Ahmed Abu Khattala, someone suspected of helping to organize the Benghazi attack, was finally taken into custody a few days ago. The YouTube guy that the Obama administration tried to blame for the attack was arrested in about two weeks, but for some reason it took us almost two years to grab one of the actual terrorists involved. Why did it take so long to find someone who made himself available for media interviews?
I think President Obama still wants to believe that the Benghazi attack really was caused by a YouTube video somehow, and only decided to capture one of the terrorists involved when it could be used as a distraction. Now Obama gets to beat his chest and pretend to care about terrorism again for a while, and all his spokespeople and media sycophants get to pounce on any Republican who dares to question the timing of it, but announcing that we have Khattala is only the first part of the distraction. The mess in Iraq is going to be a long term problem that is bound to keep eating away at Obama's poll numbers; he needs a big distraction that he can keep milking over and over again. Khattala will be tried in civilian court, and of course the whole thing will be turned into a circus. I don't think the verdict even matters to Obama as much as the circus itself does, especially if he can get Khattala to say something on the stand that reinforces the silly idea that a YouTube video was somehow to blame for everything.
Khattala is being interrogated right now, but I doubt we will get anything meaningful out of him. Even if Obama wanted to get anything meaningful out of Khattala, which I doubt, he's just not willing to do what it takes to get anything out of him anyway. With Obama, you either blow the terrorists up (along with everyone around them) before they have a chance to tell us anything useful, or you bring them in and give them some milk and cookies--and if the milk and cookies approach is ever deemed too harsh for whatever reason, Obama just sets them free. I'm convinced that the only reason Khattala isn't still free right now is because Obama badly needed a distraction and he just can't resist getting a chance to point the finger of blame at Nakoula Basseley Nakoula yet again.
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Learn to pick your battles, and your heroes
When the standoff between Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management first hit the news, I didn't quite know what to make of it. Then I saw that Bundy was getting enthusiastic support from the likes of Alex Jones and Pat Dollard, so I figured it was just a matter of time before the whole thing turned into a clown show. Boy, did it ever.
How shocked can we really be that federal agents would use a show of force to try to make an example out of a guy who openly admits he doesn't recognize the authority of any federal agency? The feds were bound to show up with guns eventually. And the fact that Bundy seems to have every wacko militia within a thousand miles on his speed dial essentially guarantees that this will end very badly for everyone, especially the wives they plan to use for human shields.
You'd think all that would be enough to make Cliven Bundy politically radioactive, but there's more. Now he's making ridiculous comparisons between the treatment of blacks today under Obama and the treatment of blacks under slavery, and instead of apologizing for it when people cry foul, he doubles down on stupid. There are plenty of reasonable ways to make the case that the welfare state is destructive to black families, but apparently Bundy's superpower is always finding the dumbest, most offensive, most counterproductive way to make the case for anything. Whether his statements were motivated by racism or not (I don't think they were), the end result is still that anyone who ever said a kind word about Bundy will be called a racist now, and even people who never supported him will still be called a racist when they try to make similar arguments in a better way. It'll be like Todd Akin all over again.
Obama has been a spectacularly awful president. Pretty much every agency in this administration is rife with incompetence and has been politicized beyond belief, and I'm sure that the BLM is no exception. To make matters worse, Harry Reid may very well have infected the BLM with his own special brand of awfulness and corruption. But the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. The federal government owns 80% of the land in Nevada, and more land than they should in plenty of other states. Lots of people not named Cliven Bundy have been affected by this. Why not point to some of those examples instead?
I hope the GOP does well in 2016, but we can't count on anything. We might end up with a decent presidential candidate, or we might not. In the meantime, we have a real chance to make some headway in 2014, so let's please not blow it by allowing someone like Cliven Bundy to become the poster child for our cause. Republicans need every seat in the House and Senate they can possibly get.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Where will it end?
It's maddening to watch this vortex of scandals swirl around President Obama month after month without any of it sticking to him in any meaningful way. The same media that desperately tried to find a scandal in every single word that came out of George Bush's mouth--even if they had to invent a few of his words themselves--can barely be bothered to acknowledge any part of Scandalpalooza. There would be a cacophony of outrage from them the likes of which the world has never seen if even one of these many scandals had happened under Bush, but now most in the media can't even bring themselves to raise an eyebrow at something as brazen as a Watergate-style break-in.
Impeachment might be too much to hope for after the debacle that was the Clinton impeachment, but I'd like to think Obama has more to worry about here than a decline in his poll numbers; after all, he won't be able to run for a third term anyway. Still, it would be nice if we could get an investigation into these scandals that goes somewhere other than in circles. If this were a Coen brothers movie someone would have been run out of town on a rail by now.
And in the meantime, much to Obama's delight, we've all been tearing ourselves apart over immigration reform and freaking out over the Zimmerman trial; not that we should never talk about those things, but when we do they seem to have a way of sucking up all the oxygen and then nothing else gets talked about.
Are we really going to sit here and accept this inept corruptocracy as our new normal? I hope people wake up. I hope someday this godawful nightmare will finally be over. But what will it take? It seems like we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it does we just find ourselves waiting for the other other shoe to drop. I shudder to think how bad things may have to get for America before they finally start to get better again.
Impeachment might be too much to hope for after the debacle that was the Clinton impeachment, but I'd like to think Obama has more to worry about here than a decline in his poll numbers; after all, he won't be able to run for a third term anyway. Still, it would be nice if we could get an investigation into these scandals that goes somewhere other than in circles. If this were a Coen brothers movie someone would have been run out of town on a rail by now.
And in the meantime, much to Obama's delight, we've all been tearing ourselves apart over immigration reform and freaking out over the Zimmerman trial; not that we should never talk about those things, but when we do they seem to have a way of sucking up all the oxygen and then nothing else gets talked about.
Are we really going to sit here and accept this inept corruptocracy as our new normal? I hope people wake up. I hope someday this godawful nightmare will finally be over. But what will it take? It seems like we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when it does we just find ourselves waiting for the other other shoe to drop. I shudder to think how bad things may have to get for America before they finally start to get better again.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Our long national nightmare is NOT over
So... Obama somehow managed to win a second term, despite having a record that should have gotten him tossed out on his ear. What happened here? I mostly agree with Ace's list of things that hurt Romney, but what's going on beneath all that? The root problem, as I see it, is that we have far too many voters in this country who simply can't be reasoned with.
Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers. They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News. They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions. If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.
For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking. They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out. They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do. You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them. The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.
And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all. They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically. They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them. They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC... and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture. They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default. Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first. That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.
These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight. And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year. I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.
Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale. I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong. This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry. As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale. You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter. I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination. Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom. I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.
That was 1984. I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama. We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems? This isn't just about the next election. I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.
Update: Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes. Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from. Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco. Oh well. Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.
Update: Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama. It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.
Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers. They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News. They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions. If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.
For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking. They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out. They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do. You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them. The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.
And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all. They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically. They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them. They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC... and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture. They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default. Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first. That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.
These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight. And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year. I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.
Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale. I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong. This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry. As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale. You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter. I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination. Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom. I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.
That was 1984. I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama. We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems? This isn't just about the next election. I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.
Update: Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes. Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from. Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco. Oh well. Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.
Update: Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama. It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Obama lied, pensions died!
Ace brought the flaming skull out for this one.
Remember when the Obama administration tried to blame the PBGC for screwing non-union Delphi workers out of their pensions? As it turns out, not so much... the PBGC wasn't even allowed to attend the meeting where this decision was made. Aside from the unseemliness of Obama looking out for his union backers while making sure everyone else gets shafted, we also have the issue of whether or not Timothy Geithner's exclusion of PBGC was a violation of the law... the PBGC is supposed to be making these decisions, not merely acting as the scapegoat for decisions made at the Department of the Treasury.
By the way, did any of those non-union Delphi employees happen to have wives who later died of cancer? I'm asking for a friend.
Remember when the Obama administration tried to blame the PBGC for screwing non-union Delphi workers out of their pensions? As it turns out, not so much... the PBGC wasn't even allowed to attend the meeting where this decision was made. Aside from the unseemliness of Obama looking out for his union backers while making sure everyone else gets shafted, we also have the issue of whether or not Timothy Geithner's exclusion of PBGC was a violation of the law... the PBGC is supposed to be making these decisions, not merely acting as the scapegoat for decisions made at the Department of the Treasury.
By the way, did any of those non-union Delphi employees happen to have wives who later died of cancer? I'm asking for a friend.
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