Bloodthirsty Liberal

Let me put this as succinctly as I can:

To elaborate:

Dick Cheney is not the most popular of politicians, but when he offered a harsh assessment of the Obama Administration’s approach to terrorism last May, his criticism stung—so much that the President gave a speech the same day that was widely seen as a direct response. Though neither man would admit it, eight months later political and security realities are forcing Mr. Obama’s antiterror policies ever-closer to the former Vice President’s.

In fact, the President’s changes in antiterror policy have never been as dramatic as he or his critics have advertised. His supporters on the left have repeatedly howled when the Justice Department quietly went to court and offered the same legal arguments the Bush Administration made, among them that the President has the power to detain enemy combatants indefinitely without charge. He has also ramped up drone strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Pakistan.

However, the Administration has tried to break from its predecessors on several big antiterror issues, and it is on those that it is suffering the humiliation of having to walk back from its own righteous declarations. This is Dick Cheney’s revenge.

And as he is probably too busy shooting defenseless little furry creatures (deer, not hippies—although now that you mention it…), let me respond in his stead.

Ahem.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Boy, it sure must suck to have to adopt the policies of someone you find the most evil entity to walk the earth since Rasputin last pulled the wings off a fly.

It would be like me having to admit Al Gore was right. As if.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gitmo, KSM’s trial—the administration has thrown its policies into reverse so many times, they’ve stripped the gears.

As long as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were responsible for keeping Americans safe, Democrats could pander to the U.S. and European left’s anti-antiterror views at little political cost. But now that they are responsible, American voters are able to see what the left really has in mind, and they are saying loud and clear that they prefer the Cheney method.

Mr. Holder has nonetheless begun a campaign to defend his decisions on Abdulmutallab and KSM, telling the New Yorker last week that “I don’t apologize for what I’ve done” and that trying KSM in a civilian court will be “the defining event of my time as Attorney General.”

That’s about the only thing he’s said I agree with.

If public radio says it’s real, then it’s gotta be real, doesn’t it?

President Bush is too classy (and the timing too urgent) to use the occasion to remind President Obama that maybe he’s not as bad as he’s made out to be by the Obama propaganda machine.

But I’m held back by neither constraint:

Yeah, you’d better hang your head in shame, after all the lies and crap you’ve thrown at this man, and the respectful way he’s responded.

And hey, President Clinton, nice of you to make it. Hope this didn’t cut short your campaign appearances for Martha Coakley. Something tells me, after you met her, you couldn’t wait to get the heck away from her. We know the feeling.

[I]s this aimed at turning down the heat that The One’s taken for his all-purpose Bush-blaming? Whatever the answer, the public rehabilitation continues tomorrow: Bush and Clinton will hit five different Sunday morning chat shows to push the new Haiti relief fund.

I gave money to Partners in Health, because Paul Farmer has had people on the ground for 20 years. But whatever you can do. If there were a way to give money to help Haiti, while supporting Bush and tweaking Obama, I’d do that.

Another former liberal with a blog

Read what she has to say about the Democrat’s plans to do an end run around the voters of Massachusetts:

This needs to go viral — everyone you know needs to read this. Democrats have admitted to a scheme to ram through the Healthcare Rationing vote before Scott Brown can be sworn in as Senator, should he defeat his Democrat opponent on January 19th.

BTL already wrote about this earlier today, but her take is interesting too.

This is also interesting

Reading this is like being with an isolated handful of people, trapped in a weirdly condescending city, possibly on another planet where the people resemble the ones you used to know, but on this planet everyone is sure that they are smarter than you, that you are an idiot at best, more likely a war criminal, a threat to Gia. But wait! Suddenly you discover another little tribe of lost souls. It is the Twilight Zone.

In my “about me” description (see upper right), I mentioned that I’ve faced some ostracism within my circle of friends and colleagues for my political views. This was especially dramatic beginning with the buildup to the Iraqi war and ending with the 2004 Presidential election.

It hasn’t been pretty, and I’ve lost some of them, perhaps forever—sometimes merely by dint of saying something as mild as, “I disagree.” It’s not as though I insulted them—at least not knowingly or intentionally—but many have nevertheless acted as though they’d been insulted.

