Posts Tagged ‘Lindsey Graham’

Not Too Syrious Roundup

Friday, September 6th, 2013

Obama’s call for attacking Syria is meeting such heavy opposition that he already has a domestic quagmire on his hands getting it approved. Here’s a mini-roundup of Syria news:

  • I can’t really start quoting this Charles Krauthammer takedown of the incoherence of Obama’s Syrian policy, because there’s so much good stuff here that it will be hard to stop. OK, one quote: “There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation.”
  • There’s a word for what Obama and Kerry want in Syria: War.
  • Iran wants to attack us if we attack Syria. If this is Obama’s masterful scheme to jujitsu Iran into giving him cover to take out their nuclear program I may have to revise my opinion of him. But how likely is that?
  • Obama’s serial Syrian blunders. “The only nation contemplating joining the United States in military action is France. That’s 38 fewer allies than joined the United States after the supposed unilateralist George W. Bush, with congressional authorization, ordered troops into Iraq.”
  • Obama has changed the military’s strike plans against Syria 50 times. Does he think he’s planning the perfect Zerg Rush in Starcraft?
  • The world set a red line in Syria? Well then, let the world enforce it.
  • Democrats in congress will be dragooned into voting for war to “save the president’s hide.”
  • Was Samantha Powers really dumb enough to think that Iran would abandon Syria over chemical weapons? (Hat tip: Ace.)
  • Obama’s road to Damascus. The goal of the POTUS: “ultimately we have a transition that can bring peace and stability, not only to Syria but to the region.” Peace and stability in the Middle East. Well, nothing too naive or ambitious about that goal, is there?
  • When John Kerry says that the Syrian rebels are “mostly moderates,” he’s using the rhetorical device know as lying.
  • The New York Times has some disturbing intelligence on some of Kerry’s “moderates.”
  • Lindsey Graham continues his downward spiral into irrelevance by declaring that failure to bomb Iraq would mean an Iran-Israel war within 6 months. Honestly, I’m a lot more enthused about that possibility than us bombing involved in Syria, if only on the off-chance an Israel-Iran war might actually accomplish something.
  • As I’m not one who credits the left for, well, much of anything, really, let’s give credit where credit is due and give the anti-war types some points for consistency: Moveon.org opposes a strike against Syria.
  • George Mitchell of The Nation says no thanks as well, citing Obama and Kerry’s many Syrian lies.
  • Even Obama’s own OAF is twiddling its thumbs rather than voicing support or opposition.
  • Syria’s war spills into Lebanon.
  • Step 1: Stop the Hispanicing

    Monday, December 17th, 2012

    I’ve held off on offering up immediate judgment on the election because I’m incredibly lazy to get past the panic and knee-jerk reactions. The world hasn’t ended, Republicans are not doomed to permanent minority status, and the cause of smaller government is not lost forever. Go over that list of bright spots again. Republicans did not do as badly as they did in 1932, 1964, 2006 or 2008. And we survived those elections, just as the Democrats survived 1994, 2004, and 2010. We’ll survive this one.

    One persistent theme in a lot of recaps is how badly Republicans did among Hispanic voters, and that Republicans must immediately cave on the issue of illegal alien amnesty to have any chance of courting Hispanic votes. Though no one can dispute that Republicans need to do better among Hispanics, much of the panic over the 2012 Hispanic vote (and the resulting predictable knee-jerk push for amnesty among prominent RINOs) has been overblown, for a number of reasons:

  • First, we don’t actually know how well Republicans did among Hispanics because the AP and the networks decided not to do detailed exit polling in Texas and 18 other states, the vast majority of them red states. Thus we don’t know the true percentage of Hispanics who voted for Republicans, as states where Republicans would do better among Hispanics have been systematically excluded from the count.
  • The Hispanic vote did not cost Romney the election.
  • Romney did worse than Bush not only among Hispanics, but among several other demographic groups, most notably white voters.
  • There are several reasons to doubt liberals’ demographics are destiny theory.
  • Those who think that caving on illegal alien amnesty is the key to Republicans winning Hispanic votes are deluding themselves.
  • Indeed, it’s more likely to destroy Republican competitiveness for the foreseeable future.
  • So take a deep breath. Republicans are far better off trying to pitch the ideas of freedom and limited government to Hispanics, and running conservative Republican candidates who happen to be Hispanic like Ted Cruz, than transparent and incompetent pandering via illegal alien amnesty.

    LinkSwarm for Saturday, July 3, 2010

    Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

    A few tidbits to tide you over the Independence Day weekend:

    • Dwight over at Whipped Cream Difficulties has a very interesting post up on Maywood, California closing their police department down. Summary: It has less to do with the budget crunch than with the entire department acting like corrupt, out-of-control thugs running roughshod over innocent people. Dwight and I both though of the similar situation in the (now thankfully dissolved) township of New Rome, Ohio.
    • “I don’t know whether the Tea Party movement will die out. But I sure hope it hangs on long enough to take down Lindsey Graham.” (Yeah, this was already on Fark, with that exact headline, but since I was the submitter…)
    • Former leftist, opponent of jihad, devout atheist and relapsed smoker Christopher Hitchens has suspended his book tour to be treated for esophageal cancer. Hitchens intellectual journey from being a (mostly) far-leftist to being a (mostly) neo-conservative has been deeply gratifying to those of us on the right, and as a voice sounding the alarm against radical Islam he’s probably only second (at least in the U.S.) to Mark Steyn. (So yes, the two most powerful voices against jihad in the U.S. are a Brit and a Canadian.) As an agnostic, I have no particular stance on the metaphysical certitude of Hitchens’ atheism, but I do believe he’s underestimated the vital role religion plays as a binding agent in a free society, as those societies which made atheism a central tenant (the Soviet Union and its ilk) don’t seem to have profited by it. (To paraphrase the late Octavia Butler, “I don’t believe in God, but the people growing up today don’t seem to believe in anything at all, and it’s scary.”) I always thought it would be interesting to debate Hitchens on the issue from the viewpoint of the social utility of religion rather than its metaphysical truth. BattleSwarm Blog wishes him a speedy recovery.

    (Hat tips: Whipped Cream Difficulties, the Bookfinder Insider Mailing List)

    Climategate Redux: A Look at the State of Play

    Monday, April 19th, 2010

    Between finishing my taxes and the House District 52 race, I’ve had precious little time to post updates on other issues, but despite my personal lacunae interesting developments in Climategate have been bubbling right along.

    This piece in the Telegraph does a good job of covering some of the further revelations. One of the more interesting points:

    “The first report centred directly on the IPCC itself. When several of the more alarmist claims in its most recent 2007 report were revealed to be wrong and without any scientific foundation, the official response, not least from the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was to claim that everything in its report was ‘peer-reviewed’, having been confirmed by independent experts.

    “But a new study put this claim to the test. A team of 40 researchers from 12 countries, led by a Canadian analyst Donna Laframboise, checked out every one of the 18,531 scientific sources cited in the mammoth 2007 report. Astonishingly, they found that nearly a third of them – 5,587 – were not peer-reviewed at all, but came from newspaper articles, student theses, even propaganda leaflets and press releases put out by green activists and lobby groups.”

    And who would you get to provide an objective, disinterested analysis of IPCC claims? Why, obviously “chair of Falck Renewables, a firm that has wind farms across Europe, and chair of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, ‘a lobby group which argues that carbon capture could become a $1 trillion industry by 2050.'” Who else? That’s like asking G. Gordon Liddy to perform a dispassionate, objective analysis of Watergate.

    You would think that Climategate, the failure of the last “cap and trade” bill, the deep unpopularity of ObamaCare, and the continued poor jobs situation would conspire to prevent Democrats from pushing a huge, job-killing, tax-and-spend global warming bill. You would be wrong. Under the bipartisan fig-leaf of the ever more RINO-ish Lindsey Graham, Harry Reid and company are getting ready to unveil Cap-and-Trade Junior. And they plan to do it in secret, without all those messy public committee meetings. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how low congressional Democrats are willing to drive their poll numbers in order to get the government’s fingers into as many economic pies as possible before the reckoning comes in November.

    The battle over cap-and-trade, and Climategate, is far from over. If you know anyone in South Carolina, they should be ringing Graham’s phone off the hook to oppose this. Speaking of which, here’s the contact information for Graham’s offices off his official website:

    Washington Office
    290 Russell Senate Office Building
    Washington, DC 20510
    Main: (202) 224-5972

    Upstate Regional Office
    130 South Main St.
    7th Floor
    Greenville, SC 29601
    Main: (864) 250-1417

    Midlands Regional Office
    508 Hampton Street
    Suite 202
    Columbia, SC 29201
    Main: (803) 933-0112

    Pee Dee Regional Office
    McMillan Federal Building
    401 West Evans Street, Suite 226B
    Florence, SC 29501
    Main: (843) 669-1505

    Lowcountry Regional Office
    530 Johnnie Dodds Boulevard, Suite 202
    Mt. Pleasant, SC 29464
    Main: (843) 849-3887

    Piedmont Regional Office
    140 East Main Street, Suite 110
    Rock Hill, SC 29730
    Main: (803) 366-2828

    Golden Corner Regional Office
    124 Exchange Street
    Pendleton, SC 29678
    Main: (864) 646-4090

    Here’s the email form: http://lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.EmailSenatorGraham.