Tag Archives: United States

High Ground – High Rhetoric – Short Memory

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In his third press conference on his 100th day in office,  President Obama stood by his conviction that torture is wrong, that water-boarding is wrong. Basically he said it was wrong making the argument that we don’t need it.  Obama claims the high ground in protecting sworn enemies of this country from harsh procedures. “It corrodes the character of a country.” Here is the text of exchange:

OBAMA: Jake? Where’s Jake? There he is.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve said in the past that waterboarding, in your opinion, is torture. Torture is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions. Do you believe that the previous administration sanctioned torture?

OBAMA: What I’ve said ? and I will repeat ? is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. I don’t think that’s just my opinion; that’s the opinion of many who’ve examined the topic. And that’s why I put an end to these practices.

I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do, not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British ? all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.

And then the reason was that Churchill understood ? you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s ? what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

However, this same man, President Obama, supports, allows and has helped restore and implement legislation that allows the arms and legs to be severed from the bodies of  pre-born infants not only in this country but around the world. (Harsh words, harsh procedures! Saline abortions are worse than corrosive, they are caustic, for the infant.)

The pre-born children of this Nation are our future citizens.  Every fragment of their being was conceived and formed while their mothers breathed the air of American freedom and protection. Obama has in the past stood side by side with those who sanction collapsing the skulls of fully formed infants making sure they never draw their first breath.

The key to his position may be one of pragmatism rather than morality.  Has he forgotten that he indicated that the destruction of his own future grandchildren was preferable to him rather than for his own daughters to bear his grandchild in an untimely manner;  His words on the subject, “if they make a mistake. I don’t want them punished with a baby.” This is part of what Obama calls teaching “morals and values to make good decisions.” This President hasn’t a moral leg to stand on.

Amy Welborn here points to Mary DeTurris Poust of OSV who wrote in Corroding the Character of Our Nation:

“We have seen the tragic results of what happens when one life is considered less important than another. It’s unfortunate that the president can recognize that fact when it comes to terror suspects and prisoners of war but not when it comes to his own countrymen still in the womb. President Obama said in his press conference last night that he believes that the abortion decision is best left in the hands of women, who he believes struggle with what they choose to do. Well, we would hope that women struggle with the decision to end a child’s life, but the reality is that with each passing year people seem to become more and more desensitized to the plight of the unborn. Why? For the exact reasons the president stated: Over time, bad but easy choices corrode what’s best in a people.”

Obama’s First 100 Days Counter to Glendon’s Life Work

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Elizabeth Lev, daughter of Mary Ann Glendon has responded to this written by Kaitlyn Riely at Politics Daily.  Riely,speaking of Mary Ann Glendon, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, says:

“But Glendon has been trained in diplomacy. Shouldn’t being in the same place and engaging someone of an opposing view be right up her alley? Wouldn’t the better decision be to use her platform — or at least her proximity — to persuade Obama to change his views? Her diplomatic style seems to be less suited for U.S.-Vatican relations and more for U.S.-Cuba relations.”

Reponse by Elizabeth Lev, Mary Ann Glendon’s daughter:

“The Laetare Medal is the highest honor conferred on Catholics in the United States. For a Catholic, it has greater prestige than a Nobel Prize for a scientist or an Academy Award for an actor, as the award is given for career-long achievement, for “staying the course” in the words of St. Paul. It doesn’t just showcase a single discovery or film role.


To renounce it, therefore, is not the lightest of matters. Professor Glendon has spent a month thinking, consulting, and given her deep faith, praying about this decision. (This, for those of you who don’t know, means asking God to help one put aside one’s own personal concerns and act in the way that will produce the greatest good). (Kaitlyn) Riely’s dismissive “thanks, no thanks” rendering of her decision, while pithy, is reductive.

Professor Glendon was to have been honored for not only for her scholarship, but for her second career, her pro-bono work — ranging from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the great civil rights issues of the present day — namely, the defense of human life from conception to natural death. Her concerns range from the aging and dying population to the unborn to the well-being and dignity of every life, regardless of race, religion, or economic status. Her outstanding work in this field has earned her the respect of the most brilliant minds of the international community, regardless of whether they agree with her position. So again, to see her merely as “strongly anti-abortion” instead of as a tireless defender of the dignity of life, is to reveal not only a lack of understanding of the subject’s work, but also the writer’s real interest in this question.

Furthermore, during his first 100 days in office, President Obama has worked tirelessly to undermine Professor Glendon’s lifetime of work; he is funding abortion out of the bailout package and planning to suppress the protection of conscience for health care workers.

