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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Smoke and Mirrors at the AF Academy

    Military.com and Associated Press report on the president’s speech to graduates at the Air Force Academy yesterday and it’s a bunch of unadulterated crap, piled high and deep. He welcomes them into a world without war and an appreciative and respectful community of nations thanks to his administration.

    Obama told the cadets that they are the first class in nearly a decade to graduate into a world that has no Osama bin Laden, no war in Iraq and no questions about when the war in Afghanistan will end.

    The president said a disappearing “dark cloud of war” will mean a less strained and better prepared military, and more use of other U.S. power – diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.

    “Even as we’ve done the work of ending these wars, we’ve laid the foundation for a new era of American leadership,” Obama said. “And now, cadets, we have to build on it. Let’s start by putting aside the tired notion that says our influence has waned, that America is in decline. We’ve heard that talk before.”

    Yup, war is ended, just because we choose not to admit that there are people trying to kill us by the buckets full of blood. We’re still the leader of the free world just because we say so, even though we haven’t done anything successful in the past four years to lead anyone towards anything constructive. And just because this administration refuses to admit that there have been real terrorist attacks between our shores, that means they haven’t happened. Just because an old intelligence estimate says that Iran isn’t building nuclear weapons, well, they aren’t.

    Mostly, when talk started that “America is in decline” we elected leaders who stopped that process from happening. I can’t get out of mind his speech to the American Legion Convention last September when he told the congregation that he wouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of veterans while his administration was planning to do just that. His words never match reality, just how you should perceive his reality.

    But, then I’m probably just a racist. And mad enough to spit.

  • Obama Administration objects to terrorism

    Well, actually, they object to the Fort Hood murders being characterized as terrorism and it’s one of their myriad reasons to object to the National Defense Authorization Act set to be debated in the Senate after Memorial Day, according to Bridget Johnson at PJ Media in a link sent to us by Old Trooper;

    The statement [from the Office of Management and Budget] then outlined some of “a number” of “concerns” — 32, to be exact — including limitations on nuclear force reduction and a provision to block repatriated Guantanamo detainees from traveling to the U.S.

    No. 26 on the list of veto-worthy offenses is objection to awarding Purple Hearts to the victims of the Fort Hood and Little Rock shootings.

    “The Administration objects to section 552, which would grant Purple Hearts to the victims of the shooting incidents in Fort Hood, Texas, and Little Rock, Arkansas,” the veto threat states. “The criminal acts that occurred in Little Rock were tried by the State of Arkansas as violations of the State criminal code rather than as acts of terrorism; as a result, this provision could create appellate issues.”

    Yeah, see, that’s the problem when we subjegate our national security policy to the legal system. Stupid arguments about jurisdictional issues that interfere with an actual policy which hinder an effective defense.

    This halfwitted exclusion of these acts as terrorist-related is purely a case of national cognitive dissonance. Those soldiers were shot and killed because they were soldiers and executing their duties in compliance with our national defense policy. Just like the people who get shot or killed in Afghanistan.

  • That war thing

    Jeff sends us a link to Politico in which someone is trying to campaign using the troops once again.

    Gen. John Allen, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, said the idea that Obama is bucking his commanders, put forth by Romney and some other Republicans, simply isn’t true.

    “There is no daylight … between the commanders on the ground and the commander-in-chief,” Allen told reporters Sunday. “I was asked whether I could execute [Obama’s withdrawal] plan, and I told [him] that I can.”

    Really? What did they expect him to say? Did they think he’d pull a Stan McCrystal and let out a tirade of expletives about the president’s policy? Meanwhile, Old Trooper sends us a link to a Daily Beast article about CentCom Commander Gen. James Mattis planning for the next war.

    Mattis wanted to send a third aircraft-carrier group to the Persian Gulf earlier this year, The Daily Beast has exclusively learned, in what would have been a massive show of force at a time when Iranian military commanders were publicly threatening to sink American ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The four-star Marine Corps general and CentCom commander believed the display could have deterred Iran from further escalating tensions, according to U.S. military officials familiar with his thinking.

    But the president wanted to focus military resources on new priorities like China, and Mattis was told a third carrier group was not available to be deployed to the Gulf.

    It seems like not all of his commanders are in synch with the president as Politico and General Allen would have us believe. We’ve been at war with Iran since 1979 and we haven’t had a president willing to accept that reality. The Iranians have been supporting every one of our enemies materially over the past eleven years and they’ve made inroads into our backyard in South America. Between Obama’s worldview of a Chinese opponent and Mattis’ Islamic Republic scenario, which is more likely to explode first? Carrier group presence in the Persian/Arabian Gulf is more likely to deter a war with Iran than have an effect on China.

    But the Obama plan is less likely to cost as much in the short term as Mattis’.

    Well, except in American lives when the balloon inevitably goes up.

  • Yeah, like you’re going to vote for someone else

    TSO sends us a link to Gordon Duff this morning who begins an open letter to Barack Obama by puffing out his feathers to convince us that he’s some kind of political boss di tuti bosses;

    We supported you four years ago, my estimate producing about 50,000 votes. We are much more than ten times that now.

    Yeah, if there was a mental stability test for voting, he’d be influencing several hundred thousand less. But, wishful thinking won’t get us there.

    We don’t even hate you. You made sure of that by cleverly manipulating the GOP into nominating the most hateful, criminal and abysmal candidate in its history.

    A Mormon bishop whose religious beliefs are totally inconsistent with freedom, equality, peace and honesty, as president? What could any of them have been thinking?

    Yeah, some kind of slight of hand made the Republicans nominate Romney, the same kind of candidate they always nominate – the one they falsely think Democrats will elect for them.

    Don’t you know we are sick of your continual lying?

    But, here we are asking you to lie to us again, so we can think up an excuse to vote for you, because you’re the closest candidate to Ron Paul, our candidate last week.

    Start recognizing you are surrounded by half baked advisors who are tied to special interest. Your set of morons aren’t much better than the last group.

    […]

    You have a CIA director, DOD Secretary and Chairman JCOS that are top rate. Congrats. Now listen to them.

    Which is it, moron? Are they half-baked or are they top rate. Should he listen to them or ignore them?

    Please arrest at least two Supreme Court justices. Put in Jews, I don’t care….

    Really? Arrest judges on the Supreme court? For what, exactly?

    “Occupy” is an honest voice of your backers, the ones you have, to some extent betrayed, and you are allowing a police state and the insane “terror” rhetoric of the Bush regime to still control the country.

    Yeah, Occupy is an honest voice, despite it’s stank-ass hippie rapists, thieves, murderers, vagrants, liars, phony soldiers, vandals and visigoths. Just a few months ago, Duff was pushing Ron Paul on the world as the savior, and now suddenly, Obama is our last hope, well, if he can stop lying. Am i the only one who thinks that the Ron Paul campaign was all about getting Obama elected? The way that the Paulians are continuing their childish behavior even after their candidate has stopped spending money?

    This should be the moment the lights come on for those poor people who shoved their money into Paul’s pockets thinking that he honestly wanted to win an election. Apparently, and judging by my emails from the Paulians, their intent all along has been to reelect Obama – and Duff spells that out rather well in this POS he published today. Because, why else would anyone who supports Paul, like Duff did, then turn 180 degrees to Obama.

    Duff continues the discussion in the comments, but just reading this much exhausts me.

  • Oh, good another Biden

    As if one Biden wasn’t enough, now his son, Beau, a member of the Delaware National Guard, is campaigning for the President and he started in Norfolk, the heart of Veteran Country in Virginia, which, according to WVEC is home to 823,000 vets;

    “We’re a group of veterans who believe very strongly that the president should remain our commander in chief. They think he’s been an exceptional commander in chief. I’m one of them. I served in Iraq a couple of years back, and this is a president who understands what it means to be commander in chief,” declared Beau Biden.

    If the presidential candidate can get veterans on board, he has a pretty good shot of winning Virginia’s 13 electoral college votes in November. But not all Hampton Roads vets agree that Obama should be re-elected.

    “I didn’t think he was qualified to take the presidency to begin with, and that was four years ago. And I don’t think he’s gotten any smarter. He’s gotten slicker or slyer, but not smarter,” said retired Naval officer Chris Vatidis who also is not happy with the Obama administration’s proposal to increase Tricare medical fees for vets.

    Biden calls that change “modest.”

    Yeah, if I was rich like the Bidens, I could call the increase “modest”, too, but who’s going to tell those veterans who depend on their meager pensions and live from check-to-check on disability that the increase is “modest”? And any amount of an increase is a broken promise to veterans, no matter how modest.

    “Tricare hasn’t increased in over 16 years. At a time when health care costs are skyrocketing, there’s been no increase in Tricare,” Biden stated.

    That’s why we invested 20 years of our youth into the military system, because we thought it was a good deal. Now that you’ve decided that it’s a good deal too, it’s fine to pull the rug out from under us…all the time smiling and telling us how Obama is doing us a favor. F*ck you very much.

  • The rush for the exits

    The Washington Post is beginning to describe the war in Afghanistan in the same terms that this blog has been using for two years. The war is no longer about COIN (counter insurgency), but more about withdrawing 23,000 more soldiers from Afghanistan this year.

    Instead of trying to continue large U.S. counterinsurgency operations for as long as he can, he is accelerating a handover of responsibility to Afghan security forces. He plans to order American and NATO troops to push Afghans into the lead across much of the country this summer, even in insurgent-ridden places that had not been candidates for an early transfer.

    Whether those Afghan forces are ready for the hand-over or not. It’s a big rush for the exits;

    The goal of the platoon’s walk through a bazaar and meetings with village leaders, the lieutenant said, was for the Afghan government to be “seen as an effective governing body that gains legitimacy with the local population.”

    Such ambition used to elicit enthusiastic praise from visiting generals. Not anymore.

    “How are you going to create that as an end state?” Allen asked, making no effort to mask his deep skepticism.

    To quote our buddy, Grim at Blackfive;

    At this point the President’s wind-down strategy is untenable, though he doesn’t know it yet; the Republican standard-bearer doesn’t obviously have an Afghan strategy at all. He’s been critical of the President, but hasn’t shown much evidence of having grappled with the problem seriously. That’s not surprising: Americans are tired of the wars, and hurting at home.

    Yeah, who would have thought that someone could bungle Afghanistan more than George Bush did. Apparently the answer is “anyone”.

  • Obama targets vets for votes

    The Washington Post‘s Amy Gardner reports that which we already know from reading the Reuters piece yesterday, that the Obama campaign is pressing veterans for their votes.

    “There’s a different face of the American veteran now,” said Lauren Zapf, 30, a Navy veteran who served in the Persian Gulf and who spoke recently at a gathering in Northern Virginia for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Timothy M. Kaine. “The president’s stance on social policies, his work with military families, what he was doing with policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan — I appreciate that.”

    Republicans concede the group’s new battleground status. “Veterans are truly a cross-section of the population,” Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell said in a recent interview. “I appreciate the fact that the president is engaging our warriors and their families.”

    Yeah, well, the President did his best, when he was a Senator and before that to undermine the war effort, and now that he’s slipping among his 2008 voters in the polls, he thinks he can make up for that with veterans. And as we saw yesterday, the media is more than willing to help him out.

    Like a discussion I had at the Carpool the other night with a young man who was trying to solicit my support for his particular organization, where were these people eight years ago? generally, they were giving hope to the enemy that all they had to do was wait us out and the Democrats would give them an easy victory.

    For me the evidence of that was when the Democrats won the Congress in 2006 and George Bush started the surge. When the Iraqi resistance had thought that they had the US beat with the Democrat victory, instead, Bush sent more troops, proving that the Democrat’s bullshit talk about ending the war was coming from a position of weakness. Barack Obama was among them, voting every time the issue came up in the Senate to cut off funding for the war and leave the troops stranded. It was their only strategy against a successful conclusion for the war, because the troops were just their political pawns.

    Remember, Harry Reid telling us that the surge had failed before it even began? Any complaints for Senator Obama?

    While most veterans are older and more conservative, younger veterans who served more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan include more women and minorities. Politically, they are more reflective of the nation overall: independent-minded, less socially conservative and more supportive of the winding down of the two wars the president inherited.

    In other words, he’s trying to attract the Ron Paulian veterans. Any that would jump over to Obama are lying to themselves. Like the soldier in yesterday’s discussion who said he likes his guns, but is supporting Obama. How long does he think his guns will last in an administration that doesn’t have to run for office again – not to mention the aging and ailing Supreme Court judges who will replaced in the next four years.

    “Before 2008, nobody talked about military families,” said Rob Diamond, who served in Iraq and is the Obama campaign’s vote director for veterans and military families. “Military families have become part of the national conversation. Americans realize that when you have an all-volunteer military, the sacrifice is not just by the service members but their families, too.”

    Yeah, nobody talked about military families, well, except the Bush Administration who mentioned almost every day since the war began. And since Obama didn’t mention them in 2008, no one talked about them, I suppose, because nothing happens without Obama doing it. Like that “Got Your 6” bullshit that I caught flack for not supporting this weekend. Yeah, sure, I’m all for some support for the troops and their family, even at this late date, but where the hell were these jerkwads for the last ten years? And they had to wait for the president to tell them it’s OK to support the troops? Please. Stop urinating on my leg.

    Just like IAVA morphed from their anti-Bush website OpTruth, a leopard can’t change it’s spots, and a skunk can’t change the fact that he stinks.

  • The Mother of us all

    Yeah, I just got this in my email. I guess Michelle Obama is mother to 300,000 people. Well, in their minds.

    Is there anything that’s not a campaign opportunity?