The Daily Gouge, Thursday, February 7th, 2013

On February 6, 2013, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Thursday, February 7th, 2013….but before we begin, we pay homage to an authentic American hero:

Chris Kyle: April 8, 1974 – February 2, 2013

In keeping with a life devoted to the service of his country….and others, he died trying to help a fellow soldier.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, it’s the ultimate “THAT Was Then; THIS is NOW!” segment, brought to you by the most deceitful, hypocritical Administration in American history….and the reports from NBC News no less!

Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans

Let’s be clear; we have no problem with whacking Islamic terrorists; it’s the rank hypocrisy and Orwellian nature of their justifications that gets us. More importantly, what’s to prevent The Dear Misleader from classifying any of US as an “imminent threat”?!?

In a related item, courtesy of Commentary Magazine, Peter Wehner reports on the realities of….

Drone Strikes, Waterboarding, and Moral Preening

On May 29, 2009, President Obama gave a speech at the National Archives in which he said the following:

Now let me be clear: We are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates. We do need to update our institutions to deal with this threat. But we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability. For reasons that I will explain, the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass.

The president went on to trumpet the fact that he banned the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, saying, “I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more.” Mr. Obama argued that (among other things) they undermine the rule of law. And during the 2008 campaign and shortly thereafter, Obama insisted that his policies would “regain America’s moral stature in the world.” This was a common Obama theme: He would act in ways that respect international law and human rights and remove the stain from America’s reputation.

Bad!

I thought of all of this in light of this report (featured above) by NBC’s Michael Isikoff. Thanks to Isikoff, we’ve learned that “a confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be ‘senior operational leaders’ of al-Qaida or ‘an associated force’ even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.”

According to the memo, “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

In addition, it states an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” But as Isikoff point out, the memo does not define “recently” or “activities.”

Good!

You can be excused if you’ve (a) missed Mr. Obama’s much-heralded due process element in all of this and (b) have a hard time reconciling Mr. Obama’s presidents-should-not-have-blanket-authority-to-do-whatever-they-wish-lectures (see the National Archives speech for more) with his Justice Department’s expansive executive powers memo.

So what do you think Senator Barack Obama would have said if President George W. Bush had pursued these policies? And how do you think the press and the political class would have reacted?

Let me suggest as well that a man who feels wholly at ease with drone strikes that have killed American citizens suspected of engaging in terrorist activities without the benefit of a trial and which have, in the process, killed hundreds of innocent people should be a tad bit more careful when it comes to lecturing about the immorality of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). Joe Scarborough, for example, argued that what Bush did with EITs is “child’s play” compared to what Obama has done.

To put things in a slightly different way: During the 2008 campaign and much of the early part of his presidency, Barack Obama obsessively argued that waterboarding all of three individuals–September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and senior al-Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri–was a violation of human rights and a grave moral offense. Here’s the thing, though: unlike Mr. Obama’s drone strikes, no American citizens, no terrorists and no innocent children have died due to waterboarding. (Hells bells, WE survived it….only after singing like a bird.) Yet the president’s press spokesman is defending Mr. Obama’s policies as “legal,” “ethical,” and “wise.”

Which leads me to two conclusions. The first is that it’s not always easy to navigate the murky waters of law, morality, and war and terrorism, at least when you’re in the White House and have an obligation to protect the country from massive harm. (After they were revealed, I had several long conversations with White House colleagues trying to sort through the morality of waterboarding and indefinite detention.)

The second is that it is true that there is a serious argument to be made that during wartime targeting terrorists, including Americans, with drones is justified. But that justification probably best not come from someone who has spent much of the last half-dozen years or so sermonizing against waterboarding, accusing those who approved such policies of trashing American ideals and shredding our civil liberties, and portraying himself as pure as the new-driven snow. Because any person who did so (particularly a President!) would be vulnerable to the charge of moral preening and moral hypocrisy.

NOT Barry!

Next up, let’s check on what’s happenin’ in the two cities with the most stringent gun laws in the nation:

Chicago Police Changing Response Plan For Some 911 Calls In Response To Soaring Murder Rate

Flash Mob Mayhem: Violent Groups Of Teens Leave NYC Businesses In Ruins

Yeah….things are really looking up….sorta like the economy.

Here’s the juice: none of this….NONE of this….has anything to do with guns or gun violence. It’s all about deflection, obfuscation and misdirection. Consider the “leaders” of the current anti-gun movement. Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly….

Yeah, Captain; she’s thinks so highly of you she wouldn’t even take your name.

….former Congresswoman (whose only claim to fame is her failure to duck) and her Asstronaut paramour; they’re out of the limelight….and miss it. Illinois, Maryland, New York; like the United States of America, they’re bankrupt….or soon to be.

