Who Likes Crashes?

I do! I do!

Dune Crashes!

Tour De France Crashes!

That one courtesy of DrewM.

All Kinds Of Other Crashes!

See ya’all tomorrow, homies.

Long Week Has Got Me Pooped Out At Parties

Yeah, I’m wussing out.  Sorry.

In my defense, I’ve been drinking heavily in the hopes of putting out a beer review for the weekend.  Also, my review of Bing West’s “The Wrong War” should be done soon so I haven’t been completely playing hookey on the ole bloggerino.

To get your mind off of Barack Obama’s Regime of Fail–and my own lameness–here’s a cool Australian blogger GregoryNo6 making fun of his country’s boneheaded socialist crapweasel leader.  It’s just nice to know America isn’t the only country with an anti-patriotic windowlicker running the ship of state as hard as he can into the rocks.  Go ahead and check homeboy’s website out.  It’s good.

Save the Earth–Burn Dirty Coal Now

Matt over at the wondrous Conservative Hideout brings us this week’s episode of “Climate Change Believers Are Stupid”.

For the latest, here is some evidence that not only is there no warming, but we might be headed for another “Little Ice Age.”

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

The Little Ice Age was a period of human history that lasted from approximately 1300 to 1870. It’s impacts were incredibly significant in ways that we do not recognize.

I want to show everybody something.

Just a picture to get a sense of scale.

Note the size of the Sun. Now note the size of the Earth. Common sense tells us that what happens on that fiery ball of raging nuclear fusion is going to have a far greater impact on the world than almost anything we humans could do to our planet. A lack of sunspots will do much more to the temperature of this planet than any amount of CO2 we could possibly pump into the atmosphere.

The climate change warmist cult, being part of the larger environmentalist kook fringe, will most assuredly blow this evidence off. They’ll play the ‘Oil Companies Are Funding This Study!’ game or more likely simply ignore it all. But then again, they love tossing out all sorts of contradictory evidence when it suits their aims.

How many truly spectacular natural disasters have we seen over the last decade? Tsunamis, hurricanes, outbreaks of tornados, earthquakes: Mother Nature has thrown just about every kind of weapon she has in her Arsenal of Killing The Shit Out Of Us. Yet even with all that, the enviro-dorks insist that the Earth is a delicate flower in need of constant protection, impossibly light footsteps and–most importantly–lots of freedom hating human-unfriendly big government solutions to keep Terra safe from the evil predations of Mankind.

Wrong. Earth is not a vestal virgin in need of a socialist chastity belt to keep her pure. Instead, the world is a smoking hot yet incredibly moody ex-wife on an eternal meth binge, armed with a loaded MAC-10 and just waiting for you to say something about her thighs so she has an excuse to pump a few rounds into your sorry ass. There’s nothing you can do to change her mind about your uselessness. You know that at some point she’s going to shoot you. It’s just a matter of when and what extremity she decides to hit.

We don’t need to protect the Earth from a whole lot. If anything, we could use some protection from her.

Now, am I arguing against protecting the environment? Hell no. There are perfectly reasonable clean water regulations and air quality rules we should be following. We can even debate some–and I mean some–broader international ecological standards, as long as it’s in the context of proper Constitutional boundaries and our national sovereignty. But the world is not going to be destroyed because a few Americans want to drive gas-guzzling SUVs.

Obama Wants To Give Missile Defense Technology To Russia-What Could Go Wrong?

Lightbringer Barry is just a generous soul after all.

President Barack Obama’s administration recently threatened to veto the defense budget, citing “serious concerns” over provisions that limit the U.S. missile defense know-how that the White House is permitted to share with Moscow. This is the sort of information that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in his earlier days, would have assigned his spies to steal. Through its single-minded pursuit of “resetting” relations with Russia, the Obama administration may simply be willing to hand over this information and, in doing so, weaken U.S. national security.

 We’ve only been working on missile defense since the Reagan administration.  But after decades of research and billions of dollars invested, our super-genius president wants to just give our nuclear shield to our bosom frenemy Russia.  Great.

Read on. 

Only two days after issuing the veto threat — and as Obama tried to warm Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to U.S. missile defense plans at the G-8 Summit in Deauville, France — the House of Representatives passed the defense bill. It included the provision that the president’s team finds so offensive: Section 1228 requires that no funds can be used to provide the Russian Federation with sensitive U.S. missile defense technology.

Wrap your mind around that for a tick.  Obama had to be restrained from giving away our Star Wars program by legislative mandate.  Not by his own common sense.  Not through a cold-eyed assessment of Russia’s capacity to hurt our long-term security.  None of that worked for Prezident SuperGenius.  Nope, it took specific legislative language telling our spectacularly doltish community organizer in chief not to shoot the country in the balls.

Obambi-’Wait, you mean I can’t just hand over our major strategic nuclear advantage to my new BFF Dmitry Medvedev?  What a congressional buzzkill.’

Amazing.  

This act of congressional prudence did not come out of nowhere. The Senate debate over New START raised questions about what the Obama administration may have promised Moscow regarding U.S. missile defense plans. The debate stemmed from the treaty’s preamble, which linked offensive and defensive weapons, and a Russian unilateral statement that stated ratification of the treaty was conditional on whether the United States made improvements to its missile defense systems. In a treaty about reducing offensive weapons, it was clear the Russians required the Obama administration to include U.S. defenses in the bargain.

People on the left like to call Obama a progressive.  Question-how progressive is it that St. Barry of The Sacred One-Sided Olive Branch wants to take American nuclear policy back to the early 1990′s?  Domestic politics, technology and our relationships with the countries in the nuclear club have all changed, but the President is still rocking the intellectual equivalent of Doc Martin boots, grunge flannel shirts and a Soundgarden cassette tape.    

With that issue still unresolved, Congress discovered that the administration has been working on a missile defense agreement with the Russians and that Moscow had requested that the United States share with it loads of sensitive U.S. missile defense technology and operational authority as part of that deal. In the administration’s eagerness to please the Kremlin, it may just oblige.

Just say no, Obama.  Go ahead and stand up to those tough meanie-head Russians.  It’s not that hard.  We’ll all hold your hand and talk you through it.  Better still, once it’s done nobody on the Right will give you any shit about it.  In fact, you might get a few unexpected pats on the back from some conservatives. 

Say, why is giving Russia our missile defense secrets such a bad move? 

Russian assistance has contributed to the progress made by Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Should the United States share critical information about its missile defenses with the Russians, a Russian entity — official or otherwise — could pass that information along to Tehran, enabling the Iranians to capitalize on the weaknesses in the U.S. system.

The Iranians are long time valued customers of the Russian SuperMarket Of ExplodeyFunBargainBasementKaboomCraters.  Once they get our missile shield technology, what’s to stop them from selling it to the Iranians?  ‘Ya know, we’ve made billions off of you ‘shroom cloud-happy Shiites buying our stuff, but we’re not gonna stock the shelves with American missile defense secrets, because that would be wrong.’

If anybody buys that scenario, they’re just as stupid as our cretin President.

All this panicky talk is aggravating.  I mean, Iran’s nuclear program isn’t really making a lot of progress lately.  Besides, they can’t hit us with an ICBM anytime soon, right?

The sea-based Aegis system is supposed to complement the GMD system in defending the homeland against long-range missiles by 2020, but the intelligence community continues to estimate that Iran will have an ICBM by 2015.

So let me get this straight.  Obama wants to give Russia our missile shield so that they can then sell it to the Iranians, who will then understand our defense systems’ weaknesses.  All of this occurring right around the time that Iran will have made a missile capable of hitting American soil.

Anybody want to draw up the articles of impeachment yet?

Too Good To Check-Obama Doesn’t Know What Year It Is

This cannot be real…can it?

Everyone wishes they could turn back the clock sometimes, and it turns out Barack Obama is no different.

He got the date wrong by three years when he signed the guestbook at Westminster Abbey today on his official visit to the UK – despite apparently asking the dean what day it was.

As a tough election looms next year and he faces criticism for his handling of the financial crisis, perhaps Mr Obama wished it was indeed May 24, 2008, when he was still a rising superstar.

I’m gonna cut the Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief some slack. Every January, for the first couple days I find myself writing the date with the last year. Like, ‘January 5, 2010′ instead of ’2011′. I usually start dating stuff correctly by the end of the first week of January. The thing is, we’ve all made that mistake.

In January.

Dating stuff with the last year.

Not three years ago.

2008. Two Thousand And Eight.

Really, Barry? Really?

[/facepalm]

Fuck, since I ripped the headline format off of Hot Air, I’ll swipe Instapundit’s joke for the finish:

They said if I voted for John McCain, we’d get a confused half-senile Constitution-stomping warmonger for President…and they were right!

I snagged the original link off of The Daley Gator, who pretty rule when it comes to this kind of stuff. Thanks, guys.

Frank J. Fleming-Our Enemies Are Dorks

Little, flaccid dorks.

So they found a big stash of porn in Osama bin Laden’s compound. I thought the whole point of terrorism was supposed to be religious or something, but apparently the terrorists are like cafeteria Muslims — they don’t subscribe to the whole Islamic tenet of clean living and instead just adhere to the blowing-up-infidels part of the religion.

It seems one of the biggest goals of Islamic terrorists — besides pointless murder and mayhem — is to have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. We have bleeding heart liberals who automatically side with America’s enemies, but the terrorists are dead set on giving even those people absolutely nothing to hold onto. You can search and search for the terrorists to have any redeeming qualities, and the best you’ll come up with is something like, “Well, one time they only kicked a puppy when they easily could have stomped it to death.”

They’re just pointless, useless enemies — far more one-dimensionally vile than anything you’d find in the most hackneyed fiction. And that’s a big problem for us.

America has been in a slump for a long time. We just can’t get our act together and be the shining city on the hill we used to be, and I think a big part of that is terrorists. Not terrorism; terrorists — in that they are our big enemy right now. The fact is, to achieve great heights, America needs a great villain to overcome, and as long as our big enemy is a bunch of primitive thugs servicing themselves in barren compounds, we’re going to be stuck in a rut.

It’s a great piece, so read the whole thing.

Here’s a quibble:  What if a sizable minority of Americans–oh, say 21%– simply refuses to show up when a real enemy actually emerges?

Even worse:  What if the American public recognizes the next supervillain, but the political class is too corrupt and addicted to power to figure it out?

Culture, Islam And The Sting Of Failure

In the post 9/11 age, Westerners have tried to explain why Islam has taken such a violent turn.  From full-throated terrorist apologias to more sober hard-eyed analyses, America and her civilizational cousins have examined the reasons for violent jihad.  Great debates have been had over the last ten years.  September 11th was a wake-up call for many Westerners.  While many of us are still asleep, the US conservative movement has at long last decided to examine the deeper motivations and passions that drive Islamic fundamentalism.

While this process of examination has been beneficial, sometimes it is necessary to listen to Muslim dissidents themselves.  They will often tell you far more of the story than you’d likely get from other sources.  That’s why Raymond Ibrahim’s translation of a Khaled Montaser piece is pretty important.

 We Muslims have an inferiority complex and are terribly sensitive to the world, feeling that our Islamic religion needs constant, practically daily, confirmation by way of Europeans and Americans converting to Islam. What rapturous joy takes us when a European or American announces [their conversion to] Islam—proof that we are in a constant state of fear, alarm, and chronic anticipation for Western validation or American confirmation that our religion is “okay.” We are hostages of this anticipation, as if our victory hinges on it—forgetting that true victory is for us to create or to accomplish something, such as those [civilizations] that these converts to our faith abandon.

And we pound our drums and blow our horns [in triumph] and drag the convert to our backwardness, so that he may stand with us at the back of the world’s line of laziness, [in the Muslim world] wherein no new scientific inventions have appeared in the last 500 years. Sometimes those who convert relocate to our countries—only to get on a small boat and escape on the high seas back to their own countries.

There’s a lot of truth to digest there.

