Glenn Greenwald Loves Terrorists

Blenn Greenwald is wringing his hands over the inhumane conditions that Wikileaks terrorist Bradley Manning must live with.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

Well, gosh, I'm glad Manning isn't violent now, but he admitted punching an officer in the face (hence his demotion), so it isn't like there's no history of violence here.

Most importantly, if Manning hadn't wanted to be subjected to solitary confinement, he probably shouldn't have downloaded more than 260,000 cables and then given them to a guy like Julian Assange to harm his own country. This isn't "whistleblowing." It's treason.

From RedState:

Glenn Greenwald is constantly telling us that the reason the terrorists want to kill us is not because they are regressive degenerates who hate Western values like freedom and tolerance, but rather because they just don’t like our military policies and how we’re all meddling in their business.

Well, I am not a man without a heart, so I am willing to propose a solution to Greenwald’s problem which I am confident the Army would be amenable to. As an added bonus, it will serve as an opportunity to validate Glenn Greenwald’s views on the causes of Islamic terrorism. We will give Bradley Manning his pillow and blankie back, and remove him from solitary confinement. In fact, we’ll let him be around lots of people. We’ll call an emissary with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and tell them that we have a political prisoner to release to them, no strings attached. We will tell them that we are going to release to them an American who thoroughly rejects our interventionist policies and our military meddling - he rejects them so strongly, in fact, that he did everything in his power to see that American soldiers were killed and that Islamic terrorists were given access to our operational details. Therefore, we have decided to let him go to be with the Taliban so that he can self-actualize and join the fight against America with them.

I’m sure that like John Walker Lindh, the Taliban will be happy to have an American like this on board. So we’ll drive Manning out there to meet them at some safe remote location in Afghanistan somewhere, and we’ll release Manning and let him rush to join his new Taliban brethren.

Then we’ll tell them he’s gay.

Yeah, that'll work.

The Truth Is Whatever Hollywood Says It Is

Valerie Plame may finally convince the world that her version of events is the truth if historians watch her movie.

"Fair Game," based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions - not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post's Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.

Sad to say, we've this revisionist crap before.

1 Out of 280

That's the number of convictions against terrorist Ahmed Ghailani, who killed 224 Americans in bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Liberals are pompously arguing that the system worked and that it's unconscionable to complain that terrorists shouldn't be tried in a court system designed for petty thieves. What nonsense.

My favorite excuse is that Barack Obama's DOJ has promised to keep the guy in jail regardless of the trial results. Now there's a result that should send shivers down the spine of anyone to the right of Teh One. The idea that we're depending on the POTUS to decide this guy's dangerous enough to keep in jail regardless of the result of these show trials does put us smack dab in the middle of the moonbats' favorite metaphor: a banana republic.

As Patterico noted, the witness against Ghailani who was barred from his civilian trial probably would have been allowed in a military trial (Glenn Greenwald's assumptions notwithstanding).

This embarassment should have the Holder DOJ thinking twice before trying this again. In the meantime, we're all a little less safe because of the political correctness of this regime.

Why Civilian Trials for Terrorists Doesn't Work

Terrorist kills hundreds of Americans and is only convicted on one count. Civilian trials for terrorists is nutty and dangerous.

From Hugh Hewitt:

224 innocents were killed by this terrorist, including 12 Americans. They will never receive justice because of the absurd legal theories of a small group of justices and the refusal of Barack Obama and Eric Holder to demand of their left-wing colleagues in the Congress a continued insistence on military tribunals.

How on earth do liberals justify this bizarre notion of "fairness" and "justice"?

A Question We'd All Like an Answer To

Don’t Mention the War

The most striking thing about all three attacks is not what we heard, but what we haven’t heard. There has been very little talk about the global war that the Obama administration sometimes acknowledges we are fighting and virtually nothing about what motivates our enemy: radical Islam.

Obama's myopic view of world events as being America's fault leaves him unable to accept radical Islam is America's true enemy.

NY Terrorist Wanted Revenge for Drone Attacks

As Allahpundit says, do we go with the "it's all Bush's fault" meme or do we blame President Obama?

He’s not lamenting civilian casualties caused by the drone strikes, he’s lamenting the fact that they’ve been too darned successful in decapitating the jihadist hydra in the area.

What this says to me is that the drone attacks are a good thing, even though ramping up the war in Afghanistan is surely a burr under the Democrats' saddle.

False Equivalents

Right now on Facebook, PBS News is running a thread asking people what they remembered most about the day Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The first few comments were interesting:

--"The horror and actions of McVeigh and others, who called themselves Christians but proved they were pawns of the devil, committing heinous acts of murder."

--"Worrying upon the impact upon my Muslim friends & neighbors if the bombers hadn't turned out to have been who they turned out to have been...."

--"The staggering realization that someone calling themselves an American Patriot truly would choose to unleash his anti-government rage on a building full of American citizens, civilians, including those 19 children in the daycare facility."

--"Pres. Clinton's amazing speech, that those who attack their own will "inherit the wind,"..."

Notice the thread:

1. McVeigh was a Christian.

2. We should be most concerned with political correctness.

3. Patriotism is misplaced.

4. President Clinton was great!

If I didn't know better, I would assume that the commenters read Byron York's opinion piece,
How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain. York notes how President Bill Clinton and strategist Dick Morris exploited the tragedy in Oklahoma City to smear talk radio hosts and Republican critics of Clinton's administration. Apparently, the smear job has stuck, if the comments on PBS's thread are any indication.

Timothy McVeigh's horrendous attack on the Murrah Building in OKC has become the counterpoint by the left to any concerns about Muslim extremists in the U.S. Go to any liberal website and you'll find the claims that McVeigh was a Christian, proving that Christians are just as likely to fly airplanes into buildings to kill infidels as any group of Saudis. It's predictable outcome: note the extremism of millions of Muslims and within two comments, someone will bring up McVeigh's "Christianity."

McVeigh was a Christian the same way someone who isn't Wiccan is a Christian. If you were baptized in a church but never attend, how Christian are you? And how much does Christianity affect your worldview? I would guarantee that it has less than nothing to do with a violent guy like McVeigh. In 2002, Maggie Gallagher researched McVeigh's faith and whatever impact it had on his decision to bomb a federal building. The answer is zilch. McVeigh didn't kill 168 people in Oklahoma because he was a Christian. He killed them because he was a fanatic of a different sort.

When did McVeigh suddenly become an example of Christian extremism? Gallagher explains that we have an exact date: September 11, 2001.

On Sept. 17, 2001, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist blurted: "The hijackers are no more typical Muslims than Timothy McVeigh is a typical Christian." On Oct. 4, a USA Today columnist picked up the refrain, describing Sept. 11 terrorists as having "more in common with Timothy McVeigh, whose twisted paramilitary take on Christian retribution led him to avenge the Davidians' death."

Timothy McVeigh, Christian terrorist. How has such a patent falsehood spread so quickly and easily through responsible media? Evidently the psychic need to equate Christian fundamentalists, millions of whom have lived peacefully in America since its founding, with radical Islamic terrorists who commit mass murder simply overwhelmed standards of journalism. Or, one might add, common decency.

But the comparisons with McVeigh don't end with his religion. Bill Clinton is now using the 15th anniversary of the bombing to attack those who disagree with Barack Obama's government.

Finally, we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them...

As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.

Emphasis mine.

This is bullshit. It isn't like large groups of Americans are talking about violently overthrowing the government (although, if you read the blogs or watch MSNBC, you'd be forgiven for thinking there are millions of white people threatening to overthrow the government). What Clinton and the Democrats are scared about is that so many people--independents and conservatives--are taking to the street to protest the outrageous and obnoxious policies of this administration. These aren't violent protests like liberals engaged in in the 1960s. These are peaceful. And large. Which is why Democrats are astroturfing like it was 1978.

(T)his must be exquisitely frustrating for professional Lefty operatives. They have almost everything that they need. They have a solid majority in both Houses of Congress; an Executive branch run by a Democrat and which contains all sorts of people willing to quietly do them favors; a media that largely takes their claims at face value; a plethora of funding; and even a broad outline of goals. They have all these things, but they lack one thing – one thing – and that’s actual warm bodies. They can’t even fill a coffee house reliably, let alone a field.

The really funny part? They’ve never needed to pack the room or the field before; because the Right. Doesn’t. Do. Protests. We bragged about it: “We have jobs.” So they never had to worry about that, until now. And it turns out that being able to bring out the people is actually an absolutely vital prerequisite for having a successful populist movement.

The TEA Party attenders aren't Timothy McVeigh., nor are they the 9/11 hijackers, the shoe bomber or any of the other extremists we've seen, and comparing them to violent criminals is disgusting.

Waterboarding Is Not Torture

And we have the provisions to prove it.

While the country and the Congress have their eyes on today’s dog-and-pony show on socialized medicine, House Democrats last night stashed a new provision in the intelligence bill which is to be voted on today. It is an attack on the CIA: the enactment of a criminal statute that would ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”...

“Waterboarding” is specified. In one sense, I’m glad they’ve done this because it proves a point I’ve been making all along. Waterboarding, as it was practiced by the CIA, is not torture and was never illegal under U.S. law. The reason the Democrats are reduced to doing this is: what they’ve been saying is not true — waterboarding was not a crime and it was fully supported by congressional leaders of both parties, who were told about it while it was being done. On that score, it is interesting to note that while Democrats secretly tucked this provision into an important bill, hoping no one would notice until it was too late, they failed to include in the bill a proposed Republican amendment that would have required full and complete disclosure of records describing the briefings members of Congress received about the Bush CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. Those briefings, of course, would establish that Speaker Pelosi and others knew all about the program and lodged no objections. Naturally, members of Congress are not targeted by this criminal statute — only the CIA.

More to the point, this shows how politicized law-enforcement has become under the Obama Democrats. They could have criminalized waterboarding at any time since Jan. 20, 2009. But they waited until now. Why? Because if they had tried to do it before now, it would have been a tacit admission that waterboarding was not illegal when the Bush CIA was using it. That would have harmed the politicized witch-hunt against John Yoo and Jay Bybee, a key component of which was the assumption that waterboarding and the other tactics they authorizied were illegal. Only now, when that witch-hunt has collapsed, have the Democrats moved to criminalize these tactics. It is transparently partisan.

We've been told for years that waterboarding is torture. But once the Democrats got through using it for political theater, they are now forced to admit it wasn't and isn't.

UPDATE: Thank God for sunlight...and Republicans. The bill has been pulled. For now.

How Can They Claim They Weren't Informed?

CIA briefed 68 lawmakers on torture program, documents reveal

CIA officials briefed at least 68 U.S. lawmakers between 2001 and 2007 on enhanced interrogation methods like simulated drowning that were being considered or used against captured al Qaeda members, according to declassified documents released on Tuesday...

The CIA briefed lawmakers as it began seeking expanded authority for the interrogation program. Current House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then minority whip, attended a briefing on Abu Zubaydah's interrogation April 24, 2002, along with seven other members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the documents show.

The CIA did not begin using the interrogation techniques until after receiving legal guidance from the Department of Justice in August 2002.

History Will Thank Him

Cheney: Obama should thank George W. Bush

If [the administration is] going to take credit for [Iraq's success], fair enough ... but it ought to come with a healthy dose of 'Thank you, George Bush' up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations with respect to prosecuting that war were just dead wrong," Cheney told ABC News' Jonathan Karl.

IT'S A WAR, NOT A CRIMINAL OFFENSE

Sorry for the caps, but I'm becoming so exasperated with the Obama administration, that caps seem perfectly appropriate for talking about their complete idiocy in handling terrorists. This Charles Krauthammer piece is excellent in its analysis.

The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama's own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration's new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn't heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had been conceived for use only abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country's best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.

People need to remember that George W. Bush was not elected in 2000 as a war president. He had promised to be the Education President and offered a softer, more compassionate conservatism to handle domestic issues. What changed GWB was 9/11, when he realized that the jihadis were freakin' serious about killing as many Americans as possible whenever possible.

Will it take another 9/11 to change Obama's course? Unfortunately, I don't think losing 3,000 Americans would be enough to change Barack Obama from an advocate of criminalization to a president who recognizes war when he sees it. And that's what scares the frilly panties off me.

John Yoo Cleans Jon Stewart's Clock

Via National Review Online, we get to see what happens when you send a comedian in to do a journalist's job.



As NRO's Daniel Foster notes,

There are legitimate reasons to find the “enhanced interrogation techniques” Yoo’s legal opinions underwrote troubling, and good-faith debates on the subject have long animated The Corner. But what Yoo’s victory indicates is that Bush’s interrogation policies — right or wrong — were soberly and sincerely crafted responses to a difficult problem, not slapdash sadism.

Liberals have argued that GWB was simply a sadistic bastard wanting to torture innocents. The interview clearly counters that argument. It also shows what lawyers do so well versus comedians.

Stupid Quote of the Day

Comes from News Writer:

Violence of any kind, perpetrated against anyone, is terrorism.

Really? Really?

I can think of lots of "violence" that News Writer wouldn't consider terrorism. Like, say, abortion.

But there are lots of other examples of violence that would not come under any person's definition of "terrorism." Burglary which ends in the death of the burglar, for instance, would be violent but not considered terrorism. Or a robbery of a convenience store. Or even a football game (soccer games in Europe can get pretty violent, too).

News Writer is trying very hard to create some giant terrorism umbrella to cover a whole bunch of murderers she finds personally offensive, such as abortion doctor killers and crackpots, in order to diminish the distinction between jihadis and general murderers. She also wants us to believe that it's racism that causes conservatives to notice jihadis are typically Muslims who want to kill bunches of civilians for Allah.

So – Maj. Nidal Hasan? Terrorist. Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab? Terrorist. Zacarias Moussaoui? Terrorist. Khalid Sheikh Muhammed? Ramzi Binalshibh? Ramzi Yousef? Omar Khadr? Ayman al-Zawahiri? John Allen Muhammed? Terrorists, all. Jose Padilla? Er, foreign-sounding name (check), brown skin (check) – Terrorist! Barack Hussein Obama? Um, can I get back to you on that?

On the other hand — Jim David Atkisson? Crazy loner who thought liberals were the root of all evil so he opened fire on a Unitarian Church. James Von Brunn? Crazy white supremacist loner who opened fire in the Holocaust Museum. Scott Roeder? Crazy anti-abortion loner who shot Dr. George Tiller to death at his church. Michael Griffin? Crazy anti-abortion loner who killed Dr. David Gunn. Robert Poplawski? Crazy loner who was convinced President Obama was going to take his guns so he killed four police officers. Eric Robert Rudolf? Crazy loner who bombed a park during the Olympics, a gay bar and a women’s health clinic and then hid in the North Carolina mountains for years. Tim McVeigh? Crazy loner who blew up the federal building in OKC because he didn’t like the Democratic government. Warren “Gator” Taylor? Crazy loner who thought Obama was going to take his guns AND tax him to death, so he held a bunch of people hostage in a Virginia post office. Johnny Wicks? Crazy loner pissed off at the federal government about his Social Security claim so he opened fire at the Las Vegas federal courthouse. Glenn Beck? Crazy commentator who urges crazy loners to act on their crazy thoughts.

Shoot, News Writer isn't even bothering to distinguish between leftwing whackos (such as the Holocaust Museum killer) and rightwingers. Or between guys (they're always guys! Are we anti-male, too?) who kill people and radio hosts who "urge crazy loners to act on their crazy thoughts." No examples cited, notice.

I guess to News Writer, a guy putting a bomb in his undies and a radio commentator running a show are pretty much the same thing. Except, of course, that the second guy has a constitutional right to discuss whatever he wants to on his show. The first guy is a terrorist.

When New Zealanders Support and Harbor Al Qaeda, We'll Bomb Them, Too

New Zealander with severely limited understanding of America thinks it's racism, as opposed to terrorism, that makes Americans willing to kill Yemenis in the War on Terror (oops! I know that term is obsolete these days, but bear with me).

The US just murdered 49 Yemeni civilians - including women and children - trying to kill a Al Qaeda leader.

Now, I was thinking - "would they ever send cruise missiles into NZ?" Would places like Aotearoa, Australia, or Canada ever find 50 civilians murdered in an explosion as the US attempted to kill its enemies?

The answer is, of course, no. For some reason, predominately white, English speaking people would never have to fear the same violence the US feels entirely justified in visiting on Arab countries. I wonder why...?

This sort of post is just one reason I can't take PiTOR seriously. Is skin color really the only difference he sees between New Zealand and Yemen? Is kiwiland harboring Al Qaeda members planning to blow up Americans and we just haven't discovered it yet? I realize the Obama administration is completely incompetent, but it's difficult to believe that Barack Obama sits in the White House saying, "Let's bomb those sand n*****s back to the Stone Age! Yeah!"

This sort of idiotic argument played better when a white man occupied the White House.

The Hope and Change You Voted For

The Obama White House is more concerned about saving face and blaming the Bush administration for failures than protecting the American people from terrorists.

On December 26, two days after Nigerian Omar Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to use underwear packed with plastic explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration.

"The idea was that we'd show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could," says a staffer in the counsel's office. "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."

Get it? It's more important to blame GWB than admit the Obama Dream Team f*cked up.

This administration is a disgrace.

Oh, How Short Their Memories

I'm constantly amazed at the short memories liberals and their accomplices in the media have. Take this column by Mike Allen at Politico:

The GOP is blaming Obama for the attack. But Republican lawmakers, candidates, pundits and commentators -- and the Bush administration -- blamed the CLINTON administration for 9/11. In September 2006, Secretary of State Rice told the New York Post editorial board, “Nobody organized this country or the international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11. … We just weren’t organized as a country either domestically or as a leader internationally. But what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton Administration did in the preceding years…We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda.” … Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a few hours after the attacks: “We had Bill Clinton backing off, letting the Taliban go, over and over again.” … Then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), later CIA director, in The New York Times, 10/22/01: “[T]he fact is that the Clinton administration was not very interested in our intelligence community, did not spend very much time worrying about, or using it, or investing in it. … It’s impossible not to go there if you really do an anatomy of why we are where we are today.”

The blogosphere wasn't in full swing in September 2001, but within months, there were plenty of lefty bloggers telling us how safe we were with Bill Clinton at the helm and how terrible GWB was at protecting American interests. My question for Allen and leftwingers now trying the, "B-but you said" defense is this: why was it impermissible to blame terrorist attacks on the previous administration when a Republican was the president but the same attacks are reasonable today?

Perhaps their memories are short. Or perhaps Allen and his ilk don't read Pandagon, Daily KOS, Echidne of the Snakes or even backwaters like Iowa Liberal. If he did, he would have read repeatedly how inept George Bush was at national security and how Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 was a completely accurate documentary that really told the truth about the jihadi attacks. And most would be telling us that the attack at Fort Hood as well as the underwear bomber are still GWB's fault, one year after he left office.

For the record, I didn't blame Bill Clinton for 9/11 any more than I blamed George Bush for it. But after watching the left compare President Bush to Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin, I am no longer in a forgiving mood. I've promised not to compare Barack Obama to Hitler or Stalin, but neither will I give him a millimeter of slack when he stumbles and falls flat on his face. Particularly when his government was warned about the underwear bomber back in October. Thank a liberal.

Obama's Non-War on Terror

A terrorist war Obama has denied

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management...

Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.

People who want to blow up airlines and do the work of Al Qaeda are not the same as penny ante thugs holding up a liquor store and don't deserve the same constitutional protections, since their attempts to harm America will not be stopped with one arrest. But the Obama administration is determined to revert to Bill Clinton's approach to terrorism: it's simply a police action. As Krauthammer notes, any president who can't call a jihadist a jihadist is putting us all in danger's way unnecessarily.

Is Michael Moore Going To Make the Christmas Attack into a Movie?

That's a rhetorical question because of course he won't. But wouldn't it be great if he did? We already know that Obama had intelligence suggesting such an attack was possible. We know that the CIA knew about this guy because the bomber's father actually went to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria to warn them. And we have the president going snokeling instead of dealing with the failed attack. It seems like a lot of material for Moore.

If Obama were a Republican.

Instead, we'll be treated to more excuses, more whining and more attempts to blame GWB for Barack Obama's ineptitude. When will these clowns realize that a year into their administration, it's not George Bush's fault Obama's inexperience leaves him ill prepared to deal with the crises America faces?

28 Terror Plots Foiled Since 9/11

Not bad.

On December 25, 2009, a Nigerian student attempted to ignite a mixture of powder and liquid on a Northwest Airlines flight landing in Detroit, Michigan. Passengers helped to stop the suspect from carrying out his mission after the device failed to fully detonate, marking the 28th foiled terror plot against the United States since 9/11.

This attempted plot is an example of how terrorists continue in their attempts to harm Americans. But it also illustrates the need to work with international partners on countering terrorism, while defending the intelligence and law enforcement tools that work inside the U.S. to disrupt plots, as well as the importance of going after overseas terrorist sanctuaries to stop terrorists from using these locations as a staging ground for operations.

The individual involved in the plot, believed by media accounts to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was a 23 year old engineering student living in London. He had boarded a plane from Nigeria to Amsterdam, and was flying from Amsterdam to the United States when he attempted to detonate a device as the plane began to land. The device failed to detonate, and passengers move quickly to stop the passenger from trying again, leading to his arrest by U.S. authorities.

I've often said that passengers will never again go peacefully to their doom after 4 Muslim extremists flew jets into the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. This passenger's behavior when, yet again, faced with a Muslim extremist, proves my point.

How many of the 28 plots were hatched by Muslim extremists and/or Al Qaeda associates? And how many were hatched by Christian extremists, the ones liberals are always telling us are as dangerous and deadly to Americans as the Muslim variety?

Apparently, liberals think terrorist attempts to kill Americans isn't so scary anymore. I guess they've just been too safe under GWB to realize these guys mean business.

This does give support to the nutters out there (like me) who think closing Gitmo is a bad idea. Anyone have info on what the Pandagonistas are saying?

Another question, is this President Obama's worse than My Pet Goat moment and will the Left savage him for it? The worst that could be said about GWB was that he continued reading a children's book for a nine minutes while he tried to figure out what 9/11 meant. Obama played golf and had a grand time for the entire day at Christmas.

Wasn't the U.S. Supposed to Get All the Oil?

Someone should have told the Iraqis.

Those who claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 to get control of the country's giant oil reserves will be left scratching their heads by the results of last weekend's auction of Iraqi oil contracts: Not a single U.S. company secured a deal in the auction of contracts that will shape the Iraqi oil industry for the next couple of decades. Two of the most lucrative of the multi-billion-dollar oil contracts went to two countries which bitterly opposed the U.S. invasion — Russia and China — while even Total Oil of France, which led the charge to deny international approval for the war at the U.N. Security Council in 2003, won a bigger stake than the Americans in the most recent auction. "[The distribution of oil contracts] certainly answers the theory that the war was for the benefit of big U.S. oil interests," says Alex Munton, Middle East oil analyst for the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, whose clients include major U.S. companies. "That has not been demonstrated by what has happened this week."