Category Archives: Media Criticism

Four Months After The Benghazi Attack

Where are the killers?

On Tuesday, the Tunisian government released Ali Ani al-Harzi, a leading suspect in the attack who was taken into custody after fleeing Libya for Turkey and then sent to Tunisia. Officials say Harzi was released over Washington’s objections, as Tunis cited a “lack of evidence.” While the FBI eventually got access to Harzi, efforts to press him on what he knew were often blocked by bureaucratic objections by the Tunisian government and its court system. In December, the Tunisian branch of the Islamist militia Ansar al-Sharia posted photos of people they claimed to be FBI agents who interviewed Harzi, according to the counterterrorism website Long War Journal. The U.S. intelligence community believes members of Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi participated in the attack four months ago.

While some U.S. officials feared that Harzi’s release was coming, Tunisian officials did not inform the U.S. government ahead of time.

It’s a good thing Obama has so improved our relations with other countries.

And then there’s this:

One source of frustration for U.S. intelligence community: the president’s decision to make the Benghazi probe a criminal investigation. While the CIA has an ever-changing list of suspects it dubs the “Benghazi attack network,” the drones and Special Operations teams that are used to hunt al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Yemen are not being used to track down Stevens’s killers. Instead the investigation is being led by the FBI, which relies on cooperation from local and national police in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt.

Brilliant.

The Media’s Gun Control Fantasies

Kim Strassel pops their delusional balloon:

Over in the House, when asked recently what was more likely — passage of gun control or Speaker John Boehner becoming a pagan — a senior GOP leadership aide told Buzzfeed: “Probably the latter.”

Even were the Senate to summon 60 votes (unlikely), and even were Mr. Boehner to risk the renewed wrath of his caucus by moving such a bill (crazy unlikely), any legislation would fall to members such as Virginia’s Bob Goodlatte (who runs the Judiciary Committee) and Pete Sessions (who runs the Rules Committee). Mr. Goodlatte is strong on gun rights. Mr. Sessions is from Texas.

Nothing will happen absent an executive order, and that will be almost immediately sued into oblivion.

Starving People For A Green Ideology

…for a green ideology, and corporate greed:

…many worry that Guatemala’s poor are already suffering from the diversion of food to fuel. “There are pros and cons to biofuel, but not here,” said Misael Gonzáles of C.U.C., a labor union for Guatemala’s farmers. “These people don’t have enough to eat. They need food. They need land. They can’t eat biofuel, and they don’t drive cars.”

This isn’t a market failure. It’s a deliberate distortion of markets through government policy. In some sense, it’s almost as criminally egregious as the behavior of the British during The Hunger in Ireland.

Intellectual Ammo

When it comes to guns (and many other issues), the Democrats don’t even have a popgun:

[Cuomo’s proposal] is beyond stupid. Rifles, notwithstanding Adam Lanza’s murder spree, are involved in hardly any homicides. More than five times as many Americans are murdered with knives than rifles – all rifles, not just “assault rifles.” More Americans are murdered with blunt objects; more are beaten to death with bare hands. The idea that banning “assault weapons” is the key to a more peaceful America is ludicrous.

Likewise with “ammunition magazines that carry more than 10 bullets.” I own two such magazines; there are countless millions in circulation. A magazine is a simple device, made from sheet metal and a spring; many thousands of Americans could make them in their garages. But let’s suppose that you could magically make all such magazines disappear. All a would-be mass murderer needs to do is pre-load, say, four 10-bullet magazines and carry them with him. People do this all the time. It takes only a second or two to drop an empty magazine from a semiautomatic rifle or pistol and slide a new one in. The idea that lives will be saved by making magazines smaller is pathetic. And yet, this is pretty much what the Democrats have to offer.

That’s what happens when you operate on emotion instead of facts and logic.

Cuomo’s Ban Of Assault Weapons

…is just as stupid and pointless as the federal ban was:

This bill is ostensibly a response to last month’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where the shooter used a Bushmaster rifle that was legal under Connecticut’s “assault weapon” ban, which uses the same criteria as New York’s current law. Therefore the legislation Cuomo supports presumably will cover that particular model and configuration. But since the features disfavored by these laws have little or no functional significance in the hands of mass murderers, why should that be considered an accomplishment? “Of 769 homicides in New York State in 2011,” the Times notes, “only five were committed with rifles of any kind.” Even if one or more of those rifles would qualify as an “assault weapon” under Cuomo’s new definition, so what? Any “assault weapon” ban that is even arguably consistent with the Second Amendment will leave people like Adam Lanza with plenty of equally deadly alternatives.

Here is how Cuomo explains the need for new gun control laws: “I think what the nation is saying now after Connecticut, what people in New York are saying, is ‘do something, please.'” There’s no denying this is something.

“Something must be done! This is something. Therefore, it must be done!”

Leftist logic.

Communism

and fascism:

One of the features that distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms, liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity, and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind – liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.

And like “progressive,” “progress” is in the eye of the beholder.