Here is the All Star Panel discussing this very issue, and how the media is continuing to ratchet up antagonism against the right under the guise of moderating our rhetoric:

As Baier highlighted, I have seen a number of reports in which people are doing exactly as he suggested, “There is no evidence of this lunatic being influenced by Palin, the Tea Party, or Republicans at all, BUT let’s blame them anyway, and try to squelch free speech while we are at it.”

I wrote recently about my ignorant representative, Jim Clyburn, blaming the Tea Party/Palin/Republicans, AND wanting to cut back on Freedom of Speech. And all of this is under the guise of wanting to decreasing violence in speech.

Tuesday, Arianna Huffington, she of HuffPo creation, wrote a post, “Arizona Shootings: Our Moment of Silence Needs To Be Followed By More Than Just Lowered Voices.” I suppose I should have warned you in case you were drinking something at the time – my apologies. Anyway, in Ms. Huffington’s post, she writes this:

[snip] And while we don’t know all the facts yet and the story is still unfolding, we know enough to know that we need more than a little soul searching.

The fact that the gunman is clearly mentally unbalanced does not absolve us of the responsibility to consider the atmosphere in which the shootings occurred. “Shootings of political figures are by definition ‘political,’” writes James Fallows. “That’s how the target came to public notice; it is why we say ‘assassination’ rather than plain murder.”

And the atmosphere in which this horrible tragedy was born, nurtured, and carried to its wretched fruition is toxic. Of course, there are always going to be unbalanced people, just as there are always going to be viruses in our environment — but what most determines whether those viruses make us sick is the strength of our immune system. When it is stressed and compromised, infections can easily take hold.

And there is no doubt that our collective immune system is worn down, making us more susceptible to the kind of infection that turned that Arizona parking lot into a killing field. While there has never been a golden age in our democracy’s history, there have been many times in which our national immune system was much stronger. [snip] (Click here if you want to read the rest.)

This is not just scurrilous, it is the height of hypocrisy. Many of us remember all too well how our “immune systems” got weakened by vitriolic speech. A lot of it happened right there at Huffington Post to those of us who had the audacity to support Hillary Clinton over The One. We were bullied, berated, attacked, and essentially banished from the site for our refusal to capitulate on the best choice for president. Sure, there have been a few posts here and there in support of Hillary Clinton since Obama took office (do I really need to explain that one?), but the fact remains, this blog has been at the forefront of vitriolic rhetoric.

Just last month, in December, Huffington Post allowed the once-great Aaron Sorkin to post an almost unintelligible screed against Sarah Palin, laced with profanity, and twisted facts throughout. His attack on her was completely unprovoked. He just couldn’t help himself in his desire to attack, attack, attack, and demean this woman. And Huffington Post allowed him to do so. One month later, Huffington has the nerve to talk about “toxic” rhetoric? Spare me the sanctimony.

MoveOn.org has joined the chorus as well, asking its members to sign a petition to our Congress with this as the petition text: “I call for an end to all overt and implied appeals to violence in American politics. We must debate, not hate.” Are they for real?? The same organization who referred to General Petraeus as “General Betrayus” is now acting as if they are some honest broker in restoring civility to speech? Again, I remember just how they conducted themselves during the 2008, 2010 elections. They have no leg on which to stand in tryin gto claim this moral high ground.

Neither does Obama Sycophant, Jonathan Alter, who, in the spirit of Rahm Emanuel, wants Obama to make sure he makes political hay out of this horrible tragedy. His headline says it all, “Can Obama Turn Tragedy Into Triumph?” Alter writes:

[snip] But silence will not be enough. This horrific event offers the president a chance to show leadership qualities that he’s inexplicably hidden away in some blind trust. The shootings and the resulting debate over the climate of incivility play to his strengths as a calm and rational leader. Just as Bill Clinton’s response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings helped him recover from his defeat in the 1994 midterms, so this episode may help Obama change—at least in the short term–the trajectory of American politics. [snip] (Click here to read the rest.)

Perhaps Alter was just mistaken that Obama ever embodied the leadership he is “inexplicably hidden away.” That was Alter’s mistake for making that leap based on little data, just like others have done with this tragedy. But even more disingenuous is this rampant implication by those on the left that they engaged in NONE of this vitriolic rhetoric. It is, again, scurrilous, for someone like Alter, who regularly appeared on Olbermann, trashing Clinton AND Palin, to now act like he and his cohorts were just meek little lambs in their political discourse. The hypocrisy is just staggering.

I cannot possibly go through all of the instances of the Left’s treatment of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Primary in their blind desire to elect Obama. The unsubstantiated attacks, the theft of votes, the fraud perpetrated in the caucuses by the Obama camp, all with tacit approval by the DNC, along with the most misogynistic shirts, slogans, sayings, and ads put out by the Obama camp. And now they are trying to act like they were harmless in their rhetoric? It would be pathetic if not so infuriating.

And then there was what they did to Palin. This Primer by Michelle Malkin gives you just a quick glimpse into the “moderate” language of the left about this governor.

And now, these same people, who attacked these candidates, and their followers, relentlessly, are now blaming inflammatory rhetoric on the RIGHT as the primary reason this maniac tried to assassinate Rep. Giffords. Moreover, they would seek to limit our speech as a result of this attack.

We cannot, CANNOT, censor ourselves with an eye to not upsetting some deranged lunatic. That essentially allows the crazy people to determine our discourse, which is, in and of itself, crazy. It is over-functioning to a pathological degree to try and tiptoe around our nation in fear that someone somewhere may just lose it. That kind of walking on eggshells is a horrible way to live, and does, by its very nature, make us prisoners of our own making. We cannot stop talking, or writing, or protesting, or arguing, just because it might set some psycho off on a rampage. We cannot know what will be the next trigger, and we cannot live our lives in constant fear of “upsetting” someone so much they will go off the rails. It is a destructive path down which some would have us go.

And it will strip us of our very freedoms. I, for one, am not willing to give up my freedom to appease some nut-job. How about you?

I learned something new about the first post-Revolutionary flag today from this clip below. You may have already known this, but it wasn’t Betsy Ross who created it. She SEWED the flag, but she didn’t create the design. Rather it was Francis Hopkinson. Who knew? But I also learned that originally, the 13 stars could be in a number of configurations, not just in a circle. Check this out (after the Hooters Waitress and up to the four-minute mark):

Interesting, right?

And speaking of the US Flag, NQ reader, creeper, wrote the other day that Fox News had a poll up about removing the US Flag from schools in order to not inflame violence (after the situation out in California with the young men wearing flag shirts and being kicked out of school for it). The poll is here.

But get this. The results have been skewed allegedly. How? Check out this Free Republicpost (with an edit for embedding the link):

Well, well, well. . . if this isn’t enough to just tick off TeaPartiers and other patriots!!

Your help is needed: Fox is running a poll about whether the flag should be banned in schools in order not to inflame Hispanic students. The poll is being sandbagged by SEIU and we should mount a counter action if you agree with me that the flag should be taken down for no one.

This is unbelievable; please take the time to show your support of our flag!

Moveon.org, Organizing for America, and SEIU have been twittering today to go to Fox Poll and vote to ban the Flag …. and right now it is working.

SHOW THEM WHAT TRUE PATRIOTS BELIEVE!!! Let’s flip those numbers and show the leftists we are organized and on the move….flip the numbers now-FLIP THE HOUSE in November!

GO HERE NOW…and then pass it along, please!

Wow. This just begs the question, why?? Why would these organizations, especially one with AMERICA in its name, want to ban the U.S. Flag from classrooms? Holy moley.

Well, for those of us who do care about the flag, Happy Flag Day. This is an Open Thread.

Oh, and here’s another story you might consider from my friend, Logistics Monster: Obama’s comparison of the BP oil spill to 9/11, and then his going off to play golf for 4 hours (not kidding).

What else is on your minds? Obama’s upcoming speech? The goldmine under Afghanistan? Let’s have it!

Senator Lincoln is the one Democrat in this bunch, and I have to say, I am THRILLED she beat Halter. As you no doubt have heard, Halter was supported by MoveOn.org, and the big unions, which poured MILLIONS of dollars into Arkansas (around $10 million), so her win is a big push against the power of the unions, as well as the far left agenda. Here she is celebrating her win:

Lincoln isn’t done – she has a strong challenger in November, but beating the organized union and MoveOn.org backed candidate is huge, make no mistake. It can also be construed as a bit of a referendum on Bill Clinton v. Obama. Clinton endorsed Lincoln, and the Unions/MoveOn are Obama backers. Maybe the Old Dawg still has it…

Nikki Haley, with the backing of both Gov., Sarah Palin and First Lady (of SC) Jenny Sanford, won the vast majority of votes (49%) with her closest competitor, Gresham Barrett, at 22%. Here is Nikki Haley after the election:

Should Haley win come November, she will be the first woman governor in SC, and the second Indian American governor in the US (along with Bobby Jindal).

