A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 10-11

See Part One – A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 1-3

Part Two – A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 4-5

Part Three: A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 6-7

Part Four: A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 8-9

In the first three chapters of Revelation we saw Christ prophetically addressing seven churches which represent “the Church” composed of all true believers in Christ on earth throughout the centuries.  In Rev 4 we saw “the Church” called up to heaven in the Rapture, and we saw ourselves surrounding God on His throne.  In Rev 5 we saw Christ on the throne of God being singularly declared worthy to unleash the judgments that will defeat evil and win earth back for God’s glory.  And then beginning in chapter six we have begun to see those judgments in the form of seven seals, seven trumpets and seven bowls.

I had described two ways God could bring about some of these judgments: by supernatural means or by merely stepping back and allowing man to do what comes naturally to his depraved nature (e.g., with nuclear war). But there is actually a very real “third way” – namely the eruption of super volcanoes:  It turns out that just one of these things “could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilization.”  And there are FIVE super volcano zones – including one in Yellowstone!  Which is to say that God has THREE paths to fulfilling every prophecy in the Book of Revelation: supernatural causation, allowing humans to fulfill the judgments upon themselves, and very real and very terrifying natural calamities that scientists declare are every bit as real and possible as they are unthinkable.

I thought that worth pointing out; I have to do a lot of simplifying and selective editing for a “midlevel” flight over Revelation, and that means it’s possible to leave out something I should have included.  Such as the effect of super volcanoes and their end times potential.

Today we’re going to get an interlude from all the hell-on-earth judgment (at least until the seventh trumpet is sounded and we get the terrifying bowl judgments).  We’re going to discuss the message of an angel, we’re going to talk about the coming Jewish Temple that will be built and we’re going to examine the ministry of the coming “two witnesses.”

“Then I saw another mighty angel…”  We saw “a mighty angel” in Rev 5:2.  These angels who are designated “mighty” are apparently members of the highest order of angels (the archangels) who stand in the very presence of God.  There are messages that are so significant to human history and divine mission that no one but an archangel with supreme authority such as Michael (Jude 9) or Gabriel (Luke 1:19) can deliver them.  And get a load of the sheer majestic “mightiness” of this “mighty angel”: he is clothed with a cloud which is the vehicle GOD Himself uses to come to earth (see Psalm 104:3; Isa 19:1; Daniel 7:13; Matt 17:5).  A rainbow is upon his head heralding back to Gen 9:9-17 and God’s promise that He remembers and keeps His covenants.  His face will be like the sun to remind us of the brilliant glory of the One from whose presence he has just come (e.g. Ex 34:29).  His feet are like pillars of fire, reminding us of Christ in Rev 1:15 and symbolic of divine judgment.  In placing his right foot upon the sea and his left foot upon the earth, he comes to take possession of the entire earth by divine decree of judgment.  And his voice is as the roar of a lion.  And the voices of the seven thunders answer his call.

This is a passage that always sends shivers down my spine.  But as incredibly mighty and glorious as this archangel – quite possibly the archangel Michael himself – is, if there were a contest to see who could fall on their feet before Jesus Christ first, I’ll bet this mighty angel would win hands down.  He serves One more glorious.

The archangel takes possession of the land and the sea and says that “there shall be delay no longer.”  Delay in doing what, we might ask.  This angelic visitation takes place very near the end of the seven years Tribulation: there shall be delay no longer in Jesus Christ returning to the earth He created as King and Lord over it.  Christ shall delay His return no longer.  The time of the eschaton predicted by the prophets has finally arrived and absolutely no power of man or demon will be able to hold it back.

We’re told “the mystery of God will be accomplished” (Rev 10:7).  The completion of the mystery is the conclusion of the Father’s plan that was initiated before the foundation of the world and is now finally to be realized in its fullness.  Many times, overwhelmed by evil, righteous man has cried wondering if God was even working at all in the affairs of men.  GOD WAS WORKING.  GOD IS WORKING.  AND GOD’S WORK WILL CULMINATE IN GOD’S ETERNAL PURPOSE.

The “bittersweet message” of Rev 10:8-11 is this: God’s Word is sweet when we learn of God’s love for man resulting in God’s salvation of man accomplished by Christ.  But it is bitter indeed to discover the brutal reality in store for all who reject Christ’s salvation and therefore experience the full wrath of God’s holy judgment for their sins.  God does not want us to be a people who are characterized by rejoicing when the wicked “get theirs.”  God wants us to be a people who grieve when He is forced to judge sin and unbelief.  Because that’s how Jesus will feel, and we should be like Jesus (Luke 9:52-56).

Revelation 11 assures us that there WILL be a Third Temple.  The Second Temple was destroyed as Christ predicted in AD 70 prior to John’s receiving Revelation in 96 AD.  So there is no question that this is a yet-to-be-built structure.  Part of the seven year covenant that Israel signs with Antichrist will allow them to reinstitute animal sacrifice (Dan 9:27) – and there is NO other place that a Jew would do so but in the Temple.  The problem is that for 4,000 years the Temple has stood in one and only one place – and that place appears to be taken up by the Muslim Dome of the Rock which was deliberately built right on top of the ruins of the Jewish Temple.  We don’t know what’s going to happen: destruction in an earthquake, destruction in a war, or something else.  Scholars like Dr. Grant Jeffrey believe that the Second Temple is actually in a slightly different location from which is commonly believed and the Third Temple could be constructed without damaging the Al Aqsa Mosque.  Jeffrey claims that a previously unknown gate of Solomon’s Temple proves that the original Temple was several hundred feet north of the Dome of the Rock (remember Herod MASSIVELY enlarged the Second Temple).

It’s actually amazing how many obstacles existed to a Third Temple – and how many have been overcome.  Money is no problem when you realize how many Jews over the centuries have included the Temple in their wills or purchased Temple bonds.  But only a Jew from the tribe of Levi and the family of Aaron can enter the Holy of holies and how can Jews prove their descent?  The answer to that is DNA testing resulting in “the first family reunion of the Jewish priestly dynasty in nearly 2,000 years.”  You’d need to have a Sanhedrin which hasn’t existed since 425 AD.  The answer is that Israel reestablished the Sanhedrin in 2005.  You need holy anointing oil – which was discovered and chemically verified as authentic in 1988.  And you need stuff like a red heifer – and they’re working on it and they’ve already come so close it’s unreal.  If you think any of the difficulties are beyond God, you’re daft.

I’m excited about the Third Temple as a fulfillment of prophecy – but in many ways it is actually a bad thing.  It will result from the covenant with Antichrist (bad thing); it will be built as a result of Israel’s unbelief in Messiah Jesus (bad thing); and Antichrist will sit in the Holy of holies and decide he’s God (bad thing).  The Jews have longed for their Temple because they believe it will fulfill all their national and religious hopes as a people; but sometimes you’ve just got to get exactly what you want in order to be able to see that what you always wanted won’t fulfill you, after all.  Ultimately Jews will have to realize that it is NOT the Temple which merely symbolizes the work of Christ that fulfills hope, but only Christ Himself.

In Rev 11:1 an angel tells John to physically measure the Temple.  If you study Ezekiel 40 and Zechariah 2, you will see that when God takes such measurements, it is to evaluate the spiritual condition of His people.  Is this Third Temple built with the help of Antichrist and the False Prophet (Rev 13:11-18) fulfilling God’s true calling to Israel?  Not even close.  It is built as an apostate place of worship that refuses to recognize Israel’s true Messiah; rather, they just want some kind of national identity symbol if not a giant stone idol.  And thus the verdict of Rev 11:2: in the second half of the Tribulation for 42 months, Jerusalem will see nothing but war and suffering until “the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Luke 21:24).  And the times of the Gentiles will only end with the return of Messiah Jesus.

Rev 11:3 introduces the two most incredible Jesus freaks who ever lived: God’s two witnesses.  God is NEVER left without a witness.  Who are these men?  We won’t know for sure until “the players take the field,” but many scholars believe it will be Moses and Elijah.  In God’s very last words in His Old Testament, He says in Malachi 4:5-6, “I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse.”  And that “great and dreadful day” is the second half of the 7 years Tribulation.  Elijah will show up at the beginning of the Tribulation and he will preach the Gospel right under the angry nose of the Antichrist who is powerless to stop him.  And a lot of people will be saved.  But ONLY “when they have finished their testimony” (Rev 11:7) and said everything that God sent them to say, will Antichrist finally be allowed to kill them.  Because God is sovereign.  Elijah’s most famous miracle was shutting up the sky for – get this – three and a half years (James 5:17; 1 Kings 17:1).  Just like “somebody” will do during the Tribulation.  So Elijah has good bona fides as a candidate.   Why Moses?  Moses’ most famous miracles featured turning water into blood and sending plagues (Rev 11:6 cf. the Exodus).  And both Moses and Elijah had their ministries end in failure – with Moses being denied entrance into the Promised Land (Num 20:12) and Elijah being taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot after he fled in fear from Jezebel and asked God to kill him.  And God replaced him with Elisha (1 Kings 19:16).  I’m sure both men would love to have a second chance to be faithful to the very end – and I believe God will give them that opportunity.

