If it looks like a rotten dead fish and if it smells like a rotten dead fish... it might be a rotten dead fish!

Almost as good as the real thing?

Fake flowers and the pretend White House press corps

posted by Hugh Hewitt

Here is what Attorney General Eric Holder testified to when, while under oath, he was asked about the Department of Justice’s investigations of journalists and national security leaks:

“In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material: This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy.”

NBC investigative reporter Michael Issikof has reported that the attorney general signed the application for the warrant authorizing surveillance of Fox News reporter James Rosen and that the warrant application included an affidavit from an FBI agent who asserted “[t]here is probable cause to believe that the reporter has committed a violation” of the Espionage Act “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator of Mr. Kim.”

The warrant application also requested secrecy as it asserted that Rosen was a flight risk.

Aiders, abettors, and co-conspirators of spies, especially those who might flee, are definitely the subjects of potential prosecution. So Holder either lied to Congress, lied to the judge, or doesn’t read what he signs.

Last week we also heard from the president on the subject of the press. Toward the end of a long and generally uninteresting rehash of his standard talking points on the war on terror, delivered at the National Defense University, the president said that “[j]ournalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.”

“Our focus must be on those who break the law,” he continued. “And that’s why I’ve called on Congress to pass a media shield law to guard against government overreach.”

And who will guard us against overreach? “I’ve raised these issues with the attorney general,” the president declared, “who shares my concerns.”

Memo to the White House press corps: At the next semiannual, six-question press conference, someone should ask the president if, when he “raised these issues with the attorney general,” the president already knew the details of the Rosen case, whether the AG told him then and there, or if the AG kept him in the dark.

It has to be one of those three circumstances. None of the three reflects well on the president, but one of them adds to Holder’s long list of sins against the office of AG that of purposefully deceiving the president about the substance of a matter the president “has raised.”

None of this hangs together, and what my radio pal Mark Steyn calls the poodle press is still not even yapping at the obvious “issues raised” by Holder’s conduct. They are all “outraged,” of course, and want the public to share the outrage.

But why should the public get riled up? The First Amendment is supposed to protect a vigilant, pressing press, not a cheerleading squad for the president they love. There are exceptions of course, but most of the Beltway-Manhattan media elite have been pulling for Obama from the first day of his presidency.

You don’t water fake flowers, and you don’t get outraged over assaults on pretend reporters. The handful of reporters who have pressed Team Obama on its various scandals — from Fast and Furious to the Environmental Protection Agency’s scam emails, the Obamacare shakedown and now the IRS shocker — have the respect and support of the public, but the vast majority of Manhattan-Beltway media bigs are seen as extensions of the White House Press Office.

When the mainstream media start doing their job again, the public will defend them. Until then, not so much.

London massacre: speak the truth

Mike Walker, Col USMC, retired

All,

Yesterday, a young man – son, husband, father, and honorable soldier – was hacked to death by two pieces of filth wrapped in human flesh.

London Mayor Boris Johnson offered a dodgy platitude when describing the rationale of the murderers as "wholly and exclusively in the warped and deluded mindset of the people who did it."

The shamefully unanswered question was: who precisely are those people?

This was not an act of a madman or madmen. In fact, it was a deliberate act perpetrated by two calculating but intolerant hate-mongers fueled by a global “hate machine” known as radical Islam.

If leaders are incapable of accurately describing the danger faced then they will never be able to effectively protect the people to whose care they are entrusted.

The Islamic world is being torn apart in what is best described as the third fitnah, or religious civil war. This fitnahis unprecedented in two ways: first, in the extreme intolerance of the radicals and, second, in its immediate recourse to horrific violence against any man or women or child it opts to hate.

The large share of the casualties remains in the ranks of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who fail to “measure up” to the vision of these radical Islamists. The rest are the “collateral damage” of these haters as they fight their war against all others who dare to be “different."

What we are witnessing is a violently extreme movement that, for the first time in the history of Islam, has been allowed to creep into the mainstream of Islamic thought and tradition.

If we refuse to fight them and, perhaps just as importantly, publically shame them for what they are – Muslims who are radically intolerant haters – then the casualty lists will only grow in the future.

The only madness, to follow the Mayor’s line of argument, is to fail to point out this truth.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Eric vonHolder...

They weren't just looking at Fox News' James Rosen's emails, listening to his phone conversations but his parents too!

Remember the outcry when Bush wanted to listen-in on overseas communication with known terrorists... hardly a word from the enlightened left... get what you want by any means...

I'll bet this guy has a closet full of brown shirts... or caftons... remember NAZI means national socialist... get what you want by any means.

GOOD AFTERNOON TO EVERYONE!

President Obama's apologists defend him by painting him as disconnected, aloof, and out of the loop (and you're having a bad month when that's how your defenders portray you!) but it certainly does seem like bad things happen to people after Obama criticizes them. The tax exempt organizations division of the IRS began subjecting conservative and Tea Party groups to outrageous levels of scrutiny, dragged out for months and years, after the President and his allies described those groups as obstacles to progress, or even threats to democracy. But it goes even further than that, as at least one donor to Mitt Romney's campaign was hit by surprise audits after his name appeared on an enemies' list published by the Obama 2012 campaign... and he says other Romney supporters were given similar treatment. Conservative groups like the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute also complain of being singled out for audits. And it's not just the IRS. Other agencies, including the FBI, BATF, and OSHA, mysteriously decided to dog-pile on groups criticized by President Obama or his party's congressional representatives. And now we've learned that the Justice Department directed extraordinary levels of surveillance at James Rosen, who works for Fox News, a media organizationrelentlessly attacked by this White House. It remains for urgently-needed investigations - conducted completely outside the influence of the Obama Administration - to determine if all this behavior was coordinated. The current Administration defense, painting it as the work of numerous low-level employees in various agencies acting independently, might be even more chilling than an orchestrated conspiracy. One way or the other, a chilling message about the high price of dissent has been sent. -- John Hayward Senior Writer HumanEvents

Sobering look at the Syrian situation, especially given the state of our foreign policies....

with Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

Syria Update

The Syrian civil war has entered a new phase following the resurgence of the Assad regime, as just a few months ago it appeared that the resistance movement was on the path to victory. For the resistance, that window of opportunity is shut for now and it begs the question: What has happened to change the situation?

The first important change was the rise of radical Islamist groups fighting with the resistance. When the troubles began back in March of 2011, the progressive pro-democracy groups dominated the movement. As is their want, these groups do best in a relatively peaceful arena where change is possible either through the ballot box or by non-violent civil disobedience. As it became clear that the issue would be decided through the barrel of a gun, the stakes for and commitment of the opposition changed. War is always an extreme option and the decision to kill or be killed proved to be a crystalizing event in Syria.

This led to three immediate results. First, once large numbers of people began to die, the possibility of a peaceful transition vanished. Second, many of the progressives we unable or unfit to make war, which left the battlefield to the most dedicated believers and that led to a disproportional increase in the numbers of radicalized Sunni Islamists in the ranks. Third, the future leaders of Syria are now going to come from the men leading the fight, either Assad and his commanders or the resistance commanders. Any resistance “leadership” sitting outside the war zone will be brushed aside once the war is decided.

The rise of the radical Sunni Islamist resistance groups (Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahram al-Sham, for example) was predictable, as was the infusion of foreign jihadists. During the height of the 2003-2011 War in Iraq, we saw roughly 200 foreign fighters per month enter Iraq across the Syrian border and most had Syrian documents, regardless of nationality. This jihadist pipeline that Assad permitted in the last decade has come to haunt him as it now is being used to topple his regime.

The radicalization of the resistance movement has proven to be a two-edged sword, however. While it provides fresh fighters for the resistance it also alienates the sizeable minorities. The non-Sunni Arabs had originally been divided: they either remained neutral or joined one of the two sides. As the resistance came to be dominated, not by Free Syrian Army (FSA), but by Sunni Islamist radicals, the minority populations – such as the Shi’a, Alawites, Druze, Syriac Christians, Turkmen and Kurds – became fearful and began moving into the Assad camp in late 2012.

This fresh infusion of supporters for the Assad regime helped to stabilize it in 2013. The earlier setbacks on the battlefield also forced the regime to formulate a new strategy. The original Assad policy had been to treat the uprising as a police action: go to the centers of resistance and restore order by any means possible. This passive-reactive approach proved unsuccessful and, as the situation became grim for Assad in late 2012, he finally was able to envision an effective plan: abandon the “police action” policy and focus on maintaining a continuous line of communication between his strongholds on the Mediterranean coast and Damascus. If successful, this will give him a secure base area to launch successive “pacification” operations to regain control over the country. The recent arrival of large numbers of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters has only improved the odds of success for Assad.

