Obama careless with the truth

Watching Lateline and caught a clip of Obama denying there was any substance to the story of his association with William Ayers, a Weatherman of the 60s and 70s.
“And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense…”
This is William Ayres Of the day he bombed the Pentagon, Ayers says, “Everything was absolutely ideal. … The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”
On another occasion, Ayers stated: “There’s something about a good bomb … Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down.”
and this from a memoir of sorts released on 9/11
‘I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.”
From Hillary Clinton;
Obama served on a board with former Weather Underground member William Ayers and “that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11.”
and this;
Deborah Harrington, president of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic organization in Chicago, said Obama was a director from 1994 through 2001. That overlaps Ayers’ time as a director by three years. It also means Obama served with Ayers for the final months of 2001, after Ayers made his comments to the New York Times.
So Senator, we’re not talking about something that happened 40 years ago but an ongoing association with an anarchist that does reflects on you and your values. You were working with Ayres when you were 40, not 40 years ago. Is that what you meant to say? If not, you lied! As far as I’m concerned there is no Statute of limitations on being an anarchist dedicated to a terrorist bombing campaign against your own countryman and even if Ayres now has an aura of respectability about him he is what he was and Obama sat down with him. Worse, he did it in full knowledge of what Ayers had done. Not that the ABC mentioned any of these details – just the denial, leaving viewers with the impression that it all happened when Obama was a just an eight year old. Amazing isn’t it that the US Democrats have a campaign HQ in Australia – ah…the ABC, ever reliable. UPDATE: An article by a victim of William Ayers UPDATE2: Dogfight at Bankstown has good coverage on the subject matter.

Obama’s 143 Days of Senate Experience

I have lifted this quote in it’s entirey from The Loft via Tim Blair
Just how much Senate experience does Barack Obama have in terms of actual work days? Not much. From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United State Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate. That’s how many days the Senate was actually in session and working. After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World, and fill the shoes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan. 143 days — I keep leftovers in my refrigerator longer than that. In contrast, John McCain’s 26 years in Congress, 22 years of military service including 1,966 days in captivity as a POW in Hanoi now seem more impressive than ever. At 71, John McCain may just be hitting his stride.
Like our own Kevin Rudd, the US Messiah is all talk.

Democrat Convention

I listened to the ABC report on the Democrat Convention in Denver. Michelle Obama spoke but her earlier comment “…first time in my life I’m really been proud to be an American” didn’t get a rerun. Ted Kennedy spoke emotionally and eloquently about the achievements of others – his brother Jack and quoted Martin Luther King’s I have a dream but he didn’t mention Chappaquiddick Understandable too, but some people have long memories and if I was Obama I would just as soon not have Ted’s support. I wonder if the ABC will give the Republican Convention to be held next week, the same sort of coverage.

I’ll vote for him but he’s still a liar

The BBC, ever ready to publish something anti-Republican, have dug up the Head Jailer at the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War where John McCain was incarcerated after having to eject from his jet. It now appears that after all this time they were actually the best of mates and the North Vietnamese were nice chaps.
“McCain is my friend,” said 75-year-old Mr Duyet as he feeds the caged birds he now keeps in his garden in this coastal city. “If I was American, I would vote for him.”
but;
“…. I can confirm to you that we never tortured him. We never tortured any prisoners.”
Besides lying about being tortured then, McCain is still lying;
“But I can somehow sympathise with him. He lies to American voters in order to get their support for his presidential election.”
You have to give it to the BBC; they start the article with ‘I would vote for him’ and from that point on ‘McCain’s a lying hound’ Didn’t torture prisoners….yeah right.

Change course, Bush urged from all sides

US President George W.Bush left Washington yesterday bound for the Asian economic summit in Vietnam with advice from left, right and centre ringing in his ears to change course, not only in Iraq but on foreign policy in general. Good Idea. Start with securing the borders of Iraq and then attacking the terrorists lines of supply and if that means destroying the factories from whence they obtain their explosives for IEDs then so be it. In whatever country they are located. The anti-war terrorist appeasement brigade have achieved one of their aims. They can now draw parrallels between Vietnam and Iraq with some degree of truth after the mid-term US elections. In ’72 and ’74 when the South Vietnamese needed support the then Democrat majority denied them hope allowing the Communist North to re-arm courtesy of the USSR and subsequently invade South Vietnam. The assassinations, reducation camps and communists policies resulting in poverty and terror for the remaining millions who couldn’t flee is now history. I would just hope we don’t repeat history just because we have forgotten the past or never understood it in the first place.

