Maureen Dowd names Hillary the Valkyrie of Libya intervention, accuses her of negligence

Here, still pining for Joe:

'When you are the Valkyrie who engineers the intervention, you can’t then say it is beneath you to pay attention to the ludicrously negligent security for your handpicked choice for ambassador in a lawless country full of assassinations and jihadist training camps. ... [T]here were 600 requests from J. Christopher Stevens’s team to upgrade security in Benghazi in 2012 and 20 attacks on the mission compound in the months before the Sept. 11 siege. ...There were no call logs of talks between Stevens and Clinton, and she said she could not remember if she ever spoke to him again after she swore him in in May. “I was the boss of ambassadors in 270 countries,” she explained. But Libya was the country where she was the midwife to chaos. And she should have watched that baby like the Lady Hawk she is.'

But of course the Valkyrs picked who should die in battle, and who should live. In addition to picking Gaddafi, Hillary also picked four Americans.

Russia's Sergey Lavrov: Obama is failing because he hates Assad more than terrorism

Quoted here:

"If people continue to acquiesce with what is going on, and continue to acquiesce with those who categorically refuse to start the political process until Bashar Assad disappears then I am not very optimistic for the future of this region," he said.

"Because these people put the fate of one person whom they hate on top of the fight against terrorism," Lavrov said.

"We have been through this repeatedly. Saddam Hussein was the one person after whom the United States went and they ruined the country."

"Gaddafi is the same," he said, referring to Libya's fallen dictator.

Delusional Rand Paul might as well run as a Democrat, blames Republicans for creating ISIS

Rand Paul, quoted here:

"ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS. These hawks also wanted to bomb Assad, which would have made ISIS’ job even easier. They created these people."

--------------------------------

ISIS wouldn't exist if Obama hadn't pulled out of Iraq, had not opposed Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria and the state of Israel, and let ISIS' leader out of Camp Bucca.

So, Libya was really Hillary's war, and more broadly the women's war, not Obama's

From the first part of an investigative report, here, which details that there were secret recordings between Gaddafi's son and none other than Rep. Dennis Kucinich, now out of office:

Mr. Kucinich, who challenged Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, acknowledged that he undertook his own conversations with the Gadhafi regime. He said he feared Mrs. Clinton was using emotion to sell a war against Libya that wasn’t warranted, and he wanted to get all the information he could to share with his congressional colleagues. ...

Numerous U.S. officials interviewed by The Times confirmed that Mrs. Clinton, and not Mr. Obama, led the charge to use NATO military force to unseat Gadhafi as Libya’s leader and that she repeatedly dismissed the warnings offered by career military and intelligence officials. 

In the recovered recordings, a U.S. intelligence liaison working for the Pentagon told a Gadhafi aide that Mr. Obama privately informed members of Congress that Libya “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter” and that the nation’s highest-ranking generals were concerned that the president was being misinformed. ...

Instead of relying on the Defense Department or the intelligence community for analysis, officials told The Times, the White House trusted Mrs. Clinton’s charge, which was then supported by Ambassador to the United Nations Susan E. Rice and National Security Council member Samantha Power, as reason enough for war.

Obama Bungles Mideast Worse Than Jimmy Carter In 1979, Gets Ambassador Killed

 

 

Hot Air, here, has that old weird feelin':

Once again, we had an American government encourage the “democracy” movement run by radical Islamists in chasing our ally out of power.  Once again, we seem surprised when the radical Islamists put radical Islamists in power.  And once again we have “students” assaulting our embassy in the capital, this time Cairo, without so much as an apology from the radical Islamist government now running the nation. ...

Qaddafi had at least been somewhat more cooperative since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the West’s military attack on Qaddafi that caused his fall — led by the US initially — sent a big message on the futility of cooperation with the US and the West to all of the other governments in the region.

Liberalism Can't Distinguish Radicalism Because They're Related

liberalism leads to death

 

 

 

 Liberalism can't recognize radicalism because they're related. Instead liberalism tries to squirm out of the uncomfortable fact by calling it anything else. Extremism will do.

So Peggy Noonan, who appears to feel like she needs a shower after witnessing the extremism of the Democrat Convention but doesn't quite know why. 

For The Wall Street Journal, here:

Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling. There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. ... The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. 

Who else but a liberal could say all that and still be comfortable having a nitwit like Joe Biden a heartbeat away from the presidency?

As for Joe Biden, I love him and will hear nothing against him. He's like Democrats the way they used to be, and by that I do not mean idiotic, I mean normal . . ..

Peggy is a liberal, and knows one when she sees one. Hence her short love affair with Barack Obama, whom she threw over for Republican liberal Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts in early 2010. The Democrats under Obama aren't liberals any longer, except in the sense that babies grow up and become adults who only faintly resemble the parents. The hapless Baby Boom can't hold a candle to the so-called Greatest Generation, yet Peggy would speak in their defense. If only their failures didn't suggest their parents weren't so great after all. The 20th Century may have been the American century, but our troubles now suggest a deeper truth, that war is by definition demoralization writ large.  

That's the problem with liberalism. It can't properly name the enemy because to do so would indict the whole family. To liberals, Rep. Todd Akin is just as much of an extremist as the Democrat secularists, but that's all. Every family has its crazy uncle, shunned if not disowned. To people like Obama, however, Rep. Akin represents a mortal danger, an existential threat which must be eradicated, as in pulled out by the roots. He has to be disappeared by his minions because he blurts out the sordid reality which the radicals are in revolt against and ever seek to deny.

That's who Obama is, a radical, one who goes to the root of things and pulls them out by the roots. You know, like babies from their mothers' wombs. And if they happen to survive that, well, he has supported laws which would require a second doctor to come in and finish the job. But when human life begins is "above his paygrade." It sure is. We should be running this man out of the country, not running him for president.

People who get caught up in Obama's notion of transforming America forget Francis Fukuyama's timely phrase, "monstrous projects of social transformation". Death on a mass scale is its ultimate form, individual murders its particular. WWI, WWII, the Ukrainian "famine", the Gulag, Auschwitz, abortion. The vice president has seen and believed. He spoke of having learned of "the enormity" of the president's heart over the last four years. "The extreme scale of something morally wrong." You know that heart. It is the monstrous heart which orders drones to kill enemies who are on a list of his own making. American citizens have been victims of these crimes, in which he has acted as judge, jury and executioner. He shook hands with Qaddafi, and then had him killed. There was no intention of capturing Osama and making a spectacle of him, only of killing him. Who will be next?   

Liberalism has failed in explicating these things, whether it is a Democrat explanation or a Republican one. Rather it takes a conservative to understand them, someone who is trying to preserve the plant we call the constitution, not rip it out, like George Will for The Washington Post, here:

[Obama] is a conviction politician determined to complete the progressive project of emancipating government from the Founders’ constraining premises, a project Woodrow Wilson embarked on 100 Novembers ago. ... Progress, as progressives understand it, means advancing away from, up from, something.

 

But from what? From the Constitution’s constricting anachronisms. In 1912, Wilson said, “The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.” ... Wilson never said the future of liberty consisted of such limitation. Instead, he said, “every means . . . by which society may be perfected through the instrumentality of government” should be used so that “individual rights can be fitly adjusted and harmonized with public duties.” Rights “adjusted and harmonized” by government necessarily are defined and apportioned by it. Wilson, the first transformative progressive, called this the “New Freedom.” The old kind was the Founders’ kind — government existing to “secure” natural rights (see the Declaration) that preexist government. Wilson thought this had become an impediment to progress. The pedigree of Obama’s thought runs straight to Wilson.

Gaddafi in the Meat Locker

"Beauty, wit, high birth, desert in service,

Love, friendship, charity are subject all

To envious and calumniating time."

Muammar Gaddafi's Fingers

"If I was an Arab dictator and a western politician shook me warmly by the hand, I would count my fingers."

-- Simon Jenkins, The UK Guardian, 22 Feb. 2011, here.

Except the two-faced meddling hypocrites of the west had plenty of company:

'For now the Devil, that told me I did well, Says that this deed is chronicled in hell.'

Democracies don't go to war against democracies, just against everyone else.

B.O. Finally Gets Gaddafi: "And Now [Obama's] An Assassin"

So Louis Farrakhan in May 2011, here:

"We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart, and now he's an assassin. They turned him into them."

So ends the undeclared, illegal war against Libya, which was only supposed to take a few days.

Next!

Bush's Patriot Act Has Paved The Way For Obama To Act As Judge, Jury and Executioner of American Citizens

And the numbskulls all around us, right and left, applaud, except, for example, for Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, here:

[H]ow terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process. Remember all that? Yet now, here’s Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President — even Barack Obama — vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process.

It is not sufficient, however, to prune the executive, overturn this deformity and return to the status quo ante in which Americans continue to sacrifice their right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, which is done all in the name of 50 million foreigners who we think must be allowed freely to visit our country each year while we pretend that they with us are all fellow citizens of one free world. This is the insane sickness of liberalism which threatens to kill us, that it is nearly a crime to believe that America is a distinct place with borders, a language and a culture which is ours and ours alone.

The dirty little secret here is that the more we embrace this horrid vision of global citizenship, the more we and our leaders become like the squalid tyrannies of Libya and Iraq than they become like us.

brothers in murder

  

Khalif Saed: The Voice of Libyan Professional Credibility

If there's an ammunition shortage, no one has told Khalif Saed. He was firing off a large machine gun welded to the back of a pick up truck, sending the contents of the heavy belt of bullets darting through the weapon and in to an empty sky. ...

Asked why he was shooting when the revolution's military leadership has appealed for discipline and its fighters not to waste ammunition, Saed said simply: "It's my gun."

Story here.

Would You Shake Hands With This Liar?

No, not this one . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . this one! 

Bush's DHS Planned to Test Mobile Scanning of Pedestrians

The creeping American fascist police state may have begun in earnest under Bush, but Obama is doing nothing to stop it. There are mobile scanning vans in the possession of the federal government right now. And you'd know nothing about it from Obama, either, but for a Freedom of Information Act request by EPIC.

Forbes has the story, here:

Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been planning pilot programs to deploy mobile scanning units that can be set up at public events and in train stations, along with mobile x-ray vans capable of scanning pedestrians on city streets.

The non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on Wednesday published documents it obtained from the Department of Homeland Security showing that from 2006 to 2008 the agency planned a study of new anti-terrorism technologies that EPIC believes raise serious privacy concerns. ...

“When you’re out walking on the street, it’s not acceptable for an officer to come up and search your bag without probable cause or consent. ... This is the digital equivalent” [said an attorney for EPIC]. ...

[S]ecurity contractor American Sciences & Engineering ... sold more than 500 of its backscatter x-ray vans to governments around the world, including some deployed in the US. Those vans are capable of scanning people, the inside of cars and even  the internals of some buildings while rolling down public streets. ... [T]he van scans do penetrate clothing, and EPIC president Marc Rotenberg called them “one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

The Forbes story has links to the documents obtained under the FOIA request.

For a guy who won't disclose any of his academic or medical records, Obama sure does think he has the right to invade your privacy, against your will and without your knowledge.

Mubarak should have resigned? Gaddafi? I say Obama should resign, NOW.

We've Already Got a Democrat Stoner Schizophrenic as President, We Don't Need a Republican One

With more and more people realizing that repeated use of the weed is bad for your health, a new study in the news links marijuana use to various mental problems like schizophrenia:

Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at Kings College London, said: "This study adds a further brick to the wall of evidence showing that use of traditional cannabis is a contributory cause of psychoses like schizophrenia."

Among the signs and symptoms which schizophrenics may exhibit are these behaviors not often firmly attributed to habitual use of marijuana as a cause of the mental illness:

. . . disorganized thinking and speech. The latter may range from loss of train of thought, to sentences only loosely connected in meaning, to incoherence known as word salad in severe cases. Social withdrawal, sloppiness of dress and hygiene, and loss of motivation and judgement are all common in schizophrenia. There is often an observable pattern of emotional difficulty, for example lack of responsiveness.

The American people should think about that paragraph and ask themselves:

Why does Obama rely so much on his teleprompter, even in the smallest of settings?

Why did Obama exhibit such an inappropriately light mood in his first public comments after the Ft. Hood terrorist incident?

Why did it take Obama so many days to respond to the Fruit of Kaboom bomber incident?

Why was Obama the last world leader to come out and condemn Gaddafi?

And then they ought to think about this from Jacob Sullum for Townhall.com, here, about Indiana's Republican Governor and presidential hopeful, Mitch Daniels:

But like many pot smokers who became politicians, Daniels -- a potential contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination -- seems to have two standards of justice: one for him and one for anyone else who does what he did.

Although Daniels was caught with enough marijuana to trigger a prison sentence, he got off with a $350 fine. Yet he has advocated "jail time" for "casual users" -- a stark illustration of the schizophrenic attitudes that help perpetuate drug policies widely recognized as unjust.

According to the Princetonian, "officers found enough marijuana in (Daniels') room to fill two size 12 shoe boxes." Under current New Jersey law, possessing more than 50 grams (about 1.8 ounces) of marijuana is a felony punishable by up to 18 months in prison. Given the amount of pot Daniels had, he easily could have been charged with intent to distribute, which under current law triggers a penalty of three to five years.

At the time of Daniels' arrest in May 1970, New Jersey's marijuana penalties were even more severe.


Not exactly your daddy's Republican.

Sympathy for the Muslims: We Never Imagined It Either

"Now, ruling America is a black man from our continent, an African from Arab descent, from Muslim descent, and this is something we never imagined – that from Reagan we would get to Barakeh Obama."

"He is someone I consider a friend. He knows he is a son of Africa. Regardless of his African belonging, he is of Arab Sudanese descent, or of Muslim descent. He is a man whose policy should be supported, and he should be assisted in implementing it in any way possible, since he is now leaning towards peace."

"I urge all peoples to give him this chance and to support this policy, because America is a country that, when its policy is bad – harms the world, and when it is good – it helps the world."

[I hope that] "the dream that Obama has for a world free of nuclear weapons will come true. This is something that no previous American president has proposed. Obama is a man who opposes wars that previous American presidents were entangled in; he has declared that he will withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq – something which has never been proposed before."

"The Arabs hate America, there is no doubt. There is not an Arab that loves America, and even the leaders who the United States considers allies or friends – hate it. The external love is merely hypocrisy or pragmatism. The reason for this is clear – Palestine."

"The Palestinians today are like the Jews of the past – dispersed in exile and persecuted. Now the Palestinians are at a point where they deserve to have the United States on their side and not on the side of the Israelis."

-- Colonel Gaddafi, quoted here, in better days

You Know, Johnny, It's Not How You Feel, It's How You Rook, and You Rook . . .

Um . . .

Gaddafi Called for Palestinian Uprising Last Week, Gets One at Home Instead

From the Department of Poetic Justice:

Hundreds of Libyans calling for the government's ouster clashed with security forces early Wednesday in the country's second-largest city as Egypt-inspired unrest spread to the country long ruled by Moammar Gadhafi.

See here and here for more.

I guess that, and the protests in Tehran in recent days, puts to rest the theory that only Middle East regimes friendly to the US are experiencing revolts.