Jan
9
Rudy Giuliani and the return of the Right Wing Infinite Memory Void
Filed Under American Politics | 9 Comments
By Israel
What [Obama] should be doing is following the right things Bush did. One of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,”
That jaw-dropping quote comes from the mouth of Mr 9/11 himself, Rudy Giuliani former Mayor of New York City who was wandering around on the day of the attack due to the fact that the New York Office of Emergency Management was situated on the 23rd floor inside the 7 World Trade Center building and he was unable to get there. The reason that it was chosen has been speculated on but one established fact is that it was against the advice of Jerome M. Hauer who had recommended Brooklyn due to the fact that:
<strong>”The [Brooklyn] building is secure and not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan.”</strong>
Proving that sentiment triumphed over adversity this man who made his bones in the last decade through this tragedy and was described as “America’s Mayor”, leading to a run for the Republican nomination, to the extent that current Vice President Joe Biden famously quoted during a debate:
“Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else!”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/10/30/biden-rudys-sentences-c_n_70509.html
It would seem that the former mayor of New York has suffered a blunt trauma to the head leading to a case of amnesia as this can be the only explanation for someone who was a former prosecutor, student of the US education system and, (I’m speculating here) current owner of devices which have working calenders to wrongly state that the presidency of George W Bush began on the 12th of September 2001 eight months after the official start date on January 20th.
I have written before about the Infinite Memory Void of the Right Wing Echo Chamber and it’s astonishing that not only Giuliani but others like Dana Perino:
They want to do all of their investigations. I don’t know. All of the thinking that goes into it. <strong>But we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term. I hope they’re not looking at this politically. I do think we ought it to the American people to call it what it is.</strong>
And Mary Matalin:
MATALIN: I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton, and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200912270001
can with impunity spout off such blatantly false claims in the so-called “liberal media” knowing full well that they will not be fact checked.
To be fair in the cases of Perino, who was with the complete tool Hannity on Faux “News”, there was no real way that a piece of false Republican propaganda was going to be debunked and Matalin, was with her husband Carville proving once and for all who wore the trousers in that house, but Giuliani was on ABC’s “Good Morning America” where the host George Stephanopoulos failed to do his job and point out the fallacy of what was being said.
What is truly annoying about this false right wing mantra is the fact that it is so easy to refute.
The Anthrax Attacks, the Shoe Bomber, the DC Sniper, the LAX Attack all happened after 9/11 yet <strong>still</strong> we have Republican mouthpieces spouting off with the false claim that nothing else happened on US soil after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, with the hypocritical attacks about the Underpants Bomber and the length of time taken for President Obama to respond (three days earlier and in far greater detail than President Bush’s response to Shoe Bomber Richard Reid), not to mention the “why doesn’t he mention terror more?” campaign being the latest stupidity.
While it’s understandable that people on the right will continue to try to cling to the claim that the US was kept “safe” under the Bush Administration regardless of facts or the attempts to raise funds off the of it will be interesting to see if anyone in the so-called “liberal media” (bar Cheney’s stenographers at Politico) will actually do their job in the future and call them on it.
Jan
3
Screwed Up Britain
Filed Under American Politics | Leave a Comment
Mark Steyn identifies a troubling consistency to recent terrorist attacks (and planned attacks) on America:
Whom should the traveling public thank for these impositions? The 9/11 killers were mostly Saudi. But the Shoebomber was a British subject. So were the Heathrow plotters. And the Pantybomber was educated in British schools – first in Togo; then at University College, London – and there is plenty of evidence he was radicalized while in the UK. So three of the four circles of homeland security hell with which the public are tortured are British in origin.
So the question of the day is this. What is it about British society that enables radical Islam so?
But we’re not going to let our American friends off the hook here. There have been two terrorist attacks on America in the last two months. The red flags that should have allowed American intelligence to recognise the threats in advance have been much documented. So why weren’t they recognised?
Jan
2
Profiling Is The Wrong Way To Go
Filed Under American Politics | 12 Comments
I’m not objecting to profiling in relation to possible airline terrorists on moral grounds, just that I see it as an impractical, inefficient and an ineffective way of combating terrorism.
The question as I see it, is who gets profiled? All Muslims or those from muslim countries. Well leaving aside the fact that most people who fit these criteria are perfectly peaceful, that still means that some of those who have attempted attacks would most likely slip through the net. Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, was mixed race British and would most likely avoided any attempts at profiling (if he shaved off his beard). Similarly, the person responsible for the most recent attack was a middle class Nigerian, again hardly a match for an Al-Qaeda terrorist.
The trouble with profiling, is that it distracts attention from the best methods to fight terrorism and protect the airlines, namely improved intelligence and airport security measures. The authorities failed on both of these thus allowing the NWA attack. The emphasis should be on improving those, not branding a large portion of the worlds population as potential terrorists.
Jun
11
Pesky Palin Is Right Again.
Filed Under American Politics | 15 Comments
Via Weekly Standard
At The Republican convention, Sarah Palin said:
“Al Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he’s (Barack Obama) worried that someone won’t read them their rights.“
In a later Townhall, Obama just smirked as a reaction to her silly little accusation. Later, after his inauguration, Obama said during a 60 minutes appearance:
Now, do these folks deserve miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.
Guess what?
From The Weekly Standard again:
For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.
So it does seem that terrorists are the moral equivalent to shoplifters in the world of Obama’s administration. That’s just what we need, a terrorist being told he has the right to remain silent.
Jun
2
Do The Left Condemn Terrorism…Or Just Right Wing Terrorism?
Filed Under American Politics | 7 Comments
The left have been very excited by the shooting of George Tiller. Until it had happened, terrorism in the eyes of the left had become a redundant word, replaced by “man made disaster”. However, in the aftermath of Tiller’s shooting, terrorism has become a favourite word on the left again. It’s just a shame that they are somewhat selective in which acts of terrorism bother them.
I decided to have a look at probably the two most prominent left wing American sites to see how they reported on both the Tiller shooting and the tragic shooting of two American soldiers outside a Recruitment Centre in Arkansas by an Islamic terrorist.
The Daily Kos in it’s first 36 blog posts refers to the Tiller shooting 14 times, nearly half of its posts. It doesn’t refer to the Arkansas shooting once. I can understand that the tragic murder of Tiller represents a political opportunity for the Kos Kids, but to not even mention the loss of two innocent soldiers is shocking although not surprising for a website run by a man who, following another tragic shooting of three policeman in Pittsburgh, said that conservatives “like to talk revolution and kill cops“.
The other site I decided to look at was The Huffington Post. More high brow than the gutter residing Kos, I would have thought that Huffpo would be much more balanced in it’s reportage. HuffPo has a newspaper style front page with a number of headlines and links. There are again plenty of stories about Tiller and many others of importance to the left: GM, Sotomayor, Angelina Jolies’ new tattoo, the worlds most beautiful older women, Obama showing off Bo’s new handshake and even a poll on Hillary’s best colour. There is even a story about a farting hippo (although I admit that that does have bipartisan appeal). But is there a story about an Islamic terrorist shooting dead two young American soldiers on American soil? Of course not.
Two other things to point out. At the top of the Daily Kos’ homepage is an advertisement for an interview with William Ayers, the man that led the terrorist group that planned to kill American serviceman and their partners. secondly, President Obama quickly released a statement expressing his shock and outrage at the murder of George Tiller. He has yet to do so in the Arkansas case.
When a farting hippo and fashion advice for Hillary rank as more important stories than the murder of soldiers, one cannot take to seriously the lefts cynical disgust at right wing terrorism.
May
14
Obama=Bush. Change? Not So Much
Filed Under American Politics | 2 Comments
Terrorists. Horrible nasty oikey people that make good governance difficult. George W Bush, protector of America to the right, evil incarnate to the left decided that to deal with terrorists we had to get down in the dirt with them. Imprisonment without trial, no access to the civilian legal system, rendition and yes I’m prepared to say it, torture. All in the interests of keeping America safe. A successful enterprise.
Understandably, the left in a blaze of patriotic dissent disapproved. To cries of “Bushitler” and “Bush is a war criminal”, they rallied behind a transformative reliably liberal candidate. He thought that American soldiers only bombed civilians, that Guantanamo should be closed, that terrorists should share the rights that any criminal would. He was the perfect anti-Bush.
So when I read this WSJ piece, I should have expected to be surprised:
The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil – indefinitely and without trial — as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But this is just the latest endorsement of the policies of the previous administration. This is a President who has employed “the chicken with head cut off” approach to dealing with terrorists. Closing Guantanamo without any plan on where to house the inmates, releasing the torture memos as a sop to his liberal base but then underestimating the firestorm that resulted, reversing his policy on military commissions, reversing himself on state secrets and on the release of photos of alleged abuse of detainees.
I suspect that a fundamental truth of governance is that the secret squirrel world defies ideology. That keeping a country safe requires a pragmatic ‘in the gutter’ mentality. Barack Obama had little understanding of the complexities involved, which his reverses and broken campaign promises are evidence of. But he is now acting, as a President should, for the interests of all Americans, not just his Moveon/Andrew Sullivan led cheerleaders. I welcome his new found ObamaHitler approach, despite the unplanned, headless chicken, broken promise, circular route that got him here.