Every Christian ought to be like the two witnesses from Revelation while on this earth.  Think about it; these two men have been in heaven with Christ for millennia – and now they’re returning back to earth for one more mission and an opportunity to cover their past failure with glory.  In the same way, according to the Bible we died in Christ (Galatians 2:20) and were born again to a completely new life.  We’ve tasted a little bit of heaven through the Holy Spirit; and now each of us are on earth on a divine mission from God.  BE A WITNESS!

Part Six: A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 12-13

Part Seven: A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 14-15

Part Eight: A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 16-18

Part Nine: A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 19-20

Part Ten: A Midlevel Flight Across Revelation: Rev 21-22

Special Operators And Intelligence Professionals Form OPSEC To Attack Obama For His Cynical Politically-Motivated Betrayal Of National Security

Remember when Kerri Strug injured herself and then incredibly won the gold medal for the USA women’s gymnastics team but hurt her ankle in the process?  The announcer said, “She’s hurt!  She’s hurt badly!” as Kerri Strug bravely stood on one leg after sticking her landing only to collapse on the ground in pain as soon as she finished her vault?  Remember her coach running over to pick her up and carry her?

I sure remember that.  What a great moment!!!  You could say that girl landed on the national heart.  That little sub-five-foot girl was magnificent when she was the only one who could win for her USA.

Well, the thing that isn’t quite as well remembered is that that scene of the coach carrying the wounded hero was overused in the media to such a degree that Saturday Night Live mocked it and then ESPN’s Sports Center did a parody of it as well.  Those spoofs weren’t mocking Strug; they were really mocking Bela Karolyi as a guy who clung desperately to his star to clutch at her fame.  In the SNL parody, Kerri Strug is basically saying six months later, “I can walk now, you know,” while Coach Karolyi constantly holds her at every appearance.

I don’t frankly don’t have a clue if Coach Karolyi was trying to pirate off the fame that his gymnast deservedly won or not; but that was how he was savaged by SNL.

And that parody is actually a great analogy for SEAL Team Six and Barack Obama.  SEAL Team Six, of course, are the professionals who took out Osama bin Laden, and Obama is your Bela Karolyi determined to pirate their place as heroes of American history which THEY ALONE risked their lives to secure.

But ask a question about all the glaring areas where Obama has failed – in the Middle East as tens of thousands have been murdered by brutal regimes and longstanding allies like Egypt have slipped into terrorist group control, and specifically in Iran where the brutal regime is practically at their goal to be attack-proof because of the nuclear weapons arsenal that they will have built under Obama’s watch – and what do we hear?  Obama got bin Laden, didn’t he?

It’s like history has been rewritten so that it was actually Bela Karolyi who stuck that vault.

Obama IMMEDIATELY went on national television to reveal the successful raid – when if he’d just waited a couple of damn days the intelligence gains could have been exploited.  And ever since then we have seen one betrayal of national security after another as Obama cynically leaked secrets at the cost of our national security and at the cost of our foreign assets and our allies in order to deceitfully and cynically exploit everything for his political posturing.

We have now had REPEATED and INCREDIBLY DAMAGING leaks that CLEARLY and in fact WITHOUT ANY QUESTION came out of the Obama White House.

Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein put it best:

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on the Situation Room, Feinstein said, “I think what we’re seeing, Wolf, is an avalanche of leaks and it is very, very disturbing. It’s dismayed our allies. It puts American lives in jeopardy. It puts our nation’s security in jeopardy.”

Feinstein also recently said:

“I think the White House has to understand that some of this is coming from their ranks,” Feinstein said in an address at the World Affairs Council, The Associated Press first reported.

These leaks are crippling America’s national security for years and years to come, intelligence experts say.  And it all began with the Osama bin Laden raid – because when we got bin Laden, Obama essentially concluded that he could sacrifice US national security and exploit it for his political present in order to get himself re-elected running as “the man who got bin Laden.”

The idea, of course, is that had George Bush had four more years in office to benefit from the success of the intelligence programs and tactics that HE created, Bush could not have got Osama bin Laden.  Why not?  Well its simple: Bush was not a messiah.  And only messiah could have got bin Laden.  And Barack Obama, of course, is the messiah.  Otherwise, Obama’s argument that “I’m the one who got bin Laden” is a truly asinine argument: because it just took until 2011 for US intelligence to track bin Laden down and Obama made the call that ANY president would have made – EVEN Barack Obama.

Forget the Navy SEALs.  Their glory is NOTHING as compared to messiah Obama’s.  I’m frankly surprised that the White House didn’t take pictures of Obama in SEAL garb and depict him as personally leading the raid and personally pulling the trigger that took out the terrorist.

The special operations community is red-hot pissed about it.

OPSEC, Special Forces Group, Attacks Obama Over Bin Laden Bragging, Leaks
Reuters  |  Posted: 08/14/2012 9:16 pm
By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON Aug 14 (Reuters) – A group of former U.S. intelligence and Special Forces operatives is set to launch a media campaign, including TV ads, that scolds President Barack Obama for taking credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden and arg u es that high-level leaks are endangering American lives.

Leaders of the group, the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc, say it is nonpartisan and unconnected to any political party or presidential campaign. It is registered as a so-called social welfare group, which means its primary purpose is to further the common good and its political activities should be secondary.

In the past, military exploits have been turned against presidential candidates by outside groups, most famously the Swift Boat ads in 2004 that questioned Democratic nominee John Kerry’s Vietnam War service.

The OPSEC group says it is not political and aims to save American lives. Its first public salvo is a 22-minute film that includes criticism of Obama and his administration. The film, to be released on Wednesday, was seen in advance by Reuters.

“Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden, America did. The work that the American military has done killed Osama bin Laden. You did not,” Ben Smith, identified as a Navy SEAL, says in the film.

“As a citizen, it is my civic duty to tell the president to stop leaking information to the enemy,” Smith continues. “It will get Americans killed.”

An Obama campaign official said: “No one in this group is in a position to speak with any authority on these issues and on what impact these leaks might have, and it’s clear they’ve resorted to making things up for purely political reasons.”

Obama has highlighted his foreign policy record on the campaign trail, emphasizing how he presided over the killing of bin Laden, as well as how he ended the war in Iraq and set a timeline for winding down the war in Afghanistan.

However, Obama has come under sharp attack from Republican lawmakers who have accused his administration of being behind high-level leaks of classified information.

They have pointed to media reports about clandestine drone attacks, informants planted in al Qaeda affiliates and alleged cyber-warfare against Iran that Republicans say were calculated to promote Obama’s image as a strong leader in an election year.

The White House has denied leaking classified information.

The president of Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc, Scott Taylor, is a former Navy SEAL who in 2010 ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for a congressional seat in Virginia.

Calling itself “OPSEC” for short – which in spy jargon means “operational security” – the anti-leak group incorporated last June in Delaware, a state that has the most secretive corporate registration rules in the U.S.

It also set itself up as a nonprofit organization under section 501(c)4 of the U.S. Tax Code, allowing it to keep donors’ identities secret. Spokesmen for the group declined to discuss its sources of financing.

Several group representatives say their main motivation for setting up OPSEC was dismay at recent detailed media leaks about sensitive operations.

In an interview, Taylor denied OPSEC had any political slant. He described the group as a “watchdog organization” but added that the current administration “has certainly leaked more than others.”

OPSEC spokesmen said the group has about $1 million at its disposal and hopes to raise more after the release of its mini-documentary, entitled “Dishonorable Disclosures,” which aims, in spy-movie style, to document a recent spate of leaks regarding sensitive intelligence and military operations.

Following the film’s release, OPSEC’s spokesmen said, the group expects to produce TV spots on the anti-leak theme that will air in a number of states, including Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada – key battleground states.

