A thought: 'Booby traps' are not limited to the Bush legacy


Upon reading the "Booby traps"
piece by Rosa Brooks, one favoring left-wing ideology (read the whole thing here), I pondered thusly:

Were there any bothers by this well-educated (that is to say, learned so as not to accidentally write in a biased manner) author regarding the actual booby traps left by Clinton, the political John the Baptist to the Obama-Jesus? I don't have the time to waste, but maybe this is something worth looking at.

What was the viewpoint after 9/11 from her? That GW Bush asked for it? That GW Bush's policies in their infancy invited this inordinately bold move? Was it was his dad's fault, GHW Bush, for keeping Kuwait Saddam Hussein-free? Or was Clinton's lack of interest in the overall values to a solid military - for the country nut-job Islamic terrorists love to hate the most, the U.S. - the thing that most certainly hurt us and
practically invited 9/11? What is her view on that end of the Afghanistan-Iraq issues?

Was there a reflection on the, umm, REAL tripwires that Clinton left for Bush, and the U.S.? Like a smaller, softer and otherwise less-prepared military, and such welcome signs for the 9/11 terrorists? "According to the latest national intelligence estimate" might have fit as an introduction to some lop-sided opinion pieces back then, and immediately after we took Hussein out of control. What did you say in those instances? It was Bush's fault then, too? He intentionally got the NIE's to favor what he wanted, did he?



You will indeed deserve the candidate-in-Chief should he get what the media expects. You will deserve him, you and all Pelosi-type liberals who believe in do-nothing, blame politics above all else. You will so sorely deserve him. Of course, who knows? Obama may be an entirely different person come one year from now. Being a puppet for far-left faction of the Democratic Party might only have been the pass he used; he might run things altogether differently. Unlike Pelosi, Dodd, Biden, Frank, Reid ... he might actually DO SOMETHING aside from awaiting the explosion of poorly drawn mortgages by his buddies in Fannie Mae and elsewhere.

If I were to dream a little dream, an Obama presidency might involve not simply denying responsibility then pushing nearly socialist fixes to serious financial issues.


Sadly, one thing Ms. Brooks nailed accurately was the Bush Admin's lack of thorough, truly forward-looking proactive leadership in the wars:
We know from Iraq that countering insurgencies requires a long, hard slog -- success not guaranteed -- and that the presence of foreign troops can help fuel nationalist insurgencies. More troops in Afghanistan might have turned things around if those troops -- and a less stingy reconstruction package -- had arrived five years ago, when Afghan hopes were high. After years of Bush administration malfeasance, increasing U.S. troop levels without an accompanying dramatic shift in regional strategy risks turning Afghanistan into another Iraq.
However, since I think she uses her brains too little for solid argument or logic and too much for bias, I react as such: It is all too convenient to point these failings out, and be a Monday morning quarterback. She ought to know better. Policy, public opinion, and a need to dangle the carrot of self-reliance in front of these long-oppressed countries makes it quite hard to try to dress this up as an abject failure of leadership. It is not what I would have preferred, but are truly reliable experts saying this is indeed what is occurring, or is this simply one talking head firing yet again at an easy target?

One thing that is clear to me: Ms. Rosa Brooks is opinionated, but a thorough, and I would dare to say baseless, nay-sayer regarding U.S. chances in our current military actions and generally in the so-called war on terror. She is, without question, a liberal commentator. Why she is not billed as such by the L.A. Times, I do not understand. Perhaps, like was made evident in the finance crisis, denying your ideals and your role in anything is a common trait among liberal commentators and politicians. Hmm. I guess we'll just have to see about that, just like if those "booby traps" go off in Obama's, or McCain's face.

Booby traps, indeed. Placed by boobs, protected by boobs, and now blamed on some other boobs by the initial booby-trap-causing boobs. Excellent work, Congress. Excellent.

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Rosa Brooks: 'Bush's booby traps for Obama'


This is regarding an opinion written by Ms. Rosa Brooks, a well-educated woman in the thick of Washington D.C. and its university
community.

Bush's booby traps for Obama - L.A. Times
The Bush administration is leaving behind foreign policy tripwires that could blow up on the next president.
... every new president is "tested" by national security crises, some predictable, some not. And I'm a lot less worried about the tests "the world" may offer Obama than about the national security booby traps the Bush administration is leaving behind for him.

On Iraq: We can't leave behind a stable Iraq without the cooperation of Iraq's neighbors, but this week's cross-border raid by Iraq-based U.S. troops into Syrian territory led Syria to break off high-level diplomatic contacts with U.S. officials -- contacts that had only recently been resumed. Heated negotiations over the future status of U.S. forces in Iraq have further increased tensions with Syria, Iran and the Iraqi government, which fear permanent U.S. military activities in the region. The current impasse in status-of-forces negotiations also threatens to leave U.S. troops in Iraq with no legal basis for their presence when their United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31. Happy New Year, Barack!

On Afghanistan: The Bush administration... mostly ignored Afghanistan for... six years. Meanwhile, the Taliban reconstituted itself, Al Qaeda leaders slipped away into Pakistan's ungoverned tribal regions. According to the latest national intelligence estimate, Afghanistan is now in a possibly irreversible "downward spiral."

On Pakistan-Afghanistan: Increasingly, U.S. forces have sought to reduce violence inside Afghanistan by staging cross-border counterattacks against suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda targets based inside Pakistan. Tactically, there's some logic to this. Strategically, not so much.

Pakistan has never been a paragon of stability, and years of unconditional Bush administration military aid for Pervez Musharraf's repressive government made things worse. Now, with the Bush administration increasingly violating Pakistani sovereignty with cross-border strikes, relations between the United States and the new government of Asif Ali Zardari are more tense than ever.
Aside from the L.A. Times (again) giving the election to Obama a full five days prior to Election Day, this piece is full of one-eyed (that is, decidedly biased) commentary. Rosa Brooks is not impressing me with her intellegence. She disappoints me with it. She is terribly biased. And by terribly, I mean she's "called in" her opinion in this piece. Someone with her edu and credentials could actually write solid journalistically appealing pieces, but instead she wrote this. Gag.

Amazingly, this was written five days before Election Day (early voting exists, but it won't truly count until after Election
Day). She's among those getting their coronation gowns ready. As if there's a landslide afoot. Not sure a roughly 48-43% race is a
landslide. Not in this country, yet. (And the liberals wonder why the conservatives throw around terms like Socialist, when a fairly tight
race is still afoot and they are pretty much impatiently waiting to go to the parties. This couldn't be much closer to a Venezuelan election
unless the state controlled the media.)

Interesting that, seeing the NIE isn't even released yet, she can see it and even exaggerate from it: saying something is in an "irreversible 'downward spiral'" is apparently a favorite saying among those who live in cushy houses in very safe 'hoods with excellent health coverage (dental, eye, catastrophic, ...). Glass houses, those are not. Well protected, from reality and risk, it would appear.


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following the money

Following the Money in the Hot House Races
McCAIN V OBAMA
Expenditures Breakdown - McCain
McCain has been stressing media (as one would expect) and travel costs. Media is not even half his costs. It is about 33%, around 1/3.
Since that's not a big deal, the media has found something else to make fun of.

Somehow, the fact that Palin and her family needed $150,000 in suitable clothes to be in front of the media makes the top end of news for three days, when $1500 suits by man-of-the-people Obama does not take that non-story out of the mix? Gag. We are such patsies. Of course, trying to suggest Obama is an outright Socialist won't work, either. (However, the Socialists do back Obama. Go figure. That's a bit creepy to me -- socialism works in very few circumstances, and beyond those it becomes the USSR, Venezuela or North Korea.)

Expenditures Breakdown - Obama
Obama, with the gobs of bucks from chiefly Hollywood and overseas, has spent virtually HALF, as a percentage and as a dollar amount more than McCain needless to say, on media. Just short of HALF his money goes to MEDIA! Yikes! Talk about buying opinions. This is around 220% of what McCain is putting into media, and it is even far more of a percentage than McCain is using.

A bit ironic, or creepy, that Obama is these days even more of a darling of mainstream, money-hungry media -- he's handed them a hefty $$$ amount in the past quarter alone! $187 million total, which I assume is across 20-22 months.

Obama also stresses salaries -- exceeding McCain's salaries, in dollars but also as a percentage, again. Obama-Biden obviously have a much larger organization, but oddly, while percentage is so high, the overall administrative is not even close to being twice McCain's. How? You won't hear this on the news, but there's talk on the street that Obama supporters are being paid to do what volunteers used to do. And no, this is not the same talk as that from which were borne the weird "Obama is a terrorist" or "Obama is a Muslim" chattering.

Strangely, TRAVEL costs for Obama are more than double McCain's dollar amount. I guess that personal logo-emblazoned jet gets expensive.

Open Secrets is always an interesting read.

Halloween: too close to Election Day for comfort?

Is it just this year, or does it seems a bit eery that Election Day in the U.S. is always the week after Holloween?

(I have nothing for Halloween. Life itself is just scary for me right now. I won't go into it.)

Barney Frank: is he just crooked, just lying, or just a sociopath?

I am still wondering why Dem congressman from Mass., Barney Frank, hasn't been accused publicly of pushing on the CRA mortgage deal-making since around 2006, at least, in order to see the whole thing collapse.

You'll notice that Mr. Frank, in front of cameras generally as unflappable as a mob boss, spends lots of time pointing out that he has no
blame in the matter prior to Feb. 2008. He knows this is silly and untrue, but like so many in Congress, he will not be called to blame because those who say he is to blame are likely knee deep in it somehow, too.

It is surprising, though, how much he does in accepting a leadership role in the cleanup, blaming the Bush Admin for the crumbling, when there were several folks from outside of Congress - Republicans, no less - who were voicing the desire to put some controls on FMA, CRA-happy banks and finance companies. Frank was one of those who pushed back, denying there were any issues with the way FMA, CRA, etc., were being handled. I guess being in the leadership, then being the outright leader, of the House Finance committee stresses theory over practical applications of the law, then?

Frank, while Chris Dodd has made himself almost nonexistent for several months, has been working hard to keep up the ass-covering for the past lack of coverage, laying blame all the way back to before 2006, when Dems took Congress control, and after 2000, when Clinton left office. Funny, then, that the legislation went through during the Clinton Admin, and the failure happened during the Dem leadership, despite efforts to effect change by people other than Frank.

He and Dodd, and a slew of others, are crooked, too crooked to realize how crooked they are and how shamefully they've led us to this. These bums need to be thrown out when their subscription to the Congress Clubhouse runs out. Dem, GOPs, I don't care. Those who are on record resisting resonsible oversight prior to the failure of the CRA tugboat need to be taken to task, every one of them. Dodd and Frnk were CHIEF among the culprits.

WHO IS GOING TO SHAKE THEM OUT OF IT? Not folks who read and believe a much from Ms. Brooks' biased commentary.

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Al Gore: My personal request to you

Al Gore is a buddy of MoveOn.org, and somehow that's OK.
My life currently sucks. This creepy kind of stuff just makes it suck more.


For all of you who thought any of the following:
#1. Al Gore deserves a Nobel Peace Prize
(Granted, he was second-billed, only SHARED it with a U.N. group,
but look who took all the P.R. from it. And media isn't liberal?
Please -- fine example right here of propagandizing for the left in mass media.)
#2. Al Gore cares about the environment, people, and things beyond politics
#3. Al Gore has some shame and/or sense of honor
#4. Al Gore never uses -- least of all, in writing -- wacky, inane scare tactics (See below, "science fiction movie")
#5. Al Gore is generally scary (see "rising up..." and "his vision of ... change")
#6. Al Gore should leave his elitist, expensively endowed, high-carbon-footprint mansion in Tennessee


MoveOn.org are the leftist propagandists of so-called progressive activist groups. Their idea of progress is lying about the enemy to get people not to just not vote for them, but to hate them -- thus, Obama has nothing to do with them (at least, as far as I recall). Thoroughly lying, not even bothering with exaggerating.

Who is their enemy? Conservatives. Republicans. Anyone who disagrees with Al Franken, Bill Maher, Michael Moore (and Bozo the Clown, I think, too -- seeing a pattern?).

And here's Al Gore, like Ted Kennedy before him, and -- funny this -- never Barack Obama, writing on behalf of MoveOn and Obama. Barack can't get his hands too dirty, though, since that would go against the Democratic trend toward protecting him from anything controversial, this professional candidate. Obviously one could never get to become presidential without being out there answering questions, etc., etc., rejecting -- at your leisure -- the paranoid, militarist crazy people who were your pastors, etc.

I wonder how all these people will feel when they recognize, theoretically, that Barack has been using, them like throwaway old dish towels, to get what blind ambition always wants: power. To be the end-all and be-all of -- well, of all. Al Gore has pretty much agreed to that, below.

Well, I hope it hurts very very bad, whenever that is. But, sadly, it is going to hurt for all of us, unless Obama proves to be a puppet and lets actual leaders do the job -- but he won't. Second thought, I doubt it will hurt at all, since they've got a belly full of Obama Kool-Aid already, swilling around, keeping them dopey, happy, sleepy and the rest of us grumpy.


Begin forwarded message: Dear MoveOn member,

I know something about what can happen in close elections. And we've only got 8 days left to make sure this isn't one of them.

We are witnessing history in the making. Millions of young people are getting involved in politics for the first time. A leader named Barack Obama is rising up to unite America behind his vision of progressive change. Yet we know from 2000 that progress is not inevitable. Victory can fall just out of reach. And the difference of a few thousand votes can put our country on a decidedly different path.

That's why I'm writing to you today to personally ask you to volunteer with the Obama campaign to help get out the vote this week. Everything we've worked for together hangs in the balance in these next few days. The Obama office in Orlando still needs more volunteers and I'm hoping you can help. Click here to sign up:

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=32&id=14722-6281706-wC3RYxx&t=1

I know that MoveOn members have the power to swing elections. In 2006, you made over 7 million calls—I made some myself—and together we won back both houses of Congress. And already this year, nearly 120,000 of you have signed up to volunteer for Obama in battleground states.

But the stakes this year are too great for any of us to sit it out. We're facing two wars and an economic meltdown. The climate crisis, in particular, is worsening more quickly than predicted and without strong leadership from the next president, we could face consequences right out of a science fiction movie.

Barack Obama will provide that leadership. But only if we all make sure he wins. Please sign up to volunteer today.

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=32&id=14722-6281706-wC3RYxx&t=2

Yes we can,

Al Gore

Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our 4.2 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs (yeah, just George Soros). And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. ...