Tag Archives: freedom

Laughingstock

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That’s putting it mildly.  “Futile” also applies.  I’ve written earlier how President Barack Obama reduced himself to a laughingstock and is reducing the United States as a whole to a laughingstock.

Now those in Syria who’ve been begging us for help speak derisively about us as a result of Obama’s…behavior.  On the heels of Obama’s belated acknowledgment that his bright red bunting strewn upon the beach sands had been stepped on and over; followed by his decision to send small arms to Syrian rebels (which all of Arabia already is providing them) with which to fight al Assad’s helicopter, artillery, and tank assaults (supported by Hezbollah fighters and Iranian soldiers); coupled with Obama’s continued refusal to send the rebels the weapons with which to defeat those helicopters and, artillery tubes, and tanks; and his continued refusal to suppress al Assad’s air force in any way, the rebel beneficiaries of the Obama Munificence had this to say:

It’s all talk.  Until we see weapons in our hands here in Syria, they are just words floating in the air.

Obama’s team is cited at the WSJ link just above in this way:

While US officials acknowledge that Hezbollah and regime forces are closing in on Aleppo, they believe there is time to train rebels and improve their defenses—with or without a no-fly zone, officials say—underscoring their belief the conflict is nowhere near a conclusion.

Umm, maybe not.  This isn’t the mid-19th century, when a two week holdout at the Alamo was enough for Sam Houston to train his forces to effectively resist Santa Ana.  More importantly, whose fault is it that the conflict “is nowhere near a conclusion?”  It’s not the rebels’.

And those…officials…had this:

US officials question whether US and European arms alone will make a decisive difference in a country already awash in weapons.

What a breathtaking, willful ignorance.  Of what use to these persons think small arms—rifles and pistols, and the occasional light machine gun—are against helicopters, artillery, and tanks?

And where is Obama anyway on this seeming change of position concerning chemical attacks and arming the rebels?  Why is he sending out low-level functionaries to tell us, in vague terms, about this?

Of what is Obama so terrified that he can’t talk to us—in detail—personally?

Red Lines and Retreat

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Thursday, President Barack Obama finally acknowledged what we’ve known—what our allies have demonstrated to us—for some months: that Bashar al Assad has been using chemical weapons on his own people for as long as a year and a half.

Obama’s big, wide, squishy red line, drawn last August during the Presidential Campaign season, has been crossed, he finally admits (coincidentally, the day after former President Bill Clinton said

(You just think how lame you’d be…suppose I had let a million people, two million people be refugees out of Kosovo, a couple hundred thousand people die, and they say, “You could have stopped this by dropping a few bombs.  Why didn’t you do it?” And I say, “Because the House of Representatives voted 75% against it?”  You look like a total wuss, and you would be.
(…
(If you refuse to act and you cause a calamity, the one thing you cannot say when all the eggs have been broken is, “Oh my god, two years ago there was a poll that said 80% of you were against it.”  You look like a total fool[.])

Crossing such a red line would change Obama’s “calculus,” he said at the time he smeared his red line in the sand.

But what does this mean in terms of actually doing anything?  Recall that Obama also has already said that changing his calculus means

It would cause us to rethink the range of options that are available to us[.]

Only now, having conceded that his line in the shifting sands survived long enough to be crossed irrefutably, will he begin to figure out what to do about it.  Starting next week.  In consultation with the G-8.  Because he doesn’t know what to do.  He didn’t start contingency planning when he painted his red decoration.

While Obama hides his head under the red sand, more Syrians will die.  Because he can’t, or refuses to, plan ahead; he’ll only plan reactively, in real time.  To figure out how to retreat from this commitment.

Another Overt Harassment

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This is just starting to come out, even though it occurred in early April.  The Examiner is reporting that Tom Francois got a visit from President Barack Obama’s Secret Service.  Francois had been a cabinet maker of some duration and skill until the Panic of 2008 did his business in.  Since, he’s been an active critic of the Obama administration via various social media.

From his critiques, the Secret Service paid him a visit, followed by a visit to his daughter and to his ex-wife.  They also demanded to see his weapons and threatened to confiscate them if he “stepped over the line.”

Had he crossed that line yet?  No, according to the agents.  Then why are you visiting me?  [mumble]

The agents justified their…visit…on the basis of the Twitter following Francois has accumulated, and “the things I said could be acted upon by some nut case out there.”  Sure.

The agents also pulled out an image of Air Force One and asked Francois whether he had posted that image.  Francois wanted to know where the rest of the image was along with his copyright mark, since he always signs his work and asserts his copyright when he posts it.  The agents had no answer.

Here’s the offending image, below the added post-visit caption:

Keep in mind that this April visit occurred before the IRS and DoJ had been caught harassing large numbers of Americans and American groups who disagree with Obama and his administration.

Hmm….

Progressive Government Run Amok

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In no particular order, we’ve had in just the last few months the following:

1.  The State Department leaving Benghazi consulate personnel to die, with too little security and no effort to help real-time; a President who absented himself from the situation in favor of a political campaign; and subsequent lies and cover-ups by both about events surrounding that.

2.  The Department of Justice targeting our free press and individual members of it in order to suppress reporting of the secret doings of our government.

3.  The Internal Revenue Service targeting American conservatives.  The low-level IRS staffers now are testifying before the House that they weren’t just ordered to target those who disagreed with the present administration, they were given the specific subjects and questions to be used and to forward specific cases to their bosses for further “treatment.”

And there’s this little IRS gem:

On May 23, Michigan Senator Carl Levin (D, MI) dropped the bombshell that his subcommittee has been in constant contact with the overseers of the IRS political-targeting scandal since it started, and even discussed the applications of “certain” specific groups.

4.  The secret metadata collection program, consisting of the gathering up of the phone calling records of millions of Americans who use Verizon (and presumably of the other American phone companies, also; we don’t know yet because the whole thing is…secret).

5.  The reading of all of our emails, text messages, video down/uploads, and so on via the Internet through another secret program, this one called PRISM.

6.  The government justifying the spying on Americans by claiming it to be a

critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.

And

The information “allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” a senior Obama administration official said Thursday.

This in light of the fact that DHS has already labelled (deliberately and overtly, early on) American military veterans and those who oppose the Obama administration as extremists and threats.  Thus, it’s important to note that the information, as broadly swept up as it is, also allows a Progressive government to surveill known or suspected persons who disagree with the government’s policies and to hinder their activities.

National Wealth

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John Hinderaker, of Power Line, suggests that

we have an utterly inept government, which, on top of its incompetence, places little value on economic growth.

President Barack Obama is on record as believing

I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.

Whether Hinderaker is right about the ineptness is a separate question.  What is clear, though, from Obama’s policies and his continued proselytizing of them in the face of their utter failure from a free market perspective is this: when Obama made that remark (the 2010 mid-term election campaign season), he was talking about our country as a whole, not just a few of his evil Fat Cat Wall Streeters.