Barack Obama: Drone Warrior

From Charles Krauthammer at NRO:

A very strange story, a 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant.

The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release.

Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. And why now? Because in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s G-8 and NATO summits.

The Obama camp thought that any political problem with foreign policy would be cured by the Osama bin Laden operation. But the administration’s attempt to politically exploit the raid’s one-year anniversary backfired, earning ridicule and condemnation for its crude appropriation of the heroic acts of others.

A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed, “the downside would have been horrible for him.” Outraged veterans released a response ad pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs. Obama only compounded the self-aggrandizement problem when he spoke a week later about the military “fighting on my behalf.”

The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America’s having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury, and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing, and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians, and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than ten killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s War on Terror, there are practically no captures any more. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

More here.

Onopoly

From Dale at Out of Order:

It turns out Barry is a leader after all. When it comes to rallying the hopelessly gullible to the politics of national destruction, he's second to none. His multi-pronged attack on America's founding principles shows us one thing, if he is re-elected, we're all forked. –Dale

More here.

Chris Hays Drops His Guard, Leaves His Ass In The Wind

From Skook at Flopping Aces:

Some of us are in awe of our troops and their devotion; yet, when we look at the people around us, we shake our heads and wonder where these young people come from, since there seems to be so few Americans with enough backbone to step forward and stand on the wall. Sadly they are but a small percentage of the 350 million people of this country, and yet, so much is owed by so many to such a small number of people.

Traditionally, the Left has considered our troops and their sacrifices to be beneath their society of effete snobs. Many who have worn the uniform have felt the derision and condescension of the Left, but they are normally silent and stoic, the Left’s snide remarks and superior attitude hardly registers to these who love their country. Trained to endure hardships and adversity, ridicule and condescension from the Left doesn’t really register in the consciousness of the veteran.

They were given a special day to remember fallen and maimed comrades, it is a solemn day for them and for many Americans who appreciate those who have fallen. In typical silence and reverence, loyal Americans and former military people reflect and give thanks to those who fell and the many who have passed on, in this righteous cause of defending our nation. They have ignored those who have contempt for the ones who gave the last measure of devotion, for it is the cause of freedom that inspires our warriors. All they ask of those who hate them, is to not desecrate the memory of the fallen on Memorial Day.

They don’t complain when they realize the vast majority of Americans consider Memorial Day to be nothing more than a paid holiday and the chance to get drunk and pay homage to hedonism. Thus there are two groups or two methods of celebrating this special holiday: ignoring the meaning of the holiday and concentrating on having fun or by moments of quiet reflection and reverence of those who gave everything for America. The two groups ignore each other and it is probably for the best; respect is not something that can be forced on someone who sees everything through their own perspective or through the eyes of the Left, who considers the work of the military to be little more than an occupation for ignorant people who have not evolved to a “higher plane of Leftism”.

However, when this special day of reverence is defiled with the effete derision of those from the Left who hate the military and consider patriotic sacrifices to be little more than the bravado of a bar fight, real Americans have an obligation to step forward and condemn this obnoxious behavior.

Chris Hays, a condescending witless snob with MSNBC, has insulted the memory of our fallen warriors in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, by saying he is reluctant to call them heroes, as if his opinion was a guiding light for Americans.

I feel… uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

For those of us who have spent time in academia, this attitude and language will bring back memories of the commie grad student trying to seduce the innocent and impressionable freshman coed with a haughty arrogant attitude and a superior vocabulary, “rhetorically approximate justifications” as she sits listening to three dollar words that impress no one but the most naive.

More here.

Nocturne in Black and White

From Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish:

The respected black commentator and philosopher Thomas Sowell has described the growing toll of black-on-white violence as a race war. I would take issue with that only because "war" implies a level of organization that supersedes that of the flash mobs.

Most of the riot organizers have moved on to cozier job titles, like Al Sharpton, who has gone from organizing riots and boycotts to holding down a desk at MSNBC and serving as the unofficial White House liaison to the black community. The old riots were usually a combination of organized protest and opportunistic violence. The organized riot is on the decline, but the opportunistic violence is still very much with us.

There are no shortage of what, the media occasionally describes as, "racially-motivated-attacks". Every society has its outside groups targeted for opportunistic violence. The people you beat up and rob when you're bored and there's nothing good on television. These are people whose lives are worth less than yours, against whom your group holds an enduring grudge against and whom the authorities will not intervene to protect.

In America, the outsider is perversely the majority. There was a time when opportunistic violence was white-on-black, but the authorities, both legal and cultural, have done an excellent job of stamping that out. Black-on-white opportunistic violence remains commonplace because it's safe in the same way that a 19th Century lynch mob was safe. While technically illegal, there is little public outrage over it, and the odds of being prosecuted for it are better than any other form of violence. The flash mob, like the lynch mob, relies on safety in numbers, the complicity of the authorities and the weakness of the system to beat the law.

Imagine for a moment that you are a black teenager or twenty-something, living in a blighted neighborhood, with few job prospects, a lot of free time and a lot of social networking. You know that white people are "bad", not so much because of the street agitators telling you that white people are the devil, but because the entire society that you live in has been telling you that from Day One.

If you made it through high school, which you probably did because every city and town is obsessed with making sure that every student gets through twelve years of educational promotion, then you learned that there is a race war on. A war of white-on-black that began with the slave ships, continued through segregation, and continues today with every report on white racism. Everything you learn tells you that you are on the losing side of a war, that your people are just as good, if not better, yet are being kept down, kept in prison and kept out of power, because of white power.

The Nation of Islam believes that white oppression is genetically coded, but that's a view that is marginally distinguishable from mainstream liberalism, which insists that white privilege makes all people part of the oppressive side to an extent that leaves them unable to understand the oppressed or to pass judgment on their suffering and outrage.

Your textbooks, unlike Malcolm X, a man you are far more likely to respect than Martin Luther King, who was a doughy preacher type, don't say that white people are the devil. They do however convey that same exact message. The world is a messed up place, and most of your textbooks tell you that white people made it that way. The news, when you watch it, talks often about white racism. The movies only occasionally have black heroes, but they always have white villains.

Take all that in, bake it in a 103-degree oven on a hot summer day, mix it with the natural xenophobia that every group has for outsiders, baste it with some envy, throw in gangsta culture's fake macho posturing, so typical of a generation of feral men with broken families and absent fathers, and the rest is utterly unsurprising.

Why would our hypothetical assailant have any great degree of respect for a white person's humanity? Asking that question is far more dangerous than speculating on IQ points, because it cuts at the heart of the cultural blight. Humanity, in its natural state, is vicious. Civilization is imposed on man from without, it does not develop naturally from within. The question is never why is an evil committed, but what influences are there to keep it from being committed.

Americans of all races, are subjected to a constant stream of information and innuendo that trains them to see one race as oppressive and the other as oppressed. This narrative shapes their worldview, it feeds their prejudices and makes it impossible for them to see past it. The narrative teaches them to disdain objective laws as cold and sterile, and to view racism as a fixed pattern that emerges out of any power wielded by a white person. The rest is just a matter of opportunity on a hot summer day.

For the most part it isn't black people teaching other black people to be racist, the white liberal establishment has done much of that on its own. The Nation of Islam is penny-ante compared to network newscasts bombastically turning the Zimmerman-Martin story into another episode in the tale of white racism.

Black people came north, like so many immigrants, to take on jobs in an industrial sector that died away leaving them stranded. The plight of the urban ghetto and that of the Rust Belt have more in common than either side realizes. The manufacturing jobs that might have made a thriving black middle class possible have gone to China, and there aren't nearly enough government jobs to compensate.

The new generations of immigrants have hacked their way up through street-level retail, often in black communities, to finance their children's education and progress up the ladder, as the only remaining access point to the American Dream. But that's a narrow ladder, and not one to which Irish, Jewish or Italian immigrants were limited. Immigrants adapt, the black community has not. Instead, its adaptations have all been maladjustments, destructive responses that leave them with fewer options than before.

Black leaders, individually, wield a great deal of power, but the black community has little power. Their "helplessness" is an excuse for the exercise of power on their behalf. That "helplessness" is what makes men like Obama or Sharpton or the neighborhood fixer and machine politician so powerful. He wields a collective tool of group votes, racial grievance and simmering violence-- but the practical benefit of this is limited. Black communities receive a sizable proportion of taxpayer money directed at services and entitlements which leave them more maladjusted than before.

All those gifts carry a dangerous price with them, creating an addiction to freebies and learned helplessness. And when the latest government giveaway implodes, as the housing market did, they are left stranded with no clue how to get back up without government intervention. The more community centers open up, the fewer businesses remain. The fewer people in the community that have real jobs, the more blighted the neighborhood becomes.

Crack is a minor addiction compared to entitlements. You can break the drug habit because you know it's killing you, but how do you break a habit of getting free things and special benefits because of the color of your skin? It's a hard habit to break, and despite racist claims otherwise, white people are not any better at breaking that habit. It's just that white people are given far less of the free stuff to learn to be fully addicted to it.

More here.

Democrats Kill Bill Banning Sex Selective Abortion

itsBigFurHat.com

From Katie Pavlich at Townhall:

Democrats in the House of Representatives have voted down a bill that would ban sex selective abortions after two videos surfaced this week showing Planned Parenthood employees advising women about how to abort their child should it be a girl instead of a boy. LifeNews has more:

The legislation needed a two-thirds vote and Democrats voted overwhelmingly against the legislation after President Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood came out in opposition.

With a 246-168 vote, the bill did not obtain the two-thirds majority necessary to pass. Republicans voted for the bill on a 226-7 margin while Democrats opposed banning sex-selection abortions on 161-20 vote margin.

Right, because a woman's "right to choose" includes aborting a child because it happens to be the wrong gender.....keeping it classy dems! And liberals claim to be the party for women.

President of Live Action, the group who exposed Planned Parenthood for encouraging sex selective abortions against baby girls, Lila Rose has issued a statement:

“We applaud the brave leaders in Congress such as Rep. Trent Franks for leading the charge against the abhorrent practice of sex-selective abortion.  The struggle to stop gendercide is a bipartisan issue--more Democrats voted in support of the ban than Republicans against—but the battle is far from over.

“We will continue to release the results of our national investigation into Planned Parenthood and other U.S. providers that are facilitating the brutal and lethal discrimination against girls in the womb. The public deserves to see the truth about how Planned Parenthood and their abortion industry allies, backed by the President, facilitate the late term targeting of girls, especially as we approach a historic election."

More Townhall here.

From ‘Rule of Law’ to ‘Hit List’: NY Times Lauds Obama at War

From Andrew C. McCarthy at PJ Media:

“The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.” Well, that’s certainly a judicious use of judicious by William Daley. The former White House chief of staff was addressing the inevitability of collateral damage inherent in President Barack Obama’s principal war strategy against al-Qaeda: killing suspected terrorists by firing missiles from unmanned drones that scour faraway skies over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. This was about halfway through the New York Times‘ rambling 6,300-word testimonial to Obama’s unparalleled splendor as a wartime commander-in-chief.

You see, for all the precision of modern weaponry, it turns out error is simply unavoidable: sometimes the wrong targets get hit and the wrong people get killed by our armed forces and the presidents who command them. Fog of war, and all that. For many years — specifically, from October 2001 through January 19, 2009 — the Times saw this inevitability as grist for scandal. But suddenly, the Gray Lady has evolved, just like its heroically “pragmatic” commander-in-chief. Collateral killings are just the way it goes — and if Obama camouflages what the Left used to insist were civilian casualties by a post facto declaration that everyone killed was a “combatant,” the Times has suddenly decided that, far from crying out for a war crimes investigation, this just proves his lawyerly brilliance.