Meg Whitman talks about her win, and her upcoming race against Jerry Brown (or “Gov. Moonbeam,” as Karl Rove referred to him on “Fox & Friends Weds. morning). In her speech, Whitman gives a shout-out to Carly Fiorina on her win to face Barbara Boxer:

And speaking of Carly Fiorina, here she is in her speech following her win, a win which will pit her against long time senator, Barbara Boxer. She returns the favor to Whitman, with a “Holla” to her, too:

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party backed candidate, will be facing off again st Harry Reid in the Fall. Oh, I cannot begin to tell you how badly I want her to beat Reid. Even when I still considered myself a Democrat (before 5/31/08), I was not a fan of Reid’s, and my opinion of him has only gone down from there. Here’s Angle after her win:

Wow. Again, what a night. I might add, I have said a number of times, that after the Democratic Party eviscerated the best candidate they could have had to be the first woman president, I have no doubt that the first woman president will come from the Republican Party.

Honestly, it has been interesting to me to see how the Republican Party seems to support its women in positions of power far more than the Democrats do. You know, the party that claims to be the party for women. After the misogynistic treatment of Clinton by the DNC itself, compared to the treatment by the RNC with Palin, as well as other powerful women in the RNC, I just knew the Demos had blown their chance in a big, big, big way. Oh, sure, the Democrats have a few women senators and representatives, but none of them are on a par with Clinton. Hell, Obama is not on a par with Clinton, never will be (I think he knows that, too – that’s why he was always putting her down to try and build himself up).

When you look at a field like this, all of these powerful, successful women who are Republicans, you just know that our first woman president is going to come from this kind of group. That is assuming Hillary Clinton is telling the truth when she says she will not run for president again, though since Obama has made such a mess of things in such a short period of time, I am not sure she COULD win in this climate.

November will be must see with Boxer having a strong, accomplished woman like Fiorina facing her, Reid having Angle facing him, Whitman against “Gov. Moonbeam,” and Sheheen having the very popular Haley against him. Things don’t look great for Lincoln against her Republican opponent, though. Maybe Bill will show up for her again…

Stay tuned – November is not that far away!

UPDATE: Gov. Palin also endorsed Susanna Martinez (R) for Governor of New Mexico. Martinez also won big Tuesday night. Here is Gov. Palin talking with Megyn Kelly about the BP oil crisis, and near the end, she discusses the Primary results, especially the role her endorsements played:

In other words, Palin does not take credit for her endorsements making that much of a difference with the wins of the “Mama Grizzlies” – wow. What kind of politician is she, anyway? Ahem.

Anyway, the next few months should prove to be exciting. Can’t wait to see how all of this plays out!

UPDATE #2: And Libby Mitchell won in Maine to represent the Democratic Party(h/t to Yttik). From sea to shining sea, the women are on the rise. Wow!

I am sure you will be SHOCKED to learn that Obama is acting in much the same way. I know, I know – what a surprise. Ahem. Well, it seems some one has been doing a little investigative journalism, something in VERY short supply of late. But get this – I tell you, you better be sitting down – in this case, it was – WAIT FOR IT –
MSNBC. YES, the very network to which we routinely refer as “MSNBO”! Once I recovered from the shock of it all, I couldn’t wait to see just how transparent President Obama was compared to Bush. (I wonder if there is a way for us to do a pool on these kinds of things, like for NCAA basketball or something?)

This is what MSNBC uncovered in this report:

Obama Names 110 White House Visitors

The White House on Friday released a small list of visitors to the White House since President Barack Obama took office in January, including lobbyists, business executives, activists and celebrities.

No previous administration has released such a list, though the information out so far is incomplete. Only about 110 names —and 481 visits —out of the hundreds of thousands who have visited the Obama White House were made public. Like the Bush administration before it, Obama is arguing that any release is voluntary, not required by law, despite two federal court rulings to the contrary.

The emphasis there is mine. This is a bit of a schizophrenic opening. On the one hand, they want to champion that Obama released 110 names – Woohoo!! On the other hand, they have to acknowledge that, once again, President Obama is using the SAME arguments as Bush. Moreover, this “Constitutional Scholar” is doing so in clear violation of not one, but TWO federal court rulings! Maybe the KoolAide was made improperly that day, I don’t know, but the report continues:

Under the Obama White House’s policy, most names of visitors from Inauguration Day in January through the end of September will never be released. The White House says it plans to release most of the names of visitors from October on, and that release is due near the end of the year. There are limitations there as well, including potential Supreme Court nominees, personal guests of the First Family, and certain security officials.

The names released Friday include business leaders and lobbyists with a lot to gain or lose from Obama policies. They include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (whose foundation is pushing for changes in teacher pay), former AIG chairman Maurice Greenberg, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Chevron CEO David O’Reilly, Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JP Morgan’s James Dimon, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis, John Stumpf of Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, State Street bank’s Ron Logue, BNY Mellon’s Robert Kelly, labor leader Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union (22 visits)*, American Bankers Association CEO Ed Yingling, community bankers president Camden Fine, and lobbyists Heather and Anthony Podesta, whose brother John Podesta led Obama’s transition team.

Besides Gates, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt are also on the list. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC. One of NBC’s parents is GE.)

Advocates and nonprofit leaders include National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy, and Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is interested in health policy.

So, this is how Obama is paying these people and organizations back, by having them in the White House? I bet Kim Gandy was just all aflutter after she threw ALL women under the bus to endorse Obama over a life-long women’s advocate. There is more on her below.

I know many readers will be interested in this White House guest:

Democratic donor and businessman George Soros visited with White House aides twice.

Yes, indeedy, a major funder of Moveon.org has been to check up on his biggest investment – ahem – twice.

We’re just getting started:

Political figures include former Sen. Thomas Daschle, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, former Gov. Howard Dean, Sen. Al Franken, former Vice President Al Gore, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, and Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf.

Celebrities at the White House include Oprah Winfrey, actors Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Denzel Washington, and tennis star Serena Williams. Journalists include Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner in economics.

Conservative religious leader Gary Bauer visited, as did liberal civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Okay, the last two, along with Oprah, are NOT a surprise. Gary Bauer? Just a tad surprising.

For anyone who wants to see more:

Msnbc.com has put the full list in a handy PDF file, and also in an Excel file for those who like to sort.

One guest is mighty interesting:

Not that Bill Ayers

The White House warns that many names that may appear familiar — and controversial — do not in fact refer to the most famous people to carry those names. Jeremiah Wright is on the list, but it’s not the president’s former pastor. This Michael Jordan is not the basketball player. This Michael Moore is not a filmmaker. The William Ayers who took a group tour of the White House isn’t the former radical from Chicago who figured so prominently in the 2008 campaign. And the Angela Davis on the list has a different middle initial than the activist and former fugitive.

The White House could have avoided some of that sort of confusion by providing more information on the visitors, such as an employer name and the city they hail from. For example, is the Shawn Carter who attended a poetry reading the same one who goes by Jay-Z and had campaigned for Obama?

“This unprecedented level of transparency can sometimes be confusing rather than providing clear information,” a White House special counsel, Norm Eisen, wrote on the White House blog.

If you spot a name on the list that bears investigating, please drop us a note.

Of COURSE we will just trust Obama and his spokes-minions when they assure us that this Bill Ayers could not POSSIBLY be domestic terrorist – Capitol Building and Pentagon bomber – long time friend and mentor Bill Ayers! He is just some guy who wanted to visit the White House Gift Shop and pick up a couple of Marine One helicopter models for his boys. I am sure of it. Sheesh. Really? They expect us to believe this crap? Evidently – they got plenty of other people to believe that kind of crap and more, so why stop now?

Okay – if you are consuming any liquids right this minute, I suggest you put it down when you read this:

Limited release

Despite the accompanying White House claim of “transparency like you’ve never seen before,” the Obama White House continues to take the same legal position as the Bush White House, arguing that the records are not public records subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Only limited “voluntary releases” are being made to settle a lawsuit filed by an advocacy group, though a federal judge has twice ruled that all the visitor logs are public. (Again, emphasis is mine.)

Yet there are severe limitations to the transparency:

Most of the visitors from Inauguration Day to September will never be released by the White House under this voluntary disclosure — unless the public can guess their names. The White House policy doesn’t allow members of the public or press to ask for “everyone who visited health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle,” or everyone who visited on May 4, or everyone from the American Medical Association. Only individual names can be checked.

I know, right? Didn’t this sound just a little pissy?? From someone at MSNBC?? The bigger picture is that the Obama Administration is BREAKING THE LAW. Hell to the YES, that information falls under FOIA – this is OUR White House, not the Obamas. We most definitely DO get to know every single John Smith and Jane Doe who cross the threshold of the White House. You better believe we do.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it is a start:

The list released at 4:30 p.m. Friday includes just about 110 names with 481 visits. Those names were among those requested by members of the public so far, for visits during the period from Inauguration Day through July. (That’s why we know of visits by the wrong Bill Ayers, the wrong Angela Davis, etc., but we don’t know of visits by countless unnamed lobbyists.) Members of the public who used the White House online form to check names did not receive a personal reply indicating whether or not the request was received, or whether the name appeared on the list, so the system provides no feedback. Does the absence of Bill Clinton’s name on the list mean that he has not been to the White House, or that the request wasn’t received by the White House online system?

