Category Archives: Politics

September 22, 2015 · 4:15 pm

Birds of a feather and “The Polish Plan”

woodpecker post card -2
Back in 2006 my husband and I took a cross-country trip to New Mexico.  We were going to visit our son at an Air Force base there, where he was assigned, before he deployed to Iraq.   As evening approached we entered the state of Arkansas and decided to stop at a motel for the night.  We ended up at an exit, where the tourist gimmick appeared to be a bird, which was believed to have been extinct for 60 years, but allegedly was sighted on February 27, 2004.

I always like to ask the locals where the best places to eat are, rather than trust online searches or road signs.  So, after we got settled in our room, I went and chatted up the receptionist at the front desk and off we went in search of a local BBQ joint.  As we ate, I kept looking at the pictures of the ivory-billed woodpecker on the walls and I asked my husband if he knew what the big deal was about this woodpecker, which I had never heard of.  He didn’t know either.  Near the cash register were shelves filled with the usual tourist junk, much of it plastered with images of the “ivory-billed woodpecker”.

Yesterday, I commented several times on Senator Marco Rubio’s foreign policy piece, “Obama’s Pathetic Cave-in to Putin’s Power Play in Syria”.  Rubio offers a lot of Cold War sounding rhetoric and insists he will arm the Syrian moderate rebels.  I believe this “Syrian moderate” strategy was foolish from the very beginning  and a recipe to inadvertently place heavy weapons into the hands of ISIS, jihadists or Assad’s forces, because really do “moderates” win wars against committed, hardened fighters?  I doubt it and much to our embarrassment, we have armed “moderates” numerous times in Syria, only to have them walk away with our training and weapons and join ISIS.  Here’s part of one of the exchanges with an ardent supporter of arming “Syrian moderates”:

Lyretail susanholly • 12 hours ago (his response to me)

There were jihadi elements based primarily in eastern Syria in 2012, yes. But if you look at a map of Syria, most of the population centers run along the western edge well away from those early staging areas. That’s where the important action was happening. The infiltration of the jihadi elements into the mainstream opposition came about because western policy toward Syria left the outgunned opposition to Assad nowhere else to turn for support and no incentive not to work with whoever would back them. If you offer nothing, you get nothing. As to ISIS specifically, their strategy from the beginning was to snatch territory from whoever was the winner in local fights between the regime and the opposition. They were spoilers from their inception interested in controlling territory of their own, not cooperating with others against the regime. Conflating them with other actors in the conflict was and is a fallacy.

I read the article you link to. The reference to the fight against Assad becoming “jihadized” is a consequence of the early failure to support the original opponents of Assad enough to be effective on the ground, not a justification for the refusal to do so. That’s rich. We had a window of opportunity, and we let it close. It wasn’t al-Qaeda or al-Nusra that took to the streets by the thousands to protest Assad’s dictatorship. It was ordinary people. Ideally, we should have destroyed both Assad’s air force on the ground and the Al Qaeda training camps out in the eastern desert and mountains that became the source of the jihadi infiltration. Dithering has costs.

As things stand now, most of the original rebels are dead, were absorbed by Nusra and its affiliates, or fled the country. The best thing we can do now is to raise a new force from among these new refugees similar to what was done with Polish refugees in WWII. The half-hearted effort in Jordan has been a farce. Backing Assad as the “lesser of two evils,” however, only guarantees more war and more jihadism.

  • susanholly Lyretail • 10 hours ago (my response to him)

    We had no vital US national interest in Syria – NONE. This misguided post 9/11 policy where we were going to remove safe havens for terrorists who attacked us, by regime change, if necessary, morphed into regime change to democratize the Arab world post Arab Spring. None of it has worked – NONE. Libya’s a gigantic safe haven for terrorists, Iraq too, Afghanistan will be back in Taliban hands, in Egypt we backed the Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy umbrella organization for Salafist radicals. You say “Dithering has costs.” Arming rebels in that neck of the woods has costs too. And there’s always unintended consequences when you throw more arms into the mix. We were gunrunning from Libya to Syria from the beginning. Of the rebels we armed I am not sure who is is “moderate” and who is “jihadist”, because the groups change sides and alliances frequently. Benghazi sound familiar – that’s what blowback looks like. Or how about the Seal Team 6 helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2011.

    “Moderates” will not win against hardened, Islamist fighters.

    I have noticed that the most ardent “arm them” crowd seem to be academics in think tanks with no military experience, while military strategists will raise concerns and discuss possible blowback and unintended consequences from arming foreign fighters. Frantic hunts for manpads ring any bells? How about the “Syrian moderate” last year, Jamal Maarouf, whom Foreign Policy wrote about as our last best hope? We trained and armed him and his band with TOW missiles – he immediately declared a truce with ISIS.

    So your best hope is:

    “As things stand now, most of the original rebels are dead, were absorbedby Nusra and its affiliates, or fled the country. The best thing we can do now is to raise a new force from among these new refugees similar to what was done with Polish refugees in WWII.”

    Yes, the fake Syrian passport business is booming, the Islamists are determined to dupe us any way they can and one wonders who is going to vet these “Syrian moderate” refugees to train into a force capable of defeating hardened Islamist fighters or Assad’s forces. This should go as well as training Afghan security forces – where they sell their US-issued gear at the bazaar, then come back and want more, then there was the endless drug-addiction problem among Afghan recruits. Training Iraqi security forces has worked great too. In Libya we sent in some General Hifter, because we left a gigantic safe haven for terrorists there, in addition to fueling a refugee crisis. It’s not like moving inanimate pieces on a chess board – there are many more than two sides in these fights, alliances and allegiance between factions are fluid, and all these sides get to think and make moves that run counter to your plan. So, now we’re being offered the Polish plan – I will not laugh.

The image above is from a post card I bought at that BBQ joint in 2006.   Our waitress, a very young woman, who looked to be still in her teens, cautiously answered my questions about this elusive “ivory-billed woodpecker”.   I asked her if she thinks the sightings of this woodpecker, long believed to be extinct, are true or a hoax.  She shrugged her shoulders and smiled.  She said she didn’t know for sure, but a lot of “experts” from back East believe it and came to search for that bird.

As I read Patrick Poole’s report at PJ Media today of another Syrian moderate we trained who took our weapons and joined ISIS, I thought our search for “Syrian moderates”, which began based largely on neoconservative think-tank “experts and a young Syria “expert” at the Institute for the Study of War/political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Elizabeth O’Bagy seems much like the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Today, GEN Petraeus  testified before Congress, I am presuming at the request of the likes of Senator John McCain, the neoconservative “Arm Syrian Moderates”, and to offer his insights into the fight against ISIS.  He thinks the US should establish safe zones in Syria, that will ostensibly encourage moderate Sunnis to fight against ISIS.  He stated:

“The central problem in Syria is that Sunni Arabs will not be willing partners against the Islamic State unless we commit to protect them and the broader Syrian population against all enemies, not just ISIS,” Petraeus said using an acronym for the militant group. “That means protecting them from the unrestricted warfare being waged against them by Bashar Assad, especially by his air force and its use of barrel bombs.”

He suggested that the U.S. tell Assad that if he continues to use barrel bombs, the U.S. will stop the Syrian air force from flying.

“We have that capability,” he said. “It would demonstrate that the United States is willing to stand against Assad and it would show the Syrian people that we can do what the Islamic State cannot — provide them with a measure of protection.”

At the same time, Petraeus warned against rushing to oust Assad without knowing who would fill the resulting political vacuum in the country.

Putin has moved Russian military personnel, equipment and fighters into Syria to bolster Assad.  Putin has had meetings with the regional leaders and even with Israel and ironed out an understanding about Russia’s aims to help the Syrian state, to avoid any misunderstanding about how the IDF forces will respond to Assad transferring arms to Hezbollah.  Yet. GEN Petraeus talks about creating some safe zone for imaginary Sunni moderates and he believes they will want to fight ISIS for us, when in truth, those Sunnis’ mortal enemy is really Assad, not ISIS (radical Salafists, who are Sunnis).  Nowhere in Petraeus’ statement is a recognition of Russia’s diplomatic effort and coordination with regional leaders and even Israel or an insistence that we must talk to Putin to avoid escalating this into a US vs. Russian conflict very quickly, if US and Russian planes are operating in tight air space over Syria.  Nope, it’s more magical-thinking that we’re going to create some viable proxy forces to fight ISIS for us.   He argued that the US should not allow Putin to push us into an alliance with Assad.  Instead he’s fine with the US supporting the Baghdad government, which relies heavily on Iranian backed militias to fight the Islamic State.  And we’re going to chug along rebuilding the Iraqi Army – again.  He did deliver the requisite catchphrase to be thrown around – this time, the clever,  Russian-themed one for the pundits to saber-rattle and fear-monger to sway public opinion for another regime change in the Mid-East.  He said:

“He called Syria a “geopolitical Chernobyl — spewing instability and extremism over the region and the rest of the world.””

The experts in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker began their search for the elusive bird in the eastern woods of Arkansas, then spread out to search in 8 different states.  They did not find any.  Last night I believed that poster’s plan, which I facetiously referred  to as “The Polish Plan”,  was laughable, but today with the “geopolitical Chernobyl” hyperbole, it sounds like it just might be an expansion of the neoconservative experts’ new “Syrian moderate” plan – the search for “Syrian refugee moderates”.  One place they likely won’t find any is Poland, because the Poles were smart enough to say they are not Western Europe and they don’t want any terrorists….

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September 22, 2015 · 1:54 am

Ben Carson thrown under the “Islam” bus

The media has tried to throw Ben Carson under the very same “Islam” bus that rolled over Donald Trump, leaving Trump (and his hair) not quite flattened, but a little unsteady on his political feet, after his strange hit and run encounter (with what sure smelled like a plant in the audience). With Carson that bus spent the weekend backing up and running over him a few more times. CAIR went on the Islamophobia warpath, demanding Carson drop out of the race, but what Carson said isn’t hate speech or religious bigotry – he’s speaking the truth.   Carson, in his quiet, thoughtful manner offers his reasoning, that tenets of Islam are not consistent with the US Constitution, which is irrefutable – Sharia law, with its totalitarian tenets is incompatible with our principles in the Declaration of Independence and with the US Constitution. Andrew McCarthy at National Review lays out the case, in his usual brilliant style:

“These assertions would not be nearly as hotly debated if the political class and the media had not sought for decades to suppress all discussion of Islam – other than mindless blather about its being a “religion of peace.” If we had been having the adult discussion we should have been having, it would be well understood by now that Islam is not merely a religion but a comprehensive societal framework with its own legal system.

Why is that important to grasp? Because in the West, we recognize a division between the spiritual realm and political life – a division reflected in our Constitution. Mainstream Islam recognizes no such separation. While Islam unquestionably has tenets that we would recognize as religious in nature (e.g., the oneness of Allah), it is also teeming with rules that control law, governance, the economy, military affairs, social life, hygiene – virtually everything we see as the realm of politics and self-determination.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/424379/ben-carson-and-islam-andrew-c-mccarthy

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September 20, 2015 · 12:20 pm

Donald Trump’s response isn’t the problem

Since I haven’t weighed in on the Donald Trump flap last week over the question from the man in the audience asking Trump a question about Muslim training camps in America, which the man prefaced with the assertion that President Obama is a Muslim and not even an American, here it goes with my thoughts.

I like to break statements into parts, because that man’s question had 5 parts, so let’s look at the parts.

  1. The man states we have a problem in American and that problem is Muslims.
  2. President Obama is a Muslim.
  3. President Obama isn’t an American
  4. There are Muslim training camps in America
  5. What will Donald Trump do about the problem (which broadly the man might mean Muslims in America in general or he might have meant the Muslim training camps.  I doubt he was asking about a specific course of action on his assertions that President Obama is a Muslim and not an American).

Let me deal with parts 2 and 3 first, President Obama attended the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for almost 20 years, where the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright served as the pastor.  Wright, as we all know, became a lightning rod when his anti-American diatribes became political fodder, because President Obama made statements that Rev. Wright had been his close friend and spiritual mentor for those long years. This begs the question, what are President Obama’s views, since Wright preaches black liberation theology, antisemitism, anti-Americanism and he blamed 9/11 on America, not on the Islamic nuts who attacked us.

I will take the President’s birth certificate, that was reluctantly produced, as legit,which makes him an American, but on the larger issue of his spirit, he has acted in ways that undermine America on the international stage and has consistently used the Presidential bully pulpit to inflame racial hostility and jumped into racial issues in the news, before the facts were even known.  From the “Cambridge police acted stupidly” to his Trayvon Martin comments, on to Ferguson, NY, Baltimore, his track record on fomenting racial tensions and prematurely passing judgment speaks for itself. He does race-baiting and makes grand pronouncements on these issues, which when the dust settles are proven to be lies.  He consults with Al Sharpton, a virulent anti-Semite, a purveyor of hate, a tax cheat, and a proven liar.

In 2009, President Obama appointed Van Jones to be his Special Advisor for Green Jobs.  Jones is an avowed communist and radical, who belonged to a group called STORM, which advocated an actual armed revolution in America, not to mention Jones aligned himself with 9/11 truthers, who believe that attack was an inside job, not the work of Islamic terrorists.

So, while I can’t read another person’s heart, President Obama is an American, but I certainly question his American spirit, even though I never believed he was born outside the United States or that he’s a secretly practicing Muslim.  Religion may play a role in how he leads his daily private life, but in his public life and political decisions, his belief system appears to be far-left, college campus radicalism.  And yes, I consider that “un-American” rather than not being an American citizen and in my book being “un-American” is a greater “sin”.  As President, he has weakened America’s military, undercut America’s credibility around the globe, created and fueled racial animosity and even undercut civilian law enforcement.  He has elevated black thugs as heroes, while casting police officers as the enemy of the people.

On the broad issue of Muslims in America, yes, we have a problem.  The punditry class, both left and right, marches in PC lockstep and bends over backwards to assure us that most Muslims in America are law-abiding, loyal Americans, which is true.  This White House uses the “lone wolf’ to describe attacks inside the US perpetrated by radicalized Muslims – they are never connected to radical mosques or radical imams, nope, they just get on the internet and read up at radical Islamist websites, then attack.  It’s a lie and our media repeats the “lone wolf” explanation from this administration, brushes each case off into the old news repository, out of sight and mind, then off they go ready to nod and repeat the next shallow left-wing spin and repeat administration narratives or jump on the 24/7 cable news punditry soapbox to do an Oprahesque hand-wringing about the anger and hate in America, which always means someone from the political right is the hater, never the young black thug who robbed a convenience store or the double-whammy left-wing special interest poster boy, a black Muslim young man who drove hundreds of miles to wage jihad in America.

What both Muslims and blacks in America have is  a “lone voice” problem.  Peer pressure and group identity politics keeps the vast majority of both groups silent or nodding agreement with the rabid, dominant political leftists who castigate and stigmatize blacks and Muslims who veer away and become “lone voices” in the far, left political wilderness.  Blacks who become vocal opponents of leftist policies, get marginalized and taunted as “Uncle Toms” or “plantation Negroes”.  Muslims who stray from the radical fringe, which plays both advocators of violent Jihadists and the chorus of Muslim victimization, with the refrain of endless Islamophobia, get shunned and face death threats from fatwas.

Even in cases where the connection to a particular mosque with radical Islamist ties emerges, the press doesn’t even ask the questions, but will charge full steam ahead attacking straw men or in the case of the Garland, TX case, they attacked Pamela Geller.  Those two jihadists were connected to the Phoenix mosque.  That imam played the Islamophobia card and pretended he didn’t know anything about one of the suspects being a radical.  Here’s a quote from a CNN report:

“Members of a mosque the suspects attended, the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, are in shock about what happened, said its president, Usama Shami.

Simpson was a regular worshiper at the mosque until around 2010 or 2011, about the time the FBI arrested him on the false statement charges.

During that time, he offered no signal that he held radical views, Shami said.

“He was a gentle person,” Shami said of Simpson. “He always had a good attitude, a good demeanor.””

Pamela Geller’s actions and motives received endless dissection and castigation by the media, but CNN didn’t dig into investigating that Phoenix mosque or the radical jihadists connections within many mosques in America.   You can google Geller yourself and find her criticized and reviled by the punditry class on both left and right.  But the imam, playing dumb about a radical jihadist within his own mosque, despite knowing full well the FBI has been investigating the radicals within his mosque, got a free pass.

With the Muslim exodus from the Mid-East and beyond into Europe, it’s not unreasonable to be concerned about “Muslim training camps in America”.  Carol Brown wrote a piece on that at the “American Thinker” just today: “Muslims of America terrorist training compounds”.  I certainly would like to know for sure, when terrorist leaders keep ranting for their followers to attack America.

On September 10, 2015, the White House announced that the US will accept at least 10,000 more Syrian refugees (catch that wording at least, which means that’s a low-ball number).  Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson insists the administration will do a thorough vetting and background checks of refugees to weed out extremists, but how they will do that remains a mystery.  Reports of the huge fake Syrian passport black market recently and since our government does not deal with President Assad’s government in Syria led me to wonder who are they going to consult to “verify” the identities and backgrounds of these refugees. And since 9/11, we, meaning ordinary Americans, have heard many times from the media and “experts” about the many aliases of Islamist terrorists, so Secretary Johnson, just how are you going to do these background checks??? It’s a huge smokescreen with plumes of hot air and lies!

That man in the Trump audience, might be an out and out racist, xenophobe, or he might be just an average American concerned about alarming trends he’s seen with this President.  Of course, the thought occurred to me, immediately that he might be a domestic political plant, a provocateur sent in to create a problem for Trump and create a media storm, in which case it worked.  Both the Democrats and the Republican establishment want Donald Trump eliminated from the race, so this idea is not totally crazy.  The man certainly seemed to recite his question carefully to hit all the “right-wing nut” themes – broad, vague Muslim charge, birther-ism, Obama’s a closet Muslim, then the training camps with echoes of UN black helicopters thrown in. Has the press bothered to check into who that man is? It wouldn’t be the first time competing politicians tried to sabotage one another.

As to how Donald Trump handled it, well, even though I can state that under no circumstances will I ever vote for Donald Trump, in this situation I believe he did the best he could and when put on the spot like that, actually his response was the TRUTH – there are a lot of problems to look at; with radical Muslims and Muslims in general, the first group speaks, “death to America” loud and clear, the later group’s silence is deafening and alarming.

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September 18, 2015 · 5:20 pm

Lunatics running the asylum

The Obama transformation continues –  he nominates first openly gay Secretary of the Army, which means his sexuality played a role in his selection – otherwise why mention it?  The Army has about a third of its combat brigades combat ready and this administration focuses on its diversity social-engineering goals???

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-to-nominate-first-openly-gay-service-secretary-to-lead-the-army/2015/09/18/d4b1aafe-5e30-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html

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September 18, 2015 · 4:13 pm

A long rant about LIARS

“Let us erect a standard to which the wise and honest may repair.”
– George Washington

Since 2003, America’s political left has led the rallying cry, from foaming mouths, roars loud and furious, “Bush lied, people died!”  The political right coined the phrase Bush derangement syndrome to explain the malady.  The mainstream media has made cornering politicians seeking higher office and demanding a denunciation and apology for supporting President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 to topple Iraqi dictator and serial human rights abuser, Saddam Hussein, a right of passage.

Jeb Bush, trying to rev up a Presidential run this year, has stumbled over how to navigate the question, while the punditry class evaluates his performance, finding anything other than a complete renunciation of his brother’s Iraq decision and begging for absolution acceptable.  The media, left-leaning, but even more so holding to a belief that, as journalists, they serve as the pure of heart, the truth-seekers for a world desperately in need of the bright light of the TRUTH.  The anger and righteousness over the Iraq war decision rest on a belief that President Bush and his administration used cherry-picked or outright fabricated intelligence information to sell invading Iraq to Congress and the American people.

Thus we enter the world of cherry-picking intelligence or even outright fabricated intelligence – the many shades of lying to promote a political agenda.  On September 16, 2015 CENTCOM commander, General Lloyd Austin III, appeared before the Senates Armed Services committee to report on progress in the fight against the Islamic State.  Headlines blare about the failure of the US military to get a $500 million program to train and equip “Syrian moderates” rebels to fight the Islamic State inside of Syria running successfully.  General Austin reported that only 4 or 5 US-trained Syrian fighters are in Syria, with the initial 54 fighters sent in back in July being captured or killed by Al-Qaeda aligned affiliates.  I suspect they might not have been “moderates” to start with and walked off, after receiving training and weapons.

In Iraq our effort to defeat the Islamic State lies in disarray too.  Recently, reports emerged of more than 50 US intelligence analysts in Iraq lodging complaints to the IG’s office, alleging that higher up in CENTCOM their intelligence reports are being altered to present a rosier picture of how the war against the Islamic State is progressing.

At the lead of the arming “Syrian moderates” cheerleaders, one can always find Senator John McCain, the most vocal true-believer in the arming “Syrian moderates” project.  McCain frequently uses the failure to arm “Syrian moderates” a few years ago to sanctimoniously berate  President Obama’s dismal handling of the Islamic State threat.

However, the truth to reemerge recently, which McCain and Secretary of State, John Kerry ignored back in 2013 , when the drumbeat for US intervention in Syria reached crescendo pitch, is that from the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the radical jihadists and Islamists played an outsized role, not moderates.  Several questions need to be answered, first, if Kerry and McCain weren’t relying on US intelligence information, whose information were they relying on and why?  Or were they just cherry-picking intelligence to advance their political agenda?

Once again I’m going to bring up Elizabeth O’Bagy, Syria subject matter expert, who blazed a trail across America’s cable news channels back in 2013, as the font of all knowledge on the rebel forces in Syria.  The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) obviously skimped on vetting her, because as O’Bagy’s connection, working as the political director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) became known, the ISW fired O’Bagy for lying on her resumé.  O’Bagy had claimed a doctorate degree, which she did not possess.  After a few days of media sensationalism, O’Bagy disappeared from the headlines and settled into a nice cozy job working as a legislative assistant for John McCain.  Yes, in 2013 he hired a woman with connections to some group with close ties to the rebels in Syria and a just outed liar.  No worries, right?

In 2013, McCain, Kerry and the White House relied on information from the SETF and O’Bagy rather than vetted intelligence from our government.  There were reports that the State Department was funding O’Bagy’s Syria research.  Both Kerry and McCain cited O’Bagy’s Wall Street Journal op-ed as a definitive accurate source.  (my posts in the archives at the right for 2013 contain numerous links on the Syrian moderate lies)

Let’s move to another scandal plaguing Washington – Hillary Clinton and her private email server in her home.  There she was running this private server and no one in the Kerry State Department did a thing to secure that server or those emails once they found out about it, instead they’ve run interference for Hillary Clinton.   In her usual covering her butt mode, Clinton hired some small IT firm to manage her server only after Sidney Blumenthal’s email had been hacked by a Romanian hacker, Guccifer.  With the recent State Department release of the emails that Hillary did turn over to them, we know she relied on unvetted information from Blumenthal rather than actual vetted intelligence from our intelligence agencies.

Step back further to Benghazi and there’s the White House weaving a false narrative blaming the attack on that US embassy outpost in Benghazi on incitement over some obscure film from some Coptic filmmaker in America.  This White House took the Clinton propaganda “spin machine” and turned it into a full-fledged fiction-writing effort, which they refer to as “the narrative”.

So, looking back at the “Syrian moderate”lie and the Obama administration lie over the sarin attack in Syria in 2013 – there again, another lie – President Obama blamed Assad before the UN investigation was even complete.  Intelligence information indicated  Syrian rebels possessed WMD capability too, but it ‘s easier to go with blaming Assad the Butcher to advance the policy for US involvement in the conflict.  Yes, Assad has committed atrocities too, but to pretend jihadist nuts are “moderates” and arm them is insanity!

McCain still pushes for arming them and still has O’Bagy whispering sweet “Syrian moderate” lies in his ears – to the tune of  a government salary of over $80,000 a year.  Not bad for a young woman who lied about her academic credentials.  He is the go to invite on all the cable news shows as the Republican senior statesman and expert on foreign policy .

So, we now have those  50 intelligence analysts complaining about CENTCOM officials altering intelligence reports to fit the Obama narrative, a DIA chief forced to retire last year, because he refused to cook the books on intelligence, a Republican “war hero” Senator, who believes some young woman aligned to a Syrian rebel lobbying group over official vetted intelligence and one can only wonder why no one in the press is connecting all these dots.

We, being the American people, but most especially our military, who put their lives on the line to carry out these misguided foreign policies, have been left with nothing but a shell of  a constitutional Republic.  This isn’t about a partisan divide in Washington, it’s about wholesale corruption.  The folks the media turns to as senior statesmen, like John McCain and John Kerry, are at best clueless nincompoops, but they are dangerous liars and dangerously reckless to rely on some lobbying group filled with young Syrian rebel sympathizers (or Islamist sympathizers – hard to tell) rather than carefully vetted information from our own intelligence agencies, especially when that information from the two sources differed so dramatically.

Late night shows recently started inviting Hillary Clinton on and they’re writing scripts to turn her email scandal into nothing more than a right-wing partisan joke.  Yes, they are aiding her in burnishing her lies and criminal conduct into little more than just little bad decisions and a laughing matter.

Last year I contacted several reporters, even that big kahuna of cable news, Bill O’Reilly, and I couldn’t get a single reporter to even talk to me or ask me for details.   I had offered them the real names to the people mentioned in my story.  Not a single taker, yet they fight over interviews with Hillary Clinton, toss her softball questions, debate over how many lies she told and yet most of them would still vote for her.  Bill O’Reilly falls all over himself blabbering on about how he wants to be “fair” to Hillary Clinton and I wonder why he and his crack staff didn’t even bother to ask me for names and details – no response whatsoever.

I shouldn’t be surprised at our lazy journalists – they missed O’Bagy and didn’t bother to check out her background, in fact, I still want to know her entire background and whether she underwent a formal security background check or if McCain waived that.  Hillary has had Huma Abedin, with direct connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, by her side for years and Abedin was handling top secret information.  Again, did Abedin ever undergo a formal security background check?

Reporters don’t even bother to challenge John McCain on his foreign policy “expertise” and in this latest CENTCOM testimony by General Austin,  there’s an Obama-appointed general, carrying out a fool’s mission hunting for “Syrian moderates” to train, and the cable news pundits invite McCain on to rail about the CENTCOM commander and Obama administration failure…  There have been mostly radical jihadists among the Syrian rebels from the beginning and McCain should know that. He’s the chairman of the Senate of Armed Services Committee, so assuredly he gets intelligence information from the US military.

The acceptance of lying by our government officials coincides with the  acceptance of lying in our culture.  Having spent every day since the Impeachment Scandal in 98-99 wondering how I could be attacked in my own home over posting comments on the Excite message boards (Messages of mhere tabbed on my home page) and not having any power or way to prove what happened, all I can say is at some point Americans need to face the truth – they have allowed their government to be taken over by corrupt liars, venal power-hungry sociopaths and foreign influence peddlers and agents.

Long ago, I used to believe that the rule of law protected every American citizen.  Thinking about all the lies and cherry-picked and fabricated intelligence making headlines brought me full-circle to my own situation. I think about,  if the power of the Presidency was used to silence, me, a homemaker who challenged the Clinton spinmeisters during impeachment – on a stupid online message board, then is any citizen really safe?

I wonder how safe I will be if that lying, conniving woman is elected President in her own right and doesn’t have to borrow power from her husband.   Once again I will state that my Messages of mhere story is the TRUTH.  Long ago when I was in the Army, I held a “Secret security clearance”, after an official security background check,  and since then, my record is-  I was a homemaker, a devoted volunteer, don’t have even a speeding ticket on my record and I like to do needlework, cook, and read a lot.  I challenge any journalist to vet my information and dig into what happened to me – of course, the retired general who was sent to attack me was fed lies about me obviously, otherwise he would not have taken on the mission of  silencing me – my best guess is I was cast as an internet terrorist or part of some right-wing militia (those were popular in the 90s) and assuredly he would lie to salvage his reputation too.  Every time I see that lying witch on TV, laughing and making light of her LIES, I get disgusted.  She really is thatwitch2016!  I want to expose what happened to me in the Fall of ’98 and early ’99.  So sick of LIARS!!!

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September 17, 2015 · 10:51 pm

Short take on the debate

A day to think about last night’s Republican debate and the thing I liked the best was the Reagan plane in the background.  The format served the candidates and the moderators poorly – too many candidates and not enough time for them to really showcase themselves.  Some disappeared into the Trump/Bush/Fiorina contrails.  Three hours felt like torture to me.

If you were scoring for substance and being well-prepared, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio won on that score.  Ted Cruz can talk for hours authoritatively, but in both debates, it seemed like the moderators shut him up quickly.  Trump offered the same talking points, with no added substance to his grandiose promises, but the polls reflect kindly on him.  The rest of the pack did okay – no real stand out moments.

The real stand out moment for me was Trump rambling on about somebody’s kid whom he knows who became autistic after vaccines.  In that moment I decided his true calling is not politics, but a permanent seat on The View (they can bring back Jenny McCarthy, so Trump and she can compare anecdotal stories on autism)…   Really, people are following this man, like he’s some sage…. scary times in America!

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September 16, 2015 · 4:12 pm

Liars and damned liars!

To keep the pieces of information together – remember the report late last month about the intelligence higher ups within the Pentagon cooking the books on our effort (of lack therof) to defeat the Islamic State. On August 26, 2015, The New York Times reported on an IG investigation:

The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.

By September 9, 2015, that “one analyst”  turned into more than 50 intelligence analysts complained, which The Daily Beast reported:

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

Along with that happy pile of crap, we’ve been regaled with this training Syrian moderates to fight the Islamic State in Syria since 2013.  On September 3, 2013, I wrote about everyone, from John McCain to John Kerry in the State Department, relying on Elizabeth O’Bagy’s assessment of the situation on the ground in Syria.  O’Bagy ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, replete with her map, which looked like the map John Kerry adopted.  I wrote about O’Bagy also being the political director of a lobbying group, the Syrian Emergency Task Force.  I mentioned this on a popular blog, Diplomad 2.0, in the comments section and provided the link to my blog.  Our government was relying on this young woman’s assessment on the “Syrian moderates” in Syria.

On September 15, 2013, I wrote a short blog post stating:

The UK Telegraph ran a report today from IHS Jane’s, stating that nearly half of the rebel fighters in Syria are hardline Islamists/jihadis (report here).  According to Charles Lister, the author of the report, the idea that the insurgency is mostly secular in nature, just isn’t borne out by the facts.  Just a reminder that a week and a half ago  John Kerry was still quoting Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy, former senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, with her lowball estimates of radical Syrian rebels (Reuters report here).   My how “facts” change so quickly ……..

On August 13, 2015, McClatchyDC reported:

“In the first week of September 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before congressional hearings in hopes of drumming up support for the Obama administration’s plan to retaliate militarily for the Syrian government’s deadly use of chemical weapons outside Damascus.”

the article continues:

“At another hearing that week, Kerry responded to a lawmaker’s skepticism about the existence of moderate rebels by saying that only a fraction of the fighters were “al Qaida and the bad guys.” Maybe 15 to 25 percent, he estimated.
“There is a real moderate opposition that exists,” Kerry said.

If the skeptical lawmaker was reassured, professional Syria watchers were not. Many were aghast at what sounded to them like either dangerous naivete or an outright lie, given that the U.S. government’s own internal assessments had found from very early in the conflict that al Qaida-style extremists were playing an outsized role in the rebel fight.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article31018362.html#storylink=cpy

Just whose intelligence information was John Kerry relying on?

Now we have the CENTCOM commander, General Lloyd Austin, reporting to Congress this lame crap about how the training Syrian moderates is going and instead of ditching this failed program – they’re revamping it…  All at the American taxpayer’s expense.  Enough already, this isn’t working and this commander should be relieved immediately!!!  And before the press lets Senator John McCain do his usual grandstanding – he has been instrumental in selling bad information to the American public on the “Syrian moderates” and when Elizabeth O’Bagy was fired from the Institute for the Study of War, back in 2013, for lying about her credentials, John McCain hired her to be on his staff.  This “Syrian moderate” delusion is not just an Obama failure, it’s a bipartisan failure.  And maybe, someone can actually tell us who exactly is Elizabeth O’Bagy, who are her contacts in Syria, who is her family, who introduced her to John McCain, and don’t forget McCain’s trip to Syria in early 2013 with the Syrian Emergency Task Force as his guide.  Let’s answer the questions about who all those people he posed with in those Syria trip photos are.  Time to come clean about the whole mess!

When we get the answers to all that, let’s zero in on Huma Abedin and her connections and handlers in the Muslim Brotherhood.  Let’s look at her influence on Madame Secretary during the not-so-glorious Arab Spring. We have been betrayed by witless fools in our own government!

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Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Military, Politics

September 16, 2015 · 3:05 pm

Austin: Only ‘Four or Five’ US-Trained Rebel Fighters Remain in Syria

Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Lloyd Austin III testified Wednesday before the Senate Armed

Source: Austin: Only ‘Four or Five’ US-Trained Rebel Fighters Remain in Syria

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September 16, 2015 · 8:22 am

Government Cracks Down on Little Free Libraries

Thank goodness the government is here to save us from… little libraries?

Source: Government Cracks Down on Little Free Libraries

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September 14, 2015 · 11:21 pm

Next will be quotas

After writing about my skepticism regarding the female Ranger School graduates, I wondered if I might be wrong and what if they completed every task just like the men.  Well, here’s the truth of the matter, it’s not about them at all, it’s about a political agenda the President ordered and these females serve as propaganda tools – nothing more.  Their propaganda value mattered enough that he took time out from his golfing to attend their graduation.

Likewise, the careful test conducted by the Marine Corps doesn’t matter either, for the same reason – this is about a political agenda.

From watching this many times over the years, here is how this progresses from getting a female poster girl out there (Ms 1st at whatever), the agenda moves to getting more women into those male-only fields.  That means quotas and careful monitoring on how the integration is progressing.  Once the politicization moves to this stage, that’s where the standards end up being quietly altered (lowered where decisions are made to eliminate or lower requirements that women can’t meet) or standards just get ignored to pass women and a double standard emerges in practice , which always erodes not only actual job performance, but also unit cohesiveness and morale.

All failures are tossed at the feet of the male culture in the military and both women and men end up poorly served.

The end result is always a weaker, less effective team. In the real world weaker teams end up costing lives and losing wars, which rests as a high cost to pay to promote a political agenda

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