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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Losing political will

    Our troops are fighting their asses off in Afghanistan, but the politicians are emptying their bladders in their diapers. So much so, that the NATO chief had to remind the members of that organization that victory in the war in Afghanistan is imperative;

    Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said some critics are starting to say that the cost of engagement in the eight-year war is too high, but he countered that “the cost of inaction would be far higher.”

    “Leaving Afghanistan behind would once again turn the country into a training ground for al-Qaida. The pressure on nuclear-armed Pakistan would be tremendous. Instability would spread throughout central Asia and it would only be a matter of time until we here in Europe would feel the consequences of all of this,” Fogh Rasmussen said at a security conference in Bratislava ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers.

    Of course, the weak-kneed know that, but it doesn’t keep them from going wobbly at the sound of the word “commitment”. Meanwhile, the former top Canadian general warned that Afghanistan will end NATO;

    Retired general and former Canadian chief of defense staff Rick Hillier wrote in his autobiography to be published next week: “Afghanistan has revealed that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse, decomposing” and in need of “lifesaving” or “the alliance will be done.”

    Meanwhile, Dick Cheney told a conservative crowd that President Obama is scared to make a decision about our involvement in Afghanistan;

    “The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger,” Cheney said at the Center for Security Policy. “Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries.”

    Even the USAToday editorial board warns that the Obama Administration’s flirtations with the Taliban are ridiculous;

    Trying to treat al-Qaeda and the Taliban as separate threats is unrealistic and unworkable. It would certainly be easier, and more convenient, if al-Qaeda and the Taliban could be regarded as distinct entities. That would allow the U.S. to pursue a simpler “counterterrorism” strategy against the remnants of al-Qaeda instead of a far more complex “counterinsurgency” strategy against the Taliban. Unfortunately, however, the weight of the evidence is that al-Qaeda and significant elements of the Taliban have become so closely aligned as to be inseparable.

    If nothing else, the Obama Administration should take VoteVets’ endorsement of that strategy as a warning.

    Dick Cheney’s warning to the President should resonate a bit more than the words of dicksmith and Jon Soltz;

    “Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced,” Cheney said in reference to Emanuel’s comments. “It’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.”

    There is no substitute for American warriors and the more, the better.

  • Kerry as Defense Secretary?

    The Wall Street Journal recounts John Kerry’s weekend with Hamid Karzai and their five meetings resulting in Karzai capitulation to the idea of a run off election;

    According to one Western diplomat, the Afghan president was more comfortable dealing with Sen. Kerry than with U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry or the administration’s special representative to the region, Richard Holbrooke. Mr. Holbrooke angered Mr. Karzai when he suggested shortly after the Aug. 20 election that a runoff might be needed.

    “He and I are friends,” Sen. Kerry said of Mr. Karzai. “It was really trying to lay out the real interests that were at stake. … President Karzai was very attentive and thinks he won the election.”

    I’d probably be more comfortable dealing with Kerry than Eikenberry, too, but it’s only because I think Eikenberry is a dick – and I’ve thought that about for about 34 years. While the Washington Times tells of a furious row between Karzai and Obama’s “most talented diplomats of his generation”, Richard Holbrooke, Kerry and Karzai seemed to hit it off;

    “I said to President Karzai that if we could make further progress, I was willing to come back to Afghanistan,” Sen. Kerry said.

    We all knew Robert Gates wouldn’t last the year as Obama’s Defense Secretary, so I wonder if they’re setting the stage for Kerry to take over since Obama doesn’t really want to think about Afghanistan much, anyway.

    I’m sure within a few weeks Kerry would finally sign that Form 180.

  • Biden rescues Poland from Russian hordes

    The Washington Times reports that just a few weeks after the Obama Administration shut down the Bush Administration’s missile defense plans for Eastern Europe, and after we listened to the “experts” tell us that a submarine-based system was more effective anyway, Joe Biden waded into the shallow end of the pool and promised the Poles an Obama missile defense plan of the ground-based genre.

    Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk emerged from a lengthy private discussion to announce that Poland’s participation in the missile defense system was, essentially, back on — though in a new format that involves delivering a smaller number of defensive weapons in 2018.

    Mr. Tusk said through a translator that he considered the revised proposal “a very interesting idea.”

    “We are ready to participate in this project,” he said.

    The hastily arranged vice presidential trip, which also will include stops in Romania and the Czech Republic this week, was intended to soothe relations and reassure the fledgling NATO members that the missile program was not being scrapped, and that the evolving policy should not be viewed as a snub or a weakening of U.S. security commitments to states in the region.

    Apparently, New Europe wasn’t buying the math of the sub-based plan, so Brilliant Joe had to go over and explain it to them. So where are the Leftists who normally protest these things?

    Somehow, I wouldn’t consider this reassuring if I were Polish;

    Noting NATO’s collective security pledge, Mr. Biden said: “An attack on one is an attack on all. And this strategic assurance is absolute. Absolute, Mr. Prime Minister.”

    “Make no mistake about it,” he continued, “our commitment to Poland is unwavering.”

    Well, our commitment won’t waver unless the Russians tell us to waver.

  • Rudderless war policy

    Who is our commander-in-chief and where is he? Today, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, told a gaggle of reporters that the president’s decision to beef up forces in Afghanistan can’t wait for their elections to get unscrewed. Of course, he’s right. There are Taliban and al Qaeda operatives in that country right now that need killing. Obama’s decision boils down to whether he wants to kill them now or wait until Spring and then kill them.

    Why is he waiting?

    “The UN, NATO, the US stand ready to assist the Afghans in conducting the second round,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.

    “Whether or not the president makes a decision before that I don’t think has been determined.

    “I have continued to say a decision will be made in the coming weeks as the president goes through an examination of our policy,” he added.

    There is absolutely no reason to delay deploying more troops to Afghanistan waiting on the Afghans to learn how to run elections. Those fighters in the mountains need killing no matter who is president of Afghanistan. The Pakistanis delayed killing them and now they’re locked in a battle for their lives. Delaying killing those folks only benefits them. Of course, it benefits Obama because he gets to hold on to his base supporters a little longer – but meanwhile US troops are dying in Afghanistan. That doesn’t seem to matter to the Obama Administration, though.

    They get to lay some medals on some troops for their actions four decades ago and everyone thinks he supports the troops. But all the Obama Administration has become is a ceremonial unit – he gets Nobel prizes for doing nothing. Jon Soltz, Chris Lejeune and Dicksmith applaud him for sending more troops to Afghanistan, even though those troops were follow-on troops for the last surge there.

    This is clearly Obama’s war now, and he’s clearly afraid to fight it. In the face of a newly-elected Democrat Congress which had been elected on their promise to de-fund his war, george Bush made the politically courageous decision to send more troops to iraq which broke the back of al Qaeda in Iraq – and it was mainly because the al Qaeda thought they had won in Iraq because of the election of Democrats. Bush made it more costly for terrorists to ply their trade.

    miss-me-yet

  • DOJ overturns local voters

    The Washington Times‘ Ben Conery writes this morning that the US Justice Department has determined that the Democrat Party is the official party of Black Americans. The town of Kinston, North Carolina voted last year to make their local elections completely nonpartisan – meaning that there would be no party affiliations for local candidates. The Obama Justice Department has overturned the will of the voters;

    The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

    The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.

    Now, I’m no Constitutional scholar, but since when does the Justice Department have the responsibility of judging local voters and how they conduct local elections? Since when does eliminating party affiliations require the adjudication of political appointees? Just in case you think there’s something nefarious cooking in the Justice Department a spokesman explains the DOJ decision;

    Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar denied that the decision was intended to help the Democratic Party. He said the ruling was based on “what the facts are in a particular jurisdiction” and how it affects blacks’ ability to elect the candidates they favor.

    “The determination of who is a ‘candidate of choice’ for any group of voters in a given jurisdiction is based on an analysis of the electoral behavior of those voters within a particular jurisdiction,” he said.

    Again, speaking from a common sense perspective and not from any particular field of study, since when is the Justice Department charged with ignoring the equal protection clause? It sounds to me like the DOJ is creating an affirmative action program for candidates.

  • VA contacting Post 9-11 GI Bill recipients

    Just so you don’t think you’re getting a telemarketing call, the VA has released that they’ll be contacting folks who’ve applied for the new GI Bill ed benefits;

    Representatives of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will be telephoning Veterans across the country to explain their education benefits under the new Post-911 GI Bill and ensure beneficiaries are able to receive payments due them.

