Benghazi

Whitewashing Benghazi

Were he alive today, Richard Nixon would have to doff his hat to Barack Obama. Compared with how the Obama administration has swept under the rug the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012, Nixon’s attempt to cover up the Watergate burglary was rank amateurism. To be fair, Nixon’s team of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean were not in the same league as Obama’s, which includes not only his cabinet but most of the national media and much of Congress.

Romney tripped up by his neocon platform:

Lucky for President Obama, Mitt Romney supported American intervention in Libya, too, which left him unable to raise the obvious point that there would have been no Americans in Benghazi to be killed if Obama hadn’t foolishly put them there. Having wrongly decided that America had a national security interest in helping France topple Gaddafi, Obama’s mistake was compounded by the decision to put American diplomats in a city that was known to be a safe haven for terrorists. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, knew or should have known of the security problems in Benghazi and had the responsibility to correct them. Romney wouldn’t point any of this out, and Obama certainly couldn’t admit it.

More reasons why Boehner should not be speaker:

Soon after the attacks, Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf introduced HR-36, a bill to create a House Select Committee to investigate the Benghazi attacks. Under Wolf’s bill, the special committee would have subpoena power and could force the issue of testimony and access to documents. If it did, we might yet see Obama exercise Executive Privilege just as he did in the “Fast and Furious” scandal. The bill has 177 sponsors, almost enough to pass the House today. The only problem is that House Speaker John Boehner won’t allow the bill to come to the floor. He has repeatedly blocked it from consideration. Without leaders interested in the truth, the American public will never find out, not now, not in the history books, just what happened on September 11, 2012. Nor, on present trends, will they find out why they can’t find out.

See also:

Mark Levin agrees

This seems important, but I don’t know what it means

EXCLUSIVE: FBI had human source in contact with bin Laden as far back as 1993 U.S. learned of plans to finance terror attacks

In a revelation missing from the official investigations of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI placed a human source in direct contact with Osama bin Laden in 1993 and ascertained that the al Qaeda leader was looking to finance terrorist attacks in the United States, according to court testimony in a little-noticed employment dispute case. “It was the only source I know in the bureau where we had a source right in al Qaeda, directly involved,” Edward J. Curran, a former top official in the FBI’s Los Angeles office, told the court in support of a discrimination lawsuit filed against the bureau by his former agent Bassem Youssef.

For those paying attention, Edward J. Curran was the FBI agent who was known as the Executioner during the FBI’s witch hunt inside CIA. Said witch being Robert Hanssen who was not even in the Agency but worked for the Bureau.

See here:

Revisiting the Hanssen case

Robert Hanssen: 9/11's forgotten man

MSM worries that they may lose control of their monster

Joe Biden, The Media's Secret Quayle

Hidden just below the surface of the liberal media is a barely noticed trend of patronizing contempt: Joe Biden is the Democrats' Dan Quayle, but because he is a Democrat they'll do anything to avoid treating him like they treated Dan Quayle.

Related:

How we live now: The rule of the inept experts

Mark Levin agrees

Mark Levin: We owe Richard Nixon and his family an APOLOGY…

I think we owe Richard Nixon and apology – posthumously of course. But I think we owe him an apology – and his family. Because quite frankly I think Obama, in terms of his exercise of executive power – certainly his exercise of unconstitutional power, is MUCH WORSE than Nixon ever was! That’s right I said it! And let me go further! I think Holder’s worse than Mitchell was as Attorney General.

Related:

Yes, worse than Watergate

WORSE THAN WATERGATE

Shutdown theater and Nixon’s Ghost

Obama and Nixon (UPDATED)

Nixon had to pay for his dirty tricks and cover-up

Notes on Nazism

From Norman Davies, Europe

Hitler: “National socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd ties with a democratic order”


It was the Nazis who first instituted May Day as a national festival for (German) workers.


Most Nazi leaders were unbelievers; Hitler himself was a lapsed Catholic.

Willi Munzenberg, Stalin's master propagandist, understood the motives of the Nazi storm troops:

"'Brown on the outside', he would say of the unemployed urban tough guys of the [Nazi] SA, 'red on the inside.'"

If you ever said, "I wish this spy thriller had more supernatural overtones"

Then do I have a book for you.

It really is outstanding.

The logic of "Stand Your Ground"

Dear New York Times, Self-Defense Is Not Vigilantism

“Stand your ground” is not a principle that endorses vigilantism, the quest to enforce the law unilaterally, but instead a principle that declares that public spaces do not belong to violent aggressors. This represents not the abrogation of law but rather the use of law to more justly determine the rights of aggressor and victim, granting greater rights to the victim and thus bringing the statutory law closer in line with natural law. When the state, by contrast, mandates that citizens retreat from aggression (a concept fraught with practical difficulties and dangers), then it does not limit violence, it instead empowers unlawful aggression.

Mark your calenders

Bob Lee Swagger is back!

Book description:

In this tour de force—part historical thriller, part modern adventure—from the New York Times bestselling author of I, Sniper, Bob Lee Swagger uncovers why WWII’s greatest sniper was erased from history…and why her disappearance still matters today.

Ludmilla “Mili” Petrova was once the most hunted woman on earth, having raised the fury of two of the most powerful leaders on either side of World War II: Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

But Kathy Reilly of The Washington Post doesn’t know any of that when she encounters a brief mention of Mili in an old Russian propaganda magazine, and becomes interested in the story of a legendary, beautiful female sniper who seems to have vanished from history.

Benghazi

Catherine Herridge:

Former CIA official accused of misleading lawmakers on Benghazi

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell is facing accusations from Republicans that he misled lawmakers about the Obama administration's role in crafting the bogus storyline that a protest gone awry was to blame for the deadly Benghazi attack.

Among other discrepancies, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee allege Morell insisted the talking points were sent to the White House for informational purposes, and not for their input -- but emails, later released by the administration, showed otherwise.

Stephen Hayes:

Lawmakers: CIA #2 Lied to Us About Benghazi

Three aspects of the controversy are drawing particular interest: (1) Morell’s obfuscation of his central role in rewriting the talking points, (2) Morell’s contention that the FBI rewrote the talking points, and (3) Morell’s false claim that the talking points were provided to the White House merely as a heads-up and not for coordination.

Andrew McCarthy

Obama’s ‘Blame It on The Video’ Was a Fraud for Cairo as Well as Benghazi More Proof

The “blame it on the video” fraud so carefully orchestrated by the Obama administration in connection with the Benghazi massacre on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has always rested on a premise that remains unquestioned by the mainstream media and that is itself a fraud. To wit: the Libyan violence, in which a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were murdered, was triggered by rioting at the U.S. embassy in neighboring Egypt which was unquestionably provoked by an anti-Islamic video (an obscure trailer for the more obscure film, Innocence of Muslims).

As I’ve previously recounted, “blame it on the video” was a fraud as to Egypt as well a calculated fraud set in motion by State Department officials in Cairo who began tweeting about their outrage over the video before the rioting started. At the time they did so, our government well knew both that there would be demonstrations at the embassy and that those demonstrations were being spearheaded by al Qaeda. In addition to the general animus against the United States that is its raison d’etre, the terror network and its Egyptian confederates were animated by their long-running campaign demanding that the U.S. release the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman, the master jihadist I prosecuted in the nineties and who Osama bin Laden later credited with issuing the fatwa that approved the 9/11 suicide hijackings).

There is now more evidence corroborating the fact that al Qaeda-linked jihadists, not the video, propelled the Cairo rioting just as al-Qaeda-linked jihadists, not the video, propelled the Benghazi attack.

We are left, then, with the original Watergate question: If they have nothing to hide, "Why are there so many lies?"

Great Tom Wolfe interview

The Bizarre and the Jejune

Tom Wolfe talks about his life.

Related:

The Great American Novelists

What a difference a year makes

The mark of a great editor

When magazines mattered

The problem with twitter

Tweeting's true believers run short on wisdom.

Twitter gets the brevity of aphorisms right. It doesn’t much do the wisdom.

Aphorisms may die as clichés. They weren’t born that way. The old-school tweets of Hoffer, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld hit the reader quickly. They developed glacially after careful thought. The best sound bites go down fast but take a long time to cook.

Before tweets, bumper stickers, sandwich boards, and peanut-gallery chants advertised shallow conformity. Twitter, to borrow from an ancient aphorism, is old wine in a new bottle

It’s just another case where speed kills.

Getting Russia right

When Americans look at Russia, they see what they want to see. And that's dangerous.

If you can't separate your biases from your analysis, your analyses will usually turn out to be wrong. One might argue that precisely this has been the case over the past few decades. In the 1990s, Westerners (and especially the Clinton administration) trumpeted Boris Yeltsin's success at leading Russia forward into a bright democratic future -- while ordinary Russians were experiencing an everyday existence marked by evaporating savings, rampant sleaze, chronically unpaid salaries, triumphant Chechen rebels, mafia shootouts, and patently unfair privatizations that left just seven men controlling most of the country's industrial assets. The architect of that privatization effort, Anatoly Chubais, was hailed by Washingtonians as a young, tech-savvy genius (he brought a laptop to meetings!), while most Russians saw him as the nauseating epitome of a corrupt new system that didn't even trouble to conceal its injustices.

Just one from my notebook

Jami Floyd on ABC 20/20, 28 November 2001:

Since September 11, the word ‘terrorist’ has come to mean someone who is radical, Islamic, and foreign. But many believe we have as much to fear from a home-grown group of anti-abortion crusaders.

It’s work like that which earned Floyd the Maggie Award for Outstanding Coverage of Reproductive Rights and Health Issuesfrom Planned Parenthood and a spot as Legal Contributor on AlJazeera America.

Broken immigration system

So that’s how H-1B visa fraud is done!

This is alleged H-1B visa fraud, remember. In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job. Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates....

Employers are posting jobs that don’t really exist, seeking candidates they don’t want, and paying for bogus non-ads to show there’s an IT labor shortage in America. Except of course there isn’t an IT labor shortage

HT: Steve Sailer

Good sense if only the GOP will listen

Who’s afraid of Comcast?

Instead of blocking mergers or beating concessions out of the telecom giants, let’s give them the treatment they really fear: Policies that encourage the entry of competitors, which are the bane of every monopolist.

I'd also like to see a push for a la carte pricing for cable subscribers.

Conservative anger and the Reagan legacy

Republican honor Reagan but most of them have failed to study him and his administration. This is true of both elected officials as well as conservative activists.

When we look at the issues that have provoked the grassroots’s anger with DC republicans, we find that they trace their roots back to Reagan era.

I’m not saying that it was RR’s fault. Rather, the problems were apparent in his administration and the journalistic narrative about his electoral victories. That MSM gets big stuff wrong is no surprise. That they do so to the detriment of conservatives is almost a law of nature.

The key problem is that many in the GOP believed their BS.

The dinosaur media could never figure out Reagan. Was he an “amiable dunce” dependent on advisers to govern? A simple-minded actor who needed advisers to feed him his line for the “role of a lifetime”? A dangerous right-winger who had snookered the country with the help of his campaign consultants?

The storyline changed according to the needs of the narrative. What did not change was the disparagement of Reagan’s abilities and principles, and the denial that voters really supported his programs. Equally constant was the emphasis on the importance of Reagan’s advisers to his success.

Reagan did not win because his principles resonated with a center-right nation. No, it was Mike Deaver and his media management.

Too many Republicans came to believe that. Mercenary consultants became central advisers on everything and elected officials came to see voters as easily manipulated fools. (Google “Romney, etch-a-sketch” for the nadir of this arrogance.)

Related to the Deaver fallacy was the Gergen fallacy. The two went hand-in-hand. If elections were decided by image makers and pretty pictures, then it stood to reason that the Republic had to be saved by wise DC insiders who made sure that incompetent rubes did not get elected and then try to carry out their campaign promises.

When conservatives urged that his handlers ‘let Reagan be Reagan’, they were fighting against Gergenism, the central tenet of which is that Republicans, once elected, should break faith with their supporters.

David Gergen may be out to pasture at the Kennedy School and PBS but his legacy lives on in Boehner’s insistence that the GOP rescue amnesty.

Conservatives who remember the Reagan administration may be most in need of a refresher course. Memory is fallible.

Reading David Frisk’s biography of William Rusher, I was reminded again that many conservatives opposed Reagan before the 1980 primaries and spent most of his term complaining about his administration once he went to the White House. Norman Podhoretz thought he was losing the Cold War; Richard Viguerie believed he had sold out to the Establishment.

Pundits have to have something to complain about or else they will not be able to write. Reagan had to govern and governing is a matter of compromise. The best any president can do is balance expedience and principle. Reagan did that better than most and his achievements warm the heart of every true conservative. Yet, it is worth remembering that plenty of vocal right-wingers thought he was failing when he was actually changing the world.

Turns out that being president is a lot like baseball. President’s don’t fail when they cannot implement 70% of their platform; they bat .300 and achieve greatness.

Learning from Lincoln

Outstanding post here:

Five Key Lessons On Presidents’ Day From Abraham Lincoln

If you asked the average voter to list the greatest American presidents, Lincoln, TR, and Reagan would almost certainly be the highest rated Republicans. Yet, there are plenty of right-wing cranks who are trying to make Lincoln and TR the enemy.

Is there a better way to lose elections than to set yourself in opposition to everything the voters believe?

Sometimes i wonder

I can imagine a heavily guarded corner in the FSB archives devoted to the NKVD/KGB's greatest still-secret operations. Among those files is the greatest disinformation operation in their history. Longer lasting than The Trust. An operation that managed to outlive the primary agent of influence and which to this day promotes the collectivist cause.

"Imagine," thinks Putin to himself, "there are Americans so stupid that they still rally to Ayn Rand when they set out to fight Socialism."

This explains why David Brooks writes for the New York Times and Steve Sailer does not

I'm reading David Frisk's excellent biography of William Rusher and came across this piece of advice that Rusher gave to WFB back in the 1950s:

"I recently read somewhere a little homily to the effect that if a person makes us think we're thinking, we love him; but if he he makes us think, we hate him. Take your choice-- and then make up your mind to take the consequences."

Why the Patriot-News deserves to die

As Pennsylvania considers Paycheck Protection, their editorial page editor offers us this:

The proxy fight over "Paycheck Protection" being waged by national labor unions and astrotuf groups such as FreedomWorks and the Koch Brothers-funded American Legislative Exchange Council is playing out in the state Legislature with bills in the state House and Senate.

Nice even-handed journalism there.

BTW, to the P-N only right-wing campaigns can astro-turf. Gun control groups etc. are always treated as legitimate representatives of large constituencies. Even when they are just a couple of tweeters and a letterhead paid for by billionaire Mike Bloomberg.

Again, this is for a paper in conservative central Pennsylvania. I expect language like this (and the nonthinking thinking behind it.) in an alt-weekly in some college town. It is simply bizarre to see this contempt for the core audience of a for-profit fishwrap.

Previous installments of this deathwish series:

Way-points on the path to irrelevance and oblivion

A paper too stupid to live

One more reason why the Patriot-News can't die too soon