Liberals Saying Obama Sounds Like A Fool Because He’s Just So Darned Brilliant

Do you remember how liberals went off on Bush as stupid for eight years (not including the primary season leading up to the 2000 election) because of the way he talked?

Bush and the word “nuclear” was a favorite, of course.  And there were always a few awkward sentence constructions from a president who – unlike Obama – wasn’t slavishly attached to a teleprompter:

Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he’s been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.

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The same left that ridiculed George Bush over his every verbal slip are now rushing in with “intellectual” defenses as to why Obama sounds like a babbling fool every single time he can’t read his lines off a screen.

Case in point from today’s Los Angeles Times:

Meghan Daum: Obama’s fast brain vs. slow mouth
It’s not that the president can’t speak clearly; he employs the intellectual stammer.

Apparently, a lot of people consider President Obama to be bumblingly inarticulate. “The guy can’t talk his way out of a paper bag!” a reader wrote to me recently. “Sarah Palin is a brilliant speaker. It’s the president whose sentences are undiagrammable,” said another in response to a column I wrote about Palin. It’s not just my readers, nor is it exclusively conservatives, who hold this view. A Google search of “does Obama have a speech impediment” turns up several pages of discussion among the president’s supporters and critics alike.Admittedly, the president is given to a lot of pauses, “uhs” and sputtering starts to his sentences. As polished as he often is before large crowds (where the adjective “soaring” is often applied to his speeches), his impromptu speaking frequently calls to mind a doctoral candidate delivering a wobbly dissertation defense.

But consider this: It’s not that Obama can’t speak clearly. It’s that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up. The stammer is commonly found among university professors, characters in Woody Allen movies and public thinkers of the sort that might appear on C-SPAN but not CNN. If you’re a member or a fan of that subset, chances are the president’s stammer doesn’t bother you; in fact, you might even love him for it (he sounds just like your grad school roommate, especially when he drank too much Scotch and attempted to expound on the Hegelian dialectic!).

If you’re not, chances are you find yourself yelling “get to the point already!” at the television screen every time Obama’s search for the right word seems to last longer than the search for Osama bin Laden. And thanks to its echoes of the college lecture hall, you may think it comes across as ever so slightly (or more than slightly) left wing.

That’s kind of ironic, given that the godfather of the intellectual stammer is arguably none other than the paterfamilias of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. With his slouch, his glazed-eyed stare and a speaking style that suggested the entire Oxford English Dictionary was flipping through his mind while he searched for a word like “dithyramb,” he makes Obama’s extemporaneous speech seem canned — not to mention pedestrian — by comparison. In fact, if the people critiquing Obama’s meandering speech patterns were to see an old “Firing Line” segment, I daresay they would think Buckley was drunk or otherwise impaired.

Granted, Buckley didn’t hold political office (he made an unsuccessful run for mayor of New York in 1965). He was more an observer than a decider, which is pretty much the opposite of what you need to be to lead a nation. Obama, as much as his critics might hate to admit it, is more than a phlegmatic egghead. He’s proved he can act decisively; whatever his faults, he’s leading the nation far more effectively — albeit less colorfully — than Buckley would have led New York. (When asked what he’d do if he won the mayoral election, he famously responded, “Demand a recount.”)

Obama’s problem is not that he’s an intellectual (for the sake of argument let’s define it as someone who is scholarly, broadly informed and distinguished as a thinker). It’s that he sounds like an intellectual. Unlike other presumed political brainiacs — Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, for example — he isn’t able to bury his ideas behind a folksy regional accent or good-old-boy affectations when he wants to. Nor is he effective at “keeping it real” when he falls into traditionally African American cadences that he clearly never used when he was growing up.

By speaking as though he hails from everywhere, he ends up being from nowhere. The result is that people look at him and see not a Hawaiian or a Chicagoan or even a black man, but a university man.

Of course, the president enables that stigma by stammering his way through town hall meetings and other public dialogues as though they were philosophy lectures. Irritating? Sure. But inarticulate? Sorry, folks, but you’ll have to find another adjective. And take your time. The right word is usually worth waiting for.

Okay.  I understand.  Obama sounds so stupid because he’s so damned BRILLIANT.  And here, look.  There’s a conservative out there who did the same thing.

Or not.  I don’t recall William F. Buckley Jr. having moments like this one:

But that is a fact.  And such things are hindrances to most of the mainstream media’s “narratives.”

I don’t recall Buckley telling us about the 57 states (with one left to go) he’s visited in those sophisticated tones of his:

Nor do I remember Buckley making a visit to Westminster Abbey and getting the date wrong by three years as Obama just got through doing:

I don’t remember Bush – who of course was a moron (just ask any liberal) doing anything this braindead either.

Nope.  It’s brilliant, intellectual “university men” who ascend to such marvellous heights of intellect.

One fellow pointed out that “Bush could not pronounce Nuclear but he knew what it was (Iran, Obama).”  And, of course, that stupid Bush was right, and those “brilliant” Democrats were all wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But why should it matter that Bush was right, and we are now facing a disastrous crisis that it’s just a damn shame that liberals basically ENTIRELY created with their abject REFUSAL to deal with a crisis, and their DEMONIZATION of anyone who tried?  Bush said “nuclear” funny, and that’s really all that matters if you’re properly sophisticated and, you know, professorial.  Bush was stupid even though he was entirely correct and the liberals who attacked him (including the three top liberals of the Obama administration with VP Biden and Secretary of State Clinton) were entirely wrong.

It doesn’t matter how many times we’re right and how many times they’re wrong.  Because they won’t acknowledge the truth and because the facts don’t really matter worth a damn to them.

There’s a concept in psychology called “accommodation and assimilation” that fits liberals in their steadfast refusal to follow the rules of normal learning.  In normal psychology, one assimilates new information into one’s worldview and accommodates one’s worldview as new facts come in that run contrary to the picture one has of the world.  Liberals don’t bother with that nonsense.  Rather, they rigidly adhere to their doctrines and simply paste-over whatever reality happens to get in the way.

