…Four decades after Watergate and two decades after his death, we still can’t stop talking about the dark anti-hero of American politics. …
The latest non-Watergate to be labelled its second coming is actually a combination of three separate scandals afflicting the Barack Obama administration.
The collective weight of this scandalabra threatens to derail the president’s ambitious legislative agenda, dragging him to premature lame duck status. But it doesn’t represent outright criminality emanating from the Oval Office or promise to provoke a constitutional crisis, however fervently Obama’s critics might wish it.
In fact the ritualistic invocation has the opposite to the desired effect, making the scandals look smaller than they are by comparison with Nixon’s. So, partisan projections aside, how do these scandals really stack up?
The Telegraph author criticizes the comparison of Watergate, then goes on to note how “the IRS scandal is the most serious”, but frankly, he’s got it backwards.
Fast and Furious, which was hushed up by a complicit media, was the most serious. Then Benghazi, which is starting to get attention. Hundreds have died from Fast and Furious. Four have died from Benghazi.
The IRS scandal and the AP snooping scandal are chilling effects of tyranny, but they aren’t the administration covering up murders, or covering up leaving an ambassador and his staff to die.
Finally, there is the continuing inquiry into the killing of four Americans in Benghazi. After damning congressional testimony from former deputy chief Libya diplomat Greg Hicks, the White House belatedly released a barrage of emails – which showed that the editing of the now-infamous “talking points” used by officials in television interviews was largely the product of a bureaucratic turf war between the CIA and the State Department.
Yeah, except that doesn’t cut it. The talking points are a question of who’s covering up what and why. The “bureaucratic turf war between CIA and State Department” is a whitewash by the media.
Who ordered the stand-downs? Why wasn’t there an F18 doing a low altitude flyby over Benghazi at supersonic speeds and terrifying the terrorists by showing American air power was there?
This media look at the Obama scandals is entirely backwards, but it is right to recognize that Watergate and Obama’s four scandals are different.
Nixon had CREEP and the Plumbers out playing political tricks and breaking into hotels.
Obama shipped guns to narcoterrorist cartels that have killed hundreds (including two USBP Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata), left a US ambassador and his staff to die and then lied about it and played politics with the coverup, then he went after political opponents with the IRS and went after media with the DOJ.
Nixon’s Watergate was some shady political tricks. Obama’s scandals are murder.
“Tax to live” works as well. Frankly, it’s the kind of smugness to be expected from this White House that smuggles guns to narcoterrorist cartels to undermine the Second Amendment, leaves our ambassadors to die and blames it on the First Amendment, targets citizens with different opinions with the IRS, and targets reporters who aren’t quite being the perfect Obama-propagandists with wiretaps. Hence why the low road response comes first. They’ve earned it.
There were several really good tweets by a host of folks who find this insulting and demeaning, if not tyrannical:
He’s not targeting the White House’s actual activities. He’s not calling them out for suppressing Fast and Furious and targeting whistleblowers for retaliation. Bernstein’s only mad because reporters who need to be monitored for party loyalty are now targets.
Bernstein said “the president should long ago have put a stop to this in his administration”. Apparently he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that the president is a Chicago street organizer who was raised by Alinskyite communist thugs and terrorists. This president does not favor freedom, he does not favor free speech. His political agenda is one that would criminalize unpopular speech, and would actively targets opposition speech. This is not a surprise to Country Class Americans.
Bernstein:
“There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”
Y’know what that means, Carl? Y’know what you should be able to get from that without having Mark Felt spoon-feed it to you? It means this presidency DOESN’T favor a free press.
Bernstein is a dinosaur. He’s in the tank for the Democrats, but he still thinks they’re the same silly Democrats of yesteryear. He’s still got some smidgen of journalistic integrity left, too, and he’s wondering why the Democrats are trying to crush and control journalists now. He doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, and he doesn’t understand that the ruling Democrats are tyrants.
He sounds mad because he can’t figure out why Obama’s doing these horrible things. He’s like a battered wife who still thinks her abusive husband who just molested their children is a good guy, and she doesn’t understand all these horrible things that surely can’t be the truth. The facts stare him in the face, but he refuses to understand.
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As just one more example, Sharyl Attkisson has been yelled at for being a journalist and actually reporting on a big story – gunrunning by the US DOJ/ATF, and the subsequent coverup by the Obama administration. The media has already hushed up a few hundred murders in Fast and Furious, and hushed up Benghazi as much as they can, and they’re going to spin the IRS story as either justified because conservative=evil or as an accident. They’ve been accomplices to tyranny for so long, are they just so blind that they’re now surprised when they’re the targets?
Somewhere, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are sharing a joke at the US media’s expense.
From “moderately libertarian” Megan McArdle at the otherwise lefty Daily Beast:
the IRS method for dealing with the volume was to take an unrandom sample. And how did they decide that you deserved extra scrutiny? Because you had “tea party” or “patriot” in your name. Since the Tea Party was a brand-new movement in 2010, they couldn’t possibly have had any data indicating that such groups were more likely to be doing something improper. So how exactly did they come up with this filter?
Yet she comes up with the answer:
There is no answer that does not ultimately resolve to “political bias.”
The current commissioner knew for a full year that the agency was targeting Tea Party groups and other opposition organization for aggressive auditing? And in the middle of an election year, no less? And yet, today Barack Obama insists that he knew nothing of this practice until last Friday.
This is either the most incompetent administration ever, or one of the least honest.
Ed, remember this is the same administration that sent guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels, murdering hundreds of Mexicans and two US federal agents, and then exerted executive privilege to hush it all up. I’d hate to see a poll between Putin and Obama on who people would trust more.
“Having been in the position of a chief executive officer, I can understand why a businessman might be reluctant to speak out against the actions of federal agencies that have the power to harm their enterprises,” he wrote in Rumsfeld’s Rules, which goes on sale Tuesday.
“By doing so, corporate leaders could expose themselves and their companies to government retaliation–from the IRS, the SEC, congressional committees, or the many other agencies of the federal government that regulate and oversee their operations,” he added.
The thing to remember is the enemy was elected. A street-level Chicago agitator is who we have as president, someone who was raised by communists in the Alinsky and Ayers mold, someone who views political power as the only end, and someone whose administration and subordinates are of like mindset.
The only question I’d like answered is why did the IRS come out and apologize last Friday?
Who was going to break this story if the IRS didn’t apologize?
This is not a question of American citizens’ rights, this is a question of the US government purposely arming narcoterrorists in order to have this talking point, claiming the 90% lie over and over.
I can’t think of many things more insulting or downright foul to hear from our President other than his own crimes being blamed on our rights – as was intended. He is now going international with the demand that our rights go away because he committed crimes… to deny us those rights.
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This is like a rapist saying “not only did she deserve it when I did it to her, but that proves my point, we have to keep the world safe from women like her who cause rape”.
We have held fast to the principles at our country’s core: service and citizenship; courage and the common good; liberty, equality, and justice for all.
This is our Nation’s heritage, and it is what we remember on Loyalty Day. It is an occasion that asks something of us as a people: to rediscover those ageless truths our Founders held to be self-evident, and to renew them in our own time. We look back to Americans who did the same, from generation to generation — citizens who strengthened our democracy, organizers who made it broader, service members who gave everything to protect it. These patriots and pioneers remind us that while our path to a more perfect Union is unending, with hope and hard work, we can move forward together.
Yes, the common good, democracy (mob rule, not a republic), and organizers who broadened democracy and reduced the republic, all us moving forward together. These are things the pioneers worked for.
Just different pioneers.
In order to recognize the American spirit of loyalty and the sacrifices that so many have made for our Nation, the Congress, by Public Law 85-529 as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as “Loyalty Day.”
Before the Boston Marathon bombings, the Obama administration argued for years that there is a big difference between terrorists and the tenets of Islam.
A senior White House aide in 2009 publicly urged Washington to cease using the term “jihadist” — asserting that terrorists are simply extremists. Two years later, the White House ordered a cleansing of training materials that Islamic groups deemed offensive.
Now, some analysts are asking whether the 2009 edict and others that followed have dampened law enforcement’s appetite to thoroughly investigate terrorism suspects for fear of offending higher-ups or the American Muslim lobby.
It’s not just suspected. The most recent fedgov-sponsored anti-terrorism course I took spent the first few hours going over the SPLC’s laundry list of evil white terrorist organizations that to any sane person, aren’t more than a footnote.
In October 2011, 57 Islamic groups wrote a letter to John O. Brennan, now CIA director, but then President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser.
Citing news reports, the groups complained of “biased, false and highly offensive training materials about Muslims and Islam” inside the federal government’s instructional halls.
“While recent news reports have highlighted the FBI’s use of biased experts and training materials, we have learned that this problem extends far beyond the FBI and has infected other government agencies, including the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army,” the letter read.
Muslims objected to several training guides, such as a 2009 report produced at the Army Command and General Staff at the Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies.
“Moderate Muslims are not exercising moderation; they are simply applying other means to accomplish the same goal of establishing global Islamic dominance,” it quoted the report as saying.
At least two of the 57 groups were listed by the Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators and as being connected to the Muslim Brotherhood in the prosecution of a Texas charity for funding Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The groups are the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America.
The organizations’ letter demanded that biased trainers be disciplined, that all instructors undergo retraining and that materials deemed offensive by Muslim activists be purged.
Want to know why we can’t effectively fight jihadi terrorists? Why we keep having Fort Hoods and Bostons?
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu’s reflections on the Obama administration would probably be something like: “If you deny yourself knowledge of the enemy and even deny the enemy’s existence because you don’t want to offend the enemy, you have already been defeated.“
John Guandolo, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, has spent years studying the global Muslim Brotherhood movement and its links to American Islamic groups. The FBI relies on some of them to guide its training. The political left has branded Mr. Guandolo an “Islamophobe.”
“There is no strategy in the FBI,” he told The Times. “At FBI headquarters, it is a daily fire drill. The threats come in, and they run around to deal with them and run them down. But because none of it can have anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood’s movement in the U.S. or Islam, they never address the root cause and common investigative realities.”
Mr. Emerson, who maintains back-channel ties to law enforcement, said any slide presentation on Islamic extremism now has to be submitted to a special Justice Department panel.
He said one slide that was required to be omitted showed the famous photo of captured Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The photo of a disheveled and unshaven Mohammed was deemed “offensive to Islam,” Mr. Emerson said.
There is a strategy in the FBI. It’s a strategy of concession and defeat.
… the president does not “see this challenge as a fight against ‘jihadists.’ Describing terrorists in this way — using a legitimate term, jihad, meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal — risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.”
Some analysts disagree with that interpretation, saying the Koran clearly states that jihad is a “holy war.”
Jihad is war.
Denying it and pretending that it’s simply “internal jihad” denies reality. The struggle in Islam is further submission to the will of Allah – Islam means submission. Salaam and the peace of Allah is all about submission to Allah’s will. People with an internal “my struggle” tend to be types who are worth keeping an eye on anyway.
Beyond that point, it doesn’t actually matter what the US says. Contrary to American popular belief, the world does not actually revolve around us. The right knows we’re big and important and we have an important role to play, but we’re ultimately not everything; the left mocks our actual importance, but then thinks every evil in the world is caused by our interference and instead blames America for everything as though we are the cause of all evil in the world – a far more powerful egocentric belief.
Jihadis who are willing to kill themselves to strike a blow against the West in a desire to further the plans for the caliphate do not care what you or I think of them. The US saying “Islamic jihadi terrorists are Islamic jihadi terrorists” doesn’t change much.
They don’t need our opinion to make themselves legitimate. They are, by their own actions, legitimating themselves. They strike terror against the west and they prove they are jihadis. The US understanding and saying “they’re jihadis” does not magically make them jihadis. That they are blowing themselves up for jihad makes them jihadis. This is a question of acknowledging reality. They aren’t seeking our approval to make them jihadis.
For your nation to protect itself does demand that it acknowledge what it is fighting.
“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”
- Osama bin Laden
Frankly, when we’re acting befuddled because we can’t understand jihad, it doesn’t make us the strong horse. When our government, filled with mush-brained liberals at best; and jihad-allies leftists as well, tells you with their rose-colored glasses and romantic worldview (or straight up leftist redistributive propaganda) that these are a peaceful, peaceable, highly spiritual wise people with a history that goes back thousands of years, wise exotic mystics who travel the deserts and kept alive the knowledge that racist bigoted white European Christians threw away, and then were attacked by ruthless murderous Christian fundamentalist Crusaders who sought to kill them for some reason… it sets up a ridiculous worldview.
The leftist worldview doesn’t allow for acknowledging who the enemy is.
“They say our enemy is violent extremism,” Mr. Lieberman said. “It’s not. It’s not animal rights extremists or white supremacy extremists. It’s Islamic extremism.”
Lieberman’s one redeeming virtue is that he somewhat understands this. At the same time, it’s not extremism.
This is extremism:
Rubio also has part of the problem recognized, but this is still a problem:
Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, told Fox News this week that the administration will not recognize the terrorists for what they are — radicalized Islamists.
These are radical muslims:
Notably, those muslim snowboarders aren’t jihadis. Or at least, probably not (Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a Golden Gloves boxer, after all).
“My problem with this administration is they refuse to acknowledge the existence of this kind of terrorism,” Mr. Rubio said.
He noted that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic complex in Benghazi, Libya, the White House refused to call it terrorism and blamed it on everyday demonstrators.
To really explain that further, the White House’s so-called “demonstrators” brought mortars. The White House story is that they brought fire support to yell about a video that no one had ever seen.
You don’t bring indirect fire area-effect weapons to a protest.
I voice my continued objection to the new zoning regulations! No new strip centers!
This is a Second Amendment protest – a protest about guns and the right of the people too keep and bear arms in order to throw off oppression – up to and including possibly overthrowing a corrupt government:
And they didn’t bring any artillery. They also aren’t jihadis.
Update: It also looks like the Tsarnaevs’ bombs required some additional training and expertise to make, as though they might not be a “lone wolf” operation as the administration claims, as though there might actually be some kind of global movement that’s doing this bombing extremist stuff (for no discernable reason)… like there’s maybe a group of people who believe in the same thing (extremism and radicalness, sayeth the administration) and are out to spread terrorism for the sake of terrorism. Whoa. (How you can have two people working together and still call them a “lone” wolf ignores what the word “lone” means, but I digress.)
Americans should not decide their opinions about the Boston terror attacks until the government decides its own opinion, President Barack Obama told the nation late Friday night.
Really.
…when a tragedy like this happens … it’s important that we do this right,” he claimed. “That’s why we have investigations … That’s why we have courts. And that’s why…”
This is justification for the next line.
“…we take care not to rush to judgment — not about the motivations of these individuals; certainly not about entire groups of people,” Obama insisted.
The fact is, the Boston marathon bombers were islamic terrorists. There’s no denying reality, but there are people who still try. The White House, in order to deflect blame, has decided to tell the truth slowly to mitigate the damage.
Within the US, about one of twelve to one in six muslims (depending on subgroup, as seen above) believe suicide bombing is often/sometimes justified. In some other polls, there was a “never” option and a “rarely” option to differentiate between those who do support terrorism, but just so fervently as to say “often” or “sometimes”.
The number of pro-suicide bombing muslims jumps to around 13%. So more than one in eight muslims are ultimately pro-suicide bombing within the US.
The problem is that government for the last few years (or even decades) has chosen never to make a judgement, based on two flawed ideologies. The Bush administration, run by squishy neocons, went to great pains to call Islam the “religion of peace” and not offend the easily offended. The Obama government, run by leftist ideologues, has focused on what they think is the enemy – the domestic right that opposes their leftist changes in government, and their destruction of the Constitution. To the left, which is in power, people like you and me are the enemy because our focus on the American virtues of liberty represents opposition to their fundamentally anti-American worldview. By contrast, islamic ideology to them, as an enemy of traditional US virtues and the West that they view as an “oppressor” in the world, is an ally.
And as you’re reading this on your own time (if you’re not, tell the Major I’d like four cups of tea sent up, please), you’re being introduced to data that goes against the media and party line – so even if you are on the left, you’ll probably find yourself considered a “right-wing extremist” soon enough. Consider what happened to Eric Allen Bell – a leftist filmmaker who used to write for fanatically leftist DailyKos and Michael Moore but ended up doing his own research and had his open-minded sensibilities challenged by reality. He found it’s very hard to be a universal hippy believer in human rights on the left and simultaneously maintain blind lefty support of an ideology that actively oppresses gays and women.
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If you take all this into account, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, swims like a duck and flies like a duck, then Obama tells you not to rush to judgement, it could be a giraffe.
ShortTimer
JBH
