Obama’s Incredibly Cynical Exploitation Of The Osama Bin Laden Killing Is Positively Vile For ALL KINDS Of Reasons

“Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” the Obama campaign says.

Obama treated the anniversary of ObamaCare like it was the leper waiting to appear before the death panel (which is of course what ObamaCare truly is and how it ought to be treated).  But the killing of bin Laden is different: Obama has been doing victory lap after victory lap after victory lap on that one.

It’s supposed to be besides the fact that Obama once attacked then-presidential rival Hillary Clinton for “invoking bin Laden to score political points”:

In a new web video titled “One Chance,” the Obama team features former President Bill Clinton praising Obama for deciding to launch the strike last year. “Why path would Mitt Romney have taken?” the clip asks.

But four years ago this April, the Obama campaign criticized Democratic rival Hillary Clinton for using Osama bin Laden in a political ad.

On the eve of the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, Clinton’s campaign released a television commercial featuring an image of bin Laden and invoking President Harry S. Truman’s quote: “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen.”

The ad never mentioned Obama by name, but it was part of the Clinton campaign’s effort to brand the Illinois Senator as inexperienced, especially in the foreign policy arena.

“Who do you think has what it takes?” the ad’s narrator says as an image of Clinton flashes on the screen. (The ad showed a brief clip of bin Laden as well as images of Pearl Harbor, the 1920′s stock market crash, Fidel Castro, the fall of the Berlin Wall). “You need to be ready for anything, especially now.”

The Obama campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, accused the Clinton team of playing “the politics of fear” just like George W. Bush.

Burton, now the head of the Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, said at the time: “When Senator Clinton voted with President Bush to authorize the war in Iraq, she made a tragically bad decision that diverted our military from the terrorists who attacked us, and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and regenerate his terrorist network. It’s ironic that she would borrow the President’s tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points. We already have a President who plays the politics of fear, and we don’t need another.”

And yet we have another in the person of the very slimeball hypocrite who is so quick to demonize everybody else for stuff you ought to KNOW he himself will soon be doing himself.

Here we are, a few years later, and Barack Hussein Hypocrite is doing the EXACT same thing he demonized George Bush for doing and attacked Hillary Clinton for doing.  Because his DNA is pure weasel.

But let’s step aside from the “Obama, one blatant hypocrite sack of fecal matter” point and move on.

Let’s first point out that the ONLY reason that General Motors is still alive is because George Bush provided the bailout that allowed incoming president Obama to do ANYTHING.  Because if George Bush hadn’t taken that step, General Motors would have filed bankruptcy before Obama even took office.  That is simply a documented historical fact; and for Obama to try to use General Motors as a political bludgeon against Republicans is, well, just another in an incredibly long series of “weasel-in-chief” garbage rhetoric.

There were a LOT of ways to rescue General Motors without all the failed idiotic crap, boondoggle pork politics and frankly illegal partisan politicking that accompanied Obama’s bailout of GM.

The bottom line is that Obama is a president who cynically politicizes and demagogues absolutely everything under the sun.

So, just with those two above facts alone, Obama is sitting on a stool that aint got any legs with his skinny butt planted firmly in midair.  But let’s continue.

Our weasel-in-chief has tried to depict the decision to nail bin Laden as an incredibly “gutsy call.”  It wasn’t.  First, consider what would have happened when Obama’s opponents learned – and in this era of Wikileaks they most assuredly would have learned – that Barack Obama had a clear shot at Osama bin Laden and refused to take it.  So, yeah, something could have gone wrong and Obama would have probably been blamed for it.  But if he hadn’t done anything THERE IS NO QUESTION HE WOULD HAVE BEEN BLAMED FOR THAT.  So just how “gutsy” was it, really?

I mean, Obama faced a “possibly damned if you do, VERY DEFINITELY damned if you don’t” decision.  How “gutsy” of a call was it to avoid the “VERY DEFINITELY damned if you don’t” decision???

But it turns out that that isn’t the half of it.  Because remember how I said Obama has weasel DNA?  Ask yourself how a true weasel would have handled the above dilemma in which he potentially stood a chance to be blamed for deciding to go get bin Laden or to refuse to go get bin Laden.  It turns out that Obama took “the most weaselly option” possible:

What ‘Gutsy Call’?: CIA Memo Reveals Admiral Controlled bin Laden Mission
by Ben Shapiro   4/26/2012

 Today, Time magazine got hold of a memo written by then-CIA head Leon Panetta after he received orders from Barack Obama’s team to greenlight the bin Laden mission. Here’s the text, which summarized the situation:

Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.

The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.

This, of course, was the famed “gutsy call.” Here’s what Tom Hanks narrated in Obama’s campaign film, “The Road We’ve Traveled”:

HANKS: Intelligence reports locating Osama Bin Laden were promising, but inconclusive, and there was internal debate as to what the President should do.

VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: We sat down in the Situation Room, the entire national security apparatus was in that room, and the President turns to every principal in the room, every secretary, “What do you recommend I do?” And they say, “Well, forty-nine percent chance he’s there, fifty-one … it’s a close call, Mr. President.” As he walked out the room, it dawned on me, he’s all alone. This is his decision. If he was wrong, his Presidency was done. Over.

Only the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.

The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus.

The memo is crystal clear on that point. It says that the decision has been made based solely on the “risk profile presented to the President.” If any other risks – no matter how minute – arose, they were “to be brought back to the President for his consideration.” This is ludicrous. It is wiggle room. It was Obama’s way of carving out space for himself in case the mission went bad. If it did, he’d say that there were additional risks of which he hadn’t been informed; he’d been kept in the dark by his military leaders.

Finally, the memo is unclear on just what the mission is. Was it to capture Bin Laden or to kill him? The White House itself was unable to decide what the mission was in the hours after the Bin Laden kill, and actually switched its language. The memo shows why: McRaven was instructed to “get” Bin Laden, whatever that meant.

President Obama made the right call to give the green light to the mission. But he did it in a way that he could shift the blame if things went wrong. Typical Obama. And typical of him to claim full credit for it, when he didn’t do anything but give a vague nod, while putting his top military officials at risk of taking the hit in case of a bad turn.

This was NOT a “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” moment for Obama.  It was not a “I have not yet begun to fight!” moment.  It wasn’t even a “You may fire when ready, Gridley” moment.  It was the tepid decision by a career bureaucrat to choose the least risky political decision while having a sacrificial lamb tied to the stake to take the blame if the least risky political decision went wrong.  Period.

With that, let’s further consider that without George Bush, without the complete overhaul of the intelligence system that George Bush created, without Gitmo and without waterboarding, Obama never would have had a shot at finding out that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in Abbotabad, Pakistan.  Nor would our intelligence have known that Osama bin Laden was relying on couriers to remain in contact with his organization.

Here’s the proof of that in the form of another memo:

Having this information – which resulted from WATERBOARDING - was absolutely critical to identifying the location of Osama bin Laden.  Without the information that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad (a small dot on a very large globe), and without the information that bin Laden was relying on a courier who could be followed to an even smaller dot on that globe, we had butkus.

Obama’s own handpicked guy – Leon Panetta – confirmed that FACT:

Asked by NBC-TV’s Brian Williams about the information obtained from detainees that led to the bin Laden takedown, Panetta replied: ‘We had multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. … Clearly some of it came from detainees [and] they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees.”

When Williams asked whether “waterboarding” was one of those techniques, Panetta replied: “That’s correct.”

And all the other principal players in the CIA confirmed that waterboarding was a sine qua non – a “that without which” – in the nailing of Osama bin Laden.  Without that information about bin Laden’s courier and the city he was hiding in, he could have been literally in any one of a few billion caves for all we knew.  In order to find Osama bin Laden, we needed somewhere to start looking and something specific – like the courier – to start looking into.

So Obama is taking all the credit for getting bin Laden when he not only opposed but even tried to criminalize the personnel and the tactic that directly led to getting the most vital information involved in getting bin Laden.

And while I myself believe that going into Pakistan to get bin Laden was the right thing to do, let’s not forget that there have been rather awful repercussions from that act – particularly the surrender of BILLIONS of dollars in stealth technology that will surely go into the hands of every single one of our worst enemies and the even more worrisome now-glaciated relations between the United States and vital ally Pakistan.  There were huge costs to what we did – which is yet more reason that a “victory lap” is a very inappropriate thing for Obama to do.

So let me refer now to the title of this article and explain what I mean.

If I asked 100 Americans who were old enough to have lived through the time “Which president deserves credit for the moon landing” the answer would be “John F. Kennedy.”  And I mean he would get the credit 100 percent of the time.  After all, it was John F. Kennedy who said:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

But here’s the thing: we didn’t actually land on the moon until 1969.  And just who was president in 1969? 

Richard M. Nixon.  The guy who gets no credit for anything partly because of Watergate but mostly simply because he was a Republican.  JFK had been in his grave for six years when his dream of putting a man on the moon became a reality – TWICE the time it took for George Bush’s goal to get bin Laden.

George W. Bush was every bit as instrumental in the eventual nailing of Osama bin Laden was as John F. Kennedy was in the eventual putting a man on the moon:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken “dead or alive,” no matter how long it takes, amid indications that the suspected terrorist may be bottled up in a rugged Afghan canyon. The president, in an Oval Office meeting with Thailand’s prime minister, would not predict the timing of bin Laden’s capture but said he doesn’t care how the suspect is brought to justice. “I don’t care, dead or alive — either way,” Bush said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

And:

“Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”

RICHARD CLARKE, White House Terrorism Advisor, 1998-01: President Bush said to us in the basement of the White House on the night of 9/11, “You have everything you need.” And that was true because as soon as we went to the Congress, they said, “Just tell us what you need.” Blank check.

NARRATOR: The president was determined to spend whatever was necessary and do whatever was necessary to conduct a new kind of war.

JOHN ASHCROFT, Atty. General, 2001-05: The president turned to me and said ─ in my direction anyhow ─ he said, “Never let this happen again.”

FRAN TOWNSEND, White House Terrorism Advisor, 2004-07: I understood that to mean there was no end of the earth we weren’t willing to go to, there was nothing we weren’t willing to ask for, there was nobody we wouldn’t work with. [...]

J. COFER BLACK: This is a very highly classified area. All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves come off.

Bush put all the infrastructure in place to get bin Laden.  He transformed the American intelligence community.  And yes, he waterboarded the terrorists who yielded the vital information we needed.  It simply took time.  Osama bin Laden could have been literally in any of a few billion different caves spread over half the planet.  And it wasn’t like Barack Obama got out his mail-order investigator kit and found out where bin Laden was hiding by himself, was it?

Finally, Obama demagogues Mitt Romney by insinuating that Romney wouldn’t make the tough decision to get Osama binLaden had he been president.  And Obama’s “evidence” for that demonization is this quote from Romney in 2007:

LIZ SIDOTI: “Why haven’t we caught bin Laden in your opinion?”

GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY: “I think, I wouldn’t want to over-concentrate on Bin Laden. He’s one of many, many people who are involved in this global Jihadist effort. He’s by no means the only leader. It’s a very diverse group – Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and of course different names throughout the world. It’s not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person. It is worth fashioning and executing an effective strategy to defeat global, violent Jihad and I have a plan for doing that.”

That clearly doesn’t mean that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have made the decision to go in and nail bin Laden in the event that GEORGE BUSH’S WATERBOARDING had led to his location.  He was merely pointing out that we undermined ourselves if we made getting bin Laden the end-all given the fact that there are MANY TERRORISTS and even MANY TERRORIST LEADERS and getting bin Laden wouldn’t magically win the war that these terrorists started.

As an überliberal website documents, HILLARY CLINTON - now serving as Obama’s own Secretary of State – COMPLETELY AGREED WITH MITT ROMNEY.  And completely DISAGREED with Barack Obama.  As did the man who would have been THE most experienced “foreign-policy” president America had ever had since Dwight Eisenhower, Sen. John McCain.

The only reason – THE ONLY REASON – Barack Obama has been allowed to make the incredibly cynical credit-grabbing statements about getting bin Laden is because the mainstream media are incredibly biased and dishonest propagandists.

Obama’s Hometown of Chicago Is Totally Out Of Control (‘you should move out for the weekend … or risk being trapped inside by rioters’)

You know, I would have thought a tough-talking ballet dancer like Rahm Emanuel would have been exactly what Chicago needed to crack down on rioters.  Whodafigured he wouldn’t be up to the job?

This kind of reminds me about what I wrote about Obama before he got elected by fools, anyway: do you want a poodle or a Rottweiler?  And dumbasses said, “Give us poodles or give us death!”

And we saw how our poodle-in-chief let us down.

Residents of State Street Condo Told To Leave Chicago During NATO Summit
Updated: Monday, 23 Apr 2012, 7:07 AM CDT
Published : Friday, 20 Apr 2012, 8:37 PM CDT
By Darlene Hill, FOX Chicago News

Chicago – Residents of a Chicago condo whose building will be in the eye of the NATO storm are being warned that they should move out for the weekend … or risk being trapped inside by rioters.

FOX Chicago News was first to report Friday that the people living in the 17-floor Library Tower building at 520 South State Street were warned in a letter from condo management that “we are STRONGLY recommending that all residents find places to stay during the conference from May 18 through May 21.”

READ THE LETTER>>>

NATO summits often attract crowds of thousands of protesters. Currently, a march is planned on Sunday, May 20, from the Petrillo Band Shell in Grant Park past Library Tower on State Street to McCormick Place.

The condo is hiring two off-duty police officers to provide security; those cops will be armed.

“In the event of a riot or the potential of one near the building, all access doors will be locked including the garage door,” the letter continues. “For everyone’s safety, we will be instructing anyone in the building to stay in his or her unit.”

“I can’t just leave my garage whenever I want. They’ll be holding us hostage in here,” said resident Sebrina Krielinger.

The condo is in a busy area on State between Harrison and Congress, and residents are used to a lot.

“It’s just pretty shocking to see and hear things are going to be scary in your own home,” said resident Jeff Lunz. “I think they’ve got everyone’s best interest in mind.”

The letter also warns:

• “We are strongly recommending that you do not have any guests over during this time including dog walkers and cleaning companies.”
• “There will be absolutely no deliveries or moves permitted between Friday, May 18 and Monday, May 21.”
• “The revolving door will be locked on Friday morning.”

“I’m inconvenienced by parades and a lot of other things. I can’t get out on the day of the Thanksgiving Day parade. So that’s just a part of city life,” said Lunz.

Coach is Right added his two cents to this story, saying:

When our Secret Service returns from their activities in Colombia, they are expected to release locations of concrete barriers and no go zones around McCormick Place on South Lake Shore Drive. Just how much more can Chicago citizens be asked to take? The black on black street crimes, shootings, murders already are approaching the ten year high for U.S. wars in the Middle East. This could get 1968 type ugly.

And of course we know what Obama’s Secret Service did in Colombia, don’t we? 

Chicago is so screwed.  Liberals let them down; so they elected more liberals.  And then those liberals went to prison for corruption.  So they elected still more liberals.  And now they’re facing their own self-created Hurricane Katrina that is on the verge of swamping the city: so flee the sinking ship, ye rats!!!

Chicago is just one of many American cities who have been utterly destroyed by Democrats and liberal policies for a good one hundred years straight – and they STILL elect more Democrats!!!

The warning letter to Chicago reminds me of the signs Obama has posted in Arizona to warn the American people that he is abandoning this nation to narco-terrorist criminals:

Putting Obama or his stooge Rahm Emanuel in control of security is the equivalent of trying to make toy poodles watchdogs.

Katy Perry Boycotted By America-Hating Liberal For Supporting Our Troops

The “Jane-Fonda liberal aiding and abetting the enemies of America while pouring hate on her own nation’s soldiers” thing is still alive and well:

Katy Perry’s ‘Part Of Me’ Video Boycotted By Feminist Writer Naomi Wolf (VIDEO)
Posted: 03/29/2012 11:09 am Updated: 03/29/2012 11:58 am

Feminist author Naomi Wolf has a big problem with Katy Perry’s latest music video, “Part of Me.”

Wolf, who is best known for her book “The Beauty Myth” and most recently made headlines when she was arrested in October at an Occupy Wall Street protest, is asking the public to boycott the singer’s video because she claims it’s propaganda for the U.S. Marines Corps.

Perry’s latest video features the singer breaking up with a boyfriend and doing her best “G.I. Jane” impersonation as she cuts her hair and joins the Marines.

“Have you all seen the Katy Perry Marines video?” Wolf posted on her Facebook page on Sunday. “It is a total piece of propaganda for the Marines … I really want to find out if she was paid by them for making it … It is truly shameful.”

The author added, “I would suggest a boycott of this singer whom I really liked — if you are as offended at this glorification of violence as I am.”

It seems fairly obvious that the video is supposed to suggest female empowerment, and joining the Marines is supposed to show that Perry isn’t broken just because heart is. All of Perry’s videos have a theatrical element to them, but “Part of Me” is a considerable departure from past videos such as “California Gurls,” which featured Perry in Candyland with whipped cream canisters shooting out of her bra.

