[This diary was re-posted with the full permission of the author, Steph C, and was originally posted at Hillbillypolitics.]
Whether you agree with her conservatism or not, this was a well done video; uplifting in an activist sort of way. It’s not big on policy issues because it was never meant to be about policy issues but a renewal of the American voices that seem to be fading away in the cacophony of liberal angst. If those who shout loudest are the only ones heard, the next video fails miserably.
I can think of only one word to describe this one: Infantilism. There’s the nurse, the teacher, the therapist, and the entertainment lawyer. It’s scary to think these people are in charge of anything in any one of those fields. It’s even scarier to realize that at least one of them is in charge of someone’s children somewhere.
The last video reminds me of the old saying: “Babies raising babies.” If not their own, yours.
Ruth Marcus wrote a column responding to Ms. Tantaros. In her column, Marcus conceded that the optics of Michelle Obama’s Spanish getaway might be less than ideal when she wrote the following–
“Let’s stipulate: A five-star resort on the Spanish Costa del Sol was probably not the first choice of White House spin-meisters for a mother-daughter getaway. Especially when the getaway included a posse of 40 friends of the first lady staying at the Hotel Villa Padierna, where rooms start at $330 a night, and photos of Michelle Obama strolling in Marbella wearing an off-the-shoulder number by Jean Paul Gaultier.”
[For the record, that John Paul Gaultier top probably cost over $2000.]
However, Marcus concludes her column by stating that we are all being a little hard on Mrs. Obama, and that maybe we should “give the First Lady a break”.
Well, I might tend to agree with Ms. Marcus if this had been Michelle Obama’s first foray into ridiculous behavior–however, it most certainly is not. Furthermore, if you will all bear with me, I am prepared to bring forth a plethora of evidence that spans back over two years in order to prove–beyond any reasonable doubt–that Mrs. Obama has gone out of her way to deliberately cultivate the image of a spoiled, entitled brat. Read the rest of this entry »
Oh look, the “racist” cop is helping an elderly black man down the steps, while the compassionate Democrat strides ahead. No doubt lost in thought of how he plans to help the elderly with his health initiatives.
I also found this gem of a cartoon from a Jerusalem cartoonist.
If Obama has a beer summit every time he puts his foot in his mouth, Michelle needs to enroll him in an AA program immediately!
Once again…just like Obama goes into campaign mode when his “plans” are questioned by rational individualistic thinkers…he also likes to dunk a pail into the “race baiting” well to confuse and confound people from looking closely at his failed agenda.
Latest controversy to take our minds off of the health care debacle going on?
Gates.
Obama even after admitting he had no knowledge of all the facts, decided to open his big lips yet again to “weigh in on race” and stepped in it.
And while a lot of people may quibble with this young woman about her stances and beliefs…ones things for sure…she’s telling truths in this video that more of my black folk need to wake up to.
The problems in this country have more to do with class-ism than racism.
It figures.
Obama called himself a “student of history” yesterday during his apology speech to the Muslim World in Cairo. Unfortunately, this student of Far Left nutwackery was wrong on the Iranian coup history he mentioned during his speech. Judith Apter Klinghoffer at History News Network reported:
Yes, the US instigated a coup against Iranian prime minister Mosaddeq but President Obama was wrong to assert that “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Far from it, the US overthrew a wannabe dictator who came to power because his predecessor was assassinated by Islamists, yes Islamists and following an election he suspended for fear he would lose it. Does anyone in the administration have access to the internet? I found this on a most obscure source known as Wikipedia.
The American Battle Monuments Commission maintains the U.S. cemetery in Normandy, France. The cemetery is situated on a cliff overlooking the English Channel. The 172-acre cemetery contains the graves of 9,387 U.S. servicemembers, most of whom died on D-Day, June 6, 1944. (Courtesy photo)
Last year Barack Obama made the mistake of recognizing dead veterans in the audience(?) during his Memorial Day speech in Las Cruces, New Mexico:
On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today – our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.
Here’s the video:
Memorial Day, of course, is a time to commemorate U.S. men and women who died while in the military service. On Veterans Day we salute our military men and women.
President Barack Obama saluted veterans and urged his countrymen to do the same this Memorial Day weekend, saying the nation has not always paid them proper respect.
In his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, Obama said people can honor veterans by sending a letter or care package to troops overseas, volunteering at health clinics or taking supplies to a homeless veterans center. He said it could also mean something as simple as saying “thank you” to a veteran walking by on the street.
“We have a responsibility to serve all of them as well as they serve all of us,” Obama said. “And yet, all too often in recent years and decades, we, as a nation, have failed to live up to that responsibility. We have failed to give them the support they need or pay them the respect they deserve.
