“Torture” & Rhetorical One-Up-Manship

Thomas Sowell calls “childish” and “fatuous” the positions taken on “torture,” inorder to appear to be morally one-up on the other side.  Regardless of what they say, these people would actually act quite differently if their butts were at stake. According to Sowell:

There is a big difference between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the President of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are “other ways” of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that “torture” had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified “other ways” could have been used.

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

If we could fight and win wars with words, our writers and poets would man the front lines with notepads and computers, however flesh and blood heroes are still our first defense and President’s are still compelled to command soldiers and protect citizen with more than words and lofty thoughts.

Thomas Sowell like Obama speaks of Winston Churchill. Sowell notes that the reason Churchill didn’t torture prisioners of war while bombs were falling on London was that these men were ordinary soldiers captured in war and covered by the Geneva convention. They also didn’t know anything that would have kept London from being bombed. Terrorists with life-saving information is another category entirely.  Sowell concludes:

The left has long confused physical parallels with moral parallels. But when a criminal shoots at a policeman and the policeman shoots back, physical equivalence is not moral equivalence. And what American intelligence agents have done to captured terrorists is not even physical equivalence.

If we have reached the point where we cannot be bothered to think beyond rhetoric or to make moral distinctions, then we have reached the point where our own survival in an increasingly dangerous world of nuclear proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.

Read Thomas Sowell here and here.

Sykes “Limbaugh 20th hijacker” Obama Laughs

Wanda Sykes makes mean-spirited jokes (humor?) while Obama laughs at distasteful humor at the White House Correspondents Dinner on May 9th.  Sykes said she thought Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker who missed the flight on 9/11 by being high on Oxycontin. From the head shaking in audience and sounds crying fowl, amid the laughter, many in audience, other than our president, recognized the defaming comments to be verbally assaulting calumny.  People around the world witness the double standard proliferated under the guise of humor and are not fooled or laughing, Mr. President, as witnessed by the Telegraph,co,uk’s Toby Harden’s blog article: “Not Funny: Barak Obama Laughs At Wanda Sykes Joke About Wanting Rush Limbaugh Dead.” Harden makes the point:

“Imagine if a comedian “joked” that Obama was a terrorist who was guilty of treason and should be tortured and allowed to die. There would justifiably be an outcry.

But when the “joke” comes from a liberal, Obama-supporting comedienne and the target is a right-winger then the likes of Hilary Rosen and Donna Brazile are on CNN saying it’s just comedy and Limbaugh is “fair game”.

And Obama laughing when someone wishes Limbaugh dead? Hard to take from the man who promised a new era of civility and elevated debate in Washington.”

Michelle Malkin calls the White House Correspondents Dinner “the most self-absorbed night in Washington since the inaugural.”  I concur and note that it is in keeping with the ongoing revelation of gotcha politics and public defamation we have seen coming from this White House.

Cheney – Limbaugh Over Powell

Dick Cheney appearing on Face the Nation left the impression that he thought Colin Powell had left the Republican Party and gave good reasons for thinking the fair weather Powell was gone, while casting his vote for Limbaugh over Powell.

AllahPundit notes

Cheney: The GOP’s better off with Rush Limbaugh than Colin Powell

A leftie tweeted AllahPundit on Twitter, “Cheney prefers a fat white drug addict to an African-American war hero!”Allah noted, “Of course, they themselves preferred a drug user to a war hero in last year’s election, for the quite logical reason that they thought his policies were better. Funny how that’s not so logical to them in Cheney’s case.”

Motherhood Most Important Role – Daah

Seems Motherhood’s still in style and in the running for things worth doing. The future generations may keep arriving with a little luck despite Planned Parenthood.

Hot Air brings some cheer with Rasmussen Report which finds “66% say being a mother is a woman’s most important role.”

Rausmaussen Report’s polling finds “66% say being a mother is a woman’s most important role.”This Mother’s Day, two-out-of-three adults (66%) believe that being a mother is the most important role for a woman to fill. Only 17% disagree and 16% are not sure.

Gangster Government-The Strong Man Using Strong Arm

Gangster government on the prowl?

Michelle Malkin writes of the abusive treatment the hedge fund industry is receiving at the strong arm tactics of  Barack Obama. “He keeps taking their money. They keep getting publicly tongue-lashed.”

This week, AQR Capital Management LLC hedge fund manager Cliff Asness — at considerable risk to himself and his business — issued a striking manifesto responding to the president’s self-serving demagoguery and flagrant disregard for the rule of law. You can find Cliff’s essay and his other invaluable work at Stumbling on Truth.

Asness writes in this manifesto:

Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can.  They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing.  Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not.  The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views.  That’s how the system works.  If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice”, you would not be happy.

….. This is America.  We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years.  When it fails it fixes itself.  Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.

I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now.

Michelle further writes:

Asness minced no words: “The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him…Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.”

Business as usual in the Era of Hope and Change. Perhaps demonized entrepreneurs will finally learn that when the dog you feed bites your hand, you don’t roll up your sleeve and give him your arm. You get a new dog.

Is the power grab over?  I hardly think so, nor does Examiner Editorial (Washington Examiner.) writing of another in your pocket action of the President giving UAW something they never earned nor could earn for themselves, effectively ownership of Chrysler:

True, the union doesn’t get an explicit controlling majority of the board of directors, but who needs that when you’ve got the White House guaranteeing your work and the U.S. Treasury Department making sure you never have to worry about the bottom line. UAW President Ron Gettelfinger’s place in Big Labor’s Hall of Fame is now secure. He found a sugar daddy with an endless supply of cash. So UAW members and retirees can keep right on drawing those pay and benefits so excessively generous they made it impossible for the old Chrysler to compete with Toyota and Honda.

Hans Bader of OpenMarket.org writes:

Obama effectively gave ownership of Chrysler to the United Auto Workers Union (which spent millions electing Obama), rather than taxpayers (who have spent billions to bail out Chrysler) or the institutions that lent money to Chrysler based on the legal right and expectation that they would receive its assets before the UAW union would. Veteran political commentator Michael Barone also calls it “gangster government.” The UAW will also retain “lucrative” pension and health benefits, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Fr. Corapi – Notre Dame Video Message

Fr. John Corapi thanks signers to the petition at NotreDameScandal.com and urges Catholics to continue the fight for Catholic campuses. For more information on this scandal and to sign the petition visit http://www.notredamescandal.com/Signt…

“A picture is worth a thousand words.  Which thousand words will be articulated to an already morally relativistic culture by the  picture of Mr. Obama receiving such honors from a  Catholic university. Metaphorically and morally it like shooting yourself in the foot but Notre Dame lives on.” Fr. Corapi