RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/lloyd-billingsley/is-the-election-delaying-nidal-hasans-trial/print/

The legal wrangling continues over Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist and jihadist who at Fort Hood in 2009 killed 13 while yelling “Allahu Akbar!” The issue is supposedly Major Hasan’s beard, which he grew to signify his Islamic faith. The judge, Col. Gregory Gross, says the beard is a disruption and wants to forcible shave Hasan. That has touched off appeals but something else may be driving the delays, such as the presidential election.

Hasan’s action scored good reviews in some quarters. “Nidal Hassan is a hero,” said the website of Anwar Al-Awlaki, imam at the Dar al-Hijirah mosque Hasan attended. “He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. . . Nidal opened fire on soldiers who were on their way to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How can there be any dispute about the virtue of what he has done?”

President Obama’s first response to Hasan’s mass murder was brief, low key, and failed to include Islamic terrorism as bearing any responsibility for the deaths. “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing,” the president said. That now amounts to official policy.

After Hasan’s mass murder campaign, the Obama administration’s Department of Defense issued Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood. As Andrew McCarthy noted in Spring Fever, Major Hasan was a “five-alarm jihadist” but the DoD report casts his actions as “workplace violence,” as though Hasan was a fired postal worker seeking payback.

Protecting the Force contains not a single reference to jihad or jihadists and its only mention of “Islamic” is an endnote reference to “Countering Violent Islamic Extremism,” a 2007 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. The word “hate” occurs only once. Given the reality of the Fort Hood mass murder, the praise from al-Alwaki, and Hasan’s attempts to contact al Qaeda, the omissions are truly breathtaking.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/michael-widlanski/obama-americas-hollow-man/

Clint Eastwood’s image of the empty chair in the White House hit home even with the literately conscious magazine The New Yorker whose cover featured Barack Obama’s “empty chair” as the metaphor for the presidential debate.

Movie cowboys are often men of few words and much action. Eastwood knows. Few people are better suited to sum up the essential emptiness and hackneyed hollowness of Barack Obama who cast himself as the sheriff who kills terrorists like Osama Bin Laden when all before him have failed.

The policies of Barack Obama all begin with a lot of words: Recovery Summer, Stimulus, Arab Spring, Re-Start with Russia, Engagement with Iran, ambassador to Syria. But they all end ”not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

That is the phrase of T.S. Eliot whose poem “The Hollow Men” seems to have been written for Obama, although it was composed before Obama was born.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

“Gesture without motion” is President Obama’s trademark in office.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/white-people-what-are-they-good-for/print/

LAMONT IS A POSEUR AND FOOL WHO IS OFTEN FEATURED BY O’REILLY…RSK

White privilege consists of being white. Black privilege consists of denouncing white people in ways that would be considered racist if the shoe were on the other foot.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, a man whose website modestly describes him as a “Professor, Author, Speaker, Public Intellectual,” has assembled a list of what he believes are the 15 most overrated white people to prove the point. Any college faculty member who tried assembling a list of the 15 most overrated black people would soon be the target of the most overzealous witch-hunt since Salem.

But if we were assembling a list of overrated black people, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill might just deserve his own place on the notepad. Hill’s bio is the usual intriguing world of African-American academia, complete with essays on social commentary in Hip Hop. Hill writes, so he’s an author. He speaks, so he’s a speaker. And he was once a weekly contributor to the Star Jones talk show, so he’s clearly a public intellectual. Best of all, he’s an affiliated faculty member in African American Studies at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. IRAAS has a logo that features two iguanas mating and offers all the usual navel-gazing courses that exist only to waste tuition money, except they’re African-American navel-gazing courses.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/understanding-israels-red-line/ Why, in his speech to the UN General Assembly late last month, did Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu push back the crunch time for Iran’s nuclear program to next spring or summer? The extended deadline came as a surprise considering that Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak had been saying for almost a […]

On a jury to consider how the Palestinians have been treated were such luminaries as musician Roger Waters and writer Alice Walker.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444024204578044213457310392.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Those who grew up with Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album “The Wall” will remember it as the perfect antidote to the crueller aspects of teenage life. Chronicling the mental breakdown of a pop star, the rock opera rages against suffocating parents, tyrannical teachers and social conformism. The story concludes with the hero hauled before a nightmarish court, where everyone in his life testifies as an adversarial witness. Before the defendant can say a word in his own defense, the judge bellows a guilty verdict: “The evidence before the court is incontrovertible. There is no need for the jury to retire!”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443982904578046671220961776.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Having been routed in the first debate, President Obama has found a comeback strategy: Fly Big Bird. Specifically, mock Mitt Romney’s call to cut federal subsidies for the millionaires at the Sesame Workshop and pledge to defend the Public Broadcasting Service no matter how much money the Treasury has to borrow.

At least he’s finally discovered a second-term agenda.

On Monday night in San Francisco, Mr. Obama claimed Mr. Romney “said he’d bring down our deficit by going after what has been the biggest driver of our debt and deficits over the last decade—public television, PBS. You didn’t know this, but for all you moms and kids out there, you should have confidence that finally somebody is cracking down on Big Bird.” He’s also rolled out a TV ad starring the Sesame Street favorite.

Mr. Obama is mocking a small effort to reduce federal spending, but it would be funnier if Mr. Obama hadn’t also rejected all the larger efforts too. From Congressional Republicans. From his own Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. From a bipartisan group in the Senate. At the San Francisco event, as at the debate, as at every other campaign event this year, Mr. Obama offered no plan to move the government’s spending into the same galaxy with its revenues.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444897304578046260406091012.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Imagine a country where challenging the ruling authorities—questioning, say, a piece of data released by central headquarters—would result in mobs of administration sympathizers claiming you should feel “embarrassed” and labeling you a fool, or worse.

Soviet Russia perhaps? Communist China? Nope, that would be the United States right now, when a person (like me, for instance) suggests that a certain government datum (like the September unemployment rate of 7.8%) doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately for those who would like me to pipe down, the 7.8% unemployment figure released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last week is downright implausible. And that’s why I made a stink about it.

Before I explain why the number is questionable, though, a few words about where I’m coming from. Contrary to some of the sound-and-fury last week, I do not work for the Mitt Romney campaign. I am definitely not a surrogate. My wife, Suzy, is not associated with the campaign, either. She worked at Bain Consulting (not Bain Capital) right after business school, in 1988 and 1989, and had no contact with Mr. Romney.

The Obama campaign and its supporters, including bigwigs like David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, along with several cable TV anchors, would like you to believe that BLS data are handled like the gold in Fort Knox, with gun-carrying guards watching their every move, and highly trained, white-gloved super-agents counting and recounting hourly.

Let’s get real. The unemployment data reported each month are gathered over a one-week period by census workers, by phone in 70% of the cases, and the rest through home visits. In sum, they try to contact 60,000 households, asking a list of questions and recording the responses.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/how_does_a_president_quit.html What does a politician, deeply involved in a campaign, do if he wants to quit? Does the man who pretended to be president now pretend to be a candidate? That may be the issue Barack Obama is dealing with. A few months ago, everything looked rosy. The Republican Party nominated the man he wanted […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/romney%e2%80%99s-target-map-expands/ Romney’s Target Map Expands The GOP candidate’s electoral horizons have grown considerably since the debate. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has had his best week of the campaign. Going into the first debate last Wednesday, the Romney poll numbers both nationally and in key states had slightly improved from the nadir in the weeks […]

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/10/09/of-skulls-and-podiums/?print=1

Chris Rock [1] tweeted shortly after the first Obama-Romney debate that “Obama is bringing Bin Laden’s skull & setting it on the podium for the next debate.” But Mitt Romney [2]‘s speech attacking the president’s foreign policy serves notice that Osama’s skull may not be enough to keep him back; the criticism he delivered suggests he’s going to mix it up.

Andrew Sullivan [3], who only a few days ago was serenely confident in his champion, is so traumatized that he can barely stand to watch Obama climb back into the ring.

Look: I’m trying to rally some morale, but I’ve never seen a candidate this late in the game, so far ahead, just throw in the towel in the way Obama did last week – throw away almost every single advantage he had with voters and manage to enable his opponent to seem as if he cares about the middle class as much as Obama does. How do you erase that imprinted first image from public consciousness: a president incapable of making a single argument or even a halfway decent closing statement?

It’s a sight he’s trying to forget. But Sullivan’s always looking to throw away information. The image he ought to be trying fix in his mind shouldn’t be of Obama wilting under Romney’s humorous chafing but of Obama alone with Putin; of Obama alone with the Chinese premier; of Obama alone with representatives of America’s enemies and rivals without Jim Lehrer to help him out.

Some people haven’t forgotten the president’s meltdown though. He was in L.A. trying to convince big donors [4] to keep backing him and vowing to “close the deal.” With a billion dollars of campaign money [5] riding on him, Obama knows he’s going to disappoint a lot of people who aren’t used to being disappointed if he doesn’t come out swinging against Romney.

One complicating factor now weighing on his shoulders is whether to order drone strikes on the suspected perpetrators of the Benghazi attack. Eli Lake [5] says “five administration officials tell The Daily Beast that the White House is now weighing whether to pursue those responsible through law enforcement or via military means like drone strikes or special operations.” In what has come to be the characteristic absurdity of his administration, the secret operation was being discussed in the New York Times.

The existence of the list was first reported this week by The New York Times. It was compiled with input from several U.S. intelligence agencies and is being constantly revised and edited as new information comes in to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Some U.S. intelligence officials say there is enough detail to begin military operations to kill or capture 10 of the operatives tied to the planning of the attack.

Television has Reality TV. The Obama administration has Reality Secret Ops. The president’s dilemma is exquisite. If he doesn’t act now, the targets may scatter. If he acts now, he may hit the wrong people and start another crisis in the Middle East.

The delay from the White House could allow specific intelligence on the locations of suspects to whither on the vine if the suspects flee the country and evade detection, according to three U.S. intelligence officials working closely on the manhunt in Libya …

“There is always the risk of flight in a situation like this,” this official said. “But it’s probably worth doing right and waiting a bit and trying to get more intel on these guys. You have to worry about relationships. If you do the wrong thing, the ramifications could be serious.” The U.S. intelligence officer said the information on the 10 suspects was “good enough to authorize action if this was Pakistan or Afghanistan.”…

But there is no agreement between the U.S. and Libya to allow the kinds of drone strikes that have become common in the border provinces of Pakistan and lawless regions of Yemen.

Good thing the rebels in Libya don’t read the New York Times. Still, a legend built on a single deed is a fragile thing. There is no depth to it; no reserve of achievement that can be called upon in time of need. The veneer of fiction, once scratched, must instantly be japanned to cover the defect.

Here’s a thought. What Andrew Sullivan saw being pummeled in public last week was the real Obama not the one who is petulantly withholding his genius. The same incompetent he trusts to keep him safe; the very same one who is making the decision on Libya and the one he hopes will win an election to another four-year term. You know, the Billion Dollar Man. Maybe Chris Rock has got it all wrong. It’s not Osama’s skull that is in the president’s hands. It’s our skulls that are in his keeping. People knew that once, back when they remembered that being president was a deadly serious job.