    Especially important in the message;

    VA representatives making calls will not ask for any personal information, such as birthdates, bank account or social security numbers, but they may ask family members for information to contact Veterans who are away at school.

    Especially disturbing in the press release;

    “The Post-9/11 GI Bill is one of our highest priorities,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki.

    A third of the recipients hasn’t received a penny yet – but the Ed Bill is one of their highest priorities? I wonder how the folks involved in a lower priority project are getting along.

  • Obama’s “Cold Shoulder War” with Fox heats up

    You know when the Washington Post’s op/ed pages turn against President Obama, it’s looking bad. This morning, that’s what happens – Ruth Marcus takes shots at the administration;

    The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters.

    Of course, so as not to shock the headline readers at Washington Post, they ad Jo-Ann Armao’s “Fox should stop whining” as a counter-balance;

    The last time I checked the First Amendment, there was nothing in it compelling officials to talk to certain journalists. Certainly, there are legal requirements about what information should be made public, but no one — not the man on the street, your local council member or even the president of the United States — is obligated to cooperate with reporters they think are unfair or who, for whatever reason, they dislike.

    That quote is a keeper – I’m sure we’ll be able to throw that back in WaPo’s face four years from now.

    The latest furor over Fox was ignited when Glen Beck dragged out some video of White House communications director Anita Dunn admitting that they used the media like an old T-shirt last year in the campaign – and the media did what it was told to do;

    “Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”

    “Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”

    O’Reilly and Brit Hume discuss the White House strategy;

    Of course, no reading of the morning’s news on the subject is complete without Scrappleface’s Scott Ott;

    Clinton hopes to strike a much more conciliatory tone, in a fashion reminiscent of the administration’s approach to dealing with Iran and North Korea.

    “We need to be willing to talk with our enemies,” Clinton said. “While we can’t surrender the high ground when it comes to this fact-checking business, there may be other areas where we can find common ground.”

  • Conflicted

    Claymore sent us this link from the Las Vegas Review Journal which profiles the Oath Keepers;

    Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.

    More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming “giant concentration camps,” a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years.

    It’s a Cold War-era nightmare vision with a major twist: The occupying forces in this imagined future are American, not Soviet.

    “The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer, said in an interview with the Review-Journal. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.

    I guess this is just Rhodes’ way of justifying the Department of Homeland Security’s report about right wing terrorists. My personal conflict is that the only person the Review Journal could find to comment against Oath Keepers is my old friend Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who happens to see hate groups around every corner;

    “I’m not accusing Stewart Rhodes or any member of his group of being Timothy McVeigh or a future Timothy McVeigh,” law center spokesman Mark Potok said. “But these kinds of conspiracy theories are what drive a small number of people to criminal violence. … What’s troubling about Oath Keepers is the idea that men and women armed and ordered to protect the public in this country are clearly being drawn into a world of false conspiracy theory.”

    Yeah, whenever Potok says “I’m not accusing…” that’s exactly what he’s doing. Why else would he be writing in a column he calls “Hate Watch”? Stuart Rhodes is a former Ron Paul staffer, and we saw how quickly the Ron Paul movement petered out last year. They became an annoyance, but they’re certainly not dangerous – unless Stuart Rhodes doesn’t tone down the rhetoric.

    On the other hand, SPLC, in perpetual search of hate groups doesn’t do the discourse any favors by amping up the hate talk.

    According to the law center, militia groups are re-emerging in this country partly as a result of racial animosity toward Obama.

    It’s the “cross-pollinating” of extremist groups — some racist, some not — that is of concern, Potok said. As evidence that the danger is real, he points to several recent murders committed by men with anti-government or racist views.

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reached a similar conclusion in a report earlier this year about the rise of right-wing extremism. The report said the nation’s economic downturn and Obama’s race are “unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.”

    The homeland security report added that “disgruntled military veterans” might be vulnerable to recruitment by right-wing extremist groups.

    That warning was enough to make Rhodes feel paranoid.

    It would have been nice of the Review Journal to mention that the DHS report leaned heavily on the SPLC’s own “research”. So quoting the DHS report is the same as quoting Mark Potok – and includes his intellectually-vacant rhetoric.

    So you see how I’m conflicted – two organizations who are equally distasteful engaged in equally harmful verbal warfare. I don’t know for whom to root – I guess the best I can hope for is mutual annihilation.