A request for the complete records of all visitors from the first months of the administration, filed by msnbc.com, was rejected by the White House, and an appeal is pending. The news organization requested the names of all visitors to the Obama White House beginning with Inauguration Day. Msnbc.com has filed an administrative appeal with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.

Say whaa?? The White House rejected a request from their lapdog “news” source?? Huh. There’s a shocker. Welcome to the “Under The Bus” club, MSNBC!

The Wall Street Journal focused on the most frequent visitor to the White House. He was mentioned in the list above, but without the acknowledgment of the frequency:

SEIU’s Stern Tops White House Visitor List

Promising “transparency like you’ve never seen before,” The White House released its visitor log this evening under a new voluntary disclosure policy.

The log chronicles 481 visits to the White House from individuals ranging from Jay-Z to Bill Gates from January through July.

The list includes William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Moore, Robert Kelly (R. Kelly), Malik Shabazz, and Michael Jordan.

But the White House said those aren’t the guys you’re thinking of. Nor is the log complete.

Ahahahahahahaha!!! I just cannot get enough of this one – sure, they aren’t the same people. Yeah, okay, we believe you. NOT. And because it is just so much fun to see them squirm, I am keeping in the part that is repetitive of the article above, especially the quotes from Eisen. Oh, what a funny guy:

“A lot of people visit the White House, up to 100,000 each month, with many of those folks coming to tour the buildings. Given this large amount of data, the records we are publishing today include a few ‘false positives’ – names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else,” Norm Eisen, a special counsel to the president, writes on the White House blog. “The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House. Nevertheless, we were asked for those names and so we have included records for those individuals who were here and share the same names.”

Adds Eisen: “This unprecedented level of transparency can sometimes be confusing rather than providing clear information.”

Uh, ya know, I think we are all smart enough to not get all confused by this incredible level of “transparency.” Beginning with, we actually know the definition of “transparency,” something Eisen and Obama apparently do not.

And then there is this:

One thing is clear: *Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern holds sway at the White House, where he’s listed for 22 visits—the top number on the logs. Visitors in the top 10 also include former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy, and NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan.

So THAT’S what Gandy and Keenan got for stabbing Hillary Clinton and, well, WOMEN, int he back – visits to the White House. I guess there is something gained by selling your soul, though, personally, I don’t think it is worth it. But that’s just me.

Anywho – yes, the President of the SEIU, again, the union co-founded by the founder of ACORN, Wade Rathke, is the TOP visitor at the White House. The SEIU has been in the news quite a bit, especially for holding California hostage – threatening that their good buddy, Obama, would not give the state any federal stimulus funds if it had the audacity to expect the union to cut wages like everyone else so the state wouldn’t go bankrupt. NOW we know how the union was able to do that. All those visits to the White House apparently paid off – for the union, not California, the state with one of the largest budgets around (as in 5th in the world). What makes this more egregious is that California pays a lot into the federal tax system and receives little comparatively speaking. And this union is allowed – by the White House – to hold it over a barrel. Yep, all those meetings seemed to do the trick!

Aren’t you just so heartened by all of this “transparency”? And by seeing who Obama is welcoming into our White House? Yeah, me, too. As long as the Obama Administration continues to thumb its nose at Federal Law, I reckon we should be “thankful” for this (no, not really – it’s BS that they are still sitting on so much information).

Oh, but if you can just GUESS who might else have been there and submit that form asking them, maybe you can confirm some other folks who have been there, too. Lemme know what you find out, okay? I am sure we would all just love to know…

George Soros, maybe? The problem in appeasing these activist groups is that there are profoundly serious intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism implications, and extraordinarily time- and energy-consuming legal tasks and confusing agency expectations behind what Obama is suddenly proposing that could suck all the oxygen out of his presidency and the entire federal intelligence apparatus. We’ll explore those prospects below.

Update #1: Worry not about my position. I am solidly anti-torture and pro-punishment. Heck, I wrote articles daily for over three years about Bush/Cheney’s torture policies. I’ve written about heroes like FBI Special Agent Dan Coleman who extracted confessions from the African embassy bombers sans torture and Alberto Mora, a conservative Republican and the U.S. Navy’s chief legal counsel who fought tooth and nail against Addington et al. . But I’m extremely worried about Obama’s motives, far-left influences, and lack of thought behind these momentous decisions. He appears clueless about the can of worms he’s opened. I also think that the POVs of two heroic Americans, Bob Baer and Gary Bernsten, deserve a platform. Agree or not, they’ve walked the walk. They’ve been inside Al Qaeda safehouses and dealt directly with these monsters.

Update #2: I strongly recommend Andrew J. Bacevich’s CNN essay that asserts that Obama can’t simply being the “un-Bush” and (ouch!) adds, “Pragmatism devoid of principle provides an inadequate basis for coherent strategy.” Besides being “devoid of principle,” Obama’s positions are confusing as all get out — which further stresses, not only us, but also our essential intelligence service members!]

UPDATE #3: See Politico‘s “Obama muddles torture message.”

After patting the heads of CIA employees as if they were little children — “So don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks. Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn,” he told the assembled crowd at CIA headquarters yesterday – he did a flip-flop today following intense pressure from his far-left base on which he counts for, what else, money. Reports CNN’s Ed Henry:

[I]n the last 24 hours we’ve seen groups like MoveOn.org on the left come out and write a petition to the Attorney General saying they want accountability from the Bush administration. Is this an example of this White House giving in to pressure from the left?

It’s early to see what’s going to happen next. But I’m pointing to the disturbing clockwork flip-flop, the motive (always money), and Obama’s lack of thought about what this is all going to entail.

Furthermore, after having decided to release the formerly classified “torture memos” and to not seek prosecution of those involved, he hastily pivots and opens a big can of worms. From the UK Telegraph’s “Barack Obama opens Pandora’s Box with green light for ‘torture’ prosecutions“:

Barack Obama’s decision to give the nod to Congress and his attorney general to investigate and possibly prosecute former Bush administration officials opens a Pandora’s Box that could ultimately consume his presidency.

When he released the four so-called “torture” memos – the Obama administration has now all but abandoned their use of the t-word – the new president, who has yet to pass the early landmark of 100 days in office – insisted he wanted to “move forward”.

He added that “at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past”.

[...]

The platitudes about drawing a line under the past were still being mouthed but they rang decidedly hollow as Gibbs talked of an investigation on the scale of the 9/11 Commission – which took two years and millions of dollars.

Obama reversed himself because of press from Congressional Democrats, who want to haul officials before their committees for what could become the political equivalent of show trials, and Left-wing groups such as MoveOn.org.

The problem for Obama is that many on the Left will not be happy until President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are in leg irons and sharing a cell at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado along with the likes of the Unabomber.

[...]

The hornet’s nest that Obama has just stirred up is bad enough even in the current climate, when it is more than seven years since the US has been attacked by al-Qaeda.

It will be nothing, however compared to the aftermath of another terrorist attack on US soil – which many intelligence officials believe is inevitable – when Americans will once again be clamouring to find out why Obama did not “connect the dots” and demanding to know how he will stop another Islamist strike.

This is why I had to write about V.P. Joe Biden’s astonishingly reckless remarks recently in “Motor Mouth Joe’s Telepathic Certitude” when he told CNN reporters that “I guarantee you we are safer today, our interests are more secure today than they were any time during the eight years” of the Bush administration.”

These two are setting themselves up for a major backlash, along with blowback, if their actions and words fail them.

“Barack Obama opens Pandora’s Box with green light for ‘torture’ prosecutions“ brings up another important point, echoed last night on CNN’s AC360 by highly experienced former CIA agents Bob Baer and Gary Bernsten, both friends of Larry Johnson. Writes the Telegraph:

Already, the fightback on the Right has begun. Although it might be questionable whether Cheney’s re-entry into the political fray benefits Republicans who are themselves trying to move on from the Bush years, his argument that more memos ought to be released is hard to argue with.

Cheney and other former Bush administration officials, as well as the former CIA chief Michael Hayden – a intelligence professional and no political partisan – maintain strenuously that the interrogation techniques yielded information that saved American lives. The former vice-president maintains that there are memos that details this. If there are, we need to see them.

We know that Bob Baer and Gary Bernsten are anti-torture, but they agree that a careful, prudent review is in order and they too want to SEE the documents. Bernsten also questions the wisdom of Obama’s release of the “torture memos.” From AC360′s transcript Monday night

COOPER: Vice President Cheney has been saying this for a long time, that — that these activities, water-boarding, worked.

A, do you believe that? And, B, do you think those memos which showed, according to him, what the results were should be released?

ROBERT BAER, INTELLIGENCE ANALYST, TIME.COM: Could I answer that?

COOPER: Yes.

BAER: Look, Cheney’s right. We have to start out by finding out, is it worth it? I don’t know of any cases where, specifically, it saved lives. No case has been made in the public. And we need to see that, to see whether this is justified, and then you can carry on the argument whether it should be done or shouldn’t.

But, so far, Michael Hayden, and no one else, has said, look, Abu Zubaydah led to the saving of American lives.

When I see that, I will trust it, but I haven’t seen it yet. So, Cheney’s right. I hate to agree with him, but he’s right.

COOPER: Gary?

GARY BERNTSEN, AUTHOR, “HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, COUNTERTERRORISM AND NATIONAL LEADERSHIP: A PRACTICAL GUIDE”: I agree with Bob. Let’s take a look and let’s examine the record.

Look, both sides, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, when they’re in charge of the White House, spin on the issue of terror. And let’s have a fair examination of what was said.

… And the argument has been out there that — that these documents should have been — should not have been released because it’s already been in the press.

I can say this. Having been inside of al Qaeda safe houses myself and gone through the documents, frequently, they like official American documents. They download them. They study them. They train off of them.

COOPER: You’re saying this is giving too much intelligence to the enemy?

BERNTSEN: Too much. I don’t think we should have released these documents in the first place.

This portion is fascinating since both Bernsten and Baer are EXPERTS on Al Qaeda and how it collects information on the United States methodologies and operating procedures:

Joining me, Robert Baer, former CIA officer and intelligence analyst at TIME.com. Also, Gary Berntsen, former CIA officer and author.

Gary, before the commercial break, you basically made the point that, by doing this, by releasing these memos, we’re basically giving all this information to our enemies, to al Qaeda to know exactly what they will face if they are ever caught. ROBERT BAER, FORMER CIA OFFICER, INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: You know, it wasn’t much of a secret because in “The New York Review of Books,” it details, Mark Danner’s article exactly what happened. And you look at the SERE (ph) manuals, escape invasion manuals that the military puts out. and you pretty well know what the program is and you’ve got some original documents.

Now, I agree with Gary, you don’t want to take intelligence and splash it across the papers. It’s the worst thing to do, but it’s already out there. The problem is that, once these guys start being released, they have detailed exactly what happened to them, in greater detail that was in those memos.

So the secret was out, and it was doomed from the beginning that we’d ever be able to keep this secret.

COOPER: Gary?

GARY BERNTSEN, FORMER CIA OFFICER, AUTHOR: Not all of them were debriefed in the same ways. But I’ll say this, that al Qaeda doesn’t cut out — wasn’t cutting out newspaper articles and saving them. They were looking for official documents, training manuals. The SERE (ph) manual Bob’s talking about, they had that, too. They had a lot of things. They’ll download documents from the White House Web site.

COOPER: What about the argument that this makes it — if the U.S. is doing this kind of stuff, then when an American is held captive somewhere and tortured, there’s not much we can complain about.

BERNTSEN: Americans are kidnapped and tortured all the time. We received no protection under the Geneva Convention from Hezbollah, from Hamas, from al Qaeda, from the Taliban. There are no American prisoners there. They kill and torture every one of us.

COOPER: But in a war if we’re captured in state by a state by a government…

BERNTSEN: By a state, they’re going to sign the Geneva Convention. These guys didn’t sign the Geneva Convention.

COOPER: But doesn’t this then, essentially, nullify the Geneva Convention? Doesn’t it make it OK by North Korea or anyone else?

BERNTSEN: Under the Geneva Convention — well, first of all, the issue of enemy combatants is really what we’re discussing. The al Qaeda members don’t, you know, receive Geneva Convention treatment, because they don’t meet the four standards: you know, not under — not in uniform; not carrying arms openly; not under the authority of a competent person; and finally, not conducting themselves in courts with rules of law. They don’t meet that. They’re marauders.

I’ve argued that many of those people could have been and should have been executed for their participation in this. I’m not a supporter of torture, but I will say this, though. We live in very, very dangerous times. Eventually, we’ll face a situation where we have WMD, someone will be picked up with this, and then President Obama, if he’s, you know, in two terms, one or two terms, in the future we’re going to face — a president will face a situation where they’re going to have to make very difficult decisions. And you should never say never.

COOPER: Bob, does this stuff work?

BAER: No, it doesn’t work. On torture we’ve looked, over the years. The Israelis have looked at it. The French have tortured people in Algeria, and it generally leads to false leads.

You know, there’s a question of the ticking bomb: is it going to go off and you get the right guy? But in general, it’s good, old- fashioned espionage that works. And that’s what we should be doing.

BERNTSEN: We want good, old-fashioned espionage. I agree. Torture, sadly, works very, very well. A lot of horrible governments use it. And they’re getting incredibly — incredibly accurate results off of it. And that’s how a lot of these terrible dictators have held themselves in power.

That’s not to say that we should be doing it. What we need to recognize, we live in a world now where we’re going to see WMD used in terror. That’s the next phase. Hang onto your hats.

COOPER: Bob, it’s interesting, you know. For years, really, we have heard sort of unnamed sources telling reporters over the course of time, you know, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded, or these two suspects were waterboarded a handful of occasions. Now it turns out we’re talking about, you know, dozens, more than several hundred times.

BAER: Well, the man was — the man was completely broken morally and physically, as well. It’s clear. You look at his affidavit, when he ended up in Guantanamo, and it’s pure dribble. I see no evidence in that affidavit that he gave up any al Qaeda operations, if he knew them, in fact, that saved American lives.

Again, it goes back to the Cheney argument. The government better prove that this actually worked, and there’s no reason why they can’t take these interrogation reports and put them out. It’s not violating sources and methods.

COOPER: Gary, do you take the fact that we did it so much that it worked or that it didn’t work?

BERNTSEN: I wouldn’t put them out, but he had a ten-year operational history, Khalid Mohammed. That’s probably why they did this so many times.

BERNTSEN: You know, we’ve got to go remember, only three people were waterboarded: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and I believe it [Abe Zubaydah], the guy who did the attack on the Cole. There were only three that were waterboarded. So this wasn’t broadly done. …

I’m with Larry Johnson and Jane Mayer, who’s done more investigative reporting than any other journalist to prove that torture does not work.

But these are not ordinary enemies. These are not the soldiers for a nation. They’re extra-national operators who are willing to do ANYTHING to bring the United States down.

But we also need to consider what these experts say, and we must consider — very deliberately — the implications of what Obama is doing, at the bidding of the far left, of George Soros, of MoveOn, of the ACLU, of the Daily Kossacks.

In my book, national security trumps revenge, no matter how sweet it may be against the likes of Dick Cheney and repellant attorneys like John Yoo. So it seems prudent to at least consider the blowback from public hearings, special prosecutors, and the revelations of more classified documents.

It’s easy as hell for MoveOn et al. to demand that President Obama do this or that. MoveOn and its noisy members have no skin in the game. They’re typical hard-core lefties who want what they want when they want it.

One should be very careful about caving in to such demands without considering the ramifications. And dancing back and forth on such grave matters hardly builds confidence amongst the American people and, I would venture, the intelligence community.

For more on this growing debate and division of viewpoints, check out Memeorandum.com here and here.

Americans United is going after Democrats who are skeptical of Mr. Obama’s plans to double the national debt in five years and nearly triple it in 10. The White House is taking aim at lawmakers in 12 states, including Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor. MoveOn.Org is running ads aimed at 10 moderate Senate and House Democrats. And robocalls are urging voters in key districts to pressure their congressman to get in line.

I refer to Americans United, Karl Rove and MoveOn as idiots, as all of them are hopelessly misinformed.

Rove believes the coordinated effort of the White House to pressure moderate Democrats through various advocacy groups will backfire. He is partially correct, but his reasoning is flawed. I quote Rove:

Every White House is faced with finding ways to nudge Congress without antagonizing it. But this overt campaign could infuriate members who won’t appreciate being targeted by a president of their own party. They could react by becoming recalcitrant. Should that happen, team Obama will have to recalculate its efforts, especially as the public sours on big spending plans.

Members of Congress will not simply become “recalcitrant” as a result of their personal disdain for Obama’s tactics; they will become recalcitrant as a result of all the Republican support they will receive from their constituents. Hence why I believe MoveOn and Americans United are idiots: attempting to incite certain Democrats to pressure certain Democratic moderates, their efforts will simply alert Republicans who probably never supported these Democrats that their Senator or House Representative is indeed a moderate. And not only will this engender Republican support for the moderate Democrats in question; it will also compel the Republicans and Democrats who voted against Obama in certain states to oppose Obama’s budget in a more active and vigorous manner. Moderate Democrats in Congress will then have electoral justifications to oppose Obama, and Republicans, Independents and Democrats who oppose Obama will have a new political signifier around which they can mobilize.

Consider Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln, two Senate Democrats who represent southern states. Mary Landrieu beat her Republican opponent John N. Kennedy by 6 points last cycle, warding off a Republican surge that delivered a 59-40 victory to John McCain. The reaction against Obama in Louisiana almost derailed her reelection efforts, but she managed to win by citing her centrism and independence. Not only has that centrism and independence been confirmed by the ads Democratic organizations are launching against her; the Republicans who opposed her will now support her out of sympathy. As a result, she will receive supportive telephone calls from Louisiana Republicans who will urge her to oppose Obama’s budget. Moreover, her approval ratings will increase, complicating liberal advocacy groups’ efforts to render her unelectable. And yes, many Democratic groups would be satisfied if Mary Landrieu lost a reelection. Some Democrats, in fact, believe she deserves no respect. But to the chagrin of these Democratic activists, their botched efforts to make her political life difficult will only garner her more support from the Republicans who would otherwise oppose her.