Because the original democracy movement did not succeed, we in the West are now faced with a grim future. We can try to resurrect an inclusive pro-democracy/FSA alliance along with other like-minded groups and hope they can win. If that proves impossible, a likely outcome, we will be forced to deal with either a radical Sunni Islamist regime or an embittered and battle-ready Assad regime.

A radical Sunni Islamist state will have a destabilizing effect on Iraq and Lebanon, if not Jordan and Turkey, to say nothing of the border with Israel. An extreme Salafi Sunni radical regime, however, will only lead to bloody chaos as these fanatics have proven incapable of effectively governing (look to the resentment and opposition towards the Taliban in Afghanistan today and the Sunni Awakening in Iraq). Finally, a victory by Assad will leave Syria with an anti-Western government that is not just beholden to Russia, but more significantly, to Iran and Hezbollah. That will certainly destabilize Lebanon and may heighten the chances of renewed attacks on Israel if Iran and Hezbollah demand Syrian support.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Federal Governance: The Tale of Two (Ohio) Cities

Federal Governance: The Tale of Two (Ohio) Cities

A chilling note from Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

A few weeks ago, the President made an impassioned, reasoned and compelling argument for the good that can be done by a strong federal government during a commencement speech at Ohio State University.

Goodbye, Columbus and hello Cincinnati.

Now, that entire argument has been badly undone by… the strongest domestic arm of the federal government, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

This is a tragedy and a disgrace for the IRS, but the real casualty is faith in a strong federal government.

What those people in Cincinnati did was almost certainly criminal (as likely was the dishonest Congressional testimony* and cover-up that began over a year ago). 

What is not in question is the fact that they singlehandedly did more to create mistrust between the American people and its government than any group since the Nixon "plumbers."

Mike

*March 2012 sworn testimony given by IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman who stated: "We pride ourselves on being a nonpartisan non-political organization" and in regards to "Tea Party groups" there was "absolutely no targeting." The only possible explanations for his false testimony was that Shulman was ignorantly unprepared (highly unlikely since he answered the "targeting issue" questions while reading from prepared talking points) or he lied or he was lied to by whomever researched, prepared and vetted his talking points or the IRS is a poorly led and under-supervised rogue power unto itself. What a mess.

Understanding Terrorism by Islamic Extremists

Understanding Terrorism by Islamic Extremists
Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

The public discourse on terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists is often of limited value because their methods are so atypical of how most American’s think and act – a psychological “disconnect” that leads inevitably to misunderstanding the nature of the threat facing us as a nation.

One problem lies in terminology. The term “self-radicalized” is a meaningless statement of the obvious and plainly unhelpful. Perhaps only “collateral damage” is more harmful, a dishonest euphemism for the death of innocents.

In the end, “self-radicalization” is simply a specific example of self-actualization and conveys nothing of real use. Everyone is self-actuated as no one is coerced, for example, to become a doctor or lawyer. The decision to enter into teaching or fire fighting or the military is the result of self-actuation and every Islamic extremist terrorist, or pacifist for that matter, chose that path at some point.

Declaring someone as “self-radicalized” gets us virtually nowhere in understanding the threat as every radical Islamic terrorists is self-radicalized to one degree or another. That gets to heart of the matter, what can we conclude about the radical Islamic terrorists?

Actually, we can conclude quite a bit. First, as alluded to above, they operate along asymmetrical lines. They do not function within a “block and line “ organization chart, nor do they operate like a traditional guerilla movement. That does not mean that their form of asymmetrical warfare is not highly effective, in fact, that sense of unfamiliarity and strangeness is an asset.

Second, there are recognizable characteristics. Radical Islamic terrorists share both a belief in a perversely extreme form of Islam and a broadly common world-vision of a future that can only be realized through horrific violence.

The terrorists are unusually independent, as their actions require a deeply personal form of commitment. In other words, the radical Islamic terrorist often needs to identify the “what, when, where, and how” they can best help in winning the war and it is their responsibility to act without necessarily being asked or told.

This is nothing new. In the Marine Corps, making independent decisions based on understanding the “intent,” rather than being given explicit instructions, is a common practice and the ability to globally transmit an “intent” that eventually translated into a terrorist operation was what made Anwar Al-Awlaki such a deadly and effective al Qaeda operative.

That leads to the final point, radical Islamic extremists realize that one of the best tools to assist their fellow travelers is through social media and the internet – personal contact is valued and encouraged, if proper safeguards are taken, but not essential to success. These are not traits that only arise in the United States, for they were and are an Islamic terrorist’s modus operandi in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Maghreb, across the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere.

Semper Fi,

Mike