Channelling Harry Reid's Inner Racist

This is incredible -- will African Americans and the media give Reid a pass (b/c he's a Dem) ?


Your Reid Gaffe of the Week [Stephen Spruiell]

I'm going to be just a little sad when Harry Reid loses his re-election bid. What fun it's been:
Harry Reid apologizes for "light skinned" remark about Obama

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) apologized today for referring to President Barack Obama as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect" in private conversations during the 2008 presidential campaign.

"I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words," said Reid in a statement. "I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments."

Geraghty tweets, "Good thing Harry Reid never said anything like 'we should have elected Strom Thurmond president,' or something like that."

Why O's "fixes" will fail: Ralph Peters & others pile on ...

The deadly attack in Fort Hood, Texas, by Maj. Malik Hassan in November, the close call in the air above Detroit on Christmas Day, and now the double-agent suicide bombing in Khost have exposed incredible lapses in our intelligence and counter intelligence systems. It exposes the befuddled lunacy of the State Dept. when it comes to issuing visas, particularly in certain third world countries infested with terror supporters.

Mr. Obama must surely know that one large-scale terrorist strike inside the U.S. would likely effectively end his presidency. Yet he golfs and surfs and hoops on.


O's 'fixes' will fail: Feeding more fat to obese US intelligence
by Ralph Peters

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/fixes_will_fail_hvOrRHKzCpnAHZOjjlX2qO#ixzz0c9KWEmkb

On Christmas day, a terrorist known to our intelligence system tried to blow up 300 innocents on a US-bound flight. Our government's response is to take porno pictures of your wife and daughter.

A radical-Islamist US Army major, known to our intelligence system, massacred his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. Our government's response was to offer counseling sessions.

A triple agent, known to our intelligence system, detonated a suicide bomb at a CIA outpost, killing seven Americans and a cousin of Jordan's king. Our government's response is to shift intelligence assets away from targeting terrorists to support development efforts.

Our president assures us that no individual is to blame. No one will be fired. It was only "the system," that elusive beast, that failed.

Well, our intelligence system is made up of people. People failed. Starting at the top.

The dazzlingly incompetent Janet Napolitano, a "man-caused disaster" if ever there was one, needs to be removed from her job heading Homeland Security. White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan should be placed on double-secret probation and warned to pull up his grades.

As for the National Counterterrorism Center chief who abandoned his post to go on a ski vacation the day after Christmas, I leave his fate to you, gentle reader.

None of these people, including our president, took what almost happened on Christmas seriously -- until the public outcry spooked them.

To energize the bureaucratic proles, you have to chop off aristocratic heads. But President Obama won't use the guillotine. He's protecting incompetents. At our nation's expense.

The corrective measures announced Thursday boil down to two things: Buy more stuff (additional computer systems, full-body scanners, etc.), and re-arrange the deck chairs.

That won't do it. These measures don't address the two enduring handicaps our intelligence community (and our government) suffers in our duel with Islamist terrorists.

First, you can't win by playing defense. Our unseemly protective measures relinquish the initiative to our enemies. Punishing law-abiding US citizens at airports is a disgrace, not a virtue. The only effective way to reduce the terrorist threat is to kill terrorists. Nothing else -- not even the humiliation of innocent air travelers -- will work.

Yet the politically correct group-think mentality in Washington is so pervasive and pernicious that even Robert Gates, who's been a great secretary of defense in so many ways, parrots the cliché that "we can't kill our way out of this."

Oh, really? Suppose we had killed young Umar Abdulmutallab on the ground with al Qaeda in Yemen? Might that not have protected Americans more effectively than making them miss their holiday flight connections?

Any program that takes intelligence assets away from finding and killing terrorists is a mistake. Improving crop yields in southern Afghanistan won't keep Americans safe from Islamist fanatics. What about this is hard to understand?

Problem No. 2 is the nature of our intelligence system itself: It's morbidly obese. The well-intentioned creation of new bureaucracies after 9/11 only worsened the problem, creating more layers of fat. I prescribe a rigorous diet and exercise -- not force-feeding the system more funding calories.

Our intel system is vast, redundant, intractable, self-satisfied, cautious and slower than crosstown traffic during a presidential motorcade.

Our Islamist enemies are lean, really mean, agile, ruthless and, above all, imaginative. Ragtag fanatics are out-thinking us. Why? Because bureaucracy, although it has its place, hates fresh ideas. The terrorists grab a good concept and run with it. We staff it to death, then decide it's far too risky.

