Category Archives: Politics

“Master of Dis-ingenuousness” Krauthammer on Obama

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“Master of Dis-ingenuousness” says Charles Krauthammer of President Obama.  While giving Barack Obama high points in a speech that lays out just how difficult decisions are in the making, it was also evident that Obama seeks to satisfy the masses with his mouth rather than corresponding actions.

Full text of Obama speech here: No point in reading it, it’s just more window dressing.

AllahPundit summarizes it well: “We must look forward while also remembering that everything is Bush’s fault, and we must not abandon our core ideals unless doing so would make things too difficult for The One.”

Personally, I’m glad Obama at least pays lip service to the fact that these Gitmo detainees are bad guys, hard core bad guys, not people pick -up at a picnic gone bad.

Obama: “We are going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who have received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, commanded Taliban troops in battle, expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.

As I said, I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture – like other prisoners of war – must be prevented from attacking us again.

Obama still doesn’t get the inconvenient truth that these are not “like other prisoners- of- war,” covered by the Geneva Convention, these are “TERRORISTS” without rights guaranteed by our Constitution to our citizens.  By the goodness of our hearts, they are still alive; even though they are still  trying to destroy this country and we are the  people they, given a chance, still intent to kill.

Obama’s Talk Doesn’t Match His Walk

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Amy Welborn responding to Obama’s speech at Notre Dame doesn’t see a real opening here for true dialogue.  However, referring to the Catholic Church’s long  “and vibrant history of engagement with political philosophy from Augustine on,” Welborn strains to get beyond Obama’s words, catchphrases and code phrases for ambiguity (e.g.”sound science” = a dismissal of ethical considerations.) Discussion on a goal to decrease abortions, which Obama says he wants, without an openess to core Church teachings on life and recognition of the humanity of the unborn in little more than an expansion of birth control availability and continues to circumvent the moral dimension of abortion.

Here are some excerpts from her response:

Obama – and Jenkins – both emphasized dialogue. Obama said, “But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.

Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.”  I agree. And when those supporting Obama and Obama at Notre Dame stop referring to those standing in opposition as “GOP hacks,” “ultraconservative minority” and “Catholic Sharia” – and actually engaging the arguments instead – we know we’re getting somewhere.

The political realities are this, and have been forever: Self-described abortion “moderates” accuse pro-lifers of being “all or nothing” in their approach. The reality is that smaller measures to limit and regulate the abortion license are never proposed by abortion proponents, but by pro-lifers, and, further, are always opposed to the death by abortion-proponents. Have you ever heard of an parental notification law or laws requiring abortion facilities to be regulated at the same level as medical clinics being co-sponsored by a state branch of NARAL and the NRLC?

To put it bluntly – until we are ready to “dialogue” about the possibility that law might play a role in decreasing the number of abortions, as is the work that goes on in Crisis Pregnancy Centers and in front of abortion facilities on Saturday mornings, the dialogue is extremely limited. Until those who are actually working with the stated, explicit goal of discouraging women from having abortions are included in the dialogue, there is really no dialogue.

Meanwhile check out this ACLU blog to see just how ecstatic President Obama is making the ACLU. “It’s been a whirlwind, but rewarding, three months.”

“The first 100 days of the Obama administration have brought us more victories than we had in the eight years of the previous administration.”

“On his first Friday in office, President Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule, restoring U.S. funding to international organizations that use their own, non-U.S. dollars to provide, refer for, and/or advocate for safe and legal abortion in their countries.”

Welborn writes:

And one more nod to reality – here’s a subject for dialogue based on as much evidence as we can muster, rather than platitudes: how is expanded funding for abortions both in the United States and overseas contributing to the cause of “reducing the number of abortions?” If we’re dialoguing, those are the questions that must be asked.

Hot Air adds:

The perfect ironic conclusion to yesterday’s paean to tolerance and dialogue at Notre Dame: The leader of a Catholic school sneering at student protesters for practicing freedom of speech in defense of Church teachings. Rarely have liberal Catholicism and campus Orwellianism meshed more beautifully.

Quoting Trinity President Patricia McGuire, AllahPundit reports:

McGuire continued, “The religious vigilantism apparent in the Notre Dame controversy arises from organizations that have no official standing with the church, but who are successful in gaining media coverage as if they were speaking for Catholicism. . . . They have established themselves as uber-guardians of a belief system we can hardly recognize. Theirs is a narrow faith devoted almost exclusively to one issue. They defend the rights of the unborn but have no charity toward the living. They mock social justice as a liberal mythology.”

Right to Life National Awareness Day- Today!

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Update: Link-Around-Pelosi

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Wall St. Journal: Pelosi’s Self-torture

Given House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s acknowledged skill at torturing the Bush Administration in recent years, it no doubt afforded her critics some pleasure yesterday to watch her twist in the wind in front of the press over what she knew and when about the CIA’s terrorist interrogations. With mockery even from Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, Mrs. Pelosi has turned herself into a spectacle about a subject that she and fellow Democrats had themselves reduced to a spectacle of demagogic accusation and blame, repeatedly threatening to put Bush officials in the dock for “condoning torture.”……

Asked this week about Mrs. Pelosi’s variable recollections, Senator Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, responded: “I think it’s a tempest in a teapot really to say, Well, Speaker Pelosi should have known all of this, she should have stopped this, she should have done this or done that. I don’t want to make an apology for anybody, but in 2002, it wasn’t 2006, ’07, ’08 or ’09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks.”……

If Washington were still able to conduct a national-security policy fitting the world’s lone superpower, the Feinstein standard would apply to both Nancy Pelosi and the Bush officials. Instead, Congressional Democrats, unable to let go of their long Bush obsession, persist in calling for a Truth Commission, as did Ms. Pelosi herself yesterday in her prepared statement.

Michelle Malkin waxes poetic with the Pelosi haiku of called Pelosiku of Jim Treacher

HotAir: Pelosi + Haiku=Pelosiku

Real time Twitter Pelosiku

Link – Around – Pelosi

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Ashes, ashes…the truth will out Pelosi!

The Torture Debate-Continued – Charles Krauthammer

“So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions — our blindness to al-Qaeda’s plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama’s own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed “high-value information” — and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.”

The Wall St Journal Time-line-intelligence trail:

What Pelosi said she knew

  • August 2002: Justice Department authorizes waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques (EITs). The CIA uses the technique.
  • September 2002: Nancy Pelosi, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, is briefed on the techniques.
  • February 2003: A Pelosi aide attends a briefing with the new ranking member on the committee, Jane Harman. Pelosi later says that she learns after this meeting that the techniques have already been used, and that she ‘concurred’ with Harman’s letter to the CIA protesting the decision to use them.
  • December 2007: A news report quotes two officials who say Pelosi was briefed on waterboarding and raised no objections. Pelosi issues a statement confirming she was briefed on one occasion in the fall of 2002 ‘on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future.’
  • April 23, 2009: After the Obama administration releases four memos approving the use of waterboarding, Pelosi says that in September 2002, ‘We were not …told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used.’
  • May 5, 2009: Intelligence officials send lawmakers a list of 40 congressional briefings on EITs, saying lawmakers ‘will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.’ The list says Pelosi was told that some EITs had been employed, but doesn’t specify waterboarding.
  • May 8, 2009: Pelosi repeats that she was briefed on techniques that would be used in the future
  • May 14, 2009: Pelosi says she wasn’t told in September 2002 that waterboarding was being used, and says ‘the CIA was misleading Congress.’

In case you missed it and hadn’t already guessed: “Pelosi: Utterly Contemptible” – here’s Charles Krauthammer, impeccable on the subject, if reason still matters?

Nancy Pelosi Explains What She Knew About Waterboarding

In her own words, you decide!

HotAir on Ed’s Post and More : Pelosi goes nuclear on CIA over torture as Cheney’s memo request is denied:

Meanwhile, as this soap opera’s playing out, Dick Cheney’s request to declassify the two CIA memos which he claims prove that torture works has been denied. Surprise. Exit quotation: “President Obama has the legal authority to declassify the documents ‘with the wave of his hand,’ according to one expert.”

Update: I want to highlight this bit from Ed’s post because it really is the million-dollar question:

And if the CIA really had lied to her in the briefings, why didn’t Pelosi start out with that explanation? In fact, why didn’t she mention that in 2005 when both the EITs and the briefings were made public? Coming four years later, this explanation lacks any kind of credibility.

The killer quote from today’s presser is “they mislead us all the time,” a reference to the CIA’s bad intel on Iraq’s WMD. If there really is a pattern of deception going on, why would she wait until there’s a Democrat in the White House to complain when she could have pinned the whole thing on Bush by screaming about it earlier?

New Majority: Former CIA Sources Respond to Pelosi: Congress Knew Everything