Fred Rustmann, a former undercover case officer for the CIA who is a spokesman for the group, insisted its focus on leaks was “not a partisan concern.” But he said the current administration had been leaking secrets “to help this guy get re-elected, at the expense of peoples’ lives…. We want to see that they don’t do this again.”

Chad Kolton, a former spokesman for the office of Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration who now represents OPSEC, also said the group’s message and make-up are nonpolitical.

“You’ll see throughout the film that concern about protecting the lives of intelligence and Special Forces officers takes precedence over partisanship,” he said.

Responding to criticism about the president taking credit for the bin Laden raid, an Obama campaign official pointed to an interview with CNN last month in which Admiral Bill McRaven, commander of the raid, said: “At the end of the day, make no mistake about it, it was the president of the United States that shouldered the burden for this operation, that made the hard decisions, that was instrumental in the planning process, because I pitched every plan to him.”

“I think Admiral McRaven knows more about the President’s role in the bin Laden operation than this group,” the campaign official said.

When I read that article, I was actually most enraged by the way the Obama administration responded at the conclusion: pitting Admiral McRaven against the credibility of the SEALs. Stop and think about it: Admiral McRaven serves at the pleasure of the president. If you don’t believe me, does anybody remember General Stanley McChrystal??? So now Admiral McRaven is put in the position of defending a president who will fire him if he doesn’t properly defend him??? Is that the kind of position our military leaders ought to be placed in???

So the Obama administration is literally saying here, “We’re as guilty as sin of doing everything our critics say, but if any active duty service member says so we’ll fire his ass.”  We might as well start doing what Nazi Germany did and have our military swear loyalty oaths of personal allegiance to their Führer rather than to their nation’s Constitution.

Exploiting Admiral McRaven for cover is every bit as cynical, every bit as dishonest, and every bit as treasonous, as everything else this administration has done.

SEALs aren’t guys who generally want the national glory for themselves; whatever “bragging” they do they tend to do within their own community because frankly nobody else would understand them to be able to appropriately honor them.

They also know that “loose lips sink ships.”  That was true during World War II and it is just as true today: when you reveal secrets of operations, you jeopardize current and future operations and you literally get good men killed.  And contrary to populist notions, there IS a limit of how many good men America has; such that every single ONE of them is a national treasure.

So the special operators aren’t pissed off at Obama for trying to leech off of their glory.  That isn’t what they’re about.  In that way, they are the OPPOSITE of Obama or most any other politician; they’re the kind of guys who go do what has to be done and do it in secret rather than the guys who call press conferences to boast about what other people just got through doing.  So it isn’t that Obama is trying to pirate their glory that is pissing them off; it’s that Obama is a reckless fool who is destroying national security and betraying secrets that will get men like themselves killed or worse (e.g., tortured and then murdered).  THAT’S what’s pissing them off.

Stunning Development: Same President Who’s Been Blaming Bush For Four Years Drafted CYA Memo To Blame Military If Bin Laden Raid Failed

Let me get this straight: the man who has blamed George Bush for FOUR YEARS of his own failures actually stood up and made a courageous decision all by himself? Seriously?

It’s time to take another drink again, you liver-failed alcoholics who are still in the Obama drinking game.

Every time there’s “unexpected” news – such as poor economic news or anything that would undermine the liberal thesis that Obama is our messiah – ye who are playing must take a drink.

Most of the players are dead now and the few who are still living are very, very sick waiting for their new donor organs (the argument being, “I’m NOT an alcoholic; I’m just a guy who trusted Obama”):

Former AG Michael Mukasey: Obama Officials Drafted Memo to Blame Military If OBL Mission Failed (Video)
Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, May 4, 2012, 10:39 PM

Leadership: Obama Administration Drafted Memo to Blame Military if OBL Mission Failed

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Sean Hannity tonight that the Obama Administration drafted a memo to protect the president from blame if the mission to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden would have failed. That way Obama could blame the general instead of taking the blame himself. Mukasey wrote about it this week in The Wall Street Journal.

“That was a highly lawyered memo (designed to protect the president politically)… I think there’s going to be more that’s going to be tumbling out about that escapade but so far that memo is enough.“

And, of course, this surprises no one who is familiar with Obama’s leadership style.

Mukasey also contrasted Obama’s leadership style tonight to Lincoln and Eisenhower as he did in his WSJ Opinion piece earlier in the week.

Lincoln took responsibility in August 1862 for failures that had been attributed to General George McClellan—eventually sacked for incompetence—and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Lincoln told a crowd that McClellan was not at fault for seeking more than Stanton could give, and “I stand here, as justice requires me to do, to take upon myself what has been charged upon the Secretary of War.”

Dwight Eisenhower is famous for having penned a statement to be issued in anticipation of the failure of the Normandy invasion that reads in relevant part: “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

A week later, when the success of the invasion was apparent, Eisenhower saluted the Allied Expeditionary Forces: “One week ago this morning there was established through your coordinated efforts our first foothold in northwestern Europe. High as was my preinvasion confidence in your courage, skill and effectiveness . . . your accomplishments . . . have exceeded my brightest hopes.

Eisenhower did mention himself at the end: “I truly congratulate you upon a brilliantly successful beginning. . . . Liberty loving people everywhere would today like to join me in saying to you, ‘I am proud of you.’”

Here’s what Mukasey said in the Wall Street Journal:

Updated April 30, 2012, 7:43 p.m. ET.Michael Mukasey: Obama and the bin Laden Bragging Rights
It’s hard to imagine Lincoln or Eisenhower claiming such credit for the heroic actions of others.
By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY

The first anniversary of the SEAL Team 6 operation that killed Osama bin Laden brings the news that President Obama plans during the coming campaign to exploit the bragging rights to the achievement. That plan invites scrutiny that is unlikely to benefit him.

Consider the events surrounding the operation. A recently disclosed memorandum from then-CIA Director Leon Panetta shows that the president’s celebrated derring-do in authorizing the operation included a responsibility-escape clause: “The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out.”

Which is to say, if the mission went wrong, the fault would be Adm. McRaven’s, not the president’s. Moreover, the president does not seem to have addressed at all the possibility of seizing material with intelligence value—which may explain his disclosure immediately following the event not only that bin Laden was killed, but also that a valuable trove of intelligence had been seized, including even the location of al Qaeda safe-houses. That disclosure infuriated the intelligence community because it squandered the opportunity to exploit the intelligence that was the subject of the boast.

The only reliable weapon that any administration has against the current threat to this country is intelligence. Every operation like the one against bin Laden (or the one that ended the career of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen and al Qaeda propagandist killed in a drone attack last September) dips into the reservoir of available intelligence. Refilling that reservoir apparently is of no importance to an administration that, after an order signed by the president on his second day in office, has no classified interrogation program—and whose priorities are apparent from its swift decision to reopen investigations of CIA operators for alleged abuses in connection with the classified interrogation program that once did exist.

While contemplating how the killing of bin Laden reflects on the president, consider the way he emphasized his own role in the hazardous mission accomplished by SEAL Team 6:

“I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority . . . even as I continued our broader effort. . . . Then, after years of painstaking work by my intelligence community I was briefed . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . And finally last week I determined that I had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . .”

That seems a jarring formulation coming from a man who, when first elected, was asked which president he would model himself on and replied, Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln, on the night after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender ended the Civil War, delivered from the window of the White House a speech that mentioned his own achievements not at all, but instead looked forward to the difficulties of reconstruction and called for black suffrage—a call that would doom him because the audience outside the White House included a man who muttered that Lincoln had just delivered his last speech. It was John Wilkes Booth.

The man from whom President Obama has sought incessantly to distance himself, George W. Bush, also had occasion during his presidency to announce to the nation a triumph of intelligence: the capture of Saddam Hussein. He called that success “a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq.” He attributed it to “the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator’s footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers. . . . Their work continues, and so do the risks.”

He did mention himself at the end: “Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them.”

That is not to say that great leaders, including presidents, have not placed themselves at the center of great events. But generally it has been to accept responsibility for failure.

Lincoln took responsibility in August 1862 for failures that had been attributed to General George McClellan—eventually sacked for incompetence—and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Lincoln told a crowd that McClellan was not at fault for seeking more than Stanton could give, and “I stand here, as justice requires me to do, to take upon myself what has been charged upon the Secretary of War.”

Dwight Eisenhower is famous for having penned a statement to be issued in anticipation of the failure of the Normandy invasion that reads in relevant part: “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

A week later, when the success of the invasion was apparent, Eisenhower saluted the Allied Expeditionary Forces: “One week ago this morning there was established through your coordinated efforts our first foothold in northwestern Europe. High as was my preinvasion confidence in your courage, skill and effectiveness . . . your accomplishments . . . have exceeded my brightest hopes.

Eisenhower did mention himself at the end: “I truly congratulate you upon a brilliantly successful beginning. . . . Liberty loving people everywhere would today like to join me in saying to you, ‘I am proud of you.'”

Such examples are worth remembering every time President Obama claims bin Laden bragging rights.

Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general from 2007-09, and as a U.S. district judge from 1988 to 2006.

A version of this article appeared May 1, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama and the bin Laden Bragging Rights.

You’ve got to understand the situation Obama faced: what would have happened to Obama politically if he had been told exactly where bin Laden was hiding and he refused to get him???  When you ask yourself that question, it wasn’t a courageous decision to go after Osama bin Laden: it would have been a far more politically courageous decision NOT to go get him; because furious intelligence and military professionals would have resigned in protest and then made very sure that Obama paid politically for refusing to get the man who murdered 3,000 Americans.  And let’s not forget that this is now the age of Wikileaks.

Obama would not have politically survived if he had refused to get bin Laden; he might literally have been impeached – with Democrats joining Republicans to wash their hands of this turd.

Obama did what Obama had to do to protect Obama. 

And the memo pretty much proves that Obama took the “protect Obama at all costs” meme as far as he could possibly take it.

Don’t blame Obama.  Never blame Obama.  Obama is he who must never be blamed.  You are not allowed to hold him responsible for anything that ever has happened or ever will happen or you are a racist.  Well, if you vote Republican you’re already a racist a priori; so you’re a DOUBLE racist.

SEALS Who Deserve Real Credit For Bin Laden Raid Saying ‘Come On, Man!’ To What They Call Obama’s ‘Cheap Shot’ To Use Them As Political Props

What follows below is from an international paper.  This is the result of Obama’s sheer mean-spirited pettiness:

SEALs slam Obama for using them as ‘ammunition’ in bid to take credit for bin Laden killing during election campaign
By Toby Harnden
PUBLISHED: 18:35 EST, 30 April 2012 | UPDATED: 10:42 EST, 1 May 2012

Serving and former US Navy SEALs have slammed President Barack Obama for taking the credit for killing Osama bin Laden and accused him of using Special Forces operators as ‘ammunition’ for his re-election campaign.

The SEALs spoke out to MailOnline after the Obama campaign released an ad entitled ‘One Chance’.  In it President Bill Clinton is featured saying that Mr Obama took ‘the harder and the more honourable path’ in ordering that bin Laden be killed. The words ‘Which path would Mitt Romney have taken?’ are then displayed.

Besides the ad, the White House is marking the first anniversary of the SEAL Team Six raid that killed bin Laden inside his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan with a series of briefings and an NBC interview in the Situation Room designed designed to highlight the ‘gutsy call’ made by the President.

Mr Obama used a news conference today to trumpet his personal role and imply that his Republican opponent Mr Romney, who in 2008 expressed reservations about the wisdom of sending troops into Pakistan, would have let bin Laden live.

‘I said that I’d go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him, and I did,’ Mr Obama said. ‘If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they’d do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.’

Ryan Zinke, a former Commander in the US Navy who spent 23 years as a SEAL and led a SEAL Team 6 assault unit, said: ‘The decision was a no brainer. I applaud him for making it but I would not overly pat myself on the back for making the right call.

‘I think every president would have done the same. He is justified in saying it was his decision but the preparation, the sacrifice – it was a broader team effort.’

Mr Zinke, who is now a Republican state senator in Montana, added that MR Obama was exploiting bin Laden’s death for his re-election bid. ‘The President and his administration are positioning him as a war president using the SEALs as ammunition. It was predictable.’

Mr Obama has faced criticism even from allies about his decision to make a campaign ad about the bin Laden raid. Arianna Huffington, an outspoken liberal who runs the left-leaning Huffington Post website, roundly condemned it.

She told CBS: ‘We should celebrate the fact that they did such a great job. It’s one thing to have an NBC special from the Situation Room… all that to me is perfectly legitimate, but to turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do.’

Campaigning in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Mr Romney responded to a shouted question by a reporter by saying: ‘Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.’

A serving SEAL Team member said: ‘Obama wasn’t in the field, at risk, carrying a gun. As president, at every turn he should be thanking the guys who put their lives on the line to do this. He does so in his official speeches because his speechwriters are smart.

‘But the more he tries to take the credit for it, the more the ground operators are saying, “Come on, man!” It really didn’t matter who was president. At the end of the day, they were going to go.’

Chris Kyle, a former SEAL sniper with 160 confirmed and another 95 unconfirmed kills to his credit, said: ‘The operation itself was great and the nation felt immense pride. It was great that we did it.

‘But bin Laden was just a figurehead. The war on terror continues. Taking him out didn’t really change anything as far as the war on terror is concerned and using it as a political attack is a cheap shot.

‘In years to come there is going to be information that will come out that Obama was not the man who made the call. He can say he did and the people who really know what happened are inside the Pentagon, are in the military and the military isn’t allowed to speak out against the commander- in-chief so his secret is safe.’

Senior military figures have said that Admiral William McRaven, a former SEAL who was then head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the decision to take bin Laden out. Tactical decisions were delegated even further down the chain of command.

Mr Kyle added: ‘He’s trying to say that Romney wouldn’t have made the same call? Anyone who is patriotic to this country would have made that exact call, Democrat or Republican. Obama is taking more credit than he is due but it’s going to get him some pretty good mileage.’

A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape.

‘In the end, Obama was forced to make a decision and do it. He knew that if he didn’t do it the political risks in not taking action were huge. Mitt Romney would have made the call but he would have made it earlier – as would George W. Bush.’

Brandon Webb, a former SEAL who spent 13 years on active duty and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said: ‘Bush should get partial credit for putting the system in place.

‘Obama inherited a very robust package with regards to special ops and the intelligence community. But Obama deserves credit because he got bin Laden – you can’t take that away from him.

‘My friends that work in Special Operations Command (SOCOM) that have been on video teleconferences with Obama on these kill or capture situations say that Obama has no issue whatsoever with making decisions and typically it’s kill. He’s hitting the kill button every time. I have a lot of respect for him for that.’

But he said that many SEALs were dismayed about the amount of publicity the Obama administration had generated about SEAL Team Six, the very existence of which is highly classified.

‘The majority of the SEALs I know are really proud of the operation but it does become “OK, enough is enough – we’re ready to get back to work and step out of the limelight.” They don’t want to be continuously paraded around a global audience like a show dog.

‘Obama has a very good relationship with the Special Operations community at large, especially the SEALs, and it’s nice to see. We had the same relationship with George W. Bush when he was president.’

It was ‘stretching a little much’ for Mr Obama to suggest only he would have made the decision. ‘I personally I don’t think Romney would have any problem making tough decisions. He got a very accomplished record of making decision as a business professional.

‘He may not have charisma but he clearly has leadership skills. I don’t think he’d have any problem taking that decision.’

Clint Bruce, who gave up the chance of an NFL career to serve as a SEAL officer before retiring as a lieutenant after nine years, said: ‘We were extremely surprised and discouraged by the publicity because it compromises the ability of those guys to operate.

‘It’s a waste of time to speculate about who would and wouldn’t have made that decision. It was a symphony of opportunity and intelligence that allowed this administration to give the green light. We want to acknowledge that they made that decision.

‘Politicians should let the public know where they stand on national security but not in the play-by-play, detailed way that has been done recently. The intricacies of national security should not become part of stump speeches.’

What highly decorated SEAL sniper Chris Kyle said was true and false: it turns out it was TRUE that Obama did not make “the courageous call” to get bin Laden; a Navy Admiral did.  Kyle did not know that memo documenting that it was NOT Obama’s call would be coming out as soon as it did.  And we further now know that Obama knew about bin Laden’s exact location for half a damn year before he was finished dithering – risking bin Laden getting away altogether – and that Bush or Romney very likely would have made that call a lot a whole lot sooner.

So maybe Obama is right: Romney wouldn’t have made the “courageous call” that Obama made on May 2, 2011; BECAUSE ROMNEY WOULD HAVE MADE IT BACK IN OCTOBER 2010!!!

The decision to go in and get Osama bin Laden was – as the SEALS said very clearly above – a “no brainer.”  It was a POLITICAL no-brainer as much as it was a foreign policy no-brainer.

