Bloodthirsty Liberal

I’d like to think I supplied the “intellectual foundation” for these folks:

[Can we all get those t-shirts?]

Dozens of demonstrators dashed into the Loop building housing President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters this morning, slipping past security guards and running up escalators as they kicked off what they called a “Week Without Capitalism.”

Eight protesters were led out in handcuffs about half an hour later after they refused to clear the lobby. They were cheered by other demonstrators who began dancing and singing folk and gospel songs.

…

After about 30 minutes marching and singing outside the building, the group tried to enter the building and reach Obama’s campaign offices around 8:30 a.m.

Guards locked the revolving doors, but protesters slipped through unlocked doors off to the sides. Some pushed past a security guard who tried to block their entry but quickly gave up as protesters poured through the doorway.

Like Elizabeth “Lie-a-Whoppuh” Warren, however, be careful whom you clutch to your bosom:

Jerica Arents, from the Rogers Park-based White Rose Catholic Workers, said some of the demonstrators had come from across the Midwest and would be joining NATO protests throughout the week. Arents said demonstrators are committed to remaining non-violent.

“We see NATO as using up a lot of resources in the city and the world,” she said.

Okay, they’re a little simple-minded—but no violence, no rape, no defecation. I’m proud to embrace these child-like creatures as Bloodthirsty Liberal’s Children.

While President Obama was taking his victory lap a year after SEAL Team 6 greased OBL, declaring Al Qaeda as defunct as Gimbels, Al Qaeda begged to differ:

He could have breezed through security at any airport.

A terrorist wearing the latest underwear bomb would not have been caught by the TSA’s most conscientious human screeners or its highest-tech fullbody scanners, experts told The Post yesterday. But the country ducked a disaster by employing an age-old weapon: a double agent.

With the help of American allies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the secret agent inserted himself into the terrorists’ secret inner circle, and became so trusted, the thugs accepted his offer to board a US-bound plane wearing the bomb.

Instead, the agent turned it over to the United States.

But experts said that as far as future suicide bomb attempts are concerned, current technology is not good enough to find nonmetallic explosive devices like the newest underwear bomb — despite Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s assurance that there was a “high likelihood’’ the bomber would have been stopped.
One top law-enforcement official insisted, “They would not have gotten him.”

This is one of those occasions when US security can proclaim a victory. Usually, it’s only the failures that make the news.

Which makes you wonder:

Federal investigators are conducting a probe into who leaked information about an al-Qaida plot in which an explosive device was to have been detonated on a U.S.-bound airline flight, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity about the leak investigation, which is just getting under way.

An anonymous official leaked information about a leak investigation? Typical.

The federal investigation is the latest move in an aggressive campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leaks, even as it has supported proposed legislation that would shield reporters from having to identify their sources. The administration has already brought at least six criminal cases against people for discussing government secrets with reporters, more than under any previous presidency.

…

A spokesman for the AP, Paul Colford, said in a statement that the news organization “acted carefully and with extreme deliberation in its reporting on the underwear bomb plot and its subsequent decision to publish.”

“As the AP has reported, we distributed our exclusive report on the underwear bomb only after officials assured us — on Monday — that their security concerns had been satisfied and we learned that the White House would announce the news the next day,” Colford said.

I’ve got an angle for the FBI to investigate. Given Team Obama’s penchant for boasting (you would have thought Obama himself had caught Osama, with nothing but a lariat and a Swiss Army knife), maybe they leaked the news. They announced it publicly the next day anyway, and it was a national security victory—but as was also true of the OBL raid, premature jubilation can be an embarrassing problem.

It’s not even truth—and they’re not even mewling:

he Daily Caller has obtained a scrapped sketch critical of President Barack Obama that was intended for airing at the opening of last night’s “Saturday Night Live” on NBC.

In the skit, President Obama addresses Americans soon after the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden — and he makes sure to remind viewers that all credit for the raid on the terrorist leader’s compound belongs to him.

“I hope you had a safe and joyous first anniversary of his killing,” the president, portrayed by Fred Armisen, begins.

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to be at home this year, as I had to fly to Afghanistan, to remind President Karzai that, exactly one year ago, we killed Osama bin Laden, and that the decision to do so was a gutsy one,” the president continues. “And was mine.”

The skit is hardly edgy. In fact, it was expected. After all, remember?

So why, dear readers, did SNL puss out?

Instead of the skit, NBC opted instead to air a parody of Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends.” That skit, which also featured Armisen, mocked Fox News personalities by portraying them as clueless partisans.

They had the right guy, they had the right skit—they just didn’t have the nuts. Useless idiots.

I think the nation had every right and reason to celebrate the whacking of Osama bin Lyin’-in-his-grave. Part of America’s charm, it seems to me, is the belittling of our enemies, in life and death. (My favorite example being the song going “Hitler was born with just one ball. Goering had two, but very small. Himmler had something sim’lar, and Goebbels had no balls at all.”)

But I did think it was unseemly for Obama to pose urinating on Osama’s body and hold up what was left of his head to put a White Sox cap on it (at least now he can name one of his favorite players on the team—hint: Harold Baines, Mr. President!).

But maybe the president had his reasons:

The Navy SEALS aren’t going to talk? Is she deaf?

In the wake of a warm conservative reception for a web video trashing the president for “spiking the football” on the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death, the conservative group Veterans for a Strong America plans to gather Navy SEALs and Special Forces operators to criticize the White House during the 2012 campaign.

“We’re looking to [put together] a coalition, to field SEALs and operators that want to come out publicly,” executive director of Veterans for a Strong America, Joel Arends, tells BuzzFeed. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with former SEALs and current SEALs. I’ve been talking to operators in the community. There is palatable discontent.”

…

Arends released his first major ad attacking the White House on May 1, titled “Why Does President Obama Take So Much Credit for Killing Bin Laden?”

The video, which took about ten days to produce, went viral. The ad has had more than 250,000 views on YouTube and he’s received some 4,000 emails.

Presidents earn credit and blame for the events that happen on their watch. But the question of why Obama took “so much” credit for putting two in the head of OBL is valid. They had to drag him off the golf course, for goodness sake; it’s not like he was reenacting some scene out of Platoon or Apocalypse Now, stripped to his waist, camouflaged, wearing night-vision goggles.

Will Fonzie successfully jump the shark? Find out after these messages.

If they had just let the anniversary happen, without the disquieting preening and posing, the credit would have accrued to them in justifiable measure. Now, there’s this sense of almost desperate politicization over every act and utterance of this administration. If I were Romney, I’d take stock. This is not the behavior of a confident administration.

Consider the source (Iran’s news agency), but it makes sense:

Russia is building up forces in the Caucasus region, preparing to protect its interests in case Israel attacks Iran with the help of the United States, the western media said.

GenerationalDynamics.com said the Russian military believes that when the US goes to war with Iran, it may deploy forces in friendly Georgia and warships in the Caspian Sea with the possible help of Azerbaijan.

Hence, Russia is deploying guided anti-ship missiles on the Caspian shore in preparation, and is forming an offensive spearhead force, heavily armed with modern long-range weapons, it added.

In the case of an Iranian war, it’s expected that the Russian spearhead will be ordered to strike south to prevent the presumed deployment of US bases in the region, to link up with the troops in Armenia, and take over the South Caucasus energy corridor along which Azeri, Turkmen and, other Caspian natural gas and oil may reach European markets, the website added.

By one swift military strike Russia may ensure control of all the Caucasus and the Caspian states, for the first time since the Soviet Union dissolved, it said.

Isn’t this how such events happen? Countries bet that other countries are too preoccupied, their leaders too timid, to deal with more than one challenge at a time. Existing alliances and treaties compel other countries to fall into line, and pretty soon it’s another world war (or regional one).

Whether you believe that Russia would see fit to take its territory if the US sees fit to take its territory—or that Russia would just take advantage of the inevitable chaos and Obama’s pusillanimity—it sure sounds plausible to me.

Everyone’s got something to hide, ‘cept for me and my monkey:

Where’s that damn Domino’s guy?

North Korea vowed Sunday to go ahead with plans to launch a long-range rocket, rejecting criticism in the West that it would scuttle recent diplomacy.

North Korea said Friday that it would fire an observation satellite into space on a new rocket as part of celebrations next month of the 100th anniversary of late President Kim Il Sung’s birth.

The announcement came about two weeks after the North agreed to suspend long-range missile tests and make nuclear concessions in exchange for much-needed food aid from the United States. The agreement was seen as a promising step toward improved relations between the two wartime enemies.

The U.S., Japan, Britain and others have urged North Korea to cancel the planned launch, calling it a threat to diplomatic efforts and warning that it would violate a U.N. ban on nuclear and missile activity because the same rocket technology can be used for long-range missiles.

China, North Korea’s main political and economic ally, also expressed rare concern Saturday and called on all parties to exercise restraint.

On Sunday, the North’s official news agency dismissed the criticism, saying it denied North Korea the right to the peaceful use of space.

“It is a sinister and deliberate anti-peace action” by hostile forces, the Korean Central News Agency said in an editorial. It said North Korea remained determined to carry out its plans.

Besides, North Korea has nothing to hide:

North Korea will invite foreign space experts and journalists to witness the launch of a satellite that the United States and other nations see as a provocation, the state-run Korean Central News Agency said Saturday.

The apparent attempt at North Korean transparency comes amid a flurry of condemnations of its planned launch because it uses ballistic missile technology.

That’s right, everybody come. We’ll make a picnic out of it. Only, it’ll have to be a potluck. Until the food aid arrives, the only thing North Korea can offer is dog a la dirt. Or dirt a la dog if supplies run even shorter.

After review, the victory of the West over Communism has been reversed. Soon, we’ll all be singing from the musical, “No, No, Nyet”:

With less than two weeks until elections, Russian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin pledged to spend 23 trillion rubles ($770 billion) on strengthening the country’s army over the next 10 years, the Kremlin’s biggest military spending spree since the Cold War.

Putin vowed to deliver an “effective and asymmetrical response” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s plan to cast a missile-defense shield over Europe while thoroughly overhauling the army’s ability to confront modern threats. If approved, the program would tack on more than $120 billion to a $650 billion defense-spending increase pushed through last year, even though a top official warned it may push Russia’s budget past its breaking point.

“It’s obvious we won’t be able to develop our international position, our economy or democratic institutions if we cannot defend Russia,” Putin wrote in an article for the government-owned Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper. “We must not tempt anyone with our weakness.”

Obama meanwhile proposes to pare the military down to a few Webelo packs, and our nuclear arsenal down to a couple of roman candles.

Wow, Iran! Who knew?

The prospect of conflict with Iran has eclipsed Afghanistan as the key national security issue with head-spinning speed. After years of bad blood and an international impasse over Iran’s disputed nuclear program, why does the threat of war seem so suddenly upon us?

Ooh-ooh, can I answer? Pick me!

The threat of war seems so suddenly upon us because your lot (the media) can’t see a damn thing with your heads inserted so far up Obama’s backside. The question isn’t if Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, but when they will complete it. Estimates differ only on the time, not the intention.

And what has our fearless leader been doing all this time?

To be fair, maybe the Stuxnet virus was at least partially our doing. Maybe we have something to do with the suspicious deaths of the Iranian nuclear scientists. Maybe we’re doing everything we can to avoid regional war, with global consequences.

And maybe monkeys might fly out of my a**.

Appearances suggest we believe this is Israel’s problem, and we want her to solve it through negotiation. Appearances can be wrong, and Obama has made a career out of false appearances (keeping Gitmo, drones, and other Bush tools in the war on terror). But appearances also suggest Iran is on a holy mission to acquire nuclear weapons, and has been for years. And they make no secret what they intend to do with them when they have them.

To wake up today and ask how it all happened overnight is asinine—and a dereliction of duty.

To President Obama, GI are only the first two letters of “Git the [bleep] away from me!”

After the talk, out of earshot from the soldiers and diplomats, he starts to complain. He starts to act very un-Obamalike, according to a U.S. embassy official who helped organize the trip in Baghdad.

He’s asked to go out to take a few more pictures with soldiers and embassy staffers. He’s asked to sign copies of his book. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers; he was complaining about it,” a State Department official tells me. “Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him.

Let’s just say the scales fell from my eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take fu**ing pictures with them?”

Well, it was a long flight, and you know how little leg room there is on those flights these days. He had probably already seen the movie.

Here’s a president who knows how to handle adoration—with both hands!

“Clinton” is the latest installment in PBS’s “American Experience” series and is set to air in February. A half-hour sneak peak is being previewed Thursday evening at the National Press Club.

The film covers Clinton’s life in its entirety — from his childhood in Arkansas to his first runs for office to his election as governor of Arkansas to his presidency — but almost a full hour of the documentary focuses on Clinton’s personal struggles with fidelity, coupled with harsh, blunt language from many of his colleagues and chroniclers. In fact, the film’s introduction, a quick summary of the entire documentary, opens with the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Eight minutes in, the topic of Gennifer Flowers surfaces.

“There was this growing skepticism in the press that this guy was just a big phony,” Time’s Joe Klein said, discussing Clinton’s reaction to the allegations. “He was too slick. He was too smooth. And he would lawyer answers to questions.”

When discussing the Clintons’ years in Arkansas, narrator Campbell Scott said, “Hillary had to deal with Bill’s constant womanizing.”

“You’ve got to understand, at one time, there [were] at least 25 women per day coming through there trying to find him,” sais Paul Fray, Clinton’s campaign manager during his unsuccessful congressional run in 1974. “I’d tell them, ‘He’s on the road, get out the door.’ But, Lord, it was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.”

…

“It’s almost as though there was a part of Bill Clinton that he had no control over,” said William Chafe, a history professor at Duke University.

Yeah, it was a little part that hangs to the left, I hear.

[Oh BTL, did you have to? Yeah, I did.]

Now that President Obama has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq, he’s got his sights set on Ass-stan:

The U.S. intelligence community says in a secret new assessment that the war in Afghanistan is mired in stalemate, and warns that security gains from an increase in American troops have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan, according to U.S. officials.

The sobering judgments, laid out in a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed last month and delivered to the White House, appeared at odds with recent optimistic statements by Pentagon officials and have deepened divisions between U.S. intelligence agencies and American military commanders about progress in the decade-old war.

The detailed document, known as an NIE, runs more than 100 pages and represents the consensus view of the CIA and 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies. Similar in tone to an NIE prepared a year ago, it challenges the Pentagon’s claim to have achieved lasting security gains in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, said U.S. officials who have read or been briefed on its contents.

As you can tell, it’s not really Obama who’s consigning Ass-stan to the ash-heap of history (come to think of it, ash-heap would be an improvement), it’s the Ass-stanis themselves. Still, this grim assessment doesn’t jibe with these plans:

[T]he NIE says the overall difficulties could jeopardize the Obama administration’s plans to withdraw most U.S. troops and hand over responsibility for the war to the Afghan government by 2014.

As regular readers might know, I’m done with the place. We had a reason to depose the Taliban and root out Al Qaeda, and we tried to leave the people with a country they could run if they chose to. We sure spilled a lot of blood, theirs and ours, in trying. But what’s the effing point now?

As a candidate, Obama talked about taking the war to Pakistan, and that’s one promise he’s kept: he took out Osama in the shadow of Pakistan’s West Point, and hasn’t been shy of parking Predator drones over Peshawar. The NIE says the Taliban still take refuge in Pakistan, so I suppose Obama could decide to expand operations there…

But I’m not being serious. He’ll find some weasely way of declaring victory and going home.

Only this time, I’ll be in full agreement. Iraq was won (thank you, President Bush) and worth keeping. Ass-stan never was and never was. Unlike the Marine sniper team (see below), I wouldn’t cross the Khyber Pass to p*ss on the place.