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-Short Attention Span Theater-

Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner

2025-01-28

[FE] The last song the public ever saw Warren Zevon play came on October 30, 2002. It was at the request of his host, David Letterman. The song chosen wasn’t the overplayed staple of classic rock stations everywhere, "Werewolves of London," nor the Russian Mafia and Honduran exile tale of "Lawyers, Guns, and Money." Instead, it was a third song off Zevon’s seminal 1978 album, Excitable Boy, "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner."

Look at the liner notes for "Roland" and you’ll see Zevon sharing credits with David Lindell. Lindell wasn’t your typical Zevon collaborator, whose partners included Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, and the Everly Brothers.

Lindell and Zevon met in a chance encounter in Spain, 1974, where one gig after another had led the musical expat to a bar (where else?) somewhere North of Barcelona. "The Dubliner" was then being run by what Zevon described as "a piratical ex-merc." Lindell, another American ex-pat, presented himself with a business card listing his occupations as guerrilla and mercenary soldier. They became quick friends over any number of drinks and used Mike’s gun-for-hire exploits to provide the inspiration, if not the alcohol-soaked details for the song.

For those not familiar with the work, the song tells of the eponymous mercenary from Norway signing on for his next hitch to fight in the "Congo War" where he would carve his submachine gun way across Africa before running afoul of the CIA. The Agency was jealous of his skill with a Thompson—or was it that the CIA flipped to supporting the opposing side? Ultimately, the Agency convinced one of Roland’s fellow mercs to blow his head off in betrayal.

The macabre nature common to Zevon’s work comes through in the remaining refrains as Roland’s headless apparition searches the Dark Continent for his killer before finding him in a Mombasa bar and returning the favor, taking out his Brutus in a hail of ghostly gunfire. The song gives the headless Roland no rest though and sends him on to haunt the world’s conflicts "Sympathy for the Devil"-style from Ireland to Palestine to Patty Hearst and the then current SLA terrorism.

Simply because Zevon was working with someone claiming to have firsthand experience in such matters, didn’t mean he was shy in taking a little poetic license. The .45 caliber Thompson had been widely used by the US in WWII and it became as commonly distributed as any other effective fighting tool, seeing use by both sides in the Arab-Israeli war of ’48, by the Chinese in Korea, Castro’s revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge, and some African Nationalists such as the Patriotic Front of the Rhodesian Bush War and of course by "colonial" powers like the French in Algeria. With the OSS and SOE arming European resistance efforts with Thompsons during WWII, this combination of circumstances makes a derring-do Norwegian expertly wielding a Thompson in the heart of Africa not totally unbelievable, but not completely corroborated either.

The rest of the song also presents some fuzzy details as well. Roland sets out for Biafra, a short lived independent state carved out of and then reunited with Nigeria during a bloody civil war from 1967-1970. So perhaps the soon-to-be-headless hero got in some mercenary shenanigans there first, but it’s in the "Congo War" where Roland is sung to have spent these same years "knee deep in gore." Those dates and the location tie nicely to the first and second Mercenaries’ Mutinies led by Jean Schramme, among others. Historical accuracy gets a bit fuzzy here with Roland both battling the Bantu (the largest ethnic group in the Congo) and killing to help the Congolese.

Maybe Lindell had a bigger hand in writing the lyrics than is normally credited...Jean "Black Jack" Schramme was not just another restless gun, but a true citizen of the Congo who viewed himself as a "white African" and having lived and worked there for the 20 years of his life prior to taking up arms. Any mercenary fighting alongside Schramme, who saw Congo independence and the UN backed expulsion of settlers as antithetical to what was best, might certainly take the view that they were on the side of the "true" Congolese—which appears may be the case with Lindell and his fictional creation.

Whether Roland was a complete fiction, or some closely held amalgamation of Lindell’s experiences and Zevon’s prodigious imagination may not be answerable.

With Zevon lost to us some 20 years ago and David Eric Lindell taking one more queue from Roland, possessing a wraith-like footprint and leaving his status and whereabouts unknown, maybe any tale of mercenaries, guns, bars, murder, revenge, Africa, and ghosts, deserves a bit of mystery to remain and I bet both would agree.

Link

Home Front: Politix

I worked on Kamala Harris's campaign - and this is why it turned out to be an utter shambles

2024-11-11

A taste:

[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] When I volunteered for Kamala Harris
who got her start in politix between former Oakland mayor Willie Brown's' knees
a few weeks ago in a swing district in the New York commuter belt, I was assured by Democratic Party organizers that their ground game would cream Donald Trump
...So far he's been unkillable, and they've tried....
Though the polls were showing the two contenders running neck and neck, the confidence was understandable.

This, after all, was the party machine that generated more than 81 million votes for Joe The Big Guy Biden
...46th president of the U.S. Too old and senile to be prosecuted, not too old and senile to set national policy...
the last time round.

And it was better funded than ever. Nearly a billion dollars had poured into the party's coffers since the start of 2023, well over twice what Trump had raised in the same period.

The campaign in New York's 17th district focused not on Kamala but Mondaire Jones, a gay, black former congressman who was challenging a pro-Trump incumbent, Mike Lawler, for a seat in the House of Representatives.

Jones had all the charisma Harris lacked and, if he defeated Lawler, there was a fighting chance Kamala would pick up additional votes on his coat tails.

At 37, Jones was a made-for-Instagram candidate. And, with registered Democrats
...every time you hear the phrase white people, white supremacy, white anything but paint, you're listening to a Democrat. Ask him/her/it to reimagine something for you; they do that a lot, though not well. They can hear a dog whistle a mile or two away. They invented the spoils system and Tammany Hall, and inspired the addition of the word (Thomas) Nasty to the English language. They want to stop continental drift and repeal the law of unintended side effects...
outnumbering Republicans by some 80,000 in the district, I thought we were in with a good shout.

Yet what I found soon changed my mind: a self-regarding shambles of a campaign staffed by temporary workers with little experience, less know-how and, apparently, zero interest in talking to Main Street America.

My turf included the affluent Westchester County horse country - home to the sprawling estates of high-profile Dems like Richard Gere and David Letterman - as well as hard-knock Hudson River towns like Ossining, where employment is provided by the Sing Sing supermax.

I’d been assigned to a campaign office in the attractive commuter village of Mount Kisco, one of three the Democrats had opened in the district. But it was a disappointing start.

There were just a few scruffy posters on the rather grubby door. Outside, Harris’s trademark 'not going back' signs were nowhere to be seen.

One smartly dressed woman strolling by told me she thought our headquarters was an abandoned shop.

Then I met my new bosses. It’s fair to say they were young — and that some of them knew little about the area we were canvassing.

Though the door knocking was performed by unpaid enthusiasts like me, our labors were overseen by temps the party hired at rates advertised from $15 an hour on a recruitment site.

I counted nine or ten of them lounging around the office.

The next surprise was to find that I would be using a supposedly state-of-the-art phone app called, incongruously, miniVan.

It would pull up addresses as I went from house-to-house, I was told. And it would synch the outcome of each approach in split seconds with the Democratic campaign's computers.

Advantage Mondaire and Kamala!

Yet the only names on the list were registered Democrat and — in what had been described as the tightest race in recent history (until the results came through, of course), we were to talk to no one else.

'The app lists the registered Democrats in the district. We're only approaching Democrats,' a temp explained.

Incredulous, I called Mitch Saunders, the party's Northern Westchester County organizer, for some guidance.

'The idea is to get Democrats to turn out,’ he confirmed. ’It's all about turn out.’

How about people like the neighbors near my home in Westchester who strung a gaudy Trump banner in the trees?

’No,’ said Mitch.

What about the throngs of well-to-do female shoppers outside the campaign base — the very demographic that the Democrats were supposedly shooting for?

'No.'

I said I'd like a Kamala-Mondaire yard sign for my verge at home. The Mount Kisco office had run out of them. 'You don't need them,' yawned an unshaven youth. 'Just use the app.'

But the app failed to synch when I hit the streets on November 5.

A few doors were answered by puzzled Democrats who’d already cast their ballots and were fed up with being 'harassed' — as they put it — by the non-stop texts and calls pestering them for money.

While the Republicans were stressing authenticity, we were confined to a verbatim script.

’Hi! I'm a volunteer with the NY Dems. I just want to confirm that we can count on you to vote for Mondaire Jones...’

The script was constantly rejigged. By Election Day its most notable feature was that had nothing to say about Mondaire Jones other than his name.

Link

Government Corruption

New D'Souza film 'Vindicating Trump' imagines how operatives could steal an election

2024-09-29

Where could they get the names and addresses for the blank ballots?
[JustTheNews] D’Souza's interview with former President Donald Trump is woven throughout the film.

In a documentary called Vindicating Trump that opened Friday in about 850 theaters nationwide, conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza hired investigators to imagine ways dishonest political operatives might be able to sway an election.

One of their solutions was simple: run blank ballots through a copy machine, or simply purchase thousands of them online, both of which the investigators claimed to do with ease in the film.

One investigator is seen phoning a voting registration office and asking whether it’s legal to make duplicates of his mail-in ballot, and the voice on the other line says that it is.

Another investigator is shown purchasing 1 million names of registered voters for $35 so he can easily identify likely non-voters whose names and forged signatures could be used on the duplicated ballots.

In an interview with Just the News, D’Souza called the segment one of the more shocking elements of his new movie.

“We told our investigators, ‘Don’t just tell us you can make ballots, go make ballots. Prove to us these are ballots that can be cast without being detected.’ And they did,” D’Souza said. “It’s mind-blowing, to be honest.”

It’s familiar ground for D’Souza, who previously made 2,000 Mules, a documentary that explored allegations that Democratic operatives were stuffing ballot boxes during the 2020 election in which then-President Donald Trump lost to then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

D’Souza obtained from state officials video of the alleged ballot-stuffing, but the mainstream media and most government officials dismissed the claims made in the film as unfounded, not significant enough to have mattered or not illegal, given COVID-19 protocols in place at the time that were designed to make voting easier.

Salem Media Group, Inc., the company behind the book and film “2,000 Mules,” in May issued an apology and said it would halt distribution of the film and remove both the film and book from its platforms. It apologized to one voter specifically portrayed as illegally voting whom Georgia officials cleared of wrongdoing.

2,000 Mules was backward-looking, while D’Souza produced Vindicating Trump to be, in part, forward looking.

“The premise is that Democrats are expected to cheat, but they can’t do so in the same way as before because people will be looking for it,” he said. “We have to think like the criminals. We’re not saying it happened, we’re saying it could. My purpose for exposing it is to make it more difficult.”

D’Souza had an additional forward-looking scene in Vindicating Trump whereby actor Nick Searcy plays an “intelligence bad guy” who hatches a plot to assassinate Trump. When the CIA balks, he laments: “Too bad it’s not the 60’s, right?”

D’Souza, who provided a clip of that scene to Just the News, said the scene was filmed prior to the July 13 attempt on Trump’s life, when he was shot in the ear while at a rally in Pennsylvania.

The scenes with Searcy and dozens of other actors are imaginative recreations of what might be going on behind the scenes at media outlets, Democratic headquarters and government agencies, who are portrayed in the movie as colluding with each other to keep Trump from the presidency and elect Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It’s not just interviews and stock footage like the usual documentary, we created an emotional storyline,” D’Souza told Just the News.

Among those interviewed is Trump, and D’Souza said the former president had to delay their meeting at Mar-a-Lago several times, which proved fortuitous, since the two men finally sat down together about 10 days after the first assassination attempt while, without the rescheduling, the interview would have happened prior.

The interview is woven throughout the film, and D’Souza called it “the centerpiece of the movie.”

He added: “I ask Trump somewhat unexpected questions because I want to see the tumblers of his mind work, and give the audience a window into his soul.”

D’Souza also provided Just the News a clip of the Trump interview in which he discusses accusations leveled by his detractors that he represents a danger to democracy.

The film, viewed by Just the News, begins with several celebrities hobnobbing with Trump decades earlier, including Jay Leno, David Letterman and the cast of "Saturday Night Live."

“Politicians and superstars lined up to be photographed with the embodiment of the American Dream. All that changed in 2015 when he crossed the political Rubicon and decided to run for president as a Republican,” D’Souza says in the movie.

In another section of the movie, D’Souza says: “Democrats, including Obama, sought to frame him as a Russian spy, an asset of Putin, a traitor to the United States. Traitors are typically shot or hanged; so this was an attempted political assassination.”

The film also includes a news clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. saying on CNN, ”I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy” than Trump.

It also includes a clip of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying on television: “Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Link

Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia

Top 20 Most Cringeworthy Zelensky PR Moments

2023-01-16

[CaitlinJohnstone] The US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine has had many jaw-dropping instances of imperialist sociopathy, propagandistic audacity and brazen journalistic malpractice that we’ve discussed in this space many times, but one of the most cringeworthy and degrading aspects of the globe-spanning narrative control campaign surrounding this war has been the way the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been turned into an ever-present corporate mascot for the most aggressive ad campaign ever devised. The way the most powerful institutions in the western world have been throwing their puppet in everyone’s face to sell the empire’s proxy warfare puts Ronald McDonald to shame.

Here are 20 of the cringiest moments of establishment PR using Zelensky to market the McProxy War to the western world, in no particular order.
Click through for links and evidence for every one of these insults to your intelligence. Remember kids, the deep state is a hostile entity that doesn't have your interests at heart - except regarding Ukraine. Then everyone cheers along like the crowds in George Orwell's "1984" during Hate Week.
1. A House Republican introducing a bill to place a bust of Zelensky in the US Capitol building

2. The fake Hollywood action hero-sounding "I need ammunition, not a ride" quote

3. The Vogue cover shoot

5. Time Magazine Person of the Year

6. Star Wars: Attack of the Drones

7. Zelensky giving a speech at the Golden Globes
https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1613126818823012352

8. Zelensky giving a speech for the Grammys

9. Zelensky getting an Academy Award from actor Sean Penn

10. Zelensky addressing the World Economic Forum
Gosh, if there's anyone who isn't totally evil and in bed with the deep state, it's the WEF.
11. Zelensky giving a speech and ringing the bell for the New York Stock Exchange
Likewise Wall Street.
12. Zelensky giving a speech at the secretive Bilderberg Group (probably)
Ditto.

That probably sounds like the lady is making stuff up to pad her list.

13. Zelensky giving a speech at the Cannes Film Festival

14. Zelensky giving a speech at the Glastonbury Festival

15. Weird Hologram Zelensky at the Founders Forum in the UK

16. Zelensky meeting with Ben Stiller

17. The Ukrainian flag performance in the US congress

18. The bizarre Biden-Zelensky slow motion action-heroes-walking-away-from-an-explosion video clip

19. Guest on David Letterman’s show

20. The obligatory Bono psyop

Honorable mention: Zelensky meeting with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to help "rebuild" (read: buy up) Ukraine
If the corporation forcing Americans out of their homes and into rentals isn't someone you should cheer for, who is?
Honorable mention: DC party at the Ukrainian embassy openly hosted by the US military-industrial complex
Ditto.
Are people not tired of having their intelligence insulted yet?

Link

Home Front: Politix

Former US President tells us again what news channel to avoid

2018-01-14

[FOX] Former President Barack Obama resurfaced on Friday and took a shot at Fox News viewers, saying they're "living on a different planet" than people who consume mainstream media.

Obama made the remarks on the premiere of the new monthly Netflix series "My next guest needs no introduction with David Letterman," which hit the streaming service on Friday morning. Early in the episode, Obama asked Letterman about his retirement but the veteran talk show host quickly let the former president know who was boss.

"Now here's how this is gonna work. I'm gonna ask you stuff, and then you respond to stuff," Letterman joked.

Letterman then asked Obama what he considers the more dangerous threat to a democracy, the president demeaning the press or a foreign power sabotaging the voting process. Both options are clearly jabs at President Trump and Obama answered without mentioning the current president's name.

"One of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we don't share a common baseline of facts," Obama said. "If you watch Fox News, you are living on a different planet than you are if you are listening to NPR."

Link

Home Front: Politix

Obama Lectures Trump On His Behavior

2018-01-12

Obama lectures... evergreen headline.
[Yahoo] Former President Obama has a message for President Donald Trump: Pay close attention to your behavior because it has the potential to impact the nation’s culture and values.

"One of the things that Michelle figured out, in some ways faster than I did‐was part of your ability to lead the country doesn’t have to do with legislation, doesn’t have to do with regulations, it has to do with shaping attitudes, shaping culture, increasing awareness," Obama told David Letterman on the first episode of his new Netflix show, which was released Friday.
So Michelle figured it out, and not Barack Hussein Obama, the Smartest President Evah? What a schmuck.
I will say this - I thought Obama was going to come out twice a week and criticize Trump. I think that, over the past year, he's been comparatively restrained. At some point, Obama's going to ratchet it up and Trump's gonna cut loose on him.

Link

Home Front: Culture Wars

Babel--The Left and Right Cultural Wars

2017-07-08

Moved to Opinion because Richard Fernandez is a columnist.

The Fisher Body Plant in Detroit

[PJMedia] David Gerlenter writing in the Wall Street Journal says something self-evidently true. The Left seems to have won every single culture battle fought.

Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

The late Andrew Breitbart noticed the same thing. Observing that "politics is downstream from culture" he argued the Left has made us the villains of our own stories.

Our lives -- indeed, our very species -- has storytelling wound into our DNA. ... Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. ...

Thus we come to politics ... the vast majority of those with the power of content creation are Liberals. ... Liberals control story. ...What is some of that messaging? Think about movies and TV. Corporations are evil -- using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). American soldiers are bloodthirsty lawbreaking maniacs (Any military film). The CIA conducts illegal, secret operations that have nothing to do with protecting America. Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders. David Letterman and Saturday Night Live ridicule the Right 95% of the time. Jon Stewart pretends to be centrist, but in fact jumps all over the Right far more often than the Left.

Liberal political candidates are the embodiments of those Liberal tenets. The goal is to associate them in voter minds via the vehicle of popular culture.

Even before Breitbart's warning there was Orwell who understood that the Left's ultimate ability was to uproot the past and plant their chosen seed for the future. His famous dictum "he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past" is an unsurpassed indictment of groupthink totalitarianism. There seemed no doubt they would succeed. Within its bubble the Left's control of culture is so absolute they can watch 1984 without realizing it's about them....more

Link

Home Front: Politix

Stars at Obama's White House Farewell Bash Party Until 4 A.M.

2017-01-08

Obama to sleep for next three days.
[Breitbart] A litany of A-list celebrities braved below-freezing temperatures to attend President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama’s final party at the White House on Friday.

The star-studded crowd at the Obama’s farewell bash included George and Amal Clooney, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg, Stevie Wonder, David Letterman, George Lucas, Paul McCartney, and many more.

Cell phones were reportedly confiscated, forcing stars to snap and post photos and videos to their social media accounts from outside the White House.

"Stumbling out of the White House at 4am after an incredible night celebrating 8 incredible years," wrote actress Olivia Wilde in a Twitter post in which she was posing next to her partner, actor Jason Sudeikis.

Link

Home Front: Culture Wars

Brian Williams Sits on Board of Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation

2015-02-06

[NewsBusters] Oh, the irony -- Brian Williams, the NBC 'Nightly News' anchor who fabricated a story about being shot at by an RPG while in a helicopter in Iraq, is 'a member of the Board of Directors of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation,' according to his bio on the NBC News website. According to the 990 tax returns for the foundation, Williams has been on the board since at least 2005. He is also listed on the 'Board of Directors' page on the foundation's website. Williams hosted a panel in October 2013 'which focused on veterans who received a Medal of Honor, and what they can teach our students,' according to Education Week. He has also promoted tributes to Medal of Honor recipients 'Nightly News.' On Feb. 4, Stars and Stripes reported that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted to not being aboard a helicopter that was shot and had to be rescued following RPG fire during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Williams stated that he 'feels terrible' and 'was wrong' for not telling viewers that he was instead 'on the Chinook behind the bird that took the RPG.' Despite claiming that he just misspoke, Williams pushed this same story multiple times since 2003, including on CBS's 'The Late Show with David Letterman' on March 26, 2013.

Brian Williamsâ Tall Tales Extend To Katrina, Too

Link

-Short Attention Span Theater-

How to Become a Cat Lady

2015-01-04

Robert Stacy McCain does a preliminary sendup of an article on feminist dating by a leftist woman.

The inlines belong to McCain
As does the pic
Lisa Bonos (@lisabonos) has published a column headlined “How to find a feminist boyfriend” that reads like an Onion parody:
“I find it really attractive how successful you are,” my date said, leaning in for a kiss.
Sure, it sounds like a line. But it also sounds like feminism. . . .
(No, it’s a line. Trust me.)
[W]hat I want a partner to be: cute, smart, funny and … yes, feminist. So go ahead, alert Susan Patton, Lori Gottlieb and the rest of the get-married-already crowd: A 30-something single woman, eggs unfrozen, is telling other single women that they should dare to want it all if they ever hope to have it all. . . .
(Hint: If you’re a “30-something single woman,” you’ll be lucky if you get to have any of it, much less “have it all.”)
But how do you spot a male feminist if he’s not at an abortion rights rally wearing a “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt?
It shouldn’t be hard. After all, as Aziz Ansari said on David Letterman’s show recently, everyone’s a feminist now. Unless you think Beyonce shouldn’t have the right to vote, should earn 23 percent less than Jay-Z and should be at home cooking rather than performing. And who would think that?
Few guys will proudly say no when asked if they’re feminists. . . .
(Few guys who want to sleep with Lisa Bonos would say that, perhaps, but exactly how many guys want to sleep with Lisa Bonos?)
Instead it’s a wholehearted yes, a lukewarm maybe or Can you define what you mean by “feminist,” please? . . .
(In some cases, it means “lonely bisexual English major.”)
Here’s how I’m defining it: Feminist daters — male or female, gay or straight — aren’t constrained by gender roles. Anyone can do the asking-out, the feelings-confessing or the initiating of any kind.
(Perhaps you see why bisexual English majors are so often lonely.)
A feminist dater or boyfriend (and yes, feminists have boyfriends) is aware of the ways women have traditionally been held back, by others and by our own accord, and actively pushes against that. He’s sensitive to the fact that women’s bodies are frequently judged, abused and legislated, and takes no part in that. He gets it. . . .
You can read the rest and “get it.” It’s really a Craigslist ad disguised as an op-ed column, a pseudo-defiant gesture typical of certain women who have wasted their 20s in a series of going-nowhere “relationships.” On Twitter, Kyle Smith offers an alternate headline:

How to remain single until you are Maureen Dowd’s age

Maybe I’ll come back with more snark later, but this column is just such a motherlode of nonsense, it needs a special touch.

Link

Africa North

President Ethelred - VDH

2012-09-25

Like old King Ethelred the Unready, who either had no counsel or had no sense, or both, and often paid the Danegeld rather than attempt to deter the Norsemen, so Barack Obama and his lieutenants still believe that they can both appease radical Islam and convince others that is not what they are doing.

Various top-ranking U.S. officials, for instance, following the lead of President Obama himself, for days insisted that the murder of the American ambassador to Libya was a spontaneous act of a crowd that got out of control, enraged by the release of an anti-Islamic video trailer posted by an illiberal private American resident. We were to believe that the fault was not millions of medieval Islamists abroad who hate the West, but one Coptic American at home who had crude taste and ill intent.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney both insisted that the killings of our people in Libya had nothing to do with anti-Americanism, much less anger at or disdain for the White House or administration policy leaving their audiences wondering at what point in the future they would simply retract or ignore all the untrue things they were now asserting.

Of course, no one believed that narrative not when the video had been in the public domain for months without incident (is there even a film that follows the trailer?), not when some diplomatic personnel in the Middle East had been put on higher alert in response to Islamist promises of violence, not when it was the iconic eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 killings, not when protesters brought in heavy weaponry to assault our facilities, not when there was a long history of radical Islamists using trivial affronts from Danish cartoons to papal communiqués as catalysts for preplanned violence.
So why those unusual efforts to downplay the circumstances around the gruesome death of an American ambassador?

The murdering of Americans in Libya is, embarrassingly so, the logical fruition of a failed and increasingly dangerous foreign policy in the Middle East. We missed out on siding with the Iranians who went out in the streets in 2009 to protest their countrys theocracy. Instead President Obama warned us about our own past culpable interference in the internal affairs of Iran. But note that Iranian reformers were far more likely to oppose fundamentalist, anti-American theocrats than were the more favored protesters in Egypt two years later. There is now no real obstacle to Irans acquisition of the bomb, and administration surrogates in the media instead talk of containment, as if Iran were a Pakistan with an archenemy, 1 billionstrong nuclear India next door.

Our loud announcements of withdrawal from Afghanistan have left us unable even to accompany the allied Afghan army on patrol. We just suffered our worst loss in planes since Vietnam, without press attention or a comment from the commander-in-chief. Few believe that the Taliban will not be in power in 2014. Iraq was once secure and open to discussions over a vestigial American base; now snubbed, it is left intriguing with Iran, the assumed regional hegemon.

The Obama administration was confused about the Egyptian revolution mum on the old allied authoritarian Hosni Mubarak until it was clear that he would lose power, then rushing in to embrace the dissidents, then declaring the Muslim Brotherhood to be secular, when it was clear that the Google crowd would not assume power, as if Cairo was supposed to have been a prePalo Alto. Now Morsi, the former Egyptian dissident, who found freedom, employment, and security only in America, lectures us on what we must do to win his friendship, and the conditions under which he is willing to accept nearly $2 billion in American aid.

No one knows what we were doing in Libya either strategically or tactically other than offering up the cute phrase leading from behind, which was supposed to denote a new hybrid soft/hard-power protocol. Apparently when the crowds appeared to go 51 percent against Qaddafi, the new monster thought to be in rehabilitation became once more the old monster worthy of being bombed.

Syrias Bashar al-Assad went from being a reformer, to a thug who had to go, to someone better left out of sight, out of mind. The more the administration declares our relationship with Israel unchanged, the more we know it has deteriorated to the lowest point in the history of the Jewish state largely because Benjamin Netanyahu has been demonized as a right-wing trouble-maker who on any given day might do something to embarrass the Obama administration in the Arab world during the election campaign. If only he were as smarmy as David Letterman or Whoopi Goldberg, he might have earned an audience with the president.

n short, there is no good or bad administration policy but rather no policy at all other than braggadocio about the killing of Osama bin Laden and Moammar Qaddafi and Predator score cards.
The murder of Ambassador Stevens may well have been the most horrific killing in our nations diplomatic history. The administrations original narrative that the ambassador got separated from his security detail, suffocated amid the smoke, and was found unconscious by well-meaning Libyans who, in concern, rushed him to the hospital cannot be true. Some disturbing rumors and evidence later emerged to the effect that Stevens may have had no real security detail to speak of, but was helped only by the brave ad hoc service of some private security contractors, who gave their lives to save an American diplomat without military support. More disturbing even than the absence of adequate military security was the likelihood that Stevens was attacked viciously by the mob, perhaps sexually brutalized by it, and then taunted by his killers, before being dumped in the street. In the long history of attacks on our embassies, I cannot think of a comparable instance where an ambassador was caught alone, mobbed, tortured, and photographed in extremis or where an administration was so averse to disclosing any details of his demise.

Obama genuinely seems to believe that he, his administration, our present foreign policy, and America 2012 are somehow not the real objects of hate of the Arab Street mobs. That disconnect was also the theme of his mythmaking in Cairo, of his al-Arabiya interview, and of his apologetic commentary to the French and the Turks: A pre-Obama America was hubristic, insensitive, and culpable for damaged bilateral relations and would be acknowledged as such by an Obama America.
When Daniel Ortega enumerated the crimes of the United States in the presence of the president, Barack Obama did not defend his country, but simply shrugged, Im grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old. In other words, Obama felt that while his country may not have been innocent, he, a mere toddler at the time, most certainly was and that he is innocent now as well.

In the context of the Middle East, Obama is thus naturally confused by the violence. He had assumed the Islamic mobs realize that America changed after 2008. So while Muslim complaints against the United States certainly had some validity at one time, such writs can no longer be valid after Obama assumed the presidency. The Arab Street could not possibly be angry at Barack Obama, the Nobel laureate and sympathetic supporter of Arab Muslims. The murdering must be an artifact, a fluke brought on by some right-wing, provocative American zealot, whose constitutionally protected rights to obnoxious free expression are overshadowed by the damage he has done in giving millions the impression that a reset America of 2012 still bears some resemblance to the America of 1776 to 2008.

We can see this disconnect in both the serious and the trivial: from Obamas use of the adjective natural to describe unhinged mobs attacking U.S. properties over a video trailer, to his new personalized campaign version of the American flag. In that sense, one cannot entirely damn Mr. Morsi as he lectures America on its shortcomings given that much of his complaint merely follows up on Obamas own. Thus he may feel that he is ingratiating himself with the administration by channeling the Cairo speech.

If Obama were a conservative Republican, a George W. Bush for example, the media narrative of Libyagate would be one of an asleep, incompetent president, lieutenants who were brazenly mendacious, an incompetent secretary of state, and an administration conspiracy of silence juxtaposed with a wider story of a disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, an abandonment of any influence in Iraq, a refusal to recognize the situation in Syria and Egypt and impotence as a war looms between Iran and Israel.

Will we ever know the circumstances that led to the murder of Ambassador Stevens? Only when government auditors and inquirers feel free to find and disclose the truth, which probably means sometime after the Obama administration is well out of office.

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Home Front: Politix

The Fantasy House of Barack Obama

2012-09-25

Victor Davis Hanson
Hanson as per usual; Excellent

It All Failed?

By Fantasy House I do not mean -- or rather only mean -- Barack Obama's La-La land in which Austrians speak Austrian, Hawaii is in Asia, Afghans speak Arabic, the Maldives lie off Argentina, there are seven additional states, servicemen are zombie corpse-men, and Kansas twisters kill 10,000 at a time.

Rather I refer to the fantasies that Obama employs to deal with a very real world he inhabits. The president just told Univision that you "cannot change Washington from the inside." In other words, the president just shattered his own four-year fantasy that he, like Lincoln, would take the train from Illinois to D.C., not just to remake America, but also to change the very way things are done there.

Now Obama accepts that the second coming of an Illinois savior has failed, not because he tried to change the ethics of Washington (he never did), but because upon arrival he almost immediately did in Washington what he was used to doing in Chicago. And so lobbying, insider politics to help campaign bundlers, private deals to pass health care, the revolving door, and nonstop campaigning all replaced hope and change.

I suppose in place of change from the "inside," he now envisions more "outside" executive orders like the de facto Dream Act, having the EPA shut down more coal plants, stopping more federal energy leases, granting more recess appointments, and extending more executive privilege.

Shattering Glass

The president's illusions about the economy have, one by one, been exploded. Do we even remember the 2010 "summer of recovery"? Or "millions of new green jobs" that ended in Solyndra-like realties? "GM is alive, Osama bin Laden is dead" -- well, sort of, in the sense that the government can take any insolvent company, inject $25 billion into it, and keep it alive until the next election.

Somehow we are to console ourselves that 43 months of 8% plus unemployment is success. The president keeps bragging that he has created 4.6 million new jobs. But who cares about the actual number created, if the number lost is the far greater figure? Do businesses brag that they grossed $4.6 million when their bottom line is a net loss of $500,000? The jobs fantasy has also evaporated in the reality that we have lost more jobs than gained under Obama, millions no longer look for work, and the percentage of adults working is at near-record lows. Where did the fifteen million more on food stamps come from?

Check your tire pressure; tune your cars up; "bankrupt" coal companies; "skyrocketing" electricity prices, Steven Chu's dream of gas prices at "European levels" -- all that only ended up at $4 a gallon gas. Yet we still don't know whether that price spike is supposed to be welcomed, in the green sense of helping to sell subsidized Volts and "cutting our carbon footprint."

The deficit? What deficit and debt? The president insists to David Letterman that he doesn't know what the aggregate debt is -- only that whatever it actually is, George Bush caused it! He barnstorms on the idea that ending the war in Afghanistan (where was the supposed "peace dividend" from Iraq that was supposed to cut the deficit?) will help pay down the $1 trillion-plus he borrows each year. Yet taking 39.5% from top incomes and hiking capital gains taxes will not even give us a 20% reduction in the annual deficit. So after the next tax hike, then what? We go to 50%, 55%, 60% -- to pay our fair share for millions of more green jobs?
Read the rest.

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