Abu Wabu

Barack Obama, Tuesday July 20:

I think all of us here in the United States were surprised, disappointed, and angry about the release of the Lockerbie bomber, and my administration expressed very clearly our objections. Prior to the decision being made and subsequent to the decision being made.

The Australian, July 26:

The US government secretly advised Scottish ministers it would be 'far preferable' to free the Lockerbie bomber than jail him in Libya. Correspondence obtained by The Sunday Times reveals the Obama administration considered compassionate release more palatable than locking up Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in a Libyan prison. The intervention, which has angered US relatives of those who died in the attack, was made by Richard LeBaron, deputy head of the US embassy in London, a week before Megrahi was freed in August last year on grounds that he had terminal cancer. The document, acquired by a well-placed US source, threatens to undermine US President Barack Obama's claim last week that all Americans were 'surprised, disappointed and angry' to learn of Megrahi's release. Scottish ministers viewed the level of US resistance to compassionate release as 'half-hearted' and a sign it would be accepted.

Let's look at a letter written last August by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who sharply criticized Scotland's justice minister for releasing the Lockerbie bomber, an act that "gives comfort to terrorists" all over the world:

The angry tone of the letter is out of character with the normally reserved Mueller, indicating his outrage is personal as well as professional. He also sent copies to the families of the Lockerbie victims.

"I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors," Mueller wrote. "Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with the facts, and the law. ... And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of 'compassion.'"

Before he became FBI director, Mueller spent years as a Justice Department lawyer leading the investigation into the 1988 airplane bombing that killed 270 people, most of them Americans.

Mueller said Thursday's release was "as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law."

...He ended the Lockerbie letter with a frustrated question: "Where, I ask, is the justice?"

I wonder how Director Mueller feels about his boss today? Did he have any knowledge of Obama's duplicity when he wrote that letter, or is the revelation of Obama's role in freeing the Lockerbie Islamist Bomber new to him?

Power Line reminds us of an imminent deadline: Coming Soon: The Biggest Tax Increase Ever

Michelle Malkin has this gem in Putting the tax in tax-and-spend liberalism.

Jake Tapper interviews New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

A fitting followup to the last post:

Meanwhile, Obama is still burning the American economy to the ground, expanding government at an exponential rate and even obstructing state efforts to collect the BP-Obama oil spill washing up on the Gulf Coast or observe federal immigration laws in Arizona. And hey, that ain't even the tenth of it.

But every cloud has a silver lining. This one is called "November 2, 2010".

Never let a serious crisis go to waste.

From MSLSD's Photoblog

Pilot Capt. Brian Bews ejects as his a CF-18 fighter jet plummets to the ground during a practice flight at the Lethbridge County Airport on Friday, July 23 for the weekend airshow in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. "He is alive and we believe right now that his injuries are non-life-threatening," Canadian Forces Capt. Nicole Meszaros told CBC News.

God speed, Captain Bews.

And just while I've got you, what's your deductible?

The One Party Media, as they are now being called in some quarters, has finally been exposed as the race-baiting, propagandizing Obama cheerleaders we all knew they were. The Daily Caller and Andrew Breitbart are all over the story, with no rest in sight for the dishonest cranks who helped perpetrate the biggest fraud in U.S. electoral history.

Excerpt:

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” . . . Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.

“It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,” Schaller wrote.

Tomasky approved. “YES. A thousand times yes,” he exclaimed. . . . Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

The Daily Caller has reactions; note how the co-perps and fellow travelers want it all swept down the hole- nothing to see here, folks...

Rove and Barnes respond.

From Big Journalism
JournoList: Ezra Klein’s Secretive Conspiracy
JournoList and the MSM Template: Minimize, Marginalize, and Drop It Down the Memory Hole
JournoList: ‘Call Them Racists’ Is the Least Shocking Revelation
JournoList: …Yes, But the Reporters at Pravda Weren’t Such Insufferable Assholes
‘JournoList’ E-mails Show Media Plotting to Kill Stories about Reverend Jeremiah Wright: Daily Caller

The One Party Media by Maimon Schwarzschild

The usual disillusioned phrase is “mainstream media” or MSM. The problem, of course, is not mainstream-hood. Angrily talking about the “state-run media” is even more misguided: the media were anything but state-run, or state-sympathetic, when Bush was president; and Republican or conservative officials or judges can expect relentless hostility now as much as ever.

