Common Sense: Obama, Karzai & the Stench

Washington, DC – The two presidents – Karzai and Obama – were on stage together in the East Room of the White House for forty minutes on May 12. They each talked about how they had differed in the past and how committed they are to going forward together. Both leaders expressed great hope in their mutual “quest for peace” and the forthcoming “Peace Jirga” or “reconciliation talks” to be held in Kabul at the end of this month. Neither leader – nor any of the journalists present – mentioned a “cease fire” or the unseen skunk at their picnic: Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, secretive head of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement, is one of the most wanted men on Earth. His sanguinary regime sheltered Osama bin-Laden’s Al Qaeda as it prepared for the 9-11-01 attacks. The U.S. government’s “Rewards for Justice” program has a standing offer of “up to 10 million dollars” for information resulting in his capture or confirmed death because he “represents a continuing threat to America and her allies.” Now, thanks to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Mullah Omar may be a key factor in the upcoming “Peace Talks” trumpeted by Messer’s Obama and Karzai at their joint White House press conference. (more…)

Wonder if this report is worth 25 cents to billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg:

You can’t accuse E.J. Dionne of not trying. In this Washington Post article he does quite a Cirque du Soleil contortionist routine in his effort to convince us that “big” government is to be trusted and that the Tea Party members, bless their naïve suspicious hearts, have it all wrong. Aiming squarely at Ronald Reagan’s famous “Government is the problem” bon mot, Dionne writes:

Rarely has the news of the day run so counter to the spin on the news of the day.  It’s hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful “big” government. Rather, most of them arose from the government’s failure to do its job in the first place.

Dionne cites four recent examples of how the government should have protected—or did actually protect—us from danger: (1) the BP oil spill; (2) the tragic West Virginia coal mine explosion; (3) the financial meltdown of 2007-2008; and (4) last week’s Times Square failed bomb attack.

Here are those four examples as Dionne presents them: (more…)

You have to admit that, even against stiff competition, Contessa Brewer is the ideal public face of the asylum known as MSNBC.  With her earnest, slightly confused demeanor, her overweening sense of moral self-righteousness, her imperviousness to logic, facts and history, and her utter inability to take any kind of answer for an answer if it’s not the answer she wants, she’s at once ludicrously predictable, always entertaining and much prettier than either Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann.

The pride of Syracuse University is, in fact, the perfect avatar of her generation, her head so stuffed full of political correctness that she literally cannot think any other way.  Instead of taking a set of facts — oh, just for laughs, let’s say an attempted car-bombing in Times Square — and coming to a logical working hypothesis — probably Muslim terrorists, with whom we are still at war — la Contessa immediately goes to the PC well, and comes up with this gem. Let the hilarity ensue:

Yes, I know: the girl can’t help it. She’s been raised in the religion of Bogus Bigotry and she sings lustily from the hymnal. But this is where the news media’s relentless search for “diversity” ultimately leads: to a glorious mosaic of male and female, white and black, straight and gay,all of whom think exactly alike.  They have the same templates, the same frames of reference, the same knee-jerk reactions to a given set of stimuli. It used to be that reporters asked skeptical questions, kept an open mind, tried to fit the facts into a historical context and then did their best to present the information in an intelligible, even-handed way. That was called “reporting.” (more…)

This morning MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer appeared on the Stephanie Miller radio show, a small syndicated left-wing talker, and during her appearance she expressed her “frustration” that the Times Square bomber was a Pakistani terrorist instead of a white person. Apparently Brewer had hoped that a new Tim McVeigh, perhaps coming from the Tea Party movement, would turn out to be responsible for the attempted bombing in New York instead of just another boring ol’ radical Islamist terrorist.

Brewer told the lefty radio host, “there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country,” and intimated that the fact that since it was an Islamic terrorist evil white America would just use that as another excuse to be racists. “I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry,” Brewer said.

So according to Brewer, I guess we should excuse all acts of terror because, after all, it’s those evil, racist, white bigots in America that force them to blow people up? (more…)

When the Times Square bomb was discovered, the usual suspects in the press once again showed us how objective they really are. Geraldo Rivera, keen to outdo Keith Olbermann in the irrelevance department, blamed it all on white people, racists and conservative extremists (which are all the same thing to Jerry Rivers, apparently). And Katie Couric interviewed tiny but autocratic New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who ventured a guess that the bomber would turn out to be: “Someone home-grown, a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.” Couric didn’t even blink or question that.

Why would she?  It fit the narrative.

And let’s not forget MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer, who revealed her frustration that the suspect is an Islamic terrorist. The horror!

I mean the thing is that — and I get frustrated and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.

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To those of us who attended college in the late sixties and early seventies, the killings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 remain indelibly fixed in memory.  They came at a particularly turbulent time in the country’s history, following the annus horribilis of 1968 and the murders of Martin and Bobby; the student strikes and uprisings, not only in the U.S. but in Europe, particularly France; the Cuban airplane hijackings, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism and the tumult of the Nixon Administration.

For years, the media narrative has been fixed: that a skittish and undisciplined National Guard fired unprovoked into a crowd of student protesters, killing four.  Now comes Fox News’s James Rosen with a revisionist take:

Previously undisclosed FBI documents suggest that the Kent State antiwar protests were more meticulously planned than originally thought and that one or more gunshots may have been fired at embattled Ohio National Guardsmen before their killings of four students and woundings of at least nine others on that searing day in May 1970.

As the nation marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State antiwar protests Tuesday, a review of hundreds of previously unpublished investigative reports sheds a new — and very different — light on the tragic episode.

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