Someone has provided a much needed pictorial corrective to the “humanitarian posturing” evinced in the “#BringBackOurGirls” “hashtag campaign,” conducted by Michelle Obama and the gormless glitterati.

Writes William Norman Grigg:

“Michelle Obama spared a moment between lavish tax-victim-funded vacations and celebrity outings to join this year’s version of the Kony campaign, which seeks military action in Nigeria to liberate 276 Christian schoolgirls who were abducted by Muslim militants.”

The Twitter campaign — in which people pose with signs reading #BringBackOurGirls — is not directed at the terrorists and kidnappers, whose hearts will not be softened by such entreaties. The intent is to cultivate public support for a “humanitarian” military operation conducted by the same kind-hearted folks who have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people during the past twelve years, and who are lending financial and military support to Jihadis in Syria who are committing atrocities every bit as vile as those carried out by Boko Haram.

This isn’t to say that the everyone who has enlisted in this hashtag campaign is a cynical war-monger, opportunistic politician, or trend-sucking celebrity. The heroic Malala Yousafzai, a Nobel nominee who survived being shot in the head by Taliban gunmen as punishment for promoting education for young girls, has joined the movement as well. Malala’s moral authority comes not merely from what she suffered in Pakistan, but from her willingness to confront the Nobel-winning murderer in the Oval Office over his continuing campaign of state terrorism. …

MORE.

Benghazi is a scandal but it is no Iraq. Why, the Benghazi affair doesn’t rise to the level of a scandal compared to the invasion of Libya, which Obama leveled for no good reason. (And Benghazi is no scandal compared to Obama’s health-care nationalization, which will kill many more.) But Republicans love leveling this or the other country occasionally. So not a murmur did one hear from them about Libya.

In case your eyes glaze over when Benghazi is mentioned on Fox News—at least as often as CNN goes on about Donald Sterling and the missing Malaysian plane—a reminder: An American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed). No attempt was made at a rescue, because of an order from high-above to stand down.

Obama’s real scandal is Zero-care, not Benghazi, which doesn’t really register on the American state’s scale of scandals.

As to Bush, Cheney and creepy Condoleeza: Yes, they are war criminals. For perspective, “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE,” published July 16, 2003, is worth a read:

This column informed readers about the Niger lie in March 2003, after Muhammad ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, unceremoniously and politely called the allegation that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa “inauthentic.” It’ll take the mainstream media a few years to work out, but many in the administration (not least Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney) had been sitting on this intelligence since February 2002, when a diplomat called Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA and the State Department to ferret it out.

Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say?

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.

But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for “the degeneracy of manner and morals” which James Madison warned war would bring—the same “bring ’em on” grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

Hold the CIA responsible for giving in to the War Party’s pressure, if you will. But recognize that the CIA was only obeying the wishes of its masters. The CIA had attempted to resist. Witness the early statements by Vince Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief, who scoffed at the concoction of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. Having come under fire after September 11, the agency gave in to White House pressure to politicize and shape the lackluster information.

Unforgivable? Yes. But consider who the intelligence community takes its corrupt cues from. Perhaps New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka had a point when he wondered, “Who know [sic] what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza.” The National Security Adviser has since September 11 been rocking the intelligence community with her antipathy to the truth. As if her Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter forecasts were not bad enough, on September 8, 2002, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” “That’s just a lie,” an appalled David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security told the New Republic.

In her latest damage control interview with Blitzer, Rice continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was threatening his neighbors when the president pounced, and, as justification for the war, she still makes reference to Saddam’s effort to pursue a nuclear program in … 1991, and to the burying of old centrifuge parts prior to the first Gulf War. Rice, of course, continues to deny the Niger forgery.

Clearly, Whitehall and Washington will not willingly give up their dark secrets. With few exceptions, such as U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich; John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee; and Bob Graham of Florida, the utterly disposable and detestable Democrats have been only too pleased to aid and abet this (heritable) executive dictatorship.

And the media will continue to do what their collective intelligence permits: focus only on the one lie, thus making the lattice more impenetrable.

I will not be adjudicating the illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq here afresh. Comments to that effect will be removed from the Facebook Timeline. For a detailed chronicling of that war, I refer readers to the Articles Archive (click the relevant key words). As does Barely a Blog feature a search on the side bar.

“Dude, this was like two years ago,” said Tommy Vietor, an ex-White House aide, in reply to Fox News’ questions about Benghazi. Your Millennial in action.

Republicans are furious over these latest revelations about Benghazi:

The Obama administration has been under fire since the emails were released earlier this week, with some Republicans calling them the “smoking gun.” The emails indicate a White House aide helped prep Rice for her appearances and pushed the explanation that the attack was because of an Internet video. The White House is now facing credibility questions, since they had previously downplayed their role in Rice’s talking points.
Vietor repeated the stance of Press Secretary Jay Carney, who has repeatedly tried to claim that the so-called “prep call” with Rice — as it was described in one email — was not about Benghazi. Vietor said the email was referring to ongoing protests around the world against American embassies.

You’d think that the fiasco and fibs of George W. Bush’s WMD were so much better. During the Bush years, GOP operatives, just like mainstream Democrat media, finessed Bush’s craven exploits in Iraq and refrained from covering the worst if it.

I feel for family members who mourn the deaths in Benghazi. But these are the occupational hazards of … occupation. Dedicate your life to doing the dirty work of the state—occupying people who’re uninterested in being occupied and democratized—and you should not expect your employer, Uncle Sam, to cherish your life or come to your rescue.

Speaking of occupational hazards, I approve of what Dana Loesch said on “The Kelly File” about the drawn-out, “botched” execution of confessed killer Clayton Lockett: “That’s the occupational hazard of killing somebody; your execution could go wrong.”

Here is an account of the “deeply troubling” Okla. execution of Clayton Lockett, as the execrable Obama called it, as well as the latter’s thoughts about abolishing the death penalty (with his pen and Idiot Pad, no doubt).

“In the application of the death penalty, we have seen significant problems,” such as racial bias and the execution of innocents, as well as the “deeply troubling” execution of Clayton Lockett, he said, responding to a question at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday.
“All these do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied,” he added.

Missing from the remarks of the odious Obama was mention of Lockett’s (white) victim. Was the termination of her life not a biased thing to do? Lockett shot young Stephanie Neiman twice with a shotgun before burying her alive, in a shallow grave. I believe that the fact of her rape has been omitted from the accounts.

Watch this beast’s confession:

GOP TV (Fox News) correctly frames delays and exemptions in the implementation of Zero Care as a pre-election ploy. However, the drone-in-chief’s deadly show of force in Yemen, at a crucial time during an election cycle: now that’s all above board. Standard operating procedure. No hidden agenda there.

Obama’s illegal and naturally illicit drone attacks on Yemen are craven and far from ‘successful.’ Fox News cops to at least six civilians killed in the course of taking out “nine suspected Al Qaeda militants.” That’s an almost 50 percent failure rate, if you take on faith the tack offered by those operating outside the law (natural and other). Yes, you’d have to believe the Obama administration that individuals who’ve not been afforded due process of law are guilty. And you’d have to have faith in the same goons that the other casualties are necessary “collateral damage.”

I don’t. Nor should you.

Antiwar.com offers what is likely a more accurate account:

A barrage of US drone strikes across Yemen’s south and east has entered its third day today, and shows no signs of slowing down, as the latest US attacks targeted the Shabwa Province.
With so many of the attacks occurring against remote villages in the hills of Yemen’s rural interior, the death toll is difficult to ascertain, but at least 68 are believed to be dead over the past three days.
Yemeni officials say the strikes are targeting “top leader” of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that they have high hopes they may kill one such leader, but they can’t confirm anything of the sort so far.
Indeed, while all of the official statements from Yemen have termed the slain “militants” or at the very least “suspects,” not a single person has been identified at all so far officially, and many civilians were confirmed among the slain on Saturday.

To listen to other US mainstream media, it’s hard to ascertain who exactly is responsible for raining drones down on the southern and eastern parts of Yemen. The passive voice is deployed to conceal culpability.

“A ‘massive and unprecedented’ assault against al Qaeda fighters in Yemen appears to be targeting high-level operatives of the terrorist network,” writes CNN. In reading the article @ CNN.com it’s near impossible to determine for sure whodunit.