It’s Tuesday, October 30th, 2012….but before we begin, we offer a picture from Hank Murphy truly worth a thousand words.  Three dedicated defenders of the Constitution, defying Hurricane Sandy, demonstrate unwavering devotion to country and comrades….

….examples which are wasted on their nominal Commander-in-Chief and his entire Administration, as Pat Caddell relates:

Any questions?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

In a break with tradition, we lead off the day our Money Quote, courtesy of Parmy Olson, Forbes.com, the WSJ and U2 frontman and anti-poverty activist Bono, who’s finally realized the importance of capitalism:

“Bono has learned much about music over more than three decades with U2. But alongside that has been a lifelong lesson in campaigning—the activist for poverty reduction in Africa spoke frankly on Friday about how his views about philanthropy had now stretched to include an appreciation for capitalism.

The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE, a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the cliches.”

“Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a bridge,” he told an audience of 200 leading technology entrepreneurs and investors at the F.ounders tech conference in Dublin. “We see it as startup money, investment in new countries. A humbling thing was to learn the role of commerce.““

We’re happy for Bono; unfortunately, as this next item from Townhall.com clearly indicates, it’s a lesson The Obamao STILL hasn’t learned:

Obama’s New Jobs Plan: Create a Secretary of Business

 

In an interview with MSNBC, the president said he wants to consolidate a number of business and trade-related agencies, creating a “one-stop shop” for oversight.

“I’ve said that I want to consolidate a whole bunch of government agencies. We should have one secretary of Business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like giving loans to SBA [the Small Business Administration] or helping companies with exports,” he said in an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.

Under the president’s original proposal, six different commerce and trade agencies, including the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Export-Import Bank, would be brought under one roof.

The president also said the SBA should be elevated to a Cabinet-level position.

Yeah….

Which is yet another reason why the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens felt compelled to compose this ode to….

Barack Obama and Other Has-Beens

Yesterday’s man of destiny is today’s peddler of spent ideas.

 

On the eve of the U.S. presidential election four years ago, educated people nearly everywhere understood that China was the country of the future, green was the energy of the future, and Barack Obama was a man of destiny. How quaint it all seems now.

In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism last week in the New York Times, reporter David Barboza identified assets worth $2.7 billion belonging to various members of the family of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, including his 90-year-old mother, a retired schoolteacher named Yang Zhiyun.

“The details of how Ms. Yang, a widow, accumulated such wealth are not known, or even if she was aware of the holdings in her name,” Mr. Barboza reports. “But it happened after her son was elevated to China’s ruling elite, first in 1998 as vice prime minister and then five years later as prime minister.”

The Times report would be interesting were it about any leading Chinese official. But Mr. Wen is in a category unto himself, having spent his political career cultivating the image of a kindly old man—”Grandpa Wen”—with a humble background, a common touch, a scientific mind and an uncorrupted soul. In March he was instrumental in firing disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai, another fabulously wealthy servant of the proletariat. The prime minister is supposed to embody the moral fiber of the Communist Party.

Perhaps he does. Perhaps he’s even the best of the bunch: In February, Bloomberg reported that “the net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress . . . rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010.” That averages out to more than $1 billion per delegate, and we’re not even talking about the senior party leadership.

It’s good to be the King!

All this is good to know as a reminder that China, so recently extolled as the very model of technocratic know-how, turns out to be a country heavily populated at the top by rent-seekers and kleptocrats. Should that be surprising? Not if you think that nothing else can come from the lucrative crossroads where politically directed capital and politically connected individuals meet.

This brings us to Al Gore.

Earlier this month the Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig reported that the former vice president’s wealth is today estimated at $100 million, up from less than $2 million when he left government service on a salary of $181,400. How did he make this kind of money? It wasn’t his share of the Nobel Peace Prize. Nor was it the book and movie proceeds from “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Instead, as Ms. Leonnig reports, “Fourteen green-tech firms in which Gore invested received or directly benefited from more than $2.5 billion in loans, grants and tax breaks, part of President Obama’s historic push to seed a U.S. renewable-energy industry with public money.”

That’s nice work if you can get it—at least if you’re on the investment-management end of the deal. But what if you’re on the worker-bee end?

The Post story mentions one of the beneficiaries of Mr. Gore’s investment acumen, Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls which won a $299 million award from the federal government in 2009 to make electric-car batteries. Here’s how that worked out:

“The company has dramatically scaled back, after executives concluded demand for electric cars was far lower than the administration forecast. The factory outfitted with stimulus funds is nearly idle, and plans to build a second plant have been postponed.”

And so to Barack Obama.

When the history of this administration is written, maybe someone will note the dissonance between the president’s hip persona and his retro ideology. Here was a man who promised a “transformative” presidency. Yet when transformation came, it amounted to a two-pronged attempt to impose, from one side, a version of European social democracy by way of ObamaCare, and from the other side a version of Chinese state-directed “capitalism” by way of the stimulus.

As a political matter it may have been Mr. Obama’s good luck that the bankruptcy of both models became obvious only after he had gotten his way legislatively on both. Yet the president’s sagging fortunes have everything to do with his buying into an ideological enthusiasm too late. In a different age, Mr. Obama would have been the guy who went out and bought an Edsel. In this age, Mr. Obama is the guy demanding that you buy an Edsel, too. That car is today called the Volt.

Mr. Obama might still squeak by. He has, in addition to incumbency and a vestige of likability, the benefit of a challenger who only found his stride very late in the campaign. But a second term will mean four years of spent ideas packaged in shopworn rhetoric, to be shoved down the national throat by a president with nothing politically to lose.

Sound appealing?

Only if you’re on the same gravy train as Al Gore!

Moving on to our continuing coverage of Benghazigate, as Joe Curl, courtesy of Balls Cotton and the Washington Times, notes….

You don’t mess with the CIA

 

You know who doesn’t like getting thrown under the bus? The CIA. You know what the CIA does when you try to throw it under the bus? They get even — quickly, quietly, and with fatal consequences.

That seems the most logical explanation for the torrent of information pouring out this week (unless Hillary Rodham Clinton — also thrown under the bus by President Obama — is scrapping any chance of ever running for president again and is simply setting the whole administration on fire, along with her legacy as secretary of state).

The main lesson from Watergate (after the no-brainer that you should never hire a guy named “Tricky Dick”) was this: The Cover-Up Is Worse Than The Crime. For some reason, Professor Obama seems not to know this crucial lesson. Or he’s just arrogant enough to say, “Well, that doesn’t apply to someone as brilliant as moi.”

Make no mistake, though: There is a massive cover-up under way in the White House. Nothing else can explain the endless contradictions over the attack that left the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans dead. The White House has already had to rewrite the entire narrative once, holding a late night conference call with reporters just before a House hearing two weeks ago in which State Department officials told a whole new tale: There was no “spontaneous” protest over some anti-Islam video posted on YouTube. Instead, there were dozens of heavily armed terrorists who poured over a 9-foot-high fence covered with barbed wire to attack America on 9/11.

Last week, Mr. Obama told another bald-faced lie when he declared at the presidential debate that he had termed the attack “terrorist” in a Rose Garden address the next day. He did no such thing; in fact, the White House and State Department took nearly two weeks to acknowledge it was a terrorist attack (all the while pushing the spontaneous protest and video canards).

This week’s deluge of contradictions, though, is far worse. Communications among top officials — including those in the White House Situation Room — suddenly appeared (thanks CIA!). The first, titled “US Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack,” said “approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well. Ambassador [J. Christopher] Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four COM [Chief of Mission/embassy] personnel are in the compound safe haven.”

The last of the released emails said: “Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack.” In case you’ve never heard of them, Ansar al-Sharia is an anti-Moamar Gaddafi group made up of former rebels from the February 17 Brigade that demands the imposition of the strict Islamic Shariah law and is willing to murder to achieve its goals — what one might otherwise call a “terrorist group.”

By week’s end, still fuming over the whole thrown-under-the-bus thing, the CIA appeared to strike again, this time by leaking more information heavily damaging to the White House — and the man in charge of the Situation Room, the president. “Sources on the ground in Benghazi” told Fox News that “an urgent request from the CIA annex for military backup during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command — who also told the CIA operators twice to ‘stand down’ rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.”

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods and two others ignored the absurd order — Americans were under attack — swooped into the consulate and evacuated those stranded there. Mr. Woods and another former Navy SEAL would die seven hours later in mortar attacks.

What’s more, the sources told Fox that “at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested backup support from a Spectre gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights.”

No help was sent, even though quick-strike teams were poised an hour away in Italy.

Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, was incensed. “Apparently even the State Department had a live stream and was aware of their calls for help,” he told a radio show. “When I heard, you know, that there’s a very good chance that the White House as well as other members of the military knew what was going on and obviously someone had to say, don’t go rescue them. Because every person in the military — their first response [would be], ‘We’re going to go rescue them.’ We need to find out who it was that gave that command — do not rescue them.”

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, getting rolled by the CIA, looked the fool with his lame excuses, saying they didn’t have enough “real-time information” to send military forces to respond. “The basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on.” Wasn’t there a live stream in the Situation Room? He called criticism “Monday morning quarterbacking.”

But the CIA wasn’t finished with him or the White House. In one last flourish at week’s end, CIA spokesman Jennifer Youngblood said, “We can say with confidence that the agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi. Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

Game, set, match. The White House sought to divert blame, set up fantastical red herrings like spontaneous protesters (armed with mortars and RPGs!?) and anti-Islam videos posted on YouTube. But the CIA doesn’t like taking the fall for mistakes by the president and his top aides, and they get even quickly, quietly, and with fatal consequences.

Fatal?  Only time will tell, particularly when the MSM continues to ignore this explosive story; which as Pat Caddell said, only bespeaks the degree to which America’s once-vaunted Fourth Estate has surrendered any shred of credibility in the service of The Dear Misleader.

And while we’re commanded to forgive, like most of America….

And since we’re detailing lessons-still-to-be-learned by the Community Organizer-in-Chief, here’s another from Bill McGurn, writing at the WSJ:

The Fog of Obama’s Non-War

Seven weeks after a U.S. ambassador was murdered and there are still no answers.

 

The fog was heavy over Las Vegas that day….when fund-raising took precedence over national security!

Mitt Romney had it only half right when he attempted in the second presidential debate to score Barack Obama for his reluctance to concede that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. The real issue is not how long the president took to call the assault on the U.S. consulate an “act of terror”—but that he still has not called it an act of war.

Plainly this is no oversight. On “The Late Show with David Letterman” a week after the attack—late-night television having become our commander in chief’s preferred venue for addressing the great public issues—Mr. Letterman asked President Obama directly whether the Benghazi attack was an act of war, one that meant we were at war. Mr. Obama said “no”—and went on to say that terrorists had attacked not only the Benghazi compound but a “variety of our embassies.”

There was a reason for that addendum, and, as odd as it may seem, a logic. As anyone who has been part of a White House communications team knows, words are chosen (and un-chosen) for a reason. In President Obama’s case, calling a textbook act of war by its rightful name would undermine a foreign policy based on a single idea: He’s the man who gets us out of wars, not into them.

Scour the president’s speeches and you will find that war is either something he has ended (Iraq), is ending responsibly (Afghanistan), or is helping us to “turn the page on.” In like manner, Mr. Obama suggests that war is something from the George W. Bush era, telling crowds that a vote for Mr. Romney means going “back to a foreign policy that takes us into wars with no plan to get out.” As for the president’s surrogates who are now on television trying to answer embarrassing questions about why the help that Americans pleaded for in Benghazi never came, the solitary reference to war has been to the “fog of war.”

The point is that for all the administration’s complaints about opponents “politicizing” Benghazi (this from a White House that leaked politically helpful but nonetheless sensitive details about the raid on bin Laden), the logic of the president’s response to Benghazi has been political from the start. Libya was supposed to be the Obama success story, showing how this president achieves our goals abroad without committing American troops or treasure. However ridiculous it might have been to blame the whole thing on a YouTube video, politically the tactic was far preferable to admitting that the president who boasts about getting us out of war in Iraq and Afghanistan might have a whole new one brewing in Libya.

Now those political choices are coming back to bite him. Sooner or later (though perhaps not in time to affect the election), the conflicting stories about Benghazi that we are now hearing from key players will bring down the president’s political narrative.

Start with the Central Intelligence Agency, whose spokesman declared in an Oct. 26 statement that “no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need.” In Beltwayspeak this means: The buck stopped somewhere between the Pentagon and the White House.

At the Pentagon, meanwhile, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says that because there was not enough real-time information available about the attack, “Gen. [Carter] Ham, and Gen. [Martin] Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation.” Mr. Panetta’s problem is that a Utah congressman who visited Libya is saying that Gen. Ham told him that forces were in place to move but he never got the order. Adding to the intrigue was the announcement earlier this month that Gen. Ham will be replaced as head of the U.S. Africa Command. On Monday, Gen. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that Gen. Ham’s reassignment from the Africa command was not because of Libya. (Which answers Robin Mayer’s timely question!)

As for President Obama, just as he told Russia’s leaders that he would have more “flexibility” about missile defense after the election, he now tells the American people that he will be freer to speak about Benghazi after Nov. 6, when the results of the investigation are (conveniently) scheduled to be delivered. So long as the only questioners Mr. Obama faced before the election were late-night comics and the incurious national press corps, that might have been the end of it.

Last Friday, however, KUSA-TV reporter Kyle Clark in Denver put it to the president simply and directly in a satellite interview: “Were the Americans under attack at the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, denied requests for help during that attack? And is it fair to tell Americans that what happened is under investigation and we’ll all find out after the election?” Mr. Obama replied, but he didn’t answer the questions.

In light of Benghazi, it’s interesting to go back to 2004 and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission about the greatest failure of Republican and Democratic administrations before that fateful day. “The terrorists were at war with us,” she said, “but we were not yet at war with them.”

Eleven years after 9/11 and seven weeks after the murder of his ambassador in Benghazi on the 9/11 anniversary, President Obama has yet to heed the lesson.

We only hope and pray he never gets the time to do so.

In a related item, Mark Helprin describes what can only be described as the Barry Soetoro/Ray Mabus Titanic initiative, aka….

America’s Capsizing Naval Policy

China’s maritime power and aggressive posture is rising while the size of the U.S. Navy continues to shrink.

 

During the recent foreign policy debate, the president presumed to instruct his opponent: “Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.”

Yes, the Army’s horses have been superseded by tanks and helicopters, and its bayonets rendered mainly ceremonial by armor and long-range, automatic fire, but what, precisely, has superseded ships in the Navy? The commander in chief patronizingly shared his epiphany that the ships of today could beat the hell out of those of 1916. To which one could say, like Neil Kinnock, “I know that, Prime Minister,” and go on to add that we must configure the Navy to face not the dreadnoughts of 1916 but “things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them,” and “ships that go underwater,” and also ballistic missiles, land-based aviation, and electronic warfare.

To hold that numbers and mass in war are unnecessary is as dangerous as believing that they are sufficient. Defense contractor Norman Augustine famously observed that at the rate fighter planes are becoming complex and expensive, soon we will be able to build just one. Neither a plane nor a ship, no matter how capable, can be in more than one place at once. And if one ship that is in some ways equivalent to 100 is damaged or lost, we have lost the equivalent of 100. But, in fact, except for advances in situational awareness, missile defense, and the effect of precision-guided munitions in greatly multiplying the target coverage of carrier-launched aircraft, the Navy is significantly less capable than it was a relatively short time ago in antisubmarine warfare, mine warfare, the ability to return ships to battle, and the numbers required to accomplish the tasks of deterrence or war.

For example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomacy in the South China Sea is doomed to impotence because it consists entirely of declarations without the backing of sufficient naval potential, even now when China’s navy is not half of what it will be in a decade. China’s claims, equivalent to American expropriation of Caribbean waters all the way to the coast of Venezuela, are much like Hitler’s annexations. But we no longer have bases in the area, our supply lines are attenuated across the vastness of the Pacific, we have much more than decimated our long-range aircraft, and even with a maximum carrier surge we would have to battle at least twice as many Chinese fighters.

Not until recently would China have been so aggressive in the South China Sea, but it has a plan, which is to grow; we have a plan, which is to shrink; and you get what you pay for. To wit, China is purposefully, efficiently, and successfully modernizing its forces and often accepting reductions in favor of quality. And yet, to touch upon just a few examples, whereas 20 years ago it possessed one ballistic-missile submarine and the U.S. 34, now it has three (with two more coming) and the U.S. 14. Over the same span, China has gone from 94 to 71 submarines in total, while the U.S. has gone from 121 to 71. As our numbers decrease at a faster pace, China is also closing the gap in quality.

The effect in principal surface warships is yet more pronounced. While China has risen from 56 to 78, the U.S. has descended from 207 to 114. In addition to parities, China is successfully focusing on exactly what it needs—terminal ballistic missile guidance, superfast torpedoes and wave-skimming missiles, swarms of oceangoing missile craft, battle-picture blinding—to address American vulnerabilities, while our counters are insufficient or nonexistent.

Nor is China our only potential naval adversary, and with aircraft, surface-to-surface missiles and over-the-horizon radars, the littoral countries need not have navies to assert themselves over millions of square miles of sea. Even the Somali pirates, with only outboard motors, skiffs, RPGs, and Kalashnikovs, have taxed the maritime forces of the leading naval states.

What, then, is a relatively safe number of highly capable ships appropriate for the world’s richest country and leading naval power? Not the less than 300 at present, or the 200 to which we are headed, and not 330 or 350 either, but 600, as in the 1980s. Then, we were facing the Soviet Union; but now China, better suited as a maritime power, is rising faster than this country at present is willing to face.

The trend lines are obvious and alarming, but in addition we face a potentially explosive accelerant of which the president is probably blissfully unaware, as is perhaps even his secretary of the Navy, who—as he dutifully guts his force—travels with an entourage befitting Kublai Khan, or at least Kublai Khan Jr. That is that whereas the American Shipbuilding Association (now dissolved) counted six major yards, China has more than 100. Whenever China becomes confident of the maturation of its naval weapons systems, it can surge production and leave us as far behind as once we left the Axis and Japan. Its navy will be able to dominate the oceans and cruise in strength off our coasts, reversing roles to its pleasure and our peril—unless we attend to the Navy, in quality, numbers, and without delay.

This will demand a president who, like Reagan, will damn the political torpedoes and back a secretary of the Navy who, like John Lehman, will unashamedly and with every power of rhetoric and persistence rebuild the fleets. (Not to mention senior Navy leaders possessed of a full set!) The military balance, the poise of the international system, and the peace of the world require no less. Nor does America deserve less.

Nor can she afford less….no matter what the cost.

On the Lighter Side….

Moving on, in another sordid story ripped from pages of the Crime Blotter, this forward from Bill Meisen informs us….

Jeffco ‘Democrat Of The Year’ Stripped Of Title

 

The Jefferson County Democratic Party has stripped 66-year-old Estelle Carson of her 2012 award for Democrat of the Year following her conviction last week for stealing from a 71-year-old developmentally disabled, partially blind, wheelchair bound woman.

“Upon learning of Ms. Carson’s conviction and in consultation with other party leaders, I revoked her award,” wrote Chris Kennedy, Chairman of the Jefferson County Democratic Party. The statement was released to CBS4 Monday.

CBS4 reported last week that a Jefferson County jury convicted Carson of felony charges for identity theft and theft from an at-risk adult. Carson stole checks from the developmentally disabled woman so Carson could pay her cellphone, Internet and cable bills. The victim is on a fixed income of $596 per month, according to the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office. The victim also has cerebral palsy.

Authorities say Carson befriended the woman and then took control of her checkbook, stealing at least two checks to pay her own personal expenses.

If you think about it, Carson behaved exactly like another, better-known Dimocrat….

….only on a much smaller scale!

Finally, last but certainly not least, we’ll call it a day with this late breaking story brought to us by Balls Cotton:

Israeli jets bomb Sudan missile site in dry run for Iran attack

 

An Israel airstrike was behind the explosion last Wednesday at a Sudanese weapons factory, and that attack was a “dry run for a forthcoming attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities,” according to a weekend report in the Sunday Times of London, which also implied the seeds of the attack were planted in the 2010 alleged Mossad assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

Citing anonymous Israeli and western defense sources, the British newspaper alleged that an IAF force consisting of eight fighters, two helicopters and a refueling plane were used in the attack on the weapons factory near Khartoum. The force flew down the Red Sea, avoiding Egyptian air defense, and used electronic countermeasures to prevent detection while over Sudanese territory.

Four fighters made the bombing run, the other four were used for air cover, and the helicopters, which carried 10 commandos each, were in reserve in case a rescue operation was needed to recover a downed pilot. (Holy Iraqi Osirak nuclear facility, Batman!)

“This was a show of force, but it was only a fraction of our capability — and of what the Iranians can expect in the countdown to the spring,” an Israeli defense source was quoted as telling the Sunday Times.

Israeli officials have neither confirmed nor denied striking the site. Instead, they accused Sudan of playing a role in an Iranian-backed network of arms shipments to Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel believes Sudan is a key transit point in the circuitous route that weapons take to the Islamic militant groups in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

Like the majority of American “Independents”, it seems the Israelis have chosen to place their faith in an….alternate….deity.

Magoo