Category Archives: Bush

UPDATED: Obama’s The Sinner; Holder His ‘Sin Eater’ (Media in Mutiny)

Barack Obama, Bush, Democrats, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Republicans

“Obama’s The Sinner; Holder His ‘Sin Eater'” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“BIG media have been willing, even eager, to pass the buck for Barack for the past five years. But the Fourth Estate rose as one on its proverbial hind legs when the president made the mistake of going after their own: members of the media.

For doing their jobs, Associated Press journalists were spied on and had their telephone records and other personal information seized by the head of Barack Obama’s Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder. For doing his job, Fox News Channel’s James Rosen was framed by the same department for the crime of conspiracy to leak classified materials.

IRS bloodhounds Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller, likely in charge of hounding conservative organizations unsympathetic to Obama, had practically taken up residence at the Big Dog’s House. Yet, curiously, conservatives have largely avoided linking Barack Hussein Obama to this and to the other scandals reverberating throughout his administration.

Republicans have eddied around the issue, merely describing the president’s stance with respect to the Rosen, AP, Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service affairs as “disconnected,” “lacking focus.” An “absentee presidency,” surmised the conservative bloggers at Powrline. “The Spectator President,” pronounced Patrick Buchanan. Judge Andrew Napolitano’s brief was equally narrow. He avoided so much as hinting that Holder had likely been carrying out the wishes of his bosom buddy.

Although it’s hard to know what to make of it here, Republican rigor mortis is par for the course. Fortunately, for every mealymouthed Eric Cantor—the House majority leader is responsible for the “disconnected” description—there are progressives like Salon’s Joan Walsh [and professor Jonathan Turley], who, spittle flying, are tying the president to the infractions liberals consider unforgivable. …”

The complete column is “Obama’s The Sinner; Holder His ‘Sin Eater.'” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE: Let’s be clear, the media schmooze Eric Holder has attempted to hold, only to be rebuffed by most news outlets, originated with our original sinner, Obama. Via HuffPo:

President Obama announced last week that Holder would meet with media executives to discuss guidelines concerning journalists caught up in leak investigations. There has been growing concern among journalists and lawmakers about the DOJ’s tactics following the seizure of Associated Press phone records in one investigation and the accusation in court documents that a Fox News reporter may have committed a crime in the course of reporting in another.

The “meeting this week between Attorney General Eric Holder and the Washington bureau chiefs of several media outlets [was ostensibly] to discuss guidelines for journalists in leak investigations.”

Please. Obama wishes to restore the privileges he enjoyed before the media mutinied. A little access, a wink and a nudge; why doesn’t the magic work any more? He also wants surreptitiously to “set conditions” on how reporting is to be done in The Great leader’s America.

And he wants this meeting (ostensibly) about the freedom of the press to take place off the record!

Following Abramson’s announcement, Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse tweeted that President Obama had asked the attorney general “to review how leak investigations are done but some in the media refuse to meet with him. Kind of forfeits your right gripe.”
Journalists would argue that the issue is not about simply refusing to meet with Holder, but that the government shouldn’t set conditions that would prevent news organizations from reporting on what takes place

UPDATE IV: Dying For Nothing Day (You’re For The Military, But Not For Liberty)

Bush, Classical Liberalism, Homeland Security, Just War, libertarianism, Nationhood, Propaganda, The State, War, Welfare

It is the habit on the Memorial Day weekend to thank uniformed men for their sacrifice. My sympathies go out to Americans who fight phantoms in far-flung destinations. I’m sorry they’ve been snookered into living, dying and killing for a lie. But I cannot honor that lie, or those who give their lives for it, and take the lives of others in America’s many recreational wars. I mourn for them, as I have from day one, but I can’t honor them.

I am sorry for those who’ve enlisted thinking they’d fight for their countrymen and were subjected to one backdoor draft after another in the cause of illegal, unjust wars and assorted informal attacks. My heart hurts for you, but I won’t worship at Moloch’s feet to make you feel better.

