The laughing Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

And what of the audio tape of Hillary Clinton giving an interview in the 1980s about a criminal case she took on in 1975? The one where Hillary slams the 12-year-old victim and says proudly how she got the probable rapist off, while laughing about his likely guilt? After all the things Hillary’s been through, including Benghazi, is this the one that might actually cause a significant number of people to turn against her?

Maybe. And if it does, one reason will be that it contradicts her strongest campaign selling point and image: that she is a champion of women.

Now, it’s not beyond the reach of her supporters to justify her actions in the case. After all, defendants need defending or our legal system could not function properly. Also, this was a long, long, long time ago (although the antiquity of Romney’s dog on the car roof story didn’t seem to stop them).

But while both things are manifestly true, it’s still a chilling and revealing experience to listen to the audio, and it’s not just because of what Hillary says, it’s how she says it. At the time of the interview Hillary was no child; she had to have been in her mid-thirties or even a bit older. So she was a fully-formed adult, and yet she sounds very different from the fully-formed adult we have come to know—or to think we know.

First of all, there’s the Southern accent. Where did that come from, and where did it go? It was briefly in evidence during Bill’s 1992 campaign when Hillary made her famous “standin’ by my man” remark (and for those of you who think Hillary is unattractive, watching that tape might remind you of how very attractive she actually was in her younger days). But at that time she was channeling Tammy Wynette in mockery, and the accent was obviously meant to be a put-on. The real question, the more relevant one for now, is how much of a shape-shifter is Clinton, and do we know the real Hillary at all?

The newly-surfaced tape also features a far more natural-seeming Clinton. On her recent book tour her control has been so iron that nothing about her seems to be the least bit spontaneous, even (or maybe especially) her laughter. So her relative ease and flow on the tape makes a person think that might just be the real, the inner Hillary, who doesn’t just get a probable child-rapist off (which after all is what defense lawyers do, and what they must try to do), but who seems not to have a qualm or regret or a care in the world about it.

That might give a lot of people pause, and not just women either.

Much of this resonates with today. Despite Hillary’s fame and prominence, I’ve seen and heard more of her on that book tour than I’ve listened to in the previous twenty-five years put together, and I’m surprised at how deeply off-putting her manner is—particularly her laugh, which seems forced, grating, and nervous. Now, if I were her supporter that probably wouldn’t stop me from voting for her, but it also would probably make me wonder about her, and this newly-unearthed tape would feed into that doubt: why is this woman laughing?

One last thing—when this tape came out, it struck me that uncovering it and publishing it was one of those things Democrats seem to do against Republican candidates, never vice-versa. Or at least, I can’t remember the last time it was done by Republicans rather than to Republicans, and even then I’m almost sure it had to do with someone on the late Andrew Breitbart’s gang (tapes about ACORN don’t count; it’s not a candidate), or involved small fish. This tape reminds me more of the secret “47%” recording which IMHO sunk Romney in 2012 more than anything else that happened.

I applaud the Washington Free Beacon, which broke the story by going to the archives at the University of Arkansas and locating the tape. That’s taking a leaf out of the leftist activist book, and it didn’t involve a single dirty trick, lie, or even distortion. Merely a determination to uncover the truth.

Polls are only bad for Obama…

The New Neo Posted on by

…if you think he still cares about public opinion.

I, for one, think he has o’erleaped public opinion. His vaulting ambition is to fundamentally change America, and that means a lot of people—maybe even a majority—will be expected to whine about it and even to stop thinking he’s such a likeable guy. But why would that matter to him, if he is intent on shoring up his and his party’s support with new immigrants, new ways to make people dependent on the federal government, and new ways to intimidate and silence the opposition? He can even do it without the help of Congress, if he continues to have the support of enough of his party members and the MSM.

And perhaps, if he’s audacious enough, he could even do it without the support of many in his party and the MSM. Not that those two entities are likely to turn on him. This crocodile would never eat them, right?

So unfortunately I disagree with Philip Klein’s evaluation of a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll:

But going into the sixth year of his presidency, Obama still hasn’t sold Americans on his view of the role of government, which could have significant ramifications for the liberal agenda in the future…

According to the poll, just 46 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that, “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people” compared with 50 percent who agreed with the view that, “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” In February 2009, right after he was sworn into office, the same poll found 51 percent thought government should do more and just 40 percent who thought it was doing too much…

…[I]f Obama-era failures make Americans more skeptical about federal bureaucracy in general, it makes things that much more difficult.

But I suspect that Klein has a fundamental misunderstanding—shared by many politicians and pundits on the right—of what is being attempted here. Those polls are already way too close, given what’s been happening lately. But if the current plans of those who advocate the “liberal agenda” go as they hope, even that slim margin of smaller-government advocates will evaporate, and permanently. It’s not a question of convincing the population, it’s a question of changing it. And to further that goal, it not only helps if illegal immigrants from Latin America flood the country expecting the federal government to take care of them (and perhaps voting illegally, too), it helps if the federal government fosters the increasing financial dependency of more and more citizens on the feds.

Just look at Obamacare, for example. Besides everything else it does and doesn’t do, it makes a hugely increased number of people dependent on government for their health insurance premiums, and therefore for their health care and even their lives in some cases. How could that largesse, once given, be relinquished?

So why would Obama care about today’s polls? I can’t imagine a single reason. He’s not even the sort of person who basks in the glow of being liked (Bill Clinton comes to mind). Being liked is just a means to an ends to Obama, a tool for getting elected. He has bigger goals in mind than being liked, and anyway he already likes himself well enough to make up for all the rest of us combined.

Texas defends itself against the tide of illegal immigrants—and against Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

The United States has jurisdiction over the border problem but is doing nothing to stop it and might in fact be encouraging it. So the state of Texas announces that it will take action:

Texas’ top three leaders, Governor Rick Perry, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, and House Speaker Joe Straus directed the Department of Public Safety to immediately begin law enforcement surge operations along the Texas-Mexico border…

The surge operations will cost $1.3 million each week, and DPS is authorized to continue the operations for the rest of the year…

In a statement, Governor Perry said, “Texas can’t afford to wait for Washington to act on this crisis and we will not sit idly by while the safety and security of our citizens are threatened.”

State officials worry that while the federal government scrambles to house thousands of unaccompanied children crossing the border, there are fewer federal agents to keep up with criminals and gangs trying to get into the U.S.

The state says last year, when DPS conducted Operation Strong Safety, crime rates related to drug cartels, gangs, and other illegal border activity dropped sharply.

Note what’s being said here. My understanding is that the state can only help prevent entry by increasing patrols; they can’t deport people if Obama won’t do so.

So the huge number of families and kids illegally coming to this country is not even the issue on which Texas is focusing here. Rather, it’s that their entry is flooding the border and distracting the guards’ time and energy while the drug cartels climb aboard.

Now, we don’t know how families are getting the money to come here, and your conspiracy theory is probably as good as mine—and I do have some. But even if the majority of families/kids are coming for their own reasons (because they think they will be allowed to stay and get services, and/or to flee the violence in their home countries) rather than purposely as decoys for the cartels, they are serving as de facto decoys for them nonetheless. So if fleeing the danger posed by murderous drug cartels in their countries of origin is one of their motivations, then it’s highly ironic that escaping in this manner will serve to facilitate the entry of those very same dangerous people into the US, while the border guards are busy being babysitters.

And our president, whose duty it is to protect the US as a sovereign country, defend its borders, and follow the rule of law—including its immigration laws—encourages the first (the illegal entry of kids and families) and winks at the second (the illegal entry of criminals). Incidentally (or not so incidentally), both will help turn Texas blue and at the same time harm it financially. This DPS money doesn’t come from nowhere; it comes from Texans.

The IRS and its email backup system

The New Neo Posted on by

Not only is the loss of the emails of Lois Lerner and the IRS Six not credible, but the failure of the agency to back them up properly in some centralized fashion is a separate outrage.

Here’s the way the IRS system supposedly worked (although “worked” is hardly the applicable term):

Not only is there no automatic permanent storage of all e-mail, the simple act of archiving a message would remove it from the IRS’s system entirely, including the “back-up system” that preserves messages for six months before deleting them. That’s a ridiculously decentralized system for an age when storage is cheaper than it’s ever been. In fact, the former IRS IT expert whom Bryan Preston interviewed claimed that the IRS has plenty of “back-up tapes” that could be used to preserve e-mails for much longer than six months if need be. What you’ve got here, in other words, is an agency stressing record-keeping in its own regulations and then doing everything it can to undermine that redundancy, first by trusting employees to diligently file “federal records” that might incriminate them and then allowing them to remove evidence from the system altogether, which naturally led to a spate of mysterious “computer crashes” in this case. It’s goofy. But it sure came in handy, didn’t it?

So, just to make it clear: this is the equivalent of relying on employees to save all of their emails that might incriminate them in wrongdoing, without any way for the agency or anyone else to independently check on those emails that have been “disappeared” by not being purposely saved by the sender. Nifty! Does anyone believe that anyone engaged in nefarious or even suspicious activity would be saving the evidence if that person had a chance to destroy it instead and leave no trace?

This is separate from the question of whether there really was no trace left in terms of whether the emails were stored on some other server somewhere outside the IRS’ system. I’ll leave that to the computer experts of the world, of which I am most decidedly not one. But it doesn’t take an expert to know that the emails should exist somewhere, if not with the IRS or some outside server, then with the recipients of those emails.

That, of course, is assuming they don’t have the same clever “system” of email record-keeping that the IRS has. And of course the irony of this being the IRS we’re talking about—you know, that agency that requires us to keep everything that passes though our hands for biblical amounts of time or face their terrible swift sword—should not be lost on the American people.

Did I say “lost”? It might as well be lost, for all the coverage the MSM is giving it. That’s another scandal, but the MSM has learned that it’s an effective way to deal with the situation. If a press has lost all integrity, the republic cannot continue. Somehow the press has decided the triumph of the left is more important than the continuation of the republic.

And let’s just say for the sake of argument that Lois Lerner and the Six are all completely innocent of wrongdoing. That’s highly unlikely to be the case, but even if it were true, learning the way the IRS handles its emails is a revelation about how the system itself constitutes an engraved invitation to abuse and coverup. This should send a chill through every single American, although it almost certainly won’t.

And that may be the most important outrage of all in the entire story.

[NOTE: You might want to read this letter send by Cleta Mitchell, attorney for the plaintiffs in lawsuits against the IRS, sent to attorneys for the defendants.]

[ADDENDUM: On the changing MSM treament of the IRS story.]

[ADDENDUM II: More on the tech details of the IRS system, from Andy at Ace’s.]

Surprise, surprise [UPDATED]

The New Neo Posted on by

The only surprise, perhaps, is that the LA Times is covering it:

The large subsidies for health insurance that helped fuel the successful drive to sign up some 8 million Americans for coverage under the Affordable Care Act may push the cost of the law considerably above current projections, a new federal report indicates.

Nearly 9 in 10 Americans who bought health coverage on the federal government’s healthcare marketplaces received government assistance to offset their premiums…

Premiums that normally would have cost $346 a month on average instead cost consumers just $82, with the federal government picking up the balance of the bill.

While the generous subsidies helped consumers, they also risk inflating the new health law’s price tag in its first year.

“The federal government picking up the balance of the bill”—wonder where that money will come from?

Who could have predicted such a thing?

