Tuesday, October 30, 2012




A Case Study In Incompetence

(Or was it cowardice -- fear of offending Muslims?  Better for Americans to die?  Appeasement? -- JR)

Myriad are the failures of the Obama administration, but none is more tragic, or more frightening, or more foreboding of catastrophe than the appalling mishandling of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi.

Details continue to leak, but it’ll be hard to top the bombshell from Fox News at week’s end reporting that repeated urgent requests for military help during the attack were summarily denied — for hours.

In those hours, former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was killed after he chose to disobey an order to “stand down” — and rushed to aid his fellow Americans.

This is not explained by the “fog of war” excuse so lamely offered by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — or the “Monday-morning quarterbacking” whining of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

It’s well established that the Benghazi consulate had been denied adequate security in the days leading up to the attack. But the new report suggests an astonishing lack of competence, or maybe it was cowardice, as a US ambassador and his team were coming under a well-coordinated terrorist attack.

Jennifer Griffin, a veteran Fox News defense correspondent, reported Friday that there were two urgent requests — hours apart — for help during the attack.

Special-ops teams and air cover were readily available, and could’ve been on the scene in less than two hours. (The attack lasted for more than six hours.)

In fact, two surveillance drones were deployed — both capable of relaying real-time visuals of what was happening.  But urgent requests for help were rejected — even when Woods and two others radioed that they had a laser fixed on the terrorists who were firing mortars and called in their coordinates.

Woods and another former SEAL, Glen Doherty, were killed by a mortar shell about six hours after the initial assault began.

“My son . . . responded to the cries for help and voluntarily sacrificed his life to protect the lives of other Americans,” says his father, Charles Woods.  “This has nothing to do with politics,” he added. “This has to do with integrity and honor. My son showed moral courage.”

True enough, surprise attacks happen.  But the failure to respond — leaving an American diplomat and his security team to their fate — defies comprehension.

This, even as e-mails show the State Department and White House Situation Room knew within the first couple of hours that an al Qaeda affiliate was publicly claiming responsibility.

But how could that be?  Hadn’t al Qaeda been defanged by SEAL Team 6 when it took out Osama bin Laden — and didn’t the president have the victory laps to prove it?  Well, apparently not.

So Obama & Co. stuck with the untenable claim that the Benghazi strike wasn’t a terrorist attack at all, but a “spontaneous” mob assault prompted by that anti-Muslim video.

Indeed, says Woods, Clinton vowed to him at a White House meeting that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”  And don’t you just know, the “person . . . that did the video” is in jail, on a very dubious probation-violation charge. (So it seems the administration can follow through on some things when it chooses.)

Equally offensive was the bizarre remark at the same event by a “loud and boisterous” Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly asked Woods, “Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”  This man is a heartbeat away?

Compare that crudity with Charles Woods’ outraged dignity: “I wish that the leadership in the White House had the same level of moral courage and heroism that my son displayed.”  He wants “the person or persons who made the decision to sacrifice my son’s life to stand up” — and accept responsibility.

Not going to happen.  Not in this administration.  Acknowledging what really happened in Benghazi would mean confessing to hubris, incompetence, amateurism and deceit.  These are, sadly, Obama hallmarks.

So, what does the president have to say for himself?  “Well, we are finding out exactly what happened,” Obama told a reporter Friday.  Forty-seven days late and four lives short, sad to say.

So add cluelessness to the bill of Obama particulars — which goes a long way toward explaining the clouds of acrid smoke hanging over the entire Middle East.

As does nature, statecraft abhors a vacuum. When one develops, adventurers and advantage-takers appear in short order.

Iran continues to build its bomb; Syria burns; Turkey awaits its fate, and Egypt is looking at a Muslim Brotherhood-enforced Sharia state.  Think of it as Benghazi writ large.

Time to evict the deceiving amateurs.

SOURCE

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Obama’s False Jobs Creation Claims

President Obama has lately been touting the amazing claim that he’s created 5.2 million new jobs as President. His fantastic claim is featured in a new TV. But FactCheck.org says, not so fast. Those claims are “inflated,” to say the least.

FactCheck notes that the 5.2 million claim is accurate, such as it is. But what makes it “inflated” is that the jobs number refers only to jobs created after 2010 and does not include the 4.3 million that were lost earlier in Obama’s term.

Further, according to FactCheck, Obama’s number counts only private-sector jobs and does not include the “continuing losses” of jobs in the government sector as state and local jurisdictions find their budgets so over spent that pink slips have resulted.

FactCheck goes on to note that far from an actual gain of 5.2 million, once earlier losses are removed, Obama has in fact only realized some 967,000 jobs which includes a credit of 453,000 private-sector jobs which will be added through the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) benchmarking process.

FactCheck also slaps Obama for his website claim that Mitt Romney said he thought the end of the war in Iraq was “tragic.” Romney did not actually say this at all. What Romney actually said was that the pace of Obama’s troop withdrawal was tragic. He never said ending a war was tragic.

Here is what Romney actually said:

"The precipitous withdrawal is unfortunate. It’s more than unfortunate. I think it’s tragic. It puts at risk many of the victories that were hard-won by the men and women who have served there. I hope the risk is not realized. I hope instead that the Iraqis are able to pick up the baton, and despite the fact that we will have walked away on a too-rapid basis."

Even The New York Times has this fact correct.

These aren’t the only outright lies Obama has been repeating ad nauseum both on the campaign trail and in his TV ads. Obama continues, for instance, to claim that Mitt Romney has proposed a “$5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy.” This is, of course, an outright fantasy as Patrick Brennan reported earlier this month.

That isn’t all. Obama has issued a passel-full of lies about Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform proposals, as well.

For more, John Nolte has also explored Obama’s constant campaign trail lies about Mitt Romney.

It seems it’s been one lie after another for team Obama since the beginning.

SOURCE

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Obama Calls Mitt Romney a BSer? Now That’s Funny!



Doug Giles

You know what’s funny? In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Obama called Mitt Romney a “bullsh*tter” … that’s what’s funny.

Now, it’s not funny in a ha-ha sense but funny in a you-gotta-be-kidding-me sense of the word. Obama accusing Romney of bunkum? Talk about the putz calling the kettle black.

Obama’s entire life and rise to power have been nothing more than a Texas-sized stockyard of ripe and foul compost. This man makes Machiavelli look lame. Hussein trades so heavily in BS that the Oxford Dictionary has now included his last name as a synonym for bollocks. I also hear OJ take notes when Obama speaks.

In addition, I’ve learned from reliable sources that a Las Vegas-based energy company is at work now trying to convert Obama’s gaseous rhetoric, his scat-laced hollow promises and his abysmal jobs record into an alternative fuel source to light up the Strip.

So exactly what is this thing called “bullsh*t” of which Obama is a ninja? Well, you can call it BS, bull crap, or the nicer sounding Latin term “stercore tauri,” or simply bull, bull roar, bull-pucky, bovine scat, horse feathers, horse hockey, poppycock, cow dung, Chris Matthews, bollocks, gobbledygook, gibberish, humbug, fisk, nonsense, evening news, tall tale, pseudo-intellectualism, propaganda, fiction, lie, bunkum, spin, or truthiness.

Whatever you want to call it, BS can be defined as communications in which reality and truthfulness aren’t nearly as vital as the ability to manipulate the audience to get it to do whatever one wants done. And here’s where Obama rocks with the tofu-brained masses.

BS is essentially all skewed, spun, knowingly dubious, carefully framed, pretentious, misleading or vacuous statements. Now, “BS” does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, BS is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions. It may also merely be “filler” or nonsense that, by virtue of its style or wording, gives the impression that it actually means something:

    "In popular explanations of philosophy, the word “bullsh*t” is used to denote utterances and speech acts which do not add to the meaning of the set of sentences uttered, but which are added purely to persuade goobers of the validity or importance of other utterances.

    The accuracy of the information is irrelevant whilst “bullsh*tting.” Whether true or false, BS is the intention to distort the information or to otherwise achieve a desirable outcome, making BS a close cousin to rhetoric as Plato conceived it" (paraphrased from Harry Frankfurt’s book, On Bullsh*t).

Do you need a few examples of how Obama has piled it high, wide and deep on Americans’ noggins? You do? Check out these smelly bullet points from our innovative BSer-In-Chief from a recent email I received …

Obama’s the first President to:

    - Apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.

    - Have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.

    - Go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.

    - Preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.

    - Have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.

    - Keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.

    - Repeat the Holy Quran and tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.

    - Violate the War Powers Act.

    - Be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

    - Defy a Federal Judge’s court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.

    - Require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.

    - Spend a trillion dollars on “shovel-ready” jobs when there was no such thing as “shovel-ready” jobs.

    - Abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.

    - Bypass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.

    - Order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.

    - Demand a company hand over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.

    - Terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.

    - Arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.

    - Threaten insurance companies if they publicly speak out on the reasons for their rate increases.

    - Tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.

    - File lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).

    - Withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.

    - Fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.

    - Appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.

    - Golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office (100+ to date).

    - Hide his medical, educational and travel records.

    - Win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.

    - Go on multiple global “apology tours.”

    - Take a 17-day vacation.

And Romney’s a bullsh*tter? Please. Go sell crazy somewhere else. Even Letterman called him on it this week.

A juicy whopper missing from that list is how Obama loves the woman voter and yet strangely voted “present” (read against) in ‘99 for a bill that would protect sexual assault victims from having the details of their cases revealed publicly.

And lastly—and most ghastly—regarding how Obama has lied what’s left of his backside off to we the people comes the Benghazi massacre, which keeps growing grosser, more malevolent and insidious with each passing day.

For Barack to say Romney is a bullsh*tter in light of Obama’s own weapons-grade bullsh*t is, well … bullsh*t.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist.  It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day.  It was only to the Right of  Stalin's Communism.  The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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