When I sat in front of my TV filled with joy that our guys got that rat bastard and that he is screaming in hell right now as he ought to be, I gave Obama credit for the call.  And the thing was that EVERYBODY was giving Obama credit for the gutsy call.  NOBODY was putting it in terms of what would have happened to Obama politically had he refused to get bin Laden after his intelligence community – after a decade of dedicating their lives to finding him – delivered him on a silver platter to Obama.

Let me take that side now.  Suppose Obama had said to his generals, admirals, and career intelligence professionals, “No.  I’m not going to get him.  Something could go wrong and it would be bad for my political career.  And my political career is far more important than Osama bin Laden.”  Just sit back for a moment and imagine what the fallout from that would be.

First of all, do you think for a second in this age of Wikileaks that that decision to refuse to get bin Laden when we knew exactly where he was would have been kept from becoming public knowledge?  Let me guarantee you it would not have.  The intelligence and military establishment would have erupted in outrage; top-level people would have resigned and gone public and told the American people that they had handed Barack Obama Osama bin Laden and Obama had refused to kill the worst mass murderer of Americans in our nation’s history.

Republicans would have jumped on Obama the way a pit bull would jump on a piece of bloody meat.  And rightly so.  Obama would have been done.  He would have lost in a landslide that made Jimmy Carter’s loss look like a victory.

Obama’s alternative was to go in and trust the finest operators in the finest military in the history of the world to do what they do best.  And Obama did that – being sure to cover his ass by putting Admiral McRaven in charge of the operation just in case something did go wrong so he could have a scapegoat.

For Obama to claim the kind of credit he’s claiming is – as even liberal writer Arianna Huffington has put it – “one of the most despicable things you can do.”

Huffington was primarily referring to an Obama campaign ad narrated by Bill Clinton – who could have on THREE SEPARATE OCCASIONS prevented 9/11 by getting Osama bin Laden when foreign governments were literally offering him to the United States – saying: if the raid had gone badly and SEALs had been captured or killed, well, the REAL casualty would have been Obama’s political health.  THAT’S what would have mattered; not the sacrifice of the men who went in and faced death.

Watch this youtube counter to that ad:

One of the things that emerges from the Clinton-narrated Obama ad – when you consider it – is how incredibly self-absorbed and narcissistic Clinton and especially Obama truly are.  It’s all about THEM and THEIR political interests.  It’s not about the REAL HEROES at all.  It’s that, “So what if SEALs get killed; they’re paid to die; I’M the one that matters here!” mindset.

George Bush ran an ad that VERY briefly displayed Ground Zero and he was taken apart by the partisan left-wing liberal media propaganda machine for it. Obama has now REPEATEDLY taken victory laps – his surprise visit to Afghanistan ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIN LADEN KILLING was yet ANOTHER VICTORY LAP – and the same media that was aghast and appalled when Bush did it only serve as Obama’s hypocrite pit bulls now when it’s suddenly THEIR guy doing the same thing. There are only a very few liberals like Arianna Huffington who are pointing out the stark raving hypocrisy.

Romney expressed regret as an American that Obama tried to so vainly and so cynically exploit the bin Laden killing: Obama unfortunately chose to politicize an event that had united the country.  There aren’t very many things that all Americans are united behind.  The American victory over Osama bin Laden used to be one until Barack Obama went so over the top in exploiting the event that it makes the SEALS who did the actual work sick.

In 1970, there was a famous and incredibly daring and risky raid into Son Tay, North Vietnam intended to rescue American POWs.  The POWs had been moved, but the raid resulted in the deaths of some 200 enemy North Vietnamese troops and pressured the North Vietnamese government.  Most Americans don’t associate the president who approved that raid – Richard M. Nixon – because as much of a slick political weasel as he was, he wasn’t THAT cynical to exploit and shamelessly politicize a true American moment.

Unlike Barack Obama.

Update, 5/8/2012: One SEAL has come out and told us what he really thinks about Obama cynically exploiting his brothers:

FORMER NAVY SEAL REBUKES OBAMA

By Benjamin Smith

President Barack Hussein Obama – STOP using the Navy SEALS as a campaign ploy. Because with all due respect, (what little I have for you), you do NOT speak for me.

You have a movie about SEALS within the past year trying to identify with me, with the navy SEALS, and with anything that might improve your polling numbers…and yet it is all a sham to hide a weak un-American man desperate to claim the victories of others for his own.

You Sir are trying to take the credit for what the American People have achieved in killing Bin Laden. Your use of the SEALs accomplishment as a campaign slogan is nothing less than despicable. I, as a former Navy SEAL do not accept your taking credit for Osama Bin Laden’s death. The American Military accomplished that feat.

Yet now that it is useful, you Mr. President, continue to refer to the event as if it were YOU and you alone which accomplished the worthy task of slaying one of America’s greatest enemies. You say “I directed”, “I Continued”, “My Intelligence Community”, “My national security team”, “I determined that I had enough….”, “My direction…”

Yet reliable sources continue to report that not only did you attempt to stop or delay Bin Laden’s demise, you did not even leave the golf course for the situation room until 20 minutes before SEAL Team 6 took out Osama Bin Laden. Even the clothes you wore in the situation room betray this fact. This is a Commander in Chief? A man who takes credit for actions largely taken while he was out golfing?

We men who have taken the oath, say ENOUGH. You do not speak for me, a former Navy SEAL, or any one of the league of men whom I have earned the right to be among. You are simply a man running for an office. Yet you behave as a glory-hoarding ruler. You campaign to be our leader, yet in reality you wish to be our Master.

The American people are the ones who got Bin Laden… You did Not! We have fought wars and slugged it with Vast Terror Organizations to get to the man you say YOU killed. The United Sates of America has won you a title sir and you have spent the last three years trying to beg, borrow and bow as you GIVE IT ALL AWAY. You just happened to be president of the USA when WE THE PEOPLE got Osama Bin Laden. We do not see you as heroic or stoic, we see you as the guy who let America Go. We got fat and weak and you gave it all away. That is your credit – you bow to foreign leaders and pander to the press. You do not represent me as a Military Man. You do not represent me as a SEAL. You do not represent me as an AMERICAN!

You do not speak for me or any American military man because though you may now be Commander in Chief, you are not the man to whom we can point our sons and say “This is the American dream, this is American exceptionalism, this is what I wish for your future”, because you Sir are NONE of these things. You Sir, are the antithesis of American Exceptionalism. Your idols are Saul Alinksi and Karl Marx and your revolutionary dreams and anti-American ideals poison your every policy. Your every action betrays the fact that in your soul you do not understand what it is to be an American, not what America truly is. Your agenda from the beginning has been to get rid of and kill everything that is and ever was American. You who so easily dismisses America’s greatness and bows to foreigners… YOU DO NOT SPEAK FOR ME. YOU DO NOT SPEAK FOR THE NAVY SEALS. YOU DO NOT SPEAK FOR THE MILITARY MAN AND you SHALL NOT claim as your prize that which you have not earned. The Navy SEALS are NOT a campaign slogan to be bantered about for play. Nor are our accomplishments, including the demise of Osama Bin Laden, yours to claim.

So you DO NOT speak for me. And I will not stand for your use and abuse of my brethren the SEALS.
For Liberty,

Benjamin Smith

.

Honoring Our Fallen SEAL Heroes While Being Utterly Pissed At Obama

The story is a punch in the gut:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a decision Luttrell bitterly regrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama said hateful garbage like:

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

Match that demagoguery up with Obama’s reality:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was what I once said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet they made their decision.

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

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

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

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

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

Just Asking: How Much Credit For Getting Osama Bin Laden Does Obama Truly Deserve?

When I first heard about the assault on the compound in Pakistan that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, I was happy and proud as an American.  And willing to give Obama credit where credit was due.

It seemed like a gutsy move – which the mainstream media narrative quickly seized upon: the political consequences for Obama would have been quite negative if the mission had failed.  It would have reminded everyone yet again that Obama is a reincarnation of Jimmy Carter.  And the whole “Desert One” fiasco would have surely been remembered.

But take just a second and look at it from the opposite perspective; you know, the one that the mainstream media has never once considered for even a nanosecond.  What would have happened had Barack Obama decided NOT to try to take out bin Laden?  What would have happened – more to the point – when the American people were informed that Barack Obama had known for certain where Osama bin Laden was, and refused to try to get him?

Wouldn’t that have had even MORE DISASTEROUS consequences???

And, the thing is, it is a near certainty that that information would have gotten out.  There would have been sufficient disgust in both the CIA and in the Pentagon that somebody would have made sure that the news got out that Barack Obama – who had PROMISED THE AMERICAN PEOPLE that he would go into Pakistan to get bin Laden – had cowardly refused to keep yet another promise.

Imagine for just a second the abundant campaign ads: slow-moving video of Osama bin Laden, followed by footage of the twin towars collapsing, followed by Barack Obama giving his word to get bin Laden, followed by the evidence that Obama knew for at least half a year where bin Laden was hiding, and refused to even try to get him.

It would have been just as “bold” for Obama to decide that an operation to get bin Laden was too risky, and jeopardized critical U.S.-Pakistani relations to too high a degree.

Barack Obama was forced into a position where he had to rely on the U.S. military to save his political hide.  And the U.S. military came through for him.

And how does Obama repay that military?  By literally gutting their budget, that’s how:

President Obama has targeted the Department of Defense to absorb more than 80 percent of the cuts he has proposed in next year’s budget for discretionary programs.

Does Obama deserve credit for that?  Really?  Is he out right now campaigning as the guy who just gutted the military he commands, or is he out campaigning as the commander-in-chief of a glorious military?

People should hear that RIGHT NOW Barack Obama is taking an axe and gutting the Navy SEALs, and the Nightstalkers who brought them in and out of that compound, and the Screaming Eagles he visited yesterday, and the entire rest of the military.

People should know that Barack Obama demonized the primary means of interrogation that got us Osama bin Laden.  And there is no question that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” methods led us to the breakthroughs we needed to get bin Laden:

Ex-CIA Counterterror Chief: ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Led U.S. to bin Laden
By Massimo Calabresi Wednesday, May 4, 2011

A former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, who was investigated last year by the Justice Department for the destruction of videos showing senior al-Qaeda officials being interrogated, says the harsh questioning of terrorism suspects produced the information that eventually led to Osama bin Laden’s death.

Jose Rodriguez ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2005, the period when top al-Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi were taken into custody and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) at secret prisons overseas. KSM was subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques. Al-Libbi was not waterboarded, but other EITs were used on him.

“Information provided by KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libbi about bin Laden’s courier was the lead information that eventually led to the location of [bin Laden’s] compound and the operation that led to his death,” Rodriguez tells TIME in his first public interview. Rodriguez was cleared of charges in the video-destruction investigation last year.

Even career Democrat and Obama appointee for Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta has openly acknowledged that waterboarding was an instrumental part of this intelligence effort:

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

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

We have the following from the CIA analysts and the CIA director at the time, describing how essential the enhanced interrogations were to the knowledge that the CIA learned:

CATHERINE HERRIDGE, FOX NEWS NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): March 2003, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured and according to U.S. officials, the self-described architect of 9/11 was immediately taken into the CIA enhanced interrogation program and waterboarded. It was three to four months later, according to U.S. officials, that KSM was asked about the courier who was known only by an Al Qaeda alias. He downplayed the courier’s importance. The top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee says the implications of the CIA’s early leads are clear. […]

A former senior intelligence official says the waterboarding of KSM, quote, “took his spirited defiance into a zone of cooperation,” adding that the harsh interrogation tactic critics described as torture was not used to elicit information but rather to alter the detainee’s mindset. Philip Mudd is a former CIA analyst.

PHILIP MUDD, FORMER CIA ANALYST: Having seen this stuff on the inside, that’s not a debate. That is a done deal. The information we got was invaluable. So debate the cultural side and the political side, but please don’t debate the intelligence side.

HERRIDGE: In a radio interview with FOX, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said there is no question the CIA program including waterboarding laid the foundation for bin Laden’s capture.

MICHAEL HAYDEN, FMR CIA DIRECTOR ON FOX NEWS RADIO (via telephone): That database was kind of like the home depot of intelligence analysis. You know, it was incredibly detailed stuff.

HERRIDGE: As for its role in identifying this compound in Pakistan —

HAYDEN: It would be very difficult for me to conceive of an operation like the one that took place on Sunday that did not include in its preparation information that came out of the CIA detention program.

HERRIDGE: 2004 and 2005 are described as turning points. Both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, a gatekeeper for Osama bin Laden, were both in the CIA secret prisons. U.S. officials say for a second time, KSM downplayed the courier significance and al-Libi denied knowing him. The men’s adamant denials appeared to be an effort to protect the courier and U.S. officials say it, quote, “sent up red flags for the CIA” because other detainees consistently claims the courier maintained bin Laden’s trust.

And if you don’t believe EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE KEY PEOPLE INVOLVED, just accept that Bush and HIS gutsy decision to approve waterboarding led us to the knowledge that Osama bin Laden (UBL) was using couriers, the pseudo-names of those couriers that led to intelligence ultiamtely finding their actual names, and even the very city where Osama bin Laden was hiding:

Which is to say that the entire Obama presidency was spent mining information from waterboarding that Obama personally demonized and from a program that Obama shut down.

And we now know that Osama bin Laden was in this compound that we learned about from waterboarding for at least five years.

Every single major fact that we learned we learned from waterboarding and from enhanced interrogation techniques.  And the rest of it was simply a matter of confirming what we knew from waterboarding and from enhanced interrogation techniques.

People should KNOW that Barack Obama demands that the United States of America should be nearly blind.

People should also know that on his second day in office Barack Obama shut down and terminated the CIA intelligence program that actually developed the information that got bin Laden.  They should know that America no longer has that capability, and that thanks to Barack Obama we could never even begin to do that again – likely for years to come, given the difficulty of developing such intensive programs.

And people should know that RIGHT NOW Barack Obama is continuing to try to criminally prosecute the incredible men and women who gave us the intelligence breakthroughs that got Osama bin Laden:

In normal times, the officials who uncovered the intelligence that led us to Osama bin Laden would get a medal. In the Obama administration, they have been given subpoenas.

On his second day in office, President Barack Obama shut down the CIA’s high-value interrogation program. His Justice Department then reopened criminal investigations into the conduct of CIA interrogators — inquiries that had been closed years before by career prosecutors who concluded that there were no crimes to prosecute. In a speech at the National Archives in May 2009, Mr. Obama accused the men and women of the CIA of “torture,” declaring that their work “did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts — they undermined them.”

Now, it turns out that those CIA interrogators played a critical role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, which the president has rightly called “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaida.”

Even NOW Obama is refusing to do anything to stop the prosecution of the men and women who gave us bin Laden, even as he flies around taking credit for getting bin Laden.  Should we be giving Obama credit for that???

This nation should be grateful to George W. Bush, and for his courage and foresight to develop the programs and to create the capabilities that ultimately won us this victory against Osama bin Laden.  It was the courage of George Bush that resulted in waterboarding – which Bush and his key advisors KNEW would be used by vile cowards like Barack Obama to demonize them.  But they knew it had to be done, and they did it.

In the same way, Bush created the Guantanamo Bay (“Gitmo”) detention facility.  Bush expanded the rendition program that had been used by Bill Clinton.  Bush created the Patriot Act.  Bush approved of domestic surveillance.  Bush set up the military tribunals that had been used by Democrats like FDR in previous time of war.  Bush established the indefinite detentions of the most hardened terrorists.

Barack Obama personally demonized and vilified all of these things.  But he is using them to this day because they had to be done.

I would argue that the hero of this is George Bush; and that Barack Obama is a self-aggrandizing coward who was forced to use virtually all of the programs that he self-righteously demagogued for political advantage in a way that is frankly treasonous.

Right now we have a treasure trove of intelligence that is likewise nearly entirely the result of the work of George W. Bush.  But be advised: if we don’t shut down al Qaeda now, we probably never will due to the massive failures of the man who sits in the Oval Office as we speak.

“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.” — George W. Bush, October 11, 2001

It was always just a matter of time.  And the time came during the misrule of a hypocritical fool.

How Obama Managed To Screw Up Even The Killing Of Osama Bin Laden

It’s really quite amazing: Barack Obama is a near-total failure even when he finally manages to get something right.

Obama’s disasterous bungling of the aftermath of the killing of bin Laden makes me think about that proverbial idiot who managed to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

From the UK Telegraph:

10 ways Barack Obama botched the aftermath of the masterful operation to kill Osama bin Laden
By Toby Harnden World Last updated: May 5th, 2011

The past few days have seemed like an extended amateur hour in the White House as unforced error after unforced error has been made in the handling of the US Government’s message about the killing of bin Laden.