According to an account in Newsweek, Biden did give up one of the country’s secrets at another dinner where journalists and politicians make fun of Republicans (and occasionally laugh at each other). Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the Vice President’s Residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Eleanor Clift writes:
Ever wonder about that secure, undisclosed location where Dick Cheney secreted himself after the 9/11 attacks? Joe Biden reveals the bunker-like room is at the Naval Observatory in Washington, where Cheney lived for eight years and which is now home to Biden. The veep related the story to his head-table dinner mates when he filled in for President Obama at the Gridiron Club earlier this year. He said the young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment. The officer explained that when Cheney was in lock down, this was where his most trusted aides were stationed, an image that Biden conveyed in a way that suggested we shouldn’t be surprised that the policies that emerged were off the wall.
Surprise, surprise. Nancy Pelosi was for enhanced interrogation techniques before she was against them. This damning coverage by Fox News (hat tip to Redstate’s Moe Lane who wrote about this in an excellent column) reports that the CIA claims that Pelosi was briefed in 2002 about waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, which directly contradicts her previous story where she claims that she was not told about the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques on suspected Al Qaeda terrorists.
I think that Charles Krauthammer hit it out of the park, in regard to Pelosi’s behavior, in his recent column titled, “Pelosi: Utterly Contemptible”, when he stated the following–
Today Pelosi protests “we were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.” She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.
On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what’s done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA’s rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do “in the future.”
But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying “Don’t do it.”
On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, “on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.”
More support, mind you. Which makes the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now “on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009″ (the words are Blair’s) to excoriate those who kept us safe these harrowing last eight years.
Now, the funny thing is that I could actually forgive Nancy Pelosi this one factual inaccuracy (OK–outright lie) if this was her first brush with idiotic and untrustworthy behavior–but, unfortunately for the country, it’s not.
Now, whether you were for or against the TARP/Bailout bill is neither here nor there. My point is that in another speech (which went viral under the title, “Nancy Pelosi: Dumber than Soap”–the embeded is below), Pelosi claimed that if we didn’t pass President Obama’s stimulus/porkulus bill IMMEDIATELY, that “five hundred million Americans would lose their jobs” (where she got that figure from, I don’t know–I don’t think that anyone knows). Anyway, my point is that Nancy Pelosi thought that it was urgent to pass the Obama stimulus package immediately in order to prevent millions of Americans from losing their jobs, and yet, she was willing to play partisan politics with the TARP bill which, to paraphrase Daniel Henninger of the WSJ, caused “the terrified stock market” to crater “wiping out individual voter wealth” when it fell apart? To quote Charles Krauthammer, that is “utterly contemptible”.
Now, I bet you are asking yourselves right now, “Can Nancy Pelosi’s tom-foolery, hypocrisy, disingenuousness, and out-right idiocy get any worse?” Well, I’m here to answer your question ladies and gentlemen–yes it can. Back in 2006 when Pelosi first became Speaker of the House she requested “regular military flights not only for herself and her staff, but also for relatives and for other members of the California delegation.” Now, it should be noted that the Bush Administration’s Department of Defense offered Pelosi the same plane to fly in that Dennis Hastert used when he was Speaker of the House, but Pelosi declined to use it because “She found it was not big enough for staff, supporters and other members.” However, in August in 2008, when asked why she was against offshore oil drilling, even though gas prices were going through the roof at the time, Pelosi replied by stating that, “I’m trying to save the planet”. OK–let me get this straight. Nancy Pelosi is “trying save the planet” by regularly flying herself and her posse across the country (creating a carbon foot-print the size of a Sasquatch’s), but we poor plebiscites are supposed to suck it up and pay $4.00 a gallon for gas, because she has a problem with offshore drilling. Man, that’s really rich. It kind of reminds me of President Obama telling us to turn down our thermostats while he cranks his up, but I digress.
However, if anyone was really interested in getting a clear view into both Nancy Pelosi’s character and competency, one only needed to look at who she initially tried to appoint to be the House Majority Leader, as well as who she eventually appointed to be be the head of the House Intelligence Committee, back in 2006 when she first became the Speaker of the House. In 2006 when the Democrats first took back the House and the Senate, the very liberal LA Times wrote a scathing op-ed about Nancy Pelosi titled, “Don’t Snub Harman”. Below is an excerpt from the column–
NEWLY MINTED House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is off to a rocky start. On the same day she was formally elected to lead the new Democratic majority, party colleagues refused to endorse her bizarre choice of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who was investigated but not charged in the Abscam scandal more than two decades ago, as her second-in-command.
That embarrassing experience should induce Pelosi (D-San Francisco) — who appeared chastened before reporters Thursday — to reconsider another ill-advised promotion: Her apparent intention to bestow the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee not on the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), but on Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.).
Hastings, like Murtha, seems an unlikely choice for a leadership role in what Pelosi has been advertising as “the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history.” Hastings was impeached as a federal judge and removed from office in the late 1980s (although he was acquitted of bribery in a criminal trial in 1983).
A litany of explanations have been adduced to explain why Pelosi would bypass Harman, an expert on intelligence matters who has won the respect of both parties while criticizing some of the Bush administration’s excesses in the war on terror. None of them is persuasive. Harman has earned this chairmanship.
But, what this op-ed doesn’t mention is WHO exactly Nancy Pelosi wound up picking to head the House Intelligence committee. After Pelosi found herself the butt of much ridicule due to her “bizarre” and ethically challenged choices after hammering Republicans for having a “culture of corruption”, she settled on Sylvester Reyes (D-TX) to head the House Intelligence Committee–a man who did not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia Muslim. Furthermore, when Reyes was pressed to answer if he knew anything at all about Hezbollah (the Shia Iranian terrorist group), Reyes responded by using the Sammy Sosa Defense (i.e., the “No habla Ingles”/”I speak no English” defense). I’m not kidding. This is the man that Nancy Pelosi put in charge of the House Intelligence Committee–think about that for a second. It clearly demonstrates just how seriously she takes our national security.
Now, I realize that Harman is embroiled in a semi-scandal of her own having to do with the Israeli Public Affairs Committee (although, the LA Times has an interesting column saying that the Harman scandal is really just some members of the Obama Administration’s Justice Department engaging in CYA–you can be the judge); however, I would be willing to bet dollars to donuts that Jane Harman knows the difference between a Sunni and a Shia, and that she wouldn’t use the “Sammy Sosa Defense” if she didn’t know the answer to a question.
But, what I find the most troubling is something that I read from a liberal blog called The Reaction. In their column, they basically admit that (and I’m paraphrasing) “Harman was backed by the Blue Dog Coalition”….”she is respected by her colleagues on both sides of the isle”….”Pelosi didn’t consider Harman partisan enough and thought that she has not been a tough enough critic of the Bush Administration”…..they quote and cite Robert Novak as saying that “Pelosi’s judgment might be distorted by personal considerations”…..and finally that “Pelosi needs to look beyond herself to the good of the country”. If this is true, then to me it is “utterly contemptible” that Nancy Pelosi would jeopardize our national security–by appointing a man to head the House Intelligence Committee who doesn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia–simply because she’s involved in some kind of p*ssing contest with Jane Harman. Not to mention, it’s also pathetic, immature, catty and embarrassing, but I digress.
So, in conclusion, I feel that it’s time to bring the Nancy Pelosi circus to an end. Yes, she had an amusing run there for a time, all the while providing great fodder for pundits and bloggers everywhere, but enough is enough. The national security of the country is at stake and this woman is at best a half-wit and a hypocrite, and at worst, she’s a slightly unbalanced liar. By the way, this is not an easy diary for me to write. I never agreed with Nancy Pelosi’s politics, but I was proud when the first woman was made Speaker of the House and I didn’t want her to turn out to be a laughing stock. (I’m sorry, but that’s how I felt–write it down, take a picture, sue me, whatever. Oh, and for any of you lefty lurkers out there who don’t believe that Pelosi’s a laughing stock, check out the SNL video that I embedded below mocking her–and SNL is a predominantly liberal organization). However, my country comes first and I can no longer trust this woman–who has by all means proven herself to be “utterly contemptible”–with our national security for another second. It is time for the circus to hit the road. Nancy Pelosi needs to go–now!
Update: Today, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air has written an excellent column (citing The Washington Post) which provides further evidence that Nancy Pelosi lied about her knowledge of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques that were being used on high level Al Qaeda terrorists.
In his press conference Wednesday evening, Barack Obama invoked Winston Churchill in support of his anti-waterboarding position, quoting Churchill to the effect that “we don’t torture,” even during the extremities of World War II. We expressed skepticism about Obama’s invocation of Churchill here. Now, Churchill student Richard Langworth confirms that Obama was wrong:
In his press conference of 29 April, in response to a question on the disclosure of top secret memos on the use of “enhanced interrogation methods,” Mr. Obama said:
I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when the entire British–all of the British people–were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat….the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.
While it’s nice to hear the President invoke Sir Winston, the quotation is unattributed and almost certainly incorrect. While Churchill did express such sentiments with regard to prison inmates, he said no such thing about prisoners of war, enemy combatants or terrorists, who were in fact tortured by British interrogators during World War II.
The word “torture” appears 156 times in my digital transcript of Churchill’s 15 million published words (books, articles, speeches, papers) and 35 million words about him–but not once in the subject context. Similarly, key phrases like “character of a country” or “erodes the character” do not track. …
Churchill spoke frequently about torture, mostly enemy murders of civilians. His daughter once told me, “He would have done anything to win the war, and I daresay he had to do some pretty rough things–but they didn’t unman him.” But if Churchill is on record about “enhanced interrogation,” his words have yet to surface.
Obama apparently relied on left-wing internet crank Andrew Sullivan for the fake Churchill quote, which is a bit worrisome in itself.
