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Remember when the Park Service was doing the tyrant’s bidding by trying to make the government shut down hurt as much as possible? Road & Track has the story of a biker who violated the ban in the Great Smoky MountainsPark, wrote about it, and got three citations and 40 hours of community service for his trouble.
If you find yourself standing before a federal judge, the last thing you want is to feel your attorney go stiff beside you. His Honor looked at the paperwork in front of him and paused. His eyes shot over his rimless glasses and landed first on me, then my attorney, who could not have performed a more perfect interpretation of 2×12 plank if we had entered into a life-and-death game of charades. It was inspired.
“Mr. Bowman, I’m trying to understand why your alleged offense occurred on one day and your citations were written almost two weeks later.”
Ah. That.
Rangers don’t take kindly to publicly mocking the government shutdown by riding a motorcycle through a closed national park. That’s especially true when you write a piece about it. I’d netted three citations for my efforts, including traveling the wrong way on a one-way road, ignoring a public closure, and operating a motor vehicle off of designated trails.
The three yellow slips of paper that showed up in the mail two weeks later succinctly summed up one brilliant afternoon in the park last October. Combined, these were good for up to 18 months of incarceration or $15,000 in fines. To make matters more endearing, the offenses occurred on federal land, which meant each was a genuine misdemeanor, the kind that go in the box under “HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF A MISDEMEANOR” on job applications and unpleasant conversations with in-laws.
“Oh, I see. It says here you wrote an article for RoadandTrack.com titled, ‘A 250cc middle finger to the government shutdown.’”
That’s the one. …
OK, back to the guy in the white house who blames everyone else for his mistakes. Andrew Malcolm is first up.
… Now, as is his habit, Obama is muddying the waters with superfluous words and thoughts to cover his lies, gaffes and distortions. He warns of making generalizations, then makes them. He smoothly dodges and deflects questions, appearing to listeners’ ears to answer while changing the subject from his responsibility to someone else’s fault.
It’s easier for Obama to do because of a less than shark-like D.C. media and because words heard come and go so fast it’s difficult for listeners to parse and analyze before the Talker-in-Chief is off gabbing about something else. All of which, of course, he knows full well.
Take this exchange with “60 Minutes’” Steve Kroft: “Is this the most difficult period of your presidency, the biggest challenge of your presidency, this period we’re in right now?”
Pause the tape. Now, Obama knows if he agrees, that’s the night’s top headline: “Worst time of my presidency: Obama.” So, he gives Kroft nothing on that subject and pivots to recalling the ancient, reviled Bush era to change the topic away from himself. Resume tape.
“It’s a significant period. But if you think about what I walked into when I came into office….”
Can you imagine a headline like this: “Obama says U.S. in a ‘significant period’” Of course not. …
Even the NY Times is not going to buy into the shameless lying by the president. Paul Mirengoff has the story.
Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times destroy President Obama’s attempt to shift blame to the intelligence community for his lack of focus on ISIS:
‘By late last year, classified American intelligence reports painted an increasingly ominous picture of a growing threat from Sunni extremists in Syria, according to senior intelligence and military officials. Just as worrisome, they said, were reports of deteriorating readiness and morale among troops next door in Iraq.
But the reports, they said, generated little attention in a White House consumed with multiple brush fires and reluctant to be drawn back into Iraq. “Some of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just didn’t pay attention to it,” said a senior American intelligence official. “They were preoccupied with other crises,” the official added. “This just wasn’t a big priority.” ‘
What “crises” were diverting the White House’s attention late last year from the rise of terrorist force more dangerous than al Qaeda? The botched Obamacare roll-out? …
Max Boot has more.
… Of course Obama won’t accept responsibility for pulling out of Iraq either–he blames that too on the Iraqis for failing to agree to grant U.S. troops legal immunity in a status of forces agreed ratified by their parliament. Yet it turns out this was a bogus issue all along. How do I know? Because Obama has now sent 1,600, and counting, U.S. troops to Iraq without any legal immunity or any Status of Forces Agreement ratified by parliament. If he’s doing it now, why couldn’t he do it in 2012? Simply because he didn’t want to–Iraqi leaders almost certainly would have acceded if Obama had shown the will to remain past 2011.
Rather than accepting blame for his own misjudgments, Obama stubbornly continues to defend his mistakes such as failing to arm moderate Syrian fighters in 2011-2012 as most of his security cabinet was urging him to do. “For us to just go blind on that would have been counterproductive and would not have helped the situation. But we also would have committed us to a much more significant role inside of Syria,” Obama said.
Yet Obama’s own officials, including Robert Ford, his former ambassador to Damascus, have said that the U.S. has had the information for years that it needs to figure out who’s who among the Syrian rebels. It’s just that Obama refused to act on that information precisely because he refused to accept a “more significant role inside of Syria” even if such a role could have stopped the growth of ISIS.
If Obama is going to rebuild shattered confidence in his foreign policy, he needs to accept blame for what he did wrong before and act to correct those mistakes now instead of scapegoating others and taking refuge in half-measures such as his current air strikes without boots on the ground, which he characterized on 60 Minutes as a “counterterrorism operation” rather than “the sort of occupying armies that characterized the Iraq and Afghan war.”
Peter Wehner says he’s getting his press secretary to lie for him.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest has a problem. In a misguided effort to protect his boss, the president, he is continuing to lie.
I use the word lie advisedly but, I believe, correctly. Here’s why.
In an exchange yesterday with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Mr. Earnest continues to peddle the fiction that President Obama did not have ISIS/ISIL in mind when he referred to it in an interview in the New Yorker as a “jayvee team.” Several weeks ago I showed why that claim is false, and so have many others, including Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker for the Washington Post. …
More and more liberals are fed up too. Here’s Josh Kraushaar in National Journal.
In attempting to downplay the political damage from a slew of second-term controversies, President Obama has counted on the American people having a very short memory span and a healthy suspension of disbelief. The time-tested strategy for Obama: Claim he’s in the dark about his own administration’s activities, blame the mess on subordinates, and hope that with the passage of time, all will be forgotten. Harry Truman, the president isn’t. He’s more likely to pass the buck.
His latest eyebrow-raiser came on 60 Minutes on Sunday, when the president blamed the failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS on his intelligence community for not informing him of the growing threat. “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said. Most early news reports dutifully pinned the blame on the intelligence agencies, with the president escaping any further scrutiny.
But anyone following the news over the past year would have been better informed than the commander in chief. As NBC foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel said on MSNBC Monday: “It’s surprising that the president said that U.S. intelligence missed this one, because it seems that U.S. intelligence was the only group that missed this one. Everyone knew that Islamic extremists were on the rise in Syria and in Iraq; it was well documented. The extremists were publicizing their activities online—they were bragging about it. Journalists, including us, were interviewing foreign fighters. This was no state secret.”
Former Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, the highest-ranking former military officer ever elected to Congress, told National Journal that the president was wrong to pass the buck. “As commander in chief, you’re accountable. …
Yes, the country was dumb enough to return him to office, but American Interest reports 60 Minutes audience dropped by half when the president was on.
President Obama gave an interview on 60 Minutes this past weekend. It seems that few people were watching.
Deadline Hollywood, self-described as “[t]he definitive choice for industry insiders,” noted that 60 Minutes ratings were “off by 69% from last Sunday, when it directly followed the game.” Meaning that an NFL game preceding 60 Minutes is responsible for the show’s typically strong ratings. Specifically, 60 Minutes had 17.9 million viewers on September 21 but only 9.7 million viewers the following week on September 28, when Steve Kroft interviewed the president. …
Matthew Continetti posts on the ways the Clintons control the press.
Amy Chozick covers Hillary Clinton for the New York Times. She is an enterprising and dedicated reporter, and many of her stories have annoyed the 2016 presidential frontrunner. This week Chozick covered a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. It was her turn to be annoyed.
Chozick’s most revealing article about the event had nothing to do with the scheduled agenda, or with the opaque, labyrinthine, and seedy finances of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or with the tsunami of clichés from the stage about global warming, gender equality, wellness, empowerment, polarization, Mohammed Yunus, sustainable development, globalization, Palm Oil alternatives, uplift, board diversity, education access, green energy, Malala, information technology, organic farming, public-private partnerships, and #YesAllWomen. The article had to do with Chozick’s bathroom habits.
Every time she felt the urge, a representative of the Clintons would accompany her to the ladies’ room. Every time. And not only would the “friendly 20-something press aide” stroll with Chozick to the entrance of the john. She also “waited outside the stall.” As though Chozick were a little girl.
If it was not embarrassing enough to be chaperoned to the water closet by a recent college graduate no doubt beaming with righteousness and an entirely undeserved and illusory sense of self-importance, some earnest and vacant and desperate-to-be-hip Millennial whose affiliation with the Clintons, whose involvement in their various schemes, consists of nothing more than her uniform of white shirt and silk scarf—if this was not on its own an indignity and an insult for a correspondent of the New York Times, when Chozick asked for comment on the bathroom police, she received the following response: …