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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Global War on Terror ends

    I wrote last week that the Obama Administration intended on dropping the “Global War on Terror” label in it’s efforts to keep us safe from the language. The Pentagon denied that there was any conscious effort to avoid the term, while admitting there was a conscious effort to avoid the term.

    Well, Hillary the Clinton confirms that there is indeed a conscious effort to avoid using the Global War on Terrorism term to describe the global war on terror;

    “The (Obama) administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously,” Clinton told reporters traveling with her to The Hague for a conference on Afghanistan, which Bush called part of his “global war on terror.”

    Obviously? What is so obvious about it?

    Why change the term? Well, because George Bush called the Global War on Terror a global war on terror – that’s their only reason. In a childish shift, reminiscent of Eric Shinseki issuing black berets to improve the Army’s combat readiness, the Obama Administration has decided to change the name.

    So let me get this straight – Obama’s Hope and Change in the war on terror means to do everything that Bush was doing, just change the name of it? That’s why the hippies and ne’er-do-wells voted for him?

    I feel safer – how about you?

  • AIG pressured to donate to Dodd

    Jennifer Haberkorn and Jerry Seper of The Washington Times write this morning that after the 2006, AIG execs were influenced by their chiefs to donate heavily to Senator Chris Dodd;

    The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was “next in line” to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would “have the opportunity to set the committee’s agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.

    “Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority’s leadership,” Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.

    Mr. Dodd’s campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.

    Now, if the same type of message had been found among the emails of Enron in regards to a Republican candidate, can you imagine the outcry? So why, exactly, aren’t Democrats calling for Dodd to resign, or at least step down from his influential position among the decision makers in Congress involved in AIG at this point?

    If the reason that the media chases down Republicans for sex scandals is because of a supposed hypocrisy between their message and their personal behavior, why isn’t the media attacking the Democrats for their blatant hypocrisy in regards to dealing with lobbyists and donors (not to mention not paying their taxes)?

    Speaking of hypocrisy (as we often do here) if this had been the Bush girls, it would have been splashed across front page as a conclusion, not as “purports”.

  • What the Hell…?

    The Washington Post and the Washington Times are both reporting that the Obama Administration used federal bailout money to coherce the CEO of General Motors to resign. First the Post;

    The Obama administration has forced the longtime head of General Motors to resign and said yesterday that it would withhold additional federal aid to the auto industry unless the ailing companies undertake changes they so far have been unwilling or unable to make.

    The administration effectively rejected as untenable the business plans that GM and Chrysler had submitted to restructure their companies, saying that neither had fulfilled the terms of the federal loans the companies received in December.

    The president is expected to announce today that both companies may still win additional federal aid but under stricter terms.

    And the Times;

    The Obama administration has determined that neither Chrysler LLC nor General Motors Corp. can survive without dramatic changes in their businesses, and given them only weeks to completely restructure on a fast schedule that could involve a quick “dip” into bankruptcy, senior administration officials said Sunday.

    The restructuring began right away Sunday, the eve of Mr. Obama’s public layout of his plan for the U.S. auto industry, with the White House asking longtime GM Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner to step down and be replaced by Fritz Henderson, GM’s current chief operating officer.

    While Mr. Obama’s team has judged that GM could become viable with major sacrifices, it decided that Chrysler cannot survive as a stand-alone company, a senior administration official said.

    And the Administration arrived at these decisions how? From the same people who’ve brought us the US Postal Service – arguably a business run by the government that is currently hemorrhaging cash? How many people in the administration have even a modicum of experience running a car company? How many union bosses are they going to force from their positions for corruption and poor judgement?

    I’ll tell ya, if you weren’t worried about this administration before, ya hafta be worried now.

  • Obama angers McCain…finally

    Almost a year ago, John McCain told America that Barack Obama would make a good President. Well, that kind of good will got McCain nothing in the election. So now that the election is over with and it won’t do him a lick of good, McCain gets his hackles up in this Washington Times article;

    Sen. John McCain says President Obama is breaking campaign promises he made to the American people and has passed up numerous opportunities to reach out to Republicans — a pledge the Democrat made repeatedly during their battle for the presidency.

    “There are things that, statements that then-candidate Obama made during the campaign over and over and over again that obviously he’s not staying with,” Mr. McCain told The Washington Times in an hour-long interview with reporters and editors.

    Of course, McCain did mention a few times that Obama couldn’t be trusted, but McCain bowed to pressure from the Obama campaign to tone down that kind of rhetoric. Now that it’s too late, McCain will feign outrage and surprise during our long ride to hell in a handbasket.

  • More on the Medal of Honor Ceremony

    You may remember my post yesterday about Brandon Friedman piteous BOFO (that’s Bend Over For Obama for those unfamiliar with the lexicon here) performance when the president actually attended an event for honoring Medal of Honor winners.

    Well, Greyfox at Mudville Gazette noticed that the entire media BOFO’d for the story;

    Resulting in national (AP) coverage – with the story morphed into an Obama praise piece:

    WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama made an unannounced stop at Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday to pay respects to recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.

    Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He was joined by several living recipients of the medal, which was first awarded during the Civil War.

    …without a word about why the Medal of Honor recipients had gathered there.

    This is clearly about making amends for missing the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball – the story that we broke here. That’s why Friedman made a point of posting it – probably on marching orders from the Oval Office.

    But go read Greyhawk’s entire post and you’ll see why I’m so convinced it’s a slobbery kiss to vets. Greyhawk did an excellent job of pulling all of the pieces together. And he does it without the use of Muppet characters.

  • GWOT becomes Overseas Contingency Operations

    Apparently, in an attempt to make us safer by changing the language we use, the Obama Administration has decided to rename the Global War on Terror to Overseas Contingency Operations according to the Washington Post;

    In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department’s office of security review noted that “this administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT.] Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’ ”

    The memo said the direction came from the Office of Management and Budget, the executive-branch agency that reviews the public testimony of administration officials before it is delivered.

    Not so, said Kenneth Baer, an OMB spokesman.

    “There was no memo, no guidance,” Baer said yesterday. “This is the opinion of a career civil servant.”

    Coincidentally or not, senior administration officials had been publicly using the phrase “overseas contingency operations” in a war context for roughly a month before the e-mail was sent.

    Right before we became involved in this global war on terror, the Clinton Administration decided to water down our language and redesignated “rogue nations” to “nations of concern” – the same kind of language the police use. Now our war against terrorists are ‘contingency operations” – it sounds more like meals on wheels operations than a war.

    Our enemies think they are in a war, what with all the missile attacks and death and destruction involved. Our soldiers think they’re in a war – their families think it’s a war. Apparently the only people who don’t think we’re in a war are our leaders. It’s just another indicator that this Administration is not prepared for the challenges it faces when it thinks that language is more important than their commitment to dealing with the threat we all face.

    Of course, all this really represents is a chldish move away from “everything Bush” – and attempt to cover up the successes of the Bush Administration and hide the fact that this new administration has no intention of doing anything except be the anti-Bush presidency. Four more years of this mental masturbation.

  • Dems step back from bonus anger

    It’s funny but early last week, those folks at AIG who took $165 million in bonuses were the most evil people on earth according to Democrats. Angry Democrats demanded a 90% tax on those ill-gotten gains – well, until it was discovered that Democrat Senators and the Democrat Administration had facilitated the bonus payments. Now, they’re in less of a hurry to recover the tax payer money, according to the Washington Times;

    Rank-and-file Senate Democrats on Monday helped put the brakes on their own congressional leaders’ frenzied dash to enact new taxes to take back executive bonuses at bailed-out Wall Street firms.

    Democratic defectors echoed President Obama’s and business leaders’ concerns about the tax bill’s legality and chilling effect on struggling financial firms. Critics said the tax penalty could scare banks from participating in the Treasury plan announced Monday to buy toxic assets in order to unfreeze credit markets.

    Of course, that doesn’t stop Harry Reid from blaming Republicans;

    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, blamed Republicans for stalling action. “With Republican cooperation, we can quickly and responsibly return these funds to the American people,” he said Monday on the chamber floor.

    The Washington Post reports that it wasn’t Republicans, exclusively who blocked the legislation, though, well, if you want to call Olympia Snowe a Republican;

    …Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a co-sponsor of the legislation, urged her colleagues to push forward with it. “It would be a huge mistake for Congress to retreat,” she said.

    But, the Senate Republicans did keep a cooler head about them;

    “My view is that this bill ought to slow down and we ought to think about the ramifications of what we’re doing,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) told reporters.

    Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) said the bonus tax could sabotage the administration’s plan, which Geithner announced yesterday, to court private-sector investors to buy up the toxic bank assets that have paralyzed the economy.

    The Democrats had their chance to prevent these bonuses from being paid when they wrote the legislation to distribute the money in the first place, but they let their own politics and Chris Dodd’s fund raising get in the way. Yes, it’s a terrible thing that our tax money went to reward failure, but it’ll be a more terrible thing to allow Congress to get their collective nose under the tent of compensation.

  • Obama; Incompetent or dishonest?

    Steven Dinan of the Washington Times notices a disturbing pattern of Obama aides running interference for the President in the recent spate of missteps of his administration;

    To hear his camp tell it Thursday, President Obama has been in the dark on his administration’s controversial efforts to force veterans to use their private insurance for treatments and to clear the way for large bonuses to be paid to the executives of the failed insurance giant AIG.

    Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was the latest to offer the president-didn’t-know defense, suggesting to a Minnesota audience that Mr. Obama was “unaware” of the veterans plan until the president floated it to veterans groups leaders this past Monday and stirred a major controversy.

    Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner joined the bandwagon, saying it was he and not the president who deserved the blame for letting the bonuses to American International Group Inc. proceed.

    “It’s my responsibility,” Mr. Geithner said, taking the blame just days after the White House leaked reports that it didn’t know about the bonuses until after they were issued.

    I noticed the same thing when The Hill reported that the president wasn’t present at the 1PM meeting with the Veterans Service Organization when Rahm Emanuel told the VSOs that the plan was being withdrawn. It looked like the President was being kept insulated from the issue that suddenly became toxic.

    The fact remains that we have two conclusions that we can choose from in regards to this meltdown of the administration – is the president incompetent or dishonest?

    In St. Cloud, Mr. Biden, responding to a veteran’s question, blamed budget bean counters for trying to save money with the care proposal that died Wednesday after an outcry from lawmakers from both parties and veterans groups.

    So Obama couldn’t hear the words that were coming out of his mouth? Or did Emanuel have his hand up Obama’s backside manipulating his mouth? That’s not the way some in the room remembered the meeting;

    Mr. Obama “refused to hear arguments about the moral and government-avowed obligations that would be compromised by it,” [American Legion Commander David K.] Rehbein added.

    So some invisible, nameless “bean counter” gets the blame for something that was clearly an executive decision made in the Oval Office.