Category: The One

Operation Empty Chair

Libya Operation Empty Chair 23 Comments

Reuters;

Fire destroyed the terminal at Tripoli’s main airport on Sunday, one day after it was seized by militia fighters from the Libyan city of Misrata, witnesses said.
Unidentified war planes also attacked targets in the capital, residents said, the latest stage of the worst fighting in Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Tripoli residents heard jets followed by explosions at dawn but more details were not immediately available.
It was unclear who had burned the terminal and supporters of the rival factions took to social media to accused each other.

Update: Egypt and the United Arab Emirates were responsible for carrying out two series of air strikes in the past week on armed Islamist factions in Tripoli, Libya, U.S. officials said on Monday.

Operation Empty Chair

Operation Empty Chair Syria 21 Comments

Who could have known, after regime change in Libya had gone so swimmingly?

What a difference a year makes. Around this time last year, the West was gearing up for military action against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was accused of carrying out chemical weapons attacks on his own people. That intervention never came to pass, not least because domestic public opinion in countries such as Britain and the United States was opposed to further entanglements in the Middle East.
Now, the U.S. is contemplating extending airstrikes on Islamic State militants operating in Iraq in Syria — fighters belonging to a terrorist organization that is leading the war against Assad. The Islamic State’s territorial gains in Iraq and continued repression and slaughter of religious minorities there and in Syria have rightly triggered global condemnation. “I am no apologist for the Assad regime,” Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, told NPR. “But in terms of our security, [the Islamic State] is by far the greatest threat.”
The irony of the moment is tragic. But to some, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Many cautioned against the earlier insistence of the Obama administration (as well as other governments) that Assad must go, fearing what would take hold in the vacuum.
One of those critics happened to be Russian President Vladimir Putin, who warned against U.S. intervention in Syria in a New York Times op-ed last September.

Red Line related: The United States has made the strongest indication to date that Syria may have withheld some of its chemical weapons on 18 August, when it said there are still “serious questions” about its declaration to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
Well, all things considered, they might want to give some back.

Now Is The Time At SDA When We Juxtapose!

Political Animal The One 29 Comments

Carol Platt Liebau (Hugh Hewitt Show) 2009;

[W]hen he was at the [Harvard Law Review] you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.
A lot of the time he quote/unquote “worked from home”, which was sort of a shorthand – and people would say it sort of wryly – shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn’t around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli whose actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.
He’s the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he’d leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.

Howard Kurtz, 2014;

What is striking now is a growing sense, fairly or unfairly, that Obama is not capable of rising to the occasion, that he just doesn’t like politics, that he’s disengaged, that despite his soaring rhetoric in 2008 he has a passion deficit.
All the criticism about him playing golf and being at Martha’s Vineyard is kind of a code for his supposedly being unplugged from the job.

Operation Empty Chair

I Miss W. Operation Empty Chair Political Animal 12 Comments

Dana Milbank:

By Monday afternoon, the crises had forced Obama to revise his schedule. The White House announced that the president, after returning from the beach, would make an unscheduled statement about Iraq. He freshened up at his 8,100-square-foot vacation home, then stepped outside, in a blue blazer and open collar; his aides wisely chose a wooded backdrop rather than one with the infinity pool and the sweeping water views. Obama finished his four-minute statement and then hopped in his motorcade for the ride to a Democratic fundraiser.

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”

Baiting The Left The One 20 Comments

Ross Douthat’s latest column is well worth a read, if even just for historical purposes, to understand how fully Obama & Co. have destroyed the American political system:

Anyone paying attention knows that no such impeachment plan is currently afoot. So taken on its own, the impeachment chatter would simply be an unseemly, un-presidential attempt to raise money and get out the 2014 vote.
But it isn’t happening in a vacuum, because even as his team plays the impeachment card with gusto, the president is contemplating — indeed, all but promising — an extraordinary abuse of office: the granting of temporary legal status, by executive fiat, to up to half the country’s population of illegal immigrants.

An Interview With Ryan Crocker, Former US Ambassador to Iraq

Operation Empty Chair Terrorism 16 Comments

Q) And the consequences are? How dangerous a situation is it?

This is analogous to Afghanistan, say, in August 2001. And this time, it is Al Qaeda version 6.0. They make bin Laden’s 2011 Al Qaeda look like Boy Scouts.
They are far stronger; they are far more numerous. They have thousands who hold foreign passports and require no visas to get into the United States or other Western countries.
They are well funded, they are battle-hardened, and they are well armed. And they now control far more territory exclusively than bin Laden ever did. They have the security; they have the safety to plan their next set of operations; and they are a messianic movement.
Believe me, they are planning those operations. That’s why the Saudis moved 30,000 troops up to their border. They know that ISIS wants Mecca and Medina.
They also want to come after us. And I can tell you, as we sit here today in Washington, they’re sitting in Mosul figuring out how they’re going to get at us next.

But read the whole thing.

Operation Empty Chair

I Miss W. Operation Empty Chair 12 Comments

American Interest;

Luckily for America’s self-esteem, it was liberal Democrats that produced this particular shambles. If Republicans had done this, the media would be on the administration non-stop, perhaps comparing Samantha Power to Paul Wolfowitz–a well-meaning humanitarian way over her head who wrecked a country out of misguided ideology. There might also be some pointed questions for future presidential candidates who supported this fiasco. But since both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have their fingerprints all over Libya, there isn’t a lot of press hunger for a detailed, unsparing autopsy into this stinking corpse of policy flub.
If Obama were a Republican, the press and the weekly news shows would be ringing with hyperbolic, apocalyptic denunciations of the clueless incumbent who had failed to learn the most basic lessons of Iraq. Indeed, the MSM right now would be howling that Obama was stupider than Bush. Bush, our Journolist friends would now be saying ad nauseam, at least had the excuse that he didn’t know what happens when you overthrow a paranoid, genocidal, economically incompetent Arab tyrant in an artificial post-colonial state. But Obama did–or, the press would nastily say, he would have done if he’d been doing his job instead of hitting the golf course or yakking it up with his glitzy pals at late night bull sessions. The ad hominem attacks would never stop, and all the tangled threads of incompetence and failure would be endlessly and expertly picked at in long New Yorker articles, NYT thumbsuckers, and chin-strokings on all the Sabbath gasbag shows.

But he’s not a Republican, so it’s Bush’s fault.

Obama’s Most Cynical Move Yet?

The One 18 Comments

From Drudge today:
Obama Readying ‘Very Significant’ Executive Action On Immigration…
Unilateral grant of ‘work authorization’…
Gutierrez: Amnesty for 5 million…
Sessions: Will ‘end immigration enforcement’…
Plea to America: Melt Congressional Phones, Kill Executive Amnesty…
Prediction: Such a unilateral move by the Executive Office would likely be overturned by the Supreme Court in 2015 but if the Republicans were to speak out against it, they’ll suffer the price at the polls on November 4th.

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