Posts Tagged ‘Benghazi’

Tomorrow is 9/11. What Is the Obama Administration Doing To Keep America Safe?

Wednesday, September 10th, 2014

Tomorrow is the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks on World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Thanks to the Obama Administration’s feckless and spineless responses to terrorism both here and abroad, Americans feel less safe than ever:

The exclusive poll reveals that 47% of Americans believe the country is less safe now than before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That’s a significant increase from even a year after the twin towers fell when in September 2002 just 20% of the country said the nation was less safe. The level of fear across America also is up substantially from last year when 28% felt the same way. In fact, just 26% of Americans now feel the nation is safer than before 9/11.

Americans are worried about America’s safety because Obama seems manifestly disinterested in national security concerns. Americans are being killed by jihadists abroad and Obama can barely trouble himself to break away from his golf game to address the issue.

Tonight Obama is going to give a speech (in Obama’s Big Pop-Up Book of Governing America, “Give A Speech” provides the same universal panacea as “Shoot” does in the Far Side’s book on equine medicine) on ISIS.

Here’s one thing I don’t expect to hear addressed: What is the Obama Administration doing to protect America tomorrow on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. America’s jihadist enemies have frequently observed this anniversary by launching attacks, such as the 2012 embassy attacks on Benghazi and elsewhere.

This is especially worrisome given reports of missing Libyan airliners possibly in the hands of jihadists.

When it comes to foreign policy (or, really, anything beyond electoral politics and advancing a left-wing agenda), Obama shows a distinct inability to learn from his own mistakes. Will there be heightened security at American embassies tomorrow? While their be fighter planes in the air flying CAP, or at least fueled and ready for takeoff on the ground, in case of another 9/11 attack? This piece suggests that government officials are “bracing” for possible attacks, but fails to give any details. If there is another attack, are we going to see another roundup of all the security lapses like we did after the Benghazi attack?

The most essential job of government is protecting the lives, liberty and property of its citizens from enemies both here and abroad. What I want to known is: What is the Obama Administration actually doing on Job 1?

I Missed Hillary’s Austin Book-Signing

Friday, June 20th, 2014

I couldn’t make Hillary Clinton’s signing at Bookpeople today because I have to work for a living. Plus tickets were “sold out.”

Fortunately, someone else was able to make it to her D.C. stop:

Ted Cruz Updates His List of Obama’s Abuse of Power

Friday, May 9th, 2014

Ted Cruz has thoughtfully compiled a fourth list of Obama Administration abuses of power. If you’ve been following the ObamaCare, IRS and Benghazi scandals, there might not be anything you haven’t already heard, but it’s nice to have them all in one place. There’s also mention of more obscure Obama Administration abuses of power, such as violation of the Magnitsky Act, or paying $205,075 to relocate a $16 shrub. Moreover, every item in the list is sourced, most to MSM outfits that liberals can’t dismiss summarily dismiss.

Read the whole thing, then send a copy to any undecided voters you know.

60 Minutes on Benghazi

Monday, October 28th, 2013

Well, this should break the story wide open. If you haven’t already, see the whole thing.

And here’s the transcript.

Camille Paglia Bashes Weiner, Hillary, Victimhood Feminism, and Foucault

Thursday, August 22nd, 2013

Camille Paglia is always good for an orthogonal view on current pieties, and this interview with her (warning: Salon) is no different. She also has a gift for intellectual putdowns that work at a much higher level of reference than Maureen Dowd’s.

Take, for example, her take on Anthony Weiner:

Two words: pathetic dork. How sickeningly debased our politics have become that this jabbering cartoon weasel could be taken seriously for a second as a candidate for mayor of New York.

Hillary Clinton and Benghazi:

It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move — with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts.

I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying “I take responsibility” for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately. The weak response by the Obama administration to that tragedy has given a huge opening to Republicans in the next presidential election. The impression has been amply given that Benghazi was treated as a public relations matter to massage rather than as the major and outrageous attack on the U.S. that it was.

Throughout history, ambassadors have always been symbolic incarnations of the sovereignty of their nations and the dignity of their leaders. It’s even a key motif in “King Lear.” As far as I’m concerned, Hillary disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, “What difference does it make what we knew and when we knew it, Senator?” Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood. The escalating instability not just in Egypt but throughout the Mideast is very ominous. There is a clash of cultures brewing in the world that may take a century or more to resolve — and there is no guarantee that the secular West will win.

On feminism:

Oh, feminism is still alive? Thanks for the tip! It sure is invisible, except for the random whine from some maleducated product of the elite schools who’s found a plush berth in glossy magazines. It’s hard to remember those bad old days when paleofeminist pashas ruled the roost. In the late ‘80s, the media would routinely turn to Gloria Steinem or the head of NOW for “the women’s view” on every issue — when of course it was just the Manhattan/D.C. insider’s take, with a Democratic activist spin. Their shameless partisanship eventually doomed those Stalinist feminists, who were trampled by the pro-sex feminist stampede of the early ‘90s (in which I am proud to have played a vocal role). That insurgency began in San Francisco in the mid-‘80s and went national throughout the following decade. They keep dusting Steinem off and trotting her out to pin awards on her, but she’s the walking dead. Her anointed heirs (like Susan Faludi) sure didn’t pan out, did they?

While it’s a big relief not to have feminist bullies sermonizing from every news show anymore, the leadership vacuum is alarming. It’s very distressing, for example, that the atrocities against women in India — the shocking series of gang rapes, which seem never to end — have not been aggressively condemned in a sustained way by feminist organizations in the U.S. I wanted to hear someone going crazy about it in the media and not letting up, day after day, week after week. The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.

And one need not share her fascination with bondage and discipline to enjoy her artful takedown of the Cult of Foucault:

My principal complaint about those three books, all from university presses, was that their intriguing firsthand documentation of the BDSM community was pointlessly shot through with turgid, pretentious theorizing, drawn from the slavishly idolized but hopelessly inaccurate and unreliable Michel Foucault.

In this tight job market, young scholars are in a terrible bind. They have to cater to and flatter the academic establishment if they hope to survive. Furthermore, they have not been taught basic skills in historical investigation, weighing of evidence, and argumentation. There has been a collapse in basic academic standards during the theory era that will take universities decades to recover from. I was incensed that none of those three authors had read a page of the Marquis de Sade, one of the most original and influential writers of the past three centuries. Sade had a major impact on Nietzsche, whom Foucault vainly tried to model himself on. Nor had the three authors read “The Story of O” or explored a host of other crucial landmarks in modern sadomasochism. No, it was Foucault, Foucault, Foucault — a con artist who will one day be a mere footnote in the bulging chronicle of academic follies.

Paglia can still be spectacularly wrong (such as her neo-Freudian take on Weiner later in that section), but she’s always thought-provoking and never dull. Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Ace.)

LinkSwarm for August 16, 2013

Friday, August 16th, 2013

A Friday LinkSwarm on Friday. Will wonders never cease?

  • Ted Cruz hails from the Republican wing of the Republican Party.
  • Speaking of Cruz: “Cruz acquired his citizenship, at birth, through his mother. He is a natural born US citizen and eligible to be President of the United States. Let us never have to speak of this again.”
  • Victor Davis Hanson does an Obama scandalrama roundup.
  • A few Democrats appear to be defying the idea that Hillary is unbeatable, just like she was in 2008.
  • 163 Ohio poll workers dismissed for that voting fraud that doesn’t exist.
  • Teen complains that Facebook just isn’t like it was when they were 7.
  • Why is Dennis Franz shooting Martin Luther King?
  • Muslim Brotherhood calls on followers to tourch Coptic churches.
  • The Jewish community isn’t wild about Alice Walker’s new book. Uh, guys? Given that Walker believes in David Icke’s shapeshifting lizard people, I’d say rational political discourse isn’t in her wheelhouse.
  • Jesse Jackson Jr. sentenced.
  • Generation parasite.
  • NPR Ombudsmen rips them a new one, but NPR itself stands by the lies: “At NPR, commitment to leftist ideology trumps any fealty to the facts.”
  • Dead Goblin Report, Texas Edition: “A couple of Texas criminals had the tables turned on them when a Texas man — taken as a hostage along with his wife and forced to rob a bank — decided he’d had enough and pulled a gun out of his glove box and shot them, killing one.”
  • Terry McAuliffe: Parasitic tick on the body politic.
  • Ashton Kutcher actually making sense. “Opportunity looks an awful lot like hard work.” Also: No job is beneath you.
  • Dear dumbass: Don’t put out a call on Twitter for people to sell you drugs.
  • Washington Post headline writers evidently have no idea what the word “surreal” means.
  • Speaking of the Post, evidently their biggest problem is that they still have one token conservative on staff.
  • LinkSwarm for August 6, 2013

    Tuesday, August 6th, 2013

    Still catching up, so enjoy your complimentary LinkSwarm and beverage (minus the beverage):

  • No, the IRS did not target liberal groups like they targeted conservatives.
  • The scary truth about state and local debt.
  • The U.S. government has $70 trillion in unfunded liabilities. I don’t happen to agree with everything in that assessment (a situation in which the FDIC would actually have to make good on all $7 trillion in deposit guarantees would pretty much be tantamount to the complete collapse of civilization), but the rest is scary enough.
  • Powerline’s John Hindraker wonders what the Benghazi cover-up is really about. I still think the secret CIA interrogation center that David Petraeus’ mistress Paula Broadwell claims was there is a strong possibility.
  • Thanks to ObamaCare, insurance premiums will increase in most states.
  • How liberals managed to turn wealthy Connecticut into just another broke Blue State.
  • Obama’s Nixonian scandals just keep churning.
  • The Black Hole in China’s shadow banks
  • Washington Post to be sold to Jeff Bezos. But he wasn’t stupid enough to take over existing pension liabilities. Bezos seems to be a liberal, but isn’t an overly active donor for a billionaire.
  • “Coming this fall on Cinemax: Leathers and Slutbag! They both got nailed by the same slimeball, and now they’re out for justice! Democratic politician not paying you your promised hush money? Call Leathers & Slutbag!”
  • Tawana Brawley finally starts paying for her 1987 rape hoax.
  • Liberal race-hustler Rep. Charlie Rangel takes time out of his busy schedule of defrauding the American taxpayer to suggest Tea Partiers are the “same group” who fought for segregation during the Civil Rights movement. Hey, Rep. Rangel, you know what the name of the group that fought for segregation was? The Democratic Party.
  • Attorney general Greg Abbott nails Texas Planned Parenthood for Medicaid fraud In fact, it was $4.3 million worth of fraud. More from Holly Hansen.
  • More show trails in Turkey.
  • Advocates of “green” energy cronyism seem to have found some Tea Party patsies.
  • On the differences between Austin and Texas.
  • Ace of Spades offers up an epic takedown of movie critic Andrew O’Hehir. “The man masturbates stupid and ejaculates embarrassment.”
  • And then does the same on Amanda Marcotte’s theory that men men hate sex and only use it to procreate.
  • Liberals get firebrand Twitter Gulag Defense Network founder Todd Kincannon’s Twitter account suspended. For all of two days.

  • Heh:
  • CIA Covering Up Benghazi?

    Thursday, August 1st, 2013

    This appears to be the case.

    CNN reports that there were allegedly “dozens” of CIA operatives on the ground during the Benghazi attack and the agency is doing its utmost to conceal its involvement.

    CNN’s sources say that, since January, some operatives that were involved in the agency’s mission in Libya are being polygraphed monthly to determine who, if anyone, is talking to Congress or the media. Sources describe the efforts as pure intimidation, and say there are threats to end the careers of unauthorized leakers.

    This makes Benghazi an ever bigger scandal than we thought, with a government agency actively undermining legitimate congressional oversight in order to cover up either real crimes or its own incompetence.

    It also suggests that the CIA was carrying out one (or possibly both) of the secret (and possibly illegal) operations that been widely rumored to be the real reason behind the Benghazi coverup:

  • They were already running arms (including surface-to-air missiles) to Syrian rebel, well in advance of Obama’s public declaration, or
  • Benghazi was an extrajudicial center for “harsh interrogation methods” of the sort Obama theoretically banned, as suggested by former CIA Director David Petraeus’ former mistress Paula Broadwell.
  • Either way, Obama lied, and Americans died to cover up Obama’s lies, and now even more people are being forced to lie, or at least refrain from talking to investigators seeking the truth, in order to cover up the coverup.

    LinkSwarm for June 28, 2013

    Friday, June 28th, 2013

    It’s supposed to hit a 106° in Austin today. Sadly, not all of these links will help you keep your cool…

  • 12 different IRS offices targeted conservatives.
  • Over 1,100 patients were starved to death at NHS hospitals in the UK. Funny, I don’t remember that being mentioned in the Olympic tribute to how awesome NHS is…
  • Marco Rubio aide: We need illegal alien amnesty because American workers suck.
  • Blue collar Americans having trouble finding jobs. I’m sure that has nothing to do with our ruling political elite’s decision to allow unlimited illegal immigration of unskilled workers…
  • Every Republican voting for amnesty better get ready for a primary challenge.
  • Obama camapign workers convicted of voter fraud in Indiana. This was for the 2008 Democratic primary, so it will likely be many years before see starting seeing convictions for the Obama campaign’s various 2012 voting fraud efforts…
  • Noam Chomsky attending the opening of Hezbollah’s “Death to Israel” theme park.
  • People told me that if I voted for Romney, the U.S. military would start blocking access to liberal news sources. And they were right!
  • The Atlantic says that Obama “succeeded” in Libya but is failing in Syria. If Benghazi was success, I’d hate to see what failure looks like.
  • And speaking of Benghazi, Libya just let one of the suspected attackers walk. Thank God we have Obama’s smart, sophisticated diplomacy in the Middle East…
  • Beer now unaffordable in Greece. And you thought they had riots before…
  • Second Colorado Democrat faces a recall election over gun control.
  • Magpul to give away 1,500 30-round magazines just two days before Colorado outlaws them.
  • By the way, there’s a Facebook page to show support for bringing Magpul to Texas. But most of the rumors I hear have them moving to Wyoming.
  • The Amarillo Globe-News has a message for gun manufacturers thinking of relocating to Texas: Come on down!
  • Texas executes its 500th murderer. Don’t mess with Texas. Or we will end you.
  • Speaking of ending you: Don’t try to commit armed robbery in a concealed carry state.
  • Nurse Bloomberg continues to underwrite anti-gun ads, shoot himself in the foot. (Hat tip: Alphecca.
  • In order to prove vegans aren’t a creepy cult, website seeks to out and harass lapsed vegans.
  • The Onion channels Jay Carney: “Well, Time To Go Out In Front Of A Bunch Of People And Lie To Them.”
  • The mystery of Lori Ruff, AKA Becky Sue Turner. No one know who she actually is…
  • Obama Scandals Midday Update for May 16, 2013

    Thursday, May 16th, 2013

    There’s so much information about various Obama scandals that I’m hard-pressed to keep up, but here are a few nuggets of savory scandal goodness (or rather, badness):

  • The IRS scandal is bad, and it’s nationwide, despite attempts to limit it to the Cincinnati office.
  • IRS demands came from the Washington and California offices as well.
  • And they targeted a lot more than just a handful of Tea Party groups.
  • Holly Paz, the Director of the IRS Tax-Exempt Determinations Office is an Obama donor.
  • Nine lies from Lois Lerner.

    Under a Democratic administration, the IRS was under pressure from Democratic elected officials to investigate political enemies of the Democratic party. The agency did so. Its commissioner lied to Congress about its doing so. When the inspector general’s report was about to make these abuses public, the agency staged a classic Washington Friday news rollout at a sleepy American Bar Association tax-law conference, hoping to minimize the bad publicity. Lerner lied to the public about the nature, scope, and extent of the IRS intimidation campaign.

  • Ted Cruz says Obama is lying.
  • All the scandals converge in an attempt to get Obama re-elected.
  • The scandal calls for a special prosecutor.
  • Obama and Hillary Clinton knew Benghazi was a terrorist attack and knew they were lying about it when they lied about it.
  • How Media Matters, the Praetorian Guard of the Democratic Party Media Complex, stays tax exempt through a shell game. Both 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 versions are far more obviously creatures of the Democratic Party than the NRA is for Republicans.