Conservative “Nutjobs” – Got Gitmo Right

By Jonathan Cousar

Conservatives Got it Right

“European Countries May Take Detainees”. That’s how the hopeful December, 2008 Washington Post article described the bright promise at the dawn of the Obama administration.  Liberals everywhere were elated at the prospect of genuine HOPE that things would finally CHANGE! On the eve of the inauguration of this charismatic and likable new president, liberals believed we would finally get some help and cooperation from our European allies.  (Of course all the while denying the ample help and cooperation they gave during the Bush years).

After Obama’s election, giddy men in high-level government positions on the European Left were promising to help us unload the “Guantanamo Concentration Camp” (as they call the prison) of “detainees” (as they call the terrorists).

But conservatives had always said that Obama’s charisma and attractiveness were not going to make countries suddenly go against their own interests.  Conservatives believed that Europe would never take a substantial number of the Gitmo prisoners.

For this belief, conservatives were ridiculed in the media as yutzes who wouldn’t know their heads from a hole in the wall.  It was said that conservatives just didn’t understand how touchy the rest of the world was.  We didn’t understand that their feelings could be so easily hurt that they would hold back vital help in a time of great need. We simply didn’t understand that having a pigheaded president who did what he thought was right, regardless of who agreed, was so offensive to the rest of the world that they would never again cooperate with us on anything.

We were told that if only we could elect a president who had empathy for other countries, then things could finally start to CHANGE .  We had to elect a president who understood the great offenses America has committed against all the nations of the world.  Someone who would even own up to and apologize for those offenses.  We were told if we could elect someone like that, then things would get better.  The world would begin to cooperate.

Well, we were told wrong. Not the first time either! It turns out that once again, conservatives got it right.  Conservatives showed a more accurate understanding of the real world.  The world has not become more cooperative – even in the face of genuine apologies and contrition on the part of our new president.  Obama has personally apologized to Europe for America’s alleged arrogance and derision.  Yet even in the face of that, France has decided to take just one Gitmo terrorist off our hands.  Germany which originally promised to take nine, now says Nein to Nine ! They are taking none.  And it’s not just the Europeans who aren’t helping – Obama, despite his charms can’t even get his own Democratic congress to help out!  Congress has voted NO to funding the closing of Gitmo!

In light of the fact that Europe, and specifically Germany, has decided not to help empty Guantanamo Bay of terrorists (sorry, we should say “detainees” – “terrorists” is so demeaning), it’s instructive to look back on what was said then.  Conservatives always knew that not only would Europeans not take Gitmo terrorists, neither would Americans! And that’s exactly what has happened.  Germany has said no, France has said no and the US CONGRESS has said NO! And that’s NO to a president everyone loves!

Don’t we now owe George Bush an apology for saying Europe didn’t help us because he was so unlikable ? It turns out they were using his low popularity ratings as the excuse for not taking terrorists.  The real reason was they had concerns about their own security.  Basically they are cowards who know it would antagonize Muslim fundamentalists in their own country and possibly prompt terror attacks against them. 

Here are some juicy excerpts from the Washington Post reporting that European leaders were giddy about helping the new president rid the world of this embarrassing problem. And below that is an article from Agence France Presse detailing the German No.  Read this in light of hindsight.  Read this knowing that France has agreed to take just one terrorists, Germany – NONE, and for all its big talk – Portugal still none.  And ask yourself… who got it right?  Conservatives who said Europe would provide no substantial help no matter who was president?  Or Liberals who said the only reason Europe wasn’t taking them was because they hated Bush so much.

WHO GOT IT RIGHT?

December 28, 2008
Washington Post
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES MAY TAKE DETAINEES

European nations have begun intensive discussions both within and among their governments on whether to resettle detainees from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a significant overture to the incoming Obama administration, according to senior European officials and U.S. diplomats.

The willingness to consider accepting prisoners who cannot be returned to their home countries, because of fears they may be tortured there, represents a major change in attitude on the part of European governments. Repeated requests from the Bush administration that European allies accept some Guantanamo Bay detainees received only refusals.

(THIS is what we were told – that Europe would not take them as long as Bush was president.  This was what Conservatives knew would be proven to be a lie as soon as Obama took office) .

The Bush administration “produced the problem,” Karsten Voigt, coordinator of German-American cooperation at the German Foreign Ministry, said in a telephone interview. “With Obama, the difference is that he tries to solve it.”

(Voigt is saying that since Bush “produced the problem” Germany would not help.  He then indicated that Obama was different… Obama was trying to solve the problem and therefore Germany would help.  But Germany DID NOT HELP!  Germany took ZERO prisoners… just as conservatives predicted they would do).

The Portuguese government pushed what had been private discussions in Europe into the open this month when Foreign Minister Luís Amado brought up the issue in a letter to his counterparts in other countries. “The time has come for the European Union to step forward,” he wrote. “As a matter of principle and coherence, we should send a clear signal of our willingness to help the U.S. government in that regard, namely through the resettlement of detainees. As far as the Portuguese government is concerned, we will be available to participate.”

(So far, despite their big talk, the Portugese government has not yet taken any prisoners).

Amado said, “I believe the new administration will have the conditions to create a new dynamic of cooperation,” Amado said. He noted that when he first raised the issue of Guantanamo Bay at a meeting of E.U. foreign ministers about seven months ago, some countries resisted assisting the Bush administration.

(Remember, this article was published Dec. 23, 2008.  France has agreed to take ONE prisoner, Germany NONE and still Portugal – NONE!  Amado said it was because “some countries resisted assisting the Bush administration.”  Well now, they’re ALL resisting assisting the Obama administration)!

“I assume the new administration will have someone on a plane to Europe within minutes of Obama being sworn in,” said Sarah E. Mendelson, director of the Human Rights and Security Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of a report on closing Guantanamo Bay.

(WISHFUL THINKING)!

Now, here’s the article from May 12, 2009 showing what ACTUALLY happened:

May 12, 2009
Agence France Presse
GERMANY REJECTS GUANTANAMO INMATES

Citing security concerns, Germany has reversed a decision to take in nine Chinese detained at Guantanamo Bay. Officials in some German federal states also made U-turns and now oppose the inmates’ resettlement , AFP reported.

The interior minister of Bavaria, Joachim Herrmann, said “no” to the move as he told German media Bild that security intelligence showed seven of the nine Uygurs – Muslims from Northwest China’s Xinjiang autonomous region – had received training from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and had contacts with militant Islamist organizations.

“We have no interest in exposing ourselves to additional risk,” Holger Hoevelmann, interior minister of Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state, told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily newspaper.

In case you’re missing what happened here… Germany NEVER had any intention of taking Guantanamo prisoners, but while Bush was still president they could pretend and blame their decision on him.  They could tell the world “we won’t take them because George Bush caused this problem and we refuse to help him out of it.”  When the reality all the while was they wouldn’t take them because they understood the security risk they posed.

Conservatives knew this all along and liberals didn’t.  Conservatives had a much better grasp on reality here than liberals did.

Jonathan Cousar is an editor and writer for AmericanFreedomNow.com  You can find more of his writings at
AmericanFreedomNow

Hey Republicans: Get To Work!

By Walter Krull

Is the Republican Party self-destructive? Dysfunctional? Ignorant? Just plain stupid?

Unemployment continues to rise. Foreclosures keep rising too as does the contraction of business across all sectors in our economy as companies go out-of-business or severely scale back operations. Credit is still nearly impossible to get despite billions of tax money poured into banks. Anywhere between 48 and 60 million Americans have no health insurance at all or have limited access. In short, we’re a mess and I believe edging closer to an actual depression than recession.

Yet, the clueless and unimaginative Republicans either can’t see the golden opportunity that has presented itself to them or they are just too dumb and entrenched in their old party-line politics to do anything about it. As much as the current Democrat Party may be controlled by sick and pathological liberal leftists who are way out-of-touch with Americans with their endless sermons to us about atheism, the environment, political correctness and slaughtering babies nine months in the womb on-demand, the Republican Party is too influenced by big business and blinded by an extreme limited view on things as per business people and the high-income bracket.

Even the most anti-Democrat has a hard time today supporting a Republican Party that has done little since January to deliver good ideas to the public in answer to the daunting challenges we face economically. Yes, their call for tax cuts on personal income and for corporate tax reductions are sound and solid answers but both are cornerstones in their ideology. They would be important changes that would provide benefit and stimulus to the economy but they must go much farther than that. In addition, it’s time Republicans ended their laziness and assumptions too and get off their asses to explain to the people just why tax cuts for citizens and business are good ideas.  Give us tangible reasons for it. Give us detailed theories of expected results. You know, work.

Then, after doing that, how about shaking off the cobwebs, complacency and lack of creativity and do what politicians and political parties do: campaign with ideas direct to the people. But first get out the thinking caps and draw-up a comprehensive counter-plan to the president and the Democrats that control the government. 

You can start by stopping this self-destructive tunnel vision approach that leans too heavily on appeasing business and the wealthy because even if all of them came out to vote for you, they are in the minority.  Start expanding your reach. And here’s a thought: accept and embrace your moderate brethren in who victory will come if you allow them to lead. It’s time to face a universal truth: a majority of citizens may love traditional values and agree with Republicans on topics like abortion, marriage, gun ownership, less government and less taxes  but most if not all people are going to be more concerned about  food on the table and a roof over their heads first.

Since the Republican Party is so much more about individualism and personal prosperity merging with a favorable business climate how about actually doing something to really merge them together? The Republican Party is far more realistic and in touch with the realities of economic policies and how they relate to a pro-growth atmosphere and yet it has offered little to counter the president’s massive and all-too familar Democrat strategy of bloating government’s size and people’s dependency on it like a tick ready to pop.

The Republican Party was defeated because it didn’t connect with enough people economically. The Democrats have rarely won the White House since 1968 because they didn’t connect with the people socially.  But since we’re facing the first depression since the 1920′s, social concerns are mere trivialities when you’re jobless, sick, hungry, homeless and scared.

There’s nothing coming from the Republicans right now that encourages me to believe they will do any of this now.  What the pary needs is an influx of new young blood. It needs new strategies and a commitment to widen it base and ideology. Being merely the “opposition party” isn’t going to cut it. The party has had a long history of great thinkers who knew how important the delicate balance of free-market capitalism fused with enough social policies to generate prosperity was to the country.  It’s time for that to happen again because the party has forgotten it serves people. It needs people. It represents people.  Many of them are looking for reasons to vote for them. They should begin by actually working on it and working for it.

Walter Krull is a frequent writer for KingNewsMedia.com

Racism Is Good (for some)

By Charles Boz

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

“It (ethnicity and sex of a judge) may and will make a difference in our judging.”

These are only two of the numerous racially-tinged comments made by the apparently race-obsessed and deeply hypocritical and inconsistent United States Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

This is the same woman who sided with a black nurse who filed a racial discrimination suit because she worked among a staff of Filipinos at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan who spoke in their native language around her but denied justice for 19 white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut by dismissing their racial discrimination complaints that they were stopped from receiving promotions because none of the black applicants passed the test.

Sotomayor gained large applause from radical and separatist Hispanic organizations including the bigot-filled La Raza, Latino Movement USA and Mexicano Movement when she declared at loony leftist Berkeley in 2001 that it was correct and understandable for judges who were non-white to make decisions based on race alone: “……..our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging,” Sotomayor said.

Sotomayor seems to have a race problem and predictably has been embraced by an ever-out-of-control far left spiral of the Democrat Party and its growing number of sicko extremist creeps and hypocritical disciples who are clearly all for racism and double-standards…as long as it benefits them.

The fact Sotomayor was selected by President Obama is about as boringly predictable, racist and hypocritical as it gets. But, so was Obama’s campaign and behavior of an overwhelming majority of corrupt American media openly supporting him and pissing on the people it was supposed to serve with journalistic integrity.

Obama’s selected court nominee really just pushes along a newly installed racist ideology in the White House that blatantly practices bigotry but takes advantage of a nation’s capital currently monopolized by a Democrat Party controlled by African and Hispanic-American bigots and racists along with squeaky-wheel whining “minorities” that gained political and economic prosperity by Obama’s election. For them racism works. It’s good to divide the people. Point out differences and drive policy, law and behavior that benefits non-whites under the guise of double-speak words like diversity, multiculturalism and equality.

Hell, the biggest bigot in the White House is the First Lady herself who could never pass a litmus test for being a well-balanced and unprejudiced individual. Her anti-white bigotry and laughable but remedial “anger” worked with enough people that her stylish victimization–such the rage with liberals–passed her off as a sympathetic figure to them. That’s not to ignore the fact the president has done a good job to date of taking his unhinged and politically dangerous spouse off the speaking circuit so that her racist tendencies don’t show too often.

But it must be questioned why all of this has been permitted anyway. And, for sake of discussion, let’s eliminate one of the obvious and major answers which is that a complicit and criminal media is nothing more than a propaganda arm of the president and his party today so most of the ugliness coming from Obama and his administration, the Democrats, the First Lady and the putrid records of Congressional leaders like Pelosi, Reid and Franks are simply not offered to the people.

Truth is that Sotomayor should not be nominated due to her clear pattern of infusing race into her thinking. Imagine a white judge, male or not, publicly admit his heritage and ethnicity (let’s say Italian or Irish for instance) was a major influence on his decisions so like or it not…tough. But Sotomayor has far more many other things that should be used as legitimate reasons for her denial to the Supreme Court including a open pattern of being an activist judge, literal laziness on the bench where she also has a pattern of taking long, intricate and complicated cases that fill hundreds of pages and skimming on the reading to come up with curiously quick and short-answered judgments that do little to resolve anything at all.

Truth is that if a white spouse of a presidential candidate spoke like Mrs. Obama did during the campaign: invoking racially-toned “us and them” speeches for instance and penned a university paper at an exclusive institution of higher education that painfully offered judgmental views on students of different skin-color, her husband would have been severely hurt by an orgasmic slanted media yelling and screaming.

Truth is that if a white presidential candidate belonged to a church whose pastor repeatedly pissed on America, welcomed an endless string of white supremacists and bigots to insult and stereotype blacks and befriended as well as financially supported a preacher sick with racist and separatist tendencies, he would never, ever have been elected because he would’ve never been nominated in the first place.

President Obama typifies and represents many things. Legitimate racial transparency and neutrality is not one of them. After all, this was a man who marketed himself as a black man instead of a bi-racial man–a man literally half-white–but all black in messaging, image and perception by design. Get ready for more of the same. You have a president in office whose own racist tendencies and those around him, I believe, will eventually seriously hurt him because his decisions, like choosing Sotomayor, are really based in skin-color politics that would never be accepted for a white president.

Instead of the presidential seal following Obama, a picture of the Roman God Janus would be more appropriate as the two-face analogy perfectly fits.

Charles Boz is a frequent columnist for KingNewsMedia.com

A Stimulating Snow Job

KingNewsMedia.com Editors Op/Ed

May 20, 2009

As we approach the mid-point of the year, it is becoming increasingly and more painfully clear every day that the “stimulus package” and all its related bills and budgets that were frantically passed in the early days of the new Obama Administration and Democrat-controlled Congress was a monumental example of bad government. I cannot label it a “mistake” or an “error” because it was not at all. The bill that was passed so hurriedly was intentionally approved and signed the way it was. There were no mistakes here. Just what I believe will be proven to become a federal failure of historical proportions.

 

Do you recall how in the euphoria of Obama’s first weeks before and after his inauguration there was a mad dash to write, pass and sign a “stimulus” bill? Do you recall how Obama held press conferences every other day while he was the president-elect and aggressively pushed the outgoing-Congress and inc0ming-Congress to get the job done as quickly as possible? Do you recall the new president’s gloomy, fatalistic and all-too daunting comments in January about how bad things looked and how the nation was on the edge of a cliff ready to drop? Do you recall how a complicit media–overwhelmingly in the pocket of the new president–fawned over him and gave a free pass to practically everything he said and did? Do you recall how the media paid more attention to what the new First Lady wore and if the president’s children were going to get a playground on the White House grounds instead of paying attention and dissecting the economic bill being written and passed on Capitol Hill?

 

 Well, here is what we got for it all: a terribly and hastily written bill that contained many pieces of political “pork” (wasteful spending) and extremely short-sighted and amateurish language that provided so many loopholes and vague instructions that it could not possibly have been passed with any real thought. But, of course no real thought was given to it since the bill, several hundred pages long, was not even READ in Congress. To be clear, there were a few members in Congress on both sides who called for calm in passing this package and requested more time to review it. But those folks, in my opinion true heroes in government, were simply shouting in the wilderness.

 

Now, as the summer approaches, we can plainly see this mother-of-all-economic-bills will be a failure simply because of the way it was drafted and passed. The problem is this bill was not a routine bill. Its importance in the history of our nation could not be elevated more. The influence it should have had was enormous. It was to be a solution-provider. It was to be literally a stimulus to get us back on track and moving forward with confidence, focus and motivation. It was to generate jobs, investment, lending and all those great and fundamental things that make an economy work. Instead, we have glaringly bad bill that may, ironically, hurt us more than help us. But, that should not be surprising today since it becomes clearer everyday that our government may be the worst impediment to prosperity in the nation.

 

All the folks who have complained that our government is seriously over-bloated, out-of-touch, ineffective, corrupt and irresponsible are correct. We are in serious trouble when a new president with such power in Congress along with a party in such control of Washington, D.C. with such backing of a partisan media and approval of the public cannot even pass a meaningful, intellectual, honest and effective bill that we desperately needed. As if we ever needed another example of how power corrupts, we have it here at the worst possible moment. The sheer power and ego that came into play with Congress and the White House experiencing near untouchable control led each to recklessly act without the thought and meaning they promised and so many Americans believed would occur.

 

Among the most glaring failures of the economic stimulus were the minimizing of two critical features that should have actually been two of the most dominating features of the bill. First and foremost, this bill did practically nothing, zero, I mean nothing for one of the most fundamental components of our economy—small business. How this segment could be so terribly omitted is coming back to haunt the administration and Congress as each day passes because you cannot have a recovery without it. Data and testimony coming in from across the country is showing that small businesses are failing, close-to-failing or doing whatever they can do to survive and ride the storm–including eliminating jobs.

The other monumental failures of our government recently–the tons of money given to the largest banks, insurance companies and automakers–have done little if anything for small business. Besides not receiving anything substantial in the stimulus package, small businesses are also dealing with the fact that the “credit crunch” is practically as bad as June nears as it was at the start of the year. The very banks that received obscene amounts of tax money have yet to provide attainable credit to business. Smaller banks that customarily loan to small and mid-sized companies cannot provide loans simply because these banks themselves cannot get the large mega-banks to give them money either. It is natural to give the large public companies all the attention when it comes to layoffs and they certainly have cut thousands of jobs. But this is a bad habit. What does not get attention is the thousands of jobs lost by smaller companies too. And as this segment continues to falter, more jobs will be cut, offices will close and other businesss relying on those companies will hurt too and do the same and there you have an unending cycle.

 

In addition, the truth is that most of the “work” that will come from the stimulus package will not be for the bulk of small business. Those that will benefit will be those in a select few segments including, surprise, government-related agencies or programs and construction. And that brings us to the second terrible omission: infrastructure. There may indeed be some jobs and projects generated in construction or related fields but they will not number anything like they should because the stimulus package allocated less than 25 percent of its massive cost to infrastructure.

 

Again, here is another example of how terribly ineffective and hideously clueless our government actually is today. You would think that in this highly-partisan era, one thing that most Americans and politicians could agree on is that our nation’s infrastructure was in need of repair and that there is more than enough work to do and it would be public money well spent to benefit……well, you know the public.

Nope.

 

There would be more tangible and faster ecomomic results from assigning more money to infrastructure projects than what the bill as written could ever do. Build a bridge, repair a highway, install sound barriers, medians or lights etc. etc. and many more businesses (and therefore people) would benefit. Instead, we have a bill that truly is for the few it seems. In fact, since June is approaching and the stimulus has been passed for months now, it is legitimate and fair to question just where is all this money now.

 

The early “returns” of the bill are coming in and I predict we are just going to see more of the same–a few jobs here and there mainly reserved for agencies, companies and people comfortably entrenched in the system.

 

As I write this column today, I point to several things today that really represent what this false stimulus bill is all about:

1. The Federal Reserve issued a far-darker economic forecast for the nation than it did in the wake of the passing of the stimulus package. Now, it says the national unemployment rate could hit 9.6 percent. But the Fed has been underestimating the jobless rate for a while now. So, if you take its past predictions, unemployment could hit double-digits. So, again where are the jobs that a stimulus is supposed to generate if we are now facing year without job growth?
2. The Fed also issued a far-gloomier outlook on Gross Domestic Product (GDP)–essentially all the goods and services we produce. Now, the forecast is that the GDP could decrease two percent. It previously predicted a maximum decrease of 1.3 percent. So, let us ask one more time where is the stimulus package’s influence and effect in our nation? We not only have less jobs but less being produced by exisiting business.
3. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner freely admitted today all the government’s manuevers did nothing to free up credit for small business and provide direct aid. Yet, the largest banks that received aid are making profits and want to return the money back so they indeed have money to lend. Hell, it is ourmoney. Furthermore, the tons of tax funds given to General Motors increasingly seems for naught as more observers belive every day the company will go into bankruptcy–which many called for it to do from the beginning.
4. New Jersey issued some employment data today. New Jersey is important to note because despite being in one of the hardest hit regions in this economy, it retains prominence as one of the wealthiest states in the nation. It is also one of the smallest states in the nation too and best educated so what happens there is a good barometer of where we are and where we are headed. Well, the exodus of jobs continues. The state lost more than 14,000 private sector jobs in April across multiple industries. There was one sector of growth. Yep, it was government. More than 1200 jobs were added to the government ranks and many of those were officially attributed to the stimulus package. Keep in mind New Jersey, one of the smallest states in the country landwise and in population, has one of the most bloated governments in the union and is currently seeking a $2 billion loan.

 

To me, all of this smacks of history repeating. Many people believe former president Bush wasted a historical chance to do immense good for the country in the aftermath of the brutal attacks of September 11th, 2001. An opportunity to induce change in government for the better and elevate the presidency to more meaning and effectiveness was wasted.

I believe President Obama has done the same exact thing.

 

People typically forget President Bush, like Obama, came into office labeling himself an outsider and someone who wanted to topple the status quo in Washington, D.C. and enact change in the beltway to better serve the people. Many believe President Bush failed at that. I believe President Obama, like his predecessor just did the same thing. He had an enormous historical and political opportunity in the wake of a terrible economy to force the change he proclaimed. Instead, it seems to me the economic stimulus package could be his Iraq War. As time passes, the cost and failure of this bill will become more apparent and the president may have no choice but to go and attempt to throw more money and legislation at the problem much like President Bush had to throw more money and troops in the Middle East. In both cases, similarities abound.

 

Both seemed rushed actions with little attention to details. Both seemed haphazzardly created without much thought to actual functionality, cost and exit strategy. Both seemed more influenced by those around the president than the president himself. Both actions seemed to benefit people and concerns already profiting from the system. In the end, it seems the people, for whom each man and each Congress serve, failed to take care of basics–the people.

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