It’s Friday, December 12th, 2014…but before we begin, Happy Birthday wishes go out to our youngest son Travis:
Git ‘er dun! This is one apple that didn’t fall far from the tree! Arthur, he’s all yours!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, in case you missed it, courtesy of Balls Cotton and his friend Mike, the Cliff Notes version of the news…every single day…for the next 769 days:
Hamas is attacking…Israel is defending…Russia is invading…the Middle East is smoldering…Boko Haram is massacring…ISIS is marching…Iran and N Korea are threatening…American cities are crumbling…our southern border is dissolving…our debt is skyrocketing…Americans are hurting…our enemies are laughing…Obama is fundraising.
Either that or he’s playing golf!
Next, courtesy of the WSJ, Peggy Noonan completely misses the mark with a sanctimonious lecture regarding…
No, Peggy; Americans agree torture is wrong. What Americans don’t agree on, and what we vehemently dispute in the strongest terms, is whether this…
…in fact constitutes torture. John McCain’s politically-correct protestations notwithstanding, if it’s suitable as a harmless POW training simulation for our Military’s aircrews and special ops personnel, it’s good enough for Al Queda, particularly when innocent American lives are at stake.
And no amount of namby-pamby equivocation in the name of maintaining American virtue in the eyes of the world will convince us otherwise. Besides, does the current leadership of the Dimocratic Party really have standing…
…to cast stones at anyone else?!?
Though in Noonan’s defense, toward the end of her commentary she finally begins to make sense:
“…The most stinging critique came from Mr. Kerrey, a Democrat who served eight years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which issued the report. In his USA Today piece he slammed the report’s partisanship: “I do not need to read the report to know that the Democratic staff alone wrote it.” The Republicans refused to take part “when they determined that their counterparts started out with the premise that the CIA was guilty and then worked to prove it.” The purpose of the committee is “to stand above the fray and render balanced judgments,” but “this committee departed from that high road.”
As for not interviewing all individuals involved, the committee staff’s rationale—“that some officers were under investigation and could not be made available—is not persuasive.” Most officers were not under investigation, and those who were saw the process end in 2012.
Worse, wrote Mr. Kerrey, is the “disturbing fact” that the report “contains no recommendations. This is perhaps the most significant missed opportunity, because no one would claim the program was perfect or without its problems.” At the same time, he said, no one with real experience would claim it was completely ineffective. “Our intelligence personnel—who are once again on the front lines fighting the Islamic State—need recommended guidance from their board of governors: The U.S. Congress.”…”
Noonan concludes by noting:
“…the report was issued just as a defeated Democratic majority walked out the door, and has the look of a last, lobbed stink bomb: “See what the terrible Bush administration did? Bye now!” There is about the entire enterprise a sense of sin being expiated at someone else’s expense. The committee’s job is to oversee the CIA. If its own report is true, it didn’t do a very good job.“
In a related item, Commentary Magazine‘s Jonathan Tobin suggests Feinstein’s parting shot may well come back to haunt Hillary in 2016:
“Liberal Democrats and their media allies are having a field day. The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s use of torture has allowed the political left to go back to its favorite pastime: bashing the Bush administration and their pet demon Vice President Dick Cheney. But as good as this feels to them, Democrats should be worried about the possibility that this issue will not only carry over into the new year but become part of the left’s standard foreign-policy talking points as we head into the 2016 presidential election cycle. Though anything that allows them to relive their glory days when hatred for all things Bush was their excuse for a political platform seems enticing, it’s actually a trap. The more the torture issue is allowed to play out as a partisan fight, the more trouble it will be for Democrats in the long run…”
As Mark Levin observed in our Quote of the Day at the top of the page, “Republicans need to run on law and order, national security and securing the border.”
Here’s the juice: first and foremost, this is the basest form of political grandstanding imaginable. Feinstein and her band of Liberal turncoats are literally undermining national security in pursuit of political profit. It’s not like Feinstein’s bothered to investigate the legality of, or the intelligence underlying, her President’s drone strikes. And one thing you can say for Bush and Cheney: no innocent civilians, not to mention children, were ever collateral damage associated with a session on “the device”, as our SERE instructors so fondly referred to the waterboard.
Second, as Louis Freeh writes in his recent WSJ editorial:
“…the RDI program was not some rogue operation unilaterally launched by a Langley cabal—which is the impression that the Senate Intelligence Committee report tries to convey. Rather, the program was an initiative approved by the president, the national security adviser and the U.S. attorney general, backed by a legal opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which functions as the president’s outside counsel in such matters. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their closest advisers at the time have confirmed that they were unified behind the RDI program; they should have been interviewed by the Democratic majority in preparing the report on the CIA interrogations.
The RDI program, including the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, was fully briefed to the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees. The Senate committee’s new report does not present any evidence that would support the notion that the CIA program was carried out for years without the concurrence of the House or Senate intelligence committees, or that any of the members were shocked to learn of the program after the fact.
Facts matter, including the fact that the Senate committee’s Democratic majority failed to interview the three CIA directors and three deputy directors, or any other CIA employee for that matter, who had briefed them about the program and carried it out.
And who, inquiring minds want to know, was on the Senate intelligence committee at the time of said briefings?
Oooh…never mind!
Lastly, Feinstein’s an unabashed, hypocritical Washington hack, willing to sell her mother down the river if it buys her some political advantage, no matter how brief. Exhibit “A”: she rails against gun ownership while holding a concealed-carry permit for her personal protection she’d make unavailable to ordinary Americans.
Noonan, however, reminds us of Robert Redford’s character in Sydney Pollack’s classic Three Days of the Condor. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth watching; but not for the message Pollack sought to convey. Rather it’s notable for the realism contained in the final scene. Redford’s character is a hopelessly naive, educated idiot who’s just seen his entire CIA station slaughtered because he unwittingly uncovered a unauthorized, clandestine op to take over the Middle East oil fields. He’s confronted his superior, Cliff Robertson, about what’s unfolded; watch it through the 3:20 mark:
Talk about art imitating, or rather accurately predicting, life; truer words were never spoken, despite their fictional origin:
“Not now – then! Ask ’em when they’re running out. Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it!“
Does Noonan really think Americans felt any different in the immediate aftermath of 9/11? What about if the attack on the Twin Towers had been followed by the destruction of the John Hancock Center in Chicago…or the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco? Not “no”, but “HELL NO”! As Louis Freeh so accurately observed:
“The Intelligence Committee’s majority report fails to acknowledge the Pearl Harbor-esque state of emergency that followed the 9/11 attack.”
Consider the view from The Left: a decided, ever-increasing majority of Americans favor repeal…not modification, but repeal…of the Unaffordable Care Act; some 60% of Americans are opposed to The Obamao’s blanket amnesty for illegal aliens; and most Americans are convinced The Great Divider has widened the nation’s racial divide rather than bridged it.
If you’re a Dimocrat, what other cards do you to have to play but obfuscation, disinformation and misdirection?
All the righteous indignation about waterboarding is politically-correct Monday morning quarterbacking…and just so much noise.
Speaking of obfuscation, disinformation and misdirection, they’re the subject of Dan Henninger’s latest column in the WSJ, as he discusses the…
“…On Wednesday last week, the day of the grand jury decision in the Eric Garner case on Staten Island, hundreds of people marched through New York City’s main streets and highways, blocked bridges, invaded the crowds of parents and kids gathered for the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and spread themselves on the floor as “die-ins” amid commuters in Grand Central Terminal.
Despite the massive inconvenience, many New Yorkers, who like to think they live in a tolerant city, more or less accepted this venting. Message sent and absorbed. Whatever political course the controversial Garner case would take next, it was time for everyone to resume their lives on Thursday.
But no. One sensed where this was headed on seeing photos in the morning papers of New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, stoically accepting that his face and suit were covered with red paint—“blood” tossed by a professional anarchist. The protesters decided that immobilizing city streets wasn’t enough to make their point.
They marched into the Apple store on Fifth Avenue. They did it at the huge, crowded Macy’s on Herald Square. They entered an H&M store and blocked the escalators. Inside a Forever 21 store in Times Square, they surrounded a display taxi cab and covered it with a sign: “The system is guilty. Burn it down.” Where is it written that a city has to put up with this?
It got worse. In Berkeley, Calif., a mob protesting the grand jury decisions in the Eric Garner and Michael Brown cases broke the window of a Trader Joe ’s supermarket. They wrecked a Radio Shack store and smashed ATM machines. (Question: what does rioting and looting in Berkeley, CA have to do with a grand jury decision in Staten Island, some 42 hours and 2,905 miles east on I-80?!?)
That still wasn’t enough. This Monday, some two dozen New York City Council members went into the street in front of city hall and disrupted traffic. For the people gridlocked in their cars, taxis and delivery trucks, Councilman Andy King explained: “We have a responsibility to wake you up, and the only way people get woken up is if you disrupt their everyday normalcy.”
That evening, President Obama in an interview gave his approval. Calling violence “counterproductive,” the president nonetheless said, “Power concedes nothing without a fight, that’s true, but it’s also true that a country’s conscience has to be triggered by some inconvenience.” This, he said, was “the value of peaceful protests, activism.”
Let me rephrase that: The president of the United States is holding the door open for politics by mob rule, the invasion of private property and economic damage to store owners…”
As G. Trevor, Lord High King of All Vietors so eloquently observed Wednesday evening, it all started here…
…Zuccotti Park. But Zuccotti Park was simply a successor to the race riots of the ’60’s, when the “authorities”, particularly in Detroit, first allowed rioters, quite literally, to get away with murder based on the color of their skin. Ferguson and what followed, and what will follow, is the inevitable result.
Unfortunately for America, like the Bug in Men in Black, Obama thrives on carnage, Tiger. Thus he’s creating all the disunity, discord and disaster…
…he can in the limited time left him.
The rub is, as Keith Koffler writes in White House Dossier…
“…What liberals forget as they promulgate all these laws and regulations and taxes is that these things have to be enforced. Sometimes, rough tactics are required to enforce the law. Bringing down a 350-pound man who is resisting arrest is not easy. And now, liberals don’t like the result. Their police state, you see, requires police.
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder seem to be barely containing their outrage about Garner’s death. Actually, Holder doesn’t seem to be containing it at all, even though he’s supposed to be neutral when a grand jury makes a decision. But what hasn’t occurred to them is that the government removes our liberty at its peril. Taking freedom creates many problems, including the impetus to take even more freedom.
Eric Garner died because the police, under orders from New York’s Socialist Mayor, Bill DeBlasio, were trying to take his freedom. Maybe Obama and Holder will draw a lesson about the destruction their heavy hands can cause.
Nah.“
We’ve already expressed our opinion on the unfortunate end of Eric Garner in our last column (available above). It’s worth reminding everyone, as this video from Balls Cotton details, police work is a very, VERY demanding and dangerous job. It’s a bit like flying, in that there’s hours upon hours of boredom…punctuated by moments of sheer terror:
It’s our studied opinion DISrespect for the law is a significantly greater problem than police brutality, especially in the Black “community”. Then again, the Dimocratic desire not to offend Black voters, the facts of the matter notwithstanding, outweighs the impact of any insult or harm to law enforcement their stand in favor of anarchy may cause.
On the Lighter Side…
Finally, courtesy of Carl Polizzi, aka “The Great One”, we wrap up the week with another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and the story of…
“…If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Harvard Business School professor thinks a family-run Chinese restaurant screwed him out of $4, you’re about to find out.
(Hint: It involves invocation of the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Statute and multiple threats of legal action.)…”
Ben Edelman: truly a profile in courage. Unless of course, the restaurateur in question were “Black” rather than “Asian”; in which case Professor Edelman would have found the meal worth twice, or even three times the price on his bill.
Update: Upon news of his utter idiocy going public, this Over-Educated Idiot has admitted he’s a…
Magoo
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