Perry hasn’t said if she was paid by the military to feature them in her video, but she told MTV she deliberately chose them because they best represent the song.

“It’s an affirmation of strength, so I wanted to go the strongest route I ever could,” she explained. “Literally, I was like, ‘I’m gonna join the service. I’m gonna join the Marines.’ We used only Marines. … For three days, I was a wannabe Marine, which was so difficult.”

Here is the video:

It is amazing that liberalism, the Democrat Party, and literally disrespecting and demonizing the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who safeguard our liberty have come to go hand in hand.

There was a time when Republicans and Democrats alike supported their president and their military in time of war.  And that is particularly relevant given the fact that World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam – you know, the four biggest and costliest wars in American history – were all waged by Democrat presidents.

Tragically and pathetically, the Democrat Party veered into the real of being “the party of treason” in the 1960s when the virulently leftist faction that today OWNS the Democrat Party undermined their own president (LBJ) and betrayed America during the Vietnam War.  They leaked the Pentagon Papers (for the record, Nixon went down trying to protect national security secrets and embarrassing details that all occurred during the DEMOCRAT LBJ administration); they spat on our troops as they returned home from Vietnam; they undermined our enormous military success in Vietnam such that they literally “fundamentally transformed” North Vietnam’s worst military defeat (the Tet Offensive) into a huge political victory; they gutted and disgraced the American military in the presidency of Jimmy Carter leaving the USA weak and humiliated in the face of a dominating USSR; they elected as president a draft dodger who had expressed his “loathing” of the American military in writing - followed by a Clinton presidency that AGAIN gutted the military and intelligence which invited Osama bin Laden to attack us; and so on.

It is simply a fact that the Democrat Party is fundamentally un-American, and pretty much everyone knows it.

That’s why just seeing an American flag or just seeing a Fourth of July parade is enough to make people vote Republican.  Democrats would be ashamed of both of those facts if they loved their country.

In God damn America, decent people like Katy Perry are boycotted and vermin like Naomi Wolf and Spike Lee are celebrated.

Traitor-in-Chief Barack Obama Caught Red-Handed On Tape Playing Naked Politics With Critical National Security

You want to talk about a hard punch right in the gut of American national security.

Allow me to sum this up for you: Obama is telling the Russians, “I assure you that I’m going to cave in to you like the pandering weakling that I am.  But I can’t do it yet.  If I sacrifice American security before the election, the American people will rightly turn on me and I’ll be out – and you’ll have a strong leader to deal with who will confront you as an obvious opponent rather than the Neville Chamberlain-style Appeaser-in-Chief that you have in me.  If you give me ‘space’ to get re-elected I promise you I’ll bow down before you the same way I’ve already bowed down so many times before.  I’ll even apologize to you for America’s ‘aggression’  if you want me to.  Heck, I just got through apologizing to the people who murdered American soldiers!  So you KNOW I’m good for it!”

Hot mike moment: Obama overheard telling Medvedev he needs ‘space’ on missile defense
By NBC News’ Shawna Thomas

SEOUL, South Korea — It was a comment not intended for public consumption, and another lesson for President Barack Obama on the importance of being careful about what you say around microphones, especially in an election year.

At the end of a 90-minute meeting between Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday, journalists rushed in to hear remarks from the leaders about the content of their talks.

Journalists spied the two leaders leaning close together and talking in hushed tones.  According to those in the room, the conversation was difficult to hear but the videotape revealed Obama asking the Russian leader to wait until after the November election before pushing forward on the topic of a planned missile defense shield.

“Pool” videotape provided more information about the conversation between the two leaders:

Obama: This is my last election…After my election I have more flexibility.

Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

While most journalists didn’t catch the rest, one Russian reporter managed to record the context with his equipment.

Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.

Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

Obama: This is my last election…After my election I have more flexibility.

Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

The planned anti-ballistic shield system has been one of many sore spots between the two world powers in the last few years.

Obama says US can reduce nuclear stockpile

Moscow says it fears the system would weaken Russia by gaining the capability to shoot down the nuclear missiles it relies on as a deterrent. It wants a legally binding pledge from the United States that Russia’s nuclear forces would not be targeted by the system.

That’s actually NOT what Moscow wants.  Yes, it is their rhetorical posture to make them sound “reasonable,” but the reality is that Russia doesn’t just want some “contract.”

Moscow wants the United States to abandon this missile defense system altogether.  Moscow wants to throw a monkey wrench into the entire system that the United States says is necessary to protect America from the now very real prospect of a nutjob Iranian ballistic missile attack.

You need to understand what current American policy is.  And then you need to realize that Obama is signalling the Russians that he is going to abandon his own policy and undermine American security if Russia just gets off his back so he can get re-elected.  Because getting re-elected is all that Obama cares about.  And he’ll violate any trust no matter how sacred if it will purchase enough votes.

To frame it in terms of the title below, if Obama was going to “stick” to the missile shield as is official US policy as of just a few months ago (December 2011), he wouldn’t have anything to be afraid of.  Which is to say that Obama is already planning on appeasing Russia; he just needs “space” to betray America:

U.S. sticking to missile shield regardless of Moscow
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON | Fri Dec 2, 2011 2:37pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama Administration plans to complete an anti-ballistic missile shield to protect European allies against Iran ”whether Russia likes it or not,” the U.S. envoy to NATO said on Friday.

Moscow’s objections to the project, which includes participation by Romania, Poland, Turkey and Spain, “won’t be the driving force in what we do,” Ivo Daalder, the ambassador, told reporters at a breakfast session.

The U.S. estimate of the Iranian ballistic missile threat has gone up, not down, over the two years since President Barack Obama opted for a new, four-phased deployment to protect the United States and NATO allies, Daalder said.

“It’s accelerating,” Daalder said of the U.S.-perceived threat of Iran’s ballistic missiles, “and becoming more severe than even we thought two years ago.”

“We’re deploying all four phases, in order to deal with that threat, whether Russia likes it or not,” he added. At the same time, he urged Moscow to cooperate in both to deal with Iran and to see for itself that, as he put it, the system’s capabilities pose its strategic deterrent force no threat.

If the perceived threat from Iran ebbs, “then maybe the system will be adapted to that lesser threat,” Daalder said.

[...]

Daalder said the sides remain at odds over, among other things, Russia’s demand for the legally binding pledge, before any cooperation, that its nuclear forces would not be targeted by the NATO elements.

“They have gotten themselves quite hung up on our unwillingness to put this in legally binding writing,” he said.

The administration was not convinced that such a pledge would be ratified by the U.S. Senate, he said, nor should Moscow be convinced that even if it were, “we wouldn’t necessarily at some point walk away from it,” as the George W. Bush administration did from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the only U.S.-Russia missile defense pact.

That withdrawal opened the way for the creation of an anti-missile defense shield that the U.S. government says is designed to protect the United States from countries like Iran and North Korea.

Daalder said that if the United States ever were placing interceptors to counter Russia’s nuclear missiles, “we wouldn’t deploy them in Europe. We would deploy them in the United States.”

The physics of missile defense intercepts make it “easier and better to approach an incoming missile from the opposite side than it is to try to chase it down.” he said. “That’s the way that it works.”

Russia knows full-well that we wouldn’t build a system designed to protect America from Russian missiles in Europe.  What Russia is trying to do is create difficulties that will make the missile shield politically impossible to build altogether.  The Russians also very much like the idea (which is why Russia has helped Iran develop its nuclear program to begin with) of America being vulnerable to Iran which very obviously gives Russia more influence and power over US policy.  At least unless we build a missile defense shield.

And ask yourself whether the threat from Iran has gone up or down given that Iran was just caught red-handed scrubbing evidence of a nuclear weapons program at its Parchin facility.

But Barack Obama is worried about the Iranian threat.  Obama isn’t worried about millions of Americans being murdered.  Obama is looking out for #1.  Obama is worried about his re-election and he will betray America if that’s what it takes to keep his job so he can continue his “fundamental transformation” of America from a constitutional republic into a Marxist banana republic. 

This has always been a nation that was determined to protect itself.  Barack Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” that.  He just needs “space” to do it so he can betray the American people with impunity.

Obama Administration To Troops In Combat Zone: ‘We Don’t Trust YOU Any More Than We Trust Our Afghan Allies, So You Are Ordered To Disarm’

You need to understand that this is unprecedented: an administration actually disarmed its very own troops prior to a visit to a combat zone:

It’s been reported that a car bomb exploded when Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta landed in Afghanistan earlier today, but no one was injured except the man who was driving the car when it burst into flames. In other news, an even bigger bomb was dropped on our Marines when they were ordered to disarm before entering a building in Afghanistan to hear Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta give a speech.
 
That’s right: our Marines, who are in a combat zone, were ordered to stack their M-4 rifles over here and their 9mm handguns over there before listening to Panetta ramble on about this and that (I don’t remember Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordering our Marines to be disarmed in his presence, even once).
 
Although the Obama administration has tried to spin this and make it look like an admittedly unusual yet valid request, the man who carried out the order to disarm the Marines, Maj. Gen. Mark Gurganus, gave some insight into the reason behind this order which even MSNBC commentators labeled “unprecedented.” We didn’t want unarmed Afghans who attended the speech to feel out of place.

And:

However, US troops often remain armed even when their Afghan colleagues have been asked to lay down their weapons and the incident is believed to be the first time they were stripped of guns during an address by their own secretary of defence.

You know when you see stacks of rifles like this? At surrenders as the surrendering enemy troops turn in their weapons. Only in this case we’re the side that is supposed to be winning.

This should be no surprise given how this administration has handled the soldiers under its misrule:

Example:

Troops: Strict war rules slow Marjah offensive
By Alfred de Montesquiou and Deb Riechmann – The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Feb 15, 2010 15:08:51 EST

MARJAH, Afghanistan — Some American and Afghan troops say they’re fighting the latest offensive in Afghanistan with a handicap — strict rules that routinely force them to hold their fire.

Example:

Family calls U.S. military goals ‘fuzzy’
Parents of soldier killed last week criticize firepower restrictions
By DENNIS YUSKO, Staff writer
First published in print: Thursday, June 24, 2010

QUEENSBURY — The parents of a Lake George soldier killed in Afghanistan attacked the Obama administration Wednesday for “flower children leadership,” and said they would work to change U.S. rules of military engagement in the nine-year conflict.

Hours before holding a wake for their 27-year-old son in Glens Falls, Bill and Beverly Osborn heavily criticized a military policy implemented last year that places some restrictions on when American troops can use firepower in Afghanistan. The new rules were set when Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal assumed command of the Afghanistan effort, and have reportedly made it harder for troops to call in for or initiate air power, artillery and mortars against the Taliban.

The counterinsurgency policy is intended to reduce civilian casualties and win the allegiance of Afghans, McChrystal had said. But echoing criticisms from the Vietnam era, Bill Osborn said Wednesday that it’s tied the hands of service members on the ground.

“We send our young men and women to spill their blood and we won’t let them do their job,” he said from his Queensbury home. “Winning hearts and minds is wonderful, but first we have to defeat the enemy.”

Example:

Fighting a War without Bullets?
by Chris Carter
05/25/2010

Commanders have ordered a U.S. military unit in Afghanistan to patrol with unloaded weapons, according to a source in Afghanistan.

American soldiers in at least one unit have been ordered to conduct patrols without a round chambered in their weapons, an anonymous source stationed at a forward operating base in Afghanistan said in an interview. The source was unsure where the order originated or how many other units were affected.

Example:

Hold fire, earn a medal
By William H. McMichael – Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday May 12, 2010 15:51:31 EDT

U.S. troops in Afghanistan could soon be awarded a medal for not doing something, a precedent-setting award that would be given for “courageous restraint” for holding fire to save civilian lives.

And you wonder why things are going so godawful over there.

If you read over my articles on Obama’s massive social engineering on the military – such as imposing homosexuality on our troops – you ought to see that this is frankly no surprise.  These days, if a gay soldier in your unit fancies you, you’d better just bend over and let him sodomize you; because if you don’t he’ll file a sexual harassment suit against you – and under this administration you will be found guilty and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

It’s also no surprise that our first “emperor” president would begin to implement the first “Praetorian guard” approach to our soldiers.

I find it despicable; but of course everything this president has done has pretty much been despicable.

If You Happen To See This Pin, Snap To It And Render Your Respect To The Wearer

It’s called the Gold Star pin; it is an award that is given to family members of a veteran who was killed in action:

It turns out that most Americans don’t even recognize it or know what it means when they see it.

That’s a shame.  By which I mean a dishonorable shame.

An article titled, “Sacrifice Isn’t Shared” posted by PJMom (I’m just guessing she’s the mother of an Air Force Pararescue Jumper) makes my guts churn:

Gallup surveyed attitudes among military. What shocked me wasn’t veteran attitudes toward Obama, but the disparity of service among generations:

• 75% of 80-89 year-old men served
• 60% of 70-79 year-olds
• 49% of 60-69 year-olds
• 21% of 50-59 year-olds
• 19% of 40-49 year-olds
• 13% of 30-39 year-olds
• 8% of 18-29 year-olds

The drop in service among Boomers marks the 60s cultural revolution more explicitly than anything else: who cares about serving thee when I can just serve me, me, me? It’s pretty obvious by the ever-dwindling percentage of veterans that boomers passed along their selfless mentality to their own progeny, no? Serve the country? How passé.

The 5,000 service members who have died in the wars of the past decade have wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. The impact ripples. But families tend to raise and shoulder the burden of service. Society at large doesn’t feel it, not with 8% of 18-29 year-olds serving in the military.

UPDATE: Via Hot Air, a tribute to the Greatest Generation who served and the pilots who donate time and resources to ensure the veterans see their memorial. If you want to be humbled, visit the WWII Memorial and watch the octogenarians awed by memories of long ago.

The thing that made me gasp was the sight of that diminishing table of military service.  There was a time when almost everyone had served their country; now almost nobody has.

It makes me just sick that so few have suffered so much for so long to stand up for the rest of us.  And when they are killed doing their duty on our behalf, we don’t even notice or care.

Look at that pin.  Memorize it.

Only those who have lost a spouse, mother, father, child or step-child to combat are authorized to wear that pin.

And if you are fortunate enough to come across someone wearing it, please stop that person and do your best to tell them from the bottom of your heart that you are thankful for that soldier, airman, sailor or Marine who gave what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion” to their country.

No one should be more honored in America than those who gave their lives in defense of this nation and the families that mourn their loss.

It’s the least you can do to a family member who may be RIGHTLY wondering if this country was truly worth sacrificing for in the face of such shocking apathy.

The Obama Navy Illustrates Why America Is Sinking: PC Navy Buying Biofuel At $16 A Gallon

In Obama’s God damn America we do truly breathtakingly stupid things and then keep doing them until we collapse.  And then of course we can also add a healthy mixture of Obama’s crony capitalist fascism:

Navy buys biofuel for $16 a gallon
posted at 7:00 pm on December 11, 2011 by J.E. Dyer

This is going to help the Defense Department weather looming budget cuts, for sure. Teaming up with the Department of Agriculture (which has a cheery Rotary Club ring to it), the Navy has purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for about $16 a gallon, or about 4 times the price of its standard marine fuel, JP-5, which has been going for under $4 a gallon.

You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy. Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.

The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of course. The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package.

Solazyme’s partner in the biofuel sale is Dynamic Fuels, a Louisiana company owned jointly by Tyson Foods and Tulsa-based Syntroleum. Tyson and Syntroleum are distinguished by having profitable lines of business that do not rely on government grants to unprofitable “green” projects. This does not make their biofuel product price-competitive with fossil fuels, however. (They were induced to develop biofuel manufacturing processes by a combination of subsidies and tax breaks.)

The Dynamic Fuels plant was opened for business in Geismar, LA in 2010, becoming by far the largest biofuels plant in North America – and reportedly, in combination with a plant in Finland, a producer of 94% of the world’s biofuels. This is great boosterism stuff, but the biofuels produced by Dynamic Fuels are still considerably more expensive than the fossil-fuel alternative. Dynamic Fuels has begun supplying aviation biofuel to KLM, the Dutch flag carrier, but of course, the use of more-expensive biofuels by commercial carriers has to be subsidized by governments.

If governments stopped subsidizing biofuels, their artificial “profitability” would disappear overnight. Price-wise, they can’t compete with fossil fuels. The day may come when they can, but subsidizing them while they don’t is not a method with any record of success for encouraging price efficiency. What it does instead is create languishing public dependencies and tremendous opportunities for cronyism, as demonstrated in the Solyndra scandal.

As the Institute for Energy Research article (top link) indicates, the US has enormous reserves of both conventional and unconventional oil and natural gas resources. Opening them up for exploitation would, among other things, ensure that the US armed forces could buy cheaper fuel – cheaper than today’s prices – produced in the USA. At a time when federal debt is spiraling and the Defense Department is facing budget cuts that are guaranteed to gut the fighting forces and render them ineffective, it seems to border on insane to eschew a ready, significantly cheaper alternative and require the armed services to quadruple what they pay for fuel as a proof of concept – apparently with the idea that the forces should buy more of the 4-times-as-expensive fuel. This is, after all, our national security we’re talking about.

