President Obama’s first Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, set the tone for the president’s administration when he said, in an interview November 9, 2008, shortly after the election that brought him to power, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.” This approach, of course, enabled the Obama administration to take advantage of the economic crisis to create a trillion dollar “stimulus” plan to reward his backers and set back true economic recovery, and to nationalize, to some extent, the banking industry, the auto industry, and health care.
If Emanuel and the president can milk adversity so effectively, imagine what the president and his current advisors can do with success. The American people did not have to imagine what President Obama could do with success. They saw it and heard it when the president delivered his speech to the world upon the killing of the world’s most notorious villain. There is no question that President Obama deserves a lot of credit for his effectiveness in repeatedly claiming an undue amount of credit where only very limited partial credit is due (not to mention removing creditor status from all too many people to whom it used to be due).
At the time this is being written, it appears clear to everyone that the courier whose identity led to the discovery of bin Laden’s last lair appears to have been identified only because of the use of interrogation techniques approved by President Bush and his predecessors, and disapproved and discontinued by President Obama and his supporters. It’s true that the trigger was pulled on Obama’s watch, but its target was located only because of President Bush’s policies.
It has also already come to light that the first breakthrough in solving this case came about in 2006, again on President Bush’s watch, and there would have been nothing to watch in Pakistan this year had the first breakthrough not been attained, not only because of President Bush’s policies but because it came about on his watch, as well.
The Navy SEALs who sealed the deal were highly trained, and certainly not novices. If they were highly trained, most of the training of most of them presumably took place in and under the policies set forth and implemented in the Bush administration.
In the 15 lines of the transcript of President Obama’s victory speech notifying the world of bin Laden’s killing, beginning with the passage about Obama’s direction to the head of the CIA until the passage about taking custody of bin Laden’s body, Obama referred to himself no fewer than seven times, once virtually every other line, with five times “I” and two times “my.” His entire speech contained only a single reference to President Bush, the true hero of the War on Terror, and even then it was only parenthetically that President Bush has also made it clear that our war is not against Islam. In fact, President Obama hasn’t even been able to articulate to whom the war is against – terror – and forbids the people working under him to acknowledge the enemy, let alone to fight the enemy as effectively as possible, considering that interrogation techniques under Obama have been watered down to eliminate water boarding and other proven effective methods of getting at the truth, and, ultimately, at the enemy.
The president proved to be almost supernatural in his ability to generate support among his collegiate colleagues, even when natural expressions of support would have been forthcoming anyway. According to Sunlen Miller, in a dispatch on behalf of ABC News that appears to have been clocked at 11:40 P.M. May 1st (note the timing), Miller’s headline was “Osama bin Laden’s Death Leads to Spontaneous Celebration in front of the White House.” The first sentence of the dispatch is very telling: “As the President began his statement announcing the death of Osama bin Laden inside the White House, a large crowd of people… had gathered outside the White House gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, waving flags and dancing.” If his surprise bombshell speech first began at 11:35 P.M., isn’t it intriguing that a crowd would have gathered “[a]s the President began,” and that they would have suddenly been spontaneously generated equipped with flags for the occasion? Many pseudo-liberals doubt that G[o]d Almighty could create the world in six days (although sophisticated creationists have found many ways to reconcile the Biblical account with many scientific findings, which combined are much more rational than the belief that a world as complex as ours evolved by random means), and believe the world took millions of years to evolve, but they have no trouble believing that hundreds of students appeared ex nihilo, out of nothing, equipped with flags, fully revved up to celebrate an event that was virtually totally unknown outside of the White House moments before.
Gathering of the mysterious crowd
Somehow this crowd mysteriously appeared at a strategic location on Pennsylvania Avenue to focus attention on the role of the present occupant of the White House, rather than the roles of the seals in training or the soldiers in the field or of all of the other people whose specific contributions and personal heroism actually helped make this event possible and gave the commander in chief the opportunity to say “okay.” Only later in the evening did true grass-root gatherings form, especially in the vicinity of Ground Zero and Times Square, where the focus was on the history of the events that led up to this evening’s festivities.
In Obama’s speech, he managed to take credit for “[t]he death of bin Laden” as “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda,” completely ignoring the uprooting of all of the Taliban and al Qaeda people from leadership positions in Afghanistan, the elimination of countless cells throughout Afghanistan, the elections in Afghanistan, the many enemy combatants killed in Afghanistan, and all of the intelligence gained from the captives in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere throughout the world, enabling this evening’s announcement to become virtually inevitable. Almost all of these events, and many more, were achieved, of course, on the watch of Obama’s predecessor, who was granted only one parenthetical mention at one point in his successor’s self-promoting speech, as indicated above.
It is interesting to note the president’s claim that “counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound,” even though we all now know that this compound should have been known to and suspected by the Pakistanis for years prior to the Obama administration’s epiphany, which presumably came about as a result of the interrogation techniques discussed earlier.
Obama administration, condemning collateral damage and Israel
It is also interesting to note that the Obama administration joins the chorus of liberals in condemning collateral damage when Israel defends itself by shooting at the sources of the rockets and missiles coming from the Gaza that the Israelis generously donated to the terrorists, and Palestinians use their women and children as human shields, yet Obama’s men had no problem shooting at Osama even though it has been reported that this revolutionary “hero” and role model reputedly used one of his wives as a human shield when the Americans came with their guns blazing, and the Americans shot at him anyway (with full justification, most people believe).
[Author’s follow-up note: Although authoritative sources originally reported that Osama used one of his wives to shield himself from the attempts to kill him, subsequent reports indicate this was not the case; however, the main point remains that there was collateral damage to civilians in the operation (to the extent that people who chose to be present in Osama's compound could be deemed civilians) that terminated in the termination of Osama and his atrocities, so that critics of Israeli policies of retaliation for premeditated and intentional acts of terrorism notwithstanding the possibility of unintended collateral damage who simultaneously defend Obama’s authorization of comparable retaliation for premeditated and intentional acts of terrorism despite the possibility of unintended collateral damage are now exposed for their further hypocritical double standard.]
Somehow or other, when Obama closed his self-serving presentation with a reference to a nation “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” it seemed to have a hollow ring to it in light of Obama’s repeated vilification of and blame on his predecessors for most of the nation’s ills, his attempts to nationalize at least partly some of our main industries, and his blatant bribes by spending “stimulus” money on rewards to the groups and unions that voted for him, and his blatant outrageous and anti-democratic “exemptions” to his glorious health care program for many of these same groups and unions that make it clear that they do not consider his health care program to be set up to enable them to thrive, even though they are among the most enthusiastic to impose the responsibility on other people to fund “universal health care.”
I of course join those who are pleased that justice has been brought to bear on bin Laden. I only hope that President Obama will begin to allow the benefits of justice, freedom, and free markets to serve the honest working citizens of our great country.
