Confederate Yankee

June 08, 2009

The NC State War Heats Up

Emails released by North Carolina State University show that former North Carolian governor Mike Easley (D) was involved in his wife's hiring at the University.

NCSU's Chancellor James Oblinger resigned earlier today, the latest casualty in a string of resignations that resulted from Mary Easley's hiring in 2005 and her promotion and a substantial 88% pay raise, even though it seems no one has been able to precisely pin down what she did to merit the increase.

Breaking news is that Mary Easley, who refused to resign, has just been fired by the University.

We shoudl have seen this coming. After all, she has Blago's hair...



More as this develops...

Update: As a friend noted via IM, Easley's saga sounds eerily familar like that of someone with a slightly higher profile, who got a substantial raise after her husband secured a million-dollar earmark for her employer.

Where is the media in investigating that potential scandal?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:41 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

"I Did Not Vote to Lower My Standard of Living"

Michael Jones of PoliGazette voted twice for Barack Obama last year—in the primaries and in the general election—but he is one of a rapidly growing number of disillusioned moderates that is coming to regret his decision.

Here is a taste of his discontent:


Like many Americans last November, I voted for change. I had hope. I no longer have hope since the president I voted for never mentioned a fraction of the agenda he now espouses. I did not vote to lower my standard of living, humble as it may be. Nor did I ask to jump into the economic abyss in order to "save" the planet.

Every time I hear another Obama supporter-turned-opponent claim that they had no idea what Obama was going to do as President, I have to shake my head in amusement.

If these new critics had relied upon the media, peer pressure, and party allegiance to help them decide how to cast their vote, then I can certainly understand how they ended up voting for Obama. The neophyte from Chicago certainly looked good, was charismatic, and said all the right things, while giving them the added bonus of being a (partially) African-American candidate that could help them wash away any guilt they may have of their own bigotry (we all prejudiced to varying degrees, and anyone who tells you they are completely unprejudiced is a liar and/or a dunce). For people not willing to put in the time to actively research a candidate's record or positions—which, let's face it, is most voters—he represented a package that was hard not to vote for.

I make no excuses at all for the pundit class, however. The Christopher Buckleys and Peggy Noonans of this world earn their living by (presumably) researching voting records and positions on issues both major and obscure, investigating ties to organizations and individuals of questionable propriety, and forecasting, to the very best of their ability, what a candidate might do if elected to the office.

The amateur pundit class—bloggers, for the most part—fired dozens of warning flares about significant issues with Obama's record, his dubious activities working of the board of radical charities, his lack of political courage or accountability, his strong biases, his temperament, his alleged affair, and his verified multi-decade associations with not one, or two, or three, but four hardcore radicals on the fringes of society, from a Catholic priest the advocates lynching, to a racialist church and it's radical pastor, to a pair of domestic terrorists, one of which already did jail time for obstruction of justice in a armored car robbery that left police officers and security guards dead, and who masterminded at least three politically-motivated mass murder attempts that (thankfully) all failed because of their associate's incompetence.

The punditry had every reason to sound the alarm on any of a dozen warning signs that Barack Obama was going to ruin our relationship with our allies, be a patsy for our enemies, be soft of terrorism, and preternaturally lethal to our economy and way of life. He's proven to be exactly what we expected... if anything, he's worse than we ever could have feared.

I'm glad to have Michael and others like him join the legions of us who knew Barack Obama was a dangerous choice for President, one who advocates policies that threaten the very core of the capitalist Republic.

I simply wish they had come to that realization prior to November 4.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:32 AM | Comments (58) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 07, 2009

Then and Now

Evan Thomas, 2007, "...our job is to bash the President..."

Evan Thomas, 2009, "...he's sort of a God."

h/t reader SmithRoz

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:03 PM | Comments (32) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Obama: Creating the Next Enron?

This doesn't look good.