We should not forget the bottom line in this: bin Laden was justifiably and legally killed by brave and skilled US Navy SEALs. The operation was audacious and meticulous in its planning and execution. President Barack Obama made the call to carry out the raid and his decision was vindicated in spades.

Having said that, the messiness since then has taken much of the sheen off this success, temporarily at least. Here’s a summary of what went wrong once the most difficult bit had been achieved:

1. It took nearly three days to decide not to release the photographs. I think there was a case for not releasing the pictures, though on balance I think disclosure would have been best. But whichever way Obama went on this, the decision should have been made quickly, on Monday. By letting the world and his dog debate the issue for so long and then say no made the administration look indecisive and appear that it had something to hide. It will fuel the conspiracy theories. And the pictures will surely be leaked anyway.

2. To say that bin Laden was armed and hiding behind a wife being used as a human shield was an unforgiveable embellishment. The way it was expressed by John Brennan was to mock bin Laden as being unmanly and cowardly. It turned out to be incorrect and gave fuel, again, to conspiracy theories as well as accusations of cover-ups and illegality. Of all the mistakes of the week, this was by far the biggest.

3. It was a kill mission and no one should have been afraid to admit that. Bin Laden was a dead man as soon as the SEAL Team landed. There’s nothing wrong with that but the Obama administration should have been honest about it rather than spinning tales about bin Laden having a gun, reaching for a gun (the latest) and resisting (without saying how he resisted).

4. Too much information was released, too quickly and a lot of it was wrong. When it made the administration look good, the information flowed freely. When the tide turned, Jay Carney, Obama’s spokesman, clammed up completely. I’m a journalist; I like it when people talk about things. But from the administration’s perspective, it would have been much better to have given a very sparse, accurate description of what happened without going into too much detail, especially about the intelligence that led to the compound (an account which is necessarily suspect).

5. Obama tried to claim too much credit. Don’t get me wrong, he was entitled to a lot of credit. but sometimes less is more and it’s better to let facts speak for themselves. We didn’t need official after official to say how “gutsy” Obama was. Far better to have heaped praise on the CIA and SEALs (which, to be fair, was done most of the time) and talked less about Obama’s decision-making. And a nod to President George W. Bush would have been classy – and good politics for Obama.

6. Proof of death was needed. The whole point of the SEAL operation, rather than a B2 bombing that levelled the compound, was to achieve certainty. The administration has DNA evidence, facial recognition evidence and photographic evidence. Some combination of that evidence should have been collated and released swiftly. It’s not enough to say, effectively, “Trust me, I’m Obama” – especially given all the misinformation that was put out.

7. The mission should have been a ‘capture’ one. Notwithstanding 3. above and the legitimacy of killing bin Laden, I think a capture of bin Laden was probably possible and, in the long term, would have been better – not least because of the intelligence that could have been gleaned from interrogating him and the couriers. My hunch is that Obama didn’t want him alive because there would have been uncomfortable issues to address like whether he should be tried, where he should be held (it would have been Guantanamo – obviously) and the techniques for questioning him.

8. Obama’s rhetoric lurched from jingoistic to moralistic. During the initial announcement, Obama said that by killing bin Laden “we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to”. If Bush had said that, he would have been mocked and laughed at, with some justification. But by today Obama was all preachy and holier than thou saying: “It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool.  That’s not who we are.  We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.”

9. Triggering a torture debate was an avoidable own goal. Following on from 3. by discussing the intelligence, the administration walked into the issue of whether enhanced interrogation techniques yielded important information. That was certainly something they could have done without. Politically, it gave something for Republicans to use against Obama.

10. The muddle over Pakistan. Everyone I talk to with knowledge of these things tells me that Pakistan had to have given the green light for the raid in some form. But the Pakistanis, for good reasons, would not want this made public. Rather than say it would not comment on whether Pakistan had harboured bin Laden or was playing a double game, the White House poured petrol on the flames by encouraging criticism of Pakistan. That might have been deserved, but in terms of managing the region it was impolitic. The Pakistanis are clearly riled and the contradictions between the US and Pakistani accounts, again, fuel the conspiracy theories.

All this has meant that this week’s media story has become one about Obama and the White House more than one about the SEALs, the CIA and what killing bin Laden means. That’s exactly the wrong way round.

It’s not enough to say that Obama arrogantly and falsely took too much credit, or even that Obama didn’t give Bush and the programs Bush developed enough credit: Obama personally demonized programs that were essential to finally getting Osama bin Laden, and even launched a vendetta to destroy the professionals who gave us the vital information via his attorney general.

Waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation” were absolutely vital to nailing bin Laden.  Even the career Democrat who was Barack Obama’s handpicked man to run the CIA openly acknowledged that:

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

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

General Michael Hayden, the career intelligence professional who had directed the CIA prior to Leon Panetta, speaking about the CIA program Obama terminated on his second day as president, had this to say:

Michael Hayden said there is no question the CIA program including waterboarding laid the foundation for bin Laden’s capture.

MICHAEL HAYDEN, FMR CIA DIRECTOR ON FOX NEWS RADIO (via telephone): That database was kind of like the home depot of intelligence analysis. You know, it was incredibly detailed stuff.

HERRIDGE: As for its role in identifying this compound in Pakistan —

HAYDEN: It would be very difficult for me to conceive of an operation like the one that took place on Sunday that did not include in its preparation information that came out of the CIA detention program.

It is a well-documented fact, confirmed by both the Republican- and Democrat-appointed Directors of Central Intelligence, that waterboarding led to the breakthrough that finally resulted in nailing Osama bin Laden.

Barack Obama wants to demonize the people and procedures that led to Osama bin Laden’s killing even as he takes credit for what could not possibly have happened without the people and procedures that he demonized.  It is a disgrace.

And Obama is STILL continuing to persecute the CIA professionals who got us the intelligence that got bin Laden via his attorney general attack dog.  He won’t even so much as talk to Holder about his rabid attack dog’s rabid determination to criminalize the professionals whose work led to the result Obama is taking credit for.  And that makes Obama a disgrace.

Then there’s the fact that so many of the events surrounding Barack Obama were staged propaganda.

Of the famous photo supposedly showing Obama and his national security team monitoring and directing the SEAL Team that got Osama bin Laden, we now know that:

Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, revealed there was a 25 minute blackout during which the live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the US special forces was cut off.

A photograph released by the White House appeared to show the President and his aides in the situation room watching the action as it unfolded. In fact they had little knowledge of what was happening in the compound.

In an interview with PBS, Mr Panetta said: “Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.

“We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound.”

Which is to say that much of the hubub of Obama as commanding figure was simply staged.  It wasn’t real.

Nor were the photos of Obama’s speech announcing that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

And while a liberal might argue that what Obama did has been done before, my response is that there are times when you’ve got to be real and not propaganda, and this was clearly one of those times.

In light of what George Bush did to create programs, build special operations capabilities capable of performing the Pakistan mission that got bin Laden, and even what Barack Obama said during his campaign for president, the decision to capture or kill Osama bin Laden was a no-brainer.

I mean, just imagine the fecal matter that would have struck the rotary oscillator had it emerged that Barack Obama had known for at least six months where Osama bin Laden was – and refused to get him????

That said, the man acted brainless before the decision to get Osama bin Laden, and he’s clearly returned to his brainless form since.

Remember How Liberals Said Every Aggressive Move Against Terrorists Was ‘A Provocation’? Why Is It A Good Thing Now?

I remember how Obama and the rest of the left decried every agressive move President George W. Bush made as being a provocation that would only result in more violence and make the new wave of terrorism being waged against America even worse.

The war on terror was a provocation.  The Iraq War was a provocation.  The terrorist prison facility at Guantanamo Bay was a provocation.  The surge strategy was a provocation.  And “provoking” the terrorists was the worst possible way to react, we were constantly told.

On the surge strategy that won the Iraq War, Obama had said:

“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Sending more troops to win the fight will increase the violence.  And that is a bad, bad thing. 

On the Iraq War as provocation (and therefore a bad thing), a critique of Obama’s apology in his Cairo Speech says it all:

On “violent extremism” Obama clung to the meme of “Afghanistan War good/Iraq War bad.” Obama said, “Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world. Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”

This does not make sense. Iraq was not a “war of choice.” Saddam Hussein, for a variety of reasons (not just on WMDs, which everyone believed Hussein had and which he was certainly pursuing) had made himself intolerable. And Saddam was certainly not responding to diplomacy; that was the main reason the coalition forces marched.

Obama also made his first cringing apology. “The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals.” Well, no we did not. That is a flat out lie and a pander not only to liberal opponents of the war on terror but to the Muslim extremists Obama says he abhors.

It doesn’t matter that because of the very surge strategy that Obama personally demonized that Obama’s vice president was able to actually say the following about the Iraq War that Obama also demonized:

“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

I would point out that George Bush won his “war of choice” that “provoked strong differences.”  And Obama – even after eventually abandoning his own demqgoguery on the “surge” to implement a surge of his own in Afghanistan, and even after using Bush’s own general which the left demonized to implement that surge – is floundering badly in “the good war” of Afghanistan.  Which is why Afghanistan sure won’t be “one of the great achievements of the Obama administration.”

George Bush “stupidly’ chose to fight a war against a tyrant in a terrain that the United States could actually win.  The vastly more brilliant Obama chose to put all his marbles in an Afghanistan that has been the graveyard of empires for a thousand years.  Afghanistan also happens to feature a terrain that almost entirely nullifies our vast tactical and strategic advantages.  But that’s what you do when you think you’re too damn smart for your own good, I guess.

On Guantanamo Bay as a provocation, Obama said:

“Guantanamo is probably the No. 1 recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations,” Obama said. “And we see it in the websites that they put up. We see it in the messages that they’re delivering.”

It didn’t matter that Guantanamo Bay was absolutely necessary, no matter how much it provoked people who were determined to be provoked.  That is just a fact, and facts don’t matter to demagogues.  It’s just an “inconvenient truth” that Gitmo is still open, and WILL REMAIN OPEN as long as Obama is president.

Then there was that nasty rhetorical phrase “war on terror” that was clearly too provocative, so Obama rebranded it as an “overseas contingency operation.”

The one thing that couldn’t be more clear: don’t you dare provoke these people.  It’s bad to provoke.  The mainstream media would crawl all over you if you dared to provoke.

So I’m left sitting here wondering how provocation suddenly went from a bad thing to a good thing just because the guy doing all the provoking was a Democrat.

Obama’s Middle East policies have resulted in dramatically escalated increases in violence throughout the Arab world.  Which would have been terrible if Bush had had anything to do with it, but which is okay because a liberal did it.  So the mainstream media has refused to harangue Obama on that unintended consequence of his budding Utopia.

In Libya, you’ve got a lot more of this “untended consequence” regarding Obama’s nearlty forgotten little third war he started in Libya:

TRIPOLI, Libya – Libyans shouting for revenge buried Moammar Gadhafi’s second youngest son to the thundering sound of anti-aircraft fire Monday, as South Africa warned that the NATO bombing that killed him would only bring more violence.

Libya’s leader did not attend the tumultuous funeral of 29-year-old Seif al-Arab, but older brothers Seif al-Islam and Mohammed paid their respects, thronged by a crowd of several thousand. Jostling to get closer to the coffin, draped with a green Libyan flag, mourners flashed victory signs and chanted “Revenge, revenge for you, Libya.”

Three of Gadhafi’s grandchildren, an infant and two toddlers, also died in Saturday’s attack, which NATO says targeted one of the regime’s command and control centers. Gadhafi and his wife were in the compound at the time, but escaped unharmed, Libyan officials said, accusing the alliance of trying to assassinate the Libyan leader.

NATO officials have denied they are hunting Gadhafi to break the battlefield stalemate between Gadhafi’s troops and rebels trying for the past 10 weeks to depose him. Rebels largely control eastern Libya, while Gadhafi has clung to much of the west, including the capital, Tripoli.

But of course NATO is denying that we’re hunting Gadafi in violation of United Nations policies against targeting political leaders.  After all, we’ve even denied we’re at war at all, preferring the nicer-sounding euphamism of “kinetic military action.”  “War” sounds so mean, and hardly something a brilliant liberal would do, after all.  The far more erudite liberals launch wave after wave of “kinetic military actions” instead.  And no matter how many of Gaddafi’s compounds somehow accidentally get targeted and blown up, that’s clearly all it is.

Now we’ve got Obama (almost as though Obama were himself one of the machine-gun toting SEALs) killing Osama bin Laden.  That clearly won’t provoke anybody.

America’s relationship with Pakistan was already at an all-time low due to Obama incessantly flying Predators over their country and launching rocket attacks on them.  But so what?  Provocation is a good thing now, because Obama is doing it instead of George Bush.  And if you’re brilliant, you don’t have to kowtow to such trivialities as consistency.

And so what if Obama ordered American troops to launch a military attack on Pakistani soil without bothering to even inform the Pakistanis?  No harm, no foul.  So what if we violated their sovereignty?  Obama is the leader of the world, and the sooner the world recognized that he is an imperial president, the better.  If you don’t like Obama pursuing “cowboy” tactics, or engaging in “you’re either with us or you’re against us” policies, well, you’re just not very enlightened.  Because it’s not fascist unless Republicans do it.

And al Qaeda, whom the left was so worried about provoking when George Bush was the guy doing the provoking?  They’ll get over it.  So we can ignore the little threat they just made less than a week ago about unleashing a “nuclear hellstorm” upon America if we killed or captured Osama bin Laden.

You think of Gitmo, the surge strategy, rendition, domestic eavesdropping, the Patriot Act, indefinite detentions, military tribunals and a host of other things Obama demonized George Bush and Dick Cheney over, and not only are they doing the same things, but they’re doing even worse.  But the same mainstream media that tore into George Bush like pitbulls going after raw bloody meat don’t seem to have time to dwell on Obama’s blatant hypocrisies.

Nor does Bush get any credit for having been right when Obama and the Democrats were so completely wrong by their own massive reversals to the Bush policies now.

We are watching a level of propaganda and fundamental hypocrisy overtake the United States of America by both the media and the White House that ought to simply stun you.

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.

Obama Orders Spec Ops To Go Barefoot Into Libya (No Boots On The Ground)

Associated Press, March 18: Obama has declared that the U.S. will not deploy ground troops in Libya or use force beyond protecting people.

New York Times, March 31: “President Obama’s top two national security officials signaled on Thursday that the United States was unlikely to arm the Libyan rebels”

Reuters, March 30:

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

Obama signed the order, known as a presidential “finding”, within the last two or three weeks, according to government sources familiar with the matter.

Such findings are a principal form of presidential directive used to authorize secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. This is a necessary legal step before such action can take place but does not mean that it will.

As is common practice for this and all administrations, I am not going to comment on intelligence matters,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. “I will reiterate what the president said yesterday — no decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya.”

A couple of things. 

1) Obama said “the US will not … use force beyond protecting people.”  He said that on March 18.  Less than two weeks later, Obama signs a “secret order” (note to self, see if the meaning of “secret” includes having four White House sources blabbing about it to the press) “seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.”

Conclusion #1: Obama is a gigantic liar.  But anyone who’s been following this weasel’s career has known that since he began his run for the presidency by breaking his personal promise to fill his entire six-year Senate term.

Conclusion #2: Obama is also a rather awful secret-keeper.

2) “President Obama’s top two national security officials signaled on Thursday that the United States was unlikely to arm the Libyan rebels.”  Compared with, “no decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya.”

Conclusion #1: Wtf?!?!

Conclusion #2: Eventually somebody over there is going to get some kind of clue as to what is going on in the “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” of Obama’s brain.

3)  “Obama has declared that the U.S. will not deploy ground troops in Libya” compared to the “presidential directive used to authorize secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency”

Conclusion #1: Does anybody not realize that a lot of military guys are military one day and “CIA” the next?  It’s called “TDY,” temporary duty.  And even the CIA guys who will be performing these “secret operations” are going to almost certainly be Special Activities Division guys.  And the SAD doesn’t get its applicants from clown school: they get them from the baddest Delta, SEAL, Special Forces, Force Recon and sniper guys.  And these guys tend to wear boots.

There might be a few tweed-jacketed agent-man types going in.  But most of them will be special operations guys.  France and Britain have openly acknowledged that they’ve got their military spec ops guys.  Contrary to our Liar-in-Chief, our guys are in there, too.

That’s in addition to the 2200 Marines who were ordered to float around off the Libyan Coast, btw.

It’s also in addition to the boots that were already on the ground rescuing the pilots who bailed out of a U.S. Navy fighter.

Conclusion #2: Maybe we can get Obama to sing us the rap song “Boots on the Ground” to a tune with a similar name and beat: