Showing posts with label Jimmy Carter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jimmy Carter. Show all posts

Friday, May 29, 2009

Memo to Obama attack dog Robert Gibbs: stop pooping on our lawn


click here for dog poster
from The Telegraph.co.uk
Posted By: James Delingpole
May 29, 2009

Memo to US Press secetary Robert Gibbs

1. Congratulations. Your presidential regime has managed to secure the most supine, slobbering, spineless, unquestioning media coverage since Enver Hoxha's Albania. A report last month by the Center for Media and Public Affairs said Obama has received more coverage than his two predecessors combined. On ABC, CBS and NBC news the majority of evaluations - 58 per cent - have been favourable. (Compare GW Bush - 33 per cent; Bill Clinton 44 per cent - in first 50 days of office). More importantly, you have Pravda. Yes, no less than 73 per cent of all evaluative comments in your chief propaganda organ - aka The New York Times - have been favourable to Obama.

2. Sure your congenitally libtard Mainstream Media were probably biased that way anyway, but you have played your part. Your combative style - which led you to dismiss the entire British print media just now in one glib, sneering phrase - has earned you the nickname "The Enforcer." You have a reputation for coming down hard on any media outlet which doesn't follow your approved version of reality. "I work the referee a little bit," as you once put it. (A reference, perhaps, to when you played goalkeeper for your college football team).

3. If you are going to make clever-sounding football references displaying your rich understanding of the British press, try to get your terminology right. We call it the "Champions League." Not the "Champions League cup."

4. That's only the beginning of your problems, matey. Your treatment not just of the British media but of Britain generally smacks of a risible ineptitude. First, you let President Obama send back the Winston Churchill bust. Then, you insult our visiting prime minister with a dismally low-key reception (worthy of a minor African head of state, not your closest and most loyal ally) and shoddy gifts (those DVDs). Then you compound the insult by having one of your monkeys declare, Chicago-politics-style, ""There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment." OK so we know Obama's not much interested in foreign affairs and has a special loathing for Britain because it roughed up his Kenyan granddad during the Mau Mau insurrection. But don't you realise, that one of your jobs as his press secretary is to make out like he loves us so much even his underpants have a union flag on them?

5. Insulting the British print media. Big mistake. We know we're not angels. We know we can go over the top sometimes. But unfortunately that's a much bigger problem for you than it is for us. You see, while a lot of your mainstream media will hold fire on stories which they think may reflect poorly on your wondrous Obamamessiah - what his half-brother has been up to, say - we have fewer qualms about telling it like it is. So far, you've had a pretty easy ride. The Obama Kool Aid has proved almost as popular beverage in Britain as it is in the US. But just you wait till we start showing our teeth.

6. A lot of Americans know this. They appreciate our irreverence. They enjoy our frank criticisms of all the myriad areas where Obama is getting it so badly wrong - everything from his disastrous cap and trade measures, to his brutal treatment of Chrysler dealerships which didn't support him, to his pork barrelling, to his failure to do anything that looks remotely like rescuing the US economy. That's why they come to read us online: because they can and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

7. We had a guy just like you over here once. Guy named Alastair Campbell. Did for our now heavily discredited prime minister Tony Blair what you do for Obama: a little light press bullying; professional turd polishing; that kind of thing. We hated Alastair Campbell, really loathed him. But he got away with bullying us because in those days we didn't know any better. We were still going through this sort of dumb-cattle phase where we still had some vestigial respect for politicians and trust that they knew what they were doing.

8. But we don't respect politicians any more. Not our politicians, and not yours either. Imagine how this new strain of irreverence bordering on utter contempt is going to affect our reporting of political affairs. Actually, you've no need to imagine. Just read some of our Telegraph blogs.
Click to read the article and the comments

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Barack Carter or Jimmy Obama - Take your pick


from Cheat-Seeking Missiles
Posted by: Laer

Were you, like me, made to feel a little less secure when the holiday weekend reports on the North Korean nuclear test and missile launches included the news that the NoKos gave us a one-hour warning? Did you think, like I did, that a presidential administration that was on its foreign policy and intelligence game wouldn’t need a one-hour warning because they’d already have a good idea what was going on?

And then there was the standard-issue statement of outrage from our president. You know the one; it’s the one from the third cubby on the left. “Outrage … blah, blah … reckless … yada, yada … U.N. Security Council.”

I didn’t hear an acknowledgement from the admin or the larger left that John Bolton was right; after all, he’d written in the WSJ on May 20 to “get ready for another North Korean nuke test.”
In fact, that was the headline. William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection notes:
As usual, the Left lashed out at Bolton, who may be third after George Bush and Dick Cheney in being portrayed as crazy and paranoid. Bolton has been derided as “the neocon’s neocon” who “laps up the hosannas of fellow knuckle-draggers.”

Allison Kilkenny at Huffington Post applied the left-wing attack on Bolton Specifically as to Bolton’s North Korea position, in a post titled, Update: John Bolton Still Crazy:

… Today, Bolton chose to growl at the old, but reliable, enemy of North Korea. This is a particularly vintage move when one considers North Korea already tried to strike fear into the hearts of Americans last month when they tested a missile that fizzled and fell into the ocean 1,300 miles off the east coast of Japan. Bolton’s stance is pretty brave because his frenzied ideology flies in the face of scholarly counsel.

It turns out that Ms. Kilkenny’s post proved just who still is crazy, and it’s not Bolton.
You can call John Bolton many things. ”Right” is one of them. “Jimmy Carter” is not. The same cannot be said of the president. It’ll take a bit more time for history to prove the wrongness of his foreign policy, but the cat-calls about his Carter streak are getting louder, including this from Forbes:

A series of actions taken by the Obama administration have created an impression in Iran, the “Af-Pak” region, China and North Korea that Obama does not have the political will to retaliate decisively to acts that are detrimental to U.S. interests, and to international peace and security.

Among such actions, one could cite: the soft policy toward Iran: the reluctance to articulate strongly U.S. determination to support the security interests of Israel; the ambivalent attitude toward Pakistan despite its continued support to anti-India terrorist groups and its ineffective action against the sanctuaries of Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistani territory; its silence on the question of the violation of the human rights of the Burmese people and the continued illegal detention of Aung San Suu Kyi by the military regime in Myanmar; and its silence on the Tibetan issue.

Its over-keenness to court Beijing’s support in dealing with the economic crisis, and its anxiety to ensure the continued flow of Chinese money into U.S. Treasury bonds, have also added to the soft image of the U.S.

The article, by retired Indian intelligence officer and China expert Bahukutumbi Raman, wraps up by pointing out that it took Jimmy Carter more than three years to turn America’s overseas reputation into pudding, but Obama seems intent to accomplish the same in his first year in office.
Click to read the article and the comments

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?

Barack Obama and the CIA
from The Telegraph.co.uk
By: Gerald Warner
image by rees

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

That is why he opened Pandora's Box by publishing the Justice Department's legal opinions on waterboarding and other hardline interrogation techniques. He cynically subordinated the national interest to his partisan desire to embarrass the Republicans. Then he had to rush to Langley, Virginia to try to reassure a demoralised CIA that had just discovered the President of the United States was an even more formidable foe than al-Qaeda.

"Don't be discouraged by what's happened the last few weeks," he told intelligence officers. Is he kidding? Thanks to him, al-Qaeda knows the private interrogation techniques available to the US intelligence agencies and can train its operatives to withstand them - or would do so, if they had not already been outlawed.

So, next time a senior al-Qaeda hood is captured, all the CIA can do is ask him nicely if he would care to reveal when a major population centre is due to be hit by a terror spectacular, or which American city is about to be irradiated by a dirty bomb. Your view of this situation will be dictated by one simple criterion: whether or not you watched the people jumping from the twin towers.

Obama promised his CIA audience that nobody would be prosecuted for past actions. That has already been contradicted by leftist groups with a revanchist ambition to put Republicans, headed if possible by Condoleezza Rice, in the dock. Talk about playing party politics with national security. Martin Scheinin, the United Nations special investigator for human rights, claims that senior figures, including former vice president Dick Cheney, could face prosecution overseas. Ponder that - once you have got over the difficulty of locating the United Nations and human rights within the same dimension.

President Pantywaist Obama should have thought twice before sitting down to play poker with Dick Cheney. The former vice president believes documents have been selectively published and that releasing more will prove how effective the interrogation techniques were. Under Dubya's administration, there was no further atrocity on American soil after 9/11.

President Pantywaist's recent world tour, cosying up to all the bad guys, excited the ambitions of America's enemies. Here, they realised, is a sucker they can really take to the cleaners. His only enemies are fellow Americans. Which prompts the question: why does President Pantywaist hate America so badly?
Click to read the rest of the article and the comments

Monday, April 20, 2009

Saberi and Obama - Barry you're a pathetic wimp!

Hey Barry, I'll bet if you had just been falsely convicted and sentenced to 8 years in a Iranian prison, you'd be wanting the President of The United States to be doing a lot more than you've done. You've shown nothing but weakness regarding foreign policy since you've taken office. Every U.S. Citizen living overseas in an unstable country should be very nervous right about now.
Rees


The Sentencing of Roxana Saberi — and Obama's Tepid Reaction
from Pajamas Media
by Michael Ledeen
April 20, 2009

The president’s response to the sentencing of Roxana Saberi—eight years in prison—is a testament to the power of Iranian blackmail and Obama’s own pigheaded refusal to understand the nature of our enemies. His “disappointment” in the mullahs’ action (echoed almost to the letter by Secretary of State Clinton) suggests that he hoped, maybe even expected, something better from them. And that, in turn, demonstrates a refusal to see Iran for what it is.

If I were Saberi’s Iranian-American father, I would be furious, and I would be inclined to call a press conference to say that, while it may be interesting to know the President’s state of mind, and even a bit sad that he is disappointed, American presidents are not paid to share their emotions with us. Among other things, they are paid to defend us from our enemies. He has manifestly failed to do this in the case of Roxana. I would ask the president very publicly, “are you going to do anything for my daughter or not? Never mind ‘I’m disappointed.’ What will you do for her, and for the other Americans in the grips of the mullahs? Or are you going to wait until there are dozens of American hostages in Iranian hands?”

I think it’s a bit inconsistent for the president to take credit for the liberation of Captain Phillips—through the use of overwhelming military power—and then limit himself to expressing disappointment at the brutal treatment of an American journalist. Why is Captain Phillips worth the deployment of the U.S. Navy, while Ms Saberi is barely worth a sigh of disappointment?

The anwer seems to be: because the pirates weren’t Iranians. If they had been, the entire crew would be facing years in prison.

Obama is committed to the “talking cure” with Iran, and he seems destined to live through the humiliation to which his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, was subjected. He might go back and watch some of the old “Nightline” shows, beginning with a count of the number of days America was “held hostage.” That’s exactly where Obama is headed.

The president may well feel that this is all very unfair. He didn’t ask for this. Indeed, he thinks he has given Iran every reason to behave nicely towards him (he seems disinclined to think in terms of the nation, it’s all about him). He doesn’t seem to realize that all his sweet talk is very provocative, it plays into the mullahs’ fantasy world in which they are routing us all over the world (they know it’s all about us, not about him), and soon the American president will kneel to the Supreme Leader. He actually seems to believe that it is possible to convince the Iranian leaders to give up their nuclear program, when every major figure in the Islamic Republic has said that Iran will never, ever, abandon that program. The only thing they are willing to discuss is how we will accommodate to the fact of a nuclear Iran.

Meanwhile, their agents and proxies are killing Americans from Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Iraq and Afghanistan. And Obama does nothing in response, except to make gesture after gesture demonstrating his lack of will to confront those who have been killing Americans for thirty years. Click to read the article and comments

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Like Father, Like Son..Appeaser & Coward

Here's a great comment from a post at ACE:
Like all good postmodernists, Obama believes in the power of speech. Words can be bent and shaped mean whatever you want. But action requires commitment; of both physical and moral character. Action requires planting your flag in the dirt and saying: follow me! The postmodernist is made very uncomfortable by the concreteness of action -- rhetoric is so much more comforable. Words are a maze in which many things may be hidden.
Obama came to power on his skill as a speaker, and speaking is pretty much all he's been called on to do so far. However, he shows a marked temerity when firm action is called for. He always seems a bit taken aback when others aren't dazzled by his charm; a bit peeved. His earnestness barely cloaks a deep reluctance to make hard choices and stand by them. He is a man desperate to be liked, and to be seen to be liked. Like all Narcissists, though, he has a thin skin and is essentially a coward. (About which more here, in a different context obviously.)
Bullies can sense a coward, and they see one in Obama. He's only been in office for about three months, and already he's been faced down by the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, and the Iranians. He's a scared little man hiding behind big important words, and the whole world is beginning to notice.

Posted by: Monty at April 07, 2009 01:30 PM (/0a60)