “will make public the legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The NSA is taking steps to put in place a full-time civil liberties and privacy officer,” promised Big Daddy. (CNN’s Jessica Yellin was in estrus.)

After all, those white guys in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment: What on earth did they know?

To be fair to this clueless creature, George Bush The Decider had a similar disregard for the Constitution.