Jim Meyers, NewsMax.com

 

Former Senator, TV star and presidential candidate Fred Thompson tells Newsmax that President Barack Obama is revealing his “naivete, ineptitude and arrogance” as he deals with matters of national security.

 

The Tennessee Republican, who now hosts a radio show on Westwood One along with his wife Jeri, also said the “dogs of war have been loosed” over left-wing attempts to single out Bush-era officials for prosecution relating to the treatment of detainees.

 

Some of these Democrats are “the same people who were briefed on these techniques back in 2002,” Thompson said, “including Nancy Pelosi, who’s not telling the truth now, who’s trying to parse words and trying to get around the fact that she knew what was going on, as others did back when this happened.

 

“That creates a new level of animosity like I’ve never seen before, and I served in the Senate for eight years. The dogs of war have been loosed in this country and I don’t know what is going to happen before we see the end of it. But none of it’s going to be good.” Read article.

 

Ronald Kessler, NewsMax.com

 

In September 1995, John Deutch, the director of Central Intelligence, bowed to congressional pressure and fired two CIA officials because they had recruited Guatemalan military assets who had been involved in political assassinations.

 

Inside the agency’s amphitheater, known as the “Bubble,” Deutch then told CIA employees that despite the firings, they should continue to take risks in the service of their country. That brought snickers from many of the clandestine officers in the audience.

 

Deutch laid down the law that recruitment of assets or spies with so-called human rights violations would require high-level approval. Yet who else would know about terrorists and our enemies except those who were themselves involved in treachery?

 

The message was clear: Stay away from informants who are not politically correct.

 

Deutch’s effort to recruit Boy Scouts as spies was chilling.

 

“People retired in place or left,” says William Lofgren, who headed the Central Eurasian Division, which included Russia. “Our spirit was broken. At the CIA, you have to be able to inspire people to take outrageous risks.” Read article.

 

Peter Roff, Fox Forum.Blogs.com

 

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama presented himself to the American people as a change-oriented centrist, slightly to the left of the middle of the road. The way he has governed over his first 100 days, however, shows him to be anything but the image he projected, particularly where many of his appointments are concerned. And it is these appointments that will determine the direction of policy in his administration over the next four years.

 

But it’s not just the apples at the top of the barrel that are reason to be suspicious that a leftward drift is underway. There are plenty of secondary appointments, not all of which are subject to the Senate’s advice and consent, which make up the new administration’s gallery of liberal rogues. Read article.

 

The Seeds of His Own Destruction: Obama's Hundred Days

Dick Morris & Eileen McGann, Townhall.com

 

When the Obama administration crashes and burns, with approval ratings that fall through the floor, political scientists can trace its demise to its first hundred days. While Americans are careful not to consign a presidency they desperately need to succeed to the dustbin of history, the fact is that this president has moved -- on issue after issue -- in precisely the opposite direction of what the people want him to do.

 

Right now, Obama's ratings must be pleasing to his eye. Voters like him and his wife immensely, and approve of his activism in the face of the economic crisis. While polls show big doubts about what he is doing, the overwhelming sense is to let him have his way and pray that it works.

 

But beneath this superficial support, Obama's specific policies run afoul of very deeply felt feelings by American voters. Read article.

 

Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters - Interview with Victor Davis Hanson   

Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMag.com

 

FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

What report card would you give the Obama administration in terms of foreign policy right now? Why?

 

Hanson: An Incomplete that at the present rate will turn into a D/F if he is not careful.

 

Obama has confused a number of issues: intractable problems like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Islamic terrorism, etc. both pre- and post-dated George Bush; they present only bad and worse choices, and are predicated on different agendas of authoritarians that hinge on whether the United States can or cannot deter their regional megalomaniac dreams.

 

In the long-term, Obama's nontraditional heritage and charisma make little difference; on the other hand, serial apologies, "Bush did it", the "reset button" ad nauseam, trumpeting the "I was only (fill in the blank) when that happened" etc. have a brief shelf life, and achieve only a transitory buzz, similar to a Bono-celebrity tour.

 

He needs to cut out the messianic style, and realize that millions of brave souls, who invest at great danger in democracy, freedom, open markets, etc. around the world, count on an American President for moral support and guidance against a bullying Russia, Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Chavez's thugs, Castro jailers, et al. GO HERE to read the interview.

 

Editorial, Boston.com

 

Partisan turmoil that lingered after this month's tea party protests reignited recently, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report to federal and local law enforcement officials on right-wing extremism. The report detailed current economic and political factors that could enhance recruitment for extremist groups. Yet the report defined extremism in a way that implicates a huge portion of the political spectrum. Conservatives are right to be angry.

 

The report drew particular criticism over comments on "disgruntled military veterans," who, it suggests, may be targeted by extremist groups looking to use their "skill and knowledge to carry out violence." Missing was any empirical evidence for its claims beyond the examples of Timothy McVeigh and Richard A. Poplawski, the Pittsburgh man who recently shot three police officers and exhibited fears that the government would take his guns.

 

Worse, the report's depiction of an extremist describes the political beliefs of many Americans, saying that "many right-wing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration . . . immigration . . . and restrictions on firearms." But Americans have every right to oppose all three. Drawing a parallel, even implicitly, between specific political beliefs and criminal intent is something Americans must oppose, regardless of political affiliation. Read article.

Roger Hedgecock, WND.com

 

Obama's blitzkrieg against the Constitution has broadened to include an assault on talk radio and the Internet to silence radio critics and growing opposition organized on the Internet from the tea party movement.

 

It also appears that the Obama administration is contemplating bailing out [liberal] failing newspapers and through such bailouts selecting executives and members of the boards of directors of newspaper publishing companies, implying the kind of permanent government control that we are seeing now in some of the banks and in the auto industry.

 

Talk radio and the Internet are preparing to fight back. Read article.

NWANews.com

 

How many Barack Obamas are there, anyway?

 

One day-last Monday, to be specific-President Obama No. 1 is telling the CIA what a great job it's doing. He certainly needs to, since morale in those precincts has grown shaky of late, mainly because the president has been doing the shaking.

 

By now his administration has revealed in detail just how the CIA interrogated high-level al-Qaida types at Guantanamo with, shall we say, less than exquisite tact. The only thing that may have been blacked out in the blizzard of memos just released were those parts about how effective such techniques proved in preventing more terrorist attacks on these shores.

 

The president's own director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, wrote a memo to his staff last week noting that "high value information came from interrogations in which these methods were used," but somehow that observation was omitted when his memo was first made public. That omission surely would have been called politicizing intelligence if George W. Bush were still president. But now not even the war on terror is called the war on terror any more but "Man Caused Disasters" and "Overseas Contingency Operations." The newspeak in Washington keeps getting thicker. Read article.

 

Paul Mason, Telegraph.co.uk

 

As he approaches 100 days in office, the President faces a grim reality check. On monetary policy, Obama has remained a bystander to the efforts of Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve. Having reached close to zero interest rates in December, Bernanke announced the Fed would print money in an attempt to bring down real interest rates.

 

Then he travelled to the London School of Economics to tell the world to reject the classic policy of "quantitative easing": the Fed would buy private-sector debts, not government bonds. Finally, on March 18, after a fractious argument within the Fed, he relented, adopting the classic form of the tactic on a massive scale. During this 90-day gap between thought and decisive action more than 1.5 million Americans lost their jobs.

 

Monetary easing is beginning to work, but it ran into the two obstacles that seem to plague the Obama administration: inertia and free-market dogma. Read article.

 

Mark Steyn, NRO.com

 

According to an Earth Day survey, one third of schoolchildren between the ages of six and eleven think the earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. That’s great news, isn’t it? Not for the earth, I mean, but for “environmental awareness.” Congratulations to Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and the eco-propagandists of the public-education system in doing such a terrific job of traumatizing America’s moppets. Traditionally, most of the folks you see wandering the streets proclaiming the end of the world is nigh tend to be getting up there in years. It’s quite something to have persuaded millions of first-graders that their best days are behind them.

 

Call me crazy, but I’ll bet that in 15-20 years the planet will still be here along with most of the “environment” — your flora and fauna, your polar bears and three-toed tree sloths and whatnot. But geopolitically we’re in for a hell of a ride, and the world we end up with is unlikely to be as congenial as most Americans have gotten used to. Read article.

 

Gerald Warner, Telegraph.co.uk

 

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

 

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

 

That is why he opened Pandora's Box by publishing the Justice Department's legal opinions on waterboarding and other hardline interrogation techniques. He cynically subordinated the national interest to his partisan desire to embarrass the Republicans. Then he had to rush to Langley, Virginia to try to reassure a demoralised CIA that had just discovered the President of the United States was an even more formidable foe than al-Qaeda. Read article.

 

S.A. Miller, Washington Times.com

 

President Obama's $83.4 billion war-spending bill is headed for an unexpectedly tough time on Capitol Hill, where Republicans are scrutinizing the funding priorities and rank-and-file Democrats want to include performance benchmarks for the Afghanistan mission.

 

Despite bipartisan support for Mr. Obama's war policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, Republicans are taking a stand against the more than $81 million requested to shut down the prison camp at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last week railed against the administration's move to close the outpost without a plan to relocate the roughly 240 terrorism suspects now locked up on the island. "Americans want some assurances that closing Guantanamo won't make them less safe, and for good reason," the Kentucky Republican said.

 

"Americans want some assurances that closing Guantanamo won't make them less safe, and for good reason," the Kentucky Republican said. Read article.

 

 

Print This E-mail This

Share It: