This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Poetrooper

  • Their Idealism Was Squandered on a Charlatan

    The conventional wisdom is that no one, having made a demonstrably colossal misjudgment, likes to be told, “I told you so.” Considering that millions of usually thoughtful voters cast caution to the winds in 2008 and voted for a presidential candidate about whom they knew nothing, there is now a plenitude of penitents upon whom those of us who had urged caution could righteously invoke that censure. Yes, the normal conventional wisdom should caution against its use, however, my own inability to resist that wisdom in dealing with a member of my own family who had willfully suspended belief and followed the Obama rainbow, left me rather pleasantly surprised.

    Not only did I not get a response of righteous indignation and defense of the indefensible, I got a grudging agreement that their moment of political exhilaration was perhaps misguided and the results had proved to be disastrous. Once moved to idealism by Obama’s oratory, they had now been returned to earth cruelly by the very factor of which I had cautioned: the man’s total lack of executive, business or governing experience. Where once that concern had been brushed aside with a glib, “That’s not really a problem if he surrounds himself with experienced people,” my back-then admonition that an inexperienced executive has no skill in selecting qualified subordinates, the stark recognition of that truth has apparently come home to roost, as the Reverend Wright might rail. The ineptitude demonstrated widely and deeply throughout this administration has to be an embarrassment to its most ardent supporters much less those who were the hopeful, impressionable crossover voters in 2008.

    So what’s my point here? Simply this: don’t be afraid to say “I told you so,” to those you know who drank the Kool Aid in 2008. Sure, some will respond angrily and defensively, but it’s not you they’re angry at, it’s themselves for being so easily and transparently duped. Worse they’re angry because their temporary foolishness has been so blatantly demonstrated by the absolutely horrible performance of this false Messiah president. After all, their idealism was squandered on a charlatan and the humiliation that harsh truth entails must necessarily inspire emotions that can be used to correct the terrible mistake to which they contributed.

    But proceed with caution; don’t be smug or condescending which likely will be met with a blast of defensive Democrat talking points created specifically by the Obama campaign to enable the disillusioned to reinforce and defend their own doubts. Take it slow and allow these doubters to express their own misgivings, which, once voiced, become much more easily accepted as topics for critical discussion. There are enough millions of American voters who fall into this voting demographic to undo the damage they inflicted on America in the last presidential election. Let us go about returning them to a position of rational voting for candidates who can truly lead our country out of the morass into which this false Messiah has so deviously Pied-Pipered us.
    Once burned, the easily winnable may be much harder to win. But they were burned by their emotions and idealism. Appeal to the stark realities of where this country and their children and grandchildren are headed if this grossly failed social experiment isn’t removed from office.

    Crossposted at American Thinker.

  • We Didn’t Leave AARP… AARP Left Us

    The report of the AARP convention booing Paul Ryan the other day made me just shake my head and smile wryly at fools who’d boo the man trying to save their bacon while they remain content to blindly follow a leftist leadership that has sold its organizational soul to liberal orthodoxy. Like millions of Americans I received my courtesy membership to AARP upon nearing fifty, some two decades ago. At the time, this free milestone membership, available to all Americans of that age, was the source of much merriment among such new members’ younger friends and colleagues. But membership did offer benefits, among them, a free monthly magazine, which back then was a rather colorless, stodgy production full of unappealing ads for drugs, insurance and esoteric health aids we new readers hoped we’d never need.

    That bland format began to change during the 1990’s to a much slicker, more professionally produced publication featuring more bright colors and dynamic graphics; it was easy to see that the AARP magazine had been taken over by an entirely new journalistic crew. Such changes would have been welcome were it not for the fact that they accompanied a change in content, from the usual, relatively neutral advice to seniors on issues that were pertinent to their specific demographic, to political advocacy regarding larger social issues that reflected a decidedly leftist sympathy. I thought of them as Newsweek in a wheelchair.

    Initially, conservative readers had to wonder if the AARP board had allowed a bunch of liberal journalists to hijack their periodical, but as time passed it became increasingly apparent that the entire organization had performed a major sidestep left. As with leftist infiltration everywhere, the takeover was implemented at a measured but unrelenting pace, but to any AARP member holding conservative political views, and there were then millions and still some remaining, the coup was obviously complete by the time of the 2008 presidential election. The organization we had foolishly believed to be representing the interests of all seniors, was by then representing only those seniors who subscribed to the increasingly politically correct views of AARP’s leadership and their masters, the Democrat Party.

    Just as we had to do with TIME, Newsweek, National Geographic, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and the Democrat Party, many conservative seniors had to accept the reality that AARP no longer made even token efforts to represent their views. Just like all those others, AARP had left us, without our having changed a thing. Those of us who realized this early were not lone voices in that hoary wilderness for long; more and more conservative seniors were waking up to the fact that they were dues-paying members of a huge, leftist, lobbying organization that was using its significant heft in Washington to push legislation not in their best interests, most specifically, Obamacare. It was AARP’s strong advocacy of that legislative monstrosity that awakened many seniors to the fact they had been sold down the river by their benevolent old buddy, AARP. Those seniors began departing in droves. Other organizations quickly came into being to provide similar services to these disaffected seniors.

    Now we learn from Kim Strassel in an article at the Wall Street Journal, that AARP was not just sympathetic to the Democrat effort to ram through universal health care legislation, it was doing much of the pushing and shoving to force this bloated atrocity through the knothole in the legislative fence. Even more disturbing is that AARP was clearly getting its marching orders directly from the White House, a fact revealed by emails just released by a congressional committee. From the WSJ article:

    The emails overall show an AARP leadership—Policy Chief John Rother, Health Policy Director Nora Super, Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond, Senior Vice President David Sloane—that from the start worked to pass ObamaCare, before crucial details pertaining to seniors had been addressed. This crew was in constant contact with Mr. Obama’s top aides, in particular Nancy-Ann DeParle and Jim Messina.

    Clearly, AARP was not advocating independently for seniors but for the Obama White House and the Democrat Congress. The emails show AARP was collaborating also with big labor leadership in this effort as well. A sellout of such huge significance should cause remaining conservative AARP members to question their continued affiliation with an obvious tool of the Democrat Party and Big Labor.

    For those reading this who retain your AARP membership solely because of their Medi-Gap insurance coverage, be advised, there are many alternatives and the AARP programs may not be the best available to you either cost-wise or benefit-wise. Shop around. You can join other senior advocacy organizations for senior discounts or simply ask for them individually. If a business offers only an AARP discount to seniors and not a broader senior discount, point out to management that they are discouraging your patronage and probably that of a significant sector of their business. And don’t be shy about it because they will listen.

    For example, I recently sent a certified letter to the CEO of a major hotel corporation pointing out that to qualify for a senior discount at a his hotels one must produce proof of AARP membership, while at Marriott, the other chain I use most frequently, any senior qualifies. That discrepancy results in my staying with Marriott far more often than with his chain. In this letter, I pointed out the dissatisfaction of many seniors with AARP and how his corporate policy could be driving away business, just as in my own case. He never responded so I have no certainty it was my letter that provided the impetus, but within a month his chain’s website began posting a senior discount separate from the AARP discount. Their IT people still don’t have the kinks worked out on the booking process but at least they’re moving in the right direction. The point is, many big corporations may not be aware of how disaffected so many senior Americans are with AARP and need wake-up calls and/or certified letters.
    As so many Republicans like to say, myself among them, we didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the party left us. The same can be said for AARP. Let them live with the results

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Sleep Well, Eric…

    It was no more than what we should have expected, this Department of Justice, in-house investigation of Operation Fast and Furious. Did any of us truly expect a DoJ inspector general to find against his boss? Or worse, against his boss’s boss? Are any among us surprised that lesser figures in the DoJ warren of agencies have been designated to take the fall? The apparent answer is no. But there is a more obvious response to this attempted whitewash that the Obama administration had best pay heed to.

    There are millions upon millions of us out here who understand one simple basic truth, that there was no reason for those now-blamed federal underlings in Arizona and elsewhere to undertake such an operation. Regional offices of the federal government do not take it upon themselves to construct and implement criminal incursions into foreign countries. They do not do it. If you think they do you are either totally and ineptly unaware of how federal bureaucracies operate or you are so far in the bag for Obama and Holder that reason and truth matter not.

    From the first glimmer of exposure to this Obama directed run against our Second Amendment, I have been pointing out that there was no credible rationale for Operation Fast and Furious except that it was designed by politicos high in the administration to use the statistics generated by Mexican drug cartel violence implementing American-supplied weaponry to justify stricter gun control, not in Mexico, but here in the United States. This rationale was ballyhooed by everyone from Obama, Hillary and Holder to lesser figures in the administration.

    There is one simple reason for my very firm belief that we skeptics are dead-right on this issue: the feds have willingly admitted they had no plan, no operation nor any structure in place to track those weapons once they crossed the border; and since the Mexican authorities had been kept totally in the dark about the entire operation, the Federales were also unprepared to track these deadly implements that would be used subsequently to kill hundreds of Mexican nationals and some American agents. It was typical Democrat under-the-radar politics being masked and implemented by federal agents, ordered to do so from the very highest levels of the Obama administration, which I will wager we will sometime in the future discover to be an impeachable offense.

    Eric Holder is whistling past the graveyard at this very moment, loudly declaring himself to be vindicated of all charges, all while the 900 pound gorilla of executive privilege to block the congressional committee’s investigation looms as a huge, hairy question mark. If you, Mr. Holder, and your boss, were simply the innocent victims of malfeasance by underlings, why that fallback to executive privilege. Two questions, Eric:
    1. If there was no way to track the weapons once they crossed south of the border, what was the rationale of the plan?
    2. If you and your boss aren’t in this up to your ears, why invoke executive privilege?

    You’re hiding the true origins and motivations of Fast and Furious. You know it and we out here damned well know it. The IG’s bogus report is but temporary cover. You may think that you have bought off all your scape-goated federal employees, but one or more will turn on you, sooner or later, because among all those career bureaucrats are some honorable agents who mistakenly believed they could follow your orders and serve their country with a dignity you took from them. And if the good guys won’t expose you, there are schemers among them, like you and your boss, who will file a law suit with an eye to the book, television and movie rights.

    Sleep well, Eric…

  • Hell Hath No Fury Like…

    Perhaps an Israeli prime minister scorned? Following close on the heels of Barack Obama’s refusal to find time in his busy schedule to meet with the Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, to discuss issues relating to the very survival of the State of Israel, World Net Daily has published an article citing some prominent Israeli scientific authorities who state unequivocally that Obama’s long form birth certificate released in 2011 is a fake.

    The link posted by WND to the Israel Science and Technology homepage no longer works. However the WND article by Dr. Jerome Corsi covers most of the points made by the original article. Here’s how Corsi introduces the author of the original scientific article:

    The website was created by a former science adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.
    Hanukoglu, an award-winning researcher, is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University Center of Samaria in Ariel, Israel.

    The professor established the first version of his website during his tenure as Netanyahu’s science adviser. The site has evolved into “the premier science and technology portal for Israel.”

    I’m not going into all the technical forensic details that led the Israeli investigators to conclude that the document is a forgery as earlier claimed by several authors here at American Thinker but for those who might be skeptical about this being a quid pro quo for Netanyahu’s shabby treatment, here’s another quote:

    Israel Science and Technology explains why, as a site of science and technology, it dedicated “a page to expose forgery about a document related to Mr. Barack Hussein Obama.”

    “Mr. Obama is the president of the USA that is currently the leader of the Free World, and the most powerful country in the Western hemisphere,” the site says. “In his position as the President, the policies pursued by Mr. Obama affects the whole world and not just the USA.”

    Moreover, inaction by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as well as U.S. courts, despite many appeals, also was seen to “raise a concern about how the governmental institutions of the reputedly best, and certainly the most important democracy in the Free World have avoided the issue.”

    Of course, the American media will turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the fact that the former scientific advisor to the Israeli prime minister has leveled such a serious charge against the leader of the world’s most powerful sovereign nation. Nor will they investigate the probable connection to the Obama snub of Netanyahu with the release of the Israeli article.

    To fail to make that connection requires, in the words of our esteemed Secretary of State, in reference to another Middle East matter, “a willing suspension of disbelief.”

  • Damn the Stupidoes, Full Speed Ahead*

    Completely clueless or devilishly devious are two possible descriptions for the Obama campaign with this latest revelation of Soviet naval vessels being used as a backdrop while a liberal, former admiral was addressing the Democrat convention. Navy Times is reporting that while retired Admiral John Nathman, a rare liberal among the retired, multistar-wearing military, spoke to the delegates in Charlotte, the Democrat campaign operatives showed their true colors by providing him a backdrop of Russian warships.

    Was it a screw-up or was it by design and symbolically significant? Democrats have such a lack of real understanding of our military that it could just be attributed to their intrinsic stupidity. On the other hand, one can imagine that some too-clever mind in the campaign structure saw it entirely fitting for a left-wing admiral to be backed up by a Soviet fleet as he supported a party and a platform that betray the very forces he once led. Whatever, I’m sure the Democrats, now that they’ve been outted by Navy Times, will want to hide behind the excuse of it being nothing more than an oversight. Regardless of whether it was ineptitude or exceeding political cleverness, it was, indeed, a stupid mistake.

    While admittedly requiring a stretch of the imagination, it could be possible that, in a political party that has become increasingly left-wing and hostile to traditional American values, a deliberate use of Soviet vessels was meant to be a subliminal, message to the far-left faithful. Surely the Democrat Party can’t possibly believe they can sell a low key hard left message to America at large. The majority of this country rejects such left-wing sentimentality. Ronald Reagan is remembered and lionized primarily for bringing the Soviet bear, including its burgeoning navy, to its knees. Yet the leftists at the core of the Democrat party believe they can get away with such imagery? Hope must indeed spring eternal in the breasts of those so politically demented.
    As for John Nathman, if he knowingly stood before those Soviet ships, the only honorable action available to this turncoat to the United States Navy and all its history and traditions, is to figuratively fall on his officer’s sword by sinking into retirement, to forever run silent and run deep. Entire careers were spent by American sailors to confront and defeat the Soviet navy during the multiple decades of the Cold War.

    Ronald Reagan’s rebuilding of our own Navy, and the sailors who manned all those new American vessels in countless confrontations around the world’s oceans, played an overlarge part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those seamen, that war was not cold at all but carried with it the very real peril of imminent death on a daily basis. This lefty admiral has betrayed those naval warriors’ honorable heritage by defending a party friendly to Soviet principles and relentlessly hostile to our military.

    And doing so before a scrim featuring their former foes.
    *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mobile_Bay#Damn_the_torpedoes

  • Narcissist in Chief Selfishly Shortens Soldiers’ Holiday

    As noted here Saturday by Rick Moran, the Commander in Chief got a decidedly cool reception from the troops on a whistle stop at Fort Bliss in El Paso Friday. While this president already is not widely popular with our military, the attitude demonstrated by the shanghaied soldiers in that cavernous hangar was demonstrably cooler than at such past events. The conservative media interpreted that indifferent reception to dissatisfaction with Obama’s politics and his repeated failures as CinC, but the event is far more consequential as yet another example of how little the Obama Administration understands the military it commands.

    I’m an old non-com who, as a bachelor lived in the barracks, and as such I’m well aware of the excitement that permeates any military barracks in the days leading up to a four-day, holiday weekend like Labor Day.

    Virtually every soldier has made big plans to escape his military existence for four precious days and spend that time with family or friends. Many will have to use the first and fourth days for travel to and from distant destinations, which means only two, crucial days of holiday pleasure for them, sandwiched between two less pleasant days of travel, especially if they must fly commercially. Take away just one of those days and many of those soldiers’ plans will either have to be scrapped entirely or the time at home or whatever destination, be reduced to a single day. Plans made long in advance have to be rescheduled, a sometimes quite difficult task when it regards holiday weekend travel: flight changes may be impossible and hotels are booked solid; neither may allow changes in reservations without severe financial penalties.

    So, some hotshot in the Obama campaign, feeling badly stung by the sparse turnouts for the president’s visits to other locales, gets a bright idea of how to produce a really big crowd for a photo op: “Hey, let’s schedule one for some military facility where the commander can be ordered to produce a big audience in a sufficiently impressive backdrop.” It was probably some over-eager, politically correct flack in the Pentagon who suggested the massive hangar at the Fort Bliss airfield, but you can bet it was some clueless member of the campaign with no military experience who picked the incredibly dumb date.

    And as with so many other aspects of the disastrous Obama campaign, their scheme to produce a huge crowd ended up giving them another embarrassing black eye. They got their huge crowd all right but it was a silent, sullen crowd that was oozing hostility to the oblivious politician who had ruined their holiday weekend at worst and, at the least, had taken away one-fourth of their free time for his own selfish political gain. That from Democrats, who, knowing that the military is primarily politically conservative, are the first to demand political neutrality from those in uniform.

    The resentment created by this incident isn’t limited to just those troops ordered to be in that hangar; it is shared by their far-flung friends and family members who won’t forget such a narcissistic, selfish, political imposition on their own holiday plans. Nor will it go unnoticed by other members of the military, their families, and the millions of veterans in this country who realize what an arrogant, selfish insult this was. Whoever it was on the campaign staff who scheduled that particular date for a military campaign stop might as well have said,
    “Here, Mr. President, take this pistol and aim carefully for your middle toe…”

  • Their Lives, Their Fortunes and Their Sacred Honor: Spec Ops Warriors Stand Tall

    In yet another instance of what is becoming a steady series of incredibly stupid misfires, the clueless Obama campaign has decided to adopt the tactics of that memorably successful Kerry campaign in dealing with criticism from the nation’s military. Rather than man-up and admit that he perhaps went a bit overboard in taking credit for the Osama raid, and that it’s entirely possible his White House has leaked critical intelligence, Obama is taking the same tack as the thoroughly torpedoed Kerry: attack his military critics by calling them dishonorable liars.

    It didn’t work for Kerry and it’s not going to work for the campaign of a man who, unlike the turn-coat Kerry, has absolutely no military credentials to link him to veterans, even that minority that leans left. It most assuredly is not going to work with that much larger group of veterans who tend to vote conservative but will vote for those candidates, regardless of party, who are supportive of the military.

    But no, the Axelrod/Plouffe bubble factory, correctly believing that a large part of their Democrat Party is inherently anti-military, has chosen the hang-tough Kerry Gambit, deny, discredit and dishonor. For those of you unfamiliar with what I’m referring to, the White House handling of the mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden back in 2011 has created a huge amount of displeasure and dissent within the multi-service special operations community as well as the overall military and veterans’ communities. The President’s quick rush to grab the glory with his I,I,I, me, me, me speech, left a lot of active and former members of the military stone, frosty cold. As any general or admiral could tell you, top commanders, especially commanders-in-chief, do not rush to claim the glory. All credit goes to the warriors who carried out the missions, not the politicians and staff wienies involved in the upper-level planning.

    Such a rush to snatch credit from the jaws of victory is unseemly and undignified to those who serve to protect this nation, especially so when the unseemly, undignified grabber-of-glory happens to be the commander of all our military forces, a position which demands dignity, gravitas and a true understanding of the Warrior Code. Bush, a fighter pilot, had it; Clinton, a draft-dodger did not; the guy there now and his Chicago advisors don’t have the slightest clue.

    But worse, in the eyes of those frontline and behind-the-lines warriors who have now posted their displeasure, is the total disregard by this White House for operational security. The unseemly haste with which the Obama spin machine jumped in to blare to the world that Osama had been killed was a grievous intelligence error. In their eagerness to seize credit, the politicians in the White House deprived our nation and our forces of the intelligence that would normally flow from the capture of a terrorist headquarters: all the information contained there about our enemy’s forces, their structure, their distribution/locations, their communications networks and their finances. With one simple White House press release, all that hard-fought-for intelligence was lost. Forever. In claiming the glory, Obama insured that all that intel was end-of-story.

    Subsequent leaks that raise the concerns of our military community are those that have exposed the Pakistani doctor who enabled our finding of Osama; intel regarding undercover operatives within Al Qaeda in Yemen; the revelation that our C-in-C maintains an enemies list from which he magisterially fingers those to be killed. Then we have the leak, exposed in a positive manner at the New York Times that suggests White House cooperation, that it was the United States and Israel that attacked the Iranian nuclear program with the Stuxnet virus. Absolutely everything listed in this paragraph was leaked to bolster the image of Barack Obama as a strong and decisive military leader. Everything in this paragraph also constituted incredibly stupid breaches of operational security that while glorifying Obama and supposedly enhancing his re-electability, endangered our country, the citizens of Israel, and all the military forces of the world engaged in the battle against militant Islamism.

    So now that the military community has responded to the outrage of the commander-in-chief being the single largest security threat to military operations with a video which is a must watch, the Obama Administration, which seems hell-bent on following the Kerry trajectory has singled out the special operations community for an honor that up to now has only been bestowed upon the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. As of today, according to Breitbart, the special operators behind that video and all who support them have been placed on the White House Enemies List. I can’t begin to express how that leaves me, and I’m betting millions of military and veteran voters, feeling: honored, energized, empowered? Yeah, all those and more, the most important of which is a determination to throw this worst commander-in-chief ever out on his incompetent butt.

    I salute the Special Operations Community for having the courage to once again be that tip of the spear they famously pride themselves on being. I also salute them for their achieving the special honor of having become designated as an enemy of the White House and the extant Democrat Party. There should be a service ribbon for that accomplishment. May I suggest a scalloped gold frame surrounding a red, white and blue background with a small gold jump boot, signifying each award for the bravery and honor of those who are willing to risk their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor to put a steel-toed jump boot up the soulless butts of those political snakes in Washington who would corrupt our military operations for nothing but political gain?

    As an honorary member of the Swift Boat Veterans and I would hope the special operations community, I have only this to say:
    Barack Obama, you totally bogus, phony commander-in-chief, consider this, then bring it on.

  • Transparency? Here’s some Real Transparency

    Good grief! How stupid does the Obama campaign think Americans are? How much contempt do those Chicago elitists have for those of us out here clinging to our guns, our religion and because of them and their incompetent leader, our livelihoods? I’m referring, of course, to this latest bit of preposterousness emanating from the White House spinmeisters: the turnout crowds at Obama campaign events are intentionally small because we’re deliberately controlling access to maintain an atmosphere of intimacy between the great one and our true Kool-Aid drinkers.

    Excuse me, but Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

    Sure you are, Axelrod. As any successful political campaign consultant will tell you, it’s really smart to keep the crowds small and make that really close, confidential connection. Sure it is, especially at fundraisers, hmm?. That’s a real formula for winning, know what I mean? Who wants the tens of thousands of enthusiastically cheering voters who are turning out at the Romney/Ryan events? That’s just so gauche and totally unbecoming, not to mention a testimony to the coarseness and unsophistication of those spiritual, gun-loving knuckle-draggers who unfortunately occupy such a large geographical portion of America. Bunch of damn Tea Party fools, don’t you agree Mr. Plouffe? When you and Axelrod write your book chronicling the disastrous and failed campaign you concocted in 2012, perhaps the chapter on limiting the crowds at Obama events should be titled:

    Crowds? We don’t need no stinking crowds!

    Truth is folks, this transparently laughable idiocy isn’t aimed at the kinds of Americans who read American Thinker; no, it’s hard targeted on those who are hopelessly unaware and eternally naive, which means most of California, New York and Michigan and all of Massachusetts and Illinois. Unaware and naive are the nicest possible excuses you can make for people willing to believe that a messianic politician really doesn’t want to be greeted at every stop by massive, adoring, idol-worshiping crowds like he was the last time around.

    And these are the fools who look down their elitist noses at the rest of America…