First, it is important to note that there are Muslim scientists and thinkers doing important work.  They study and invent and innovate not in Damascus, Jakarta or Tehran but in London, Frankfurt and Chicago.  This indicates that there is no genetic or racial basis for the lack of ‘Islamic inventions’.  It is the culture of Muslim-majority nations that is stifling.

The West in general, and America in particular, is the only place where a Muslim can safely use his mind to create something other than yet another jihadist ideology or violent terrorist organization.  If you’re a clever Muslim who wants to invent something in the United States, chances are that the fast-thinking Farouk will be rewarded for his hard work and labor should his innovation actually perform.  The same cannot be said for the vast swath of kleptocracies that riddle the Middle East.  The man with a plan in the Islamic sphere will most likely see his good idea stolen by the thieves that man the important government posts or ignored by religious fundamentalists.  There’s really no reason for the intelligent person to even bother trying, so he doesn’t.

That five hundred year failure rate has to gall many hard-core Muslims.  While the mongrelized infidels in America and Europe have dominated the world with rapidly changing technology, vibrant expansionist pop culture and wild commercial success, Muslims live off the fruits of Western intellectualism but cannot hope to emulate it in their own homelands.  According to the Koran, it is Muslims that have the truth–and more importantly, God–on their side.  For Islamic supremacists, having God in their corner should’ve meant that they would be blessed with inventions and innovations.  They should’ve been the winners of progress, not the debauched kaffir West.  

Consider another irony.  Even many of the Islamic sphere’s bad ideas come from us.  The Ba’ath party that dominated Iraq and continues to oppress Syria is merely an Arab facelift for a German socialism.  Bashar al-Assad is basically Erich Honeker with a much funnier name and a slightly more brutal secret police organization.

More to the point of Montaser’s article, Islam’s constant seeking of Western validation–specifically through the conversion of Westerners to Islam–speaks to the inherent weakness of the faith.  We in the West sometimes think that Muslim expansionism is a sign that the Western world or that Judeo-Christian values are in decline.  But what does it say about Islam when the only way they can feel good about themselves is if some Eurotrash brainfart or American half-wit starts praying to Mecca five times a day?

When you always have to have the approval of others, you are doomed.  The same is likely true for the supremacist version of Islam.  While non-Muslims cannot do much to make that collapse happen, we can encourage those voices who criticize the backwardness of modern Islam.

I snagged the link from Kathy Shaidle’s Five Feet Of Fury, who directed me to Jihad Watch, which got me to Raymond Inrahim’s post.  Thanks to all.

‘Shoot First So No Questions Can Be Asked Later’

That’s how Andrew McCarthy characterizes the Obama administration’s policy towards dealing with terrorism and terrorists. Here’s more from his piece.

The Lawyer Left is the core of the president’s base. From its legions, Obama recruited his attorney general, the top lawyer in his State Department, and many of his administration’s most influential voices. Its signal achievement has been to make a legal and political hash of terrorists’ detention and interrogation. It has become far easier and cleaner to kill the enemy than to capture and squeeze him for intelligence purposes.

This is an extraordinarily problematic situation. As I’ve conceded before, my principal concern about candidate Barack Obama was that, in his maddening solicitude toward anti-American Islamists, he would abandon the fight against Islamist terrorists. I’ve been delighted to be proved wrong about that. Considering where I feared he’d come out, it seems downright ungracious to complain that we are killing when we ought to be grilling.

Nevertheless, given that our concern here is national security rather than good manners, we have to complain — at least about the policy, if not to its application in bin Laden’s case.

…President Obama is enjoying counterterrorism success by slipstreaming behind Bush-era policies and exploiting the afterclap of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation program. But the well is running dry. Unless we replenish it with new interrogation intelligence, the days when we can identify previously unknown terrorists and thwart their plans are numbered. You can’t rely on killing every terrorist when you don’t know every terrorist.

Read the rest.

In the essay, McCarthy is quick to add that he believes Osama bin Laden had to die. He argues–rightly, I think–that the potential intel we lost by killing OBL was outweighed by the sheer necessity of his death. Bin Laden had to go, no matter what he might’ve been compelled to tell us during a friendly chat with a few of our intel officers at Guantanamo Bay.

McCarthy’s larger point…that we’re killing potential sources of valuable intel because the Administration doesn’t want to have use enhanced interrogation techniques…is particularly important. Obama’s propensity to “kinetically de-live” (Hat-tip, Manhattan Infidel) terrorists rather than question them is ultimately counter-productive.  By all means turn the big bad guys, the living symbols of fundamentalist jihad, into corpses.  That’s better than good in my book.  However, there has to be a limit to how many terrorists you can afford to simply rub out.

For instance it probably would’ve been easier to kill Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the number 3 guy in al-Qaeda and the chief planner behind the 9/11 attacks, rather than capture him alive. No transporting a live human who could give you trouble en route, no potential rescue attempts by his buddies and no messy issues involving the methods used to pry intel out of his brain.  KSM catching a JDAM-induced curb stomp would’ve been Kool and the Gang for most of the American public.  It would’ve also taken away the need to question KSM.  Naturally, you can’t put a pile of soon-to-be fertilizer into a stress position and expect it to talk.

But killing Khalid Sheik Mohammad would’ve also denied the Americans a large chunk of data.  Most importantly, KSM was the man who gave up the name of the Osama courier.  That vital piece of intel eventually led SEAL Team 6 to kill Osama bin Laden.  Taking KSM alive was an important component in the nation’s long-term security plans.

The thing is, capturing high-value targets sorta implies that we’ll interrogate them.  Interrogating them means making tough choices about what methods of questioning are used on what detainees.  All the labyrinthine  decisions and ethical dilemnas that George Bush faced have not gone away simply because the current president has decided to avoid painful quandries unless he absolutely cannot dodge them. 

Complexity.  Hard choices.  Nuance.  Ambiguity.    All things that Team Obama assured us the President could handle and handle much better than Dubya.  Has St. Barry actually figured these things out, or has he just decided to yet again vote ‘present’?  Sadly, signs point to the latter.

Wednesday Post-The Gloating Edition

Found this one over at Mr. Bingley’s terrific Coalition of the Swilling.

Christopher from the Conservative Perspective brings us Der Führer’s reaction to Osama bin Laden’s sudden demise.

Ol’ Dolphie took this setback…surprisingly well.

Finally, Donald Douglas at the American Power site gives us this:

Enjoy getting a kick out of Osama bin Laden getting a third eye at the hands of the American armed forces!

More Reactions On Osama Bin Laden’s Death

1:  Two Cheers For Obama

I dislike Obama’s domestic agenda as much as any other sane human being, but on this issue I gotta give it to the President.  Most striking is the nerve Obama displayed.  There were only about a thousand things that could’ve gone wrong here.  From faulty intel to equipment failure to poor planning, this mission could’ve gotten off track and ended in disaster.  If that happened, it could’ve easily metastasized into a Jimmy Cartereqsue clusterfuck.  A foul-up in Abbottabad could’ve effectively ended Barack Obama’s presidency.

Think about how Obama handled this situation, then compare it to how Bill Clinton handled similar circumstances.  In 1998, Bubba threw some Tomahawk missiles at what he thought was bin Laden’s headquarters.  He hit some tents and little else.  By contrast, the President was presented with good verified intel, then sent a team into Pakistan and made sure SEAL Team Six got their man.

There were huge risks to the operation–potential damage to American prestige, possible negative political ramifications–and Obama still gave this mission the green light.  Congratulations to the President for bucking up his courage and doing the right thing.

2:  A Superpower Got A Much Needed Win

SEAL Team Six did something truly spectacular.  From a military perspective, they killed the man responsible for 9/11.  Osama bin Laden was also the head–at least from a spiritual perspective–of the most dangerous international terrorist organization in the world.  This will have some effect on al-Qaeda’s future operations.

The slaying of the bin Laden dragon also gave America some much-needed swagger.  The Afghan War has been seen as morass where our military has so far played for a costly blood-soaked tie with the Taliban/al-Qaeda/Islamist insurgency.  While the US public hasn’t been screaming for a pull-out, there is a level of exhaustion creeping into people’s minds.  Giving Osama a third eye settles a score America had with the al-Qaeda leader and with the Afghan War itself. 

Beyond that, the American people were hungry for a win.  Anemic economic growth, high unemployment, high gas prices and the creeping shadow of inflation have been a part of the daily lives of Americans for a quite a while.  These pocketbook issues create downward pressure on the morale of US citizens.  For a few days, folks can rally and celebrate the fact that our military finally scored a clear, unadulterated victory against an opponent that has slipped the noose for over a decade.

3:  Don’t Expect Many Changes

Just how much day-to-day command of al-Qaeda…and international terrorism in general…did Osama bin Laden have at the time of his death?  That has yet to be conclusively discussed, but signs point to not so much.  The terrorist leader’s safehouse was apparently not wired for the internet or telephone.  Bin Laden has to rely on couriers to send and receive messages.  Barring new revelations about the connectedness of al-Qaeda’s top dog, it seems like Osama really wasn’t in the loop as much as he may have been ten or even five years ago.

That tells me that the Afghan War will continue to frustrate American patience.  I’m currently reading “The Wrong War” by Bing West.  One is struck by just how little Osama bin Laden figures into the daily problems involved in winning the Afghan conflict.  Like an evil djinn from an old Arabian myth, Osama created massive chaos that has taken on a life independent of its malevolent architect.  The death and misery that bin Laden helped bring to Afghanistan will sadly live on long after Osama’s corpse has sunk lower than whale shit.

In America, the killing of Osama bin Laden does not alter the reality on the ground.  In my travels yesterday, I tried listening in to people’s conversations about the death of Osama and talking to them about it.  In contrast to the spontaneous celebrations that occurred around the country, folks I ran into were basically happy that al-Qaeda’s leader was dead, but they weren’t overwhelmed by it either.  What I saw was a quiet joy and a somber hopeful attitude.

What I gather is that the killing of bin Laden is a tremendous one-time event in the course of American life.  As great as Osama bin Laden’s demise is–and it truly is an awesome accomplishment for Barack Obama and especially for our military–it doesn’t change the problems that have crowded into American life.  Unemployment will not suddenly shrink back to five percent.  The choking threat of inflation has not magically receded to manageable levels.  The cost of energy and fuel have stubbornly failed to take  precipitous drop in the last 24 hours.

The President scored a great victory for himself and for America, the country he leads and the nation he is basically ambivalent about.  The problem for Barack Obama is this victory will not have a huge lasting impact on his political fortunes.  Circumstances in Afghanistan are probably not going to change all the much from killing bin Laden.  Also, Obama can’t blow a hole in Osama bin Laden’s skull every week until November 2012.  These facts suggest that, while this is a large political game changer right now, OBL’s death cannot turn around Barack Obama’s poll numbers for very long.  The President’s popularity is based on negative factors that cannot be changed with one grand event.

Update:  AceOFSpadesHQ poster CAC does a nice break down on the “Osama is Dead” bounce Obama has received.  Click the link to check out his snazzy chart, and here’s a cool quote.

Obama has received an average bounce- including the WaPo moonland poll, of about 6.6.

Yep, 6.6. Mind you there is time for more rescue polls, but the driving concerns for Americans aren’t in Afghanistan/Pakistan right now. They haven’t been there in nearly a decade.

President Obama in fact received a larger bounce at the end of last year thanks to the tax cut extension agreement with Republicans than he has so far [for] killing bin Laden.

Yeah, the MSM are gonna want to play this as the Great Obama Re-Election Clincher, but the numbers simply don’t bear this out.

Even More Gooderer Update:  Iowahawk kills it.

As much as I am now embarrassed to admit it, if you had asked me 48 hours ago whether Osama Bin Laden would ever be brought to justice I would have probably answered “no.” Like many Americans I had all but abandoned hope that we would ever capture or kill the 9/11 mastermind, and had resigned myself to the idea he would die an old man thumbing his nose at us from some comfortable cave in Waziristan. Well, I can happily report that I completely underestimated the skill, courage, and perseverence of America’s military. And, almost as happily, I can report that I also completely underestimated the capacity of America’s erstwhile “peace community” for turning on a dime and embracing the kind of all-American xenophobic flag-waving bloodlust they only recently decried. So today I stand proudly with my new friends of the formerly antiwar left in a mindlessly jingoistic salute to President Obama for an extralegal military assassination well done.

Yes, it’s true that some pre-January 2009 antiwar activists have remained morally and logically consistent in their opposition to America’s military presence in the Mideast; but, thank God, it appears now they were only a tiny, insignificant minority. Recent events have happily made clear that the antiwar movement of 2001-8 was overwhelmingly dominated by a vast silent hypocritical majority of craven political opportunists awaiting a Democratic administration to gleefully celebrate the covert execution of a man whom, until 28 months ago, they would have described as a “tragic civilian casualty.”

Who is to credit for this rebirth in American national unity? First and foremost, we must cite the leadership of President Obama. Like many Americans – and the Nobel Peace Prize committee – I naively feared he was actually serious when he initially proposed shutting down Guantanamo, trying detainees in American civilian courts, and prior consultation with the international community. Little did I know that this untested young Commander-in-Chief would muster the courage to read his weekly Gallup numbers and, in one daring unilateral extra-judicial targeted hit job, toss aside every single idiotic foreign policy principle of his election campaign. Perhaps most satisfyingly, it was a mission made possible thanks to information extracted by methods he previously banned as “illegal torture.”

Read. The. Whole. Thing.

NOW.

Osama Bin Laden Dead

Pardon me if I take some time to do a little sack dance for a bit.

Fuck you Osama.  Fuck you with a red hot 5.56 round in your rat-bag cowardly cerebral cortex.  You got a little too comfortable in your Pakistani chill out pad.  You didn’t think America was still hot on your heels.  You believed your own mistaken assumptions about the US, that we were cowards that would give up after a long chase.  It gives me great pleasure to know that it was this fatal error in judging American resolve that contributed to your violent, bloody and well-deserved demise.  Ace of Spades said it best when he headlined his piece celebrating your death “Osama Bin Ladin Loses Popularity and 30cc of Brain and Skull But Mostly 30cc of Brain and Skull”.  The only sad part is that we can only kill you once, Osama.

And now…it’s over.  What is the best part of Osama bin Laden’s death?  Let us count the ways.  Certainly it is gratifying to think about the mind-killing panic that had to have flashed through bin Laden’s once-complacent mind as the SEALs broke into his compound.  To know that he felt even a small measure of the terror he put into the hearts of the victims of the 9/11 attacks as bullets flashed into him is a dark comfort. 

It’s also encouraging to know that it was US troops who pulled the trigger; that our military men were the ones who finally took out this virulent cancer masquerading as a human being.  What a shoddy way for it to have ended if it was one of our proxies to have done this instead of us.  It is far better to know that the last thing bin Laden saw was American soldiers, wearing American uniforms and an American flag, putting the final nail in Osama’s coffin.

Another thing that makes bin Laden’s death sweet is the knowledge that his eternal reward is not Paradise.  He promised his followers that death through jihad would bring them instantaneous access to janna, the Islamic heaven.  How ironic that for Osama there will be no grand lush gardens awaiting him in the afterlife.  Seventy two virgins won’t be ready to service bin Laden’s sexual appetites.  For the death, torture, misery, oppression and hatred he spread across the globe Osama bin Laden has earned a far hotter destination.        

All these things are to be celebrated.  But once you get beyond those visceral emotions, a more somber feeling emerges.  It is the wish and prayer of many that Osama bin Laden’s death brings solace to the families of his victims.  For twenty years, OBL has had a hand in torturing or killing thousands of people, not just in America but around the world.  For the most part, the people bin Laden murdered were not military personnel.  In large measure, they were innocent civilians engaged in the routine of their daily lives.  From Afghanistan to Bali to Tanzania to Manhattan, bin Laden preyed upon the weak, the unsuspecting and the innocent.  He was an international bully who picked fights with blameless people for his sick ideology 

Al-Qaeda may still be limping along in decentralized franchises.  Ayman al-Zawahiri might’ve assumed leadership of whatever remains of bin Laden’s terrorist organization by now.  No doubt they are planning other attacks in retaliation.  None of those things change with bin Laden’s death. 

However, the mastermind of misery for many in the United States and the rest of the world is now sinking to the bottom of an unnamed ocean in an unmarked location, unmourned by all but the most depraved and repellent corners of human society.  His rotten schemes of terror can bring death and woe no more.  Hopefully, that will somehow soothe the losses suffered by those that lost family and friends because of bin Laden’s evil.

Now that’s one brave German chick

Courtesy of Eric Dondero of the rad Libertarian Republican blog.  Watch the video.

This girl knows these Salafist dickstains are the ideological heirs to Hitler.  Why can’t some of our smart set see the patently obvious?

Rehabing Syria’s First Dictatorial Lady

Our new blog homie Sitting On The Edge Of The Sandbox brings us news on Asma al-Assad, the First Lady of Syria.  Specifically, Vogue Magazine did a happy little profile on Chinless Bashar’s wife.  There’s a lot of clap-trap to sort through in the Vogue piece, so I’ll just snag the quote Edge used. 

In the Saint Paul orphanage, maintained by the Melkite–Greek Catholic patriarchate and run by the Basilian sisters of Aleppo, Asma sits at a long table with the children. [...]

Back in the car, I ask what religion the orphans are. “It’s not relevant,” says Asma al-Assad. “Let me try to explain it to you. That church is a part of my heritage because it’s a Syrian church. The Umayyad Mosque is the third-most-important holy Muslim site, but within the mosque is the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. We all kneel in the mosque in front of the tomb of Saint John the Baptist. That’s how religions live together in Syria—a way that I have never seen anywhere else in the world. We live side by side, and have historically. All the religions and cultures that have passed through these lands—the Armenians, Islam, Christianity, the Umayyads, the Ottomans—make up who I am.”

Wow.  That’s a beautiful kumbaya moment.  The open-mindedness on display here is heart-warming.  Obviously, this statement of tolerance is of a piece with the mindset of the entire Assad Regime Hugs-n-Kisses Joy Boner Fun Zone.

Thousands of demonstrators in Syrian cities hit the streets after Friday prayers in another week of anti-government rallies, angry but largely peaceful outpourings of protest against the Bashar al-Assad regime.

The gatherings come as a prominent humanitarian watchdog group issued a report detailing “torture and ill-treatment” of protesters over the past month, and U.N. human rights experts released a statement deploring the crackdown on peaceful demonstrations.

…Detainees arrested during the protests told Human Rights Watch that officers from the intelligence services, or the Mukhabarat, beat them during arrests and in detention. They saw beatings of dozens of detainees, including children, and “heard screams of people being beaten.”

See?  Just like I said.  There is so much tolerance going on in Syria that it hurts.

Knowing just how brutal and repressive the Assad kleptocracy is, why the hell is Vogue Magazine doing puff pieces on Bashar’s wife?  I don’t recall Vogue doing multipage interviews with Saddam Hussein’s wives.  What gives here?

Well, for one thing, Asma al-Assad speaks English.  In fact, she was born and raised in England after her family emigrated out of Syria.  For the multi-culti leftism of an Anna Wintour-run magazine, it’s a big help that Syria’s dictatorette talks the same language as the interviewer.

But that’s just a side benefit.  The main reason why Asma gets the softball treatment is because she’s cute and she’s a fashionista who wears expensive clothes.  Who cares if Mrs. Assad stays in shape by roughing up political prisoners in a Damascus dungeon?  She looks great, doesn’t she?  I’m sure it’ll be the workout program du jour for all the beautiful people.   

More seriously, it seems pretty clear that Vogue really doesn’t give a shit if Asma al-Assad can afford all those top designer outfits only because her husband is a Baathist goon who has robbed his country to pad his personal wealth.  I guess that tragic fact is of no concern to Vogue.  It only matters that this pretty little fascist says all the right PC platitudes.

Also, and this might be sorta douchey on my part, but she’s not even the prettiest Middle Eastern First Lady out there.  If you want a real beauty in a position of power from an Arab country, I give you the one and only Queen Rania of Jordan.

 

 

 

I told you so.

Can Public Transportation Be Cool?

I dunno, but this makes a damn good effort.  Seriously, a bus that look like the Batmobile? 

Wow.

I’m totally stealing this from Darcprynce over at the rad Daley Gator, a blog you need to be reading.

One thing that kinda bummed me out was the part where the designers discuss how they’re looking to start mass producing their creation. 

I can totally see the sad ending coming with this one:  They take their prototype to some doucherocket desk jockey in the sub-bureaucracy of the Ministry of Getting People Out Of Their Cars Because Cars Are For Meanie-Heads.  Herr Pencil-Pusher will politely nod, say it’s a nice design, then tell them that the SuperBus is way too risky, it looks too aggressive and it simply won’t work.  Then he’ll tell the SuperBus folks to come back when they design something that looks closer to this:

Depressing?  Yes.  But then again, life-sucking is what the government is good at, isn’t it?

War, Obama and a conservative’s response

Let’s just get this out there right now.

President Obama’s Libyan adventurism is a disaster. It’s a disaster on an epic scale. It’s a disaster in ways we might not have even considered. Listen to The Other McCain’s pointed summation.

…That Obama the Commander-in-Chief is resorting to familiar tricks of Obama the Candidate — making replies to arguments attributed to the convenient straw men “Some” and “Others” — should not surprise us at all, given that the president doesn’t seem to be trying to accomplish any coherent foreign-policy goal so much as he is using Libya like a photo-op in his 2012 re-election campaign.

It takes a connoisseur’s taste for raw cynicism to appreciate what Obama is actually doing here: Attempting to add 20 seconds of footage to the film that’s going to be shown at the next Democratic National Convention before Obama’s acceptance speech. The “Libyans celebrate Qaddafi’s defeat” segment of that film, following on the “Egyptians celebrate Mubarak’s ouster” segment, will serve to convey the message that Obama the Peacemaker has accomplished almost bloodlessly, and at a discount, what Bush the Warmonger could not: Freedom in the Middle East.

Read the whole thing, as McCain lays out a compelling case.

Don’t get it twisted. Obama has some other ideas when it comes to Libya. He’s uncomfortable with America leading anything more complicated than a conga line, so the idea of a quick hand-off (to who again…?) is in line with his general ‘America, Meh’ attitude. A no-fly zone appears nice and safe and containment-y. Liberals love few things more than to ‘contain’ a rogue world leader, so the President’s jerky incoherent strategery makes sense to internationalist lefties.

The issue here is that all those aspirations–as problematic and lame as they are–can’t cover up the fact that Obama is using Libya to butch up for 2012. That’s all this is. Now how can a conservative, realizing that Obama is manipulating a crisis to spin it into political hay, respond to the Libyan War?

No matter what else conservatives do, they should continue to point out that Obama has gotten us into a shooting war without Congressional approval, thereby making the confrontation illegal. This should be stressed early and often, if only because the Constitution can’t be ignored by Obama just because he needs to buck up his approval ratings.  That’s something everybody on the Right side can get with.

I think we can definitely learn something from the Left when it comes to being the loyal opposition during a time of war.  Specifically, we should learn to not do pretty much anything the progressive did in response to the Iraq War.  From the start of hostilities in Iraq–if not before then–it felt like liberals were going to do anything they could to weaken our war effort to deny George Bush a political victory, and America a military victory as well.  From ugly anti-American anti-war protests to really stupid counterproductive suggestions, elements of the progosphere were determined to kneecap Dubya.  The 2000′s anti-war movement, with all of it’s fierce moral urgency bullshit, were really just a bunch of hacks.      

So yeah, the Right can safely forgo the full retard moves the Left pulled during the Bush era.

Instead, we should do what we can to de-politicize our criticisms.  There are American troops in harms way.  It’s fucking gross to try to use them as pawns in this game, even if Obama is doing just that. Let St. Barry of the Bleeding Peace Prize have a monopoly on crap-weasel misuse of our military men and women.

Best Earth Hour Sign-Off…EVAH!

Well, another Earth Hour came and went. Not being a credulous stinkbag granola-gobbling hippie or a pompous cynical hack who uses environmentalism to get rich, I could not care less about this retarded made-up holiday/enviro-guilt hairshirt self-flagellation fail fest.

But this is pretty good.

Nice find by Tim Blair, another awesome Aussie in the fine tradition of MK of the fearless Down Under On The Right Side and Patrick Carroll of the terrific It’s A Matter Of Opinion.

I guess you can call this my high-five to the Antipodeans post, but whatevs. Clickie the MK and Patrick Carroll linkies. Some great bloggage to be had. Trust me.

Evil Rich American Cowboy Imperialists! (Doing Much Needed Charity Work)

In all seriousness, this is kind of amazing.

Watch this video news report from a Japanese TV station. It’s a story about US Navy personnel flying supplies to Sendai, Japan…

You’ll see an older Japanese man a little ways into the clip, speaking to the camera. What he says is, essentially, that the townspeople had no idea the Americans were coming or bringing them anything. There was no announcement or anything about it. Which is true. Between the destroyed roads and the radiation fears, hardly anyone can even get to the Sendai area. But these US pilots did.

Bryan Preston over at the PJ Tatler notes that this was an ad-hoc thing. The Navy guys threw this releief package together on their own initiative. Mind-blowing stuff.

We may act like rich American cowboys from time to time. Lord knows we stick our nose into more international slap-fights than we probably should. But we’re not imperialists. More plainly, as the clip shows, we’re not evil.

Barry’s Bogus Libyan Journey

Does this count as good news?

France has proposed that a new political steering committee outside Nato be responsible for overseeing military operations over Libya.

The proposal comes just a day after Prime Minister David Cameron told the House of Commons that Nato would be in charge of enforcing UN Security Council resolution 1973.

But on Tuesday Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that it would only “help enforce” the no-fly zone, not lead it.

French Foreign Minister Alain Jupe said the new body would bring together foreign ministers of participating states – as well as the Arab League.

David Cameron is saying one thing, France is saying another, NATO is both in and out of the loop and all the while Obama ain’t saying shit. Awesome. Maybe if you cross your eyes while staring directly at the sun for a few hours, you might be able to see this as a sign of progress in the Libyan crisis.

If Barack Obama’s sterling reputation for being a hands-on leader wasn’t rock solid, it’d be easy to think that President Peace Prize haphazardly got America into yet another Middle Eastern conflict or something.

A krazy kwestion for you: Why weren’t the logistics of the handover nailed down before the UN resolution was approved? The possibility of western military action may not have crystallized until last Tuesday but U.S. and European officials obviously had been thinking about it for weeks. They knew they’d have to act quickly once the Security Council approved airstrikes, so in theory a plan for military operations should have been in place. If the French were so hot to bomb Qaddafi, why didn’t they float the “steering committee” idea early on instead of cobbling it together now as some half-assed face-saving measure to try to scrub NATO’s fingerprints from the mission? The understatement of the year thus far from a former U.S. ambassador to NATO: “I am surprised these things were not worked out beforehand.”

I hate to keep coming back to the same well, but it bears repeating. The Left pounded George Bush–with some justification–because there was very little planning for a post-Saddam Iraq. Well, if that was bad, what does that make President Obama? The guy doesn’t even have a plan for the period before Colonel Qadaffi gets rubbed out, but we’re still lobbing cruise missiles and bombing the crap out of Libya.

Instead of us calling the shots, Obama seems perfectly content to let NATO, France, England and the Arab League sort out the messy details. Instead of a mission created by the best military minds on the planet–meaning our generals–we subcontract the consulting job to the Eurodweebs and the craptastic Amr Moussa. While they dick around over who gets to wear the big-boy pants in this merry little war they’ve cooked up, we’re doing the heavy lifting.

The best part is the liberal kvetching over Obama’s North African excursion. For almost a decade, they’ve been whining about neocon go-it-alone American cowboys. Well, now we’ve got the perfect left-wing version of a war: A coalition of the weak sisters arguing about how best to spend our blood and treasure in a fight where the US has no clear national interests at stake.

You’d think the Left would be dancing in the streets. Instead they’re curled up into a ball and quietly sobbing. Here’s old-head prog Michael Kinsley, banging his spoon on the proverbial high chair:

If Qadhafi is still in power a year from now, even if he is obeying the “no fly” rules, it will be regarded world-wide as more evidence of America’s decline as a great power and regarded in America as evidence that Democrats in general and Obama and Hillary Clinton in particular are not ready to play foreign policy with the big children.

Quick question, Mike. What part of Barack Obama’s background as a lawyer, community organizer, state senator, Friend of Bill Ayers and half-term US Senator made you think he’d be up for this kind of foreign policy challenge? Oh right, his years of studying diplomacy and military history and publishing all those books about American foreign power and giving all those speeches about the US relations with other world powers [sarc/].

Operation Odyssey Dawn Getting Better And Better

Well, we’re in Libya.  We’re supposed to be creating and enforcing a no-fly zone.  We’re not specifically targeting Moammar Qadaffi.

Except when we are.

A cruise missile blasted Moammar Gadhafi’s residential compound in an attack that carried as much symbolism as military effect, and fighter jets destroyed a line of tanks moving on the rebel capital. The U.S. said the international assault would hit any government forces attacking the opposition.

…It was not known where Gadhafi was when the missile hit near his iconic tent late Sunday, but it seemed to show that while the allies trade nuances over whether the Libyan leader’s fall is a goal of their campaign – he is not safe.

Half of the round, three-story administration building was knocked down and pieces of the missile were scattered around, according to Associated Press photographer escorted to the scene by the Libyan government. About 300 Gadhafi supporters were in the compound at the time. It was not known if any were hurt.

Mixed signals, muddled messages, mission creep–what the hell is going on here?

I dunno.  Maybe this would be a nice moment for the Teleprompter of the United States of America to throw together some pretty words and tell Barry to get on the TV so he can explain the who/what/where/when/why type-shit that’s happening in Libya.  I mean, how long would it take for the pResident to throw on a business jacket, stand in front of a few American flags and talk to the citizenry for ten minutes?  The guy likes to tell us about his magnificent health care plan and his NCAA March Madness bracketology.  When he’s putting American armed forces into harm’s way, that’s when the Bamster likes to clam up?   

Perhaps President Lightbringer is worried about giving away too many military secrets.  I guess he doesn’t want to pull a Geraldo and alert Qaddafi to our next move  [sarc/].  Even though Obama isn’t telling us much, it’s clear that he is fully engaged in this military engagement. 

President Barack Obama played grand tourist to Rio de Janeiro’s vivid extremes on Sunday, motorcading from brilliant beaches to a notorious slum even as he monitored U.S. military strikes in faraway Libya.

With his whole family in tow on the second day of a Latin American tour meant to knit economic and cultural ties, the president visited the City of God shantytown that gained fame after a movie by the same name was nominated for four Oscars. At a community center in the heart of the jostling slum, the president plunged into the lives of children there, playing soccer with kids and watching enthralled at a dazzling martial arts display.

The president shed his coat and tie, rolled up his sleeves and dribbled one-on-one soccer with one surprised boy. Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia got involved, too, kicking a ball around with the kids.

Yup, just like I said.  Fully Engaged.

Meanwhile, Ilya Somin over at Volokh notes that Barack Obama still hasn’t gotten Congress to authorize the use of force.  I’m sure we’re going to see huge demonstrations of anti-war folks protesting Obama’s trampling the Constitution.  I’m sure they’ll be showing up any minute now.  Why look, here they are now.

Posted March 20, 2011 at 12:24 p.m-More than 100 anti-war protesters, including the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, were arrested outside the White House in demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

See!  The principled moral Left has arisen!  They’re protesting Obama’s illegal Libyan war-mongering!  The People United!/Will Never Be Defeated!  DOWN WITH O-BOMB-A!

Oh fuck…wait.  They’re still just pissed off over Bush and Iraq.  Never mind.

Glenn Greenwald reacts to Operation Odyssey Dawn

Or is it Operation Goldie Hawn?  Whatever.

Here’s unrelentingly lame sock-puppeteer Glenn Greenwald’s reaction bored yawn.

There’s one other difference between Iraq and Libya worth noting:  at least with the former, there was a sustained, intense P.R. campaign to persuade the public to support it, followed by a cursory Congressional vote (agreed to by the Bush White House only once approval was guaranteed in advance).  By contrast, the intervention in Libya was presidentially decreed with virtually no public debate or discussion; it’s just amazing how little public opinion or the consent of the citizenry matters when it comes to involving the country in a new war.  That objection can and should be obviated if Obama seeks Congressional approval before deploying the U.S. military.  On some level, it would be just a formality — it’s hard to imagine the Congress ever impeding a war the President wants to fight — but at least some pretense of democratic and Constitutional adherence should be maintained.  

Every now and then, a leftist sock puppeteering cock-knocker manages to blindly paw along the floor of his ideological cage and find a nugget of truth amongst the spent kleenex rags.  In this case, it’s truth by example.  Compare Greenwald’s marble-mouthed, ho-hum, la-di-da response to Obama’s use of military force to how he continues to whine about the 2003 Iraq War.

The invasion of Iraq was unquestionably one of the greatest crimes of the last several decades.  The fact that it was illegal — a blatant violation of international law — makes it that much worse.  Imagine what future historians will say about it — a nakedly aggressive war launched under the falsest of pretenses, in brazen violation of every relevant precept of law, which destroyed an entire country, killed huge numbers of innocent people, and devastated the entire population.

If you were wondering:  Yes, apparently Greenwald gets paid to write like that.

Regardless of Greenwald’s teenage melodramatic tone, questions remain: Was Bush’s Iraq war illegal?  Is Obama’s Libyan War legal?

Well, Dubya got Congress to vote for a use of force in Iraq in October 2002.  The United Nations Security Council resolution 1441 was only one of over a dozen resolutions passed against the Iraqi Baathist regime.  Legality?  Bush had more than enough to do what he did.  

According to Greenwald’s view, the was a rush to war in Iraq.  Huh?  Democrat President Bill Clinton was an advocate for kicking Saddam Hussein out back in 1999, when he publicly declared that regime change was the official policy of the US government.  Post 9/11, there were numerous debates about taking out Saddam before the October 2002 congressional vote.  Bear in mind,  the fight to oust the Hussein kleptocracy didn’t start until March 2003.  Far from a rush to war, the Bush Administration gave Saddam Hussein plenty of time to get in line.  

Evil ruthless American warlord Premier Bush also gave the Democrat Party ample opportunity to bail out.  Instead, they merrily climbed aboard the Enduring Freedom express.  Liberal heroes in the House and Senate like Henry Waxman, Joe Biden, Anthony Weiner, Jack Murtha and Chuck Schumer all voted in support of using force in Iraq.  Being for war against Saddam Hussein was not a fringe position of the scheming neocon Right.  It was a perfectly reasonable mainstream bipartisan position.  It was also in accordance with the Constitutional powers granted to the President and Congress. 

So, it turns out something isn’t illegal just because Glenn Greenwald has a raging two year old hate-boner for George Bush.  Who knew? 

Using the criteria laid out above, does Obama’s Libyan adventurism come close to the standards laid out by Bush’s actions vis-a-vis Iraq?  Not by a parsec.  There has been no grand debate about the use of the American military in Libya.  While the UN has sanctioned the strikes against the Qaddafi dictatorship, I don’t recall hearing about the US Congress approving a declaration of war in this case.  By that alone, Barack Obama is acting in defiance of the US Constitution.

Hey Greenwald, I can see your double standard showing.

But hey, even though Operation Soaring Donkey Punch reveals the rank hypocrisy amongst American lefties like Glenn Greenwald, it’s all good in the hood.  If progressives didn’t have double standards, they would have none.  I mean, at least Greenwald is being consistent in his inconsistencies, right?