Do you have any idea how much Kool Aid Jacob Weisberg had to drink before arriving at this conclusion?
So what does Weisberg think justifies such a declaration?
…he has saved his fire for his most urgent priorities—preventing a depression, remaking America’s global image, and winning universal health insurance.
Preventing a Depression? By driving us into debt deeper than ever before? By creating or saving no jobs? Yeah, that’s pretty brilliant. Remaking our global image…yep. According to Hugo Chavez, George Bush was the devil, but Obama is an ignoramus. The European press is less impressed with him than were with Bush.
“Winning universal health care”? Really? Has that passed already? And even when it does, do you honestly think it’ll look anything like what Obama promised in the campaign? So, by accomplishing nothing
Ed Driscoll writes about the first year of the Roosevelt Administration.
Stephan Pastis, the creator of the comic strip “Pearls Before Swine”, recently went on a tour for the USO in the Middle East along with nine other cartoonists and met our troops. He discovered what most of us here at TAH already know;
I have never been thanked by anyone as I was by those soldiers we visited in hospitals and on military bases. Their thanks were as sincere and heartfelt as anything I’ve ever heard. And as much as it was for our being cartoonists whose strips they might enjoy, I think it was also simply because we were there.
I wish I could introduce them to you. They were sincere and direct and respectful to a degree I have never experienced in my day-to-day life here. And if something were to have posed a threat to any of us while we were there, I had no doubt they would have protected us before they protected themselves.
Every morning, I groan while getting out of my bed knowing that I have to face a day with the latte-drinking crowd and I miss the mornings when I bounded from my bed at oh-dark-thirty looking forward to my day (weeks, months) ahead that I’d spend among soldiers. I’m glad that Mr. Pastis believes the gap between the troops and the latte crowd is bridgeable, and I’d like to share his optimism, but I don’t hold out much hope.
The latte crowd prefers to see the troops as victims of George Bush, of a failed education system, of predatory recruiters, of jingoistic neo-cons – that way the latte crowd doesn’t have to accept the fact that there are things in this country worth dying and sacrificing. That there are people in this country who put other things above SELF.
People who have never spent a day in uniform think that sacrifice means watching the news a few times every week and being subjected to homogenized images of war. I’ve heard them tell recovering wounded soldiers that “we’ve all lost things in this war” when the only thing they’ve given up is cheap coffee and common sense.
VoteVets’ Jon Soltz crawls out from under President Obama’s desk long enough to fire off an angry missive at the Republican Party – you know, like a good non-partisan that he is;
I never thought Sarah Palin could say something that would leave me totally speechless, but this time, she’s done it. Reports Politico:
Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday accused President Barack Obama of not acknowledging the sacrifices made by the men and women in the U.S. military.
“There’s been a lack of acknowledgement by our president in understanding what it is that the American military provides in terms of, obviously, the safety, the security of our country,” Palin said during an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren. “I want him to acknowledge the sacrifices that these individual men and women – our sons, our daughters, our moms, our dads, our brothers and sisters – are providing this country to keep us safe.”
Hasn’t acknowledged their sacrifices? Seriously? What’s this look like?
This past weekend, I read Robert Wright’s anti-intellectual piece in the New York Times entitled “Who Created Major Hasan?“. Of course, since it’s Robert Wright and the New York Times, you know his conclusion. It was us (or US, if you prefer)
Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them.
So, clearly Wright is a proponent of sitting on our collective hands. Well, Christopher Hitchens took it upon himself to knock down Wright’s straw house;
For a start, did Hasan or [Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — Carlos Bledsoe, the Arkansas murderer] ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.
It’s clear to me who created Major Hasan – the cowardly imams and terror sponsors who are afraid of dying themselves, but have no aversion to sending their own children into the flames. Hasan handed out Korans to his neighbors – what if one of us handed out the Bible to our neighbors in the Middle East? Tell me we’re the violent ones in this fight.
Yeah, just once I’d like to see someone on the Left, the non-racist, defenders of human rights Left, someone besides Hitchens, admit that the war is worthy of our commitment. The only reason these cretins think that they have any chance at all of winning this war is because they have pathetically ignorant pea-wits like Wright defending them and the New York Times to give the pathetically ignorant pea-wits a forum.
In a control room SNAFU, during a segment of Fox News Channel’s “Happening Now”, the wrong tape was shown to the audience according to the Chicago Tribune;
Today, FOX News host Gregg Jarrett was talking about Republican Sarah Palin’s book tour and the crowd she is drawing at the start of it – no small turnout, with some 1,500 people lining up early this morning for a chance to get into this evening’s premier book-signing for Going Rogue in Grand Rapids.
“Sarah Palin continuing to draw huge crowds while she’s promoting her brand new book,” FOX’s Jarrett told his viewers. “Take a look at — these are some of the pictures just coming into us… The lines earlier had formed this morning.”
But it turns out that Happening Now had pulled some video of something that happened last year: Displaying video today from Palin’s campaign for the vice presidency, on the ticket with the GOP’s Sen. John McCain – which also drew considerable crowds, as shown today in video of a smiling Palin before an adoring campaign crowd.
Fox News has promised that it will discipline the people responsible, but that’s not enough for the Left.
Predictably, the moonbats have berserk. John Amato at Crooks and Liars and HuffPo has filed a complaint with the FCC;
FOX News is passing on “false information” to the public. This must end. They were busted by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show when Sean Hannity used the same technique to make it seem like a tea party rally was bigger than it actually was. And you know Hannity was told to apologize by “legal” over the “Hoax” he tried to get away with. Inadvertent footage doesn’t end up on a network show. That’s a bogus explanation. I think it’s time we started to take action and the first step is to file an FCC complaint report here. Please join me here and at CrooksandLiars.com to expose these “Hoaxes” by News Corp.
Well, anyway, here’s the video they’re complaining about;
Oh, wait, that’s not the video of the Fox show – it’s REAL media malfeasance, the kind that doesn’t provoke a reaction from Think Progress, Crooks and Liars, Huffington Post or Media Matters.
I must have problems in my control room – heads are going to roll, I promise you. I hope no one reports me to the FCC.
Matthew Alexander published his book last year entitled “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq”. The book has it’s roots in a Mark Bowden article in the Atlantic. Alexander parlayed the Atlantic article into a book deal. After he wrote it, with some help from a renowned co-author, he went on a book tour making the rounds of all of the farthest Left news programs that would have him. Alexander didn’t use his real name to author the book or do his book tour. According to Alexander, his name was sealed in a court order for his protection. Of course, a puny DC District court order doesn’t affect the crack research staff of This Ain’t Hell. Here’s his DD214; (more…)
Can you imagine the furor in the media if you substituted “President Obama” with “President [insert any Republican name in this space]” in this paragraph from the New York Times?
President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.
At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.
If it were still Bush, the media would say that he bullied the rest of the world into capitulating to his capitalist whims. Instead, the New York Times makes excuses for him. Funny how that works, huh?
The current president is doing his level best to keep his accomplishments at “zero” – which is fine with me, except everything he doesn’t get done this year will all become “issues” that the Democrats will prostitute in the next election. Then they only have to drag out the same old bumperstickers we’ve been reading for decades.
