Category Archives: War Commentary

Lois Lerner

Should be doing a long stint in Club Fed:

Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan; she also is a national security problem, because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.

The case for the National Security Agency’s gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.

The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.

This is the danger of a too-powerful government.

Susan Rice?

Susan “Youtube” Rice?!!!

Is this the most politically tone-deaf administration in history?

And do they really think that throwing Donilon under the bus is going to make Benghazi go away?

I feel much more secure now that we have a security advisor who doesn’t know the difference between a terrorist attack and a rambunctious movie review.

[Afternoon update]

“Not one, not two, but three flips of the Obama bird:

Susan Rice is no more qualified to opine on matters of national security than a character from The Wizard of Oz. Like Obama himself, she is a highly politicized, over-credentialed Scarecrow, with certificates from Stanford, Oxford, and the Brookings Institution in place of a brain.

He’s being kind, I think.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, per comments here and elsewhere, how can the administration prevent her from testifying on executive privilege when the thing that she will be testifying about occurred when she was working for the State Department?

OK, let me amend that. How can they credibly do so?

Not that that ever slows them down, either, of course. It didn’t with Holder in Fast and Furious.

And then there’s this. Maybe Bob-1 is right in comments (hey, you know, blind squirrels and all) and it’s not Donilon that’s becoming a bus speed bump:

As for birds two and three, I’ll leave it to my PJ colleagues to unpack the implicit antisemitic and anti-Israel nature of the Power appointment; the Irish-born Ms. Power is married to Harvard egghead Cass Sunstein, proving once again that leftists, like rock stars and supermodels, tend to travel in packs and marry each other because they never meet anybody else. But surely Hillary Clinton, who’s clearly now being fitted for the fall guy jacket regarding Benghazi, must be seething.

Keep the corn popper on standby.

Memo Reading For Idiots

The video magically appeared between edits two and three:

That’s when the video became the deus ex machina, the soon-to-be-visible hand of the bag of lies dumped on the electorate to prevent us from seeing the catastrophe of the Obama appeasement of radical Islam — a.k.a. “leading with the behind.” Saying “attacks” would have automatically put the Benghazi events in the context of the (banned concept) war against terror, whereas ”demonstrations” shifted the context — the whole Arab Spring thing consisted of lots of demonstrations, and the Obama crowd was basically pro-demonstration.

Indeed, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice justified the demonstrations. How? By blaming them on the video. More evidence that the invisible video was hidden in the third edit.

You can tell they were scrambling to try to save the campaign narrative.