In the Obama administration, a lot of information has been recently declassified and publicly distributed. Memos detailing enhanced interrogation tactics of Jihadist terror detainees (or, as the left defines it, torture) and photos that allegedly show the abuse of these detainees by their American captors are the first – but not likely the last – in the declassification queue.
The intent, in the eyes of our president and his advisors, is noble: to introduce “transparency” and to “make up” for the mistakes of the Bush administration. After all, we want al Qaeda and its copycat Jihadist terror organizations to like us. What better way than to put on the public relations equivalent of a hair shirt and prostrate ourselves in front of those against whom we have “sinned”?
So what if it besmirches our military and puts into jeopardy everything they and our intelligence community have fought for long and hard? All of that amounts to a hill of beans next to our new image of the kinder, caring, more submissive America. Out with superiority – in with inferiority. Bowing down to royal despots and slapping the backs of tin pot dictators are all a part of the grand plan to cut America down to size. Tired of the Ugly American stereotype? Then you’ll love the Subservient American.
I, for one, have reason to rejoice in this new era of dirty laundry airing. As long as we’re creating a paper trail a mile long and a mile wide, Obama might want to keep the momentum going and release that long form birth certificate we keep hearing so much about. It’d be a great excuse for him to fly back out to the old Hawaiian homestead (not that he needs a reason to gas up Airforce One and fly the friendly skies – that plane gets more use than Nancy Pelosi’s Botox needle) and ask the governor to take it out of its vault, the location of which is a bigger secret than that of the Bat Cave.
Hey, if it’s no problem to release classified documents, the birth certificate should be an easy call, as to my knowledge it’s not classified. Neither are his undergraduate records. If he’s as brilliant as everyone keeps saying he is, why not prove it by showing off his stellar grades? What articles did he write while editor of the vaunted Harvard Law Review? Inquiring minds want to know. Speaking of Harvard, how did he pay for his high priced law degree? Let’s not forget that trip during college to Pakistan in 1981, the one that supposedly provided Obama with his foreign policy credentials. There has been a lot of controversy about whether Americans were allowed to travel to Pakistan at that time due to the strife, violence and martial law within that nation at the time. Yet he, an unconnected college student, managed to travel there and stay for three weeks. (Is this just more evidence of miracles wrought by The One?) A call to the State Department by one of my colleagues yielded Pakistan travel information on the early 1980s but not 1981. Hmmm…
All of these questions are easily answered, and would put the minds of many Americans at ease to know that our president is exactly who he says he is as prescribed by the Constitution – a natural born citizen – whose brainpower would, we hear tell, put Albert Einstein to shame. How often have we heard that it’s nice to have a smart guy in the White House instead of that dummy George W. Bush?
Americans have asked nicely. Pretty please with sugar on top? Some have even filed lawsuits, a number of which have been summarily dismissed, while others have been the cause of threatening letters by the lawyer representing President Obama and Vice President Joe “Gaffe-o-Matic” Biden. Robert F. Bauer wrote a letter to attorney John Hemenway threatening “sanctions, including costs, expenses and attorneys’ fees” if Hemenway does not withdraw the appeal of his “frivolous” lawsuit demanding the release of the birth certificate. Gee, that’s friendly. Are threats to private citizens on behalf of our elected officials some of the “change” we were promised?
Now really. For Obama, a man who talks about sharing and caring more than those sickeningly sweet Care Bears, you’d think that sharing a little information with an adoring public would be a priceless opportunity to practice what he preaches.
Come on, Barry. Come clean. Take that certificate out from its hidey hole and wave it proudly for your fellow Americans to see, then frame it and display it next to your signed copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in the Oval Office. The American people are getting in to this transparency thing. Don’t disappoint us. You’re the change we’ve been waiting for, remember?
Tag: Terrorist
Prosecuting Patriots
It’s funny how Barack Obama (D-Kenya) denounces America’s humane interrogation techniques as “illegal torture” and yet he laughs it up with his new pals Chavez, Noriega, and Castro who all have long records of very real and brutal torture.
WITH the ugly sanctimony of those who never had to make hard decisions, the American left demands show trials of those who kept us safe after 9/11. Wrapping themselves in repugnant self-righteousness, the MoveOn.org set wants political prosecutions. Should President Obama acquiesce, he won’t be furthering the rule of law, but dismantling it.
Show trials have long been popular with leftists. Those who don’t conform to each jot of doctrine become “enemies of the people.” From Stalin down to Putin, and from Mao to Castro, vengeance disguised as law has been a mega-hit.
Those on the left don’t want justice. If they did, they’d be protesting the murderous torture prevalent in Iran, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and Russia. Instead, our leftists want us to show the leaders of those terror states more respect.
The left is out for revenge. It always is. Hatred of those who think differently is the left’s unifying principle. Leftists don’t need God, but they see devils everywhere.
When President-for-Life Hugo Chavez called President George W. Bush “el Diablo,” our leftists agreed. Hatred of the last administration grew so irrational that any terrorist, no matter how monstrous, became no more than a victim of Bush-Cheney.
Now the left wants an Inquisition for heretics who failed to share its worldview. Men and women who, in their capacity as public servants, wrestled with difficult legal issues in the course of our battle with terrorists are now to be tried and shamed because the left disagreed with their legal opinions and actions. No matter that most Americans wouldn’t view the methods of our interrogators as torture when applied to hardened terrorists (despite the media’s ceaseless effort to convince us otherwise). No matter that foreign leaders championed by the left use vastly more brutal techniques.
No matter that interrogators differ on the utility of “harsh” methods or that the information gleaned indisputably saved American lives. No matter that our system of government functioned as it was designed to.
The left just didn’t like the results the system produced. Law has nothing to do with this cry for vengeance. This is purely about political differences. During the Bush administration, leftists warned repeatedly that actions they didn’t like put our country on a “slippery slope.” Well, once we initiate show trials of government officials who did their best to protect us, we’ll have skipped the slippery slope and leapt to the bottom.
If Obama agrees to any form of show trial, he and his own team will live to regret it. His party won’t always be in power, and he’ll have set a hideous, un-American precedent.
If the Obama administration fails to keep us safe and our citizens are attacked at home or abroad, shall we then prosecute those who dismantled our safeguards and gutted our intelligence effort?
As countless leftists learned in the course of the 20th century, today’s witness for the prosecution is tomorrow’s enemy of the people.
The rule of law is paramount. When we pervert the law for political ends, we attack our deepest foundations. Where would such show trials stop? Will we try Supreme Court justices for issuing legal opinions with which a future administration disagrees?
There are plenty of genuine crimes worth prosecuting in Washington, DC. Corruption abounds. Not a few members of Congress — from both parties — should be in jail. But corruption isn’t taken seriously. Politics are.
If the left gets its People’s Court to destroy the lives of patriots who did their human, imperfect best to defend us (and who succeeded in that effort for seven years), we will do more damage to the United States than all the dictators our president longs to embrace could do together.
The left has nothing against torture. It just wants to choose the victims.
Meanwhile, that great bogeyman beloved of left-wing propagandists and Hollywood (sorry for being redundant), Sen. Joseph McCarthy, is grinning from ear to ear in hell: He’s become the left’s new role model.