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

Category: Politics

  • Jimmy Carter: Portrait of an abject failure

    There’s an old saying that goes: “Let your life serve as a warning to others”.  In Jimmy Carter’s case, that’s an understatement.  In the “worst president in history” category, it’s a tie between Jimmy Carter and Bubba Clinton. Neither was keen on national security, and both were dismal failures at foreign policy. They were however, adept at smooth-talking minorities and poor into believing that age-old myth of the “Democratic party being for the “working class”.  All one needs to do is study the history of the Unions in this country to see the result of that lie.
    The former Georgia peanut farmer never met a dictator he didn’t like.  His approach to foreign dictators is stomach-turning.
    Of Saddam Hussein, Carter said: “Even if his effort is successful [Colin Powell addressing the U.N. Security Council] and lies and trickery by Saddam Hussein are exposed, this will not indicate any real or proximate threat by Iraq to the United States or to our allies.”  Instead, Carter wanted a “a sustained and enlarged inspection team, deployed as a permanent entity until the United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council determine that its presence is no longer needed”.
    Evidently, 12 years of Hussein’s nose-thumbing trickery wasn’t convincing.
    During his disastrous administration he declared that Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was someone “Who believes in human rights”, and told Nicolae Ceausescu that “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics”.
    Thanks to hapless foreign policy decisions which resulted in the abandonment of the Shah, mishandling of the Iranian hostage crisis, and botched rescue attempt, this myopic simpleton was responsible for thousands of deaths, and left the door wide open for a succession of Iranian Ayatollahs and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
    His antics with the former Soviets weren’t much better.  During Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure, the Soviet Union expanded militarily and engaged in several coups funded by the Kremlin. Carter’s reputation as a foreign policy wimp encouraged the Russians to install Communist regimes in Vietnam, Angola, Somalia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Grenada, Nicaragua, and South Yemen.  All the while, the American military was underequipped, underfunded, and underpaid.
    As if Carter’s bumbling as President weren’t enough, it pales in comparison to his post-Oval Office behavior.  He cuddled up with Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime, wrote letters to members of the United Nations opposing any interference with Iraq’s aggression in Kuwait, traveled to Pyongyang and praised Kim Il-Sung, announcing that that Pyongyang was a “bustling city where shoppers pack the department stores”.  That’s great news of the rest of North Korea; since they have virtually no electricity and a diet consisting of grass soup.
    Included on Carter’s past and present A-list list of friends:  Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Syria’s late Hafez al-Assad, Ethiopian tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam, and former Haitian butcher and junta leader Raul Cédras.  It reads like a who’s who of global despots.
    He refuses to let go of the office he was kicked out of in 1980.  His free-lance anti-American diplomacy is an embarrassment and a disgrace.  His arrogance and stupidity doesn’t just affect himself. The problem is that he gives aid and comfort to America’s enemies and there is a segment of like-minded sycophants who endorse his grotesque behavior.
    Do us all a favor, Jimmy.  Stick to building “Crack houses for humanity”.
          

    GI JANE

    sfcmac@wordpress.com

  • Congress capitulates to the will of the people

    Last night, Congress finally got off it’s high horse and passed funding for the war against terror in Iraq. The Washington Post reports that the anti-American wing of the left was apoplectic;

    Antiwar groups demanded that Democrats continue pressing for withdrawal dates and bombarded congressional offices with angry phone calls and e-mails in the hours before yesterday’s votes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), both war opponents, called the benchmarks woefully weak.

    But Democrats were reluctant to hold up troop funding. Nor could they override a second presidential veto. In an anguished floor speech, Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime war opponent, said he would reluctantly support the spending bill. “We do not have it within our power to make the will of America the law of the land,” Durbin said.

    Got news for ya, Durbin, you don’t have it within your power to inflict the will of a tiny minority of Americans on the rest of us.

    The Washington Post reports that al Sadr finally came out of hiding this morning - I don’t suppose that losing a timetable forced him to return to Iraq;

    Moqtada al-Sadr, the influential Shiite cleric and militia leader who went into hiding before the launch of a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive in February, made his first public appearance in months today, delivering a sermon before thousands of worshipers at a mosque in the southern city of Kufa.

    After months out of public view that U.S. officials say he spent mostly in neighboring Iran, Sadr arrived at the mosque in a motorcade and rekindled his anti-American rhetoric at a time when he is trying to broaden his standing as a national leader.

