The incident was one of those things once known as the “fortune of war”; except of course that the Libyan operation is not war. At best the bomb which reportedly killed Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, the Libyan leader’s youngest son and his three grandchildren, might be called is the Fortunes of R2P. The Washington Post has a series of photographs showing the bomb impact and the bomb itself.
A NATO spokesman appeared to deny the Duck himself had been targeted. “‘We do not target individuals,’ said Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, Commander of NATO’s Operation Unified Protector. ”
The New York Times said the target was a military installation. The article further said that Khadaffi was reported to have been at the target, but survived. “A NATO official in Naples, Italy, reached by e-mail and responding on condition of anonymity, said that allied planners had not known Qaddafi family members were in the building that was attacked, which the official described as a command and control center. The official would not specify the nationality of the aircraft or pilots that carried out the strike. ”
The photos show the bomb itself to be a bunker-buster penetrator which did not detonate. Such bombs are made out of thick, hardened steel casings, sometimes converted from artillery tubes, and packed with explosive. One such weapon is the GBU-28, “built from modified 8 inch/203 mm artillery barrels (principally from deactivated M110 howitzers), but later examples were purpose-built”. It has a diameter of 14 inches and is used by the US and Israel.
GBU-28 type weapon
Compare the photos of the projectile and the entries below with the video of the GBU-28 in action. They are not conclusively the same, but they are the same type of ordnance.
Penetration path
Unexploded warhead
“Inshallah”
Regarding the unexploded ordinance – everything mechanical has a finite failure rate, and everything mechanical eventually breaks down. Too bad it happened at a bad time.
there is not even a war on
They have to look for knockout blow on the cheap, not in the name of victory, but in the name of humanitarian action of all things.
W, W, W, you know this is a game, don’t you?
Nobody cares about Ghadfly and his offspring or his regime. Nobody cares about the Libyans. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that nobody cares about Libyan oil (not to be confused with Saudi oil). The game is about getting the Arabs to accept that the West will no longer cop the ‘Death to America’ crap, that there are consequences to their rhetoric, to their actions. That America will no longer accept Euro haughtiness. That the Euros must put in.
We are witnessing the transformation of the narrative about the MENA – unexploded (oh yeah?) bombs, mayhem in Syria, $60b orders from KSA, are just part of this. Londonistan must end, Shengen arragements must be renegotiated. The Left is being routed in front of our eyes.
But the real joy is watching the Euros squirm as they are hoist on their petard.
The best American strategy I’ve seen in a long time.
ADE
‘We do not target individuals,’
First thing we do, kill all the lawyers. Identify the center of gravity and kill it. Anyone remember ‘Get Yamamoto’?
Attributed to an unknown Afghan fighter in the early part of the war who when being interrogated remarked that when fighting the Russians they’d shot the officers and the men would retreat. However, when fighting the Americans, the men would continue to advance. Authoritarian systems are very dependent upon ‘the one’, true democratic societies [no man is better than another] are far more resilient.
Kadaffy and his sons certainly qualify as figures of command and control. The same mentality that brought us “depends on the definition of ‘is’” brings us kinetic military and time limited actions and yes we don’t target individuals but centers of command and control (and Kadaffy and his sons certainly are the center of that action in addition to being part of command and control).
As Sheik Zubir (at least according to Kadaffy) a rose by any other name smells just as sweet. A kinetic military and time limited action is hell just the same as if it were called any other name.
Didn’t we kill Kadaffy’s daughter the last time we went after him?
Seems to me that MK coughed up a buncha nuclear stuff last time around, and he wasn’t even a target at that point in time.
Think that he’ll have second thoughts about taking his loot and going on vacation, and letting whoever wants take the reins in Libya? I mean, these guys are getting serious…
tom
I just read my previous comment and now I have to add a no-posting rule to cover pre-coffee to the currently existing post-alcohol posting ban!
As Sheik Zubi [said]…
The point is: this is not a war, this is a campaign allowed by a resolution of the UNO Security Council. The objectives (stupid as they are) are to protect the civilians, not others.
When governments start not following the rules of war, the laws of war, because they are afraid of the word “war”, things start to unravel.
If the US, or Italy, or whatever, bomb and kill without a proper war declaration, they make themselves open to retaliations in kind.
What prevent Gaddafi from hiring an attorney and request the prosecution of the pilots and all the command chain? At worse, he could be able to obtain names and send some operatives to obtain redress from them or their families.
The same could be done by the Mexican cartels, if the US Army is used against them.
What happens if the Duck strikes back at the families of Western leaders?
Once the aura of invincibility is stripped away then Gagadafy becomes another thug that no one wants to stand near. Suddenly instead of having the leaders of the Badassi and Ostinki tribes joining him for rallies the 3rd level staff of those groups, who are like mafia button men, will be drawing short straws to see who has to go take a message to The Duck. If this perspective spreads then the age of personality cult empires will be over.
Unfortunately payback will happen. We can expect a significant increase in the number of man made disasters. This will consume resources and reduce the openness of our society. While it is true that some will be “bemused” by thinking of politicians, like the junior members of the Libyan tribes, choosing who has to risk being seen with Obama, the long term costs to our democratic society will be serious.
The embedded terrorists who I expect to be activated in Europe and America may not even know who they will be taking orders from. Eventually this may degenerate into the war of the Ummah against all.
Whether the Libyan operation, reflected in this attack on Gaddafi, is a war or not is entirely dependent on who our President is. Let me just check, quickly.
It’s NOT a war.
The pictured projectile may have been one of those concrete-filled jobs, intended to pretty well wreck the joint without excessive collateral effects.
Ignoring the consequences of ignoring process is an Obama characteristic.
The damage done to the US economy by stiffing secured creditor priority in GM and Chrysler is huge. It showed there are no longer rules in commercial law in the US, so invest elsewhere.
In general the left thinks there are no perverse side effects to anything.
Everybody can see better if everybody stands on their toes.
Structurally, all the problems that can be solved by direct action have been solved already. What’s left is problems that respond to direct action with perverse consequences. Those the left attacks with direct action, and the right is always right about: it won’t work.
“Men of Distinctions” –my nomination for post title of the year-to-date!
–the other end of the subtlety continuum might be the scene in Mars Attacks! where the Martians are chasing down and incinerating humans by the hundreds in the streets of Las Vegas while their ships hovering overhead broadcast through loudspeakers “People of Earth! Do not run! We are your friends!”
If the libyans decide to strike back at our leaders tit for tat, Then my amigo’s it will become a Real War. Then the whole shebang will be over quite quickly because what leader wants to be killed in a police/peace action?
“There’s no glory there Bubba.”
I’m not convinced that it didn’t explode. I always wondered if an 8 inch artillery piece would actually splinter into shrapnel or just blow explosive propellant out of each end. I recall some testing to see if such a device would be effective in destroying biological and chemical weapons inside a bunker. The answer was yes, and anything else living.
I don’t think that chants of ‘Death to America’ had anything to do with this R2P folly. As I said before, it is as if all participants had their own personal interests involved in this one.
12. LaLa
The pictured projectile may have been one of those concrete-filled jobs, intended to pretty well wreck the joint without excessive collateral effects.
Western media were shown the site almost immediately, and these dainty highnesses aren’t typically inclined to crawl around new bomb rubble when live ordnance is still ticking. Perhaps the privileged people already know something they aren’t telling us.
But why is everyone so surprised that Obama is twisting the quiddities and quillities of “war”? Ever since Islam began deploying violent Jihad against us, Western lawyers/politicians have taken great pains to explain it isn’t Islamic Holy War confronting us, but simply a tiny minority of violent extremists who’ve gone bonkers. That legal distinction (lie) apparently suits our leaders, and of course it suits our Muslim enemy even more. It makes you wonder what all the lawyers’ skulls are up to…?
“The best American strategy I’ve seen in a long time.”
It doesn’t seem to be working. The international position of America doesn’t look to be improved. As of this writing, the Duck of Death Doesn’t seem to be leaving the ring. We have yet to experience the Duck’s counter-attack. If this is a “best Strategy”, I would hate to see the worst. Unfortunately, unless the LLMDfK (Long Legged Mack Daddy from Kenya) is stopped, I fear I will.
I suspect that the real target was hit.
Don51 #4:
When the mission to shoot down Adm Yammamoto was planned they did indeed call in the lawyers and ask if it was Okay to target the admiral. I have always considered that issue to be absurd, but we have “progressed” well beyond that since 1943.
ADE #3:
This is not a strategy. To quote George Will concerning the early days of the Clinton Admin, this is what liberal government actually looks like.
Lala #12 and Morton #17:
Anyone recall that bunker strike in Iraq during Desert Storm? A bunker was hit during one strke at night and it was filled with women and children. It seems that by day it was a command bunker and by night a bomb shelter for innocents. Now, anyone in Iraq should have known that the worst place to be during the war was in a military complex, hardened or not and secret or not. So one would suspect that Saddam deliberatley filled it with women and children at night, but in any case the results badly shook the people in DC and was a factor in the premature end of the war. So a concrete filled PGM is a possibility. If it had been filled with women and children they would want to limit the casualties.
Totten interview;
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2011/04/29/michael_totten_interview_book_review_99497.html
ADE, you should read it. Also anyone else that thinks the Obumbler has the slightest idea of what he is doing.
