“Hey,” says the Obama administration, “how about…
…trying KSM at Gitmo?”
Word is that this brilliant, groundbreaking, never-before-thought-of option is currently being considered.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
I really don’t see how the Obami avoid this.
Trying KSM in NYC would have been a nightmare from any number of angles, but any civilian trial will entail security problems, intelligence leaks during discovery, and the likelihood of an OJ circus each night on the news.
Plus if there is any terrorist attack in that time frame, it’s just death to Obama’s polls on national security.
They’ve already eaten crow on Gitmo once; they can do it twice.
Damn I feel vindicated. From yesterday’s thread: Memo to Barry: Man up, accept that you’ve stepped in the dog’s business, and have a military tribunal at Gitmo.
Occam’s Beard: well, they’re just thinking about it. I’m not at all sure they can go this way; reflects too badly on their former judgment.
Of course, not going this way now reflects very poorly on their present judgment.
I hear ya, neo. Getting this crew to make a sound decision is like pushing rope up a wall – they find a thousand ways to go astray.
I see Bloomberg also offered the Obamanauts the same fig leaf that I did, viz., claiming that in some ineffable way the circumstances had changed:
Attaboy, Bloomie. Between us, Scott Brown, Sam Alito, Joe Wilson, and the Tea Parties we’ll get this crew housetrained in no time.
Masterful. Having had only fringes of the Right, great gobs of the Center, and all of the Left in his self-aggrandizing paws, The Won has found a way to alienate all of them.
The loss of the Right was, of course, inevitable. The Center was squandered foolishly (“stupidly” might be more apropos), and the Left is going to have conniptions over this.
Unforced and unforgivable errors, top to bottom, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier or feel more vindicated.
I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.
Neo, you’re absolutely right in your comments re their former and present judgment. No matter what they do, they’re going to take a hit in the public perception of their judgment. Better it be their past judgment than that they’re exercising (“displaying” might be a better word) now.
The best advice for them: you messed up. It happens. Accept it, rectify it, draw a line, turn the page, and move on to something else as quickly as possible. Don’t agonize over it, or drag it out; that just makes people focus on your bungling. Performers who flub their lines know not to dwell on it, but to move on quickly, in which case many people will scarcely notice.
Furthermore, to Hogarth’s excellent point, by flailing wildly on this issue the Obamanauts are alienating people whom they need not have alienated, had they exercised a bit more foresight and judgment.
Make that “a lot more foresight and judgment.”
This Obamanian farce is just becoming sad and pathetic. I still say KSM should be released on his own cognizance — from an airline 36,000 feet over Yemen.
Hogarth Says:
“The loss of the Right was, of course, inevitable.”
Not really… we had our hopes up when he appointed all the Clinton retreads…
“I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.”
Heh!
“The system worked!”
Neo, I beleive you have a particular affection for Ecclesiastes.
jon baker: yes.
From what we’ve seen in the last year the children of today will tell stories to their grand children about how Obama managed to self-destruct as they go looking for sleeping space under dilapidated railroad bridges.
The famous Marlene Dietrich line in Touch of Evil comes to mind. Orson Welles ask her to tell his future. She answers “You have no future, your future is all used up”.
I wonder if it will get bad enough for KSM to have an accident.
The Won is out of control. The Democrats are going to wish it was 1994 again. At least they had a party after losing the congress.
National Review just put up an excellent article explaining why the Obama administration will climb down from the KSM civilian trial. I quite agree.
If so, it’s amazing and great how their self-righteous, weaselly little plans to get back at the Bush administration for the War on Terror keep blowing up on the Obami.
So Obama now morphs into, surprise, Bush redux; whatever it takes to get elected for a second term. But oh, that may now be Hillary, who will finally have her chance to foist massive nationalized health care down everyone’s throats as, Obama redux; the Democrats are a dog chasing its tail…
KSM ought to have a Military Tribunal of no more than 5-days duration. Death Sentence pronounced on 6th day. Death by hanging within 48-hrs of said pronouncement.