Before launching an attack on a confirmed terrorist target in Afghanistan, our combat units need up to a dozen different permission slips. Think al Qaeda or the Taliban work that way?
We're not being defeated. We're defeating ourselves.

As a former Military Intelligence officer, I know the answer isn't more inexperienced hires or throwing more money at well-connected defense contractors. The answer is to emphasize quality, and for our leaders to foster a culture of risk in the field and personal responsibility in the Cabinet.

We need to be creative and willing to commit sins of commission, rather than waiting for terrorists to expose our sins of omission.

Instead, we'll continue to penalize honest citizens (handing al Qaeda a massive, continuing win). Those full-body scanners? If you don't think porn shots of innocent women will end up on the Internet, you probably believe that trying terrorist butchers in civilian courts will make al Qaeda respect us.

We need to check under the burqas, not the halter tops.


Charles Krauthammer gets in on the act as well with his comments on President Obama’s speech:

I thought it was rather appalling. I find it mind-numbingly bureaucratic, flat, bloodless. It was almost inside baseball describing how bureaucracies work.

And his conclusions? Directive # 1 is: High-priority intelligence will now have to be treated urgently not just some of the time, but all of the time. That's a remarkable advance!!

And then he said at the beginning: The first conclusion [of his review] is that, in this world, timely intelligence, etc, etc, is of the utmost importance. Well, this is a president who after we seized Abdulmutallab — who had extremely timely intelligence regarding Yemen, who had been armed and trained in Yemen — was given a lawyer and Miranda rights and shut up almost immediately after singing at the beginning about everything he knew.

That is the timeliest of intelligence regarding Yemen, which the president's terrorism advisor said today is the newest and the most aggressive and the most surprising al-Qaeda element in the world. Here is information waiting to be gleaned and received — and we are gratuitously giving it away [by lawyering up Abdulmutallab].

Talk about not connecting the dots! The administration has little control over what happened before a terrorist attack, but it had total control over what happened afterwards, and it blew it. ...

It looks as if he gave this speech in order to undo the impression of his earlier addresses [of the Christmas bombing].

A, he said the buck stops here, because it looked as if he was detached and blaming everybody else. Secondly, he said we are at war, which is a concession, because people are complaining about the fact, rightly so, that he gave the bomber over Detroit a defense lawyer and treated him as a civilian defendant.

But here is how the president actually sees it. He said we are at war with al-Qaeda, who are "a network of hatred."

Now, first of all, it's not just al-Qaeda. It's jihadism. al-Qaeda is a leading edge of it, but there are imitators, affiliates, cells all over the world. It's a religious ideology, a religious cult. It's an extremist cult.

And when he speaks about hatred — there is a lot of hatred in the world. It's not an inchoate hatred. It's hatred of a specific kind. It's religious fanaticism, hatred of the West and of its liberties, et cetera.

And when you don't identify what the war is about, you leave everyone cold. And you end up saying, as Obama did, one of our responses ... was reaching out and assuring Muslims of an interest in mutual respect, that we understand their aspirations, meaning three items: education, secure job, and security.

Well, the bomber over Detroit was well-educated and he had all the security of a mansion in London. The guy who killed the seven CIA agents in Afghanistan was a doctor. Osama bin Laden is a multimillionaire. This is not about oppression or poverty or lack of education. The Fort Hood shooter had education and security as an army psychiatrist.

He [Obama] will not speak about the nature of the war ... That remains incomprehensible.

And thus you've got to ask yourself: “A network of hatred” — why? and over what?

Obama is "Clueless" on Nat'l Security - Secy John Lehman

Lehman: Clueless Obama [Robert Costa]

After watching President Obama’s remarks on national security this afternoon, John Lehman, the secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, tells National Review Online that, “frankly, I’m pissed off.”

“President Obama just doesn’t get it,” says Lehman. “I don’t think he has a clue. It’s all pure spin. He’s ignoring key issues and taking respectable professionals like John Brennan and turning them into hacks and shills. It’s beyond contempt.”

“The president has ignored the 9/11 Commission’s report,” says Lehman. “This whole idea that we can fix things by jumping higher and faster is ridiculous. The fact is that the system worked just like we said it would work if the president failed to give the Director of National Intelligence the tools he needs: it’s bloated, bureaucratic, layered, and stultified.”

“President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He’s made a lot of commission’s members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations.” Obama, he adds, has taken a “lawyer-like, politically-correct approach” to national security issues like terrorist watchlists and no-fly lists. “You got to blame the president for enforcing the politically-correct and legalistic policies that led to these failures.”


The Christmas Attack Report summary here.


The Message Filters Down [Victor Davis Hanson]

The repeated signs of radical Islamic furor that were shown by Major Hasan and ignored by his colleagues vested with authority, the assassination of CIA agents in Afghanistan by a double-agent Islamic operative, and the numerous missed opportunities to stop the Christmas Day airline terrorist, all should make us concerned about the effectiveness of various branches of our anti-terrorism services.

None of these deadly lapses are the direct fault of the present administration, but they are ominous signals that it is past time to once again think about counterterrorism as a necessary war against murderous Islamists rather than a criminal-justice matter that can be defused through serial outreach to the Islamic world, renunciation of effective Bush policies, and the personal charm and unique heritage of the president.

As worrisome as the actual acts themselves have been the immediate and baffling responses to them — in the Hasan case, military worries that Hasan's murdering might imperil efforts at diversity enhancement and was proof of a new sort of secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome; in the Abdulmutallab matter, initial assurances that the system "worked" and legalisms what he had "allegedly" attempted to do (blow up 300 people). As for the CIA matter, last year we shifted our attention to the supposed culpability of past CIA acts and the need to investigate our own agents, failing to appreciate how perilous a job they carry out in the most godforsaken places in the world.

Again, the climate at the top is essential in keeping us safe. If the commander in chief, through speeches and acts, treats the war on terror in terms of its superfluousness, its constitutional criminality, or past American culpability, rather than in terms of its essential role in keeping us all alive, then that message, in insidious ways, will filter down to various branches of the national-security community, whose members will begin to shift their attitudes and actions accordingly.Very dangerous, all this.


Instant Review [Cliff May]

Watching the White House briefing and my reaction: This is much too bureaucratic to be reassuring.

Also, what I think most Americans already grasp:

1) The father says his son may have joined al-Qaeda. One phone call should have been enough to cancel the kid's visa to the U.S. Why didn't that happen? I didn't hear an answer.

2) Abdulmutallab buys his one-way ticket with cash, has no luggage, and has been in Yemen for the past few months. So you pull him out of line, question him and screen him. Why didn't that happen? I didn't hear an answer.

And:

White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel "a certain shock" when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane

So where's the shock? What was new? What did I miss?


Bolton: Obama Misses the Big Picture [Robert Costa]

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tells National Review Online that President Obama’s remarks on recent American intelligence and security failures this afternoon “miss the big picture” and “ignore the problems we face in dealing with al-Qaeda.”

“I didn’t hear any hint of the president planning to deal with al-Qaeda’s growing capabilities,” says Bolton. “Now, maybe that’s still to come, but, for now, it seems like the president still thinks this is about one person and the intelligence agencies. He outlined a message of government management when he should have addressed the importance of destroying al-Qaeda’s base camps and eradicating its networks.”

Obama, Bolton adds, “needs to remember that classic formulation: the best defense is a good offense.”

“If we’re simply relying on the intelligence agencies to keep people off a plane, then we’ll have many more examples of near misses or, God forbid, a tragedy, in coming years,” says Bolton. “Pushing for a shift in the intelligence bureaucracy won’t stop al-Qaeda. I don’t think the president realizes the implications of what he’s doing with this kind of law-enforcement response.”

“The tone of the remarks is not what’s important,” says Bolton. “We’re not judging some rhetoric exercise. The metric of government is effective action and what he’s proposing addresses issues at the molecular level, not the molar level.”

The Underwear Bomber Fiasco rolls on ...

Now the Feds claim they found out mid-flight that this was a guy they might want to check out, so they planned to grab him AFTER the plane landed. As in AFTER he BLEW UP THE PLANE.

Dolts.

As Mark Steyn put it:

Elsewhere in travel news, relax. Homeland-security officials were right on top of that

Pantybomber situation:

U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials disclosed Wednesday.

Given that he was planning to land in 4 million pieces over the greater Detroit metropolitan area, that's a lot of manpower. I wonder if the Obama administration understands quite how stupid they sound to the rest of the world.


Mukasey on the Obama Administration's Handling of the Underwear Bomber [Andy McCarthy]

The former AG's critique is in the WSJ this morning and it's just devastating. Every word is worth reading, but the conclusion is especially good:

What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as "war" and "Islamist terrorism," and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us. That's too bad, because the Constitution vests "the executive power"—not some of it, all of it—in the president. He, and those acting at his direction, are responsible for protecting us.

There is much to worry about if they think that the principal challenge of the day is detecting bombs at the airport rather than actively searching out, finding and neutralizing terrorists before they get there.

Jen Rubin already has some excellent observations at Contentions, here.


It's a War. Where's the Strategy? [Chris Harnisch & Charlie Szrom]

The interagency report on the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt issued by the White House today states that failing to “connect the dots” was the main reason for the failure to prevent the Christmas Day attack. Additionally, the report summary notes that intelligence community analysts spent December examining al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) threats against U.S. interests in Yemen and providing support to counterterrorism operations in Yemen, as opposed to focusing on AQAP threats against the American homeland. These analysis priorities apparently persisted despite an increasing shift in AQAP rhetoric during the fall suggesting that the organization was targeting the United States itself.

Al-Qaeda has an active strategy to fight America and its interests using its franchises and affiliates, who often follow through on threats of the type made by AQAP, in concert. The Christmas Day attack was carried out by the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). AQAP is an al-Qaeda regional franchise — not a copycat cell and not a local proxy — that is in direct communication with al-Qaeda’s central leadership. The group’s efforts contribute to al-Qaeda’s long-term goal of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East and, indeed, globally.

The global Islamist movement has franchises and affiliates all around the world — not just Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen — and the administration has not yet described a coherent and detailed strategy to combat them. Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups in Somalia and West Africa — particularly al Shabaab and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — may pose threats to the United States and its interests as large or larger as AQAP does. These groups appear to be flying under the radar just as AQAP had for most of 2009. Like AQAP, al Shabaab has shown an ability to follow through on threats: In December 2009, it killed, via a suicide bombing, the Somali ministers of education and higher education, as well as dozens of others, at a college-graduation ceremony. Just three months earlier, the group warned against the use of “un-Islamic” educational materials. Like AQAP, al Shabaab’s rhetoric has increasingly singled out the West, moving beyond threats confined to Somalia alone.

America cannot afford to fight terror only with x-ray machines and visas, as the President has suggested. The Obama administration needs to develop, articulate, and implement a comprehensive strategy for defeating those terrorists and denying them safe-havens.

— Chris Harnisch & Charlie Szrom write for AEI's "Critical Threats" website.

Obama's Trust Me Transparency Moment(s) jeopardize ObamaCare

"And we'll have it all on C-SPAN !"

This is right up there with "Trust Me", "The Check is in the Mail", "I'm from the Government and I'm here to Help", etc.


Obama’s Broken Health-Care Promise [Victor Davis Hanson]

The tape circulating in the blogosphere of Obama in 2008 repeatedly and passionately promising to broadcast the upcoming health-care debate and vote on C-Span, combined with C-Span’s polite request to follow through on that promise, combined with the apparent unwillingness of the Obama administration to honor its pledge, combined with Speaker Pelosi’s cynical remark that the vow was just another Obamaism, is all quite damning. I don’t think I can recall in recent political history a serial public vow that was so flagrantly and cynically renounced.

Things like this, in and of themselves, are not fatal, but they bring the president’s approval ratings down another notch or two; and when one adds them all up, these deceits account for Obama’s 20-point drop in the polls, since they are confirming a picture of political expediency, duplicity, and cynicism quite intolerable for a messianic figure who hinged his presidency on a new ethics.

It didn’t help that, almost simultaneously, in response to the Christmas Day attack on an airliner, Obama blamed Bush for Guantanamo in the now Orwellian fashion of “Bush made me keep Guantanamo open, and it is a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.” (If it really is, and serves no purpose other than to empower the enemy, why not close it immediately? Also: What was the recruiting tool on Sept. 10, 2001? And since when are the endless purported grievances of al-Qaeda or any other fascistic enemy to be believed?)

Today in ObamaNation: The Goresicle

FAIRBANKS - In what might become an annual tradition, an ice sculpture of former Vice President Al Gore has taken its place in front of Thrifty Liquor along Airport Way.



The two-ton “Frozen Gore” sculpture isn’t exactly a tribute. It’s a tongue-in-cheek critique of Gore’s vocal belief in man-made climate change, complete with hot air pouring out of his mouth.



Local businessmen Craig Compeau and Rudy Gavora contracted the piece from award-winning sculptor Steve Dean and say they’ll keep erecting one each winter until Gore accepts an invitation to discuss the global warming issue in Fairbanks.



Read more:



http://newsminer.com/pages/full_story/push?article-‘Frozen+Gore’+sculpture+returns+in+Fairbanks+to+fuel+climate+change+debate%20&id=5444000&instance=home_lead_story

For Obama, terrorism is a four-letter word: Bush

The title of Byron York's article says it all ... this is only part of what is wrong about Obama.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/For-Obama_-terrorism-is-a-four-letter-word_-Bush-8719090-80663422.html