Morton D @ #17:
“…Tha legal distinction (lie) apparently suits our leaders, and of course it suits our Muslim enemy even more. It makes you wonder what all the lawyers’ skulls are up to…?”
Hey, the lawyers know where their falafel is buttered.
Time consuming project for those interested:
The blog, The Volokh Conspiracy is mostly lawyers and law profs. For a good many years, they were all in against and about the WOT. Rent lapels, charged Bush/Cheney and the vicious American military with every evil that could be imagined. Went on and on and on. They profess themselves to be libertarian, for the most part.
Starting about 2009, the spittle dropped off almost entirely. It is a marvel to see.
If, as I say, you have the time, go back to about 2005 and see how things went and after the inauguration of The Zero.
Amazing—not at all.
It certainly appears that all the important decisions in this fiasco are being made by a committee of lawyers and politicians. If a dud bomb was intentionally used, it may have been because the kinetic-caused death of the Duck was collectively seen as an undesirable collateral effect. Action intended to “send a message” is easier to get approved by a committee, hence the “mismatch between means and consequences”; hence the entire “gesture without motion”.
For all of you artillery nuts, here is a photo of one of the M55 8″ enclosed turrent howitzers of the Marine Corps’ 3rd 8″ Howitzer Battery taken near Chu Lai in early 1967.
I was the battery’s radio repairman (which meant that my primary task was to drive trucks) so I’m not an artillery expert, but the word was that under ideal conditions, these howitzers could drop a round into a garbage can at 12 miles.
We were taking this gun to FLSG-B at Chu Lai for repairs.
Our correspondents in #Libya say many there think #Gaddafi has fabricated the report of the death of his son http://aje.me/lFgr4j
“Kadhafi son killed”? that smells like a medias mise en scene. difficult to escape from such a bombing, if Kadhafi had really been there, and or his family he would have been killed too.”
“House hit by four bombs looks flattened, Seif AlArab is single,not known to have children, he was implicated in weapon smuggling not charged”
Besides the quater where bombing happened isn’t known to be a quater of inhabitations, but rather of castels and mansions for the regime apparatchiks, and those prefer bunkershelters at the moment !
NBC’s Mitchell Regurgitates Gaddafi Lies http://j.mp/kldsBf
Yet,none saw the bodies of Sail al Arab, nor of the grand Children
#14
Distortions.
Yep, that about sums it up. Though I’d go with “Men of Extinctions” myself.
More seriously, though, at the rate things are going, we’ll be needing some ace yodelers.
(Too bad the Swiss are “neutral,” eh?)
“Key Targets and Engagements**
30 April: In Tripoli area: 1Command & Control Building, 7Ammunition Storages. In Zintanarea: 2Ammunition Storage. In Misurataarea: 1Tank. In Sirtearea: 1Tank.
**Key Engagements are not intended to give a complete account of all targets which were engaged”
http://www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_2011_05/20110501_110501-oup-update.pdf
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jtoidqHc3sCnqODD3GAv1hOtWFdg?docId=CNG.5531a5fdacd2913af0d710c9a6a041f8.a1
Libyan rebel capital doubts Kadhafi’s son is dead
This is not a war to Obama and the left, it is a means to an end. They had to get R2P on the books and legitimized in order to give the International Community a foothold in its bid to replace all governments of sovereign nations. It is being used now to interfere in a civil war but that is a sideshow. Just the idea of “Its for the children” on steroids. And just as detrimental.
Wretchard: “…not even a reference to Congress”
The portion of the US Constitution about “war powers” is effectively a dead letter. You may as well take some bleach and a brush and scrub it off the original document.
Congress will never seriously enforce it. And it doesn’t matter which party is in the Whitehouse, they’ll both equally ignore it when it suits them. The courts won’t do anything about the situation either. The Constitution is now just a piece of paper, at least that section of it.
The erstwhile Soviet Union once had an ostensively excellent constitution, a beautiful piece of paper full of glowing concepts, the only problem being that it was mostly ignored. Constitutions by themselves don’t mean anything once the rulers have learned that they can get away with ignoring them.
For all intents and purposes, the US military has become the private reserve of the Executive branch, a “king’s army” to be used at the king’s sole discretion. When congress does nothing to stop this, it is tantamount to acquiescence.
I’m sure some of you out there remember the now discontinued comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. One of the themes that was played on several occasions was about the game of CalvinBall where the rules were made up as the game went along and any of the players could unilaterally change the rules at any time, usually and always for their own advantage.
It came to me that that is what the fiasco in Libya is. Its an international game of CalvinBall. The only hard and fast rule is that there really aren’t any rules that have a life expectancy any greater than that of a butterfly.
But I fear that the fix is in. I suspect that the desired end game is a perpetual tie and siege between the rebels and the Duck. In the name of protecting civilians they will make sure that neither side can ever achieve a victory, as that might cause the deaths of the innocent. And in the meantime, it will be necessary for some organization like the UN to take over the sale of Libyan oil to make sure that the money is used only for noble purposes like providing food and medicine to the Libyan people on both sides.
Remember the Oil for Food program when Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq? It provided such lucrative graft. The transnational humanitarians miss it deeply. They’d like to bring it back, only with Libya this time around. It will ensure that the right people get to buy it at the right price and the right people get to skim off the top.
Then again, I am a cynical son of a bitch.
s @ 30: This is not a war to Obama and the left, it is a means to an end. They had to get R2P on the books and legitimized in order to give the International Community a foothold in its bid to replace all governments of sovereign nations.
Whether they explicitly ever said that to themselves or not, yes.
OTOH, it’s not going very well is it.
That it’s not going well may not faze the left, but it may just faze the general American electorate, which is still involved. To what degree there is still democracy in the EU, is a matter for some debate.
To what degree the US electorate still cares about such things as facts, will be tested in 2012.
Josh @ #33: “To what degree the US electorate still cares about such things as facts, will be tested in 2012.” Indeed. I think the electorate cares, plenty. But its priorities are (1) personal safety (2) personal economic wellbeing (3) national economic prospects (4) national social/cultural issues (5) whether the President is obnoxious or embarrassing to them (6) something vague called “international opinion.” Something like that.
So the interesting question, regarding the not-war in Libya, is whether the “facts” are delivered unavoidably to the attention of the electorate. This could take the form of the Duck bringing the pain to some mall in the Midwest or some harbor full of shipping, etc. Or maybe whether his opposition does so, out of frustration that we let them down. If that happens any time before November 2012, it violates priority (1) above. No body bags, nice clean dronewars, and yet the news is full of pictures of shattered storefronts and TSA friskers at the parking garage. Thanks a lot, Hopey, we’re done with you.
Insofar as Hopey can’t avoid “boots on ground” then of course the odds are even worse. People don’t want to get into wars; but not because they care so much about international opinion or even the legality of it all. They just don’t want to waste blood and treasure unless there is no way around it. So a cheap discretionary war is possible. An expensive unavoidable war is possible. But expensive and discretionary? Unforgivable.
The damage the duck can do doesn’t worry me much as much as what the other one man, one vote, one party countries will do in reaction to this farce.
All the gibberish, buzz words, and magical phrases on the Obambites’ part will not obscure the actions and in-actions taking place. The Spring has sprung and is spreading in some places the Spring sprang and then sprung out. China is trying to spank down the possibility of a spring, and everybody is hoping that sagging and spent N. Korea won’t spring into chaos and splat refugees all over the place or spring a dirty bomb into space.
The difference between a declared war and a war-by-any-other-name is precisely the lack of existential commitment involved in the latter. In an Obama-type war, there is constant agonizing over means and targets; in a real war, you target any enemy you can find, using the most ruthless means you can muster. The purpose of a real war is to bring about an unambiguous victory that actually feels like a conclusion to friend and foe alike. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and all acknowledge the new paradigm.
An Obama-type war, by implication, never brings about such a feeling of victory. Its purpose is to preserve a status quo which was settled long ago, and which is so much an established reality that the ruling elites simply take it for granted. Ironicly, these wars not only indicate that the status quo isn’t as stable as it’s supposed to be, they actually help to bring about its demise.
It’s been a long time since the full muscular might of the Western nations was deployed on a field of battle, but the need to find out where we stand has become pressing. Half-measures bring no relief from anxiety; the world hungers again for a “real” war. We will probably have all we can stomach before the decade is out.
j/33; That it’s not going well may not faze the left –yep, left don’t have to EVER get it right –it just needs to keep trying, and sooner or later, the culture, the society, will be croaking thru cracked lips, “please, just kill me”.
For the record I recite, the western idea of limited and democratic government depends on the Judeo-Christian tradition of a nation of laws, written laws.
When we cede all authority and distinctions to a bureaucracy, individual, or czar, we are outside the western canon.
It is not necessary for a lefty to believe in no such traditions or limitations, but how much they believe in “situational” “distinctions” and such is a pretty good measure of how far they are from the American system.
#30. SpeakEasy
They had to get R2P on the books and legitimized in order to give the International Community a foothold in its bid to replace all governments of sovereign nations. It is being used now to interfere in a civil war but that is a sideshow.
I don’t think its a sideshow. I think its a deliberate tactic. Aid and foment civil wars–and then intervene to create and keep a stalemate. Then declare it a failed nation which needs intervention, control, and supervision of the International Community.
To them civil wars aren’t a bug, they’re a highly desirable feature. Its opportunity knocking. As the saying goes “never let a crisis go to waste.”
In time of war, anyone who wears a uniform is fair game and since Kaddafi wears more uniforms (and more theatrical ones at that) than most he’s fairer game than most.
I must point out, if we dropped bombs on Libyan he can retaliate against us or any of the other participating countries. The fact that we have a limited agenda set forth by the UN Security Council means nothing. I hope no one was thinking we were entitled to some special dispensation.
I’d expect that Kaddafi will ring himself with orphaned disabled children, captured journalists, the wounded of both sides, and rebel POWs. Also expect him to sleep in mosques and hospitals.
Good guys that we are, the whole world knows how desperately we avoid collateral damage and how we are loathe to attack religious, cultural heritage, and humanitarian effort buildings.
After ten years of GWOT, the enemy, to a degree, knows how to play us.
…will be tested in 2012…
In November 2010, American voters made it very clear what they thought of this (albeit dangerous) joker.
For anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. (Though there are still quite a few out there who don’t want to look and who refuse to listen.)
Come November 2012, American voters will make what they think even clearer.
Springtime in Afghanistan
Now this silly debacle.
There is strong sentiment in Israel to avoid war yet they have never been better prepared.
Maybe I am not the only one who hears drums for a war nobody wants.
Hell in a hand basket, that’s what we got now. Shoot to kill or leave the gun at home. I can respect either choice. How difficult is that?
Just does not look as if we have our act together.
Someone described our president as a conequentialist. The limitation of that is that consequences are difficult to predict. Idealism has the advantage of a fixed point not based on prediction over time. The true believer never doubts which direction to face in prayer.
We go with the leaders we have at a critical time. May g-d bring them guidance and wisdom.
Spindok
Tcobb@32,
You’re not nearly cynical enough; consider this situation not in isolation but in context with other situations in the Middle East.
I believe the real end game (as posted by another BC commenter a few days ago) is keeping the price of oil high enough long enough to collapse the dollar and the U.S. economy.
Well, if we kill enough of their children maybe they’ll give up …
buddy:37,
Nahhhh, I like the ending where the cowboy shrugs, pulls his pistol and shoots the rattlesnake through the head (figuratively of course)!
mariner@43 wrote:
I think you’re crediting them with a grasp of reality that they do not possess. I believe Obama better expressed it with:
Things like unintended consequences escape him. He may have gotten as far as thinking about the impact on the price of oil, perhaps after it was drummed into him. He may not.
It seems to me that telling the US military not to win is not effective or advisable. As The Duck knows well, pylon malfunctions happen. I wouldn’t wager that Obama understands that one.
“Well, if we kill enough of their children maybe they’ll give up …”
Well AirCav, no government lasts for forever. In a democracy, elections are held to determine the winner. In a tyranny, revolutions are substituted for elections. Khadafi, younger just lost the election.
Well, like old Admiral Stephen Decatur said in reference to fighting Libya, “My Country, Right or Wrong”. By golly, they will know, kidnap our sailors and we’ll kick their ass for 200 years!
Anyhoo, wouldn’t it be amazing if this entire world situation started off as a scheme by the Ford Motor Car company to amp up the cash flow of the world’s largest untapped car market?
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel –The Sirens of Titan –with a similar premise –turned out that all of human history had been engineered by some martians trying to get a part for a broke-down spaceship delivered from across the universe. Wonder if little Timmy and little Barry read it together back home in Indonesia back in the sixties or seventies.
bl…
OT…
But it appears that the wheels are starting to come off of the Chinese express. The Australian Dollar is plunging right along with silver on the assumption that Chinese metals demands are fading.
Both Canada and Australia are in the midst of enormous housing bubbles due to mineral exports to China and Chinese immigration out of Hong Kong.
The real estate bubble of China eclipses history. 64,000,000 un-occupied ( ever ) condos in a nation of squalor.
The high speed rail spending vortex has been shut down. I’d say that’s where the collapse in materials volumes is rippling out from. Building new railways is hugely expensive — especially in a land already intensively used.
I rather suspect that the graft involved reached critical thresholds; to such a degree that the national leadership dived in. I suspect that massive write-offs/ revaluations are at hand.
—-
WRT the Money Trust ™ I’d say that it’s achieved fusion. The financial markets have largely broken down and now operate on the ‘carney ethos.’ The Chairman has devolved into a ‘barker.’
“Step this way, proles…. get your last dimes ready… you’ll see a freak of nature: a horse with its head where its tail is supposed to be!”
Upon viewing, the proles note the animal is wrong-way into its stall. They’d paid dearly to see a horse’s ass!
What was a profitable gag in 1894 San Francisco’s Fair leaves us to contemplate the turned around savant-idiot, the Bernanke, has done to our currency and hence to the value of all time-contracts.
The effect is surely corrosive. The only metal known to resist corrosion: gold.
w: …not even a reference to Congress
I@31: For all intents and purposes, the US military has become the private reserve of the Executive branch, a “king’s army” to be used at the king’s sole discretion. When congress does nothing to stop this, it is tantamount to acquiescence.
Some Historical Context:
[paragraphs added]
[The author] notes the disintegration of the Nixon presidency as being a starting-point for slowly building incidents and trends related to an active `shadow government’ that have re-emerged in the disaster of 9/11 and the subsequent, seemingly comprehensive cover-up. Little known government plans from the Nixon era for militarily suppressing public dissent (via the secretive, innocuously titled `Operation Garden Plot’) are discussed here.
Then, following the post-Nixon rise to prominence of Cheney and Rumsfeld during the Ford presidency, Scott notes how these martial-law ambitions eventually reappeared in a different form during the Iran-Contra events via the newly politicized FEMA and Lt. Col. Oliver North’s `REX 84′ plan. REX 84 evoked (in the event of an unspecified future `national emergency’) the widespread surveillance (and possible detention) of political dissenters, the suspension of the U.S. constitution, and the activation of a secretive, parallel government set up to run things away from the pesky oversight of Senate and Congress.
It’s carefully noted early on that these aims were strongly desired by both Cheney and Rumsfeld, with the two of them conducting much of the highest level planning at the time for all the above, and the accompanying process given the title of `Continuity of Government’, or `COG’. (Scott jokes darkly that in the light of the sweeping measures it would, and eventually did, enable post 9/11, `Change of Government’ is a much more accurate description).
Cheney pushed hard to enable and lay the groundwork for COG through FEMA in the 80′s – groundwork which would institute a parallel government in the event of a national crisis – and Scott eventually notes what he dryly calls an `arresting coincidence’. Once Cheney and FEMA are reunited in May 2001, the same COG planning team from the Iran-Contra era in the 1980′s was put forth by George W. Bush as a terrorism task force, and then a major terrorist attack on the United States allowed those same folks to implement COG.
[end]
Who said: What’s more important: the fall of the Soviet Union or a few agitated Muslims?
Peter Dale Scott is a Berkeley English professor, but he’s not alone:
David Ray Griffin (ed.) (The New Pearl Harbor (2003)): theologian, runs a research center for Claremont School of Theology, Claremont Colleges producing a history of sharp talent; Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad.
Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (2004)): Cold Warrior, CIA consultant, Phoenix native, Berkeley MA & PhD; …instead of demobilizing its armed forces, the US accelerated its reliance on military solutions to problems both economic and political. The result of this militarism (as distinct from actual domestic defense) is more terrorism against the US and its allies, the loss of core democratic values at home, and an eventual disaster for the American economy.
William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2004)): engineer and reporter, grew up in Texas, argues for abiogenic origin of oil, argues that earth is cooling not warming;…history of the oil industry’s grip on the world economy.
Michael C. Ruppert and Catherine Austin Fitts (Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (2004)): In reality, 9/11 and the resulting “war on terror” are parts of a massive authoritarian response to an emerging economic crisis of unprecedented scale. Peak Oil—the beginning of the end for our industrial civilization—is driving the élites of American power to implement unthinkably draconian measures of repression, warfare and population control; Ruppert: ex-LAPD Narcotics officer, flamboyant life, most aggressive case against Cheney.
Webster Griffin Tarpley (9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (2005)): rogue network theory, LaRouche operative.
Robert Dreyfuss (Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (American Empire Project) (2005)): LaRouche movement; Dreyfuss traces this ultimately misguided approach from support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s, the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the ultraorthodox Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, and Hamas and Hezbollah to jihads in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Fearful of the appeal of communism, the U.S. saw the rise of a religious Right as a counterbalance.
YBR…
That’s some first class peyote they’ve been smoking.
Ever since Qutb bailed out of Colorado and took up his passion as an ink stained wretch in the bowels of the MB agitprop engine — the muslim brotherhood has morphed into a stridently anti-American cause.
We couldn’t support it if we tried.
The Ayatollah is Carter’s baby and no one else.
Wahhabism is NOT ultra-orthodox in normal sense of orthodox. It is a schismatic creed straight from the brow of Wahhab. Uniquely, wahhabists decry even islamic monuments centuries old, standing at Medina and Mecca; and are tearing them down into rubble. The other schism: Wahhab preached that the House of Saud MUST become supreme in Araby and rule the iconic spaces.
OBL NEVER accepted American money — even in Afghanistan while fighting the Soviets.
As ever, Peak Oilers NEVER contemplate the true reason for oil exploration tempos: politics.
Just look at the Gulf and the Beaufort Sea!
b/49; straws nin that wind, silver just open down 10% in Asia, and you saw the EC probes announced Friday –it’s Markit and ICE targetted –the two secret assassins slithered thru the rampart grossly breached by suicide subprime. So Merkel is going for the kill. Also note just out in Foreign Policy by Frederick Kaufman, big article, How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis.
whatever it will be, it’s already Biblically Shakesperian, so will be fascinating, even if in the way Gregory Peck was fascinated all the way even as Moby Dick kilt him daid.
…suggest upcoming chapter title for that begun with Putin/Lavrov remarking on the well, untermenschen behavior of NATO and USA in blasting the Gaddify toddlers (*groan*), as well as the German-led EC decision to actually penetrate the story of the 2008 collapse:
“Ethics Move East”
I think you’re spot on, Dishman, when you characterize our betters as having no clue when it comes to the consquences of their actions. Their righteous ideology blinds them in this area. They truly don’t know there are things they don’t know, as Rummy might have summarized it. The space occupied by the gray area of unknowing in a stock issue rational mind has been wallpapered over in theirs, and become the idealized uplands on which they hope to arrive via their statist ambitions.
To be sure, they think they know all. What else could explain the twin shockers of last week where first, they fined VA Tech over the 2007 campus massacre, and second they pulled the rug out from under Shell Oil in Alaska? In the first case, VA Tech was found culpable for not getting word out in time that a madman was shooting up the place. Note, it took them 4 years to figure out when “in time” was and to condemn the folks who, unlike themselves, were actually on the ground that afternoon. And the VA Tech adminstrators are their fellow travellers, too, who had done such things as instituting a campus-wide gun ban. The notion that had a lawful citizen been on hand with a registered firearm then a better response to the killer might have taken place is a notion that simply got pre-emptively ruled out and did not factor into any consideration at all. VA Tech played by their rules, and got found lacking by their own grandees.
With Shell Oil in Alaska, the company had leased sites for exploration at the tune of $2.2 billion. Shell then pumped another $2 billion into logistical planning (this was an offshore effort). The EPA scotched the whole affair because in the paperwork Shell neglected to account for the impact one of the ship’s engines’ emmissions with regard to greenhouse gases. At the same time, amazingly, this so-called president was on the podium threatening investigations into why oil companies are not drilling in all these places they’ve leased. He is also creating a misperception that oil companies are not “paying their fair share”, in full ignorance of the fact that Shell Oil just paid over $4 billion dollars on a lease for exploration only to be denied use of it on an absurdity with no compensation whatsoever. In street parlance: dey was robbed.
Is General Electric paying their fair share? They are heavily subsidized, thanks to Energy-Star appliance tax codes. Every time they sell an Energy-Star appliance they get a cumulative tax credit. GE, Whirlpool, Kenmore, et al. don’t pay any taxes. They’ve got years of these credits accumulated on their books. In fact they count these credits as “assets” on their books to the degree that these manufacturers have come to occupy a surreal space among industrial concerns on Wall Street. It’s no longer rightly called a “subsidy”, but rather government backed smoke and mirrors. Meanwhile oil companies pay corporate tax rates approaching 48%, the very highest among all major industries. And that’s not counting arbitrary governmental confiscations that happen all the time, like Shell Oil’s $4 billion dollar shakedown in Alaska this year, or BP’s $20 billion shakedown in the Gulf last year, or ExxonMobile’s $14 billion shakedown in Venezuela a few years ago.
Somebody here is fond of saying, “We are governed by monsters”, and he, too, is spot-on. The verdict is out on whether outcomes are an intended plan or a consequence of an ill-fated philosophy. The final verdict on that, and the question of our betters’ intent, winds up being beside the point when faced with the necessity of fighting them.
The chilling thing is that regardless of our betters’ intent, there’s no way they could be successful in their madcap, culturally suicidal designs unless important elements of their philosophy were not widely accepted. They’d have no chance amongst a people who could look at the VA Tech decision and the Shell Oil decision and tolerate it. And that’s just two of last week’s outrages. What will come with this week?
And Libya? Aren’t we there because of a UN resolution regarding a humanitarian crisis? Aren’t we explicitly barred from attacking Quadaffy & Co. and self-confessedly sworn off those designs? Yeah, we’ve signed up for an utterly absurd position, to be flying around dropping bombs on people in order to finesse a desirable human rights outcome. Or no, we’ve punted that to NATO. Or whatever. Who the hell knows because now apparently we are in the business of regime change through force. Kinda. But really, maybe not.
We’ll know with greater clarity four years after the fact. When the commission can fine the CIA or somebody, for not doing it all correctly.
Clarity in hindsight: If you call it a “Kinetic Military Action” instead of a “War” it becomes more or less impossible to have anyone say you LOST.
Did they consider this also means they can’t WIN?
The swollen pubic lice running things in this country seem now to be awakening to the nasty truth that they don’t after all have the slightest ability to DO or CONTROL any of the toplofty things they’ve claimed they could.
There are many who claim our leader is in fact very methodically fulfilling his “secret” agenda. That is to cripple and humble the nation that gave birth to his mother and welcomed several of the men she chose to couple with, despite their antagonism to this culture.
Bazz-Fazz, say I.
Any quarter-wit with a hammer can run through a museum smashing the inheritances of the ages.
Fearless Leader’s life can fairly be called a prolonged tantrum, possibly prompted by a mother who was trained by her own parents to despise her country, her heritage, and herself. The communists’ training was so effective, she evidently was unable to come into estrus except in the presence of a man foreign to and contemptuous of these things.
History will remember this administration as the rule of the schoolyard bullies when they suddenly found the playground devoid of teachers. (Were they all drunk, or AWOL vandalizing some state legislature to intimidate the reps?)
blert -
So Brzezinski’s ‘agitated Muslims’ didn’t make life just a bit more difficult for the Soviets in Vietnestan? Did we not help the Taliban in the early phases of Afghanistan (Charlie Wilson’s War?)
Before the rotten tomatoes get flung in my direction, the gist of my posts is that the context of American ME foreign policy conditions the current events more than Obama critics allow. I’m not yet prepared to defend Obama’s foreign policy, but the ME has a lengthy incubation period of pre-existing conditions.
The second point is that the intellectuals – as a group and a diverse group at that – strongly objected to the facts of 911 as presented. Scott’s book is the most measured and anti-hysterical.
Last point is the COG theme, which fits everything I have noticed from the periphery, in particular a tightening of civic freedoms in behest of the GWOT, and the Wall St crash, bailouts and persistent behavior patterns (increasing compensation, exclusion of derivatives trading houses from Frank-Dodd, etc etc etc.)
I am leaving to watch a movie now.
May I suggest a modern substitute for an archaic saying? Should we now blame the demise of unintended casualties on the “karma of kinetic operations” instead of “fortunes of war”?
mf/56; your point is clear but have you forgotten the serried ranks of studious rascals on the executive payroll –hundreds and thousands counting allied senatorial staffs, all lawyers making six figures and all under 30 and indefatiguable, working all this out to the ninny-head before it launches?
Wouldn’t this mass of cleverness be looking at the world history writ under the Carter administo-degradation, when a mirror image of today’s American stagflation and consequent demoralization was used to destroy or badly damage the structures of free-market western-oriented bastions all over the world, notably sub-saharan Africa, South America, the Isthmus countries on both coasts, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the Persian Gulf, and in so doing lit wars that never end in all those places, the worst being the totalist-world-seeking jihad, neatly boxing the compass of the planet and setting up the push –putsch push –into the inner citadels, the north American continent and the tiny nation of Israel? In a demonstration of how a small team with a large secret agenda can draw together and engage in tactics that the very horribleness of creates the grand stgrategy?
YBR, intellectuals are the least diverse group of people you can gather. It’s shocking, really.
As for continuity of governance (COG), yes, such an idea has a huge following in GOP backcircles, but not for nefarious reasons. You mention Cheney’s efforts with FEMA starting in the 1980′s, and these were because of a perception of the weakness in American responses to disasters. They’re locally based. The Bush administration with Cheney at the helm did push for bumping the feds up on the command chain, and lost legislatively on this at the hands of governors (who were mostly GOP governors) who saw it (rightly so, I think) as a federal play to weaken local turf. Then we had Katrina, when local governments in Louisiana effectively collapsed en masse, exposing the very weakness Cheney had been concerned about, and a very pissed-off George Bush got left holding the bag.
There’s another prong of COG which relates to transitions of power. Feeling in the GOP, going back to the Bush-Clinton transition in 1993 was that it was a horrific botch. One whole floor, and a crazy amount of money given the chances of the campaign, of the Dole/Kemp ’96 effort went to the transition team. Lots of energy was expended on this. Then, we had the absolute horror of the Clinton/Bush transition of 2000, with Florida’s dangling chads and all that. This was an unqualified disaster.
The Bush/Obama team, on the Bush side, was very sensitive to these issues. The Obama guys, like (and in many cases BEING) the old Clinton guys, not so much. Note, President Bush very widely made big accomodation for President Obama. We very well might have gotten TARP out of it. We certainly got the GM bailout out of it. Bush was not going to make a risky move on such fronts, alone. Everything Bush did on these fronts in the latter half of 2008 was co-ordinated with the McCain and Obama campaigns. Bush thought he was simply being fair, and doing the right thing, by switching to this mode of inclusiveness for the sake of COG. Ironically, we might have been better off had he not, had he done exactly what he absolutely despised about Bill Clinton, a man who threw up every obstacle, signed every awkward presidential order possible, actually had staff walking out of the White House with disk drives and deleting data off ones they didn’t lift, etc., and who generally made the transition of government as hard as it could have been, intentionally.
Don’t worry, in that the COG instinct has probably faded. Should the GOP win the White House in 2012, they will expect maximum hardship and deviousness on the Democratic side. This has been the unshakeable pattern since 1993. Obama will mine every field he can find with as many political bombs he can produce. That’s long become par for Democrats, now. The new-look GOP guys are increasingly less like the Country Clubber’s of old.
It is ironic who gives civility lessons in today’s political culture.
…that is, the never-writ nor spoke shadow grand strategy, not the always-nobly proclaimed in the sonorous and orotund tones of the ‘public’ grand strategy.
Operationally, this appears to have meant little. Politically, this is quickly becoming a diplomatic disaster for NATO, and by extension the US. We are there to protect civilians – how do we protect civilians by blowing up children in their homes?
Now even more interesting is that we don’t, and won’t really ever know, whether or not this son and his possibly mythical grandkids really died there or not. There are important implications either way.
maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t – what a mess we are in! By blowing up residential buildings, Nato (including the US) left themselves wide open to be manipulated. You try to assassinate a foreign leader and he knows you’re going to try it, you give him a lot of time to come up with a way to drape innocent bodies all over it and make you look like crap. If I was Qaddafi, I long ago would have moved all of my operational assets into the basement of the biggest Children’s Hospital in Tripoli. And I would make sure hundreds of sick children and their nurses were on the levels above me every moment of the day.
We did this to supposedly build support among other Arabs. do you think there is going to be *anyone* in the Arab world who doesn’t believe we killed those kids? They already think we are liars, and now the truth no longer matters. The Narrative is all that matters, and thanks to our incompetence, the Narrative is now set. Saying, a couple days later, “nuh-uh, nuh-uh” just don’t cut it with anyone.
Think about it – why hit that compound? There are no technical facilities left there, all the electronics that could be taken out got taken out in the first couple of days. This isn’t an electronic war, this is an old fashioned, men on the ground, house to house down and dirty war. Blowing up a bunker does nothing UNLESS you are trying to assassinate the leader. BUT…. if you’re going to try and kill the king, you better kill the king!!!! Otherwise he will make you pay – and now we will.
The reason NATO hit there was because We are Losing this War. The *only* way to win would be to put boots on the ground, but we don’t *dare* put boots on the ground. The idea that this could be won by air power alone was idiotic from the start. Now we are trapped in an unsolvable quagmire, and the only quick and easy way out is to assassinate the leader.
But the try failed. SO – either we failed and killed innocents, which is bad, OR Qaddafi anticipated what we intended, came up with a fantastic PR claim, and publicly pantsed Obama and NATO! Which, of course, is even worse, because that means that we are not just losing, Qaddafi is strategically whipping us.
Like I’ve said from the beginning – we either escalate, or surrender.
And I don’t think escalation is gonna happen.
Gentlemen, this War is Lost.
A simple way to put R2P to the test would be for Jordan to take R2P action to save those being slaughtered in Syria. Jordan has the military means to do so. All they would need is UN Authority(?) and willingness on the part of the King. Since Jordam is a Constitutional Monarchy, with the emphasis on Monarchy, it lives in that twylight world of faux democracy that is the best that can be expected from the Arab Spring. There might be good politics in it for him. He might get some traction as the knight in shining armor, riding his trusty Challenger 3 MBT into battle to save the poor peons from the evil despot. Plus his wife is a hottie, which never hurts.
IIRC he served in the 40th Brigade in his youth (XO, I think), so if he can still fit in the turret, he might lead them. Since the Syrians have nothing that will do more then scratch the paint on a Chall 3, it will look good to the do-gooders without being dangerous. Very Kingly, his subjects will eat it up. Lots of machismo in Arabic cultures. Did I mention his wife is a hottie? She can lead a relief column with food and band-aids and the press will go wild.
Won’t happen, of course. R2P is just the 21st century version of Colonialism tilted toward the ‘White man’s burden”. I guess having a 1/2 black POTUS means the White man’s burden thingie isn’t racial anymore? Half Racial?
In 1830 France, the July revolution overthrew Charles X who was replaced by his cousin, the Duc d’Orleans. In the midst of the struggle, the unscrupulous Prince Talleyrand announced:
“We are triumphing!”
He was asked, “Who are we?”
“Quiet! Not a word. I will tell you tomorrow,” was the reply.
Reelection assured. Bin Laden dead.
“n Moscow, Igor Panarin’s Forecasts Are All the Rage; America ‘Disintegrates’ in 2010″
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html
So we will solve the worlds problems with water pistols?
we will file that–thanks for sharing–do not call us we will call you–maybe
The interesting event is that the French, with a US assist, have located the Black Box for the French Airbus crash via robots–4000 meters under the ocean
4000 meters after the batteries ran out–
That is amazing
Elvis endorses Obama reelection, film at eleven.
OBL is dead–we have his body
Good
Well done US Special Forces
Who is next?
It was not a water pistol that killed him–that is for sure
dream on
A missile knocked out the refrigeration unit of his hiding place?
conflicting bin laden stories still percolating … if we really have a body, I hope they feed it to the pigs, or dump it in the latrine. I remain dubious.
If US troops killed OBL in Pakistan, I’d hate to be an American in Karachi right now. Pakistan is going to blow.
Let’s face facts. Since 0bama took power things has sukked. Almost everything 0bama has done has benefited his cronies and hurt the average American.
0bama maybe a stalking horse but he sure knows how to spread manure. Anytime anybody criticizes him he obfuscates, deflects, and uses the race card.
He has screwed the pooch in Libya. Everyone can sense that civilians will be killed and 0bama will be portrayed via his MSM cronies as a brilliant Bill Clinton type of strategist.
For all we know 0bama has ordered the used of cement filled “bunker busters” to “reduce civilian causalities.” In the long run Gaddafi will send his death squads far and wide to extract vengeance – which they will do. The effect will be the opposite of 0bama’s plans.
The entire 0bama Presidency has been a nightmare. 0bama has mucked up America so badly that many people on his side are hoping he will leave office now. Heck, the new campaign slogan should be Leave Office now! You deserve it!
I assumed OBL was dead a long time ago. Now the Obama regime wants to parade his mummy around as proof that they’ve actually accomplished something? It looks like they had both the birth certificate and the body in cold storage somewhere, as a put option when approval ratings sank below a certain minimum.
This is rapidly becoming sheer insanity.
I am with Matt. What a surprise (cough, cough) 0bama finds Osama bin Laden’s body [if you believe debka]:
American TV networks interrupted their broadcasts at 05:45 IST Monday, May 2, with the news that the head of Al Qaeda, the most wanted terrorist in the world and author of the 9/ll attack on America, is dead. The US is in possession of his body. There are no further details about the circumstances of his death. President Obama is to make a statement from the White House shortly.
http://www.debka.com/article/20892
The shell game continues.
Here’s a google search of the OBL is dead stories
#55 Cowboy – re: Shell & the EPA
That’s definitely theft by the EPA under color of authority.
I’d like to see a Presidential candidate pledge to simply “end the EPA”, i.e. defund it completely. It’s a corrupted institution from head to toe. Any enforcement action the EPA previously had authority over should be passed directly to the states. All federal EPA “mandates” should be sunsetted by Congress. If Alaska and California wants to exploit natural resources within their borders, or lock it up, let them make that decision and live with it.
Expanding on my EPA statement, the only way to “reduce the size of government” and end the government base is to downsize wholesale with a meat cleaver. No more unconstitutional “Czar’s”, and combine and downsize departments and Cabinet appointments.
“Trimming budgets” is the way in which conservatives lose when they win, i.e. the progressives government funded institutions and laws continue forever regardless of election results. If Obama and Clinton can hire 10′s of 1000′s and Democrat Congresses can draft 1000′s of new laws, their opponents should be able to eliminate those positions and FIRE the government workers, and rescind the laws.
America’s economic and energy problems are PRECISELY caused by “progressive” government, and by the timid Republicans who rail against the left’s government abuse while they campaign, but never find it necessary after the elections to actually change any of left’s policies once they take office. Paul Ryan is considered a conservative “radical” by the GOP movers and shakers, and he’s merely trying to keep government “affordable”, able to live within the tax receipts collected.
Readers: What’s your first thought regarding my “end the EPA” comment? I’m sure most think “yeah, nice if it would happen, but dream on because it never will”. I can guarantee you that damn near every GOP Congressman and Senate thinks that way. “Too radical” .. “Too scary” .. “Wingnut”.. is their attitude towards such measures that would truly be effective at controlling progressive government.
I despair of hope for America given the feckless midgets we have running it. Of course, the blame ultimately falls upon American’s who are content to settle for the government we have, or who never vote at all.
OBL became vulnerable two months ago when he broke cover because he wanted to get involved in the ongoing revolutions in the middle east.
77. Old Salt,
Toss in the IRS and the DOE, and you’ve got yourself a deal.
Yes, there a lot of stories on how bin Laden died.
Aside that, let’s take a close look at how the Palestinians, Iranians, Libyans, and Saudis react to the news. Will al Jazeera TV do a feature on bin Laden?
The world wonders.
