Category: The One

Was There Nothing That Obama Couldn’t Do?

Operation Empty Chair Syria The One 19 Comments

Holocaust Museum Pulls Study Absolving Obama Administration For Inaction In Face of Syrian Genocide

The intervention of the Holocaust Museum in a hot-button political dispute–and the apparent excuse of official US government inaction in the face of large-scale mass murder, complete with the gassing of civilians and government-run crematoria–alarmed many Jewish communal figures. “The first thing I have to say is: Shame on the Holocaust Museum,” said Leon Wieseltier, the literary critic and fellow at the Brookings Institution, who slammed the Museum for “releasing an allegedly scientific study that justifies bystanderism.”
The Museum’s exercise in counter-factual history, he suggested, was inherently absurd. “If I had the time I would gin up a parody version of this that will give us the computational-modeling algorithmic counterfactual analysis of John J McCloy’s decision not to bomb the Auschwitz ovens in 1944. I’m sure we could concoct the fucking algorithms for that, too.”

How could such a thing happen?

Some Jewish communal leaders suggested both privately to Tablet, and in conversations with board members and staff at the Holocaust Museum, that the Museum’s moral authority had been hijacked for a partisan re-writing of recent history, and alleged that the museum had absolved the Obama administration of any moral or political error in its response to mass atrocities in Syria. At least one of the architects of the Obama administration policy in Syria, former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, was appointed to the museum’s Memorial Council during the closing days of the Obama administration.

Oh.

When The Democrats Do It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

The One 16 Comments

In 1972, some employees of President Nixon’s re-election committee were caught when they broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant a bug. This led to Nixon’s resignation and probably would have led to his felony prosecution had he not been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.
But if a single bugging of the political opposition is enough to bring down a presidency — and maybe lead to an unprecedented criminal prosecution of a former president — then what are we to make of the recently unveiled Obama administration program of massively spying on political opponents in violation of clearly established law?
Because that’s what was unveiled last week.

Was There Nothing That Obama Couldn’t Do?

Political Animal Radioactive Terrorism The One 20 Comments

He wasn’t anti-nuke. He was on the other side.

When federal prosecutors and agents learned the true extent of the releases, many were shocked and angry. Some had spent years, if not decades, working to penetrate the global proliferation networks that allowed Iranian arms traders both to obtain crucial materials for Tehran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, in some cases, to provide dangerous materials to other countries.
“They didn’t just dismiss a bunch of innocent business guys,” said one former federal law enforcement supervisor centrally involved in the hunt for Iranian arms traffickers and nuclear smugglers. “And then they didn’t give a full story of it.”
In its determination to win support for the nuclear deal and prisoner swap from Tehran — and from Congress and the American people — the Obama administration did a lot more than just downplay the threats posed by the men it let off the hook, according to POLITICO’s findings.
Through action in some cases and inaction in others, the White House derailed its own much-touted National Counterproliferation Initiative at a time when it was making unprecedented headway in thwarting Iran’s proliferation networks. In addition, the POLITICO investigation found that Justice and State Department officials denied or delayed requests from prosecutors and agents to lure some key Iranian fugitives to friendly countries so they could be arrested. Similarly, Justice and State, at times in consultation with the White House, slowed down efforts to extradite some suspects already in custody overseas, according to current and former officials and others involved in the counterproliferation effort.
And as far back as the fall of 2014, Obama administration officials began slow-walking some significant investigations and prosecutions of Iranian procurement networks operating in the U.S. These previously undisclosed findings are based on interviews with key participants at all levels of government and an extensive review of court records and other documents.
“Clearly, there was an embargo on any Iranian cases,” according to the former federal supervisor.
“Of course it pissed people off, but it’s more significant that these guys were freed, and that people were killed because of the actions of one of them,” the supervisor added, in reference to Ravan and the IED network.

It’s Not Wiretapping When The Democrats Do It

Drain The Swamp Political Animal The One 13 Comments

Obama Political Spying Scandal:

Was Russia, and specifically the overwrought “Russia hacked the election” narrative, used as camouflage for what was actually a political spying operation? Do you really think the Obama administration, which turned the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department into process cudgels for beating Obama detractors, would be above that sort of thing?

h/t OttRob

It’s Not Wiretapping When The Democrats Do It

Drain The Swamp The One 11 Comments

Those names were leaked by a hateful internet video;

After the revelations these last couple of days about the “incidental” unmaskings, Rice made another television appearance, this time in an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC. Asked about allegations that she had been been involved in disseminating the names of people swept up by the intelligence investigations, she insisted that they were “absolutely false.”

Did the Obama Administration’s Abuse of Foreign-Intelligence Collection Start Before Trump?

In a December 31, 2016, Tablet article on the controversy, “Why the White House Wanted Congress to Think It Was Being Spied on By the NSA,” I argued that the Obama administration had merely used the appearance of spying on American lawmakers to corner opponents of the Iran Deal. Spying on U.S. citizens would be a clear abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance system. It would be a felony offense to leak the names of U.S. citizens to the press.
Increasingly, I believe that my conclusion in that piece was wrong. I believe the spying was real and that it was done not in an effort to keep the country safe from threats–but in order to help the White House fight their domestic political opponents.
“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism–activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

And…“President Obama, of course, got his start in national politics when sealed divorce records became public.”

Heckuva Job, Barry*

Operation Empty Chair Terrorism The One 20 Comments

Telegraph;

British Islamic State fighter who carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq this week is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who was paid £1 million compensation by the government.
Jamal al-Harith, a Muslim convert born Ronald Fiddler who detonated a car bomb at an Iraqi army base near Mosul, was released from the US detention camp in 2004 and successfully claimed compensation after saying British agents knew or were complicit in his mistreatment.

And of course, there’s this.

He was freed following intense lobbying by Tony Blair’s Labour government.

(*Update: Heckuva job, Kate… “2004”.)

Truth Hurts.

The One 10 Comments

Via Instapundit, I’m a little shocked that the author doesn’t realize that everyone in politics; pundits, media, staffers, politicians and especially partisans are all cynics and hypocrites.

So as I watch my friends and thousands of other Americans gather together to protest the inauguration, I find myself a little speechless. It cannot be that all of these people only see evil when it wears the other team’s uniform. It cannot be that they are more upset by offensive speech than by a man claiming the right to kill any human being on earth at his whim. These things simply cannot be. And yet it sure looks like they are.

Obama’s Legacy of Failure

Baiting The Left The One 25 Comments

Barack Obama’s sycophants in the media have a way of constantly repeating the same lies over and over again until a large percentage of the public accepts them as truth. Market Watch’s Caroline Baum wanted to set some things straight before he left office:

  • It’s (still) the economy, stupid
  • A Legacy of Ashes
  • Keep your friends close
  • Divided we stand
  • That which must not be named

Dear Mr. President, don’t the let door hit you on the way out.

#Occupy White House

Drain The Swamp The One You Might Be A Liberal 30 Comments

Chant a bunch of slogans, get people angry, then go home to collect your welfare cheque while leaving your garbage for others to pick up.
Am I close?
And in the end, Obama remains largely impotent.

Which he did on Friday morning, when in a stunning reversal, the Russian leader took the high road, rejected the Lavrov proposal, and in a statement posted by the Kremlin said that Russia won’t expel any Americans in retaliation to US moves, in a brutal demonstration of just how irrelevant Obama’s 11th hour decision is for US-Russian relations.

Via Drudge

Not A Muslim

The One 37 Comments

NOOOnonononono……

Update – Since September, if not well before that, Obama has been weighing a menu of possible actions to hammer Israel before leaving office. I know this because US officials openly admitted this to me. Indeed, they were almost boasting about it.
And now this… Leaked Document: U.S. Colluded With Palestinians 10 Days Before UN Settlements Vote
Eli Lake: Obama’s decision to break precedent by declining to veto Friday’s resolution looks entirely premeditated.

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