Monday, January 11, 2010
Ed Koch To Isolated-Extremist-In-Chief: They're Called Islamic Terrorists, And They Want To Kill Us
Maureen Dowd thinks she may have heard "boy" at the end of this:
Bonus Round:
More Thoughts On Captain Wonderful’s Counter Intel Review, Such As It Was
Essentially, Obama was directing the intel agencies to go back to doing the exact work they had been doing under the Bush Administration and should still have been doing all along. This from the guy who sicked Attorney General Eric Holder on the CIA to satisfy the idiot fantasy of charging Bush and Cheney with war crimes; who puts Navy Seals on trial for giving a target a bloody nose; who swore to close Gitmo and send the detainees back to Yemen with no regard whatsoever for the dangers, particularly the glaring record of recidivism among released detainees; who gives as his reason for closing Gitmo the ludicrous claim that it has become a recruiting tool for AQ, and then proposes to move the detainees to a prison in Illinois because - because - what? Holding them on American soil somehow magically won’t be a recruiting tool?
The fact is that Obama and his people have swept into office with both the intel and military services in their collective sights. First they announced that the biggest threat to America was in its very own “extreme right wing”, code language for pretty much whomever the Obama people might decide to target in the future, with a special shout-out to returning veterans. Then they set about imposing political correctness and restraints on the very language these agencies use to just go about their work: there was no longer a war on Islamic terror; only “overseas contingency operations”; a terrorist attack was henceforth only to be referred to as a “man-caused disaster”; rules of engagement were rendered moot and successful interrogation techniques were made public to the benefit only of the enemy.
Obama’s claim in this speech that “there is no silver bullet in screening incoming potential threats” is correct, but only because he chooses not to employ profiling as a defense. Once again, the commander-in-chief, whose first responsibility is to protect the American people from harm, has been subsumed by the legal academic whose leftist sensibilities prevent him from accepting the true nature of the threat and using the necessary tools to defeat it.
The insane brew of ideology-induced ineptitude and shameless dishonesty on display in this speech would be shocking in any other administration; for this one, it is entirely predictable.
Bonus Round:
More Thoughts On Captain Wonderful’s Counter Intel Review, Such As It Was
Essentially, Obama was directing the intel agencies to go back to doing the exact work they had been doing under the Bush Administration and should still have been doing all along. This from the guy who sicked Attorney General Eric Holder on the CIA to satisfy the idiot fantasy of charging Bush and Cheney with war crimes; who puts Navy Seals on trial for giving a target a bloody nose; who swore to close Gitmo and send the detainees back to Yemen with no regard whatsoever for the dangers, particularly the glaring record of recidivism among released detainees; who gives as his reason for closing Gitmo the ludicrous claim that it has become a recruiting tool for AQ, and then proposes to move the detainees to a prison in Illinois because - because - what? Holding them on American soil somehow magically won’t be a recruiting tool?
The fact is that Obama and his people have swept into office with both the intel and military services in their collective sights. First they announced that the biggest threat to America was in its very own “extreme right wing”, code language for pretty much whomever the Obama people might decide to target in the future, with a special shout-out to returning veterans. Then they set about imposing political correctness and restraints on the very language these agencies use to just go about their work: there was no longer a war on Islamic terror; only “overseas contingency operations”; a terrorist attack was henceforth only to be referred to as a “man-caused disaster”; rules of engagement were rendered moot and successful interrogation techniques were made public to the benefit only of the enemy.
Obama’s claim in this speech that “there is no silver bullet in screening incoming potential threats” is correct, but only because he chooses not to employ profiling as a defense. Once again, the commander-in-chief, whose first responsibility is to protect the American people from harm, has been subsumed by the legal academic whose leftist sensibilities prevent him from accepting the true nature of the threat and using the necessary tools to defeat it.
The insane brew of ideology-induced ineptitude and shameless dishonesty on display in this speech would be shocking in any other administration; for this one, it is entirely predictable.