I think of Harold Camping and his followers.  It didn’t matter than he falsely predicted the end of the world before in 1994.  It didn’t matter that the Bible that he’s doing all his “calculations” from specifically says no man can know the day or the hour of such things.  It doesn’t even matter that his prediction for the end of the world on May 21 turned out to be wrong.  Such facts don’t work, so so much the worse for the facts.  Now we’re assured that the world will end on October 21.  Really.  Better get ready.

Like Harold Camping and his followers, liberals are immune from any genuine learning.  They simply lack the character to deal with reality in an honest way.

Obama is brilliant because he graduated from Harvard, but Bush is stupid even though he graduated from Yale.  Previous Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was brilliant because he graduated from Yale, even though Bush had also graduated from Yale and even though Bush actually had a better accumulated grade average (77 versus 76) than Kerry.  Oh, and by the way, even though Bush also actually had a higher IQ than Kerry.  But so what?  Kerry had that arrogant Massachusett’s tone that just sounded so… so smart.  And of course, Bush was stupid because he had a few gaffes; ergo sum Obama is brilliant whenever he’s off his teleprompter because his gaffes are supposedly somehow kind of similar to brilliant people’s.

Or Bush was evil because of Gitmo, and rendition, and the Patriot Act, and domestic eavesdropping, and indefinite detentions, and military tribunals, etc. etc.; ergo sum, when Obama goes back on his demagogic rhetoric and pursues all the same policies that he demonized when Bush did them, it is Obama magnificently adapting his foreign policy.  Bush was evil for using enhanced interrogation and Obama was righteous to dismantle the CIA program that relied on such intelligence – even though Obama should get all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and even though enhanced interrogation and the CIA program that Obama dismantled were absolutenly essential to getting Osama bin laden.

Or Bush was a poor leader because he wanted to raise the debt ceiling versus Obama showing his magnificent leadership in demanding that we raise the debt ceiling.  Or Obama standing for the Constitution when he attacked George Bush for wars that he got congressional approval for, versus being the bold defender of human rights when he launches a third war in Libya without bothering to get congressional approval.  Or Bush was a partisan hack and a failure as a leader because he divided the country, but the fact that Obama divided the country far more than Bush EVER DID after promising to “transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics” and “end the partisan and ideological wars ” is entirely due to conservatives.  Because Democrats have a moral obligation to attack a Republican president, but Republicans have a moral obligation to bow down before a Democrat messiah.  That sort of thing.

One has to wonder how their heads don’t just explode from containing all the contradictions.  But it turns out that when you live in your own little world – and particularly when you get to control the media and shape the “narrative” for society to consume – irritating things like facts and contradictions just don’t really matter.

Justice Finally Comes To Osama Bin Laden, American-Style

It had to happen eventually.  And it finally has.  Osama bin Laden is in hell where he belongs, where seventy-two very un-virginal demons will tear his flesh for all eternity.

And it came the best way: by the trigger fingers of individual heroes, rather than by the faceless push of a button to activate a missile by a Predator drone.  It is fitting that bin Laden died at the hands of Americans who got to look him in the eye as they facilitated his journey to the eternally burning trash pit in the sky.

And just to add some icing to the cake, the reports are that they killed Osama bin Laden’s oldest son in the attack, too.

Osama bin Laden Killed; ID Confirmed by DNA Testing
By DEAN SCHABNER and KAREN TRAVERS
May 1, 2011

Osama bin Laden, hunted as the mastermind behind the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil, has been killed, sources told ABC News.

Bin Laden was killed in a ground attack by Joint Special Operations Command forces working with the CIA, not a drone strike, a national security source told ABC News.

According to a national security source, a compound in Pakistan where  the terrorist mastermind was believed to be had been monitored for months. When the decision was made to move on it, special operations forces were sent across the border from Afghanistan to launch a ground attack and take the body.

DNA testing confirmed that it was bin Laden, sources told ABC News.

Vice President Biden has reached out to congressional leadership to update them on the news tonight.

“This is a terrific day for America and quite frankly the whole world that cares about winning the war on terror,” former Bush chief of staff Andy Card told ABC News. Card said the news is “particularly significant” for the intelligence community.

“They’re the ones who kept their nose to the grindstone and worked very hard to allow this day to be realized … finally,” he said.

[The rest of the ABC story is mostly biographical on who bin Laden was and what he did.  You may read it here].

My congratulations and heartfelt appreciation go out to all the intelligence and military professionals who brought about this fitting end.

As President George Bush put it on October 11, 2001:

“In terms of Mr. bin Laden himself, we’ll get him running. We’ll smoke him out of his cave and we’ll get him eventually.”

It was just a matter of time.

Anyone who has read one paragraph of my blog knows that I am a fierce critic of President Barack Obama.  But he and his administration deserve credit for approving the actions that led to this day of reckoning.  Obama also displayed some class in how he first called former President Bush and then cited him in his announcement of bin Laden’s killing.  

That said, the city where bin Laden was killed – Abbottabad – was a military district headquarters.  And the early releases are claiming that the Pakistani government was not informed prior to the raid that got Osama bin Laden.  And the fact that bin Laden was staying in a large walled security compound only 100 yards from a Pakistani military facility tells you that bin Laden was almost certainly being protected by at least a faction of the Pakistani military.

Given how badly we need Pakistan and other key Muslim countries to cooperate with us if we are to be able to use anything other than a “Kill them all; let God sort them out” policy, Pakistan’s apparent duplicity and its cooperation with al Qaeda is not good news.

The war on terror isn’t over.  It might even intensify, as the terrorist network al Qaeda looks for vengeance.  It’ s who they are; it’s what they do.  Here, for instance, is a story that al Qaeda threatened a “nuclear hellstorm” if America killed or captured bin Laden.  Rest assured, al Qaeda will be determined to do something that will seek to restore their honor and credibility in the Islamic world as a result of this raid.

What will happen as a result of this raid and the killing of bin Laden?  Will Pakistan be embarrassed into more cooperation with the U.S., or will they be embarrassed into LESS cooperation with the U.S.?  Did conducting a massively consequential military operation in a foreign country without notifying its leaders make that country a better friend, or a less trustworthy foe?  Under the presidency of Barack Obama, U.S.-Pakistani relationships have soured to an all-time low.  Did this attack on their country improve those relations?  What will happen as a direct result of this attack?

I don’t even want to think about what would have happened had a Pakistani military or police unit fired on the U.S. special operations forces.

If liberals are consistent, they will immediately denounce President Obama and demonize him for further antagonizing the Islamic world and for risking an escalation of terrorism.

The problem with that is that it is total crap.  And whether liberals like it or not, we are in a war for the survival of our culture against a culture of hate.

George Bush put it best describing countries and their attitude toward the United States: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”  That statement was met with incredible criticism and condemnation from the left.  And yet, in what way did Obama’s actions today do anything other than reinforce that that was the only attitude we could realistically take?

The left has been proven fundamentally and profoundly wrong in its attitude toward the war on terror.  And it should be obvious by now that the only way to be successful is to not just follow George Bush’s example, but to actually try to “out-Bush” Bush’s example.

And Obama has largely “out-Bushed” Bush in Pakistan.  President Bush did not want to cause a deterioration in U.S.-Pakistani relations, because he viewed Pakistani cooperation as key in the war on terror.  Obama, in using drone attacks and now direct military action, has been far more aggressive in “taking the war” to Pakistan.

Another example of “out-Bushing Bush” would be the Libya attack.  George Bush – decried as the “imperial president” for his attack on Iraq – at least had constitutional authorization for that action (i.e,. the Iraq War Resolution).  Obama took the “cowboy” route in Libya without bothering to obtain permission from any constitutional authority whatsoever.  Except the “world.”  Obama’s actions should serve to amply demonstrate just how hypocritical and utterly vacuous George W. Bush’s liberal critics truly were.

Liberals said that Bush’s attack on Iraq was a provocation that would make the war on terror worse.  They said that the war on terror was a provocation.  They said the surge was a provocation.  And we shouldn’t be provoking the Muslim world like that.

Let me assure you, what those spec op warriors just did in their raid on that compound in Pakistan was an in-your-face provocation.

What’s the long-term effect of this degraded relationship with Pakistan going to be?  I have no idea.  But any liberal who wants to tell me that “cooperative” liberal policies are working where “confrontational” conservative ones have failed is simply an imbecile.  Because what just happened clearly proves the exact opposite.  And when you consider the fact that Obama has already pursued Bush’s policies on Guantanamo Bay, rendition, domestic eavesdropping, the Patriot Act, military tribunals, indefinite detentions and a host of other polices, George Bush and Dick Cheney stand as men proven correct.

We cannot relent.  Because our enemies will not relent.  They are determined to murder.  It is a virtue for them.  It is a religious duty.  And the 9/11 attack was a religious act.

If these terrorists want to get in America’s face or try to intimidate the American people, America should make sure that its warriors give them a giant shot to the nose that they will never forget in response.  Whether we speak softly or loudly, I don’t really care; just make sure that we always carry one big giant stick, and demonstrate the willingness to use that big giant stick on anyone who wants to make trouble for us.

And so there is one more thing to say: if President Obama tries to take political advantage of the killing of Osama bin Laden, we should make sure the American people know that Obama is planning to gut the budget of the U.S. military that just killed bin Laden.

Our warriors should smile and give one another hearty high-fives for this victory.  And then they need to get right back to work.  Because what they do is vital for their country, whether their country has the moral intelligence to understand that or not.

What I most like about this is that it sends a message.  Even ten years later, the United States of America will continue to hunt you down and kill you if you kill her citizens.  And that is a message that Republican and Democrat alike ought to be able to unite around.

Update: we are now learning that it was a squadron of forty U.S. Navy SEALs from Team 6 who conducted the raid that got bin Laden.  God bless you guys.

And now we are even beginning to learn that “enhanced interrogation” may very well have given us the information breakthrough that got us bin Laden.

Absence Of Values: Obama Targets American Citizen For Death Without Trial

There’s a phrase that Francis Schaeffer used: “feet firmly planted in mid-air.”  It aptly describes the plight of the secular humanist left.  Here’s a quote to familiarize yourself with the concept:

Since present day Humanism vilifies Judeo-Christianity as backward, its goal to assure progress through education necessitates an effort to keep all mention of theism out of the classroom. Here we have the irony of twentieth century Humanism, a belief system recognized by the Supreme Court as a non-theistic religion, foisting upon society the unconstitutional prospect of establishment of a state-sanctioned non-theistic religion which legislates against the expression of a theistic one by arguing separation of church & state. To dwell here in more detail is beyond the scope of this article, but to close, here are some other considerations:

In the earlier spirit of cooperation with the Christian church the ethics or values of the faith were “borrowed” by the humanists. In their secular framework, however, denying the transcendent, they negated the theocentric foundation of those values, (the character of God), while attempting to retain the ethics. So it can be said that the Humanist, then, lives on “borrowed capital”. In describing this stuation, Francis Schaeffer observed that: “…the Humanist has both feet firmly planted in mid-air.” His meaning here is that while the Humanist may have noble ideals, there is no rational foundation for them. An anthropocentric view says that mankind is a “cosmic accident”; he comes from nothing, he goes to nothing, but in between he’s a being of supreme dignity. What the Humanist fails to face is that with no ultimate basis, his ideals, virtues and values are mere preferences, not principles. Judging by this standard of “no ultimate standard”, who is to say whose preferences are to be “dignified”, ultimately?

What happens when “preferences, not principles” encounters a difficulty?  The preferences will go out the window every single time.  Call it a “preference” for “the ends justify the means.”  Who needs moral principles when Obama has political pragmatism?  And bye-bye, any professed principles.

“Feet firmly planted in mid-air,” and the abandonment of principles in favor of a constant stream of moral relativism and ends-justifies-the-means thinking has plagued the amoral Obama administration again and again.  Obama damned Bush over Gitmo; but he’s doing the same thing.  Obama damned Bush over military tribunals.  What is he doing now?  He damned Bush over the surge strategy in Iraq; what in the world would you call the strategy he’s employing now in Afghanistan?  Obama damned Bush over the practice of rendition, but he’s doing it as much as Bush did.  Obama denounced Bush for holding terrorist detainees without trial, but he’s doing the same exact thing.  The list goes on and on.  Obama attacked Bush over his lack of transparency, only to be far less transparent than Bush ever was.  Obama criticized Bush for protecting the wealthy at the expense of the poor, but has since engaged in bailout after bailout of the rich and powerful.  Obama blasted Bush for being partisan, but he has become the most partisan president in American history.  Obama denounced the right for using reconciliation to pass key legislation, and then used it to pass the most significant legislation this country has seen in 60 years.  For all Obama’s lefty rhetoric, he has abandoned virtually every principle he professed.

Quite possibly above everything else, Obama pronounced himself the man who would end the war on terror – if nothing else than by the sheer magnificence of his person – and restore all the principles of liberalism’s views toward constitutional protections to the enemies we would confront on the battlefield.

But when the rubber met the road, the amoral president demonstrated that his moral values amounted to dust in the wind, which would blow away in the face of the next challenge.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism.

The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.

To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review.

“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”

Obama and his supporters have routinely depicted Obama (somewhat falsely) as “a constitutional law professor.”  But stop and think about it: this “constitutional law professor” now has the view that it’s okay to blow away an American citizen without any form of legitimate trial.  He’s dogmatic about protecting the sanctity of the guy’s cellphone calls, but he has no compunction about ordering the guy to be blown to bits without a trial based on secret intelligence.

A pretty remarkable degree of chutzpah from a guy who once demagogued a president over his treatment of foreign terrorists.

Now, one might think that the political left and the liberal mainstream media would be frothing in outrage over all of these abandonments of principle, but the left is as incapable of genuine moral outrage as they are of genuine moral principles.  Which is to say that the media damned Bush over every breach of constitutional ethics from a leftist perspective, but they largely never mention all of Obama’s myriad breaches of the very same ethics.

Whenever the left offered its next political Utopia, the mainstream media of the day sanctified the government takeover as wonderful.  And then failed to speak out as the next regime, and then the next, and then the next, became a living hell on earth (as an example, here’s an article about the “hidden” history of evil in the Soviet Union.  Why is it “hidden”?  Because the left has steadfastly refused to look at the ugly face of socialism/communism).

Standing for nothing, with their feet firmly planted in mid-air, Barack Obama and the leftist radicals he champions have no principles to plant their feet upon.  The result has been one abandonment of principle after another beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.

White House Implosion Approaching

We’re seeing growing sings that all is most certainly not well in the Camelot Part Deux that liberals wanted to recreate in the Obama White House.  Obama himself is cracking under the stress, smoking too much and drinking too much.  I think we’d all like it if the man who had the responsibility of imposing his will on an Iran determined to develop nuclear ICBMs had at least enough willpower to impose his will on the next pack of cigarettes.  Meanwhile, Obama’s Chicago-thug “fearsome foursome” who form his paranoid inner circle are taking all kinds of heat – and showing signs of meltdown from all the gear-clashing.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel – Mr. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” himself – has been under fire from liberals who want to blame him for the near-total failure Obama’s first year has been.  But Emanuel has some allies in the press as well, who have come out to make a strong defense (mayhap with Rahm’s help?) at the direct expense of Obama.  I mean, the mainstream media is blaming the failure of the Obama administration on Emanuel’s lack of discipline and management skills, while other parts of the mainstream media argue that Rahm Emanuel is the only thing preventing Obama from ending up worse than Jimmy Carter.  I mean, you know there are a lot of hurt feelings and dead bodies in closets at the White House with this stuff going on.

And now we see the glue is coming off the veneer of David Axelrod, too.

March 6, 2010
Obama Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him
By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon — tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy,” he said, and in the space of five minutes, repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, pointing to the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House. Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. A “Moonie,” dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.”

Still, it is a charge that infuriates Mr. Axelrod, the president’s closest aide, longest-serving adviser and political alter ego. “I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,” he said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

No one has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as Mr. Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Mr. Obama is presented. As such, Mr. Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Mr. Obama’s agenda and accomplishments for the country.

“The Obama White House has lost the narrative in the way that the Obama campaign never did,” said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University. “They essentially took the president’s great strength as a messenger and failed to use it smartly.”

Mr. Axelrod said he accepts some blame for what he called “communication failures,” though he acknowledges bafflement that the administration’s efforts to stimulate the economy in a crisis, overhaul health care and prosecute two wars have been so routinely framed by opponents as the handiwork of a big-government, soft-on-terrorism, politics-of-the-past ideologue.

“For me, the question is, why haven’t we broken through more than we have?” Mr. Axelrod said. “Why haven’t we broken through?”

That question has dogged Mr. Axelrod in recent months and has preoccupied Mr. Obama’s inner circle, fueling speculation that the vaunted “No Drama Obama” team might be fracturing. Not surprisingly, the White House has no patience with the notion.

“You guys want to fit people into boxes and categories that are just not accurate,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Axelrod would not discuss what counsel he offered to Mr. Obama, though he denies any “fissure with my buddy Rahm” and any charge that he is too infatuated with the president to recognize the political risks of his ambitious agenda.

“Believe me, if we were charting this administration as a political exercise, the first thing we would have done would not have been a massive recovery act, stabilizing the banks and helping to keep the auto companies from collapsing,” he said. “Those would not even be the first hundred things he would want to do.”

But Mr. Axelrod argued that the president, confronted with “breathtaking challenges,” did not have the luxury of moving more slowly or methodically.

In a lengthy interview in his office on Wednesday, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

When asked how he would assess his performance, Mr. Axelrod shrugged. “I’m not going to judge myself on that score,” he said. But then he shot back: “Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”

The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy — leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers and cable chatterers — clearly stings Mr. Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over three decades in politics as a consultant and, before that, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune.

“Every time I hear that the White House is getting the message wrong, it breaks my heart,” said Mr. Axelrod’s sister, Joan, an educational therapist in Boston. “I know he agonizes.”

Ms. Axelrod says that while her brother is devoted to Mr. Obama, he is not a sycophant. She paused when asked whether he admired the president too much. “He is very, very loyal, sometimes to a fault,” she said.

Added Mr. Gibbs: “The list of people who have to deliver bad news to the president is very small, and David is first on that list. I’m probably second.”

Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job — citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.

Unlike other presidential alter egos, Mr. Axelrod is not viewed as a surrogate “brain” (like Karl Rove), a suspicious outsider (like Dick Morris in the Clinton White House) or a co-president (James Baker in the first Bush White House). Sometimes portrayed as a bare-knuckled Chicago operative, he is also a bantering walrus of a man in mustard-stained sleeves who describes himself as a “kibbitzer,” not a “policy guy.”

Sitting at his desk next door to the Oval Office last week, he was tearing into a five-inch corned beef sandwich on rye with a Flintstone-size turkey drumstick waiting on deck. “I am the poster child for the president’s obesity program,” he said.

A few minutes later, Mr. Obama walked in unannounced, scattering two aides like startled pigeons. “Hey,” Mr. Axelrod said by way of greeting (no “sir” or “Mr. President.”) Mr. Obama surveyed the spread on Mr. Axelrod’s desk with a slight smirk.

“What is this, King Arthur’s court?” he asked, then pulled Mr. Axelrod aside to talk about a health care speech he was about to deliver.

Mr. Axelrod is often at the president’s side; he sits in on policy and national security meetings and is routinely the last person he talks to before making a decision. He directs every aspect of the administration’s external presentation, overseeing polls, focus groups and speeches and appearing on the Sunday shows. Mr. Emanuel describes Mr. Axelrod as “an integrator of the three P’s” — press, policy and politics — “and how they make a whole.”

White House officials describe Mr. Axelrod’s focus as big themes rather than day-to-day sound bites. There has been no shortage of Democrats willing to second-guess his messaging approach.

“They made a big mistake right out of the box with the Inaugural Address,” said former Senator Bob Kerrey, adding that a president pledging bipartisanship should not have disparaged the previous administration in his speech, as many listeners believed Mr. Obama did.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Of course, they are continuing to make the same mistake of blaming Bush over and over and over again on a daily basis over a year later.

And that does go to the core of the Obama failure: the inability to match his rhetoric with reality, or even his rhetoric with his own rhetoric.

The man who pledged bipartisanship and a transcendent ability to reach across the divide and bring the country together has blamed and demonized the Bush administration and the Republican Party every single time he “reached.”

The man who promised transparency, who promised repeatedly to open up the entire “bipartisan” health care negotiations on C-SPAN, has not never even bothered to try to do so (and dang I wish I could have seen the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator-Aid, and various other acts of illegal political patronage being negotiated), but has routinely had closed door meetings which were not open to the press, the public, or certainly the Republicans.  Meanwhile, the Democrats have been so byzantine, so secretive, so wheeling-dealing, that even senior Democrats have had to acknowledge they were completely in the dark as to what in the sam hill was going on.

And of course now we have the same Obama who basically said that reconciliation was a totalitarian act of “simply majoritarian absolute power” that was both unconstitutional and as partisan and evil as Karl Rove is, now saying that it’s okay as long as he’s doing it “to maintain his strong presidency.”

That’s just health care.  You can take almost any other issue and find the same thing with Obama.  Foreign policy?  Take Renditions.  Take Eavesdropping programs.  Take the Patriot Act.  Take  Gitmo.  Take the surge strategy.  Take the Iraq War.  Take the  Iranian nuclear threat.  And now, take military tribunals.  In every single one of these cases Obama personally demonized the Bush position, and then did the same thing himself without ever once having the integrity to say that George Bush had been right and he had been wrong.  Energy policy?  Obama so completely abandoned his own stated energy policy promises that a senior Democrat was forced to say that Obama “is beginning not to be believable to me.”

I have to say I feel sorry for the messengers who are being hounded for not being able to get the White House message out: it’s full of lies and deceit; how do you make all the Obama lies look good without telling a whole bunch of other lies?

Then you’ve got the fact that a whole bunch of Democrats across the spectrum are just furious with the Obama administration for massively expensive policies that didn’t work and for sheer flagrant incompetence.

How do you make a turd look good?

The one word that most accurately frames this piece is, “Wah.”  The people who most successfully demagogued mainstream media narratives when it came to George Bush and Republicans are the biggest bunch of thin-skinned whining crybabies I’ve ever seen.  Someone else is ALWAYS to blame with these people.

And when they demonize Republicans for their criticisms when the Obama team has done nothing BUT demonize Bush and Republicans, it is beyond disgusting and even beyond despicable.

What couldn’t be more obvious about Obama’s inner circle – political rather than policy experts all – is that all they can do well is campaign.  So they constantly campaign in campaign mode, and then cry the moment anybody suggests they’re doing anything because of “politics.”  I mean, think about it: the same man who lambasts the press for their “every day is Election Day sort of mentality,” is the guy who is closer than anyone to Obama – and  who spends all his time as the “integrator of the three P’s” — press, policy and politics — “and how they make a whole.”

I mean, how DARE you people accurately describe us as what we are, and consider policies from the same uber-political perspective that WE consider them.  HOW DARE YOU!

The Obama inner circle lives in a bunker and embraces a “bunker-view mentality” to the world.  In contradiction to their statements to the contrary, they are hyper-hyper sensitive to any skepticism at all.  And their growing problem is that the nastiest skepticism of all isn’t coming from “the right” or from Fox News, but from their very own left and from media that should be in their pockets.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take before it happens, but this president and this inner White House circle are heading for a meltdown of epic proportions.

Military Tribunals: Bush Was Evil! Bush Was Unconstitutional! Uh, Bush Was Right

When I was a kid, we had a tough little dachshund.  Then we got a poodle who was as arrogant as you’d expect a poodle to be.  The poodle constantly attacked the dachshund, even though time after time the dachshund would have the poodle on her back with her teeth around the poodle’s throat in about 2 seconds every time they got into it.

That’s sort of like Obama and Bush.  With Obama being the poodle, and Bush (despite the fact that he doesn’t bother to defend his policies in the media) being the dachshund.

Renditions? Obama got his butt kicked.  Eavesdropping programs? Obama got his butt kicked.  Patriot Act? Obama got his butt kicked.  Gitmo? Obama got his butt kicked.  Surge strategy? Obama got his butt kicked.  Iraq War? Obama got his butt kicked.  Iranian nuclear threat? Obama got his butt kicked.  That sort of thing.

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.

And now we see it yet again.  Military Tribunals?  Another Obama butt kicking:

Obama advisers set to recommend military tribunals for alleged 9/11 plotters

By Anne E. Kornblut and Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 5, 2010

President Obama‘s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.

The president’s advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said. While Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of U.S. commitment to the rule of law, critics have said military tribunals are the appropriate venue for those accused of attacking the United States.

You just thought you were so above it all, weren’t you, Poodle-in-Chief?  Bush’s policies were terrible in every way except in virtue of the fact that they actually worked, while all yours are now revealed to be so totally full of crap you dropped them.

In other developments, the guy we are forced to rely upon to impose his will on an Iran determined to create a nuclear ICBM stockpile doesn’t even have the nerves to impose his will on a pack of cigarettes.

This is why we shouldn’t have wanted a poodle for our president.

Another Milestone Day For Obama: The Monstrous Mistake Of Trying Foreign Terrorists Like U.S. Citizens

I didn’t used to believe in anything special about “Friday the 13th.”  It was just another day.  Turns out I was wrong.

Obama has brought about yet another “change.”

Friday the 13th now features a new monster – the President of the United States of America – as the Creature Who Made Terrorists Feel Right At Home.  I know the name doesn’t sound as scary as “Jason Voorhees,” the hockey-masked hacker-slasher, but believe me, this is a monster that can kill more Americans than Jason Voorhees ever did.

Under Obama, we’re undermining our CIA.  We’re mirandizing terrorists captured on foreign battlefields.  And now we’re trying mass-murdering terrorists like American citizens in our justice system.

And, of course, when a terrorists actually guns down more than two score unarmed soldiers on a military base, he denies the man is even a terrorist in a rush to whitewash lest the revelation somehow undermine our “diversity.”

Hope you terrorist-murderers feel at home.  If there’s anything else we can do for you, please let us know.  Our president will go to any lengths to make you as comfortable as possible.

And don’t you mind that whole “slaughtering” thing.  We’re really like sheeple now; we don’t mind.  Murder 3,000 of us, or 3,000,000; we’re fine with it.  Really.

Why are we going to put the 9/11 mastermind and four of his fellow murderers on trial in civilian court?  Because Barack Obama is more righteous and wonderful than our despicable presidents of the past – such as Abraham Lincoln and the admittedly less-righteous FDR – have ever been.  Honest Abe was actually DIShonest Abe because he had military tribunals.

NYC trial of 9/11 suspects poses legal risks

By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Devlin Barrett, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 33 mins ago

WASHINGTON – In the biggest trial for the age of terrorism, the professed 9/11 mastermind and four alleged henchmen will be hauled before a civilian court on American soil, barely a thousand yards from the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers they are accused of destroying.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse.

It’s a risky move. Trying the men in civilian court will bar evidence obtained under duress and complicate a case where anything short of slam-dunk convictions will empower President Barack Obama’s critics.

The case is likely to force the federal court to confront a host of difficult issues, including rough treatment of detainees, sensitive intelligence-gathering and the potential spectacle of defiant terrorists disrupting proceedings. U.S. civilian courts prohibit evidence obtained through coercion, and a number of detainees were questioned using harsh methods some call torture.

Holder insisted both the court system and the untainted evidence against the five men are strong enough to deliver a guilty verdict and the penalty he expects to seek: a death sentence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people who were killed when four hijacked jetliners slammed into the towers, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.

“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York — to New York,” Holder repeated for emphasis — “to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”

Holder said he decided to bring Mohammed and the other four before a civilian court rather than a military commission because of the nature of the undisclosed evidence against them, because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil. Institutionally, the Justice Department, where Holder has spent most of his career, has long wanted to reassert the ability of federal courts to handle terrorism cases.

Lawyers for the accused will almost certainly try to have charges thrown out based on the rough treatment of the detainees at the hands of U.S. interrogators, including the repeated waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of Mohammed.

The question has been raised as to whether the government can make its case without using coerced confessions.

That may not matter, said Pat Rowan, a former Justice Department official.

“When you consider everything that’s come out in the proceedings at Gitmo, either from the mouth of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others or from their written statements submitted to the court, it seems clear that they won’t need to use any coerced confessions in order to demonstrate their guilt,” said Rowan.

Held at Guantanamo since September 2006, Mohammed said in military proceedings there that he wanted to plead guilty and be executed to achieve what he views as martyrdom. In a letter from him released by the war crimes court, he referred to the attacks as a “noble victory” and urged U.S. authorities to “pass your sentence on me and give me no respite.”

Holder insisted the case is on firm legal footing, but he acknowledged the political ground may be more shaky when it comes to bringing feared al-Qaida terrorists to U.S. soil.

“To the extent that there are political consequences, I’ll just have to take my lumps,” he said. But any political consequences will reach beyond Holder to his boss, Obama.

Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama’s plan to close the military-run detention center in Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the prison by next Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.

Obama said he is “absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people will insist on it and my administration will insist on it.”

After the announcement, political criticism and praise for the decision divided mostly along party lines.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said bringing the terrorism suspects into the U.S. “is a step backwards for the security of our country and puts Americans unnecessarily at risk.”

Former President George W. Bush’s last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge in New York, also objected that federal courts were not well-suited to this task. “The plan seems to be to abandon the view that we are at war,” Mukasey told a conference of conservative lawyers. He said trial in open court “creates a cornucopia of intelligence for those still at large and a circus for those being tried,” and he advocated military tribunals instead.

But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the federal courts are capable of trying high-profile terrorism cases.

“By trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system — a system respected around the world,” Leahy said.

Family members of Sept. 11 victims were also divided.

“We have a president who doesn’t know we’re at war,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles Burlingame, had been the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She said she was sickened by “the prospect of these barbarians being turned into victims by their attorneys.”

From McClatchey:

Congressional Republicans, however, promptly accused the Obama administration of trying to return to a pre-Sept. 11 mentality of criminalizing the war on terrorism.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas warned that “bringing these dangerous individuals onto U.S. soil needlessly compromises the safety of all Americans.”

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said the possibility that the accused terrorists “could be found not guilty due to some legal technicality just blocks from Ground Zero should give every American pause.”

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder – who actually has a track record for PARDONING AND FREEING TERRORISTS had this to say:

A big obstacle could be whether an impartial jury can be impaneled so close to where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood.

Holder said that a careful jury selection process should dispel those concerns.

“I would not have authorized the bringing of these prosecutions unless I thought that the outcome … would ultimately be successful,” he said. “I will say that I have access to information that has not been publicly released that gives me great confidence that we will be successful in federal court.”

But what happens if you thought wrong, Holder?  What happens then?

What happens if these guys are found not guilty?  Are we supposed to just let them go?

What happens if the five terrorists draw a liberal activist judge who wants to make “torture” and issue, rather than “terrorism” and “3,000 murdered Americans”?  Is Obama and his Justice Department at work to circumvent the system relating to the assigning of judges to particular cases and guarantee that “the right” judge hears the case?  Wouldn’t that be tantamount to the very worst that Obama has claimed he wants to avoid in the first place?  Wouldn’t that amount to a show trial?

Obama is either taking a giant chance, a literal roll of the dice, or he’s already stacked the deck.

What happens if a Muslim is on the jury pool?  That one’s kind of interesting.  A single juror can hang the jury and lead to a mistrial.  Do we want to take a chance that a sympathizer throw a monkey wrench into the system?  Is the Obama team that so values “diversity” going to try to prevent Muslims from serving on the jury?

What about a change of venue?  Surely a judge would HAVE to grant such an obvious petition, given the fact that the attacks occurred in New York, virtually every adult was impacted, and “New York” is hardly the best place to find an untainted jury pool for the 9/11 attack on the “World Trade Center attack in New York”?  And yet New York has this mulit-million dollar high tech courthouse complex to deal with them.

I mean, again, if you grant the change of venue, people will justifiably become enraged.  And if you DON’T grant the change of venue, people will justifiably think that the fix is in.

A military tribunal of KSM and his terrorist buddies at Gitmo would have been a ho-hum affair.  A civilian trial in a lower Manhattan courthouse with the press swarming over every detail like cockroaches would be the trial of the century.

Propaganda forum?  You bet.  Journalists will cover every remark that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his merry band of mass murderers offers.  Including the words of solidarity with other jihadist murderers.  Including words of encouragement to any who would murder Americans anywhere on the planet.  This is hardly the message that the American media should be broadcasting, but rest assured we’ll be broadcasting every word of it.

Terrorists are different from jewel thieves and even from gang bangers: every single thing they do is directed toward spreading a message.

These terrorists want a big stage.  And Barack Obama and Eric Holder want to make sure they have that stage.

And what happens if the trial – whether it’s held in New York or somewhere else – stimulates more terrorist attacks?  It’s one thing if terrorists try to attack Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, quite another if they launch an attack in New York, Los Angeles, or wherever else.

And assuming (no guarantee anymore) that these terrorist monsters go to prison, you can bet in the age of Gitmo (which is actually a model prison) being shut down under Obama that these guys will end up in the U.S. civilian system.  And they will be welcomed like rock stars.

Authorities are becoming increasingly alarmed over the radicalized Muslim population coming out of the U.S. prison system:

“Over the past 30 years, Islam has become a powerful force in the U.S. prison system, with some estimates that up to 20% of the inmate population is now Muslim.  Terrorism experts are increasingly concerned that disaffected inmates drawn to radical Islam could become a source of homegrown terrorist activity.”

Authorities are seeing more and more “homegrown jihadists” coming out of the prison system.  Just two weeks ago, federal authorities were confronted by radicalized Muslims coming out of the U.S. prison system and organizing a cell that was claiming “that the government was the enemy and they must be willing to take on the FBI — even if it meant death.”  And thanks to this brain dead decision by Barack Hussein, we’re going to start seeing a lot more of this.  Putting these terrorists into the U.S. prison system is tantamount to putting crack cocaine in the hands of addicts.  It will not end well.

This is a truly stupid idea on every level imaginable.

My question is, what are we gaining from taking what Obama’s Justice Department ADMITS is a risk?  That we were “open”?

There’s the obvious question, “You know what?  This thing could backfire.  I mean these guys could be acquitted.”  And MSNBC Justice Department Correspondent Pete Williams has this to say, based on his sources:

“No.  They’ve got a drawer full of other charges that they could bring against these defendants.  There are already indictments pending against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for other crimes, so they will just re-arrest them and charge them with something else.”

The thing about a fair game is that either team could actually win.  This isn’t a fair game.  And everyone in the world is going to know that, no matter where it is held.  Contrary to what the White House might think, the inhabitants of the rest of the world are not as stupid and gullible and willing to believe propagandist drivel as Democrats are.  This isn’t going to be any kind of demonstration about how “open” we are.  People who didn’t believe it before won’t start believing it now – unless and possibly even including that we allow the five terrorists to walk out of court free men.

A National Review article entitled, “Holder’s Hidden Agenda,” reminds us of how Obama’s people just ripped into the CIA and started pulling out every wire and diode they could.  They demanded an investigation and just plain released all kinds of previously classified information that made the US and the CIA look as bad as they possibly could.  To what end?

This summer, I theorized that Attorney General Eric Holder — and his boss — had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department’s obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the “reckoning” that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. […]

So: We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Like I said.  The new Friday the 13th monsters revealed today as Barack Obama and his AG Eric Holder are far more dangerous to Americans than Jason Voorhees ever was.

Update, November 14: TEN jihadists terrorists are coming to the U.S. to stand trial in civilian court, rather than the five that Obama and Holder claimed.

Update, November 14: Barack Obama, on September 27, 2006, in the debate concerning “The Military Commissions Act of 2006,” assured America that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and those like him would face MILITARY justice, and that he would NOT get “all kinds of rights.”  Obama is, as usual, a documented liar.

Between Rock and Hard Place: Hoping That Weasel Obama Breaks Ridiculous Promises

It’s not an easy position for a country to be in: we have a choice between having a craven liar for president, or having a president who keeps utterly stupid and immoral promises that undermine the country at every single turn.

This week, Obama is choosing to be a lying weasel who demagogued George Bush’s policies only to adopt those selfsame policies when it became evident just how truly asinine his own ideas were.

First, we hear that Obama decided to break his previous bright idea about releasing terrorists into the United States.  Thanks for not making me live next door to a jihadist murderer, Barry.  Much obliged.

Then Obama breaks his promise not to release Abu Ghraib pictures that by all accounts would have led to revenge-killings of American servicemen by nose-out-of-joint terrorists.  Again, appreciate it, Barry.  Keep up your lying ways so we don’t have to suffer under the most dumbass and immoral policies of any president in history.

And now we’ve got Obama breaking his word about giving terrorists the same rights as every American citizen (you know, the ones that they’re trying to murder).

President Barack Obama, who was one of the Bush administration’s sharpest critics concerning the military tribunals used to prosecute detainees at the Guantanamo detention facility, may be backing away from his election promise to abolish them.

Last week, a story in the New York Times reported that the Obama administration is now likely to retain the military commission system, but in a modified form. According to the Times, the announcement regarding this stunning about-face could come as early as next week.

“The more they look at it,” one official told The Times, “the more commissions don’t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.”

As an indication of the high priority the military tribunals had for Obama, he requested on Inauguration Day a 120-day delay of all trials in progress. Two days later, the new president signed an order to close the Guantanamo facility itself within a year. Obama planned to transfer the detainees’ cases to civilian courts in the United States where the prisoners would enjoy the constitutional rights, albeit undeserved, of American citizens.

But the president, who during the election said, once elected, he would “reject the Military Commissions Act,” soon encountered hard, cold reality. In Obama’s case, his second thoughts about closing Guantanamo’s military commission system, which he once termed “an enormous failure”, arose after having reviewed the files of the 241 terrorists still held there.

Most of the remaining prisoners, he discovered, are hard-core al-Qaeda members who are too dangerous to be released. And if tried in a regular American court of law, it is estimated that 50 to 100 of them would be acquitted. The problem Obama failed to understand before making his rash promise is that there is not sufficient evidence to obtain their convictions in civilian courts.

There are also other headaches that would arise from civilian trials in the United States, which would not reflect favourably on the Obama administration. One is that the Guantanamo terrorists, including some involved in the 9/11 attack, would be able to grandstand and promote their cause in the courtroom, since now they would have an audience augmented by television cameras. Under the military system in Guantanamo, the trials are closed to the public and the cameras are absent. Reporters are, however, present in the courtroom.

Other problems concern the possibility of civilian judges throwing out key evidence if they deem it was obtained by questionable methods. Intelligence agencies would also be faced with the nightmarish prospect of having to reveal in public how they got their evidence (secret information is not revealed in open court in the Guantanamo legal system). In a civilian courtroom, terrorists would also take advantage of the legal right guaranteed to American citizens to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

But the biggest problem concerning stateside civilian trials for the Obama administration is what to do with the terrorists if they are acquitted, as surely dozens of them would be. Many of them cannot be returned to their country of origin because they will be tortured and possibly executed. Other countries, including those in Europe, are, with good reason, balking at accepting them, regarding the prisoners primarily as an American problem.

“If the detainees are not dangerous, then I don’t see any problem in the USA taking them in,” said one German politician.

The happiest people in all this would be the acquitted terrorists themselves. Some of the Guantanamo prisoners have openly admitted to their American captors their intention to return to terrorism when released. Other former Guantanamo detainees have already done so. So for those still wanting to kill as many Americans as possible, they would love to be set loose in the United States.

THANK YOU, Barry Hussein!  Now there’s less of a chance that these monsters will be able to beat our easy-to-beat legal system so they won’t be able to murder more Americans!  You’re a prince of the realm for breaking your word on that one.  Thank you for demagoguing an issue only to backstab and lie to your idiot supporters!

And, we learn in an AP article about the same broken promise that this means that Obama will be breaking ANOTHER stupid and immoral promise to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility that kept prevented these monsters from harming Americans in the first place.

Obama could roll back the January 2010 deadline, which he imposed on his second day in office. That could throw in doubt his campaign promise to shut down the prison…

Thank God we’ve got such a liar for a president.  In the case of our Fool-in-Chief, it’s better to have him breaking one stupid promise after another than keeping one stupid promise after another.

Of course, sometimes having a Liar-in-Chief gets pretty confusing: such as when Obama promises to “look forward rather than backward” rather than criminalize Bush officials, only to almost immediately break that promise by subsequently saying he’d turn them over to his Justice Department, only to YET AGAIN go back on himself by saying he didn’t want to do the thing that he earlier said he’d do before saying he wouldn’t do that thing…

Anyway, the current situation is that Barry Hussein is finally keeping his fool mouth shut by staying out of the whole conversation of prosecuting Bush officials for waterboarding while Nancy Pelosi twists in the wind as a result of her own damn repeated lies.

Liar or fool.  In the case of our current president, we clearly have both in one teleprompter-clinging package.