The president has also suggested that Guantanamo should be closed because it is hurting America’s image around the world. But it’s not Guantanamo that does the harm, it is the critics of the facility who peddle falsehoods about it.

Dick Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir

Here’s the thing… I read this article and thought — “Duh, no kidding.”

But then it dawned on me that many lib/progressive drones will never accept these facts. Because they are so blinded by their anti-military views and too infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. special operations forces is a major success in our country’s war against al-Qaeda. As a result of the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program and the intelligence gained from detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a major fraction of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has been captured or killed since 2001.

This conclusion was inadvertently reinforced recently by WikiLeaks’ illegal disclosure of more than 700 classified Defense Department files on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Their publication has harmed our security and cemented the impression among allies that America is incapable of keeping secrets. But the material also provides compelling evidence of the effectiveness of Bush administration anti-terror policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The illegally released files, in addition to a host of declassified documents on U.S. detention policies posted at www.rumsfeld.com, record complex decisions and excruciating trade-offs that President Bush and national security officials had to make. They document the deadly techniques and intentions of hundreds of Guantanamo detainees who still desire to return to the fight, and the labors of analysts and interrogators who enabled us to stop additional attacks.

Gathering intelligence is a painstaking process. Some information comes in an immediately actionable form. More often, the significance of particular data, whether provided by senior or lower-ranking operatives, does not become apparent for months or years, as happened with the years-long effort to patch together information that led our forces to bin Laden.

The classified files from Guantanamo Bay, particularly those on senior operative Abu Faraj al-Libi, contain clues about al-Qaeda’s courier network and even mention Abbottabad. Had bin Laden closely followed WikiLeaks’ release of these documents April 25, it is unlikely he would have been there when U.S. Navy SEALs descended into his compound days later.

The primary documents are the best public evidence yet of our systematic efforts to ascertain detainees’ links to terrorism and to weigh the dangers of their potential release or repatriation. In a war in which our nation’s terrorist enemies hide among civilians and do not carry their arms openly, the question is not whether some unfortunate detention mistakes are made but whether there are appropriate protections to detect errors and correct them when discovered.

Read the whole thing — it is chock full of FACTS.

I can only hope that the most important lib/progressive sees the error of his previous anti-Bush, anti-American world view. He lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I am not holding my breath.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Once again, Stacey McCain asks the relevant question:

If it weren’t for the fact that it plays 24/7 in airport waiting areas, would anyone ever watch CNN?

Well, I sure wouldn’t watch the network if they didn’t play it on the TV monitors at my gym.

(I recommend McCain’s piece, a reflection on the consistency and angry preening of Jimmy Carter’s favorite living filmmaker.)

(H/t:  Ann Althouse at Instapundit.)

Back in 2004, when Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, was released, the guest list at the Washington premiere read like a Who’s Who of leading Democrats:

The Fahrenheit 9/11 premiere was organized by Clinton White House social secretary Capricia Marshall, and the attendees who praised the movie included DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, Sens. Tom Daschle (D), Tom Harkin (IA), Max Baucus (MT), Ernest Hollings (SC), Debbie Stabenow (MI), and Bill Nelson (FL), as well as Reps. Charles Rangel (NY) and Jim McDermott (WA).

Jimmy Carter invited the filmmaker to sit in his box at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and dubbed Moore’s movie one of his two favorites.  Now, Moore has been making some crazy statements about the death of Osama bin Laden, hinting at some bizarre conspiracy theories involving White House deception.

So, given Democrats’ past embrace of Mr. Moore, some might think it really shameful that the supposedly responsible leadership of the Democratic Party has not repudiated him.

First, watch a clip of the immediate past President of the United States.  Note how that good man praises two men his successor will be tapping for key national security positions, including Leon Panetta, who was a leading member of the Democratic congressional caucus when serving in the legislature and a top official in the Clinton and Obama administrations when serving in the executive branch:

(Via Breitbart.tv via a newly trentagenarian reader.) Note further this Republican former president refrains from criticizing the policies of the Democratic incumbent.

Now watch this clip of another former U.S. president.  And read this report:

Wrapping up his visit this week to Pyongyang, former President Jimmy Carter says relations between North Korea and South Korea are “currently at rock bottom.” Nonetheless, he said he believes the North is committed to getting talks underway. . . .

Carter said Thursday at a press conference in Seoul that North Korean officials had “expressed deep regret … for the loss of life” from two military attacks against South Korean targets in late 2010. But they did not apologize and suggested that they wouldn’t, the former president said.

Why does this man always take the enemies of the United States at their word?  Has any other former U.S. President so criticized his country on foreign soil?  Why hasn’t Mr. Carter focused on the real source of the starvation in North Korea, the economic system its Communist leaders have forced into place through their ideological zeal and kept in place with military might and barbaric means, including forced labor, imprisonment and torture? (more…)

You’ve got to wonder at our mainstream media, eager to report the shenanigans of a crackpot preacher with a congregation of about 50 families.  Had the media not made an international celebrity out of Terry Jones, few people outside of the neighborhood surrounding his “Dove World Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida would have known this publicity-hungry former hotel manager was going to burn a Koran.

And now that he has carried out this juvenile stunt, we’ve seen murder and mayhem in Afghanistan:

Stirred up by a trio of angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at Florida church [sic], thousands of protesters overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said…

Unable to find Americans on whom to vent their anger, the mob turned instead on the next-best symbol of Western intrusion — the nearby United Nations headquarters. “Some of our colleagues were just hunted down,” said a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kieran Dwyer, confirming that the attack.

Via Daily Caller via Instapundit.)  And “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)” has told “CBS’s Bob Schieffer . . . that some members of Congress were considering some kind of action in response to the Florida Quran burning that  sparked a murderous riot at a United Nations complex in Afghanistan and other mayhem.”

“People,” Doug Powers quips, “were murdered in Afghanistan and members of Congress are pondering how to clamp down on somebody who burned a book in Florida. Now that’sproblem solving, DC-style.”

What is it about our political and cultural “elite” that they have to pin the blame for a murderous rampage on the antics of self-promoting Christian rogue. It’s as if, they believe, that the worlds ills stem from the actions and attitudes of white Christian males, the very aspects of their culture rejected by the politically correct.

American Christians must be to blame; the foreign other is always blameless. (more…)

When reader V the K e-mailed a link reporting that “75 percent of religious persecution being carried out against Christians,” I sent back a hasty response, edited for clarity:

Shhh. . . don’t tell the left.  It’ll upset their narrative.  Remember, white male Christians are responsible for the most persecution in the world.

One day, someone will have to examine why so many on the left have decided that the only oppression that matters is that done by white Christians or Jews.  Why do so many in the West, those with a European Jude0-Christian background, assume the victim always be the “other”?

Well, it seems one of our readers has.  Writing on his blog, he looks at how these Westerners have turned out society’s tradition of self-correction against itself:

Part of the trouble with this noble self-criticism, based as it is on the multiculty prescript that one may critique one’s one people but not another’s (especially if brown), is that the other groups are not doing this. While Westerners flagellate themselves in this ongoing and interminable White Lent, the other tribes are flexing their muscles, singing their virtues and heartily agreeing with us that we do not deserve to live. This is a part of why Obama’s repentance and apology tours provoke me so much.

A lot of liberal behavior reminds me of two particularly female psychopathologies: bulemia and self-cutting.   Liberals, especially the comfortable classes, alternately gobble up the pleasures of the West and then, guilt ridden, vomit them out. And it seems that they are happiest when they are cutting up their own bodies.

Read the whole thing.

RELATED:  DOJ to white male bullying victims: Tough luck

*or Jews.

I have detected two broad attitudes toward America among American liberals, the first (and hopefully largest) contingent believes the United States to be a flawed, but fixable country, which is only occasionally responsible for problems abroad. They know that not all evil is caused by the policies of our government or the economic interests of our corporations. Many of them believe that the U.S. can often be a force for good, offsetting its occasional misdeeds and counteracting the crimes of various tyrants and would-be despots. Those who agitate for action in Darfur are examples of such liberals.

These folks means well and do not define their worldview by a hatred of their native land.

There are others who attempt to tie all world evil back to the policies of the United States government and its (in their view) subsidiary corporations. Michael Moore comes to mind as an example of this kind of letie.

Last night, Glenn Reynolds linked a must-read post on the latter example of lefties who want to blame the U.S. for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge:

Two weeks ago, there was an Asia Society screening of a UN documentary about the trial of Comrade Duch, who ran one of the Khmer Rouge’s most infamous political prisons. Two women became upset during the Q&A session (about 37:00 into the linked video) that all this talk about torture and killing fields and retribution and memories of the dead had not been presented “in context.” You can guess what they meant, can’t you? That’s right: Big, Bad America had been an enabler for Pol Pot and his fellow-travelers, and apparently that was what we should have been getting worked up about.

What is it about such people that they always have to blame the United States?  They have easily earned an epithet often offered to gay conservatives:  self-hating.

Yet, in their case, the epithet is not a smear with no basis in reality, but a real description of their own attitudes toward the nation that protects their freedom to criticize it.

Un-effin-believeable.  THIS is the “most educated” President evah?

Some may say it was an accident that he left out “Creator”.  But… and this is important, people… by ignoring that our unalienable rights come from Our Creator, he completely misses the mark on what makes America great!  Before 1776, rights were seen to have been granted by Man (Kings, Queens, etc.)  Our Founding Fathers’ brilliance was that they put a new stake in the ground of mankind. 

Obama, our President, is a complete dope.  I guess they forgot to teach the Declaration of Independence to him in his prep schools in Indonesia and at Harvard.

Let’s help him out a bit. 

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Good heavens.  Can’t everyone but the utmost Bush-haters now see what a complete buffoon America has in the Oval Office? 

So is he just stupid, or is he removing God from the DofI because his political philosophy is that rights come from the State, not the Creator?  If we had a responsible media — we’d have known the answer to that question…. in 2007.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Remember how, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a number of voices in the chattering classes, in the highest of dudgeon, inveighed against a coming backlash against Muslim Americans, with a skyrocketing number of anti-Muslim hate crimes?

Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case:

Hate crimes directed against Muslims remain relatively rare, notwithstanding the notoriety gained by incidents such as recent vandalism at the Madera Islamic Center.

Jews, lesbians, gay men and Caucasians, among others, are all more frequently the target of hate crimes, FBI records show. Reported anti-Muslim crimes have declined over recent years, though they still exceed what occurred prior to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Such crimes did jump right after 9/11 but, as Jonah Goldberg reminds us, have since begun to decline considerably.  

Regardless, 2001 was the zenith or, looked at through the prism of our national shame, the nadir of the much-discussed anti-Muslim backlash in the United States. The following year, the number of anti-Islamic hate-crime incidents (overwhelmingly, nonviolent vandalism and nasty words) dropped to 155. In 2003, there were 149 such incidents. And the number has hovered around the mid-100s or lower ever since.

(Read the whole thing.  Jonah asks a great question about the rush of some on the left to find intolerance in America.)  Guess Americans just aren’t the vindictive, bitter people who cling to their antipathy to people who aren’t like them as a means, you know, to express their frustration.  

Now, catch this anecdote (from the first article I quoted); it gets at the real problem with defining certain crimes hate crimes: (more…)

Speculating about the media’s (and Hollywood’s) double standard in responding to anti-Semitic tirades from Hollywood bigwigs, Jeff Jacoby concludes:

Gibson and Stone are both guilty of indulging in rank anti-Semitism (for which both promptly “apologized’’), but only Gibson was buried under a newsroom avalanche of outrage and disgust. What explains that glaring difference? Surely the media don’t think Jew-baiting is intolerable only when it comes from a right-wing Christian like Gibson. Surely they wouldn’t overlook Stone’s noxious rant just because he is a pluperfect left-wing activist.

(Via Instapundit.)  And as Glenn might say, read the whole thing.

Jacoby’s right, but there’s more to it than that Gibson represents a dying breed, the anti-Semitic “right-wing Christian,” Oliver Stone embodies a certain breed of self-styled intellectuals, always present, but now increasing in number, in our culture:  the left-winger who includes Jews in their list of people responsible for world problems.

There are, alas, all too many folks like Oliver Stone who see all the world’s problems as products of Western hegemony.   They cuddle up to tin pot tyrants, looking away from their failing economies and dismal human rights record and see only problems in the societies of which they themselves are products.

It’s almost as if they have so internalized our culture’s laudable tradition of self-criticism, that they believe only our culture merits criticism.

Wow.  This is rich.

If almost seems a certainty that if a public figure veers off into America-bashing conspiracy theories, he’s soon going to start apologizing for our enemies.  Usually, such apologetics focus on run-of-the-mill despots like Daniel Ortega, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, but occasionally spills over into full-blown defenses of Communism and even Islamofascism.

Rarely, however, have such self-haters shown sympathy for Adolf Hitler.

Until now.

According to a smart young writer, the ”man who immortalized Che Guevara is off to set the record straight and correct the right-wing’s misinformation campaign about Hitler“:

In a new documentary series titled “Secret History of America,” Stoned says, “I’ve been able to walk in Stalin’s shoes and Hitler’s shoes to understand their point of view. We’re going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them.”

Most of us know the man my nephew called Stoned as filmmaker/conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone.  So, if we, as Stone claims, “can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good,’” guess that lets W off the hook?

Right, so even as the Left accuses George W. Bush of killing one million Iraqis in his illegal war for oil, Bush has done nothing wrong. It’s all… America’s?… fault.

Surely, Stone’s next project will be to walk in Bush and Cheney’s shoes and understand their point of view.  So, if you do want to educate your own minds, take a gander at my nephew’s column, it’s well worth your time.

As the information drips out about the ties Nidal Malik Hasan had (or aspired t0 have) to terrorists at war with the United States and about his own radical statements, we see two competing narrative developing among the blogging and pundit class.  Conservatives wonder why more wasn’t done to discipline or discharge this American-hating Islamist while those on the left warn us not to make hasty judgments while chiding conservatives for stirring up Islamaphobia.

Of course, those left-wingers don’t get that most conservatives have been careful to distinguish those Islamists who would do us harm from the American Muslims who serves his nation honorably.

And then there’s another other left-wing narrative that has even seeped into the mainstream media, as it did in the days after 9/11:   given the bellicose nature of Americans, there will be a backlash against Muslims for the actions of one lunatic Islamist.  Problem is this is narrative based more on liberal prejudice rather than American reality.  And while, to be sure, there was a spike in anti-Islamic hate crimes after 9/11, hate crimes against Muslims have plummeted since 2001 with 1/12th as many such crimes committed against Muslims in 2007 as were committed against Jews.  (And even with that spike, fewer such crimes were committed against Muslims in 2001 as were committed against Jews in 2007.)

What does it say about the left that they seem more concerned about crimes yet to be committed than about the Islamist motivations of a man who has just murdered over a dozen Americans?  Or, as Michael Nehring puts it, “What says more about America–that we always, ALWAYS manage to refrain from an anti-Muslim backlash, or that progressives are always, ALWAYS, convinced that one is on the way?”

Indeed, American leaders have bent over backwards to avoid such backlash.  Within a week after 9/11, then-President George W. Bush visited an Islamic center in our nation’s capitol, making clear that Americans do not see Muslims as our enemies, “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.”

But, perhaps we have gone too far to avoid such a backlash.  That’s how Army Major Shawn Keller sees it:

The Army as an institution has been neutered by decades of political correctness and the leaders in Hasan’s chain-of-command failed to act accordingly out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report. The counter-terrorism agencies knew Hasan was communicating with Al-Qaeda and dismissed it as academic research instead of delving deeper into the probability that a terrorist had infiltrated the ranks. . . .

This has nothing to do with being anti-Islamic.  After numerous tours to Iraq and working with countless cultural advisors on Ft. Bragg, I know dozens of Muslims who I respect and admire greatly. (more…)

While Peggy Noonan is normally Dan’s territory, I hope he will indulge me on this one.  Reason being is that I’m now a self-created student of the “American Generations” after reading “The Fourth Turning“.

Noonan’s column today sums up exactly why, as a Gen X’er, I hold the Baby Boomers in such disdain and long for the day that they have exited our political structure.  Noonan also echoes a lot of what Strauss and Howe said about the Boomers in “The Fourth Turning”.

Her column title sums it up nicely: We’re Governed by Callous Children.

And her last paragraph fits the Boomer Class like a glove:

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

As Strauss and Howe noted in 1997, it is now our time.  The practical Gen Xers & The Millenials have to rescue America from the Baby Boomers who lived their entire adult lives wishing for the ideals of America to end; and are now in the middle of fulfilling those goals.

It is time to take America back from these callous children.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Bruce, of course, I’ll indulge you on this one.

I agree that the column you cite was particularly insightful.  And do hope you’ll indulge me by according me the privilege of writing a followup.

Just when you think the American liberal left can sink no lower to weaken their own nation….

WASHINGTON POST: The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Investigators are looking into allegations that laws protecting classified information were breached when three lawyers showed their clients the photographs, the sources said. The lawyers were apparently attempting to identify CIA officers and contractors involved in the agency’s interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in facilities outside the United States, where the agency employed harsh techniques.

If detainees at the U.S. military prison in Cuba are tried, either in federal court or by a military commission, defense lawyers are expected to attempt to call CIA personnel to testify.

The photos were taken by researchers hired by the John Adams Project, a joint effort of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to support military counsel at Guantanamo Bay, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the inquiry. It was unclear whether the Justice Department is also examining those organizations.

Both groups have long said that they will zealously investigate the CIA’s interrogation program at “black sites” worldwide as part of the defense of their clients. But government investigators are now looking into whether the defense team went too far by allegedly showing the detainees the photos of CIA officers, in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes.

American liberals want to defend terrorists at all costs and provide them with Constitutional protections.  But in doing so, they deny those same protections to American citizens.  The irony is rich if it weren’t so serious.

Abraham Lincoln would have called these acts of treason.  I doubt the self-proclaimed reborn Lincoln at 1600 Penna will feel any sympathy, except for the ACLU.

As Michelle Malkin says:  Privacy for jihadi, but not for thee.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I have long believe that the primary goal of the gay movement should be promoting real and lasting social change, creating a society where we can live openly without suffering derision or marginalization because of our difference.  That is, people would see our sexuality as incidental to our essence.

“Oh, you’re gay?” someone would say when we come out, “Well, my best friend does Civil War reenactments, never much understood it, but, well, he enjoys it.”  The comparison may not be perfectly apposite, but is at least appropriate.  Being gay is just one aspect of who we are–and not the defining aspect.

And yet, just as some in America see our sexuality as our defining aspect, others see race.  Perhaps the greatest hope of those of use who did not support Barack Obama’s candidacy is that his election would help us move beyond defining each other by the color of our skin.  Race would become incidental.

But, the way the President–and many of his allies–have handled the Gates issue makes it clear that this Administration will not serve to help us transcend race, that is, unless his defenders dare to fault the professor’s boorish behavior and address his own anti-police prejudices.

This is only an issue about race because Professor Gates (and his followers in the MSM) have made it one.  Roger Simon calls it a “nostalgia for racism“:

The secret wish of these people, buried not far from the surface, is for things not to have changed. They have a nostalgia for an evil past when they could feel self-righteous and victimized. Self-defeating indeed. . . .  In those days [time of Civil Rights Movement] it was very easy to tell right from wrong and feel good about your actions. These days it’s a lot more complicated.

And what this race nostalgia has done is make it increasingly difficult to realize Dr. King’s dream.  Instead, we’ve become increasingly race-obsessed, with the woman who had called the cops to complain objecting to being called white as she has “olive-colored” skin, leading law professor Wiliam A.  Jacobson to lament: “Is this what we have come to? Measuring skin tone as an indicator of intent? So if Whalen were black, no racial profiling; if white, racial profiling; but olive colored people?”

Although we have touched on this many times here, a number of bloggers and even MSM figures (including WaPo’s Dana Milbank) are suddenly “discovering” the vitrolic nature of American Liberals.

Here was a particularly good point from earlier this week:

They Won

So why is the left still angry? Glenn asks: “maybe it’s become a habit.”

“Become” a habit? It seems to me it’s an intrinsic feature of leftism, which is based on a permanent state of envy, class warfare and seeking “social justice” and “equality.” Which is why it is leftists (from Hitler to Stalin to Mao and Pol Pot) who have been responsible for hundreds of millions of violent deaths over the past century. You have to break the eggs to make the social-justice omelette through the collective will. It’s not individualists who do that kind of thing.

Maybe it is a genetic issue? I mean they even were rooting for the USA to lose in Iraq.  They were rooting for insurgents to kill our own troops.  WTF?

I also think that the Left became clinically insane on December 12, 2000 … and they haven’t recovered.  Not even an attack on their nation has stopped their progression into insanity.

IMHO.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

One of the most ubiquitous (and my most favorite to pick apart) argumentative fallacies is that of the Straw Man. The Straw Man Fallacy is a cop-out in a debate wherein if an arguer has no (or insufficient) defense of his own position, he’ll simply argue against a point that nobody is making. In doing so, he can claim victory without ever having to face an actual intellectual challenge.

A favorite example of this from the Left is that of questioning someone’s patriotism. Although we hear from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Joe Biden about how patriotic it is to pay higher taxes, never have I heard a prominant Republican raise the issue of anybody else’s patriotism. Never. Nonetheless, it is a constant theme of the Left when the efficacy of their policies are questioned to resort to the Straw Man argument that their opponent is “questioning the patriotism” of said Leftist politician.

But then something curious usually happens: in so defending himself, ironically, the Leftist in question actually does raise the question of his own patriotism where otherwise it wouldn’t even be a thought in a voter’s mind. I remember first hearing this bizarre line of accusation during a presidential election several cycles ago and thinking to myself, “Yea, well nobody’s questioning your patriotism. But come to think of it, isn’t it a good idea that we elect someone president who is patriotic? That’s not asking too much, is it? To have a president who’s patriotic? Maybe we should ask candidates about their patriotism. I’d kinda like to have a president who loves America.”

Comes along Barack Obama (who, in spite of his constant drumbeat of anti-American rhetoric as he tours the world, I believe really does love America after all), who’s turned straw man-building into a way of political life. His latest is brought to us from (once again) foreign soil. Not content to simply diss us as “disengaged” and selfish, now we’re bullies.

The quote from The One was: “We’re not simply going to lecture you, but we’re rather going to show through how we operate the benefits of these values and ideals.” The straw man here is obvious. Who, Mr. President, has been lecturing? And who suggested we should?

More importantly, this kind of raises the question: Perhaps Americans don’t want a president who “lecture”s other nations or their leaders about liberty and freedom. But is it asking too much for a president to embrace these ideals at least? To advocate them? We have a president whose reply to those who feel he’s gone too far toward nationalizing the banking system and the automotive industry, who feel his forrays into nationalizing a private health industry, whose profligate spending and borrowing will only further weaken an already hobbled US (and world) economy, is “we won”.

“Lecture,” Mr. Obama? No. We wouldn’t expect you (nor even consider asking you, with the track record you have) to “lecture” other nations or their leaders. But how about if you showed us you believe in American principles in the first place?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot) from Undisclosed Alternate HQ

Buried in heavy wet snow at HQ this evening (and almost trapped at SOUTHCOM today), I took some time and caught up with our Dear Leader and his backpacking trips throughout the world as of late.

Fresh off his stop south of the border where he blamed the drug mafia’s overrunning of a clearly impotent and/or corrupt Mexican government inexplicably on US gun laws, he followed on to the Carribian to attend the Summit of the Americas.

As an aside, by the way, the photo of him greeting yet another America-hater, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is an interesting juxtaposition, don’t you think, with that of our then-First Lady cum Senate candidate and now Secretary of State with her gal-pal?

And let’s not forget the words of Chavez from less than two years ago:

The United States empire is on its way down and it will be finished in the near future, inshallah.

No doubt we’ll hear the president soon saying that “these words do not reflect the Hugo Chavez I know.”

But anyway…

Reading Obama’s words in Mexico, I got to thinking: Those who spend time on social networking sites are familiar with the “Countries I’ve Visited”-type applications that allow jet-setters (and humble military deployers) to show off all the fantastic places they’ve been. I decided to start one for the Big O. Below is a map of the world showing all the places President Obama has visited and trashed the United States. While he didn’t explicitly trash the USA in Saudi Arabia, the way he, as the leader of our Nation, subjugated himself in public to the throne of that kingdom, I’m going to count it. I’ll be back tomorrow if I need to add Trinidad and Tobago (which, unfortunately desipte its name only counts as one).

Please feel free to correct me if I’ve missed any.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot) from HQ

UPDATE!
A very helpful commenter reminds me of The One’s trip in February to Canada where he indeed did badmouth us. I’ve also had a couple requests to improve the quality of the map. Given that the Dear Leader is currently in Trinidad and Tobago, I know I’ll have to update it pretty soon anyway, so I’ll hold off for now on those improvements and just post a brand new one once he insults us all at the Summit. As for the concern about Germany, I don’t think I’ll count that as he was merely a Senator (do you remember when he was just a Senator?). It would be impossible to include his trips before being inagurated president since his destinations and words weren’t always in the public record back then.
Fear not, though. I’m sure he’ll be back to visit his constituency our friends in Europe soon enough. And when he does, he’ll be packing his disdain for us with him.