What Is This World Coming To?

The Obama Press Corps (which evidently includes every mainstream media outlet except Fox News and the blogosphere) has evidently gone as far as it can go in its efforts to justify President Obama’s America-Bashing Tour.  After all,  there’s not much the President can say to bash the country that the mainstream media hasn’t said already. Read the rest of this entry »

When George Bush famously winked at the Queen,  the breach of protocol practically set off an international incident.   When Barack Obama breached protocol by taking the monarch’s proffered hand in both of his (protocol allows only brief touch)  the breach was politely ignored.

Obama Bows Before His King

It was not an accident — nobody gets near the Queen without first getting a lesson in proper protocol, so Obama deliberately violated it.

Frankly, I’m ok with it — America doesn’t have a queen and American presidents don’t bow to royalty.

But wait!  Who is this guy bowing and scraping before King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziiz Al Saud, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King of Saudi Arabia and the birthplace of Islam?

Yes, it is President “I’m-Not-A-Muslim” Barack Hussein Obama whose nose is practically scraping the floor as he humbles himself before the Arab-Muslim King.   It is small wonder that about one American in ten believes Obama is secretly a Muslim.  Perhaps he’s about to come out of the closet, so to speak?  I mean, what does he have to lose?

I found it interesting that the London Sunday Times has already found enough similarities between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter in Obama’s first two weeks to merit an entire column.

“Barack Obama thinks he can charm his adversaries into changing their ways but his personality can’t change the dynamics,” said Tom Edmonds, a Republican consultant. “Carter [president from 1977 to 1981] had the same belief in naive symbolism. Their styles are very different but the political similarities are there.”

Considering the fact that Obama has already entered into secret negotiations with both Syria and Iran,  the Jimmy Carter label may one day be a relative compliment.

Nuclear non-proliferation experts had several “very, very high-level” contacts in the last few months with Iranian leaders, said Jeffrey Boutwell, executive director for the US branch of the Pugwash group, an international organization of scientists which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

Former defense secretary William Perry, who served in Obama’s election campaign, participated in some of these meetings focused on “a wide range of issues that separate Iran from the West: not only their nuclear program but the Middle East peace process, Persian Gulf issues,” Boutwell told AFP.

The Pugwash official declined to name the other participants, except to say they had considerable clout.

“We had very, very senior figures from both the Iranian policy establishment and from the US; people who have very close, good access to the top leaders in both countries,” Boutwell said.

“The Cable,” the blog of the specialist magazine Foreign Policy, said Iran’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (AIEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was “among the Iranian officials who attended the Pugwash dialogues.”

According to former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, pretty much every single item on the Democrat Party’s talking points list about George W. Bush is true. At least, its true if you believe Scott McClellan. And if his Amazon.com position is any indication, there are about a million rea$on$ to be skeptical.

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term. And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

McClelland’s job was to be open and forthright on Iraq. If he knew back then what he is saying in his book, then why didn’t he say something? If he didn’t know, then he does he know that Bush did?

“I still like and admire President Bush,” McClellan writes. “But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

“If Bush had only listened to me . . . (sigh) McClelland even found a way to resurrect the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby story, despite the fact that everybody NOW knows that the leak was undersecretary of State Richard Armitage.

“I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood,” McClellan writes. “It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the president effectively. I didn’t learn that what I’d said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later.”

The media figured it out? When did that happen? The media hasn’t gotten the story right yet. It was Joe Wilson, (who nobody can deny knew that she worked for the CIA) that called down the spotlight on him and his family by launching an attack against his own government in time of war. Wilson was no media novice — he opened his attack by writing an op-ed piece for the New York Times.

When Richard Clarke published a similarly spurious and innuendoed account of his time as counter-terrorism chief (”If they’d only listened to me!”) entitled “Against all Enemies” then-White House spokesman Scott McClellan said this:

“Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he’s raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let’s look at the politics of it. His best buddy is Rand Beers, who is the principal foreign policy advisor to Senator Kerry’s campaign. The Kerry campaign went out and immediately put these comments up on their website that Mr. Clarke made. …”

So Scott comes along and writes a book timed for release in the ‘heat of a presidential campaign’. Certainly, let’s look at the politics of it.

When former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill wrote his book, The Price of Loyalty” (said price, evidently, being a fat book deal ) McClellan dismissed it out of hand:

“It appears to be more about trying to justify personal views and opinions than it does about looking at the results that we are achieving on behalf of the American people. If you look back at his past comments and his past actions, they contradict his current rhetoric. I talked to you all a little bit about that earlier today. Go back and look at exactly what he has said in the past and compare that with what he is saying today.”

Back at ya, Scott!