Blanche Lincoln will run for reelection in 2010, and the results of the 2008 Presidential election in Arkansas are certainly not in her favor. In fact, McCain clobbered Barack Obama by a margin of 20 points in Arkansas, a margin that would make any Democratic incumbent nervous. Republicans are targeting her for her potential support of Card Check, while some Democrats derisively characterize her as the Democrat of Wal-Mart. This is certainly a stressful position for a Democrat who hopes to cobble together the coalition required to win in 2010 in a state that rejects the current Democratic President to whom she will be tied. But now that liberal advocacy groups are airing advertisements and complaining about Lincoln on the telephone lines of Arkansans, Republicans will rally behind her, and they may even cast votes for her in 2010. Americans United and MoveOn think they are blackmailing Lincoln with the threat of political death, but they are in fact increasing her popularity in her state, thereby handing her justification to oppose Obama’s budget and agenda. Some actions have inadvertent consequences.

Rove is incorrect when he claims moderate Democrats will react personally to Obama’s efforts to manufacture grassroots opposition to their centrism, and MoveOn and Americans United are incorrect when they believe their Washington, DC, advocacy will yield results in Louisiana and Arkansas. All of them are idiots, as all of them are misinformed, and all their efforts are misguided. But at least Democrats who struggle to win south of the Mason-Dixon line will remain in office as a result of the idiocy of some groups’ version of advocacy. For similar to Bill and Hillary Clinton, these Democrats understand the predicaments and the paradoxes that sustain the Democratic Party in the South. Republicans and the operatives surrounding Obama, on the other hand, do not. Obama, after all, admires Reagan, and Reagan, to be sure, is anything but an expert on Democratic politics.

And now for the L Words. No, this is not about the show that recently ended (though I probably could write an entire post about that), but the puppies. There have been requests for photos of them, too. They are now two weeks old. Most of them have their eyes fully open now (as of Sunday and Monday), and they are getting BIG! Here they are in order of birth, with a 10 inch ruler beside them so you can see how long they are now.

Lucas:

Lucky:

Leo:

Lani

Leila

Loco(motion)

Luna:

And here is the pile of them altogether after their EXHAUSTING photo shoot:

So, when I see reports like the one below on Unity ’09 (I know, I know – Karl Rove – to say I’m not a fan is an understatement, but hey – he managed to get BUSH elected twice, so that’s saying something):

I can go look at this pack of puppies, listen to their cute sounds, watch them learn to walk, and not have my head explode at what is becoming of our country. I hope that looking at all of this cuteness works for you, too.

Imagine yourself at the podium talking to a huge crowd, and the words on the teleprompter say things like: "This is the moment that the world is waiting for. . ." or, "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." How do you pull it off? Maybe you flash to Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, running across the top of a train shouting, "Acaba! Acaba!" with stirring music underwriting your every move. Even so, something in you hesitates at throwing your full self into such grandiosity. Something healthy in you that feels it’s just too way over the top. Besides, isn’t it up to other people to say whether you are a transformative figure?

That something in you that hesitates is not present in some people, such as Barack Obama. When he proclaims that, "we are the change we’ve been waiting for," he goes full tilt with a straight face and no embarrassment. Those caught up in his rhetoric feel like they are part of the "we," and that they are going to be part of something big and wonderful together. Others of us get an unsettling sense that even when he says "we," it’s all about him, quite singular. We don’t sense individuals in a crowd relating to him (as we do, for example, when Hillary Clinton speaks), but a fused entity lost in him. He is not offering to  serve them or fight on their behalf. He is proclaiming that they can become part of him. Many of us get an eerie chill because this is the kind of messianic promise made by cult leaders, not politicians.

And that’s just the beginning of the diametrically opposed reactions to Obama that have deeply divided feminists, progressives, and Democrats, and pitted friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors, networks, interest group members and officials, former political allies, as well as demographic groups against one another. One of the things that keeps us so divided is that his devotees and even many of his converts seem to know so little about him yet consistently reject information that does not fit with their trusting view of him. Many pour out unprecedented—for "progressives"—nastiness, misinformation, and hatred to demean Hillary Clinton and then Sarah Palin, and to intimidate and even threaten those who don’t agree with them. Their bullying has dominated campuses, caucuses, and the convention as well as the blogosphere and media. "Truth squads" aim to silence anything but unqualified admiration.

This is not politics as usual. How can we explain the depth and ferocity of opposing views about a man who portrays himself as a uniter? What is unleashing such widespread animosity and bullying? Is there something about the candidate himself that is inherently divisive?

When a situation has lots of pieces that don’t seem to fit, I look for a lens that can make comprehensive sense of them. In this case, we can get part of the way there via Alinsky-style "community organizing" which Obama says is the best education he ever had. This explanation dovetails perfectly with another that takes us deeper and makes sense of diametrically opposed perceptions and reactions: the anatomy of the candidate’s "self-system." The hypothesis advanced here is that his self-system appears to be organized by "narcissistic personality disorder" (NPD). The NPD lens can illuminate the structure and dynamics not only of the candidate but also of his campaign and the roles of the key sets of players. That is the focus of this article which has grown into two parts: why Obama cannot unify, and how he has divided us.

Having first engaged seriously with NPD 30 years ago and integrated it into my interdisciplinary work, I find the term "narcissist" can be a valuable tool when it is not tossed out casually or without a clue that the self-centered-ness to which it typically refers is merely the tip of an iceberg. We need to dive beneath the surface.

When we do, we discover that NPD is a defective way of organizing the self. Rather than growing around a core, it is cut in half and has no center. The ensuing hollowness and fragmentation explains why "NPDs" lack empathy and authenticity, and have difficulty standing by a principle. It’s also why the psychiatrists who first began recognizing this pattern referred to it as the "as-if" personality. Non-professionals who try to figure out NPDs invariably find themselves
encountering masks and personae, and puzzle over what lies beneath them. Where is the "real" person? Where is the "real" Barack Obama?

They will never succeed in finding him. The devastating truth about NPDs is that there is no "there" there. Nothing substantial and real lies under the masks. There are only masks.

But there is an invisible anatomy beneath the masks. It makes sense of what otherwise doesn’t. It shows us how the pieces fit together and why NPDs are inherently divisive. NPD is not uncommon, and it comes in variable degrees and with different overlays. We’ve all paid an enormous price for not recognizing NPD the last time around. Bush, too, claimed to be a uniter. Despite the disaster he has perpetrated, the Democratic establishment and most of the media have learned absolutely nothing. They can’t wait to do it all over again.

I, on the other hand, being a sociologist, tend to look beneath the surface to social and behavioral processes and the meanings they enact. I have been appalled by what it reveals about this campaign. I am perhaps even more disturbed by the feeble degree of interest and outrage among so many Democrats about these processes and what that bodes for our future. My allegiance is to neither wing of the corporate party nor their candidates, but to getting at the truth—the only basis for any of the
things we say we value.

The issue of divisiveness initially came into focus during the spring because, despite his rhetoric, Obama’s campaign and captive media kept hammering Clinton as "polarizing," and, along with the DNC, as "dividing the Party." How could a candidate who kept getting stronger and winning all the swing states be seen that way—unless, as we now know, the playing field had been rigged before a single vote was cast? This claim had legs, however, because it built on the old shibboleth that Hillary is polarizing. Really? What has seemed obvious to me for the past sixteen years is that Hillary is just the Rorschach onto whom has been projected our culture’s polarizing ambivalence about women, especially powerful women, a deep ambivalence that is carried by many women as well as many men. Not only was Hillary getting a phoney bad rap, but, equally troubling, why were so many voters unable to see through the media narratives to discern that the Obama campaign, their bloggers, and their captive media were the ones generating extraordinarily hateful vitriol and divisiveness?

When I began this piece in early August, we could still hold out the hope that the pledged and automatic delegates could resist the monumental pressure and intimidation to choose the eminently qualified woman over the unqualified man—and of course, as most people don’t know, they nearly did on Convention Wednesday until they were quashed. Although the short-term electoral context has changed, nothing changes the absolute necessity of untangling the modus operandi of this campaign. Liberal ideologues will consider my critique heretical while I consider their singularity and suppression of other narratives dangerous. I’m in the business of deconstructing false narratives and exposing what goes on beneath them—the job our defunct Fourth Estate failed to do.

Forming a Self: the Right Way and a Wrong Way. To understand NPD, we need to see the invisible structure beneath the masks. The kind of structure in focus here is mental: how we represent images, feelings, and experiences and organize them into a pattern or structure. Because we filter new experience through that structure, it becomes a self-reproducing system. The most basic of these structures is how we configure the self.

Gaining a sense of self while also learning about relationships and boundaries with others is the big task of an infant/toddler. When this goes well, "I" develop a sense of "me" and "you" in relationship with a realistic internal boundary separating us.

• Someone organized by NPD never got that right. Instead, the young narcissist-to-be lays down a different primary pattern: good/bad.

