Dirty tricks in Egypt's election campaign

Mohammed El-Baradei is best known outside Egypt as the do-little head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inside Egypt, however, he is a critic of the Mubarak regime and a putative proponent of democracy.

Apparently the Mubarak regime, which has the next generation Mubarak in the person of Gamal preparing to take over from Papa Hosni, takes El-Baradei seriously as a threat. El-Baradei thinks so, and thinks the regime is behind a dirty trick on Facebook.

The Egyptian government has been blamed for the emergence of photographs of Mr ElBaradei's daughter Laila variously dressed in swimming costumes or sitting in places were alcohol was served, in an attempt to outrage more conservative members of Egyptian society.

The photographs, apparently taken from her Facebook profile without her knowledge, were posted elsewhere on the social networking site under the title "ElBaradei's Family Secrets".

Although the creator of the group by claimed to be a friend of Laila's who was opposed to her father's activities, Mr ElBaradei told a local newspaper that he believed the government was behind the Facebook group because he had called for "democracy and economic reform" in Egypt.

"Such a campaign is the usual and only response of the regime towards whoever demands democracy," he told the independent Dustour newspaper.

Since he returned to Egypt in February, after serving 12 years as the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr ElBaradei has emerged as the most recognisable dissident in the country which has been ruled by President Hosni Mubarak for nearly three decades. Mr Mubarak, 82, is widely believed to be preparing his son Gamal for succession.

I haven't ever been to the Red Sea coast of Sinai, but I tend to think there are plenty of Egyptian women there wearing something more revealing than a "Burkini." It remains to be seen how scandalous the Egyptian public will see these photographs as being. Moreover, the Islamicist wing of Egyptian society (including the Muslim Brotherhood) are the ones most likely to find the pictures lascivious, and yet they are themselves staunch opponents of the Mubarak regime, and so may be willing to overlook Laila's immodesty in order to use her father to bring down the dynasty.

Jonathan Alter, Closet Birther?

Look at Newsweek's latest cover:

THE MAKING OF A

TERRORIST-CODDLING

WARMONGERING

WALL STREET-LOVING

SOCIALISTIC

GODLESS

MUSLIM

PRESIDENT*

* who isn't actually any of these things

BY JONATHAN ALTER

Wow, Jonathan - are you telling us that Obama isn't really the President of the United States? What do YOU know that the rest of us don't?

From Bee Lo Obama's new CD, "The Economy-Killer"

At Ace of Spades HQ, Ace notes that the Democrats are losing the "millennial generation" of voters. This prompted me to consider how the White House might try to counter that trend -- and, combining that with the likely result of the mid-term elections, I envisioned this Presidential Address from the Oval Office:

I see you swept into office by the voters I love
And I'm like, FUCK YOU!
Oo, oo, ooo!
I guess the change and the hope just weren't enough
And I'm like, FUCK YOU
And FUCK THEM, too!
I guess you would be richer
if your job was still wit'cha
Now, ain't that some shit?
And now Pelosi is out I just stand here and shout,
Hey, voters! FUCK YOU!
Oo, oo, ooh

I was only too willin to spend eight hundred billion
But that didn't seem to make a dent
You love the Tea Party but I'm more of a soiree
A Kobe-eating President

I pity the fool who gets elected by you
(Oh shit they're spoiled brats)
Well
(Gave up on the Democrats)
Ooo
I got some news for you
Yeah run and tell your Sarah and Glenn

I see you swept into office by the voters I love
And I'm like, FUCK YOU!
Oo, oo, ooo!
I guess the change and the hope just weren't enough
And I'm like, FUCK YOU
And FUCK THEM, too!
I guess you would be richer
if your job was still wit'cha
Now, ain't that some shit?
And now Pelosi is out I just stand here and shout,
Hey, voters! FUCK YOU!
Oo, oo, ooh

Now I know that I had to borrow
From China and your grandchildren
Trying to keep ya, trying to please ya
But unemployment is still pushing ten

I pity the fool who gets elected by you
(Oh shit they're spoiled brats)
Well
(Gave up on the Democrats)
Ooo
I got some news for you
Yeah run and tell your Sarah and Glenn

Now all you little voters, why you wanna hurt me so bad?
(So bad, so bad, so bad)
I thought you were sick and tired of W and his dad
(His dad, his dad, his dad)
Uh! Whyyyy? Uh! Whyyy?!?
Uh! Whyyyy, people?!?!?
Ooo, I'm the one -- oh! -- you waited for!!!
OOOOO!