It becomes readily more apparent every day that the far left shriekers of the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Raw Story never really worried about tyrannical fascism arising in this nation. They're real concern is that it might not happen when they were in power. Now that President Obama has unilaterally granted himself far more power than Bush and Cheney ever dreamed of, the same people who worried about a police state are sitting merrily at home without so much as a whimper... shining their badges.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:55 AM | Comments (52) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 06, 2009

Newsweek Editor Fellates God-President

Evan Thomas of Newsweek has exposed himself as being unable to hold the remotest objectivity needed to function as the editor of a news publication, declaring his unseemly and frankly creepy admiration of the President while simultaneously denigrating America:


Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn't felt that way in recent years. So Obama's had, really, a different task We're seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is 'we are above that now.' We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something – I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above – above the world, he's sort of God.



Michelle Obama would LOL at this crap, and she married the man.

It is no secret that Newsweek long ago forfeited any claim to being an objective source of news, but this latest fanboy worship by Evan Thomas is simply shameful. It shatters any illusion that the magazine is capable of being anything other than an Obama propaganda device, and that Thomas is dangerously too biased to serve as a a competent and objective editor.

Newsweek is losing money and purposefully retargeting to lose even more. If their goal is make their employees radioactive while bankrupting themselves, I'd say that Thomas is doing exactly what they need.

Update: The Anchoress aims higher—literally— and suggests a higher oral interface between the President and a media latching on to his man-teats.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:35 AM | Comments (41) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

D-Day +65 Years

65 years ago today, brave, scared men on spray-drenched landing craft saw their landing ramps drop on the Normandy coast, and they charged out into German artillery and machine gun fire in the largest amphibious invasion in history, daring to take Hitler's Fortress Europe. They joined thousands of paratroopers and glider-borne infantry that has slipped in the night before under the cover of darkness.

Today, we pause to remember those brave men of the Allied Expeditionary Forces who risked—and in many cases died—in a bid to take back Europe from the forces of fascism.

I can do no better than direct you to Blackfive's excellent tribute, A Struggle to Preserve Our Republic, and repost the following:



General George S. Patton's Normandy Invasion Speech:


"Be Seated."

"Men, this stuff we hear about America wanting to stay out of the war, not wanting to fight, is a lot of bullshit. Americans love to fight - traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble player; the fastest runner; the big league ball players; the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win - all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost, not ever will lose a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American."

"You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Every man is frightened at first in battle. If he says he isn't, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes! But they fight just the same, or get the hell shamed out of them watching men who do fight who are just as scared. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some get over their fright in a minute under fire, some take an hour. For some it takes days. But the real man never lets fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to this country and his innate manhood."

"All through your army career you men have bitched about "This chickenshit drilling." That is all for a purpose. Drilling and discipline must be maintained in any army if for only one reason -- INSTANT OBEDIENCE TO ORDERS AND TO CREATE CONSTANT ALERTNESS. I don't give a damn for a man who is not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn't be here. You are ready. A man to continue breathing must be alert at all times. If not, sometime a German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit."

"There are 400 neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily all because one man went to sleep on his job -- but they were German graves for we caught the bastard asleep before his officers did. An Army is a team. Lives, sleeps, eats, fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is a lot of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting, under fire, than they do about fucking. We have the best food, the finest equipment, the best spirit and the best fighting men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor sons-of-bitches we are going up against. By God, I do!"

"My men don't surrender. I don't want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he is hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight. That's not just bullshit, either. The kind of man I want under me is like the lieutenant in Libya, who, with a Lugar against his chest, jerked off his helmet, swept the gun aside with one hand and busted hell out of the Boche with the helmet. Then he jumped on the gun and went out and killed another German: All this with a bullet through his lung. That's a man for you."

