TOBY PETZOLD

John Hinderaker is saying that Barack Obama told a reporter in Sderot, Israel today (emphasis mine):

Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.

To which Hinderaker adds:

But Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Obama just made that up so he could count the committee’s action as one of “my deeds.”

If committed by a Republican, this would be a gaffe of historic proportions. Even a Senator as inattentive to his duties as Obama certainly knows what committees he serves on. For him to fabricate the claim, out of whole cloth, that the Senate Banking Committee is “[his] committee,” strikes me as another sign of Obama’s megalomania. That, plus more evidence that he is totally at sea without a teleprompter.

Surely, there’s just some sort of misunderstanding, right?

Just caught the last few minutes of Madame Couric fluffing Obama Soter —and it turns out that the reason he’s going to hold a campaign rally in front of Hitler’s favorite monument to Prussian militarism is to get the krauts “to feel good” about America again. And to say we’re sorry to our “old enemies.” So very, very sorry.

Obama is an abomination. Inshallah, this wankfest he’s been on this past week will be the beginning of the end of his hopes. Surely Americans won’t reward this degree of narcissism.

Is the phenomenon of synesthesia evidence of a purely physiological mind-soul complex —as manifested through the mechanics of neurology— wherein a system error persists and is well-tolerated, or is it just one more instance of witchcraft and demonism? I say the former: errors are the irritation that begets a pearl —and what moves mutation, the engine of our being. Error itself is the final proof of material and objective reality, for we do not know what we are but by what we are not. It is the imperfection in our being that finally distinguishes, see. It’s the snag. The nub of the gist of the rub of the Not and the Am.

Drudge is reporting that the New York Times will soon report that Michelle Obama is going to stay home and bake cookies until Election Day.

Or something like that.

I guess Obama Soter read the recent polls on his wife’s approval ratings. I still don’t know why she’s so unpopular. She’s very pretty and has a great figure, but I guess she’s outspoken enough with some to have a bad rep. I don’t know. But doesn’t the Messiah need her? She’s got to at least have a speech at the convention! WTF?

Charles Krauthammer pegs Barry Hussein Obama as the phoniest bastard of the past week:

In last week’s column, I thought I had thoroughly chronicled Obama’s brazen reversals of position and abandonment of principles — on public financing of campaigns, on NAFTA, on telecom immunity for post-Sept. 11 wiretaps, on unconditional talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — as he moved to the center for the general election campaign. I misjudged him. He was just getting started.

Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November — i.e., the primary season — statement “inartful.” Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary — “Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial.”

“Swiftboating” is another word the Democrats use that doesn’t mean what they think it means. Who knows how their minds work? At this point, it must be said that they’ve gone soft because they aren’t really thinking through their support of this charlatan, but feeling it. It’s an embarrassment because most of them do not have the intellectual integrity to hold their man accountable for his many major renegings of the past three weeks. They’re just giving him a pass on everything because they are his bitches. He owns their sorry hippie asses and is making no secret of that in how he now behaves.

The whole thing, as Bill Clinton said, is a fairy tale.

Yesterday, Obama’s surrogate, Wesley Clark, told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation that McCain’s service in the Viet Nam War was nothing too relevant to his leadership. Here’s part of their exchange (emphases mine):

SCHIEFFER: Well you, you went so far as to say that you thought John McCain was, quote, and these are your words, “untested and untried,” And I must say I, I had to read that twice, because you’re talking about somebody who was a prisoner of war. He was a squadron commander of the largest squadron in the Navy. He’s been on the Senate Armed Services Committee for lo these many years. How can you say that John McCain is un- untested and untried? General?

CLARK: Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk. It’s a matter of gauging your opponents, and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in Armed Forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air- in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, ‘I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it-’

What is he even talking about? What an absolute fucking idiot. What part of Obama’s experience in foreign policy and wartime diplomacy does this dolt hold above McCain’s decades of real experience? Where is the evidence of Obama’s superior judgement? Clark’s “argument” is an embarrassment to stupidity itself. 

Not to be outdone, another of Obama’s surrogates, former NSC member Rand Beers, told a public audience today that McCain’s experience as a POW works against him:

While Barack Obama was urging supporters not to devalue the military service of rival John McCain, an informal Obama adviser argued Monday that the former POW’s isolation during the Vietnam War has hobbled the Arizona senator’s capacity as a war-time leader.

“Sadly, Sen. McCain was not available during those times, and I say that with all due respect to him,” said informal Obama adviser Rand Beers. “I think that the notion that the members of the Senate who were in the ground forces or who were ashore in Vietnam have a very different view of Vietnam and the cost that you described than John McCain does because he was in isolation essentially for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil here or the challenges that were involved for those of us who served in Vietnam during the Vietnam war.”

“So I think,” he continued, “to some extent his national security experience in that regard is sadly limited and I think it is reflected in some of the ways that he thinks about how U.S. forces might be committed to conflicts around the world.”

McCain spent five years in captivity as a POW in North Vietnam.

It’s hard to imagine a reason why Obama would send these idiots out into the world on his behalf to question the relevance of John McCain’s service in the Viet Nam War. Is Obama somehow trying out a line of attack to suggest that McCain is somehow unfit or unsound because of his years of isolation as a prisoner of war? If so, it’s an amazingly dirty angle to take for someone who has a lot to prove to the veterans of Middle America.

Let’s wait for the backlash and the inevitable disavowals. 

UPDATE: Oops! I didn’t realize that Obama has already disavowed Clark’s idiocy. Andrea Mitchell says:

Here’s a statement from Obama spokesman Bill Burton on Wes Clark’s controversial comments about McCain’s military service. “As he’s said many times before, Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

It will not be enough to be factually correct about Barack Obama’s incompetence to defeat him this November; it may be only just enough to damage him irreparably —day by day and by all means necessary. Smug conservative writers and strategists need to forget about the latest flip-flop and concentrate on those areas of Obamessiah’s character and judgement that are most amenable to question and doubt.

Obama reminds me a little bit of Ross Perot. Both of his campaigns were mediaphobic (except for the CNN infomercials) and stage-managed until they started to break down in a major way because of his over-weening sense of self. The nut came out and stayed. With Obama, I don’t think there is a nut; there’s only a lack of conscience and an outsized ego. And with an ego like his, the key to bringing him down is to get him to over-correct in its defense since he has no actual humility. But we’ve only got four months to go. There’s a lot to be done to ensure that the absurdity of Obama’s candidacy never succeeds on Election Day.

What happened to all of the Democrats’ tough talk on making the President cry uncle on the War for Iraq? I don’t know, but opposing the war there must not be as important as it used to be:

WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) - Democrats in the U.S. Congress, who came to power last year on a call to end the combat in Iraq, will soon give President George W. Bush the last war-funding bill of his presidency without any of the conditions they sought for withdrawing U.S. troops, congressional aides said on Monday.

Lawmakers are arranging to send Bush $165 billion in new money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, enough to last for about a year and well beyond when Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.

What’s changed their minds? Is it the same thing Obama doesn’t want to have to acknowledge, but must, anyway?

Don’t forget that the War for Iraq has made us safer. International jihad was drawn to Iraq because we made that country the primary venue for taking on the Great Satan. After five years of fighting our best and bravest, what is the opinion of martyrdom now? As they continue to reject al-Qaeda and even Osama himself, the Muslim world is beginning to see that Uncle Sam’s judgements are altogether righteous.

ABC’s Jake Tapper recently asked Barry Obama (emphases mine):

The Bush administration says, no matter what people think about other programs, other policies they’ve initiated, there has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11. And they say the reason that is, is because of the domestic programs, many of which you opposed, the NSA surveillance program, Guantanamo Bay, and other programs.

How do you know that they’re wrong? It’s not possible that they’re right?

Notice that Obama never answers the question:

Well, keep in mind I haven’t opposed, for example, the national security surveillance program, the NSA program. What I’ve said that we can do it within the constraints of our civil liberties and our Constitution.

TAPPER: They disagree, though.

OBAMA: Well, but the fact that they disagree does not mean that they’re right on this. What it means is, is that they have been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution, that our founders put in place.

And it is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. And there has been no evidence on their part that we can’t.

And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. 

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, “Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.”

So that, I think, is an example of something that was unnecessary. We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws.  

Remember how the elites howled when Bush the Younger referred to terrorists in the days after the atrocities of 11 September 2001 as “these folks”? Remember how that was inappropriate and cowboyish? Well, now such constructions are acceptable because someone else is making them.

And when you look at how Obama evades Tapper’s question, he does so by dashing into the thicket of the Bill Clinton-John Kerry approach to America’s defense in the post-Cold War world: these terrorists can be handled through the judicial system. And why is that? Because anti-war liberals apparently believe that American Constitutional jurisprudence extends itself throughout the world and even into our combat theaters. Mo may be Mirandized —even though Mo would slash a hippie’s throat as soon as he would mine.

So where do liberals come by this imperialist belief in the United States Constitution? I have no idea. That they do, though, is an indication of their essential childishness. These are not the spiritual descendants of Wilson or FDR or Truman making the world safe for democracy or making us an arsenal of such a world; these are incoherent people, now isolationists and then, some other day, globalists. These miserable hippie bastards deem America’s military sacrifices only worthwhile if there’s no discernible strategic interest at stake. They do not support the troops because they cannot understand the value in winning the War for Iraq. They also do not support the troops because they reflexively charge anyone who supports the war, but has never served, as a chickenhawk who deserves the punishment of military service himself. You could ask Obama this very hour whether this war should have been waged and he would say no because he has never been anything more than a gainsayer on that point. He believes that that is his answer and trump card in one. That he has supposedly opposed the war from the start is asserted to be the final proof of his superior judgement and, yet, neither part of that equation is true. When does he have to start making sense? Shouldn’t it have happened by now —or is the intoxication of charisma too much for such concerns?

If you go to Obama’s website Fight the Smears, you’ll see in one of the exhibits what is purported to be his birth certificate. Supposedly, there’s a rumor going around that he is hiding his birth certificate, probably to obscure the fact that his parents were not really married. Well, in fact, Obama is hiding it. As Charles Johnson’s commenter jinxmedic notes:

A “certificate of live birth” is a government extract of the original birth certificate filed with the state or commonwealth. The certificate shown on Kos’ page is what you would get if you applied for a duplicate of an existing birth certificate, in the event that you needed it for employment or identification, or whatever. It is NOT a copy of the original document, simply the extracted information printed onto a proprietary paper at the time of the request. So, yes, a certificate of live birth from 1961 can be authentic, printed via Microsoft Word with a laser printer.

That’s right. Markos Zuniga obtained a copy of what is essentially an abstract of Obama’s birth certificate —from the Obama campaign itself. So part of fighting the smears, see, is supplying the help with bullshit documents to wave in the public’s face like gypsies with sheets of cardboard.

Just look at the damned thing. The copy that Zuniga has up at his site is a very hi-res image, while the version up at Obama’s place is so lo-res there’s no point in even looking at it. Which was probably their intention.

Notice also the manually-added date-stamp near the bottom. I think it says June 2007. I guess that’s when Obama sent away for a copy. Who knows? It’s crap, anyhow. I didn’t ask to see it in the first place, but if you’re going to perpetrate like that’s a copy of the original certificate, then there’s only one thing to ask:

When is John Kerry going to sign Form 180?