Tweets of the Week (6/15/14 - 6/21/14)

Obama's latest distraction

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.

Tweets of the Week (6/8/14 - 6/14/14)

Obama throws Iraq under the bus

An especially militant offshoot of Al-Qaeda called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, has taken control of several cities in Iraq.  They took Fallujah earlier this year, Mosul and Tikrit both in the past few days, and now it's looking like Baghdad might be next on their list.  The prime minister of Iraq has asked for help, but President Obama has yet to offer any.  Drone strikes may or may not still be on the table, but Obama has completely ruled out sending any ground troops back into Iraq.

Obama seems to want to have it both ways by taking all the credit for "ending" the Iraq War while still counting on all the blame for the inevitable horrors that follow to be laid at Bush's feet.  The thing is, Obama has already had a hand in creating these horrors for years.  The maniac currently running ISIL is someone that Obama set free when he needlessly shut down the Camp Bucca prison in 2009.  Obama also gave ISIL a head start when he took it upon himself to supply Syrian rebels with weapons and training without giving much thought as to how radicalized the rebels were becoming or how the weapons or training might be used against us later.

Some people refer to ISIL as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria instead, or ISIS, which can be misleading.  Not only does ISIL want to control Iraq and Syria, but also Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Cyprus, and part of Turkey; since President Obama always makes a point of referring to the group as ISIL instead of ISIS, I have to assume that he knows this.  The leader of ISIL has even specifically threatened the United States, and yet Obama would have you believe that ISIL is a problem that we should leave to the Iraqis to figure out for themselves.

Tweets of the Week (6/1/14 - 6/7/14)

The curious case of Bowe Bergdahl

After it became clear to President Obama that the Shinseki resignation wasn't going to be enough to make the VA scandal go away, he decided that it was time to reach into his magic bag of distractions and pull something out; what he pulled out was Bowe Bergdahl, the last remaining American POW in Afghanistan.  Obama was hoping that bringing Bowe home would make himself immune to criticism about the treatment of veterans by showing that he leaves no man behind.  Indeed, most people were initially glad to hear that Bowe was released, if a little queasy about releasing five high-level terrorist scumbags to do it.  But then we started hearing from Bowe's platoon mates that he was only captured because he deserted his post, and Bowe's father showed up in the Rose Garden speaking in Arabic and Pashto, looking like he just crawled out of a fucking spider hole.  Add to all that the sheer lunacy that is the twitter account run by Bowe's father, and this started to look like the worst deal we ever made with anybody.

And over the next few days the deal continued to look worse and worse.  Not only did President Obama violate the law by failing to consult Congress on the deal, but he also blatantly lied to us about why he did it.  First we were told that Bowe was so sick that he would have died if the deal hadn't happened right away, and then the story eventually became that Bowe would have been murdered by the Taliban if the deal were ever made public, even though the Obama administration and the Taliban had both talked rather openly about the possibility of such a deal.

Before Bowe disappeared, he emailed his parents to tell them how much he hated America and our military, and how much he wanted to help the Afghan people; after taking his father's idiotic advice to "OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE", he went AWOL and left behind a note saying that he didn't want to be an American anymore.  At least six people died searching for him.  The Obama administration knew all of this, and yet they still expected us to be euphoric over this deal for some reason.

Bowe converted to Islam while in captivity.  He also declared himself a mujahid and was reportedly allowed to carry a loaded gun.  The Pentagon knew this for years, and yet the exchange went ahead anyway.  Why?

And now the latest feeble attempt at spin from the Obama administration is that Bergdahl's platoon mates were probably all psychopaths or something.  Rather than distracting us from the VA scandal, it seems that Obama has only succeeded in reinforcing the idea that he cares much less about how our troops are treated than he does about how it affects him politically.  Maybe for his next trick Obama will ask John Kerry to resign as Secretary of State and nominate him for Secretary of Defense instead.

Tweets of the Week (5/25/14 - 5/31/14)

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.

Cliven Bundy's fight with the BLM has somehow turned him into some sort of conservative folk hero, but to him this is much more than just a fight over grazing rights and government overreach.  Cliven Bundy doesn't think the federal government has the right to do anything in Nevada; to him, the federal government doesn't even exist.  Cliven Bundy is not a conservative.  He's not even a libertarian, though he may call himself one.  He's closer to an anarchist than he is anything else.

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.

The Council Has Spoken!

This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels.  The winning council entry for the week was "Obama’s Loving Requiem For A Prominent Communist – And Mine" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Michael Gurfinkiel's post "Great Caesar’s Ghost" over at National Review.  Congrats!

Update:  Last week's winners can be found here.