• The profoundly disturbing implication is that his self has no core or center from which to grow himself. Instead, he has two halves split off from each other. They don’t "talk" to each other. His self-boundary is in the wrong place. It divides him in two rather than drawing a line between himself and the other.

• What gets really crazy-making is that both halves of "me" get mixed up with "you" (i.e., my mental representations of you). Both halves cut right across self and other. "Good me" conflates parts of you and of me, and "bad you" conflates different parts of you and of me.

• The mixups enabled by his mislocated boundary lead to unending projections and reversals that are inevitably destructive, and make our heads spin when we try to untangle them. That’s why it is so important to slow them down and have some guidance for how to see their strange anatomy.

To add to our difficulty in seeing through the spaghetti maze, NPD is a deep structure which can be overlaid by later developments and adaptations that obscure its operation to many observers. The bright NPD can use his charm to "pass" with people who aren’t used to looking deeper, and in situations that do not threaten his faulty structure. Things get very nasty very quickly, however, whenever his "stuff" kicks in. That, not his surface adaptations, is my focus here. I begin with half of his faulty self, what the literature refers to as the "Grandiose Self."

Grandiose Self. The surface presentation of the Grandiose Self may be extremely charming, polished, even charismatic. He has a sense of entitlement and an appearance of great independence. Beneath his
grandiosity, however, lies a sense of emptiness and hollowness. How can he not feel hollow when he has no center?

Rather than learning how to "feed" and take care of himself, the NPD’s sense of entitlement leads him to expect to be filled up emotionally and supplied by his admirers. His Grandiose Self requires a steady diet of admiration, applause, and other supplies to feel alive, real, and good; anything less than wholehearted approval may be experienced as criticism. When the applause stops, the narcissist deflates like a balloon.

Beneath his grandiosity and entitlement lies the hidden structure of the NPD’s Grandiose Self. It conflates three streams into the "good" self who the narcissist considers himself to be:

 
(a) realaspects of himself that he "owns" as being "who I am";

 
(b) qualities he idealizes and claims for himself but does not in fact embody; and

 
(c) mirroring aspects of other(s) which feed his fantasy of himself by reflecting the only image of himself he identifies with and will accept and which he appropriates as part of himself.

What’s wrong with this structure? First of all, the narcissist lacks the normal tension between who he is and his ideal or fantasy of himself. That tension is essential to realistic self-perception. Presidential candidates do not normally claim that the other party’s administration is handling Gustav better than Katrina because they are following "my recommendations."

Once we know about that conflation, we are not quite so surprised by the Obama mantras about the world waiting for His Coming. That conflation also explains why the speaker of such words shows no embarrassment in speaking them, or in demanding a Greek temple stadium or the Brandenburg Gate, or usurping a presidential seal for his podium. He feels entitled to these venues, symbols, and much more. When called on it, he does not feel shamed. No acknowledgment of his gross inappropriateness will be forthcoming, only a denial of his intent when turned down ("The Brandenburg gate was only one venue we were considering") or denial of our interpretation ("We never intended to use the seal for more than one occasion"). It’s like a cat who has misjudged a leap: "I intended to change my position in precisely that manner." Yet a cat knows she is pretending; the narcissist doesn’t.

Given the absence of a center and the fragility of the Grandiose Self, narcissists are defensive, thin-skinned, and lack a sense of humor about themselves. This may not at first appear obvious because they conceal their lack of humor and humility with preemptive, inoculating statements about themselves. ("They’ll try to scare you and tell you that I’m ….." the stump speech intones.) But underneath: how dare anyone criticize! Or worse, poke fun.

Nothing hurts a narcissist more than ridicule. Mockery and even simple questions can trigger "narcissistic wounds" that lead to retaliatory behavior—especially if they churn up some truth he is trying to hide. No surprise then that following an acerbic cartoon cover of the presidential pretender and his wife, there was, according to Dana Milbank, no room for the New Yorker on the Europlane.

Obama’s conflation of fantasy and reality is readily observable in his representations of his polygynous father and his union with his mother. Barack, Jr. has created a mythic birth for himself that rearranges facts, events, and time, including the Selma march (four years after he was born!). His inability to represent his parents’ relationship realistically is merely the beginning of fabrications, distortions, denials, and coverups about his birth, childhood, schooling, family, and chunks of his adult life. Like many others, I am concerned about not only what he is hiding about himself, but also his still being a prisoner of his internal family drama.

Like many of you before this election cycle, I never watched Fox News. In my naivete, I believed they were the bad guys and MoveOn were the good guys. Boy have things changed.

I now go to Fox before any of the other MSM, and while there are several excellent reporters there, my favorite is Greta Van Susteren. Greta Wire has the real dope, the antidote to the sexism and misogyny of the others talking heads, men and women alike.

In response to Obama’s Infomercial, Greta points out that Obama is not taking questions and that there are questions that women in particular need answered:

Tomorrow night [TODAY, October 29] Senator Obama has purchased 30 minutes on television on multiple television statIons. It is disappointing that he is NOT TAKING QUESTIONS – that means he is going to miss talking about issues that might matter to YOU. Until now, I have had a question that he has not answered but he won’t do an interview with me to get the answer….but now I have another question….a new one…and I think he needs to answer this BEFORE WOMEN VOTE FOR HIM on November 4 ..and here is the question (with a few follow ups):

She asks questions that Obama has ignored through the primary and then general election.

IS IT TRUE THAT WOMEN IN YOUR SENATE OFFICE GET PAID LESS THAN THE MEN???? PLEASE ANSWER THIS IMPORTANT ISSUE TO WOMEN IN YOUR 30 minutes tomorrow night! IF THIS IS FALSE, MAKE SURE WE KNOW AS IT WOULD BE UNFAIR TO YOU.

SusanUNPC addressed this in a post in September; in addition, Obama’s inequality to women has been raised here and here and here. Greta makes her case to Obama for answers before election day in terms that all women can understand:

I have read that the women get paid 83 cents to the men’s $1.00 in your Senate office…true? or false? ….I was suspicious of the unequal pay allegations and suspected the allegation was wrong and/or politically motivated. So what did I do? I had someone on my staff crunch the numbers and it is, per our calculations 84 cents on the dollar! I am still uneasy about our number crunching. We are not accountants and this is a very important issue. What is the truth? Tell us!

As an aside, we did a similar analysis of Senator McCain’s Senate office and women get 97 cents to the men’s $1.00.

Let me tell you what I was also told by my number cruncher – which might be disturbing to women (if true.) The reason for this unequal pay for women analysis is due in part because men hold the better jobs (the important high paying jobs) in your Senate Office. This also needs to be explained. Women in other Senate Offices are the chief of staff etc and hold all sorts of important higher paying jobs than entry ones. Why don’t women hold the high paying jobs in your Senate Office? Women I know don’t accept it anymore that we can’t have important jobs. Many women not only are the breadwinners in many families but also assume extra responsibilities at home…yes, multitask..so we demand equal pay for equal work and equal opportunity…not extra..and not less.

There are many reasons I refuse to vote for Obama, but the sexism coming out of the Democratic Party is the reason I have quit the party after almost 40 years of loyalty. And the liberal women who felt justified in attacking Hillary turned their rabidity onto Palin with a bloodlust previously unimaginable.

Sarah Palin appeals to women who work hard for a living, especially women who work hard while raising a family. But as we’ve seen, the Democratic Party, as evidenced by Randy Rhodes’ comments about older white Hillary supporters, Donna Brazile’s comments about the Democratic Party not needing the white-working class, Obama calling blue-collar Pennsylvania Democrats “bitter,” and Rep. Murtha calling huge swaths of Pennsylvanians “racists,” it’s clear that the new Democratic Party, with Obama as their leader, HATES THE WHITE WORKING CLASS! Obama will not deign to answer Greta’s question because if you have to quibble over the difference between .83 and .97, you are of no interest to him. To quote Victor David Hanson again, as Reverend Amy did in her fine post:

Feminism, it turns out, is no longer about equal opportunity and equal compensation, but, in fact, little more than a strain of contemporary elitist identity politics, and support for unquestioned abortion. Had Gov. Sarah Palin just been a mother of a single child at Vassar rather than of five in Alaska, married to a novelist rather than a snow-machiner, an advocate of pro-choice, who shot pictures of Alaskan ferns rather than shot moose — feminists would have hailed her as a principled kindred soul, and trumpeted her struggles against Alaskan male grandees.

This is not the Democratic Party I used to know.

IF it suddenly seems like the Obama campaign doesn’t have any idea what it’s doing, maybe that’s because it doesn’t.

Barack Obama has never run a campaign against a real Republican. And his main strategist, David Axelrod, is way out of his areas of expertise.

Axelrod specializes inurban politics. He’s run a bunch of mayoral races (usually in cities with lots of blacks), plus contests in true-blue states like Massachusetts and New York.

By creating a culture war between the so-called Whole Foods Nation and working class Americans, Axerod’s tactics worked for Deval Patrick, but not for Freddy Ferrer in the 2005 New York race for mayor or for John Edwards’ primary run in 2004. Cunningham points out Axelrod’s overt class warfare tactics, which included naming sides:

New Yorkers may recall that he was on the Freddy Ferrer team – and how the class-warfare theme of “the Two New Yorks” managed to lose the 2005 mayoral race in a city that’s overwhelmingly Democratic.

Nor did the same shtick do much for Axelrod client John Edwards, who didn’t exactly score big with “the Two Americas” in the Democrats’ 2004 presidential primaries.

As to Deval “just words?” Patrick’s victory in Massachusetts, which also depended on Axelrod’s talents at divisiveness, Cunningham writes:

By the way, it’s not much of a governing philosophy: After less than a year on the job, Patrick has job-approval ratings to rival President Bush’s.

Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for VP, has thrown this class warfare strategy into stark contrast. The press and blogs have gone after Palin like meth-heads after a fix. Foaming at the mouth and euphoric at the opportunity to name call, the media sees Palin as the antithesis of the Moveon.org crowd, and more of the poster child for Walmart than for Whole Foods. And rather than be shamed as they think she should be, Palin is proud of that fact.

Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, has a excellent article about this divide in the September 6 edition of BBC Today. Bagent writes:

During this US election cycle we are hearing a lot from the pundits and candidates about “heartland voters,” and “white working class voters.”

What they are talking about are rednecks. But in their political correctness, media types cannot bring themselves to utter the word “redneck.” So I’ll say it for them: redneck-redneck-redneck-redneck.

Bagent is being somewhat facetious in his use of the term “redneck” but not in his description of how the pundits, the politicians and the media work vigorously to attack this culture and their values. According to Bagent, “The term redneck indicates a lifestyle and culture that can be found in every state in our union.” His list of these values is relevant here:

• Belief that no law is above God’s law, not even the US Constitution.

• Hyper patriotism. A fighting defence of native land, home and heart, even when it is not actually threatened: ie, Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Haiti and dozens more with righteous operations titles such as Enduring Freedom, Restore Hope, and Just Cause.

• A love of guns and tremendous respect for the warrior ideal. Along with this comes a strong sense of fealty and loyalty. Fealty to wartime leaders, whether it be FDR or George Bush.

• Self effacement, humility. We are usually the butt of our own jokes, in an effort not to appear aloof among one another.

• Belief that most things outside our own community and nation are inferior and threatening, that the world is jealous of the American lifestyle.

• Personal pride in equality. No man, however rich or powerful, is better than me.

• Perseverance and belief in hard work. If a man or a family is poor, it is because they did not work hard enough. God rewards those who work hard enough. So does the American system.

• The only free country in the world is the United States, and the only reason we ever go to war is to protect that freedom.

It’s not such a mystery that the mean machine of the Democratic primaries, which stole the nomination away from Sen. Hillary Clinton, is sputtering so badly now.

We all understand that there is a political class which dominates in America, and that Sarah Palin for damned sure is not one of them. And the more she is attacked by liberal Democratic elements (translation: elite highly-educated big city people) the more America’s working mooks will come to her defence. Her daughter had a baby out of wedlock? Big deal. What family has not? She is a Christian fundamentalist who believes God spat on his beefy paws and made the world in seven days? So do at least 150 million other Americans. She snowmobiles and fishes and she is a looker to boot. She’s a redneck.

Buchanan: Move On claimed that Palin supported this “right-wing extremist” who is, they claim, a Nazi sympathizer. Palin supported Forbes in 2000, and worked on his campaign. She wore a Buchanan button when Buchanan came to visit as a sign of respect. For what it’s worth, this “right wing extremist” is supporting OBAMA. (HERE’S the UPDATE: There are some who are debating the validity of this claim. After Obama’s speech, Buchanan said this:

“I stand with Obama(emphasis mine)! It was a genuinely outstanding speech, it was magnificent. I saw Cuomo’s speech, I saw Kennedy in ‘80, I even saw Douglas MacArthur, I saw MLK; this is the greatest convention speech and probably the most important because unlike Cuomo and the others, this was an acceptance speech, this came out of the heart of America, and he went right at the heart of America. This wasn’t a liberal speech at all. This is a deeply, deeply centrist speech. It had wit, it had humor, and when he used the needle on McCain, he stuck it into McCain and it was funny. It was Kennedy’s speech in ‘80. I laughed with Kennedy when he was needling Ronald Reagan.”

Make of it what you will. He may be making positive remarks about Sarah Palin now, but this is what he said right after Obama’s speech.

And Charles Martin, who has been debunking Palin rumors left and right (H/T to Medusa!), has this at #24:

No, Buchanan doesn’t support her now; in fact he’s supporting Obama. (Buchanan did think her speech was amazing, but then so do 80 percent of the people who saw it.) Or maybe not. Buchanan sure doesn’t like McCain though.

Creationism: she does not want to teach creationism in school. She said if it comes up in a classroom discussion, then people should be able to discuss it.

Abortion: Palin believes in birth control as a way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. And she believes in abortion for the sake of the mother’s life.

Just for comparison, how many of you are aware that Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is anti-choice? He is the most powerful Democrat in Congress. There are a NUMBER of anti-choice Democrats in Congress. To attack Palin on this one point repeatedly is hypocritical when so many Dems hold a similar, and in some cases, even MORE conservative positions. The bottom line is, a Pres. or VP, cannot take away a law. It is one that has been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court.

Then there’s Sen. Bob Casey of PA, a HUGE supporter of Barack Obama’s. We’ve heard all about him and his pro-life stance.

Environment: she does acknowledge that we need to make changes in energy, and has said clearly that we need to look into geothermal and wind energies. As far as the wolves go, and I say this as someone who has LONG been a member of “Defenders of Wildlife,” she supports culling the packs from the air because they kill so many caribou and moose, which people need to be able to hunt to survive.

Move On also slams Governor Palin for only being a governor of Alaska for 1.5 months. She was inaugurated in December, 2006. Since that time, and it is more like 1.75 years, Move On, she has enacted a number of reforms, as well as run a state the NY Times said is harder to govern than other states in the Continental US:

That said, by other measures, Alaska is harder to govern than a smaller, more settled realm in the Lower 48. With vast distances, large numbers of indigenous peoples and a narrowly based extraction economy — with a handful of giant multinational oil corporations dominating the game — some economists say a country like Nigeria might be an apter comparison.

“Alaska really is a colonial place,” said Stephen Haycox, a professor of history at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “One third of the economic base is oil; another third is federal spending. The economy is extremely narrow and highly dependent. It’s not to say that Alaska is a beggar state, but it certainly is true that Alaska is dependent on decisions made outside it, and over which Alaskans don’t have great control.”

Add to that a sense that Alaskan governors are more accessible to their people:

Overlaid across all of that is a distinctly informal Alaskan style. At the annual governor’s picnic, usually held in July, the governor is expected to turn the brats and burgers on the grill — something Ms. Palin has done with gusto — with cabinet members in aprons rounding out the kitchen staff.

The article continues with information about Alaska I sure didn’t know, and which is important to consider when belittling Palin’s experience:

Alaska also came of political age recently, which has meant two crucial things to Ms. Palin’s rise and experience as governor.

First, the State Constitution concentrates power in the governor’s office more thoroughly than in almost any other state — a legacy of the late 1950s, historians say, when statehood and a simultaneous trend all over the country toward elevating executive authority coincided.

Alaskan governors can edit legislation and their vetoes are tougher for lawmakers to overcome. In the numerical scale of power devised by Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, only Massachusetts’ governor has a mightier tool kit.

Second, inch-deep history has meant that the leading lights of statehood are not mere names in history books but are in many cases still around and even still in power, like Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Don Young, both Republicans with decades under their belts in Washington. That old guard is still revered by some Alaskans, but it is disdained by others who have been on the lookout for fresh Republican faces.

It is in that densely layered Alaskan mix that Ms. Palin rose, governed and must be understood, academics and people in both parties say — not as merely a governor, or a woman, but as an Alaskan.

“The frontier mentality, whether myth or not, is still alive,” said Donald Linky, director of the Program on the Governor, at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

Huh. Apparently being the Governor of Alaska actually counts for something after all!

And here’s a good one. This just goes to show what strange bedfellows Politics makes. It turns out that the reports of Gov. Palin moving to ban a bunch of books is bogus – yet another rumor concocted to demean her. We cannot stoop to these kinds of Swiftboat levels. So, I am being FORCED to use sources like Michelle Malkin. What the hell is the world coming to?!? But, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Ahem. Ms. Malkin had this article yesterday (and honestly, she has been debunking a lot of Palin smears, so it is worth a trip to her site to see what else is being said):

The Bogus Sarah Palin Banned Books List (Michelle Malkin debunks yet another Palin smear), MichelleMalkin.com

Palin Derangement Syndrome strikes again. This time it’s hysterical librarians and their readers on the Internet disseminating a bogus list of books Gov. Sarah Palin supposedly banned in 1996. Looks like some of these library people failed reading comprehension. Take a look at the list below and you’ll find books Gov. Palin supposedly tried to ban…that hadn’t even been published yet. Example: The Harry Potter books, the first of which wasn’t published until 1998.