There will be no autopsy, no third party verification. If it’s a long dead mummy, a cousin, or the actual guy dead of natural causes, we’ll never know for sure.
Campaign 2012 Theme: “The GOP brought you 10 years of war, 1000′s killed, and $Trillions of debt. The Democrats actually KILLED the guy and ended the threat”.
Congrats to the 2012 Democrats who will sweep the independents, and therefore, the election.
Hail and Hallelujah –Obama made a good speech. He used some of the mystic chords, without keyword drops, without irony signs, with straight non-code wordings. Yes, yes, i know –it’s squid ink –but –well, ”thanks for the memory” of when it wasn’t.
Obama: “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability.”
Suddenly he’s the decisive mister tough guy.
Exactly where did we get the DNA sample to use as a control? If we were ever close enough to bin Laden to obtain a sample of his DNA, why didn’t we just nab him then?
Now that OBL is dead, we can retire from Afghanistan !
ouch !
we have had DNA from OBL and his relatives for years
Now is a good time to declare victory–end the Billions of handouts to the leeches and parasites and spend that money at home in the US
Bibi should cancel his tin cup pitch to Congress–he is now irrelevant
Too little too late
We can now apply the $ 20 Billion in handouts to American domestic needs
Great
Democrats demanding a “Peace Dividend” will be heard in 3…2…1….
My guess is that they will try to eliminate the Marine Corps.
—-
Wow,
I am good I write the above and the Kremlin/Ummah shill posts a call for domestic spending 3 minutes earlier.
Buddy Larsen — exactly. “Squid ink” indeed!
Yes, it’s very tiresome that he will try to take credit for being Mister Tough Guy in combatting Man-Caused Disasters. (What’s this, “we,” Obama? you got a rat in your pocket?)
But I shed a tear of gratitude tonight to the men of our Special Forces, the folks in Intel, and our military more generally. Somehow it’s much more satisfying to the needs of vengeance that he died of a shot to the head in a firefight, rather than by a bomb: he knew we were coming, he knew it was we who killed him and his “men.”
Now, if we can just get that head severed so we can put it on a pike on the Brooklyn Bridge. “Pour encourager les autres,” you know.
I have to say, I’m enjoying his dismay as he realizes how HOT it is at his current address, and who some of the inmates are.
Re: DNA — we have his sister’s brain, oddly enough. She died of cancer in the US. So that’s one possibility.
This isn’t going to matter in the elections. They are much too far away. It will be about the economy, plus whatever other disasters are happening at the time. This will fade quickly from public memory, though there will be plenty of insufferable “nyah nyah” sneering from the Left in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, rest in peace to my nephew, 21 years old and killed at One World Trade.
We got him, buddy. We got him.
“Now that OBL is dead, we can retire from Afghanistan !” Post haste!
OMG – Second term?
I think BHO did a good job talking about America while talking about himself. He even gave some credit to president Bush. This is a very good day for America and a good day for the US armed forces. I am left to believe that Obama values the US military as much as I do. We must celibate this day for the good it is for our nation and hope that it draws us together as much as it did on 911.
Now, on to solving the economy. We care more about principles than the face that can deliver them and I hope BHO can deliver on all fronts.
v/86; unless you speak in binding words for the hostile military forces arraying against our ally Israel and our friendly neutrals of the Gulf and Jordan, you are just talking to hear yourself talk.
beverly –thanks — now i’m glad i didn’t go with ‘octopus’ –feedback is great!
C@60: intellectuals are the least diverse group of people you can gather.
It’s the setting. Surely you wouldn’t deny that descriptor to more than a handful of contributors to this site, including yourself? Those working directly in the academic environment tend to your definition of homogeneity of thought. The people in the list of publications I cited range from theologian to journalist to CIA to cop to engineer – and from Lyndon LaRouche followers to the Berkeley English professor. I do not think the critique leveled against ME foreign policy and the formal 911 forensics can be dismissed on the basis of intellectual claustrophobia – or ideological bias.
RE: COG: at the time of Katrina, Louisiana was possibly more corrupt than Illinois, depending on the metrics. Gov Jindall has been praised for remarkable health care reforms, but I am waiting to see if he has the old fashioned moxie to force (Elliott Ness style) clean-up of state, municipal and local government. From what I have read, New Orleans set a new standard for level of corruption. Then Katrina hit – and the feds took the heat!
Should the GOP win the White House in 2012, they will expect maximum hardship and deviousness on the Democratic side. This has been the unshakeable pattern since 1993.
I’m not sure that a pattern has been established.
GW Bush had no choice but to cooperate with the incoming team, facing one of the worst financial disasters since the 1930′s, resulting in part from the failure of his administration to take forceful action; a point I raise only to suggest that the thesis of ‘shadow government’ stands on empirical evidence provided by the Bush administration.
The Gore loss was a one-off event – the closest election in modern history. That’s not a pattern. That’s a data point.
M@63: R2P is just the 21st century version of Colonialism tilted toward the ‘White man’s burden”.
R2P is getting too much press. ME operations are currently subject to COIN. Libya is another example of ME vagaries and resistance to predictive behavior. blert, far from an intellectual slouch, predicted Khaddafi’s fall one week after hostilities broke out: Thursday or Friday at the latest IIRC. He was wrong. This is not an R2P issue. This is a political issue and a coordination issue. Policy is ‘leading from behind.’
V@67: So we will solve the worlds problems with water pistols?
Funny how saber rattling is back in style again. The issue is formulating and adopting policy that minimizes combat injuries and death. Used to be called leadership.
So riddle me this one batman. How do you decode a week in which Obama shows his birth certificate. Superman renounces his american citizenship and OBL finally gets killed on O’s direct order.
vidéo — BBC: Osama Bin Laden; Dead or Alive (1/6) http://t.co/GH4vnjI
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seven-years–U-S-Britain-covering-cont OBL dead since 2001 !!!!
Sandmonkey “If only they had taken out Ghaddafi yesterday and then OBL today, then it would’ve been a twofer!”
That was a quick DNA test on bin Laden!
When was he killed?
Exactly, how long does it take to do a DNA test?
Here is one answer:
Hey Steve,
Its actually a little of both at times. Back logs can cause major delays, the test itself takes 5 to 10 days to run the test itself, and the type also has something to do with it at times.
There is more than one type of DNA comparison.
Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (RFLP,RFLP is a technique for analyzing the variable lengths of DNA fragments that result from digesting a DNA sample with a special kind of enzyme. This enzyme, a restriction endonuclease, cuts DNA at a specific sequence pattern know as a restriction endonuclease recognition site. The presence or absence of certain recognition sites in a DNA sample generates variable lengths of DNA fragments, which are separated using gel electrophoresis. They are then hybridized with DNA probes that bind to a complementary DNA sequence in the sample.
RFLP was one of the first applications of DNA analysis to forensic investigation. With the development of newer, more efficient DNA-analysis techniques, RFLP is not used as much as it once was because it requires relatively large amounts of DNA… The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uses a standard set of 13 specific STR regions for CODIS. CODIS is a software program that operates local, state, and national databases of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence, and missing persons. The odds that two individuals will have the same 13-loci DNA profile is about one in a billion.
Mitochondrial DNA Analysis, Mitochondrial DNA analysis (mtDNA) can be used to examine the DNA from samples that cannot be analyzed by RFLP or STR. Nuclear DNA must be extracted from samples for use in RFLP, PCR, and STR; however, mtDNA analysis uses DNA extracted from another cellular organelle called a mitochondrion. While older biological samples that lack nucleated cellular material, such as hair, bones, and teeth, cannot be analyzed with STR and RFLP, they can be analyzed with mtDNA. In the investigation of cases that have gone unsolved for many years, mtDNA is extremely valuable.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Careers-Police-1531/2009/6/DNA-test-long.htm
geraldo is having one his finest days tonight in front of the White House, where a huge crowd of college students, off-duty soldiers sailors and Marines, and just whovever, are whooping it up like the football team just won the big Bowl game, times about 2 or 3. Marvelous sight to see. Geraldo’s bleeding heart will frost my gills again before long, but tonight it’s thumpin’ out the version you gotta love –
The thing Obama did at the end of his OBL speech saved him. What he did was equate America’s destiny with God’s destiny. This was an improbable thing for him to do, given his radical leftist background, but he did do it.
This move is important because the religion of Islam sets forth parameters under which you are allowed to live, Allah-willing. Good can be evil tomorrow, or vice-versa, Alla-willing.
Osama bin Laden’s great power and mystique is based upon the fact that he took the fight to America and he seemed to win. 9/11 was not only an act of Osama bin Laden and his people, it was an act of Allah. Or was it? If 9/11 was an act of Allah, Allah seems to have closed the door on it since OBL got his butt greased.
Barack Obama’s speech tonight was mostly for domestic consumption and to communicate what an awesome guy Barack Obama is. But, yet, at the end and improbably, Obama tied OBL’s demise to America’s Manifest Destiny. Allah chose America.
I’ll give the man props. I really dislike Obama. I fully expected his speech to be a harnosed speech with domestic focus concentrating on what a Dirty Harry he was and how he succeeded where Bush failed. It was exactly that, for a long time. But then Obama closed with a religious argument that really put the hammer down on the jihadist mindset. He pretty much declared God to be on America’s side, with evidence in hand.
I got to give him props for making a great speach, on a great day.