After all, it is the end result of a “judicious process.” That’s judicious, not judicial. Of course, time was when candidate Obama, his campaign surrogates, and the Times would have scoffed at the notion that the executive branch was capable of judiciously prosecuting the battle, determining who was the enemy, and taking action to kill or capture and detain. Sure, from 1787 through 2001, presidents may have been trusted with plenary control over war-fighting. But that was then. Now, according to the Bush-deranged Left, the “rule of law” demanded a judicial process. Terrorists don’t wear uniforms — a willful violation of the laws of war that the Left converted into a presumption of innocence. Thus, progressives told us, to hold suspected terrorists, let alone kill them, based on nothing more than a unilateral executive branch determination, no matter how “judicious,” was a shredding of the Constitution and a profound violation of international law.

Now that the president’s name is Obama, though, “judicious” executive unilateralism is more than enough to justify killing — and not only in an emergency: the Timesdepicts Obama as the don, meeting weekly with his consiglieri to decide who lives and who dies.

Eleven years into post-9/11 combat operations and facing a tough reelection fight, it has conveniently dawned on the Obama Left that when the nation is threatened and takes up arms, the risk of error shifts from the government, which bears it in peacetime law-enforcement operations, to “the enemy.” For the Times — whose epic account of Obama at war begins with a portentous “This was the enemy” – enemy is the term now in vogue for what, heretofore, were known merely as “young Muslim men,” subjected either to indefinite detention without trial or to being slain under ambiguous circumstances in Bush’s “war on terror,” which was really a “war against Islam.” Now that those young Muslim men are being detained or killed by Obama, it is remarkable to discover what a mortal threat to the United States they really are. And it further turns out that, while our intelligence community does the best it can, warfare requires our combat forces to take action without the certainty of meticulously tested courtroom evidence — and that’s suddenly okay, too: When people are plotting to mass-murder Americans, the Times wants you to know that we can’t afford to wait until we have proof that will satisfy a jury; they need to be rubbed out, pronto.

What is most astonishing in the story co-authored by Jo Becker and Scott Shane is its rationalization of the president’s naivete and amateur-hour missteps. In the revisionist history, these are seen as emblematic of the Omniscient One’s duplicity — which the reporters, far from finding offensive, portray as the president’s most praiseworthy attribute. “Bush lied and people died”; Obama lies and … it is his unmatched attorney’s mind at work.

Thus does the Times celebrate what in the retelling is Obama’s knowing deception — not his ideologically driven recklessness — in ceremoniously pronouncing, on his second day in office, that Gitmo would be closed and that he would make good on other campaign commitments to turn the clock back, back to Clintonian courtroom counterterrorism and away from Bush-era reliance on the laws of war. Even as the Times and the rest of the Left deliriously swooned, we now discover that Obama was furtively inserting “a few subtle loopholes” in his first executive orders, “already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.” An outrage? No, the Times sees this as just “the deft insertion of some wiggle words” by “a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters [ACM: the Times, for one], was never carried away by his own rhetoric.” The Paper of Record, which spent years obsessing over 16 words in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, now builds sleight-of-hand into the president’s job description.

And why not? Why shouldn’t the Times‘ preferred commander-in-chief be afforded the same loose acquaintance with the truth that the paper allows itself? For how else could it publish paragraphs such as this:

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

In point of fact, we learn in the course of the article (as if we did not know already) that the drone is not all that precise: It often takes lives and destroys property beyond its narrow targets. Furthermore, because the Obama administration, in its demagoguery against Gitmo and Bush detention policies, has nullified the options of capturing and interrogating jihadists, “our ideals” now apparently include killing people we could have taken alive — and whose intelligence we could have exploited to save American lives.

At least Bush didn't deploy drones in his own country.

