We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
Stewart Udall
I LOVE This Take on Simon & Garfunkel...
The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth
OF COURSE, the Obama Administration LIED over Benghazi. But Bob Woodward, where was the mainstream media during all this? I knew just from the description of the ambassador's passing this was more of a sophisticated, deliberate, military-like attack, and I've had no access to US intelligence. Was or wasn't there an election campaign? Were there news reports on radicalized Muslims in Libya? Had there not been multiple attempts on the lives of British diplomats before our ambassador was killed? Had there not been dozens of security incidents in Benghazi during the year before 9/11/12? Did the press not realize that the Obama campaign had a recurring soundbite in having crippled the Al Qaeda network and admitting a security failure less than 2 months before the election could have consequences?
It was very clear why the State Department invented this cover story of a video protest gone rogue. Recall leftists seized on a vague threat in an intelligence briefing weeks before the original 9/11? All sorts of crackpot theories arose, including Bush let the events happen to justify military intervention overseas. The last thing the Obama campaign wanted to discuss is how the campaign against Qaddafi had radicalized elements, not unlike the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation that America subsidized. How about the fact the US also had an alliance with Saddam Hussein--how many cases of "be careful of what you wish for"? As I write, there's a report that Al Qaeda affiliates may have seized Syrian oilfields, but yet Obama is still trying to rationalize a mission there. But in the case of Benghazi, you don't even have to go to classified intelligence to know its instability. It's clear what the Administration didn't want to explain why if they were going to maintain a mission in Benghazi, security got short shrift.
Let's remember, Obama never complied with the War Powers Act, and even then Democrat Congressman Kucinich said, ""The war in Libya is illegal, unconstitutional and unwarranted. It must end."
Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., had offered the funding bill, which would restrict funds for Libya save for search and rescue, intelligence, surveillance and a few other contingencies. "The president has ignored the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution, but he cannot ignore a lack of funding."
Earlier this week [then Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton said lawmakers were free to raise questions, but she asked, "Are you on Qaddafi's side, or are you on the side on the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been bringing them support?"The GOP leadership pushed Rooney's initiative, but the bill failed 180-238, with two-thirds of the votes against coming from Democrats, the rest by neocon Republicans. Ron Paul didn't even want to support the limited activities. Hillary Clinton's position is morally indefensible, yet another reason this demagogue must never be elected President. The correct issue is not whether or not Qaddafi was a good guy; the question is whether or not the US had a vital interest in Libya, which had not attacked the US. [On principle I agree with Paul; as a pragmatist, I saw it as a tactic to force Obama to comply with the War Powers Act. I then would have voted against giving him authorization.]
Ron Paul hasn't skipped a beat since retiring from Congress:
But the Republicans in Congress also want to shift the blame. They supported the Obama Administration’s policy of bombing Libya and overthrowing its government. They also repeated the same manufactured claims that Gaddafi was “killing his own people” and was about to commit mass genocide if he were not stopped. Republicans want to draw attention to the President’s editing talking points in hopes no one will notice that if the attack on Libya they supported had not taken place, Ambassador Stevens would be alive today.
Neither side wants to talk about the real lesson of Benghazi: interventionism always carries with it unintended consequences. The US attack on Libya led to the unleashing of Islamist radicals in Libya. These radicals have destroyed the country, murdered thousands, and killed the US ambassador. Some of these then turned their attention to Mali which required another intervention by the US and France.I'm not sure what Ron Paul means by "manufactured claims", but it may be based on an interview with Dr. Bouchuiguir, a key source for allegations whom admitted under questioning that he had no evidence to back up claims. I think Ron has a tendency to go beyond where he needs to: it's enough simply to point out that we have attacked countries which have not attacked us and/or have made dubious alliances and have basically opened up Pandora's box in foreign policy. I also think that Paul puts too much blame on the Congressional GOP. The GOP does not control the Senate or the White House. A bipartisan coalition of mostly Democrats defeated an attempt to restrict Obama's authority to noncombat missions; it is true that most Congressional Republicans are probably interventionists vs. noninterventionists, but I think there was a basic Constitutional question here that Paul is not acknowledging: Obama has refused to acknowledge his constitutional limits as Commander-in-Chief, and this goes beyond Libya--there is Obama's radical escalation of drone attacks on countries with which we are not formally at war.
