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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • How’d you like that, AP?

    The Associated Press complains that the Obama Justice Department seized the phone records of several of their reporters in an investigation of the leaked information from one of their anti-terror operations last year;

    In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

    “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.

    The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

    Some of us aren’t all that surprised – if the Obama Administration doesn’t care about the Second Amendment, why should they care about the First Amendment that is supposed to protect the “freedom of the press”? Apparently, the Bill of Rights is considered a “Bill of Suggestions” by this administration. Now, when the IRS targeted conservative organizations no one said much of anything in the press, but it led news stories when President Nixon only asked questions about using the IRS against his enemies. The media climbed on board when this administration wanted to take away the right of legal gun owners. But now they’re interfering with news organizations’ ability to gather news. Who is going to want to give the AP tips in this legal environment? How does that quote from Pastor Martin Niemöller go? Something about “…Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”

    Thanks to ROS for the link.

  • Politics Disguised as the Fog of War

    That title is not mine; it’s taken from an excellent article by Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal titled The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi. Noonan went a little wobbly back in the 2008 campaign when she, like so many others, let her emotions overrule her commonsense judgment about Barack Obama. This latest posting at the WSJ shows she’s stable and clear headed once again. In fact, it is the best explanation I’ve read yet as to why there was no effective military response by American forces.

    Quite simply, there was no aggressive response because, as we’ve long suspected, a political decision was made early on not to respond. It was not that we didn’t have forces available, both air assets and troops, ready and able to intervene; despite all the excuses made by the administration and even our dishonorable military commanders, it wasn’t that we couldn’t do something, it was because a decision had been made that we were not going to do anything.
    As Noonan explains, the truth that this was a terrorist attack was politically inconvenient to the Obama 2012 re-election campaign. The Democrats, including their leader, had been gloating that with the demise of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda was dead, no longer a serious threat to American interests. An Al Qaeda led attack on a sovereign American possession, even on foreign soil, put the lie to that boast. More importantly, such aggression by Al Qaeda required an aggressive response by our military forces.

    On the other hand, and this is where Noonan nails it, a mere out of control demonstration by angry Muslims, outraged over a sophomoric You Tube video, would not require a military response. In fact, an American military response to a mere riot would be a clearly inappropriate intervention into the sovereign affairs of Libya. And right there, folks, is the answer as to why the orders to stand down were issued. In order to meet the political needs of the Obama re-election campaign, this event could not be seen as a terrorist attack so it was hurriedly morphed into a deadly demonstration incited by an American-made video.
    The political decision to remake this Al Qaeda attack into a demonstration didn’t come from the military, even though the current command structure is clearly carrying water for the Obama administration; nor did it come, as the White house has claimed, from the intelligence community. The recent congressional whistleblower testimony makes that clear. So that leaves Hillary Clinton’s State Department and Obama’s White House, most likely working in collusion, to create the false narrative. Their motive seems fairly simple: maintaining Democrat control of the executive branch.

    That’s cold, really cold; a political decision is made that a terrorist attack must be presented to American voters as a demonstration and therefore no military response is possible, no matter how dire the consequences may become for those under attack. As we now know, it was a death sentence for four Americans, one of whom was our ambassador to that country. What we don’t know is who the scheming, calculating politicos were who made that cold, deadly decision.

    Not yet anyway…

    Go read Noonan’s entire article for the best dissection of this political scheme to date.

    Crossposted at American Thinker.

  • Who’s in trouble over Benghazi (so far) and why

    The Benghazi hearing this Wednesday and two pieces by The Weekly Standard and ABC News have established that there was a coordinated effort to scrub the initial public reports on the attacks of politically damaging information. They reveal that people in the State Department and, in all probability, the White House knew the attacks were pre-planned and well coordinated by al Qaeda linked terrorists. They reveal that the State Department knew from the beginning that there were long outstanding requests for additional security in Libya and that disclosure of this fact would be damaging.

    ABC News has obtained the precise edits made to talking points to be disclosed to the public. The important point to be had here is that the person with the most fingerprints on these edits, so far, is career Foreign Service Officer and Ambassador Victoria Nuland. This is critical because Nuland is not a Democratic political appointee or White House staffer. In fact, Nuland served under various administrations and was a close adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney. While Nuland’s own politics are not yet clear it’s not without reason to note that she’s married to well known neoconservative intellectual Donald Kagan, the founder of the Project for the New American Century, putting her in close political and social proximity to Bill Kristol, the founder of The Weekly Standard, the same magazine calling for investigations and performing the first reporting on the talking points cover-up. This reveals two things, first that the cover up was systematic in the State Department; Nuland was seeking to cover for the Sate Department itself. Second it shows the non-Fox media’s initial indifference to the Benghazi investigations as partisan politics were more indicative of their own inherent biases than any grounding in fact. The partisan effort was not in investigating the attacks but instead in the Democratic Party’s circling of the wagons and “nothing to see here” routine. The true partisan politics were in the cover-up, a divide then sold to the public as a Republican witch hunt.

    The cover-up, while seemingly starting at State, doesn’t end there. Reporting so far also fingers two high level White House staffers, Ben Rhodes and Jay Carney. Ben Rhodes is a White House Speech writer and close confidant to Barack Obama. He’s well known for helping craft the White House’s public positions on Middle East policy. In fact, Rhodes wrote Obama’s now infamous 2009 Cairo speech. Jay Carney is the White House Press Secretary, the same man who recently couldn’t find the moral clarity to reject the notion that U.S. troops in Afghanistan are terrorists. Both men seem to have been aware of, or participated in, the changes. Despite this Carney has been insisting from the beginning that the attacks were of the nature portrayed by the false edits instead of the nature indicated by the truthful intelligence reporting scrubbed from the release, something he knew to be a lie.

    Of course the three people everyone is watching now are former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the President himself. There still remains the unanswered questions of how and why a Special Forces CIF team in Italy was left waiting on the tarmac, why no armed air support was scrambled, why a four man Special Forces detachment in Tripoli couldn’t get permission to fly in on a Libyan C-130, why CIA Global Response Staff at the nearby CIA Annex was refused permission to provide back up, why in the aftermath of the attacks Greg Hicks was told not to talk to visiting Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz and what instructions the President left as he delegated the handling of the attack before going to bed that night. Gregory Hicks, the State Department’s number one in country after Ambassador Chris Stevens’ death has already testified he was actively seeking the Tripoli detachment’s help and coordinated their airlift but that the team was denied permission to go. We also know that the CIA GRS, despite being denied permission to aid the Ambassador and his staff in Benghazi, saddled up and went anyway. Who exactly refused, or declined to provide, permission to send aid remains to be seen. The President, Panetta and Clinton are so far avoiding answering these questions, deflecting by leaning on the fog of bureaucracy surrounding the response.

    The important thing to watch and demand accountability for now is that the media shines the light on the partisan obstruction of the investigation and that the House continues to seek answers to who, exactly, made the changes, was aware of the changes, was aware of requests for help, denied or refused to grant permission to help and what the President knew and when. Why did Jay Carney continue to lie to reporters about the nature of the attack? What was his motivation and who did he believe these lies helped? For those of us who expect leadership from our President perhaps most important of all is a personal explanation of why the President thought that having dinner with his family and getting rested up for a political fund raiser the next day was more important than dealing with an American Consulate under attack and one of our Ambassadors going missing.

  • Benghazi; about that “problem of time and distance” thing

    According to Bloomberg, Gregory Hicks, now the interim ambassador to Libya, said in testimony to Congress that he repeatedly asked for air cover for the besieged consulate on September 11th last year and his requests were ignored. When the Libyans offered to fly four special forces soldiers to the site of the attack in a C-130 aircraft, they were denied permission to board by someone in their command – an event which stands in stark contrast to Leon Panetta’s statement while he was Secretary of Defense, that the administration was hindered by “time and distance”.

    Hours after the initial assault that killed Stevens and one of the other Americans, Hicks said, the Libyan military offered to transport the special forces unit from an air base near Tripoli to Benghazi aboard a C-130 transport. They were ordered not to board the plane by U.S. commanders, he said.

    “We fully intended for those guys to go, because we had already essentially stripped ourselves of our security presence, or our security capability to the bare minimum,” Hicks said.

    Hicks told committee investigators he was informed by the unit’s commander that “they were on their way to the vehicles to go to the airport to get on the C-130 when he got a phone call from” commanders and was told “‘you can’t go now, you don’t have authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight.”

    As events unfolded, the C-130 didn’t arrive until after a second attack on a CIA annex in Benghazi that killed the other two Americans.

    Our buddy, Gateway Pundit reports that Tyrone Woods called for air support which went unanswered. Even though Woods and his team had the capability to direct fire from aircraft accurately to their intended target with laser designators;

    The presence of laser capability on the roof of the CIA annex confirms what Fox News sources that night in Benghazi originally said, which is that they had laser capability and for 5 hours and 15 minutes were wondering where the usual overhead air support was, especially since, according to this source, they radioed from the annex beginning as early as midnight asking for it.

    But, we’ll see what happens to come out during testimony today.

  • Trigger-pullers told to ‘stand down’ for Benghazi

    I heard this yesterday, but I was waiting to see if witnesses to the attack on the Benghazi consulate were actually going to tell Congress that Special Forces soldiers were told to “stand down” for their planned insertion into that fray. According to CBS News, that was in the testimony today;

    The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. Hicks gave private testimony to congressional investigators last month in advance of his upcoming appearance at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

    According to excerpts released Monday, Hicks told investigators that SOCAFRICA commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound “when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, ‘you can’t go now, you don’t have the authority to go now.’ And so they missed the flight … They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it.”

    Of course, we suspected that from the beginning. All of that blather about there being no time to react, that troops were too far away to have an impact on the battle, blah, blah, blah, was all armchair quarterbacking and outright lies. But, hey, there was an election to win, so what were four lives compared to that?

    Also from CBS News is the reaction from acting ambassador to Libya, Greg Hicks who wasn’t at the consulate at the time of the attack. He said that from his vantage point, he thought it was a terrorist attack, too, and he thought that everyone in the State Department knew it was a terrorist attack and that his “jaw hit the floor” when he heard that a YouTube video was blamed for the attack. The video auto-starts;
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  • Cruz challenges Bite Me to debate

    Politico reports some of the best blogging news I’ve heard since the 2012 vice presidential debate between Paul Ryan and Joe Bite Me. Senator Ted Cruz who almost made Dianne Feinstein cry during their discussion of gun control, has challenged Joe Bite Me to a “discussion” on reducing crime (i.e. gun control);

    Cruz indicated that he doesn’t regard Biden as a formidable opponent, noting that Biden’s home defense advice — firing a shotgun twice into the air — “is very useful, if it so happens that you’re being attacked by a flock of geese.”

    The Washington Post quotes Cruz;

    “If Vice President Biden really believes the facts are on his side and this is not an exercise in political power, I would think he would welcome the opportunity to talk about the sources of violent crime and how we can do everything we can to stop it,” Cruz said.

    It is supposed to be a discuss, right? That’s what they told us before they started preaching to us and telling us to sit down and shut up.

    The video of Cruz’ challenge from CBS;
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  • Unmitigated gall

    The Washington Times highlights portions of the President’s speech to Mexican students today in Mexico City. Strangely enough, he doesn’t mention the “Fast & Furious” operation which put semi-automatic weapons in the hands of Mexican criminals when he promises the students that he’ll do everything he can to keep US guns from streaming into Mexico from the US;

    “Most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States,” Mr. Obama said at Mexico’s Anthropology Museum. “I think many of you know that in America, our Constitution guarantees our individual right to bear arms. And as president, I swore an oath to uphold that right, and I always will.”

    But he drew cheers from Mexicans when he added, “At the same time, as I’ve said in the United States, I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people. That can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States. It’s the right thing to do.”

    First of all, the guns that have made it to Mexico recently did so under the watchful gaze of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. And the only “common-sense reforms” that have been proposed have focused on keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens. What could save lives in Mexico is arming the law-abiding citizens there. Since no one in Mexico can legally own guns, the citizens become targets of armed criminals and they have no way to defend themselves – sheep surrounded by wolves. And the police there, generally don’t show up until the firing has safely ended.

    I’m pretty sure that Mexican students loudly applauded for the President when he promised to disarm Americans. It would certainly make it easier for those students to invade our frontiers knowing that we’re defenseless.

    “So we’ll keep increasing the pressure on gun traffickers who bring illegal guns into Mexico,” Mr. Obama said. “We’ll keep putting these criminals where they belong — behind bars.”

    Really? How many of those bureaucrats at the BATFE have been jailed for irresponsibly forcing otherwise legitimate gun dealers to sell thousands of guns to criminals?

  • Yes, please let it be true

    A link to the Washington Post sent to us by Chief Tango speculates about whether or not Joe Biden will be the 2016 candidate for President for the Democrats.

    People close to Biden laid out several considerations on his mind, starting with fundamental political concerns: Would the country effectively turn backward by picking a baby-boomer white man to succeed a youthful black president? Will the Obama administration three years from now be considered a success, particularly on the economy?

    First of all, Biden isn’t a “baby boomer” – he’s four years too old to fit the post-WWII chronological profile. Secondly – YES! I’m here to tell you that I will vote for Biden as many times as they need me to vote for him. He’ll be the first Democrat I’ve voted for President since Jimmy Carter. I’ll leap across the aisle to vote for Joe Bite Me…er…Biden.

    Biden clearly has the experience and gravitas to ascend to the presidency, but many Democrats say he may have been in Washington too long (since 1973) to win an election. He is President Obama’s governing partner yet is rarely seen as Obama’s heir apparent.

    Not true! Joe is the only one who can attract Republicans to the Democrat Party at this juncture. He’d be the most experienced candidate in the race…if you don’t believe me, just ask him. Just because he’s been wrong on every single policy issue since he went to Congress shouldn’t count against him, it certainly won’t keep me from pulling the lever for the smartest man in America.

    Biden, a spry 70, keeps a travel schedule that would exhaust most men half his age. But he will be 73 when the next election rolls around, and those close to him said he knows his age would be an issue.

    Not at all. So what if he’ll be ten years older than Dick Cheney was when the media told us that Cheney was too old to be Vice-President. Joe can handle it.

    In fact, if Biden doesn’t run in the next presidential election, I’ll stay away from the polls altogether. Clearly this is a hit-piece on the part of the Post and they’re scared that Biden will be the best President ever and overshadow Obama and Bill Clinton in the history books – I say Run, Joe, Run!!!