US Mid-term elections

Senator Kerry campaigns for the Republicans as he reminds the US that the Democrats come with left wing garbage.
Senator Kerry is a decorated war veteran who served in Vietnam. He said people were “crazy” to think he would denigrate America’s 140,000 personnel serving in Iraq.
Maybe people are crazy and are ready to believe that Kerry would insult servicemen because that’s what he does. Since he first come on the radar screen in the early 70s his stock and trade has been to dispage his own countrymen and curry favour with their enemies. Kerry in 2006 addressing a rally;
You know, education–if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.
Kerry in 1971 addressing a Senate Inquiry;
They [US servicemen in Vietnam] had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
But as we know, Kerry is also a a man of action. He went to North Vietnam and helped the communists secure leverage in the Paris Peace Talks. This from a guest at the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam war;
I was a POW for nearly six years, held in North Vietnam prison camps, including the notorious Hanoi Hilton, a place of unimaginable horrors — torture, beatings, starvation and mind-numbing isolation. When Kerry branded us “war criminals,” he handed our captors all the justification they needed to carry out their threats to execute us. Thanks to Kerry, Jane Fonda and their comrades in the anti-war movement, our captivity was prolonged by years. The communists in Hanoi and Moscow couldn’t have had a better press agent to spread their anti-American propaganda.
And this from Opinion Journal;
Kerry’s apology isn’t really an apology at all. Here’s a shorter summary of it:
1. What I said wasn’t really what I said. 2. I’m sorry if you misinterpreted what I was saying by taking it at face value. 3. Republicans suck.
Why it is so hard just to say, “I’m sorry for what I said”? I trust we can get quotes from Kerry everyday from now until the mid-term US elections. It may help to remind Americans that this is what the Democrats think of the US military. Every house has a veteran and the main-steam America treats them honourably, unlike Kerry.

Scientists and magic numbers

Tim Lambert is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales and a standout example of why we don’t let academics with math majors run real life situations. He has invested a considerable amount of time defending the latest Lancet Democrat Party campaign advert that points to 650,000 deaths in Iraq.

Using such cutting post titles as Flypaper for the ennumerates and Stupid beyond belief he attacks all and sundry with mathmatical wizardry pointing out the methodolgy is well proven. What he doesn’t do is prove that the figures are anywhere near believable.

As there are too many lawyers fighting battles in court to save the souls of terrorist with clever legal procedures against a backdrop of slaughtered civilian victims then likewise there are now too many scientist quoting theory that has little to do with real life.

When I went to war, as different than when I read about it or studied the mathmatical formulae pertaining to same; my battalion lost 30 killed and 220 wounded giving a 7.33:1 ratio of deaths to wounded. Our sister battalion lost 50 to 281 resulting in a ratio of 5.6:1. Current stats from Iraq are running at 8:1, slightly higher, but all this low level maths suggests the Iraq hospitals have had 5.2 million wounded to deal with. The 650,000 also suggests that there has been 500 killed per day for every day of the war.

Sorry, I just don’t believe it. As Lambert argues, the methodology is proven but the extrapolation says what might be and it clearly isn’t.

It is worth reading the comments at Deltoid. It may help the casual reader to understand the politics behind the anti Bush theorists. Theories abound in a common sense vacuum.

US politics

On the US political front a new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study of Iraq has said 600,000 died post invasion and Barbara Striesand screams “shut the f***k up to a heckler complaining about a skit during her show that depicted Bush as a bumbling idiot. Maybe if she had stated at the start “This is a free Democrat Party election advertisement” then the heckler would’ve had nothing to complain about. She added “Shut up if you can’t take a joke!” It’s not funny Barbara and you’re not a commedienne, or a believable political commentator for that matter, so just stick to singing. The Iraq deaths, a statistical extrapolation from approximately 40,000 known dead has been gleefully reported by the Tehran Times and is so blatantly released in time for the 7 Nov elections that I’m surprised it gets any oxygen from the general media. Our ABC, of course, are all over it.