IF it were up to me, the corpse would share an open grave with a large, dead pig. Video the progress of said corpses for 3-Months and share the video on the WEB. General Pershing was less tender with captured Islamists.
IF it were up to me, the corpse would share an open grave with a large, dead pig.
And KSM would know it before they opened the trapdoor. “Say hi to your grave buddy, Khalid. Oink!”
Fat chance KSM will be executed. O will see he gets life.
One thing I learned from a really sh1tty boss a while ago is that if you’ve been demanding a certain approach, which he ignores or puts down, then suddenly calls you in and comes up with the same idea as his own brilliant idea, you are in big trouble.
But we knew we were in trouble a year ago.
Tactically speaking, it’s foolish for the Obama administration to be dithering about where to hold the KSM trial.
When they announced that the trial was to be held in NYC, the dangers of the trial were concrete for those living in NYC and abstract for everyone else in the United States.
Now that the location of this trial is up in the air, the rest of the country can think about the concrete dangers of having this trial in their city.
Once you start thinking about the dangers of having KSM’s trial at your local federal courthouse, you might start thinking about the wisdom of having a civilian trial for KSM at all. Maybe that idiot Bush was right after all.
See today’s posting re Baraq/Holder on powerlineblog.com
I blame Bush. Wait, he had the same notion??!!
I’m sure you’ve seen the latest: Gibbs opining that KSM will be convicted and executed.
So the only conceivable benefit of trying KSM – showcasing the fairness of the American criminal justice system – has just taken a death blow from Gibbs and (previously) his moronic boss.
Westerners and Japanese will realize that this was just two idiot babbling their opinions, but Muslims – presumably the people the Messiah was trying to influence – will take this as a sign that the fix is in.
A typical high school student body president evinces greater political acumen.
Occam’s Beard, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time a government official has pretty much come out and said that KSM will be executed. At this point they’d better hold a military trial; a good attorney will carve up a civilian one.
I may be stupid, but I thought KSM already had a trial. He plead guilty, did he not? The Dems say that he needs to be brought into the “legal system.” But the military court of justice is part of the American legal system.
Why is he not dead already? Fry the bastard. It is what he wants anyway.
Barb, yep, the Messiah more or less said the same thing some time ago. He should have first availed himself of the services of a good lawyer – if he knows any.
And using government officials’ statements in KSM’s defense hardly requires a good lawyer. Anyone who’d watched a few segments of “Law and Order” could make the requisite argument re prejudicial statements.
Throughout all of this I’ve wondered about the relative contributions of Holder and Obama. Is it Obama’s idea to try KSM in a civilian court being pushed on Holder? Is it Holder’s idea which he sold to Obama?
Mr. Frank, don’t #$%^& around with middle management. The question is why Soros would want this.
OB, I know you think Soros is in control, but I think no one is in control.
Furthermore, these professional and academic leftist don’t have plans, they just promote attitudes. When posturing takes the place of thinking and you feel no responsibility for the outcome, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that unanticipated consequences manifest themselves with astounding speed. It’s really a kind of cultivated stupidity.
I hate to ask, but could this administration get any stupider?
Anybody hearing any reasons those suffering from buyer’s remorse gave for being such idiots?
I think no one is in control.
Oblio: I agree and I think we’re heading into some very strange political weather.
Rasmussen’s Presidential Approval Index just shot up 10 points in two days to -7. Since SOTU liberals have rallied to Obama. Liberal pundits like Andrew Sullivan and Maureen Dowd are sounding peculiarly upbeat for reasons that don’t make that much sense to me.
Meanwhile Michael Barone claims that Dems are looking at an “epic disaster.”
The next couple of weeks are going to be very interesting.
Richard: I concur your posting concurring with the lack of foresight/critical thinking/intelligence/reasoning power of the administration.
It reminds me of the varieties of the long running DumPubs/Bright Demos we heard during the campaign and after. So bright Mr. HopeyChangey was, without any standardized scores to corroborate. All the bright people were going to be in DC now. All the coolest, all the best educated and brightest people were voting for Mr. HopeyChangey.
Yeah, yeah.