The situation would usually arise in the context of a party or a dinner or some other get-together among friends. I’d be at the table, chatting, joking, having a good time, and someone would bring up politics, the war, Bush—something. Then the vitriol would start, with the assumption that of course all of us agreed on these things: Bush was an asshole and a liar, the war a disaster and a crime, and so on and so on and so forth.

I’d be faced with the choice of speaking up or keeping silent. Sometimes I chose the latter, depending on the company, how long the conversation went on (passing remark vs. lengthy gabfest), and how strong I might be feeling that day.

Whenever I did decide to speak up, I tried to be quiet and respectful, and above all simple. I’d start by saying that I’d been a liberal Democrat my whole life (I’m one of you, not one of them, so don’t hate me, please!). I’d say I’d never voted for a Republican in my life (true). Then I’d say, in the mildest of voices, that nevertheless I happened to have come to agree with George Bush on quite a few aspects of his foreign policy.

First there was usually a stunned silence. At one party the person I was addressing asked me, “What did you say?” three times before she actually could process my answer and even understand the words I had said, much less react to them. Yes, every now and then people would be curious to hear what I had to say, and we would have a decent discussion. But far more often the anger would erupt, often instantaneously—and I mean rage, the like of which I had never before encountered with friends or acquaintances. A closed-mindedness, and a refusal to even listen to me. Most of these people had always seemed to respect my intelligence before, but now I was considered to be very very stupid—or evil. Gone over to the Dark Side.

Attacks. Name-calling: “imperialist,” “colonialist”—and, in one rather memorable case, “Dan Quayle lover,” although I certainly hadn’t breathed a word about any passion for him. Many of my friends were noticeably cooler to me after these exchanges, and a couple of old friends actually severed our relationship (permanently, so far).

There are a host of reasons this happened, I suppose. But at the time I didn’t see it coming, and it was extremely shocking and disturbing to me. But now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I think that I actually would have gotten a better response from them if I’d skipped the “I’ve always been a liberal Democrat” intro. Because there are few things more hated than an apostate, a turncoat, a traitor.

She goes on, but you get the drift. I think that both BTL and I have been there, and more than once.

- Aggie

Let me just say first and foremost, how despicable I find this story and how much I hate it:

The U.S. Secret Service says it is investigating an effigy of President Barack Obama found hanging from a building in the Georgia hometown of former President Jimmy Carter.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told The Associated Press on Sunday that the large black doll was found Saturday morning along Main Street in the small town of Plains.

Footage from WALB-TV shows the doll was hanging by a noose in front of a red, white and blue sign that says “Plains, Georgia. Home of Jimmy Carter, our 39th President.” A witness told the station that the doll had a sign with Obama’s name on it.

I don’t know if it’s a serious threat or just a disgusting prank, but the Secret Service is right to take as seriously as death.

But it wouldn’t be the first time a president was hanged in effigy. I won’t show you the Obama effigy because I understand the resonance of such an image and want no part of it.

But what’s an asphyxiation of a white president between friends?

Thanks to Zombietime.com for most of those images.

BTW, necktie parties aren’t just for presidents, or even just for gentlemen:

I always blame Bush! Always, always, always!

Then I’ll blame someone in his administration. Rahm, find me a cabinet member. No, not mine! I never wanted one before, why would I want one now?

Yes, perfect! The ideal scapegoat for our multitudinous eff-ups.

Curse you, Dirk Kempthorne!

The briefing to Brennan was delivered at the White House by Muhammad bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s chief counterterrorism official. In late August, Nayef had survived an assassination attempt by an operative dispatched by the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda who was pretending to turn himself in. The operative had tried to kill the Saudi prince by detonating a bomb on his body, but stumbled on his way into the prince’s palace and blew himself up.

Saudi officials initially thought the bomb had been secreted in the operative’s anal cavity. But after investigating the matter more thoroughly, they concluded it had likely been sewn into his underwear, thereby allowing the operative to bypass security checks before his meeting with the prince. A main purpose of Nayef’s briefing for Brennan was to alert U.S. officials to the use of the underwear technique.

…

At the briefing for Brennan, Nayef was concerned because “he didn’t think [U.S. officials] were paying enough attention” to the growing threat from Al Qaeda in Yemen, said a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the briefing.

…

Quoth former FBI agent Ali Soufan, “The system should have been lighting up like a Christmas tree.”

Perhaps the president’s downsizing of Christmas and Hanukkah this year let our guard down.

This is the second time today I’ve had to call out President Obama on his “isolated extremist” comment. The more we know, the more we know he knew that wasn’t true. I’d ask why he can’t level with us, but I’ve seen no evidence that he can. Demanding of him what he has no ability to perform is cruel, and that’s not my style.

He practically had the flight and seat number of Abdulmutallab handed to him, and he essentially crumpled the information into a ball and tossed it into the waste basket from across the room (then doing a celebratory moonwalk, saying “count it, and one”). If it weren’t for his incessant posturing, he’d have no posture at all.

Oh, Dick Cheney is going to tear him a new one.

Each gets credit for a year of this splendid news.

President Bush must get credit for the other eight:

So, the year 2009 has been a dismal one for the international regime of nuclear arms control. Or has it? asks Joshua Pollack, who writes for the Web site ArmsControlWonk.com.

“One way to look at it a little differently is not that the regime is cracking or that the regime is failing, but that the regime has succeeded in retarding the pace of proliferation and continues to do so, but isn’t going to catch everything,” he says.

Since the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945, the past decade has seen the fewest nuclear tests of any comparable period, notes Michael Krepon, president emeritus of the Stimson Center in Washington.

“Never before have there been so few nuclear tests as in this past decade. This is a norm. It can still be broken. But the country that breaks the norm does not gain points. It loses standing,” he says.

Who said NPR was good for nothing? All right, I did. But sometimes even an ideologically blind liberal stumbles upon the truth.

President Bush resisted limits on nuclear testing when he came into office, earning the contempt and opprobrium of the intelligentsia, but the Texas gunslinger had no intention of firing off random radioactive rounds. He just wouldn’t leave American national security to worthless treaties and untrustworthy allies or foes.

So, yet again, boys and girls, let us say what is getting to be hackneyed from over use: Bush was right.

PS: The wonks and specialists are useless, all of them, even when they reluctantly credit President Bush. There is no credible argument—none—that we were less safe under the policies of Reagan and Bush than we are under the pusillanimity of President Obama.

Third or fourth hand, but worth passing along:

Usually, trawling the “comments” section following any column in the on-line newspaper causes one to feel frustration or worse, but this comment to E.J.Dionne’s column in the Washington Post this morning about how the Democrats need Bush was perfect:

BUSH:

- Two wars
- Gitmo open
- Don’t ask. Don’t tell.
- Patriot Act
- Stocks 14,000
- Unemployment 4.5%

OBAMA:

- Two wars. 60,00 additional troops.
- Gitmo open
- Don’t ask. Don’t tell.
- Patriot Act extended
- Stocks 10,000
- Unemployment 10%

Democrats don’t need Bush. America needs Bush.

As the polls have indicating.

How can you tell when a liberal is full of s**t? Pretty much all the time, true, but there are times when liberals are positively brimming with the stuff, runneth-ing over.

Meet James Carroll:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S Oslo speech could have been titled “the ambiguities of history.’’ That the president spoke with self-awareness from within those ambiguities made the speech important.

“Ambiguity”: that would be a clue. “Nuance” would have been another, but it’s hard to use both in the same piece. You’d need a columnist the caliber of Paul Krugman or Frank Rich to accomplish that feat.

But Carroll soldiers on as best he can:

Those ambiguities were enough to prompt skepticism and even anger, especially from many who opposed the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. I count myself among those so opposed, yet oddly the president’s stance in the thicket of such contradiction gave his remarks resonance.

“Resonance”! Nice touch, James. President Obama oozes resonance from every pore. That may be the reverb dial on the sound system, but there’s no doubt the man resonates (ates-ates-ates).

With just the right mix of ambiguity and resonance, a president might get away with murder.

Literally:

Yet President Obama struck a different note. Having invoked just war, he observed how, precisely from within its tradition, “the capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible.’’ After the total wars of the 20th century, “it became clear to victor and vanquished alike that the world needed institutions to prevent another world war.’’ Either humans will put an end to war, in John Kennedy’s formulation, or war will put an end to human beings. Following World War II, institutions of a new order were constructed, yet “a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats.’’ What is required now, Obama said, is thinking “in new ways about the notions of just war.’’

Okay, I’m not sure what that means. But I suspect I know where he’s going.

Yet Obama’s tough assessment is clear - that the world has not yet advanced to the place where non-violence is a solution to problems of aggression and injustice. “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.’’ Yet equally clear is his insistence that we “must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to change behavior.’’ The old dichotomy between realism and idealism no longer applies - exactly because, like the just war theory itself, it reinforces the deadly status quo. More than that, the so-called realist must submit to the judgment of those whom hard men have always dismissed as soft. Obama cited Martin Luther King Jr. to declare that violence never brings permanent peace, and always creates “new and more complicated’’ problems that lead to new rounds of violence. Rulers in the throes of exercising power are traditionally criticized by prophets who stand apart from power. At Oslo last week, a war-making ruler dared to offer his own prophetic self-criticism.

Nope, still not clear. But I think if he were going to criticize Obama (as he so tediously did with Bush), we’d know by now.

In his short presidency, Obama has become a connoisseur of the “ambiguities of history,’’ and his Nobel speech is their catalogue. Ambiguities can seem like contradictions, which destroy coherence and meaning. But ambiguities can also point to paradox, how the expansive truth can contain its own opposite. With King, President Obama concluded that the ambiguities of history are a source not of despair, but of the “continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there’s something irreducible that we all share.’’ In that “something’’ lies our hope.

I’m sorry. You’ll never get these three minutes back. Take heart in the knowledge that Carroll wasted more than that in writing it (though not much). Typing “ambiguities” so many times can’t be easy (though cut-and-paste would speed things up).

The moral of the story is that when George Bush killed Taliban terrorists, he was a bloodthirsty tyrant; when Barack Obama kills Taliban terrorists, he is a “connoisseur of the ‘ambiguities of history’”.

And I paid money to have that delivered to my front porch.

simpering, whining, clueless

The NY Times is so distanced from reality that is appears to believe that 1. The NY Times offers objective news and 2. The Wall Street Journal just isn’t objective enough anymore. They don’t like Obama! What’s up with that?!?

…But there are growing indications that Mr. Murdoch, a lifelong conservative, doesn’t just want to cover politics, he wants to play them as well.

A little over a year ago, Robert Thomson, The Journal’s top editor, picked Gerard Baker, a columnist for The Times of London, as his deputy managing editor. Mr. Baker is a former Washington bureau chief of The Financial Times with a great deal of expertise in the Beltway. The two men came of age in the more partisan milieu of British journalism.

According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper’s Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper’s circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there’s nothing to suggest that The Journal’s readers don’t approve.

Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)

I put that last sentence in bold because it is the only sentence in the article that approaches some sort of reality, albeit a skewed reality. The rest, if I may borrow a word from someone who shall remain unnamed, is CODSWALLOP.

I don’t want to overtax the fevered brains at the NY Times, but they might just take a itsy bitsy teeny weeny peek into their own coverage of oh… say… George W Bush. Or Obama. Have they turned in their cheerleader suits yet? The high school wants them back. Or Israel. Perhaps they could explain why terrorism happens in the United States or western Europe, but activism happens in Israel?

Do they remember their very own ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, who wrote that the NY Times is a liberal publication? this is not a problem at all

I’ll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

Others would include Israel, folks.

What’s wrong with being a liberal newspaper? Only conservatives spread cooties, liberals are cool. But how can we ever trust a paper, such as the NY Times, that missed the fact that Jews perished in the concentration camps, didn’t get around to mentioning this little tidbit to their loyal readers until 1950? How ’bout that Pulitzer to Walter Duranty? Where exactly do they get off?

- Aggie