The Dangers of the Daddy Party

It's an old political saw--the Democrats are the 'mommy party' because they favor helping people over everything else, including common sense and finances; the Republicans are the 'daddy party' because they favor common sense and finances over everything else, including helping people. Dems feed on emotion; Repubs feed on logic and rules.

There is some truth to the characterization, but it varies from candidate to candidate. George W. Bush tried to make an end run on it by calling himself a 'compassionate conservative'. It sorta worked. Romney has famously referred to himself as a 'severe conservative'. Maybe prudent when one is a life-long moderate angling for conservative votes, but not very handy in a general against someone trying to set himself up as the chief mommy.

Obama is out touting his Buffett Rule (just another day of dividing America) not because he knows it will help the deficit or the economy, but because he thinks it will help his chances against Thurston Romney III. And why not? Most of the time people gravitate to the poor populist going against the evil magnate--just watch Turner Classic movies for awhile.

Part of that strategy is to label the magnate as cruel towards the fairer sex, someone whose authoritarian governance will threaten them right down to body, soul, spirit and offspring. It's unfair of course, since it's all a gimmick, but with Romney it might be working.

So what does the presumptive nominee do? Does he take a page from Kerry's playbook and appear at the beach? Does he take one from Gore's playbook and wear more flannel shirts? Or is that part of the negative image already? Does he keep a stock of valiums on hand and open his shirt collar an extra button? Or, when the time comes, does he waffle on Obamacare and other free stuff?

Or does he stick to the one he's bringing to the dance--the economy. After all, women are part of the unemployment numbers. Mommies will benefit from a better economy in every area.

Unfortunately Romney has always appeared a bit stiff in body and wobbly in belief. That image will be exploited continuously and ruthlessly until November. His wife softens it a bit, but she's not Mitt. His best chance will be to stick with his best chance, the economy. He can't out-mommy Obama.

Of course that leaves him open should the economy begin seriously improving through summer, which likely assures his place in the same historic dustbin along with Bob Dole, John McCain, and Walter Mondale. Variables always exist, such as 6 dollar gas or an Israeli attack on Iran, unsanctioned by Obama, which probably tanks the markets and causes Hizballah counter strikes in America. But even that could bring the masses to the side of the commander-in-chief, the guy who was holding out for peace unlike the daddy party candidate who wanted to kickass, etc.

Surely team Romney will be trying to counter this image with the correct VP choice. But picking another moderate might not bring out the base, who are desperately needed to win. Yet picking a more conservative female, let's say, will only shift the focus of the mommy party attacks as occurred with Palin. So we'll see.

The Ghost Returns

While Christians celebrated Easter Sunday an old foe took to the air in Iraq to commemorate another anniversary:

Duri, dressed in a drab green military uniform and black beret, reads remarks from sheets of paper, his hands shaking, and sometimes stumbles over the words.

"Our Baath (party), on its 65th anniversary, is in a major historic war," he said. "I call on this ... occasion for all the progressive resistance forces and all the national Islamic resistance forces to work for the liberation" of Iraq.

He alleged that "the political process today is ... for the benefit of Iran, which is carrying the most dangerous project for the Persians, with the intention of taking over Iraq and then destroying the nation."

Hmm, criticizing the Maliki government as tools of Iran. Is he still a foe or an asset?

By the way, it's funny how the AP and other mainstreamers covered this event, reminding us that al-Duri had both died and been captured more than once. Many also call him a force behind the insurgency, which could explain why he was high on both the American and Iraqi most-wanted lists (number two on ours, number one on theirs). Kinda funny for a guy who most Iraqis considered a joke. Perhaps he was less a joke to those in the know. This was from 2010:

Maliki's security adviser, Safa Hussein, warned in December that al-Qaida in Iraq has now fallen under the influence of the Baathists, led by Douri and his main rival, Gen. Mohammed Yunis al-Ahmad.

Indeed, on the latest video he was introduced as follows:

At the beginning of the video, a man in a military uniform introduces Duri and calls him the "high commander of jihad (holy war) and liberation ... and the general secretary of the Baath party."

Jihad, a religious thing. But religious men typically don't wear military uniforms. However, men who use religious zealots as useful idiots might. But that's in the past. It no longer matters; Iraq is no longer a story as Obama won the dumb war and brought home the troops by Christmas. All is well.

Thoughts

On this day of good news the country sure needs some. It's amazing that in 2012, with a black president, the United States stands teetering on a racial divide. In the news, it appears they've captured some white suspects in the indiscriminate Tulsa shootings, a good thing.

But notice the description of the neighborhood found in this CNN story:

"For a white male to come that deep into that area and to start indiscriminately shooting, that lends itself for many to believe that it probably was a hate crime," Blakney told CNN.

This made me think of the brouhaha at National Review Online, where editor Rich Lowry has fired writer John Derbyshire for opining--on a non-affiliated blog--about similar things:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

First, Derbyshire sounds like a guy who has never lived in the south. Second, his rules are overly harsh and judgmental, but like all such things they are based on vague truthisms. Notice the Tulsa pastor's apparent amazement that whites would be venturing so 'deep' into a certain part of their own city, which seems to confirm the Derbyshire generalization.

Of course the irony is that the poor victims didn't discriminate and were apparently responding to the shooter(s) as any normal human being would respond to a stranger asking for directions. Afterwards, the citizens living in the area were terrorized by the shootings every bit as much as the DC area was when John Allen Mohammed and his sidekick were shooting random people of both races while the FBI was frantically looking for a composite white guy.

But random racial crimes are seemingly becoming more frequent. A rash of stories have dotted the back pages of newspapers for over a year regarding flashmob attacks in cities all around the country, lately in places like Minneapolis, Baltimore and St. Louis. These attacks are not occurring deep in black neighborhood or in areas where blacks are massing for concerts, rather in the downtown entertainment sections common to most cities. Most of the victims seem to be white people. So following Derbyshire's rules 'non-black' people should desist attending downtown entertainment areas under the premise a flashmob might show up. Or just about anywhere. So much for generalizations.

With the Tulsa shooting, the Martin shooting, flashmobs and planned Occupy events we can all guess the likely future--saturation coverage of violence. If it bleeds and is politically correct, it leads.

In times like these we need calm and sober leadership more than ever. What we've seen so far is a leader self-identifying with certain victims and another chastising Americans as cowards for not wanting to discuss the issue. But there's always hope for tomorrow.

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What's going on in Syria? Are innocent people still getting mowed down by a tyrant?

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What's going on in Africa? While the Muslim Brotherhood meets at the White House stories are suggesting that radicals have virtually taken over the heart of the continent and some are worried they may align themselves with al Qaeda. Of course 'some' does not yet include most in the American media.

Also, don't we have troops over there looking for a crackpot Christian-based tyrant? No news on that operation either.

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NBC says they have fired the 'veteran producer' who apparently mis-spliced a 911 call recording to make George Zimmerman appear even more racist than their previous stories and cable commentator had already indicated. That's good, but can't they name names? Maybe they're trying to protect him and family and will release it later but at the same time, maybe they didn't fire anyone at all.

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The Masters final round is today. Golf nirvana. A lot was expected out of Tiger Woods, who hasn't won a major tournament since he was attacked with a nine iron in his front driveway several years ago. He won on tour 2 weeks ago, but this kind of stuff can't help....



The Tour may fine him, although they'd have to fine everyone who ever wacked a club into the ground or tossed it as golfers are prone to do. So they probably won't. But the role model thing is pretty much gone. President Obama weighed in on the Augusta National club not admitting women; will he weigh in now on unsportsmanlike conduct?

Oh well, it's a beautiful day in Augusta and Memphis. Life goes on despite the headlines. Family is coming over for an Easter dinner so this post will mark an end to concerns over current events and the direction of our country and transition to some needed fellowship this afternoon. Peace out and best wishes for a great Easter.

Hijab Update

According to MSNBC there is a 'new twist' in the murder case of Shaima Alawadi, the hijab-wearing Iraqi immigrant found in her El Cajon, CA home beside a note calling her a 'terrorist'.

A new twist. Really? This was MSNBC's old twist:

"We're not going to cry, if that's what you wanted. We're not going to take off our scarf, if that's what you wanted," Alawadi's eldest daughter, Fatima, said at the vigil, addressing her mother's killer.

For many in El Cajon, the case has drawn parallels to that of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager shot in Florida last month by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer in a killing that has also drawn outrage because of its racial undertones.

The new twist is that there was friction between the daughter and her boyfriend, who didn't like the fact their parents were going to marry her off to a cousin per tradition. There was also friction between the deceased and her husband, who were evidently heading for divorce. So another epic media fail could be in the works. Go figure.

The Men who Attacked America

It's been a few days since a new insider bin Laden story has trickled out of the elite media. He'll be back, though, we're coming up on the one-year anniversary and there's also an election looming.

But you say, "bin Laden was the big fish". No doubt, he blessed 9/11. But the guy who actually dreamed up 9/11 and made it happen was named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and he was captured on George W. Bush's watch in 2003.

And he still hasn't been tried.

Not that some haven't tried to try him, but it's been 9 years. Obama's minions were out acknowledging this, saying "it's about time" without the slightest sense of irony seeing as how their boss canceled the last trial in-progress as soon as he entered office. But there's talk of a new attempt, so here we go. An interesting question is how these terrorist narratives might line up: zombie UBL in the press versus breathing KSM in the courtroom. The last time we saw Mukhtar he was taking credit for almost everything.

The thing is, not everyone knows KSM. Oh, they know the weird hairy little man from the picture who is blamed for the attack, but how much more does the average person know? Do they know he's the uncle of Ramzi Yousef Abdul Basit Karim, aka the first World Trade Center bomber? Do they know both conspired with an actual pilot, Hakim Murad, a childhood friend of common Baluch heritage, to kill the Pope, Clinton and knock down ten US airliners over the Pacific well before anyone had bin Laden on the radar?

Maybe they don't know that Yousef and Murad were not AQ members and that KSM remained on his own through most of the 90s. Maybe they don't know that none were quite as pious as the Islamists tied to bin Laden or Zawahiri. Maybe they don't know that KSM was almost captured in the mid 90s while living in the UAE after the feds intercepted a love note he wrote to a dancer he had dated in Malaysia. Which means they also may not know that Bill Clinton failed to catch him in the mid 90s even though he was devoting more time than anyone to catching UBL (we now understand that presidents catch terrorists, of course).

Bin Laden was indeed the face of AQ and it's good that his rotted corpse is being nibbled on by Charlie the Tuna but KSM is the face of 9/11. UBL sat in his hut and blessed mass murder via writ through Quranic scriptures while doling out his Saudi oil inheritance. KSM killed Daniel Pearl with a sharp knife. He didn't need Quranic blessings to murder westerners.

Like UBL he used safe-houses in Pakistan and even the same courier--al-Kuwaiti. Yet after he was captured there were no leaked stories about how gutsy the Bush team was in nabbing the perpetrator of 9/11--on the contrary, they squirreled him away to secret prisons to mine him for intelligence on what might be coming next. And there were things coming next. His legacy is not of being shot by Navy Seals in the act of grabbing his trusty Kalashnikov but of having water being dumped on his nose by the CIA, ie, the victim of a Bush-Cheney war crime.

Assuming this tribunal goes forward there will likely be stories about KSM's exploits to accompany coverage. Like NBC's snippet coverage of George Zimmerman there will probably be some reshaping to fit the narrative if it can help Obama and hurt Bush-GOP in any fashion, so get ready. Perhaps coincidentally, a book about KSM has already hit the shelves called "The Hunt for KSM" written by Josh Meyer and Terry McDermott, a pair of former LA Times reporters.

The book is a good read with shortfalls. It cleverly tries to debunk some of the more conspiratorial views mentioned over the years by maintaining the 'super terrorist' rogue status despite shining no new light on how these super terrorists were actually funded or by whom. Or why a handful of Baluch natives would be so ticked off at America they wanted to knock down the Trade Center and other assorted skyscrapers. After all, what had we ever done to Baluchistan? Or for that matter Pakistan, other than help them help the Afghanis defeat the Soviets.

Anyway, the writers couldn't help choosing sides, taking the FBI over the CIA (Valerie Plame is just a memory now for lefties), which just so happens to line up well with Eric Holder's view of terrorism. Once again Ali Soufan is a hero while various CIA operators are made to appear as goofballs, know-nothings, or just petty bureaucrats, all save Michael Schuerer, founder of the Alec Station UBL group in CIA and a man who once wrote in a book that UBL was probably working with Saddam, which was flushed down the memory hole years ago.

They also rarely mentioned the name "Bill Clinton" while detailing terrorism in the 90s but had no such trepidation referring to Bush and Cheney in describing their short history on Mohammed between 2001 and his capture in early 2003.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of bias comes not from what was written, but what was not written. They detail the gumshoe vigor of FBI agent Frank Pellegrini in chasing the Baluchi boys for a decade but curiously mention little of informant Emad Salem, the Egyptian mole who had been inserted into the initial World Trade terror cell in 1992 before he got disgusted and pulled out.

Maybe that's because several months later, after a bevy of phone calls from the cell members to Iraq, Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Yasin showed up in New York and later turned the plot from a pipe bomb attack to knocking over two 110 story buildings with a massive cyanide bomb in an effort to murder several hundred thousand innocent New Yorkers.

The writers also provided a new version of the so-called terrorist summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2000, describing only the two 9/11 hijackers in the condo without mentioning others or the fact there was an Iraqi airport greeter there who drove them to the safe house. The CIA was working that one and evidently lost them before they arrived in LA, later finding them but not informing the FBI in DC until a few days before 9/11, meaning we can't blame Robert Mueller while blaming the CIA.

Not all FBI agents got the glory. Ironically one who comes off less than spectacular is the late John O'Neill, G-man turned director of security at the WTC (killed there) who many claim tried to "warn America". The writers claim he was preoccupied with UBL while ignoring KSM because the Baluchi boys were old news or something, almost as if bin Laden was some kind of McGuffin.

And maybe he was. KSM and his Baluchi buds never stopped targeting America, with or without al Qaeda's support. They must be seen at least on the same level of depravity as UBL and Zawahiri and the book tries to correct that perception, which alone makes it worth the read. But elevating KSM might make the narrative problematic. Bin Laden is the kingpin bad guy, public enemy number one, who we got, and who we knew a lot about. We still don't know everything about KSM and crew, and the end is almost near.

Not the Onion

Good grief, is there any rule of law left? We have the president saying it's 'unprecedented' for the Supreme Court to overturn a Congressionally-passed law, which seems pretty darn close to their exact mission statement. As punishment the 5th Court of Appeals is giving the admin a homework assignment, which itself seems pretty unprecedented. Sorta like the notion of one political party forcing Americans to purchase insurance.

Now the president's illegal alien half-Uncle Omar, who just lost his driver's license for 45 days as a result of a plea in his drunk-driving case (ramming a police car) gets a 'hardship' license so he can illegally stay in America and drive back and forth to his job at a liquor store. Remember the old days when losing your drivers license was supposed to be a hardship?

It's simply impossible to make up this stuff.

More on Hijabs

As the elite media remained focused like a laser on Martin vs Zimmerman NBC (the same network relegated to investigating itself in that case) is apparently trying to help CNN find a common thread between hoodies and hijabs by highlighting the murder of a Shiite Iraqi immigrant woman in California:

For many in El Cajon, the case has drawn parallels to that of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager shot in Florida last month by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer in a killing that has also drawn outrage because of its racial undertones.

"My condolences go out to the family of Trayvon," Alawadi's 15-year-old son Muhammed said at the vigil, as tears welled up in his eyes. "My candle goes out to you as well."

Some activists have begun linking the two cases on social media, spurring a popular #hoodiesandhijabs hashtag on Twitter. Martin was wearing a hoodie when he was killed. Students at several college campuses held "Hoodies and Hijabs" rallies on Thursday.

Read the comments, though. Many are saying what was said here when this came out last week--lots of possibilities. That's because such a conclusion requires only a basic modicum of common sense or perhaps a few re-runs of "Columbo". The police are playing their investigation very cool, as they should. If it turns out to be a redneck xenophobe, let there be swift justice! If it turns out to be an acquaintance of the victim, let there be swift justice! Justice is supposed to be blind. It seems that too many kneejerks in the media have apparently become blinded to that concept:

What is happening in San Diego?

Well, a murder happened, one murder, and nobody knows yet whodunit. That doesn't stop the kneejerk from citing a series of harassment episodes since 9/11, such as verbal mocking and rude comments, to make the case that the El Cajon case might already be closed.

Why, though? What's the point of the media behaving so irresponsibly and without seeming regard to the possible consequences of their reporting? Ratings? Yes, perhaps, but one has to also consider their general quest to get Obama reelected. But how does such reporting accomplish such a goal? Well, the sensationalism gets ratings and sets a narrative, which tends to create stories that divert attention from a multitude of actual problems by focusing blame on the "true evils" like rich people, Rush Limbaugh, George Zimmerman, and xenophobes clinging to their guns and God. Hey, that Mitt Romney's a white rich guy, isn't he?

MORE 4/1/12

Speaking of the story about NBC News doing an internal investigation about the misleading edit on the "Today Show" regards George Zimmerman, is it any coincidence that none other than Sarah Palin will be filling in on the show this week? NBC and the major networks (and Fox) do that kind of editing all the time; suddenly NBC launches an "investigation" right before Palin shows up at the network to host a show. Maybe they were afraid she would attack the very show she was hosting.