Obama: The weak horse.
Jed Babbin of Human Events asks, “are we safer or in more danger than we were a year ago?” As he reviews Obama’s first year record, it’s plain to see that we aren’t and the reasons that is so:
…One of the first things the president did on taking office was to ban the “enhanced interrogation methods” ... Snip –
As George Tenet… said: "I know that this [enhanced interrogation methods] program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
President Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, said: "High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."
… the documents released by the CIA Inspector General last year…showed, in detail, how Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other high-value prisoners provided specific information that was used to interdict terrorist plots and capture some of the terrorists who were planning them.
Yet President Obama has prohibited the use of these interrogation methods. If they were as valuable as Tenet and Blair said, we are now left with intelligence gathering methods which are inferior and inadequate. The president and his White House political staff are now controlling interrogations, rather than leaving that business to those who know how to gain the intelligence that can be used to prevent coming attacks. Snip –
President Obama campaigned on the promise to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and ordered its closure within a year of his inauguration without any plan on where the detainees would go, or how they would be tried and possibly punished for their violations of the law of war.
He now plans to purchase the Thomson, Illinois maximum security prison and move the Gitmo detainees there. And even those such as 9-11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his cohort will be tried by civilian courts in American cities, not by the military commissions created for that purpose.
Last week, White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan said that we would still, on a case by case basis, release Gitmo detainees to Yemen . This despite the facts that would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was trained there by an al Queda cell that reportedly contains two Gitmo alumni and that the Yemenis released Jamal al-Badawi, one of the men responsible for the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Snip –
There is no substantive or legal reason to close Gitmo, only political calculation… at least 18 of those released have been captured again or killed on the battlefield, and -- as of 2008, according to the Defense Department, 43 more are suspected of having returned to terrorism.
Obama has classified the more recent estimates of how many Gitmo alumni have returned to terrorism. He is committed to closing Gitmo regardless of the risks, and doesn’t want us to know how many more of those released have gone back to their murderous ways. Snip –
Abdulmutallab’s isolation from intelligence gatherers may literally cost lives. He must know who trained him and where, and may know other terrorists who went through training with him. The others are a current threat. If -- as the Obama Justice Department plans -- he cooperates and negotiates a plea agreement, we may get some of that information. A year or more from now, when it’s no longer current. When it can no longer be used to save American and other lives. Snip –
Obama is a weak horse. His weakness is the weakness of all liberals, just as Ronald Reagan defined it: “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” Snip –
Obama believes that terrorists should be treated like common criminals, put into our civilian criminal justice system and protected from intelligence interrogations by methods because he finds them distasteful.
…(Obama) is apparently willing to accept a nuclear-armed Iran rather than take the military action which is the only path remaining to deny the world’s principal sponsor of terrorism those arms.
As Don Rumsfeld was fond of saying, weakness is provocative. Provocation results in danger, and loss of life.
Are we in less danger than we were a year ago? By the objective criteria we have to measure the danger of terrorism, the answer is an emphatic “no.” And, unfortunately, we likely soon to be able to measure it by another objective criterion -- the number of lives that will be lost to terrorism, the butcher’s bill -- that is paid for Obama’s knowledge of so much that just isn’t so.
Yes, it does seem the Obama administration is run less by the desire to keep the country safe than by the desire to not acknowledge that Bush did many things right, and they are basically naïve fools. And that for Democrats, in general, politics is more important than anything. The American people and their safety? Just politics as usual. Please read the whole thing here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35140
Sowell: Intellectuals and Society.
As if by way of explaining why Obama would even think that by acting weak, he would get some kind of consideration from Islamic extremists, Thomas Sowell’s interview with National Review Online’s Peter Robinson comes at the perfect time. Sowell explains that intellectuals believe that with them in charge, all will be right with the world because of their intellect. Sowell further says that when an intellectual’s output is ideas and they don’t work, they don’t suffer immediate consequences in the academic world. However, if an engineer’s idea of a building doesn’t work, it collapses and the consequences can be seen. So, once ideas meet the real world, as Obama’s have over this past year, shouldn’t that be their real test? Please watch part one of the interview regarding Sowell’s new book: Intellectuals and Society here:
Goldberg – GOP, reinvent yourself like Dominos.
Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online says Republicans can’t just win by saying “no,” they must reinvent themselves so that Americans can see that they haven’t thrown the country and conservatives over the cliff. They must admit where they went wrong over the past several years, especially during the Bush Administration.
The Democrats are poised to have a bad year; the only argument is over how bad it will be. And that question rests on whether or not the Republican party crafts an agenda voters will support.
So far the GOP has shrewdly been the “party of no.” Since I disagree with so much of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda, I happen to think that “no” is the correct position on the merits. But that’s not the point. Saying “no” has worked because that’s what most Americans say, too. Snip –
I’d tell the GOP to look not to Reagan in 1980 or Gingrich in 1994, as so many pundits suggest.
I’d look to Domino’s in 2010.
… Domino’s new campaign can be summed up easily enough: “We blew it.”
Focus groups and consumer surveys revealed something pretty much everyone outside of Domino’s has known for years: Their pizza stinks…
In their four-minute video (search YouTube for “the Pizza Turnaround”), executives, employees, and chefs at the company confront their harshest reviews head-on. They talk about how much it hurts to hear that their product “tastes like cardboard” and is worse than microwave pizza. But they admit the truth and commit themselves to starting over with more flavor, better crusts, and cheese that doesn’t taste like discount weather caulking. Domino’s says that the American palate has improved, and they want to update their recipe to take account of that fact.
The appeal of the campaign should be obvious: honesty. Domino’s admits they lost their way, and they want a second chance. They’re confronting the criticism head-on rather than denying it.
Obviously, the analogy to the GOP isn’t perfect…
But the GOP’s troubles over the last decade have a lot to do with the fact that Americans didn’t stop liking what the Republican party is supposed to deliver. They stopped liking what the GOP actually delivered.
… I would hate to see the GOP abandon conservative policies in order to be more popular. That would be like Domino’s listening to critics and then deciding to get into the Chinese-food business. Indeed, by my lights, that’s what George W. Bush tried to do with his “compassionate conservatism.” He surrendered to liberal arguments about the role, size, and scope of government on too many fronts. In effect, he said you can have your pizza and Kung Pao chicken all in the same dish…Snip –
So what would a GOP-turnaround recipe look like? …for starters, I’d look to young political chefs like Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.). He’s been the leader in attacking “crony capitalism” — the corrupt merger of big business and big government, a hallmark of the Obama administration. For too long Republicans confused supporting big business with supporting free markets, when big business is often the biggest impediment to fair competition. Other fresh new ingredients would almost surely include pro-family tax policies and the de-linking of legal and illegal immigration as interchangeable terms.
But first, the GOP needs to admit it screwed up. That’s what Democrats did with Bill Clinton, and it gave the “New Democratic Party” a new lease on life.
… More than any nation on earth, America is about second acts. We love contrition and redemption. We love it in pizza companies and politicians alike.
This makes much sense. With the Tea Parties attacking Republicans and Democrats alike, they just might be able to win more allies from those protesting in the streets by realizing what Americans want: adherence to the Constitution, government off of our backs, the end of political correctness, and doing things for the country not against it (via illegal immigration along with so many other things that political correctness and multiculturalism have done to tear the country apart and keep it in danger.)
Napolitano on The Constitution.
This is the first of five short videos on the Constitution. It’s well worth your time. Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News will be doing one every day this week.
http://www.thefoxnation.com/judge-andrew-napolitano/2010/01/11/judge-andrew-napolitanos-constitution-and-freedom-part-1