According to these reports,
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42853221/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/
US operatives had been targeting the compound in Abbatabad since august 2010. that would mean the reports a month ago of OBL stirring from caves in mountains along the afpak border were false flag reports.
I’m really annoyed that most of the news articles I’ve been reading about bin Laden’s death are spending most of their ink trying to tell me who he was, and damn little telling me about what happened.
Osama bin Laden might as well have been Rudolph Valentino from the 1920′s. All the news articles have been built along those biographical lines, as if nobody would know about the life of the man.
I dunno, does Osama bin Laden seem like a guy the average citizen of today would be aware of? Apparently not. Apparently he’s a guy who needs to be re-introduced upon his death, according to the sanctioned narratives to boot.
It is increasingly insulting to be an American citizen.
The story the Mainstream media is selling is that Obama has suddenly evolved a spine and testicles.
Sorry, I have a real hard time swallowing that frog.
This guy is a documented d*ckless wonder who has soiled himself repeatedly when Somali teenagers with weapons have taken US and other Western hostages on the high seas. He hid in his office while the Iranians massacred protesters in the streets, but jumped at the opportunity to betray Mubarak, who had been a steady ally for three decades.
You may ask “So What?” Iran has been killing American soldiers and citizens and our allies for decades, and poses a substantial threat to the US and its allies. Egypt under Mubarak was the ONLY Arab Islamic country in the world to have negotiated a peace agreement with Israel, and consistently cooperated with the US in anti-terrorism. In other words, confronting Iran, which has shown repeatedly that it is willing to kill Americans, would have a cost; betraying Mubarak, who has been a friend America, was never going to send terror teams to the US for opposing him. (Of course, in time there will most likely be a huge price, but only later as the Muslim Brotherhood takes over and we see terrorism against the US being supported by Egypt…How long before they repudiate the peace treaty w Israel?)
At every turn, Obama has shown utter contempt for the traditional values, laws and precedents of this country. I would like to be happy about this end to OBL and his terrorism, but the idea that President Obama has suddenly reversed course and wants to PROTECT AMERICA is *I*N*S*A*N*E*
GIVE US A BREAK. You can easily list 200 things this guy and his appointed perverts have done that violate, circumvent, or undermine US law (Why have there been no civil or criminal charges?) and the traitors in the press seriously expect me to believe that he has somehow magically transformed into AMERICA’s HERO?
It’s much more likely that some group of SpecOps guys found him and killed him, and Obama, presented with a fait accompli, resigned himself to the onerous task of taking full credit for it, claiming to have “fully authorized it” long before.
My ass. Just like his alleged long-form whatsit. I would not believe this piece of garbage to tell me whether the sun is shining.
mf/100, well and good, but if rationality says we gotta let possibility breathe, then we gotta let improbability –even utter improbability –breathe too, as they are the lower forms of possibility.
…having a baleful-eyed president and CiC tracking the nation and the calendar like a lizard with counter-rotating eyes watching two flies buzz around coming ever nearer tongue range, holding his coup de gras for your little piece of the world until the end of his last act, is so dreadfully ominous, so grindingly onerous and debilitatingly sinister, that even the palest wan sunshine ray of chance that he might whistle up a slight counterpoint to the funeral dirge demanded by his malign cabal –the ray of chance that the office is said to have the power of shining –to become a merely hapless and feckless left-wing moron such as Jimmy Carter, is well worth the observing that the words he let loose at the end of his speech tonight were –unexpectedly and delightfully for a change –the right ones.
101/buddy larsen & mf/100
While I understand and acknowledge the completely human need to find comfort in words, especially in desperate times, rationality also makes it imperative that we steel ourselves against succumbing to the narcotic effects of such words on both those analytical faculties and skeptical instincts which are necessary for survival in the real world.
In responding to comforting words, that same rationality also demands that we evaluate them objectively and logically, and by those same criteria weight their values proportionately and with consideration to the totality of the known data concerning the veracity and reliability of their source.
Comforting words from a leader such as Obama, whose track record demonstrates a consistent pattern of destructive and malevolent intent towards this country, are in no way of equal value to such words from a Churchill or Reagan, with their demonstrated records of actually wanting to benefit their country and people.
If we are truly to look at this development rationally and honestly, then we should acknowledge the double-edged negatives as well. For example, while we may bask in the momentary endorphin rush of having “gotten” Osama bin Laden, he has also been elevated to martyr status and will serve as an inspiration to fuel further rage, destruction and death from his followers.
In addition, his death will make almost no difference in the effectiveness of the operational aspects of the WOT. He has always functioned and had more power as a symbol than as a tactical leader. His martyrdom will likely enhance rather than diminish that power. Killing Ayman Zawahiri would have done far more to cripple the enemy’s operational ability to mete out death and destruction, without the messianic martyrdom blowback.
Bottom line is I believe Mad Fiddler has it pegged correctly and he’s in good company:
“For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.” – Patrick Henry
bl: Obama cannot be defended on this board, which is intellectually tragic.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
“The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
And the Rotten Tomatoes Award goes to:
“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”
-Albert Einstein (all)
t/102, ybr/103, thanks for the thoughts –i was really offering only the mundane thought –which i lost in a late-night attempt to write it purty –that the prodigal son parable applies with Obama. IOW, we’re stuck with him –even if he quit his job tomorrow, we’d be stuck with THAT too –and to refuse the occasional popsicle in Hell ain’t gonna do much but lower the popsicle count and raise the temperature. there’s always the improbable but not impossible change of heart –even if it starts with the gall of remembering that a popsicle in Hell is better than Hell with no popsicles at all, so take the damn popsicle.
100. Mad Fiddler
The long form whatsit is a fraud: Like the Dan Rather fraud the long form scam used kerning where it is purported to be typed.
No typewriter ever built can kern letters. That’s only possible with computers or lino-types or movable type.
The kerned letters also correspond to the layers. The only possible answer is that they were computer manipulations dropped in by a rube, a young one at that, who didn’t even learn about the Dan Rather screw-up.
That the long form was released right in front of: the royal wedding, John Paul II, and the death certificate of OBL — was just a coincidence. Right.
There’s no doubt that Barry was born a legal bastard, that much is certain.
What he’s really trying to hide is is red-diaper baby status and his DNA linkage to Frank Marshall Davis — a real vote killer.
Other items to be suppressed: his founding of the Marxist student club while at Occidental, just another vote killer.
If the MSM had vetted him reds and muslims would have been falling out of the closets. That’s what he’s concerned about.
yep –difficult to campaign for the radical-left’s support without leaving some radical-left spoor. It’d be flat-out impossible unless you had something to allow you to disappear that record –something indemnifying to the professional racialists strapped to every major microphone and high-profile keyboard in the country.
Yep. The earnest white boomers –still, despite their carnage evident, busily undermining the fourth estate –are very very sincere about their obsessive/compulsive anti-racism pose –so much so that they’ve managed in a few short years to destroy sixty-five years of natural growth of color-blindness in American society. I’m sure Herman Cain and Allen West are just tickled pink over the wholesale hypocrisy.
Obama at Occidental College:
[Dr. John] Drew was founder of the Democratic Student Socialist Alliance at Occidental – basically, the Marxist club, as he describes it in the interview. He got to know young Obama fairly well, and notes that Obama described himself at the time as a Marxist-Lenninist, and anticipated a revolution in the United States.
Occidental College is a chi-chi upscale liberal arts institution outside of LA that essentially provides feed stock for Hollywood and the surrounding liberal arts industries.
The fact of the student activity is concerning, in and of itself, but the biographical airbrushing is, here I would agree, more serious. Every young person is communist – for 15 minutes. Most grow out of it. Obama’s level of commitment was more serious and should have been part of his record.
JFK never learned that lesson. (Is sharing a girlfriend with Sam Giancana any less of a national security threat than Obama’s “internationalism?”) A few others I could include in the list. Obama is just another flavor of political snipe. Washington is loaded to the gills.
Laura D’Andrea Tyson on CNBC said that USA remains a strong and viable country etc etc etc etc etc (the woman can sling it) and that “we” know what to do – the technical solutions not that mysterious – but having trouble actually, well, ‘doing it.’ (Those words sound familiar to me.)
Same thing I posted earlier about Jack Bogle. When an interviewer got impatient with Bogle’s description of how to fix SS, Bogle replied, then why haven’t we done it?
Obama’s background contains distasteful, and suggestive, elements, but the problem in Washington is bigger than a lefty wannabee with visions of utopian grandeur.
Going after this man personally is easy – and self-indulgent. Squeezing some semblance of execution out of Congress is not. It will take years – and hard work.
In terms of personal animus, I can think of three presidents I have despised before Obama even registers. I argue for marginalizing an inadequate president – not demonization, which I see as a default strategy lacking a presentable GOP candidate for 2012, let alone what the Party has planned for the Congressional races, if anything.
“No dessert,” says ybr, “…until everyone has cleaned their plates. The broccoli, too.”
::)) That librarian voice sneaks out now and then. I have no idea where it comes from.
—
Obama had nothing to do with with the people who leaped to their deaths rather than burn on 9/11. I have nothing but contempt for the responsible parties.
—
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is bidding to play the Navy Seal whose place in history was made by a double tap to the left.
ybr/109; can we explore the ”Obama had nothing to do with with the people who leaped to their deaths rather than burn on 9/11. I have nothing but contempt for the responsible parties” in the light of the ‘Leninism’ part of your quote bloc?
To ever be a ‘Leninist’ –even as a callow college kid –is to betray a certain psychological mindset we all familiarly allude to as ‘the end justifies the means’ –and ANY end ‘for’ Communism justifies ANY means whatsoever –killing humans in vast numbers to dot an ‘i’ in a commie tract included without a second thought.
It’s really sort of a mark –a mark of Cain one might say –marking at any age a person who likes kicking a dog or who enjoys power over others just for the frisson of ‘getting even’ with nature.
So one might say that the idea which gave us 9/11 is the same idea which gave us Leninism, and the same idea motivating a student of Lenin to agree with Lenin.
which all, it just occurred, makes a circle, in that Occidental was founded by Armand Hammer, an actual personal friend of Lenin himself (establishing with his Occidental Petroleum a sinister template that we see today in full flourish in the likes of BP, global energy giant and covert policy operative of governments holding oil-market power), and whose college turns out commies and whose oil company is still shot-thru with friends of the oil boyz in the Kremlin (see just recently the highly perp-tainted transfer of Phibro to Oxy from Citi, at a price so ridiculously low –beware, Citi shareholders –that one is forced to regard it a clear payoff for duty in the trenches in support of the 2008 financial collapse).
Also re Occidental College, Obama apparently had a Fulbright Scholarship –which is granted in support of the ideas of, as well as named for, the late Arkansas Senator (and the Ayres of Obama to the career of Bill Clinton) William J. Fulbright, who also established a template –that of a senate foreign-relations committee chairman who always toes the Kremlin line, which he always knew via friends inside that august body, so many that even the ideologically-unmoored LBJ felt he had to, in order to prosecute the Vietnam War, assign an entire posse of FBI agents to keep an eye on what the good senator was passing on to the backers and paymasters of the enemy in the field against US soldiers.
bl: Obama apparently had a Fulbright Scholarship
Speculation – that nobody is pursuing with any diligence.
So one might say that the idea which gave us 9/11 is the same idea which gave us Leninism, and the same idea motivating a student of Lenin to agree with Lenin.
Not going to cede much except to say that my original statement was simplistic of course.
Ideas are dangerous and advocates over the age of consent are responsible for their actions and behavior.
Moving down the big picture scale into event-specific details, Leninism is not overtly or by universal consensus equivalenced with fundamentalist Islam. Berman et al make a few links and draw parallels that derive from pre-WWI influences, but equivalence of ideology is not fully mainstream thought. One can argue, as you do, that all totalitarian constructs – have power issues, especially as they pertain to the question of pesky humans – it is after all a universal question that defines most or all of human history.
Fundamentalist Islam and Leninism, for all their commonalities remain distinct ideologies, united only by their contradistinction to freedom/democracy.
The shadows of fundamentalist Islam hover over 911, much more so than Leninism. The explicit USA foreign policy failures under Bush, Clinton, Carter, and back to Nixon, hover over 911 much more so than Obama’s left-leaning politics. The foreign policy designs of the Saudi’s and the Pakistani’s are far more dangerous to the security of this country than any flirtation Obama may have experienced as an 18-yr old college student.
To the extent that Obama, or someone with similar political persuasions, is a danger rests with his embrace of “internationalism” as I stated before. New words but slightly different template.
bl…
Phibro lost its ‘goodwill premium’ once the bidders realized what a crooked market it was riding.
It was loaded with taint.
Next, its huge ROI was due to staggering leverage fueled by Citi’s Primary Dealer status.
No non-PD could repeat the ‘trading’ success.
And the key trader was pulling a Cassano: raking in 33% of the gate just for himself. It’s an absurd situation.
ANY diligent prosecution could easily claw back the outlandish salaries from Cassano and others.
Just do it as a civil action. You’d win every case. Forget about prison — too many & too tough. No ordinary jury could fathom the depth of their schemes.
Understanding a pile of money moving from the taxpayers to the TBTF to Cassano. Yeah, that they can follow.
blert, now add atop all that you just said the facts around how Phibro ended up a subsidiary of Occidental –how easily your observation would have been proven, but was not, in the normal placing of the the property on the market, rather than by Citi standing by so clownishly uncharacteristically passive as newly-appointed Obama ‘pay czar’ Ken Feinberg, acting as a Kingsman on a wholly legally irrelevant assertion that ‘the people are outraged over that trader’s compensation’, literally snatched the company from Citi and gave it, with only a flimsy nod toward opening any market bid, to Occidental (effectively awarding the Kremlin a trader’s vest on the futures floor), for what among many others the top bank analyst Dick Bove calculated @ thirty cents on the dollar.
Just for fun, take a look sometime at Occidental and ‘Love Canal’ (and Carol Browner, and how many dollars have gone to whom from the resultant ‘environmental superfund’).
***
ybr, my compliments –when you decide to do it, no one but no one can equivocate as beautifully as you!
bl: I had some good instruction.
Policy bending – the stage we’re in – chugs along on compromise – and enough ambiguity to keep the proper palms properly greased. It’s the American Way.
I will say as a closing remark that the rawness of the hatred is a mental game-stop to me. When I think of all the Washingtonians for whom I can muster an equivalent degree of emotion, Obama isn’t anywhere near the top of the list.
His past and his past affiliations deserved more media exposure but his rise was too meteoric. I am not so sure that the MSM was complicit as that they got played. Faster than a speeding bullet. And Obama’s ‘minions’ turned out to be really good.
The Washington establishment definitely got outplayed. What they are doing now is whining. And it is mighty poor form.
The GOP should be out fundraising, building a candidate roster, and composing a policy platform that will offer the electorate real change. Such a course of action will require compromise to appeal to a country that is – to use the hated phrase – fiscally conservative and socially liberal.
“Working” a BC isn’t the issue, won’t be enough and, as per previous suggestions, is likely to alienate a large group of voters, especially given current events, not to even contemplate the near-term future events.
Distracting with too little potential payback too much possible blowback and way too little threat. (JFK, Carter and Johnson did more damage individually to the country and the constitution. It’s not as if we haven’t been here before.)
The on-line Obama photo showing the two bullet taps over the left eye is fake.
okay, i’ll cooperate and call it a draw, ybr. But do want to observe re damage done by whom, that things i did for fun at 20 would physically kill me today, while things i do for fun today would mentally kill me at 20.
To have a life and death effect one can go to ten years of medical school, or one can be a beach lifeguard and spend two minutes pretending not to notice someone drowning.
The War of the Roses. Exhausting all of England and killing off the best and brightest of two generations, was decided by that horse shoe nail.
Today we have a president nonchalantly tossing that nail up in the air and seeing if he can catch it, while the camera dollies back and slowly reveals, he’s doing it standing on a tightrope stretched across Hell, and is showing no sign of having noticed.
bl: i’ll cooperate and call it a draw
I will admit that my argument suffers from a preponderance of “what ____ did was worse.” Unfortunately it’s true. (Washington simmers – year round.)
As in all of Wall St “pretending not to notice someone drowning”. It’s just an economy.
Right? President Bush? (On his behalf, I am fairly confident he had no clue so the issue wasn’t ignoring, but, using your argument of extended responsibility, Bush holds accountability for appointing responsible staff.)
Right? Secretary Paulson?
Obama is a cool persona. But, according to Steve Schmidt (one of McCain’s 2008 campaign managers), so was Sarah Palin. During a plane conversation when he was briefing her on expectations and responsibilities, she seemed immune to the pressure – smiled serenely.
Grace under pressure or something else?
But I agree. The subject’s been squeezed dry. To be effective with the electorate, Obama’s liabilities must be conditioned in the present tense, which means health care reform, where I believe he is exposed naked as a jaybird (courtesy of a Pelosi-led Congress, but, by extension, the buck stops … somewhere.)
Also the end of Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations. (Maybe.)
the thing is, with Sarah Palin, you are privileged to keep things elemental. Oh, she could put on the complex pose if she wanted –who couldn’t, really, everyone mastered it in high school –but she allows one to simply muse “I trust her”, and then go out and have some fun –rather than spend life in the weeds outside the Obama castle, trying to puzzle out where the next blow will fall.
Trust vs trying to puzzle out where the next blow will fall
Mercy. You boys are suckers for a pair of legs.
I wouldn’t trust Palin farther than I could throw her.
On a serious note, my view is that she’s been damaged (Nixonized) by the press treatment of her first exposure. The thrill is gone.
A shame maybe, but gone it is.
Of course Nixon came back from his Checker’s speech, but that was a good decade, which means Palin has some trench work to do – not to mention some decision-making, which I don’t think she has finished, let alone started. Rushing it would be a huge mistake.
blert@113: ANY diligent prosecution could easily claw back the outlandish salaries from Cassano and others. Just do it as a civil action. You’d win every case. Forget about prison — too many & too tough. No ordinary jury could fathom the depth of their schemes.
I’d be all for that. Much as I’d like to see some cell time, I’d settle for a bank roll squeeze.
Neither one is going to happen. Where the ambition?
The AIG criminal investigation was called of long ago –about two weeks after it began, iirc. “No evidence of criminal wrongdoing” said the FBI.
feh.
Someday, boyz n grilz, i’ll tell you why the saturnine visage and spectacle of un-TV-ness Elliot ”lipstick exit” Spitzer has his own ratings-free show on CNN.