It’s Thursday, January 31st, 2013….but before we begin, proof positive Obama LOVES shooting:

Sorry….our bad; their mutual hatred of America often causes us confusion.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in the “What’s NOT Their Fault?!?” segment….

White House: GOP responsible for contracting economy

 

The Offal Office’s professional palterer, Jay “Small Hands” Carney, went on to detail Republican responsibility for slavery, Jim Crow, breeding Bull Connor’s German Shepherds, the fall of Saigon, Pearl Harbor, the Holocaust and the sh*t in KFC that makes the bruthas impohtant….er,….impotent.  Whatever; you get the drift.

Since we’re on the subject of deliberate Dimocratic deception, Thomas Sowell offers his thoughts on why Hillary was….

Shouting Louder

 

An old-time trial lawyer once said, “When your case is weak, shout louder!”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shouted louder when asked about the Obama administration’s story last fall that the September 11th attack on the U.S. ambassador’s quarters in Benghazi was due to an anti-Islamic video that someone in the United States had put on the Internet, and thereby provoked a protest that escalated into violence.

She shouted: “We had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Students of propaganda may admire the skill with which she misdirected people’s attention. But those of us who are still old-fashioned enough to think that the truth matters cannot applaud her success.

Let’s go back to square one. After the attack on the American ambassador’s quarters in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, the Obama administration immediately blamed it on the anti-Islamic video.

Moreover, this version of what happened was not just a passing remark. It was a story that the administration kept repeating insistently. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice repeated that story on five different television talk shows on the same Sunday. President Obama himself repeated the same story at the United Nations. The man who put the anti-Islamic video on the Internet was arrested for a parole violation, creating more media coverage to keep attention on this theme.

“What difference, at this point, does it make?” Secretary Clinton now asks. What difference did it make at the time?

Obviously the Obama administration thought it made a difference, with an election coming up. Prior to the attack, the administration’s political theme was that Barack Obama had killed Osama bin Laden (with an assist from the Navy SEALs), vanquished Al Qaeda and was now in the process of putting the terrorist threat behind us. To have the attack in Benghazi be seen as a terrorist attack — and a devastating one — would have ruined this picture, with an election coming up.

The key question that remains unanswered to this day is: What speck of evidence is there that the attack in Benghazi was due to the much-discussed video or that there was ever any protest demonstration outside the ambassador’s quarters? If there is no evidence whatever, then the whole attempt to say that a protest over a video escalated into an attack was a deliberate hoax by people who knew better.

Have a glass of my Chardonnay-flavored Kool-Aid!

There is no point in the administration saying that they did not have all the facts about the attack immediately. All the facts may never be known. But the real question is: Did you have even a single fact that would substantiate your repeated claims that some video led to a protest in Benghazi that got out of hand and led to the attack?

Interestingly, Hillary Clinton herself was not featured in this campaign, even though as Secretary of State she was a key figure. Hillary was not about to create video footage that could come back to haunt her if she runs for President of the United States in 2016.

In a larger context, the Benghazi attack showed that you cannot unilaterally end the “war on terror” or the terrorists’ war on us, by declaring victory. For years, the Bush administration’s phrase “war on terror” was avoided like the plague by the Obama administration, even if that required the Fort Hood massacre to be classified as “workplace violence.” But, no matter how clever the rhetoric, reality nevertheless rears its ugly head.

Once the September 11th attack in Benghazi is seen for what it was — a highly coordinated and highly successful operation by terrorists who were said to have been vanquished — that calls into question the Obama administration’s Middle East foreign policy.

That is why it still matters.

Indeed it does.  Does anyone really believe if the Benghazi terrorists had killed 4,000 instead of 4….

….the MSM wouldn’t STILL be covering for both him….

….and her?!?

Absolutely, positively, unequivocally NO BOUT ADOUT IT!  In for a dime, in for a dollar; and the MSM went all-in for these two ages ago.

Next up, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger defines what he terms….

Obama’s Thunderdome Strategy

The president’s goal is to make Republican ideas intolerable.

 

Few are the men and women in American public life who haven’t heard Mr. Dooley’s famous aphorism: “Politics ain’t beanbag.” John Boehner, currently serving out his community service as speaker of the House, appears to have been meditating on Mr. Dooley’s cautionary wisdom. At the Ripon Society last week he said the Obama administration was trying “to annihilate the Republican Party.”

Better late than never, Speaker Boehner now sees that Barack Obama’s notion of political competition is Mad Max inside the Thunderdome: “Two men enter, one man leaves.”