What we have is One-Party Media: newspapers, broadcast networks, newsmagazines which represent the views and preoccupations of the Democratic Party and the political left, and consistently denigrate or ignore the views and preoccupations of the political right or centre-right; and which very often systematically ignore any news or information which might reflect badly on the one party, or reflect well on the policies, proposals, or values of the other. . . . It is extraordinary, and I think unprecedented, that a free press has voluntarily transformed itself into something not very different from the controlled press in an undemocratic country. But that is what has happened. There are, to be sure, alternative sources of information and commentary in the US for anyone who seeks them out. (There are often such sources in undemocratic countries as well: foreign broadcasts, "underground" or samizdat circulation, and so on.) But the mainline, and still collectively very powerful, media are overwhelmingly a One-Party media. It needs to be said plainly.

This 1948 cartoon, one of a series produced by the Extension Department of Harding College, foretold the exact formula in use today by Barack Hussein Obama to "fundamentally transform" the United States of America:



Americans have had a big taste of Obama's "Ism" agenda. The solution posited by the film has already been set in motion by the Tea Party, which will begin dismantling the left's "Isms" in November 2010.

Like other leftist idiots (you know who you are), Barack Obama didn't mind genocide against Iraqis by Saddam Hussein. Hell, his official policy is to not even use the terms "terrorism", "Islamism" or "jihad". But when he sees Islamists murdering black Africans, well: that's just intolerable.

In an interview earlier today with the South African Broadcasting Corporation to air in a few hours, President Obama disparaged al Qaeda and affiliated groups' willingness to kill Africans in a manner that White House aides say was an argument that the terrorist groups are racist.

Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, "What you've seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains."...

Explaining the president's comment, an administration official said Mr. Obama "references the fact that both U.S. intelligence and past al Qaeda actions make clear that al Qaeda -- and the groups like al Shabaab that they inspire -- do not value African life. The actions of al Qaeda and the groups that it has inspired show a willingness to sacrifice innocent African life to reach their targets."

Experienced Islamist-fighter that he is, Andrew McCarthy calls bullshit:

I think this is more revealing about our government than it is about al Qaeda. A few points:

1. The race obsession of the Obama administration is a sight to behold. Remember, these are people who adamantly refuse to see the Islamic underpinnings of jihadist terror, although those underpinnings are obvious and undeniable to anyone willing to look. Yet, racism, their unified field theory for interpreting all human phenomena, somehow explains al Qaeda. Sure.

2. I think all this "hearts and minds" stuff is way overdone. But if I were a believer in it, I would say that it does us no good to make stupid arguments. Al Qaeda is not a racist organization, it is an Islamist organization. The goal of Islamism is to establish a global caliphate in which all people either convert to Islam or accept the authority of the Islamic state (and, as the Koran puts it in Sura 9:29, "pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued"). Over the years, al Qaeda has shown itself willing to work with anyone who can be persuaded to support that goal — including Shiites, even though Sunnis actually do bear animus against them. Al Qaeda has never had any problem working with black people, whether in Africa, America, or anyplace else. The audience the administration is trying to reach knows that — better, apparently, than the administration does. So once again, our government ends up looking clueless.

3. Along the same lines, the president is either misstating or misunderstanding al Qaeda's argument. As Jen relates, Obama said (in reference to the Uganda bombings), "What you’ve seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself...." Well, of course they don't, but that has nothing to do with its being African life. Islamist groups (not just terrorist organizations but all Islamist entities) do not regard any kind of life other than one lived in accordance with sharia to be valuable in and of itself — they regard all other forms of life as an affront to Allah. They don't care about nations or continents; it's all about the umma, the global Muslim Nation. Ayatollah Khomeini famously said of his own country, "I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world." That's what al Qaeda means by deriding "African life," just like they deride every other kind of life besides sharia life.

4. I'm always fascinated by the Left's penchant for projection. Obama faults al Qaeda's strategy in Africa for being blindly ideological, and for being willing to sacrifice the entire African community to al Qaeda's agenda, without any regard for the harmful "long-term consequences." Hmmmm.

Yeah, that sure has a familiar ring to it.

Via Ace comes this insightful syllogism from Dave at Garfield Ridge:

One cynical angle to consider: if the Democratic leadership, NAACP, etc. considers the Tea Party movement racists, and now the White House considers Al Qaeda racist, ergo, logic argues that the Tea Party equals Al Qaeda.

Can't wait to hear more of that Lefty trope. Can't. Wait.

While we're at it let's connect some other dots that I find fascinating, this time from an interview with McCarthy by Kathryn Jean Lopez:

Obama Jr., as a sitting U.S. senator, spent six days in Kenya barnstorming on behalf of Raila Odinga, the anti-Western, radical Leftist presidential candidate — a move that outraged the incumbent, pro-American Kenyan government. Later, it emerged that Odinga had made a secret agreement with Kenyan Islamists to impose sharia law. Moreover, when Odinga lost the election, the Islamists rioted, with the result that thousands were displaced and many were killed. Far from reproach, this extortion resulted in his installation as prime minister, a position that had to be created (Kenya hadn’t had a prime minister since Kenyatta, during the year or so when it was still in the process of severing ties with England — after which Kenyatta became president).

