First Woodward, Now Bernstein

Remember a few months back, Bob Woodward criticized the White House about the sequester limiting military movements, and then was threatened?

Of course, Woodward was blasted by his fellows in the media for criticizing Obama, and it’s not like Woodward was actually going to say anything serious, since Woodward never thought there were any questions worth asking about Benghazi or Fast and Furious.  He made one comment that wasn’t wholly in lock-step with the Obama-loving media and was verbally attacked and threatened for it.

Now today, Carl Bernstein is calling out Obama for targeting Associated Press reporters.

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.

From the Obama administration targeting FOX news and calling it “destructive” for having a viewpoint that opposes his to Obama specifically blaming Rush Limbaugh for all the problems in America, to calling anyone who is opposed to the socialist manifest destiny an “obstructionist” or “destructive”, this administration, from the President down through all of his true-believer lackeys, are on the same page.  If you oppose them and their autocratic mania to tell you how to live, you must be destroyed.

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.

Media Hushes Up Benghazi Whistleblower Hicks’ Political Background

Via Drudge, from Breitbart:

NBC News “spiked” the story this week, prior to Hicks’ dramatic testimony before Congress.  

Toensing appeared on WMAL-FM in Washington DC Saturday with host Steve Malzberg.

“He voted for Hillary in the primary and Obama twice. NBC spiked the story where I told it before the hearings…

…It’s just amazing what the press is still trying to do to cover this up. So they try to make this partisan because of the lawyer. Well I’m not the messenger, he’s the messenger! The modus operandi is to find anything they can do to just attack.”

Thing is, if Hicks were reported as a Democrat supporter who votes Democrat all the time, it goes to show that there is actual bipartisanship – that people as Americans are saying something’s wrong, that this was a criminal coverup.  There are actual Democrats who recognize that what happened at Benghazi is wrong, and there are actual Democrats who are critical of the Obama administration.

That would go against the narrative that this is just a right-wing fiction, a right-wing kooky conspiracy theory that’s all about editing a document that gets edited anyway and nobody died and nothing happened and it was all a protest against a reich-wingnut who made a video on youtube to offend the arab world because he’s out to offend them so much.

It’s only natural that people take RPGs and mortars to protests, because right-wingers make people that mad, and they deserve it.  So it’s the right’s fault… according to the left.

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That part really is key, in case someone isn’t getting how the White House story of a spontaneous protest doesn’t fit with reality.  In the leftist worldview, it’s somehow “normal” that people take fire support to protest, and a “protest” with mortar support is a perfectly acceptable explanation for an attack on a 9/11 anniversary.

Yes on proposition 19!

House Oversight and Reform Benghazi Hearing Live Feed

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

Goes for a few hours yet.

If you have the time, much like the Fast and Furious hearings, it’s worth watching.  It’s fascinating to see exactly what happens and is discovered versus what the media will report afterwards.

Bob Woodward Asking The White House About Fast & Furious and Benghazi?

Nope.

Bob Woodward says the White House is warning “you’ll regret this” because he’s saying Obama’s sequester response is “madness”.

Drudge had it as his headline today.  From Business Insider:

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret doing this,” the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.

Real Clear Politics has some video of an exchange with Wolf Blitzer where he discusses it as well.

This started because Woodward said Obama’s sequester strategy was “madness”.  HotAir has a good roundup of it and the reactions.

So why is this a story?  Because it’s a historical footnote for reporters.

Woodward wasn’t asking questions about Fast and Furious.  Woodward didn’t think there was anything worth asking about Benghazi.

In Fast and Furious, the Attorney General authorized smuggling guns to narcoterrorist cartels in Mexico with the express outcome of finding guns at crime scenes.  We have Congressional testimony of ATF agents who ran the operation discussing that.  Heck, CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson even managed to get the story moving a little bit.

The Justice Department hid it, hushed it up, and refused to turn over documents.  What they did turn over was a joke.

And Obama exerted executive privilege over things he claims he had no knowledge of (which isn’t how EP works), and it all went away because the media doesn’t ask questions.  If Woodward had wanted to, he could’ve run with it and taken down two administrations.  But he’s in the tank for Obama just like the rest of the complicit media, he’s just upset that he’s being threatened.

With Benghazi, we had questions of an admiral being relieved because he wanted to go and help our ambassador & embassy personnel.  There were questions of what the ambassador was doing in Benghazi anyway – and what about the MANPADS in Libya going to Syria.  Woodward blew it off.

This isn’t really a story.  It’s journalists looking at one of their heroes and saying “yeah, he’s taking a stand”.  No, he’s not.  He’s an irrelevant old man who 5 years into an administration that’s had plenty of scandals hushed up by the media, is just now realizing that they’re not the people he and the rest of the media have been carrying water for.  But he’s old, and just a curiosity today, and he’ll be forgotten just as quickly as Geraldine Ferraro was when she questioned misogynistic Democrat attacks on Palin during the 2008 elections.

Jay Leno Slowly Finding Out That Old Soviet Jokes are the New American Reality

From HotAir:

“This week, CBS News became the first news organization besides Fox to ask President Obama ‘Who changed the Benghazi talking points?’” Leno teased.

“See, this is very dangerous to the White House if journalists should suddenly start asking real questions.”

That he made the joke speaks well of Leno, who’s willing to joke about everyone.  The disturbingly Soviet part is that the mainstream leftist media is so effective at suppressing the news that many of his audience don’t get the joke, or don’t know how to react to mockery, even gentle mockery, of dear leader in public.

Previously: Old Soviet Jokes are the New American Reality, about the People’s Cube story.

Obama’s National Insider Threat Policy

Very strange, this is.

Presidential Memorandum — National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs

This Presidential Memorandum transmits the National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs (Minimum Standards) to provide direction and guidance to promote the development of effective insider threat programs within departments and agencies to deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security. These threats encompass potential espionage, violent acts against the Government or the Nation, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including the vast amounts of classified data available on interconnected United States Government computer networks and systems.

The Minimum Standards provide departments and agencies with the minimum elements necessary to establish effective insider threat programs. These elements include the capability to gather, integrate, and centrally analyze and respond to key threat-related information; monitor employee use of classified networks; provide the workforce with insider threat awareness training; and protect the civil liberties and privacy of all personnel.

The resulting insider threat capabilities will strengthen the protection of classified information across the executive branch and reinforce our defenses against both adversaries and insiders who misuse their access and endanger our national security.

BARACK OBAMA

HT to ZeroHedge and LibertyBlitzkrieg.

He’s certainly not concerned about people like leftist hero Bradley Manning, but he may well be concerned about ATF whistleblower John Dodson or Petraeus’ mistress Paula Broadwell talking about secret CIA prisons.

Update: Just in case it disappears, a screenshot as of 11/29/12 648 EST.

Telling the Truth Slowly

Thomas Sowell penned this column earlier in the week, and it’s well worth reading.

Confidence men know that their victim – “the mark” as he has been called – is eventually going to realize that he has been cheated. But it makes a big difference whether he realizes it immediately, and goes to the police, or realizes it after the confidence man is long gone.

So part of the confidence racket is creating a period of uncertainty, during which the victim is not yet sure of what is happening. This delaying process has been called “cooling out the mark.”

The same principle applies in politics. When the accusations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton first surfaced, he flatly denied them all. Then, as the months passed, the truth came out – but slowly, bit by bit. One of Clinton’s own White House aides later called it “telling the truth slowly.”

By the time the whole truth came out, it was called “old news,” and the clever phrase now was that we should “move on.”

It was a successful “cooling out” of the public, keeping them in uncertainty so long that, by the time the whole truth came out, there was no longer the same outrage as if the truth had suddenly come out all at once. Without the support of an outraged public, the impeachment of President Clinton fizzled out in the Senate.

We are currently seeing another “cooling out” process, growing out of the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11th this year.

Sowell’s column goes on to cover the lies, deceit, and coverup of the Benghazi consulate attack and how it morphed from a “spontaneous protest” which it wasn’t , into a non-issue, which it also isn’t.  The real-time video of the attack, the denials by the administration, the arrest of the “inciting filmmaker” by a SWAT team complete with news media perpwalk, are all “telling the truth slowly”.  Now that we know that Benghazi wasn’t a spontaneous demonstration, something noted early on… as no one goes to demonstrations with coordinated mortar fire.

Yes on Proposition 19!

But Benghazi, which Sowell elaborates on, isn’t the only case of “telling the truth slowly” from the Obama administration.  The other very notable example is Operation Gunwalker/Fast and Furious.

Consider that this week, ATF head Kenneth Melson went out and stated that the lies told to congress by the ATF & DOJ were known months in advance.

The former head of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told congressional investigators he discovered the Obama administration’s original account to Congress about the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal was inaccurate as early as March 2011 and urged the Justice Department to correct the record, an action that did not formally occur until eight months later.

The full testimony from retired Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson has not yet been officially released by Congress. But excerpts were obtained by the Washington Guardian as House and Senate investigators this week issued their second report into the gun-running scandal that has become an embarrassment for the administration and prompted a court fight over executive privilege.

At issue is the Obama administration’s initial account when the Fast and Furious scandal broke in February 2011 that ATF agents never knowingly let semiautomatic weapons fall into the hands of smugglers for the Mexican drug cartels. Senior officials held that position in varying forms for months as the scandal grew, but then reversed course last December in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.

The DOJ, Eric Holder, the ATF, and every part of the Obama administration involved lied, lied, and lied again.  They lied for months, then when they were proved completely to be liars, they “reversed course”.  They didn’t acknowledge lies, they “told the truth slowly”.

With complicit media, it’s how the Obama adminstration has managed to keep Fast and Furious, Castaway, and the dozen or more other gunwalking operations silent, as well as hush up Benghazi until after the election.

A final point with Benghazi: as has been often noted, there are very few people in the chain of command who could deny military assets to the consulate.  There’s Petraeus, Clinton, Panetta, and Obama.  Petraeus and Clinton have already said they didn’t deny military assets or aid to the consulate.  So the only remaining people are Panetta and Obama, or someone directly in their office.  The “investigation” is a stall tactic, because the only thing that matters is the election and power.

This is all the longer the investigation has to be, with the people changed, and the question changed to “did you deny military assets?”

Obama “We Leave Nobody Behind”

Gunwalker Update: Libya?

This isn’t quite connected with Fast and Furious or the ATF’s gunwalking, but is the same administration walking guns not under a law enforcement guise, but as foreign policy… maybe.  Though it could parallel what the Sinaloa cartel member on trail in Chicago had to say about the Obama administration running guns to them.  Same effect, slightly different initial reasoning, ultimate goals include not just anti-2A, but foreign policy objectives through illegal means.

Via Washington Times:

Fox News has chronicled how the Al Entisar, a Libyan-flagged vessel carrying 400 tons of cargo, docked on Sept. 6 in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. It reportedly supplied both humanitarian assistance and arms — including deadly SA-7 man-portable surface-to-air missiles — apparently destined for Islamists, again including al Qaeda elements, in Syria.

What cries out for further investigation — and debate in the remaining days of this presidential election — is whether this shipment was part of a larger covert Obama effort to transfer weapons to our enemies that could make the Iran-Contra scandal, to say nothing of Operation Fast and Furious, pale by comparison.

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What we do know is that the New York Times — one of the most slavishly pro-Obama publications in the country — reported in an Oct. 14 article, “Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster.”

In short, it seems President Obama has been engaged in gun-walking on a massive scale. The effect has been to equip America’s enemies to wage jihad not only against regimes it once claimed were our friends, but inevitably against us and our allies as well. That would explain his administration’s desperate and now failing bid to mislead the voters through the serial deflections of Benghazigate.

This is more Iran Contra and less Fast and Furious, but it’s weird how an administration that hates US citizens owning weapons is sure willing to arm unfriendly actors in the Middle East; as well as arming cartels in Mexico.

Libya Insider Perspective

A caller on the Rush Limbaugh show who knows quite a bit about Libya and how ambassadors and military ops at the highest levels work explains:

And via the Jawa Report, three encounters between Benghazi hero Tyrone Woods’ family and the Obama administration, characterized for being cold, calculating, and bizarre.

Worth reading, especially after watching the video.

Update: From around the internet: