Pass the buck much, Jay? Via RCP: Fox News’ Ed Henry: “Because when you say, if there are concerns to be raised, Mr. Chen told the Daily Beast, I believe, that his wife tells him that she was tied to a chair, beaten, and interrogated by Chinese guards after they found out that he had
See the original post here:
Carney Won’t Answer Question On Obama’s Human Rights Record: Ask The State Department…
WASHINGTON — It has now been a year since Osama bin Laden became a ghost courtesy of the United States SEALs. I had long since come to the conclusion that Osama became crêpes suzette for the worms back in Tora Bora in December 2001, and I was somewhat stubborn in my belief. Yet he fooled me and the student of Araby Mark Steyn and a few other pundits. I shall be a big enough man to admit it. I was wrong. Apparently Osama took up residence in the wilds of Pakistan, where he believed he was safe. Doubtless like-minded pietists in the Pakistani army or intelligence community told him he would be safe there. They were doubtless proud of their world-famous tenant. Well, they were asleep on the night of May 2, 2011, or they had the good sense not to get involved. When the U.S. helicopters swooped in Osama was pitifully exposed. He had no guards that we know of, save a few women. Several doors collapsed before our tough troops, and pop , he was on his way to the 72 virgins in Heaven or the 42 cows or whatever the Muslim theologians estimate the Hereafter to be composed of. At any rate I am glad he is gone, and doubtless you are too. Now we know he spent his last days reading licentious literature and mixing up potions not unlike the West’s miracle drug, Viagra. Also we hear from intelligence reports that he was heavily into Just For Men, another diabolical potion that originates with the hated West. He did not stay particularly fit. There was no jogging or windsurfing or bungee jumping for him, as there is with select American politicians. There was just the womenfolk all around. Sometimes he doubtless admonished them with a good scolding or perhaps a stick. According to the Islamic specialist Hazrat Maulana Ashraf Ali Thani in his Islamic bestseller A Gift for Muslim Couples, a husband can resort to “a stick,” can deny money and even “pull” his wife “by the ears.” Still, it is no substitute for a good workout at the gym. Other morsels of intelligence were found in his redoubt in historic Abbottabad, the felicitously named town in which he breathed his last. He kept computers, another Western gadget, and doubtless pens and pencils, again Western utensils. On his hard drives the U.S. has discovered valuable intelligence. Frankly, I doubt our intelligence community has been candid with us. But from what we have been told his group al Qaeda has laid plans for the long haul. They have a strategy for making pests of themselves in Afghanistan once our heroic president vamooses. And they are setting up operations in romantic places like Yemen. Moreover, they recently allied with al-Shabab, a terrorist group in Somalia. Their present leader is Ayman al-Zawahiri who we are told is not another Osama. He is according to our intelligence community “divisive.” He lacks Osama’s swarthy charm. But he does have plans for a long-term struggle. His problem is al Qaeda has too many openings at the top. In fact, by the time I have published this, even his position may be open. The skies above Afghanistan and Pakistan are full of U.S. drones. They pick up a message, say, from al-Zawahiri ordering a pizza delivery and poof , he could be gone. It has happened time and again. Consider Ilyas Kashmiri. Osama tapped him to assassinate President Obama. Possibly Osama did not like him, for no sooner had he been tapped than he was tapped… by a missile from one of those infernal drones. Or consider Atiyah Abdul Rahman, who was in charge of al-Qaeda’s day-to-day operations and Osama’s main link to his network. Poof , he is no more. And then there is, or should I say was, Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born sheik at work in Yemen. Poof , he was incinerated by another drone. So it has been a happy year against terrorism, but I would not let down our guard. We are not fighting the Cold War against technologically symmetrical forces. We are fighting a war against primitives, but all they need is a suicidal maniac with some advanced Western gadget to kill hundred s , perhaps thousands.
Read more:
Osama bin Laden a Year Later
Tuesday I awakened to hear my wife walking around the house at about eight in the morning. This is extremely early for her and I mean EXTREMELY. I asked her what the matter was and she said, as expected, that it was G., a very close family member who is suffering from a serious mental illness. This is someone who was always problematic, but has now gotten what his doctors describe as a paranoid psychosis of the schizophrenic variety. This is a matter of his suspecting that his food is poisoned, that his meds are poisoned, that snipers are setting up perches to kill him near his home, that cars filled with assassins are circling him in his car. He is really, really sick. God bless Big Pharma. They have drugs that could straighten him out but he won’t take them, and the reason that my wife is up so early is that she’s getting called by another family member about how oddly G. is acting. Genuinely scary stuff. Threatening stuff. We made a flurry of calls to the doctors who attend G., but while they are eager to help they can do nothing if G. never shows up for his appointments. So, my wife and I are frantic. I swam for a long time, then worked on some bills, then took my wife out for lunch at our golf club, Morningside. There was only one other person at lunch, a distinguished-looking older woman. She shared with us that she had just lost her husband of forty years. What a blow that is. How does a mate go on living after that? I don’t even have any idea. It must be harrowing. Back at home, I had a blizzard of texts from a dear friend in New York who is having a wild fight with her husband, or maybe it’s her ex-husband, about their children. She called for me to help her get a hotel room in Manhattan so she could go there and cry all night. This woman is in her late 30s and has no credit card. How is that possible? Anyway, I arranged it, and off she went to cry. Then more calls from a family member about G not showing up for doctors’ appointments, and then time for a long nap in my guest room, where I feel fairly protected. It’s the shadiest room in the house and neat as a pin. I slept for two hours and then went outside to say farewell to a crew who had been putting in a new, incredibly pricey air conditioning unit in a wing of the house. “Are you sure it works?” I asked them. “Oh, yes, it works great,” they said and it seemed to be keeping my bedroom cool. I lay down and in half an hour, the darned thing simply stopped working altogether. Many calls to the a/c man later, he showed up and said the problem had been some small part and I never needed that whole unit after all. Of course, he has to charge me for it anyway. Meanwhile, the unit is still not working. Then, a call from a lawyer in a case in which I am a plaintiff, or The Plaintiff. We have a ruling against us on an issue so insane that only a trial lawyer could have thought of it. I can easily appeal, but I am sick of the whole thing. Litigation is a pure nightmare. I really feel sad for people who do it for a living. Painful. More texts about G., more texts from the friend in New York whose husband or ex-husband is mistreating her, and new texts from a woman whom I help to hide from her anxieties, and then a text from a woman I met at an airport in Miami ten years ago who saw me on TV and wants to marry me. She wants me to take her away from her fears about money. Ha! Little does she know. Alex and I took the dogs for a walk. Above us, jet planes crossed the sky high above the oleander and the palm trees. “I wish we could ride away on a contrail,” my wife said. My life is filled with other people’s problems. Russ Ferguson said that about me and it’s true. I need yet another nap and I need to change my focus. Fifty years ago this summer, my pal, Marvin Goldberg, put the car radio in his little blue Triumph sports car on a local Virginia station that played “folk songs.” The station was WAVA. “There’s this really great singer they play a lot,” he said. “Name’s Bob Dylan.” As we sped through the Fairfax, Virginia night, on the then empty Dulles Access Highway, sure enough, the next song to come up was Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” an anti-love song that lit my brains on fire. Dylan’s raspy voice said that he was not going to be totally devoted, that he was no one’s love slave, that he was his own man. And he was angry that the question even came up. From then on, he was my hero. It wasn’t because he was the voice of my generation — anti-segregation, anti-war, questioning, mocking. It was that for the first time I had ever heard, a popular musician expressed the most basic of human emotions — anger, poetically and unsparingly. His song about the wrongful death of a poor black hotel worker, Hattie Carroll, because she was hit with a cane by a wealthy landowner’s son at a Baltimore hotel society gathering, has many of its facts wrong… but the emotions of outrage he expresses at what whites could do to blacks in my home state of Maryland fifty years ago were searingly on target. He was not content to be a folk singer. He became an electric guitarist and rock star with the best rock song of all time, “Like a rolling stone.” I still don’t know what it means, but then I don’t know what a sunset means either and I love them both. For more than fifty years, Bob Dylan has been giving us songs of genius that no one else even touches. This little boy from the Mesabi Range in Minnesota has come to be — to many of us — the greatest poet — by far — of the postwar era. Now, he is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. He deserves it. No singer that I am aware of ever hit the notes of what life really is, what humans really are, better than Dylan. I have spent more hours listening to him than to all other human beings on the planet put together and it will never be enough. Well done, Mr. President. Well done, Bob. I have not spoken to Marvin in forty years. I don’t know why. By the way, Mr. President, I caught your speech about Afghanistan tonight. It is EXACTLY the same as Nixon’s speeches about Vietnamizing the Vietnam war some forty years ago. I suspect it will work out about as well. Can Mr. Obama really be that ignorant of history and reality? Yes, he can.