The smear merchants who continue to circulate the list also failed to do a simple Google search, which would have showed them that the bogus Sarah Palin Banned Book List is almost an exact copy-and-paste reproduction of a generic list of “Books Banned at One Time or Another in the United States” that has been floating around the Internet for years. STACLU notes that the official Obama campaign website is also perpetuating the fraud. And it’s spread to craigslist, where some unhinged user is posting images likening Palin to Hitler. Here it is again.

The person who first spread the Palin smear is identified as “Andrew Aucoin,” a commenter on the blog of librarian Jessamyn West. West has done the right thing in keeping the bogus comment up and pointing out in her main post that “there appears to be no truth to the claim made by the commenter, and no further documentation or support for this has turned up.”

It’s a fake. Not true. Total B.S. A lie.

If it gets sent to you by a moonbat friend or family member, set ‘em all straight. Fight the smears. They’ve only just begun.

The bogus Sarah Palin Banned Books List(can be found) HERE.

From the Anchorage Daily News story that inflamed P.D.S.:
Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.
According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn’t fully support her and had to go.

Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job.

It all happened 12 years ago and the controversy long ago disappeared into musty files. Until this week. Under intense national scrutiny, the issue has returned to dog her. It has been mentioned in news stories in Time Magazine and The New York Times and is spreading like a virus through the blogosphere.

The stories are all suggestive, but facts are hard to come by. Did Palin actually ban books at the Wasilla Public Library?

…Were any books censored banned? June Pinell-Stephens, chairwoman of the Alaska Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee since 1984, checked her files Wednesday and came up empty-handed.

Pinell-Stephens also had no record of any phone conversations with Emmons about the issue back then. Emmons was president of the Alaska Library Association at the time.

Amazing the rumors that are coming out, and the lengths to which organizations will go to fabricate stories about Governor Palin. There seems to be no care for the damage these falsehoods will do the organizations’ own reputation in their haste to discredit this woman. It is remarkable. And remarkably stupid. It makes people like me question how in the world I was ever even a MEMBER of Move On. It lowers the level of discourse to ducking mud slinging all around. We can do better than that. I’d like to think we are BETTER than that. So, come out with the facts – let’s take a look, form our opinions, and have some honest discussion, not this constant smearing with any crackpot rumor that comes down the pike. Just a thought.

These PUMAs caught up with me in between gigs….excited and confused, they needed to tell me the story of voter registration in Denver. These ladies poliely declined to re-register but asked a question of these young people. They asked, where are these voter registration forms going….. the answer: MoveOn.org!

They have endorsed Obama and promised to mobilize their members on Obama’s behalf.

Why are voter registration forms being sent to MoveOn.org?

“Gee, I really want to suck my thumb.”

But after I saw it on the internets a few times, I realized that this is not what most adults would be thinking if they saw this ad. Instead, they would more likely recognize their own Gen-Y kids who are hanging around still being supported by Mom and Dad, pretending to be “upscale” on their parents’ money. The parents would be thinking about how their charming and sensitive little dependents don’t seem to be offering the slightest indication that they have any intention of actually getting off on their own and paying for silly things like their own own heat, food, property taxes, car insurance and cell phones–for a change.

This condition, of course, allows a generation known as America’s longest-running parental dependents to hang around all dreamy-eyed, thinking of Hopey-Changey – while pushing the age of 30 in some cases. So I would imagine that their parents’ actual reaction if they saw this ad would be,

“Am I going to have to support that baby chick!???”.

That’s why MoveOn will be more likely to run this ad on MTV and Comedy Central– so that all these sweet, sensitive, expensive dependents will remember to get up on Election Day and do that irritating Vote Thing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dear Sara,     

Last week I forwarded you an important email from MoveOn, regarding FOX’s use of language against Senator Obama and his wife, Michelle. Many thousands of you joined the petition, and for that I thank you. Below is an update on that campaign that was sent earlier this week.

With great respect,

Congressman Robert Wexler

 Dear MoveOn member,

 Over 428,000 people have signed a petition telling FOX to stop their racist and hate-filled smears against Barack Obama. If we hit half-a-million signatures, we can draw media ttention and put pressure on FOX’s advertisers.

Plus, Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films released a video this morning documenting FOX’s ongoing smears against Michelle Obama. Please check out the video, and then sign the petition calling on FOX to stop peddling racism—and then tell your friends.

Just click here: Click here

 Here’s the link: https://pol.moveon.org/donate/foxsmears.html?rc=wexler2

 FOX is shameless: in the last several weeks alone, they’ve “confused” Obama’s name with Osama’s, referred to Michelle as “Obama’s Baby Mama,” and called an affectionate fist bump by Barack and Michelle a “terrorist fist jab.”

 Our partners at ColorOfChange.org will hold a major event next week to deliver boxes and boxes of petition signatures to FOX’s headquarters. If we can deliver half-a-million signatures, other media outlets will have a powerful story to report—and FOX’s advertisers will get the hint that it’s not a good idea to associate their products with FOX’s hate-speech. Thanks for helping to fight the right-wing smears.

 –Adam G.

Paid for by “Wexler for Congress”

 

This was my reply: 

First of all, MANY people in the media have accidently confused Obama with Osama, including Ted Kennedy. And CNN, and MSNBC. And Obama events. It has even happened in Italy, when someone called Barack, Obama bin Laden.  

 ALL the media talked about for years was Osama Bin Laden. It is normal that it would be a slip up every now and then.

And not that I spend a lot of time defending Bill O’Reilly, but he said he did NOT want to start a lynching party on MO after her statements that she made about not being proud of her country.

And thirdly, Michelle called Obama her baby daddy, and that is where FOX got the idea. 

Oh, also, Eddie Hill, as shown in your video, was listing all of the names the *fist bump* had been called, once Michelle and Obama were seen doing it.

I suggest you focus on more important issues than continuing this idiotic drive to label ANYONE who opposes Obama as racist.

Obama is the one who drew the race card first. Obama is the one who labeled the Clinton’s and their supporters racist. Why don’t you address THOSE issues. Not some fake contrived *attacks* by the right. These attacks have been coming from the Obama camp. Not the right, but the far left. The media and the Obama camp.

 

I have unsubscribed from these emails. This is so ridiculous. 

Published at American PUMA in Italy.

And now? He’s not standing on principle, he’s running to the center. He has reversed himself on public campaign financing, late term abortions, gun control, FISA, Iraq, MoveOn.org, NAFTA, and Iran. How bad is it?

I got a call this afternoon from the Barack Obama campaign. (Apparently, they have hired Meyer Associates, who can be reached at 301 851-4961, to help them with fund raising.) The woman on the other end of the line opened with a pitch about Barack Obama representing “hope and change,” at which point I cut her off. I recounted the litany of Barack’s flip flops. Imagine my surprise (and my delight) when the woman sighed and said, “I agree with you.”

She went on to tell me that 70% of the people she had talked to during the last two days were telling her the same thing. Most, she said, were unwilling to vote for McCain and were vowing to stay home. Needless to say the fundraising was not going well. I mentioned that I had heard that Barack’s campaign failed to reach their fundraising goals for the second quarter. She confirmed that this was true. We had a very pleasant conversation. I wished her good luck and hung up.

A few minutes later I was checking email and came across this message from a NoQuarter reader (thanks dude):

Incidentally, I just now received my first fund-raising call from the Obama campaign — not the DNC, DCCC, or DSCC, but the campaign (the D groups probably won’t be calling me again). You would have loved hearing that call from the campaign, not so much for my opening rant about how “I will not be contributing to the Obama campaign or any other national Democratic groups after their treatment of Senator Clinton, race-baiting, and race slurring”, but for the young caller’s response to my rant, which was an exasperated “what is all this I’m hearing about how we treated Hillary? We took all the flack for Wright with no help from her, and now you people are saying we called her a racist!”

That told me that their fund-raising operation is running into more Clintonistas than they imagined. Or else, that one poor guy is somehow getting ALL OF US on the phone!

The only way Barack raises new money (because most of his major existing supporters are maxed out) is to get some coinage from Hillary supporters or disenchanted Republicans. Well, that ain’t happening. And if traffic at Barack’s website is an indicator then it certainly appears that Barack is not having much success in expanding his base. In fact, the base is contracting.

Coyote Ugly used to refer only to a situation that started with too much alcohol and led to casual sex with a partner that, in the soft low lights of a bar, appeared to be cute. But when the sun rises and you open you eyes, you discover that the beauty you thought you bedded was actually a beast. Like a coyote caught in a trap, you will chew off your arm rather than risk moving it and waking the sleeping horror show at your side.

Let’s face facts–Super Delegates are slowly discovering that they climbed into bed with a Barack Obama that does not really exist. He is not a new and different kind of politician. Nope. He’s an old style Chicago politician who has feasted on graft, compromised principles, got public money for slum lords who put black folks in homes not fit for pigs, and is now pandering to an imaginary conservative center. His decision yesterday to abandon his promise to fight George Bush for shredding the fourth amendment was not an aberration, it was a window into his soul. Will Super Delegates come to their senses and put a halt to nominating the fraud that is Barack Obama? We will see.