Democrat’s wish list

Sex scandal threatens to sink Republicans The Times reports
THE iron grip with which Republicans have held the House of Representatives for the past 12 years appears looser by the day with each fresh disclosure in the sex scandal involving Congressman Mark Foley and teenage boys working on Capitol Hill.
and quotes a pollster.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, predicted yesterday that the mid-terms are set to mirror those of 1994 when Democrats were swept from power by a wave of voter anger. He said: “I watched something similar happen in 1997 when Tony Blair’s Labour Party won its landslide against the Conservatives. The Republicans are sinking fast.”
I’m not convinced. When the story first broke I surfed around to get some idea of the severity of Foley’s crimes and stumbled across Tim Dunlops “Road to Surfdom Hysteria” I followed a link from this line “The emails are stomach-turning: you can see them here. I followed the link anticipating hot flushes, nausea and the development of a burning desire to kill the nearest paedophile. I was dissapointed. I read them again…well, they are creepy in a “send me a picture of yourself” and “what would you like for a birthday present” sort of way but the hysteria eluded me. Tim Blair quotes Kerry Howley at Reason on Line who says
The Mark Foley pedophilia sex scandal lacks two things: pedophilia and sex.
I would hope that Foley’s’ public office’ days are over, he apparently has a track record of bothering Pages and comes across as creepy and immature, but if it reflects significantly on the Republican vote I’ll be surprised. The “holier than thou” hypocritical reaction of the Democrats lacks substance in the light of actualy having sex with an intern (Clinton); get drunk, crash a car into the water and leave the passenger to drown (Kennedy); and actually having sex with a 17 yr old male page (Studds) to name just a few transgressions. Casualties so far;
Foley’s has resigned,
The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, has resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, and Speaker of the House Hastert is under pressure but will most probably survive.
One for being stupid and weird and two for keeping the fact under wraps. That should be it and if pundits are predictng the collapse of the Republican Party over one bad apple then they need some history lessons.  People in glass houses…….etc

Bonfire of the inanities

John Burtis in the Canadian Free Press puts the ‘Dick Cheney shooting a lawyer mate’ press frenzy in perspective.
In their Herculean efforts to lend further “gravitas” to the beleaguered story, the media trundled out grizzled hunting experts, college-trained weather men and women, experts on color recognition and the reasons for the use of international orange on hunting outfits, the problems to be encountered from lead poisoning, ornithologists and the year of the expected Texas quail extinction, medical experts and the grave damage to be expected from the horrors of bird shot, cardiologists, Neil Young and the needles and the damage done, schematic diagrams of shooting victims, savvy attorneys to discourse on the legal ramifications of the expected charges for attempted murder and great bodily harm, pettifoggers to discuss the upcoming civil penalties, constitutional scholars to describe this latest nail in the proverbial coffin of impeachment, pundits to describe in glib detail the replacement of Dick Cheney for this strategic gaffe of immense proportions and experts in finer points of haberdashery to explain the meaning of the pink tie – the full list may never be fully tabulated because of its absolutely daunting size and the fact that it was pounded out in 24 news cycles for nearly a week.
And finishes with this;
And on the world front, as the hunting accident is still being rehashed for inconsistencies, investigated for further nefarious activities and the possible consumption of, gasp, a beer in the woods, the cartoon wars go on, Iran continues its nuclear build up, North Korea remains a menace, Hamas continues its activities to destroy Israel, we have helicopters down off the African coast, the UN remains a rotten borough, Islamist terrorists are still killing people in Iraq and the Philippines and the beat goes on.
But at home the US press burns in its own bonfire of inanities and it won’t step out of the fireplace or look outside its ridiculously small box because there was a hunting accident and somebody’s got to pay.
The story rates with SBS running their 433rd episode of Abu Ghraib prison saga. via LGF
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