Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
I still remember the shock, the horror of the Valerie Plame “outing.” You’d have thought that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had finally degenerated even the depths of Lucifer himself in their sheer moral evil.
The story, as the left breathlessly told it, was that George Bush sent his attack dog Dick Cheney to destroy a petty diplomatic official named Joseph Wilson because this courageous man had the courage to stand up against Bush’s claims of WMD. And so Cheney used his wife’s career to accomplish his agenda.
Cheney’s chief of staff was convicted in THE most liberal district in America for being a Republican. HE didn’t have ANYTHING to do with outing Valerie Plame, however.
We ultimately find out that there is legitimate reason to doubt that Plame was ever a “covert agent,” and that several years of history now proves that she was a DESK JOCKEY rather than a field agent who was ever in any danger.
It wasn’t Dick Cheney who outed Valerie Plame, contrary to the liberal theology; it was a JOURNALIST named Robert Novak. Furthermore, it came from somebody who
But in fact it was Joe Wilson HIMSELF who “outed” his wife. He had basically blabbed all over Washington to anyone who would listen to him because he was trying to exploit his wife’s career to give his own sagging prospects a leg up.
Anyway, what you have to take away from this is that it is a very, very bad thing to out a secret agent and risk that agent’s life. And anyone who does it ought to go to prison and have the key thrown away.
The White House mistakenly leaked the name of one of their top spies to nearly 6,000 journalists on Sunday.
The CIA officer’s name was included on a press tip sheet that was given to the White House’s pool reporter, who then forwarded the list to the entire press pool—about 6,000 email addresses.
The list contained the names of 15 people President Obama was scheduled to meet with during a visit to Bagram Airfield, a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. Mistakenly included was the name of the top U.S. spy in Kabul, identified on the list as the “Chief of Station.”
Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Scott Wilson has been identified as the person who filed the pool report, although he told the Post that he copied the list from a White House press email.
A revised list with the spy’s name removed was quickly distributed to the press pool, and White House officials asked the media outlets not to publish the officer’s name for fear of harm to the officer and his family. It is unclear whether the officer will remain in Afghanistan.
The incident marks the fourth chief of station to have his identity leaked in recent years. Two CIA station chiefs in Pakistan were outed by the Pakistani media in 2011 in retaliation for U.S. raids in the area. Last year, another station chief in Pakistan was exposed by a Pakistani political party in protest of U.S. drone strikes.
Relations between the U.S., Pakistan, and Afghanistan have been increasingly strained following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the death of Osama bin Laden. The Al-Qaeda leader was killed in a U.S. raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011.
The relationship between the countries was compared to a bad marriage by Cameron Munter, the U.S. ambassador in Pakistan.
“There is a certain amount of resilience built into the relationship, and I don’t think it’s going to collapse,” he told NBC News after the November 2013 station chief leak.
“I just think it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be like a bad marriage that continues.”
We don’t need enemies like Pakistan; hell, we’ve got FRIENDS like Obama to do our enemies’ dirty work for us!
For the record, I’ve seen this agent’s name and even his picture flashed on the news. Basically, Obama betrayed his identity to 6,000 people whose job is literally to betray secrets and then asked them to be hush-hush. Not going to happen.
Now, to whatever extent that it WASN’T Joe Wilson who VERY DELIBERATELY leaked the former identity of his wife, it was without any question basically an “accident” on the part of the Bush administration. Richard Armitage had virtually nothing to do with anything “White House.”
But in any event, unless liberals are demon-possessed hypocrites, the left ought to be howling mad at Obama and heads ought to roll and people ought to go to prison. I want to see the Scooter Libby treatment for the person who betrayed this agent whose compromise makes the “Valerie Plame incident” look like a kindergartner telling on another kindergartner who stole somebody’s cookie.
But of course, liberals ARE demon-possessed hypocrites. So never mind. But just let this little walk down memory lane remind you of how rabid Democrats and the mainstream media were when Bush was president versus how determined they are to ensure Obama gets away with scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal.
Anyway, while Valerie Plame had ALREADY HAD her secret agent career and was safely working behind a desk in a secure building in America, the poor bastard Obama just outed was still very secret indeed and was living in Afghanistan – where we kind of needed him to be. Now his life is at risk, his wife and children’s lives are at risk, and oh, well, oopsie.
Liberalism means never having to be treated like Bush. No matter how much worse than Bush you are.
Today we find out officially that Obama is backpedeling on two lies: one to close Guantanamo Bay, and the other to try the worst terrorists in civilian court. As the LA Times reports via the AP:
Professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators are being referred to the system of military commissions for trial, a federal law enforcement official said Monday.
The decision by the Obama administration is an about-face from earlier plans to have the five go on trial in civilian federal court in New York.
You stupid, arrogant poodle, Obama. You’d be completely ashamed of yourself if you weren’t such an arrogant narcissist.
Again and again, on issue after issue, Obama demagogued and demonized Bush policies on the campaign trail. But when it came time to put up or shut up, and actually DO something, Obama’s “poodle policies” ended up on their back with Bush policy fangs around their throat.
But just when you think Obama has finally accepted reality, the idiot climbs back on his winged unicorn and flies off in another cloud of magic fairy dust.
By finally relenting – after 17 months of wasted time and God only knows how many millions of dollars spent fighting reality – to try the terrorists at Gitmo, Obama is acknowledging that Guantanamo Bay will not be closed as long as his loathsome character pollutes the White House.
Here’s the worst of it. Obama cowardly and despicably went overseas and demonized his predecessor for his atrocities such as Gitmo and trying terrorists in military tribunals. The contemptible rat bastard-in-chief even said he would consider holding Bush criminally responsible. And now Obama will be embracing the very “atrocities” that he himself personally demonized.
The left has been saying that Gitmo and military tribunals would give al Qaeda ammunition for recruiting terrorists. Riddle me this: how much more will they gain ammunition by replaying the very words of Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder as saying Gitmo and military tribunals were immoral?!?!??
Do you remember how the left demonized George W. Bush for eight years? Remember how he was trampling all over the Constitution with his military tribunals? Remember how Guantanamo was a scourge upon the face of humanity, a veritable second Auschwitz? Remember how Obama was going to close Guantanamo within his first year in office? Remember the “fierce moral urgency of change?”
There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law — a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.
So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That’s why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year.
Now, you vile liberals, you explain to me how al Qaeda will not be playing Barack Obama’s and Eric Holder’s speeches and saying, “You see? America is evil even by its very own president’s and attorney general’s standards.”
Dick Cheney has repeatedly said that Obama couldn’t be more naive or more wrong and that he would ultimately be forced to abandon his immoral positions on both Gitmo and the military tribunals.
You owe George Bush and Dick Cheney a personal apology. When Dick Cheney stood up to your lies and denounced your terrible policies, he rightly confronted you on the very issues that you just backed down from today in an implicit acknowledgment that he was right and you were totally wrong. And if you had so much as a single shred of personal honor or decency, you would offer that apology.
The fact that you DON’T have any honor or decency is why we can know that you won’t bother.
The following article will consist in two parts: 1) A detailing of just a few of the profoundly hateful rhetoric that comes out of the left on a routine basis, which clearly refutes the idea that some sort of “climate of hate” is being generated by the right wing; and 2) my argument why “political rhetoric” – which is free speech that should be protected by anyone who values American society – should have nothing to do with acts of violence.
Allow me to state at the outset that, when we look at Jared Loughner, what we find is that he had a grudge against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords dating back to 2007. That grudge predates Sarah Palin; it predates the Tea Party movement; it predates the so-called “rightwing rhetoric” against Barack Obama. In fact, Loughner’s hatred of Rep. Giffords actually occurred during the LEFTWING hatred targeting George W. Bush and Republicans. And we find that while Loughner nowhere mentioned Sarah Palin, the tea party movement, ObamaCare, conservatives, or anything “right wing,” he DID repeatedly mention his belief that George Bush was responsible for engineering the 9/11 attacks.
Let’s take a moment and look at the hatred of the left, and realize just how amazingly laughable it is for the left to claim the moral high ground regarding any “climate of hate,” and recognize that they did nothing more than despicably try to seize political advantage from a terrible tragedy:
■ “I’m waiting for the day when I pick it up, pick up a newspaper or click on the Internet and find out he’s choked to death on his own throat fat or a great big wad of saliva or something, you know, whatever. Go away, Rush, you make me sick!” — Left-wing radio host Mike Malloy on the January 4, 2010 Mike Malloy Show, talking about Rush Limbaugh going to the hospital after suffering chest pains.
■ MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in 2009 fantasized about the death of Rush Limbaugh: “Somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp”
■ Author/humorist P.J. O’Rourke: “It’s the twilight of the radio loud-mouth, you know? I knew it from the moment the fat guy-”
Host Bill Maher: “You mean Rush Limbaugh and Sean-”
O’Rourke: “-from the moment the fat guy refused to share his drugs….” Maher: “You mean the OxyContin that he was on?…Why couldn’t he have croaked from it instead of Heath Ledger?” — HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, February 8, 2008.
■ MSNBC’s Amy Robach in 2006 mildly wondered if “Death of a President” movie depicting the imagined assassination of President Bush was “poor taste or, as some say, thought-provoking?”
■ On his radio show in 2009, Ed Schultz wished for Dick Cheney’s death: “He is an enemy of the country, in my opinion, Dick Cheney is, he is an enemy of the country … Lord, take him to the Promised Land, will you?”
■ Also on his radio show, in 2010, Schultz shouted: “Dick Cheney’s heart’s a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him!”
■ Then-Air America host Montel Williams in 2009 urged Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to kill herself: “Slit your wrist! Go ahead! I mean, you know, why not? I mean, if you want to – or, you know, do us all a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. I mean, start right at the collarbone.”
■ Writing on the Huffington Post in 2007, radio host Charles Karel Bouley mocked: “I hear about Tony Snow and I say to myself, well, stand up every day, lie to the American people at the behest of your dictator-esque boss and well, how could a cancer NOT grow in you? Work for Fox News, spinning the truth in to a billion knots and how can your gut not rot?”
■ “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Host Bill Maher on his HBO show Real Time, March 2, 2007, discussing how a few commenters at a left-wing blog were upset that an attempt to kill Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan had failed.
■ “Earlier today, a rental truck carried a half a million ballots from Palm Beach to the Florida Supreme Court there in Tallahassee. CNN had live helicopter coverage from the truck making its way up the Florida highway, and for a few brief moments, America held the hope that O.J. Simpson had murdered Katherine Harris.” — Bill Maher on ABC’s Politically Incorrect, November 30, 2000.
■ Host Tina Gulland: “I don’t think I have any Jesse Helms defenders here. Nina?” NPR’s Nina Totenberg: “Not me. I think he ought to be worried about what’s going on in the Good Lord’s mind, because if there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.” — Exchange on the July 8, 1995 Inside Washington, after Helms said the government spends too much on AIDS.
■ “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease….He is an absolutely reprehensible person.” — USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS To the Contrary.
I have further documented numerous concrete acts of violence by the left in two articles here and here which I wrote during the debates that occurred last year when Democrats falsely demonized the right.
Furthermore, you should do a review of history. Go back to the 1960s and consider movements and organizations such as the Weathermen, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the anti-war movement, the radical environmentalist movement, and the violence that has been all-too typical of the left.
I believe by now I’ve made my point.
Before moving on, allow me to demonstrate how top Democrats have deliberately manufactured blame and guilt at conservatives for crimes that liberals and Democrats in fact committed.
First, there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reflecting on how his Uncle Jack (JFK) was essentially killed by right wing conservative hatred as a device to “me to” the liberal movement to demonize conservatives as being responsible for the Tuscon, Arizona shooting by a deranged psychopath. There was only one problem: JFK was murdered by a communist named Lee Harvey Oswald, who somehow is never mentioned a single time in Kennedy Jr.’s fabricated account.
The second episode was Nancy Pelosi, speaking out against the Tea Party movement, reflecting on the murder of Harvy Milk in her district of San Francisco:
Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw … I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco,” Pelosi said, choking up and with tears forming in her eyes. “This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place and … I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”
What’s wrong with Pelosi’s words and tears? Well, in demagoguing conservatives for their climate of violence-generating hate, she nowhere reflects upon the fact that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered by a Democrat who was angry because his fellow Democrats had not reappointed him to his government job. And her equating these murders with right wing violence is not just absurd, but evil.
Both of these accounts are readily historically verifiable. The Democrats in question literally fabricate history in order to blame the party and ideology that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with these murders. What we see are people who are clearly close enough to the events in question to know that what they are saying is not true. They are either liars without shame, or they have literally so committed themselves to false ideology that they have used every possible device of rationalization to believe obvious lies. You can take your pick.
So you take an event like the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (along with the murder of conservative Republican-appointed federal judge John Roll, btw), and demonize conservatives for it, and it is merely one more documented case of obvious demonization that merely serves to demonstrates that if you want to see hate, just look at liberals.
And, yes, if deranged monster Jared Loughner was anything, he was a liberal. One thing is certain; he certainly was not a conservative, and he certainly was not influenced by any “rightwing climate of hate.”
Clearly, I did not attempt to prove that conservatives have not said anything hateful. First of all it would be impossible to prove a negative; and second whether conservatives have said hateful things about liberals really isn’t the point here. The point is that when Democrats denounce the right for “hate,” they merely demonstrate that they are hypocrites without any shame whatsoever.
This baseless and hateful charge about rightwing hate being responsible for the Tucson shooting that was recently repeated by dozens of Democrat elected officials, hundreds of mainstream media journalists, and thousands upon thousands of liberal bloggers, literally becomes a tacit acknowledgment that it is in fact the left that practices hate.
Tomorrow: Part 2, on how free speech political rhetoric should be and is unrelated to acts of violence: “On The So-Called Link Between Political Rhetoric And Violence.”
Imagine the New York Times assigning a reporter to cover liberalism and the liberal agenda. They pass this reporter off as being himself a liberal, but he’s really a plant. He personally despises liberals and hates the liberal agenda, and is only on staff to sabotage the liberal movement by continually reporting a slanted picture of on only the worst aspects of liberalism.
Don’t worry, liberals. You can stop hyperventilating. Such a thing will never happen. You don’t have to worry. Every story you read will be doctrinally pure leftist propaganda.
But that is precisely what the mainstream media does to conservatives 60 seconds every minute, 60 minutes every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and so on.
The leftwing bias and total lack of objectivity is simply unrelenting.
The perennially dishonest left have destroyed journalism. It is dead.
UPDATE | Lachlan Markay – 6/25, 3:00 PM: A roundup of reactions from all over the blogosphere and twitterverse below the fold. Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel resigned today after a host of offensive e-mails surfaced revealing his disdain for much of the right – the beat he was charged with covering. Fishbowl DC, which published a number of those emails yesterday, confirmed the resignation with the Post just after noon.
Yesterday I reported on leaked emails from Weigel to a listserve of liberal journalists bashing conservatives and conservatism – you know, the people Weigel is supposed to be covering. As bad as those email were, a plethora of messages from Weigel published in the Daily Caller take the conservative-bashing to a whole new level.
The new emails also demonstrated that yesterday’s quasi-apology from Weigel was really not as sincere as he claimed. He said that he made some of his most offensive remarks at the end of a bad day. But these new emails show that there was really nothing unique about them, and that offensive remarks about conservatives really were nothing new or uncommon.
Many of the misguided statements were clearly made in jest – “I hope he fails,” Weigel said of Rush Limbaugh after the radio host was hospitalized with chest pains, a reference to Limbaugh’s hope that Obama’s agenda would fail. But other bouts of name calling – ragging on the “outbursts of racism” from “amoral blowhard” Newt Gingrich, for instance – were obviously not jokes.
The Daily Caller revealed some quite stunning statements from the JournoList in its piece today:
“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.
In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power.
“There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes,” Weigel wrote.
Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked, “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”…
Republicans? “Ratf–king [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratf–k” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratf–king tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.
Weigel continued to defend these outbursts, as he did when contacted by the Daily Caller. “My reporting, I think, stands for itself,” he said. “I’ve always been of the belief that you could have opinions and could report anyway… people aren’t usually asked to stand or fall on everything they’ve said in private.”
First, there’s the issue of whether anything said on a 400-member email list can really be considered “private.” “There’s no such thing as off-the-record with 400 people,” Nation columnist Eric Alterman told Politico.
But the real issues are, first, whether such mean-spirited jabs demonstrate a disdain for many conservatives that precludes Weigel from covering them fairly (he did label gay marriage opponents “bigots,” after all), and second, whether the Post feels it is appropriate to have someone hostile to the right covering conservatism, while a through-and-through liberal in Ezra Klein covers the left.
The Post signaled that it did not consider Weigel’s comments to be a serious problem. It seems that attitude has changed.
Managing Editor Raju Narisetti told Politico that “Dave’s apology to readers reflects he understands, in calmer hindsight, the need to exercise good judgment at all times and of not throwing stones, especially when operating from inside an echo-filled glass house that is modern-day digital journalism.” He added that it was “time to move on.”
The Post declined comment on Weigel’s resignation.
*****UPDATE
Below is a roundup of reactions from prominent online commentators since Weigel’s resignation.
Politico’s Ben Smith paints Weigel as an unfortunate casualty of the collapsing facade of objectivity in the Post’s online efforts.
The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he’s a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he’s liberal is primarily the Post’s fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper’s brass to put him in an unsustainable position.
Having an anthropological study of conservatives, such as Dave provides, would work if the Post had a similar anthropological look at liberals from someone on the outside to balance it. As it stands, however, Post readers get a Conservatives In The Mist approach that seems to predicate itself on the belief that they can’t figure conservatives and conservatism out for themselves. That’s not a reflection on Dave, but a criticism of the editorial decision to pursue a one-sided strategy of critical analysis at the Post.
And indeed, one of the most interesting elements of the reaction to Weigel’s resignation seems to be the admission, or at least the acknowledgment, that he is, in fact, a liberal. The “libertarian” label seemed to stick.
But today, Weigel’s liberalism was treated as a given. Even Keith Olbermann, on whose show Weigel is a regular guest, tweeted his agreement: “If the WaPost didn’t know @DaveWeigel wasn’t a conservative blogger, it’s time for the Post to FOLD. My full support is yours, David.”
At the Atlantic, Jefferey Goldberg made that observation almost in passing. Goldberg went on to make what has been (somewhat surprisingly) a sparsely invoked argument in the hours since Weigel’s resignation: that the crudity of his comments itself was enough to sully his reporting.
