Is there any prominent person or editorial board (outside of the administration) on the left who made a huge stink about Valerie Plame’s outing who is remotely as horrified by the ongoing Wikileaks travesty?
The outrage is indeed selective.
What I want to know is why Wikileaks can’t get its hands on Obama’s college transcripts. Apparently, there are some secrets that the administration can keep.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Michael Ledeen actually kind of likes the leaks. Well, some of them are damaging to the terrorists. And it’s nice to see that the administration and State Department aren’t as utterly clueless in private as they are in public.
Thoughts on freeing Lori Berenson. She can rot there, for all I care (maybe give her Joran Van Der Sloot for a roomie — sociopaths deserve each other). But someone needs to take care of her kid.
OK, that’s long enough. Between this sort of thing and Stuxnet, I’m glad to see that someone is doing something about this. I wish that I had confidence that it was us.
The attacks could be a concerted effort to retard Iran’s nuclear progress, or they could be meant to hype Iran’s own “terror threat” and provide an excuse to crack down on domestic opposition. The only certainty is that the life expectancy of Iranian nuclear physicists is falling rapidly, and is now almost as low as that of Iran’s civil-rights activists, journalists, and public intellectuals.
Given the stated goals of the Iranian nuclear program, I’m hoping that it will go lower.
I’m shocked, shocked to hear that the anti-Israel types got it all wrong.
They had promised that an “even-handed approach” to the Middle East that “put daylight” between the US and Israel would lead to Israeli gestures, at which point Arab regimes would reciprocate. Nothing of the sort came out of the Riyadh meeting. Instead of admitting that they had somehow gotten Saudi priorities or intentions wrong, that crowd doubled down and insisted that the Saudis cared so much about the Palestinians that Obama needed to put even more pressure on Israel to bring around Arab countries.
On the other side you had Middle East experts like Dan Diker, who insisted on One Jerusalem Radio’s Omri Ceren Show that the Saudis gave Obama a bruising lecture on what they actually care about, and it wasn’t the Palestinians. Under this theory King Abdullah expected to talk about militarily confronting Iran, and he couldn’t believe it when Obama kept reciting bromides about the earth-shattering importance of the Israeli/Arab conflict and his enthusiasm for solving it. That was a regular public topic between the two – Obama’s first talk with Abdullah focused on Gaza and the President later emphasized his abiding support for Saudi Arabia’s “Israel Has To Commit Suicide” plan – but the King kind of thought he was dealing with a serious person who could separate spectacle from policy. Instead he got the equivalent of an International Relations graduate student enamored with pseudo-sophisticated “insights” he’d gleaned from Arab media outlets. Ergo, meltdown.
“The main thing was the way he said he hated Americans,” Stull said. “It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life — ‘I hate Americans.'” Now that we have lots of guys named Mo, it probably makes sense to wonder how many of them share this Mo’s “determination in life.”
It’s a question that the multi-cultis don’t like to ask.
…stinks up the room in Cancun. Which makes the economy-killing legislation passed by the morons in California (including moron-in-chief Schwarzenegger) even more pointless.
[Update a few minutes later]
An excerpt:
Our genius environmentalists came up with the idea that in order to make the treaty more palatable to US public opinion and therefore to the Senate, the US would assume an open-ended and eternal obligation to pay tens of billions of dollars a year to various developing world governments, however corrupt, incompetent, dictatorial and unfriendly these might be. Iran, Cuba, and North Korea would get money just like Yemen, Syria and Sudan. In exchange, these countries along with India and China would accept restrictions on their carbon output that are significantly less drastic than those to be imposed on the US.
Who could possibly object to a smart plan like this? What US Senator wouldn’t love to defend a vote to force taxpayers to subsidize Iran while giving China permanent business advantages over the US? Surely Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh would find nothing to attack here. Getting two thirds of the Senate to ratify a no-brainer like this would be a cakewalk.
This is the fruit of the gigantic brains of the Great Gurus of Green. This is the bright shining idea at the core of the UN process: that US opposition to Kyoto could be overcome by requiring the US to pay tens of billions of dollars in Green Danegeld to the third world every year. And the people who thought of this had Big Degrees from Name Schools! We know, because they keep telling us, that they are smarter than the rest of us and they understand complex systems better than we do. These are the geniuses to whom we are to entrust ever greater control over ever larger swathes of the global economy because, after all, they see so clearly and so far.
Apparently, the maximum revenue from income taxation is 19% of GDP, regardless of tax rate. The implication is that a) this should be the maximum size of government spending as well and b) that we should have rates in place that maximize economic growth. But that doesn’t satisfy the class-envy warfare mentality of the left, including the president.
Shut up, they explained. The EU Parliament shows its true Supreme Soviet colors. I hope that this is the beginning of the end of this undemocratic institution.