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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Obama’s North Korea/Iran test

    This morning, North Korea decided that, since the world hasn’t made an active response to their missile launches and nuclear tests, they’d abrogate the 1953 armistice that ended the hot war on the intra-Korean frontier (CNN link).

    “Our revolutionary armed forces … will regard” South Korea’s participation “in the [the 6-year-old Proliferation Security Initiative] as a declaration of war …” the North’s official news agency said.

    Pyongyang also announced it was no longer bound by the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War.

    “The Korean Peninsula is bound to immediately return to a state of war from a legal point of view, and so our revolutionary armed forces will go over to corresponding military actions,” North Korea said through its news agency.

    Sweet. It’s the 1950s all over again. But that’s not the extent of the dangers we now face because the Obama Administration wouldn’t take the lead in shutting down North Korea’s nuclear program. Israel has discovered that Bolivia and Venezuela are supplying Iran with uranium (CBS News link);

    “There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions. It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”

    The report concludes that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is trying to undermine the United States by supporting Iran.

    So hugging Hugo Chavez did Obama a lot of good, didn’t it? Of course, if you read this blog in December 2007, you’d have got a whiff of the uranium connections, when a suitcase full of cash was discovered on an airstrip in Bolivia’s uranium-mining region.

    Since there was supposedly collusion between the North Koreans and Syrians on Syria’s own nuclear program, we can probably assume that the North Koreans lent aid to the Iranians – so it’s come full circle.

  • Tales from the Powell side

    The Washington Post is reporting this morning that Colin Powell is going on CBS’ Face The Nation to explain to the rest of us Republicans how we can be more like Colin Powell. Like Dick Cheney, I was surprised that Powell still considers himself a Republican after supporting the most anti-Conservative candidate to run for president from the Democrat Party.

    Some of the quotes from Powell in the article are staggeringly ignorant coming from a person I formerly considered fairly bright;

    The appearance will come just days after Powell, one of the country’s leading black political figures, told an audience in Boston that a new Republican Party is “waiting to emerge.” Earlier this month, he said the party is in “deep trouble” because “Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less.”

    The party should realize that the country has changed, he said, adding: “Americans do want to pay taxes for services.”

    In April, he appeared on liberal host Rachel Maddow’s TV show, telling her, “I am a Republican, yes,” but saying the party should reduce its emphasis on cutting spending.

    But even if you think these quotes from Powell are based in ignorance, you can’t look away from that car wreck called the Republican Party as they plant their lips firmly on Powell’s ass;

    “We are not going to get to a majority if we weed out people who disagree,” said Rep. Mark Souder (Ind.). “I’m very conservative, but we need people like him, even if we disagree on some issues.”

    Sen. John Thune (S.D.), a member of the GOP leadership in the Senate, said Powell is “one of the greatest leaders of our generation, and he is at heart a Republican.”

    I’ll admit, I haven’t liked Colin Powell as a Republican ever since he coined that stupid “conservative with a heart” phrase. Conservatism is compassionate in that we think you can do better for yourself and your family than some heartless bureaucrat in Washington. For Powell, or anyone else, for that matter, to think that we need to qualify our individual conservatism with divisive labels, they’re missing the whole point of Conservatism.

    I don’t know about the rest of you, but I didn’t join the Republican Party because it has a cool-sounding name. I looked at Jimmy Carter’s Administration, counted his lies to the American people and watched them drive poor people further into poverty and dependence. I decided that Democrats and government is not the Big Answer to our problems. A landslide number of Americans agreed with me when we voted Ronald Reagan to replace Carter and his band of ignoramuses.

    If the Republican Party isn’t about smaller government and lower taxes, it’s the Democrat Party with a different name. We don’t need Colin Powell in the Republican Party, we don’t need to drop to our knees every time he walks in the room. As Dick Cheney says in the Washington Post article;

    I didn’t know he was still a Republican.

    He’s not and we need to stop acting like he has anything of substance to add to the discussion.

  • Bush policies unassailable

    We, the Americans firmly rooted in reality, as opposed to those other Americans who live in a fantasy world where bombers magically stop bombing when you build them a road or school, are slowly being vindicated by current events. The Wall Street Journal notices in “Bush’s Gitmo Vindication“;

    Yet for all of his attacks on the Bush Administration, which he accused of making “decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” Mr. Obama stuck with his predecessor’s support for military commissions, adding some procedural bells and whistles as political cover to justify his past opposition. For the record: Both the left and right, from the ACLU to Dick Cheney, now agree that the President has all but embraced the Bush policy.

    Mr. Obama also pledged to release at least 50 detainees to other countries — about one-tenth the number released under President Bush — and added that the Administration was in “ongoing discussions” to transfer them. Good luck with that: The Europeans who were so robustly against Gitmo in the Bush years have suddenly discovered its detainees are dangerous. Meanwhile, the countries that might take them, such as Yemen, can’t be trusted to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, where they can kill Americans again.

    In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer writes “Obama In Bush Clothing” ;

    The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they’re back.

    Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

    Krauthammer recounts some of the flip-flops of the Change Administration which changed into the Bush Administration on national security;

    Observers of all political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government. Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list: “The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e., slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e., the surge) — and now Guantanamo.”

    Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds: rendition — turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets — claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus — to detainees in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

    Harry Reid declared yesterday that there will be no detainees on American soil. Where then? Europe doesn’t want them, the countries in the Gulf region who are willing to take them are less than trustworthy in keeping terrorists from returning to their former lives and their former fights. Dick Cheney reminded the Obama Administration yesterday;

    The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum. If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the president is on the path of sensible compromise. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States.

    Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy.

    While Obama declared yesterday that the Bush Administration’s policies “created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained” and “has weakened American security” without examining the fact that there have been no successful attacks on American soil since the event that was the catalyst for those Bush policies. The Democrats are real good at campaigning, but they’re not real successful at actually accomplishing things. So their strategy has been to campaign as Democrats and fight for our national security like Republicans. We’ve recounted some of the reactions from the Left on the Obama policies here on this blog – but it’s not like the hateful rhetoric we heard against the Bush Administration for the same policies. That makes them kind of disingenuous, doesn’t it?

  • Biden is the smartest guy in the Democrat Party; proof

    Yesterday, I wrote a short screed about Joe Biden being a boastful braggart, like he usually is and telling the people at his table at the Gridiron Dinner how Dick Cheney’s “undisclosed location” was in a bunker beneath the VP’s living quarters at the US Naval Observatory in Northwest DC. Of course, the Left immediately discovered my post, especially since I disparaged the whole party by claiming that they’re dumber than Joe Biden. I can’t blame them, I’d be upset at that discovery, too, if I were a Democrat.

    So immediately, the first nutroot to weigh in was my old buddy TBogg at Firedog Lake who admits that we have an actual braintrust here at This Ain’t Hell, a fact that must really grate on TBogg. But not understanding the difference between speculation and confirmation, TBogg posts a Washington Post article from seven years ago in which author Nakamura guesses that there’s some construction going on under the Naval Observatory. Good catch, TBogg, but I don’t believe anyone actually knew what was going on there until Biden admitted it. Kind of like we didn’t know there weren’t WMDs in Iraq at the time of the invasion until we got there and looked around. See how that works?

    And then I got a link from the Village Voice. Somehow, my post was lumped in with WHOLE bunch of reaction from the Right on the President’s speech at Notre Dame yesterday as proof that we (The Right) make mountains of molehills. Kinda like the mountain that the Left made a mountain of out of the waterboarding issue.

    But, I don’t think comparing my post to the anti-abortion issue is quite fair, since I’m just talking about how stupid Democrats are for selecting Joe Biden while the abortion issue is about saving millions of innocent lives. But, since Joe Biden is the smartest Democrat, I wouldn’t expect the nutroots to understand without getting Biden’s opinion first.

    If my post about Biden didn’t ring true to the nutroots, they would have ignored it, like usual.

  • Biden is the smartest guy in the Democrat Party

    I mean why else would he disclose the “undisclosed location” that the Vice President occupied in the last administration to avoid the chance that terrorists would be able to knock off our country’s leadership in a single strike (from Fox News);

    According to a report, while recently attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, an annual event where powerful politicians and media elite get a chance to cozy up to one another, Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which is now the home of the vice president.

    The bunker is believed to be the secure, undisclosed location former Vice President Dick Cheney remained under protection in secret after the 9/11 attacks.

    Eleanor Clift, Newsweek magazine’s Washington contributing editor, said Biden revealed the location while filling in for President Obama at the dinner, who, along with Grover Cleveland, is the only president to skip the gathering.

    According to the report, Biden “said a young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment.”

    What a dumbass. What happens when Biden needs a secure, undisclosed location? And it’s not like someone hasn’t tried to take out all of leadership before. The night Lincoln was assassinated, the group also tried to kill the Vice President and the Secretary of State.

    I’m sure Biden would survive an attack, though. Apparently the worst thing terrorists could do to this country is leave Biden, well-known rocket-scientist-slash-brain-surgeon, in the White House.

    Added: The SNL Bush/Cheney skit from last night;

    Since they can’t pick on Obama, they can take shots at Biden, I guess.

  • An Armed Forces Day message from the Left

    On this day, the day during which we set aside a moment or two to thank our Armed Forces for keeping us free and prosperous, at least one anti-war blogger published this message on his blog;

    Saying no to war is the most important way to bring it to a halt. If troops had the guts they think they have they would get up and walk away from the most blatant display of American arrogance in this Century.

    So I suppose that, since they can’t really blame Obama for the continuing wars without calling him a lying hypocrite, they can blame the troops instead. But that blogger isn’t the only one. On Alternet, some gumball named Jeremy Scahille starts another rumor about our troops in Guantanamo;

    …an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

    His source? Human rights lawyers and former prisoners. Lord knows they never lie. Like this hilarious story;

    In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantánamo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: “This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day,” he said. “Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change.”

    Um, did anyone notice that the guy is supposed to be in the most secure prison in the world, isolated even from the people on the same island – yet he supposedly called Al Jazeera? If he was being treated that badly, how was he able to get a call out, for Pete’s sake?

    Regardless, do these nutballs realize that they’re talking about the same kids they went to school with? The same guys they grew up with in their neighborhoods? The same folks who were on their Little League teams and at their summer camps? Why are they so eager to believe this about the people with whom they have more in common than they are to disbelieve the folks who have a stake in lying about their behavior?

  • Swiftboating Obama

    The last few weeks, the Obama Administration has dragged out all of the old Conservative boogeymen to frighten their (mindless drone) supporters. Rush Limbaugh – check. George Bush – check. Dick Cheney – check. Karl Rove – check. So who’s missing? Ah, yes – the Swiftboat Vets that sunk John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. Well – check them off, too. This was in my email this morning under the subject heading “Swiftboating healthcare”;

    Yeah, so I went over and checked the Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth website and they’ve been officially disbanded for almost a year. So what the Hell is Plouffe talking about?

    Well it seems that the Center for Media and Democracy (another one of those “nonpartisan” organizations – like IAVA and VoteVets) has discovered that CRC Public Relations, the same PR firm hired by the Swiftboat vets in 2004 to get their message out, has been hired by the Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. So because of that tenuous link, Obama is being threatened by the Swiftboaters.

    I guess the Obamabots are easily convinced that anything those extremist veterans support is wrong for them. I wonder why?

    For pete’s sake.

  • DHS pulls extremist report

    The Washington Times confronted DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on her department’s report IDing veterans as dangerous extremists with terrorist potential;

    “The wheels came off the wagon because the vetting process was not followed,” Ms. Napolitano told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

    “The report is no longer out there,” she said. “An employee sent it out without authorization.”

    There ya go – it’s not her fault. Someone sabotaged her. The American Legion national commander weighs in;

    David K. Rehbein, commander of the American Legion, said the withdrawal of the report “validates our objections.”

    “It did not contain any evidence,” Mr. Rehbein said. “It was an unfair and unsubstantiated stereotype based on Timothy McVeigh.”

    The report also said “rightwing extremism” may include groups opposed to abortion and immigration, among several other threat assessments.

    Some have called it a strictly partisan attack on the Obama Administration, but that’s not exactly true;

    Rep. Christopher Carney, Pennsylvania Democrat, said that as a veteran he “took offense personally,” and his constituents were offended by the report as well.

    “It really hit home hard to me and in our district,” Mr. Carney said. “It’s not a good start when I go to town hall meetings and I hear people calling for your resignation.”

    Of course some low-level GS employee is going to take the heat;

    Asked whether the person who wrote the report is still employed, Ms. Napolitano said, “Appropriate personnel action is being taken.”

    Is there room under that bus for every general schedule federal employee in DC?