Bearing All For Obama

It’s been one of those months.

Departing President Of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – unlike Supreme Leader for life Ali Khamenei, the presidency of Iran is term-limited –has paid the United Nations, Babel on the Hudson, his final visit.

His unvarying spiel was the same. Oil rich Iran is engaged in the peaceful production of nuclear facilities. No, Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Israel is a fake state that historically has no roots in the Middle East. Iran will obliterate the fake state if Israel should be presumptuous enough to attack Iran facilities that are producing nuclear weapons to obliterate Israel-- on and on.

Iran has a military presence in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. It has both in the past and present destabilized Iraq when the United States was in the process of bringing the fruits of liberty to Iraq following the untimely demise of Saddam Hussein. The U.S. military, under the leadership of President George Bush, term-limited Mr. Hussein. The cause of death listed on the coroner’s report for Osama bin Ladin – along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the architect of the destruction of the Twin Towers buildings in New York – was “death by Seals.”

For some reason, the patient people of New York City, attacked with an assist from mad Sheikh bin Ladin, since deceased, have not marched en mass on the United Nations the way earlier Frenchmen, invigorated by liberté, égalité, fraternité, marched on the Bastille.

Perhaps their tolerance of the rumbustious Mr. Ahmadinejad can be put down to good manners. Bill Buckley use to say that the trouble with bad manners, like those so often exhibited in militant theocracies, is that they sometimes lead to murder, as was the case when TERRORISTS sacked the American embassy in Libya and murdered American Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The TERRIORIST attack, first thought by the Obama administration to have been occasioned by a film that dishonored the Prophet Mohammed, apparently was planned by combustible TERRORISTS to celebrate the successful TERRORIST attack on the twin Towers in New York.

After much fidgeting, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was persuaded to admit that U.S. Ambassador Stevens was not assassinated by an unruly crown protesting a film denigrating the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. The consulate in Libya – recognized by most civilized nations under international law, as U.S. territory – was destroyed by TERRORISTS to coincide with September 11, the date of the destruction of New York’s twin towers.

It is to be supposed that President Barack Obama did not recognize the obvious connection because there was no calendar handy at the White House for the past week, in the course of which Mr. Obama persisted in calling the offensive film the flashpoint for the TERRORIST assault. After eight days of massaging the message, the White House finally fessed up and acknowledged the murder of Mr. Stevens was a TERRORIST act, information it was in possession of two days after the attack. Because the property was not immediately secured, the FBI, even today, has not had access to the site.

It may seem to the reader of these lines that the author has needlessly emphasized the word “TERRORIST” throughout. But there is a purpose to this method: Those who read these words aloud will soon get used to the “T”word. In time, it will become as familiar to them as other unmentionables, and with repetition, they will lose their logophobia and begin to call things by their right names.

On the Hollywood front, the singer, stripper Madonna has come out strongly in favor of Mr. Obama, according to the The Hill, a respected Washington publication read by most politicians on the Hill:

 

“Madonna offered a profanity-laced endorsement of President Obama at her concert Monday night, which involved the singer stripping down to her underwear to reveal the president's name written on her body.

“’You all better vote for f---ing Obama okay, she told the crowd at Washington's Verizon center.

“Later in the show, Madonna took off her shirt and pulled down her pants to show she had ‘OBAMA’ written in all capital letters across her lower back.

“’When Obama is in the White House for a second term I'll take it all off,’ she said to cheers and whistles from the audience.

Apparently this is not an idle threat. 
Madonna – no relation to THE Madonna – has been bearing parts of herself all over the world during her present tour. It’s still a matter of conjecture whether Ms. Madonna’s threat will intimidate people into voting for Mr. Obama. No polls have yet been taken.

Is Obama A Liability?

President Barack Obama is due in Connecticut on September 16th in Stamford to raise money for U.S. Senate candidate-State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, and Mr. Blumenthal’s office has just released a media report that the attorney general-U.S. Senate candidate will show up for the event.

Mr. Blumenthal’s statement is straightforward enough. Over a twenty year period, citizens of the state have come to expect straight-talk from Attorney General Blumenthal:

“I look forward to welcoming the President of the United States to Connecticut. It is an honor to have his support and his assistance. His visit will make a difference for us, energizing our supporters and helping us raise the resources we need against my opponent who is spending an unprecedented $50 million on her campaign.”

A carefully crafted caveat was delivered by Blumenthal spokesman Marla Romash: “Dick has always said when he agrees with the President he’ll stand with him and when he doesn’t he won’t … The bottom line here is the most important thing for Dick has always been and always will be what’s best for Connecticut.”

And what’s best for Connecticut are dollars for Dick.

The Linda McMahon campaign, rather hoping to pin Blumenthal to Obama’s increasingly truncated coattails, issued its own caveat through press spokesman Ed Patru:

“Dick Blumenthal is just another politician. He hasn’t been honest about special interest money, and he supported a partisan assault on health care that was put together behind closed doors and now is costing us all. He supports the President’s national energy tax, and he supports higher taxes on Connecticut’s small businesses. We are not going to get our economy growing again by electing more politicians who don’t get it. More of the same is just not good enough.”

Earlier in the week, former Chairman of the Democratic Party John Droney, an old time political pugilist, was asked by Dennis House on “Face the State” whether he thought it was a good idea to invite Obama to Connecticut to campaign for Democrats. With refreshing honesty, Mr. Droney -- subbing on the program for the party’s semi-invisible chairwoman Nancy DiNardo – replied he did not think that would be helpful. Using Mr. Obama as a dollar magnet for Democratic candidates was, on the other hand, a horse of a different color.

There was a day when Mr. Obama could be relied upon to sent a chill up the leg of Chris Mathews, the formidable host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” but this was during a campaign in which Mr. Obama, glancing nervously over his shoulder at Hillary Clinton, steered his ship towards a more moderate center, except on some few vote churning issues such as bringing troops home from the war in Iraq by the Spring of 2008, closing down GITMO weeks into his presidency and promising to devote quality time in the oval office to bringing in Osama bin Ladin -- dead or alive.

Since having been elected president, the national economy, perversely refusing to respond to Mr. Obama’s stimulus packages, continues to steam, full speed ahead, towards economic sand bars; the nation’s Gross National Product is heading for the cemetery; GITMO is still open for business; the war in Afghanistan, a collection of tribes sometime called the “graveyard of empires,” is proceeding apace; terrorists whose names no one can pronounce are being tried in military courts; the post-terrorist security apparatus in the United States continues to threaten the liberties of non-terrorist citizens; the trial in New York city of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11, has been derailed; Iran’s nuclear machinery, fine tuned both by China and Russia, will soon be fully functioning; the Democratic controlled U.S. Congress has passed, over the strenuous objections of minority Republicans, two massive spending programs; the Frankensteinian Dodd-Frank bill regulates many untidy corners of the economy but leaves Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the chief culprits of the Bush era economic collapse, unmarred by the Dodd-Frank regulatory deep sea squid.

Mr. Droney, and some few other concerned centrist Democrats, are necessarily queasy about all this.

The good news is that while perambulating around Waterbury (unemployment rate 14.4 percent), New Britain (13 percent) and Torrington (11 percent), knocking on doors and talking to non-millionaires in Connecticut’s 5th District, Democratic U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy has discovered “anecdotal signs” that the economy is recovering and that the Obama’s stimulus, “an appropriate blend of tax cuts and stimulus spending,” part of a larger vision in his party’s recovery strategy, has worked its magic.


Mr. Murphy’s Republican opponent, Sam Caliguiri, cool to Mr. Murphy’s anecdotal evidence, is convinced that his opponent, unable to read the signs of the times, has kissed reality goodbye.

While Mr. Murphy has not asked the president to campaign for him, he told the Housatonic Times, “I’d welcome him to come to Connecticut. It would be a great opportunity to focus national attention on the challenges people are facing in this tough economy.”

Republicans are likely to agree.

The Left and Blumenthal

Whoa!

Mr. Gregg Levine of FireDogLake has launched several rhetorical missiles at the highly partisan Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for Chris Dodd’s seat in the U.S. Senate:

“Those who know Dick tell me that he is the quintessential finger-in-the-wind politician. Hell, just listening to this short interview on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, I got the image of some classic Hollywood film caricature of the blowhard, entrenched, do nothing, say anything gasbag. So, what struck me while listening was which way this weathervane thought the wind was blowing.”

Mr. Levine is disappointed both with Blumenthal’s hawkish view on President Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan and the attorney general’s public disagreement with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder concerning the proposed trial of terrorist Kahlid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian court.

Mr. Levine quotes an offending passage from Blumenthal’s interview:

“I am determined to chart my own course in Washington, different in many respects from the Administration. I’ve taken the position that the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed should be in a military tribunal away from the United States, or, I’m sorry, away from New York and New Haven, and on a number of other issues, for example opposing the reconfirmation of Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, I have charted my own course, I’m prepared to do it, and issue-by-issue debate either side in what I think is the right thing to do.

“Drivel,” says Mr. Levine.

He then tears into Blumenthal with a meat axe.

Obama, Mr. Levine notes, is still popular in Connecticut, “a very blue state.” And yet in this and other interviews, the Democratic senatorial hopeful has gone to some pains to disavow Obama’s publicly declared position, admittedly now in flux, on no fewer than three important issues: the trial of terrorists in civilian courts; the reappointment of Ben Bernanke as Fed Chair; and the Mirandizing of terrorist suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

On the Mirandizing of terrorists, Blumenthal fails to satisfy Mr Levine, who once again quotes Blumenthal in the interview:

“Let’s talk in real terms about what Mirandizing means. It means reading somebody their rights as opposed to simply interrogating them. I think there’s a general consensus now that in that instance there may have been no real need to read Miranda rights before some interrogation took place. And, in my view, with a terrorist, with our nation potentially at risk, interrogation should be pursued, and the consequences may be that some evidence may be inadmissible, but there is obviously in that case, overwhelming evidence without whatever may be gained or gleaned from the interrogation. So, bottom line, interrogation should have been pursued by a specially trained group of agents without necessarily a lawyer being present, and if at some point there was diminished usefulness to the interrogation, other criminal interrogation should have been applied perhaps by other authorities.”

“Utter garbage,” observes Mr. Levine.

And when Blumenthal is not spewing garbage, he is spouting “inaccuracies” and “inanities” such as this:

“Very often the reading of rights diminishes the usefulness of subsequent interrogation, the reason being simply that the defendant chooses to have a lawyer present, or chooses to cease talking. And I would have pursued the interrogation without the Miranda rights because I believe that the usefulness of learning about contacts from Yemen and elsewhere in the world and potential immediate attacks that may be known to this individual outweigh the benefits of having that at the trial.”

Not only are such sentiments “stupid” in Mr. Levine's view but they are “completely counter to the position of the administration of a president still thought popular in Dick’s state.”

On the whole, Mr. Levine’s is not a positive review thus far of Blumenthal’s positions on matters of importance to the left. Indeed, at this rate, it will be difficult for Blumenthal to avoid the charge over at FireDogLake that the attorney general is beginning to sound like his likely Republican opponents or, at worse, Dick Cheney.

Local leftist have not yet weighed in on Mr. Levine’s trenchant analysis.