Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Posts Tagged ‘Obama Scandals’
LinkSwarm for December 7, 2012
Friday, December 7th, 2012Missing Link Between the Benghazi Scandal and the Petraeus Sex Scandal
Tuesday, November 13th, 2012If, as resigned CIA Director David Petraeus’ mistress Paula Broadwell mentions in the clip below, the attack on the Benghazi consulate was an attempt to free prisoners being held for interrogation, then it adds a new dimension to the scandal, as explained by Charles Krauthammer.
If the interrogation story is true, there are at least four interlocking scandals here:
- The Obama Administration standing by watching while an American consulate was under attack for seven hours without lifting a finger to help as four Americans died.
- That same Administration lying about the cause of the attack to both congress and the American public.
- The same Administration has known about the CIA director being compromised by an extramarital affair since at least summer and did nothing about it for fear of jeopardizing Obama’s reelection campaign. The only other explanation is that everyone in the intelligence community is manifestly incompetent. (“Hey, should I tell Obama his CIA director is having an affair? Nah. He’s got that golf swing to worry about.”)
- Either the intelligence community, or else the Obama Administration itself, has been ignoring Executive Order 13491, issued January 22, 2009, which states (in part) “The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.”
I think the Administration standing by for seven hours while four Americans died without lifting a finger to help them is still the biggest scandal. Guess I’m just old-fashioned that way. Sadly, I get the impression that the last point is the one the Obama Administration was trying hardest to cover up.
But all deserve investigation.
Sexy Girls (With Bad Judgment), Sexy Guns
Monday, November 12th, 2012So it turns out that Paula Broadwell, purported mistress of (now) former CIA director David Petraeus, used to moonlight as a machine gun model:
While not my favorite of the genre, who doesn’t like a woman who can handle a firearm? (Though she’s more in the “wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers” than “jaw-dropping gorgeous” category; then again, this seems sadly common in today’s Democratic sex scandals.)
As for the video itself? Whenever a gun manufacturer starts talking about “revolutionary” designs, I start rolling my eyes. It’s an obvious PR/grant bait reel, and should be viewed as such.
Barack Obama Stands Down Throughout History
Saturday, October 27th, 2012“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
For he today that stands down with me
on Crispian’s day shall be my brother”
— King Obama V, October 24, 1415, the day before the English surrender at Agincourt
“Come and take it. No, really, come and take this cannon off our hands. It’s just cluttering up the place. We’ll just stand down while you haul it away.”
— Colonel John Henry Obama, commander of Texas forces at Gonzales, before handing over the town’s cannon to Francisco de Castaneda, October 2, 1835, ending the Texas Rebellion
TO PRESIDENT OBAMA STOP
FROM FT SUMTER STOP
UNDER BOMBARDMENT BY REBELS STOP
REQUEST PERMISSION TO COUNTERATTACK STOP
TO FT SUMTER STOP
FROM PRESIDENT OBAMA STOP
STAND DOWN STOP
STRIKE COLORS STOP
SURRENDER FORT STOP
— Telegram exchange, April 12, 1861, a month before the United States government recognized the Confederate States of America.
General George S. Patton, Commander, U.S. 3rd Army: Request permission to relieve 101st Airborne surrounded by Germans at Bastogne.
General Dwight D. Obama, Supreme Commander, Allied Forces in Europe: Attack two German armored divisions? That’s just nuts! Stand down.
— Field message exchange December 23, 1944, three weeks before the Roosevelt-Hitler Peace Treaty was signed
Gen. Douglas MacArthur: Pusan perimeter now stable. Request permission to launch Inchon landing under Operation Chromite.
President Harry Obama: There’s no way we can defeat so many red Chinese. Stand down, withdraw from Pusan, and evacuate all U.S. personnel from the Korean peninsula.
— Message exchange, September 8, 1950
Gen. William F. Garrison, Commander UNOSOM II: Two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters have crashed in central Mogadishu following raid on Aidid compound. Request permission to send rescue force in to retrieve survivors.
President William Jefferson Obama: Stand down. Our troops could never hope to survive such a hostile urban combat environment. We’ll just have to leave those men behind.
— Message exchange, October 3, 1994, three days before the American withdrawal from Somalia
Shrinkage
Saturday, October 27th, 2012Mark Steyn’s latest column looks at the Incredible Shrinking Obama presidency, contrasting two videos (“the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one”) that “bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s reelection campaign.”
Given yesterday’s revelations about Benghazi, that the besieged Americans were denied aid thrice by higher-ups in Washington, I think it’s safe to say Obama looks smaller than at any point during his presidency.
I thought I would drive that point home in graphic format:
The Obama Administration’s Response to Benghazi, In Easy-to-Understand Graphic Form
Monday, October 22nd, 2012Some devastating critiques of the Obama Administration’s non-response on American officials in Benghazi.
A U.S. ambassador is missing and his diplomatic team is desperately fighting off terrorist attacks. Our commander-in-chief and his national-security team in Washington are listening to the phone calls from the Americans under attack and watching real-time video from a drone circling overhead. Yet the U.S. military sends no aid. Why?
Snip
Our diplomats fought for seven hours without any aid from outside the country. Four Americans died while the Obama national-security team and our military passively watched and listened. The administration is being criticized for ignoring security needs before the attack and for falsely attributing the assault to a mob. But the most severe failure has gone unnoticed: namely, a failure to aid the living.
Snip
For our top leadership, with all the technological and military tools at their disposal, to have done nothing for seven hours was a joint civilian and military failure of initiative and nerve.
Obama, Biden, and Panetta met in the Oval Office at 5 p.m. We know Charlene Lamb at the State Department was watching events in real time. It seems likely Panetta was, too — and perhaps even Obama.
When something bad happens at a consulate on the other side of the world, very few nations have the technological capability to watch it in real time.
Even fewer have fighter jets and special forces within less than 500 miles — or about the distance from Boston to Washington.
Yet the commander-in-chief chose to do nothing. He chose to let the enemy determine the course of events, how long the battle would last, how many Americans would die. The only choice he made was to hold a photo-op at their coffins.
Many Obama partisans continue to downplay the attacks in Benghazi as though they were indeed a mere bump in the road of no particular importance. Therefore, I’ve decided to put the incident in a graphic form that perhaps even they can grasp:
Mark Steyn Lays Waste to the Obama Adminstration’s Libyan Lies
Saturday, October 13th, 2012Mark Steyn’s comprehensive takedown of all the Obama Administration lies and incompetence in the Benghazi terrorist assault and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens is so righteous it deserves a link of its own.
“The entire reason that this has become the political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”
Thus, Stephanie Cutter, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager, speaking on CNN about an armed attack on the 9/11 anniversary that left a U.S. consulate a smoking ruin and killed four diplomatic staff, including the first American ambassador to be murdered in a third of a century. To discuss this event is apparently to “politicize” it and to distract from the real issues the American people are concerned about. For example, Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki, speaking on board Air Force One on Thursday: “There’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he is riding on this plane.”
She’s right! The United States is the first nation in history whose democracy has evolved to the point where its leader is provided with a wide-body transatlantic jet in order to campaign on the vital issue of public funding for sock puppets.
Snip.
Obviously, Miss Cutter is right: A healthy mature democracy should spend its quadrennial election on critical issues like the Republican party’s war on puppets rather than attempting to “politicize” the debate by dragging in stuff like foreign policy, national security, the economy, and other obscure peripheral subjects.
Snip.
For most of those four weeks, the president of the United States, the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and others have persistently attributed the Benghazi debacle to an obscure YouTube video — even though they knew that the two events had nothing to do with each other by no later than the crack of dawn Eastern time on September 12.
Snip.
Secretary Clinton linked the YouTube video to the murder of her colleagues even as the four caskets lay alongside her at Andrews Air Force Base — even though she had known for days that it had nothing to do with it. It’s weird enough that politicians now give campaign speeches to returning coffins. But to conscript your “friend”’s corpse as a straight man for some third-rate electoral opportunism is surely as shriveled and worthless as “politicization” gets.
Snip.
Liberals are always going on about the evils of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” — selfish vulture capitalists like Mitt shipping jobs to cheap labor overseas just to save a few bucks. How unpatriotic can you get! So now the United States government is outsourcing embassy security to cheap Welshmen who in turn outsource it to cheaper Libyans. Diplomatic facilities are U.S. sovereign territory — no different de jure from Fifth Avenue or Mount Rushmore. So defending them is one of the core responsibilities of the state. But that’s the funny thing about Big Government: The bigger it gets, the more of life it swallows up, the worse it gets at those very few things it’s supposed to be doing. So, on the first anniversary of 9/11 in a post-revolutionary city in which Western diplomats had been steadily targeted over the previous six months, the government of the supposedly most powerful nation on earth entrusted its security to Abdulaziz Majbari, 29, and his pal, who report to some bloke back in Carmarthen, Wales.
Read the whole thing.
So What Was It Romney Said About Libya, Again?
Wednesday, October 10th, 2012So remember right after assault on our Libyan embassy in Benghazi, Mitt Romney issued a statement, then clarified those statements the next day?
Let’s roll the video, shall we?
Remember how the press jumped all over him, said it was a potentially campaign-ending gaffe?
Since then we’ve learned that:
This video timeline might help:
Watching and listening to Romney now, who do you agree with more: Mitt Romney, or reporters sounding outraged at his criticisms of the Obama Administration?
Both the Obama Administration and their lapdog media surrogates seem far more interested in defeating Obama’s political opponent than America’s Jihadest enemies, or telling the American people the truth.
Texas vs. California: Dog Days of August Edition
Monday, August 27th, 2012It’s late August, and California’s slide toward insolvency continues apace.
Obama Asserts Executive Privilege Over Fast and Furious Documents
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012Backing up Eric Holder’s stonewall of congressional investigation of Fast and Furious, today Obama asserted Executive Privilege over subpoenaed Fast and Furious documents. As Judge Napolitano noted, executive privilege only applies if the President was personally involved. That does rather suggest that Obama himself was involved in the decision to let guns walk across the Mexican border to drug cartels, doesn’t it?
I believe this cartoon by Nate Beeler of the Washington Examiner is good:
But I liked this altered version better:
I haven’t been doing much coverage of Fast and Furious, mainly because bloggers like Sipsey Street and Snowflakes in Hell/Shall Not Be Questioned were doing such good jobs moving the story forward I didn’t feel a need. But now that the Obama Administration is in full cover-up mode, well, bring the swarm.
Remember: Over 200 innocent people have died due to Fast and Furious. So when liberals tell you that “It’s not Watergate,” they’re right. It’s much worse.
And the Ted Cruz campaign emailed a reminder that Cruz was on top of the Fast and Furious scandal before anyone else in the Senate race.