► Show Top 10 Hot Links

Posts Tagged ‘Mark Steyn’

« Older Entries

Major Hasan is honest about himself; why aren’t we?

by Mojambo ( 132 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Taliban at August 12th, 2013 - 4:00 pm

Funny in a pathetic sort of way how the Obama regime twists itself into pretzels in order to avoid saying “Islamic terrorism”.

by Mark Steyn

On December 7, 1941, the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked. Three years, eight months, and eight days later, the Japanese surrendered. These days, America’s military moves at a more leisurely pace. On November 5, 2009, another U.S. base, Fort Hood, was attacked — by one man standing on a table, screaming “Allahu akbar!” and opening fire. Three years, nine months, and one day later, his court-martial finally got under way.

The intervening third-of-a-decade-and-more has apparently been taken up by such vital legal questions as the fullness of beard Major Hasan is permitted to sport in court. This is not a joke: See “Judge Ousted in Fort Hood Shooting Case amid Beard Debacle” (CBS News). Army regulations require soldiers to be clean-shaven. The judge, Colonel Gregory Gross, ruled Hasan’s beard in contempt, fined him $1,000, and said he would be forcibly shaved if he showed up that hirsute next time. At which point Hasan went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, which ruled that Colonel Gross’s pogonophobia raised questions about his impartiality, and removed him. [……..]

The U.S. Army seems disinclined to hold anything against him, especially the 13 corpses plus an unborn baby. Major Hasan fired his lawyers, presumably because they were trying to get him off — on the grounds that he’d had a Twinkie beforehand, or his beard don’t fit so you must acquit, or some such. As a self-respecting jihadist, Major Hasan quite reasonably resented being portrayed as just another all-American loon gone postal. So he sacked his defense team, only to have the court appoint a standby defense team just in case there were any arcane precedents and obscure case law he needed clarification on. I know that’s the way your big-time F. Lee Bailey types would play it, but it doesn’t seem to be Major Hasan’s style. On the very first day of the trial, he stood up and told the jury that “the evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter.” Later, in one of his few courtroom interventions, he insisted that it be put on the record that “the alleged murder weapon” was, in fact, his.  […….]

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.

Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous.  […….]

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban. Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.” The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse. After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.” And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.

Like I said, we think he’s nuts; he thinks we’re nuts. Right now, there’s a petition on the Internet seeking to persuade the United States government to reclassify Hasan’s “workplace violence” as an act of terror. There are practical consequences to this: The victims, shot by an avowed enemy combatant in an act of war, are currently ineligible for Purple Hearts. The Pentagon insists the dead and wounded must be dishonored in death because to give them any awards for their sacrifice would prejudice Major Hasan’s trial and make it less likely that he could be convicted.

Hence, the Internet petition. Linking to it from their homepage, my colleagues at National Review Online promoted it with the tag:   [……]

That’s not true — and actually it’s grossly unfair to Major Hasan. He’s admirably upfront about who and what he is — a “Soldier of Allah,” as he put on his business card. On Tuesday, he admitted he was a traitor who had crossed over from “the bad side” (America’s) to “the good side” (Islam’s). […………]He helpfully informs us that that’s his gun. In this week’s one-minute statement, he spoke more honestly and made more sense than Obama, Gates, Casey, the Armed Forces Court of Appeals, two judges, the prosecution and defense lawyers, and mountains of bureaucratic reports and media coverage put together.

But poor old Hasan can say “Yup, I did it” all he wants; what does he know?

Unlike the Zimmerman trial, Major Hasan’s has not excited the attention of the media. Yet it is far more symbolic of the state of America than the Trayvon Martin case, in which superannuated race hucksters attempted to impose a half-century-old moth-eaten Klan hood on a guy who’s a virtual one-man melting pot. The response to Nidal Hasan helps explain why, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, this war is being lost — because it cannot be won because, increasingly, it cannot even be acknowledged. Which helps explain why it now takes the U.S. military longer to prosecute a case of “workplace violence” than it did to win World War Two.

Read the rest –  Know thine enemy

Tags: ,
Posted in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Islamic Terrorism, Islamists, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Taliban | 132 Comments »

Unstable truce with the Axis of Crazy; and America’s support for Israel at all time high

by Mojambo ( 48 Comments › )
Filed under Democratic Party, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Libya, Libya, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Turkey at March 18th, 2013 - 11:30 am

I love Rand Paul’s reference to John McCain and Miss Lindsey Graham being “stale and moss covered”.

hat tip – Powerline

by Mark Steyn

I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in Taken 2, in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter’s new boyfriend. “Don’t shoot this one, Dad,” she cautions. “I really like him.” And they all have a good chuckle over it. In Die Hard 5 or whatever we’re up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians.  […….]

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson’s and Bruce Willis’s obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in Taken 2 was Neeson’s advice to his daughter in an emergency: “Go to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be safe there.” It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological badassery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don’t worry.  […….]

Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Senator Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster — questioning drone assassinations on Americans in America — broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations on Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations on anyone, nor even to questioning the “war on terror” or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a “crime against humanity” and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town — and those are just our “allies.” [……..] There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

And, to be fair, even Dick Cheney isn’t Dick Cheney, at least in the sense that Dick Cheney isn’t Darth Vader. After a decade of inconclusive war, Americans are understandably receptive to the notion that it’s time to “come home.” Thus, newly appointed defense secretary Chuck Hagel faces, in the words of the Associated Press, “the jarring difficulties of shutting down a war in a country still racked by violence.” “Shutting down”? Yes, the defense secretary is now doing to the Afghan War what Romney’s Bain Capital did to midwestern factories. […….] Some personnel can be reassigned, but thousands of EU nation-building consultants, cousins of Hamid Karzai, and tribal pederasts enjoying free Viagra from Washington (seriously) may have to be laid off.

“Shutting down” Afghan wars can be a tricky business, as the British discovered during their 1842 retreat from Kabul, when the locals offered them “safe passage” and then proceeded to massacre all 4,500 troops plus 12,000 wives, children, and attendant locals, leaving only Dr. William Brydon and his horse to make it through to Jalalabad. His mount died upon arrival; Dr. Brydon lived to tell the tale, albeit missing part of his skull, sheared off by a Pashtun tribesman.
No doubt things will go better this time. Two more Americans died this week at the hands of one of their Afghan “allies,” a man trained, paid, and armed by the United States. If you slaughter thousands, you can still just about get our attention, as Mullah Omar discovered after 9/11. But the slow bleeding of two deaths here, three deaths there, week after week after week takes a psychological toll, rotting out purpose and strategy. So in Washington this will be a war we “shut down”; in Kandahar and beyond, it will be a war we lost.

As one war “shuts down,” are any others likely to open up? This week Obama told Israel’s Channel 2 TV that “we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon.” So Tehran, fresh from playing the bad guys in Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning blockbuster, is going nuclear? Hey, relax, says the president: “I continue to keep all options on the table.”[……..] The best option would be if the Israelis just got on with it, absolving everyone else from a tough decision and simultaneously affording them the deliciously irresistible frisson of denouncing the Zionists for their grossly disproportionate response.

More likely, Iran will be permitted to go nuclear — followed shortly thereafter by Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and anyone else who dislikes being conscripted under the Shia Persian nuclear umbrella. North Korea and Pakistan both anticipate a lively export market.

Pakistan has a nominal per capita GDP of about $1,200, with North Korea’s barely detectable. By comparison Sweden’s is about $58,000 and the Netherlands’ about $50,000. But North Korea is a nuclear power and the Netherlands isn’t, and has no plans to become one, and any party so minded to propose otherwise would soon find itself out of power. […….]

Perhaps this improbable division will hold. Perhaps the Axis of Crazy will be content just to jostle among itself leaving the Axis of Torpor to fret about lowering the retirement age to 48 and mandatory transgendered bathrooms and other pressing public-policy priorities. But, even under such an inherently unstable truce, the American position and the wider global economy would deteriorate.

As the CPAC crowd suggested, there are takers on the right for the Rand Paul position. There are many on the left for Obama’s drone-alone definition of great power. But there are ever fewer takers for a money-no-object global hegemon that spends 46 percent of the world’s military budget and can’t impress its will on a bunch of inbred goatherds. A broker America needs to learn to do more with less, and to rediscover the cold calculation of national interest rather than waging war as the world’s largest NGO. In dismissing Paul as a “wacko bird,” John McCain and Lindsey Graham assume that the too-big-to-fail status quo is forever. It’s not; it’s already over.

Read the rest – The Axis of Torpor

Despite The New York Times, Barack Obama, Chuck Hagel, 60 Minutes, CNN, The Washington Post , and Little Green Balls – American sympathy towards Israel remains overwhelming.

by Haviv Rettig Gur

Americans’ sympathy for Israel is at a 22-year high, according to Gallup figures released on Friday, just five days ahead of Barack Obama’s first visit to Israel as president.

In figures gleaned from the polling organization’s early February World Affairs poll, 64 percent of Americans say their sympathies “in the Middle East situation” – Gallup’s term for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace talks – lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians. Just 12% favor the Palestinians.

Nearly one-quarter, or 23%, said their sympathies lie with both parties, neither, or had no opinion.

The figures mark a 22-year high in sympathy for Israel. The last Gallup poll that showed 64% sympathy came in 1991, at the height of the First Gulf War and in the midst of the first intifada.

Sympathy for Israel then declined through the 1990’s, though it remained comfortably ahead of sympathy figures for Palestinians. The number who said they favored Israel reached a low point of 38% in 1997, during the first government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the early 2000′s, Americans’ sympathy for Israel saw turbulent spikes and drops as US public opinion responded to successive terror attacks on Israel’s cities and the subsequent Israeli military incursions that drew civilian casualties.

[……..]

The figures are bad news for the Palestinians, as sympathy for their side remained relatively steady — and low — throughout the past three decades, hovering between a high of 20% and a low of 7% since 1988.

Even in periods when many Americans stopped saying they favored Israel in the conflict, most did not switch to the Palestinians, but rather said they favored neither side.

Sympathy for Israel among respondents aged 18-34 is at 55%, compared to 71% among those over 55. But both groups favor the Palestinians in equal measure, at just 12%.

“Younger Americans show less favoritism toward Israel than middle-aged adults and, in particular, seniors; however, they are no more likely to favor the Palestinians,” Gallup notes. Younger Americans “are simply less anchored about whom they favor.”

The poll also found that “Palestinians receive the highest sympathy from Democrats, liberals, and postgraduates, but even among these, support tops off at 24%.”

Self-described “liberals” show the highest level of sympathy toward the Palestinians — 24%, compared to 51% for Israel — while 19% of Democrats are partial toward the Palestinians, and 55% toward Israel. Sympathy for Palestinians is at just 5% among both Republicans and self-described “conservatives.”

Read the rest – American’s sympathy for Israel at 22 year high

Tags: , ,
Posted in Democratic Party, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Libya, Libya, Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Turkey | 48 Comments »

Senate Republicans arm the Muslim Brotherhood; no wonder Tehran supports Hagel; and reports Israel hit a biological weapons factory near Damascus

by Mojambo ( 104 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, Egypt, Hezballah, IDF, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Republican Party, Sharia (Islamic Law), Syria at February 4th, 2013 - 7:00 am

I cannot say that I  am totally surprised. Republicans and Democrats have been in the pocket of the House of Saud ever since 1944. God Bless Rand Paul.

hat tip for all three articles – Powerline

by Andrew C. McCarthy

I’m done grumbling about how President Obama is empowering America’s enemies. After all, it is not just Obama. When it comes to abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, Republicans are right there with him.

Not all of them, of course. This week, for example, Senator Rand Paul proposed an amendment that would have prohibited our government from transferring F-16 aircraft and Abrams tanks to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government. This lunatic plan is not just an Obama initiative. It is also a GOP brainstorm — of a piece with 2011’s Libya debacle, in which Republican leaders cheered as Obama, upon consulting with the Arab League, ignored Congress and levied war on behalf of the very jihadists who, quite predictably, have since raided Qaddafi’s arsenal, besieged northern Africa, and massacred Americans in Benghazi.

A few weeks back, the John McCain & Lindsey Graham roadshow made its way to Brotherhood Central in Cairo, with newcomer Kelly Ayotte in tow. Senator Ayotte appears to have filled the void created by Joe Lieberman’s retirement — after all, when you have Republicans, who needs another Democrat? The former trio is best remembered for its Tripoli triumph of late 2009, when the three kicked back in the Qaddafi compound and toasted our newly cozy relations with the dictator. The bipartisan solons then winged their way home in time to second the Obama State Department’s increase in funding for the Libyan dictator’s regime. After all, they reasoned, Qaddafi was our hedge against Libya’s jihadists. As is their wont, though, the solons soon dazzled us with a 180, suddenly deciding that what we really needed to do was back Libya’s jihadists in their war against Qaddafi. The rest, as they say in Mali, is history.

So the GOP brain trust now brings this Midas touch to Egypt, rallying behind Obama’s cozy relations with the new “Islamic democracy.”  […….]

Senator Paul, by contrast, has three ideas that seem positively batty to the McCain gang. First, he thinks that American foreign policy ought to be premised on American national interests, not on the shifting notions of “global stability” popular at the Wilson School and the Council on Foreign Relations. Second, he suggests that when we give aid and arms to anti-American Islamists, bad things tend to happen to America. Finally, Paul believes the foundation of American foreign policy is, of all quaint things, the United States Constitution. The Framers gave Congress not merely the authority but the duty to thwart executive excess. On the international stage, that primarily means the power of the purse, which enables the people’s representatives to defund such madness as the arming of Islamic supremacists.

So Senator Paul tried to stop weapons transfer. His amendment, however, was defeated 79–19, because 23 Republican senators opted to follow the lead of McCain, Graham, and Ayotte. They joined all Senate Democrats (and a couple of nominal “independents” who are, in effect, Democrats) in voting to “table” the Paul Amendment. “Tabling” is a bit of procedural chicanery, allowing senators to defeat Paul’s amendment yet pretend to the folks back home that they didn’t actually vote “against” it.

Don’t be fooled. The choice here was simple: Stand with the Muslim Brotherhood or stand with the American people. Nearly two-thirds of Senate Republicans went with the Brothers.

Let’s be clear about whom Republicans have voted to arm. In late 2010, as I detail in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, Mohammed Badi, head of the Muslim Brotherhood, called for violent jihad against the United States and Israel. The “Supreme Guide” gleefully added, “The United States is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise.” The Brotherhood took pains to post this speech on its Arabic-language website, reflecting its official position.

Badi’s sentiments would have been no surprise to anyone who had been paying attention. It had not been long, after all, since the Holy Land Foundation trial, in which the Justice Department proved that the Brotherhood regards the core mission of its U.S.-based affiliates (such organizations as CAIR, the Muslim Students Association, and the Islamic Society of North America) to be, as the Brothers themselves put it, “a grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within” by “sabotage.” [……..]

Mohamed Morsi, a leading Brotherhood official, became Egypt’s president last summer — just as his close associate, the aforementioned Supreme Guide, was railing that all Muslims, including rulers, must “wage jihad in Allah’s way” in order to reverse the “usurpation” of Palestine by the “murdering Zionist criminals.” In his very first public pronouncement after winning the presidency, Morsi called for the United States to release Omar Abdel Rahman. That would be the “Blind Sheikh,” who is serving a life sentence for terrorism convictions, and who has been credited by Osama bin Laden with issuing the fatwa that approved the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qaeda quite sensibly gleaned that fatwa from this statement about Americans that Abdel Rahman made following his conviction:

Muslims everywhere . . . dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, . . . shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.

In addition to calling for the Blind Sheikh’s return to Egypt, where such sentiments are common, Morsi has directed the release of many terrorists who had been incarcerated during President Hosni Mubarak’s tenure — Mubarak having had a close counterterrorism partnership with the United States. Morsi further failed to protect the American embassy from being overrun by Islamist rioters.  [……..]

Prior to his election, Morsi promised that his top imperative would be the imposition of sharia, Islam’s totalitarian legal code and societal framework. He has been true to his word, recently orchestrating the imposition of a new sharia constitution — the heavy-handed gambit that has horrified minorities and sent Egypt reeling into its latest chaos. Sharia constitutions are apparently fine with Senator McCain these days, but as we saw in his vertiginous positions on Qaddafi, the GOP’s guru of choice is not exactly a model of consistency on this point.

In a 2011 interview with Der Spiegel, the senator declared, quite correctly, that “sharia law . . . in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned.” Thus McCain then insisted that the sharia-driven Brotherhood — which he accurately described as “a radical group” that “has been involved with other terrorist organizations” — “should be specifically excluded from any transition government” in Egypt.  […….]

Meanwhile, under Morsi’s leadership, Egypt is seeing the widespread persecution of Christians and other religious minorities. In many areas, police and Islamist vigilantes now enforce sharia standards on the streets, just as they do in Saudi Arabia and Iran. And recordings recently surfaced of Morsi calling Jews the “descendants of apes and pigs” — “blood-suckers” for whom Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred,” including “hatred . . . for all those who support them.” [Memo to Republicans: “Those who support them” refers to . . . the American people.]

I could go on, but as Beltway supporters of America-hating Islamists like to say, “What difference does it make?” Still, just in case it makes any difference to you, here are the Republican senators who shamefully voted to provide Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government with F-16s and Abrams tanks: Alexander, Ayotte, Barasso, Blunt, Burr, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Collins, Corker, Enzi, Flake, Graham, Hatch, Hoeven, Inhofe, Isakson, Johanns, Johnson, Kirk, McCain, McConnell, Murkowski, Portman, Toomey, and Wicker.

Kudos to the 18 Republicans who joined Senator Paul in trying to stop the arming of America’s enemies: Boozman, Coats, Cornyn, Crapo, Cruz, Fischer, Grassley, Heller, Lee, Moran, Risch, Roberts, Rubio, Scott, Sessions, Shelby, Thune, and Vitter. Common sense is on their side. Sadly, history is sure to follow, and probably soon.

Read the rest – Senate Republicans arm the Brotherhood

I love Mark Steyn’s description of Chuck Hagel as being an oversedated Elmer Fudd. Some commenter wrote ” ‘It would seem Obama has little shame putting forth nominees who have “no other merit than that of… [being] personally allied to him’ ”

by Mark Steyn

You don’t have to be that good to fend off a committee of showboating senatorial blowhards. Hillary Clinton demonstrated that a week or so back when she unleashed what’s apparently the last word in withering putdowns: What difference does it make?

Quite a bit of difference, it seems. This week, an oversedated Elmer Fudd showed up at the Senate claiming to be the president’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, and even the kindliest interrogators on the committee couldn’t prevent the poor chap shooting himself in the foot.

Twenty minutes in, Chuck Hagel was all out of appendages.

He warmed up with a little light “misspeaking” on Iran. “I support the president’s strong position on containment,” he declared. Breaking news!

Obama comes clean on Iran! According to Hagel, the administration favors “containment.” I could barely “contain” my excitement! Despite official denials, many of us had long suspected that, lacking any stomach for preventing a nuclear Tehran, Washington would settle for “containing” them. Hagel has been a containment man for years: It worked with the Soviets, so why not with apocalyptic ayatollahs? As he said in a 2007 speech, “The core tenets of George Kennan’s ‘The Long Telegram’ and the strategy of containment remain relevant today.” Recent history of pre-nuclear Iran – authorizing successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, bombing Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, seeding client regimes in Lebanon and Gaza – suggests that these are fellows disinclined to be “contained” even at the best of times. But, even if Iran can be “contained” from nuking Tel Aviv, how do you “contain” Iran’s exercise of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, or “contain” the mullahs’ generosity to states and non-state actors less squeamish about using the technology? How do you “contain” a nuclear Iran from de facto control of Persian Gulf oil, including setting the price and determining the customers?

[…….]
Unfortunately, as Hillary said the other day, “our policy is prevention, not containment”. So five minutes later the handlers discreetly swung into action to “contain” Hagel. “I was just handed a note that I misspoke,” he announced, “that I said I supported the President’s position on containment. If I said that, I meant to say that we don’t have a position on containment.” Hagel’s revised position is that there is no position on containment for him to have a position on.

[……..]

Containment? Prevention? What difference does it make? Could happen to anyone. I well remember when Neville Chamberlain landed at Heston Aerodrome in 1938 and announced the latest breakthrough in appeasement: “I have here a piece of paper from Herr Hitler.” Two minutes later, he announced, “I have here a second piece of paper from my staffer saying that I misspoke.” Who can forget Churchill’s stirring words in the House of Commons? “If, indeed, it is the case that I said, ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender!,’ then I misspoke. I meant to say that we’re keeping the situation under review and remain committed to exploring all options.”

