“If the Iranians LIKE their enriched uranium, they get to KEEP their enriched uranium”

In case you somehow missed it this weekend, Obama has apparently decided that World War III should happen sooner, rather than later.

To quote Carol Platt Liebau, “If the Iranians like their enriched uranium, they get to keep their enriched uranium“:

Obama’s ‘big’ speech on #Syria accomplished LESS than nothing…

For a guy who loves to talk as much as our President, a fifteen minute speech barely gives his teleprompter a chance to warm-up.

It was …unusual. He at once made the case for striking Syria, even as he gave support for continuing diplomacy à la Russia and John Kerry’s verbal gaffes. Which is it?

Should we bomb everything that moves because Chemical Weapons are an affront to the civilized world, or should we trust that Russia’s Putin will help us hold Assad accountable by making him pinkie-promise to never kill his citizens in that particular way again?

Who knows?

Experts reach Consensus on planned Peace Talks with the Taliban: Yeah, that’s a pretty dumb idea

Back in 2009, President Obama included the following statement in an interview with Al-Arabiya: 

“My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy”.

Ummm, okay, but that was always a glaring oversimplification. Left unsaid was that we should probably differentiate between the Muslim world in general, and specifically radical Islamists (such as the Taliban), seeing as how the latter consider themselves to be OUR historic enemies, and plan on remaining so until long after we’re all dead.

For a man who prides himself on ‘nuance’, failing to make such a distinction called into question Obama’s basic competence for this job.

Words I can’t believe I’m typing: “We’re really trying to have Peace Talks with …the TALIBAN”???

We’re trying to have Peace Talks with the Taliban.

Wait a sec… what?

NO way.

Seriously??

No kidding?

….the Taliban???

White House talking points on Benghazi show what we suspected all along: They Lied…..

As I said just days ago:

“…And when (Obama) stands in front of the American people and offers the most amateurish of fibs, you know that it’s now not a matter of IF this is all going to come out, but merely WHEN.”

And here we go:

(From The Weekly Standard) – … The CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis prepared the first draft of a response to the congressman, which was distributed internally for comment at 11:15 a.m. on Friday, September 14 (Version 1 at right). This initial CIA draft included the assertion that the U.S. government “know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”

(…)

The agency draft also raised the prospect that the facilities had been the subject of jihadist surveillance and offered a reminder that in the previous six months there had been “at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy.”

I believe in Monsters, and Things that go Bump in the Night…

My wife and I have been watching a lot of old Law & Order episodes recently, back when the series dealt with its topics in a relatively even-handed way. And one line in particular keeps coming back to me.

It was spoken by ADA Jamie Ross (played by Carey Lowell), and it certainly applies to many of our current news items today: “I believe in monsters and things that go bump in the night, Jack. May they rot in hell, along with their attorneys.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

What else would you say about national monsters like Kermit Gosnell, whose abortion mill was so gruesome and stomach-turning that just reading the reports makes your skin crawl?

Or about tyrannical despots like Ahmadinejad in Iran, or Kim Jong-un in North Korea?

These men, each of them, ARE monsters…and are very, very real.

Okay, 1st: Obama lied for 2 weeks about Benghazi. Now: he’s lying …about the lying

At this point, I’m really getting sick & tired of even hearing this disingenuous, illiterate drivel.

Unless you’ve been holed up in solitary confinement for the past two months, you’ve heard about the “did-he-or-didn’t-he” Benghazi discussion. President Obama and his team are pushing this retelling of history to

(A) insist he had “informed” the American people that Benghazi was terrorism in his 9/12/12 Rose Garden speech (he didn’t), and

(B) downplay the even bigger truth, which is Obama & Co lied to our face about a stupid video for two weeks AFTER the Rose Garden speech, and is now lying…about the lying.

Honestly, this has to be the most ridiculous argument I’ve seen in my adult life. We are being told to ignore what our eyes, ears and brain are telling us; to literally ignore an observable truth. I’m past incredulous that they’re even attempting this; now I’m just plain ticked off.

It’s not an insult to our intelligence; it’s insinuating that we have no intelligence whatsoever.

Here, watch the address again. Are YOU left with the impression that Obama is telling us the attacks in Benghazi were by terrorists?

Answer: NO, you’re not.

Now, why are you not? It’s because words mean things, and context matters. From Alana Goodman in Commentary Magazine:

If Obama wanted to call the Benghazi assault a terrorist attack in that speech, he had plenty of opportunities to do so. Instead, he described it as a “terrible act,” a “brutal” act, “senseless violence,” and called the attackers “killers,” …not terrorists.

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By the way, speaking just for the English & Grammar nerds in the room, the phrases “act of terror” & “terrorist act” are not even grammatically interchangeable: one describes an act (which could be done by anyone), the other describes an action done by a specific person.

Big. Difference.

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More from Alana Goodman:

Obama said during the speech that “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation” — but at no point was it clear that he was using that term to describe the attack in Benghazi. He’d also spent the previous two paragraphs discussing the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath. “Acts of terror” could have just as easily been a reference to that.