AG Holder, Do You Know...?
Obama Playing the Race Card--Playing With Fire
- "We’ve got no time for excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there."
- "I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down."
- " Every one of you has a grandma or an uncle or a parent whose told you at some point in life as an African American you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by."
Here are some well-written reflections from Professor Williams:
- "Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged pronouncement that United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's utter nonsense. Slavery has never had a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South. Buying into the reparations nonsense, you'd have to conclude that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts." Think about it; part of why we invest in productive technology is to leverage labor, a scarce resource; if you're employing "free labor", how much do you save? This is why libertarian economists assert that the collapse of slavery as an institution was inevitable. As Fruend points out, "Slavery existed from time immemorial; it ended only with the rise of democratic capitalism and the liberal bourgeois revolution that it set in motion (which also led to the rise of feminism, the emancipation of Europe's Jews, the end of Russian serfdom, and so on). In other words, the rise of classical liberal ideas about individual sovereignty hardly resulted in a better case for slavery; it resulted in the definitive case against it.
- "One definition given for insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; it might also be a definition of stupidity. Let's look at some cities where large percentages of black Americans live under poor conditions. Experiencing a violent crime rate of 2,137 per 100,000 of the population, Detroit is the nation's most dangerous city. Rounding out Forbes magazine's 2012 list of the 10 most dangerous cities are St Louis; Oakland, Calif.; Memphis, Tenn.; Birmingham, Ala.; Atlanta; Baltimore; Stockton, Calif.; Cleveland; and Buffalo, N.Y. The most common characteristic of these predominantly black cities is that for decades, all of them have been run by Democratic and presumably liberal administrations. Some cities -- such as Detroit, Buffalo, Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia -- haven't elected a Republican mayor for more than a half-century. What's more is that in most of these cities, blacks have been mayors, chiefs of police, school superintendents and principals and have dominated city councils.
"Today 72 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock. In fact, [growing up in a single-parent home is] a near guarantee for school dropout, poverty and crime, but such a start in life has nothing to do with racial discrimination. Law-abiding poor black people suffer the nation's highest rates of criminal victimization from assaults and homicide. More than 50 percent of homicide victims are black. Black education is a disaster, but who runs the violent, disruptive big-city schools, where education is all but impossible? Black people could benefit from an honest examination of the bill of goods they've been sold. Such an examination would not come from black politicians, civil rights leaders or the black and white liberal elite. Those people have benefited politically and financially from keeping black Americans in a constant state of grievance based on alleged racial discrimination. The long-term solution for the problems that many black Americans face begins with an absolute rejection of the self-serving agenda of hustlers and poverty pimps."There are some obvious reforms: decriminalize victimless crimes; eliminate counterproductive wage regulations, like minimum wages, mandatory benefits, etc.; end the public monopoly on education; redefine public assistance programs as temporary and eliminate perverse, morally hazardous incentives in government programs (e.g., perpetual free/subsidized housing, more assistance for paternal/spousal abandonment) ; get rid of bad policies like rent control, lower barriers to business/professional entry (e.g., occupational licensing, vendor permits, food courts, etc.); affirm constitutional rights to self-defense, etc.
It's time to declare victory in the civil rights battles of the past and move on. My ancestors emigrated from French Canada to Massachusetts after the Civil War; I was raised as a military brat--my Dad worked for one of the most integrated employers in America. I have worked for black managers and clients, with black professors, technical professionals and account executives; I personally know racially-mixed married couples. I even applied for a faculty position at a historical black university in Louisiana. Professor Williams has generously granted me and others of ultimately European descent a full pardon and amnesty for the sins of the past, for which we had no control over.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Robert Ariail and Townhall |
Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band, "Fire"