Last week during the president’s second inaugural address, if one can employ that hallowed phrase to describe this speech, Mr. Obama used the occasion to defend entitlement programs by whacking his defeated presidential opponent: “They do not make us a nation of takers.”

This was the second time Mr. Obama used a traditionally elevated forum to take down his opposition. His 2010 State of the Union speech will be remembered in history for nothing other than an attack on members of the Supreme Court seated before him. Justice Samuel Alito’s whispered “Not true” would prove a prophetic comment on the Obama modus operandi.

Subsequent targets of the president’s contempt have included the members of Congress’s deficit-reduction supercommittee, the Ryan budget (“antithetical to our entire history”), repeated attacks on the “well off” and bankers, and famously a $100 million dump-truck of vilification on Mitt Romney.

When he won, the rationalization was that it was all a shrewd if brutal campaign strategy. But it kept coming. What is striking about the Obama technique is that it’s not so much criticism as something closer to political obliteration, driving his opposition out of the political arena altogether.

After the inaugural speech, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer said that Democrats don’t have “an opposition party worthy of the opportunity.” Even among the president’s supporters, one is hard put now to find anyone who doesn’t recognize that Mr. Obama’s original appeal to hope and change has given way to search and destroy.

Conventional wisdom holds that these unorthodox tactics are a mistake, that he’s going to need GOP support on immigration and such. And by now it’s conventional wisdom that when our smiling president transforms into Mr. Hyde he is merely channeling Saul Alinsky, deploying the tactics of community-organizing campaigns, the only operational world he knew before this.

The real pedigree, though, is a lot heavier than community organizing in Chicago.

Speaking last Saturday, Rep. Paul Ryan said that for Barack Obama to achieve his goals, “he needs to delegitimize the Republican Party.” Annihilate, delegitimize—it’s the same thing. The good news is that John Boehner and Paul Ryan recognize that their relationship with this White House is not as partners in anything. They  are prey.

Back in 1965, when American politics watched the emergence of the New Left movement—rebranded today as “progressives”—a famous movement philosopher said the political left should be “liberated” from tolerating the opinions of the opposition:”Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”

That efficient strategy was the work of Herbert Marcuse, the political theorist whose ideas are generally credited with creating the basis for campus speech codes. Marcuse said, “Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.” Marcuse created political correctness.

But let’s talk about Marcuse in the here and now. He also proposed the withdrawal of toleration “from groups and movements . . . which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”

Barack Obama in his “gloves-off” news conference Jan. 14: “They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research.”

Marcuse called this “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions.” That, clearly, is what President Obama—across his first term, the presidential campaign and now—has been doing to anyone who won’t line up behind his progressivism. Delegitimize their ideas and opinions.

A Marcusian world of political intolerance became a reality on U.S. campuses. With relentless pushing from the president, why couldn’t it happen in American political life? Welcome to the Thunderdome.

The original argument for the Obama presidency was that this was a new, open-minded and liberal man intent on elevating the common good. No one believes that now. This will be a second term of imposition. As he said in the inaugural: “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” That is Marcusian.

If the opposition is looking for one word to shape its role now, it would be this: Dissent.

Along with active opposition….armed if necessary.

Speaking of dissent, as Jonah Goldberg informs us, it’s exactly what The Obamao would like to stifle in response to his latest measure to minimize America:

Soldier-girl blues

The decision to allow women in combat hasn’t stifled the debate.

 

What if, during the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney had accused President Obama of wanting to let servicewomen serve in combat? After all, Obama had hinted as much in 2008. What would Obama’s response have been? My hunch is that he would have accused Romney of practicing the “politics of division” or some such and denied it.

In any case, wouldn’t an open debate have been better than putting women into combat by fiat? You’d think the folks who are always clamoring for a “national conversation” on this, that and the other thing would prefer to make a sweeping change after, you know, a national conversation.

Instead, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the change on his way out. And Panetta has been lionized even though it wasn’t really his decision to make. If the president didn’t want this to happen, it wouldn’t happen. Perhaps Obama let Panetta run with the idea, just in case it turned out to be a political fiasco.

The ChiComs must be soooo impressed!

The good news for Obama is that it hasn’t been. Absent any informed debate, polls support the idea. Indeed, the Republican Party has been shockingly restrained in even questioning what is a vastly bigger deal than the lifting of the half-ban on gays in the military — “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The mainstream media have celebrated the milestone and largely yawned at the skeptics.

Most lacking from the coverage is any attempt to explain how this will make combat units better at combat. Instead, we’re told that gender integration is necessary because without combat experience, it’s hard for women to get promoted. Lifting that glass ceiling is an understandable, even lofty desire. But what does it have to do with making the military better at fighting?

My point isn’t that women should be kept out of all combat roles. Indeed, as many supporters of the move are quick to point out, women are already getting shot at. “In our male-centric viewpoint, we want to keep women from harm’s way,” Ric Epps a former Air Force intelligence officer who teaches political science, told this newspaper. “But … modern warfare has changed. There are no true front lines; the danger is everywhere, and women have already been there in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

True enough. But does anyone believe such changes are permanent? Will we never again have front lines? Or are the generals simply fighting the last war and projecting that experience out into the future?

Or maybe they’re preparing for the next war….like in Aliens.

Heck, if we’ll never have wars between standing armies again, we can really afford to cut the defense budget. Something tells me that’s not the conclusion the Pentagon wants us to draw.

It is a common habit of many liberals and self-avowed centrists to preen about how they don’t deny science and evolution the way conservatives do. Ironically, on this issue, it is the opponents of women in combat invoking the scientific data that confirm a fairly obvious evolutionary fact: Men and women are different. For instance, at their physical peak, “the average woman has the aerobic capacity of a 50-year-old male,” notes Mackubin Thomas Owens in a powerfully empirical article in the Weekly Standard.

Another evolutionary fact is that men act different when around women. This creates challenges for unit cohesion and fighting effectiveness.

The three most common responses to such concerns are that countries such as Israel and Canada let women in combat; advances for women can’t be held hostage to sexist attitudes; there won’t be any lowering of standards, so only physically qualified women will be in combat. As to the first point, Israeli gender integration is often wildly exaggerated. And the Canadians have neither the capacity nor the need for a large standing army.

The latter arguments don’t strike me as particularly reality-based either. Sexist attitudes alone aren’t a justification for anything. But we’re not talking about misogyny here. Proof of that is the fact that the military already practices gender-norming (giving women extra points for being women) in many instances. Will there really be less now?

Obama’s decision hasn’t stifled the debate, it’s merely postponed it until the day Americans see large numbers of women coming home in body bags too.

Which will likely be accompanied by the biggest ass-kickin’ America’s suffered since the Little Bighorn.

Been there….done that.  We had the dubious distinction of welcoming the first female midshipmen to the wonders of Plebe Summer at the Naval Academy.  We were assured….repeatedly….the women would be treated in an identical fashion to the men.  And they were….right up until the moment the powers-that-be discovered they couldn’t meet the fitness standards….whereupon the standards were either lowered or eliminated.

Right up until the moment the powers-that-be (a group which incidentally included one Mike Mullen, eventual architect of America’s military decline)  determined certain women were gaining weight, ostensibly from the high-starch diet necessary to maintain the male metabolism under high stress and activity….whereupon the we witnessed the establishment of special “diet tables”, where females could graze on a veritable cornucopia of low-carb salads and other Vegan delicacies.

That these “diet tables” were separate from the rest of the Brigade, and relieved the women from the rigors and stress their male counterparts had to endure during every meal….or that such privilege was not available to a single Plebe possessed of a penis….was simple coincidence.

Here’s the juice: we’ve heard this song-and-dance before….and it’s not in America’s interest….at all.

And since we heard somebody mention things decidedly not in America’s interest, they might well have been talking about, as the WSJ reports:

Obama’s Immigration Principles

Some warning signs about his bipartisan intensions.

 

And while you’re at it, check their green cards!

President Obama has never been known for getting his hands dirty with legislative details, and he certainly didn’t with his remarks on Tuesday about immigration. Though he flew back and forth nine hours to speak in Las Vegas on the subject, he offered mostly general principles that massaged every poll-driven soft spot without many specifics.

That may be for the best, since it could mean he’ll leave the nitty-gritty to Members of Congress in both parties who know more about the subject and really want to get something done. On the other hand, the President’s remarks and the White House talking points raise a couple of warning signs about his sincerity in wanting a deal.

One problem is the lack of any mention of a guest-worker program for new migrants, especially low-skilled workers of the kind who arrive in greater numbers when economic times are good. Mr. Obama sounded good when he talked about providing more visas for high-skilled workers, and we support his call to “staple a green card” to the diplomas of foreign graduates with technical degrees from U.S. universities in engineering, mathematics and the sciences.

But the U.S. also needs more legal ways for low-skilled immigrants to enter the country—not merely to fill labor needs in the likes of agriculture and construction but also to reduce illegal immigration in the future. The biggest mistake of the 1986 Reagan reform was granting citizenship to illegals already here but then providing no legal entry path for future migrants. They came anyway, as they will again without a large and flexible guest-worker provision.

The President didn’t say he opposes such a program, but the AFL-CIO does and Mr. Obama helped to undermine a guest-worker plank when George W. Bush was pushing reform in 2007. Someone should remind Mr. Obama of the history of the Bracero program of the 1950s, which accommodated legal labor flows back and forth from Mexico for years until Big Labor lobbied Congress to kill it in the 1960s. Not coincidentally, that’s also when Mexicans began to come illegally in much greater numbers without returning home.

Another red flag is Mr. Obama’s apparent refusal to accept enforcement triggers before illegal migrants currently in the country can apply for a green card. We don’t think more border enforcement is the main reason illegal immigration is down. Mr. Obama bragged in his speech that “illegal crossings are down nearly 80% from their peak in 2000.” But that has much less to do with enforcement than with the lousy U.S. economy, especially since 2008. The biggest barrier to more illegal immigration has been Obamanomics.

Speaking of flags….!!!

However, the lack of an enforcement trigger is important politically because Republican reformers will need it to convince their conservative rank and file that the U.S. won’t be back at the same old stand five years after reform passes. If Mr. Obama wants reform to fail so he can blame Republicans, the fastest way to do it is by pressing for easy green cards for current illegals with too few strings attached.

Mr. Obama didn’t draw any nonnegotiable demands that we noticed, so perhaps in the end he’ll cede on these and other points to deal-makers on Capitol Hill. But it wouldn’t hurt if, for once in his Presidency, he tried to understand what can pass with a bipartisan coalition instead of with liberals only.

And in today’s Money Quote, the Journal offers yet another example of politics trumping science:

“….in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie issued an executive order classifying the storm as a “post-tropical cyclone” rather than a hurricane, pre-empting the scientific evaluation of the National Weather Service, which has yet to make its final determination. Whether Sandy was a hurricane or not makes a big difference in insurance payouts to individual homeowners. If a hurricane, the payouts would be much smaller. In a letter to the Weather Service, New York Sen. Charles Schumer reminded the agency that its scientific judgments could cost his constituents a lot of money.“

Please note, neither Chris nor Chuckie is the least bit concerned about the money their largesse will cost the rest of the country.

And in the Environmental Moment, former Playboy CEO and renowned climatologist Christie Hefner reveals the reason behind the soaring murder rate in Chicago (which, based on the claims of the gun-control crowd, should be the safest city on the planet):

No Christie, you said “we have this climate-change effect which is driving” the heat waves.

In any event, perhaps Professor Hefner can explain this next headline, forwarded by Bill Meisen:

15-Year-Old Girl Shot And Killed In Kenwood Neighborhood Park

 

Then again, a high of 50 degrees in January could constitute a heat wave in Chicago.

On the Lighter Side….

And in the Sports Section….

It’s Splittsville for Judd-Franchitti

 

Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti are separating after 11 years of marriage.Before their split, Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti formed one of sports’ true power couples. Judd’s spokeswoman confirmed a Tuesday report from People magazine that the 44-year-old actress and 39-year-old Scottish race car driver are ending their marriage.

The star of such films as “Double Jeopardy” and “Kiss the Girls” says in a statement that the pair will “always be family” and will continue to cherish their relationship based on love, integrity and respect.

Yeah….

As TLJ instantly observed, “Who was cheating on who?!?”

Finally, we’ll wrap things up with another sordid story ripped from the pages of The Crime Blotter, courtesy of Bill Meisen and man :

NJ Man Charged With Bow and Arrow Killing

 

Victim and Perp

A southern New Jersey man is charged with murder after authorities say he used a bow and arrow to kill another after a fistfight. Twenty-five-year-old Timothy Canfield of Berlin was charged Tuesday.

Authorities say Canfield was at his home when another resident got into a fistfight Monday night with 25-year-old Kereti Paulsen of Cape May Court House. After the fight broke up, authorities say Paulsen was outside the home and Canfield followed him with a compound bow and a quiver of arrows. They say Paulsen was shot in the stomach and died after the arrow tore through a vein in his pelvis.

Or, as London’s Daily Mail referred to the proximate cause of death, a “razor-tipped” arrow.  Yeah….undoubtedly fired from an assault bow!  Unlike The Obamao, we’re more than willing to blame….

‘Hunger Games’ has America kids hooked on archery

….Hollywood!

Magoo