"All real heroes are not story book combat fighters either. Every man in the army plays a vital part. Every little job is essential. Don't ever let down, thinking your role is unimportant. Every man has a job to do. Every man is a link in the great chain. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into the ditch? He could say to himself, "They won't miss me -- just one in thousands." What if every man said that? Where in hell would we be now? No, thank God, Americans don't say that! Every man does his job; every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important to the vast scheme of things. The Ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the Quartermaster to bring up the food and clothes to us -- for where we're going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man in the mess hall, even the one who heats the water to keep us from getting the GI shits has a job to do. Even the chaplain is important, for if we get killed and if he is not there to bury us we'd all go to hell."

"Each man must not only think of himself, but of his buddy fighting beside him. We don't want yellow cowards in this army. They should all be killed off like flies. If not they will go back home after the war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we'll have a nation of brave men."

"One of the bravest men I ever saw in the African campaign was the fellow I saw on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of furious fire while we were plowing toward Tunis. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at that time. He answered, "Fixing the wire, sir." "Isn't it a little unhealthy right now?," I asked. "Yes sir, but this goddamn wire's got to be fixed." There was a real soldier. There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how great the odds, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time."

"You should have seen those trucks on the road to Gabes. The drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting around them all the time. We got through on good old American guts. Many of these men drove over forty consecutive hours. These weren't combat men. But they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it -- and in a whale of a way they did it. They were part of a team. Without them the fight would have been lost. All the links in the chain pulled together and that chain became unbreakable."

"Don't forget, you don't know I'm here. No word of the fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell became of me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army. I'm not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. Someday I want them to raise up on their hind legs and howl, 'Jesus Christ, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again.'"

"We want to get the hell over there. We want to get over there and clear the goddamn thing up. You can't win a war lying down. The quicker we clean up this goddamn mess, the quicker we can take a jaunt against the purple pissing Japs an clean their nest out too, before the Marines get all the goddamn credit."

"Sure, we all want to be home. We want this thing over with. The quickest way to get it over is to get the bastards. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin. When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually, and the hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one. We'll win this war but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans we've got more guts than they have."

"There is one great thing you men will all be able to say when you go home. You may thank God for it. Thank God, that at least, thirty years from now, when you are sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knees, and he asks you what you did in the great war, you won't have to cough and say, 'I shoveled shit in Louisiana.' No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, 'Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named George Patton!'"

"That is all."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:26 AM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 05, 2009

Obama's Approval Plummets

Did you ever wonder how long an ideologue recycling old philosophies would be able to pull one over on the American electorate after taking power, even if the media was doing their best to champion him as the best think since sliced bread? Well, we have an answer.

About four months.



As jobs continue to be lost despite media reporting designed to disguise the truth, we may be seeing America's love affair with Hope and Change dying just months into a new Presidency.

But why is that?

While there are books that can (and no doubt will) be written about this recession and Obama's role in mismanaging it, we don't need the hindsight of history to know simple economics. You can't spend your way out of debt. Spending more when you're already in debt simply gets you deeper in debt. My nine-year-old gets this.

My President does not.

America is coming to grips with the fact our President is far out of his depth. He's a gifted orator, but speeches are not solutions.

He had no solutions. He has rhetoric.

He also has a sincere, irrational belief that more government involvement is the solution to almost any problem. But as almost everyone else knows, all government does in inhibit progress and retard growth with bureaucracy and inefficiency.

The number one domestic threat to the United States at this moment is a President that thinks government is the solution instead of the problem.

The polls are finally beginning to reflect that fact.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:08 PM | Comments (48) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

ABC NEWS: Alien Armada Targets President For Death!

Barack Obama's cascade of economic and foreign policy gaffes are apparently so great that aliens from other planets are threatening to have him killed:


Murray then said "We are on a mission to kill the president of the United States," according to the complaint.

Murray told the teller during that visit, the complaint added, "We are 94 million miles from the sun, and are in-between the sun and moon, and the eagle that flies between them, and it's a giant step for mankind. ... I have traveled thousands of miles to be here and know things that are going to happen. ... The banking system will fail and people will die. ... There will be chaos in the world."

What's worse is that the Secret Service has confirmed that Murray is just one of a vast alien conspiracy that desires to assassinate the President:


"This is one of a gazillion cases," the spokesman told ABC News. "It's not that out of the ordinary. We see this day in and day out."

A gazillion. Wow.

This strongly suggests that our President may be not just the most incompetent leader on this planet, but also the closest thing to Zaphod Beeblebrox in this and surrounding galaxies.

For those of you unfamiliar with Beeblebrox, he was, for a short time, the President of the Galaxy which was according to Wikipedia's summary, "(a role that involves no power whatsoever, and merely requires the incumbent to attract attention so no one wonders who's really in charge, which is a role Zaphod was perfectly suited for)."

Through a colossal accounting error known as the 2008 Presidential Election, Barack Obama was selected to the same assignment, traveling around making inane speeches that inflame allies and encourage our enemies while making humiliating protocol errors like giving foreign heads of state tawdry department store gifts that don't work.

So either Barack Obama is a such a dangerously incompetent leader that the entire galaxy wants him offed, or a fawning media is looking for any chance at all to whip up hysteria by making famous each and every crank they hear about.

I wonder which it is.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:40 AM | Comments (37) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 04, 2009

Beware Flying Alter Boys



Swiped shamelessly from Rachel Lucas, who got it from AP at Hot Air.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:54 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Great Moments in Parenting

A five-year-old kindergarten student was found with a handgun at my child's elementary school (name removed) in Raleigh, NC today. Don't bother to check the news, as that information hasn't been released to media outlets, just sent out as a phone alert to the parents of students, who are—at least at this moment—unaware of the prepubescent gunmen in their midst.

We were assured that the gun they recovered was unloaded, and from the moment it was discovered, that no student saw or touched it. Would that make you feel better if it was your child's school? Frankly, the seeing it isn't what concerns me.

I'm all in favor of having guns in schools. I think concealed carry permit holders should be allowed on college campuses as faculty, staff, and students, and would feel comfortable—actually, more comfortable—if I knew that public school faculty and administrators were empowered to act as a last line of defense against prospective school shooters.

But I also know you must always treat all guns as being loaded weapons all the time, and you simply cannot put them where children and irresponsible adults in your home can access them. Owning a firearm is a right, but it is also a serious responsibility.

Wake County law enforcement is dealing with the child, and his family.

I'm simply thankful that this time around no one is having to deal with the coroner.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:55 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Bill Killed

David Carradine, dead at 72.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:33 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

A Brilliant Delusion

In a stirring address in Cairo, Egypt, a U.S. President confirmed that he saw the world as he would have it be, and not as it was.

In rhetoric that bared a broad range of thought, from empathy and denial, to wishful thinking and sophomoric ideological fantasy, Barack Obama alarmed allies and confirmed for the nation's enemies that he will do for democracy and the advancement of human rights what George Tiller did for pediatrics.

By all means, go through Obama's Cairo speech... and you tell me how "reality-based" our dorm room Marxist President really is.

He promises common ground with countries that harbor cultures who long ago declared holy war against us...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:28 AM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 03, 2009

Most Brilliant President Evah Declares United States is a Muslim Country

Jake Tapper has discovered that the Administration is now comfortable referencing President Obama's Muslim roots.

I count myself as an Obama critic for many reasons, but I've consistently defended the President's school record even as he attempted to minimize the public's view of his exposure to Islam. He felt—accurately—that there are a lot of religious bigots in this country that would not vote for a Muslim for President, and I'd be shocked if his own internal polling during the election didn't reflect across the board including minority voters as well, especially African-American Baptist congregations in the South and heavily Catholic Latino communities around the country.

Quite frankly, if Barack Obama had not made strong efforts to quash his early ties to Islam as much as possible, there is little reason to suspect that a post-9/11 America would have elected him President.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:15 AM | Comments (50) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 02, 2009

An Ideologue's World

The flash was blinding and disorienting, and Hassan dropped to his knees as a roar like the end of the world shook the ground under him. The sky over Jericho dimmed and he turned west to see a mushroom cloud rising above Tel Aviv... or where Tel Aviv once was.

A song began to rise in his heart at the death of the Jews, but it hung as he saw the contrails of high-flying Israeli jets streaking overhead toward Damascus and Tehran.

"The Shia have killed us all," he whispered, and he sat down to die.

For now, this vision of the end of the Cradle of Civilization— the realization of the so-called Samson option by a dying Israel in response to an Iranian nuclear strike —is fiction.

Our President, however, seems unwilling to take repeated Iranian threats to destroy Israel at face value, just as he ignores that nation's continued development of long-range missiles and nuclear warheads.

He pretends to believe that Iran has a need or desire for peaceful nuclear energy instead of the beginning of Armageddon. His is a childish belief of a man who has never been a leader but has always been an ideologue in a political movement cowed by an irrational and suicidal belief of moral equivalence between good and evil when it admits that they even exist at all. He says we cannot impose our values—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—on nations with murderous histories and hate-consumed cultures.

Better to let them live out their fantasies of genocide, no matter how many millions die, than be a man who has to make difficult decisions.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:57 PM | Comments (35) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Where King's Bill Would Have Failed

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the American Muslim convert that shot two local soldiers outside of a Little Rock military recruiting station, was on a FBI watch list after all, not that it did any good:


The suspect arrested in the fatal shooting of one soldier and the critical injury of another at a Little Rock, Ark., Army recruiting booth today was under investigation by the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force since his return from Yemen, ABC News has learned.

...

Officers who searched the car found more than 100 rounds of ammunition, an SKS assault rifle, two pistols, and two military books.

The ammunition was loaded in magazines which were found in a vest, police sources say.

You can expect at least lip service for Peter King's H.R.2159: Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2009 to pick up steam in the wake of the Little Rock attack that killed soldier William Long and the killing of an infanticide specialist in a Wichita church the day before.

Denying terrorists the means by which to carry out their attacks is something we can all get behind on both sides, but I can't find anything in King's bill to suggest that Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad or Scott Roeder would have been effectively denied access to firearms even if King's proposed bill was already established law.

Roeder's Freemen fringe is known to be well-armed and not prone to having any respect for federal laws—indeed, the defining characteristic of this and similar groups is that they do not respect federal authority—and I rather doubt King's proposed law would be the one they decided to follow.

Likewise, Muhammad could easily obtain arms via other, non-legal means.

As it stands, I haven't seen law enforcement or media reports that established how either of these domestic terrorists obtained their firearm. That said, we do know that another law, however well-intentioned, would not have been the slightest impediment to these killers.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:12 AM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

June 01, 2009

African-American Muslim Convert Guns Down Two Soldiers at Little Rock Recruiting Station

The political apparatus behind Homeland Security is obviously not tracking the right extremists:


A Muslim convert who said he was opposed to the U.S. military shot two soldiers outside an Arkansas recruiting station, killing one of the soldiers, police said Monday.

"This individual appears to have been upset with the military, the Army in particular, and that's why he did what he did," Little Rock Police Lt. Terry Hastings said in a phone interview.

"He has converted to Muslim here in the past few years," Hastings said. "To be honest we're not completely clear on what he was upset about. He had never been in the military."

Hastings identified the man in custody as Carlos Bledsoe, 24, of Little Rock, who was going by the name of Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad.


It seems like it was just within the past few weeks—because it was—that another group of African-American Muslim converts attempted to carry out terrorist attacks against American citizens.

Has anyone heard of Homeland Security or the Justice Department issuing warnings to law enforcement agencies to be looking for signs of suspicious activity from this very specific pool of potential terrorists? Before they struck twice in the past two weeks, I mean.

I'd love to hear from those of you in law enforcement if such a warning had been issued.

I'd hate to think that our current Presidential Administration would rather ignore the uncomfortable realities of real terrorist threats in favor of playing to the comforting silence of identity politics... but considering President Obama's ties to certain terrorists/authors and the 20 years he spent in the congregation of a racial separatist church, I wouldn't put it past Dear Leader, either.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:04 PM | Comments (34) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Left Gets Their Andrew Mickel to Celebrate

Via Little Green Footballs, it seems that the suspect arrested in the murder of infanticide specialist George Tiller may be one Scott Roeder.

Charles notes that someone posting under that name has posted at the Web sites of several anti-abortion groups, and that he may be the same Scott Roeder that belongs to several extremist groups on the far right fringe, including the Sovereign Citizen movement, the Freeman, and perhaps the Christian Identity movement. If so, Roeder is far outside the mainstream of American thought, as was his analog, Andrew Mickel.

Those of you familiar with this site know that I've referred to Mickel on several occasions in the past precisely because he is an excellent whipping boy that showcases the extremism that can come from far leftist ideologies. He and Roeder may very well be mirror images of the same sort of extremist-prone mindset that seeks to become a malevolent force.

There are some of us in the center-right blogosphere who came down heavily on Mickel for his politically-motivated assassination of an innocent police officer, but the national media largely ignored Mickel's conviction in a death penalty case, probably because of the fact that they helped shape the terrorist he became, and because he was a living example of the worst extreme of their ideology.

Now that a man identified as Roeder has murdered infanticide specialist George Tiller, the media finally has a politically motivated assassination it can get behind and hype. They will try to portray as some sort of representative example of a much wider group, just as noted conspiracy theorist Andrew Sullivan reflexively did, even though the last murder of an abortionist occurred more than a decade ago.

As I noted earlier, nobody gains from such politically-motivated murders, and I can only wonder how the powers that be will try to use this tragedy to their advantage.

Provided they don't get someone else killed first.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:41 AM | Comments (29) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

When You've Lost the Shrieking Radical Cartoonists, You've Lost Them All

Barack Obama seems to be losing the far left wing of his support, as evidenced by pressure from the left wing blogosphere on a number of issues and most recently, a rant from bigoted cartoonist Ted Rall.

Pardon me, but didn't we warn you of this before the election?


Obama is useless. Worse than that, he's dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now — before he drags us further into the abyss.

I refer here to Obama's plan for "preventive detentions." If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in "prolonged detention." Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama's shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK.

In practice, Obama wants to let government goons snatch you, me and anyone else they deem annoying off the street.

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people's lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can't control, what George Orwell called "thoughtcrime" — contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

If Rall and his peers had actually bothered to vet Obama prior to the election, instead of acting as his fluffer, then perhaps he could have avoided the nasty shock of discovering that Barack Obama is exactly what we said he would be if he won the election. America voted for a charismatic, radical orator with a well-oiled field organization and brilliant propaganda, and we got it.

Like the spoiled children they are, they don't seem willing to pay the cost for their decision.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:57 AM | Comments (28) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 31, 2009

A Monster is Murdered, and Nothing is Gained

"Two wrongs don't make a right."

That childhood admonition stuck with me over the years, and was the first thought to pop into my head when I read that an infanticide practitioner by the name of George Tiller was gunned down in a Wichita, KS church this morning, and that a suspect was in custody.

I'm finding it harder than normal to find sympathy for this murder victim, but with reason.

He was a man who killed babies the age my daughter Kate was when she came into this world. To me putting a baby to death is simply unimaginable and tragic, and it makes him a monster. I cannot imagine the kind of man who would do such a thing, or easily imagine the circumstances in which such an act could be justified if the baby wasn't an immediate and life-threatening medical risk to the mother, but I do try to remind myself that it isn't my place to judge what happens to him, or his soul.

If you believe in God, you know that either Tiller is forgiven for his sins, or he is damned for eternity.

Sadly, there are some small-minded people who find a bit of satisfaction in the thought of an abortion doctor burning in Hell, and think that the only think wrong with this scenario is that the other few doctors nationwide that still practice this barbarity aren't also in morgues.

I don't think they grasp that the murder of this physician is merely the last tragedy of a life tragically led, and that politically-motivated murders rarely accomplish anything more than throwing away two more lives (that of the the victim and the murderer) without coming a single step closer to resolving the underlying disconnect that leaves the sides so far apart.

George Tiller was a monster. So is his killer. Neither should be made into martyrs or heroes, as it is quite clear that neither man was.

Simply pray they both find forgiveness, and hope that when our final day arrives, we find forgiveness as well.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:54 PM | Comments (39) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 29, 2009

Obama Holds Israeli Helicopters and Weapons Integration Hostage, Benefiting Hamas and Putting Civilians at Risk

In a move that a cynic might note may be designed to save their $900 million investment in Hamas, the Obama Administration has stepped in to block the sale of six Apache helicopters to Israel and also stopped the integration of the Spike missile system with the Apache's millimeter wave radar.


The Obama administration has blocked Israel's request for advanced U.S.-origin attack helicopters.

Government sources said the administration has held up Israel's request for the AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter. The sources said the request was undergoing an interagency review to determine whether additional Longbow helicopters would threaten Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.

"During the recent war, Israel made considerable use of the Longbow, and there were high civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip," a source close to the administration said.

What a naked, ideologically-driven crock.

Obama's Administration, which apparently has little knowledge of or use for military systems, does not seem to grasp that the use of the Longbow's mast-mounted sensor suite enables it to more carefully select targets that other variants of the Apache, which in and of themselves are a better targeting, surveillance, and attack system than most alternatives.

Nor do they seem to grasp that the close air support function of helicopters with lighter weapons loads is less likely to cause the collateral deaths of civilians than other weapons systems that would have to step into the suppression role that helicopters typically occupy.

Artillery units (in Israel, typically 155mm self-propelled howitzers) fire salvos of "dumb" high explosive or incendiary shells that either burst above the target (spraying shrapnel over a wide area), point detonate on impact, or less frequently, on a time delay that lets them penetrate structures before exploding. But artillery is not designed to be a precision weapon, and Obama's decision could force the Israeli's to use this area weapon, directly putting civilian lives at risk.

The other option for the Israeli's if these Apache's are out of the picture are "fast movers" such as the F-15i and and F16i, fighter-bombers armed with bombs weighing hundreds or thousands of pounds. While they can be armed with precision weapons, the warheads on these munitions are typically larger than those of helicopter mounted weapons. Once again, this creates a situation where the Israeli's are boxed into a less-than-optimal weapons system and put civilians at greater risk of death because of an ignorant decision made by a neophyte's Administration trying to play hardball not with an enemy, but an ally.

The net result is that Obama's short-sightedness and inexperience is potentially leading to a situation that will increase the collateral damage of Israeli strikes, even if the strikes are carried out with the utmost care, because Obama has blocked the sale and integration of the most precise and surgical weapons system available to handle the threat.

Instead of being able to target a Hamas rocket team that has retreated into the garage of an apartment building with a Longbow's precision gunfire or a pinpoint missile strike, Obama's decisions may lead to Israel being boxed into a position where their options are to respond with artillery strikes that run the risk of bringing down the building and spraying everyone nearby with shrapnel, or bombing the building with fighter aircraft armed with bombs large enough to flatten the building and kill everyone inside it.

Obama stupidly thinks that by denying Israel precision-strike capable aircraft and precisions munitions integration that Israel might not fire on the Palestinian terrorists he's provided more money to than anyone but Iran. He thinks he's protecting his investment. Israel, however, does not suffer terrorist rocket attacks on it's neighborhoods and schools, nor should they.

Those innocent Palestinians that may die as a result of this shortsightedness need look no further for a culprit that then man who hides behind the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

(h/t Bookworm)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:05 AM | Comments (40) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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