Media consultant Josh Treviño claimed on Twitter that “nearly all journalists mock their subjects. Maybe not the ones covering elementary schools. But all the others.” But Goldberg disagrees:
“How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?” one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. “I’m not suggesting that many people on the paper don’t lean left, but there’s leaning left, and then there’s behaving like an idiot.”
I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.
Others, such as NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor and National Review’s Jim Geraghty, attributed Weigel’s decline not so much to the language he used as to his style of reporting; his tenancy to seek out the fringe elements of the movement, and focus on them, rather than on mainstream conservatism.
As Gainor said in a statement today,
Weigel’s rapid meltdown showed the incredible danger for traditional media to play fast and loose mixing news and opinion. The Post was either unwilling or unable to find a neutral reporter to cover conservatives. Nor did it hire an actual advocate as it has done for the left with Ezra Klein. Instead, the Post brought in someone who tried to tear down conservatives and look at the right as if he were visiting a zoo. This disaster should be proof enough that their method was a failure.
Geraghty echoed Gainor’s comments in a blog post, saying
Dave only fits the loosest definition of conservative; I think he’s best defined as a left-leaning, idiosyncratic libertarian. He is also a political junkie with a voluminous appetite for news and a dogged reporter. From where I sit, he spends too much time writing about fringe figures and trends that are largely irrelevant to national politics (Orly Taitz, Birthers, etc.) but perhaps that’s his genuine fascination and/or what his employers wanted. Righties suspected Dave wanted to spotlight the freakiest and least appealing self-proclaimed “conservatives”; I suspect that at least part of Dave’s mentality was simply, “You have got to hear what this lunatic is saying.”
Journalism is a field that basically only hires liberals. Like another liberal-dominated field – education – it basically maintains standards of ideological purity that rival the Nazi or Communist Parties in their worst days of yore. Journalism is dead in America, and liberals were the murderers.
Education is likewise dead. Like the unions that destroyed every single other industry they touched, liberals have destroyed education – turning it into leftist indoctrination – just as liberals turned journalism into leftist propaganda.
You will never see a day in which half of all reporters, journalists, and op-ed writers are conservatives. The status quo is hard-core liberalism; and the field of journalism will maintain that status quo at absolutely all costs – even as the liberal dinosaur media shrink into bankruptcy or laughably low ratings and readership.
Which means any scintilla of objectivity is a farce.
The most asinine thing of all is this notion that reporters – who are so overwhelmingly liberal it is absurd – somehow believe that they can think conservatives are not only stupid, but genuinely evil, while at the same time believing that liberals are both intelligent and virtuous, are somehow able to cover both sides fairly and objectively.
In that regard, journalists are so arrogant, and so transcendentally stupid, that it defies all rationality.
“Aha!” Democrats are out in droves telling everyone who will listen (which of course includes the entire mainstream media propaganda machine). “The CIA really DOES lie to Congress! And we have the smoking gun!”
They are referring to a “secret CIA program” that was not disclosed to Congress for nearly 8 years.
And they argue that it proves Nancy Pelosi, rather than being a lying demagogue who tries to cover her own lies by claiming that other everyone else are the actual liars.
Of this “secret CIA program” the generally reliably liberal Washington Post says:
In an interview last night with The Washington Post, an intelligence official said it was “generally known” from the beginning that Cheney had requested that the program be kept from Congress. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear whether the agency was obligated to brief Congress.
During the second half of the Bush administration, CIA officials did not consult with the administration about the program or take orders from Cheney to keep it secret, according to former agency officials who held senior posts at the time.
“We never briefed the vice president, the president or the Cabinet,” said a former senior intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the program remains highly secret. He said the program remained in the planning stages and never crossed the agency’s threshold for reporting to the administration and congressional overseers.
Congress and the CIA have jousted for decades over the interpretation of the 1947 law creating the agency, which included a provision mandating that the committees be kept “fully and currently informed” of intelligence issues. Even for covert actions, lawmakers on the committees generally must be notified.
But the law also says such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”
So two things come out of an actual examination of the facts:
1) “The program remained in the planning stages and never crossed the agency’s threshold for reporting to the administration and congressional overseers.”
2) The current flap is nothing more than the continuation of an debate that has been going on for 62 years as to just what “fully and currently informed” means in relation to the fact that such briefings only be conducted “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”
It doesn’t really sound like much of an issue for the Democrats to hang their hats on – and it certainly doesn’t sound like they have any legitimate issue to hang Dick Cheney by the neck until dead over.
Not that a lack of facts or evidence has ever stopped Demagogues before.
Democrats claim that the really evil thing about all of this is that Dick Cheney ordered the program kept secret, even as they argue that this evidence of the CIA’s failure to disclose information about programs somehow vindicates Nancy Pelosi.
A couple more things should come out:
First of all, there’s the letter that seven Democrats released following a classified briefing to Congress by CIA Director Panetta disclosing the “secret programs.” They couldn’t wait to run and tell. They just couldn’t wait to undermine secrecy for the sake of political demagoguery. And if that doesn’t serve as a proof of the wisdom of Dick Cheney in wanting the CIA program kept secret, I don’t know what is. If Senators and Representatives can’t keep their mouths shut about classified briefings, it’s better that they just be kept in the dark – just as the 1947 law provides.
Another not-so-little issue is this: Nancy Pelosi didn’t just say that the CIA didn’t always fully inform: she said they repeatedly lied. And in spite of all the Democrats own lies, there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that Nancy Pelosi was right in her accusations, or even that the CIA failed to do anything they were required to do.
This is now the third time that Democrats have tried to dredge up the demonization of Bush officials and CIA professionals for the sake of political gamesmanship. It is a frankly evil endeavor.
The biggest risk is that the CIA will become more bitter and defensive than they are already. The biggest risk to our national security is that our intelligence professionals – who need to take risks and bold actions in order to be successful at what they do – will begin to refuse to take risks, and engage in the repetitive dotting of every ‘i’ and the crossing of every ‘t’. It’s a process known as “slow rolling.” CIA professionals will increasingly start sending avalanches of paperwork to cover their backsides rather than doing anything that might even possibly risk their pensions. And you can count that it’s going on in an agency whose morale has been recently describe as sullen, depressed, and enraged. That’s the “change” Obama and Democrats have brought to the CIA.
Leon Panetta is proving what a partisan political hack Americans always should have known he is and always has been. I first called Panetta a “partisan political hack” back in January when he was first nominated. And Panetta’s outrageous cheap-shot at Dick Cheney is nothing short than the tactics of a partisan political hack.
The difference between the CIA and the KGB has always been that the one was geared toward intelligence, while the latter was geared toward enforcing political ideology. At least until Barack Obama came along, that is. Now we’ve got our first “communist show trials” since the days of McCarthy and the latter days of the USSR in the works.
Cheney: I Hope Panetta Was ‘Misquoted’ in Claiming My Wish for Attack
After the CIA director apparently told The New Yorker that he thinks the former vice president is crossing his fingers for another attack on America, Dick Cheney says he hopes his “old friend” didn’t really say those words.
FOXNews.com
Monday, June 15, 2009
Dick Cheney says he wants to know if he heard Leon Panetta correctly.
After the CIA director apparently told The New Yorker that he thinks the former vice president is crossing his fingers for another attack on America, Cheney said Monday he hopes his “old friend” didn’t really say those words.
“I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted,” Cheney said, in a written statement to FOX News. “The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years.”
Others were not quite willing to give Panetta the benefit of the doubt, as his politically charged quote stirred controversy on Capitol Hill.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called on Panetta to “retract immediately” his statement, arguing that the director crossed the line.
“I disagreed with the Cheney policy on interrogation techniques, but never did it cross my mind that Dick Cheney would ever want an attack on the United States of America,” the former GOP presidential candidate told FOX News Monday. “And it’s unfair, and I think that Mr. Panetta should retract, and retract immediately.
“By the way, I hear morale is not at an all-time high over at the CIA under Mr. Panetta’s leadership,” he said.
Panetta, a long-time Washington insider with scant intelligence experience, has been caught in the middle of a political war during his first few months on the job. First, he had to deal with morale issues as President Obama cracked down on the rules for detainee interrogations. Then he stepped up to dispute House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s allegation that the CIA misled Congress about the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.
This time, he’s firing back against Cheney’s frequent media appearances in which he’s accused Obama of making America less safe.
According to The New Yorker, Panetta said Cheney “smells some blood in the water” on the security issue.
“It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics,” he said, according to the piece.
Asked about the statement, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs ducked.
“I’m not going to get into motivations. That’s not what our business is. The president’s concern is keeping the American people safe,” Gibbs said Monday.
FOX News’ Mike Emanuel contributed to this report.
Maybe Gibbs isn’t “going to get into motivations.” But his fellow liberal hack – CIA Director Leon Panetta – sure will.
Maybe the CIA has some kind of “motive analyzer” that Panetta zapped Dick Cheney with. In the liberal tradition, I must ask, “Doesn’t Panetta need some kind of warrant to zap private citizen Cheney with his spook motive-detector gizmo? Liberals and the ACLU should be crawling out of the woodwork. Don’t forget, that’s what they did when they found out that the government was listening in to calls made to or from people on the terrorist watch list to or from this country.
This is classic liberal politics of demonization and demagoguery. This is classic Nancy Pelosi. This is classic Barack Obama.
Right now, liberals like Keith Olbermann are teeing off on conservatives for waterboarding when we now learn that liberals like Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats were fully briefed on “enhanced interrogation techniques that had been employed,” and neither said or did anything to prevent such techniques. And even the very liberal new CIA Director under Obam0, Leon Panetta, essentially says Pelosi is lying. How are their attacks now anything but partisan demagoguery?
And right now, liberals including Barack Obama himself are deceitfully claiming the moral high ground even as the new liberal administration takes many of the same positions that it hypocritically and demagogically found so hateful on the campaign trail. As many policies as Obama has undone that will make this country less safe, there have been almost as many that he once demonized, only to follow himself once in office.
And Obama has indicated that he likewise reserves the right to continue to hold some prisoners without trial indefinitely – a position he demonized during the campaign. How can such a man who so hypocritically employed such demagoguery only to come to the same position as the man he demagogued claim any semblance of moral high ground? Obama is lower than Bush in his character, not higher. Bush and Cheney didn’t self-righteously demagogue; only Obama did.
Dick Cheney is often called “Darth Vader” by the left. But I think in Cheney’s gracious response to Panetta’s vicious, hateful, and evil comment who the REAL “Darth Vaders” are. Panetta savagely attacked Cheney’s motives; Cheney responded by politely pointing at policy disagreement.
Now that liberals have opened the door wide to attacking people based on their motives and their politics, let me do a little “motive assessment” of my own: Maybe Leon Panetta is aware that the morale of his agency is at a shocking low after the butchery Democrats have done to its credibility. And maybe he is aware – due to the “depressed, sullen, and enraged” morale at the CIA in the wake of the Obama administration’s and Democrat’s attacks against them – that the United States is now exposed to another massive terrorist attack.
[T]he CIA better change their mission to “CYA,” because our government is not going to stand behind you.”
Those concerns were echoed by a retired undercover operative who still works under contract for the agency (and asked to remain anonymous when discussing internal agency politics). Clandestine Service officers are both demoralized and angry at Obama’s decisions to release the memos and ban future agency use of aggressive interrogation tactics, the former operative said. “It embarrasses our families. You just can’t keep hitting us. Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” The official added that “a lot of offense was taken” among some Clandestine Service veterans when Obama declared that the interrogation practices the agency employed under Bush were wrong, even though the new Administration would not prosecute operatives for carrying them out.
Just maybe Panetta and his boss realize that the only way to avoid blame for such an upcoming attack will be to try to preemptively blame and scapegoat conservatives by saying that THEY are somehow more responsible than the Democrats who totally undermined our war on terror at every single turn because conservatives might have somehow hoped for it.
I remember exactly what I was doing the morning of September 11, 2001. I was a grad student at the time, getting ready for my first class with the television running in the background. Just before the first large passenger plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center something caught my attention just in time to see it happen live. [Note: please see the update at the conclusion for a correction].
And the day froze into shock, numbness, dismay, terror, and a rising anger.
The broadcasters were talking to themselves about whether this was an accident, or an intentional attack. I didn’t need them to tell me what it was: like many other Americans, I knew exactly what had just happened.
And then the second plane struck the second tower. And shortly afterward the cameras began to catch specks falling out of the towers that turned out to be Americans throwing themselves out of top story windows to their deaths in order to avoid the even more agonizing death by burning.
President George Bush had been President for just over six months. But I would have felt EXACTLY the same sense of horror and outrage whether Bill Clinton, or Al Gore, or George Bush was President.
It wasn’t about being a member of a political party, or who was President or what party he was from; it was about being an American whose country had just been attacked.
That’s just no longer the case, though. I no longer feel that way.
Barack Obama’s constant unrelenting blaming of the Bush administration for virtually every problem under the sun was bad enough; Obama’s description of Bush “torture” and his releasing of CIA memos intended to politically hurt the Bush administration at the expense of informing our enemies exactly how we would and would not interrogate them was bad enough; House Speaker Nancy Peolosi’s demagoguery of the Bush administration over its “torture” and her subsequent lies that she herself had been informed about such “torture” and done nothing was bad enough; but it just never seems to end.
But the following example of Bush Derangement Syndrome finally sent me over the top:
The delusional claims he has made this day could be proved by documentation and firsthand testimony to be the literal and absolute truth, and he still, himself, would be wrong because the America he sought to impose upon the world and upon its own citizens, the dark, hateful place of Dick Cheney`s own soul, the place he to this hour defends, and to this day prefers, is a repudiation of all that our ancestors, all that for which our brave troops of two years ago and two minutes ago, have sacrificed and fought.
Olbermann acknowledges that EVEN if Dick Cheney is telling the truth and his own liberal allies are lying, it doesn’t matter. Because he thinks Cheney and his vision for America are evil. So truth be damned. That is the warped mind of the true ideologue.
And he then uses a rhetorical flourish to indicate that our troops have suffered for Cheney’s hateful vision.
What Olbermann, evil liar that he truly is, fails to mention is that our “brave troops” who “have sacrificed and fought” actually think JUST LIKE Cheney and DON’T THINK like Olbermann.
If Keith Olbermann had even a shred of personal honesty, integrity, character, or virtue, he would not have dragged American soldiers into his hateful polemic given that they themselves are on the very side that Olbermann so utterly despises. But Olbermann doesn’t have any honesty, integrity, character, or virtue.
So he warps the men and women who supported George Bush and Dick Cheney so overwhelmingly into victims.
Olbermann says:
Gee, thanks for being motivated by the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans to go so far as to take a serious second look. And thank you, sir, for admitting, obviously inadvertently, that you did not take a serious first look in the seven months and 23 days between your inauguration and 9/11. For that attack, sir, you are culpable, morally, ethically. At best, you are guilty of malfeasance and eternally lasting stupidity. At worst, sir,in the deaths of 9/11, you are negligent.
Again, if Keith Olbermann had so much as a shred of personal or professional honesty, he wouldn’t say something like this.
Let’s review the list: 1) In 1993 Bill Clinton ran from Somalia after a battle with Islamic insurgents that left 18 American servicemen dead; 2) Also in 1993 the US suffered a terrorist attack in the form of the first World Trade Center bombing that killed 6 and wounded more than 1000 Americans; 3) In 1995 the US suffered its first domestic terrorist attack at the Oklahoma Federal Building that left 168 Americans dead; 4) In 1996 19 American servicemen were killed in a Saudi Arabian terrorist bombing of the US military Khobar Towers barracks; 5) In 1998 there was a simultaneous terrorist bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people; 6) In 2000 the USS Cole was attacked by terrorists, leaving 17 American servicemen dead.
There may well have been more, but that is all I can remember.
How can Keith Olberman in good conscience so blame Bush and Cheney for 9/11 when the Clinton administration had never taken terrorism seriously themselves? But Olbermann doesn’t have a good conscience. He is a truly depraved human being.
Bill Clinton failed to take 9/11 seriously for the same reason George Bush failed to take it seriously in the six months of his administration preceding the 9/11 attack: because we hadn’t been hit hard enough yet. Clinton should have learned from the attacks America suffered throughout his entire presidency; and Bush should have paid attention to Clinton’s disastrous track record.
Olbermann said:
You saved no one, sir. If the classified documents you seek released really did detail plots other than those manufactured by drowning men in order to get it to stop, or if they truly did know plans beyond the laughable ones you and President Bush have already revealed, hijackers without passports, targeting a building whose name Mr. Bush could not remember, clowns who thought they could destroy airports by dropping matches in fuel pipelines 30 miles away, men who planned to attack a military base dressed as pizza delivery boys, forgetting that every man there was armed, and today, the four would-be synagogue bombers, one of whom turns out to keep bottles of urine in his apartment, and is on schizophrenia medicine.
So the man popping schizophrenia medicine and washing it down with his own bottled urine is none other than Keith Olbermann and everyone at MSNBC and everyone who watches the network. It certainly isn’t Dick Cheney.
Olbermann saves his ugliest and most hateful remarks for last:
You saved no one, Mr. Cheney. All you did was help kill Americans. You were negligent before 9/11. Your response to your complicity by omission on 9/11 was panic and shame and insanity, and lying this country into a war that did nothing but kill 4,299 more of us. We will take no further instructions from you, sir. And let me again quote Oliver Cromwell to you, Mr. Cheney. “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go.”
I’ve written about other things that Keith Olbermann and his “guests” have said. Only very recently Janeane Garofalo said:
This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they’ll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become — it’s like showing Frankenstein’s monster fire. They become confused, and angry and highly volatile. That guy, causing them feelings they don’t know, because their limbic brain, we’ve discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it’s pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring. Is Bernie Goldberg listening?
And there was Keith Olbermann and Michael Musto engaging in about as hateful of an attack as one can possibly imagine against Miss California Carrie Prejean for the simple reason that they despise her right to express her own views about an issue that most Californians and most Americans agree with her over.
Keith Olbermann is a vain, petty, vindictive, vicious, hateful, and truly ugly human being. And MSNBC would do far better broadcasting in place of pro-terrorist al Jazeera than it is doing here. Both networks run basically the same message.
But Keith Olbermann’s rant against Dick Cheney and every conservative who agrees with him rose to such a level of hatred, such a level of vicious, bitter, ugly, deceitful, and frankly evil rhetoric, that it transcends anything I have ever heard.
Right now, liberals like Keith Olbermann are teeing off on conservatives for waterboarding when we now learn that liberals like Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats were fully briefed on “enhanced interrogation techniques that had been employed,” and neither said or did anything to prevent such techniques. And even the very liberal new CIA Director under Obam0, Leon Panetta, essentially says Pelosi is lying. How are their attacks now anything but partisan demagoguery?
And right now, liberals including Barack Obama himself are deceitfully claiming the moral high ground even as the new liberal administration takes many of the same positions that it hypocritically and demagogically found so hateful on the campaign trail. As many policies as Obama has undone that will make this country less safe, there have been almost as many that he once demonized, only to follow himself once in office.
And Obama has indicated that he likewise reserves the right to continue to hold some prisoners without trial indefinitely – a position he demonized during the campaign. How can such a man who so hypocritically employed such demagoguery only to come to the same position as the man he demagogued claim any semblance of moral high ground? Obama is lower than Bush in his character, not higher. Bush and Cheney didn’t self-righteously demagogue; only Obama did.
Obama decided against the release of the remainder of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. But only because he had to bow to the reality of the massive resitance against his decision to release them and the consequences such a stupid and depraved act would have had both for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and for Democrats at home. In electing not to release them, Obama took the SAME position that Bush/Cheney had taken. Obama is not better than Bush or Cheney; he’s worse. They didn’t waiver and pander before going back on their decision out of the selfish interests of political survival. They were consistent in their determination to do the right thing.
Obama has idiotically promised he would close Gitmo, but even his own party now realizes how foolish that would be and has twice denied him funding to do so until he come up with a plan that makes some kind of sense. Obama wrapped himself up in puffed-up, posturing self-righteousness, but the reality is that Bush was forced to confront the same unsolvable dilemmas. The only difference was that Bush was wiser than Barack Obama in recognizing the problems that made a closure of Gitmo nearly impossible; and that Bush – unlike Obama – was never a pandering demagogue.
Again, Obama isn’t one iota better than Bush or Cheney. He’s worse.
Not that any of these FACTS matter to liberals. Because far too many of them are exactly like Keith Olbermann: even if the facts support conservatives, it doesn’t matter. Such liberals are completely false, vile people who routinely treat the truth with as much contempt as Olbermann does.
I said earlier that I no longer feel the same way about my country that I did following 9/11. I wish it were not true, but the constant unrelenting barrage of lies, hypocristy, demonization, and demagoguery from the left – particularly on national security issues – have left me with an increasingly bitter taste in my mouth. And following so many years of such hateful tactics, I fear that if we are attacked again, that I will react politically, rather than patriotically. I wish it weren’t true, but there it is.
Update: I have since realized that the first attack was not covered live, and film footage of the first airplane was not made available until later. What I would have seen was video footage of smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center shortly following the first attack, finally followed by live footage of the 2nd plane strike. I attempted to describe from memory what I had seen 8 years ago, and it turns out that my memory was not perfect.
Having studied my fair share of philosophy, I recognize the genetic fallacy when I hear it. And I heard it today from the mouth of Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Let’s not talk about a legitimate issue; let’s instead demonize the person who is raising the legitimate issue while ignoring the issue itself. Hillary Clinton engaged in a textbook example of playing the politics of personal destruction – and distraction – rather than reveal the truth.
It’s testy in the Foreign Relations Committee hearing today.
SecState HRC is testifying in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee and it seems she got into a bit of a heated exchange with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher — or he did with her — over the release of the interrogation memos.
Rohrabacher asks Secretary Clinton whether she agrees with former Veep Cheney’s suggestion that all memos on enhanced interrogation be released.
Secretary Clinton’s response? “It won’t surprise you that I don’t consider him to be a particularly reliable source of information…”
Rohrabacher bites back: “Madam Secretary, I asked you a specific question. … Dick Cheney has asked that specific documents be declassified. … I didn’t ask you what your opinion is of Dick Cheney and if you want to maintain your credibility with us, what is your opinion on the release of those documents?”
Secretary Clinton: “I think we should get to the bottom of this entire matter. I think it’s in the best interest of our country and that is what the president believes and that is why he’s taken the actions he’s taken.”
Well, that’s okay, I suppose. Dick Cheney just joined war hero and savior of the American effort in Iraq General David Petraeus in lacking credibility as far as Hillary Clinton is concerned.
WASHINGTON — Senator Clinton squared off yesterday with her possible challenger for the White House in 2012, General David Petraeus, and came closer than any of her colleagues to calling the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq a liar.
Using blunter language than any other Democrat in the last two days, Mrs. Clinton told General Petraeus that his progress report on Iraq required “a willing suspension of disbelief.”
Personally, I think that places Dick Cheney in far better company than the heroine of Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, a bunch of other assorted “-gates” and the wicked witch who blamed her husband getting blow jobs in the Oval Office on “a vast rightwing conspiracy.” And it was such a perfectly-executed conspiracy that those dreadful rightwingers were able to plant Bill Clinton’s own semen on Monica Lewinsky’s dress.
But that’s okay: her boss Obama is now going after all of those rightwing conspirators who believe horrible things such as: the right to exercise free speech; the right to peaceably assemble; the 14th Amendment’s restriction of the federal government encroaching on the rights of the states and the people; the right of an innocent baby to live; the right to think that the United States should protect America for its own citizens; the right of our heroic combat veterans not to be regarded as dangerous terrorist threats when they return home; etc.
I want you to understand something: THESE are the people saying former` Vice President Dick Cheney isn’t “reliable”:
From April 20: (AP) President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.
From April 21: President Obama left open the door Tuesday for charges to be brought against Bush administration lawyers who justified harsh interrogation techniques, though he continued to argue that CIA agents who used those tactics should not be prosecuted.
JENNIFER LOVEN, AP: The $100 million target figure that the president talked about today with the Cabinet, can you explain why so small? I know he talked about—you know, you add up 100 million and 100 million, and eventually, you get somewhere, but it would take an awfully long time to add up hundred million (inaudible) in the deficit. Why not target a bigger number?
GIBBS: (Smiling) Well, I think only in Washington, D.C. is a hundred million dollars…
LOVEN: The deficit’s very large. It’s not a joke.
GIBBS: No, I’m…
LOVEN: The deficit’s giant. $100 million really is only a step.
GIBBS: But no joke.
LOVEN: You sound like you’re joking about it, but it’s not funny.
GIBBS: I’m not making jokes about it. I’m being completely sincere that only in Washington, D.C. is $100 million not a lot of money. It is where I’m from. It is where I grew up. And I think it is for hundreds of millions of Americans.
LOVEN: The point is it’s not a very big portion of the deficit.
TAPPER: You were talking about an appropriations bill a few weeks ago about $8 billion being minuscule—$8 billion in earmarks. We were talking about that and you said that that…
GIBBS: Well, in terms of—in…
TAPPER: …$100 million is a lot but $8 billion is small?
Of course, $100 million is a lot of money where anyone is from. But in Washington DC, where Obama has expanded government spending by gargantuan amounts, it’s 0.0029% of the budget. Or 0.00076% of what Obama spent on the “economic stimulus” spending spree
These are people who justify whatever the hell they want as “reliable information.” The same people who justify trivializing $8 BILLION in pork because that $8 billion makes them look bad almost immediately thereafter justify claiming that $100 million in budget cuts is a huge figure because they think that .0029% of the budget they say they’ll trim makes them look good. The people who claim Cheney lacks credibility massively lack so much of a shred of it themselves.
For the Obama administration, credibility means doublespeak. Openness means releasing only those documents that hurt the political opposition. Accountability means personally attacking anyone who raises a legitimate point.
So the administration that promised openness and accountability is now releasing only the documents that make the Bush administration and the United States of America look bad, but refuse to release the information that reveals how necessary and useful the actions that Bush took to protect this country. The administration that promised unparalleled bipartisanship is now pursuing the greatest political witch-hunt in American history and essentially transforming this country into a banana republic where the winners of the next election criminalize the previous administration. And personally attack anyone who confronts them for doing it while avoiding the main issue.
The facts are obvious to anyone who will consider them (or allow them to be released): the “harsh” interrogations worked. The Bush Administration officials were called upon to make extraordinary decisions in the heat of battle with thousands of dead Americans and many thousands or tens of thousands more feared to come. And they acted to protect the country.
So let’s have a communist show trial, forbid the accused from presenting any exculpatory or mitigating evidence in their own defense, and put them in prison. That’s the documented historical way of the left, after all.
That’s the new America under Barack Hussein.
One day a Republican administration will be back in power – and they’ll be mad as hell over the shocking perversions of justice that are going on right now. That administration will find its legal precedent to prosecute from what is going on right now. And the president and the administration that engaged in politically-motivated prosecutions is going to become the next victim of the next wave of politically-motivated prosecutions.
Note to the soon-to-be-prosecuted Bush officials: demand a change of venue out of Washington D.C., or you will be convicted of the crime of being a Republican just like Scooter Libby.
Conservatives would still disagree with tax-hungry liberals even if they gave generously of their own money, but at least they would respect the consistency.
As it is, we have nothing but utter contempt for liberals who claim to be working so tirelessly in the name of “the poor” even as they demonstrate a contemptuous disregard for the poor in their own charitable giving.
Sadly, Barack Obama and Joe Biden continue in the liberal tradition of demanding that other people pay for their massive socialist wealth-transfer programs, while being incredibly stingy with their own money.
Barack Obama’s chintziness has been known for awhile. But the rather shocking lack of generosity of Joe Biden is just now becoming known.
Prior to his run for President, Barack and Michelle Obama were in the top 2% of income earners, but actually gave less than the average American in charitable giving:
In 2002, the year before Obama launched his campaign for U.S. Senate, the Obamas reported income of $259,394, ranking them in the top 2 percent of U.S. households, according to Census Bureau statistics. That year the Obamas claimed $1,050 in deductions for gifts to charity, or 0.4 percent of their income. The average U.S. household totaled $1,872 in gifts to charity in 2002, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
The national average for charitable giving has long hovered at 2.2 percent of household income, according to the Glenview-based Giving USA Foundation, which tracks trends in philanthropy. Obama tax returns dating to 1997 show he fell well below that benchmark until 2005, the year he arrived in Washington.
Both Obama and his wife, Michelle, declined to respond to questions about their charitable donations.
Looking at the ten-year total of Biden’s giving, one percent would have been $24,500. One half of one percent would have been $12,250. One quarter of one percent would have been $6,125. And one eighth of one percent would have been $3,062 — just below what Biden actually contributed.
“The average American household gives about two percent of adjusted gross income,” says Arthur Brooks, the Syracuse University scholar, soon to take over as head of the American Enterprise Institute, who has done extensive research on American giving. “On average, [Biden] is not giving more than one tenth as much as the average American household, and that is evidence that he doesn’t share charitable values with the average American.”
The plain fact of the matter is that conservatives – who are routinely demonized as “greedy” and “uncaring” – are actually FAR more generous than the liberals who demonize them.
As for John McCain, during the same years that Barack Obama was only giving between .4 and 6.1% of his net income to charity, John McCain was giving about 28% of his net income to charity.
And it’s not just John McCain and Dick Cheney who are personally generous as conservatives, and it’s not just Barack Obama and Joe Biden who are chintzy as liberals. Conservatives are overwhelmingly more generous than liberals with not only their money, but their time and even their blood:
Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.” The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives.
If many conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, Brooks, a registered independent, is, as a reviewer of his book said, a social scientist who has been mugged by data. They include these findings:
— Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
— Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.
— Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.
— Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
— In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.
— People who reject the idea that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.
Brooks demonstrates a correlation between charitable behavior and “the values that lie beneath” liberal and conservative labels. Two influences on charitable behavior are religion and attitudes about the proper role of government.
The single biggest predictor of someone’s altruism, Willett says, is religion. It increasingly correlates with conservative political affiliations because, as Brooks’ book says, “the percentage of self-described Democrats who say they have ‘no religion’ has more than quadrupled since the early 1970s.” America is largely divided between religious givers and secular nongivers, and the former are disproportionately conservative. One demonstration that religion is a strong determinant of charitable behavior is that the least charitable cohort is a relatively small one — secular conservatives.
I despise liberals because they are quintessentially defined by their abject hypocrisy on issue after issue. But nowhere do I despise them more than on the issue of taxation and giving. The simple fact of the matter is that the more people want to take other peoples’ money, the less generous they are with their own; and the more people object to having other peoples’ money seized without their consent, the more generous they are with their own money.
Start Thinking Right 