And yet another day.....

Downplay Danger and Willful Ignorance:

"In short, Obama’s out-to-lunchness was both strategic (downplay the war against Islamic fundamentalists) and the result of abject ignorance, perpetuated throughout his administration, as to just how serious was the threat of a Yemen-hatched plot to attack the American homeland. The ho-hum rhetorical ploy has blow up in the Obami’s faces and is likely to be adjusted, although not to the extent that the president would use the words “Islamic fundamentalist” or some variation thereof to describe our enemy. But what about those who apparently didn’t grasp the nature of the threat we faced?

It is appalling, really, that those who wrapped themselves in a cloak of ignorance and carried out foolhardy policies (e.g., refueling the terrorist pipeline in Yemen) should remain in their jobs. Yes, the president is responsible, but he can’t be fired for another three years. In the meantime, what’s the excuse for keeping everyone else around?"

And what else would you expect from a professor who never created a job for anyone in his life?

Commentary:

"That inspirational candidate from 2008 is nowhere to be found now. He’s reduced to mouthing bureaucratic platitudes. Is it part of the gambit to de-escalate, once again, the war on Islamic terrorists? Or has he simply lost the rhetorical touch, run out of things to say? Maybe his “eloquence” wasn’t eloquence at all but a short list of buzzwords and New Age window dressing meant to disguise a candidate with a thin resume and limited repertoire of executive skills. Just wondering."

Clueless Obama....

Lehman:

"“President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He’s made a lot of commission’s members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations.” Obama, he adds, has taken a “lawyer-like, politically-correct approach” to national security issues like terrorist watchlists and no-fly lists. “You got to blame the president for enforcing the politically-correct and legalistic policies that led to these failures.”"

Bravo!

The Hugh Hewitt Show:

"We are 45 weeks from the chance to begin to repair the damage that has flowed from marrying high school rhetoric and plans with power. We had another close call yesterday. Pray we keep being lucky for a while longer until we can start to be smart again."

No Shit...

Charlie Foxtrot:

"OK, so we the press doesn't have the Bush administration to kick around anymore, but I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that someone with connections to the Obama Administration will appear on CNN or MSNBC and present the spin that this was somehow the fault of Bush Administration policies.

Mark my words...."

Quote of the Day

Instapundit:

"The trouble with socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money."

Oh, Yes! You are being lied to....

The Clarity of False Choices:

"What about those who do not like the status quo but have a different vision of reform, not because they want to go farther than Obama does but because they want to go in a different direction, toward more choice, more competition, and less government involvement? In Obama’s world, they do not exist; instead we have his bold yet achievable plan, pitted against socialist utopianism and blind partisan intransigence. Let me be clear: This is a false choice."

Quote of the Day....

The New Editor:

"The Democratic Party is not so much a political party anymore as much as it is a public relations firm whose primary target audience is that of a remedial civics class."

Quote of the Day....

Megan McArdle:

"I try not to watch the Sunday political shows. If God had wanted me to engage in such an activity, he would have provided me with a small hammer with which I could repeatedly smack myself in the head once a week for three hours."

Swingin' Copenhagen

Dennis Miller:

"By the way, how much CO2 does a whiny bleat put out into the atmosphere?"

Channeling Mel Brooks...

Let’s have an inquisition:

"Pope Urban VIII — the Al Gore of his day, whose truths were infallible and irrefutable, and who should also be admired by progressives of today for his ban on smoking — ordered Galileo in front of the Inquisition, where he admitted that the earth can’t move (notwithstanding the rumor that he muttered “And yet it moves” under his breath as he did.)

The same mechanism that shut up the heliocentrics can also shut up their modern-day equivalents."

A new definition of "leadership" ?

Mark Steyn:

".... Obama’s speech is only about Afghanistan if you’re in Afghanistan. If you’re in Moscow or Tehran, Pyongyang or Caracas, it’s about America. And what it told them is that, if you’re a local strongman with regional ambitions, or a rogue state going nuclear, or a mischief-making kleptocracy dusting off old tsarist dreams, this president is not going to be pressing your reset button. Strange how an allegedly compelling speaker is unable to fake even perfunctory determination and resilience. Strange, too, how all the sophisticated nuances of post-Bush foreign-policy “realism” seem so unreal when you’re up there trying to sell them as a coherent strategy. Go back half a decade to when the administration was threatening to shove democracy down the throats of every two-bit basket case whether they want it or not. Democratizing the planet is, in a Council of Foreign Relations sense, “unrealistic,” but talking it up is a very realistic way of messing with the dictators’ heads. A pipsqueak like Boy Assad sleeps far more soundly today than he did back when he thought Bush meant it, and so did the demonstrators threatening his local enforcers in Lebanon."

The Liberal One Way Street.....

WSJ.com:

"For our money, one of the better parts of President Obama's speech at West Point this week was his connection between a healthy economy and U.S. national security. To quote: 'Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy.' We only wish Mr. Obama understood the link between the larger welfare state he is trying to build at home and the economic weakness that will undermine our military power."

Just watch it.....

No wonder ABC didn't want him anymore....

John Stossel:

"When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs."

Don't you just hate the laws of physics?

The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama:

"The laws of gravity, the weight of history and of precedent, have caught up with the Obama presidency. We are beyond stirring speeches. The novelty of the Obama approach, and the Obama persona, has worn off. There is a whole American diplomatic tradition to draw upon—engagements made, wisdom acquired in the course of decades, and, yes, accounts to be settled with rogues and tyrannies. They might yet help this administration find its way out of a labyrinth of its own making."

It shouldn't have been hard....

Mark Steyn:

"Major Hasan couldn’t have been more straightforward about who and what he was. An army psychiatrist, he put “SoA”—i.e., “Soldier of Allah”—on his business card. At the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, he was reprimanded for trying to persuade patients to convert to Islam and fellow pupils objected to his constant “anti-American propaganda,” but, as the Associated Press reported, “a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.”

This is your brain on political correctness.

As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in U.S. history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit. And he gave the presentation to a roomful of fellow army psychiatrists and doctors. Some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And, when the question of whether then-Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic,” the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried “how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents.”"

Do they kiss you before "they do sex to you"?

Mark Steyn:

"And that’s what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann’s mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the New York Times and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of “saving the planet” from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the last week, you’re as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin."

Sometimes it IS the fault of the schmuck with his finger on the trigger....

Christopher Hitchens:

"It is he, who I am taking as representative of a larger mentality here, who uses equally inert lingo to suggest that Maj. Hasan was 'pushed over the edge by his perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.' That's a nice and shady use of the word 'perception.' Might it not be equally true to say that Hasan was all-too-easily pulled over the edge, having already signaled his devout eagerness for the dive, by a cleric who makes a living by justifying murder of Muslims and non-Muslims alike?"

Quote of the Day....

George F. Will:

"Today, there is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism."