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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Just stay in your lane, admiral

    The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, if the Washington Post can be believed, has expressed concern that the public support for the war in Afghanistan is slipping;

    Mullen also expressed concern over recent opinion polls indicating that for the first time a majority of Americans do not think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting.

    I wasn’t aware that military hierarchy was supposed to be worried about the political implications of fighting wars. I’ve always thought that the military’s job was to fight the wars that politicians told them to fight and let the elected representatives worry about public opinion. I’ll grant that President Obama has done a piss-poor job of making the case that we need to continue to press the fight on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it’s certainly not the admiral’s job to comment on public opinion.

    Now, Karl Eikenberry was also on the networks yesterday morning making the same case. My former platoon leader, the ambassador to Afghanistan, should be out there making those statements, he’s a political appointee now. But the Admiral should stick to military issues and leave worrying about public opinion to the folks who get elected.

    In my mind, this how the Obama Administration is putting out feelers to withdraw from Afghanistan, though. The President acts like it’s distracting his domestic agenda, so I’m sure he wants to abandon the tiny resource free country. That’s a mistake…we’d be repeating the mistake we made in 1988 when we abandoned Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops leaving it ripe for the Taliban to pick.

  • No, we don’t think Obama is Hitler

    I don’t think anyone at This Ain’t Hell thinks Obama is Hitler. I don’t think any of us has ever made the absurd comparison that any Democrat is a Nazi – however we have suffered the “Bush is Hitler” chant from the intellectually-impaired over the years.

    Those who thought that Bush is Hitler should be calling Obama Hitler, too, though, since Obama hasn’t changed one thing Bush was doing – oh, except that Obama said he won’t let anyone be waterboarded. Bush didn’t say it, but no one has been waterboarded in the last five years or so – except protesters who demonstrated the process and surprisingly survived their ordeal.

    That PATRIOT Act which was the main reason the Left screamed about our civil rights being rolled back is still in force and hasn’t been altered one iota. Bush wasn’t Hitler for signing it (after nearly all of Congress approved it) nor is Obama Hitler for continuing it.

    A more apt comparison to Obama would be Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Obama has taken a page from Chavez’ book by using his Organizing For America, SEIU and ACORN zombies to go around the democratic process to deliver money directly to communities without input from elected officials. Chavez has entrenched himself in office by using the same method to buy patronage.

    The assault on Kenneth Gladney at a Missouri townhall meeting is also reminiscent of Chavez’ tactics. While opponents of Chavez peacefully protest in Venezuela, red shirted Chavez supporters, assault them. Some have been known to fire on crowds with weapons.

    Now, I’ll grant that assaults from the Obama thugs have been few and far between so far, but I suspect that it could escalate – especially since some from the Right are foolishly (albeit legally) bringing weapons to peaceful protests. The intellectually vacant left will see that as an excuse to escalate violence.

    I don’t see internment camps or reeducation camps in our future. I don’t think we’re going to be marched to the ovens or gas chambers. I do, however, see a large number of people being disenfranchised, I see endless taxes, I see an increasingly intrusive government and an incompetent management of the economy. Like Hugo Chavez’s government.

    ADDED: If you want to see who is REALLY calling Obama Hitler, you need to go to El Marko’s blog Looking at the Left. Of course, they’re also calling for Obama to be hung, and they’re taking up a collection for the colonization of Mars. Oh, and they’re not Republicans.

  • That Republican conspiracy against healthcare

    Obama told a talk show host this morning that he sees a Republican conspiracy against him and not necessarily against his health care plan (Washington Times link);

    “I think early on, a decision was made by the Republican leadership that said, ‘Look, let’s not give him a victory, maybe we can have a replay of 1993, ’94, when Clinton came in, he failed on health care and then we won in the mid-term elections and we got the majority. And I think there are some folks who are taking a page out that playbook,” the president said.

    So our opposition to his health care plan is because we don’t like him – everything is about him these days. Except that’s not necessarily true in my case – and I suspect, it’s not true in your case either.

    Next month, I turn 54 years old, and I began planning for my retirement health care when I was 19 when I joined the Army. I kind of liked the idea that when I broke my hand in basic training, the Army provided me with medical attention. It wasn’t the best, but it worked. OK, so I have one crooked finger, now. I could still shoot straight.

    A few years later, I got married and my son was born a year later. Health care for him was almost free. It was one of the things I considered when I reenlisted. I accepted my low pay because the Army took care of my family health-wise. So that became part of my old-age planning.

    Now, as I near my final retirement, this Obama fellow tells me, after paying for my own health care with my youth, I owe for someone else’s health care. Someone who wouldn’t join the military, someone who is just sitting on their ass waiting for Obama to hand them some free health care – at my expense.

    Am I worried Obama will succeed at changing my health care system? Not particularly – I have the VSOs sticking up for me which is I why I joined a few. What I’m most worried about is that while my income is reduced after I retire, I’m going to be saddled with paying for some derelict’s family health care.

    Am I being selfish? Not as selfish as that lazy SOB who won’t insure his own family. And I don’t want to hear that he’s too poor to afford insurance for his family – if he’s poor, why is he dragging kids into his poverty?

    Not everyone in America has military health care – yet 86% of people living in this country are covered by their own health insurance. We were all responsible and took care of our respective families, how does that make us responsible for some other schlub’s poor choices?

  • Democrat corporate shills? Unpossible!

    I remember that during the Bush Administration, because VP Cheney once worked at Haliburton, somehow it proved that Bush and Cheney were working to make that company profitable so Cheney could get some sort of remuneration from the relationship. It’s difficult to find a newspaper article that doesn’t mention Cheney and Haliburton in the same line at least once.

    Well, I started reading Michelle Malkin’s latest book Culture of Corruption this week – mostly because I’m the only person who wasn’t reading it (it’s Number 1 on Amazon for nonfiction US politics and number 8 of all of their books) – so this morning, it looks like she’s working on a new chapter.

    It appears that David Axelrod maintains a relationship with his former employer, who owes him money and continues to employ his son. That’s a closer relationship than Cheney had with Haliburton, isn’t it? Well, not in the world of the well-intentioned Liberals;

    White House flack Gibbs called any suggestion that Axelrod benefits from the relationship “ridiculous.” Retorted Gibbs: “David has left his firm to join public service.” So when Republicans trade power and access, Team Obama calls that being “in cahoots” with business. But when noble servants like Axelrod do it, it’s called “public service.”

    Ms. Malkin explains Axelrod’s ties on Hannity the other night;

    Five Feet of Fury writes;

    Malkin and Hannity savored the irony: that the same White House insiders and Democrat operatives eager to smear town hall protesters as “Astroturfers” funded by “big corporations” are themselves funded by… big corporations. Adding insult to irony, these are the very same “big corporations,” Malkin noted, that liberals like Obama and his supporters supposedly believe are so “evil.”

    I guess today is Hypocrisy Day at TAH.

  • ACLU outing CIA agents to terrorists

    The Washington Post‘s Peter Finn writes this morning about some lawyers investigating detainee abuse at Guantanamo who showed their clients pictures of CIA agents in an attempt to ID perpetrators of the alleged abuse. Some agents were pictured outside of their homes.

    The photos were taken by researchers hired by the John Adams Project, a joint effort of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to support military counsel at Guantanamo Bay, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry. It was unclear whether the Justice Department is also examining those organizations.

    Both groups have long said that they will zealously investigate the CIA’s interrogation program at “black sites” worldwide as part of the defense of their clients.

    That’s kind of odd, because the ACLU was pretty upset at the supposed “outing” of Valerie Plame by the Bush Administration.

    The ACLU/SC board urges the House of Representatives to investigate impeachable offenses by the President and Vice President, including:

    • Manipulating intelligence before the Iraq War and deceiving the American people about imminent threats they faced. • Authorizing the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other military prisons and handing over suspects to other nations who tortured them (a practice known as “extraordinary rendition”). • Authorizing the firing of federal prosecutors for political reasons and obstructing justice by defying Congressional subpoenas investigating the firing. • Authorizing wiretaps on U.S. citizens without warrants and in violation of the Constitution, and concealing the program from Congress and the public. • Conspiring to disclose the name of Valerie Plame, a covert agent in the Central Intelligence Agency. This action risked her life and the lives of her intelligence contacts.

    Now they’re showing CIA agents’ pictures in front of their homes to honest-to-goodness terrorists? Why, that seems a bit hypocritical doesn’t it?

  • Murderer returns to hero’s welcome

    Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi arrived home in Tripoli, Libya to a cheering crowd after eight years in a Scottish prison for murdering 270 people in Lockerbie, Scotland. Ain’t that nice? (Telegraph link)

    After he left Scottish soil, Megrahi, who has served just eight years of a 27-year sentence, released a statement protesting his innocence and expressing his “sympathy” for the families of the 270 people he was convicted of killing.

    It’s nice that he has sympathy for the victims’ family, too. Of course, it would have been nicer if he’d had sympathy for the victims’ families before he bombed them out of the sky.

    Another Telegraph article reports that President Obama leads the condemnation of the murder’s release;

    Mr Obama said: “We have been in contact with the Scottish government, indicating that we objected to this, and we thought it was a mistake.”

    He added that he is now pressuring the Libyan government to keep Megrahi under house arrest until his death.

    Yeah, that’ll work. You can tell how the Libyans are going to punish him from the looks of his reception on the tarmac in Tripoli;

    Libya Britain Lockerbie

    The Daily Mail describes the scene;

    The US president’s pleas for Tripoli to refrain from idolising Megrahi when he landed on home soil went unheeded.

    Instead, he was greeted by a mob who had descended on Mitiga Airport brandishing placards and cheering.

    Some displayed Megrahi’s face on their t-shirts while others waved Libyan and Scottish flags.

    Yeah, it’s so nice that the world respects us now, ain’t it? The Libyans used to fear us – that’s why they turned over their weapons of mass destruction without us firing a shot at them. If they don’t put Al Megrahi into prison, we ought to reinstate the embargoes against them and put them back on the rogue nation list.

    Yeah, that’ll happen.

  • Who will get the oil in the Gulf?

    The Washington Examiner editorial board writes this morning that it’s going to get a little crowded off our shores in the Gulf of Mexico with oil platforms – unfortunately, none of those platforms will be American;

    Brazil, China, India, Norway, Spain and Russia have all signed agreements with Cuba and the Bahamas to initiate exploration and production in the Gulf of Mexico within the next two years. So the prospect of seeing Russian oil rigs 45 miles off the Florida Keys — where American oil companies are now forbidden to drill — is a very real possibility.

    The other day I wrote about the Obama Administration underwriting Brazilian oil drilling off of their coast and ours. Now we face the prospect of watching the money and jobs that could be part of our economy floating a few miles off our own shores – financed by our own government (read that: our own earnings confiscated by the government).

    As I wrote the other day, there’s a very strong possibility that developing our own natural resources could be the engine that provides the jobs as well as making us energy independent for the next few decades. There hasn’t been a refinery built in the last 30 years (30 years ago last month, Jimmy Carter promised that we’d build a refinery and a pipeline every time we needed one). Decades worth of oil and jobs lay fallow in Alaska.

    And who do you have more confidence in to drill clean and protect the environment – China, Russia, Cuba or the US? Apparently, someone is going to drill no matter what we do – shouldn’t it be us?

  • Post sees light

    The editorial board of the Washington Post gives Obama sound advice today by admitting that he should drop proposals for a “public option”.

    This is not a matter of ideology but of political nose-counting. The kind of comprehensive health reform that the president rightly wants — changes that would extend affordable coverage to millions of people and help slow the growth of health-care costs — requires 60 votes in the Senate. Democrats could muscle through some provisions with 50 votes, but a Senate rule limits how much can be done through that route. Measures such as establishing insurance exchanges or imposing new coverage requirements on insurance companies, as President Obama has been emphasizing, might be vulnerable to being stricken. And there’s no way to amass 60 votes with a public option in the bill.

    Whether the Obama Administration really wants health care reform or if they’re just using it as political leverage will determine their next move(s). Obviously, there is not strong support for the public in Congress. In fact, Dave Boren, an Oklahoma Democrat, promised his constituents that he’d shave his head if he ever voted for the public option.

    Democrats would lose a big issue if they ever passed the public option, anyway – they don’t want to do that. It’s much easier to blame Republicans for the failure of health care reform than to actually give Americans an option that actually works.

    A commenter in the Washington Post misses the point completely;

    rcasero wrote:
    NO. The WH should ditch any attempt to work with Republicans. They have been nothing but obstructionists.

    Yeah, it’s not the Republicans causing this to fail, it’s Democrats. The President’s party controls the House and Senate (like they did in 1993 when Hillarycare failed) – they don’t need Republicans to pass this bill, based on sheer numbers. If it was a workable plan, Democrats should be able to get it through on their own.

    But I guess it’s easier to just blame those evil Republicans and the nebulous “lobbyists”.

    I doubt, however that the ideologues in the Democrat Party – the same bozos who opposed the war only because it was a Republican war – will allow the Obama Administration to walk away from the public option. They’d rather watch it die a slow and painful death than to actually accomplish something.

    Actually, so would I, but for more practical reasons.