[UPDATE 6/19: I see that the LA Times has changed the headline of the story to “Obamacare subsidies on track to cost billions this year, report says,” as well as some of the text, and issued a correction which reads as follows:

Because of an error in calculations, a previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a new federal report indicates that the cost of insurance subsidies under President Obama’s healthcare law may be running above current projections. The figures in the report actually suggest that the cost of the subsidies is roughly in line with current projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

So, in the first version of the piece the Times apparently did the math wrong, or got the projection numbers wrong, or made some other error (which is also no surprise). I can’t independently verify whether the Times was correct before, correct now, or correct neither time (it’s unlikely they were correct both times, so I’ll leave out that choice, but certainly the entire incident does not engender increased faith in the abilities of the Times to report on a story).

I also note the careful wording of the correction: “may be running,” “suggest,” and “roughly,” as well as that phrase “current projections,” which occurs twice in the correction. How do “current projections” compare to the projections made at the time the ACA was passed?

At any rate, although it’s certainly worse if subsidies are higher than expected versus the same as expected, by far the most important point is whether they are too high. The article says:

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in April that the annual cost of subsidies will rise to $23 billion next year and $95 billion in 2024, although the budget office continued to project that all the law’s costs will be offset by additional revenue it raises and by cuts in other federal healthcare spending.

Embedded in that sentence is quite a tale. That’s a lot of money any way you slice it, plus a projection about the offset that is still unknown—and of course those other unspecified “cuts” will come from somewhere, almost certainly Medicare.

And although I knew that Obamacare subsidies would be widespread in the exchanges, I find it pretty shocking that it’s at the rate of 9 in 10 (assuming, of course, that the Times is reporting that figure correctly). An incredible rate of government dependence, and purposeful.]

Losing trust

The New Neo Posted on by

In the end, will anything much be done about all these suspiciously lost IRS emails and the larger IRS scandal? Will the buck stop somewhere, and if so where? And how?

It certainly won’t be easy to get at the truth and some accountability, because of the high probability that they’re all in on the corruption: not just Lerner and the IRS, but the DOJ, Obama, perhaps the FBI, and of course the MSM, which has barely been covering the story at all, as opposed to its furor over the missing minutes in the Nixon Watergate tapes.

Poor Nixon. If only he’d had the MSM on his side (which would only have happened had he been a Democrat), he—as a commenter here wrote—probably could have “burned the tapes, and then accused the other party of arson” and gotten away with it.

The depth and breadth of the government corruption in the IRS scandal makes me think of a memorable moment in the 1985 film “Witness”. It’s when the Harrison Ford character, who’s been fighting an enormous web of police corruption and has been reporting back to his trusted supervisor about it, has the dawning and horrific realization that the supervisor is also part of the conspiracy. It’s a searing scene as I recall it (I can’t locate a video clip, though, to check my memory), conveyed through Ford’s facial expression as he’s talking on the phone to the guy.

Although I saw the movie long before my political change, I think that sort of feeling of deep betrayal by a person or people you once trusted can be an integral part of the process of change. How many people in America are feeling that way now—and how many would be feeling that way if the MSM were to properly report the story?

[NOTE: Although I can’t find a clip of the scene, “Witness” is an excellent movie, in case you haven’t seen it. Here’s a different clip that deals with a different—but also fascinating—topic. Harrison Ford has been hiding out with the Amish after the Amish child Samuel has witnessed a violent murder while in the city. The gun here is Ford’s gun.

I’ve written about pacifism many times. The summary version of my viewpoint: too bad the bad guys won’t agree to be pacifists, too.

Another cinematic treatment of the same question occurs towards the end of another wonderful movie, “High Noon.” Grace Kelly, Will Kane’s Quaker wife, has to make a similar decision. She decides that she knows who the bad guys are.]

The dangers in the Middle East as a whole

The New Neo Posted on by

One dire prognostication that might come true:

The fall of Mosul and the advance of ISIS””the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida offshoot””toward Baghdad last week prompted headlines warning that Islamist militants aim to redraw the map of the Middle East and establish a new state: a modern-day Islamic Caliphate spanning parts of Syria and Iraq.

They are well on their way…

…[I]t now seems the Middle East created by Sykes-Picot is going to collapse because of what National Review Online’s Mario Loyola last week called the Obama administration’s “criminal negligence” in Iraq. If so, then we should at least pause to consider what it is that we’re allowing to slip away, and why it has held together for so long.

Read the whole thing, and see what you think.

Snarky and bleeding heart liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

First we have Jen Psaki, State Department spokesperson and former spokesperson for President Obama, “answering” some questions from James Rosen, Fox News correspondent and recent Justice Department investigatee, about the capture of the Benghazi suspect:

“There are a range of factors that are taken into account”—yes, indeed. And “in terms of the right timing for operations along these lines, the President made the decision with the support of the National Security Team about the timing.” Yes indeed, again. Timing is everything, I hear.

I wonder why there is that slight smile on Psaki’s face, considering what extremely serious business this is. It is characteristic of what I referred to as “the sophomoric administration” in this post, where I described another State Department spokesperson, Marie Harf, in this way:

There’s something much more profoundly disturbing about her, as though she’s a bad actress miscast in a role for which she’s learned only some of the lines. The director has given her poor advice on how to play it,…what voice quality would be suitable. To say that she lacks gravitas it to say the obvious. But she lacks even the appearance of gravitas; there’s no attempt at gravitas, except perhaps the glasses.

Psaki lacks even the glasses.

Let’s move to the second clip. Now we have Kirsten Powers, Democratic pundit on Fox, explaining to Bill O’Reilly that our Judeo-Christian tradition requires that we must take in and provide for all the children that might come here illegally:

I wonder how common Powers’ attitude is.

You know that things have completely degenerated…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when the administration trots out excuses as stupendously preposterous as the idea that the emails of Lois Lerner and six other IRS higher-ups have disappeared in perfectly-timed crashes.

That’s a tale that literally no one believes. One can only conclude that it’s not even meant to be believed. It’s meant to deflect and simultaneously taunt with its arrogant assumption that there will be no consequences, ever, for this administration.

As this commenter writes:

Destroy the evidence and plead the fifth…what are they going to do…contact the DOJ? Hahahahahahahaha.

Who are they going to call, the FBI? LOLOLOLOLOL!

Maybe have the Harry Reid Senate investigate? ROTFLMAO!!!!

Have the media do an in-depth investigation? Hohohohohohoho!!!

Impeach me? GUFFFFAWWWW!!!!

Please have the appropriate agencies erase all evidence of this email.

Peace and Love,

Barry

I am reminded of a post I wrote eight years ago entitled, “On forgetting, unpersons, and doublethink.” In it I pondered why the Soviets bothered to reconfigure historic photos in order to remove figures who’d been purged, when it didn’t fool anyone into thinking those people hadn’t been there. After all, the public was familiar with the people and the original photos:

…[H]ow could the Czech Communists be so silly”“–and so transparent–”“as to do away with Clementis’s [the Communist leader who had been purged] image in a photo that every school kid in the country already knew by heart? How could they think they could get away with the rewriting of a history that was already so well-known? And, as Winston Smith asks in another but strikingly similar context, why would they want to?

So why was Clementis erased from the photo, if his presence was so easy to remember? For future generations, of course, it might be possible to eliminate even the appearance of any jarring notes in the supposedly harmonious symphony of the history of Czech Communism, and so some of the erasure was undoubtedly for them.

But for those contemporaneous with the incident, who knew better, those rewriting history must not have cared how transparent their actions were, because their real aim was probably to teach a different object lesson. Perhaps what they were really saying was not “Clementis the traitor didn’t exist” but rather, “Take heed: if you become a traitor like Clementis, you’ll become an unperson, too.” Perhaps they meant the erasure to be transparent, to demonstrate quite graphically how they had the power to crush a person”“not just the body, but the history of the life, as well.