What have they wrought?
Gringo: Forgot where I saw it, but according to polls Obama is still doing well with the post-graduate crowd.
One of the funniest things I noticed after the 2004 election was that Bush had expanded his support in all demographics since 2000 except two — post-grads and high school dropouts!
If this hasn’t already been mentioned, all the terrorists have to do is stage a “small” attack on the place where the KSM trial is, or where the captured terrorists are imprisoned, and they’ve won those rounds, because moving the trial or prison site will only result in the same thing again. Gitmo was as perfect as it gets.
Rasmussen shows Presidential approval index up to -4 in only two days. Can anyone explain this?
Before O was elected we all could see he would the worse president in history, I was concerned however that the public would not see it until it was too late to correct, I hope we are not going in that direction.
I think we’re heading into some very strange political weather.
strange? no, not strange at all. historically speaking, a republic lead by men who make clerks of what would be a variation of some feudal state, is strange, and such a state of control tinted with the particulars of who ends up on the acme, is historically normal.
“build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda” Organizing America
Government class in the eleventh grade in Perry Local in Massillon, Ohio. Has passed out a recruiting paper so students could sign up as interns for Obama’s Organizing for America. now which progressive states thought that such was a social good to work on kids? same plan, different variation, different time, different people, same end.
i went to the website for the district, clicked on the high school. interesting…Revolution TV
perrynet.sparcc.org/~brownk/revolution/revolution/Welcome.html
its VERY progressive showing you that the Revolution is an Evolution… (so 1930s)
[R]evolution TV at Perry is about bringing news to you in a challenging, thought provoking way in order to promote dialog among students. We invite you to catch an episode, respond to editorials and be part of the [R]evolution.
its probably benign in its output, but yet its the same big lie over and over… episodes are here
http://www.youtube.com/perryrev
the revolution evolution theme though is not their idea. even nickelodeon has whole shows devoted to progressive ideals, protest, and mobilization. the ‘science’ documentaries are either concerned with the fascination of manufacturing… exposing weird or bizarre living conditions of man… showing animals tearing man apart… and a HUGE series of shows whose graphic beauty talks constantly of the end of the world by some catastrophic or multi catastrphic fit of planetary medical treatment to the desease that is man (as mentioned in many top movies too).
from an article
Nick has launched “The Big Green Help,” a multimedia campaign that encourages the network’s young viewers to become junior environmentalists, and major finger-waggers. “Nickelodeon’s Big Green Help is all about helping YOU find simple, positive ways to protect the Earth every day,” explains the home page on Nick’s Web site.
The Big Green Help is filled to the brim with throbbing dance music, bright colors (green most prominent, of course), grinning teen celebrities and feel-good phrases, Nick is indoctrinating kids into the secular cult of environmentalism, and it wants them to indoctrinate you in turn.
“With The Big Green Help, we want to provide them with the necessary tools and information so they can become part of the environmental solution.” Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group Executive Vice President of Public Affairs Marva Smalls
they report the issue with a certainty. anyone realize that obama may not only be talking to a captured future, making history start now.. but that he is also reafirming the BS that the kids are getting in school, in after school activities, textbooks, kids stories, media, etc.
if you go here, they are about to push the next global crisis fiasco to replace warming, which then went to climate change, which when shown to be a scam… they now go to
http://www.nrdc.org/tv/
ocean acidification…
(i guess a tribute to club of rome)
there WAS a FEW countries that did similar things. oh, not so polished and clever, at least to us on the outside. but they did exist, and others have experienced, them. i guess you are too, in a way. the young have no other dialogue except what progressives want them to have. we dont believe they exist so we dont stop it. heck.. the best we can do is say things seem weird.
just wait.. its going to get weirder faster.. .they have to overcome the speed with which we shake our head and wake up and realize and (then learn real history). you only need the few years for those who are in the wings to take up their place and add their energy and unquestioned loyalty from below (like an anvil)… with the state from above (like a hammer)
its an old reference… made by those in the more historically common states. but today, do as your told and dont read dead white guys.
With the bourgeoisie occupying a position between the hammer and the anvil, idealistic phrases, too, are psychologically inevitable, phrases which our liberals in general and their pet philosophers in particular are now mouthing with such bad taste. “As far as the Russian liberation movement is concerned,” we read in the explanatory comment, “democracy is not only a fact but a moral and political postulate. It places moral justification for any social form above its historical justification….” Not a bad example of the turgid meaningless phraseology with which our liberals “justify” their approach towards betrayal of democracy!
and E Flannery in The anguish of the jews: twenty three centuries of anti semitism
In the civil war between the White and Red Armies (1918- 20), Jews were caught between the hammer and the anvil: Each side attacked them as enemies
but i think the most informative source might be this one. London Review of Books.The Two Totalitarianisms. Slavoj Žižek
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/slavoj-zizek/the-two-totalitarianisms
No kind of liberal, whether pure or impure, needs to waste time deciding which had the harder surface, the hammer or the anvil. As the German Social Democrats of the 1930s discovered when they were caught between them, all that mattered was the impact. Clive James Cambridge
the piece (while ignoring the other targets of germany) tries to explain the difference between the two and why, we never cleansed ourselves of the progressive love for such political power.
If Heidegger cannot be pardoned for his flirtation with Nazism, why can Luké¡cs and Brecht and others be pardoned for their much longer engagement with Stalinism?
This position reduces Nazism to a reaction to, and repetition of, practices already found in Bolshevism — terror, concentration camps, the struggle to the death against political enemies — so that the ‘original sin’ is that of Communism.
In the late 1980s, Nolte was Habermas’s principal opponent in the so-called Revisionismusstreit, arguing that Nazism should not be regarded as the incomparable evil of the 20th century. Not only did Nazism, reprehensible as it was, appear after Communism: it was an excessive reaction to the Communist threat, and all its horrors were merely copies of those already perpetrated under Soviet Communism.
Nolte’s idea is that
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
Rasmussen shows Presidential approval index up to -4 in only two days. Can anyone explain this?
Bob from Virginia: I’ve noticed that too. In fact it’s even worse — the approval index has moved from -17 to -4 in three days.
I’m not sure what’s going on either. My thoughts are:
* For those susceptible, the SOTU was a strong Obama speech.
* Obama’s appearance at the GOP Retreat was also strong. Americans like seeing their President look strong.
* Americans believe, perhaps prematurely, that the mistakes of ObamaCare and the KSM trial are behind us and feeling relieved, they are now inclined to be charitable towards Obama.
One of the best things for Obama right now is that health care, which the majority of Americans detest, is no longer front page news.
However, Democrats have been working quietly behind the scenes to jumpstart the Frankensteinian bill back to life with the sidecar reconciliation scheme, and supposedly they are close.
and just cause this is interesting and points to more interesting reading… (reading that the left on the top have DEFINITELY read in their worship. while others dont even know exist in their disinterest)
We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism. It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon.
The exceptions are telling: Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), which suggested that the three great world-systems — New Deal capitalism, Fascism and Stalinism — tended towards the same bureaucratic, globally organised, ‘administered’ society;
Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (1958), his least passionate book, a strangely neutral analysis of Soviet ideology with no clear commitments; and,
finally, in the 1980s, the attempts by some Habermasians who, reflecting on the emerging dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the notion of civil society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime — interesting, but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist totalitarianism.
How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus on the conditions of the failure of the emancipatory project abstain from analysing the nightmare of ‘actually existing socialism’?
And was its focus on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the real trauma?
It is here that one has to make a choice.
The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ — that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc — is a priori false.
It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism.
The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion — explicit or implicit — that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat.
When, in September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist symbols.
A link on the behind-the-scenes stuff I mentioned on health care:
Nothing epitomizes the idiocy of this administration than this situation.
It was blindingly obvious from the very moment the decision was made to try KSM and his cohorts in NYC that it was a disaster waiting to happen. At first it was just the right screaming, but the more reasonable Democrats have joined in as well.
The result is that the administration is backing down and al Qaeda is laughing. Congratulations, Barry.