OSAMA BIN LADEN RAID
Obama takes the credit for getting bin Laden. Was it Obama who rebuilt the national security apparatus following 9/11 to reshape it from the Cold War emphasis that had characterized it for the previous sixty years? Was it Obama who first announced the mission to get bin Laden dead or alive? Was it Obama who used water boarding to secure the key intelligence breakthroughs that bin Laden was relying on couriers for his communication (rather than phones, computers, etc.) and that he was living in the city of Abbottabad which allowed intelligence to zero in on him?
The key intelligence breakthrough occurred when US intelligence discovered two key facts: 1) that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in the city of Abbottabad in Pakistan; and 2) that bin Laden was relying on a courier who could then be identified and tracked to bin Laden’s specific location in that city. Both of these key facts were discovered under the Bush presidency by means of waterboarding:
Liberals outrageously lie when they talk about how waterboarding was used. CIA professionals did NOT ask a terrorist a question and then waterboard him until he gave them whatever answer they wanted. Rather, they used this incredibly painful – but completely medically safe under supervision – procedure of simulated drowning to “alter the perception” of the terrorist. The terrorist was confronted with his new reality in a cold, painful way: “We own your ass; we can do whatever the hell we want to you; and we will ultimately break you down. Get used to the idea that you WILL tell us what we want to know.” The point of waterboarding was to break their will to resist, not to torture immediate answers out of them but rather to inexorably bring them to the point where they would ultimately crack. The fact of the matter was that the CIA experts didn’t even bother to ASK terrorists any questions while they waterboarded the three terrorists who ended up singing like canaries. But it is a simple FACT that waterboarding was the essential background component that led to the breaking of these hard, hateful men: because the terrorists we waterboarded were the very same terrorists who told us about Abbottabad and the courier.
Democrats talk about “torture.” I say if we catch a monster like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed we waterboard him until he grows gills and then we take the water away so he’ll flop around like a dying fish. And repeat it over and over again until the same man who tried to destroy us becomes the very man who tells us how to destroy his hateful organization.
I recently watched a 2 hour documentary about the 2006 terrorist attempt to use passenger jets as bombs titled “Stopping the Second 9/11” on the National Geographic Channel. The thing that most struck me was the fact that British intelligence recorded the terrorists talking to each other on phones. The terrorists planned to bring their own wives and their own BABIES on the flights that they planned to destroy in order to reduce the likelihood that they would tip off law enforcement by boarding the planes as “family men.” That ought to scream about the determination of these men to kill and destroy. You simply are not going to get men like this to open up with courtesy and niceness. Islamic terrorists by their culture, their religion, and their brutal nature as mass murdering killers respect only superior force, not peaceful overtures, which they see as a sign of weakness. Anyone who thinks you can “nice” a terrorist into betraying his worldview, his ideology, literally his religion, and his movement is simply a naive fool.
The question then becomes this: Why would anybody but a radical leftist ideologue give Obama credit for the intelligence breakthroughs that led to killing bin Laden when Obama was the very guy who most viciously demonized the very procedures that led to those breakthroughs?
There is a fascinating analogy that comes out of the talk about the moon landing that happened as a result of the discussion about the passing of Neil Armstrong (who by the way went on the record criticizing Obama before his death). The anology begins with this: We give John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon:
Nixon gets ZERO credit even though he was the president sitting in the White House when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. You will not read an article written by a liberal giving Nixon any credit for landing a man on the moon and bringing that man safely back to earth. Why? Kennedy had been DEAD for six years prior to that moon landing. Why isn’t Nixon “the president who put a man on the moon”? Because it was JFKs vision and the fulfillment of that vision just as getting bin Laden was the fulfillment of George W. Bush’s vision:
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.”
But again, that meme about the first man on the moon merely reinforces the pathology of the left to take full credit for every good thing and avoid any blame whatsoever for any bad thing. The media gives John F. Kennedy complete credit for putting a man on the moon because JFK was a Democrat; the media gives George W. Bush ZERO credit for getting Osama bin Laden because GWB was a Republican. It’s really that simple.
Was Obama’s decision to send the SEALs into Pakistan to kill bin Laden really that amazing? Let me ask you this: what would have happened to Obama’s political fortunes if he had refused to kill bin Laden and a bunch of pissed off CIA and military professionals leaked Obama’s abject refusal to kill the world’s worst terrorist monster? How many people think Obama could have been reelected as “the man who refused to kill bin Laden”???
Bottom damn line: if Obama had tried to kill bin Laden and failed, he would have been criticized for that failure. And to insulate himself from that possibility, he set up Admiral McRaven as the fall guy by giving McRaven responsibility. It was ultimately McRaven who made the “courageous call,” not Obama. That said, if Obama had refused to even try to kill bin Laden, HE WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE POLITICALLY. Does anybody seriously think for one second that the men who had devoted YEARS to getting bin Laden would have just rolled over if Obama had refused to issue the order to get him? In fact, I will bet you that Republicans would have brought up and article of impeachment due to Obama’s refusal to protect the citizens of the United States, and Democrats would have voted for it. Because otherwise, this election would have been the worst disaster in the history of politics for the Democrat Party as the weakling coward treasonous bin Laden Party.
So spare me about Obama’s “incredibly courageous decision” to kill bin Laden as George W. Bush had promised the world that the United States would do. Spare me the idiotic rhetoric that if George W. Bush had still been president he never would have had the guts to kill bin Laden. Just spare me all your blathering idiocy, liberal.
IRAQ WAR
Let’s talk about the Iraq War. Let’s talk about the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Do you know which president won that war? Do you know which president negotiated that withdrawal of American troops? I do. In answer to both questions, the name is George W. Bush.
But who claims credit for the success of Iraq? Listen to Vice President Joe Biden, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration:
“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”
Two words come to mind: they are “evil” and “hypocrite.” Obama demonized the Iraq War again and again while Bush was trying to fight and win there. Obama demonized the incredibly successful surge strategy that allowed us to break the back of the insurgency. But now that same Obama claims credit for what he opposed.
AFGHANISTAN WAR
That same Obama dragged America FAR deeper into the quagmire of Afghanistan than anybody could ever dream blame on Bush. Because Obama and the Democrat Party didn’t want to appear weak on national security. So they created a contrast between Iraq (which Bush won) as the “bad war” and Afghanistan (which Obama massively expanded) as the “good war.”
You wait and see: when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’s going to frame it as his courageously getting us out of the last of “Bush’s wars.” When Obama massively expanded America’s involvement in Afghanistan and very obviously used Afghanistan as a political device to give Obama a cover from charges that he was a cut and run coward:
As I pointed out before, Charles Krauthammer pointed out the sheer cynical depravity of Barack Obama and the Democrat Party as regards Iraq and Afghanistan by pointing to what the Democrats themselves said:
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.
And that’s why Obama has this dilemma. He said explicitly on ABC a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t even use the word “victory” in conjunction with Afghanistan.
And Democrats in Congress have said: If you don’t win this in one year, we’re out of here. He can’t win the war in a year. Everybody knows that, which means he [Obama] has no way out.
Afghanistan was just a way to demagogue Bush in Iraq by describing Afghanistan – where Obama is failing so badly – as “the good war” and Iraq – where Bush won so triumphantly – as “the bad war.” It was beyond cynical; it was flat-out treasonous.
There’s more about how the Democrats – including Democrat voters – did a “cut and run” on their “good war” here.
The thing is that Obama’s “good war” aint going so good. The thing is that if you examine the casualties of Obama’s “good war” since Obama took it over, Obama is responsible for more than 70 percent of the casualties for the entire war (i.e., compare Obama’s 1,477 casualties in less than four years to Bush’s 630 casualties over eight years of fighting.
Bush limited the Afghanistan War. Obama radically expanded it. And now the man who radically expanded the Afghanistan War is trying to A) walk away from the mess that HE created and 2) blame the mess that HE created on Bush just as he’s blamed ALL his failures on Bush.
We are NOT winning in Afghanistan. We are not GOING to win in Afghanistan – particularly after Obama declared a “timetable for withdrawal” that told the enemy all they have to do is hang on until we crawl out with our tails between our legs and the country will be theirs. There IS no winning in that hellhole. As I have pointed out in the past echoing other conservatives, Afghanistan was a terrible place for the U.S. military to fight and be able to exploit our overwhelming air and ground power whereas the flat plains of Iraq was a GREAT place for America to fight and win.
I’ve said that before (just to show you I’m not boasting with 20/20 hindsight):
Bush was rightly resistant to putting too many troops into Afghanistan because he knew enough about history to understand that Afghanistan is a hell-hole. Bush understood that while Iraq – with its flat, mostly open terrain – was perfect for American equipment and tactics, and that mountainous and cave-ridden Afghanistan was most certainly NOT well-suited for American equipment and tactics. Bush knew that the fairly well-educated Iraqi people were capable of some semblance of democracy; and Bush knew that the ignorant, basically stone-age Afghani people were NOT capable of anything resembling self-governance.
Because Bush – however stupid the left wants to say he is – wasn’t 1/20th as massively moronic as Barack Obama is.
Afghanistan is also the place where Obama ignored and overruled his generals. He was the one who declared that we needed to have a huge surge there (after demonizing Bush’s successful surge in Iraq, fwiw); and then he was the one who refused to listen to his own generals’ recommendations when they said we’d need at least 40,000 troops to do it right – and then after endless indecision finally decided to basically give them too many not to lose but not nearly enough to ever win.
Afghanistan is as much Obama’s war as Iraq was “Bush’s war.” The difference was that Bush owned his war and accepted responsibility for how it went and how it was fought and Obama will NEVER own ANY of his massive failures. So as I said above, when Obama cuts and runs from Afghanistan, he’ll deceitfully depict it as getting America out of the last of “Bush’s wars.” Because that’s the kind of slandering liar that weasel is.
I was wrong about one thing in my past predictions: I thought that Obama would crawl out of Afghanistan before the election in November and make the immediately above claim. But I submit at this point that Obama can’t do that: because Afghanistan is frankly going so badly with new cases of Afghan soldiers fragging their American partners practically every day that to cut and run NOW would only serve to draw attention to just how catastrophically Obama has truly failed over there.
IRAN
Obama is the president who was mocked by Hillary Clinton for his naive stupidity in assuming he could talk Iran out of its rogue regime intent on acquiring nuclear weapons status. He is the same naive fool today that he was when Hillarly Clinton mocked him.
And Iran has doubled its centrifuges and made it all but impossible for observers to monitor Iran’s nuclear program while Obama has dithered.
Just as Iran has successfully propped up the Syrian dictatorship while Obama has done nothing.
And I have documented that when craziest nation in world history Iran gets its nukes – which it will – you can COMPLETELY lay the blame for the Armageddon that will surely ensue on Barack Obama and the Democrat Party.
Not that Obama will accept responsibility for his failure of leadership.
OIL
Barack Obama has also been constantly taking complete credit for being the president who has produced more oil than any other president. Is that true? No. The reason that we are producing virtually ANY domestic oil at all right now is because of the Bush administration’s granting the leases that have produced so much American oil.
“According to EIA’s short-term 2011 outlook, released last week, oil production was significantly higher in 2009 than in the years prior. Obama may have been in office for most of that year, but the oil production numbers are due to action taken before he became president. In 2010, most if not all of the production increase recorded is likely due to action that predates Obama, since Obama didn’t take any major action expanding offshore drilling his first year in office.”
But the Obama administration has taken action since then, as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on Wednesday. “Over the past two years, the Obama administration has delayed, revoked, suspended, or canceled an enormous range of development opportunities. One month after the President took office, his administration cancelled 77 oil and gas leases in Utah — once the review was complete the administration refused to reinstate a single one. . . . Last January, it announced new restrictions for onshore oil and gas exploration in the Mountain West. Last February, it denied a permit to build a bridge needed to access an oil producing field in Alaska, after the Environmental Protection Agency designated a nearby river an aquatic resource of national importance. Last April, the Administration suspended 61 oil and gas leases in Montana that were issued in 2008 — then announced that all oil and gas leases in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota would be delayed indefinitely. Last May, the President announced a 6-month moratorium on deepwater drilling — a moratorium that’s been repeatedly struck down in the courts.”
Bush was the president who signed the leases that Obama is taking credit for. Obama is the president who has shut down oil production. And yet Obama is the president who is taking credit for Bush’s success even as he refuses to stand behind his failure. Something to consider as we face the highest gasoline prices in the history of the republic on this Memorial Day.
HEALTH CARE
ObamaCare was an unpopular fiasco the entire time Obama and Democrats were forcing it down the throats of the American people. Obama demagogued health care costs – which were actually going DOWN before his ObamaCare boondoggle placed another one-sixth of the economy under government bureaucratic control – to pass his socialist takeover of the health care system.
Health care will be more expensive thanks to Obama and his socialism. We’re talking $1.76 trillion more than Obama promised. In fact, it’s already three times as expensive as Obama said it would be and we aint seen nothin’ yet. That is a fact.
College students are seeing their health care costs skyrocket or be completely removed altogether as insurance companies decide they don’t want to pay for all the “free stuff” that ObamaCare forces them to pay for.
ObamaCare disingenuously imposes all the burden on the doctors and insurers while claiming to give all kinds of benefits. Which is why 74% of doctors say they will quit, retire early, or see fewer patients if ObamaCare stands. ObamaCare shennanigans, higher costs and fewer doctors mean that you will have LESS chance of actually seeing a doctor under this incredibly failed program.
Obama also swore up one side and down the other that he would NEVER raise taxes on the middle class. And yet ObamaCare is a massive tax hike on ordinary people. Because 75% of the 21 new tax hikes will fall on the middle class.
And where’s Obama to accept responsibility for his failed program???
ECONOMY
Question: Which president left his successor with a bubble collapse that vaporized $7.1 trillion in American wealth and wiped out 78% of the Nasdaq portolio? Answer: William Jefferson Clinton. But we don’t tend to remember the terrible Dotcom bubble recession that Bill Clinton left for George Bush to inherit because of three reasons: 1) the sheer unmitigated bias of the mainstream media; 2) the disasterous 9/11 attack (that can likewise be laid almost entirely at Clinton’s feet as he gutted the military and intelligence community and left America both weak and blind such that Osama bin Laden declared America to be a “paper tiger” and began to plot his devastating attack); and 3) because unlike Barack Obama, George Bush wasn’t a pitiful whiner and accepted responsibility for the economy.
The fact of the matter is that George Bush began his presidency with a huge double whammy. Not that the media will ever assign responsibility for it to Clinton the way they were determined to assign responsibility to Bush. Because there is a longstanding propaganda meme according to which the mainstream media will NEVER blame a Democrat for a failure and will ALWAYS find a way to blame a Republican.
Barack Obama has demonized Bush for the “Great Recession,” literally refuses to cite statistics that consider the first year of his presidency to create the rhetorical statistical illusion that his presidency has been better than it actally was, demonized Republicans for “obstructionism“, and taken credit for his “recovery”. The truth is that none of these things is true.
Let’s take the “Great Recession” first. Obama has demonized Republicans over and over again for “lack of regulation” and “failed policies” causing that recession. Bullcrap. The single entity that resulted in this collapse was Government Sponsored Enterprise Fannie Mae and its twin Freddie Mac. I’ve documented that fact over and over again on this blog:
http://startthinkingright.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/2009/12/31/with-eyes-finally-wide-open-reconsider-why-the-economy-collapsed-in-the-first-place/
And since Democrats took over and issued regulations up the yin yang and then up the whazoo of aforementioned yin yang, we’ve continued to have clear examples of the very things Democrats demonized Republicans over. And Obama is setting up America and the world for an ultimate $600 trillion collapse that will make the one in 2008 look like a warm, sunny day compared to Armageddon.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed FIRST before ANY private sector entity to initiate the collapse – just as conservative economists had predicted a full decade before the collapse occurred:
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.
”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”
And in fact the private sector entities such as Lehman Brothers that collapsed did so because they suddenly found themselves holding BILLIONS of dollars in sub-prime mortgage backed securities that had been issued by the GSEs that the Democrats created and ran into the ground and protected – and refused to allow Republicans to regulate (Bush tried SEVENTEEN TIMES to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prior to its collapse and was stopped by Democrats every single time). In fact Bush was trying to regulate Fannie and Freddie all the way back to 2003 when we still had time to prevent the coming collapse. Democrats used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to force the market to sell homes to people who couldn’t afford those homes; and when the bubble burst and Lehman Bros. and others found themselves holding “toxic assets” that they had purchased from Fannie and Freddie, they couldn’t cover their Democrat-caused losses and collapsed.
Nixon was president during the moon landing, but Democrats and liberals have never and will never give him credit because they wanted to give one of their own credit for the success. Bush was president during the 2008 collapse, and that was all liberals needed to say to blame him for the entire fiasco regardless of how many Democrat shennanigans had gone into that collapse.
And here we are, nearly four years later, and all of Obama’s promises based on his anti-Bush demagoguery to: 1) not increase the debt ceiling; to 2) cut the deficit in half during his first term; to 3) cut the debt after demonizing Bush for his debt. Obama imposed the most massive one-time spending binge in the history of planet earth and promised that unemployment would be 5.5% by now. Instead not only has unemployment been over 8% longer than ANY time in history since the Great Depression, but in fact unemployment has actually been worse than had Obama’s own experts said it would be had we NOT wasted and pissed away $862 billion that we can never get back.
Obamanomics has been one catastrophic failure after another. Here we are, with median household income under Obama nearly TWICE as bad than they were during the Great Recession – whether you want to blame Bush for that recession or not. Here we are, with more poor people devastated by Obama’s economy than at any time in history. And that didn’t happen under Bush’s watch, you liberal liars. Somehow, it wasn’t Bush who put more people into poverty than ever before; it wasn’t Bush who devastated median household incomes as people move in with parents and relatives because the economy has failed them; it has been Obama. It was OBAMA who made one out of every six Americans poor.
And Obama’s stimulus cost Americans an incredible and frankly insane $278,000 per job. We can’t afford any more damn Obama jobs!!!
Obama is a liar and his “success” is based on lies – as you will see for yourself if you just try to match his rhetoric to painful American reality under his presidency:
But it’s Bush’s fault that Obama did it. Because no president in history has ever abrogated his responsibilities or refused to claim responsibility for his failure to live up to his responsibilities than has Obama.
Obama has been the president for the last four years, people, not Bush.
I began talking about the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. The only “man on the moon” now – thanks to Obama’s policies – is none other than Barack Obama: because this disgraced leader will surely assume no responsibility for anything that happens on the earth that lies so far below his lofty but meaningless rhetoric.
It’s past time to hold him responsible and fire his ass.
Start Thinking Right 