Your notion that her “training in diplomacy” might somehow ease this situation does not take into account that she has a five-minute acceptance speech and he will have a lengthy commencement speech. There is no “engaging” here. Diplomacy generally teaches that if you have a rapier and your opponent has a missile launcher, try not to engage.

That Professor Glendon “did not like that Notre Dame was claiming her speech would serve to balance the event” is again facile and simplistic. What is there to like in being the deflector screen for inviting a profoundly divisive figure to give the commencement speech? What is likeable about a Catholic University named for the most important woman in Christianity exploiting a woman who has already dedicated her life to protecting the Church’s teaching by turning her into a warm-up act for a grotesque twist on a reality show?

Finally, after 50 Catholic bishops condemned the university for its direct defiance in honoring a man in open conflict with the Church’s teaching, it is right that Professor Glendon let her silence speak louder than her five-minute allotment of words would have.
Readers might be wondering how I know all this. Well, for one I am her daughter, but more to the point, I read her letter with the careful consideration it deserves.”

Elizabeth Lev is an art historian and writer based in Rome, where all of her three children were born… more

Michelle Malkin sums up Obama’s first 100

Unarguably Founded On Christian Principles

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I needed solid footing and balance after the bombardment of an aberrant President and press. Stephen Prothero writing for USA Today says:

Now comes President Obama, who in January in his inaugural address spoke of this country as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers.” On April 6 in Turkey, Obama added that the United States “does not consider itself a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation” but “a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

It was just such that drove me in search of visual confirmation in Washington D.C.  Now home from our Nation’s capital, I feel again on the cutting edge of a clandestine warfare coming of age and to light.  Washington D.C. did indeed confirm that the United States of America was unarguably founded as a Nation established on Christian principals as document after document, monument of monument, Statesmen and heroes alike, testify to, in stone, and marble,valor and blood, recorded there for posterity, dramatically and historically.  Homecoming, however, is returning to the fray.  It is waking up each day to being unceremoniously attacked by the daily news of the madness that is Obama.

However, it not just Obama, that drives me to distraction, it’s the incessant kowtowing menagerie of his Orwellian Animal Farm. George Orwell, to his chagrin, aside from being proved right, can now see his book lived out in the American experiment.  Eric Blair’s (George Orwell’s) satire is on parade for all to see and most of the animals are oblivious to the part they are playing in the threatening demise of our Nation as a Republic” of the People, by the People and for the People.

Americans are not perfect people.  We are like all people, flawed; and, as foreseen by the Founding Fathers, we need our checks and balances to curtail our greed and self- centeredness, to keep an eye open and watch our backs as a People.  Our checks and balances are gone. Our press is the servant of the President, our Congress is the servant of our President and our people seem content to worship at his feet.  So much for balance.

Our weaknesses as individual’s who are capable of resenting one group or another within the American system are being used against us.  We are being set against imagined “masters” despite the fact that our nation is the free-est on earth. All the “animals” set free by Obama’s Hope Machine, with childish idealistic and idyllic dreams can now High Five one another in the name of justice and progress, oblivious to the new chains being forged for their piggy hands and feet.  Yes, power-hungry pigs, like Orwell’s, Napoleon, are on the prowl ready to become their new totalitarian dictators. The little happy piggies will some learn on their Animal Farm that “All Animals Are Equal  But Some Are More Equal Than Others.” Oppression, call it what you will, even “the Audacity of Hope” is no less oppression. Martin Luther Jr.’s “I have a dream.” is being replaced by Obama’s dream which it best described as, “I have a nightmare.”

Crunching the Numbers-Iraqi Lives Saved

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The Gateway Pundit has an interesting take on American success in Iraq, lived out in lives saved.  He writes in:

Bush Saved Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqis From Saddam’s Reign & Clinton’s Embargo

So how do Bush’s numbers compare to the slaughter during Saddam Hussein’s reign or the deadly embargo kept in place during the Clinton years?
Scott Thong crunched the numbers:

Saddam Hussein’s reign: From the 285 months of Saddam Hussein’s reign from 16 July 1979 to 9 April 2003, using just six of the war crime events listed by U.S. War Crimes Ambassador David J. Scheffer, a total of 865,000 Iraqis civilians died as the result of Saddam’s ethnic cleansing, political oppression and ‘arrests’. That is a rate of 3035.088 deaths per month… 1.75 times greater than Bush’s death rate. This figure does not count the deaths of non-Iraqis, nor the casualties suffered during the wars against Iran and Kuwait, nor the countless other documented human rights abuses Saddam committed.

Bill Clinton era embargo: From the 108 months of 6 August 1990 to 6 August 1999, using the United Nations estimate, a total of 1 million Iraqi civilians died as result of the sanctions. Of these, as many as 567,000 of the casualties were children. That is a rate of 9259.259 deaths per month… 5.337 times greater than Bush’s death rate. Justify that, anti-war liberal Democrats. (Clinton actually only gained the Presidency on 20 January 1993, but the sanctions also lasted past the date of the UN estimate – to 22 May 2003, while Clinton stepped down on 20 January 2001.)

Back in 1996 Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that Clinton’s policy that may have resulted in 500,000 dead Iraqi children was worth it.
In a much forgotten exchange between Lesley Stahl and Madeleine Albright on “60 Minutes” back on May 12, 1996:

Liberals Want to See Shameful Photographs

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Our President seems bent on shaming America before the world with pictures.  Not for the faint of heart, but here are the pictures that should shame the President and the world.

Priests for Life reports:

Baby Body Parts

Priests for Life has known for some time of the grisly trade in baby parts taking place in abortion facilities throughout the nation. Through the efforts of our friends at Life Dynamics, Inc., the details of this trade have come to light. You may obtain from Life Dynamics (1-800-401-6494) copies of the actual order forms used. Some of the forms request that there be no abnormalities. Many mistakenly think that abortions in later stages of pregnancy are performed only in cases of fetal abnormality.

Fetal tissue wholesalers are companies which place employees in abortion clinics to harvest tissue, limbs, organs, etc. from aborted babies. This material is then shipped to researchers working for universities, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. Although it is against federal law to sell human tissue or body parts, these organizations have devised a system to circumvent this restriction. Technically, all fetal material they harvest is “donated” to them by the clinics. However, they do pay a “site fee” to the clinics for the right to access the tissue. The tissue is then “donated” to the researchers who in turn pay the wholesalers for the cost of retrieval. Profit is realized by the wholesalers’ ability to set their own retrieval fees.

As to the harsh realities of keeping our country safe, the Gateway Pundit says Fox reports:

The release of the photos along with Obama’s decision last week to release CIA memos has federal agents feeling dispirited.
Jake Tapper reported:

Calling the ACLU push to release the photographs “prurient” and “reprehensible,” Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal, former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, tells ABC News that the Obama administration should have taken the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

“They should have fought it all the way; if they lost, they lost,” Lowenthal said. “There’s nothing to be gained from it. There’s no substantive reason why those photos have to be released.”

Lowenthal said the president’s moves in the last week have left many in the CIA dispirited, based on “the undercurrent I’ve been getting from colleagues still in the building, or colleagues who have left not that long ago.”

“We ask these people to do extremely dangerous things, things they’ve been ordered to do by legal authorities, with the understanding that they will get top cover if something goes wrong,” Lowenthal says. “They don’t believe they have that cover anymore.” Releasing the photographs “will make it much worse,” he said.

Along the same lines of disclosures that hurt our country, Michelle Malkin points to the Rasmussen report in her, “Public to White House”:

Results from the latest Rasmussen poll show a public more in tune with Dick Cheney than George Soros:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos about the harsh interrogation methods used on terrorism suspects endangers the national security of the United States. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 28% believe the release of the memos helps America’s image abroad.

Thirty-seven percent (37%) of voters now believe the U.S. legal system worries too much about protecting individual rights when national security is at stake. But 21% say the legal system is too concerned about protecting national security. Thirty-three percent (33%) say the balance between the two is about right.

This reflects a significant shift over the past couple of years. In several surveys conducted during 2008, Americans were fairly evenly divided as to whether our legal system worried too much about individual rights or too much about protecting national security…

…Forty-six percent (46%) of voters disagree with Obama’s decision to close the prison camp for terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, while 36% agree with the president’s action. Support for the decision has fallen since the president announced it in January.

Ed Morrissey says more:

Instead of the headlines being about what the Bush administration sanctioned, they became about Nancy Pelosi’s denial and then non-denial of her knowledge on waterboarding interrogations, the success of the interrogations in preventing an attack, and Obama’s lack of testicular fortitude in sticking with his original position to let sleeping dogs lie. Small wonder that he began backtracking in earnest yesterday when meeting with Congressional leaders.

Now we have confirmation that Obama planned this all along as a political attack against a man who hardly matters on the national political scene any longer – or at least he didn’t until Obama decided to pick a fight with him. Just as with his strange attack on Rush

Napolitano Apology to American Legion

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Ed Morrissey’s exclusive interview today with Commander David Rehbein of the American Legion after Janet Napolitano fills out an previous attempt at an apology to the American Legion for  the DHS report that dissed veterans linking them to Timothy McVeigh and potential homegrown terror attacks without an ounce of statistical proof.  (Actually statistics proved just the opposite of the reports implications.):

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Michell Malkin adds that Ja-No is scheduled to testify about DHS immigration enforcement policies (or rather, the lack thereof) on May 6.