“There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits…and investing in job creation and economic growth,” President Obama said last week. “This is a false choice.” During the same speech, he asked his audience to “let me just be clear” that his administration, having racked up the biggest budget deficits ever, is embracing fiscal responsibility, as reflected in his vow that “health insurance reform” will not increase the deficit “by one dime.”
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For connoisseurs of Obama-speak, the address featured a trifecta, combining three of his favorite rhetorical tropes. There was the vague reference to “those who” question his agenda, the “false choice” they use to deceive the public, and the determination to “be clear” and forthright, in contrast with those dishonest naysayers. These devices are useful as signals that the president is about to mislead us.
In comparison to the approval ratings for modern elected presidents in December of their first year in office, Obama’s standing is the worst, though he’s close to Ronald Reagan. In December 1981, Reagan’s approval rating was also 49%, though his disapproval rating was a bit lower, 41%.
Wonder how our “smart power” people are going to ignore this:
Iran worked on testing a key component of a nuclear bomb as recently as 2007, a British newspaper said on Monday, a finding which if proven would be at odds with Iran’s assertion its nuclear work is for civilian use.
Citing a confidential Iranian technical document, The Times of London described a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the part of an atomic bomb that sets off an explosion. The Times said the device had no civilian use.
Something of the same is happening with our President. He is experiencing the sharpest popularity decline in the history of first-year administrations. The problem is not just that he inherited a bad economy; Reagan did too. Or that the war in Afghanistan heats up, since it is not nearly as bad as the mess Nixon inherited in Vietnam.
Instead, after 11 months there has emerged a series of bothersome incidents that the public has come to associate with Obama, both the man and his philosophies. Some are major policy issues; others trivial acts of no cosmic importance. None in themselves matter all that much. Each gaffe or mistake was contextualized and mended, or attended to by Robert Gibbs. Some are Obama’s fault; others the work of associates. Sometimes mere chance is the culprit.
I know Bush had his own list of catastrophes; other Presidents did as well. Again, my point is not trying to adjudicate relative culpability, but rather just to remind us all how and why Obama dived over 20 points in the polls in just 11 months—and his speeches transformed from inspirational to caricatures.
In short, taken together, after nearly a year, these fissures have nearly ruined the once pretty texture of the Obama administration, and almost rendered it incapable of effective governance.
Here is a random selection. I provide no chronology or theme. Nor do I judge the relative importance of any one incident. The point, again, is only that each was a fissure, some small, some major—all were glued over. The result is that now the public understands that its china presidency is fragile and held together by mere glue.
Here it goes:
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Constant apologies abroad for everything from slavery to Hiroshima
Bows to Saudi royalty, the Japanese emperor, and Chinese autocrats
The on-again/off-again Guantanamo shut-down mess
The fight with the former CIA directors
The public show trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
The reach out to Ahmadinejad Castro, Chavez, and assorted thugs
Nevadans need to think long and hard about whether we wish to endure another six years of Harry Reid. And worse, his son, Rory, for four in Carson City?
Our founders wrote the Constitution to limit the power of Congress to avoid precisely this kind of outcome. When elected officials tell their serfs subjects constituents that Congress has the power to write any kind of laws they want, it exemplifies the founders’ most basic fear of centralized, federal governments. They knew that serfdom could come through the ballot box, and they’re about to be proven prescient.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iran has sentenced five people to death over the unrest that followed the country’s disputed June presidential election, state television reported Tuesday.At least three others caught up in the turmoil have received death sentences previously.
Iran began a mass trial in August of prominent opposition figures and activists, accusing them of a range of charges from rioting to spying and plotting what authorities have called a “soft revolution” to topple the country’s Islamic rulers.
The opposition led massive street protests and clashed with security forces in the weeks following the disputed June 12 presidential election. The opposition claimed fraud after election authorities declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of a second term and their anger unleashed the most serious internal unrest in Iran in the 30 years since the Islamic Revolution.
The Iranian people thank you for your support, Mr. Obama. They are happy to know you don’t give a crap about promoting liberty and freedom for those oppressed by religious nut-job dictators.
At least they know that now…
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. – Dwight David Eisenhower
President Obama and his merry band of Statists idiots have failed. They have failed – again and again, and it will continue.
At some point you chowder-heads who voted for this amateur are going to see the damage he is doing to the country. He’s created more debt than EVERY PRESIDENT WHO CAME BEFORE HIM COMBINED.
I don’t expect you O-bots to understand the damage he is doing to our military, maybe because you don’t care. I don’t know.
