Tag Archives: political parties

Investigate After All?

Posted on by
Reply

After acknowledging last week that several minutes of video from a 2013 briefing on the Iran nuclear deal had been intentionally cut, the State Department announced Wednesday that Secretary of State John Kerry has ordered an investigation into who ordered the edit.

This comes on the heels of ABC News having caught the White House altering the transcript of President Barack Obama’s (D) press agent, Josh Earnest’s, briefing about another Iran-related matter.

Given State’s (and this administration’s generally) mendacity regarding this sort of thing from the jump, why should we take any investigation State might now undertake seriously?  Why should we believe its outcome to be anything other than a once-over-lightly square filler, or any “miscreant” who might be identified as anyone other than a scapegoat?

Hillary Clinton’s Insecurity

Posted on by
Reply

With her emails, that is.  Only more so.  It seems she exchanged, and was in the middle of exchanges, that were real-time discussions of drone strike permissions in Pakistan.

The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side”—government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters—as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.

Unfortunately, the only thing secret about these discussions was the arrangement between State and the CIA.  They knew their discussions were in the clear because they used weasel-words (instead of encryption).

The vaguely worded messages didn’t mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about the militant targets, officials said.

But they talked around the subjects.

State Department officials told FBI investigators they communicated via the less-secure system on a few instances, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials.  It happened when decisions about imminent strikes had to be relayed fast, and the US diplomats in Pakistan or Washington didn’t have ready access to a more-secure system, either because it was night or they were traveling.

Because secure communications systems cease operations when the sun goes down.  Sure.  Traveling?  Folks important enough to be in on discussions of this nature have mobile satellite phones on them all the time.

These guys carefully ignore COMSEC considerations when they make idiotic excuses like this.  Which makes the excuses dishonest rather than idiotic.

Some of the emails were then forwarded by Mrs Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said.

And one of these guys wants to be President of the United States.  What secrets will she give up from that office, with this knowledge of security?  This knowledge of right and wrong?  What damage will she do to our nation with this level of understanding of the difference at this time that it makes?

Elections have consequences.

Sexism of the Left

Posted on by
Reply

Jessica Tarlov, a political strategist at Douglas E. Schoen, LLC, had a couple of thoughts on the significance of Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s primary victories Tuesday and their aggregation into the likely Democratic Party’s nomination.

[W]hat really matters here is that the United States has now joined just a few nations across the globe in offering the opportunity to pick a woman to be president.

I couldn’t be prouder.

And I also couldn’t be more astounded at how little the magnitude of this feat has seemed to matter.

While gaining the party’s nomination is something of a big deal, the gender of the nominee is singularly unimportant.  Beyond that, it matters so little because it’s already been done.  Tarlov carefully ignored Geraldine Ferraro who, if elected, would have been right next to the office.  Tarlov carefully ignored the election of an American who is black, which was a far larger accomplishment, even though race is as singularly unimportant as gender.

Tarlov closed her piece with this:

It’s our turn, ladies.

Because a woman needn’t actually be qualified; it’s just her turn.  It’s hard to see how Democrats’ sexism could get any more blatant than that.

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy

Posted on by
Reply

This is what Democrat Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy has been like and what President Barack Obama’s (D) foreign policy is like.

  • Compromised national security with her cavalier treatment of our most classified information—and lying about it
  • Failed to protect or rescue Americans in Benghazi—and lying about it afterwards
  • Enthusiastically pushed for the Libya war—and then failing to support efforts to control its aftermath
  • Supported the premature Iraq withdrawal—which threw away our hard-won victory and left Iraq in shambles
  • Failed to deal with the spread of Islamic terrorism
  • Failed to reset relations with Russia—not even bothering to use the correct Russian word on her “reset” button
  • Lost all of our then-ongoing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Counting Syria, and her BFF’s badly faded and washed out pink line, four
  • Facilitated Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons
  • Failed to deal with the Veterans Administration’s apparent abandonment of our veterans—many of them the very same ones whose battlefield victories her foreign affairs policies have abandoned
  • Ongoing, slow-motion surrenders of the South China Sea to an expansionist People’s Republic of China and of provinces of Georgia and Ukraine to an expansionist Russia

Clinton is loud and proud about wanting more of the same.

Elections have consequences.

On Donald Trump’s San Jose Rally

Posted on by
Reply

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo had a thought.

The mayor, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter, criticized Trump for coming to cities and igniting problems that local police departments had to deal with.

“At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign,” Liccardo said.

A typical Democrat attitude: it’s always someone else’s fault.

No, Liccardo, it was your city’s residents’ conscious decision to protest Trump’s rally—an entirely appropriate thing to do—and it was your city’s residents’ conscious decision to then turn violent and physically attack Trump supporters as they left the rally, and it was your city’s residents’ conscious decision to steal those supporters’ property and destroy it.

…Trump hats grabbed from supporters were set on fire on the ground.

And it was your own conscious decision to hold the police back while your residents carried out their violent attacks and vandalism.

Police stood their ground at first but after about 90 minutes moved into the remaining crowd to break it up and make arrests.

This is what we can look forward to under a Clinton presidency.