Posted on 04/23/2013 4:59:13 AM PDT by SJackson
On September 12, 2012, Obama stepped out into the Rose Garden and told the millions of Americans watching at home, “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”
More than half a year has passed since then and justice is nowhere in sight. The perpetrators of the attack openly walk the streets of Benghazi long after the FBI team sent there has gone home.
It may well be a coincidence that the first major successful terrorist attack comes as the administration plots a withdrawal from its second lost war. The Boston marathon massacre may have succeeded by a simple roll of the dice. Or it may have inaugurated a new series of terrorist attacks on the homefront.
For over a decade, Islamic terrorists who wanted to kill Americans headed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Obama’s grand security plan was to replace boots on the ground with drones carrying out pinprick strikes and then flying away again. It was a comfortable technocratic vision but it doesn’t account for what happens to all those fighters on the ground with no one left to fight and no reason to stick around except to act as drone targets.
Some have headed for Syria and others for North Africa. But the big question is how long will it be until they make another serious pass at the United States? Or have they made it already?
In Libya, Obama tried to avoid casualties by bombing from the air under the guise of a No Fly Zone. But once Gaddafi was dead and the zone was down, nothing protected the Americans in Benghazi. Obama had used the United Nations to sanction regime change, but without its sanction or the sanction of the Arab League, he refused to use air power to scare away the Salafist militias besieging the trapped Americans.
The new soft power strategy was big picture. It had nothing to offer the Americans fighting and dying while waiting for help to arrive.
Al Qaeda understood soft power as a weakness. Unlike the decrepit Clinton policy wonks, it was not impressed by the old strategy of refusing to engage while hiding behind the drones that were standing in for Bill Clinton’s favorite terrorist-fighting cruise missiles. It understood that limited engagement was not some bright and new philosophy, but an unwillingness to take casualties and inflict collateral damage.
“We will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people,” Obama announced in the Rose Garden and the terrorists laughed. They laughed because they had support from within the Libyan government. They laughed because the Libyan government had obstructed the arrival of rescue teams and denied the use of armed drones over Libyan airspace.
What sounded like a reasonable statement to an American audience was actually an admission that Obama would not act unilaterally to go after the killers. There would be no Abbottabad style raids. There was no reason to worry that they would wake up to find the Navy SEALS coming down on them.
Obama had been unwilling to flout the authority of the Libyan government to rescue the Americans in Benghazi. He was certainly not going to do it to find their killers.
The Jihadists had carefully assessed Obama’s weaknesses while searching for loopholes to exploit. In Afghanistan, the Taliban had outplayed him by refusing to negotiate. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had outplayed him by claiming the mandate of the people. Iran had outplayed him by prolonging meaningless negotiations. Al Qaeda had outplayed him by using that same reliance on the meaningless formalities of international law.
Before the Boston bombing, Guantanamo Bay was in a virtual state of revolt with prisoners refusing to move to individual cells and covering up security cameras and windows to take control of sections of the prison. While some imprisoned terrorists staged hunger strikes, others wielded broomsticks and batons in clashes with guards.
In Guantanamo Bay, in Benghazi and Afghanistan and Mali and a hundred other places, the Jihadists were testing the nerve of their infidel opponents and probing for weaknesses. Weak opponents can be hemmed in by their own laws and hamstrung by their need to cling to the moral high ground. The greatest weapon of the terrorists is their ability to exploit our rules, leaving us unable to act.
As the surviving Boston bomber lies in his hospital bed, Republican senators and congressmen are calling on the administration to treat him as an enemy combatant. But the same administration that refused to violate Libyan airspace to rescue its own people is showing no signs that it is willing to push the envelope in Boston and transfer Dzhokhar Tsarnaev into military custody.
When Obama spoke in the Rose Garden on September 12, all he had to offer were worthless words spewed from a teleprompter. On April 15, he delivered much the same speech, with entire sentences seemingly lifted from the original. Once again there were vows of justice, tributes to the American spirit and all the other formalities of an administration covering up its failures with heaps of words.
The media cheers every one of Obama’s utterances, as do the Jihadists, but where the media sees strength, they see weakness.
The Taliban won in Afghanistan. The Muslim Brotherhood won in Egypt. Al Qaeda won in Benghazi. And they don’t intend to rest on their laurels. Whether or not the surviving Boston bomber was one of theirs, the old war that was put on hold when American troops went to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan is about to go hot again as Al Qaeda franchises gain the spare resources and breathing room to develop and deploy the next generation of terrorist plots.
The United States is the only country in the world that rewards the weakness of its opponents. The opponents we face today lack any such chivalrous notions. They have exploited the weakness of our leaders in Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya. And they intend to exploit that weakness on American soil.
After September 11, President George W. Bush made it clear that the United States would do whatever it took to protect the homeland. This administration has sent the opposite message over and over again. The Clinton Administration’s ineptitude in dealing with the World Trade Center bombing and the African embassy bombings invited September 11. The Obama Administration’s ineptitude in Benghazi may have invited the marathon massacre of April 15.
Thanks justiceseeker93.
I agree, but that an a dollar will almosty get you a coffee at Starhacks.
The SOS of IN has a 200+ page report on a voting machine that he refused to clear for use in our state. IT was used in every purple state. Get you hands on the report and make it public and everyone will know how Obama won
So true justiceseeker93. Since there is no record of how anyone votes, estimating how they would have voted is very difficult, though perhaps not impossible. I agree that padding or invaliding counts, or busing, or multiple voters, or even illegal voters are not really necessary. There is no verifiable record to corrupt! For what can be verified, the SEIU, which counts most votes, or its contractors, or Secretaries of State, or their contractors, can put any number into voting tabulation summaries and no one has any way to prove they are not counts, and no way to prove that they are!.
Allen West had no data with which to contest, and responses by his Florida precinct managers changed every time they were challenged for numbers. Our system has been modified so not to support or provide any audit trail. The talk now is about using Google or Facebook or Twitter for voting. Might as well ask television viewers to gather on election eve and raise their hands when their candidate's theme song plays. Representation is flawed or nonexistent, at least not through our election process. Google or Bing would come up with more representative numbers by characterizing voter preferences through their constant tracking of every web site we visit. But Google, which helped to put the Muslim Brotherhood into Egypt, and concealed corrupted Supreme Court decisions which would have helped citizens understand that we have positive law defining who are natural born citizen, can not be trusted to report their findings. They can be trusted to submit their data to friends in our FCC, Justice Department and Executive before allowing any such data to reach the naïve world.
These are solvable problems but the corruption within our government, and within both parties is so ubiquitous as to make solutions like Germany's return to paper ballots unlikely until we experience revolutionary changes in our government. Without representation, our only hope now is to assert change locally. Our failing economy, even with big banks doing well, may inspire change; but then again, it may not.
He was re-elected because the stupid people are everywhere!
Please clarify. I'm presuming that the Indiana SOS is a Republican, saw this report on a particular voting machine, thought it was too vulnerable to hacking, and didn't allow its use in the state of Indiana. Am I correct? If so and that particular device was used in Indiana in 2008, it might explain how Zero won the state in 2008 and lost it in 2012.
Now who was the manufacturer of the suspect device (Diebold)? And is the SOS's report available to the public on the Internet?
BTW, you could consider Indiana as "purple," since it went from 'Rat in the 2008 presidential election to GOP in 2012.
It is a report by the R SOS is my understanding. I know about it because our county had purchased the machine and when it was not certified by the SoS office we had to optain machines from another company. Assume you can get copy of report under F of I from their office. Iirc our county was mentioned on page 2?7. Do not know the name of the company but know our county clerk was concerned that all purple states using this machine would go to 0. She was right. Have sent information to many even before the election. No one seems interested enough to investigate or ask for a copy of the report from the IN SoS
Yes, she was also very perceptive as to the cheating and fraud that was about to go down. And, as I said, your SOS's diligence probably saved Indiana for Romney. Those "purple" states fell like dominoes on election night, one right after the other. And sadly, most of their SOSs were Republicans.
Here's the bottom line: Unless the elections are reasonably honest and fair, little else in politics really matters!!! People in tyrannies around the world have been saying that for a long, long time!
I have been thinking that about the beginning of the year to get FReepers in all these purple states and get these machines inspected. Maybe even form some kind of an organization. But it is still a brain activity at the moment, at least for me.
If I am able to get something off the ground I will let you know.
True, but the (mathematical) question I raise is simply this: "What would have been the election result had it been conducted (hypothetically) in an honest and fair manner?"
And in so far as stupid people are concerned, how many actually came out to vote for Zero on their own free will, how many were lured to the polls by Obama operatives, and how many had votes cast in their stead by Obama operatives?
My guess is that cheating and fraud could have made the difference between a Romney win by a popular vote margin of, say, three points and the purported Obama win by a similar percentage popular vote margin. The cheating and fraud was probably on an unprecedented scale!
Obama signaled all of this when he debated Keyes in the Senate race in Illinois. Few listened. Or thought.
I am not in St Joe county. Was referring to the case in the courts of that county for forging names to get BO on the ballot. They had to forge to get him on the ballot yet iirc he handily won the county. It doesn’t compute
I am not in St Joe county. Was referring to the case in the courts of that county for forging names to get BO on the ballot. They had to forge to get him on the ballot yet iirc he handily won the county. It doesn’t compute
Greg. They can pass inspection. It’s just can be manipulated is what I was led to believe. We need to read the report from IN SOS to see what the problem was that he decertified it
Indeed. Thanks for the ping!
There is a video out there that shows how the machines are manipulated. They can be checked quit easily. Unfortunately at this time I am too busy to start this process but when I do I will have all the necessary information.
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