How does this relate to Lois Lerner and the IRS Six’s disappeared e-mails? Just this: it is a demonstration of the power to crush enemies as well as a demonstration that there will be no accountability and no redress. Perhaps it was meant to be audacious and outrageous, unbelievable and frightening.

Ace has…

The New Neo Posted on by

…a good idea:

“Child Migrants” Surge into NYC, Overwhelming the System

I’m glad it’s happening in NYC. In fact, I think it would be a good idea for any state experiencing this problem to put their “child migrants” on a bus to one of two destinations: New York City, and Washington DC.

The White Liberal Urban Self-Proclaimed Elites in those cities are making this problem — they should be confronted with it, and forced to deal with it themselves.

Agreed.

However, something gives me pause: isn’t that sort of thing exactly what Cloward-Piven wanted? The idea was that the flooding of the system would lead to a collapse into more socialism, not less. And it would start in New York and similar liberal cities.

Here’s Piven’s original article outlining the strategy [emphasis mine]:

The strategy is based on the fact that a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive…

The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis. The force for that challenge, and the strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls…

A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be con-strained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas. By the internal disruption of local bureaucratic practices, by the furor over public welfare poverty, and by the collapse of current financing arrangements, powerful forces can be generated for major economic reforms at the national level…

The ultimate objective of this strategy–to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income–will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income. Instead, programs are demanded to enable people to become economically competitive. But such programs are of no use to millions of today’s poor…

It’s goes on, but you get the idea. I haven’t read the whole thing, but skimming the rest of it I can see that her examples seem to come from New York. The idea was to overload the welfare system there—and the system of other similarly liberal cities—during a Democratic federal administration, so that a federal program would take over because people would demand it.

In fact, the Cloward-Priven strategy may have actually led to the financial crisis in New York City in 1975:

The socialist test case for using society’s poor and disadvantaged people as sacrificial “shock troops,” in accordance with the Cloward-Piven strategy, was demonstrated in 1975, when new prospective welfare recipients flooded New York City with payment demands, bankrupting the government. As a consequence, New York state also teetered on the edge of financial collapse when the federal government stepped in with a bailout rescue.

So there was a federal response, but not exactly the one Piven had hoped.

You can’t expect the IRS to keep good records, can you?

The New Neo Posted on by

More and more IRS emails gone missing: six more employees’ email records, to be exact.

Even before this new “accident” was announced, Sharyl Attkisson had a great comment on the loss of Lerner’s emails:

There is a responsibility on the part of government officials to retain the data, make sure that is and can’t be lost in the system. If it’s true that the emails are lost, that’s quite a story in itself.

“Quite a story” indeed. And one the MSM hasn’t been interested in telling. They know it would be worse than Watergate—a Watergate that would get their bad guys this time, so best leave it be.

If an administration commits a crime in the forest and the press doesn’t report it, does anybody hear it?

See, Obama is tough on terrorists!

The New Neo Posted on by

The Benghazi terrorism suspect Abu Khattala has been captured in a secret raid and is on his way to the US.

So, that’s one terrorist captured, five Taliban kingpins released from Gitmo, and an enormous army of other Islamicist terrorists triumphantly marching through an Iraq we abandoned. Sorry if I don’t think the math looks all that good for the administration.

And yes, I do question the timing of this arrest. All previous reports I had seen agreed with this one from the Times a month after the attack, which stated he was hiding in plain sight. Even today’s WaPo article announcing his capture by the US makes it clear that this has been the case:

Failure to make arrests in the Benghazi case was seen as an enormous frustration for the FBI and a subject of sharp criticism from lawmakers. Within weeks of the attacks, and sporadically thereafter, Abu Khattala was interviewed by American reporters in the open in Benghazi, where he said he did not participate in the initial assault on the Benghazi compound but came on the scene as it was ending.

I don’t think his apprehension at this point in time is any coincidence. He is most useful right now to the administration in terms of PR. And I guess he wasn’t any spontaneous demonstrator complaining about a video, was he?

This is an interesting fact which illustrates that nasty dictators such as Libya’s Gaddafi have their uses:

Believed to be in his 40s, Abu Khattala was imprisoned for many years by the Gaddafi regime for his Islamist views.

Others believed to have been involved in the Benghazi attack are being sought. One of them, Bin Qumu, “was released [in 2007] from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and sent to Libya, where he was detained. Gaddafi’s government released him in 2008.”

That’s not Obama releasing him, that’s the Bush administration and then Gaddafi. I wonder why. Although I have yet to find a single article that gives the details as to the reason Bin Qumu was released, there is no question that Bush was under intense pressure from the moment of Guantanamo’s establishment to free its inmates.

At any rate, Bin Qumu has quite a history. Quite a history. Before he was implicated in the Benghazi killings, the NY Times pointed out his checkered past and the fact that in the fight against Gaddafi he had supposedly become our ally (protect your neck while you read the article or you might get whiplash trying to follow Bin Qumu’s twistings and turnings):

Today [April 24, 2011], Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah Brigade…The former enemy and prisoner of the United States is now an ally of sorts, a remarkable turnabout resulting from shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.

Remarkable indeed.

He was a tank driver in the Libyan Army in the 1980s, when the Central Intelligence Agency was spending billions to support religious militants trying to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. Mr. Qumu moved to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, just as Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen were violently turning against their former benefactor, the United States.

He was captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, accused of being a member of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and sent to Guanté¡namo ”” in part because of information provided by Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

“The Libyan Government considers detainee a ”˜dangerous man with no qualms about committing terrorist acts,’ ” says the classified 2005 assessment…

When that Guanté¡namo assessment was written, the United States was working closely with Colonel Qaddafi’s intelligence service against terrorism. Now [April 2011], the United States is a leader of the international coalition trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi ”” and is backing with air power the rebels, including Mr. Qumu.

The classified Guanté¡namo assessment of Mr. Qumu claims that he suffered from “a non-specific personality disorder” and recounted ”” again citing the Libyan government as its source ”” a history of drug addiction and drug dealing and accusations of murder and armed assault.

In 1993, the document asserts, Mr. Qumu escaped from a Libyan prison, fled to Egypt and went on to Afghanistan, training at a camp run by Mr. bin Laden. At Guanté¡namo, Mr. Qumu denied knowledge of terrorist activities. He said he feared being returned to Libya, where he faced criminal charges, and asked to go to some other country where “You (the United States) can watch me,” according to a hearing summary.

Nonetheless, in 2007, he was sent from Guanté¡namo to Libya and released the next year in an amnesty for militants…

Mr. Qumu did not turn up for a promised interview last week, but Mr. Hasadi did…He denied that Mr. Qumu was in his group…Two of Mr. Qumu’s sons are in his brigade, he said.

“I don’t know how to convince everyone that we are not Al Qaeda here,” Mr. Hasadi said. “Our aim is to topple Qaddafi,” he added. “I know that you will never believe me, but it is true.”

For now, Western observers in Benghazi, the temporary rebel capital 180 miles from here, seem content to accept those assurances. “We’re more worried about Al Qaeda infiltration from outside than the indigenous ones” one said. “Most of them have a local agenda so they don’t present as much as a threat to the West.”

Reading that, you can see some of the reasons the Obama administration was so eager to ascribe the Benghazi murders to a nameless crowd whipped to frenzy by a video.

You can also see how incredibly difficult the task of fighting Islamic terrorists is whether an administration seems committed to the task or not. Shape-shifters.

The situation keeps presenting us with the dilemma of which bad-but-perhaps-less-bad guy to back against the other. And staying out of it doesn’t make them any less intent to harm us. After all, we weren’t doing all that much against them back in September of 2001, and you know where that got us.