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re as expert in all the nuances of Iranian affairs as Chuck Hagel. After he’d hailed Iran’s “elected, legitimate government,” it fell to another Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, to prompt Hagel to walk it back. Okay, delete “elected” and “legitimate”: “What I meant to say, should have said, is that it’s recognizable.”

“Recognizable”? In the sense that, if you wake up one morning to a big mushroom cloud on the horizon, you’d recognize it as the work of the Iranian government? No, by “recognizable,” he meant that the Iranian government is “recognized” as the government of Iran.

“I don’t understand Iranian politics,” he announced in perhaps his least-misspoken statement of the day. But the Iranians understand ours, which is why, in an amusing touch, the Foreign Ministry in Tehran has enthusiastically endorsed Hagel.

Fortunately, Iran is entirely peripheral to global affairs – it’s not like Chad or the Solomon Islands or the other burning questions the great powers are currently wrestling with – so it would be entirely unreasonable to expect Hagel to understand anything much about what’s going on over there. So what of his other, non-Iranian interests?

“There are a lot of things I don’t know about,” said Hagel. “If confirmed, I intend to know a lot more than I do.”

[……..]

Really? So what’s the job for, then? Just showing up at the office and the occasional black-tie NATO banquet? Most misspeakers loose off one round and then have to re-load, but Chuck Hagel is a big scary “military-style assault weapon” of a misspeaker, effortlessly peppering the Senate wainscoting for hours on end. Late in the day, after five o’clock, he pronounced definitively: “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“It does matter what you think,” insisted New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte.

With respect to my own senator, I think it matters that he seems incapable of thinking – or at least of thinking through his own Great Thoughts.

There are over 300 million Americans, and another 20 million Undocumented-Americans about to be fast-tracked down the soi-disant “path to citizenship.” Surely, from this vast talent pool, it should be possible to find someone who’s sufficiently interested in running the planet’s biggest military not to present himself on the world stage as a woozy, unfocused stumblebum. In an exquisite touch, responding to reports that Hagel was “ill-prepared,” someone in the White House leaked that he had been thoroughly “coached.” In other words, don’t blame us: We put him through the federally mandated Confirmation Hearing For Dummies course. [……..]

Hagel may know nothing about Iran, but he’s an incisive expert on America.

During an appearance on al-Jazeera in 2009, a caller asked him about “the perception and the reality” that America is “the world’s bully” – and Hagel told viewers that he agreed. Confronted with this exchange by Sen. Ted Cruz, Hagel floundered. There was no aide to slip him a note explaining that the incoming SecDef takes no formal position on whether or not his own nation is “the world’s bully.”

Ah, if only. In the chancelleries of Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Cairo, Pyongyang, the world’s bullied are laughing their heads off.

Read the rest – Easy to see why Tehran endorses Hagel

There are reports circulating that the Israelis hit a biological facility outside of Damascus last week. I would sure hope so.

by Michal Shmulovich

In air raids on Syria overnight Tuesday, Israeli jets targeted several sites, including a biological weapons research center, which hadn’t previously been mentioned in the media, TIME magazine claimed Friday.

The center was “flattened out of concern that it might fall into the hands of Islamist extremists fighting to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad,” the report said, quoting Western intelligence officials.

The article also claimed Washington has given Israel a “green light” to carry out more such raids if it deems them necessary.

TIME added that Israel has raised security at embassies “and other potential targets overseas,” for fear of a Hezbollah-orchestrated retaliatory attack.

Thus far, the TIME article noted, only two airstrikes had been mentioned in the media: One attack, announced by Syria, was allegedly on a scientific research center in Jamarya, northwest of Damascus; the other, reported by various news organizations, claimed Israeli jets struck a convoy carrying advanced anti-aircraft defense systems toward Lebanon, presumably to Hezbollah, the Shi’ite group allied to Iran and Assad.

[……..]

Regarding the strike at Jamarya, the magazine added new details: “Among the buildings leveled at the military complex at Jamarya, outside Damascus, were warehouses stocked with equipment necessary for the deployment of chemical and biological weapons, relatively complicated systems typically manned by specially trained forces,” it said.

The biological warfare labs were considered to be of particular concern — in part because of the grave damage small amounts of biological agents can cause, and also due to the stated interest in such weapons by terror groups, namely Osama bin Laden’s successor as head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The TIME story added that the US was prepared to carry out raids of its own in the Aleppo area if it feared rebels might otherwise gain control of weapons of mass destruction in that area of Syria.

On Wednesday, US officials told The New York Times that Israel had notified the United States about an airstrike it carried out overnight Tuesday near the Lebanese-Syrian border. The officials said that they believed the target of the strike was a convoy carrying sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry intended to reach Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.

An unnamed Western official told the Wall Street Journal that the convoy was carrying sophisticated Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft weapons, which could constitute a strategic game-changer were Hezbollah to possess them.

A former Syrian general said Friday that the facility reportedly struck by Israel produced non-conventional weapons, in addition to conventional arms. Maj. Gen. Adnan Sillu was previously in charge of the country’s chemical weapons training program.

[………]

Read the rest – Israel’s strike on Syria also hit biological facility says report

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Al Qaeda, Egypt, Hezballah, IDF, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Republican Party, Sharia (Islamic Law), Syria | 104 Comments »

Getting rid of the Obama Bunch will be an act of political hygiene

by Mojambo ( 93 Comments › )
Filed under Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Hillary Clinton, Islamic Terrorism, Joe Biden, Libya, Political Correctness at October 29th, 2012 - 8:00 am

The media made Obama, nurtured him, promoted him and protected him – now is the time for the media to expose him for being the poseur that we all know that he really is (of course they won’t). I am thoroughly disgusted by Obama, Hillary Clinton and Clueless Joe Biden.

by Mark Steyn

“We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I’ll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did “have that person arrested.” By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. These two videos – the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one – bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s re-election campaign.

You’ll recall that a near month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden’s bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department emails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half-hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.

We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and Special Forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy – or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hell hole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. “Within minutes of the first bullet being fired, the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,” said Ty Woods’ father, Charles. “In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured, and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision.”

Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaida affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter – that Osama was dead, and al-Qaida was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, “have that person arrested.” And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock-on-the-door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall guy into custody.

[………]

At the photo-op staged for the returning caskets, Obama et al seem to have been too focused on their campaign needs to observe even the minimal courtesies. Charles Woods says that, at the ceremony, Joe Biden strolled over to him and by way of condolence said in a “loud and boisterous” voice, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?” One assumes charitably that the vice president is acknowledging in his own inept and blundering way the remarkable courage of a man called upon to die for his country on some worthless sod halfway across the planet. But the near-parodic locker-room coarseness is grotesque both in its inaptness and in its lack of basic human feeling for a bereaved family forced to grieve in public and as crowd-scene extras to the political big shot. Just about the only formal responsibility a vice president has is to attend funerals without embarrassing his country. And this preening buffoon of pseudo-blue-collar faux-machismo couldn’t even manage that.

[……….]  Yet, oddly enough, the more furiously Obama and Biden have waved their binders and talked up Sandra Fluke, the more his supposed lead among women has withered away. So now he needs to enthuse the young, who turned out in such numbers for him last time. Hence, the official campaign video (plagiarized from Vladimir Putin, of all people) explaining that voting for Obama is like having sex. The saddest thing about that claim is that, for liberals, it may well be true.

Both videos – the one faking Obamagasm and the one faking a Benghazi pretext – exemplify the wretched shrinkage that befalls those unable to conceive of anything except in the most self-servingly political terms. Both, in different ways, exemplify why Obama and Biden are unfit for office. One video testifies to a horrible murderous lie at the heart of a head of state’s most solemn responsibility, the other to the glib shallow narcissism of a pop-culture presidency, right down to the numbing relentless peer-pressure: C’mon, all the cool kids are doing it; why be the last holdout?

If voting for Obama is like the first time you have sex, it’s very difficult to lose your virginity twice. A flailing, pitiful campaign has now adopted Queen Victoria’s supposed wedding advice to her daughter: “Lie back and think of England.” Lie back and think of America. And then get up and get dressed. Who wants to sleep twice with a $16 trillion broke loser?

Tags:
Posted in Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Hillary Clinton, Islamic Terrorism, Joe Biden, Libya, Political Correctness | 93 Comments »

« Older Entries