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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Not soft on terror?

    In 1949, Mao Zedung (or however we’re supposed to spell it these days) successfully seized the reigns of the mainland Chinese government and US Republicans charged that the “Democrats lost China”. That’s what was in the back of Lyndon Johnson’s mind when he sent combat troops to Vietnam in reaction to the fuzzy details of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” that filtered back to the White House – Johnson didn’t want to be known as the guy who lost Indochina.

    A decade later, Jimmy Carter lost Iran, Nicaragua and the Panama Canal and a decade later Bill Clinton lost Somalia – all of those have come back to bite us. Now, Barack Obama is in danger of losing the war against terror. So the Washington Post feels an urgent need to defend the young president;

    Words first. “Evil does exist in the world,” Mr. Obama said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. “Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” In his weekly radio speech Saturday, he disposed of the war-vs.-law-enforcement canard, pointing out that in his inaugural address he made it clear that “0ur nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred and that we will do whatever it takes to defeat them and defend our country, even as we uphold the values that have always distinguished America among nations.” “

    But actions speak louder, and Mr. Obama’s actions — often at the cost of enraging his party’s liberal base — have also demonstrated tenacity and pragmatism blended with a necessary reassessment of the flawed policies of his predecessors and a recommitment to the rule of law. He wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, which is all to the good given its stain on the national character, but he has delayed that goal until acceptable alternatives can be found. He has brought criminal charges against some terrorists, but he has also sent others to be tried by military tribunals. He has invoked the authority of the executive to have lawsuits dismissed because they risk exposing state secrets. In addition to the new troop deployments, he has aggressively used predator drones to strike at terrorists, including outside Afghanistan. Even before the failed attack, his administration has been working aggressively with Yemeni authorities to deal with extremists there.

    See how brave he is – he enraged his party’s base. Like they’ll start suicide bombing the White House, or vote Republican in protest. Whew! How courageous. Don’t you wish he’d enrage our enemies instead?

    His administration announced today that they won’t open a new front in Yemen despite the fact that three strikes in our own country have their origins in Yemen;

    The U.S. does not plan to open a new front in Yemen in the global fight against terrorism despite closing its embassy there in the face of Al Qaeda threats, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser said Sunday.

    “We’re not talking about that at this point at all,” White House aide John Brennan told Fox News when asked whether U.S. troops would be sent to Yemen.

    “The Yemeni government has demonstrated their willingness to take the fight to Al Qaeda,” he said. “They’re willing to accept our support. We’re providing them everything that they’ve asked for.”

    Like they provided McChrystal with everything he asked for?

    See how much “smart power” worked against Iran – they won’t even let John Kerry get a visa;

    On Saturday, Iranian legislators stepped up the rhetoric against the news that Kerry was considering traveling to Tehran with the blessing of the White House.

    “The Islamic Republic of Iran has no plans to negotiate with any American official, unless the country (the U.S.) changes its policies,” member of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Zohreh Elahian said, according to Fars News Agency.

    Yeah, the US has to change it’s policies, while Iran murders dissidents and locks up thousands more.

    But don’t let the Washington Post catch you calling him soft on terror.

  • Morons of the highest order

    David Brooks of the New York Times inspires Glenn Greenwald and Alan Colmes to call Americans names for demanding that our government do it’s best to keep us safe. Brooks first;

    History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

    That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

    Greenwald’s echo;

    …the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist episode, egged on — as usual — by the always-hysterical American media. The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will — in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation — Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction — just as we saw this week — is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens.

    Colmes just nods like a good Leftist bobblehead.

    I’ll just remind the three morons that the Constitution charges the government to “provide for the common defense” – it doesn’t say to pass out food stamps or had out cash from one part of our society to another. It doesn’t tell the government to determine the minimum width of theater seats. It certainly doesn’t tell the government to tax the living shit out of people in California to pay for new guard rails in Maryland’s hinterlands. Nor does it mandate that the federal government stick it’s fingers in huge car companies and huge banks.

    How. Dare. You. Three. Retards. Call. Us. Names?

    When the government was warned no less than twice (once by the bomber’s own father…by name) that this shit stain was planning something, and the government couldn’t summon the testicular fortitude to actually stop him. When they were following Hasan’s trail to terror, when they were trailing Carlos Bledsoe and couldn’t stop him. This isn’t a case of one terrorist slipping through – it’s the latest in a series that have slipped through since January.

    Brooks, of course, thinks that Napolitano is innocent because it’s the system that’s flawed;

    There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy.

    Well, it’s a start. Napolitano’s demonstrated incompetency over the last year certainly doesn’t deserve one more penny from the tax payers.

  • The depth of Soltz’ intellect

    If ever there was someone who should be stripped of his veteran status, it’s Jon Soltz, the dork who is the public face of VoteVets, and mostly likely the guy who saddled the organization with it’s stupid name. The following is from his latest missive;

    The failed bombing of a Detroit-bound airplane by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has raised a ton of questions – from what holes there are in airline security, to how he wasn’t picked up before on suspicion of terrorist activity. But, to me and the forces in or heading to Afghanistan, one of the most pressing questions is why we’re sending nearly every Marine and Soldier we have to Afghanistan, when Abdulmutallab and a Somali man arrested for plotting a similar attack last month apparently had no real connection to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

    There you have – the depth of Soltz’ intellect. Because one guy almost bombed Detroit with his underwear, we should abandon the war in Afghanistan. Makes sense to me.

    …given the ability of al-Qaeda to spread and pop up in areas around the globe where we are not present, it simply doesn’t make sense anymore to engage in a long-term counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, which focuses on beating back insurgents rather than al Qaeda, and securing the country at large.

    Now, I was never a motor officer in a combat situation for over four months, so I don’t have the “big picture” skills necessary to see the war from that vantage point, but I don’t think that we should change our entire strategy against al Qaeda because of one attack. How much of a simpleton must one be to think we should? In fact, if Soltz’ presidential choice (who is not a veteran, by the way) had forced his administration to pay attention to the warning signs, the underwear bomber wouldn’t have gotten through the layers of security.

    Besides, in the grand strategy of Obama, troop deployment numbers don’t matter, because the war against terror is now fought by the Justice Department and the law enforcement agencies. Didn’t Soltz get the message?

  • The system worked in Houston

    Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano was able to protect us from another potential attacker when the potential attacker became violent and caused his sweetheart to call police. Arriving at the residence, the police found what looks like an AT-4 anti-tank rocket;

    They found an AT-4 shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. It can shoot a missile nearly 1,000 feet through buildings and tanks.

    “It gives infantrymen the advantage with an ultra-light weapon that can stop vehicles, armored vehicles as well as main battle tanks and fortifications,” said Oscar Saldivar of Top Brass Military and Tactical on the North Freeway.

    The guy (Nabilaye I. Yansane – a good Christian name) was storing the rocket with his sweetie along with “Jihadist writings”. Of course, his sweetie is more than willing to tell her story to the media;

    “This is my house,” the woman said. ” Get away from here. I don’t want to talk to nobody.”

    The double-negative indicates to me that she wants to talk to somebody.

    But Napolitano did a yeoman’s job of forcing that jihadist to piss off his girlfriend. We can all sleep better tonight knowing that Big Jan is on the job. More at Gateway Pundit.

  • TSA goes after bloggers

    Yeah, TSA is shown to be a bunch of incompetent boobs by a third world nincompoop so what’s the first thing they do? They target bloggers – read the story at Blackfive written by Laughing Wolf and at The Washington Times.

    So what does this have to do with us, besides the fact that we’re also bloggers? Well, the same thing happened to This Ain’t Hell early last month. While they should have been investigating the Fort Hood shooter, Army Criminal Investigation Division agents were flying around the country with a search warrant signed by a Federal judge trying to solve the mysterious and life threatening case of Major Hasan’s Officer Record Brief making it to the internet.

    Keep in mind that when we posted the ORB, Hasan was dead according to reports, and soon after we posted it and made it clear we weren’t taking it down, he was reanimated. Funny how that worked.

    The Army CID showed more interest in tracking down the electronic route of an unclassified document than tracking down Hasan’s connections with terrorism. One of us had all of his computers confiscated and the hard drive was copied by Army CID, just like the two bloggers in the TSA incident. He noticed that the screen names of the other two bloggers of TAH were on the search warrant – but neither was visited by CID.

    So, apparently, this government is more interested in bullying bloggers to keep our traps shut than they are in keeping us safe from terrorists.

    Expect more on this story in the future.

  • Cheney strikes a nerve

    With speculation about the culpability for the latest failed attempt by a terrorist, Dick Cheney spoke to Politico and charged that the current administration seems to be avoiding the fact that we’re at war with terrorists;

    “[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society.”

    That certainly is the way it appears. Obama set aside the war to focus on his domestic agenda this year – an agenda that seems to be failing, by the way. Anyway, the Administration took the time out to post on their blog about Cheney’s comments;

    First, it’s important that the substantive context be clear: for seven years after 9/11, while our national security was overwhelmingly focused on Iraq – a country that had no al Qaeda presence before our invasion – Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s leadership was able to set up camp in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they continued to plot attacks against the United States. Meanwhile, al Qaeda also regenerated in places like Yemen and Somalia, establishing new safe-havens that have grown over a period of years. It was President Obama who finally implemented a strategy of winding down the war in Iraq, and actually focusing our resources on the war against al Qaeda – more than doubling our troops in Afghanistan, and building partnerships to target al Qaeda’s safe-havens in Yemen and Somalia. And in less than one year, we have already seen many al Qaeda leaders taken out, our alliances strengthened, and the pressure on al Qaeda increased worldwide.

    Yes, that’s the way it happened – if you ignore all of the facts. Thank goodness that Obama started winding down the war in Iraq – his opposition to the surge probably help speed that along. When the administration can’t muster enough hyperbole, they call in Eugene Robinson Pulitzer Prize-winning dunce at the Washington Post to make unbelievably naive statements

    …Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was given training — and probably the bomb itself, which involved plastic explosives sewn into his underwear — by al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. It happens that at least two men who were released from Guantanamo appear to have gone on to play major roles as al-Qaeda lieutenants in Yemen. Who let these dangerous people out of our custody? They were set free by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

    Reminiscent of the Left blaming the first Bush Administration for not taking out Saddam Hussein and saddling the Clinton Administration with the problem. Robinson has been advocating for the release of Guantanamo detainees for half-a-decade – yet this bombing attempt was the Bush Administration’s fault. It’s as if they don’t realize that “Google” was invented.

  • CIA was looking for Detroit bomber

    The story is Drew M’s at Ace of Spades. Apparently the CIA was looking for a guy with the undecipherable code name “The Nigerian” who was training in Yemen. Of course, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father telling the State Department that his “Nigerian” (whatever that means) son was hanging out in Yemen with undesirable elements wasn’t enough of a clue.

    It seems to remind me of something;

  • The system worked AGAIN!

    The Washington Times reports that a homeless man in Frederick, Maryland tried to steal an airplane – but once again, the system worked!

    A homeless man stole a small plane Monday morning from a suburban D.C. airport but crashed before getting airborne, according to law enforcement officials.

    As long as the homeless people continue to comply with the Laws of Gravity, we’ll remain safe from their attacks.

    Good job, Janet!