Most recent blog entries

I'll Be On...

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 02:03:00 GMT

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Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:13:00 GMT

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Looking at the Axis of Unreason

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:11:00 GMT

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Announcing: "A Summons to Perdition" by John L. Work

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:06:00 GMT

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Did Saudi Prince Buy Fox News' Silence?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:42:00 GMT

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The Little Lady Abu Qatada Calls Mom

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:55:00 GMT

No story. (Who needs a story with a picture like that?)

(Prince Talal's) Fox News AWOL on (Prince Talal's) Twitter Story

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:46:00 GMT

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"Why Wasn't Obama in Contempt of Court?"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:49:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

One thing I’ve learned while researching my new, nearly finished book is that both history and news, history’s so-called rough draft, are not written by the “victors” as much as they are censored, twisted and reconfigured by what I can best describe as “the mob.”

I’m not referring to the Mafia. What I’m talking about is a mob-like amalgam of sharp elbows and big mouths who dictate acceptable topics, their narrative flow and an approved range of opinion – the consensus-makers. Defying consensus, breaking what amount to Mafia-like vows of “omerta” – silence – and delving into the verboten, is the worst possible crime of anti-mobness, punishable by eternal hooting and marginalization.

Few transgress. Which explains the news blackout on an extraordinary chain of recent events that took place in and around a Georgia courtroom and pertained to challenges to President Obama’s eligibility to be a presidential candidate in Georgia in 2012. In the end, the president defeated the challenge. He will be on the Georgia primary ballot come March. But therein lies an amazing tale.

Already I can feel the chill hiss of “birther” at the mere mention of these events, all because I haven’t included the mob-requisite catcalls that are “supposed” to go along with such accounts. But there’s nothing to mock here.

Last month, after Administrative Law Judge Michael Malihi denied motions by President Obama’s lawyer Michael Jablonski both to dismiss proceedings against the president and to quash a subpoena, three attorneys made history. For the first time, attorneys were permitted to enter evidence into the court record challenging Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.

Georgia state law stipulates: “Every candidate for federal and state office … shall meet the constitutional and statutory qualifications for holding the office being sought.” Plaintiff attorneys Van Irion and Mark Hatfield, who is also a Georgia state representative, argued that President Obama, an American citizen, fails to meet these qualifications because he is not a “natural born” citizen, the constitutional requirement for the presidency. This is due, they argued, to the uncontested fact that his father, Barack Obama Sr. of Kenya, was a British subject, not an American citizen. A third plaintiff attorney, Orly Taitz – object of an eternity’s worth of “two-minute hates” within the media mob – introduced evidence that the 44th president of the United States has engaged in what appears to be identity fraud.

Such evidence, as gleaned from a partial list of exhibits introduced in the hearing and published at the American Thinker website, included affidavits from security professionals and other documentation attesting that Obama is using a Connecticut Social Security number (he never lived in Connecticut); that Obama’s purported Social Security number was never issued to him; and that – my favorite – his Social Security number “does not pass E-Verify.” Another affidavit from an Adobe Illustrator expert maintains that Obama’s birth certificate, released last spring to much hype and ballyhoo, is a computer-generated forgery.

Frankly, I was unimpressed with the presidential defense in pre-hearing arguments. For example, Jablonski tried to deflect the Social Security issue – which, after all, raises serious questions of fraud – by pointing out that “nothing in the Constitution makes … participating in Social Security a prerequisite to serving as president.” (So what’s a little felonious fraud?) On the “citizenship issue,” Jablonski declared the issue was “soundly rejected by 69,456,897 Americans in the 2008 elections, as it has been by every judicial body” since. Is he saying that a lot of votes or previous court actions nullify the legal merits of any new proceeding? I’m no lawyer, but that doesn’t seem like much of a legal argument.

The day before the hearing, Jablonksi announced he and the president would “suspend further participation” in the proceedings; Brian Kemp, the Georgia secretary of state, retorted that Jablonski and his client would “do so at your own peril.” On hearing day, the defense and defendant didn’t just rest; they didn’t show up, defying the subpoena summoning Jablonski and the president to court. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution later styled the president’s rejection of his subpoena as a boycott.) Contempt of court, anyone? How about just a headline?

Nope. Headlines could wait – at least until the story came out “right,” which it did when both the judge and secretary of state ruled this month in favor of President Obama.

Obama’s on the Georgia ballot; “birthers” lose again. The narrative is locked down.

This time around, though, it doesn’t feel as if Obama really won.

The Incredible, Shrinking US Embassy in Iraq

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:46:00 GMT

Like a postmodern-day ziggurat, the $750 million US Embassy in Iraq stands as a grotesque symbol of Washington hubris, not to mention dumbness. It is now practically approaching white elephant status, according to a New York Times report, but not soon enough. Meanwhile, things are getting ugly at the embassy salad bar ....

The Times reports:

Less than two months after American troops left, the State Department is preparing to slash by as much as half the enormous diplomatic presence it had planned for Iraq, a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.

Officials in Baghdad and Washington said that Ambassador James F. Jeffrey and other senior State Department officials were reconsidering the size and scope of the embassy, where the staff has swelled to nearly 16,000 people, mostly contractors.

The expansive diplomatic operation and the $750 million embassy building, the largest of its kind in the world, were billed as necessary to nurture a postwar Iraq on its shaky path to democracy and establish normal relations between two countries linked by blood and mutual suspicion.

Spilled blood is more like it.

But the Americans have been frustrated by what they see as Iraqi obstructionism and are now largely confined to the embassy because of security concerns, unable to interact enough with ordinary Iraqis to justify the $6 billion annual price tag.

Sounds like a 1950s survivor's story: I was locked in the US embassy in Iraq, forced to spend $16 million a day!

The swift realization among some top officials that the diplomatic buildup may have been ill advised represents a remarkable pivot for the State Department, in that officials spent more than a year planning the expansion and that many of the thousands of additional personnel have only recently arrived.

Shouldn't Congress haul in -- I mean, invite -- the State Department officials responsible for such ill-advisedness for an informational hearing?

Michael W. McClellan, the embassy spokesman, said in a statement, “Over the last year and continuing this year the Department of State and the Embassy in Baghdad have been considering ways to appropriately reduce the size of the U.S. mission in Iraq, primarily by decreasing the number of contractors needed to support the embassy’s operations.”

Mr. McClellan said the number of diplomats — currently about 2,000 — was also “subject to adjustment as appropriate.”

Two thousand diplomats and 14,000 contractors!

To make the cuts, he said the embassy was “hiring Iraqi staff and sourcing more goods and services to the local economy.”

After the American troops departed in December, life became more difficult for the thousands of diplomats and contractors left behind. Convoys of food that had been escorted by the United States military from Kuwait were delayed at border crossings as Iraqis demanded documentation that the Americans were unaccustomed to providing.

Within days, the salad bar at the embassy dining hall ran low. Sometimes there was no sugar or Splenda for coffee. On chicken-wing night, wings were rationed at six per person. Over the holidays, housing units were stocked with Meals Ready to Eat, the prepared food for soldiers in the field.

Chicken-wing night?

At every turn, the Americans say, the Iraqi government has interfered with the activities of the diplomatic mission, one they grant that the Iraqis never asked for or agreed upon. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s office — and sometimes even the prime minister himself — now must approve visas for all Americans, resulting in lengthy delays. American diplomats have had trouble setting up meetings with Iraqi officials.

For their part, the Iraqis say they are simply enforcing their laws and protecting their sovereignty in the absence of a working agreement with the Americans on the embassy.

It's called payback, hatred, animus, pettiness, rottenness and the clash of civilzations.

“The main issue between Iraqis and the U.S. Embassy is that we have not seen, and do not know anything about, an agreement between the Iraqi government and the U.S.,” said Nahida al-Dayni, a lawmaker and member of Iraqiya, a largely Sunni bloc in Parliament.

Expressing a common sentiment among Iraqis, she added: “The U.S. had something on their mind when they made it so big. Perhaps they want to run the Middle East from Iraq, and their embassy will be a base for them here.”...

The current configuration of the embassy, a 104-acre campus with adobe-colored buildings, is actually smaller than the original plans that were drawn up at a time when officials believed that a residual American military presence would remain in Iraq beyond 2011. For instance, officials once planned for a 700-person consulate in the northern city of Mosul, but it was scrapped for budgetary reasons.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari met with Mr. Jeffrey last week to discuss, among other things, the size of the American presence here. “The problem is with the contractors, with the security arrangements,” Mr. Zebari said. Mr. Jeffrey will leave the task of whittling down the embassy to his successor, as officials said he is expected to step down in the coming weeks.

No doubt counting the days.

“We always knew that what they were planning to do didn’t make sense,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “It’s increasingly becoming clear that they are horribly overstaffed given what they are able to accomplish.”

Mr. Pollack described as unrealistic the State Department’s belief that it could handle many of the tasks previously performed by the military, such as monitoring security in northern areas disputed by Arabs and Kurds, where checkpoints are jointly manned by Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, and visiting projects overseen by the United States Agency for International Development.

Americans are also still being shot at regularly in Iraq. At the Kirkuk airport, an Office of Security Cooperation, which handles weapons sales to the Iraqis and where a number of diplomats work, is frequently attacked by rockets fired by, officials believe, members of Men of the Army of Al Naqshbandi Order, a Sunni insurgent group.

American officials believed that Iraqi officials would be far more cooperative than they have been in smoothing the transition from a military operation to a diplomatic mission led by American civilians. ...

Who believed that? And why? These are the officials Congress need to question.

The size of the embassy staff is even more remarkable when compared with those of other countries. Turkey, for instance, which is Iraq’s largest trading partner and wields more economic influence here than the United States, employs roughly 55 people at its embassy, and the number of actual diplomats is in the single digits.

If Graham Greene were alive, he could write Our 16,000 Men in Baghdad.

“It’s really been an overload for us, for the Foreign Ministry,” Mr. Zebari said of the American mission.

The problems with the supply convoys, as well as a wide crackdown on security contractors that included detentions and the confiscation of documents, computers and weapons, prompted the embassy to post a notice on its Web site warning Americans working here that “the government of Iraq is strictly enforcing immigration and customs procedures, to include visas and stamps for entry and exit, vehicle registration, and authorizations for weapons, convoys, logistics and other matters.”

The considerations to reduce the number of embassy personnel, American officials here said, reflect a belief that a quieter and humbler diplomatic presence could actually result in greater leverage over Iraqi affairs, particularly in mediating a political crisis that flared just as the troops were leaving. Having fewer burly, bearded and tattooed security men — who are currently the face of America to many Iraqis and evoke memories of abuses like the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square in 2007 by private contractors — could help build trust with Iraqis, these officials believe. ...

Hey, wait a minute -- Gen. Petraeus already did that. Make him the next ambassador.

One State Department program that is likely to be scrutinized is an ambitious program to train the Iraqi police, which is costing about $500 million this year — far less than the nearly $1 billion that the embassy originally intended to spend. The program has generated considerable skepticism within the State Department — one of the officials interviewed predicted that the program could be scrapped later this year — because of the high cost of the support staff, the inability of police advisers to leave their bases because of the volatile security situation and a lack of support by the Iraqi government.

Run those reasons for "skepticism" by again: high cost of support staff (yeah, yeah), the inability of poluce advisors to leave their bases due to security situtation, and "a lack of support" from the very people we're doing all this pricey charity work for!

Doesn't anyone have some splainin' to do?

In an interview late last year with the American Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a senior official at the Interior Ministry said the United States should use the money it planned to spend on the police program “for something that can benefit the people of the United States.” The official, Adnan al-Asadi, predicted the Iraqis would receive “very little benefit” from the program.

Maybe Adnan should get into the GOP presidential race.

Reducing the size of the embassy might have the added benefit of quieting the anti-Americanism of those who violently opposed the military occupation.

Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has steadfastly railed against American influence here and whose militia fought the American military, has recently told his followers that the United States has failed to “disarm.”

Mr. Sadr recently posted a statement on his Web site that read, “I ask the competent authorities in Iraq to open an embassy in Washington, equivalent to the size of the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, in order to maintain the prestige of Iraq.”

How about at the State Department?

Parfumier on Trial Today in Paris for "Racism"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:34:00 GMT

For years now, we've watched an increasingly totalitarian Europe arise in the courtrooms of infamous speech trials in Holland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, France, England and elsewhere as dictatorial government authorities use the courts to maintain their political power against political rivals and freethinkers who dare call out the dishonesty and deceptions of the State. With the speech trial today of a fabled and elderly parfumier in Paris (described below), however, we see a strain of totalitarianism that is qualitatively different but equally sinister.

When parfumier Jean-Paul Guerlain (picture above) told an TV interviewer in 2010 that in order to create the popular perfume Samsara ("blends notes of ylang-ylang, jasmine, sandalwood, and tonka bean") "for once, [he] started working like a negro," he threatened no government power structure, he called out no deception. He made a banal comment, simply not worth parsing although it's hard to resist noting that he chose the simile to convey something he is obviously proud of -- a sustained and apparently arduous effort to create something beaitiful. But that is utterly and completely beside the point: The French state here is more and more inserting itself into the regulation of its citizens' minds, not in an overt attempt to maintain political power (Wilders, Dewinter), not to destroy facts and principles that threaten its fabrications (Sabaditsch-Wolff, Hedegaard, Robinson), but rather, in the evil tradition of Communism's relentless social engineers, to rewire all thought processes down to the most trivial. It is the totalitarian effort to create the New Man.

The Australian reports:

THE creator of some of the world's best-loved perfumes will go on trial in Paris today accused of racism for using the word "negre" (n****r) on television in a case that campaigners say illustrates the spread of prejudice in France.

NB: Lest the constellation of asterisks prove blinding, the offending word is "negro."

Jean-Paul Guerlain, the inventor of such fragrances as Parure and Nahema, is being prosecuted for comments that he made during an interview on France 2, the state-owned television channel, in 2010.

Asked how he created Samsara, another of his perfumes, he said: "For once, I started working like a n****r. I don't know if n*****s have always worked like that, but still..."

The remark sparked furious protests outside Guerlain's boutique in the Champs Elysees in Paris and calls for a boycott of the company's products.

"He provoked the indignation of anti-racist associations," said Faycal Megherbi, a legal adviser for the Movement Against Racism and Friendship Between Peoples. "The slave trade went on for centuries and his words were very wounding."

The doggerel of the New Order: Sticks and stones may break my bones and words are very wounding.

The maximum sentence for making a public insult of a racist nature is six months in prison and a fine of $A23,000.

Mr Guerlain, 73, whose great-great-grandfather created the perfume house in 1828, has apologised for his remark, "which in no way reflects my true beliefs, but which was a slip of the tongue". He denies that the comment constitutes an offence and is expected to be present in court....

Race relations in France were already under strain after Claude Gueant, the Interior Minister, suggested on Saturday that European civilisation was superior to those of Muslim countries. Mr Gueant's claim that "not all civilisations are of equal value" has dominated the presidential campaign this week.

Serge Letchimy, a Socialist MP, accused him of promoting Nazi ideology, prompting ministers to leave the government bench in the French parliament and demand an apology.

But critics say that Mr Guerlain's comments suggest a colonial attitude in the French subconscious.

So, off with the French subconscious's head.