    “No, no for the devil. No, no for America. No, no for the occupation. No, no for Israel,” the firebrand cleric chanted to a crowd estimated at around 6,000, the Associated Press reported.

    It’s my opinion that al-Sadr resurfaced because he’d hoped the Democrats would prevail, but when they didn’t, he needed something to rally his troops before they becaome too disillusioned – as if dying in droves isn’t doing that anyway. 

    The Washington Times’s S.A. Miller reports the actual numbers for the votes in Congress calling it a “painful defeat” for Democratic leadership;

     The Democratic leadership’s painful defeat in challenging President Bush on war policy was evident in the 280-142 House vote, with 194 Republicans and 86 Democrats supporting the war funding. More than half the Democratic caucus, 140 members, voted against it, as did Republican Reps. John J. “Jimmy” Duncan Jr. of Tennessee and Ron Paul of Texas.

    Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne takes a long view of their “struggle” to end the war in Iraq:

    Democrats, in short, have enough power to complicate the president’s life, but not enough to impose their will. Moreover, there is genuine disagreement even among Bush’s Democratic critics over what the pace of withdrawal should be and how to minimize the damage of this war to the country’s long-term interests. That is neither shocking nor appalling, but, yes, it complicates things. So does the fact that the minority wields enormous power in the Senate.

    What was true in January thus remains true today: The president will be forced to change his policy only when enough Republicans tell him he has to. Facing this is no fun; it’s just necessary.

    Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said recently that no one remembers how long it took to reverse the direction of American policy in Vietnam. Obey is hunkered down for a lengthy struggle.

    It’s really too bad that Democrats can’t summon the testicular fortitude to “hunker down” for the long struggle against terrorism the way they’ve “hunkered down” against their political rivals.

    Over in the Senate, two Presidential candidates decided winning the primary is more important than winning the election, according to the AP;

    Courting the anti-war constituency, Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama both voted against legislation that pays for the Iraq war but lacks a timeline for troop withdrawal.

    “I fully support our troops” but the measure “fails to compel the president to give our troops a new strategy in Iraq,” said Clinton, a New York senator.

    “Enough is enough,” Obama, an Illinois senator, declared, adding that President Bush should not get “a blank check to continue down this same, disastrous path.”

    How do you support the troops yet vote to shut off money for them to complete their mission? How does that make a lick of sense? And, Obama, your job is to write blank checks for the Executive Branch. If you want troops out of Iraq, pass a law – that’s your job, too.

    The Wall Street Journal brings the bad news about the bill;

    Included in the measure is a $2.10-an-hour increase in the federal minimum wage as well as billions in new domestic spending for Democratic priorities. But President Bush will retain a free hand over managing the war after vetoing earlier efforts by lawmakers to force him to begin to withdraw U.S. troops Oct.1.

    * * * * *

    In the case of the minimum wage, the $2.10 increase to $7.25 an hour would be spread over the next two years in three 70-cent increments, the first of which would take effect 60 days after the president signs the bill, which is expected this weekend. It promises small business employers new tax breaks to help absorb the added payroll costs, including more generous expensing rules worth $3.5 billion over the next five years.

    But, that was political manuevering by the Democrats – when the economy slows because of increased wages which will result in layoffs and slowing job growth, they can blame the Administration just in time for the 2008 elections. Of course, they’ll blame the tax cuts which influenced job growth (and increased tax revenues) in the first place.

    David Sirota of SirotaBLOG is pretty angry at his party for pulling off a political stunt instead of letting the train just run over them.

    This is what we’re dealing with folks. A party that runs to the press to brag about the brilliance of using their majority not to end the war, but to create a situation that makes it seem as if they oppose the war, while actually helping Republicans continue it.

    I’m constantly amazed that the activist Left just doesn’t understand that “not enough votes” means that there aren’t enough votes. They don’t understand the veto process, and they just think that everyone should give them their way all of the time, without questions. What a terrible existence. Intentionally irretrievably ignorant.

    Now, according to the Washington Post and AP;

    “I think the president’s policy is going to begin to unravel now,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who described the just-passed measure as a disappointment because it did not force an end to U.S. participation in the conflict.

    This from the same woman who predicted that the President didn’t have the guts to veto the first spending bill. You just keep hoping you’re right, Nance – someday you’ll get that pony.

  • A political strategy that will surely kill us all

    The Democrats have decided that they can’t convince the American voters that Democrats are committed to protecting us. They ran what they perceived to be a war hero as their Presidential candidate in 2004, not realizing that he came with loads of baggage that real war heros would recognize as snotty, elitist Hollywood faux-heroism.

    Democrats realize that they can’t win the 2008 presidential election within the confines of the current state of affairs in the world – that being the global war against terrorism – without a candidate that can prove they are committed at any cost to defend Americans. They can’t find a candidate like that while their base voters are a bunch of Left-wing nutballs convinced that any war Republicans fight is illegitimate and some sort of conspiracy.

    So what’s the Democrat strategy to overcome such an obstacle? Deny that there’s a war against terror. John Edwards is just the latest to tell us to ignore the man with the bomber’s vest behind the curtain. Last month Dick Durbin claimed that he knew the American people were being misled to war by the White House – there was no threat, but anyone who has been half-awake for the last six years knows Durbin would have leaked any damaging information to the press in heartbeat if he thought he could hurt the administration.

    Dennis Kucinich, last month declared that the war was lost the minute the administration fabricated a cause to go to war. So there was no reason to go to war, because the Global War on Terror doesn’t really exist, except in the minds of some nebulous neo-con organization somewhere.

    So that’s the strategy – deny there’s a war so they don’t have to prove that they can defend us. Mainly because Americans will never trust the Left with our National Security. Rational people might try to formulate a coherent policy to answer America’s problems. But, then, we’re not talking about rational people here.

  • It ain’t just a river in Egypt, Edwards

    John Edwards, the prettiest girl in the Democrat field of Presidential candidates, denies that there’s a terrorist threat to this country, according to USAToday;

    Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on Wednesday repudiated the notion that there is a “global war on terror,” calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.

    In a defense policy speech he planned to deliver at the Council on Foreign Relations, Edwards called the war on terror a “bumper sticker” slogan President George W. Bush has used to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad to the invasion of Iraq.

    “We need a post-Bush, post-9/11, post-Iraq military that is mission focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes,” Edwards said in remarks prepared for delivery. “By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set — that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam.”

    I’m sure that the Jersey Girls will be outraged that Edwards called their slaughtered husbands “bumper sticker slogans” for a “discredited ideology”. Funny, but we can replay the scenes of the World Trade Center attack over-and-over and some people still don’t believe it happened, I guess.

    I wonder what Edwards considers a 21st century threat – maybe split ends epidemics or caked mascara in the corner of his eye? Does he think that space aliens are going to fly their craft into the White House? What the hell could a 21st century threat be if not this global war against terror?

    Edwards outlined several steps he said he would pursue as president to strengthen the military, including using force only to pursue essential national security missions, improve civilian-military relations, and root out mismanagement at the Pentagon.

    Ah, that’s the real enemy – the Pentagon. Now we can see clearly – thank you, poodle-boy.

    I’ve catalogued on this blog that terrorists are cooperating across ideological borders to prepare for the next attack. If they can find IRA terrorists in Columbia and Basque separatists in Bolivia, what more proof do we need that there is a GLOBAL war against GLOBAL terrorists?

    Not only is Edwards wrong about terrorism, he’s wrong on the economy, too, according to the Wall Street Journal;

    It’s been a rough week for John Edwards, and now comes more bad news for his “two Americas” campaign theme. A new study by the Congressional Budget Office says the poor have been getting less poor. On average, CBO found that low-wage households with children had incomes after inflation that were more than one-third higher in 2005 than in 1991.

    The CBO results don’t fit the prevailing media stereotype of the U.S. economy as a richer take all affair — which may explain why you haven’t read about them. Among all families with children, the poorest fifth had the fastest overall earnings growth over the 15 years measured. (See the nearby chart.) The poorest even had higher earnings growth than the richest 20%. The earnings of these poor households are about 80% higher today than in the early 1990s.

    What happened? CBO says the main causes of this low-income earnings surge have been a combination of welfare reform, expansion of the earned income tax credit and wage gains from a tight labor market, especially in the late stages of the 1990s expansion. Though cash welfare fell as a share of overall income (which includes government benefits), earnings from work climbed sharply as the 1996 welfare reform pushed at least one family breadwinner into the job market.

    If Edwards can’t get simple economics right, how can we trust him to handle the big stuff – like our lives.

  • What would we do without Hillary

    I guess Hillary Clinton (D-NY Carpetbagger) figures she’s the only one on the planet to think the Pentagon needs to have contingency plans. In a letter to Defense Secretary Gates, she prodded the seasoned professional to produce a withdrawal plan from Iraq. From AP:

    The Democratic presidential candidate, whose recent statements have made her own position murky on when the bulk of U.S. troops should leave Iraq, urged top military brass in a private meeting and a public letter to detail how they would bring forces home.

    The New York senator met privately with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace late Tuesday, and sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates urging military leaders to begin such planning if they haven’t already.

    The move by Clinton follows word from Baghdad that Iraqi military officials are drawing up plans for the possibility of a withdrawal of U.S. forces, and a failure by congressional Democrats to muster enough votes for legislation forcing a timed withdrawal.

    Clinton now wants the Pentagon to brief lawmakers on their withdrawal contingency plans.

    What else can we expect from her – she doesn’t think parents are smart enough to raise their own children until the age of four, why would she think that the Pentagon doesn’t already have a plan to extricate it’s troops from Iraq without her telling them to present her with a plan?

    And anyone dumb enough to brief that leaky Democrat caucus on a withdrawl plan doesn’t deserve their job.

    This purely a political move to make voters think Clinton is all caught up to the political game. Someone tell that goofball from Chicago, by way of Little Rock, that the Pentagon planners don’t sit around on their butts until some halfwit from across the river tells them to plan something. They’ve probably got an OpPlan laying around to invade her Georgetown mansion if they needed to. My Aspen Hill mansion, too.

    But, the Left already thinks she’s some sort of rocket surgeon;

    Now here’s an anti-war candidate who’s thinking.

    If Democrats muster the political will to cut off war funding, how bad would it be for them if the military then had to flee Irag in chaos and confusion, with no plan, because the money spigot suddenly was cut off? You could be pretty sure the GOP would be back in charge in 2008.

    Yeah, well, after another year of the performance I’ve seen from Democrats this year, I think they’ll have a tough time convincing Americans they can be leaders. If this is the best they have, we should coast till November – if we can come up with a candidate, that is.

  • Democrats surrender to President

    As I’ve been saying, the Democrats woke up to reality and discovered that pandering to the vocal, but tiny rush-to-surrender minority of the far Left isn’t getting them anywhere among voters the Washington Post reports today;

    Democrats gave up their demand for troop-withdrawal deadlines in an Iraq war spending package yesterday, abandoning their top goal of bringing U.S. troops home and handing President Bush a victory in a debate that has roiled Congress for months.

    Bush, who has already vetoed one spending bill with a troop timeline, had threatened to do the same with the next version if it came with such a condition. Democratic leaders had moved ahead anyway, under heavy pressure from liberals who believe that the party won control of Congress in November on the strength of antiwar sentiment. But in the end, Democrats said they did not have enough votes to override a presidential veto and could not delay troop funding.

    So all of that blather about “the will of the American people”, falls by the wayside as reality strikes a bitter blow. But, all of the Democrats are still in Leftist dreamland, according to S.A. Miller of the Washington Times;

    “It’s the president’s legislation, not the Democrats’,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, California Democrat and co-founder of the Out of Iraq Caucus. “It’s going to take Republicans to pass it.”
        Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat and one of the chamber’s loudest antiwar voices, called the benchmarks “toothless.”
        “There has been a lot of tough talk from members of Congress about wanting to end this war, but it looks like the desire for political comfort won out over real action,” he said.

    Political comfort, Russ? How about political reality.

    So I figure the jihadists next move to try and defeat our political will, you can bet, will be a strike here in this country. Shouldn’t be hard to volunteers, according to AP via Fox News;

    One in four younger U.S. Muslims said in a poll that homicide bombings to defend their religion are acceptable at least in some circumstances, though most Muslim Americans overwhelmingly reject the tactic and are critical of Islamic extremism and Al Qaeda.

    So I guess a quarter of the guys I eyeball on the subway here in DC are willing to accept terror. It’s probably inevitable that it’ll happen, but I think the jihadists are, once again, miscalculating the reponse they’ll get from Americans.

    For a comparison of how the media is spinning this poll to suit their particular agendas, see Bloodthirsty Liberal’s research results here and here.

  • Gore discovers 20/20 hindsight (Updated)

    Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV, Al Gore is back and on book tour for his latest act of public mental masturbation “Assault on Reason” – a more apt title I can not imagine. From ABC News;

    On the one hand, Gore has written an un-nostalgic look back at the previous six years that lays out his case as to how the world might look today had the chads fallen another way — a world where U.S. troops would not be fighting in Iraq, Abu Ghraib would just be a town’s name and the nation would have been better prepared for Hurricane Katrina, global warming, and, yes, perhaps even Sept. 11.

    Funny but I saw an episode of Family Guy last night that touched on the same subject. Without going into detail, Al Gore becomes the President in 2000 and the cast comments on how he hunted down and captured bin Laden himself (bin Laden was hiding out amongst the cast of MadTV) and cars all ran on vegetable oil. I wonder if the show’s writers had a sneak peak at Gore’s book.

    According to Dan Fromkin in the Washington Post Gore claims;

    “‘History will surely judge America’s decision to invade and occupy (Iraq) as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd.’

    “He does not flatly state that Sept. 11 would not have occurred during a Gore administration. But, he writes, ‘Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable, it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes.’”

    Look, Al, you and your country-ass hick master had eight years to do something about al Qaida and Hussein, you did nothing – only because you needed something to distract the American people from your constant failures and they made nice, easy targets at which to fire off cruise missiles. And finally, when they did strike, we had no choice – thanks to you, dimbulb. And what did the Clinton Administration do to protect New Orleans from Katrina. Have you forgotten that you were Vice President for eight years?

    As for the title, I’m sure that everyone will agree that you assault reason just by writing your crybaby crap – thinking that any rational person would have the slightest interest in what you would have done if only we’d had your hindsight as foresight.

    I had a girlfriend like Al Gore once – she never let me go. To this day, she still emails me after 35 years and tells me how wonderful our life would have been if I’d married her instead of my wife of 30 years. And then she complains that I don’t answer her email.

    Al Gore, you’re America’s pathetic ex-girlfriend.

    UPDATE: Ben Smith at Politico has a “User’s Guide to Gore Fever”.

    A fawning EJ Dionne professes his non-sexual man-crush on Al Gore in his Washington Post column “Free to be Al Gore“;

    Gore, to his credit, won’t talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

    I guess it’s easy to be declared right when it’s impossible to prove whether it’s true or not. Apparently, even some on the Left aren’t buying Dionne’s deranged hug-fest.

  • It takes an idiot

    According to Fox News Channel, Hillary Clinton, unsurprisingly, is coming for your children. Since you don’t know how to raise your own kids, she’s proposing a Federal pre-kindergarten for your 4-year-old. At a cost of 10 billion bucks;

    “I want every 4-year-old regardless of parental income to have access to high quality pre-K because it not only enhances their academic preparation, they stay in school longer, they have fewer behavioral problems,” the New York senator and former first lady said.

    Clinton said she would pay for the program by closing tax loopholes and eliminating Bush administration programs she disagrees with.

    “There is a lot of evidence that this saves money over the long run and economists and others have validated what experts in early childhood education have told us for a long time,”

    And those “experts” are just slobbering all over themselves thinking about that 10 billion bucks and all of the experimental useless bells and whistles they can buy with it and all of the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face research they can fund with it. We’ve been hearing for years how all our classrooms needed for kids to learn better was computers – and we’re still surrounded by post-pubescent want-wits.

    Now we find out that the real reason kids are so stupid is because we raised them ourselves for four years without a government program. How the Hell did we reach this point in our history without pre-K – I’m surprised we’re aren’t so damn stupid we’d all fall off the planet.

    Why did I stay in school without pre-K? Hell, my mother didn’t even got to kindergarten – how did she make it through life? I wonder how many of those “experts” attended pre-K.

    It’s been my experience that everyone who ever called themselves an “education expert” is generally a moron. All of the real education experts I’ve ever known were teachers who knew how to shove knowledge into my hermetically-sealed brain-housing-group – and none of them would have considered themselves experts by any measure.

    And I certainly wouldn’t take child rearing advice from Old Elephant Ankles. She raised ONE kid sporadically, and with the assistance of Arkansas State Troopers and the Secret Service. What does she know about parenting or a child’s education? And why should we listen to the old bag? Cuz some journalist once called her the smartest woman in America? I wonder if that journalist went to pre-K.

    The education system in this country is turning out illiterate morons every year and inflicting them on the employers who paid for their shortchanged education. Why should we throw more money down that dark hole and give them more time to indoctrinate our kids into a culture of dependency?

    Mike Bates at Townhall says the same and brings the numbers without all of my emoting.