I see you swept into office by the voters I love
And I'm like, FUCK YOU!
Oo, oo, ooo!
I guess the change and the hope just weren't enough
And I'm like, FUCK YOU
And FUCK THEM, too!
I guess you would be richer
if your job was still wit'cha
Now, ain't that some shit?
And now Pelosi is out I just stand here and shout,
Hey, voters! FUCK YOU!
Oo, oo, ooh

The Left used to think triumphalism was bad

Prior to the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Left warned of a bloodbath. Saddam's army was the third-largest in the world; it had advanced weaponry, much from France and other top armament producers; its chemical weapons would rain down on the invaders. Media reports of the military ordering up 200,000 body bags for U.S. service members deepened the atmosphere of dread.

In the actual event, Iraq's military proved extremely weak. The invasion moved swiftly and Baghdad fell in just three weeks.

But rather than exult in the swift victory and express gratitude for the light loss of American and British lives, the Left instead invoked an even greater danger ahead. America, it warned, was going to fall victim to a demonic force of its own making: Triumphalism.

American triumphalism, they said, would turn the Iraqi people against us. Shi'ite triumphalism would alienate the Sunni and cause them to engage in sectarian violence. The British in Basra were held up as a model of moderation: unlike the Americans with their imposing and fearsome helmets and dark glasses, the Tommies patrolled Basra in berets and uncovered faces.

Looking back, certainly Shi'ite triumphalism stoked Sunni fear and anger, but not as much as the Sadrite Shi'ite militia or the Islamofascist influence of Al-Qaeda or the resentment of deposed Ba'ath party members did. And the British seemed early on to be winning the hearts and minds of the people of Basra -- until the city started on a downward spiral of terrorism and murder, and a few of the British soldiers turned out to be bad apples willing to torture and kill Iraqis in their custody.

But the Left had a valid point about Triumphalism: putting up monuments to act as a constant reminder to the people you defeated of their failure is much more likely to make them hate you than love you. And even if your intention and belief is that the monument should only represent respect and honor to the victors and not malice or humiliation to the vanquished, it's unlikely the vanquished will see it that way.

So who in their right mind would defend the Park51 project as a good idea for promoting respectful dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims? Even if the developers' intentions are pure, they should be now realize that a lot of non-Muslims don't see it that way.

And there are a few Muslims who go further and ascribe malicious intent to the developers. The Dubai-based general manager of Al-Arabiya television, Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, says, "I cannot imagine that Muslims want a mosque on this particular site, because it will be turned into an arena for promoters of hatred, and a symbol of those who committed the crime." Canadian Muslim writers Raheel Raza and Tarek Fatah go further:

New York currently boasts at least 30 mosques so it's not as if there is pressing need to find space for worshippers. The fact we Muslims know the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel. The proposal has been made in bad faith and in Islamic parlance, such an act is referred to as "Fitna," meaning "mischief-making" that is clearly forbidden in the Koran.

The Koran commands Muslims to, "Be considerate when you debate with the People of the Book" -- i.e., Jews and Christians. Building an exclusive place of worship for Muslims at the place where Muslims killed thousands of New Yorkers is not being considerate or sensitive, it is undoubtedly an act of "fitna."

Maybe we ought to believe these people, who understand Islamic sensibilities from the inside, when they say that they understand how Park51 could be seen as triumphalist, and may indeed be intended as an expression of triumphalism.

But the Left, which used to rail against the evils of Triumphalism, now gives it their full-throated endorsement. And they turn a blind eye to the actual Muslims warning against Park51's triumphalism. Peter Beinart at the Daily Beast writes, "It’s telling that the people Republicans are turning to for their anti-mosque street cred are not 'moderate, peace-loving' Muslims, since even Muslim Republicans are disgusted by their party’s actions. The GOP’s new heroes are former Muslims like Nonie Darwish and Ayaan Hirsi Ali." Nor does he reserve his venom exclusively for Republicans: "We’re supposed to believe, we savvy, pragmatic liberals, that the Democrats fleeing the anti-Muslim stampede are mere opportunists, not actual bigots."

This isn't narrow-mindedness, it's razor-thin-mindedness, and it ignores the fact that America is in fact a far more tolerant and accepting country for Muslims than even many Muslim countries are. In the United States, Sunni or Shi'ite or Sufi or Ahmadi Muslims need not fear being murdered in their homes or mosques by the religious majority or oppressed by their government; the same cannot be said in Pakistan or Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Jonah Goldberg at National Review writes, "In any decent society, tolerance must work both ways. If the majority is expected to show respect for a minority, the minority must also show some tolerance for the values of the majority. I’m no strict majoritarian – one with right on his side is the majority as far as I’m concerned. But this isn’t a clear-cut issue of right and wrong. It’s more complicated than that. It’s about deference and decency and common sense. And one of the things common sense should tell us is that it is not only unfair but terribly ill-advised to portray 7 out of 10 Americans as bigots when they are anything but."

Common sense also tells us that anyone sincerely seeking dialogue between faiths and communities should avoid even the appearance of triumphalism -- and that anyone who persists in giving that appearance in the face of protests from a majority of his neighbors isn't at all sincere about peace and harmony.

"A stubborn man without conviction"

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web points out that President Obama’s nearly-instantaneous pivot on the issue of the “Ground Zero mosque” (the Park51 Islamic cultural center) shows that “Barack Obama is a stubborn man without conviction.” While this latest episode is a very stark and visible example, the insight it offers into Obama’s character and political modus operandi is hardly new.

Obama’s long had the habit of saying something to pander to an audience and then “explaining” to a different audience how he didn’t really say what he said. The only thing that’s changed is that the mainstream media is unwilling to cover for Obama when he contradicts himself.

One of the best examples is his 2008 speech to AIPAC.

“Let me be clear. Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper — but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

It took very little time for that last sentence to be “clarified” by the candidate’s campaign.

“…Barack Obama did not rule out Palestinian sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem when he called for Israel’s capital to remain “undivided,” his campaign told The Jerusalem Post Thursday.

“‘Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided,’ Obama declared Wednesday, to rousing applause from the 7,000-plus attendees at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference.

“But a campaign adviser clarified Thursday that Obama believes ‘Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties” as part of “an agreement that they both can live with.’

“‘Two principles should apply to any outcome,’ which the adviser gave as: ‘Jerusalem remains Israel’s capital and it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967’.”

It is pretty clear that Obama operates on the principle that voters’ memories are short and that he will therefore not be held to account for any position he takes or promise he makes that later gets “clarified” into its diametric opposite.

Will Bill Clinton drive Barack Obama to forgo re-election?

This could be the event that drives Obama not to seek a second term: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton back different Colorado candidates.

Barack Obama's influence over the Democrat party is under threat after Bill Clinton backed a rival candidate to that favoured by the President in a key US Senate seat.

The former president recorded a telephone message for voters backing Andrew Romanoff, who is hoping to be the Democrat senator for Colorado, a key state in the forthcoming midterm elections.

The intervention of Mr Clinton threatens to undermine Mr Obama, who has been a prominent support of Michael Bennet, the incumbent Democrat senator who is also fighting to contest the seat.

Obama has already had to turn to Bill Clinton for political help, both in the 2008 campaign and in office. If this midterm election demonstrates that the past President and not the sitting one has the most influence in the Democratic Party, Obama may decide that living as a past President is a pretty sweet deal compared to the meat grinder he'd face in his re-election campaign... especially if Bill manages to persuade Hillary to run again.

UPDATE: Bennet wins with 60% of the primary vote, allowing the Democrat Party establishment to claim that Obama is still politically relevant.

The leak was in Obama's Presidency, not just the Gulf

At the NRO Campaign Spot blog, Jim Geraghty asks who benefits from the capping of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico:

On Obama, clearly it’s better for him that the oil stop leaking than that it continue leaking, as it is for everyone else. But I think the damage has been done, and in fact the likelihood of additional political damage to the president from the slow spill response was pretty minimal. The second month of this mess was when the public began concluding Obama wasn’t moving with much urgency or improving the situation; in the third month, disapproval of how Obama handles this issue increased by only four points. That’s about 1 percentage point for every eight days. For Obama’s approval rating, I suspect the issue of the spill is now baked in the cake.

If the cap holds, it’s not likely that voters will see Obama’s response as any quicker or more effective; most will continue to wonder why the federal government creaked and groaned and took so long to respond to Louisiana’s plans and requests and why skimmers sat in port for Coast Guard inspections. Obama ripped his predecessor’s response to Katrina and repeatedly promised a more effective, more efficient, more confident and active federal government. In the spill response, many Americans saw the same old, same old. Of course, the fact that the president seems to be on the golf course more frequently than Tiger doesn’t help.

I think the political damage to Barack Obama from the Gulf oil spill goes far beyond the voters' reaction to his Administration's lackluster, even lackadaisical, response.

Until the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Obama was managing to make the "I inherited it from Bush" ploy work. Around half of the electorate bought the idea that whatever the problem, since Obama inherited it from Bush, they needed to cut him more slack in solving it -- maybe it was bigger than he thought, maybe Bush had set him up somehow to make a solution more difficult.

But the Deepwater Horizon happened on Obama's watch, and as such, he owned it. His effort to blame it on the Bush-era holdovers at the Minerals Management Service fell flat. The electorate watched to see how he would handle this disaster, the first one of his Presidency that they felt was in no way Bush's fault, and he failed. One might say he failed spectacularly; though he didn't order a specific effort that crashed and burned, like Kennedy's Bay of Pigs or Carter's Desert One, he did something even worse: he demonstrated total impotence, combined with incompetence and inattentiveness.

That gave voters a reason to reflect back and reevaluate the "Bush did it" excuses of the prior year and a half. No longer could they take it as given that a competent, powerful Obama was overmatched by problems created and amplified by an ineffectual or even diabolical Bush. They were faced squarely with the possibility that Obama had been unequal to the challenge of being President from the start.

And now we see that even those polls with the strongest Democrat sampling bias are showing Obama's disapproval above his approval -- in some instances, above 50 percent -- with large numbers of those polled expressing little or no confidence in his leadership on the economy, the most important issue on which Obama drew a contrast with the "policies that got us into this mess." This isn't just dissatisfaction with a three-month-long oil spill, it's a fundamental reevaluation of his entire Presidency.

Legislator + Regulator + Disaster = Quagmire

In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank, the ruptured wellhead has been spewing crude oil and gas at a terrifying rate. At the same time, news reports about the Obama Administration's response to the spill have more resembled water torture: they've come out in a slow dribble. But we've finally seen enough to detect a pattern:

• Despite early offers of help from the Netherlands and other nations, the Jones Act prevents foreign-flagged and foreign-crewed ships from joining the containment and cleanup effort in the early days of the disaster.



• The Environmental Protection Agency decrees that when skimmer ships fill with oily water and allow the oil to float to the top, they cannot discharge the cleaned water into the ocean because it doesn't meet EPA standards for discharge water purity.



• The national inventory of skimming equipment, pre-positioned around the country in case of oil spills, stays largely where it is because of the regulations that call for it to be available for potential disasters rather than redirected to a single catastrophic spill.



• The State of Louisiana is prohibited from building temporary sand berms between offshore barrier islands to block the oil from reaching coastal wetlands because proper environmental impact analysis of the sand dredging and alteration of coastal current hadn't been done. When the Administration relents, it does so reluctantly and only partially, and when Louisiana finally begins constructing berms, regulators shut down the sand dredging essential to supplying the construction, again due to environmental impact concerns.



• The Coast Guard inspects skimming barges operating off the Louisiana coast and shuts them down for a day due to insufficient fire extinguishers and life preservers on board.

The pattern, of course, is the slavish adherence to regulatory regimes during this catastrophic spill without regard to the scale and nature of the disaster.

The question has been asked widely: why didn't President Obama issue an executive order waiving the Jones Act restrictions, as President Bush did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Some speculate that he's been reluctant to offend the maritime unions due to his reliance on support from organized labor.

But that doesn't explain why he has also failed to issue executive orders to waive EPA restrictions and other regulations. After all, doing so would facilitate workers getting onto containment and cleanup jobs, even if it would potentially dismay environmentalists. And even environmentalists must be at a loss to understand why the regulations that protect wetlands and coastal ecosystems in normal times should prevent defensive measures against a massive flood of oil.

Maybe it's not his obligations to special interest groups that make President Obama reluctant to waive these regulations. Maybe he just likes regulations.

President Obama had little executive experience before ascending to the Presidency. His public service was as a legislator. Legislators create laws, which become regulations. That's as far as legislators go: the implementation of laws and regulations fall to the executive.

So a politician with legislative experience but no executive experience becomes conditioned to believe that all you need to solve any problem is a law and the regulations that translate that law into specific instructions. The legislator isn't tasked with implementing that law in the real world, nor is he directly exposed to the direct results of the law and the measures of its success or failure -- there may be many years and obfuscating factors separating the passage of the law and the first election after its failure becomes evident, so the verdict of the ballot box is an inefficient tool for teaching legislators how to craft laws that work.

So here is President Obama and his coterie, trained up in the belief that laws and regulations solve problems. The idea that solving a problem might require waiving regulations never enters their minds.

And here's David Axelrod on The Daily Show, confronting Jon Stewart's question about whether the Obama Administration has demonstrated sufficient competence to be trusted with ever more regulation of Americans' lives:

JON STEWART, HOST: It's clear that this administration believes that government can have a stronger hand in regulating Wall Street, in regulating energy, in doing these things. But, has government during this time proved itself competent? And are our only two choices sort of an incompetent bureaucracy that doesn't quite regulate properly or free market anarchy? Before you can make the case that this administration and government can effectively regulate shouldn't they, you know, the MMS case makes a pretty clear point that the regulatory system is somewhat broken, and you guys had a chance to...

DAVID AXELROD, SENIOR OBAMA ADVISOR: The answer Jon is not to abandon the notion that there have to be rules and oversight. The answer is to make it, to make it work better. There's a long legacy there at MMS, and frankly at other agencies of government because the last administration wasn't really interested in regulating.

STEWART: But why then, why not then go in and really, with the urgency? You know, the fear is the government is not agile enough, is not urgent enough to deal with things like a catastrophic oil spill.

AXELROD: There is, there is no doubt that in retrospect we would have liked to move faster on the MMS situation, but understand that we were also dealing with the economic crisis, and, and, and, and, and the wars, and a whole range of issues, and we, that was, that was a defect that we're correcting and moving aggressively to correct now. But the answer isn't to walk away from it. I think we tested the proposition of what no regulation means. What you get, you get the leak, you get the mine disaster in West Virginia, and you get an economic crisis. And everybody recognizes that government has to play a role. It shouldn't be an oppressive role, but there has to be some firm oversight and some rules of people respond to. These, you know, it's pretty clear the oil industry is not going to regulate itself.

STEWART: But do you think, I guess my point is before you have the opportunity, before you can earn the ability to go in and, and, and do that, don't, don't we have to show a certain baseline level of competence.

Note that Axelrod mentions both the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the West Virginia mine disaster as "what no regulation means." But here's the thing: there were and are plenty of regulations on offshore oil drilling rigs and on coal mines. The problem was not the absence of regulation, but the Obama Administration's blind belief that merely having regulations in place ensures that those regulations will be followed properly.

So have a little sympathy for President Obama. When he refuses to waive Federal regulations in order to allow an all-out effort to contain and clean this ever-burgeoning catastrophe, it may just be because he doesn't know any better.

Too bad I can't draw.

(image by buzzsawmonkey)

Being that it's Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

However, I can repost.

It wasn't always haram to display images of Mohammed.

A Persian depiction of Mohammed preaching to his followers.



An Uzbek depiction of Mohammed on his flying steed Buraq on his Night Journey to (what has been interpreted as) Jerusalem. [Note: why would he have gone to the Temple in Jerusalem if, as modern Muslim fanatics suggest, there was no Temple in Jerusalem?]



But somehow we are now supposed to believe that Islam prohibits depictions of Mohammed on pain of death.

Screw that.

One of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons that set off the current assault on free speech.



And an image composed by one "tadpole" that pretty much illustrates the same idea of a religious figure being perverted into an excuse for murderous oppression.



But here may be the most provocative image generated for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, by Day-By-Day cartoonist Chris Muir. Do you see a man of peace, a religious fanatic, an object of idol worship, or perhaps the death struggle of Western freedoms against medieval religio-political values?

Why the Truth Will Only Make the AGW Cult Stronger

James Taranto notes in Best of the Web that the AGW "settled science" is rapidly unsettling, and that Warmerists are facing a crisis of faith:

For an amusing example, listen to this New Yorker podcast on Climategate, featuring writers Elizabeth Kolbert and Peter J. Boyer. Boyer acknowledges that the emails raise serious questions about Climate science, but Kolbert denies it. Listen, though, to Kolbert's tone of voice: She sounds extremely defensive, as if she feels personally threatened by questions about global-warmist doctrine.

And maybe she does. There are, no doubt, lots of true believers in global warming--not scientists, but people, including many journalists, who have embraced global warmism as a political and quasireligious doctrine based, they have been led to believe, on the authority of science.

Even Phil Jones acknowledges climate science is rife with uncertainty, but global warmism's popularizers refuse to brook any doubt or acknowledge that the "consensus" they have touted is a sham.

And they used to call us deniers.

Dr. Robert Cialdini wrote a very good primer called "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." One of its chapters deals with the reason that millenial cults often survive the failure of their founders' predictions of world destruction -- and indeed why it's often the case that the failures drive the cult followers to intensify their belief in the cult.

Warmerists NEED AGW to be real in order to give their lives meaning in the larger context of being the vanguard of the planet's saviors. To them, the failure of the science doesn't mean that the science is wrong, but that it needs deeper exploration -- backed by more fervent belief -- to reach the underlying truth that proves that mankind is the controlling factor in the biosphere's condition and future. The alternative, that humankind is at the mercy of an unthinking, uncaring and implacable Nature, is too horrible for them to comprehend, because it means that at any moment, the Earth can shake humankind off its skin like a dog flinging off its fleas.

(Of course, I am speaking of the garden-variety Warmerists, not the cynical manipulators who know AGW to be a fiction but whose intent has been to use that fiction to start a worldwide cult that would demand an end to capitalist freedoms in the name of ecological survival. Those hucksters will simply move on to the next scam that promises to let them panic the masses into giving them political control.)

Moron Misses Mitt's Mug

Hey, someone took a swing at Mitt Romney!

http://tinyurl.com/y97umma

Mr Romney, 62, was sitting in the economy section of an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to Los Angeles on Monday when he asked a man sitting in front of his wife, Ann, to raise his seat back.

A spokesman for the former Massachusetts governor said the passenger became enraged and tried to hit him.

Mr Romney did not retaliate and his assailant was removed from the flight by police after the pilot returned to the gate, said the spokesman.

Uncharacteristically impolite Canuck? Or characteristically psycho American moonbat? Inquiring minds want to know.

President Barack Hussein Shepherd

Commenter Bill R. at Ace of Spades HQ notes that in President Obama's visit with the Congressional Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, he said something familiar:

OBAMA: No -- no, but here's my point.

If the main question is going to be what do we do about Medicare costs, any proposal that Paul makes will be painted factually from the perspective of those who disagree with it as cutting benefits over the long term.

Paul, I don't think you disagree with that -- that -- that there is a political vulnerability to doing anything that tinkers with Medicare. And that's probably the biggest savings that are obtained through Paul's plan.

And I raise that not because we shouldn't have a serious discussion about it. I raise that because we're not going to be able to do anything about any of these entitlements if what we do is characterize whatever proposals are put out there as, "Well, you know, that's -- the other party's being irresponsible. The other party is trying to hurt our senior citizens. That the other party is doing X, Y, Z."

That's why I say if we're going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can't start off by figuring out, A, who's to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side.

Bill R. recognized that last line. It's from the movie The American President, written by Aaron Sorkin:

President Andrew Shepherd: For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was, to a certain extent, about character, and although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I've been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation: Being President of this country is entirely about character. For the record: yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. But the more important question is why aren't you, Bob? Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question: Why would a senator, his party's most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the Constitution? If you can answer that question, folks, then you're smarter than I am, because I didn't understand it until a few hours ago. America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free". I've known Bob Rumson for years, and I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it! We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and character. And wave an old photo of the President's girlfriend and you scream about patriotism and you tell them, she's to blame for their lot in life, and you go on television and you call her a whore. Sydney Ellen Wade has done nothing to you, Bob. She has done nothing but put herself through school, represent the interests of public school teachers, and lobby for the safety of our natural resources. You want a character debate, Bob? You better stick with me, 'cause Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of your league.

I am old enough to recall the kerfuffle over President Reagan's remarks at Hickam Air Force Base in 1984:

You know, many years ago in one of the four wars in my lifetime, an admiral stood on the bridge of a carrier watching the planes take off and out into the darkness, bent on a night combat mission, and then found himself asking with no one there to answer, just himself, to hear his own voice, he said, "Where do we find such men?" A decade or so ago, after spending an evening with the first returning POW's from Vietnam, Nancy and I found ourselves -- as the evening ended, having heard the stories of horror and brutality by men who had been confined as prisoners of war longer than any other fighting men in America's history -- found ourselves asking that same question, ``Where do we find such men?'' We find them where we've always found them when we need them. We find them where we found you -- on the main streets and the farms of America.

Of course, no one at the time recalled that Reagan had used that quotation before:

In James Michener's book "The Bridges at Toko-Ri," he writes of an officer waiting through the night for the return of planes to a carrier as dawn is coming on. And he asks, "Where do we find such men?" Well, we find them where we've always found them. They are the product of the freest society man has ever known. They make a commitment to the military—make it freely, because the birthright we share as Americans is worth defending. God bless America.

Exit question: is it really authenticity if you crib your lines from Hollywood movies without attribution?

Barack Obama cares nothing for the safety of Americans

A harsh blanket statement, to be sure.

But what other conclusion can one draw when the President puts a premium on closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay -- and is willing to entrust the "rehabilitation" of its current residents to YEMEN?!?

Yemen 'to host Guantanamo rehab centre'
Yemen and Washington are in talks to set up a rehabilitation centre in the Arab state for Guantanamo detainees.

By Alex Spillius in Washington
Published: 12:23AM GMT 27 Jan 2010

The move would help President Barack Obama achieve his elusive goal of closing the controversial US prison.

The issue will be raised for the first time in an international setting on the sidelines of a ministerial meeting in London on Wednesday...

A source close to the Obama administration said the Yemenis had agreed in principle to the establishment of a Reintegration and Risk Reduction Initiative, which would be internationally funded and monitored.

Aimed at steering detainees back into society, it would be modeled on previous efforts in Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Let's recall that the Christmas Pantybomber (the "Fruit of Kaboom Bomber," as Rush Limbaugh dubbed him) was dispatched to the USA by Yemeni handlers that included past graduates of the Saudi version of this rehabilitation program. So of course to the Obama Administration, it only makes sense to quintuple down on this approach: after all, the guy's underwear didn't actually detonate, so it's all cool, right?

I note that this stupidity has the tacit approval of Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State:

The project has support from within the US state department and is gaining ground among White House advisers, said the source, because it would help the president dig himself out of a large hole created by his pledge to close the prison while trying to avoid releasing terror suspects back into the militant fold. Having missed his Jan 22 deadline to close the detention centre, as things stand Guantanamo is unlikely to shut this year.

God protect us from idiots such as this:

"If Guantanamo was a recruitment tool before, it will be a super-recruitment tool once Yemenis are the majority there," said Sarah Mendelson, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that has helped draft the proposal.

"Obviously we don't want a situation where former detainees could just leave or where they simply faced indefinite detention in Yemen rather than in a US facility," she added. "But programmes that include job skills, family support and carefully watched re-integration have been shown to work."

If the Obama Administration goes forward with this suicidal insanity, it should at least condition the program on Ms. Mandelson going to Yemen to work directly with the "retrainees." After all, she should have nothing to fear from them, right?

Bin Laden tried to assassinate Clinton - why didn't Bill return the favor?

We know learn that in 1996, Osama bin Laden came within minutes of killing Bill Clinton.

Former President Bill Clinton came within minutes of being assassinated in the Philippines by terrorists controlled by Osama bin Laden, a new book has revealed.

The US leader was saved shortly before his car was due to drive over a bridge in Manila where a bomb had been planted.

The foiled attack came during Mr Clinton's visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the city in 1996.

You'd think a guy might hold a grudge for something like that.

But throughout the rest of his term, President Clinton seemed unable to muster the necessary will and military resources to take out Bin Laden.

In the fall of 2000, in Afghanistan, unmanned, unarmed spy planes called Predators flew over known al-Qaida training camps. The pictures that were transmitted live to CIA headquarters show al-Qaida terrorists firing at targets, conducting military drills and then scattering on cue through the desert.

Also, that fall, the Predator captured even more extraordinary pictures — a tall figure in flowing white robes. Many intelligence analysts believed then and now it is bin Laden.

Why does U.S. intelligence believe it was bin Laden? NBC showed the video to William Arkin, a former intelligence officer and now military analyst for NBC. “You see a tall man…. You see him surrounded by or at least protected by a group of guards.”

Bin Laden is 6 foot 5. The man in the video clearly towers over those around him and seems to be treated with great deference.

Another clue: The video was shot at Tarnak Farm, the walled compound where bin Laden is known to live. The layout of the buildings in the Predator video perfectly matches secret U.S. intelligence photos and diagrams of Tarnak Farm obtained by NBC.

“It’s dynamite. It’s putting together all of the pieces, and that doesn’t happen every day.… I guess you could say we’ve done it once, and this is it,” Arkin added.

The tape proves the Clinton administration was aggressively tracking al-Qaida a year before 9/11. But that also raises one enormous question: If the U.S. government had bin Laden and the camps in its sights in real time, why was no action taken against them?

“We were not prepared to take the military action necessary,” said retired Gen. Wayne Downing, who ran counter-terror efforts for the current Bush administration and is now an NBC analyst.

“We should have had strike forces prepared to go in and react to this intelligence, certainly cruise missiles — either air- or sea-launched — very, very accurate, could have gone in and hit those targets,” Downing added.

Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, says the White House required the CIA to attempt to capture bin Laden alive, rather than kill him.

Can anyone explain why Clinton didn't think Bin Laden deserved exactly what Bin Laden had planned to do to Clinton?

Failing to take out Bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of the 1996 assassination attempt left him free to plot the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the 2000 USS Cole bombing. Either of those should have been a casus belli for killing Bin Laden on sight. Clinton seems to have been more interested in sexual stimulation than in national defense, or indeed even basic self-preservation.

Gotta love that L.A. Times

The Los Angeles Times published a transcript of President Obama's speech at West Point laying out his Afghanistan strategy v3.0. Here are the photos that the Times chose to illustrate the article.





Hmm... I wonder if they're trying to say something with those choices.

As opposed to, say:



Or:



But of course, there's no such thing as a liberal bias in the antique media. Whatever would give you such an idea?