More here.

Are Liberals Immoral?

Yeah, right. Honestly, when I heard old Teddy had a brain tumor, my first thought was "He has a 

brain?!" and my second thought was "A big brain tumor would explain a lot about the old bastard."

From Jeffrey Folks at American Thinker:

Yes, liberals are immoral. The liberal power elite are selfish, hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and, worst of all, destructive of those around them. They are willing to saddle everyone else with rules and regulations that do not apply to them, and with higher taxes that they somehow escape paying. The Buffett Rule might sound like a great idea, but it would never apply to the Buffetts of this world. Or the Kerrys, Kennedys, or any other left-wing billionaire.

Liberal do-gooders are always coming up with lovely schemes for redistributing other people's money and managing other people's lives. The problem is that all of these schemes do more harm than good. Welfare, which redistributes wealth to those who cannot work but also to those who avoid working or underreport income, is funded on the backs of those who actually do work. "Saving the planet" costs jobs but never actually saves anything. Killing fossil fuels increases energy costs and triggers inflation across the board. Yet the liberal elite blithely support every cause that comes along with no consideration of the cost to ordinary people. In doing so, they pad their already inflated sense of self-importance, and at no cost to themselves.

Scratch the surface of the liberal elite, and you will find a monstrous contempt for those "beneath" them. Liberals like Barack Obama live and breathe in a realm of utter disdain for ordinary Americans, including congressmen who hail from what the president likes to call "Palookaville." It is not just that they are out of touch; it is that they despise what is normal and decent. They would no more live in the heartland or send their kids to a public school than they would forego an exemption engineered solely to save them money -- the same tax break for the rich that they publicly decry as soooo unfair. It's no surprise that several prominent liberal Democrats made their fortunes as slum lords and ambulance-chasers. Others just married their money.

There's nothing wrong with making money, of course. Mitt Romney earned every penny of his fortune, and to his credit he has never apologized for his success. But the liberal game -- the Kennedy game -- is to pretend to side with the poor and, by doing so, gain political power so as to further line one's own pockets. In all of this, the liberal elite are utterly cynical. I didn't notice any bottle-washers or cleaning ladies admitted to George Clooney's $40,000-per-person fundraiser for President Obama, nor any middle-class Americans, either. The liberal elite's contempt for the rest of us was palpable when Nancy Pelosi noted that "every week we don't pass a Stimulus bill, 500 million Americans lose their jobs," or when in 2004 Teresa Heinz Kerry called Elizabeth Edwards a "mother earth person" who still had a brain.

It's not just that liberals don't know much about those "500 million" Americans. They despise them the way they despise Walmart and NASCAR and the American Legion. What it all boils down to is an appalling contempt for life. As long as Obama can keep his nose elevated at a 45-degree angle, and get re-elected, he is happy. Happy, even if 25 million Americans remain out of work as a result of his environmental pipe dreams, happy if millions of seniors just go away and die, as his former Medicare director Donald Berwick suggested ("they just need the morphine and counseling that have been around for centuries").

The liberal elite appear callous even when the lives of those close to them are at stake. In a sad footnote to the Kennedy family legacy, Mary Richardson Kennedy, the 52-year-old estranged wife of Robert Kennedy, Jr., was found dead on May 16, an apparent suicide by hanging. One's sympathy goes out to Mrs. Kennedy's family and particularly to her four children. One can only imagine the degree of anguish that would lead an individual to commit such a horrific act. Daughter of a wealthy northeastern family, Mrs. Kennedy was part of the liberal elite culture from birth. Yet despite all her gifts and her privileged lifestyle, something went wrong, as it does so often for those in her social milieu. Reportedly, Mrs. Kennedy had become dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol. As for her husband, who lists no profession other than "environmentalist," there was a record of heroin possession, and there were rumors of infidelity during the years of his marriage. In many ways, the contrast between his selfless public persona and dubious personal behavior fits the mold of the classic liberal player.

More here.