UPDATE: We now have a report that the former commander of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) has accused the administration of ignoring and even falsifying the Islamist threat.
“You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists,” he said.
The administration, he continued, wants “us to think that our challenge is dealing with an undefined set of violent extremists or merely lone-wolf actors with no ideology or network. But that’s just not the straight truth.”
Flynn left government last summer, a year before scheduled. He did not provide a reason for his early departure, but sources close to Flynn told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that he was forced out after years of making arguments the Obama administration did not want to hear.
Flynn, and many of the analysts who worked for him, consistently reported on the global nature of the jihadist threat and the interconnectedness of the groups driving it. They mapped overlapping networks of al Qaeda and its offshoots and rejected arguments, pushed primarily by the White House and the CIA, that killing leaders of “core al Qaeda” inevitably meant a diminishing threat.
The Obama people do not want to hear what DIA says.
Sources familiar with the documents tell TWS that they include troubling information about al Qaeda’s plans to empower its franchises, new details about the many relationships with Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service and, significantly, support that the group has received over the years from senior figures in the Iranian regime.
In classified analyses based heavily on the documents, the DIA directly challenged the Obama administration’s claims that the threat from al Qaeda was diminished or fading. Flynn hinted at this in an interview he gave to James Kitfield of Breaking Defense shortly after he left government. “When asked if the terrorists were on the run, we couldn’t respond with any answer but ‘no.’ When asked if the terrorists were defeated, we had to say ‘no.’ Anyone who answers ‘yes’ to either of those questions either doesn’t know what they are talking about, they are misinformed, or they are flat-out lying,” Flynn said.
I have never been a fan of Obama. I didn’t like his ideas on foreign policy before he was elected.
I don’t know how the elections will turn out but I do believe that a victory by Obama in the fall election will be seen as an American retreat from the world. Some people see that as positive, especially those people in Berkeley who rank Marine recruiting stations with adult bookstores. They are big Obama supporters.
I didn’t like his rise to power in Illinois, one of the most corrupt states in the union.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
I don’t blame him but they all got on the bandwagon.
I didn’t like his economic policies or “ideas.”
Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.
The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Redevelopment Act, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.”
Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.
Of course, that was Clinton.
I didn’t like his tax plan.
Under Sen. Obama’s proposal, returns for very low earners would rise to around 6% above inflation — about the same return as on stocks, except with none of the risk. Compounded over a lifetime’s contributions, the difference in the “deal” offered to workers of different earnings levels would be extreme.
This would change Social Security from self-funding to a welfare program funded by high income earners. It would also add to the deficit that is looming for the program due to the Baby Boom Generation retirement.
Moreover, this payroll tax cut plan would reduce Social Security’s tax revenues by around $710 billion over the next 10 years. If made permanent, the Obama tax cut would increase Social Security’s long-term deficit by almost 60% and push the program into insolvency in 2034, versus 2041 under current projections.
It was all nonsense, of course.
I didn’t like his attitude about science.
The Marxists, like our all-too-probable next president have their own rules about virtue and truth. They are useful only insofar as they promote the desired end. Science depends on truth and the willingness to tell the truth and accept it. Why do so many scientists see enemies on the right but not on the left ?
I have previously written about The Second Era of Bacteriology, which I believe will solve the energy problem for a while until nuclear energy takes over. The second area in which science is moving quickly is genetics and human behavior. Bacteriology may be safe from the Marxists but behavior is a major area of their concern. Larry Summers found out how intolerant they are and that was before we had a leftist president.
Worse was to come.
The new era of Democrat majorities promised nothing but pork spending and deficits, which I predicted.
OK so we raise tax rates in a recession and that increases revenue ? Democrats seem to think that people will not alter behavior when incentives change.
Even some non-partisan observers question the wisdom of announcing a plan to raise taxes in the midst of a recession. But senior White House adviser David Axelrod said in an interview that the tax proposals reflect the ideas that won the election last fall.
That worked well. Then came Obamacare.
He is telling people he will cut costs by rationing.
Obama’s central message so far has focused on the promise of lower costs for health coverage and more accessibility. But the poll (conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group) suggests that these aren’t the most potent issues.
In fact, a mere 29 percent of respondents agreed with the promise that their premiums would go down as a consequence of reform. And regarding “accessibility,” only 9 percent said that in the last five years they were without coverage all or most of the time.
Moreover, when asked, “Who do you think will benefit most from reform?” a whopping 60 percent chose “other people, but not [me].”
The majority of the country may have been dumb enough to elect him but they’re not this dumb. Mickey Kaus says It’s Obama’s own fault for raising the issue of cost and then getting into the whole issue of “effectiveness research.”
Well, we saw how that turned out.
I was pointing out how bad Obamacare is but it was a losing battle at the time.
Perhaps nothing in the Obamacare legislation embodies the top-down, command-and-control nature of Progressive healthcare more than the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a 15-member panel of “experts” to be appointed by the President. There are three particular features of the IPAB that illustrate this fact: The IPAB will control all healthcare spending, public and private. The IPAB has been awarded near-dictatorial power. And the IPAB is designed to be a nearly immutable entity.
That issue kind of faded away in the general incompetence of the launch and the delays in the mandate.
Well, here we are a few weeks after his second inaugural. I could not bear to watch his State of the Union speech and I will leave it to others to describe that tissue of lies.
The administration has been clueless in the Middle East, an area that Obama seemed to think he knew something about.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that President Obama will review his Middle Eastern policy after the unrest in Egypt subsides. The future, in whose spaces the administration believed its glories to lie, plans to review its past failures in the same expansive place. Yet time and oil wait for no one. Crude oil prices surged as the markets took the rapid developments in. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu observed that any disruption to Middle East oil supplies “could actually bring real harm.”
That was before his friends in the Muslim Brotherhood took over and before they were thrown out by the army a couple of years later.
Now, he is waging his war with Israeli PM Netanyahu.
President Barack Obama and U.S. officials were completely blindsided by the announcement that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will come to Washington to address a joint session of Congress this spring — a move that’s rattled the White House and diplomatic officials.
The announcement from House Speaker John Boehner’s office this week came after several high-level interactions between U.S. and Israeli officials, including a phone call between Obama and Netanyahu and a multi-hour meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, a senior administration official told CNN.
The purported reason why Obama is upset is that Israeli elections are coming and this interferes with them. Of course, that is a lie as Obama has sent his election team to Israel to defeat Netanyahu.
Haaretz reporter Roi Arad revealed in an article in the Hebrew edition today that the foreign funded organization, “One Voice”, is bankrolling the V-2015 campaign to defeat Binyamin Netanyahu’s national camp in the March 2015 Knesset Elections.
One indication of the generous financing is that it has now flown in a team of five American campaign experts (including Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign’s national field director) who will run the campaign out of offices taking up the ground floor of a Tel Aviv office building.
V-2015 is careful not to support a specific party – rather “just not Bibi”. As such, the foreign funds pouring into the campaign are not subject to Israel’s campaign finance laws.
And Haaretz, a left wing newspaper enemy of Netanyahu, is careful to keep the article untranslated from Hebrew to avoid being quoted in the US.
Meanwhile, Obama is busy chewing gum in India.
And now we have participation in a conspiracy to commit murder.
The United States pressed Argentina to end its investigation of Iranian complicity in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in which nearly 100 people were killed.
Western diplomatic sources said the administration of President Barack Obama urged Argentina on several occasions to either stop or limit the investigation into the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association in Buenos Aires. The sources said the U.S. appeals marked one of the demands by Iran for a reconciliation with Washington, Middle East Newsline reported.
Nothing should stop the Obama diplomatic coup with Iran. Even murder.