I know the president doesn’t really care about our service men and women and their mission. He doesn’t care the same way other presidents cared about our men and women in uniform at home or abroad. He showed it before the campaign. He pretended to be something else during the campaign. He has faked and postured his way from Dover to Arlington to Fort Hood attempting to convince the nation that he has their best interests in mind and supports their mission.
And now as ‘His Ditherness’ struggles to find the lint in his bellybutton, our finest, our bravest, our most patriotic sit, wait, bleed, and die while the “smart power” you voted in as your new ‘American Idol’ makes a f’ing decision about the “necessary war”, the central front on the War on Terror, that he chided President Bush and John McCain over. You know the war that Candidate Obama thought was sooo important:
“His plan comes up short. There’s not enough troops, not enough resources and not enough urgency. What President Bush and Senator McCain don’t understand is that the central front in the War on Terror is not in Iraq and never was. The central front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the terrorists who hit us on 9-11 are still plotting attacks seven years later.”
I am sure the ripples of HOPE® and CHANGE® are reaching our troops here and across the ocean in the dusty military posts, forts, and bases knowing that Barack Hussein Obama – mmm, mmm, mmm – is on his way to save the day with his own plan.
Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence, the Army said Friday…
Though findings of two new battlefield surveys are similar in several ways to the last ones taken in 2007, they come at a time of intense scrutiny on Afghanistan as President Barack Obama struggles to craft a new war strategy and planned troop buildup.
Obama “struggles” because he has no f’ing backbone and no clue about fighting for anything more than a community center or the Olympic Games.
He struggles because he doesn’t trust his military leaders. The people in our country who have led lives of substance, sacrifice, and purpose for decades already.
Obama’s never done anything of substance beyond be a lawyer and politician – two of the lowest professions possible falling in right next to prostitutes and thieves, but wait, I repeat myself.
It takes more to be a member of today’s military and face the uncertainties of war than it does to demagogue to the likes of SEIU, ACORN, Organizing for America, Egyptians, Germans, and guilty white Americans, when you yourself have stated you have not done anything of measure.
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So, it comes as no surprise our Commander-in-Chief is already looking to run away instead of fighting against evil ruthless radical religious zealots who torture and terrorize innocents in the name of Allah:
President Barack Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan will include a plan for “how we’re going to get folks out” after a secure environment can be passed to the Afghan government, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday.
“We have been there for eight years. And we’re not going to be there forever,” Gibbs said. “It’s important to fully examine not just how we’re going to get folks in but how we’re going to get folks out.”
Gibbs spoke en route to Alaska, where the president stopped at an Air Force base in Anchorage before traveling on to Tokyo for his maiden trip to Asia, which will take him to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea.
The president “has asked for, and will want, benchmarks to evaluate our progress,” Gibbs said. “That’s part of his desire to get a sense of where we are rather than committing to an open-ended conflict.”
But whatever the reason, this man is making a mockery of our country and our military. He is destroying our economy. He is destroying our way of life. He is rewarding failure and taking away our liberty. He is destroying 230+ years of real human progress. And he intended to do it ever since he fell in with the pathetic refuse that surrounds him.
Osama bin Laden was right when he called the America a “Paper Tiger” in his declaration of war against our nation, he knew more about the majority of us than we would like to believe.
The impressionable useful idiots in our nation who believe HOPE® and CHANGE® are actually something more than novelty.
As long as the Democrats, Statists, Liberals, Progressives, and sheep of this nation lead us, a paper tiger is all we will be and we will continue our decline because of them.
Democrats have never been good at going after the important threat:
November 7, 2009
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DROP THE BALL: “While DHS was busy putting tea parties and anyone who dares fly the official military Gadsen flag on the domestic terrorist watch list, a real terrorist was spouting off online, glorifying suicide bombings and our mission in Iraq. I mean, I’m sure if I drink enough I might be able to understand the perception that a bunch of middle-class people peacefully dissenting with certain Washington policies are way more dangerous than a dude who talked about terrorist stuff on social sites and had gotten authorities’ attention six months ago.”
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “Ah, but those middle class protesters are a threat to politicians’ power. Terrorists are just a threat to their constituents’ lives. See the difference?” Such a cynic.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Washington Post: Officials may not have heeded warning signs. “Law enforcement officials also faced questions about whether they had missed possible warning signs. Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.” Too busy worrying about Glenn Beck viewers, military veterans, and Tea Party organizers, I guess.
The White House says that Republican wins in two governors’ races were not referendums on the president.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday that voters went to the polls in Virginia and New Jersey to work through “very local issues that didn’t involve the president.” The presidential spokesman said voters were concerned about the economy.
“I don’t think the president needed an election or an exit poll to come to that conclusion,” Gibbs said.
Hundreds of tons of weaponry, ten times the size of the Karine A shipment of 2002, were seized in an overnight raid Tuesday by the Israeli navy, some 100 nautical miles west of Israel, officials said. The ship seized was sailing under an Antiguan flag.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says…
Big Hollywood has already posted a couple disturbing videos of young school children singing/speaking praises to President Obama, but when eleven more dropped in our email box it came as quite a shock. What seemed like an aberration now appears to be a troubling pattern.
Since late this summer General Stanley McChrystal has been asking for more troops for Afghanistan lest we lose the war. Early last month those sentiments were expressed in a formal request for 40,000 additional troops. General Patraeus and Secretary of Defense Gates have publicly endorsed Gen. McChrystal’s request.
Since that time you have been considering whether or not to provide those troops and whether or not the use of those troops in a counter-insurgency strategy — similar to that employed in Iraq — is wise or not. If press reports are to be believed, then top members of your administration have serious doubts as to whether or not the strategy as outlined by Gen. McChrystal and endorsed by Gen. Patraeus and Sec. Gates will work.
Your inaction on this request speaks volumes and one can only draw one logical inference from it: you do not trust the judgment of Gen. Patraeus, Sec. Gates, or Gen. McChrystal.
If you trusted their expertise, then you would have immediately begun to implement their strategy.
Since it is glaringly obvious that you do not trust the judgment of your top commanders in the field or of your own Sec. of Defense, then why don’t you fire them?
If they are so wrong, then they should be fired.
Personally, I don’t think Obama has the stones in his shorts to fire anyone (his wife on the other hand…).
Obama has never had to do anything truly important that included personal responsibility and risk, that is why he is unable to make decisions.
It’s ‘Petraeus’ just in case your internal spellcheck rang.
As a military brat, a Marine, and a civilian I have always distrusted the Democrat Party and their values.
Once again, they prove just how f’d up their priorities are:
Twice as many Democrats say health care reform should be President Obama’s top priority as say the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be his top concern, according to a new Gallup poll.
Gallup asked people this question: “Which of the following should be Barack Obama’s top priority as president — the economy, health care, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy, the federal budget deficit, or something else…?”
The numbers help explain Obama’s slowness in reaching a decision on what to do in Afghanistan. There simply aren’t very many people in the president’s party who believe the war should be his top priority — just half as many as those who say health care should be his top concern. When it comes to pressure for a decision coming from his own party, there just isn’t much.
When I see numbers like that I don’t see an explanation of Obama’s slowness. I see their attitude towards our military, their sacrifices and the what they really believe when it comes to helping others.
The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander in chief look like a weenie – like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.
The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.
Suppose this year’s Nobel Peace Prize had gone to the scores of Iranians now on trial for having protested the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last June. For the three defendants who were sentenced to death over the weekend, a Nobel might have made all the difference in the nick of time. At a minimum, it could have validated their struggle.
Our friends in Oslo had a different idea, which means that the fate of the three defendants—known officially by their initials M.Z., A.P. and N.A.—are at the mercy of Iran’s appellate and supreme courts. It’s a slender hope in a country that is the leading executioner of juveniles, and whose leaders have only become more truculent toward dissenters since the election.
Hope is also slender because the Obama Administration has downplayed human rights in Iran as it pursues a negotiated nuclear settlement with the Ahmadinejad government. Without explanation, the State Department this month pulled funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, a New Haven, Connecticut outfit that has been investigating the plight of those Iranians now in the dock, including Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh and Newsweek reporter Maziar Bahari.
In his Rose Garden remarks about the Nobel, President Obama spoke about “the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard even in the face of beatings and bullets.” The elliptical reference is almost certainly to 27-year old Neda Agha-Sultan, whose murder last June by one of Ahmadinejad’s goon squads was captured on a video seen around the world. We hope the President keeps in mind that the same people whose good faith he now seeks in negotiations were her killers.
Why does the White House want the military to keep quiet about Iranian connections to the Taliban? They want to keep enough political support in the US for direct talks with the mullahs. That support will evaporate if the military starts drawing clear connections between Tehran and the Taliban, especially with al-Qaeda as its ally in Pakistan.
Iran was at war with the US in Iraq. They are at war with us in Afghanistan. Iran does nothing but preach our demise and continues to flaunt their “peaceful” nuclear program in the face of the world.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.
The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad’s birthplace, and the name derives from “weaver of the Sabour”, the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.
Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.
Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: “This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad’s background explains a lot about him.
“Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith.
“By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society.”
The Austrian, Adolf Hitler, had an inferiority complex too being surrounded by Germans. Napoleon was a Corsican among “mainland” French.
Outsiders tend to feel the need to overcompensate. You see it in politicians everywhere.
