Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber convicted of killing 270 and diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2008, was released in August of 2009 under compassionate grounds (where’s the compassion toward the victims?) due to “a Scottish law that allows terminally ill prisoners to die at home. When he was freed, Mr. Megrahi was expected to live three months.”

Instead of 3 months, he enjoyed almost 3 years of freedom, not including the 3 years it took before he was indicted, 8 more years before Qaddafi surrendered him for trial, followed by 2 more years before conviction on 2001.

All in all, he lived 22 years longer than the 259 unfortunates aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and the 11 on ground; and 7 months longer than Qaddafi. A peaceful end in contrast to their violent deaths:

On Dec. 21, 1988, a bronze hard-shell Samsonite suitcase was loaded onto an Air Malta plane bound for Frankfurt. From Germany, the suitcase was transferred onto a flight to London. Upon arrival, the bag was placed inside the forward cargo bay of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Bound for New York, Pan Am Flight 103 held 189 Americans, including a group of Syracuse University college students returning home for the holidays from a semester abroad.

The jet was cruising at 31,000 feet at 7:03 p.m. when a bomb hidden inside the Samsonite bag exploded. All 259 aboard died, and 11 people on the ground were killed when flaming chunks of the plane plummeted into the bucolic village of Lockerbie.

~~~

When he arrived in Tripoli in 2009, he was greeted by hundreds of jubilant Libyans, including some who wore shirts depicting his face. Others in the crowd waved Scottish flags, an apparently taunting gesture.

He earned a reputation as a national hero, and babies were reportedly named after him. He was granted an exclusive audience with Gaddafi.

The decision to allow his release enraged many of the families of Lockerbie bombing victims. President Obama called Mr. Megrahi’s release “a mistake.”

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was born April 1, 1952, in Tripoli. He studied in the United States during the 1970s and spoke fluent English. He received an engineering degree from Benghazi University in Libya.

Survivors include his wife, Aisha, and five children.

At home in Libya for the past two years, Mr. Megrahi lived in a resplendent villa in Tripoli, complete with a garden and swimming pool.

Until his death, Mr. Megrahi maintained his innocence, claiming that he was the victim of an international conspiracy.

“You judge me falsely,” Mr. Megrahi once told an American interviewer. “My life is clean.”

What if he were innocent? Unfortunately, the secrets and details of the plot to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 probably dies with Qaddafi and Megrahi.

Seattle Times:

After treatment at Tripoli’s most advanced cancer center, al-Megrahi lived with his family at a villa in Tripoli at the government’s expense. As civil war engulfed Libya in 2011, Western calls for his return to prison increased, especially after Gadhafi was overthrown and later killed by revolutionary forces.

Tripoli’s new leaders refused to return him but amid international pressures signaled a willingness to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie case, still unresolved after nearly a quarter of a century of struggle among nations and investigations that spanned the globe, touching on Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians and Libyans.

The enigmatic al-Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist, but defended by many Libyans and even some world leaders as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence.

His first cousin was Sa’id Rashid, a senior officer of Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat, the Libyan intelligence service, and a member of Gadhafi’s inner circle. Al-Megrahi was also a senior intelligence officer and director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Tripoli.

U.S. intelligence officials said he became chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines as a cover for his secret work as a military procurer, enabling him to travel widely, often using aliases and false passports. As tensions between the United States and Libya mounted in the 1980s, prosecutors said, al-Megrahi was enlisted for an act of terrorism.

It was to be the worst in British history and a devastating strike against America.

~~~

While they had no direct proof, investigators believed the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Pan Am 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.

After a three-year investigation, al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted for mass murder in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion.

Al-Megrahi lived under armed guard and worked as a teacher. Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999 — the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.

The trial lasted 85 days. No witness connected the suspects directly to the bomb.

But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified al-Megrahi as the buyer, although he seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.

The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.

Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that al-Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.

On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found al-Megrahi guilty but acquitted Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that “there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of al-Megrahi. Much of the evidence, however, was later challenged as unreliable.

It emerged that Gauci had failed repeatedly to identify Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his picture in a magazine and being shown the same picture in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

Investigators said Bollier, whom even the court called “untruthful and unreliable,” had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.

In 2007, Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for explosives residue, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight also was cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.

Hans Koechler, a U.N. observer, called the trial “a spectacular miscarriage of justice,” words echoed by Mandela. Many legal experts, authors and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling al-Megrahi a scapegoat for a regime long identified with terrorism.

A boy stands stands in front of the main headstone in the Lockerbie memorial garden in Lockerbie, Scotland. Families of victims of the 1988 bombing stood sharply divided over reports that the former Libyan agent jailed for life for the attack is to be freed. David Moir-Reuters

No…we’re not talking about America’s merriest, happy warrior-in-chief.

Toni Morrison named Bill Clinton America’s first “black” president in the same sense that Barack Obama is being heralded by Newsweek (are they merely trying to compete with Time’s cover?) as America’s first “gay” president. But who was America’s first actual gay president? It certainly wasn’t Abraham Lincoln.

Well, here’s the straight “news”:

Tina Brown would like you to think that our 44th commander in chief is the “First Gay President.” Jim Loewen would like you to know that title actually belongs to our country’s 15th leader, James Buchanan. After taking a moment to smack Newsweek for the “cheap sensationalism” of its buzzy cover, Loewen imparts a history lesson. “Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House,” he writes for Salon. And the country was well aware of it.

Loewen on the subject of “chronological ethnocentrism”:

Loewen’s intention isn’t just to give you a new trivia tidbit: It’s to explain why Buchanan isn’t lauded as such, and what that means. Quite simply, our “touching belief in progress” is the problem. “We must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.” Loewen urges us to embrace a more complex national history, one in which “we all moved backward” for about 50 years beginning in 1890, particularly in terms of race relations. “If we can rid ourselves of the fantasy that we are always getting better, then maybe we can create a nation that actually becomes more tolerant,” he writes. “Then we might—again—elect a real gay president.” Click for his entire column.

Not to make more out of this than is warranted, Loewen concludes:

President Obama’s change of heart about gay marriage remains significant. It does show increasing tolerance compared to our recent past. During the nadir of race relations, that terrible period between 1890 and about 1940 when white America went more racist in its thinking than at any other time, the U.S. also clamped down on beards, liquor (briefly) and, yes, homosexuals. As Jackie Robinson was not the first black player in Major League Baseball, but rather the first after the nadir, so President Obama is not our “first gay” president (Forgive me: I cannot seem to retype Newsweek’s silly headline without putting quotation marks around the words), but only our “first” since the nadir.

Remembering that James Buchanan was homosexual complexifies our national narrative, to be sure, but it is a complexity that we need.

Daily Beast:

Obama has twice been called the first woman president: first in 2008, by Newsweek’s Martin Linsky, and then again by The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker in 2010. The argument in both cases was that Obama’s wisdom, values, and management style were similar to that of a female leader. In 2009 the Associated Foreign Press asked if Obama was the first Asian-American president while, the same year, Geraldo Rivera suggested he might be the first Hispanic president. Then, in 2011, New York magazine declared him the first Jewish president. “Expectations were high that editor Tina Brown would do something typically attention-grabbing to mark this occasion, but this effort seems, well, cliché,” Randall writes. “It wasn’t going to be long before someone outed our first black, female, Jewish, Hispanic, Asian-American president as gay.”

That’s just so….”gay”.

When will the sexual, ethnic, and religious identity of our president cease to matter?

As an aside and afterthought…now I’m curious to know who was America’s merriest of presidents?

Marketing seeks to create images in our minds by relying on the creativity of a writer. Political marketing often involves the creation of myths, transforming an ordinary man into a heroic figure with selfless ideals who is willing to endure suffering to serve his fellow man.

This transformation of normal ordinary men into heroes of mythical figures has never been more obvious than the stories of our most recent Liberal presidents Clinton and Obama.

We were just subjected to a reelection commercial featuring former President Clinton explaining the potential fallout and risk for President Obama if the SEAL raid in Pakistan had gone horribly wrong.

Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there . . . suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him [Obama].

This was a unique opportunity for Americans to observe and compare our most notorious Narcissists, and watch one create the typical Narcissistic pool for all of us to admire the other’s reflection.

The myth of Narcissus is from the ancient Greeks. Greek Myths are stories that are a means to teach lessons of morality. If you will give your imagination a little freedom we will imagine the Myth of Narcissus in a contemporary setting.

Echo the Nymph was desperately in love with the handsome young hunter Narcissus, but he was proud and disdained all those who admired him, for he was in love with himself. Nemesis, a tricky god, directed him to a pool where he could observe his own reflection. From that point on, Narcissus spent all his time observing his own handsome features, unable to quit staring at his image and caring for nothing else, he eventually died by the pool. A flower grew where he fell and was to be known as the Narcissus.

If we replace Echo with the American people and the personality of Narcissus with President Obama, the basis for the myth is recreated after two thousand years.

While the American people have been dreaming of being loved and cared for by the object of their imagination, the harsh truth becomes more glaringly obvious with the passage of time, for the Narcissist exists for himself and only loves his own being.

Only Bill Clinton, the accused serial rapist who refused to kill or capture Osama and avoid the catastrophe that was 9/11, understands the strain facing the Narcissist Personality. For when he says:

“Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there . . . suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him [Obama].”

Zeus Is The Universal Boogeyman, Here Disguised As A Swan He Rapes Leda

Zeus Represents The Powers That Threaten Mere Mortala And From Whom We Need The Protection Of An Omnipotent

Former President Clinton concentrated on portraying Obama as the wily Prometheus who risked stealing fire from Zeus to give it to mortal man. He thus risked the possibility of tragedy through this trial of personal sacrifice. For in the myth, Zeus was enraged with the theft and tied Prometheus to a rock on a mountain and during the passage of each day, an eagle ate his liver and each night his liver grew back, to be eaten again the next day. Oh, how Prometheus suffered for the crime of bringing the fire of Zeus to mankind: fire that was used only for warmth, cooking, and light. Prometheus became a man of constant sorrow for the crime of serving man. This is the fate Obama risked to serve his people. He was so near this position of constant sorrow that he needed to be pulled from the golf course during the commission of this service to mankind, lest the mission fail and he would be tied directly by a Zeus like boogeyman, supine on the mountain and the feathered beast allowed to savage his vital organs.

The personality of this same Prometheus has been a favorite reference for Karl Marx to portray the martyrs of Communism, representing those who suffer unselfishly for the cause of mankind.

True to form, the Narcissist views the world as it relates to him. Thus we have become inoculated to the “I” word and now are conditioned to view world events through the personal pronouns of Obama.

“Tonight, I can report . . . I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken . . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as commander-in-chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed . . .”

In our personal lives, we tend to tire of people who see the world revolving around them and all to ready to overuse the personal pronouns in every conversation, but with Obama, we have been conditioned to excuse and overlook his boorish behavior.

Being programmed by these harpies of Madison Avenue to believe and accept the allusion of the strong leader who protects us from the evil of the world is a feature of being subjected to media. Most of the recent efforts Of the Obama marketers have been amateurish and obvious, but precious few of us caught the ambiguities of Clinton marketing Obama.

Sometimes, it is the utter audacity of the marketing ploy that creates the lasting impression. The vision of a man’s liver being eaten each day and of a maiden being raped by a God in the form of a swan are not easy to accept, but they have survived for 2500 years, and their story lines are still being used to teach and create allusions.

Unfortunately for Obama, the image of Narcissus is working against him, for Narcissus is his only enemy and it is his self-absorption that ultimately destroys him. The comparisons are all too obvious and transparent, and his adoring public like Echo grows weary of the self-absorbed man who loves himself above all others.

NARCISSUS. A large genus of flowers of the amaryllis family, native to Asia and Europe, is called narcissus. Included are the daffodil, the poet’s narcissus, the jonquil, and others.

Maybe Elizabeth Warren can get 1/32 of it (Yeah, I know- Cherokee, not Sioux) and Ward Churchill…well…nevermind:

South Dakota’s Black Hills, home to the granite faces carved into Mt. Rushmore, should be restored as Native American tribal lands, a United Nations official recently said.

James Anaya, a U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, completed a fact-finding mission on Friday that included meetings with a number of Native American tribal leaders as well as White House officials. His investigation led him to suggest that the United States take additional steps to repair the nation’s legacy of oppression against Native Americans.

Reuters:

[James Anaya] met with representatives of indigenous peoples in the District of Columbia, Arizona, Alaska, Oregon, Washington State, South Dakota, and Oklahoma. He also met with U.S. government officials.

“I have heard stories that make evident the profound hurt that indigenous peoples continue to feel because of the history of oppression they have faced,” Anaya said in a statement issued by the U.N. human rights office in Geneva.

That oppression, he said, has included the seizure of lands and resources, the removal of children from their families and communities, the loss of languages, violation of treaties, and brutality, all grounded in racial discrimination.

Anaya welcomed the U.S. decision to endorse the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2010 and other steps the government has taken, but said more was needed. His findings will be included in a final report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council. While not binding, the recommendations carry moral weight that can influence governments.

“It is clear that this history does not just blemish the past, but translates into present day disadvantage for indigenous peoples in the country,” Anaya said.

“There have still not been adequate measures of reconciliation to overcome the persistent legacies of the history of oppression, and that there is still much healing that needs to be done,” he said.

~~~

“Past uncontrolled and irresponsible extractive activities, including uranium mining in the Southwest, have resulted in the contamination of indigenous peoples’ water sources and other resources, and in numerous documented negative health effects among Native Americans,” he said.

He said indigenous peoples feel they have too little control over geographic regions considered sacred to them, like the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona and the Black Hills in South Dakota. Anaya suggested such lands should be returned to Native peoples.

“Securing the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands is of central importance to indigenous peoples’ socioeconomic development, self-determination, and cultural integrity,” Anaya said.

“Continued efforts to resolve, clarify, and strengthen the protection of indigenous lands, resources, and sacred sites should be made,” he added.

Mount Rushmore, a popular tourist attraction, is located in the Black Hills, which the Sioux tribe consider to be sacred and have territorial claims to based on an 1868 treaty. Shortly after that treaty was signed, gold was discovered in the region. U.S. Congress eventually passed a law taking over the land.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the seizure of the land was illegal and ordered the government to pay compensation. But the Sioux rejected the money and has continued to demand the return of the now public lands.

Are Native Americans still being oppressed? Are they a separate people from the rest of America? At what point in history do we let go and move on? A generation? 100 years? 200 years? A millennium? Never? To always hold grudges and claim victimhood for one’s situation today due to what happened to one’s ancestors, generations removed? And what of those Americans of “oppressed ancestry” who are currently experiencing great prosperity in today’s America? Who have benefited because of the course America took- good and bad, just and unjust- in its formulation?

In the case of Japanese-Americans receiving compensation for internment, that I can understand and am more sympathetic to, because those directly affected are still around.

With upwards of 70% unemployment on two Sioux reservations in South Dakota, Hot Air points out:

The report goes on for paragraph after paragraph about proposed plans based on the concept of systemic racism against indigenous people, but it does also manage to touch on one issue which is very real.

Anaya visited an Oglala Sioux reservation where the per capita income is around $7,000 a year, less than one-sixth of the national average, and life expectancy is about 50 years.

The two Sioux reservations in South Dakota – Rosebud and Pine Ridge – have some of the country’s poorest living conditions, including mass unemployment and the highest suicide rate in the western hemisphere with an epidemic of teenagers killing themselves.

“You can see they’re in a somewhat precarious situation in terms of their basic existence and the stability of their communities given that precarious land tenure situation. It’s not like they have large fisheries as a resource base to sustain them. In basic economic terms it’s a very difficult situation. You have upwards of 70% unemployment on the reservation and all kinds of social ills accompanying that. Very tough conditions,” he said.

Conditions on many of the reservations are indeed horrible. There are some exceptions, of course, among some in the Northwest with ocean access and others with casinos, but many of the tribal lands are simply desolate pools of poverty. If there is anything to the questions being raised by the UN, though, it is likely to be found less in some sort of nebulous cure for any sort of endemic racism than in the technicalities of a court of law.

The United States has indeed made many treaties with Native Americans spanning three centuries. Some were honored, (at least in part) but many were either ignored or crafted in patently unfair ways.

Everyone’s ancestors (let aside the possibility of immediate family members) at some point in time and in history has suffered injustices and oppression at the hands of some invading tribe or army, pillaging, raping, conquering. What is the practical solution to righting the wrongs of the past? The U.S. government is still around but the people involved on both sides of the equation are long gone. When do you cut your losses and say, “Time to move on” and quit blaming your circumstances on what happened centuries ago?

Barack Obama’s re-election has adopted a new slogan: “Forward”

It has some really interesting historical predecessors:

Click here to view the embedded video.

via GP

And then there are these:

Under the Leadership of the Great Stalin — Forward to Communism!

Under Lenin’s Banners, Under Stalin’s Leadership, Forward to a New Prosperity of the Soviet Motherland, to the Complete Victory of Communism in Our Country!

Forward to the Victory of Communism!

Via WZ

And over at Free Republic was the reminder of these images:

And who could forget this?

Click here to view the embedded video.

All we need now is that “Civilian Defense Force” as powerful as the military.

Then we’ll take your guns

The collection agency for the Federal Reserve known as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is working with legislators to gain control over the rights of Americans. Without the right to due process, the IRS can simply claim a citizen owes $50,000 dollars or more to their illegal operation. This accusation alone will give their agency the right to revoke American’s travel rights and even remove the right to own a firearm.

With the help of Representatives like Barbara Boxer of California, a bill rapidly working through Capitol Hill (passed through the Senate and is currently up for review in the House) will give the IRS power to:

Accuse Americans of delinquency of tax payment without due process
Revoke their passports and travel rights
Place the accused in a centralize database
Authorize the removal of their right to own a firearm

No formal charges are required. Simply the accusation from the IRS is sufficed to strip American citizens of their Constitutional rights.

All you need is the accusation that you are a subversive.

Obama employs the words favored by the Nazis and Stalin and the Communists. Coincidence?

I don’t think so.

Is someone trying to fundamentally change this country?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think so.

FORWARD!

Every time I listen to Barack Obama describe how he repelled down a rope from a stealth helicopter on a dark Pakistani night and took down Osama Bin Laden I am reminded of the movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Seldom has a story been more dishonestly spun than the one surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Barack Obama is celebrating the deathday of Obama Bin Laden with a party from himself. I caught a post over at Weekly Standard in which Dan Halper notes that the smirking Obama once again suggests that Mitt Romney would not have made the decision to kill Bin Laden. Obama is quoted as saying:

“I’d just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and to take out bin Laden,” Obama said, obviously taking a shot at Romney. “I assume that people meant what they said when they said it. And that’s been at least my practice. I said that I would go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him–and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they would do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.”

But here’s the part that caught my eye:

“I’d just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of whether they thought it was appropriate to go into Pakistan and to take out bin Laden,”

As if going into Pakistan was his decision. Or his plan.

It wasn’t.

Going into Pakistan was George Bush’s decision, based on the advice of a CIA analyst named “John.”

While he was shepherding the hunt for bin Laden, John also was pushing to expand the Predator program, the agency’s use of unmanned airplanes to launch missiles at terrorists. The CIA largely confined those strikes to targets along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. But in late 2007 and early 2008, John said the CIA needed to carry out those attacks deeper inside Pakistan.

It was a risky move. Pakistan was an important but shaky ally. John’s analysts saw an increase in the number of Westerners training in Pakistani terrorist camps. John worried that those men would soon start showing up on U.S. soil.

“We’ve got to act,” John said, a former senior intelligence official recalls. “There’s no explaining inaction.”

John took the analysis to then CIA Director Michael Hayden, who agreed and took the recommendation to President George W. Bush. In the last months of the Bush administration, the CIA began striking deeper inside Pakistan.

Barack Obama adopted John’s and Bush’s plan. Then he co-opted it.

“John” persisted in the hunt for Bin Laden for a very long time. Then in 2007 a co-worker of John’s targeted “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.”

All the while, John’s team was working the list of bin Laden leads. In 2007, a female colleague whom the AP has also agreed not to identify decided to zero in on a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a nom de guerre. Other terrorists had identified al-Kuwaiti as an important courier for al-Qaida’s upper echelon, and she believed that finding him might help lead to bin Laden.

“They had their teeth clenched on this and they weren’t going to let go,” McLaughlin said of John and his team. “This was an obsession.”

It took three years, but in August 2010, al-Kuwaiti turned up on a National Security Agency wiretap. The female analyst, who had studied journalism at a Big Ten university, tapped out a memo for John, “Closing in on Bin Laden Courier,” saying her team believed al-Kuwaiti was somewhere on the outskirts of Islamabad.

The intel used to find and kill Bin Laden came from a career CIA analyst- not from Barack Obama.

John and his team had guessed correctly, taking an intellectual risk based on incomplete information. It was a gamble that ended a decade of disappointment. Later, Champagne was uncorked back at the CIA, where those in the Counterterrorism Center who had targeted bin Laden for so long celebrated. John’s team reveled in the moment.

And it has been revealed that the decision to undertake the raid was not Obama’s decision either. That belonged to Admiral William McRaven.

It’s been almost a year since President Obama’s leadership and foreign policy bona fides were allegedly established by the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. A campaign film narrated by Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks tells of the president’s alleged solitary, agonizing decision.

With apologies to Vice President Biden, maybe President Obama doesn’t carry quite as big a stick as Joe would lead us to believe.

As reported by Big Peace, Time magazine has obtained a memo written by Leon Panetta, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency and now-Secretary of Defense, that says “operational decision-making and control” was really in the hands of William McRaven, a three-star admiral and former Navy SEAL.

“The timing, operational decision-making and control are in Adm. McRaven’s hands,” the memo says. “The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the president. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the president for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and, if he is not there, to get out.”

In other words, it was McRaven’s call to pull the trigger or not on the raid.

Now back to that Obama assertion:

President Obama’s campaign has highlighted a 2007 quote from Mitt Romney, who suggested that the fight against terrorism was bigger than bin Laden, and that it wasn’t important to “move heaven and earth” to catch him.

Curiously, back in 2009 Obama held pretty much the same position:

Obama: Killing bin Laden may not be essential

In a late Wednesday interview with CBS News, Obama signaled a more measured approach to catching the ever-elusive bin Laden, refusing to deliver any “dead or alive” ultimatums.

“I think that we have to so weaken his infrastructure that, whether he is technically alive or not, he is so pinned down that he cannot function,” Obama said.

“My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him. But if we have so tightened the noose that he’s in a cave somewhere and can’t even communicate with his operatives, then we will meet our goal of protecting America.”

It’s no stretch to assert that it was Barack Obama who in 2009 co-opted Romney’s 2007 position on the capture of Barack Obama. It is completely disingenuous for Obama to suggest otherwise because he was the beneficiary of the decisions made by George Bush and “John’s” detective work. You’d never know that by listening to Obama. Contrast the braggadocio of Obama

“I directed Leon Pannetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority”

“I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden”

“I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden”

“I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action and authorized an operation to get Usama bin Laden and bring him to justice”

“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad Pakistan”

“I have made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam; bin Laden was not a Muslim leader”

to the quiet and classy reserve of George Bush describing the capture of Saddam Hussein:

The success of yesterday’s mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq. The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator’s footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate ‘em.

Barack Obama did not decide to take the war into Pakistan. Obama did not decide to send drones deeper into Pakistan. Obama did not find Bin Laden. Obama did not pull the trigger on the raid. What you could bet your life on is that had the mission failed McRaven would have been thrown under the bus and Obama would have said “You know, this was not our plan, per se.” What Obama did do was take credit for it all.

His behavior is so offensive that he has blasted by John McCain and the SEALS. Even Arianna Huffington has called Obama’s ad “despicable.”

This morning on Fox News the CIA interrogator who over saw the CIA EIT program (and who personally briefed Nancy Pelosi) said that the interrogating Abu Zubaydah gave them a rather important piece of information- that Osama Bin Laden was communicating with the outside world through one person- the courier.

Barack Obama has called waterboarding torture and sought to prosecute those who carried out the EIT’s all the while being the beneficiary today of the information gained from those techniques.

Barack Obama is full of sh*t. He is a miserable low life.

But we can’t leave without revisiting the only truth Ted Kennedy ever uttered:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This man has to be the sorriest example of a “professor” ever seen. Not only does he not understand the argument against his green energy push he also “mangles U.S., world History”

That is the headline at the very liberal, very leftist, blog known as Talking Points Memo

You know it’s bad when they are calling him out.

But let’s not even get into his ignorance in history. Let’s get into this statement:

“Now, here’s the sad thing. Lately, we have heard a lot of professional politicians, a lot of the folks who were running for a certain office, who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy. They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that’s good for our future. We’re trying to move towards the future. They want to be stuck in the past!” Obama exclaimed to cheers from the crowd. “If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they probably must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not believe that the world was round!”

Leaving out the fact that the Columbus flat earth assertion is not historically accurate either he still fails to acknowledge what the real argument against his policies are. We all want alternatives to the traditional oil energy but conservatives understand that there is NO green energy alternative that is around today, or will be in the next decade, that can replace oil. So while we all want energy alternatives to be investigated and refined, we still need oil. And its better for our country to get it’s own oil rather than depend on other countries.

Newt asks a great question in response to Obama’s insulting speech:

“Why is Saudi drilling good and American drilling bad?”

“This is utter intellectual nonsense,” Newt taunted.

“If he wants to represent Saudi Oil and algae, I’ll be happy to represent American oil and American jobs and we’ll see this Fall who the American people want to elect.”

Additionally, why should the government subsidize obviously failed technology? Obama attempted to use Henry Ford’s innovation as an example. Well…did the government subsidize Ford?

No.

It was because of a businessman who wanted to become successful AND rich that we got the Model T and all the innovation that came with that.

But Obama wants to tax, tax, and tax some more, men and women like Henry Ford until they are forced out of business while doling out millions to his cronies in green energy. His policies stifle innovation. Stunts growth. And is ruining this country.

Because Derrick Bell lives on in Barack Obama. Bell was Obama’s ideological mentor. Compare the following excerpts:

Bell believe that the US Constitution was a form of original sin.

Bell:

At the nation’s beginning, the framers saw more clearly than is perhaps possible in our more enlightened and infinitely more complex time the essential need to accept what has become the American contradiction. The framers made a conscious, though unspoken, sacrifice of the rights of some in the belief that this forfeiture was necessary to secure the rights of others in a society embracing, as its fundamental principle, the equality of all. And thus the framers, while speaking through the Constitution in an unequivocal voice, at once promised freedom for whites and condemned blacks to slavery….

…The Constitution has survived for two centuries and, despite earnest efforts by committed people, the contradiction remains, shielded and nurtured through the years by myth. This contradiction is the root reason for the inability of black people to gain legitimacy — that is, why they are unable to be taken seriously when they are serious and why they retain a subordinate status as a group that even impressive proofs of individual competence cannot overcome. Contradiction, shrouded by myth, remains a significant factor in blacks’ failure to obtain meaningful relief against historic racial injustice.

…The reason that the Civil War amendments failed to produce equality for blacks remains an all-too-familiar barrier today: effective remedies for harm attributable to discrimination in society in general will not be granted to blacks if that relief involves a significant cost to whites. Even in northern states, abolitionists’ efforts following the Revolutionary War were stymied by this unspoken principle. Today, affirmative action remedies as well as mandatory school desegregation plans founder as whites balk at bearing the cost of racial equality.

Barack Obama believes the Constitution is “deeply flawed.”

Obama in 2001:

“The original Constitution as well as the Civil War Amendments,” he replied. “But I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time.

“African-Americans were not — first of all they weren’t African-Americans — the Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the Framers. I think that as Richard said it was a ‘nagging problem’ in the same way that these days we might think of environmental issues, or some other problem where you have to balance cost-benefits, as opposed to seeing it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth.

“And in that sense,” Obama continued, “I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

Can there be any doubt from where Obama draws these impressions?

Derrick Bell was a highly intelligent man. It’s a shame that he spent so much time on hating and hand-wringing. In Bell’s world there was no solution than “abolishing the white race by any means necessary” as he believed “[R]acism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.”

Bell was wrong pretty much on all counts. Many Framers had profound objections to slavery.

Henry Laurens:

I abhor slavery. I was born in a country where slavery had been established by British Kings and Parliaments as well as by the laws of the country ages before my existence. . . . In former days there was no combating the prejudices of men supported by interest; the day, I hope, is approaching when, from principles of gratitude as well as justice, every man will strive to be foremost in showing his readiness to comply with the Golden Rule ["do unto others as you would have them do unto you" Matthew 7:12].

Thomas Jefferson:

He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. . . . Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [that is, he has opposed efforts to prohibit the slave trade].

and Jefferson also had this to say:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. . . . And with what execration [curse] should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

John Quincy Adams:

The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself [Jefferson]. No charge of insincerity or hypocrisy can be fairly laid to their charge. Never from their lips was heard one syllable of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural step-mother country [Great Britain] and they saw that before the principles of the Declaration of Independence, slavery, in common with every other mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be banished from the earth. Such was the undoubting conviction of Jefferson to his dying day. In the Memoir of His Life, written at the age of seventy-seven, he gave to his countrymen the solemn and emphatic warning that the day was not distant when they must hear and adopt the general emancipation of their slaves.

Benjamin Franklin

That mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness, the Christian religion teaches us to believe, and the political creed of Americans fully coincides with the position. . . . [We] earnestly entreat your serious attention to the subject of slavery – that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage and who . . . are groaning in servile subjection.

John Jay:

That men should pray and fight for their own freedom and yet keep others in slavery is certainly acting a very inconsistent, as well as unjust and perhaps impious, part.

James Wilson:

Slavery, or an absolute and unlimited power in the master over the life and fortune of the slave, is unauthorized by the common law. . . . The reasons which we sometimes see assigned for the origin and the continuance of slavery appear, when examined to the bottom, to be built upon a false foundation. In the enjoyment of their persons and of their property, the common law protects all.

Walter Williams explains the 3/5 clause:

It was slavery’s opponents who succeeded in restricting the political power of the South by allowing them to count only three-fifths of their slave population in determining the number of congressional representatives. The three-fifths of a vote provision applied only to slaves, not to free blacks in either the North or South.

As for the media’s and left wing’s continual misrepresentation of the 3/5 clause, Prof. Williams nails them:

Politicians, news media, college professors and leftists of other stripes are selling us lies and propaganda. To lay the groundwork for their increasingly successful attack on our Constitution, they must demean and criticize its authors. As Senator Joe Biden demonstrated during the Clarence Thomas hearings, the framers’ ideas about natural law must be trivialized or they must be seen as racists.

Derrick Bell does matter. He tells us what is in Barack Obama’s heart.

The Constitution.

What does it mean to you?

To me, it stands as the shield against tyranny. Where the Declaration announced the intention to engage in a truly free and open society, the Constitution extended just enough power to a federal government to protect that free and open society.

The framers of the Constitution understood the need for a common, centralized, government entity to provide for those things the state and local governments and individuals could not provide for themselves. Things such as a defense against other nations hostile to us, an overreaching or tyrannical state imposing it’s will and infringing upon it’s neighbor’s freedom, a common representation of the states for other nations to negotiate and treat with, and to protect the individual against abuse of power.

However, the framers also understood that giving too much power to a centralized government could result in it’s own kind of tyranny, something they had fought a war to be free from. So, the Constitution was written as a “granting” of powers to the central government, in effect, and intention, limiting the federal government to only those powers. This “limiting” of powers is the shield to the states and individual from central government tyranny.

The thing is, though, that a shield is only as good as the person holding it. In the case of the Constitution, it’s use as a “shield” is only as good as we, the people, allow it to be. To have the Constitution be a strong shield against tyranny, one must believe in it and hold it inviolable. As a people, we have not done so. We, as a people, have let politicians, since the ratification of the Constitution, twist meanings and words, propose their own definitions of terms, and insert their own viewpoints of the framers’ intentions. In effect, the Constitution is no longer the “Supreme Law of the Land” as envisioned by people such as Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, etc.

We, the people, like to believe that we are a nation ruled by laws, and that those laws stem from the granted powers and the limitations of that power, to the federal government. However, when the standard describing what powers are granted, and what limitations are imposed on that power, is continually changing based on the people’s current viewpoints, we no longer can stand as a “Nation of laws”, but rather, we become a nation of “Rule by men”, where the only limitation on the federal government’s power is entirely dependent upon the morality and benevolence of the person(s) holding that power.

“Rule by men” leads to completely arbitrary ideas on what “freedoms” we, the people, can enjoy. It leads to completely arbitrary ideas on what constitutes a “right”. When these arbitrary ideas are involved, one man’s “freedom” or “right” becomes another man’s enslavement, infringing on his “freedoms” and “rights”, and the arbiter over the conflict depends entirely upon the people in power at that time. And when the people in power are able to arbitrarily change the “rules”, tyranny is the result.

We have become a nation where “rule by men” is commonplace, where we extend “rights” to every manner of people, groups, and entities, based not on a standardized rule of law, but rather, on which person, group, or entity is most politically expedient. Because of this, equality has become an arbitrary idea, and used as the reasoning behind which person, group, or entity will be favored. And, since the arbiters of the “standard” and the arbiters of “equality” are not limited in their power, and are the ones who decide exactly what the “standard” is, and what “equality” means, what may be protected for a person, group, or entity today can be just as easily infringed upon tomorrow.

And this is what people do not understand. About the Constitution, or about what, exactly, constitutes a “right”. And why? Because of dependency upon government, specifically, the federal government, in which they place the responsibility over their lives. It is easier to place ones life at the hands of another than to bear the responsibility themselves, and to do so, they depend on government not only for the handouts, but also the “protection” of those things they wish to engage in, and to get the handouts, they arbitrarily label them as “rights” and falsely claim the Constitution “protects” that “right”, even at the expense of inviolable rights specifically delineated by the Constitution, simply because they want it.

I urge everyone to read The Federalist Papers. In it, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay offer the arguments FOR the Constitution. They argue for the extending of powers, by the states and people, to the Federal government. And to do so, they address the counter-arguments and reservations of the critics to the Constitution at the time, explaining both the need for the granted power, and the limitations on those powers. By them, the meanings of the clauses, phrases, and sections within the Constitution can be defined, more clearly than anywhere else.

Without the understanding of the original intent of the Constitution, there can be no standard of law. Without the standard of law, we, the people, are entirely dependent upon the benevolence of government to protect us from tyranny. And given the history of the world, dependence upon government benevolence leads, almost invariably, to tyranny.

Mario Launi, a WWII veteran who served in the Pacific, will be turning 100 years old on January 26, 2012. He is currently at the Hollidaysburg Lutheran Home, 915 Hickory Street, Hollidaysburg, PA 16648. His family and caregiver have requested the community and all veterans to come together and shower him with cards. So what I am requesting that every patriotic and freedom-loving American in the area join in thanking him for his sacrifices. This will be a small token by letting him know how much we appreciate his selfless and dedicated service.

Thank You so Very Much,

Peggy Lidwell, Ret USA MSG
Service Officer
Post 175
Gallitzin, Pa