Diana West

The Imperial Presidential Candidate, or: Who Does He Think He Is?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:39:34 GMT

Reuters reports: "Obama speech stage resembles ancient Greek temple."

Or maybe Imperial Rome: All Hail Barackus Huss-heinous Obamaius!

From Reuters:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's big speech on Thursday night will be delivered from an elaborate columned stage resembling a miniature Greek temple.

The stage, similar to structures used for rock concerts, has been set up at the 50-yard-line, the midpoint of Invesco Field, the stadium where the Denver Broncos' National Football League team plays.

Some 80,000 supporters will see Obama appear from between plywood columns painted off-white, reminiscent of Washington's Capitol building or even the White House, to accept the party's nomination for president.

He will stride out to a raised platform to a podium that can be raised from beneath the floor.

The show should provide a striking image for the millions of Americans watching on television ...."

It'll be "striking," all right. In fact, what the Tank Shot did for Dukakis, the Plywood Parthenon should do for Obama.

The Ad That Barack Hussein Obama Doesn't Want You To See

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:46:03 GMT

Barack Obama: Dictator?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:03:33 GMT

From the AP via Michelle Malkin:

DENVER (AP) - Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly to stamp out an ad that links him to a 1960s radical, eager to demonstrate a far more aggressive response to attacks than John Kerry did when faced with the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign.

Obama not only aired a response ad to the spot linking him to William Ayers, but he sought to block stations airing the commercial by warning station managers and asking the Justice Department to intervene. The campaign also planned to compel advertisers to pressure stations that continue to air the anti-Obama commercial.

It's the type of going-for-the-jugular approach to politics many Democrats complain that Kerry lacked and that Republicans exploit.

"Going-for-the-jugular"? How about going-for-the-totalitarian?

Obama's target is an ad by the conservative American Issues Project, a nonprofit group that questions Obama's ties to Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground organization that took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.

The lone financier of the anti-Obama ad, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, was also one of the main funders of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who targeted Kerry. Simmons, a McCain fundraiser, contributed nearly $2.9 million to the American Issues Project, according to documents filed by the group with the Federal Election Commission.

Fox News and CNN have declined to air the anti-Obama ad. But by Monday afternoon, the ad had run about 150 times in local markets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Michigan, according to Evan Tracey, head of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, an ad tracking firm.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said Obama supporters have inundated stations that are airing the ad, many of them owned by Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails. He called the ad false, despicable and outrageous.

"Other stations that follow Sinclair's lead should expect a similar response from people who don't want the political discourse cheapened with these false, negative attacks," Vietor said.

Sinclair offices were closed late Monday and officials there could not be immediately contacted.

"It seems they protest a bit too much," American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston said. "They're going all of these routes—through threats, intimation—to try to thwart the First Amendment here because they don't have an argument on merit."

Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.

Obama also was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform group of which Ayers was a founder. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s.

Obama has denounced Ayers' past activities.

"Barack Obama is friends with Ayers, defending him as, quote, 'Respectable' and 'Mainstream,'" the group's ad states. "Obama's political career was launched in Ayers' home. And the two served together on a left-wing board. Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?"

There is nothing "false," "despicable" or "outrageous" about this--except, of course, for Barack's long-term relationship with this ex-Weatherman terrorist.

In a letter to station managers, Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer wrote: "Your station is committed to operating in the public interest, an objective that cannot be satisfied by accepting for compensation material of such malicious falsity."

Bauer also wrote to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Keeney, noting that the ad is a "knowing and willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law."

The campaign's aggressive tactics could draw more attention to a subject the campaign wants to go away. On Tuesday, the University of Illinois at Chicago will make available records of Obama's service on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The group was set up to improve the city's schools. The documents could shed further light on whether Obama and Ayers had a relationship.

The American Issues Project is a 501(c)4 nonprofit corporation. It is permitted by law to air a political ad provided that the majority of its spending is nonpolitical. It cannot accept money from corporations and it must identify the donors that finance its ads in reports to the Federal Election Commission. Pinkston said the group has set aside money to carry out non-election related work to meet the legal requirements. It filed a report identifying Simmons as its sole donor for the ad last week.

In the Obama campaign's own response ad, an announcer states: "With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the 60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers. McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers' crimes, committed when Obama was just 8 years old."

What difference does it make how old Obama was when Ayers was trying to bring down this country? I happen to have been about the same age and wouldn't give Ayers the time of day now, let alone sustain a long-term working and personal relationship with him.

The McCain campaign cannot coordinate efforts with outside groups. But the campaign took advantage of being the target of the response ad.

"The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.

Bingo.

Another Question

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:56:46 GMT

Here is this week's column as it appears in The Washington Times, the first of 125 papers that now regularly run my column.

While we're on the subject of questions for the presidential candidates, I realize this column introduces another question for them: What, even under the best of conditions the US military can achieve, can the US expect to "get" out of its immeasurable investment of blood and treasure in Iraq?

If the answer is "an ally," please explain how this can be so.

If the answer is "a bulwark against Iran," please explain how this can be so.

If the answer is "another Kuwait," please explain why we bothered. (If the explanation includes reference to the Bush administration's complete misunderstanding of the chances for Western concepts of freedom to succeed, or even be desired, in an Islamic culture, pass Go and proceed straight to the Oval Office.)

Spencer's Q's for the Next President

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:35:14 GMT

Robert Spencer poses key questions for the presidential candidates.

1. What would you do to deal with the national security aspect of immigration? With plans afoot to bring large groups of Iraqis, including Iraqi Muslims, into the United States, what kind of screening will you implement to try to ensure that we are not importing jihad terrorists into the country? Will you reevaluate immigration levels from Muslim countries based on recognition of the fact that there is no reliable way to distinguish a peaceful Muslim from a jihadist sympathizer or potential jihadist?

2. Forty percent of the foreign jihadists fighting against American troops in Iraq come from a putative ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is also one of the world’s leading bankrollers of terror. A Treasury Department official who tracks terror financing, Stuart Levey, recently remarked: “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia.” What will you do as President to work toward ending the absurd situation we find ourselves in today, of helping to finance by means of oil revenue our own destruction by means of jihad terrorism? What steps would you take to put our relationship with Saudi Arabia on a more realistic footing than it is on today?

3. The Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies have adopted guidelines forbidding U.S. government analysts and spokesmen from speaking about jihad or Islam in connection with Islamic jihad terrorism. Given that the terrorists themselves consistently use the language of classic Islamic jihad theology to explain their actions and make recruits among peaceful Muslims, doesn't this policy create the risk that we will not understand our enemy's motives and goals, and not be able to combat them as effectively as we otherwise could? And wouldn't that be true even if the jihadist use of Islamic texts and teachings were, from an Islamic standpoint, improper and incorrect?

Also, there is evidence that this policy was adopted on the recommendation of Islamic scholars who are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is engaged, in its own words, in "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Is this not reason enough in itself to reevaluate these new guidelines, if not to scrap them altogether?

4. Terrorism expert Stephen Emerson has called Hesham Islam, a top aide to the deputy secretary of defense, Gordon England, “an Islamist with a pro-Muslim Brotherhood bent who has brought in groups to the Pentagon who have been unindicted co-conspirators.”

If that is true, it raises serious questions about the extent of jihadist infiltration within the highest levels of our defense apparatus.

If you are elected President, what will you do to root out possible Muslim Brotherhood operatives and other jihadist sympathizers from sensitive government positions? What kind of screening will you institute for Muslim military and intelligence officials in order to try to ensure their loyalty to the United States and their rejection of the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism?

5. Last week, a torture chamber was discovered in a mosque in Baghdad. This revelation follows a large number of other incidents in which jihadists used mosques to plot terrorist attacks and to recruit. As President, would you favor the monitoring of mosques in the United States in order to ensure that there is no terrorist activity and no seditious, Islamic supremacist activity going on in them? What other steps would you take? Would you call upon the Muslim community in America to institute comprehensive and transparent programs in mosques and Islamic schools, teaching against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism, and extolling the virtues of American pluralism, democracy, and the non-establishment of a state religion?

If not, why not?

Micro-Managing Islamic Sects

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:39:11 GMT

If the Bright Idea behind the US surge was, in essence, to Surge 'Till They Merge--meaning, provide the requisite security conditions under which Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds and, presumbly, remnant Christians still not ethnically cleansed by the above, would achieve "reconciliation"--we may have hit a wall.

Not in providing the requisite security conditions: That is the successful part of the surge story. The dodgy bit comes from the misbegotten twist of so-called strategic thinking that removed chances of ultimate US success from US hands, entrusting it instead to what we blithely (arrogantly and ignorantly) assumed would be the Iraqi reaction to enhanced security: the "reconciliation" of warring Iraqi parties. The surge succeeded, improving overall security conditions in Iraq, but the Iraqis have failed to fulfill the rest of the plan--at least, the rest of the US plan.

Of course, the Iraqi powers that be--the ruling Shiite majority--may have had a different plan in mind all along. Now that the surge has succeeded in quelling the most chaotic cycles of violence, the Shiite-dominated government is hardly pursuing anything like "reconciliation." On the contrary, as we learned this week, Shiite authorities are arresting hundreds of Sunnis from the so-called Awakening movement, who in 2007 famously turned on al Qaeda-type insurgents, much to the US command's relief, which placed them on the US payroll at $25 milllion per month to continue fighting on the right, i.e. US/Iraqi government, side. (And no, the Iraqi government doesn't want to start picking up the tab.)

Question: Has Surge 'Till They Merge turned into Surge 'Till the Shiites Are Strong Enough to Crush the Sunnis?

Another Gem about "The Jewel"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:54:49 GMT

The Washington Post weighs in, lightly, on "The Jewel of Medina" debacle. In recounting the story--by now much blogged on and written about by Yours Truly--they start describing the author's experience thus:

She started writing a fictionalized story of Aisha, a young and much-beloved wife of Muhammad. Seven drafts later, in April 2007, Random House gave Jones a $100,000 contract for "The Jewel of Medina" and a sequel.

Aisha wasn't just "young"; she was six.

The Voice of the McCain Campaign

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:48:43 GMT

I mostly read this stuff, so I haven't actually seen McCain spokesman Brian Rogers, but he's scored twice in 24 hours with some target-nailing responses to the Obama campaign: first here, and now this:

From National Review's Byron York writing at The Corner:

From McCain spokesman Brian Rogers, in response to the Obama campaign's new offensive on John McCain's houses:

Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people “cling” to guns and religion in the face of economic hardship really want to have a debate about who’s in touch with regular Americans?

The reality is that Barack Obama’s plans to raise taxes and opposition to producing more energy here at home as gas prices skyrocket show he’s completely out of touch with the concerns of average Americans.

This was in response to Obama, playing off the Politico interview in which McCain didn't know how many houses and condos he and his wife own, said, "I guess if you think that being rich means you've got to make $5 million, and if you don't hknow how many houses you have, then it's not surprising that you might think the economy is fundamentally strong. But if you're like me, and you've got one house…you might have a different perspective."

Col. David Hunt Gets It

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:43:04 GMT

Photo: Major General Hammond apologizing for the Koran sniper incident.

I was on a plane to Europe on June 6, the day this column by Col. Hunt appeared on the Fox News website, and missed it until someone sent it to me this morning. It's about the Koran Sniper incident, which, I am reminded, took place at the end of May. When I looked up my own two columns on the subject, I was actually surprised at how recently these events took place in a blur disgrace that never receieved the appropriate amount of clarifying attention. Col. Hunt puts it all into sharp focus by concentrating on the chain of abject apologies from the military in Iraq to the president in Washington, and what it means to our ultimate war effort. It's called "Time to Bring Them Home." He writes:

That’s right, bring the troops home now. Its over, the bad guys won, terrorism is victorious, we have been defeated!

I never thought I would write such words, ever. But then again, I never thought I would ever hear the president of the United States apologize for the actions of one soldier. I never imagined, even as bad as the military leadership has been in this war (and it has been awful), that a two-star general in the United States Army would utter the words, “I come before you seeking your forgiveness … I look in your eyes today and say please forgive me and my solders.”

The presidential and general officer apologies, and the pictures of a U.S. Army Officer kissing the Koran and handing it to an Iraqi, should tell us that this war is over. These defeatist words were a completely wrong headed reaction to the criminal activities of an ignorant, ill disciplined soldier who shot at a Koran and wrote graffiti on its pages.

For a general officer in today’s military to make such a statement, as Major General Hammond did last week, he would first have to clear it with his three-star boss, who would have to clear it with his four-star boss who would have to clear it with his secretary of defense boss. And, after hearing the president utter the words of apology, it is clear that this one general’s remarks were cleared all the way to the White House.

All this checking with bosses does not occur in a vacuum; the generals and their boss’ staffs talk before, during and after such an event. All actions of our military, especially anything that even hints at a political action, are approved on a computer, on the phone or with a fax. The point here is that what happened with the Koran and how our government dealt with it was cleared all the way back to the president of the United States. Things that are cleared by the White House become policy, so I am saying our “policy” is one of apology not victory.

Hell, when the president speaks, his words can become policy. So we can all now more see clearly that this administration is so strangled by politics and political correctness that it cannot see beyond the actions of one soldier or get that when a nation has to apologize for stupidity it is seen as less than by our enemies, not serious, not worthy. The nation that apologies in this manner is not interested in winning.

If we are not in this for victory then stop throwing our soldiers lives away, bring them home now.

Our military leaders have zero independent thought and even less action, this incident with the Koran apology is emblematic of why we have as a nation have been losing this war, despite the bravery of our soldiers. Did I mention that the president apologized? We have had over 4,000 soldiers die and more than 35,000 soldiers wounded defending Iraq and one of our soldiers makes a mistake and we kiss the Koran and beg for forgiveness? You have got to be kidding me. We have this recent success in Iraq with Basra and Al Anbar Province and we celebrate these successes with an APOLOGY? Don’t blame the press or another political party, neither of them had a damn thing to do with this incident or the insipid policies that led to it.

We have lost the high ground, we have lost our clarity, and we have become weak and unworthy of the sacrifice of our soldiers. You cannot have soldiers dying on the battlefield on one hand and generals and presidents apologizing for those same brave soldier’s mistakes on the other. Does anyone see a problem here? My fear is that this incident has gone completely unnoticed and that the rest of us are paying more attention to “American Idol” than to this war. I pray I am wrong. I pray we are worthy of our soldiers. I pray that we are the people we imagine ourselves to be.

Get this, war is an ugly thing but there are some things uglier, one of them happened on 9/11, we seemed to have forgotten that.

More on the Obama-Ayers Doc-Lockdown

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:56:52 GMT

Responding to an Obama commercial linking John McCain with the Abramoff scandal, a McCain spokesman comes back good and strong. ABC's Jake Tapper reports:

“Barack Obama’s ad is ridiculous," responded McCain spox Brian Rogers. "Because of John McCain, corruption was exposed and people like Jack Abramoff went to jail.

“However, if Barack Obama wants to have a discussion about truly questionable associations, let’s start with his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, at whose home Obama’s political career was reportedly launched. Mr. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for countless bombings against targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and numerous police stations, courthouses and banks. In recent years, Mr. Ayers has stated, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs … I feel we didn’t do enough.’"

Rogers the raised the fact that, as the Chicago Tribune reports here, the University of Illinois this week refused to release records related to Obama's work with Ayers on the education project the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, at the request of an unnamed donor of the materials.

“The question now is, will Barack Obama immediately call on the University of Illinois to release all of the records they are currently withholding to shed further light on Senator Obama’s relationship with this unrepentant terrorist?" Rogers asked.

I like.

Just for the record, notice how the AP doesn't report the McCain spokesman's challenge on the Obama-Ayers doc-lockdown. Or USA Today. Or the Boston Globe. This is a perfectly grotesque example of the media "protecting" the public from facts that might harm...the media's candidate.