Wonder what this will do to Ahmadinejad? piss him off? embarrass? humiliate?
The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health-care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.
Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health-care legislation — “Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town . . . ” — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.
Obama lost credibility with his deadline-that-never-was, and now he threatens to lose some more with his posturing toward Iran. He has gotten into a demeaning dialogue with Ahmadinejad, an accomplished liar. (The next day, the Iranian used a news conference to counter Obama and, days later, Iran tested some intermediate-range missiles.) Obama is our version of a Supreme Leader, not given to making idle threats, setting idle deadlines, reversing course on momentous issues, creating a TV crisis where none existed or, unbelievably, pitching Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. Obama’s the president. Time he understood that.
It is not hard to see why a standing ovation awaits the president at Turtle Bay. Obama’s popularity at the UN boils down essentially to his willingness to downplay American global power. He is the first American president who has made an art form out of apologizing for the United States, which he has done on numerous occasions on foreign soil, from Strasbourg to Cairo. The Obama mantra appears to be – ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do to atone for your country. This is a message that goes down very well in a world that is still seething with anti-Americanism.
Sigh, but since we don’t have a leader with this moral clarity and a set of stones in his slacks, we will have to look to the north to remind us that there are some who do not feel the need to go to the UN to appease and apologize.
Iran’s sole Simorgh AWACS aircraft was lost during a military parade Sept. 22, one of two Iranian military aircraft that crashed in Tehran while participating in a display to mark the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.
The Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force operated a single Simorgh, a former Iraqi Air Force Adnan. The Adnan AWACS was in turn a modification of a Soviet-built Ilyushin Il-76 transport.
The Simorgh collided with one of the Air Force’s Northrop F-5E Tiger II fighters over the area of the Imam Khomeyni Shrine, southern Tehran. According to eyewitnesses, the crash occurred immediately after the parade. Apparently, no mayday call was issued.
I hope the MOSSAD had something to do with it in preparation of doing what the UN and the international community has failed to do – end Iranian nuclear weapons development.
Month and a half after plan to blow up tallest skyscraper in world exposed, 45 more suspects arrested in addition to eight arrested when plot unraveled. Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese among those detained. Iran suspected to be mastermind behind plot
The defense apparatus in the United Arab Emirates arrested 45 suspects, most of them Palestinian and Lebanese, after the plot to blow up Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower) was uncovered. Dubai Tower, currently under construction, is the tallest building in the world.
The current wave of arrests adds to the eight other suspects detained immediately after the plot was revealed one and a half months ago. The detainees were apparently sent as agents of Iran.
Kuwaiti newspaper, al-Jareeda, reported a month and a half ago that UAE security officials arrested “an armed network affiliated with one of the countries in the region that operated on Ras al-Khaimah.” Dubai was apparently hesitant to say so explicitly, but the implication was towards Iran as the responsible party for the terror network.
Ras al-Khaimah was is the northern-most emirate in the United Arab Emirates and borders the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, both of which run parallel to Iran.
The Kuwaiti newspaper reported that of the eight detainees, two are UAE citizens and the rest are Syrians and Palestinians. They were transferred to Abu Dhabi for investigation under a strict media blackout. According to the report, UAE officials found a weapons cache in a house in which the detainees were staying. One of the detainees with UAE citizenship works in the pharmaceutical industry, and the other UAE citizen is “a member of a well-known family in Abu Dhabi.”
Officials connected to the case reported to Ynet that some of the detainees said in the investigation that they plotted to crash a plane into the Burj Dubai. The plan apparently was to carry out the attack close to the inauguration of the building upon its completion at the end of 2009. According to these same sources, it was possible that the plane would await them in an unofficial airfield in Iran.
Ynet has learned that the UAE has embarked upon an additional wave of arrests as the case has developed. Recently, 45 more suspects were arrested. Most of the detainees in this round of arrests are Lebanese and Palestinian with various citizenships. A majority of them were expelled from the country. The UAE has denied these allegations.
Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) — The United Arab Emirates has seized a ship carrying North Korean weapons bound for Iran, in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, diplomats said.The UAE two weeks ago notified the UN Security Council of the seizure, according to the diplomats, who spoke on condition they aren’t named because the communication hasn’t been made public.
The council committee that monitors enforcement of UN sanctions against North Korea wrote a letter to Iran asking for an explanation and one to the UAE expressing appreciation for the cooperation, the envoys said. No response has been received or further action taken, they said.
The weapons seized on Aug. 14 included rocket launchers, detonators, munitions and ammunition for rocket-propelled grenades, they said. The ship, called the ANL-Australia, was Australian-owned and flying a Bahamas flag.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." - The 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution
