Saturday, June 21, 2008

Barack Obama's America

Stuck in time

September 10th, 2001

The new rallying cry on the Right is that Obama is stuck on 9/10/01 and that criticism is dead on. For Barack Obama and most of the American left, we still live in a 9/10/01 world. We can still fight terrorism by UN resolution and economic sanctions. A lengthy excerpt from The National Review:

Barack Obama is the herald of the September 10 Democrats.

On Monday, Obama off-handedly reiterated his fondness for 1990s-style treatment of Islamic terrorists as if they were mere criminals to be managed by prosecution in the civilian criminal-justice system. By now, that should come as no surprise. Pressed on the subject again Wednesday, Obama insisted, “I have confidence that our system of justice is strong enough to deal with terrorists.” Top Obama backer Bill Richardson, a member of the Clinton Cabinet that delegated national defense to our system of justice while radical Islam killed Americans in New York City, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen, told CNN on Wednesday that he “totally” rejected the Bush administration policy of branding jihadists as enemy combatants because doing so is somehow tantamount to “abridging our own freedoms.”

Appropriately, John McCain has slammed Obama and his fellow wishful thinkers as naïve and beholden to a “September 10th” mindset — the mindset that gave us the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

The occasion for this latest dust-up was the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Boumediene v. Bush vesting alien enemy combatants detained by our military with a constitutional right to habeas corpus — that is, to review by the civilian courts of the military’s determination that they are enemy combatants. In addition to raising the possibility that jihadists who pose a lethal threat to Americans will be released, Boumediene portends litigation chaos: The justices have dumped potentially hundreds of detainee cases on the federal district courts with no guidance about the rules and procedures that should govern those proceedings.

Naturally, this prospect has prompted intense debate. McCain called the decision one of the worst in American history. Obama, by contrast, is glowing in his praise and yearns for a return to the model of our treatment of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when, he points out, suspects were apprehended and successfully prosecuted in the civilian courts.

Leaving aside that Obama here is once again not in command of the facts (not all of those responsible for the 1993 bombing were apprehended), the criminal-prosecution approach left America vulnerable. (For a powerful account of why, see our colleague Andy McCarthy’s book, Willful Blindness.) The civilian-justice system is incapable of apprehending and neutralizing more than a fraction of the Islamic radicals who target our country. That’s not deduction — it’s empirical fact: Major terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were under indictment for over a decade even as they continued to plot and execute attacks, including 9/11, with the authorities impotent to stop them.

Because of our system’s prohibitive due-process demands — demands that are reasonable for Americans accused of crimes but out of place when the “defendants” are foreign combatants — less than three dozen terrorists could be prosecuted in the eight years between the WTC bombing and the destruction of the Twin Towers. That’s fewer enemy operatives than our military often kills or captures in a single day in Afghanistan and Iraq. The trials of the Nineties, moreover, were a treasure trove for al-Qaeda, providing it with generous discovery of our national-defense secrets as well as insight into our methods and sources for obtaining them.

Worst of all, the September 10 approach was provocatively weak. It told an enemy, so committed to killing Americans that its operatives were willing to sacrifice themselves in the effort, that the world’s only superpower would respond to atrocities with subpoenas and indictments. Without the prospect of a vigorous response to acts of war, the enemy continued to attack. The result was 9/11.

McCain has learned these lessons and maintains that we must stay on offense in the war against radical Islam. That means a real war footing: military and covert operations, aggressive collection of intelligence, and Treasury tracking of terrorism finances. The justice system has a role, but it’s a subordinate one: Instead of prosecutions after Americans have been killed, it now pursues the lower-profile but more effective task of breaking up terror cells before they can attack. Although the U.S. could be hit again at any time, it says something about the success of this approach that seven years after 9/11 we have not suffered another attack on our soil.

This aggressive post-9/11 approach is what an Obama spokeswoman has called “stupid.” The candidate himself says he’s not going be “lectured” on national security by the people responsible for the Iraq war. But he might benefit from some time listening to and learning from McCain on Iraq, since McCain advocated the surge that has beaten back al-Qaeda in Iraq while Obama wanted to pull combat troops out in what would have amounted to a surrender. This is a debate McCain should welcome, and win.

Barack Obama apparently subscribes to what is known as the "law enforcement" model of fighting terrorism, the Bill Clinton mentality that seeks to treat terrorists, that seeks to deal with the thugs we are at war with the same way we deal with car thieves and drug dealers. Note again the contrast with Senator McCain, a man who knows a little something about war.

We tried chasing down terrorists like common criminals after the first World Trade Center attack, and that worked so well that they tried again and succeeded on a grander scale. After 9/11/01 we stopped playing games and went after the terrorists where they were instead of waiting for them to blow up a building in America and then trying to find and arrest them.

For all the criticism leveled at Bush, some of it justified, what is truly incredible is that we have not had a single large scale terror attack in America since that horrible day almost seven years ago. No buildings blown up. No suicide bombers. Nothing. I can hardly imagine what attacks have been thwarted that we will only find out about in the years to come as the information comes to light. That is not because terrorists have stopped desiring to destroy America, it is because we have stepped up prevention efforts in America and we have taken the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. The War on Terror never stopped, it just changed fronts and I would rather have the best trained and equipped armed forces in the world fighting the terrorists over there than having our citizens on the front lines and relying on local police departments to fight terror.

Obama also lives in the past when it come to energy independence, operating in the sub-$2 gas mentality. In kowtowing to the radical environmental movement, Obama is opposed to anything that would actually lower gas prices, instead focusing on pie in the sky "alternative energy"and "higher fuel economy standards". Instead of the government getting out of the way, he seeks to have the government be more intrusive. This is his "plan" for energy independence...

Set America on Path to Oil Independence

Obama's plan will reduce oil consumption by at least 35 percent, or 10 million barrels per day, by 2030. This will more than offset the equivalent of the oil we would import from OPEC nations in 2030.

Increase Fuel Economy Standards: Obama will double fuel economy standards within 18 years. His plan will provide retooling tax credits and loan guarantees for domestic auto plants and parts manufacturers, so that they can build new fuel-efficient cars rather than overseas companies. Obama will also invest in advanced vehicle technology such as advanced lightweight materials and new engines.

I guess you could call it oil independence when no one has jobs or cars to put gas in. Contrast that with Senator McCain who is calling for us to finally start drilling more and building nuclear power plants. Obama's path leads to shared misery and poverty. McCain's leads to greater independence from foreign oil and more jobs for American. Senator Obama, you want to help the poor? Make it cheaper for them to go to work, make it cheaper to go on vacation so that people visit resorts, make it cheaper to move freight. That will really change their lives, not bowing down to pseudo-science about climate change and electric cars.

In Barack Obama's America, the primary function of government is to a) collect money from tax payers, b) filter it through the bloated D.C. bureaucracy and c) dribble it back in the form of political favors to some of the people it came from. That is progressive? This news story captures that mentality...

Obama raps McCain on flood prevention programs

MIAMI - With communities in the Midwest still under water, Democrat Barack Obama on Saturday criticized Republican John McCain for opposing federal spending on flood prevention programs and opened a new debate in the White House race.

McCain's campaign said Obama was confusing the facts and engaging in typical political attacks that the Democrat rejects in his speeches.

So anytime we get natural disasters, it becomes a Republican issue. I guess to Barack, every American home (tax payer funded homes of course) should be encased in Teflon and surrounded by a wall lest anything happen (at tax payer expense of course). The Midwest is a flood prone area, it is what makes the soil so rich (the soil we pay farmers not to farm). At least McCain had the fortitude to veto a bill that no doubt contained enormous spending on every pet project under the sun, hidden under the guise of an omnibus bill. Almost none of these pork spending bills would pass if forced to stand alone. Liberals like Barack Obama see America and her people as a giant piggy bank, to be shaken and finally broken by our wise masters in Washington while they control every nickle. We certainly can't be trusted to make our own spending decision, can we? I mean, if we left some of that money in Iowa, maybe Iowans would build levees. Or maybe not, but at least the decision would be theirs.

But none of this matters to Barack Obama, candidate of "change" and "hope". The only "change" in an Obama administration is whatever change you can jingle in your pocket when the government gets done fleecing you and the only "hope" you will have is the hope that the next tax cut hits someone else and you get a little piece of the action from Uncle Sam.

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