Unexamined Premises

Benghazi Blues

Michael Walsh — Sun, 05 May 2013 21:42:43 +0000

Shame of a Nation

No matter what happens with Darrell Issa’s congressional committee meetings this week, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Obama administration, and the cause is Benghazi. It’s impossible to overestimate the blowback that has been gathering steam for the past seven months, now about to erupt with full force. Few reputations will emerge unscathed, Obama’s presidency will be crippled, Hillary Clinton‘s 2016 candidacy will be destroyed — and perhaps some new heroes will be born.

My New York Post column on Friday, which was also linked at RealClearPolitics, sets the stage:

On Wednesday, the FBI released photos of three men present at the deadly jihadist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya; the bureau has asked the Libyans’ help in identifying them.

Which nicely highlights the fact that it’s been more than seven months since Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans were killed — and yet there’s been no justice, nor even vengeance, in the matter.

Nor much exposure: We know little more today than we did in the immediate aftermath of the fiasco.

That’s because, right from the jump, the administration has been lying through its teeth about what happened on the night of Sept. 11, 2012 — the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, as it happens. It transparently lied about the Mohammad video, threw the scapegoated filmmaker in jail (where, last time I looked, he still is), and convened a bogus “accountability” board to whitewash the whole damn thing so as not to disrupt the precious Narrative that Osama was dead and al-Qaeda was on the run.

It was all a lie, of course, and some of us knew it at the time. I wrote about it repeatedly on the Post’s Op-Ed page: you can find examples here, here and here. In this case, however, what happened in Benghazi, Foggy Bottom, the White House, and the Obama re-election campaign headquarters in Chicago was (as the saying goes) worse than a crime: it was a blunder. And that blunder may now bring down the man who never should have been president in the first place, for grotesque dereliction of his duty as commander-in-chief:

Indeed, the State Department’s Inspector General is now investigating the Accountability Review Board that reported on Benghazi in December, Fox News reported yesterday. What Fox called “well-placed sources” say the IG is trying to find out if the State panel failed to interview key witnesses who’d come forward.

In fact, Washington power attorney Victoria Toensing — a Reagan-era deputy assistant attorney general with a strong background in intelligence work — says she’s got a whistle blower inside State who’s itching to go public.

But so far she’s been stymied by officials who won’t act on her request for a security clearance so she can deal with classified material the case entails. Other attorneys for as many as three other potential witnesses from inside State and CIA say they’re having the same problem.

In fact, some whistleblowers allege that they’ve been threatened with reprisals should they come forward — even though federal law explicitly protects whistleblowers.

At his Monday press conference, President Obama shrugged off questions about all this, saying, “I’m not familiar with this notion that anybody has been blocked from testifying.”

There’s another lie — this one of Nixonian quality. From the moment Obama learned of the attack on the Benghazi compound — learned in part from Ambassador Stevens’ frantic phone calls to Washington, begging for help — what did he do? He went to bed early and flew off to Las Vegas in the morning for a campaign appearance; after all, first things first. And since Barry’s only real function in this administration is as its frontman/pitchman, he was only doing what he does best.

He’ll be aware soon enough. Next week, the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.), will open new hearings on Benghazi — and they could be explosive. He promises to expose new information the administration “has tried to suppress.”

Issa — who previously held the administration’s feet to fire over the still-unresolved Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal — has twice requested guidelines from State, but a department spokesman recently denied that any whistleblowers have come forward and scoffed at reports that they’ve been intimidated.

In fact, word is that some of the whistleblowers may testify that help in the form of a rapid-response force was only hours away — but, for whatever reason, was not authorized.

Safety Last

Michael Walsh — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 05:11:05 +0000

A single-action revolver with its loading gate open

What are to make of this? Via the Of Arms and the Law blog (h/t Instapundit) comes this New York Times story about a tragic, accidental shooting — but alas, a story published in order to further the Times‘s notion that inanimate objects, especially inanimate objects of swaggering macho desire, have a mind of their own:

It was the second week in August, a Friday the 13th, in fact, in 1982. I was with a group of college roommates who were getting ready to go to the Omak Stampede and Suicide Race. Three of us piled into a red Vega parked outside a friend’s house in Okanogan, Wash., me in the back seat. The driver, who worked with the county sheriff’s department, offered me his service revolver to examine. I turned the weapon onto its side, pointed it toward the door. The barrel, however, slipped when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty, and turned the gun toward the driver’s seat. When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing. When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round.

My friend, Doug, slumped in the driver’s seat, dying, and another friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, raced into the house for the phone.

The commenters at the blog are doing a good job of unpacking not only the principal paragraph above, but the whole intent of the piece (who recounts a story of killing his own friend in order to obliquely further the gun-control meme?), but what does it say about the editing chops at the Times that they would let this pass without at least some clarification? To wit:

“… who worked with the county sheriff’s department offered me his service revolver to examine.”

Let’s leave aside the sheer irresponsibility of handing a loaded firearm over to a kid. In 1982, the vast majority of police sidearms were double-action revolvers or semi-automatic pistols, which would make the description of the accident above completely unbelievable, unless the firearm in question was a single-action revolver with the hammer down on one empty chamber, about which more in a bit.

“… when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty…”

You don’t check to see whether a revolver is loaded by pulling the hammer back. You check it by pushing the cylinder out (which instantly renders it non-fireable, since there cannot be a round in the barrel) and making sure all five, six, seven, or even eight chambers are clear.

“When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing.”

The instant you pull the hammer back on a revolver, the mechanism also rotates the cylinder. It is impossible not to notice this, unless you have never seen a gun before in your life.

“When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round.”

“Pulling the hammer back” will not fire a round. Releasing the hammer will. For this story to be true, the only possible explanation is that the author was (mis)handling a Colt-type single-action revolver — what shooters call a “cowboy gun” — which is loaded and unloaded one round or expended shell at a time via a gate on the right side of the cylinder.

The Memory of Beslan, the Shame of Boston

Michael Walsh — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 03:23:45 +0000

Hide — there’s an armed teenager on the loose

Enough with all the chest-thumping, mingled with manly tears, about the dramatic end of the Marathon bombers’ reign of terror in Boston last week. From the press coverage, you’d think the entire city (which is actually rather small) rose up as one and smote two evil Chechens a stunning blow for truth, justice, liberty and the American Way. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What we saw instead was a city cowering in fear, led by two particularly pusillanimous toads in Gov. Deval Patrick and Mayor Mumbles Menino, who had the services of some 10,000 armed personnel — literally, a small army — to take down… wait for it… a wounded teenager with a gun, and maybe some self-detonating explosives.

Way to go, Boston. You’ve made all of us proud to be Americans.

Now, of course, the liberal East Coast media is getting all mushy about the Brothers Tsarnaev. I’m not even going to bother to cite some of the more egregious examples from the New York Times and elsewhere, part of the MSM’s ongoing bout of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to dealing with Islam and its discontents. John Hinderaker of Power Line has a nice roundup of the usual-suspect idiocy.

But don’t you wish, just once, an American public official would react like a man? A man, say, like this guy, who said this about the Chechens after they attacked a school back in 2004. WARNING: offensive, ethnically biased stereotyping ahead:

“You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child killers?

“No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to child killers,” he added.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but Margaret Thatcher, whom I’ve met more than once said: ‘A man who comes out into the street to kill other people must himself be killed’.”

Now, that’s some real straight talk about murdering, child-killing bastards. In case you’ve forgotten Beslan, here’s a brief taste of the hell the Muslim Chechens visited upon little kids on the first day of school:

Note that, when the Russian military finally stormed the school, they were accompanied by armed residents of the village, desperate to save their children. In typical ham-handed Russian fashion, the former Soviets managed to kill almost as many people as they saved — but the point is they fought back. They didn’t “shelter in place” (what an odious, bloodless phrase for enforced institutional cowardice), hiding behind locked doors; they got up, got their guns, and finally did something to rid themselves of the aliens in their midst. For they knew — with the example of the Moscow theater crisis fresh in everybody’s minds — that there was no way this atrocity could end any way but bloodily. They wanted to get their licks in, and die like men instead of dumb beasts waiting for the slaughter.

‘I Believe in the Second Amendment’

Michael Walsh — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:27:57 +0000

Yeah, right. Via John Hinderaker of Power Line, and courtesy of the NRA, comes this counter-strike against the Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ transparently phony “gun control” ad. Naturally, this gang of criminals won’t answer the question:

What does this tell us about the dishonest Left? That there is no lie they will not tell, no misrepresentation they will not offer in their single-minded pursuit of power. Their breathtaking mendacity is no accident; it’s not only the means to their ends, it’s who and what they are. Shame on us if we fall for it.

So whenever a fascist Regressive proposes a power grab in the name of “common sense,” “reasonable restrictions ” or ”the children,” call them on it — what part of “shall not be infringed” don’t they understand?

Good for NRA for exposing these frauds, and would that congressional Republicans could must enough testicular fortitude to do the same. But no, they’re too busy reaching across the aisle.

Let’s hope they fail.

****

Cross-posted at PJ Lifestyle

Dr. Mengele, I Presume

Michael Walsh — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:11:05 +0000

The “doctor” will see you now

As you can read here, I’ve been following the horrific tale of “Dr.” Kermit Gosnell, the alleged Butcher of Philadelphia, ever since the story broke last year. In fact, in the guise of my crazy-lefty character, David Kahane, I wrote a big piece, “The Charnel House of Blackmun,” about it shortly after the grand jury issued its stomach-turning report on this latter-day Mengele‘s crimes. An excerpt:

For us, a day without an abortion somewhere in this great land is like a day without a sermon on climate change: The world is a drab and bitter place, in which the cheery hosannas of the unborn dead cannot be heard, praising the glory of a Gaian world they will never pollute with their presence. Forget that Baudelaire dude and the gimp, Verbal Kint: The Master’s greatest trick was not convincing the world he didn’t exist, but persuading women that it was morally affirmative to murder their own children. Medea, take a bow!

Now, you may quibble that Medea killed children who were, you know, actually ambulatory, but to us and Peter Singer, that is a small matter, a mere detail, a bagatelle of a bump in the road on our way to a more perfect nihilism. Which is why I’m here to celebrate a great American named Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., a man who was standing up to the forces of bigotry and intolerance and unreasoning pedophobia by providing abortion services at his Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia — until, unaccountably, the state of Pennsylvania arrested him…

Well, one man’s “baby charnel house” is another man’s monument to the House that Blackmun Built, and surely reasonable men and women of good conscience can agree to disagree, even if Roe is long-since settled law and if you troglodytes so much as try to touch one hair of its sacred little head, we’re coming after you with scissors, suction, a pair of pliers, and a blowtorch… Once you accept the proposition of abortion pretty much on demand, including post-“birth,” this seems to us a distinction without a difference, but there’s no accounting for the lengths to which you Christianist Javerts will go in order to hunt down innocent women’s-health specialists.

While it’s true that the alleged details of Dr. Gosnell’s practice can make you squeamish right-wingers uncomfortable, our brave women are made of sterner stuff. They know the parasitic clumps of cells in their wombs — punishment-by-“baby” for the simple, innocent, joyous act of sexual intercourse — are being eliminated for a higher, nobler cause than mere Christianity. We progressives don’t believe in the afterlife, unless we’re trying to fake some sort of “faith” on television, but we do believe in, shall we say, an eternally resonating resonance that proclaims to the universe: We were here. We lived. We killed. Mission accomplished.

The Mainstream Media, though — until being shamed into it by Kirsten Powers last week in USA Today — has given the case scant attention and next to no coverage. An ever-shifting series of completely unconvincing excuses has been given, including “we don’t cover local crime stories”; that’s rich coming from the same gang that made the death of Trayvon Martin into national news for months on end.

Sex! Guns! Girls!

Michael Walsh — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:30:29 +0000

And they kick ass, too: the feel-good video of the year and certain to get the lefties’ panties in a puddle. Be sure to watch it in full-screen mode:

A video thank-you from the troops in Afghanistan to the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders, the Betty Grables of our time.

O Brave New World that has such people in’t.

John McCain, Useful Idiot

Michael Walsh — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 19:17:58 +0000

Here’s everybody’s favorite “conservative Republican” senator, John McCain, once again showing why he’s the most overrated man in Congress, and why it’s long past time for him to resign and leave the country he’s served so poorly in peace:

“I don’t understand it,” said McCain on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.”

“What are we afraid of? Why would we not want… if this issue is as important as all of us think it is, why not take it to one of the world’s greatest deliberative bodies – that’s one of the greatest exaggerations in history by the way – but you know why not take it up, an amendment and debate. The American people will profit from it,” said the Arizona senator.

“I don’t understand why United States senators want to block debate when the leaders said we could have amendments,” McCain added.

Stop right there and back up, senator: The “purpose” of the U.S. Senate is to debate and vote and let the people know where you stand? Um, no. The purpose is for you to do what the people of your state tell you to do. And in McCain’s case, that would be the people of Arizona. (Repeal the 17th Amendment!) And the people of Arizona have already stated, loud and clear, where they stand on the Second Amendment:

“The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the State shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain, or employ an armed body of men.”

Arizona State Constitution, Article 2, Section 26.

I understand that McCain thinks of himself as a national figure, the Guy Who Ran for President (and was handily defeated by a no-name freshman colleague from the ultra-corrupt Chicago Machine), but the fact remains that like his pal Chuck Schumer in the video above, the Senator from Keating has a glorified view of himself and his own imaginary moral rectitude.

Adding insult to injury, at practically the same time McCain was snuggling up next to a figure of almost comic malevolence in Schumer, the man who beat him in 2008 was gratuitously insulting the very state of Arizona McCain supposedly represents:

As President Barack Obama hit the road Wednesday to press for tougher federal gun laws, he singled out Arizona.

In a tweet, the commander-and-chief had this to say about the Grand Canyon State: “FACT: Almost twice as many people were murdered by guns from 2001-2010 in Arizona than killed in combat in Afghanistan. #DemandAction”

The president was referring to a new report that ranks Arizona as having the 4th highest level of gun violence in the country.

That “report,” by the way, was issued by the George Soros-funded, not-at-all-partisan Center for American Progress, which bills itself as fostering “progressive ideas for a strong, just and free America” and is run by former Clinton hack, John Podesta. I’ll leave it up to some of my PJ colleagues to analyze the report.

The Honorable Campaigner

In the meantime, it’s simply time for McCain to get off the national stage. He’s been a thorn in the side of whomever’s been unlucky enough to come in contact with him all his life: ask any naval officer his or her candid opinion of McCain and you will get an earful. For reasons known only to himself — and perhaps not even to himself — the “maverick” McCain is his own best friend, always willing to sell out his pals to the enemy, perhaps in the vain hope that his tormentors will finally be nice to him.

History Lesson: Racist Democrats and the Big Lie

Michael Walsh — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:07:14 +0000

The way we were

In order to escape their truly wretched past (click on the link for my short book on the subject), modern Democrats have adopted as an article of faith the bedtime story that, thanks to Tricky Dick Nixon’s “southern strategy,” the racists who had been the backbone of their party for the better part of a century suddenly switched to the GOP en masse some time around 1968, with the happy result that now all the racists are on the right. Presto — instant virtuousness and a clean slate!

It’s a lie, of course. But don’t take it from me, take it from my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson, who addressed this issue brilliantly last year:

Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.

As Kevin goes on to point out:

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.

And yet this myth persists — in fact, it’s just about the only response today’s Democrats have to their own sordid history: pinning it on the other guy. It makes them profoundly uncomfortable that among the 21 who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be found Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., the founder of the Hillbilly Dynasty; Robert “KKK” Byrd, the Conscience of the Senate; and Sleepin’ Sam Ervin of Watergate fame.

Just for laughs, let’s take a look at the electoral maps for 1968 (Nixon-Humphrey), 1972 (Nixon-McGovern), 1976 (Carter-Ford), and 1992 (Clinton-Bush) to see how the South voted.

Mike Bloomberg, Liberal Fascist (Part Two)

Michael Walsh — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:31:31 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

What’s wrong with this picture? Besides everything. Let’s go over the four basic rules of gun safety:

The gun is always loaded.
Never point a gun at anything you’re not prepared to kill.
Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.
Always be sure of your target and know what’s behind it.

Anyone who follows these four simple but very important rules is highly unlikely ever to have an accidental discharge of a firearm or, worse, an accidental shooting of another person. And yet this is what New York City’s nasty little fascist of a mayor, Mike Bloomberg, and his rogue’s gallery of Mayors Against Illegal Guns are currently advertising as normal gun-handling behavior.

This life-threatening nonsense has been widely pilloried in the blogosphere, by the estimable Emily Miller among others:

Mike Bloomberg is spending $12 million on attack ads designed to force U.S. senators to vote for national gun control laws that will supposedly save lives. However, the New York mayor’s commercials running in 13 states over the next two weeks could cause injury or death by showcasing irresponsible handling of a firearm.

Mr. Bloomberg’s organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, produced two ads featuring a man holding a shotgun, wearing plaid flannel with a camouflage cap and sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck. While a child swings on a tire in the background, the man says, “I support comprehensive background checks so criminals and the dangerously mentally ill can’t buy guns.”

To which I’d like to add: take a look at the suspiciously well-manicured, bearded intensity of the man in the video and tell me you want this guy anywhere near your children, or even your senators:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note also that Bloomberg and his fellow busybodies are attempting to disguise their fascism — “universal background checks,” a euphemism for a centralized information bank that would prevent parents from handing down weapons to their children without first going through the Washington bureaucracy — as “protection” for hunters. “Vote to protect gun rights” — yeah, right. The Leftist genius for disguising its true intentions has never been more brazen.

But let’s leave aside for the moment that the Second Amendment has little or nothing to do with hunting. The last thing the Leftists of the criminal organization masquerading as a political party and its hypocritical offshoot, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, want you to think about is your own personal safety, whether from street criminals or tyrannical government. (You can read all about a counter-organization, Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors, here.)

As these two videos make clear. They depict a “progressive’s” kindly fantasy of yeoman rural America, right down to the flannel shirt, the camo cap, and the pickup truck, as if to say “we’re one of you” — but only an urban liberal would fall for it. No shotgun owner in his right mind would have his gun locked and loaded, with his finger on the trigger, while his kids played in the background. Because (see Rule No. 1, above) even when the gun is not loaded, The Gun Is Always Loaded.

Mike Bloomberg, Liberal Fascist

Michael Walsh — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 18:56:09 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s New York City’s nasty little fascist mayor, the ersatz and erstwhile “Republican” who used the party to sneak into Gracie Mansion in the wake of the Giuliani administration’s successful war on street crime, and then double-crossed the GOP in his bald-faced but successful attempt to subvert term limits, lecturing David Gregory in his Boston honk that he knows what’s best for New Yorkers — and us.

Yes, it’s the Soda Jerk himself, tossing his pint-sized weight around as he attempts to remain politically viable after his reign as the successor to such corrupt and incompetent wretches as Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Abe Beame and David Dinkins mercifully comes to an end. Let’s unpack a little of what the Terror of Tinytown had to say.

We’re not banning anything. All we’re saying is, we want to show you just how big the cup is. If you want 32 ounces, take two cups to your seat. If you want 64, carry four. But our hope is, if you only take one, you won’t go back.

If you believe that, Bloomberg has a bridge to Brooklyn to sell you. And to which the only proper response — the one that until New York turned into a city of Upper West Side conformist sheep he would have justly received — is (to quote Kurt Schlichter) “bite me.”