Or maybe it wasn’t a direct reference to anything, …just a generic, reassuring line he’d added into a speech which did take place, after all, the day after the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

By only focusing on the small, carved-out phrase “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation” from the rest of the speech, it allows the media and the Obama Administration to shape the context more easily.

Less to deal with; easier to lie about.

If you skipped over the video, go watch it; it’s short. Because no matter what else Obama was trying to convey to us that day, the attacks in Benghazi being terrorism wasn’t one of them.

VP Debate: Ryan holds the fort, while Biden is buffoonish

Last week in the initial presidential debate, Romney’s win over Obama more closely resembled a 90-minute video game, with Obama having been stuck with the broken controller. It became a rout almost immediately, and you stuck around only to see how bad the final tally would be.

In contrast, this week’s Vice-Presidential debate was more closely contested, but was still memorable for two big reasons: demeanor and facts.

First, the facts. Biden started the evening off by pulling a Bart Simpson (“it wasn’t me!!”), essentially blaming our Intelligence Community for the Administration’s repeated lies about Benghazi.

From Commentary Magazine:

The vice president claimed that the story the administration put out about the terrorist attack on the consulate and the murder of the U.S. ambassador being part of the fallout from a controversial anti-Muslim video was the fault of the intelligence they were given. But rather than put the issue to bed, it raises even more troubling questions about not only about the security disaster but also about the lack of leadership shown by senior administration officials including the president. It also contradicts State Department testimony and other comments from intelligence officials that they knew it was a terror attack within 24 hours of it happening.

For Biden to put all of the blame for the lies about the video and the denial of terrorism on intelligence officials says a lot about the complete breakdown of administration counter-terror policy. His denial that anyone in Washington knew that the story put forward Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations wasn’t true seems implausible. Even if true, it speaks to administration incompetence.

“Smart Power“. It’s worked just awesome so far.

Joe being Joe, he was just getting warmed up. This from the Washington Free Beacon:

Vice President Joe Biden accused Rep. Paul Ryan of putting two wars on the “credit card,” and then suggested he voted against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“By the way, they talk about this great recession like it fell out of the sky–like, ‘Oh my goodness, where did it come from?’” Biden said. “It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card, at the same time, put a prescription drug plan on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy.”

“I was there, I voted against them,” Biden continued. “I said, no, we can’t afford that.”

[Actually], Sen. Biden voted for the Afghanistan resolution on Sept. 14, 2001 which authorized “the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.”

And on Oct. 11, 2002, Biden voted for a resolution authorizing unilateral military action in Iraq, according to the Washington Post.

Further, if you re-read that quote, what the Beacon doesn’t single out is the “put a prescription drug plan on the credit card” part of Biden’s quote. His finding fault with that is curious, since he voted for it, too, along with many of its expansions.

Hey, maybe he forgot?

And now, and perhaps most importantly in the long run, the demeanor.

I have to assume that it was drilled into Biden’s semi-porous cranium that he had to attack, attack, attack the entire night. Well, if that was his goal, he succeeded. However, he also succeeded in portraying himself as an overbearing, contemptuous, insufferable creep.

I promise you: that is a charitable description.  

Biden's got the "arrogant know-nothing hard of hearing mathematically ignorant jerk" vote locked up.

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) October 12, 2012

Poor Joe, he's been talking to himself for 4 years, he doesn't know how to hold a conversation. #VPDebate

— Craig (@craigcarroll) October 12, 2012

I listen to Wallace every week, and he’s no partisan. He is, in fact, often much tougher on Republicans than anyone this side of MSNBC. His portrayal of Biden is accurate to a fault: Biden exhibited the manners of the drunk guy at your last office party, hectoring the bartender for “one more for the road”. I haven’t seen as epic an interruption (or in this case, a blizzard of them) since Kanye West and Taylor Swift. Virtually ever time Ryan spoke, Biden would begin yammering. The most recent tally that I’ve seen so far is Biden=82 interruptions, Ryan=6. If that’s even close to the official total (and I think it may be too low), that tells you all you need to know.

Biden wasn’t done. As Wallace intimated, even during the times that Ryan could string three sentences together without Joe “My turn! My turn!” Biden butting in, he amused himself by laughing. Snickering. Smirking. Openly guffawing. Rolling his eyes. And generally behaving like your 9-year-old when they argue with a sibling.

It was pathetic.

Feel free to watch all or part of it below. I’m warning you, though: within the first 30 minutes, you will have lost whatever remaining respect you had for our current VP. And the next 30 minutes is worse.

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Ryan was solid throughout, and presented himself as smart (we knew that), and in control of the facts (knew that, too). Ryan didn’t outright win the evening so much as Biden discredited himself from consideration with his churlish, clownish behavior. Among Independents especially, I think that will count against Biden far more than any policy points he may have scored.

Before the debate, I had initially decided against including this cartoon. Now it’s more than appropriate.

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UPDATE: Ed over at HotAir.com has video of Biden claiming to have voted against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, citing them both as the reason for the massive deficits we now face. As I mentioned, this is a complete and total lie.

Check out his post, and you won’t have to sift through the entire debate video (above) to see it.