I honor those sad, sad draftees to Vietnam and to WW II. The first valiant batch had no option; the same goes for the last, which fought a just war. I grew up in Israel, so I honor those men who stopped Arab armies from overrunning our homes. In 1973, we came especially close to annihilation.

I can legitimately claim to know of flesh-and-blood heroes who fought so that I could emerge from the bomb shelter (in the wars of 67 and 73) and proceed with my kid life. I always stood in their honor and wept when the sirens wailed once a year. Every Israeli stops on that day, wherever he is, and stands still in remembrance. We would have died or been overrun by Arabs if not for those brave men who defended the homeland, and not some far-away imperial project.

But can we Americans, in 2013, make such a claim? Can we truly claim that someone killed an Iraqi or Afghani or a Libyan so that we can … do what? Remind me?

“What I learned growing up in a war-torn region is that a brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly one fights because it can.”

UPDATED (5/26): GIVE GOVERNMENT A LEG, RIDE WITH DUBYUH. Thomas DiLorenzo nails it:

That’s how emailer John D. describes the Marc Levin (“The Grate One”) radio show Friday night during which he “played nationalistic and patriotic music nonstop” during the third hour, motivating “a weeping veteran” to call in to say “thank you for all you do, Mark.” One envisions a “weeping veteran” who lost both legs or an arm or two in Iraq calling in to thank the neocon propagandist/shill for the military-industrial complex for making it all possible. It’s kind of like those old pictures of legless veterans with their new iron “legs” jogging with President Dub-Yuh and smiling away at the “honor”he bestowed on them.
Get ready for all the chubby chickenhawk neocons like Levin and Limbaugh, who never even tried on a military uniform, to produce an explosion of war propaganda tomorrow.

UPDATE II: “For The Love of A Brother-In-Arms, And ‘Big Brother’ Be Damned.” Robert Glisson was once asked by myself to write an op-ed for Barely A Blog about the “Patriot Guard Riders.” I prefaced his op-ed—which I entitled “For The Love of A Brother-In-Arms, And ‘Big Brother’ Be Damned”—with this comment: “I do not identify with the military mission, but who can fault the humanity of the effort?”

It’s a shame Robert failed to remember the distinction when engaging with boorish warmongers on my Facebook Timeline.

UPDATE III: DITTOHEAD DAY. The military is still a government job; a career path with huge risks. How fast the so-called small government types forget this immutable truth. From the appropriately titled “Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program” (which the military has become):

“When Republicans and conservatives cavil about the gargantuan growth of government, they target the state’s welfare apparatus and spare its war machine. Unbeknown to these factions, the military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small. Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while excluding the military mammoth.”—ILANA (“Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program.”)

UPDATE IV: IF YOU DON’T GET THIS; YOU’RE FOR THE MILITARY, BUT NOT FOR LIBERTY. From “Classical Liberalism And State Schemes”:

We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because (supposedly) upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.
“philanthropic” wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects, if you will. The warfare state, like the welfare state, is thus inimical to the classical liberal creed. Therefore, government’s duties in the classical liberal tradition are negative, not positive; to protect freedoms, not to plan projects. As I’ve written, “In a free society, the ‘vision thing’ is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a ‘visionary’ bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government (‘great purposes’ in Bush Babble), the poorer and less free the people.”

Blah, Blah, Blah Benghazi

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq

“On the atrocity scale,” I wrote on 11.19.12 “Bush’s badness dwarfed Benghazi-gate.” Any one with a moral compass and a cerebral cortex recognizes that, as scandalous as it is, Benghazi is small scale compared to the immoral, fraudulent invasion of Iraq, and the cost in blood and treasure George W. Bush wrought with that one.

It would be an entirely different matter if Republicans had the intellectual moxie to examine the human toll, for decades to come, of Obama’s “murder by multilateralism” in Libya. For that was what the invasion of Libya amounted to.

But they don’t. To the Republicans, Benghazi-gate amounts to no more that a “procedural mishap.” Namely, finding out “what happened? How did it happen? Who covered it up? And, above all, how do we return to doing what we did before IT happened. ‘IT’ being the Sept. 11 attack on the embassy in Libya that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and ‘three other,’ mostly faceless Americans dead.”

In any event, ABC homes in on the meat of the scandal, tracing it directly to the Obama administration:

…ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.
White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack. …

The bare-bones of Benghazi is laid out by STEPHEN F. HAYES of the neoconservative Weekly Standard:

….Within 24 hours of the attack, the U.S. government had intercepted communications between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists discussing the attacks in Benghazi. One of the jihadists, a member of Ansar al Sharia, reported to the other that he had participated in the assault on the U.S. diplomatic post. Solid evidence. And there was more. Later that same day, the CIA station chief in Libya had sent a memo back to Washington, reporting that eyewitnesses to the attack said the participants were known jihadists, with ties to al Qaeda.
Before circulating the talking points to administration policymakers in the early evening of Friday, September 14, CIA officials changed “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” to simply “Islamic extremists.” But elsewhere, they added new contextual references to radical Islamists. They noted that initial press reports pointed to Ansar al Sharia involvement and added a bullet point highlighting the fact that the agency had warned about another potential attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in the region. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.” All told, the draft of the CIA talking points that was sent to top Obama administration officials that Friday evening included more than a half-dozen references to the enemy?—?al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, and so on.
The version Petraeus received in his inbox Saturday, however, had none. The only remaining allusion to the bad guys noted that “extremists” might have participated in “violent demonstrations.”
In an email at 2:44 p.m. to Chip Walter, head of the CIA’s legislative affairs office, Petraeus expressed frustration at the new, scrubbed talking points, noting that they had been stripped of much of the content his agency had provided. Petraeus noted with evident disappointment that the policymakers had even taken out the line about the CIA’s warning on Cairo. The CIA director, long regarded as a team player, declined to pick a fight with the White House and seemed resigned to the propagation of the administration’s preferred narrative. The final decisions about what to tell the American people rest with the national security staff, he reminded Walter, and not with the CIA. …

MORE.

As the always outspoken and interesting Michael Scheuer put it, not so long ago, “Barack Obama is a despicable man.”

Indeed. On par with George Bush.

A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma

America, Ancient History, Barack Obama, Bush, Ethics, History, Islam

“A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… While dhimmis contemplate what to do with the decaying corpse of a Muslim mass murderer, consider what General Sir Charles James Napier counseled about the valiant defense of Western values. The general (on an admittedly imperial mission to India) was confronted with the local Hindu practice of Sati, “the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.”

When “Hindu priests complained to him,” as Wikipedia tells it, “about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities,” Napier replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

In the West, we do not dispose of the dead on open-air funeral pyres, as is still done in India, Bali, south of Indonesia, and Nepal. But we do cremate. Cremating Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s remains is commensurate with what ought to be American values: It conserves resources and leaves (almost) nothing behind.

Incinerate Tsarnaev’s corpse. It’s the moral thing to do.

It matters not that “Islam strictly forbids cremation.” True Christians and Jews forbid the murder of innocents. Those are the values that trump Islam.

Besides, Islam is a highly derivative (and distorted) belief system. Tamerlan believed that “the Bible was a cheap copy of the Koran.” However confused Muslims like him are about historical chronology, they do claim to accept the Ten Commandments, bequeathed in the Hebrew Bible’s Exodus and Deuteronomy, centuries before Muhammad. If so, the Sixth Commandment is unequivocally clear: “Thou shalt not kill.”

He who kills innocents has forfeited his right to religious burial rites—especially if these are to be administered by the killer’s victims. …”

The compete column is, “A Burning Dilemma Among America’s Dhimma.” Read it on WND.

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