Is it any surprise these are the epicenters of the latest attempt to gut the 2nd Amendment? They care about one thing, and one thing only: personal power. And they’ll sacrifice any of YOUR inalienable rights to get it and keep it. Else America might wake up to the fact their eviscerating the economy.

Since we’re on the subject of eviscerating America, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger weighs in on….

Obama’s Colossal Politics

His laws are so big there are parts no one has ever seen.

Who wouldn’t want to live in Washington? It’s a wonderful world, a place where every problem of life can be reduced to just two words. Gun control. Immigration reform. Climate control. The deficit, which of course can be solved in two words: a “balanced approach.” Things so hard haven’t been so simple since Tinker Bell taught children to fly in “Peter Pan,” also with two words—pixie dust.

Gun control stands out. After the Newtown killings in December, President Obama channeled a national gun-control law through Joe Biden. There was no surprise that he would do so. “If there’s just one life that can be saved,” Mr. Obama said Monday in Minnesota, using standard Washington risk-benefit analysis, (except when it interferes with a woman’s “right to choose”!) “then we have an obligation to try it.”

And so the president will spread gun-control across the land. But consider the discrepancy between the Washington lawgivers and the nation receiving their unitary solutions. Congress has 535 members who work inside the Capitol Building, which you may notice is shaped like a bubble. The rest of the United States consists of 313.9 million individuals spread across a 50-state land mass of more than 9.6 million square miles.

No matter. Mr. Obama’s Washington will try to write a gun law that applies in the same way everywhere for each of the nearly 314 million Americans.

Occasionally Washington looks back at what it has done. In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, which created a national background-check system and a list of people forbidden to own a gun: felons, the mentally ill, persons who committed a domestic-violence misdemeanor, drug addicts and the dishonorably discharged. A year later, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, prohibiting 19 models of semi-automatic assault weapons and limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. In other words, they did then what we intend to do again now.

The Brady Law remains in force, but the Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004. That year, the government formed a panel of specialists at the National Research Council to assess the effects of these gun-control efforts. Its conclusion was that gun-control was a whimper. It said the data on guns and violence “are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements.”

What they said next is even more pertinent: “Drawing causal inferences is always complicated and, in the behavioral and social sciences, fraught with uncertainty.” Let’s rephrase that. When serious scientists (excepting of course the Environazis.) try to solve a problem, they ask, What works? When Washington takes on a problem, it says, Why not?

“Successful Dimocratic policy”; as real as his girlfriend!

Legislative grandiosity predates the Obama presidency. But it has achieved its apotheosis in the past four years. Barack Obama’s politics aren’t just large. They’re colossal. His laws are so big there are parts of them no one has ever seen.

Here’s a Washington Post summary this week of a story on the Affordable Care Act: “Signing up an estimated 30 million uninsured Americans for coverage under the health-care law is shaping up to be, if not a bureaucratic nightmare, at the very least a daunting task.” And we’re only in the foothills of Mount ObamaCare.

At the July 2010 signing ceremony for the Dodd-Frank law’s 2,300 pages, Mr. Obama announced: “It provides certainty to everybody, from bankers to farmers to business owners to consumers.” That’s right, universal certainty. Still, the massive law’s iconic centerpiece, the Volcker Rule, doesn’t exist. And what’s the one word seen nonstop after Dodd-Frank in The Wall Street Journal? Un–certainty.

Conservatives predictably object to all this, but one has to ask: How did liberals, especially on the left and without exception, become such mute footmen for Barack Obama’s faceless conglomerate politics?

Years back, a popular notion among liberal thinkers was something called “imperial overstretch.” This was the idea that America’s far-flung foreign-policy commitments could bankrupt the country. Mr. Obama believes this, and before Chuck Hagel started talking the other day, he was supposed to explain it. In his State of the Union speech next Tuesday, Mr. Obama will say again that Washington, after Iraq and Afghanistan, needs to “invest” at home. But isn’t the federalization of pretty much everything in a diverse country like the U.S. just another exercise in imperial overstretch?

In their own lives, the men and women of the left are all about keeping things simple. Back in the ’70s, they were early adopters of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful.” Today the watchwords are “handcrafted” and “artisanal.” How about some artisanal government?

Don’t worry, we get it. This is politics, ergo the goal is to acquire and exercise colossal power, at least for the pros at the top of the Democratic food chain. Still, the evidence piles up daily that what Barack Obama is producing with his countrywide “investments” is a blob, a morass, a mess. In the 2012 presidential election, nearly 66 million people voted for Barack Obama. We’re waiting for one Democrat in Congress to express doubt in the president’s pixie dust.

Yeah….about the time Chris Christie….