Tag Archives: Equality

News

Can the Democrats be trusted to protect our national security?

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A Washington Post editorial by three Republican senators highlights a persistent problem.

Excerpt:

Espionage is a dangerous business often seen only through a Hollywood lens. Yet the real-world operations, and lives, that inspire such thrillers are highly perishable. They depend on hundreds of hours of painstaking work and the ability to get foreigners to trust our government.

Sitting in a prison cell in Pakistan is one of those foreigners who trusted us. Shakil Afridi served as a key informant to the United States in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. This brave physician put his life on the line to assist U.S. efforts to track down the most-wanted terrorist in the world, yet our government left him vulnerable to the Pakistani tribal justice system, which sentenced him to 33 years for treason. The imprisonment and possible torture of this courageous man — for aiding the United States in one of the most important intelligence operations of our time — coincides with a deeply damaging leak in another case.

The world learned a few weeks ago that U.S. intelligence agencies and partners had disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a civilian aircraft using an explosive device designed by an affiliate in Yemen. This disclosure revealed sources and methods that could make future successes more difficult to achieve. The public release of information surrounding such operations also risks the lives of informants and makes it more difficult to maintain productive partnerships with other intelligence agencies. These incidents paint a disappointing picture of this administration’s judgment when it comes to national security.

[…]The problem stems in part from the media’s insatiable desire for real-world information that makes intelligence operations look like those of filmmakers’ imaginations. That is understandable, but this hunger is fed by inexcusable contributions from current and former U.S. officials.

For example, why did the Obama administration hold a conference call May 7 with a collection of former government officials, some of whom work as TV contributors and analysts, to discuss the foiled bomb threat? In doing so, the White House failed to safeguard sensitive intelligence information that gave us an advantage over an adversary. Broadcasting highly classified information notifies every enemy of our tactics and every current and future partner of our inability to provide them the secrecy that often is the difference between life and death.

[…]When they leave Capitol Hill, former members of Congress and their staff are, by law, prohibited from petitioning their former congressional colleagues for up to two years. Yet nothing restricts former security officials from using their government contacts and experience to provide live commentary on breaking news stories.

Furthermore, nothing limits current officials from using their media contacts to control a story — or to even promote a big-budget movie. We were shocked to learn that the White House has also leaked classified details of the bin Laden raid to Hollywood filmmakers, including the confidential identities of elite U.S. military personnel.

The authors:

Dan Coats, Richard Burr and Marco Rubio, all Republicans, represent Indiana, North Carolina and Florida, respectively, in the U.S. Senate and are members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Here’s my take: Democrats want to equalize influence between our country and countries like Iran, China and North Korea. One way they can do this is by undermining our ability to defend our interests abroad. It’s all part of the leftist dream of making everyone “equal” so that there are no disagreements. In a very real sense, leftists are responsible for enabling the human rights abuses and purges that go on in countries like Iran, China and North Korea. They don’t really think that things like shooting pro-Democracy protestors (Iran), coerced abortion (China) and executing Christians for distributing Bibles (North Korea), etc. should be opposed with American influence.

News

Should Barack Obama get credit for killing Osama Bin Laden?

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I’ve written before about how George W. Bush deserves credit for the termination of that terrorist vermin.

But there are a couple of other data points to add that recently emerged, as well.

First, the decision on the Bin Laden raid was made by the American Armed Forces, not by Barack Obama, as a newly released memo reveals.

Second, Obama had already drafted a memo to blame the military if the operation failed.

In fact, Obama has weakening our counter-terrorism and defense capabilities from the day he took office.

Excerpt:

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the president’s victory lap in Afghanistan on the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the Navy SEALs “an attempt to shore up his national security credentials, because he has spent the past three years gutting our military.”

Indeed he has. “He cut the F-22, future combat system, C-17 and our ground-based interceptor in Poland, to name a few,” Inhofe noted.

[…]President Obama’s defense policies fulfill a campaign pledge he made to the far-left group Caucus for Priorities a month before the January 2008 Iowa caucuses. Caucus for Priorities is an offshoot of a bigger group, Priorities Action Fund, created by Ben Cohen, the peace activist and co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

In a video made for the group, Obama called for a further deterioration in our military strength.

“I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems,” he said.

So far, he has kept his word.

In the video, he also vowed, “I will set a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop new nuclear weapons, I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenals.”

He has kept that promise as well.

As the Heritage Foundation notes, since Obama took office, over 50 major weapons programs of more than $300 billion have been cut or delayed.

Obama, who betrayed Poland and Czechoslovakia on missile defense and shut down key weapon systems like the F-22 Raptor, has vowed to veto any changes to the mandated cuts, including $650 billion from defense as called for by the Budget Control Act over the next decade.

That comes on top of $460 billion in defense cuts already agreed to — a total of $1.1 trillion in defense cuts our commander in chief is OK with.

A 14-page analysis by the Republican majority staff of the House Armed Services Committee says the cumulative cuts will result in Army and Marine Corps losing 200,000 troops.

The Navy will shrink from 300 ships to 238 vessels and would lose two carrier battle groups needed to project American power and influence. Strategic bombers will fall from 153 to 101. Air Force fighters would drop by more than half, from 3,602 aircraft to 1,512 planes. These are real cuts, both in spending and in military capability.

In fact, the main priority of the Obama administration seems to be redirecting the U.S. military to fight global warming intervening in favor of South American socialist dictators, dismantling our nuclear arsenal, allowing Iranian Islamists to rig elections and shoot pro-democracy protesters, giving drone technology to the Iranians,  setting up the the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya, and handing over the keys to our European missile defense system to the Russians.

This is not the full list of how this man has been a disaster for world peace and national security. And it is a list that is ignored by hist supporters who think with their emotions and who have their hands out for more of their share of their neighbor’s earnings.

Commentary

The Life of Julia: the Democrat push for more dependence on government

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Here is an interesting post from Stuart Scheiderman about the Democrat’s latest ad campaign, “the Life of Julia”.

Excerpt: (links removed)

What were they thinking? What was the crack Obama re-election campaign thinking when they launched their slideshow about “The Life of Julia”?

How is it possible that highly skilled political operatives could have descended into such ham-handed manipulation?

Have their minds been infiltrated and colonized by Republican gremlins? Or were they just trying to provide fodder for the conservative commentariat?

If the latter, they have succeeded beyond their dreams.

James Taranto describes the unfolding story of Julia:

Julia, who has no face, is depicted at various ages from 3 through 67, enjoying the benefits of various Obama-backed welfare-state programs.

As a toddler, she’s in a head-start program. Skip ahead to 17, and she’s enrolled at a Race to the Top high school. Her 20s are very active: She gets surgery and free birth control through ObamaCare regulations, files a lawsuit under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and pays off her student loans at a low interest rate. We get updates at age 31, 37 and 42–and then the narrative skips ahead 23 years when she enrolls in Medicare. Two years later, she’s on Social Security, at which point she can die at any time.

In its last frame Julia is retiring comfortably on her Social Security payments. Apparently, they are so generous that she does not need to worry about running out of money.

Is this what people on the left think of individuals? That we need to depend on government for success?

Consider this story from the UK about how government doesn’t trust parents to feed their own children but instead insist that schools feed them, paid for through taxes, of course. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt: (links removed)

This defence of free school meals against a posh government which “hates anyone who is not like them” is promoted as a radical stance. But in truth it is shot through with a cloying, Dickens-style pity for poor kids, who, it is presumed, never receive hot food at home and thus must receive it at school. Campaigners are really calling on the authorities to play in loco parentis and to provide less well-off children with nutrition, because apparently their parents are too poor or stupid to do so. So the Children’s Society says free school meals are essential because “poor diets can be prevalent and child obesity is particularly high in low-income families”. Apparently free school meals are often “the only healthy cooked food [poor children] get”. These waifs and strays, who come from “disadvantaged families” whose eating habits “exceed recommended daily sugars and saturated fat intakes”, must have their eyes opened to “healthy food options”, says the Children’s Society.

It seems clear that the passion for free school meals is not driven by serious political thinking but by perverse middle-class fantasies about the “junk” that poor kids get fed at home. Likewise, when the government cut back on free school milk in 2010, commentators and campaigners were aghast, seeming seriously to believe that poor kids would become calcium-deprived, malnourished creatures without that daily third of a pint of milk. As one said, for children who “do not get a balanced diet high in fruit and vegetables and food like fish, milk [in schools] is the only real way of them getting enough calcium”. One expert told the BBC that the reason it’s so important to have milk and hot food in schools is because”the understanding from some parents about nutrition is so poor”.

In short, schools must do what feckless poor parents have allegedly failed to – care for children. The free school meals defenders are not just interested in feeding kids; they want to save them, fantasising that these urchins come from such unhealthy, morally dilapidated homes that it falls to schools to make them good, healthy, upstanding citizens. At least the school dinners crusader Jamie Oliver was a bit more upfront about his obsession with giving poor schoolkids hot meals, arguing that they come from “white trash” families where the parents are “t*ssers” or “*rseh*les” who feed their children “s**t”. Those are the exact same sentiments behind the current fretting over free school meals, even if the lingo is a bit more PC.

Stuart concludes his article on “The Life of Julia” with this:

As you know, Chinese thinkers grant the greatest importance to “face.” Saving face is a vital psychological need. It’s so important that I wrote a book about it.

When the Chinese talk about face they are talking about the public presentation of self. Face is the way you present yourself in public. People know who you are because they identify your face.

Imagine what it would be if you went through your day without having anyone recognize you, without having anyone know your name, without anyone acknowledging your existence. How long before you would think that you had gotten lost in the twilight zone?

Having face means that you belong to the community. Losing face means that you have either lost status within the community or have been expelled from it.

That is Julia’s status, or her lack of status. She has been transformed into what the Obama campaign wants her to become, a parasite that depends entirely on government support and whose most significant relationships are with the government agencies who are trying to buy her vote.

By the way, what do you call a woman who has been stripped of her name and her dignity, and who allows herself to be sold to the highest bidder?

That’s how socialists view the people who pay them: as incompetent fools in need of micromanagement, so that you everyone will be equal – equally dependent on the government and indistinguishable. While you were completing your double major in economics and physics, they were majoring in feminist theory, race theory and queery theory – learning how their attitudes were better than yours. You learned how to be self-sufficient. They learned how to think that you are stupid and evil.

Your job is just to make money so that they can spend it on you to help you and your children to have the right views – their views. Even though their views have no practical value.  They learned that they should be telling you where you should work, how much of your money you should keep, and how the money you earn should be spent. Not just the tax money they take from you, but the money you keep. They think they should decide how far you can drive, how much you can heat or cool your house, what food you can eat, and how much health care you are allowed to buy. And so on. That’s the Democrat party.