April 09, 2008
Is Barack Obama a Communist?
It is reprehensible that we are this deep into a U.S. presidential election run and this question is on the table, but that is what can happen when political parties and the media anoint a candidate based upon rhetoric and marketability instead of vetting him for substance.
A blog called The Obama Report has passed along an Accuracy in Media account that cites Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis as Barack Obama's mentor:
In his books, Obama admits attending "socialist conferences" and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a "hard-core academic Marxist," which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just "Frank."
The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.
Barack Obama has been swimming in a sea of left radicalism all his life, from his communist dad to his firebrand America-hating preacher to his terrorist buddy Bill Ayers.Barack Obama is very vague about his actual politics and few have bothered asking.
So I'm asking: What are Barack Obama's politics?
Is Obama "merely" another radical leftist like another one of his mentors, Saul Alinsky?
Is he a Marxist, as would befit his continued 20-year association with a church founded on the Marxism underlying Black Liberation Theology?
Is he a socialist revolutionary with Maoist tendencies that wants to wage war against the United States like his close friend, fellow Woods Fund board member, and domestic terrorist William Ayers?
Is he a communist, like his mentor Davis, his father, his ethic-cleansing, Islamist-coddling cousin, and even his own wife Michelle Obama, who insisted just yesterday the thought that, "someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."
At this point we simply do not know where along the radical leftist continum Barack Obama's thoughts reside, because no one has ever pressed him on his beliefs or his meager record.
For the media, it might be nice to know these things before Obama sews up the Democratic nomination.
Update: Captain Ed has related thoughts on the underlying philosophy of "statism" that plagues both remaining Democratic contenders.
Show Comments »
April 08, 2008
Biden PWN3D Crocker! ...In the Community-Based Reality
For reasons rational people will never fathom, lefty bloggers and blog readers are filled with glee over, well, this:
There was once a blog called Joe Biden Is Thugged Out. (I swear this is true.) Biden just proved why. He asked Ryan Crocker, who used to be ambassador to Pakistan, whether it would be better for U.S. interests to go after Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or Al Qaeda in Iraq.Crocker, in an impossible political position -- give the correct answer and humiliate the Bush administration; give the administration's answer and look like a fool -- dodged as much as he could. Then Biden forced him down. Crocker: "I would therefore pick Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."
Biden "forced him down" how, exactly?
Clearly Ackerman, the flickering bulbs at Think Progress and other gloating liberals didn't actually hear how Crocker responded.
Let's go to the videotape:
BIDEN: Mr. Ambassador, is Al Qaeda a greater threat to US interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region?CROCKER: Mr. Chairman, al Qaeda is a strategic threat to the United States wherever it is--
BIDEN: Where is most of it? If you could take it out, you had a choice, the Lord Almighty came down and sat in the middle of the table there, and said, 'Mr. Ambassador, you can eliminate every al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or every al Qaeda personnel in Iraq, which would you pick?'
CROCKER: Well, given the progress that has been made against al Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities, the fact that it is solidly on the defensive and not in a position as far--
BIDEN: Which would you pick?
CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.
So despite the cleverly truncated quote at Think Progress (seriously, when are lefty bloggers going to tire of being set up and used as fools by these shills?) and Ackerman's own deceptive forgetfulness, what Crocker actually told Biden is that our military had severely damaged the operational capabilities of al Qaeda in Iraq (by 75-percent in the last year alone, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry) and knocked it into a defensive posture where it is far less of a threat.
How much less of a threat?
According to StrategyPage.com, Osama bin Laden admitted defeat in Iraq on Oct 22, 2007, a sentiment that Marine Colonel Richard Simcock shared contemporaneously as it related to al Qaeda's former strongholds in al Anbar in specific. Battered, tattered, and lethally-harassed by coalition soldiers at night and former Sunni Iraqi allies during the day, al Qaeda's morale in Iraq is crushed, along with most of it's capabilities.
Thanks to Iraqi and coalition efforts, Al Qaeda in Iraq is beaten, fragmented, and on the verge of a final collapse, according to the terror organization itself. With this enemy almost defeated, it is only common sense that Crocker would select the remaining al Qaeda hiding along the Afghan-Pakistani border as being the greater threat.
I guess Ackerman can pretend that Crocker's quite logical response--to advocate the targeting the terrorists that are still alive, instead of those we have already dispatched--is humiliating to the Bush administration, but outside his insular nutroots community, in a land where common sense prevails and truncated quotes are not swallowed at face value time and again, Crocker got the better of this exchange by merely pointing out that we've run out of al Qaeda in Iraq to kill.
Show Comments »
Obama: Foreign Policy Expert?
Yes, that his roughly what Barack Obama asserted during a fundraiser in San Francisco, according to the Huffington Post:
Last night at a fundraiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama took a question on what he's looking for in a running mate. "I would like somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I'm not as expert on," he said, and then he was off and running. "I think a lot of people assume that might be some sort of military thing to make me look more Commander-in-Chief-like. Ironically, this is an area--foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.""It's ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags 'I've met leaders from eighty countries'--I know what those trips are like! I've been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There's a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then--you go."
"You do that in eighty countries--you don't know those eighty countries. So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa--knowing the leaders is not important--what I know is the people. . . ."
Barack Obama lived in Indonesia from 1967 to 1971. Born in 1961, he's admitting that he brings to the table the foreign policy experience of a 6-10 year old... is that really the depth of experience that he thinks American voters want in a leader? If so, my experiences playing with G.I. Joe when I was that age qualify me to be Secretary of Defense.
As for Obama's family in "small villages in Africa" I'm not sure he wants Americans to focus very much on them.
Supporters of Barack Obama's cousin Raila Odinga were behind an ethnic cleansing campaign that killed more than 600 in Kenya in January of this year, and part of that included burning men, women, and children alive in a church. Odinga had also promised to institute harsh Sharia courts throughout the country and ban the teaching of Christianity if elected... change Kenyan Islamists can believe in.
As for the experience of his presidential opponents, Obama may have a point about fellow Democratic contender Hillary Clinton having little experience beyond exclusively political trips, but Obama's foreign experiences pale in comparison to those of John McCain, a man born in Panama who moved around the Pacific and the United States as a child as he followed his father's U.S.Navy career. He also built up an impressive travel resume on his own, some of which Obama might have heard about.
In 1982 while running for office in Arizona, McCain delivered a line on his residency in various parts of the world to an opponent that Obama may well want to remember when attempting to play up his own meager life experiences, foreign policy or otherwise:
"Listen, pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."
McCain, of course, has gone on to develop a bit more foreign policy experience since then as a representative to the House and later as a four-term Senator.
Obama? He may have watched Sesame Street in Indonesia while his Kenyan relatives learned communism in East Germany.
Not quite the same thing.
Update: Fellow N.C.-blogger Sister Toldjah has closely-related thoughts.
Show Comments »
As Sadr Collapses...
It becomes increasingly more amusing to watch the "impartial" international news media attempt to spin away unmistakable signs of progress in Iraq. The latest example of this sad phenomena is Reuters' account of Muqtada al Sadr's threat to end a ceasefire:
Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatened on Tuesday to end a truce he imposed on his militia last year, raising the prospect of worsening violence just as top U.S. officials prepare to testify on Iraq in Washington.Sadr urged his Mehdi Army to "continue your jihad and resistance" against U.S. forces, although he did not spell out if this was an explicit call for attacks on American soldiers.
His warning came a day after Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki threatened to bar Sadr's movement from political life if the anti-American cleric did not disband his militia.
Despite the more than 7-month-old ceasefire, Sadr's followers have clashed with Iraqi troops and U.S. forces in the south of the country and Baghdad in the past two weeks in the country's worst violence since the first half of 2007.
al Sadr's Madhi Army suffered hundreds of KIAs—some estimate place as a high as 1%-2% of his entire militia—in operations across southern Iraq in recent weeks. The failure of the militia and the success of Iraqi forces has encouraged top Sunni, Shia and Kurdish members of the Iraqi government to form a unified front that has demanded that al Sadr disband the Madhi Army, or run the risk of having his party being disbarred from Iraqi politics.
Sadr's threat to end the truce is the most desperate political option available to him, and one of the few options he has left. His power has been drawn largely from the threat of withdrawing the ceasefire, but if that ceasefire is withdrawn, al Sadr has few more cards to play, and the resulting combat would likely mirror last recent combat on a much larger scale, perhaps resulting in far more physical destruction to his forces.
Sadr did not win in Basra, and runs the risk of having his militia destroyed if he decides to send it into combat again against an Iraqi Army that is far more competent than al Sadr's militiamen.
Muqtada al Sadr's relevance in Iraq will be determined by the choices he makes in coming days. The only real real question is how much his relevance will be diminished.
Show Comments »
April 07, 2008
MSNBC Games McCain Speech with Irrelevant "Breaking News"
As has sadly become commonplace, Amanda at Think Progress missed another story today, even though this one slapped her right between the eyes.
Her post, McCain's Speech On Progress In Iraq Interrupted By News Of Mortars Hitting The Green Zone, notes that MSNBC interrupted a John McCain speech about progress being made in the Iraq War with the breaking news story that four mortar shells hit Baghdad's Green Zone, an unremarkable development as Sadrists and insurgents have used mortars for harassment and interdiction (H&I) fires frequently throughout the war, usually to little effect.
There were no known casualties at the time the story was reported, and there was no known targets of importance hit. What Amanda did not grasp is the utter lack of a legitimate reason for MSNBC producers to break into McCain's speech, other than to try to undermine his message.
MSNBC needs to justify this "breaking news" event by proving that they have broken into other live events on their network to cover minor Green Zone mortar attacks during the campaign season.
Somehow, I doubt they can.
Show Comments »
MCCain: Dem Positions Evidence of a "Failure of Leadership"
He would, of course, be right:
Addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars, McCain criticized Obama and Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and insisted that last year's U.S. troop buildup in Iraq brought a glimmer of "something approaching normal" there, despite a recent outbreak of heavy fighting and a U.S. death toll that has surpassed 4,000."I do not believe that anyone should make promises as a candidate for president that they cannot keep if elected," McCain told the crowd.
"To promise a withdrawal of our forces from Iraq, regardless of the calamitous consequences to the Iraqi people, our most vital interests, and the future of the Middle East, is the height of irresponsibility," he said. "It is a failure of leadership."
The Democratic position on Iraq is one of diligent ignorance and the studied avoidance of reality.
National Democrats, including both Democratic presidential hopefuls, long ago invested their individual political futures and that of their political party in the gamble that the Iraq War would be a defeat, and they then positioned themselves politically to take advance of the expected loss.
They did so with reckless disregard, and did precisely what they'd accused Republicans of doing: they "went to war" without an exit strategy of any kind at all.
Now that the war has turned for the better, al Qaeda has all but admitted defeat, and Sadr's Iranian-controlled militia is on the verge of being dissolved under a united front of Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish leaders, Democrats have no choice but to continue to advocate for defeat. They continue to do everything in their power to salvage a loss, from trying to influence the media as Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid have repeatedly done, to promising a defeat by calendar dates as Barack Obama has done time and again in campaign stops.
General Petraeus' COIN doctrine, the "surge," the Sawha "Awakening" movement, and even Prime Minister al- Maliki's poorly-planned raids into southern Iraq against Iranian-controlled militias have tilted the conflict strongly against al Qaeda and Iran. Democratic politicians find themselves in the unenviable position of having to lie to potential voters and their fellow travelers alike to retain votes and relevance, sharing a delusion that things have not gotten better in Iraq.
To give up the delusion of a static unchanging conflict, an endless stalemate that can only be changed by our loss, is to lose a key element of their community-based reality.
Both Democratic Presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to pay lip service to the virulent and vocal fringe that are convinced that the war was irrevocably lost before the battle was joined. They make promises that no responsible military or foreign policy strategist in either party or on the international stage will support, promising defeat, championing genocide, cheerleading for disaster to garner votes... without any intention of actually following through and letting such a disaster happen on their watch.
Clinton and Obama recognize the passive-aggressive bloodlust of the "progressive" fringe of their party, radicals that do not mind thousands of Iraqis being killing in a genocide, or seeing the Middle East sucked into a violent conventional regional war or nuclear arms race if they can only blame the blood-stained streets on Republicans.
Obama and Hillary follow their supporter's fickle whims. They will pander to the torches—and—pitchforks base, but as their own strategists have made clear, they will not honor the calls for genocide by apathy. They'll lie to them with a smile on their faces, and then enact the exact same policies that McCain has the political courage to vocalize publicly.
McCain rightly criticizes his opponent's positions as failures of leadership. Neither Hillary nor Obama have ever led anything of consequence before.
It is too much to expect them to display leadership now.
Show Comments »
ISM
Via the headlines at Hot Air comes a breathtaking Joe Klein entry at the TIME blog Swampland:
Pete Wehner, former chief White House propagandist for the Iraq war, has taken me to task for claiming that liberalism is more optimistic and therefore inherently more patriotic than conservatism. That takes some nerve. He would compare my statement to the constant drumbeat of right-wingnutters questioning the patriotism of those who do not support the Bush Administration's foreign policy foolishness. But I didn't do that at all. I didn't question the patriotism of conservatives: I simply argued that it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will--that is, the best work of government--will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom.In others words, it is more patriotic to be in favor of civil rights legislation than to oppose it...to be in favor of social security and medicare than to oppose them...and to hope that the better angels of our legislators--acting in concert, in compromise--will produce a universal health insurance system and an alternative energy plan that we can all be proud of.
Klein can on occasion be astute, but his grasp of the affect of government on the human element is achingly weak from someone who writes about the subject for a living. Government is never comprised of merely the best intentions or has the best work in mind. It is at best a necessary evil, and is often done with the accrual and consolidation of power the goal of lawmakers, their campaign idealism either false from the outset, or leached out of them over time as they succumb to the seductions of power.
Someone posted this Youtube video to a comment thread of one of my Pajamas Media articles several weeks ago.
I do not care for the the purposeful misspelling of Obama's name at the end, but the "ISM" cartoon that comprises the bulk of the video neatly diagnoses Klein's disease.
Government always impinges on freedom. It is government's inherent nature, and for Klein not to understand it's congenital condition is sad to behold.
Show Comments »
April 04, 2008
Rep. McHenry Calls Green Zone Security Guard "Two-bit"
Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has referred to a "two-bit security guard" in the Green Zone in Baghdad who would not let him into the gym without having the proper ID.
What a jerk.
His political opponent Lance Sigmon is capitalizing on the statement, as he should, but I think those who are claiming that McHenry belittled a soldier are probably not accurate, or are at least jumping the gun.
The Green Zone certainly has American personnel, but many are Iraqis or foreign security personnel.
Somehow, I don't think the liberals at Think Progress who have built a reputation lately of getting the facts wrong would care nearly as much if McHenry had uttered his comments to a security guard contracted through Blackwater, even though they face many of the same risks.
Update: Yep, Amanda at Think Progress screwed up again. The guard in question was not a soldier, but instead was what liberals like to refer to as a "hired killer," or as the rest of us call them, a security contractor.
Amanda either needs a break, a new fact-checker, or a new career.
Show Comments »
Dear Shrieking British Media Harpies...
The bulletproof hoodie that has so many of you up in arms today is more than likely a cynical fraud by a company that obviously knows how to play up the easily excitable U.K. press, but who doesn't have much of a chance of following through with a product that can do what they claim.
According to the company's web site:
Bladerunner have now created " The Defender Hoodie " which is BULLET PROOF throughout the main body area.This Hoodie is rugged and tough just like a normal Hoodie but this one has a removable Inner Shell that gives you Balistic Security at Level NIJ STD 0101.04
Number 1: Never trust your "Balistic Security" to a bunch of over-zealous fashion designers that can't spell "ballistic."
Number 2: There is no such thing as "bullet proof," just bullet resistant, a fact that any responsible armor designer will tell you that Bladerunner blows right past in a bit of self-promoting puffery.
Number 3: NIJ STD 0101.04 is not an armor level. It is a testing specification published by the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice to determine the classes or types of armor protection.
Type I body armor--which I suspect the "bulletproof hoodie" will be if it meets any NIJ standards at all--will only stop low-velocity ammunition, and is generally regarded as being obsolete for all practice purposes. Types IIA, II, and IIIA provide increasing resistance to penetration from handgun bullets.
Types III and IV are designed to protect against rifle rounds.
Of course, if the edgy fashion designers at Bladerunner want to put their products up for real-world testing, I can easily find some police officers and civilian shooting instructors here in the United States that would enjoy helping test these claims with common .22LR, 9mm, .38 Special, 40 S&W, .45ACP and .357 Magnum ammunition.
My email address is in the right column of this page under "email me." I look forward to hearing from you.
Via Ace, who isn't buying this, either.
Update: I sent Bladerunner an email leading them back to this blog post. Barry Samms of Bladerunner responded via email with a curt "who are you to be calling me a fraud, I suggest you choose your words a bit wiser before emailing us."
I suppose that was meant to be intimidating, but you'll note he didn't refute a single point I made, nor did he seem willing to offer his product up for real-world testing.
Show Comments »
