George Lindsey dies at 83; 'The Andy Griffith Show's' Goober Pyle

The character actor played Mayberry's genial auto mechanic, the cousin of naive gas station attendant Gomer Pyle. He also was a regular on 'Hee Haw.'

By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
May 7, 2012

George Lindsey, the Southern-born character actor who played dim hayseed Goober Pyle, the genial gas station auto mechanic on "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Mayberry R.F.D.," died early Sunday morning. He was 83.

Lindsey, who later was a regular on the long-running country music comedy show "Hee Haw," died at a healthcare center in Nashville after a brief illness, said his manager and booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed.

"George Lindsey was my friend," Andy Griffith said in a statement. "I had great respect for his talent and his human spirit."

Noting that he had his last conversation with Lindsey a few days ago, Griffith said: "I am happy to say that as we found ourselves in our 80s, we were not afraid to say, 'I love you.' That was the last thing George and I had to say to each other. 'I love you.' "

"The Andy Griffith Show," the classic 1960s situation comedy starring Griffith as the kindly sheriff of Mayberry, N.C., was in its fourth season in 1964 when Lindsey first appeared as the cousin of naive gas station attendant Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors.

Lindsey's character became more prominent after Nabors left the show to star in the spin-off series "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." in 1964.

As Goober, Lindsey wore a brown felt beanie with turned-up scalloped edges and had a tire gauge, pens and pencils stuffed into the pocket of his work shirt and a rag hanging out of the back pocket of his high-wasted pants.

"I had a lot of trouble with that part," he said in a 2005 interview with Alabama's Montgomery Advertiser newspaper. "I'd been playing a lot of heavy character roles. I'd done them on 'Alfred Hitchcock,' and 'Twilight Zone' and some others, and at first I found myself just doing an impersonation of Jim Nabors doing Gomer. I finally said, 'Look, tell me about this guy and who he is.' "

Lindsey often recalled that Griffith told him, "Goober's the kind of guy that would go into a restaurant and say, 'This is great salt.' "

"Andy Griffith turned out to be the greatest teacher I've ever had," Lindsey, an Alabama native, told The Times in 1968. "He kept tellin' me to play myself, to let it happen to me, instead of trying to be funny."

Over the years, fans of the show often would ask Lindsey to repeat a line he said during his first appearance on the series: a scene in Sheriff Andy Taylor's office in which Gomer asks Goober to do his "take-off on Cary Grant" for Andy.

The bashful Goober quickly gives in and delivers a humorously terrible: "Judy, Judy, Judy, Judy, Judy."

"Couldn't you just swear Cary Grant was right here in this room?" an impressed Gomer says.

"Yeah, that was good, Goober," says Andy.

One of Lindsey's favorite episodes was the one in which, as a practical joke, young Ron Howard's Opie and a friend hide a miniature walkie-talkie under the collar of the stray dog Goober has adopted.

"Goober thought he had a talking dog," Lindsey said in a 1985 Associated Press interview. "It revealed Goober's childlike qualities; it made you laugh and cry."

Lindsey believed "The Andy Griffith Show," which earned Don Knotts five Emmy Awards as Deputy Barney Fife, was popular because "it was honest and simple."

"At that time, we were the best acting ensemble on TV," he said. "The scripts were terrific."

After Griffith left the high-rated CBS series in 1968, Lindsey continued to play Goober on the sequel series, "Mayberry R.F.D.," starring Ken Berry. It was canceled in 1971.

An only child in a poor family, he was born in Fairfield, Ala., on Dec. 17, 1928, and grew up in Jasper, Ala. He majored in biological science and physical education at what is now the University of North Alabama.

After graduating in 1952, he spent four years in the Air Force and another year as a history teacher and head basketball coach at Hazel Green High School in Alabama before moving to New York City, where he studied acting on the GI Bill at the American Theatre Wing.

One of his first jobs on TV was as one of the liars on the quiz panel show "To Tell the Truth." He did a stand-up comedy act to make ends meet and later played opposite Ray Bolger in the 1962 Broadway musical comedy "All American."

After landing in Hollywood that same year, Lindsey actually auditioned for the role of Gomer Pyle — and, he later said, was told he had the part — before it went to Nabors, a fellow Alabama native.

Lindsey's later credits included providing voices for characters in the Disney animated features "The Aristocats," "The Rescuers" and "Robin Hood." He also had a long run on the syndicated "Hee Haw."

"I really don't do Goober on 'Hee Haw.' I do George Lindsey," he told the Associated Press in 1982. "Maybe I don't know where George Lindsey stops and Goober begins. If you're in a series, as I was for seven and a half years, you draw on every personal experience for that character."

Although he once resented being typecast as Goober, Lindsey learned to embrace the role that brought him fame and provided the title for the 1995 book "Goober in a Nutshell," which he wrote with Ken Beck and Jim Clark.

As Lindsey said in the 1985 AP interview, "Goober is Everyman. Everyone finds something to like about ol' Goober."

Lindsey, who was divorced, is survived by his son, George Lindsey Jr.; his daughter, Camden Jo Lindsey Gardner; two grandsons; and his longtime companion, Anne Wilson.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com

Today's Laugh Track: Andy Griffith Show- Barney & Goober

Excruciating Beginning to Trial of 9/11 Plotters

By Rick Moran
http://frontpagemag.com/
May 7, 2012

It was supposed to be a routine arraignment — a reading of the charges and entering of pleas by the defendants.

But the hearing before the military commission charged with trying the 5 major 9/11 plotters for crimes ranging from nearly 3,000 counts of murder to terrorism quickly bogged down and became a circus. A legal proceeding that was expected to last about 2 hours became a 13 hour marathon when defense attorneys used a variety of delaying tactics that bordered on the surreal at times, while the defendants ignored the presiding judge, Col. James Pohl, and refused to enter pleas as a protest against what they believe is an “unfair” system. Their pleas were deferred until a later date.

The arraignment, broadcast on closed circuit TV to 4 other military bases, was witnessed by members of the press, military officials, human rights advocates, and six family members who lost loved ones on 9/11. Some family members who spoke to the press after the arraignment were outraged at the cavalier attitude toward the hearing by the terrorists. The untried system of military commissions will no doubt slow the legal process down even more, as defense attorneys explore the limits of their client’s rights. President Obama and Congress amended the system in 2009 and gave the defendants more legal rights while denying some evidence from being presented that was obtained from the prisoners via “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Human rights groups still say the proceedings are unfair and wish the trials to take place in civilian court.

The five accused included the boastful mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Ramzi Binalshibh, who allegedly scouted flights schools; Waleed bin Attash, who allegedly ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and researched flight simulators; Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who allegedly supplied Western clothing and credit cards, as well as acting as a conduit for money to the hijackers; and Mohammed’s nephew, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, who also helped with financing the operation. The crimes committed by the 5 are outlined in an 87-page indictment that includes charges such as “conspiracy, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, murder in violation of the law of war, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, hijacking or hazarding a vessel or aircraft, and terrorism.”

It became clear that one of the tactics of defense lawyers — both civilian and military — was to put the entire concept of military commissions on trial. In pursuit of this goal, they have filed hundreds of motions challenging every conceivable aspect of the proceedings, leading Col. Pohl to put back the start of the trial until May, 2013.

The cloak of secrecy — necessary to protect counterterrorism methods and confidential informants — is one of the major bones of contention about the commissions pointed to by human rights groups. While evidence obtained from defendants at CIA black sites has been made inadmissible by congressional reforms, some testimony from witnesses who may have been “renditioned” will be accepted. And there will be no mention of alleged mistreatment of the prisoners by their attorneys, although Col. Pohl allowed he will hear motions challenging that matter. Also, as a matter of secrecy, attorneys will not be able to discuss the government’s treatment of their clients while in custody.

Commission critics say that secrecy could still be maintained at a civilian trial — a questionable supposition given the opportunity for the terrorists and their lawyers to wreak havoc under the far more generous protections granted by the Constitution in such a trial. The outrage expressed by both Republicans and Democrats to the Obama administration’s announcement two years ago that Mohammed and his 4 co-conspirators would be tried in New York City caused the Justice Department to beat a hasty retreat and the idea of a civilian trial was dropped.

Prisoners now have access to civilian defense attorneys who specialize in complex death sentence cases — at taxpayer expense. And it was from civilians that most of the posturing and courtroom antics came from. For instance, attorneys for two of the plotters asked that the entire 87-page indictment be read word for word — a right that is granted defendants but is rarely exercised. It took 2 1/2 hours and 6 prosecutors to plow their way through the mind-numbing legalese. At one point, it was thought that all 2,976 names of the 9/11 victims would be read aloud, but prosecutors only mentioned the number of dead without objection.

But that was a small blessing. There were constant interruptions and trivial objections. Binalshibh’s attorney, James Harrington, interrupted the hearing to inform the judge, “My client would prefer to have his name pronounced Bin-al-shib-ah.” Pohl acceded to the request while Binalshibh laid a rug on the floor and began to pray. No attempt was made to stop him.

One female attorney for Mr. bin Attash, Cheryl Bormann, came dressed to the hearing in an abaya, covered head to toe with only her face showing. She suggested that females on the prosection side do likewise, “so that our clients are not forced to not look at the prosecution for fear of committing a sin under their faith,” she said.

The defendants themselves were alternately defiant and disinterested. Mr. Bin Attash had to be brought into the courtroom chained to a wheelchair because he refused to enter voluntarily. They all refused to put on headphones to listen for the simultaneous translation in Arabic, so Col. Pohl ordered the loudspeakers in the courtroom to carry the translation. This slowed the pace of the hearing down even more as the defendant’s lawyers would often speak over the Arabic translation, causing confusion and forcing the translator to repeat. The Guardian referred to the “near-farcical scenes in which the defendants prayed, read the Economist, talked among each other and ignored the judicial events around them.”

At one point during the reading of the charges, Judge Pohl asked Mr. bin Attash’s attorney Capt. Michael Schwartz, who was the attorney who demanded that the charges be read in their entirety, why he wasn’t paying attention. “You are the one who wanted it to be read,” Pohl said. “Your honor, it’s not my right. It is my client’s right,” the lawyer replied.

All of these antics angered many of the family members of 9/11 victims who were granted access to the proceedings at Guantanamo after winning a lottery. Prominent spokesperson for the families, Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles was a pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, said, “They’re engaging in jihad in a courtroom.” An emotional statement issued by Eddie Bracken, whose sister died in the World Trade Center, echoed the thoughts of many family members:
“I came a long way to see you, eye to eye. … If you would have this in another country, it would be a different story. They would have given you your wish to meet your maker quicker than you would realize. But this is America, and you deserve a fair and just trial, according to our Constitution, not yours. That’s what separates us Americans from you and your ideology,” he said.

The hearing will continue next month as Judge Pohl will entertain the first of several hundred motions filed by attorneys for the defendants.

Image: Reuters

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Thanks, Obama, but wealth is not theft

By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/
May 6, 2012

There is nothing new under the sun, including politicians who seek to win votes by milking the gap between rich and poor.

Today it’s Barack Obama, demanding a “Buffett rule” and decrying the harm caused when “the gap between those at the very, very top and everybody else keeps growing wider and wider and wider and wider.” Not so long ago it was John Edwards, intent on riding his “Two Americas” stump speech (“One America does the work while another America reaps the reward”) all the way to the White House. Earlier still it was FDR, lambasting the wealthy who “did not want to pay a fair share” and boasting that he’d “increased still further the taxes paid by individuals in the highest brackets” because that was “the American thing to do.”

Those who peddle class resentment can always find ready takers; otherwise politicians wouldn’t keep selling the same rug. But the demand for it is never as great as the demagogues imagine. Most Americans don’t hate the rich, or even the very rich, and they don’t despise the economic system that makes great wealth possible. “That all men are created equal” goes to the core of our national creed; its undeniable moral force led Americans to fight a horrific Civil War over slavery in the 19th century, and to embrace the legal and social upheaval of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th.

But what Americans honor is equality in the eyes of the law, political equality — not equality of income or material circumstances. The two kinds of equality are inherently in conflict, as every effort to impose egalitarianism eventually proves. “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal,” wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1948. The fact that some people make much more money than others has never convinced the American people that a fundamental overhaul of society is necessary or even desirable. For all the extravagant claims made last year about Occupy Wall Street’s significance, is anyone surprised that the movement has fizzled?

For months President Obama has been calling income inequality “the defining issue of our time,” but relatively few Americans agree. In a recent Gallup poll, only 2 percent of respondents identified the gap between rich and poor as their top economic concern. Even among the Democrats in Gallup’s survey, inequality didn’t show up as a major worry.

Armed with a bully pulpit and backed by a liberal media chorus, Obama may have good political reasons to keep hammering away at the wealth gap. No doubt he can mobilize some voters with his suspect claims about billionaires paying a 1 percent tax rate, or the charge that Republicans want “everybody left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

But most voters understand intuitively that in a free society, unequal productivity will generate unequal wealth. Incentives and rewards are powerful motivators of work and risk-taking; and the greater the potential rewards, the more an economy will achieve. A Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Sam Walton is far more likely to flourish in a nation where people can become millionaires and billionaires — and to enrich all of us in the process of enriching themselves.

“In a democratic, capitalist society, gaps in income are inevitable,” write Peter Wehner and Robert Beschel Jr. in the current issue of National Affairs. “Yet it is worth noting that democratic capitalism has done far more to create wealth, advance human flourishing, and lift people out of destitution than any other economic and political system. . . A policy agenda that has as its top priority the elimination of income gaps. . . not only encourages resentment but also threatens the American economy — because a narrow focus on closing gaps tends to go along with reduced overall growth.”

There is no fixed limit to the wealth a society can produce, and today’s “1 percent” produce an amazing amount of it. But their wealth takes nothing away from the other 99 percent. We are all free to rise as high as talent, education, and hard work will take us. Wealth is not theft. Productivity is not zero-sum. If economic disparity is a problem, then the way to solve it is by raising those who are stuck near the bottom, not tearing down those who have climbed to the top.

Today's Tune: John Coltrane - Central Park West

What Does 'Composite Girl' Tell Us About Obama?

By Jack Cashill
http://www.americanthinker.com/
May 6, 2012

Barack Obama and former girlfriend Genevieve Cook

Within hours after Dylan Byers of Politico created a mini-firestorm on Wednesday with the article titled "Obama: 'New York girlfriend' was composite," David Graham of the Atlantic had all but smothered the flames with his article, "Obama's Composite Girlfriend: How Politico and Drudge Created Fake News."

Graham argued that since Obama owned up to using composite characters in the forward of the book in question, his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, there was nothing shady about the practice. Not surprisingly, Graham overlooked the real problem. So did Byers. So did veteran Washington Post reporter David Maraniss, whose forthcoming book, Obama: The Story,ignited the controversy when it was excerpted in Vanity Fair. No, the real problem with Dreams is the inexcusable dishonesty throughout the book. The promiscuous use of composites is merely a symptom of the larger problem.

In the Vanity Fair excerpt, Maraniss profiles two former Obama girlfriends, heretofore unknown to Obama fans. One of them, the Australian Genevieve Cook, seems to have provided most of the grist for Obama's white "mystery woman," the only girlfriend mentioned in Dreams -- and she only briefly.

"Like many characters in the memoir," says Maraniss of Cook, "[Obama] introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race." What Maraniss does not say, and may not know, is that most, if not all, of the dramatic racial moments in the book are fully manufactured.

With the help of his muse and co-author, Bill Ayers, Obama wove a series of racial grievances into the narrative to toughen up Obama's life story. These stories aren't "compressed," as Obama claims. They are contrived. In his own memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers likewise shows a casual disdain for facts. "Is this then the truth?" he asks. "Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me." When lesser memoirists do the same -- James Frey of A Million Little Pieces fame comes quickly to mind -- they get trashed on national TV by Oprah.

In the case of composite girl, for instance, Obama tells of how their relationship came to a bitter end over her failure to understand black angst. "We had a big fight, right in front of the theater, writes Obama. "When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn't be black, she said." Cook denies that this ever happened.

As Obama later explained to Maraniss, "I thought that [the anecdote] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends." Frey felt much the same way. "A memoir literally means my story. A memoir is a subjective retelling of events," he protested, adding, "I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has." When Obama used the theater story in Dreams, he never expected this kind of scrutiny, either. At the time, no one beyond his neighborhood knew who Obama was. Nor did Obama expect scrutiny when he shared in Dreams the following racial life lessons, all of which have since been proven false (For a fuller accounting, see Friday's WND):

• As a nine year-old, he saw in Life magazine a story about a black man turned grotesquely white in a desperate chemical effort to lighten his appearance. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed that it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article, either.
• In his first days at his Hawaiian prep school, Obama shamefully rejects "Coretta," the only other black student, lest he be tainted by her blackness. Obama biographer David Remnick found the girl. She had no such memory. "He was my knight in shining armor," she gushed. In his book, A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers tells much the same story. He talks of a useful reading assignment about the travails of Clint, one of two black students in an otherwise all-white school, who rudely tries to distance himself from Marvin, the other black boy. Like Obama, Clint feels guilty on reflection.
• After Columbia, Obama worked for what he describes in Dreams as "a consulting house to multinational corporations." He observes, "As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company." In full grievance mode, he considers his unique status "a source of shame." A former coworker (and fan) revealed Obama's account to be a "serious exaggeration." It was not a multinational corporation, but a "small company that published newsletters." Obama was not the only black. He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles.
• In Dreams, "Frank," the real-life Communist Frank Marshall Davis, slams college education. "Understand something, boy," he tells the college-bound Obama. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." Adds Frank, "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit." Davis would never say this. In his memoir, Livin the Blues, he tells of the richly rewarding years he spent at Kansas State University: its "beautiful" campus, its "usually agreeable" students, its "excellent" journalism department. Later, he would see open-minded white college students as the hope for America's racial future. His college poetry-reading tours on the mainland in 1973 and 1974 were huge successes. It was Ayers who had the grudge against orthodox education. "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Sound familiar?
• In Dreams, the composite character "Asante Moran" tells Obama, "The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period." Social control -- no surprise here -- is an Ayers obsession. "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."
• To shore up the black base in a book calculated to get Obama elected mayor of Chicago, Obama suggests that the mystery white woman was the only white woman he dated. "There are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good," Obama tells his half-sister Auma. This has yet to be proven false, but I doubt if even Maraniss will turn up any of these ladies.

Although I believe Maraniss wrote the Obama book in good faith, too much of what he learned from these two women in question is too convenient. The events they "remember" fill holes in the Obama narrative much too neatly. Maraniss has been misled by useful memories of old Obama friends before. In fact, on the eve of the election in 2008, he misinterpreted one such memory so completely it may have saved Obama's campaign -- but more on this later. Given Obama's elusiveness, Maraniss should have been more on guard here. He should have asked out loud why he was allowed to "find" sources no one else, including Obama's most prominent biographer, David Remnick, had.

When celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen went looking for the mystery woman post-election, he came up with nothing. "No one," he writes in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, "including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence." Siddiqi apparently regained his memory. Maraniss writes, "If Barack and Genevieve were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis. ... Sohale Siddiqi was part of the crowd."

Here is what I wrote about this narrative hole in my book Deconstructing Obama: "Given Remnick's list of the allowable ways to interpret Dreams -- verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping -- I choose 'D' for the mystery woman, 'invention.' In the absence of any contrary information, best evidence argues for a creation largely of Ayers' contrivance."

Ayers' great lost love, Diana Oughton, a Weatherwoman killed in a 1970 bomb blast, matches the brief description of this woman in Dreams even better than Cook does, right down to the "specks of green" in her eyes and a multi-generational estate with a lake in the middle. "The house was very old, her grandfather's house," Obama writes of his girlfriend's country home. "He had inherited it from his grandfather." In real life, Oughton's father's grandfather built the main house on their estate, a 20-room Victorian mansion, which is now on the national historic register.

Maraniss makes a point to establish that Cook and Obama visit a family house in the country in the fall. He concedes that it is not her father's house, but her stepfather's, and that Cook has "flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes," but otherwise Cook does seem to fill the bill. In its inimitably oily way, Media Matters noticed. The discovery of Cook, the reader is told, undermines "one of the main pieces of 'evidence'" in my book. Media Matters headlined its article, "The Obama Ex-Girlfriend Conspiracy Inevitably Falls Apart." My suspicion is that Team Obama green-lit the Cook story expecting the Media Matters spin to prevail, not Politico's. The White House could not have been pleased with the results. All the e-mails I received were congratulatory.

It should be noted too that Cook, an avid diarist, does not produce any diary entries to corroborate the trip to the country. At least, Maraniss does not share any. Nor is there a diary entry to back Cook's least credible recollection. In his memoir, Obama relates a preposterously detailed dream about his father that sets him on his quest to find his roots. "Genevieve recalled the morning he awoke from that dream," writes Maraniss of a day thirty years prior. "He woke up from that dream and started talking about it," Cook tells Maraniss. "I think he was haunted." This memory is much too useful. It validates the legitimacy of Obama's quest and gives him full ownership of the book's thesis.

Maraniss writes for the kind of audience that reads Vanity Fair. Most of them are barely aware that serious questions have been raised about Obama's identity, his origins, and the authorship of his two books. Maraniss makes no effort to enlighten them. Unwittingly or otherwise, he immunizes his audience against the charges that will continue to bubble up as we approach November.

Alex McNear, the second and lesser mystery girl, helps shore up the "Obama as writer" myth that got him get elected in 2008. McNear apparently knew Obama at Occidental College and reconnected with him when she spent the summer of 1982 in New York. Like Cook, she conveniently kept a "lasting record" of her relationship with Obama, McNear's in the form of 30-year-old letters. One of these letters from Obama, Maraniss reproduces at length. Here are some excerpts:

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he [T. S. Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality.

Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.

... but you're pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

Graham of the Atlantic dismisses Obama's youthful take on writer T.S. Eliot as "awful, pretentious gibberish," and he is not far off the mark. But the letter leaves a different first impression on casual readers, as evidenced by this e-mail from a foreign correspondent supportive of my research:

Jack,

reading Obama's letters quoted in the Vanity Fair article
I wonder whether his share in the writing of Dreams
was not bigger than you (and I) thought.

I still think that the structure of the book points to Ayers
as the main "plotter" and that he is responsible for ideas
like having composite characters. He must have edited
Obama's ramblings and improved on them.

At first glance, I felt the same way this fellow did, and then I noticed a major red flag: the letter is entirely free of the problems with punctuation, noun-verb agreement, and participle use that dog Obama to this day. From Maraniss's account, Obama's would seem to have written the letter in his senior year at Columbia, the same year he wrote the one fully documented writing sample from that era, his 1,800-word article for the Columbia Sundial, "Breaking the War Mentality." Let me cite just a couple of quick samples from this article with commentary:

The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive.

This is one of an incredible five sentences in the piece in which the noun and verb do not agree. This should read, "The belief ... keeps SAM's energies alive." The random use of commas throws everything off. Plus, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. The reader is told that these institutions are "moribund" -- that is, "nearly dead." How their debilitated state keeps the "energies" of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) "alive" is not exactly clear.

Regarding Columbia's possible compliance, one comment in particular hit upon an important point with the Solomon bill.

The subject of "hit upon," not an apt verb to begin with, should have been a person, not a "comment." Obama did not understand participle use.

What members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.

I went back and reread the hard copy on this sentence to make sure it had not been deformed when digitized. This, alas, reads as weirdly as written. "Infuse" is the wrong word. One infuses something "into" something else. There should be an "and" after "situation," not a comma. Obama utterly mangles the "bring to bear" phase." It should read something like "bring the words of those formidable men on the face of the Butler Library -- Thoreau, Jefferson, Whitman -- to bear." As to how or whether we are part of a "twisted logic," I will leave that to the reader's imagination.

These same grammatical problems surface in Obama's awkward 1988 article "Why Organize" and in a published letter on affirmative action he later wrote while a student at Harvard Law. They continue to show up in his spoken words today. The letter that Maraniss reproduces, by contrast, is exquisitely punctuated and free of all such errors. The author of the letter even uses his or her participles correctly.

Given the questions around Obama's writing skills and the fact that Team Obama has been credibly accused of forging a birth certificate, Maraniss owes his reader some proof of this letter's legitimacy. He should tell us whether he saw a hard copy of the letter, whether it was typed or hand-written, and why it reads so much better than Obama's published work of the same period.

Maraniss has been down this road before. In a lengthy biographical piece on Obama for the Washington Post in August 2008, Maraniss mistakenly shored up the myth of a happy little Obama family, the myth on which Obama built his candidacy. Maraniss did so by relying on the testimony of Susan Botkin, a childhood friend of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. In the process, he made an amateurish botch of the timeline of Obama's early years.

As Maraniss acknowledges, Obama Sr. left Hawaii for the mainland and ultimately Harvard in June 1962. Maraniss implies that the family had been living together since Obama's birth in August 1961. Based on Botkin's testimony, Maraniss contends that Dunham stopped by Seattle in the fall of 1962 on her way to visit her presumed husband at Harvard. Botkin reportedly tells Maraniss, "[She said] he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him." Maraniss adds, "But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawaii."

Other earlier interviews with Botkin, one of which was posted online, yield a much clearer picture. In these, Ann had come to visit "briefly" with Barry at Botkin's family home. Botkin placed the time as "a late August afternoon" in 1961 "when Barry was just a few weeks old," and she claimed to have changed Barry's diaper.

In April 2008, Botkin told the Seattle Times that Ann was excited about her husband's plans to return not to Harvard, but to Kenya. Botkin said the same thing to writer Michael Patrick Leahy, who interviewed her early in the summer of 2008. Here, too, Botkin adds a clarifying detail: "[Dunham] left [Hawaii] just as soon she had clearance from her doctor to travel with her new baby."
As Botkin acknowledged in several interviews, she never saw her friend again. The visit at Botkin's mother's house had to be in 1961, a year before Barack Sr. left for Harvard. Dunham arrived in Seattle in August 1961 and stayed for a year, enrolling at the University of Washington. Obama would not see Obama Sr. until he was ten.

What Maraniss needs to do is explain whether he was misled by Botkin or whether he willfully misinterpreted what she told him. He also should reveal whether he actually saw the letters that Dunham allegedly sent Botkin detailing her romance with Obama Sr., the only such proof of the same. If Maraniss can correct the record on Obama's origins and tell us a little more about those heart-breaking "black ladies out there," I may even buy the book.

Compulsory Blindness

The Obama administration is enforcing a false orthodoxy.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/#

May 5, 2012

Mohammed Mahdi Akef. former Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood

A few years back, I wrote a book called “Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.” It was about being on the “front lines,” so to speak, of the battle against Muslim terrorism. I put “front lines” in quotes because, though the terrorists saw themselves as fighting a doctrinally ordained war of armed combat, we were treating them as mere criminals — such that our idea of a battlefield was the federal courthouse, and our idea of a commander was, well . . . me.

Misapprehending the dimension of the challenge — that it was war, not crime — was only one part of the story. The real willful blindness was government’s failure to examine the nature of the challenge. This, of course, involves the question of why things happen. To duck that question was reckless. A failure to understand the terrorists’ rationale made it impossible to grasp how pervasive the security problem was, how likely it was that additional mass-murder plots were in the offing, what kinds of targets were vulnerable, and what should be done to try to prevent attacks.

Still, things were better 20 years ago. If the book were to be written about today’s counterterrorism approach, I’d have to call it Compulsory Blindness: A Surrender to Violent Extremism.

See, however wayward our approach in the Nineties may have been, it was still possible to tell the truth, to fashion an accurate depiction of the phenomenon. To be sure, in the Clinton years, there was plenty of feel-good “Religion of Peace” drivel coming out of the White House, the State Department, and Main Justice. But back then, willful blindness was the familiar, tacit kind of conscious avoidance: Officials who should have known better passively avoided learning basic, uncomfortable facts. For the most part, though, they did not affirmatively obstruct those who were more industrious.

No one, for example, stopped me from eliciting sworn testimony from FBI agents and other experts that the concept of “jihad” stemmed from classical Islamic doctrine, and that its original meaning involved armed combat against unbelievers in order to fulfill the divine injunction to spread Islam.
Regardless of what the politicians were saying in Washington, no one tried to stop us, in our New York courtroom, from proving that the terrorists had been animated by a supremacist ideology that was firmly rooted in Islamic scripture. No one prevented me from pointing out to the jury that the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman), whose various physical maladies rendered him unable to carry out terrorist acts, was nevertheless empowered to command the terrorist organization, solely because of his mastery of Islamic jurisprudence.

I marched into the courtroom every day for nine months and proved that there was an undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims. The Blind Sheikh, the jury was allowed to learn, was not a fringe lunatic; he was a globally renowned scholar of sharia whose influence over a spate of international jihadist organizations was based on his doctorate from al-Azhar University, the world’s most influential center of Islamic thought. And when I demonstrated the straight-line, undeniable logic of the evidence — that scripture informed the Blind Sheikh’s directives; that those directives informed his terrorist subordinates; and that those subordinates then committed atrocities — the government gave me the Justice Department’s highest award.

Today, I’d be ostracized. No longer is the government content to be willfully blind. Today, it is defiantly, coercively, extortionately blind.

“Islamic outreach” started out in the post-9/11 Bush years as a well-intentioned but wrongheaded way to connect with Muslim communities: convince them to share information about jihadist elements while persuading them that America’s quarrel was with terrorists, not Islam per se. It was a wayward idea, but not fatally so. After all, outreach was just a sideline — something the FBI, the intelligence community, and the military did in addition to, and in the service of, their more conventional methods of gathering information and evidence in order to thwart a threat.

In contrast, Islamic outreach is the ne plus ultra of Obama counterterrorism. Today, conventional methods of intelligence collection — along with the basic premise that you need to understand what you are looking for — are foresworn if they are deemed to interfere with Islamic outreach in any way. Counterterrorism is not national security anymore; it is pseudo-psychology. The key to making us safer is making Muslims feel good about themselves, the theory holds. This will nullify resentment, and resentment, not ideology, is the cause of Islamic aggression — except we wouldn’t want to call it Islamic aggression because Muslims would resent that. So we must suppress all references to Islam (Islamist, “political Islam,” “Islamic supremacism,” jihad, etc.). And we must violate the first rule of good intelligence that nothing is beyond scrutiny: It is to be taken as a given that Islam is not the problem but a key part of the solution.

There are many farcical things about Islamic outreach, but the worst is that it miniaturizes the threat of Islamic supremacism. Contrary to popular wisdom, violent jihadists do not kill wantonly. It is a grave error to confuse tactical barbarism with mental dysfunction. They kill for the same reason that non-violent Muslim supremacists champion sharia, Islam’s legal system and societal framework. The rational, coherent goal of both the violent and the non-violent is to Islamize the society by imposing Allah’s law.

Islamized society is antithetical to the Western notion of free society — it rejects liberty and equality. Therefore, the threat to us is not merely violence, or “violent extremism” (the euphemism in vogue for “jihadist terror”). Violence is just the immediate part of the threat. The overall threat is that our liberty will be eroded as sharia mores take root. Sharia is extremism, and it imperils us whether or not it is implemented violently.

Moreover, the animating supremacist doctrine is the same for everyone who hears it, even if only some are moved to violence. All who accept the doctrine have the same ultimate goal; they differ only in their methods of achieving it.

By and large, the government’s outreach “partners” are leaders of Islamic organizations, many of which are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood and al-Qaeda accept the same doctrine of Islamic supremacism. They have tactical disagreements about how to carry out the duty to spread sharia, but they are in harmony on the point that spreading it is a duty. That is why in 2008, for example, the Brotherhood’s then–Supreme Guide, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, rejected the suggestion that Osama bin Laden was a “terrorist.” He countered that bin Laden was a “mujahed” (an honorific applied to “a warrior in Allah’s cause”). Akef added that, in his “sincerity in resisting the occupation,” bin Laden was “close to Allah on high.”

If, under the guise of Islamic outreach, the government gives these Islamic-organization leaders a veto over what our agents can learn about Islam, it is giving a veto to people who believe what bin Laden believed. Even if they disagree with bin Laden’s methods, they are not going to help us discredit the ideology that causes terrorism. They are going to tell us to ignore that ideology while they go merrily on promoting it. And that it won’t incite terrorism in everyone does not mean it won’t incite terrorism in anyone.

The Obama administration has gone all in with these Islamic leaders. It is not only willfully blind to the threat, a la Clinton and Bush. Obama has made blindness compulsory. Under his direction, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and even the military are taking muscular steps to bleach training materials of any information that these Muslim leaders might find offensive, meaning: anything that explains Islamic supremacism and demonstrates the unmistakable causal relationship between Islamic scripture and Islamic terror. Disappearing along with the materials are the instructors who lecture about them. The idea is not just to airbrush Islam but to intimidate — with the specter of taint and lost employment — anyone who would dare challenge Obama orthodoxy.

The president is purging information on which, not so long ago, juries relied to convict jihadists. Notwithstanding all its willful blindness, the government used to pass out sparkling awards to the officials who stitched that information together. Now, in the era of compulsory blindness, the government stamps “Islamophobe” on your head and hands you your walking papers.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Today's Tune: Adele - Set Fire To The Rain (Live)

The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course

By Mark Tapson
http://frontpagemag.com/
May 4, 2012

Just in time for the President’s reelection campaign to pick up steam, the Obama administration last week declared an end to the War on Terror. A few drone strikes, and voilà – mission accomplished! Yet, in an awkward coincidence, in the same week as that announcement came the release of an online video course exposing the alarming degree to which we are losing the broader war against the enemy we officially refuse to identify.

Of course, it was never a war on “terror” anyway; as many have pointed out, terror is a tactic, not an enemy. We weren’t waging a War on Blitzkrieg in World War II. And terrorism was never the only threat posed by our Islamic enemy, which Obama limits to “al Qaeda and its affiliates.” In fact, our focus on violent jihad has left us vulnerable to the subversive Muslim Brotherhood’s more insidious “civilization jihad,” which continues apace.

Obama himself has been supportive of the Brotherhood’s rise to political power internationally and has opened the door for them at home. He has literally welcomed them into the White House (at least his predecessors made them work for such access by infiltrating), pretending that we are now partners in the political process instead of enemies. But while the Obama administration trumpets this and the waning influence of al Qaeda as the end of the ill-named War on Terror, Frank Gaffney declares that we are no closer to victory than we were on 9/11.

Gaffney runs the Washington D.C.-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a nonprofit organization for national security research and policy advocacy founded in 1988. In 2010 Gaffney and CSP published Shariah: The Threat to America, a highly acclaimed report on the dangerous reality of political Islam. Now he and his team have rolled out a free, ten-part, online “video briefing” entitled “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course,” designed to educate American citizens about “a threat most Americans are even unaware even exists within our country, let alone the peril it represents”:

The threat is the totalitarian, supremacist doctrine its adherents call shariah, and the organized, disciplined, and increasingly successful efforts such adherents – most especially the Muslim Brotherhood – to bring it here.

Gaffney describes the course as a “distillation of all we’ve learned” in the 24 years since the CSP’s inception. Narrated by the quietly intense Gaffney himself, the videos range from fifteen minutes to two hours in length (eight hours total), and define how and why our very civilization is in danger.

Part 1 lays the groundwork in “The Threat Doctrine of Shariah & the Muslim Brotherhood.” Part 2 elaborates on the Brotherhood’s plan to “eliminate Western civilization from within” in “The Brotherhood’s ‘Civilization Jihad’ in America.” In Part 3, the course takes a closer look at the Brotherhood’s penetration and manipulation of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America – a development which will come as a shock to those who are concerned only about the complicity and naiveté of the left.

In Part 4, the course examines a case study in such infiltration, the story of a Brotherhood-linked conservative activist named Suhail Khan. Part 5 offers examples of the many ways in which Khan’s mentor, influential tax reform advocate Grover Norquist, and his team are actively promoting the Islamist agenda, and Part 6 scrutinizes how Norquist’s Islamist protégés are running for office as Republicans. In Part 7, Gaffney et al. examine how Norquist’s ongoing Islamist influence operation is advancing the agendas of the civilization jihadists.

In “Part 8: Team Obama & the Islamists,” the course looks at “Brotherhood-associated individuals who have been allowed access to – and, in some cases, given prominent positions in the Obama administration” – figures like the influential Daliah Mogahed. Then in “Part 9: Team Obama & the Islamist Agenda,” the course takes a hard look at Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform” this country, in a “two-hour deep drill-down into the disastrous policies of the Obama White House, its State Department, Defense Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and more.”

The course isn’t solely educational. It also seeks to empower American citizens “to take myriad steps to counter this civilization jihad.” It concludes with “Part 10: What’s to be Done?” in which Gaffney offers practical suggestions on “how to defeat the most serious and imminent of such dangers in our time”: the attempt to impose shariah through violence or stealth. Those suggestions include educating others, engaging the media and elected representatives, and developing a support network. Some of these steps can be undertaken as individuals, some through organized efforts, and others as a nation.
The website also provides Endnotes for documentation, and Resources which include links to books and films on the subject, like Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad and Islam: What the West Needs to Know. The Resources section contains links as well to organizations like CSP and the David Horowitz Freedom Center and to activist groups such as Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America and Stop the Islamization of Nations.

The site also lists 16 “Key Findings” about shariah and the Muslim Brotherhood, in light of which “there is an urgent need for rigorous congressional oversight and investigations aimed at exposing the extent of the civilization jihad – and the need for corrective action aimed at countering it.” A sampling of those findings:

2. Shariah is principally about power, not faith. Accordingly, acting to realize its political end of overthrowing the U.S. government is seditious and must be prosecuted, not treated as protected religious practice…

15. The conduct of seven key federal agencies suggests the considerable success of the Muslim Brotherhood in destroying us from within by our own hands – starting with the policies and directives emanating from the Oval Office…

A unique and monumental project by Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course” is both an essential guide to comprehending the depth and breadth of the threat posed to America by the Muslim Brotherhood, and a useful plan of action to counter that threat.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Fauxcahontas and the melting pot

Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding license application. And now it’s here!

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
May 4, 2012

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts

Have you dated a composite woman? They're America's hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In "Dreams from My Father," the world's all-time most-unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend:

"When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn't be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn't. She could only be herself, and wasn't that enough..."

But being yourself is never going to be enough in the new composite America. Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend – "Julia." She's worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can't even be herself. In fact, she can't be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his "Head Start" program at age 3 through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you'll love it: Sweet Dreams From My Sugar Daddy. She's what the lawyers would call "non composite mentis." She's not competent to do a single thing for herself – and, from Barack's point of view, that's exactly what he's looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.

Then there's "Elizabeth," a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack's white girlfriend, she couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be a composite – a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface makeup and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the "Are you Native American?" box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she's part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F—kin' Chief Dances With Plugs.

How does she know she's a Cherokee maiden? Well, she cites her grandfather's "high cheekbones," and says the Indian stuff is part of her family "lore." Which was evidently good enough for Harvard Lore School when they were looking to rack up a few affirmative-action credits. The former Obama Special Advisor to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former Chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel now says that "I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am," and certainly not for personal career advancement or anything like that. Like everyone else, she was shocked, shocked to discover that, as The Boston Herald reported, "Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the '90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty's lack of diversity."

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School's first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.
Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have – hang on, let me get out my calculator – duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother's wedding license application. And now it's here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren's memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams From My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran'ma as Cherokee, but let's cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – "people who are like I am," 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America's melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you're having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich's Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it's the other way round. Progress!

Coincidentally, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission last week issued an "Enforcement Guidance" limiting the rights of employers to take into account the criminal convictions and arrest records of job applicants because of the "disparate impact" the consideration of such matters might have on minorities. That's great news, isn't it? So Harvard Law School can't ask Elizabeth Warren if she's ever held up a liquor store because, if they did, the faculty might be even less Cherokee than it is.

My colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote the other day about Chris Mooney, author of "The Republican Brain," and other scientific chaps who argue that conservatives suffer from a genetic cognitive impairment that causes us to favor small government. In other words, we're born stupid. So, thanks to gene sequencing, we now know why conservatives aren't as smart as, say, Pete Stark, the nigh-on-half-a-century Democrat congressman who believes that Solyndra, which is based in his district, is an automobile manufacturer: "I wish I had a big enough expense allowance to get one of those new 'S's' that Solyndra's going to make down there, the electric car," he told The San Francisco Chronicle this week. "My 10-year-old is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants Dad to have an 'S' sedan." Pete sounds so out of it, you have to wonder if maybe he's 1/32nd Republican on his great-great-great-grandmother's side.

But, if conservatives are simply born that way, shouldn't they be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission?

Aw, don't waste your time. Elizabeth Warren will be ahead of you checking the "right-wing madman" box on the grounds that she gets her high cheekbones and minimal facial hair from Genghis Khan. And "Julia" will be saying she was born conservative but thanks to Obama's new Headcase Start program was able to get ideological reassignment surgery. And Barack's imaginary girlfriend will be telling him that she'd be left if she could, but she's right so she can't, but she'd love to be left. So he left her.

Good thing the smart guys are running the joint.

©MARK STEYN

Katie Pavlich's 'Fast and Furious'

By David Limbaugh
The Washington Examiner
http://washingtonexaminer.com/
April 17, 2012

Of all the myriad scandals of the Obama administration, there is one, largely ignored by the mainstream media, that could actually be its worst.

That scandal is the operation run from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the Justice Department, known as "Fast and Furious," through which the federal government actually encouraged and even ordered American gun shops to sell guns — against the store owners' better judgment — to "straw" purchasers who were funneling guns to Mexican drug gangs while the ATF sat back and watched and did nothing.

As Katie Pavlich shows in her remarkable and eye-opening new book, "Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up," the whole scheme was either absolutely harebrained or, as some have more ominously theorized, intentionally designed to manufacture "evidence" for tightening gun control legislation.

Pavlich exposes how extreme gun control measures have been a top political goal for President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other important leaders within the administration — and she draws the lines that link this goal directly to the implementation of Fast and Furious. Just as importantly, she shows how the administration has shamelessly tried to obscure those links.
The operation resulted in the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the murder or wounding of some 200 Mexican citizens.

In the operation, there was no attempt to track the weapons sold, and some agents who tried to follow the purchasers were told to stand down. Not only that, but our government kept Mexican authorities wholly in the dark about the operation. Allowing these guns to "walk" into Mexico without surveillance and behind the backs of Mexican authorities guaranteed they would end up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels and only be recovered after crimes had been committed, which is exactly what occurred.

As one ATF agent testified to Congress, "you can't allow thousands of guns to go south of the border without an expectation that they are going to be recovered eventually in crimes and people are going to die."

In their reports on Fast and Furious, congressional investigators concluded that the Department of Justice "had much greater knowledge of, and involvement in, Fast and Furious than it has previously acknowledged." Indeed, Attorney General Holder claimed that he had been unaware of Fast and Furious until a few weeks before May 3, 2011, but it was shown that he had received numerous memos about it much earlier, which he later insisted he had not read.

Rep. Darrell Issa has said that the DOJ has spent more time and resources trying to protect the careers of its officials who knew about the operation than in holding accountable those who were involved. In fact, the evidence shows that the only ones who have been punished are those who blew the whistle on the operation, while those who were engaged in wrongdoing have been rewarded — reassigned or promoted with their pensions still intact.

Meanwhile, the DOJ, according to the committee report, "has blamed everyone except for its political appointees for Fast and Furious." Ken Melson, then the ATF's acting director, said that the DOJ is "circling the wagons to protect its political appointees."

Though Holder told the House Judiciary Committee his office was working "tirelessly to identify, locate and provide relevant information" to Congress, Republican representatives and senators say he and his department have been stonewalling their investigation. Sen. Charles Grassley said that Justice was withholding some 74,000 pages of relevant documents from the investigators.

The ongoing investigation also reveals a disturbing lack of coordination and cooperation among the ATF, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, all of which are under the domain of Holder's DOJ. One deputy attorney general, upon being confronted with this issue, just casually replied, "We will look into it."

The committee's report said that everyone involved was blaming others: The ATF pointed the finger at the Justice Department for encouraging the operation, and Justice blamed the U.S. attorney's office in Arizona for implementing it. DOJ officials who could have stopped the operation blamed their staffs for not bringing critical facts to their attention. Making matters worse, U.S. attorney's office personnel have taken the Fifth Amendment in refusing to testify before Congress, or the DOJ has prohibited them from appearing before Congress at all.

Katie's book is a real reporter's book, loaded with interviews with inside sources, including conscience-stricken government agents who are appalled by the politicization of the ATF. She quotes ATF agent John Dodson, who says, "I have never heard an explanation from anyone involved in Operation Fast and Furious that I believe would justify what we did."

This book, which is the best reporting yet on the Obama administration's bloodiest scandal — and its most unconscionable one — will make your blood boil. You should purchase and read it.

Examiner Columnist David Limbaugh is syndicated by Creators.


Katie Pavlich, Fast & Furious BS, and Generation Scary

By Doug Giles
http://townhall.com
April 22, 2012

If you’re looking for light summer beach reading then do not, I repeat … do not … buy Katie Pavlich’s disturbing new book, Fast & Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up.

Further, if you want to live undisturbed in Obama la-la-land, you need to put your tennis shoes on and run away from this tome. Indeed, Pollyanna, this book will smash all the windows of your enchanted little cottage and grind your rose-colored Obama glasses into powder.

Fast & Furious parlays into the public arena the scurrilous way the ATF, at the behest of the DOJ, allowed thousands of weapons to get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. These firearms, in turn—as anyone with even half a brain can imagine—were used to slaughter thousands of Mexicans and to take the lives of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE’s Jaime Zapata.

Now, why would our government agents give thousands of working, untraceable arms to some of the worst SOBs on the planet? Well, we the sheeple were told it’s how the ATF could “know who the bad guys are”—or some crap to that effect.

Hey, wizards at the ATF and the DOJ: If you want to know who the major Mexican dirt bags are who are moving big chunks of weed and mowing down their people and ours with AK-47s, why not use Google versus giving Miguel a machine gun? Por qué?

Most folks, when they take a poke into the Fast & Furious debacle, say, “How can our feds be so stupid?” Which begs the question, was placing thousands of functioning, high-powered weapons in filthy thugs’ hands stupidity on steroids or some twisted scheme with a hidden agenda? Pavlich smelled the latter. The DOJ says it was a whoopsie daisy. Katie thinks they should go sell crazy somewhere else.

Pavlich said “puh-lease” to the 5th amendment-pleading DOJ: “If you’re going to bloviate and obfuscate, Mr. Holder, then I’m going to investigate. And if I find dirt then I’m going to expose you and this massive and murderous crime and cover-up.”

And investigate Katie did, and the gold (or, rather, blood) she found led her to pin the blame on the Attorney General, the Department of Homeland Insecurity and ultimately, the president himself. Katie concluded in her investigations, coupled with the insane lack of media attention and the stalling and bawling by the DOJ, that F&F was not an op that went awry but rather a backdoor grab for our guns that was uncovered when Terry was murdered. FYI to naysayers: Good luck refuting Katie’s conclusions.

Finally, I’d like to praise the 23-year-old Miss Pavlich, the product of a strong and loving dad and a stay-at-home mom—y’know, the kind of mom who “doesn’t work” whom the Left loathes? My tribe and I have been friends with Katie for the last couple of years, and here’s what I dig about her personally and professionally and which other young people would do well to emulate …

1. Katie, unlike the occupunks, believes that America and the principles upon which our nation was founded do not suck. She believes that the U.S.A. deserves our respect and is definitely worth fighting for.
2. Katie picks big fights. BHO, the DOJ and Mexican drug cartels are no small targets, mind you. Go big or go home, boys.

3. Katie is a hard worker and is not a prissy wannabe conservative starlet begging to be fawned over.

4. Katie is a happy warrior. Fighting for justice in this crap-laden culture can be a joy-sucking, hopeless business. Katie’s confident, however, that in time truth will prevail; it simply needs someone to find it, dust it off and declare it without fear.

Katie and other young twentysomethings like her whom I know—including both of my daughters and my son-in-law—represent what I have come to call “Generation Scary.” They are some of the scariest and most fearless young patriots walking this great land, and everybody and their dog who loves this country should get behind them and praise them and promote these young charges wherever the sun doth shine.

Once again, for those who can handle truth in an uncut form, this balls-out book picks no small fight and is definitely worth your time and money.

Watergate … meet #Murdergate.

PS: The DOJ just appointed Media Matters to run interference for them regarding Fast & Furious. You cannot make this stuff up.

Junior Seau's apparent suicide brings into focus the question of how many people must die for love of football

Seau's death is only the latest in a series of NFL tragedies

By Mike Lupica
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
May 3, 2012

Sometimes this is the violent end to a violent sport, another ex-football player, a great one this time, Junior Seau who had his best years with the San Diego Chargers, shooting himself in the chest in an apparent suicide.

Twenty years in the National Football League and he does not even make a few years of retirement before it ends like this for Seau, the way it ended not so terribly long ago for an old Chicago Bears safety named Dave Duerson, who also shot himself in the chest so that doctors could study his brain, find out the damage that a violent sport had done to him.

This is not to say that Junior Seau is Duerson, that somehow they are the same because they were football players and their lives took them to these lonely and brutal deaths. No one could ever say that with certainty, even if their lives brought them to this kind of moment with a gun.
But even one death like this is too many and now there is another one for an ex-football player and if there is no way of knowing at this time that Junior Seau, who came out of the University of Southern California to become one of the most famous defensive football players of his time, the Lawrence Taylor of the San Diego Chargers, was another ex-player suffering from some kind of traumatic brain injury.

But would anyone be surprised if he did suffer from that kind of injury? He played 20 years in the NFL. He had been taking shots to the head since he was a star high school player at Oceanside High School, and probably earlier than that. A big, fast, violent player in a violent sport. How many hits to the head is that, between Oceanside High and Junior Seau being found dead at his home in Oceanside yesterday morning?

Maybe it was something else with Junior Seau, maybe it is never just one thing. But now he is dead, at the age of 43. Another ex-football player shooting himself dead with his own gun. After all the cheering, in all the great stadiums of his sport, after being as big a star as there has ever been in San Diego, the last sound is the gun going off.

“We believe it was a suicide,” an Oceanside police lieutenant, Leonard Mata, said. “There is no indication of foul play.”

He played his game as hard as it could be played for longer than most defensive players have ever played it. Twenty years in the pros, and college before that, and high school football before that. Again: We don’t know if brain injuries brought Junior Seau to yesterday, but we know that he wasn’t just leading with his shoulder pads all those years.

Dr. William Focazio is the founder of Pain Alternatives, Solutions and Treatment, a group that treats retired NFL players and other former athletes. Focazio and his people do not only provide free medical testing and care, because they run into so many ex-athletes who are destitute, they are even likely to pay for travel and lodging when the athletes fly in to see them from out of town.

“Given the style that Seau played,” Focazio said Wednesday, “I’m sure he had head problems. We know that repeated hits lead to depression.”

And then Focazio said, “Nobody wants to give up their lives to play (football), but that is basically what they are being offered.”

Seau played with the Chargers until 2003, played with the Dolphins after that and finished up with the New England Patriots. The stats on him were easy to find after it came out that he was dead by his own hand on Wednesday, that he had 1,526 tackles in his career, and had 561/2 sacks and even intercepted 18 passes.

And there were less glittering parts of his resume, an arrest once because of an investigation into domestic violence against a girlfriend with whom he was sharing a home in Oceanside, the woman saying that Seau had assaulted her during an argument. A few hours after that, he went down a seaside cliff in an SUV and survived.

This was less than two years ago, and maybe the post-playing life of Junior Seau was starting down a cliff at the same time.

Finally it played out on Wednesday the way it did, the body of the greatest San Diego Charger of them all found with a gun beside him, that body finally loaded into a medical examiner’s van and taken away. The news stories out of Oceanside said that fans took pictures as the van pulled away.

This was the dark ending to such a bright, loud, colorful career, for the football player known as “Say Ow.” An ex-Falcon named Ray Easterling killed himself on April 19. So that is two suicides in two weeks for ex-NFL players. It feels like an epidemic. Maybe we will never get an answer about why it was Junior Seau this time. Or maybe we don’t have to get hit upside the head to know the answer already.

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SEAU DEATH STUNS FRIENDS AND FOES

The Foggiest War

We don’t know the enemy. What’s worse: We don’t want to.

By Clifford D. May

http://www.nationalreview.com

May 3, 2012

The “fog of war” is a concept derived from the writings of Carl von Clausewitz, the great 19th-century Prussian military theorist who recognized that those leading troops into battle often lack data, perspective, and situational awareness. Enveloped within this “fog of uncertainty,” they may not know whether they are winning or losing, and they may take actions that weaken their position and strengthen their enemies.

Would Clausewitz not be fascinated by the war dominating the 21st century, a conflict so murky we can’t even agree on its name? Is it the “War on Terrorism” or the “Long War” or the “War Against al-Qaeda” or just “Overseas Contingency Operations”?

Over at Foggy Bottom — an apt nickname if ever there was one — an unnamed “senior State Department official” told National Journal’s Michael Hirsh that “the War on Terror is over.” He (or she?) elaborated: “Now that we have killed most of al-Qaeda, . . . people who once might have gone into al-Qaeda see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.” A White House spokesman later issued a “clarification”: “We absolutely have never said our war against al-Qaeda is over. We are prosecuting that war at an unprecedented pace.”

Both statements miss — if not the elephant in the room — the guerillas in the mist. Yes, Osama bin Laden sleeps with the fishes and many of his lieutenants have learned the hard way how accurate American-made unmanned aerial vehicles can be. But as Rand Corporation scholar Seth Jones recently noted, with “a handful of regimes teetering from the Arab Spring, al-Qaeda is pushing into the vacuum and riding a resurgent wave as its affiliates engage in a violent campaign of attacks across the Middle East and North Africa. . . . Al-Qaeda is regrouping.”

Nor have we defeated al-Qaeda’s many affiliates and allies. Among them: the Taliban, the Haqqani network, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

And, most significantly, there is Iran, which the State Department itself has for years designated as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s rulers do not think their war against “the world of arrogance” is over. And they have standing on this issue.

As for “legitimate Islamism,” that is meant to imply the Muslim Brotherhood — whose members may indeed believe that elections are preferable to violence as a path to power. But if the Brothers differ with the jihadis over means, they sing from the same hymnal when it comes to ends. Both believe in Islamic supremacy; both are committed to the establishment of Islamic hegemony over the Middle East and, eventually, well beyond; both seek the power to silence critics at home and abroad; both are engaged in persecuting religious minorities in “Muslim lands”; both are committed to the destruction of Israel, the only Middle Eastern nation not ruled by Muslims.

And, as Andrew C. McCarthy recounts in The Grand Jihad, American Muslim Brothers meeting in Philadelphia in 1991 produced an internal memorandum candidly proclaiming their mission: “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house.” Should we really be calling this “legitimate Islamism” — and should we really be comfortable with it?

There are those who predict that the Islamists taking power in Egypt and elsewhere will become pragmatic once they have to pay bills, fill potholes, and curry favor with voters. But that has not happened in Iran over the past 33 years — much as we’ve tried, from time to time, to convince ourselves such a transition was at hand. Nor has it happened in Pakistan and Turkey — both have become increasingly Islamized in recent years.

Others scholars — my friend and colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht prominent among them — argue that Islamism should be seen as a way station rather than a destination. They argue that Muslim-majority societies will learn soon enough that it’s not true that “Islam is the answer” to all the vexing questions of economic and societal organization. Once that happens, they predict, a process of liberalization and democratization will commence. But what is the basis for the belief that the Islamists will allow themselves to be voted out of power? Again, that’s not been possible for Iranians who, ample evidence suggests, long ago became disenchanted with theocracy.

That brings us to the most egregious way in which our thinking has been befogged. In 2009, President Obama visited Fort Hood to honor the 13 Americans massacred by Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army officer who proclaimed himself a “soldier of Allah.” The Americans who were gunned down, Obama said, “did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil, in the heart of this great state and the heart of this great American community. This is the fact that makes the tragedy even more painful, even more incomprehensible.”

Such incomprehensibility not only persists — it is being reinforced by official U.S. policy. Last week, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered all military schools to make sure they are not including “anti-Islamic themes” in training courses. Dempsey’s order prohibits instructors and guest lecturers from “advocating ideas, beliefs and actions that are . . . disrespectful of the Islamic religion.”

Imagine if, during the 1930s, the U.S. government had prohibited ideas, beliefs, and actions that might be seen as disrespectful of the German, Italian, and Japanese nations. What if, during the Cold War, there had been a ban against ideas, beliefs, and actions that could be seen as disrespectful of Russian culture — or of socialism since most socialists are not “violent extremists”?

To see through the fog of war, Clausewitz wrote, requires “a fine, piercing mind.” He probably took for granted that it also requires intellectual courage — something not often exhibited by Western leaders in the current era.

— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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