Yes, fascinating: Obama went to Kenya to campaign for a radical leftist who secretly promised to sell out his own people to the Islamists. Who would have guessed?

The commercial the MSM refuses to run:

George Steinbrenner has died at the age of 80. He loved the very idea of the New York Yankees and the players and their fans both loved and hated him. So all's right in the universe.

So long, boss.

NRO's Geoffrey Norman pays tribute.

Noemie Emery's takedown of Peter Beinart, and her explication of what really activated George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11, is right on target against just the latest example of leftist hypocrisy:

The cry of the left after Sept. 11 was that Bush had failed to "connect the dots" before the attack and take pre-emptive measures to stop it. Now, he connected the dots that trailed into the future, and most of them led to Iraq -- which had invaded Iran and Kuwait, built a reactor (till Israel zapped it), used chemical weapons against its own people, was a protector of terrorists, and hated the United States (and the Bushes) for its humiliation in the first Gulf War.

If anyone was going to hand off a bomb or a vial of gas to a branch of al Qaeda, Iraq seemed a prime candidate, and when it refused to admit U.N. inspectors or account for the weapons it was known to have had, it became a prime suspect instead.

Iraq hadn't threatened the United States, or used weapons against it, but Cuba hadn't threatened it either when President Kennedy risked nuclear warfare to have its nuclear warheads removed. He assumed their possession by an enemy within striking distance was too great a threat to his country.

Now, striking distance meant any place on the planet, and the warhead could be a small vial of anthrax. Kennedy thought he would have courted impeachment if he left the threat standing. Bush made the same call on Iraq.

That is so: First Bush wasn't pre-emptive enough for the left; 9/11 was his fault. Then when he enuciated the pre-emptive Bush Doctrine that explicitly answered that criticism, dishonest as it was, suddenly pre-emption by connecting the dots became a cardinal sin.

Now that the shoe is on Obama's foot, it must be galling to idiots that he is hewing so closely to the actual policies of the Bush administration, but worse, in continued defiance of how the idiots portrayed it at the time. It's all real now, and it's President Obama who is shafting them: Predator drone attacks, his new hero General Petraeus, Gitmo still open, massive environmental disaster, still no jobs, 13 trillion dollars of debt, all that.

Obama's chickens... are coming home to roost.

Via Gateway Pundit

FOX News picked up on the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition resolution against NAACP racism today:

Tea Party Preempts ‘Racist’ Resolution, Condemns ‘Bigoted’ NAACP

A Tea Party group in Missouri, reacting to the NAACP’s plan to take up a resolution branding the conservative movement as “racist,” has drafted a resolution of its own condemning the civil rights group for reducing itself to a “bigoted” and “partisan attack dog organization.”

The St. Louis Tea Party had an all-hands-on-deck response to the NAACP’s plan to denounce the nationwide network of activists at its annual convention across the state in Kansas City. The NAACP as early as Tuesday could take up language to “repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties” and stand against the movement’s attempt to “push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.”

In a matter of hours, the St. Louis group drafted and fired off to the NAACP a resolution demanding the organization withdraw its “bigoted, false and inflammatory” statement. The missive accused the NAACP of resorting to political tactics and urged the IRS to reconsider whether it can continue to qualify for tax-exempt status.

Tea Party organizers routinely defend themselves against charges of racism, disavowing racially charged signs that appear in their protest crowds and provide fodder for Tea Party critics. The NAACP resolution, first reported by the Kansas City Star, was expected to make reference to an incident in March when Tea Party protesters allegedly hurled racial epithets at black lawmakers on Capitol Hill ahead of a health care vote. Tea Party members afterward challenged that account and no evidence was produced to show any racist attacks.

St. Louis Tea Party organizer Bill Hennessy wrote on the group’s website Tuesday that the Tea Party stands for smaller government and fiscal responsibility, and accused the NAACP of abandoning black America.

“When you look at the crime and poverty and family breakdown of the African-American community … you see a half-century of failure by the NAACP,” he wrote. “None of those persistent problems was caused by the Tea Party movement, yet the principles of the Tea Party are exactly what’s needed to wind down the multi-generational destruction in the African-American community.

“The NAACP was once a vital weapon in the war against segregation and oppression. All that’s left is a bigoted and malicious shell that does far more harm than good for people who need a break,” he wrote.

Fellow St. Louis Tea Party organizer Dana Loesch accused the NAACP of morphing into a political organization.

“They no longer prioritize civil rights,” she told Fox News.

St. Louis Tea Party Resolution

More from Jim Hoft: We Will Not Be Silenced

We shocked the elites. We shocked the radicals and extremists. They couldn’t believe that we were speaking out. This wasn’t their plan. They knew they had to react and they lashed out at us. They called us mobsters, Nazis, radicals, and racists. They beat us, and smashed us in the face and bit off fingers. They wanted us to pipe down; to be good little drones as they continued to wreak havoc across this great nation with their radical agenda. But, we gathered on street corners and met them at town halls.

The widespread efforts by black leaders and the MSM to paint Tea Partiers as racists are beginning to backfire because of their blatant dishonesty. In particular, the black caucus members' "N-word" accusations have fallen flat in the wake of Andrew Breitbart's $100,000 offer to anyone who could provide material evidence, and enough video of the March 20 non-event has surfaced to debunk Clyburn and every other liar who leveled that despicable charge. So it is doubly disgusting that the NAACP, an organization whose supposed mission is to fight bigotry, is instead willfully fomenting it in the name of politics.

But this is Obama's America now, baby. It's time for a new kind of justice - it's time to kill some crackers:

?

From Instapundit Glenn Reynolds:

GUANTANAMO PRISONERS: Please let us stay! “The detainees fear that they might be tortured or killed if they return to Algeria. Which is to say, actually tortured, something that has never happened at Gitmo, notwithstanding the global hyperventilation of the last seven or eight years.” No such hyperventilation about Algeria. Or Iran. Or Egypt. Or Syria. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Libya. Or Pakistan. Or . . . well, hell, you get it by now.

Hillary Democrats are accusing the Obama machine of voter fraud in the 2008 primary. Who knew?

Here are separate segments from YouTube:











Hey: Anything I can do to help.

This is serious, so I hope it grows legs. Put a man on it, Faux.

'We Will Not Be Silenced': Democrats Produce Documentary Alleging Rampant Vote Fraud by Obama Campaign vs. Hillary in 2008 Primaries

Was Barack Obama "Selected" Rather Than Elected?

Via The Right Scoop and Mark Levin.

Glenn Beck and crew dish on CNN's fresh young Ted Baxter: It's Like Picking On The Handicapped.

Or watching Obama bowl.



Awkward.

Bill Kristol writing in the Weekly Standard combines Alexander Hamilton's exhortation in Federalist 1 with the Fourth of July Philadelphia Tea Party to define the parameters of America's present existential crises:

We are not now quite at a founding moment, or even a re-founding moment. But we have arrived at a genuine crisis, or a set of crises, and we may well be at a decisive moment for the country.

This sense of crisis is what animates the Tea Parties. I had the pleasure of attending the “Proud to be an American July 4th Tea Party” outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It featured patriotic songs and speeches, and expressions of support for our troops and praise for our country. Yet the mood of patriotic gratitude was mixed with expressions of alarm from my fellow Tea Partiers about the administration now in charge of our government. The combination of patriotic gratitude and urgent alarm produces a determination to act and a willingness to deal boldly with the crises in the economy, in foreign policy, and in self-government that the country faces.

November 2010.

As enunciated by Abraham Lincoln:

Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometime about the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I suppose to be some of them.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty---or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,---with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,---we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves---we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men---descended by blood from our ancestors---among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe---German, Irish, French and Scandinavian---men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration [loud and long continued applause], and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of "don't care if slavery is voted up or voted down" [Douglas's "popular sovereignty" position on the extension of slavery to the territories], for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice---"Hit him again"], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will---whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which
we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! [Voices---"me" "no one," & etc.] If it is not true let us tear it out! [cries of "no, no,"] let us stick to it then [cheers], let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]

Power Line posts that excerpt every July 4.

Jacob Sullum writes in Reason:

Gun Shy
Four Supreme Court justices make the case against constitutional rights.

On Monday the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities as well as the federal government. Judging from their objections, the four dissenters were still reeling from the Court's landmark 2008 decision recognizing that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.

In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If "the people" want to ban handguns, they say, "the people" should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.

What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church, or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

Likewise, Stevens defends "state and local legislatures' right to experiment," while Breyer is loath to interfere with "the ability of States to reflect local preferences and conditions—both key virtues of federalism." Coming from justices who think Congress can disregard state decisions about the medical use of marijuana because a plant on the windowsill of a cancer patient qualifies as interstate commerce, this sudden concern about federalism is hard to take seriously.

Read it all.