While Obama is making the Navy shoot itself in both feet by buying fuel that costs FOUR TIMES what they need to spend, he is simultaneously demanding that the military’s budget be gutted by $600 billion – AFTER he already gutted it $450 billion the year before.

And to “pay for” forcing the Navy to purchase fuel that costs four times more than what they had been buying, Obama is going to lay off more than 3,000 valuable mid-level sailors who make up the heart of our armed forces.

Hopefully all that biofuel is for ships with names like “The USS Dodo Bird.” Because that’s the way we’re going under this president’s leadership. Or maybe the “USS Teapot Dome” in honor of Obama’s in-your-face blatant corruption.

Libya, Iran, Entire Middle East Beginning To Spiral Out Of Control. Obama Entirely Responsible

We told you so! WE TOLD YOU SO! WE TOLD YOU SO!!!

My exact words back in August:

If Muammar Gaddafi is truly overthrown from Libya, who or what is going to take his place? A worse regime? A French-Revolution-style bloodbath of mob-rule and executions galore? Terrorist Islamist groups like al Qaeda? A pro-Iranian puppet state like Lebanon?

It shouldn’t surprise anybody if the factions that fought alongside one another to depose Gaddafi begin to fight against each other for control over the oil fields and political control. There are the Berbers versus the Arabs, and a whole bunch of tribes versus a whole bunch of other tribes.

Just remember that if Barack Obama assumes the credit for the wonderful day that Gaddafi is overthrown, then he should assume every single particle of blame for Libya turning ugly.

Colin Powell famously told Bush regarding Iraq, “If you break it, you buy it.” And liberals threw that in Bush’s face – even though Bush got Saddam Hussein and won the Iraq War. If a crisis develops – which I think it will – shouldn’t Obama be held accountable for his substantial role in buying Libya???

But is the mainstream media blaming Obama for the disastrous developments in Libya the same way they blamed Bush at every turn for everything that went wrong in Iraq? Nope.

Libya: revolutionaries turn on each other as fears grow for law and order
Hundreds of revolutionaries fought each other at a hospital in Tripoli early on Monday, in the biggest armed clash between allies since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
By Nick Meo, Tripoli
9:00PM GMT 31 Oct 2011

The fighting fuelled growing fears that nobody is in control of thousands of swaggering armed men who are still based in Tripoli and that the country’s interim government will struggle to impose law and order.

Two people died from bullet wounds and at least seven fighters were injured during a battle that started when militia from the town of Zintan were stopped by guards from the Tripoli Brigade from entering the city’s Central Hospital to kill a patient.

The hospital front door and entrance hall were afterwards left pocked with bullets, doctors and patients had to flee the building and two elderly patients died of heart attacks during the shooting, which lasted from about 1am until dawn. Heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft guns were used by both factions, supposed allies who in reality nurse a dangerous rivalry.

The shoot-out started when a group of gunmen arrived at the hospital in search of a man they had shot earlier in the night. Witnesses said the gunmen were drunk, and had come to finish the man off after learning that he had survived and been taken for medical treatment.

Doctors asked them to leave, at which point one of them pulled out a pistol and began shooting.

“He was overpowered, but then hundreds of Zintan men arrived outside the hospital with heavy weapons and shooting started,” said Mohamad Hamza, a Tripoli Brigade fighter in charge of security. “We had to call for backup, and our boys came from all over Tripoli.

“We couldn’t believe that they were shooting at us. I had to say to them, you are shooting at a hospital, not at Muammar Gaddafi’s 32nd Brigade. Eventually, after several hours, a Shaikh came from the mosque and persuaded them to stop and they handed over three of them who started it to Tripoli’s military council.”

He said one Zintan fighter and a passer-by were killed in shooting, and seven Tripoli Brigade men were injured, two seriously. He said he believed Zintan injured were taken to other hospitals.

The incident will raise pressure on the fragile National Transitional Council to disarm the former rebel fighters who are still at large in Libya’s capital, even though they were asked to leave weeks ago and have been ordered to give up their heavy weapons.

The Zintan brigades were some of the most ferocious fighters against Gaddafi’s forces and helped lead the attack on Tripoli, but have outstayed their welcome, earning a reputation for mayhem and looting.

Thousands of them have ignored pleas to go, staying put instead of returning to their town in the mountains three hours drive to the south.

The battle came on the day Human Rights Watch warned in a report that the entire population of 30,000 people from the town of Tawargha, near Misurata, has been driven out by former rebels for siding with Gaddafi. There have been reports that some of its men, who are predominantly black-skinned, may have been shot or beaten.

Tripoli’s residents fear that there will be more clashes in their city, which is desperate to get back to normality. Mr Hamza, in charge of security at the hospital, said he expected more trouble. “I think it will happen again,” he said. “They will be back for revenge.”

Peter Cole, Libya analyst with the International Crisis Group, said: “Rivalry between brigades from different cities has not been resolved and it does now pose a threat to Libya’s security.

“This suggests that the National Transitional Council needs to work harder with the militia groups to bring unity among them.”

The fighting came on the day that Nato formally ended operations in Libya.

The military action, unprecedented in setting out from the beginning to win a war while guaranteeing not to use troops to do so, was declared a success by Nato’s chief. “At midnight tonight, a successful chapter in Nato’s history is coming to an end,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general and a former Danish prime minister, said at a press conference with the interim Libyan president, Mustafa Abdul Jalil.

Libya’s interim leadership meanwhile elected an academic from Tripoli as the country’s new interim prime minister.

Abdel-Rahim al-Keeb was chosen by the National Transitional Council and will appoint a new Cabinet in coming days. The new government is to run Libya in the coming months and to pave the way for general elections.

In the same way, Barack Obama has done nothing but take credit for getting Osama bin Laden. It doesn’t matter that THE single instrumental intelligence coup necessary to get bin Laden was the result of the BUSH WATERBOARDINGS that Obama demonized and actually even tried to criminalized.

Obama gets all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden. But he receives absolutely no blame whatsoever for destabilizing U.S. – Pakastani relations by the mainstream media propaganda. Even when he actually personally admits his action was responsible for that destabilization.

Osama Bin Laden killing hit US-Pakistan relations: Barack Obama
Published: Saturday, Oct 1, 2011, 9:43 IST
By Lalit K Jha | Place: Washington, DC | Agency: PTI

The US-Pak ties have strained following the detention of American diplomat Raymond Davis in Lahore and the Abbottabad raid which killed Osama bin Laden, affecting the bilateral military cooperation, President Barack Obama has told the Congress.

“Bilaterally, the fallout of the raid resulting in the death of Osama bin Laden continued to complicate the United States-Pakistan relationship, further strained by a series of media reports based on alleged leaks from both the United States and Pakistan,” Obama said in a new report to Congress on US operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Let’s also not forget the disaster that Obama has now created in Iraq with his total troop pullout.

Obama had THREE YEARS to negotiate with the Iraqi government. The Iraqi Congress WANTED American military assets to remain. And in EVERY SINGLE WAR ON EVERY SINGLE FRONT for the last SIXTY YEARS, when the United States of America fought and won to defeat an enemy, they have STAYED ON THE GROUND THEY FOUGHT FOR. Example Germany. Example Japan. Example Korea.

Obama snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. And turned Iraq into Vietnam, the only country we pulled out of.

Which is why the military is beyond pissed off:

Key general: Iraq pullout plan a ‘disaster’
Others echo call for strength against Iran
By Rowan Scarborough – The Washington Times
Sunday, October 23, 2011

President Obama’s decision to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq by Dec. 31 is an “absolute disaster” that puts the burgeoning Arab democracy at risk of an Iranian “strangling,” said an architect of the 2007 troop surge that turned around a losing war.

Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane was at the forefront of persuading President George W. Bush to scuttle a static counterinsurgency strategy and replace it with 30,000 reinforcements and a more activist, street-by-street counterterrorism tactic.

Today, even with that strategy producing a huge drop in daily attacks, Gen. Keane bluntly told The Washington Times that the United States again is losing.

“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”

U.S. troops will be vacating Iraq at a time when neither Baghdad’s counterterrorism skills nor its abilities to protect against invasion are at levels needed to fully protect the country, say analysts long involved in the nearly nine-year war.

“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.

“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”

But how is the mainstream media propaganda describing this abject disaster? As a great victory won by Obama. That’s how dishonest the media is today.

And let’s not forget Iran. George Bush WARNED America that Iran posed a clear and present danger to the United States as they developed nuclear weapons. And Democrats demonized him for being RIGHT:

THE NATION – Democrats rip Bush’s Iran policy
Presidential candidates say a new intelligence report shows that the administration has been talking too tough.
By Scott Martelle and Robin Abcarian
December 05, 2007

Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.

While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of them sought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.

“I vehemently disagree with the president that nothing’s changed and therefore nothing in American policy has to change,” said New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We do know that pressure on Iran does have an effect. I think that is an important lesson.”

Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the new intelligence report indicated that Iran dropped its program before international pressure came into play.

“It was like watching a rerun of his statements on Iraq five years earlier,” Biden said. “Iran is not a nuclear threat to the United States of America. Iran should be dealt with directly, with the rest of the world at our side. But we’ve made it more difficult now, because who is going to trust us?”

The debate was aired without a studio audience over NPR, live from the Iowa State Historical Museum. It covered Iran, China and immigration, offering the contenders a chance to delve more deeply into subjects that often receive less detailed debate treatment.

Clinton and Biden were joined by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel.

Iran is bolstered. They already have TWO NUCLEAR WEAPONS under Barack Obama’s misrule. And they are flaunting their strength in front of a weak and frankly pathetic Barack Obama.

You also need to realize that the euphamistically media-labelled “Arab Spring” (sounds SO refreshing) has unseated long American allies such as Egypt and is the direct result of Obama’s terrible mismanagement of the U.S. dollar which has created soaring food prices both here and abroad:

FEBRUARY 23, 2011
The Federal Reserve Is Causing Turmoil Abroad
Few protesters in the Middle East connect rising food prices to U.S. monetary policy. But central bankers do.
By GEORGE MELLOAN

In accounts of the political unrest sweeping through the Middle East, one factor, inflation, deserves more attention. Nothing can be more demoralizing to people at the low end of the income scale—where great masses in that region reside—than increases in the cost of basic necessities like food and fuel. It brings them out into the streets to protest government policies, especially in places where mass protests are the only means available to shake the existing power structure.

The consumer-price index in Egypt rose to more than 18% annually in 2009 from 5% in 2006, a more normal year. In Iran, the rate went to 25% in 2009 from 13% in 2006. In both cases the rate subsided in 2010 but remained in double digits.

Egyptians were able to overthrow the dictatorial Hosni Mubarak. Their efforts to fashion a more responsive regime may or may not succeed. Iranians are taking far greater risks in tackling the vicious Revolutionary Guards to try to unseat the ruling ayatollahs.

Probably few of the protesters in the streets connect their economic travail to Washington. But central bankers do. They complain, most recently at last week’s G-20 meeting in Paris, that the U.S. is exporting inflation.

China and India blame the U.S. Federal Reserve for their difficulties in maintaining stable prices. The International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, always responsive to the complaints of developing nations, are suggesting alternatives to the dollar as the pre-eminent international currency. The IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has proposed replacement of the dollar with IMF special drawing rights, or SDRs, a unit of account fashioned from a basket of currencies that is made available to the foreign currency reserves of central banks.

About the only one failing to acknowledge a problem seems to be the man most responsible, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In a recent question-and-answer session at the National Press Club in Washington, the chairman said it was “unfair” to accuse the Fed of exporting inflation. Other nations, he said, have the same tools the Fed has for controlling inflation.

Well, not quite. Consider, for example, that much of world trade, particularly in basic commodities like food grains and oil, is denominated in U.S. dollars. When the Fed floods the world with dollars, the dollar price of commodities goes up, and this affects market prices generally, particularly in poor countries that are heavily import-dependent. Export-dependent nations like China try to maintain exchange-rate stability by inflating their own currencies to buy up dollars. [...]

Oil is going up. Foodstuffs are going up. And when the Fed sneezes money, the weak economies of the world, and the poor masses who are highly vulnerable to price rises in the necessities of life, catch pneumonia. [...]

The Fed is financing a vast and rising federal deficit, following a practice that has been a surefire prescription for domestic inflation from time immemorial. Meanwhile, its policies are stoking a rise in prices that is contributing to political unrest that in some cases might be beneficial but in others might turn out as badly as the overthrow of the shah in 1979. Does any of this suggest that there might be some urgency to bringing the Fed under closer scrutiny?

Obama has depicted the “Arab Spring” like it was a good thing. It has been a terrible thing that was the result of terrible Obama policies.

This reminds me of the Clinton years. Bill Clinton created one foreign policy disaster after another. And it started right away. In 1993, Bill Clinton radically expanded the humanitarian mission to Somalia that George H.W. Bush had implemented. Clinton turned it into a military campaign to get the Somalia warlord Adid. But Clinton refused to allow the US military the assets on the ground they needed to get that job done; he refused to allow them the heavy armor they needed to support any raid that could (read “would”) run into trouble because he wanted to keep “a low profile.”

When the Black Hawk Down” incident that humiliated America occurred, the U.S. was forced to seek emergency assistance from the U.N. security forces from Pakistan and Malaysia – which were justifiably furious at us for not having warned them about any military actions.

And then we pulled out with our tails between our legs like cowards.

That incident pulled a yet-unknown Osama bin Laden to conclude – and I quote:

“Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. … As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press…”

And so Osama bin Laden – smelling liberal Democrat weakness – began to set a plan in motion during the Clinton presidency. He put all of his assets into the United States under Bill Clinton’s nose. And by the time it was all ready to go, George Bush had just taken over. Which of course made the plan that occurred during the Clinton years and the assets being inserted into the U.S. during the Clinton years all Bush’s fault when the Clinton-era terrorists took down the World Trade Center twin towers and murdered 3,000 Americans.

Of course, George Bush had to respond. But Bill Clinton had gutted the United States military and the Central Intelligence Agency in order to “take advantage” of the “peace dividend” that Reagan and Bush 1 had won:

Upon taking power in 1993, Risen reports, the Clinton administration “began slashing the intelligence budget in search of a peace dividend, and Bill Clinton showed almost no interest in intelligence matters.”

The agency cutbacks combined with presidential disinterest took their toll almost immediately.

“Over a three-or-four-year period in the early-to-mid 1990s,” reports Risen, “virtually an entire generation of CIA officers – the people who had won the Cold War – quit or retired. One CIA veteran compared the agency to an airline that had lost all of is senior pilots . . . “

After Clinton CIA Director John Deutch cashiered several senior officers over a scandal in Guatamala, the situation got even worse.

“Morale [at the CIA] plunged to new lows, and the agency became paralyzed by an aversion to high-risk espionage operations for fear they would lead to political flaps. Less willing to take big risks, the CIA was less able to recruit spies in dangerous places such as Iraq.”

What chance did George Bush have to stop the 9/11 attacks? Bill Clinton had gutted our intelligence capability and allowed all of the terrorists into America before Bush even took office.

And of course Democrats SCREAMED in outrage when Bush spent to rebuild the United States military and intelligence capabilities in order to fight a war that was the direct result of Bill Clinton dismantling the American military and the American intelligence capability – leaving America both weak and blind – and then displaying gross weakness and outright cowardice by pulling out of Somalia the way he did. But, then again, it was Bush’s fault that Clinton had done those things.

It is long past time to disregard the mainstream media propaganda and finally hold the Democrats responsible for the messes that they have made.

The only thing more dangerous to the United States of America than the Democrat Party is the Goebbels’-like media propaganda that sustains the Democrat Party with bias and distortion and outright lies.

Honoring Our Fallen SEAL Heroes While Being Utterly Pissed At Obama

The story is a punch in the gut:

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the deadliest day for U.S. forces in the nearly 10-year war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter Saturday, killing 30 Americans — including Navy SEAL commandos from the broader unit that killed Osama bin Laden — and seven Afghan commandos, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

The helicopter, on a night-raid mission in the Tangi Valley of Wardak province, west of Kabul, was most likely brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, one coalition official said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and they could hardly have found a more valuable target: U.S. officials said 22 of the dead were Navy SEAL commandos from two different special teams, including SEAL Team 6.

The number of SEALs killed has since been released as 23.  It’s the worst day in the entire history of the Teams, which date back to the early days of the Vietnam War.

And of course the previous worst day in SEALs history occurred in Afghanistan, also:

In June 2005, on a barren mountain high in the Taliban-infested Hindu Kush, Luttrell and three fellow Navy SEALs came together to talk. Their mission — to locate and possibly take out an important Taliban leader hiding in the Afghan village below — had just been compromised. Three goatherds, one a boy of about 14, had blundered onto their position. Sitting against a log under the watchful eyes of their captors, the Afghans clearly weren’t happy to see the Americans. On the other hand, they were unarmed, technically civilians.

As about 100 goats milled about, Petty Officers Matthew Axelson, Danny Dietz and Luttrell, and their commander, Lt. Michael Murphy, discussed what to do. Having tried and failed earlier to make radio contact with their home base, they were on their own.

As they saw it, they had two options: kill the Afghans, or let them go and hope for the best. They let them go.

It’s a decision Luttrell bitterly regrets.

Within hours, more than 100 Taliban fighters descended on the SEAL team. In the terrible gun battle that followed, Murphy, Axelson and Dietz died. A few miles away, a Taliban grenade brought down a rescue helicopter on its way to help the trapped men, killing all 16 aboard. It was the worst day in the 40-year history of the Navy SEALs

Our special operations warriors are most vulnerable when a) they’re risking their lives by treating their enemies like decent human beings and b) relying on helicopter transportation for their insertions and extractions.

Both “weaknesses” relate to my belief that Afghanistan is a terrible place for the U.S. to be fighting as our “central front.”  Bush was right to make Iraq that front; Obama was wrong to make it Afghanistan.  I point out that:

Iraq was a place where we could win, and Afghanistan was a place where we could fall into an abyss.  Iraq – with its flat terrain and its conventional military dynamic, was a place where American technological might could completely dominate.

In making Iraq the central front, Bush chose a war that he knew America could win.

In demanding that Afghanistan be the central front, Democrats – and in particular Barack Obama – may well have chosen a war that we can’t win.

And Democrats now have a well-known history of losing wars since 1950.

Our jet fighters are virtually useless in this incredibly mountainous terrain, as our our armored forces. And helicopters – especially Chinooks – are incredibly vulnerable to rocket fire when they are inserting troops. Afghanistan has been called “the graveyard of empires” with damned good reason.

The SEALs were shot down while being transported aboard a Chinook helicopter, along with the eight crew members of the Chinook and another seven Afghan Special Forces soldiers.  A U.S. military dog assigned to the SEALs was also killed. 

For what it’s worth, if Barack Obama deserves “credit” for the SEALs nailing Osama bin Laden, he deserves just as much “credit” for the Chinook crash and the 22 dead SEALs now. You can’t have it both ways. Obama wanted to take the credit before; let him take the blame now.  Especially since the latest reports are that the Taliban LURED the SEALs to the site in retaliation for the Osama bin Laden killing.  Obama took all the credit for the operation that got Obama; why doesn’t he take credit for the operation that resulted in the deaths of one-tenth of the entire SEAL Team 6 unit that got bin Laden?  Other than the fact that Obama is the kind of guy who takes credit for every sunrise and then demonizes the Republicans for every sunset???

And it is important to realize that making Afghanistan the central front (i.e. “the good war”) was entirely political:

Bob Shrum, who was a high political operative who worked on the Kerry campaign in ’04, wrote a very interesting article in December of last year in which he talked about that campaign, and he said, at the time, the Democrats raised the issue of Afghanistan — and they made it into “the right war” and “the good war” as a way to attack Bush on Iraq. In retrospect, he writes, that it was, perhaps, he said, misleading. Certainly it was not very wise.

What he really meant to say — or at least I would interpret it — it was utterly cynical. In other words, he’s confessing, in a way, that the Democrats never really supported the Afghan war. It was simply a club with which to bash the [Bush] administration on the Iraq war and pretend that Democrats aren’t anti-war in general, just against the wrong war.

Well, now they are in power, and they are trapped in a box as a result of that, pretending [when] in opposition that Afghanistan is the good war, the war you have to win, the central war in the war on terror. And obviously [they are] now not terribly interested in it, but stuck.

One graph is all you need to see that George Bush basically fought a war of containment in Afghanistan.  It was Obama who turned it into the central front:

And, to continue, let me also say that Obama’s demonization of George Bush has clearly since been proven to have been completely false as well as depraved.

Obama said hateful garbage like:

Asked whether he would move U.S. troops out of Iraq to better fight terrorism elsewhere, he brought up Afghanistan and said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

Match that demagoguery up with Obama’s reality:

UN: Afghan civilian death toll hits record high
Jul 14, 2011, 12:24 GMT

Kabul – The first half of 2011 has been the deadliest six months for Afghan civilians since the decade-long war began, the United Nations mission said Thursday.

‘Afghanistan experienced a 15 per cent increase in conflict-related civilian deaths in the first six months of 2011,’ the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said in it’s midyear report.

And just who the hell is “air raiding villages and killing civilians” now, Obama?

Karzai scolds US military over Afghan civilian deaths
Sardar Ahmad
May 29, 2011

President Hamid Karzai on Sunday scolded the US military for “arbitrary and unnecessary” missions that kill Afghan civilians, saying it was his last warning on the issue after 14 died in an air strike.

Citing initial reports that 10 children, two women and two men were killed in a strike in the southern province of Helmand on Saturday, Karzai said such operations amounted to the “murdering of Afghanistan’s children and women.”

And of course there is the story of the premeditated murders of civilians by a 5th Stryker Brigade “kill team” of hoodlums.  If Bush was president, there would have been a demand over the course of months for an investigation into exactly what Bush knew and when he knew it.

Obama – who just plain demonized George Bush while deceitfully exalting himself – created the now documented incredibly false dichotomy between the world hating America because of Bush and the world loving America because of Obama.  He falsely promised that the Muslim world would respect America with himself as president.  In one word, BULLCRAP:

Bush trumps Barack in the Arab world: President Obama is proving an embarrassing flop in the Middle East
By Nile Gardiner     Last updated: July 13th, 2011

Today’s eye-opening IBOPE Zogby International poll for the Arab American Institute Foundation should be a wake-up call to the White House on its failing foreign policy. After two and a half years of bashing Israel, appeasing rogue regimes such as Iran and Syria, and promising a new era of relations with the Muslim world, Washington is now less popular in major Arab countries than it was when George W. Bush was in the White House.

The poll surveys Arab opinion in six countries: Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and reveals that “Arabs see the Obama Administration’s handling of most Middle East policy issues as having made no contribution to improving US-Arab relations. Only on the issue of the “no-fly zone over Libya” do a majority of Saudis and plurality of Lebanese see a positive contribution.”

According to the report’s author, the Democrat adviser James Zogby:

After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran’s favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia).

… While many Arabs were hopeful that the election of Barack Obama would improve U.S.-Arab relations, that hope has evaporated. Today, President Obama’s favorable ratings across the Arab World are 10% or less. Obama’s performance ratings are lowest on the two issues to which he has devoted the most energy: Palestine and engagement with the Muslim world.

The Zogby poll overwhelmingly demonstrates that weakness and a markedly softer approach to the projection of American global power do not make the US president more popular abroad. In fact they simply strengthen the position of America’s enemies, undermine her effectiveness as a global power, and draw contempt and derision from both friend and foe alike.

Finally, conservatives have been pointing out that Obama’s whimpering exit to his own giant escalation would amount to a retreat which, combined with his “timetable for withdrawal,” would embolden our enemies and endange our troops.  And from all signs, we are now dealing with an emboldened enemy who know they have already won:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Three American senators visiting Kabul said Sunday they were worried that President Obama’s planned withdrawal of 33,000 American troops by September 2012 could undermine Afghan morale, embolden the insurgency and hamper efforts to defeat the Taliban.

It is LONG past time the American people finally start taking Obama and the media propaganda he depends on to task for all their lies.

These SEALs and the Chinook crewmen who made the ultimate sacrifice are far better men than me on multiple levels.  One of those levels is that they did something I wouldn’t have done: they stayed in the military and continued fighting because – Obama’s total garbage rhetoric aside – they knew that our enemies would hate us as much with Obama as president as they did when Bush was president.  And they made the conscious decision to put America’s security first.

This was what I once said:

I was a soldier, too. If a Barack Obama suddenly became my Commander-in-Chief, I would have realized the war is over, and America lost. I wouldn’t fight for the radical infanticide/abortion agenda, the radical gay rights agenda, or any other radical liberal agenda. I signed up to fight for the United States of America; not God Damn America. And I’d figure it’s about time that liberals sent their children off to die screaming in the mud for their new Peoples’ Socialist Republic under their new Messiah-in-Chief. Hell, instead of protesting military recruitment, these once-traitorous vermin (under the previous gone-but-not-forgotten United States of America) can quit protesting military recruiting stations and start actually signing up in them. That’s right, liberals; instead of bombing recruiting stations like Obama’s terrorist pal William Ayers you can go and start signing up to sacrifice your blood and guts for your new country.

Geez, I wonder if you’d stop bitching about how evil American soldiers were fighting terrorists all over the world if you actually had to do all the fighting yourselves? Heck, it’s possible it might even start to occur to you that a place like Guantanamo Bay is a better idea than releasing terrorists who will immediately start trying to kill you again the moment they get back to their old stomping grounds.

And of course, here we are now, with the whole radical homosexual agenda imposed on the military whether it was ready for it or not.

I would have left at my first opportunity because all the crap that’s going on in God damn America is vile.  But these noble SEALs and crewmen realize that America needs to be protected and defended no matter which fool the American people elect as their president.

This country no longer deserves men like these, it no longer deserves the incredible personal sacrifices they have to make.  But they keep showing up where they are most needed, wherever the fighting is the worst, and keep making the ultimate sacrifices, just the same.

And thank God for their incredible nobility and their incredible heroism.

I think back to the example of heroism that still leaves me wondering.  It occurred during the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia.  A Blackhawk was shot down in Mogudishu, and two Delta Force snipers aboard a circling helicopter demanded to be set down near the wreckage to protect the crew of the downed Blackhawk.  MSG Gary Gordon and SFC Randall Shughart were set down on what was very obviously a suicide mission of their own request.  The rest of us can only guess what these noble and heroic warriors were thinking, but I believe they saw the honor of the United States on the line, and they determined to give their own lives to protect that honor.

They knew they were going to die.  There is no question that when they asked to be set down, that they were going to die.

And they knew that this would be what would happen to their bodies.

And yet they made their decision.

I wouldn’t have done what they did.  Because the level of honor, and nobility, and courage, and raw heroism and willingness to suffer and die for their country simply transcends anything I can even begin to understand.

And I’m hardly alone in that.  There are approximately 313,232,044 Americans in the United States.  And only a tiny, tiny few would be willing to give their lives the way these men were willing to give their lives for a man they didn’t even know.

But many of those SEALs who died yesterday would have.  Because that’s just who those guys are.

As righteously pissed off as I am at the fiasco I am watching every single day as this nation is run into the ground, something like this national tragedy happens and it gives me pause.

In their spirit and in their honor, and in the honor of the men who knew them and fought with them, I say today, God bless America.  And may God bless the families and the comrades of those slain.  Thank you for giving us men like these, Lord God.  And thank you for the lesson their nobility and courage can teach us.

Fearmongering Obama Holding Gun To Seniors’ Heads With Social Securty Threat. The FACT Is He Is A Lying Demagogue

The words of Barack Hussein Obama, our fearmonger-in-chief:

Obama in an interview with CBS said he couldn’t guarantee Social Security checks would be sent out on Aug. 3 if Congress did not raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department has said it will no longer have the money to pay all of the U.S. bills

Republican Allan West is entirely right in saying, “That’s fear mongering that’s not leadership, that’s sad and pathetic.”

Allow me to point out first of all that this fearmongering from Obama is nothing new.  Allow me to quote a Wall Street Journal article from almost immediately after Obama was sworn in as president:

“President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.”

Obama’s fearmongering then resulted in our undertaking a suicidal $3.27 TRILLION pork-laden “stimulus” that has massively failed to do what Obama promised it would do at a giantic cost to our children.  But he is an evil, cynical loathsome man who has experience in the fact that the lowest common denominator often wins.

Let’s move on to a demonstration of a man who is A) a liar; B) a fearmonger; and C) the worst kind of demagogue.  Let me begin by citing the Bipartisan Policy Center:

Bipartisan Policy Center: U.S. Won’t Default on Debt If Congress Fails to Raise Debt Ceiling
Posted in Weekly Standard – 8 July 2011 – No comments

With under a month left until the U.S. hits its statutory limit to borrow more money, Republicans and Democrats continue to disagree about what exactly would happen if Congress and the president fail to reach an agreement that raises the debt ceiling.

“Failure to raise the limit would precipitate a default by the United States,” wrote Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner earlier this year. No, that’s not true, say Republicans. There’s enough federal revenue to pay the interest on the debt as well as fund the troops and entitlement programs.

According to a study by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), Treasury could indeed avoid a debt default by prioritizing payments, but failure to raise the debt ceiling would mean deep and immediate cuts.

Which is to say that Democrats are lying and fearmongering, and Republicans are telling the truth.  But seriously what else is new???

And, with that, a piece of an article from Market Watch that provides the numbers to support what the Republicans are saying and to factually disprove what lying Obama is saying:

Q: What is a default?

A: In this case, a default would be the failure by the U.S. Treasury to make payments of principal or interest on its debt in a timely manner.

Q: In a given month how much does the Treasury owe as interest on its debt?

A: Roughly about $15–20 billion (more on this in a moment).

Q: How much revenue does the Treasury take in on average in a month?

A: Roughly about $200 billion.

Q: Are you saying the Treasury could pay interest on its debt 10 times over (or more) from monthly income?

A: Yes.  Therefore the likelihood of not paying interest on its debt is zero.

Q: But, what about redeeming bonds that come due?

A: As bonds come due, the Treasury would again use monthly income to pay them off. This would lower the debt owed beneath the so-called debt ceiling.  Then, the Treasury could turn around and issue debt in that amount up to the debt ceiling.

Q: Why then do Treasury Secretary Geithner and others in government make such apocalyptic statement about the horrors of default.

A: I’m afraid Secretary Geithner and others in government are doing the moral equivalent of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater and they are doing so for political reasons rather than financial reasons.  They simply do not want any interruptions in the bloated spending underway in Washington and they want to scare Americans into thinking the end of the world is nigh unless the gravy train keeps chugging along.

Math is hard for politicians

Now, let’s do the math to flesh out some of these points.  I know that for many politicians and pundits math is hard, but I’ll try to make it as simple as possible. If we do not raise the debt ceiling by August 2nd, we will not default on Treasury obligations.  Nor, will we have trouble making Social Security payments.  However, there would be a big drop — roughly 44% — in government spending because that percentage represents the difference between government revenues which would be about $200 billion for the full month of August and $172 billion for August if we start counting after the first week when the deadline hits.  Spending is slated to be over $300 billion that month.

Here are the numbers from an excellent and highly detailed study by the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) quoted in this piece [emphasis added]:

…The BPC study found that the United States is likely to hit the debt limit sometime between August 2 and August 9. “It’s a 44 percent overnight cut in federal spending” if Congress hits the debt limit, [BPC's Jay] Powell said. The BPC study projects there will be $172 billion in federal revenues in August and $307 billion in authorized expenditures. That means there’s enough money to pay for, say, interest on the debt ($29 billion), Social Security ($49.2 billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($50 billion), active duty troop pay ($2.9 billion), veterans affairs programs ($2.9 billion).

That leaves you with about $39 billion to fund (or not fund) the following:

Defense vendors ($31.7 billion)

IRS refunds ($3.9 billion)

Food stamps and welfare ($9.3 billion)

Unemployment insurance benefits ($12.8 billion)

Department of Education ($20.2 billion)

Housing and Urban Development ($6.7 billion)

Other spending, such as Departments of Justice, Labor, Commerce, EPA, HHS ($73.6 billion)

The decision to prioritize payments would fall on the Treasury department, and Powell points out it would be chaotic picking and choosing who gets paid (in full or partially) and who doesn’t…

No doubt picking and choosing who gets paid and who doesn’t would be chaotic.  And, lots of programs would not get their funding and that would lead to plenty of screaming.  Nonetheless, it should be clear from this exactly how much we are spending in excess of government revenues.  And, that could and should lead to a sober assessment of what government can and cannot do.

We can easily make all of our debt payments (both interest and principal), our Social Security payments, our contributions to Medicare and Medicaid, our payments to our active duty soldiers and provide funding to the VA system.  With room to spare.  Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner (a lying weasel who didn’t pay his own taxes) are lying weasels.

They are treacherous and un-American.  They are the very worst kind of cockroaches.  They represent everything that is wrong with this country’s political system.  What Obama is doing is low and loathsome beneath contemptible.  The only way that we wouldn’t send out Social Security checks is if Obama decides to fund demonic ACORN instead of sending out those checks (see here and then see here and here).  And the scumbag might actually do that because he’s simply that wicked and depraved and uncaring about the American people or their suffering.

Obama – the liar, the demagogue, the fearmonger – falsely demonized Republicans by claiming that they were using the debt ceiling as a gun to the American people’s heads.  HE’S THE ONE USING THIS ISSUE LIKE A GUN.

This is what happens in God damn America.

The beast is coming.  And with Obama’s help imploding America, he is coming soon.