I have to be honest; although I have not had the time to write about it, I have been enjoying the little spat which has developed between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over the last several days as the presidential hopeful tries to distance herself from a president who is growing more unpopular by the day.
It all started when Hillary Clinton was interviewed and was critical of Barack Obama’s lack of leadership in the Middle East, which she said led to the rise of ISIS:
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,”
The Pentagon claims it knew about the threat of ISIS all along
Barack Obama has recently come under fire for flippantly comparing ISIS to a junior varsity basketball team now that the so-called terrorist organization (to use the words of the Obama propaganda arm MSNBC) is reeking havoc all across the nation.
In his defense Barack Obama claimed it was due to bad intelligence:
There is no doubt that their advance, their movement over the last several months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the expectations of policymakers both in and outside of Iraq.
This should come as quite a surprise to the Pentagon because they claim they have been very clear about the danger ISIS presented to Iraq from the very beginning.
Here is more:
Then vs now: Barack Obama on ending the war in Iraq
Barack Obama was recently asked if he was second guessing his decision to end the Iraq war now that ISIS is marching across the nation and he basically said that he found it interesting that people think it was his decision to end the war:
“What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision,”
Now where in the world would the American people get the idea that it was Barack Obama’s decision to end the war? Perhaps this video with clips from the 2012 campaign could shed some light on this.
Now that ISIS is on the march in Iraq and Barack Obama has ordered airstrikes in the region in order to slow the terrorist organization’s progress he has been coming under fire for comparing ISIS to a junior varsity basketball team not all that long ago.
The White House press corps (not corpse Barry) has been trying to defend that analogy but it has not quelled the criticism being leveled at the president, so before leaving for vacation Barack Obama tried to distance himself from the removal of United States troops from Iraq by stating the following:
“What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision,” Obama said, indicating he does not believe it was his decision as commander in chief of U.S. troops in a congressionally authorized action in Iraq to decide whether the troops should stay or leave.
“In order for us to maintain troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of the Iraqi government and we needed assurances that our personnel would be immune from prosecution if, for example, they were protecting themselves and ended up getting in a firefight with Iraqis, that they wouldn’t be hauled before an Iraqi judicial system.
“And the Iraqi government, based on its political considerations, in part because Iraqis were tired of a U.S. occupation, declined to provide us those assurances,” Obama said. “And on that basis, we left. We had offered to leave additional troops. So when you hear people say, do you regret, Mr. President, not leaving more troops, that presupposes that I would have overridden this sovereign government that we had turned the keys back over to and said, you know what, you’re democratic, you’re sovereign, except if I decide that it’s good for you to keep 10,000 or 15,000 or 25,000 Marines in your country, you don’t have a choice, which would have kind of run contrary to the entire argument we were making about turning over the country back to Iraqis, an argument not just made by me, but made by the previous administration.
He continued:
Open thread for Sunday, August 10th: Phantom of the Opera
Here is the open thread for Sunday, August 10th; please feel free to post links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues arise during the course of the day. Nothing is off-topic here.
First a little site news: WordPress has finally made comment liking available. Now in addition to liking a post you can either give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to an individual comment or you can give it a like–or you can give a thumbs up and a like. (I think I prefer we use the like feature, but it is up to you guys) It is about time this feature was made available!
Last week on America’s Watchtower we discussed a variety of issues: Barney Frank admitted Barack Obama lied about Obamacare, the FBI is going to monitor news reports about itself, MSNBC slipped up and said the president was from Kenya, Barack Obama expanded the quarantine list through Executive Order, the hypocrite Ann Coulter blasted Rand Paul, another company was targeted by Operation Choke Point, and the list of Federal employees whose emails have gone missing now numbers over 20.
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I decided this week that I was going to share some heavy metal for my musical selection and I chose Iron Maiden performing ‘Phantom of the Opera.” However, as Iron Maiden fans know, this presented a bit of a dilemma: Paul Di’Anno or Bruce Dickinson? Do you go with the original or do you choose the man who most people associate with Iron Maiden? In the end I had to choose the original so here is their performance of this song from 1980.
Enjoy:
It appears as if emails aren’t all that is going missing from Federal offices nowadays because, according to this story, the Department of Injustice does not have receipts for over half of the illegal immigrant children who have been sneaking over the border in recent months.
The Department of Justice does not have receipts for more than half of the unaccompanied alien children apprehended at the southwest border by Border Patrol since the start of fiscal year 2013, government records show.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show more than 85,000 total apprehensions of unaccompanied alien children during fiscal year 2013 and fiscal year 2014 through June. Information from the same time period provided toNational Review Online by the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Reviewshows 41,592 total receipts marked as juvenile in immigration courts.
The Department of Injustice has the receipts of less than half of all the illegal immigrant children who have been entering the country since 2013. Care to take a guess at what these receipts are used for?
20 Federal employees have either lost or destroyed emails related to Congressional investigations
Yesterday it was learned that some of the emails the House Oversight Committee was asking to see from Marilyn Tavenner of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services might have been deleted.
She claims that because her email account is open to the public she has been receiving thousands of emails and has had to forward them to her assistants to help her deal with the volume.
“Therefore, she receives an extremely high volume of emails that she manages daily. To keep an orderly email box and to stay within the agency’s email system capacity limits, the Administrator generally copied or forwarded emails to immediate staff for retention and retrieval, and did not maintain her own copies.”
Apparently during this process it appears as if emails relevant to the investigation into the Obamacare roll out (which is a waste of time in my opinion, what is going to be accomplished by this?) might have conveniently been deleted as well. Read more…
‘True the Vote’ filed a lawsuit against the IRS, hoping to get the court to appoint an expert to try to recover the lost Lois Lerner emails, and to also stop the IRS from destroying documents during routine purging.
Yesterday a judge in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia (the same court Barack Obama has been adding judges to since Harry Reid removed the filibuster) ruled against ‘True the Vote’ on both issues. Read more…
When the Congress failed to pass cap and trade legislation a few years ago Barack Obama quipped “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” Of course we all knew what he meant by that and since that time the EPA has been working on regulations which would for all intents and purposes implement the president’s agenda.
Although you have not heard much about it, the same can be said about gun control. Having failed to push any type of gun control through the Congress Barack Obama is in the process of using other, more nefarious, means to make it harder to purchase guns.
Instead of going after gun owners the Federal government is using a program called Operation Choke Point to intimidate banks and make them think twice about doing business with gun dealers and other “high risk” businesses–choke off the suppliers. This program is supposedly designed to protect consumers but is also being used for ulterior motives.
Ann Coulter appeared on CNN recently and after watching two video clips showing Rand Paul’s evolving position on foreign aid to Israel she blasted him for flip-flopping on this issue saying she wished he would “take a position and just go with it.”
I cannot post the video directly but if you go here you can watch it. The video clearly shows Rand Paul taking two different positions on this issue and for that Ann Coulter is right to call him out. Where does he really stand on Israel?
However I find this criticism coming from Ann Coulter to be just a little bit disingenuous.
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