The rest is here:
Bad Day in Rancho Mirage
My father was a unique character. I never met a man who was more set in his ways or more unwilling to change them, especially when it came to his looks. His one ill-advised attempt at updating his wardrobe — my mother’s really — was the purchase of an awful Nehru jacket sometime in the late 1960s. It just didn’t fit him; not in a sartorial manner, but because pandering to something so trivial as current fashion would have undermined his air of authority and diminished our trust in his rock-solid dependability. I’ve always felt that there is something comforting in a man who disdains passing fads while I’ve never wholly trusted one who is a slave to fashion. This must have run in my family, because my youngest sister once said that Ronald Reagan — who, though a well-tailored movie star, never altered his appearance with the changing styles — always made her feel “safe.” Likewise, I instinctively mistrust anyone who has been tagged with the puerile sobriquet of “rock star”; a paean to cool and hipness that is truly a symbol of all that is wrong in America. I suppose there is something to be said for hipness when you’re a teenager and peer pressure demands the need for such foolishness, but when your bank account is overdrawn or the IRS comes a’knockin’ at your door, who do you want to handle it? Do you want a bling-bedecked hipster or do you want a nerd with a pocket protector full of pens and pencils? Or when the bogeyman sneaks up on you in the middle of the night, is it a rock star you’d want to protect you? George W. Bush, with his dreary vacations in Crawford, Texas and his penchant for being in bed by 10:00 PM, was the epitome of what was once known as “square,” but even the most ardent lefties were glad he was in charge during 9/11. It may have been the cool rock star who gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden in flashy, video-game style, but it was the slow, plodding and sometimes painful ways of the dull Bush that laid the groundwork. Since the culture-busting days of the ’60s, our nation has been schizophrenic in its choice between style and substance, starting with the first paparazzi president, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie; the first First Lady to assume the role of stylish trendsetter. Although JFK was far more credentialed than the current cool cat in the White House, many felt that his election was the product of marketing his attractive family background and his ruddy, New England good looks. After JFK came the dreary career politician, Lyndon Johnson, followed by Richard Nixon, a man so square that when he appeared on Laugh-In during the 1968 presidential campaign, I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know what “Sock it to me” meant. Next came the enigmatic Jimmy Carter, with a personal style that was chock-full of corn yet whose policies were the stuff that liberal dreams are made of. The two terms of Reagan brought to fruition a synthesis of elegance and gravitas which had probably not been seen since George Washington, and might never again grace the highest office of our land. He naturally attracted the “beautiful people” of Hollywood, yet they remained only on the fringes of his social life and had no bearing on his presidency, unlike the next rock star, Bill Clinton, the first “black president.” Clinton, who followed on the heels of George H.W. Bush — so unhip that his nickname was “Poppy” –was the first president to use the cool and the hip to advance his career; famously using Hollywood producers to make videos for his campaigns. While Reagan actually was a movie star, Clinton merely played one in the White House. Then came George W. Bush who, as I said, would never be mistaken for being hip, cool or in any way a rock star. Together with his wife, a down-to-earth schoolteacher who nonetheless carried herself with exceptional grace, he was about as exciting as white bread but was fundamental to the nation’s need for emotional stability and leadership at a time when this was desperately needed. No, some men are just not destined to be “hip” nor is this spurious attribute one that voters should seek in a man who is to lead us out of our deadly moral and economic decline. We’ve danced and slow-jammed around our problems enough for the last four years. It is time for a square deal for America.
Here is the original post:
Square Deal for America
Thank you sir may I have another? (The Hill) — Democratic political strategist Hilary Rosen said on Sunday that President Obama’s criticism of her controversial comment about Ann Romney was just “politics.” Earlier this month, Rosen said the wife of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee is out of touch because she has “never worked a day
View post:
Hilary Rosen: Obama Throwing Me Under The Bus Over Ann Romney Remarks Just “Politics”…
